Macro-Historical Parallelism and the China
“Puzzle”
Ruan Wei, Shenzhen University (China)
Abstract: China’s rapid development in recent years has puzzled not only the world but also the Chinese themselves. Growth on such a massive scale and at such an astonishing speed might seem miraculous and incomprehensible to many. Confronting the ‘puzzle’, it could be meaningful for us to notice the fact that between China’s sinking to its nadir toward the end of the 19th century and its unmistakable rejuvenation after 1949, there was a lapse of only about fifty years. This is a very short time indeed in macro-historical terms. Or we could adopt a different way of periodizing, putting this period of time between the Opium Wars of the 1840s, when China was defeated by Britain and signed unequal treaties with the Western powers, and the 1990s, when China’s economy began decidedly to take off. In the latter case, a lapse of one hundred and fifty years is still a very short time macro-historically.
Keywords: China, Development, History, Parallelism
China’s rapid development in recent years has puzzled not only the world but also the Chinese themselves. Growth on such a massive scale and at such an astonishing speed might seem miraculous and incomprehensible to many. Confronting the ‘puzzle’, it could be meaningful for us to notice the fact that between China’s sinking to its nadir toward the end of the 19th century and its unmistakable rejuvenation after 1949, there was a lapse of only about fifty years. This is a very short time indeed in macro-historical terms. Or we could adopt a different way of periodizing, putting this period of time between the Opium Wars of the 1840s, when China was defeated by Britain and signed unequal treaties with the Western powers, and the 1990s, when China’s economy began decidedly to take off. In the latter case, a lapse of one hundred and fifty years is still a very short time macro-historically.
So the question is: why has this happened?
Eurasian civilizations and especially recent researches in the world system indicate that the major civilizations of the Eurasian Continent have for a long time been developing parallelly in economic, social, administrative and intellectual terms. To put it simply, the China ‘Puzzle’ to a great extent could be accounted for by the major civilizations’ parallel progresses throughout history. But what is this parallelism after all?
It is for the various civilizations of the world to share the same historical course, nature or tendency. It is for them to have macro-historically equivalent development levels. In some cases the development of the civilizations is synchronous with each other in terms of proto-capitalism or commercialized agriculture and credit, proto-industrialization (or mechanized handicraft industries), population density and size, urbanization, and sophisticated government. Yet these are only ‘hardware’ parallelisms. There are also ‘software’ parallelisms between the civilizations in the way of education and of philosophic, literary, artistic sophistication. Although in some aspects one particular civilization can do better than the others, its lead is generally temporary and insufficient to disrupt the overall equivalence pattern.
It was up to the Industrial Revolution in the West to really succeed in destroying the pattern. Recent studies reveal that Europe did not really surpass the rest of the world until 1800, when the Industrial Revolution was fully under way. This would suggest that the advantages now enjoyed by the West could not last for long. At present, when the rest of the world has finished industrialization or is being industrialized rapidly, major shifts in the balance of power will occur sooner or later. Yet the idea of equivalent development has another implication: there had been cultural compatibility convergences between the civilizations long before 1800 in the way of economic growth, social progress and intellectual development. To a very great extent, this could explain the spectacular speed of Asia’s ‘modernization’, however glaring its differences from the West might seem at a first glance.
For now I will not elaborate further on the historical facts to validate the parallelism thesis. Historians like Kenneth Pomeranz (author of The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy, 2000) and world-system theorists like Andre Gunde Frank (author of ReOreient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, 1998) have done a superb job. It is therefore necessary to have a look at their basic arguments.
China or India, rather than in West Europe. In other words, the advantages enjoyed so far by the West are accidental, having nothing to do with ‘culture’, let alone race.
Frank’s approach is complementary to Pomeranz’s but is even more macro-historical. He argues from the assumption that Europe's success was nothing unique; it had been the lesser compared with the other players in economy, technology, and industry until about 1800. To Frank, from 1500 BC to 1800, China, India, South-East Asia, and the Middle East were the main players of the global trade; these regions had better infrastructure in roads, bridges, canals, river and ocean transportation, greater industrial and commercial enterprises, more advanced technology, more efficient government, more sophisticated arts, literatures, philosophies and music styles than Europe. Of great importance is the fact that silver the Europeans obtained from the New World (and the wealth accumulated from the slave trade) played a key role in helping Europe develop industrial capitalism so as to become a major player in the global trade. Because silver gave it the purchasing power to buy Chinese silks, tea, porcelain and other products, and to buy Indian cotton textiles and South-East Asian spices and gems. Silver was in fact an important contributor in West Europe’s industrialization.
Yet the question still remains: why has that parallelism, which threatens the very validity of the modernity discourse, been possible?
nations have to go through). From now on, there was a key factor unifying all the civilizations, including the Hellenic civilization, that is, iron. In fact the widespread use of iron played a role very similar to that played by energy-intensive industries in our era, that is to say, from the mid-18th century to the present time.
