The Missing Chinese Machine Revolution | Hacker News Reader

The Missing Chinese Machine Revolution

erikexamines.substack.com

There's a big literature on this in Chinese history -- many arguments concentrate on economics and labor specifically (to crudely sum it up, there was always lots of cheap labor available, and little incentive to invest the capital to develop and build expensive machinery so as to replace it). There are cultural and intellectual arguments too.

But this piece is totally wrongheaded in that it supposes that South China is China. For most of Chinese history, North China has been politically, socially, and culturally dominant (and not infrequently economically dominant too). It's too cold and arid to grow rice, and thus grows wheat and other grains. (This is why the cuisine is dominated by bready dumplings, e.g. mantou) Some of the author's arguments about rivers could apply to the Huang He (the Yellow River), too, but it has historically been much more central to Chinese civilization than the Yangzi ("Yangtze", or Chang Jiang - lit. "long river").

Chinese rivers typically have too large variation in water flow which makes the river poorly suited for year round usage for transportation as well as for water wheels. Chines water management has through history been all about protecting against floods and for irrigation.

Europe with more even waterflow has been much better suited for mills. You can see this in Europe itself. Italy never got as large number of mills as Britain as the rivers flowing into Northern Italy have too large variation in water flow. That is part of the reason Romans could never utilize waterwheels to a great extent.

I said in another HN thread that the Romans didnt innovate in energy. Someone replied that they did. Looks like you put a definite coda to that-- the Romans too were let down by their geography.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32609732

That said, care to expand on the other reasons?

Continuing in this vein, rudimentary steam engines were known in both the Roman and Song eras, but the state of metallurgy is said to have held back adoption.

https://factsanddetails.com/china/cat2/4sub9/entry-5471.html

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/2012/did-the-chi...

Britain was a part of the Roman Empire for a long time. The lack of industrialization goes much deeper than river flow.

Northern China grows plenty of rice. Heilongjiang is currently China’s top rice producer (the southern provinces grow more in aggregate of course).

https://www.statista.com/statistics/242360/production-of-ric...

However the seats of power are more centered around Beijing in the south, where not much rice grows (though today you can find some rice farming in the area).

> If you try to simply cook wheat grains, you will end up with a rather nasty porridge

Maybe nasty to modern eaters, but wheat porridge was a staple in Europe, N. Africa, and the Middle East for thousands of years, especially outside of towns where gristmills were far away and often exorbitantly expensive

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frumenty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harees

Author mentions the printing press as an example of European machinery, but doesn't seem to go into why printing never really caught on in China, despite there having been movable type printing presses there before the west: ideogrammic writing.

This whole revolution that you just needed to have a few dozen dies of each latin alphabet character and you could print any page was completely not operative in a language where you needed thousands of individuals character dies.

Ideograms are not really any harder to learn or to handwrite than alphabets in the pre-printing press era, and they aren't a disadvantage in the modern computer age, but they were a huge disadvantage in the like 1400-1950 era.

Author there, that is something, I thought about covering but it is a larger topic that probably needs its own article. It is not merely about the advantage of the latin alphabet, but also about the screw press which was not known in China, which feeds into a much larger and quite interesting story. Another aspect is metallurgy. Gutenberg was a goldsmith. There is also an interesting story about gold smiths and metal working in general was not as prevalent in China despite the fact that China actually had large scale steel production before Europeans.

Metal working is an important part of the story of the printing press, because metal types was an important invention. Metal types existed in China to some degree but they did not get made in the revolutionary way Gutenberg made them.

Some fairly large works were printed using movable type, famously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gujin_Tushu_Jicheng

So I'm not sure the idea that printing never caught on is really correct. You'd need to do an exhaustive survey of every written work ever produced to check.

Also, the Gutenberg bible https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gutenberg_bible_Old_... seems to have had about 60×40 characters, amounting to thousands of individual dies to print a page. (And IIRC Gutenberg used a trick where he had multiple versions of the same character in different widths to create perfectly justified lines without any gaps.) The amount of metal dies required doesn't seem to be hugely different.

Also also, the Manchu ruling class had their own alphabetic script, as did various other ethnic minorities.

> The amount of metal dies required doesn't seem to be hugely different.

The number of dies you need for each page is different than the number of types of dies you need to print any arbitrary page.

If there's a character for 'war', how many copies do you need? It'll change greatly depending on the subject matter, of course. But how many 'w's, 'a's and 'r's per page won't change to nearly the same extent.

I've thought about this a fair bit and despite my initial conclusions I am no longer certain that the two alphabet styles are similar. It seems to me that ideagraphic systems have a tendency to evolve in a highly stratified society where it is useful to have knowledge of the symbols serve as ingroup signalling.

https://www.readingthechinadream.com/yao-yang-my-view-of-rev...

Author, a Chinese, argues (as an aside in that article) that a conservative response and embrace of rigid confucianism in late Song dynasty to invaders from north, in contrast to the earlier Northern Song's dynamic and progressive mode, stopped China from kicking off the industrial revolution.

Should add a p.s. here: The Song assumed the source of their troubles was 'Heaven'. They assumed they had displeased heaven and decided the solution was religious in nature.

One reason I posted this was because just the other day I saw this article ("Is God punishing the United States of America?"):

https://www.jpost.com/jerusalem-report/article-715454

"It is a challenge for me to believe that the series of “plagues” that have befallen the United States of America of late are not part of some heavenly master plan."

