21
Celestial Empire:
Stasis and Retreat
N o w E n g l a n d is paying h o m a g e .
M y Ancestors' merit a n d virtue m u s t have reached their distant shores.
T h o u g h their tribute is c o m m o n p l a c e , m y heart approves sincerely.
Curios a n d the boasted ingenuity o f their devices I prize not.
T h o u g h what they bring is meager, yet,
In m y kindness to m e n from afar I m a k e g e n e r o u s return,
Wanting to preserve m y g o o d health a n d power.
— P o e m by the Q i e n l o n g e m p e r o r o n
the occasion o f the Macartney embassy ( 1 7 9 3 )
Those sixteenth-century Europeans who sailed into the Indian
Ocean and made their way to China met an unaccustomed shock
of alien condescension. The Celestial Empire—the name tells everything—saw
itself as the world's premier political entity: first in size and
population, first in age and experience, untouchable in its cultural
achievement and sense of moral, spiritual, and intellectual superiority.
The Chinese lived, they thought, at the center of the universe.
Around them, lesser breeds drew on their glow, reached out to them
for light, gained stature by doing obeisance and offering tribute. The
Chinese emperor was the "Son of Heaven," unique, godlike representative
of celestial power. Those few who entered his presence showed
their awe by kowtowing—kneeling and touching their head nine times
to the ground. Others kowtowed to anything emanating from him—
a letter, a single handwritten ideograph. The paper he wrote on, the
clothes he wore, everything he touched partook of his divine essence.*
Those who represented the emperor and administered for him were
chosen by competitive examination in Confucian letters and morals.
* Lest o n e think the Chinese strange, c o m p a r e the rule in early m o d e r n Spain that all
kneel when the wafer a n d wine o f the Eucharist passed in procession.
336 T H E W E A L T H A N D P O V E R T Y O F N A T I O N S
These mandarin officials embodied the higher Chinese culture—its
prestige, its wholeness and sublimity. Their self-esteem and haughtiness
had ample room for expression and exercise on their inferiors, and
were matched only by their "stunned submissiveness" and selfabasement
to superiors.1
Nothing conveyed so well their rivalry in humility
as the morning audience, when hundreds of courtiers gathered
in the open from midnight on and stood about, in rain and cold and
fair, to await the emperor's arrival and perform their obeisance. They
were not wasting time; their time was the emperor's. No mandarin
could afford to be late, and punctuality fell short: unpunctual earliness
was proof of zeal.2
Such cultural triumphalism combined with petty downward tyranny
made China a reluctant improver and a bad learner. Improvement
would have challenged comfortable orthodoxies and entailed insubordination;
the same for imported knowledge and ideas.3
In effect, what
was there to learn? This rejection of the foreign was the more anxious
for the very arrogance that justified it. That is the paradox of the superiority
complex: it is intrinsically insecure and brittie. Those who
cherish it need it and fear nothing so much as contradiction. (The
French today so trumpet the superiority of their language that they
tremble at the prospect of a borrowed word, especially if it comes from
English.)* So Ming China—convinced of its ascendancy—quaked before
the challenge of Western technology, which was there for the
learning.
Ironically, those first Portuguese visitors and Catholic missionaries
used the wonders of Western technology to charm their way into
China. The mechanical clock was the key that unlocked the gates. This,
we saw, was a European mega-invention of the late thirteenth century,
crucial for its contribution to discipline and productivity, but also for
its susceptibility of improvement and its role at the frontier of instrumentation
and mechanical technique. The water clock is a dunce by
comparison.
For China's sixteenth-century officials, the mechanical clock came as
a wonder machine that not only kept time but amused and entertained.
Some clocks played music; others, automata, featured figurines that
moved rhythmically at intervals. Clocks, then, were the sort of thing
the emperor would want to see and enjoy, that had to be shown him
if only to earn his favor, that a zealous courtier had to show him be*
Latest m o v e : the English C D - R O M , p r o n o u n c e d say-day-rom in French, will n o w
be cédérom, p r o n o u n c e d say-day-rom in French.
C E L E S T I A L E M P I R E : S T A S I S A N D R E T R E A T 337
fore someone else did. Not easy. This magical device had to be accompanied.
Chinese instinct and practice dictated that foreigners be
kept at a distance, confined to some peripheral point like Macao and
rarely allowed to proceed to the center. The sixteenth-century clock,
however, needed its attendant clockmaker.
