China and the West

Crossroads of Civilisation

Peter Nolan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429840432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Capitalist globalisation since the 1980s has produced immense benefits in terms of technical progress, poverty reduction and welfare improvement. However, it has been accompanied by profound contradictions, including ecological destruction, global warming, inequality, concentration of business power, and financial instability. Regulation of global political economy in the interests of the majority of the world's population is essential if the human species is to avoid a Darwinian catastrophe. This book explores China's rich history of regulating the market in the interests of the mass of the population. For over two thousand years the Chinese bureaucracy has sought pragmatically to find a Way in which to integrate the 'invisible hand' of market forces with the 'visible hand' of ethically guided government regulation. Instead of seeking confrontation with China, citizens and politicians in the West need to deepen their understanding of the contribution that China can make to globally sustainable development in the decades and centuries ahead.

Part I

China and the West over the long term

1 Convergence and divergence in the long-run development of China and the West

The history of the human race as a whole can be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature, [which] opens up the comforting prospect of a future in which all the germs implanted by nature can be developed fully, and in which man’s destiny can be fulfilled here on earth. [The] highest purpose of nature [is] a universal cosmopolitan existence, [which will] at last be realized as the matrix within which all the original capacities of the human race may develop.

(Kant, 1784: 50–52)

Without understanding between ourselves and the peoples of East Asia we cannot hope for harmonious relations and fruitful cooperation; in fact, we may face ultimate disaster. But understanding can be based only on knowledge and a sound knowledge of East Asia is not easily achieved.

(Reischauer and Fairbank, 1960: 5–6)

Introduction

Human civilization stands at a crossroads.¹ There are urgent global challenges that need to be confronted, including destruction of the natural environment; climate change; inequality of income, wealth and life chances; industrial concentration and regulation of the financial system. Looming above all of these is the issue of how to avoid a ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and a New Peloponnesian War. Only by looking deep into the past can one better understand the possible direction that the long-term evolution of world civilization might take. The relationship between China and the West will play a central role in the path that humanity follows in the decades and centuries ahead. In the Ancient World for around 2,000 years the evolution of civilization in both China and the West followed convergent paths. From the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fourth century AD until the early nineteenth century their paths diverged radically. In this era China continued to build in an evolutionary fashion on the foundations laid in the Ancient World while Europe followed a fundamentally different course from that which had been established in the Ancient World. The long era of the ‘first divergence’ left a deep imprint on the culture of both East and West. The Industrial Revolution in Britain signalled the start of a second era of radical divergence, which lasted up until the late twentieth century. In the course of world history this era is of short duration, a mere 200 years, compared with more than 4,000 years of complex civilization that preceded it. Since the 1980s the world has entered an era of renewed economic convergence between China and the West. However, there are still deep differences in the respective civilizations, which are inherited from the long sweep of history. These differences have the potential to result in conflict, producing global instability and violence, but they also have the potential to combine in a virtuous fashion that helps to construct a sustainable and peaceful global future for the whole of humanity.

The first convergence

The foundations of Chinese civilization were laid in the Yellow River Valley in North China during the ancient dynasties of the Xia (21–16 century BC), Shang (16–11 century BC) and Zhou (11 century–221 BC). During the Zhou Dynasty the expansion of commerce, the use of money and the rise of a wealthy class, combined with the high intensity of warfare among the separate kingdoms, helped to stimulate philosophical investigation about the nature of the human condition and the political system. A common theme of philosophical investigation was the necessity for the rulers to pursue the common interest of ‘everyone under heaven’.² Among the wide range of thinkers, Confucius was by far the most important. The Analects has provided the moral foundations for the Chinese state for over 2,000 years. In Confucius’ view the most important objective for the government official is to care for the welfare of the common people. The core Confucian value is benevolence (ren), which is ‘more vital to the common people than even fire and water’. The government official ought to devote his life to the interests of the common people: ‘With Yu I can find no fault. He lived in low dwellings while devoting all his energy to the building of irrigation canals.’³ If the bureaucracy becomes corrupt, losing its moral foundation, the result is disaster for social order: ‘Those in authority have lost the Way and the common people have for long been rootless.’

