by Jean-Pierre Voiret for the Saker blog
First note: With all its problems, Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China (SCC) is definitely a tremendous contribution to the history of science and technology as well as a formidable vehicle for intercultural dialogue.
Second note: A successor of Father Ricci S.J. in the Jesuit China Mission, Father Dominique Parennin S.J., was in my opinion the first man ever to formulate the so-called “Needham question“ (also called Needham’s puzzle). He asked this question in a letter he addressed to the French academician Dortous de Mairan on the eleventh of August, 1730!
But what is “Needham’s question?”
Joseph Needham’s biographer Simon Winchester formulated this question in the following terms:
“Joseph Needham fretted for decades over one single aspect of China’s inventive history that seems at odds with the main story: The curious fact that after centuries of scientific and technological creativity, everything in China suddenly ground to a halt. The Chinese of the distant past did essentially all inventing. Come the fourteenth century, when the Renaissance was fully under way in Europe, the creative passions of China suddenly seemed to dry up; the energy began to ebb away and to die”[1].
Why?
Now, let us see how Father Parennin formulated this same question almost 300 years ago in his letter to Dortous de Mairan[2]? Commenting on his observations he asked himself (I sum up): Why is it that the scientific knowledge of our Chinese colleagues at the imperial court – the doctors and astronomers one would meet there every day – is much lower than the level of knowledge one would find in the Song dynasty’s books on medicine and astronomy[3] in the imperial library? In other words, why was the high level of science in China during the Song period (960–1279 AD) lost to a considerable degree later on? Father Parennin provides no answer to this question in the letter. However, I think we can agree that his is a superb early formulation of “Needham’s question“.
So why did modern science not develop in China as it did in Europe? Indeed, it is a bit of an understatement to call this question simply “Needham’s question“ or “Needham’s puzzle“. It is really Needham’s grand question; for apart from dozens of times he asked this same question again and again in the various volumes of his ‘Science and Civilisation’, he wrote an entire book about it entitled “The Grand Titration“.[4] To be sure, he did provide partial answers (the bureaucracy, the conservative evolution of Confucianism, the different focal points of mathematics in the East and West, the late evolution of Taoism, the development of capitalism in Europe, the influence of logics, the influence of religions, the influence of various social factors, etc.), but he also repeatedly underlined that these answers were partial at best, and that more research would have to take place before this complex problem could be considered understood. Please allow me now to contribute my modest insight into this question.
- What I shall try to demonstrate in the next twenty minutes is that the incredibly crippling Mongolian invasion and the long occupation of China could be the main reason for China’s scientific and technical stagnation during and after the 65-year war from 1214 to 1279 and the long phase of occupation and exploitation of China by the Mongols and their vassals from 1279 to 1368[5]. I shall try to prove that the negative impact of the Mongolian intervention on China has been grossly undervalued. One reason lies in the fact that the Chinese historians themselves have considered and treated the Yuan dynasty practically like a traditional Chinese dynasty and have invented the “fairy tale“ of the sinisation and of the integration of the Mongols into Chinese society in order, firstly, to reduce the loss of face of having been defeated as a cultural and technical superpower by an army of illiterate barbarians, and, secondly, to repress and forget the traumatic experience of more than one and a half centuries of war, ravage, rape and occupation. As for the reason why Western sinology uncritically accepted the Chinese version of these events, it probably lies in the fact that after WWII, Western sinology was dominated by Anglo-Saxon sinology. Needham was a citizen of Great Britain, a nation that has never been invaded and occupied since 1066, so that Britons cannot really envision what a defeat and a prolonged occupation actually mean. US sinologists cannot imagine that either. Conversely, I do believe that my experience, as a child, of the occupation of my country, France, by the Wehrmacht, and of the exploitation of the French industry to the aims of Hitler’s wars, as well as my later reflections on these and similar events, did help me acquire a view of China’s Mongolian trauma that is very different from the benign view of this event which is common among the Chinese and Anglo-Saxon sinologists.
This text is actually but a brief summary. As a consequence, let me list here my main arguments, for which you will find many further details, explanations and evidence in my 2022 book (in German).
1. The conquest of China by the Mongol armies lasted 65 years (1214–1279), which is more than twice the duration of Europe’s devastating so-called “Thirty Years War” in the 17th century. Before this conquest, China’s weakening had already started with the Khitan and the Jürchen invasions of North China.
2. During this Mongolian conquest, according to the available censuses, China lost around half of its population: not only half of its farmers, but also half of its scholars, scientists, technicians, doctors, teachers, printers, etc.
.3 We often underestimate the utter level of barbarism and of destruction achieved during China’s conquest, although we own the testimony of a European Witness, Marco Polo: As Marco travels on horseback in 1278 through Western Sichuan, he observes that the ravages that go back to the conquest of this region by the troops of Mongka Khan in 1258 are still obvious:
“There are many towns and many villages and hamlets in this province, but all dilapidated and ruined. And one passes quite twenty days journey through uninhabited places, through which wild beasts roam.”[6]
The destruction was so complete that twenty (20!) years later, there is nothing to see but ruins.