No question that Chinese loved clocks and watches. They were less
happy, though, with their European attendants. The problem here was
the Chinese sense of the wholeness of culture, the link between things,
people, and the divine. The Catholic priests who brought them these
machines were salesmen of a special kind. They sought to convert the
Chinese to the one true trinitarian God of the Roman Church, and the
clocks served a twofold purpose: entry ticket and argument for Christian
superiority. Those who could make these things, who possessed
special astronomical and geographical knowledge into the bargain,
were they not superior in the largest moral sense? Was not their faith
truer, wiser?
The Jesuits came prepared to make this argument, stretching the
while the rules and rites of the Church to fit the moment. (The Chinese
ideographs for ancestor worship, for example, became the signifiers
for the Christian mass.) European laymen followed suit. Here is
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, co-inventor of the calculus and
philosopher:
What will these peoples say [the Persians, the Chinese], when they see
this marvelous machine that you have made, which represents the true
state of the heavens at any given time? I believe that they will recognize that
the mind of man has something of the divine, and that this divinity communicates
itself especially to Christians. The secret of the heavens, the
greatness of the earth, and time measurement are the sort of thing I mean.4
On occasion, this argument carried. Catholic missionaries had some
small success, although they had trouble persuading their open-minded
"converts" to be good exclusivists (no other faith but the "true" faith)
in the European tradition. But most Chinese saw these pretensions for
what they were: an attack on Chinese claims to moral superiority, an assault
on China's self-esteem.
The response, then, had to be a repudiation or depreciation of Western
science and technology.5
Here is the K'ang Hsi emperor, the most
open-minded and curious of men in his pursuit of Western ways, the
most zealous in teaching them: " . . . even though some of the Western
methods are different from our own, and may even be an im-
LATE MING AND EARLY Q'ING CHINA, SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES.
T h e "willow palisade" s u r r o u n d e d the area o f C h i n e s e settlement in L i a o - t u n g a n d
cut it o f f from the rest o f M a n c h u r i a .
C E L E S T I A L E M P I R E : S T A S I S A N D R E T R E A T 339
provement, there is little about them that is new. The principles of
mathematics all derive from the Book of Changes, and the Western
methods are Chinese in origin. . . . " 6
So ran the heart-warming myth. So the Chinese, who would not give
up clocks, who wanted clocks, trivialized them as toys, which for many
they were; or as nonfunctional symbols of status, inaccessible to hoipolloi.
Premodern imperial China did not think of time knowledge as a
right. Time belonged to the authorities, who sounded (proclaimed) the
hour, and a personal timepiece was a rare privilege. As a result, although
the imperial court set up workshops to make clocks and got
their Jesuit clockmakers to train some native talent, these Chinese makers
never matched Western horologists—for want of the best teachers
and lack of commercial competition and emulation. Imperial China
never had a clockmaking trade like Europe's.
The same sin of pride (or indifference) shaped China's response to
European armament. Here we have anything but a toy. Cannon and
muskets were instruments of death, hence of power. The Chinese had
every reason to desire these artifacts, for the seventeenth century saw
the Ming dynasty fighting to survive and losing to Tartars from the
north. In these decades of war, European inventions might have tilted
the balance of power.
And yet the Chinese never learned to make modern guns. Worse yet,
having known and used cannon as early as the thirteenth century, they
had let knowledge and skill slip away. Their city walls and gates had emplacements
for cannon, but no cannon. Who needed them? No enemy
of China had them.* But China did have enemies, without and within.
No European nation would have been deterred from armament by
enemy weakness; when it came to death, Europeans maximized. European
technology was also incremental: each gain led to further gain.
The Chinese record of step-forward, step-back, signaled an entirely
different process.1
* T h e Jurchen Tartars ( M a n c h u s ) w h o overthrew the M i n g dynasty, replacing it with
their o w n Q i n g line, o p p o s e d Chinese musketry with b o w s a n d arrows. Yet s o ineffective
were these muskets, presumably because they t o o k s o l o n g to load a n d were
hard to m o v e about, that they were m o r e handicap than advantage. S e e Wakeman, The
Great Enterprise, I , 6 8 .
f Students o f Chinese technology a n d science, m o s t notably J o s e p h N e e d h a m a n d his
team, have m a d e m u c h o f Chinese priority in discovery a n d invention, pushing the origins
o f important techniques a n d devices far back, well before their appearance in E u rope.