In 221 BC under the Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di the main body of China was united for the first time. The Imperial system inaugurated by Qin Shi Huang Di proved to be ‘the most long-lasting of all human institutions’. During the Qin Dynasty (221–207 BC) the system of weights and measures, the coinage, the method of writing Chinese characters and even the axle lengths were all standardized across the country. The Great Wall in north and northwest China as well as a system of roads that radiated across the Empire were constructed. Although the dynasty collapsed four years after his death, the Qin Emperor’s main achievements remained intact. The successor dynasty, the Han lasted from 206 BC–220 AD. During the Han Dynasty, China developed an early form of the political structure that has remained intact to the present day. The traditional Chinese state was a combination of a hereditary emperor with a large professional bureaucracy, selected by competitive examination, with exams based on the ancient philosophers, especially Confucius and Mencius. Under the Han Dynasty economic integration over a large part of China, together with peace and political stability, allowed an era of great economic and technical progress. Advances in government-initiated water control facilities increased farm productivity and reduced transport costs. China developed the cultivation of silk worms for silk thread and production of silk textiles. The water-powered mill was invented. The shoulder harness increased the efficiency of draft animals. The inventions of paper using rags took place. It took more than a thousand years for knowledge of paper-making to spread to Europe. Towards the end of the dynasty, porcelain production began in China and techniques quickly advanced. Europe was unable to produce porcelain until the eighteenth century. Chinese metallurgists discovered the method of puddling molten pig iron to make wrought iron as well as the technique of melting wrought iron and cast iron together to produce steel. The European metallurgical industry didn’t reach the technical level that China achieved during the Han Dynasty until the eighteenth century.

The Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East was the core of the Ancient World in the West. The Ancient Empires in Mesopotamia (Assyria and Babylon) and the Egyptian Empire in the Nile Valley lasted for over 2,000 years before the rise of classical Greek civilization after the ninth century BC. In The Histories Herodotus (490–420 BC) provides a vivid account of the violent context in the first millennium BC. After the defeat of the Persians in 479 BC Athens grew into the pre-eminent economy in the Mediterranean. Trade, urbanization and the use of coinage developed to a high level. Classical Greek civilization was founded upon ‘massive chattel slavery’, which emancipated the landowning ruling class from manual labour and permitted intellectual life to flower among the leisured ruling class.⁴ All important questions were directly debated and decided by the Athenian Assembly. The mass of free citizens were mainly small-scale farmers, but an elite of around 300 wealthy households occupied the summit of Athenian society. The combination of almost constant warfare alongside flourishing trade and the widespread adoption of writing stimulated a remarkable era of intellectual investigation about the human condition. Aristotle stood out from the numerous towering Greek intellectuals. He came to be considered as the ‘great master’ in both the Muslim and Christian worlds in the Middle Ages. Aristotle considered that the pursuit of wealth for its own sake was ‘contrary to nature’. He deeply disapproved of charging people interest for the loan of money, which consisted in ‘making money from money’. He considered that the essence of morally ‘right’ and ‘fine’ behaviour was benevolence towards one’s fellow human beings and that the common interest of the whole community has priority over the interests of the individual:

[E]ven if the good of the community coincides with that of the individual, it is clearly a greater and more perfect thing to achieve and preserve that of a community, for while it is desirable to secure what is good in the case of an individual, to do so in the case of a people or a state is something finer and more sublime.

By the end of the first century BC the whole of the Mediterranean and its northern hinterlands were integrated under Roman rule into a single political and economic unit. The Roman Empire was built upon a huge standing army, which enabled foreign conquests, one of the main purposes of which was to provide slaves for the Roman landowning ruling class. By the late Republic not only was Italian agriculture based on slavery, but so too were industry and mining. The slave economy inhibited technical progress. A large part of the Roman law of property was devoted to the ownership of slaves. Even during the Republican phase (500 BC–27 BC) a hereditary nobility kept hold of power through a complex civic constitution. In the late first and early second centuries AD the Roman Empire entered its ‘Golden Age’ of economic prosperity and cultural progress in literature, history and philosophy. The inner core of the Empire around the Mediterranean enjoyed a unique two centuries of peace. This remarkable era was presided over by a succession of emperors who assumed the reins of personal power after 27 BC. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was written in the late eighteenth century. His view of the Roman Empire was influenced strongly by the violent conflicts between European states in the Age of Absolutism. In his view, the second century of the Christian era, when the Roman Empire was at its height, was the most ‘enlightened’ era in human history. The great artery of the Mediterranean linked a large part of the empire. Gibbon estimated that at this point there was a total of around 120 million subjects ‘who acknowledged the laws of Rome’.⁵ This formed the ‘most numerous society that has ever been united under the same system of government’, with ‘the vanquished nations blended into one great people’. The use of the Latin tongue was consciously spread across the empire. Across the length and breadth of the empire the Roman rulers constructed a vast array of public buildings. The empire contained more than 2,000 cities, which were connected by a network of public highways. Under this vast, unified structure, commerce and industry were able to develop unimpeded by national boundaries and conflict.