The great sinologist Wolfram Eberhard has thoroughly analysed the reasons for the strong impoverishment of China under Mongol rule, especially the huge growth of statute labor (corvée) for the sole benefit of the invaders. For instance the building of Kanbalik’s (Peking’s) new palaces and buildings was done by armies of Chinese farmers, whose field thus remained uncultivated. It was also necessary to repair the dykes and irrigation systems which had been systematically destroyed. Again, armies of farmer had to do this work and could not produce food. But this was only one part of the disaster: The peasant class, which traditionally had to feed their aristocracy and upper class, had now to feed one million more people: the Mongol conquerors and their foreign collaborators. On top of that, huge pieces of land were requisitioned for the private use of Mongol nobles, for military camps and for Lamaist temples, and thus lost for agriculture. In this way, the number of tax paying farmers was considerably reduced. At the same time, the State needed growing sums of money to satisfy the greed of the new Mongolian and foreign prebends and sinecure receivers. For these reasons, tax levels had to grow permanently, so that “the Mongolian occupation became a period of permanent and fast impoverishment of the whole of China”. (…) “A statistic from the year 1329 states that the number of starving people in the empire reached 7.6 Million. Since this was the official number, their real number was probably much higher”[7].
4. The conquest was followed by up to 108 years (1279–1387) of occupation and exploitation[8], during which time especially the schools and institutions of higher learning were in deplorable shape or did not function at all for long stretches of time.
5. The total period of war plus occupation lasted more than 150 years. This means that four to five generations of well-educated scholars and scientists are missing in the history of China’s academia. I call these 150 years the “Mongolian black hole“.
6. The scholars and scientists who Needham calls “Yuan scholars and scientists“ were in fact not Yuan scholars and scientists; they were the Song scholars and scientists who had not been killed during the war and had survived the 65 years of war, flight, hunger and sickness. Very few, like Guo Shoujing agreed to work for the Mongols. Most of them disappeared into private, retired life and at best taught a few private students. The following generation of scholars failed to be bread. Why?
7. Well, under Mongolian rule normal training of scholars and scientists was practically impossible. During the war in many provinces no examinations had taken place for decades. Many schools and libraries had been destroyed; the existing schools were almost empty. Biot mentions Ma Duanlin stressing that only few of the scholars who had fled to the mountains agreed to reintegrate into academia or into the civil service in spite of the calls by the Khans Qublai and Renzong[9]. Furthermore, the exams remained non-existent until 1313 although Qublai had reintroduced them by decree in 1291. Later, in 1335, they were abolished (!) again; then, from 1351 to 1387, a new period of war followed, ending with the ousting of the Mongols. In 1369 the first Ming emperor writes: “All institutes of higher learning created by the Mongols mostly existed only in name and had no material reality!“[10]
8. In his letter Father Parennin underlines the relative ignorance of the imperial astronomers and doctors who were his colleagues at the Ming court in the 17th centuryt[11]. Let us not forget, first, that they were the best available in the country (if not, they would not have been selected as Court scientists), and second, that the Mongols had particularly sponsored astronomy and medicine.
Consequently, you can imagine the state of the other sciences not promoted by the Mongols.
9. In his book “Chinese Science“[12], Nathan Sivin emphasises correctly how scattered the scientific institutions and developments of the early Chinese were as well as how equally scattered the technical achievements were. Now Song China was well committed – with the help of the book printing technology – to a unique and in my eyes most important process of classifying, concentrating and systemizing this broad but scattered Chinese treasure of knowledge. The edition of a significant number of scientific and technical encyclopaedias under the Song[13] amply demonstrates this fact of growing general knowledge. It is also in Song times that the publication of local histories of cities and towns began in earnest. If these processes had not been interrupted by the Mongolian conquest and occupation of China, it would – as we may assume – have led to a Renaissance-similar process of knowledge concentration and, like in Europe, to a corresponding break-through to “modern science“.
10. Before the invasion, Song China witnessed an extraordinary economic and commercial development[14], based on a genuine “green revolution”[15], with a shift away from the tribute mode of production and a shift towards a proto-capitalist mode of production with a growing salaried sector in the non agricultural fields of economy. Similarly, Song China witnessed the creation of written money transfers and of paper currency. After Yuan, Ming China, on the other hand, reverted progressively from paper money back to silver bullion and witnessed a re-establishing of old fashioned tribute contributions. Can we explain this huge monetary and economic step backwards without considering the Mongolian “black hole“?