T h e y see this quite properly as a sign o f exceptional creativity a n d precocity, b u t
they m i g h t better ask why the s u b s e q u e n t retreat a n d loss.
340 T H E W E A L T H A N D P O V E R T Y OF N A T I O N S
So it was that in 1621, when the Portuguese in Macao offered four
cannon to the emperor by way of gaining favor, they had to send four
cannoneers along with them. In 1630, the Chinese hired a detachment
of Portuguese musketeers and artillerymen to fight for them,
but gave up on the idea before they could put it into action. Probably
a wise decision, because mercenaries have been the death or usurpation
of more than one regime.* But the Mings did use some Portuguese as
teachers, and later on they got their Jesuit theologian-mechanicians to
build them a foundry and cast cannon.
These Jesuit cannon seem to have been among the best China had.
Some still found use in the nineteenth century, two hundred fifty years
later. Most Chinese guns saw short service, however, being notoriously
unreliable, more dangerous to the men who fired them than to
the enemy. (We even hear of Chinese cannonballs made of dried mud,
but these at least allowed the force of the explosion to exit by the
mouth of the tube.) In general, Chinese authorities frowned on the use
of firearms, perhaps because they doubted the loyalty of their subjects.
In view of the inefficacy of these weapons, one wonders what they had
to fear. Presumably the improvement that comes with use.7
All of this may seem irrational to a means-ends oriented person, but
it was not quite that; the ends were different. Europeans saw the purpose
of war as to kill the enemy and win; the Chinese, strong in space
and numbers, thought otherwise. Here is Mu Fu-sheng (a pseudonym)
on the imperial viewpoint:
. . . military defeat was the technical reason why Western knowledge
should be acquired, but it was also the psychological reason why it should
not be. Instinctively the Chinese preferred admitting military defeat, which
could be reversed, to entering a psychological crisis; people could stand humiliation
but not self-debasement. . . . The mandarins sensed the threat to
Chinese civilization irrespective of the economic and political issues and
they tried to resist this threat without regard to the economic and political
dangers. In the past the Chinese had never had to give up their cultural
pride: the foreign rulers always adopted the Chinese civilization. Hence
there was nothing in their history to guide them through their modern cri­
sis.8
* T h e pressure actually c a m e from C a n t o n e s e merchants, w h o feared losing the m o n
o p o l y o f foreign trade t o such useful foreigners a n d bribed ministers at court to cancel
the p r o j e c t — W a k e m a n , The Great Enterprise, I, 7 7 , a n d n. 1 4 8 .
C E L E S T I A L E M P I R E I S T A S I S A N D R E T R E A T 341
Along with indifference to technology went resistance to European
science. Christian clerics brought in not only clocks but knowledge
(sometimes obsolete knowledge) and ideas. Some of this interested
the court: in particular, astronomy and techniques of celestial observation
were valuable to a ruler who claimed a monopoly of the calendar
and used his mastery of time to control society as a whole. The
Jesuits, moreover, trained gifted students who went on to do their
own work: mathematicians who learned to use logarithms and
trigonometry; astronomers who prepared new star tables.
Little of this got beyond Peking (Beijing), however, and soon the
new learning ran into a nativist reaction that reached back to longforgotten
work of earlier periods. One leader of this return to the
sources (Wen-Ting, 1635-1721) examined mathematical texts of the
Song dynasty (tenth to thirteenth centuries) and proclaimed that the
Jesuits had brought in little that was new. Later on, his manuscripts
were published by his grandson under the title Pearls Recovered from
the Red River? The title was more eloquent than intended: by this
time much Chinese scientific "inquiry" took the form of raking alluvial
sediment.
Meanwhile European science marched ahead, and successive churchmen
brought to China ever better knowledge (though still well behind
the frontier). Here, however, constraints thwarted their mission. They
had laid so much stress on the link between scientific knowledge and
religious truth that any revision of the former implied a repudiation of
the latter. How, then, deal with Europe's constantly changing science?
