What China wants
economist.com
economist.com
To me it is very clear. It is the Invention of the Guttemberg mobile type printing press and the sharing of knowledge it created. Latin has over 70 different writing symbols(Upper and lower case plus numbers), Chinese has thousands.
Printing a book in Chinese was orders of magnitude more work(and expensive). Remember that at the time it took years to copy a book. Chinese already knew about printing presses, but Guttemberg discovered the way to make it in metal, and making new Glyphs from molds is very inexpensive thanks to latin.
After Guttemberg it took years to copy a book, but once you have it you could make thousands of copies. Chinese could not, because the plates deteriorated fast and was very expensive to recreate them. The Japanese identified the problem and created a vocalic language from Chinese, the kana. The reason Japanese stated running circles around Chinese and humiliated them.(Chinese and Japanese hate each other so much)
The fact that Chinese today consider Confucius the "greatest philosopher of all time" is the evidence of Chinese lag.
Imagine Europeans considering only Aristotle or Plato, with no mention of Descartes, Kant, Nietze, Ortega and dozens of other brilliant philosophers.
Renaissance and science were the result of the printing press. Everybody could buy a Bible, and discuss it, without having intermediaries.
Before that a Bible or any other book was priced as years of the salary of a worker.
Update: as has been pointed out below, Manchester overstated his case. It was still an enjoyable read some 16 years ago, and I still agree with the idea that the printing press - by disseminating news and knowledge at speed - undermined the prevailing authority of the day.
I say this because I was under the strong impression no one believed the earth to be flat. Yet the myth persists, much to my annoyance.
If you can't back that up, could you please remove it, to avoid spreading rumour?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth
Of course, if a pope actually did say such a thing, I cheerfully withdraw my comment.
Note: I just checked the amazon reviews of that book. They claim it is rife with error.
http://www.amazon.com/World-Lit-Only-Fire-Renaissance/dp/031...
It's my understanding its shape as a sphere was well accepted for a very long time, e.g. Wikipedia, citing a 1995 German PhD dissertation says "A recent study of medieval concepts of the sphericity of the Earth noted that 'since the eighth century, no cosmographer worthy of note has called into question the sphericity of the Earth.'"
See further https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth or the book I just found, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (http://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Flat-Earth-Columbus-Historia...), about how modern era "historians" created out of whole cloth the idea that it was thought to be flat back then. See the latter Wikipedia article over the issue with Columbus, which had to do with his incorrect estimation of the earth's circumference. If not for the convenient location of "the new world", he and his crews would have perished since he had the distance to the Far East off by a factor of 4. While his contemporaries weren't exactly sure of the circumference, they knew his voyage as envisioned would have ended in ruin.
This is not quite accurate, kana are basically just an alphabet (two alphabets actually) that can be used to write Japanese. To my knowledge kana were adopted to the spoken language rather than the other way around.
> The reason Japanese stated running circles around Chinese and humiliated them.(Chinese and Japanese hate each other so much)
Is it? Perhaps you are right -- but your argument strikes me as somewhat implausible.
First of all, the Japanese were extremely isolationist until the Meiji era (1860's); they didn't start to "run circles" around China until close to 1900.
So I suppose that you are claiming that many Japanese books were published using only kana in this time period? Contemporary Japanese books, except those written for young children, use a combination of kana and Chinese characters. I believe the same has been true since 1860 (i.e. the start of the Meiji era), so I'm not sure that the existence of kana can be responsible for Japan's rise to power.
Please correct me if I have said anything incorrect.
Japanese isn't a phonetic language as such, it's syllables, with only the vowels and 'n' allowed to be alone, the rest are a consonant follow with a vowel (although the vowel is often omitted in speech), and there aren't very many of the. Therefore there are a zillion homonyms (and puns) and a lot of inherent ambiguity, which is addressed by context and, as you note, except for children, using full kanji (adopted Chinese ideographs). Publications for older children frequently use kanji with small kana to the right side called furigana for the kanji they're still learning.
That said, as I understand it there are many fewer kanji that literate Japanese need to learn compare to the Chinese, about 1,800 by the time they graduate from high school.
Japan also wasn't extremely isolationist until 4 decades into the Tokugawa Shogunate, so it's really a period of 1641 to 1853, and as Wikipedia puts it, correctly to my knowledge, it "maintained limited-scale trade and diplomatic relations with China, Korea, the Ryukyu Islands and the Netherlands".
The emphasis of the Chinese exam system on the classics was also a problem, though having a bureaucracy selected by what was essentially an IQ test was a pretty huge advantage in general. But intelligence is no guarantee of probity, and by the time of the opium war 25% of the Chinese GDP was being collected in taxes... but only a fifth of that was going into government coffers. Top down control matched with an absence of credible external threats was a recipe for corruption.
