False Economy - Alan Beattie [78]
A similar process has been at work in China. Settled agricultural civilization arose in China before it did in India, several millennia before the birth of Christ. Just as agrarian societies coalesced around the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates river valleys, Chinese civilization began in the Yellow River valley with the planting of millet, followed later by rice.
China entered the second millennium not just ahead of Europe in wealth and knowledge but in a position to continue to dominate, and perhaps in an even more advantageous situation than India or the Islamic civilizations. Like Europe, China had a temperate climate, was relatively free of diseases, and had good rainfall and substantial rivers. It had animals that could be domesticated, a long history of political organization, and an established educational system.
By the twelfth or thirteenth century, China was technologically far ahead of Europe. It had developed a water-powered spinning machine, and had worked out how to use coke rather than charcoal to smelt iron. One estimate has it that by the late eleventh century, China was producing 125,000 tons of pig iron annually. Britain would not match this output until the eighteenth century. The list of Chinese technological breakthroughs is long and legendary, from the revolutionary to the mundane: gunpowder, printing, the compass, the wheelbarrow, the stirrup. Advances in one area were catalysts for those in another. Having developed techniques of irrigated-paddy rice farming, far more productive than the prevailing rain-fed "dryland" rice cultivation, the Chinese disseminated them throughout the country in how-to guides printed with wood-block typography.
And then China decided that enough was enough. In one of the most remarkable pieces of self-inflicted damage—or at least conscious self-restraint—in economic history, China deliberately gave up trading with the rest of the world and turned inward. Starting in the fourteenth century, the Ming dynasty, which ruled China then, restricted foreign trade, indeed all foreign contacts. The navy was disbanded, and transporting grain by sea was abolished in 1415. Some lines of technological progress simply ground to a halt: the machine used to spin hemp, for example, was never adapted to cotton. And while the population continued to expand, and hence the economy to grow, China nonetheless ceded to Europe the lead in both scientific discovery and geographical exploration.
The predominant religion in China is Buddhism, but a "Buddha made me do it" explanation looks very weak. Unlike Islam or Christianity, Buddhism did not have a clerical authority that exercised much control over the state. And the moderate and meditative religious doctrine of Buddhism in any case tended to be associated with a generally more laissez-faire attitude toward other religions, as well as toward the intrusion of religion into the economic sphere.
"Confucianism is the culprit" might get us a little closer, not least because Buddhism was not officially introduced in China until the first millennium a.d., whereupon it was synthesized into a distinct form known as Ch'an (also called Zen) Buddhism. The influence of Confucius, the Chinese philosopher of the fifth and sixth centuries b.c., was already widespread.
The writings of Confucius do indeed contain paeans to stability and the maintenance of existing relationships of hierarchy within society. Those with a grudge against him might well argue that his