In 1710, a Jesuit astronomer sought to use new planetary tables based
on the Copernican system. His superior would not permit it, for fear
of "giving the impression of a censure on what our predecessors had
so much trouble to establish and occasioning new accusations against
[the Christian] religion."1 0
This intellectual xenophobia did not apply to all Chinese. A few farsighted
officials and at least one emperor understood that the empire
had much to gain by learning these new ways. Yet the curse of foreignness
remained. In a letter of November 1640, the Jesuit von Bell
wrote: "The word hsi [Western] is very unpopular, and the Emperor in
his edicts never uses any word than hsin [new]; in fact the former word
in used only by those who want to belittle us."1 1
The would-be modernizers were thwarted, moreover, not only by
britde insecurities but also by the intrigue of a palace milieu where innovations
were judged by their consequences for the pecking order. N o
342 T H E W E A L T H A N D P O V E R T Y OF N A T I O N S
proposal that did not incite resistance; no novelty that did not frighten
vested interests. At all levels, moreover, fear of reprimand (or worse)
outweighed the prospect of reward. A good idea brought credit to
one's superior; a mistake invariably meant blame for subordinates. It
was easier to tell superiors what they wanted to hear.1 2
This prudent aversion to change struck generations of visitors. Listen
to the Jesuit missionary Louis Le Comte (1655-1728): "They [the
Chinese] are more fond of the most defective piece of antiquity than
of the most perfect of the modern, differing much in that from us
[Europeans], who are in love with nothing but what is new."1 3
George
Staunton, Lord Macartney's secretary, disheartened by Chinese indifference
to suggestions for improvement of their canals, lamented that
"In this country they think that everything is excellent and that proposals
for improvement would be superfluous if not blameworthy."
And a half century later a Christian friar, Evariste Hue, engaged in the
sisyphean task of missionizing, despairingly observed: "Any man of
genius is paralyzed immediately by the thought that his efforts will
win him punishment rather than rewards."1 4
(Imperial China is not alone here. The smothering of incentive and
the cultivation of mendacity are a characteristic weakness of large bureaucracies,
whether public or private [business corporations]. Nominal
colleagues, supposedly pulling together, are in fact adversarial
players. They compete within the organization, not in a free market of
ideas but in a closed world of guile and maneuver. The advantage lies
with those in higher places.)
The rejection of foreign technology was the more serious because
China itself had long slipped into technological and scientific torpor,
coasting along on previous gains and losing speed as talent yielded to
gentility. After all, China was its own world. Why did it not produce its
own scientific and industrial revolutions? A thousand years ago, the
Chinese were well ahead of anyone else—and certainly of Europe.
Some would argue that this superiority held for centuries thereafter.
Why, then, did China "fail"?
Some China scholars would mitigate the pain by euphemism: "Chinese
society, though stable, was far from static and unchanging . . . the
pace was slower . . . the degree of change less."1 5
(True, but the issue
remains.) Others dismiss the question as unanswerable or illegitimate.
Unanswerable because it is said to be impossible to explain a negative.
(This is certainly not true in logic; the explanation of large-scale failure
and success is inevitably complicated, but that is what history is all
C E L E S T I A L E M P I R E : S T A S I S A N D R E T R E A T 343
about.) Illegitimate because where is the failure? The very use of the
word imposes non-Chinese standards and expectations on China. (But
why not? Why should one not expect China to be curious about nature
and to want to understand it? To cumulate knowledge and go from
one discovery to another? To pursue economic growth and development?
To want to do more work with less labor? The earlier successes
of China in these respects make these questions the more pertinent.)1 6
What about the relations between science and technology? Did the
one matter to the other? After all, science was not initially a major contributor
to the European Industrial Revolution, which built largely on
empirical advances by practitioners. What difference, then, to Chinese
technology if science had slowed to a crawl by the seventeenth century?
The answer, I think, is that in both China and Europe, science and
technology were (and are) two sides of the same coin. The response to
new knowledge of either kind is of a piece, and the society that closes
its eyes to novelty from the one source has already been closing it to
novelty from the other.
In addition, China lacked institutions for finding and learning—
schools, academies, learned societies, challenges and competitions. The
sense of give-and-take, of standing on the shoulders of giants, of
progress—all of these were weak or absent. Here was another paradox.
On the one hand, the Chinese formally worshipped their intellectual
ancestors; in 1734, an imperial decree required court physicians to
make ritual sacrifices to their departed predecessors.1 7
On the other,
they let the findings of each new generation slip into oblivion, to be recovered
later, perhaps, by antiquarian and archeological research.*
The history of Chinese advances, then, is one of points of light, separated
in space and time, unlinked by replication and testing, obfuscated
by metaphor and pseudo-profundity, limited in diffusion
(nothing comparable to European printing)—in effect, a scattering of
ephemera. Much of the vocabulary was invented for the occasion
and fell as swiftly into disuse, so that scholars today spend a good
deal of their effort deciphering these otherwise familiar ideograms.