The first divergence

Under the Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD) the concept of a meritocratic bureaucracy developed far beyond that of the Han Dynasty. Although the bureaucratic system evolved under succeeding dynasties,⁶ the basic features of the system remained intact. Exams for entry to the highest levels of the bureaucracy focused on the Confucian classics and Chinese history. Civil servants were subject to regular exams for promotion, demotion or dismissal. The examination system not only helped to produce a professionally capable bureaucracy more than one thousand years before such a system emerged in the West, it also contributed strongly to Chinese unity. It established a common educational system for the ruling class. The system emphasized pragmatism and solving practical problems in order to ensure the well-being of the mass of the population. Government officials were expected not only to be expert in writing but also have a knowledge of history, etiquette, astronomy, human affairs, political institutions, government and contemporary issues.⁷ Because it was a system that had ethics at its core it was widely accepted as legitimate by the mass of the population. The concept of benevolence, which was central to both Confucius’ and Mencius’ thinking, is fundamental to the understanding of human nature. This was the foundation of the training for government officials. The Chinese bureaucracy at both the central and the local level performed crucial functions in order to ensure that the market economy prospered. These included maintaining peace across the vast unified territory, which allowed the economy to benefit from specialization and exchange; constructing and maintaining both locally and nationally a vast infrastructure of water control; ensuring effective famine avoidance and famine relief; supporting the compilation of encyclopaedias and textbooks to spread best-practice knowledge across the country; administering a legal system that protected property rights for producers and traders; and closely monitoring and taking action to ensure commodity prices were kept stable, especially the price of grain.

The traditional Chinese economy developed a high level of urbanization, far ahead of Europe until the early modern era. In the eighteenth century in China’s most economically advanced areas, such as the Yangtse Delta, around two-fifths of the population lived in towns. Urban areas were not only production and trading centres, but also possessed a sophisticated and enlightened culture, based on high levels of literacy by pre-modern standards. Long-term advances in agriculture permitted China’s population to expand from 50–60 million in the eighth century AD to 430 million in 1850. High densities of population and the relative shortage of arable land help explain why, from early in its development, private property in land was the main form of land ownership. In the Tang Dynasty private land ownership and tenancy, with legally binding contracts, were already pervasive.⁸ Perceptive European travellers, from Marco Polo in the thirteenth century to the Jesuits in the eighteenth century, considered that the internal trade of China was much greater than that of the whole of Europe. In addition, there was a flourishing trade across the South China Sea to Southeast Asia and beyond, exporting sophisticated Chinese products, including porcelain, textiles and ironware, in return for primary commodities. The vibrant market economy nurtured by state action produced sustained long-term technical progress. Over the long term from the Tang through to the early nineteenth century, innovation, which was driven mainly by inter-firm competition, proceeded incrementally. These embraced advances in ship-building (including the stern-post rudder and watertight compartments), navigation (including the mariner’s compass), inland transport (including canal lock-gates), metallurgy (including the use of water powered double-acting piston bellows in blast furnaces), porcelain (including advances in kiln technology in order to reduce fuel consumption), paper and printing (including the development of movable type), textiles (including both machinery and fabrics), weaponry (including the application of gunpowder and the production of tubular iron weapons), mining (including ventilation shafts and the use of explosives) and deep drilling technology (for brine and natural gas). In the early eighteenth century China may have produced around one-third of global manufacturing output compared with less than one-quarter in Europe.⁹

The Roman Empire collapsed after the late fourth century and Europe split into numerous quasi-states, with fluid boundaries. Military conflict was endemic, with a continuous zero-sum struggle for land and resources. The classical form of serf-based feudalism that emerged in Western Europe was closely connected with the political turmoil of the Dark Ages. The political foundations of the states were land grants (fiefs) from the king to feudal lords in return for military support. In the eleventh century the outlines of modern European states were not even faintly visible. There was no common European culture or language, and no European-wide economy. As Europe began its slow climb out of the Dark Ages, instead of re-establishing the unity of the Roman Empire, the outlines of separate states gradually emerged. They engaged in incessant warfare. Education and literacy were of negligible importance for European rulers. The central figures in the military struggles were landholder knights who fought on horseback. Christianity was deeply embedded in the medieval political economy and culture. Military struggle was closely associated with the concept of knightly chivalry and service to God. Over the course of the Middle Ages, in response mainly to increased pressure of population on farmland, serfdom was replaced gradually by a system of landlords and tenant farmers. In the seventh and eighth centuries AD the nature of the West altered radically with the rise of Islam on the fringes of the Eastern Mediterranean. The integrated whole of Roman civilization was rent still further apart. Henceforth, a major part of the dynamic of the West was the conflict between the Christian and the Muslim segments of the lands around the Mediterranean. The political structure in Europe altered significantly in the later Middle Ages. In the Age of Absolutism the role of parliaments increased. They were composed of the representatives of the large hereditary landlord-aristocracy, religious leaders and the rising commercial class. Intra-European warfare reached a new peak of violence. The Absolutist states used the revolution in military and naval technologies to launch the first era of violent colonial conques...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I: China and the West over the long term
• PART II: The two-edged sword of capitalist globalization
• PART III: The Communist Party of China, parliamentary democracy and the Ancien Régime
• References
• Index