A rchive Date
[ 04-02-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ China ]
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[Why China will get democracy too - part 2
Same Difference
By ROBERT WRIGHT
Issue date: 03.27.00
Post date: 03.16.00
China's ideographic script had another key consequence. Because its symbols referred to concepts, it transcended linguistic differences. No matter how distant two Chinese, no matter how different their dialects, they could read each other's contracts, shipping bills, and correspondence, not to mention the same books and periodicals. So the press helped foster a "unified field of exchange and communication" across linguistic boundaries, not within them. But for this fact, linguistic differences in the age of print might have formented nationalist sentiment, as in Europe. (The common claim that Europe's relative linguistic diversity is due to its having more geographic barriers than China loses force if you actually examine a map of China and see that it is full of mountain ranges.)
China's government, for its part, had long worked to reinforce the naturally unifying effect of an ideographic script. It kept the script standardized across dialects even as phonetic elements crept in. It had also, back in the seventh century, built the Grand Canal, which linked the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, keeping China economically cohesive. But perhaps the main reason the printing press didn't prove more disruptive is that, in two senses, the government responded deftly to the challenge it posed.
First, the government showed religious tolerance. In the Sung era, some preachers did circulate printed tracts advancing upstart theologies. Chinese authorities could have viewed this as a threat to Confucianism, the official state philosophy. But, as the historian Peter C. Perdue has noted, they proved more liberal than the Christian authorities of 1517, allowing people to worship their own deities so long as their religious practice didn't upset the social order.
The second government adjustment to the pluralizing tendencies of print was what you might call institutionalized pluralism. When literacy spreads across a nation, power usually does, too. (That's why, during the U.S. Civil War, it was illegal in some Southern states to teach blacks to read.) China's Sung government, facing a growing--and increasingly affluent--literate class, reformed itself in ways that at once acknowledged this diffusion of power and controlled it.
The government catered to the new literati by making entry to the civil service more meritocratic. This diminished nepotism and, along with a widening market-based prosperity, eroded the power of China's hereditary elite. As the historian Charles O. Hucker has said of this period, "The role of printing in the social leveling process can hardly be overemphasized."
In a sense, the government was just co-opting the literate class. In studying for civil-service exams, young men had to master Confucian doctrines that would make them obedient servants of social stability. Still, in exchange for this service, the government granted real influence; during Sung times the civil service, now more broadly representative of the population, acquired unprecedented power. As the historian Jacques Gernet noted, "The emperors themselves played only a secondary role, leaving the limelight to their ministers." The government also ventilated itself. Three separate agencies were charged with assessing citizens' complaints, a process elaborately insulated from the emperor's interference.
Broadly speaking, then, China responded to its print revolution in the same way that President Clinton hopes it will respond to the Internet revolution. First, it used information technology to prosper; the press helped spread technical knowledge, and growing literacy lubricated commerce and entrepreneurship. (Sung China was way ahead of the West technologically and economically.) Second, the resulting diffusion of power across the society had a pluralizing effect, forcing the central government to become more broadly responsive to citizens. To be sure, the Sung era didn't give rise to a modern representative democracy. Then again, Europe's printing press--unveiled around 1450--didn't accomplish that overnight, either.
On the other hand, Western Europe did eventually get modern representative democracy and extensive political liberties. What happened to China? Among other things, the Ming dynasty.
In thumbnail histories, the Ming era, which stretched from 1368 to 1644, is depicted as a time of technological stagnation, authoritarianism, and a kind of solipsism, famously symbolized in 1433, when China ended oceanic exploration and started shunning foreign contact. In truth, these themes are a bit overdrawn. Still, skeptics of Clinton's engagement policy might well ask why, if China is now expected to follow the logic of Western economic and political development, it didn't do so earlier. Why did it spend much of a millennium failing to achieve what the West achieved: an industrial revolution and liberal democracy? Can we, as Landes argued in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, attribute this stunted growth to something deep within China's cultural character?
My own answer--no--is laid out in a chapter of my book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. (That part of the book is available at
www.nonzero.org/asia.htm.) The Cliffs Notes version of my argument can be seen in a simple dynamic that many historians (even Landes, oddly) accept but whose full import is rarely drawn out. That dynamic is competitive development. Because Europe fragmented into many distinct but interactive polities, stagnation was not a luxury rulers could afford. The neighborhood was too crowded; if you didn't advance technologically and economically and grant the freedoms required for such advancement, you would get squashed. Though Ming China did face foreign threats--including annoyingly persistent barbarians--it didn't have nearly the incentive for "defensive modernization" that European states did.
Besides, even if China had felt more motivated, it wouldn't have had many neighbors to draw ideas from. Europe, by contrast, was a hotbed of competitive laboratories for inventing new technologies, new economic theories, new political ideas--all of which tended to spread across national bounds, once proven effective.
In fact, England, which beat continental Europe to the industrial revolution, did so partly with tools taken from the Continent. Britain's pioneering steam engine drew on a Frenchman's earlier demonstration that steam could move a piston. And its intellectual-property laws weren't homegrown, either. Patent law had sprung up in Venice in 1474 and then spread across Europe, encouraging invention.
China lacked such neighborly inspiration. What's more, its relative isolation spared it from a dilemma that precisely foreshadows its current one: in Europe during the industrial revolution, information technology tightened the link between economic and political liberty. As the industrial revolution unfolded, the printing press not only hastened technical advance by publicizing new ideas; it also smoothed day-to-day commerce by spreading business news, shipping schedules, and the like. Keeping presses free enough to perform these services well while restricting the political use of the press was difficult at best. Indeed, England's especially free presses, and its greater respect for political rights, may well explain why it led Europe into the industrial revolution. In any event, England's combination of political and economic liberty became the paradigm for prosperity. Slowly and fitfully, this paradigm would spread across Europe. China, off in its own sparse neighborhood, could ignore the paradigm without getting clobbered by some neighbor that had embraced it.
But, as technology shrank the world, China's solitude couldn't last--a point made forcefully by Western gunships in the nineteenth century and made just as inescapably by commercial vessels today. China now feels competitive heat across continents and oceans. It must face the same logic the rest of the world faces: In the age of the Internet, even more than in the age of industry and print, granting enough economic liberty for cutting-edge prosperity while denying political liberty is a tall order.
And that's not all that has changed. Though China's ideographic script remains a burden--ever try to use a Chinese keyboard?--it doesn't multiply the costs of communication nearly the way it did during the Sung era. Besides, voice-recognition software, which is now approaching practicality, will soon let the Chinese publish Web pages and send e-mail with Western ease.
In short, two things that help explain China's distinctive past--its ideographic script and its geographic isolation from the modern world--are of vanishing relevance. And that is why Clinton is not crazy to expect a culture with a technological, economic, and political history so different from the West's to move toward the Western way.
Still, Europe's age of print offers one big caution: When an information technology strengthens the link between liberty and prosperity, rulers can spend a long time in denial, trying to have their cake and eat it, too. Even after England's liberal formula for economic success had proven itself, Napoleon was doing things like seizing the newspaper Journal des débats and renaming it Le Journal de l'empire. And, more recently, the Soviet Union showed that, for a while at least, you can stifle freedom and keep industry humming. That no such attempts to have it both ways have ultimately succeeded is reassuring, but that they've succeeded for years is not. Even assuming that membership in the WTO sends more information technology into China, its leaders could spend a long time trying to evade the moral of the story.
In fact, they probably will.
 World Fact Book (CIA]
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