With the price of labour falling, profit margins declining and static markets, there was no incentive to invest in labour-saving machinery; instead there was a premium on conserving resources and fixed capital. In such a situation there was little reason to engage in the kind of technological leap into the factory system that marked Britain ’s Industrial Revolution. In other words, it was rational for the Chinese not to invest in labour-saving machinery. As Elvin argues:
In the context of a civilization with a strong sense of economic rationality, with an appreciation of invention such that shrines were erected to historic inventors… and with notable mechanical gifts, it is probably a sufficient explanation of the retardation of technological advance. [224]
With growing markets and a rising cost of labour, on the other hand, investment in labour-saving machinery was entirely rational in the British context and was to unleash a virtuous circle of invention, application, increased labour productivity and economic growth; in contrast, China remained trapped within its old parameters. In Britain the domestic system, based on small-scale family units of production, proved to be the precursor of the factory system. In China, where such rural industrialization was at least as developed as it was in Britain, it did not. While Britain suggested a causal link between the domestic and the factory systems, this was not true in China: widespread rural industrialization did not lead to a Chinese industrial revolution. [225]
THE CHINESESTATE
The most striking difference between Europe and China was not in the timing of their respective industrializations, which in broad historical terms was similar, separated by a mere two centuries, but rather the disparity between the sizes of their polities, which has persisted for at least two millennia and whose effects have been enormous. It is this, above all, which explains why Europe is such a poor template for understanding China. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, Europe was never again to be ruled, notwithstanding the ambitions of Napoleon and Hitler, by an imperial regime with the capacity to exercise centralized control over more or less the entire continent. Political authority, instead, was devolved to many small units. Even with the creation of the modern nation-state system, and the unification of Germany and Italy, Europe remained characterized by its division into a multi-state system. In contrast, China retained the imperial state system that emerged after the intense interstate competition — the Warring States period — that ended in the third century BC, though this was to assume over time a range of different forms, including, as in the case of the Mongol Yuan and the Manchu Qing dynasties, various phases of foreign rule. [226] Apart from Outer Mongolia, China’s borders today remain roughly coterminous with those the country acquired during the period of its greatest geographical reach under the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). China ’s equilibrium state has been that of a unified agrarian empire in contrast to Europe, which for two millennia has been an agglomeration of states. [227]
From this follows a fundamental difference in contemporary Chinese and European attitudes: while the Chinese attach greater importance to unity than literally anything else, the Europeans overwhelmingly believe in the nation-state rather than European-wide sovereignty, the European Union notwithstanding. The underlying strength of the Chinese desire for unity is illustrated by the fact that, while the rise of nationalism in Europe in the nineteenth century resulted in the break-up of old empires and the creation of many new states, this has never happened, and shows no sign of happening, in China. The Chinese commitment to unity has three dimensions: the fundamental priority attached to unity by both the state and the people; the central role expected of the state in ensuring that this unity is maintained; and a powerful sense of a common Chinese identity that underpins this overarching popular commitment to unity. This unity could never be taken for granted: China has spent around half its history in varying degrees of division, which, in the light of the country’s size and diversity (far greater than that of Europe), is not surprising. As a result of its attachment to unity, China has largely escaped the intra-state wars that have scarred Europe ’s history over many centuries, though its periods of disunity and fragmentation have often carried a very heavy cost in terms of war and famine, notably from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century, when it was chronically divided. [228] China ’s frequent experience of disunity and its baleful consequences have served to reinforce its commitment to unity, a tradition that began with Confucius — who, living during the Warring States period, was witness to the huge cost of instability and conflict, and preached the importance of harmony.
A further difference between the Chinese state and the various European states was that the former never faced competition from rival elites seeking to limit its power. By the mid tenth century, the Chinese aristocratic elites had been destroyed, with the consequence that no elite enjoyed authority independent of the state. The opposite, in fact, was the case, with the bureaucratic elite enjoying unrivalled authority and numerous privileges, and all other elites dependent for their position on the patronage of the state. [229] The key mechanism for the selection of the bureaucratic elite was the imperial examination system, which had been more or less perfected by the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) [230]. Although the nobility enjoyed an advantage in these exams, they were open to a wide cross-section of society, and were the means by which recruitment to the imperial elite was greatly broadened. Knowledge of the Confucian classics formed the core of the exams and served, for successful and unsuccessful candidates alike, to articulate and reinforce a common set of values. [231] Whereas in Europe the elites remained relatively autonomous, except at extreme moments like war, the Chinese elites were absorbed by and became effectively part of the state, often being called upon to act on its behalf. The imperial bureaucracy, under the aegis of the emperor, faced no challenge from a Church (after the seizure of Buddhist properties in the ninth century), a judiciary, a landed aristocracy, the military or an urban bourgeoisie. [232] The most important exception was the tradition of the literati, like Confucius himself, who were given licence to write critical things provided that they, in effect, removed themselves from everyday society.
The Chinese state was thus never constrained by independent power elites in the manner of Europe: it enjoyed universal and unchallenged authority. While the boundaries between the state and society in Europe were clearly delineated and constantly contested, this was not the case in China, where the frontiers remained blurred and fuzzy, as they still are today: there has been no need to define them because there were no competing social groups. Given the non-conflictual nature of state-elite relations, the boundaries between state and society were instead determined by practical issues of organization and resource constraints. In Europe, by contrast, autonomous, competing elites — nobles, clerics and burghers — fought to constrain the power of the state. Whereas the contest between state and elites in Europe was intimately bound up with both Church and class, in China the functional differentiation into scholars, peasants, merchants and tradesmen did not translate into independent bases of power or institutionalized voices.
[224] Elvin,
[225] Ibid., pp. 281-2; Bin Wong,
[226] Gernet,
[227] Bin Wong,
[228] It can also be argued that if, like Europe, China had been composed of a group of competitive nation-states, this would have made governance rather less forbidding and might also, at times, have stimulated greater innovation; Lucian W. Pye,