In Japan, by contrast, you had the Shogunate which was suzerain over Japan but only sovereign over a relatively small portion of it. The Tokugawas worked hard to prevent the Daimyos from taxing their peasants too hard (as a means of restricting their power), which resulted in a lot of commercial growth in the pre-Meiji period. In the modern West we have methods of taxation that are generally[2] fairly efficient in terms of transferring wealth from the citizens to the state with not much loss, and the things that the money is spent on are fairly useful. These things are far less true of taxation back in the 18th century.
And you could look at lots of other issues too. Like the fact that the Qing dynasty was still viewed as a bunch of foreign barbarians by many meant that they had to be very traditional, and didn't have enough legitimacy to spend on modernization.
[1] Katanana, the other syllabary, is used for non-Japanese sounds such as those made by the wind or Americans.
[2] Except the US's corporate income tax.
Not just the Qing. China's entire history for the last 2,000 years is basically one of an agricultural society being repeatedly conquered and subjugated by foreign invaders. For a long time it was pastoral "barbarians" from the north, but then it was Japan and the European powers.
There are all kinda of theories on why the West became hegemonic instead of China, but China's geography likely had something to do with it. Raids from the north resulted in constant upheaval and frequent wars. Hence the building of the Great Wall as an futile attempt to keep the northern invaders out.
As far as I can tell the Great Wall was more about stopping raids than invasions.
Can't forget the Jin, Liao, Xia, and Yuan.
Also, another geographic factor I forgot to mention was the fact that much of China's land is just unsuitable for the kind of modern farming technology that was developed in the west. (Try running a harvesting combine over this: http://www.jacobsexposure.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/MJP... or, for another matter, this: http://i.imwx.com/web/multimedia/images/content/China_drough... )
South China is too hilly and has too much water, meanwhile North China has never had enough water.
The relatively poor rice/grain farming productivity in China was a pretty major obstacle to technological progress. Too much of the population had to rely on subsistence farming, and famine was a constant threat from time immemorial up until about the 1980s.
1. Movable typing in China was inventing around 1040 A.D. [1], about 400 years prior to Guttemberg. It uses ceramic materials.
2. Confucianism, much like Christianity in the West and Islam in the Middle East, is not uncontested. And Confucius is not he greatest philosopher of all time.
I think this article is quite interesting. It's a very good summary of the West's understanding of "China", and it's a very good example of Chinese government rewriting history to suit its needs. I wouldn't buy much into it.
Also, even though kana were used, that didn't mean kanji weren't used as well. If you look at Japanese works from any period in history, including the 1800s, 1900s, and now, you can see that kanji are everywhere.
I mean, don't get me wrong, the characters are ridiculous and I'm very intrigued to see how typing evolves in China (currently, type pinyin and select which of the several characters are spelled that way from a list -- do they switch to straight pinyin eventually?), but printing was alive and well in China way before the west, same with gunpowder. China was technologically superior from 500-1700 or so. If you want to point to something, point to the coal-fired steam engine.
My opinion (having majored in China Studies in university) is that China's biggest handicap was that the regional geography made it very easy for pastoral peoples from the Central Asian steppes to ride in on their horses and conquer the Yangtze and Yellow River basins. This happened over and over again, and the cycle of repeated war and subjugation by foreign tribes, kept China from making more significant advances in technology or stabilizing internally enough to focus on expanding their reach outward. To this day instability and unrest is the bogeyman of Chinese society, that's why they're always talking about maintaining "order" and "harmony."
Very like medieval Europe, isn't it? What did break that cycle in Europe?
(I remember from my school's history classes the explanation that nations and empires grew over the entire territory - what clearly didn't happen; and that the more war-liking population were conquered - quite a contradiction. Also, it happened before Europe got rich, not after, thus that argument is invalid.)
Europe also has better farming land and more stable waterways than China, which allowed more efficient use of farming technology, keeping famine at bay and allowing the region to support a larger urban population, which had sufficient free leisure time for innovation. Whereas drought and famine were constant threats, and subsistence farming was an all-consuming effort for most people in China up until the late 20th century.
More importantly, two centuries before Gutenberg, scholars in Western Europe had thrown off the shackles of believing antiquity had all the answers, something many parts of the world still struggle with. This is sometimes credited to the rediscovery of Aristotle but the Persians and Arabs knew Aristotle and never made that leap. Instead Aristotle is simply another accelerant. What actually led Europe (and specifically Western Europe) to science was the development, from Catholic cathedral schools to pseudo-independent, credential granting institutions of learning which encouraged adding to previous knowledge and, because of this, specialization. Six hundred years before Gutenberg these proto-universities had already formalized specialized programs with separate credentials for studies in theology, philosophy and medicine.