Much thought remained mired in metaphysical skepticism and
speculation. Here Confucianism, with its easy disdain for scientific re*
A n d this in spite o f considerable effort to collect k n o w l e d g e in encyclopedias. O n e
such project, really an anthology, m a y well have b e e n the biggest o f its kind ever attempted:
8 0 0 , 0 0 0 p a g e s — S p e n c e , Search for Modern China, p . 8 6 . B u t a plethora o f
encyclopedias is a b a d sign: like still p h o t o g r a p h s , they aim t o fix k n o w l e d g e at a p o i n t
o f time. T h e y are useful as reference works, especially for historians, b u t they can imp
e d e free inquiry.
344 T H E W E A L T H A N D P O V E R T Y OF N A T I O N S
search, which it disparaged as "interventionist" and superficial, contributed
its discouraging word: "With the microscope you see the surface
of things. . . . But do not suppose you are seeing the things in
themselves."*
This want of exchange and challenge, this subjectivity, explains the
uncertainty of gains and the easy loss of impetus. Chinese savants had
no way of knowing when they were right. It is subsequent research,
mostly Western, that has discovered and awarded palms of achievement
to the more inspired. Small wonder that China reacted so unfavorably
to European imports. European knowledge was not only
strange and implicitly belittling. In its ebullience and excitement, its
urgency and competitiveness, its brutal commitment to truth and efficacy
(Jesuits excepted), it went against the Chinese genius.
So the years passed, and the decades, and the centuries. Europe left
China far behind. At first unbelieving and contemptuous, China grew
anxious and frustrated. From asking and begging, the Westerners became
insistent and impatient. The British saw two embassies dismissed
with contempt. The third time, in 1839, they came in gunboats and
blew the door down. Other Western nations followed suit, and then
the Japanese, with their own pretensions to dominion after the Meiji
Restoration (1868), moved to secure their place alongside Great
Britain, France, Germany, and Russia.
Even so, the outsiders barely scratched the surface of the porcelain
kingdom: some trading cities along the coast; uncertain spheres of influence
in the interior; the right to import opium, kerosene, and manufactures.
These represented only a small fraction of the market, but
the potential size of the market—so many people!—made China the
legendary El Dorado of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Inside the brittle skin, the empire was restless, the people unhappy,
the mandarinate divided, the rulers insecure. The Qing (pronounced
"Ching") dynasty (1644-1912), remember, was of Manchu origin. A
small nomadic people of perhaps 1 million seized a nation of hundreds
of millions and held them captive for two hundred fifty years. To be
sure, the dynasty had adopted and been absorbed into Chinese culture,
* F r o m a p o e m , early nineteenth century, by the s o n o f the prime minister, himself a
high state dignitary, q u o t e d in T a t o n , ed., General History, I I , 5 9 3 . O f course, when
the time c a m e , o n e c o u l d find s u p p o r t in Confucianism for other positions. O n e can
q u o t e sacred writ t o one's purpose. Which d o e s n o t stop p e o p l e from using it to b a d
purpose.
C E L E S T I A L E M P I R E : S T A S I S A N D R E T R E A T 345
but the difference in manners, descent, and privilege remained. Markers
(the obligation of Chinese males to wear the pigtail) distinguished
rulers from ruled—a thorn in the flesh of the Chinese people. And
while most of the administration was necessarily Chinese and these officials
did not want for diligence and loyalty, they were inevitably diminished
by their inherited inferiority and tainted by their
collaboration.
The first years of the new dynasty saw improvement. Peace and order
were restored; food supply kept up with demand. This was Europe's
greatest gift to the people that thought it had everything: new crops
(potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts) that could be grown on otherwise
barren, upland soils. But now Chinese population grew sharply—the
traditional Malthusian response—and when food supply leveled off,
famine, hunger, and civil unrest returned. The Kangxi (K'ang Hsi)
emperor (1662-1722) was barely in his grave when the trouble started,
easily suppressed at first but a gathering storm.
Chinese thoughts turned easily to xenophobia. The foreigner became
a focus of fear and hatred, the presumed source of difficulty, oppression,
and humiliation. Much of this indictment was justified:
superior power does not bring out the best in people. But insofar as it
shifted responsibility for native ills, it was a self-defeating escapism.
