| Interesting topic and great comment so far. I tend to agree with Chen Yanqing. Many of my students (I teach history) ask a similar question, "What happened to China?" My answer is: nothing. Let's assume as many of the commenters do, that the industrial revolution as the historical moment when--to borrow a phrase--Europe and China diverged on different development paths. History is full of chance and contingencies and it was not inevitable that Europe had an industrial revolution. I think 300 years is a bit long, it's probably closer to 200. Even as late as 1800, the agrarian economies of China and Europe faced similar technological and ecological limitations on growth and development. Europe broke through this barrier during the industrial revolution and Kenneth Pomeranz has argued that Europe had two things that made sustaining an industrial revolution easier--ready access to coal and overseas colonies as markets/source of natural resources. It was not because Europeans were somehow 'better' or 'smarter', just luckier and--perhaps more controversially--willing to use exploitation as a means to sustain economic development. I think there's probably more to it than simply the "coal" and "colonies" of Pomeranz's argument, (certainly the Qing were not above colonizing), but the larger point is that China didn't "fail," an industrial revolution just never happened. For years--well, at least since Max Weber anyway--social scientists have been searching for the fatal flaw in China that would explain this Chinese "stagnation" or "backwardness", with various bogeymen including Confucianism, a lack of scientific innovation, government repression of trade, etc. And since then, researchers have looked at all of these "reasons for China's failure" and discovered that none held water. The problem was actually the question they were asking. Rather than seek the source of China's failure (Why did China fail to have an IR?) the real question lies on the other side of Eurasia. (Why did Europe have one?) I think the IR was great. Now the fact that some European countries used the technology and the imperatives of the industrial revolution to bring more resources, markets, and colonies under their control through force of arms and economic warfare is another story--and one with which the Qing government and people were all too familiar. Ps. I agree with Ling about the unsuitability of Singapore as a model for comparison with any country, but especially China. I studied at NUS for a year. Singapore is a city-state with a small, almost entirely urban, population. China both before and now faces grave problems and challenges--rural/urban economic disparities, population/resource pressures, uneven development of coastal and interior provinces, a growing and dangerous disconnect between central and local government--that are pretty much unheard of in Singapore. |
What's Wrong with China?