11. “Whereas the State Treasury was mostly sustained by commercial taxes under Song, the bulk of the State resources came again from agricultural taxes under Ming and Qing“[16]. Another step backwards to the economical Middle Ages! What about industry? Look at cotton, for instance: Under the Southern Song we find the first real “cotton factories“, with hundreds of full-time salaried workers. What a step backwards under the Ming dynasty, during which time a law limited the size of workshops to twenty (20) looms! Capitalism was now blocked at the level of petty capitalism and the tribute mode of production regained centre stage!
I mention these economic points because in Volume VII: 2 of his SCC, Needham writes: “In the West, military-aristocratic feudalism was replaced by the bourgeois merchants. In China, on the other hand, this did not happen. Bureaucrats continued to operate as before, opposing that which was fundamentally new“[17].
This is simply not true. Particularly not in Song times: The Song period witnessed, as we said, a “green revolution“ of agriculture, with – I quote SCC Vol. VI: 2 – “the government offering financial incentives to its farmers to invest in improvements.“18 Consequently, the bureaucrats did not “oppose that which is fundamentally new“; they supported it. The Song period witnessed the robust beginnings of an industrial revolution, of a market revolution, a huge growth of production, an increase of both domestic and foreign commerce, a monetary revolution, the growing monetarisation of the social and economic relations and structures, an intensive urbanisation of the country, a schooling revolution, growing population mobility and substantial social changes. Where were the “bureaucrats … opposing that which was fundamentally new?“ In Needham’s own words in SCC’s Vol. III[18] you can read that these bureaucrats distributed the latest mathematical books like the Haidao suanjing – I quote – “to all government libraries“! No, my friends, China’s leap to fully developed capitalism was not hindered by the Song bureaucrats. Something else occurred:
This process of economic development was interrupted by more than 150 years of war and occupation and by the loss of five generations of scholars, “engineers“ and early “industrialists“ – not by bureaucratic opposition. Moreover, on the whole until the end of the Song dynasty, there was a period of continuous progress towards more modern social and economic structures and infrastructures, and this occurred in spite of the continual necessity of hefty payments to the Khitan and Jürchen to keep them out of China proper.
At the same time – as we did in our Renaissance – the Chinese rediscovered under Song their ancient past, categorized their bronze vases, their art styles and their inscriptions; they continued to develop their science and technology; they systematized the extant knowledge in hundreds of technical books and encyclopaedias; they published – officially and privately – millions of books[19]. Was this a period of stagnation? By no means: Rather it was definitely a period of bright progress! This was a progress to a Renaissance-similar development which unfortunately got brutally interrupted by 150 years of conquest and occupation by the Mongols.
Bibliography:
BALAZS, E., HERVOUET, Y. (Hg.), 1978: A Sung bibliography. Hong Kong.
BIOT, Édouard,1847: Essai sur l’histoire de l’instruction publique en Chine. Paris.
GERNET, Jacques, 1972: Le monde chinois. Paris.
HARTWELL, Robert: “A revolution in the iron and coal industries during the Northern Song”. In: JAS, 21, p. 153-162.
MOULE, A.C., PELLIOT, Paul, transl., 1938: The description of the World. London.
NEEDHAM, Joseph, 1954: Science and civilisation in China. Vol. I, Cambridge.
1959 Science and civilisation in China. Vol. III, Cambridge.
- Science and civilisation in China. Vol. VI:2, Cambridge (Bray).
2004 Science and Civilisation in China. Vol. VII:2, Cambridge (Rob.).
NEEDHAM, Joseph, 1972: The grand titration: Science and society in East and West. London.
SIVIN, Nathan:1973 Chinese Science. Cambridge, Mass.
TWITCHETT, Dennis, 1983: Printing and publishing in medieval China. London.
VOIRET, Jean-Pierre, 1983: Papier und Graphik im alten China. Katalog, Zürich/Thalwil.
VOIRET, Jean-Pierre, 1996:Gespräch mit dem Kaiser und andere Geschichten.
Bern.
VOIRET, Jean-Pierre, 2022: Ex Oriente lux? Göttingen.
VAN GULIK, Robert, 1971: La vie sexuelle dans la Chine ancienne. Paris.
WINCHESTER, Simon, 2009: Bomb, book & compass, Joseph Needham and the secrets of China. London.