Previous academies that investigated the natural world were simply not resilient institutions; tending to decline under weak central rulers (Gondeshapur in Iran, Baghdad's House of Wisdom), be obliterated in war (House of Wisdom again, Plato's Academy) or fade after the passing of famous founders. Many also lacked a professional faculty and credential granting, further limiting long term innovation.
Western Europe's fractured political map and separation of religious power in the papacy worked against these tendencies. The independence and progress of local universities was always to the benefit of local rulers and at the same time the universities enjoyed an association with the church that helped protect them from both obliteration after military conquest and excessive domination by the state. This independence has to be one of the biggest keys because China's Imperial Academy had both amazing resilience and degree granting so it's inability to develop any kind of formal science has to be blamed on the strong subjugation to the central government which used it strictly to train civil servants. The most learned men of China were interested in the natural world, they engaged in scientism (cf. Shen Kuo's proto-geomorphism 800 years before Lyell) but they were essentially all self-taught hobbyists.
[1] http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21574458-india-poised...
A good microcosm of this is iPhone. It took four years for the government to bless iPhone for Chinese people to use... Even though it is nearly 100% made by Chinese people in China. That rigid disparity between what people of a country WANT and what they MAKE doesn't exist like it does in China anywhere else. That's what makes China such a tough nut to crack.. The near absolute control of what the people are "allowed" to like and buy.
No spite/sarcasm intended - I am genuinely trying to be helpful.
A more useful illustration is the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) attitude towards civil society (per Wikipedia, "the aggregate of non-governmental organizations and institutions that manifest interests and will of citizens"), it must be extremely limited and restrained, and there are no extremes including mass murder to which the CCP is not willing to go to keep it that way. See the Falun Gong for the most recent severe example, and I've noticed recent headlines WRT to some Christian "sect" and 1,000 people arrested.
No doubt the CCP knows their history, see for example the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Turban_Rebellion and the general history of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Lotus , and that their control of their sprawling mainland empire is fragile, as it also historically has been.
In that context, smartphones, which can communicate in ways less subject to surveillance than say SMS, are an existential threat to the CCP, potentially as dangerous as guns.
"As China becomes, again, the world's largest economy, it wants the respect it enjoyed in centuries past. But it does not know how to achieve or deserve it"
In 1990 we would have been talking about Japan becoming the largest economy instead.
Turns out there are a lot of problems between here and there. For example, China is at a point where they're unable to grow their economy without taking on ever increasing amounts of debt. That has resulted in one of the greatest debt binges in world history in the last six years.
I'd argue it's far more likely China will see stagnation, and extremely challenging growth, over the next 30 years as a consequence of what they're doing to fake growth now, rather than see continual boom. Wherever China stops in their vast debt accumulation, the bill that will go along with it is going to be historical in scale. That will drag on their growth in a dramatic way for decades.
The Chinese boom ended in 2007/08. In the next few decades it will be very difficult for them to achieve even 3% to 4% real GDP growth. What is basically going to happen, is normalization. It seems to be a perpetual cycle of analysts and economists making terribly poor extrapolations for future outcomes based on temporary boom periods that originate from extreme lows.
Decline is at least as good a bet as postulating "extremely challenging" growth ... and perhaps the PRC's current aggressive foreign and military policies are in part in reflection of this. Certainly wouldn't be the first time that happened, that motivated a lot of French policy before WWI.
The robotics revolution interests me greatly as it pertains to China's aging situation (and Japan's of course). Whether they'll fully embrace robotics, or seek to limit that and instead focus on maximizing human labor (which is currently vastly under-utilized, via their intentionally backwards farming system that keeps hundreds of millions of people artificially busy).
Sent from my desktop computer.
1. The current leaders want to colonize the rest of the world 2. They want to do so in the same heavy-handed manner that they use to subjugate their own people 3. With overseas dominance, use that "soft power" to increasingly assert themselves over their own people in China.
So the overseas expansion isn't for the sake of only resources, etc, they apparently want to use their external international influence to assert more control internally over the Chinese people as well.
"FOR all this ambition, China is not bent on global domination. It has little interest in polities beyond Asia, except in as much as they provide it with raw material and markets. "
"China is “neither a missionary culture nor a values superpower,” says Kerry Brown of the University of Sydney. “It is not trying to make other people into China.”
"Clan-focused Confucianism and the fear bred by communism have persuaded the Chinese to mind their own business"