Most potent and cosdy of these internal explosions was the so-called
Taiping rebellion (1850-64), a religiously inspired revolt that for all its
nativism was part Christian-millenarian and took over a decade to suppress,
at the cost of 20 million lives.
All this anger blocked economic modernization. Foreign ownership
and management, for example, immensely complicated the introduction
of railways. Steamboats were equated with gunboats—instruments
of penetration and oppression. Mechanization, discouraged by an
abundance of cheap labor and the reluctance of women to work outside
the home, was tarred with the same brush.1 8
As a result, factory industry
barely had a foothold at the end of the nineteenth century,
creeping into the foreign settiements of the treaty ports, extraterritorial
carbuncles on the hide of the Chinese empire. Since the country
could not defend itself against imports by tariffs—forbidden by the
unequal treaties imposed from outside—these "plantation" enterprises
had little exemplary influence on the domestic economy. China remained
overwhelmingly agricultural with a scattered overlay of handicraft
industry.
And poor. Evariste Hue, who traveled through China as a missionary
from 1839 to 1851, bears witness to the misery:
346 T H E W E A L T H A N D P O V E R T Y OF N A T I O N S
. . . unquestionably there can be found in no other country such a depth
of disastrous poverty as in the Celestial Empire. Not a year passes in which
a terrific number of persons do not perish of famine in some part or other
of China; and the multitude of those who live merely from day to day is incalculable.
Let a drought, a flood, or any accident whatever occur to injure
the harvest in a single province, and two thirds of the population are immediately
reduced to starvation. You see them forming up into numerous
bands—perfect armies of beggars—and proceeding together, men, women,
and children, to seek some little nourishment in the towns and villages. . . .
Many faint by the wayside and die before they can reach the place where
they had hoped to find help. You see their bodies lying in the fields and by
the roadside, and you pass without taking notice—so familiar is the horrible
spectacle.1 9
"Modern Universal Science, Yes;
Western Science, No!"
Nothing troubles a historian's spirit more than the wounds of the
past. This seems to be especially true when studying those countries
and peoples whom time has mistreated. Once rich, they have become
poor. Once mighty, they have fallen. Such losers and victims carry
with them the memory of better days and resentments that feed on
bitter experience. And the historian, who seeks to understand them
and to translate them for others, who wants to know and love them,
finds himself caught up in the campaign to justify their past, to assert
their dignity, to salve their wounds.
This is a worthy mission. It can, however, get in the way of
science. Nowhere is this more evident than in the historiography of
China, navel of the universe, the earth's richest and most populous
empire a thousand years ago, still an object of admiration some three
hundred years ago, only to be brought down to derision and pity
thereafter. The desire of sinologists to defend China from outrageous
outsiders has spawned a small industry of defensive scholarship,
typically erudite and ipsofacto intimidating, designed to enhance
Chinese performance and correct Western criticisms.
Nowhere is this strain-to-maintain more prominent, indeed
intrusive, than in discussions of the alleged failure of Chinese science
and technology, especially in the context of Chinese contacts with
Europe. Many China experts are not happy to be reminded of this
C E L E S T I A L E M P I R E : S T A S I S A N D R E T R E A T 347
failure, for two reasons primarily. First, Westerners have often seen it
as a mark of weakness and as proof of their superiority. In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries even those visitors who
admired China in general, and its government, its philosophy, its
walled cities, its rectangular street patterns, its manufactures, and
number of other aspects in particular, usually condemned and
scorned Chinese science. Very awkward.
Secondly, nothing has been more distressing to the people and
government of the new China than this condescension. In the past,
the Chinese saw their land as "the one true center of civilization."2 0
How should they see it now—a caboose at the end of a European
train? How to reconcile the pursuit of Western science with a legacy
of sublime self-esteem? The answer: to stress the worldwide character
of scientific inquiry and technological advance—one common
stream—and highlight Chinese contributions to that enterprise.
"The achievements of China's ancient science and technology prove
that the Chinese people have the ability needed to occupy their
rightful place among the world's peoples."2 1
Western sinologues have taken up the cudgels. One tactic has been
to minimize the import of the contrast. What's all the fuss about?
Why this fascination with West-East contacts and conflicts? China,
these scholars contend, had its own history to live, and to see this
solely in terms of confrontation, as a puppet of Europe-driven
challenge and response, is to diminish it and empty it of its essence.
Look in more than out.