Winchester, 2008, pp. 269-270. ↑
In Voiret, 1996, p. 194-211: letter of Aug. the 11th, 1730 „On the stagnation of science in China.“ ↑
For the Song Dynasty scientific books and encyclopediae, see Balazs, Hervouet, 1978, pp. 238-319 (detailed) or Voiret, 1983, pp. 62-68 (concentrated). ↑
Needham, 1969. ↑
So called Yuan dynasty. Actually from 1279 to 1387. In 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang founded officially the Ming dynasty in Nanjing, but Sichuan, Gansu and Yünnan still had to be reconquered and it was not before 1387 that the whole of China was one again. See Gernet, 1972, p. 341. ↑
Moule & Pelliot, 1938, chapt. 115, p. 268. ↑
Siehe Eberhard, 1948, Seite 264-267. Eberhard schätzt die Anzahl Mongolen, die in Yuan-China wohnten, auf ca. eine Million Menschen (Seite 260). Zu den Zwangsbelehnungen schreibt Endicott-West, 1989, Seite 127: „The appanages of the imperial princes, however, were indeed semi-autonomous entities. (…). The Yuan rulers never abrogated the system of semi-autonomous domains.“ ↑
On exploitation of China, see Van Gulik, 1971, p. 307: „The Mongols had only one thought: drain all the country’s riches in the shortest possible time by the most merciless methods.“ ↑
Biot, 1847, p. 416: mentions of Ma Duanlin’s „Wenxian tongkao“, XXXVII, fol. 5 to 7. ↑
Biot, 1847, p. 409. ↑
See Voiret, 1996, especially p. 203, 205. ↑
Sivin, 1973, p. XVII. See also Voiret, 2022: „Ex Oriente Lux? “, chapter 4. ↑
Voiret, 1983, p. 63-68, or for more details Balazs, Hervouet, 1978, p. 238-319. ↑
See for instance Hartwell, 1962, p. 153-162. ↑
Needham, 1984, p. 597 f. –do–, p. 599. ↑
Gernet, 1972, p. 342. ↑
Needham, 2004, p. 209. ↑
Needham, 1959, p. 40. By the way, I consider Michael Billington’s assertion that Needham was supported by the British Intelligence service to promote Taoism as a means to stop China’s industrialization as idiocy. Mao’s China did oppose Taoism: it opposed every religion, and was not very good at industrializing. Today’s strongly industrializing China has practically no problems with Taoism. Ask Pepe Escobar. ↑
See Twitchett, 1983, p. 38f. ↑
The Ming Dynasty did have voyages of discovery. In your thesis China ought to have been too exhausted by Mongol rule to accomplish these voyages.
From Wiki:
Between 1405 and 1433, the Ming government sponsored seven naval expeditions.[49] The Yongle Emperor, disregarding the Hongwu Emperor’s expressed wishes,[50] designed them to establish a Chinese presence and impose imperial control over the Indian Ocean trade, impress foreign peoples in the Indian Ocean basin, and extend the empire’s tributary system.[citation needed] It has also been inferred from passages in the History of Ming that the initial voyages were launched as part of the emperor’s attempt to capture his escaped predecessor,[48] which would have made the first voyage the “largest-scale manhunt on water in the history of China.”[51]
Zheng He was placed as the admiral in control of the huge fleet and armed forces that undertook the expeditions. Wang Jinghong was appointed as second in command. Preparations were thorough and wide-ranging, including the use of so many linguists that a foreign language institute was established at Nanjing.[48] Zheng He’s first voyage departed 11 July 1405, from Suzhou[52]: 203 and consisted of a fleet of 317[53][54][55] ships holding almost 28,000 crewmen.[53]
Zheng He’s fleets visited Brunei,[56] Java, Siam (Thailand), Southeast Asia, India, the Horn of Africa, and Arabia,[57] dispensing and receiving goods along the way.[55] Zheng He presented gifts of gold, silver, porcelain, and silk, and in return, China received such novelties as ostriches, zebras, camels, and ivory from the Swahili Coast.[52]: 206 [55][58][59][60] The giraffe that he brought back from Malindi was considered to be a qilin and taken as proof of the Mandate of Heaven upon the administration.[61]The Daxuexi Alley Mosque in Xi’an has a stele dating to January 1523, inscribed with Zheng He’s the fourth maritime voyage to Tianfang, Arabian Peninsula.[49]
I’ve always thought about how unlucky Latin America was that Zheng He’s fleet never came here. This would have given the Inkas, Aztecs and others the wider knowledge of the “outside” world to have efficiently impeded the Spanish invaders.
I think that there is another question that is missing. Why did the Mongols suddenly become extremely thuggish imperialists? My answer is lead (Pb) poisoning on account of silver mining (silver is an impurity in the lead; a “silver mine” is a lead mine with a high degree of silver impurity). The same can be said of the subsequent Japanese thuggish empire (and Lewchoo, now a domain of Japan, but independent at the time, facilitated the Chinese purchase of Japanese silver, giving rise to said thuggishness).
While Rick Nevin has shown himself to be a stereotypical Russophobe liberal, his argument about lead poisoning is imao valid.
I did some research on lead poisoning that may be of interest (the link expires in about five days):
https://wetransfer.com/downloads/22af56de72b64e73d29022d4263edb6820220809051000/6f0a07
Maybe my youthful insanity was partly due to daily inhalation of tetra-ethyl lead (TEL), an additive to petrol (gasoline) for cars. Mercury dental fillings, too!