As we know, Karl Jaspers the philosopher put forward in The Origins of History (1949 ) his famous thesis of the Axial Age. It refers to a specific period of time, roughly from the 8th to 2nd centuries BC, in which parallel intellectual phenomena like Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Hebrew prophetic teachings and Greek philosophy flourish and the moral teachings of intellectual leaders begin to be canonized. All these happen simultaneously, apart from each other and in totally unconnected cultural milieus. Jaspers particularly highlights the ‘philosophical breakthroughs’ that occur synchronously in the hitherto unconnected regions. Yet in his argument, he leaves out an extremely important point: how is this parallelism possible? Obviously, simultaneous Enlightenment in the different regions cannot have happened by chance. It must have had a material basis which the civilizations somehow have all acquired in the period he generalizes about.
Great Wall), standardized weights and measures and a sophisticated government, which is so conspicuous in Max Weber’s rationality discourse on the civilizations.
Though Jaspers does not explain why ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘Philosophical Breakthroughs’ appear synchronously in the hitherto unconnected regions in the 8th – 2nd centuries BC, that he draws attention to this very fact itself is worth noticing. It suggests that until about 1800, a major characteristic of the civilizations was their essentially equivalent development. In plain words, no region was fundamentally more (or less) advanced than any other regions. This would mean that the parallel intellectual advance of the different regions noticed by Jaspers and superbly captured in his Axial-Age thesis applies not only to the 8th to 2nd centuries BC, but also to the two thousand years that lapsed between then and 1800. His argument has other implications as well: it applies not only to the spiritual domain but to the material advance of the civilizations, as it is the socio-economic nature of their material development that determines the rationality level of their intellectual progress.
Now the question is: why are there after all such parallelisms in the material growth of the civilizations? We have mentioned iron, upon which the simultaneous ‘breakthroughs’ in the different regions depends and which makes a polycentric ancient world possible. This would suggest that the different regions by the Axial Age have all acquired the technology of separating and removing iron from iron ores. The Mesopotamia may be the first area to have it, and then it is Asia Minor’s turn. Exactly when the Greeks, Persians, Indians and Chinese come to know the secret is uncertain, but up to the Axial Age, iron has been widely available in most parts of Eurasia. After all, the continent is one single geographical plate. Whatever meaningful innovations occur here in this corner will soon disperse elsewhere.
slower pace could still guarantee parallel access of the civilizations to the latest inventions. The civilizations might have grown independently of each other for a long time, yet from the Axial Age onward, long-distance trade was conducted between China, India, West Asia and Rome, and between China, East Asia and India. This would mean that the different parts of the world now were already interconnected and interdependent, though not in such an overwhelming manner like today. Not only did the ‘Silk Road’ serve this purpose, but lots of other trading routes by land or sea. Here humans should pay homage to the horse, who in the past played a key role in inter-civilization transport and communications. Without this gift for us to overcome distance and thus hugely facilitate transport and communications, civilization of today would be unthinkable, probably not very far removed from the Stone Age.
From the above discussion it is clear that globalization had been going on long before 1500. Yet Emmanuel Wallerstein the world-system theorist would not allow it to happen until 1500. Whether globalization was already under way in antiquity depends on a definition of ‘globalization’. Yet we may probably use a new concept--- ‘pre-1800 globalization’. Yet we should remember that the industrial capitalism is by no means a historical feat of Northwest Europe, something it churned out single-handedly in a closed system, totally independent of the other regions in the world system. It is a fairly well-known fact that some kind of proto-capitalism and proto-industrialization had been going on in the Italian cities hundreds of years before the industrial revolution of England which began in the latter half of the 18th century. Yet the reason why it was Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Florence, etc rather than the other regions that led Europe out of the Dark Age deserves greater attention. To a large extent, this could be explained by their locations. Due to proximity to the East, the Italian cities could easily take advantage of the capital, knowledge and technology from the pool of the world-system, which had never ceased to grow even when Europe was having its Dark Age, but from which Europe had been cut off since the 4th and 5th centuries, when Rome declined and fell.
much the product of a series of other types of capitalisms and industrializations that had been happening in the world-system for hundreds of years. As is discussed above, due to parallel access to the latest innovations, the ancient civilizations shared the technology of iron before and during the Axial Age. From this follows that the agricultural surpluses, infrastructures including roads, canals, and terraced and irrigated fields, handicraft industries, commerce, credit and overall capital accumulation in the different regions of the world would for a long time remain at an equivalent level; and that because of parallel access to the latest inventions, the different regions far apart from each other would acquire gun powder, paper, compass, printing techniques, Arabic numerals, silk, windmill, etc in a relatively synchronized manner. Most of these inventions would prove essential elements for the industrial ‘modernity’ we know today.
beginning from the 12 century, did the stagnant Medieval Europe begin to revive and grow.