The old emperors would have approved. But that kind of
argument adds litde to our understanding, for it is simply irrelevant
to the issue of Chinese regression. You do not solve a major
historical problem by pretending it does not exist and telling people
to look elsewhere.
A somewhat similar dismissal says that we simply do not know
enough about Chinese science to ask the question. To pose it would
be "an utter waste of time, and distracting as well . . . until the
Chinese tradition has been adequately comprehended from the
inside."2 2
(Until when? It is always a good idea to learn more about
one's subject, but not at the expense of shelving important and
timely questions. In fact, Nathan Sivin, author of this caution and
collaborator with Joseph Needham in the exploration of the history
of Chinese science, ignores his own advice and turns to this issue in
other contexts.)
More to the point has been an effort to accentuate the positive by
348 T H E W E A L T H A N D P O V E R T Y O F N A T I O N S
painting a happy picture of Chinese achievements in the context of
ecumenical science. This we might call the multicultural approach:
knowledge is a house of many mansions, and diverse civilizations
have each taken their own path to their own truth. And then, in
science at least, all these truths merged in a common product. Here
is Sivin again:
T h e historical d i s c o v e r i e s o f t h e last g e n e r a t i o n h a v e left n o basis for the
o l d m y t h s t h a t the a n c e s t r y o f m o d e r n science is exclusively E u r o p e a n a n d
t h a t b e f o r e m o d e r n t i m e s n o o t h e r civilization w a s able t o d o science e x c e p t
u n d e r E u r o p e a n influence. W e h a v e g r a d u a l l y c o m e t o u n d e r s t a n d that scientific
traditions differing from t h e E u r o p e a n tradition in f u n d a m e n t a l res
p e c t s — f r o m t e c h n i q u e s , t o institutional s e t t i n g s , t o views o f n a t u r e a n d
m a n ' s r e l a t i o n t o i t — e x i s t e d in t h e I s l a m i c w o r l d , I n d i a , a n d C h i n a , a n d in
smaller civilizations as well. It h a s b e c o m e clear that t h e s e traditions a n d the
tradition o f t h e O c c i d e n t , far from b e i n g separate s t r e a m s , have i n t e r a c t e d
m o r e o r less c o n t i n u o u s l y from their b e g i n n i n g s until they w e r e replaced by
local v e r s i o n s o f t h e m o d e r n science t h a t they h a v e all h e l p e d t o f o r m . 2 3
This is the new myth, put forward as a given. Like other myths, it
aims to shape the truth to higher ends, to form opinion in some
other cause. In this instance, the myth is true in pointing out that
modern science, in the course of its development, took up
knowledge discovered by other civilizations; and that it absorbed and
combined such knowledge and know-how with European findings.
The myth is wrong, however, in implying a continuing symmetrical
interaction among diverse civilizations.
In the beginning, when China and others were ahead, almost all
the transmission went one way, from the outside to Europe. That
was Europe's great virtue: unlike China, Europe was a learner, and
indeed owed much to earlier Chinese inventions and discoveries.
Later on, of course, the story was different: once Europe had
invented modern science, the current flowed back, though not
without resistance. Here, too, the myth misleads by implying a kind
of equal, undifferentiated contribution to the common treasure. The
vast bulk of modern science was of Europe's making, especially that
breakthrough of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that goes
by the name "scientific revolution." Not only did non-Western
science contribute just about nothing (though there was more there
than Europeans knew), but at that point it was incapable of
participating, so far had it fallen behind or taken the wrong turning.
This was no common stream.
C E L E S T I A L E M P I R E ' . S T A S I S A N D R E T R E A T 349
All of this has not discouraged the propagation of the new gospel,
because in matters of this kind scholars are often the servants of their
ideals and their needs. The extraneous ideological and political
motivation here may be inferred from the following text:
E d u c a t e d p e o p l e all over the w o r l d are n o w p r e p a r e d t o r e s p o n d t o n e w
revelations a b o u t C h i n e s e scientific traditions. . . . T h e h e i g h t e n e d interest
has m e a n t a small b u t p e r c e p t i b l e rise in the w o r l d ' s e s t e e m for C h i n a . M o r e
t o the p o i n t , it has m e a n t that scientists all o v e r the w o r l d are increasingly
involved in the give a n d take that help C h i n e s e scientists t o b e fully involved
in the international scientific c o m m u n i t y . 2 4
As though even now they needed encouragement.2 5