The Mongols did not “suddenly become extremely thuggish imperialists”. Northern tribes were always like that, which is why China built the Great Wall in the first place. I have read a hypothesis that around the 13th century climate change caused favorable conditions for the Mongols and their expansion.
Thanks for this report.
1) I read that after the Norman conquest of 1066, no English was written for 129 years.
2) It is interesting that in 1730 Fr. Palennin, S.J. had access to the Song dynasty’s intellectual treasures while the current Court scholars apparently did not.
In fact, as J.R.R. Tolkien pointed out, he considers it a major source of flaws of imagination and empathy in the English that after the Norman invasion all mythology was destroyed and no further resurrection of it occurred. While writing stories based on the mythology of Scandinavia, he mourned “there is no mythology to turn to in my own language, from my own people”
{This is, of course, not true of the Celts of Cymru – we still have our mythology. Maybe it explains some of the differences between us and the English}.
Its almost as if the Chinese are competing with the Jews for the title of who has suffered the most throughout the ages.
«for the title of who has suffered the most throughout the ages»
Chinese (and nearby places) history has generated a theory of cycles, where periods of “central” urban/agricultural civilization being terminated by invasions of “peripheral” nomadic/looting civilization.
With the glaring difference that distant foreigners are describing Chinese suffering, whereas Jewish suffering is trumpeted by the Jews themselves.
There is a parallel to the Mongol destruction and retardation of China, that is the destruction of the Arab Caliphate in the west by the same Mongols, something that the Arab civilization never recovered and about which Arab scholars still see as the linchpin moment in their descent.
Instead of asking why did China stagnate, the other side of the question is why did the West pull ahead of China after so many century of backwardness.
There are quite a few studies in Chinese that answer the later question. The answer, in one word: war. The West had a lot more wars and most of the scientific advances were motivated and created through wars. Even today, most of the US science and tech research are related to military uses.
Interested readers, who can read Chinese can check the following book and references:
科学革命的密码——枪炮、战争和西方崛起之谜》
文一
上海交通大学安泰经管学院
https://book.douban.com/subject/35691410/
https://new.qq.com/omn/20220108/20220108A07F8G00.html
2022-01-11 文一：回答“李约瑟之谜”，未来科学革命如何推动？
https://www.guancha.cn/wenyi1/2022_01_11_621749.shtml
@ d dan
Yes, I would completely agree to this. War has provided mankind with too much knowledge that couldn’t have been gleaned in any other way really. Medical knowledge especially! The wounded especially those close to death provided experimentation to see what would and would not work!
I’m actually reminded of an episode of MASH where Hawkeye was so furious at the death of one of his patients all because of a lack of a proper clamp. He then turned to a local craftsman to build for him a clamp that had a hooked end that would lock. This the guy did to hawkeyes great pleasure because as the episode revealed that’s all he needed to stem the flow from a ruptured artery in the patients chest cavity near the heart. It would have saved the mans life from bleeding out.
So much of what we have and take for granted didn’t come from peaceful pursuits but in the fire of war where as the saying goes necessity is the mother of all inventions.
And what about the Library of Alexandria? When a youngster I read and heard that if only the Romans didn’t burn and loot the place our civilization would be thousand years ahead of where we actually are which is debatable.
D dan, I think you put your finger on the wound. Interesting point of view, no matter what, backed by many western scholars nowadays.
«There are quite a few studies in Chinese that answer the later question. The answer, in one word: war. The West had a lot more wars and most of the scientific advances were motivated and created through wars.»
That is also the impression of D. Landes in “The wealth and poverty of nations”, a very good book, with a slightly different additional flavour:
* War gave an impulse to technical progress, but what *allowed* it was the fragmentation of Europe in many competing states with different policies, so that when science and engineering were oppressed in one country, those who practiced them could move to another country where they were not oppressed.
* In China centralized empires, in particular the Mongol and Jurchen/Manchu dynasties, often oppressed new things as their policy was consolidation, and since they were far more centralized, those policies applied everywhere.
In current China the current Gongchan dynasty in this respect is indeed treading carefully between too little centralization, which could be exploited by foreign powers to breakup China-mainland, and too much centralization, which would block progress.
In this respect perhaps the best strategic decision by Deng was to allow development to happen at different speeds in different parts of China, giving huge regions some *economic* autonomy, while keeping central *political* control. But it is a difficult balance to maintain. The USA, EU, RF, Brazil, India, the “continental powers”, have similar issues.
An excellent article. But I have always thought (and assumed it was obvious from written sources) that the Mongols were responsible for this throttling of China’s development – after all, they crippled Islam too, and had it not been for the death of the Great Khan, Europe would have been next. The counterfactual possibilities are intriguing, are they not?
Interesting that Chinese is getting back to the historical norm of scientific and tech achievement today. The latest studies by Japanese (not particularly friendly to China lately) shows that:
“China tops U.S. in quantity and quality of scientific papers
China now leads the world both in the number of scientific research papers as well as most cited papers, a report from Japan’s science and technology ministry shows, which is expected to bolster the competitiveness of its economy and industries in the future.