Oh dear. Let's hope America does not make the same mistake as Song dynasty. It took China a 1000 years to recover from that error.

I've read other analysis, the key point is ancient China always had an excessive working force problem, why inventing machines when your slave labor can work just fine? Things got worse when corns & potatos were introduced to China. A married couple can reallocate to really remote places and raise a family easily. There's no motivation to farming for larger margins. Silk and tea were much more lucrative business. Farming was scattered and limited to core-family scale. Tech advancements never caught on.

I don’t believe slavery was ever as prevalent in China as in Europe. Complex rice farming discourage the use of slaves. Chinese farmers usually had a more independent position than in Europe. European peasants ran away to towns in medieval times for a reason.

Slavery has a long and rich history in Asia, including china. (N.b., unrelated but all Thai people were enslaved to the monarchy)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_China

They point out it was not chattel slavery though. But labour costs certainly must have played a role. Adam Smith remarked in his book the Wealth of Nations that Chinese workers seems to have much lower pay despite China being no less developed economically.

Not to nitpick but rice is rarely eaten unprocessed even in ancient times. Milling of rice requires machinery not too dissimilar to wheat, but somewhat more precise as you’re only trying to rub away the outer layers. In all of Asia unmilled rice is for prisoners.

Removing the husk is not as labour demanding as grinding the grain though as far as I understand.

I build machines in China today and studied ancient Chinese history. Can't answer off-hand but Science and Civilisation in Ancient China is the go-to reference text for these sorts of questions. It is a huge, many-volume series still being authored covering evidence of disparate types of scientific advancement in Chinese history. I believe the multi-part Volume 6, Biology and Biological Technology will have the answers you seek, at least two parts of which are available on libgen. Perhaps someone with more time can post a summary here.

I found surprising that the author totally misses the role of financial capitalism of private bankers lending money to entrepreneurs as a catalyst of inovation.

Both Gutenberg and James Watt themselves didn't have the money to start their ventures, they were supported and financed by their contemporary versions of venture capitalists.

This is something that was quintessential European and didn't exist in other parts of the world, from the Medici in Tuscany to the Dutch East India Company, stock markets, double entry accounting, private banks, etc.

Even within parts of Europe, the lack of financial capitalism, private bankers and the rule of the law was the main reason many regions didn't have strong manufacturing prior to late 19th century, e.g.: Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc.

They could not evolve manufacturing as they lacked the water situation to have waterwheel driven factories like England. They also lacked coal. Even if they had had financial capitalism it would have made no difference as they lacked the material conditions to industrialize.

Another problem was lack of protestantism which held back development of reading and writing.

https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/why-england-industri...

Doesn't northern China grow wheat instead of rice?

Northern China was systematically destroyed after Tang dynasty. The population declined ever since.

If you have unlimited human chattel, who needs machines? (qv. maybe this applies to the Romans as well).

The pedant wrote the same article from the concept of ancient rome. What's interesting is that the industrial revolution didn't start in europe... it started in Britain and then spread to wider europe. Which is funny as the author completely skips over britain when it mentions the founding of the industrial(Machine) revolution.

tldr; There is a long list of requirements and prerequirements for a machine revolution to occur. The industrial revolution was not inevitable.

https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

It depends on what you call industrial revolution. If you refer only to manufacturing powered by steam engines (Savery's, Newcomen's, Watt's) then yes, Britain was the first mostly because they were the ones with enough coal for those machines.

However the steam engine marks what is commonly called the second phase of the industrial revolution.

Manufacturing with machines with other sources of power was widely spread in other parts of Europe long before steam engines. They used wind, water currents and horses for grain mills, textiles production, wine production, etc.

This kind of suggests that if only there had been readily available coal in location X (a statement copied over in a majority of history websites) then the industrial revolution might have started in X. [ there was such availability in many locations other than Britain ] Innovation and imagination were likely prime drivers necessarily allied with the geographic features conducive to its advance.

https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/131/635/1135/5955447

Author here, I didn't conveniently skip over England. In terms of the Industrial revolution I have written about why England industrialized first: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/why-england-industri...

But this story is not about the industrial revolution but about the fascination for machinery that spread around Europe in the 1500 and 1600s and which laid the foundation for the later industrial revolution in Britain. This story never gets to the industrial revolution as that isn't the topic I am covering.

Just to add to this, you also need an agricultural revolution to go with the industrial revolution, otherwise the first would just not get off the ground. More exactly, you need to be able to feed more and more urban people (who presumably work in industry) using less and less rural people (who presumably work in agriculture). England also had a mini-agricultural revolution accompanying its first industrial revolution, that’s why the gentleman farmer had become a thing.

If you don’t have that you risk your industry thing to not take off, because living in the town/city is too expensive because of the lack of food or because of its high relative costs, or you might try and do what Stalin did when he industrialized the USSR in the 1930s, that is force millions of peasants to die of hunger in order to feed the city folk.

China did have an agricultural revolution however in the the 1600 to 1700s which cause a very rapid population growth. And even before that Chinese agriculture was far more efficient than European agriculture: They could grow multiple times through the year, the had seed drills and better plows. In terms of agriculture they were far ahead.

What they lacked was the conditions and incentives to make large number of mills. Thus with fewer mills, one did not develop the same machine focus in China as in the West.

The “how to feed an army on the move” guy went into detail on this - the amount of food you need to overwinter per person is tremendous.

It is possible it’s all down to the potato.

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