Chinese v. European History
November 11th, 2006
R. Bin Wong's China Transformed sets out to compare the political and economic histories of China and Europe. He seeks to remove Euro-centric biases in the study of Chinese history by examining Europe in Sino-centric terms in addition to examining China in Euro-centric terms, combining both perspectives. A non-Eurocentric history of China (or any other area) should not merely explain why China did not follow the same path as Europe but also why it followed the particular path it did follow.
Until the 19th century, China and Europe were very similar in economic terms. Both evolved commercial and agrarian oriented economies, with rural production, in the early modern period. An important difference is that Europe was capitalist – it had a class of dominating merchants & bankers who enclosed communal land – whereas China was largely oriented towards small-holding peasants. He argues (p. 279), “only the initially contingent fit between the institutions of capitalism and the technologies of industrialization made possible the pattern of economic change that unfolded in nineteenth-century Europe.”
Chinese and European politics diverged when Rome fell, long before their economics diverged. While the Chinese empire managed to stay together for thousands of years, rebuilding whenever it fell, Europe splintered into large numbers of small states. In the early modern period European states were in military competition with each other, pursuing mercantilist policies and building colonial empires. Because China was politically unified, and not in competition with itself, it pursued policies aimed at supporting its commercial small-holder economy. China was mostly a “modern” (bureaucratic) state already in the early modern period, well before “modern” states were born in Europe.
In his analysis of state formation Wong relies on the “Bringing the State Back In” paradigm from political science. He, and others who use this paradigm, view the state as an independent actor rather than as an instrument of the elite or the dominant class or an arena of struggle & negotiation. The principle weakness of this paradigm, especially in Theda Skocpol's work, is their tendency to create a deterministic model which denies everyone agency, but Wong goes out of his way to avoid that, emphasizing contingency over determinism.
Relations between the state and the elite are another area where China and Europe diverged. European elites had their own separate power bases and were organized into separate estates distinct from the state. Chinese elites were not as clearly separated from the Chinese state nor did they have their own power bases. Different relations with their own elites caused different states to pursue different policies and evolve differently. For example, European elites were able to inhibit the states' ability to tax land while Chinese elites were not – encouraging the Chinese state to rely on agriculture as a major source of revenue while European states had to look elsewhere.
The comparative method used by R. Bin Wong can be very useful in other areas. The most obvious use is to remove Euro-centric biases from other non-Western areas the same way Wong does for China. Looking at Europe (or the United States) in Latin American, Ottoman, or other non-western terms in addition to looking at non-western areas in western-centric terms can shed light on both regions. Even studying only Europe or only the US can benefit since viewing Europe or the US from the perspective of another area can shed light on Europe or the US. The method can also be applied within the US or Europe, without reference to areas outside it, by comparing different areas or phenomena within Europe or the US to each other.