Research papers are considered higher quality the more they are cited by others. Chinese research accounted for 27.2%, or 4,744, of the world’s top 1% of most cited papers, overtaking the U.S. at 24.9%, or 4,330. The U.K. came in third at 5.5%.”
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Science/China-tops-U.S.-in-quantity-and-quality-of-scientific-papers
“China tops U.S. in quantity and quality of scientific papers”
Not so fast! The final verdict isn’t in, yet.
” When comparing field-weighted citation data, the US has a higher percentage of research in the top 1% worldwide than China does. ”
https://physicsworld.com/a/china-overtakes-the-us-in-terms-of-research-quality-finds-study/
2 years ago David Duke had up a video about the shock to the USAF of a new jet that China had developed with forward canards on the front fuselage. The American Defense Department didn’t take to well to that because that technology was still classified tech they had developed 30 or 40 years ago I believe. The questions surrounding the who, what, where and how i believe is still being debated but for Dr. Duke well one knows the answer.
Please, no. Canards invented by americans?
China bought technology from two failed projects: Israeli one and the Soviet next-gen MiG jet fighter. The latter never got past flying prototype stage as USSR collapsed and Russia could only afford one next gen jet and needed heavy Sukhoy more than light MiG. Wiki also said that MiG had some flight problems. Yet compare fusalages of J-20 and that prototype. J-20 is Chinese derivative of MiG no less than F-35 was of Yak. And that next-gen MiG did have canards, as did Su-27.
More so, what about the famous Wright’s Flyer-1? The world’s first practical aircraft had a canard (albeit single one)!
What next would we hear from USAF, top secret reinvented wheels?
“Canards invented by americans?”
Strange that they didn’t call them “ducks”.
As in “duck tape”.
The Chinese invented printing, paper money, clocks, watertight bulkheads and rudders for their large merchant ships, and much else besides. The West could be facing a period of self inflicted stagnation far worse than foreigners inflicted on China. The Mongols did the same to Iraq, piling up mountains of human skulls – though their depredations probably pale into insignificance compared to those of Blair and Bush. Civilisation is very fragile and cannot be taken for granted.
Great article
I do not see any account of the impact of the plague on China, with it’s western onset around 1350. For the Norwegian Empire this was the end, the elite and the state apparatus broke down … for the next 300 years.
Much of its know history survived in the settlements on Island, including the language.
I do not believe that China has ever suffered from an epidemic the way Europe did.
Their public health was the world’s best for millennia and is again today.
Perhaps it had something to do with the hatred of Christianity in Europe. When one reads about wells being poisoned well just imagine?
Is there a connection between the spread of the plague and the spread of the Mongols, with the fact that the plague, today, is an endemic desease in Mongolia? The dates seem a little suggestive, although I don’t know when the plague began further east …
Japan suffered a similar cultural loss as the Shogunates (Kamakura, later Muromachi) took over from the Imperial court after Yoritomo’s bakufu became a power in 1192. The period was described as a “Kalpa of Decrease” because of the ‘Three Calamities’ of War, Famine and Pestilence, including not only outbreaks of plague but also earthquakes and internal factional struggles resulting in the destruction of the Taira and Fujiwara families. Presumably if epidemics were rife in Japan, they would have affected China to some extent. The famine and cultural loss were partly driven by the presence of the Mongols in China, a threat narrowly averted in Japan in 1274, which terrified the rulers into imposing ruinous taxes throughout the country to defend against the second attack which came in 1281.
The cumulative effect was that the remarkable cultural and artistic evolution of the Heian period stopped abruptly under the Muromachi Shogunate.
Hmm, could it be that the massive population loss in China observed by Marco Polo was more due to the spread of the plague than direct violence of the Mongols? It is hard to envisage death on such a scale due to invasion and oppression alone, unless the Mongols specifically wanted to reduce population (Remind you of someone?). It is also not difficult to imagine scenarios by which the oppression might have created optimal conditions for local intensification of the epidemic.
Also if you interpret Marco Polo’s description as ‘passing 20 days through devastation to reach an islet of inhabitation, followed by another 20 days of devastation to reach the next islet of habitation’ that would presumably suggest massively greater extinction than 50% – perhaps another domain of gross underestimation by the Chinese historians of the period? At the time, if the die-out was too colossal it would surely be dangerous to say so.
On the other hand another interpretation is possible, as large patches of devastation and die-out, 20 days in diameter, surrounded by larger areas of habitation. Such a scenario could arguably be better described as regions of especially intense epidemic within a larger tapestry of habitation where survival was more or less possible. Again, the oppression might plausibly create conditions whereby in some regions the plague spread particularly intensely compared to other regions (eg peasants all huddling together in fear would be expected to increase transmission of the plague, while in other reagions peasants might scatter and hide, which would reduce transmission).
