Why Beijing lost to Europe in the technological race

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Why doesn't China dominate the world? It is the oldest major culture still in existence, and it has always been the biggest. Until the 15th century, it usually led the world in technological advances, in literacy, and in its ability to provide a stable, peaceful environment for its people. It was the world's richest and most powerful country.

So why didn't the scientific revolution start in China? Why was it the quarrelsome, Johnny-come-lately Europeans who took the technological lead, settled the Americas and Australasia, conquered the rest of the world, and then had the industrial revolution? Why, even today, does China lag behind its Asian neighbors, Japan and Korea, in both economic and political development?

When I found myself chatting to the chief executive officers of a big Japanese multinational and a big Korean one a couple of years ago, I put the last question to them, and they instantly gave the same response: China's problem is that it is too centralized.

Three times in the past century, they pointed out, some Chinese provinces, mostly on the coast, have begun to climb the well-trodden path to industrialization and 'modernization'. Every time the center (whether in imperial, Nationalist, or Communist hands) panicked, because they were becoming too different from the rest. Each time, in the end, Beijing cracked down and stifled the changes in order to 'preserve national unity'.

As an explanation for China's difficulty in modernizing in the past century, this argument holds a lot of water. Even today, Beijing's Communist rulers cite the danger of luan (literally, chaos) as a reason to fear and shun democracy in China, and the Chinese obsession with preserving national unity is so strong that it still has a certain resonance. Now along comes someone with a far more sweeping theory about China's failure to modernize, but one that runs along the same lines.

The reason that Europe forged ahead in the past five hundred years while China stagnated, argues Graeme Lang in two recent essays, is basically that China was united and Europe wasn't. Take the Ming emperor's decree of 1433 banning ocean voyages, the most fateful single decision of the past thousand years.

At that time, China was the technological leader, having been first with innovations like gunpowder, printing, and magnetic compasses (all achieved, it should be noted, in the period of political disunity that preceded the Ming hegemony).

Europe had copied these advances, and from both Europe and China the first ships were venturing into the wider world beyond. Both regions had great technological superiority over the rest of the world -- and whoever got there first was going to dominate it.

At precisely that point, the Chinese emperor banned ocean voyages. His decree was enforced throughout China, with the result that today all of the Americas, and even Australia and New Zealand, speak European languages, not Chinese. Little European countries like Portugal and the Netherlands even built empires in Africa and the rest of Asia, while China fell further and further behind.

Graeme Lang's point is that this was not an accident. Had some European monarch made the same decree as the Ming emperor, he simply could not have enforced it, for Europe was divided into dozens of big states and hundreds of smaller ones. Neither individuals nor their ideas could be controlled: if you annoyed the ruler of the state you lived in, you just moved on to the next.

Christopher Columbus, for example, pitched his plans for ocean exploration unsuccessfully to five different rulers before he hit the jackpot with Queen Isabella in Spain. Johannes Kepler, working on ideas about the universe that were bound to upset the defenders of the status quo, just kept moving between the many German mini-states, from Tubingen to Graz to Prague to Linz to Dresden. Nobody could shut him up, and so the work got done.

In China, by contrast, it was easy to shut people up if their ideas didn't fit: there was one, omnipotent emperor and literally nowhere else to go. This, says Lang, is why Europe began to pull ahead of China so rapidly once the basic foundations for scientific enquiry and technological advance had been laid. But he also makes another, even more profound observation.

The basic difference between Europe and China, Lang argues, was neither the accidents of politics, nor even the underlying culture. After all, as he observes, "even if culture was a factor, we would be left with the problem of explaining why the cultures of these two regions were so different." The real difference, he says, was simply geography. China was easy to unite, whereas it was impossible to unite Europe.

Look at a map, and it's obvious why. China and Europe are about the same size, and both then and now they have about the same number of people. But China is a simple land-mass with a smooth coastline, long navigable rivers, no big mountain ranges, and no large offshore islands (neither Taiwan nor Hainan are even as big as Ireland). Europe, on the other hand, has a deeply indented coastline, big offshore islands, and serious mountain ranges.

Nobody ever managed to unite Europe, though many tried: the Caesars, Charlemagne, Napoleon, and most recently Hitler. China, on the other hand, was first united in 221 BC, and despite occasional collapses has stayed united for over 90 percent of the time since then. China's bad luck, Europe's fortune, says Lang: it was precisely the disunity of Europe that made it impossible for rulers wedded to the status quo to smother innovation.

All water under the bridge, but at last things may be changing: most of Europe is moving towards unity under the European Union. It will be a long and rocky road, but once economic union and the single currency kick in next Jan. 1, the trend will be largely irreversible.

Now if only China can contrive to be disunited....