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If Japan was the great exception, the only non-Western country to begin its industrialization in the nineteenth century, China was an example of the opposite: a country which failed to industrialize, even though it enjoyed a similar level of development to Japan in 1800. As a result, China found itself hugely outdistanced by Europe and the United States over the course of the nineteenth century, and also by Japan towards the end of it. After 1800, and especially from the middle of the century, China suffered from growing economic weakness, near implosion, debilitating division, defeat, humiliation and occupation at the hands of foreign powers, and a progressive loss of sovereignty. Disastrous though its fortunes were in the period between 1850 and 1950, however, their consequences should not be overstated. China ’s progress after 1949, and especially since 1978, suggests that the roots of its contemporary dynamism lie in its own history rather than being mainly a consequence of its turn to the West: even if it did not appear so at the time, all was far from lost in the century of humiliation. [191] Nonetheless, this period was to leave deep psychological scars. Like Japan, moreover, China ’s modernization was to take a very different path from that of the West. [192]
A PLACE IN THE SUN
China had already begun to acquire its modern shape in the centuries leading up to the birth of Christ. [193] The victory of the so-called First Emperor (Qin Shihuangdi, the Western name for China being derived from his family name, Qin) marked the end of the Warring States period (475–221 BC) — an endless series of conflicts between the numerous Chinese states of the time which resembled a much later phase of European history — and the begi
Extensive internal migration, improving communications and many centuries of unity or near unity helped to foster a relatively homogeneous culture across what was, for its time, a massive population. The Qin dynasty, short though its life may have been, constructed over 4,000 miles of imper-ial highways, as many as the Roman Empire. [197] A centralized state, and a sophisticated statecraft, took root based on the teachings of Confucius (551–479 BC), who was to exercise a huge influence over the Chinese political and moral universe for more than two mille
Map 5. Boundary of the Qin Dynasty at its Greatest Extent, c.206 BC
Map 6. Boundary of the Han Dynasty at its Greatest Extent, 141-87 BC
Historically, relatively advanced forms of agriculture enabled societies to sustain large populations and provided propitious conditions for the development of organized states; China was a classic example of this phenomenon. It is now believed that millet and rice first appeared in northern and southern China respectively 12,000 years ago, earlier even than in Mesopotamia, where sedentary agriculture began about 8,000 years ago. Although North China has long sustained ‘dry’ agriculture by way of cereals, barley and various kinds of millet, it was the wet cultivation of rice, which developed slowly from the begi
[191] Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 79.
[192] Ibid., pp. 81, 151-2; Huang Ping, ‘“Beijing Consensus”, or “Chinese Experiences”, or What?’, unpublished paper, 2005, pp. 5–8; Zheng Yongnian, Will China Become Democratic?: Elite, Class and Regime Transition (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2004), p. 85.
[193] Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 103-6; Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years (London: Vintage, 1998), pp. 323; also pp. 413-16.
[194] Fairbank and Goldman, China, p. 61.
[195] Ibid., pp. 80, 114, 116, 120.
[196] Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973), pp. 21-2.
[197] Fairbank and Goldman, China, p. 56.
[198] Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past, p. 93.
[199] Ibid., pp. 51, 106; Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (London: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 171; for successive historical examples of this phenomenon, see Lovell, The Great Wall.
[200] Ostler, Empires of the Word, pp. 113-73, especiallypp. 116-17, 168-9.
[201] Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, pp. 14–15, 265-6; Fairbank and Goldman, China, pp. 168-9.
[202] Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, pp. 319-20.
[203] Fairbank and Goldman, China, pp. 89, 167-9; Maddison, The WorldEcono- my: A Mille