Does one or other model correspond more closely to Marco Polo’s description?
I am not sure, but I feel that there is something huge missing here:
The end of every empire/dynasty happens as a result of systemic deterioration; a ruling elite oblivious to the plight of its subject and it’s place in it, incapable of sensing its threats and its obvious dangers, unable to defend its sofisticated towers of industry, learning and sciences; and promptly occupied by, in this case Mongols.
I agree that China’s development was huge, especially in the sciences. I also agree that the mongol invasions had a massive negative influence in the scientific development of China, for obvious reasons. In many ways, Russian society did not fare any better as it was also occupied by the Mongols. I often ask myself, had the Mongols not been called back to the east when they were at the gates of Europe, would the development of this continent’s enlightenment been prevented or at the very least stunted??
Back to the question, how and why did the Mongols, achieve taking over a kingdom that was an important centre of learning science, industry, navigation and innovation?
I agree.
We can just look at the decline of the American/Western Empire. The overall IQ level reached a peak, and have been sinking since the 70s. If you read an 100 year local paper, or look at the level of knowledge even in basic education … your blown away. The public discourse is impressive and the level,depth and width of knowledge is astonishing. Look like beyond todays phd level … this is observations from out among the pesants in rural communities in Norway.
Something has gone seriously wrong in West, for a long time, it’s only getting worse … and it’s not on the agenda.
«I also agree that the mongol invasions had a massive negative influence in the scientific development of China, for obvious reasons. In many ways, Russian society did not fare any better as it was also occupied by the Mongols.»
The Mongols were ruthless conquerors and greedy exploiters, but theirs was also a very well organized state and “Pax mongolica” did help trade and recovery from the conquests.
«I often ask myself, had the Mongols not been called back to the east when they were at the gates of Europe, would the development of this continent’s enlightenment been prevented or at the very least stunted??»
After the goths and huns in Italy, western Europe had some narrow escapes with the arabs at Poitier, the mongols in eastern Europe, the ottomans at Vienna, only to fall to the americans in the 20th century, because of the stupid adventurism of the nazis.
This is a topic which has been interesting me lately. I won’t put in a link to my own writing on it because Saker does not seem to like that. But google yaxls.
China at times in its history accumulated a great deal of technical knowledge, but made only a limited use of it. It never underwent the scientific revolution which happened in the west.
It seems to me that the key to this puzzle of Needham and Parennin is in the way the two cultures used knowledge. The scientific revolution which took place in Europe between about 1500 and 1700 was about learning to use knowledge in a more effective way.
In Europe the scientific revolution broke away from old scholastic education. Knowledge went from being tightly controlled by an educated elite to being widely available. The scientific method was developed.
This meant, inductive thinking; taking things apart and finding out why they worked as they did. This was opposite to the many centuries of deductive thinking, looking at what was and trying to fit it into a preexisting system.
This became possible in Europe due to the lack of centralized control. Europe was a mishmash of small and multilevel political authorities. Yet the basic observational knowledge could accumulate.
I suspect that China never got out of a scholastic way of thinking about things. Control was too centralized. Factual observations could accumulate but they had to be explained within an official ideology.
Because of this tendency toward a centralized state, whenever there was a break down, all knowledge was lost, in the same way as the dark ages followed the fall of Rome.
But after 1500 in the west things clicked and we had the scientific revolution, which made the industrial revolution possible, which unfortunately made capitalism and imperialism possible.
I think it is an important point that industrialization was not caused by capitalism. Capitalism parasited off industrialization and hindered its development.
What is interesting about the Chinese revival is they are learning to use industrialism without capitalism. But that is getting beyond the topic.
I think you use the consept of capitalism to generally. Some say it was Industrial Capitalism which accelerated industrialization, where as Financial Capitalism de-industrializes (as seen today in the West). It can be said the Finance Capitalism is just a refined form of Feudalism.
The current Green Fascism promoted by Finace Capital today, will de-industialize Europe. Where I live in Norway, after we got hooked into the EU electricity net last year … prices have increase 1000 – 2000%. We’ve gotten EU price levels as expected, this despite the most educated … the best expert community … the best scientists … predicted and sold the consequences as at most an 10% increase in price level.
According to university level Professors of Economics … this is a good thing ! To me the pseudo science of Western Economics seemes to have taken an anti-social turn.
Wow! Not only did the Saker censor let this through, I got a halfway intelligent response from it.
Somebody says I am using the concept of capitalism too generally. He/she thinks industrial capitalism accelerated industrialization, while financial capitalism is just a refined form of feudalism.
There is a book, The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood, which says that capitalism developed out of the type of feudalism that developed in England. I do not agree with parts of it. I think she ignored the long conflict between socialists, financialists, and industrialists.
Industrialism really got going with the projects of the utopian socialists; the Rochdale experiments and the Wedgewood works. They thought that organizing production in that way would create surpluses which could go back into the community to benefit everyone. However, some racketeers looked at this and decided they had a way to create a huge surplus for themselves.
The concept which Marxists almost all miss is that the industrialists have always been in conflict with financialists. They hate each other almost as much as they hate socialists. In the western world, it looks like the financialists have finally won.
However, in China and a few smaller places, the socialists have figured out how to use industrialism for social aims. Because they have incentives to increase new technology, not suppress it, they are winning against the financialists.
The thing with financialists, including the “Green Fascists” which ir47 talks about, is they do not see manufacturing as important. It can just be done anywhere to meet their needs. They just want to get it cheap.
The financials want to own the basic resources society depends on. They see most of the population as useless mouths, decreasing the value of their holdings.
Enough said. There is the nucleus of a nice little essay in here. Wonder if I could get Saker to link to it?
Two of the reasons things clicked in the west around the year 1500 were the fall of Byzantium and the expulsion of the Moors from Spain. The first cut off Europe’s access to the Silk Road and the second opened access to Moslem scholars and in particular Arabic copies of Greek and Latin copies of Aristotle. Europe’s philosophy of science can best be described as Platonic before then. Thomas Aquinas legitimized Aristotle for Catholic European scholars and a few centuries later came Francis Bacon and the Renaissance.
The absence of access to the Silk Road prompted people to seek an alternate route to India. Some suggested going south around Africa and some went west, though that route was considered too long a journey to survive. Just imagine a globe sans the Americas and you will see they had a point.
The underlying Western question is why the Chinese did not use their many inventions to exploit less advanced peoples. The answer is simply that China was always territorially self-sufficient. There’s also the matter of whether endless material gratification is really a functional objective. So the overall answer is that the Chinese are quite civilised, whereas the West, despite its sophisticated trappings, still holds to barbarian methods and objectives. The looting and pillaging that the Mongols inflicted on China was no different from that of a hundred other nations (in comparison the destruction wrought by China’s native despots has been irreparable and of a far greater magnitude).
A fascinating article, and a convincing thesis, thankyou! But perhaps I might reformulate somewhat, if I may?
Why is it that the scientific knowledge of our
ChineseEuropean colleaguesat the imperial courtin Western academia – the doctors and astronomers one would meet there every day – is much lower than the level of knowledge one would find in theSong dynasty’s40 years ago books on medicine and astronomy in theimperial libraryWestern scientific publications?Not a perfect fit to be sure, but perhaps it makes the point (and the 40 years refers to the gradual descent from the ’80s rather than a precipitous drop – and also preceded by more subtle tendencies).
“Science” today – as Covid-19 has so eloquently illustrated – is by and large not science at all but massaged sales promotion, PR, and commercially-motivated manipulation with a hefty dab of politics thrown in. “Scientific” journals are prostitutes to their commercial sponsors – the Big Pharma industry of course is the exemplar par excellence, but it applies more or less generally across all fields, to varying extent. If I remember correctly no less than three (certainly at least two) former editors-in-chief of The Lancet have complained that the pressure from Big Pharma makes it impossible to publish scientifically valid research, and that most medical publications published today cannot be relied upon because of the level of degeneration of the system. Likewise an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and at least one of the other top medical journals which I won’t cite for fear of getting it wrong off the top of my head.
Once upon a time research in universities tended to be biased towards “pure” research (i.e. research intended to advance core theoretical knowledge rather than solve specific commercial problems), while most commercially motivated research was carried out as R&D within industry. Especially during the ’80s industry started to sponsor research programs in universities with much more commercial goals. With increasing cuts in state spending on theoretical research (in itself no doubt partly motivated by the sight of increasing money coming from industry, noticed by Humanities-educated politicians who have no idea about science), universities started salivating at the hefty profits of industry-sponsored research, and so not surprisingly the trend accelerated. The more state funds were cut, the faster the transition to commercial research and the neglect of real science. Even with “real science”, there are always commercial implications and potential interests, and today the vast majority of research carried out at universities is sponsored at least in part by commercial interests. Even research grants that are decided by state institutions are often funded at least in part by commercial interests.
Over the same period the general standard of morality has also completely collapsed, and the level of corruption, wilful misrepresentation, willingness to be influenced, incompetence of all categories, negligence, lack of due diligence, etc have surged. Included of course is bias in the design of experiments and bias in the interpretation of results, completely filling all ranges of the scale from ever so slight (but highly widespread) bias all the way to categorical conflict of interests. Even slight bias when highly widespread can lead to dramatic failures in science – especially when complemented by isolated categorical fraud and deliberate deception (and all levels in between) as is the case with Covid-19.
Who was the US politician who boasted how the US now creates its own “reality”? Yes, that is where science is headed today (and in some cases already there). A repeat of the “Needham Effect”?