What Happened During the Great Chinese Decline?

Throughout its Golden Age, the Chinese economy was driven by a combination of state- sponsored education, infrastructure, and technological advances plus a strong undercurrent of rural and urban private entrepreneurship. This balance produced a great outpouring of innovations in science, engineering, manufacturing, agriculture, and the arts. But over the centuries that followed, the Chinese engine of growth and innovation sputtered and eventually stalled completely. Although the economy continued to expand and the population continued to grow, some technologies that were once widely known fell into disuse or were forgotten altogether. By the sixteenth century, for example, knowledge of Su Sung’s water clock design was lost. When Jesuits visited China in the 1580s, they found that time measurement there was quite primitive compared to the mechanical clocks of Europe.?

. A China that had seemed on the verge of world domination and industrialization experienced a pattern of regression somewhat like Europe after the end of the Roman Empire. The causes of this slow-down of creativity and innovation were many, and even today scholars are not sure what to pin the blame on. But a close examination of the institutional, scientific, and economic structures of China after its Golden Age points to number of factors that my innovation model predicts can inhibit innovation.

During the eleventh century, the Chinese launched a universal education system that focused on literary and moral instruction derived from Confucian philosophy. All schools received sets of the officially sanctioned, block-printed Confucian classics that students were expected to memorize and recite. They also learned calligraphy and classic poetry, but the natural sciences and mathematics were excluded from the curriculum. Unlike the universities that emerged in Europe at this time, independent thinking was prohibited, leading to a uniformity of attitude and opinion reinforced by the Civil Service Examination. As we have seen, for the natural sciences, and more broadly for independent, creative, analytical thinking to flourish, official and public approval are essential, as are institutions that provide the foundation to nurture their evolution. These were all lacking in China from the Song dynasty to the twentieth century. The complete uniformity of thought, enforced by political indoctrination and the lack of institutions that supported the challenge to the status quo, culminated in the dearth of innovation in scientific, creative thought.?

As Europeans were decentralizing their administrative powers by separating religious and moral authority from the secular state and from autonomous guilds, universities, towns and cities, the Chinese launched an unprecedented program to do just the opposite. During the Ming Dynasty, the emperor and his enormous network of officials wielded complete control over all of China through an inflexible legal system that helped legitimize and promote this new power. An Office of Surveillance gave censors the power to watch over the nation’s massive bureaucracy and enforce imperial law that allowed for absolutely no independent thinking or challenge to the emperor. This new system also inhibited the birth of the institutional basis for promoting intellectual freedom—including advanced scientific thought.?

China may also have suffered from a lack of governmental and institutional support for certain fields of inquiry, even though we have seen that the state was heavily involved in many industries and endeavors. Astronomy and mathematics did have the support of some emperors, but no formal schools for the study of these subjects or medicine existed. No work on optics was conducted; Emperor Kangxi even imported teams of European lens experts and grinders due to the lack of great craftsmen in optics. And the study of anatomy through postmortem dissection was strictly forbidden. In fact, the officially sanctioned manual guiding forensics on human anatomy remained the same from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries because it was embedded in imperial law. After 1430 the imperial court decided to halt all geographical exploration while the Europeans were on the verge of colonizing the New World.?

While government had aided Chinese innovation during the Golden Age, it also showed itself capable of limiting or even quashing further change and advance. In Europe, advances in innovation were essentially private initiatives and the role of rulers was typically secondary or passive. In China, however, as we have seen, the role of the government through the enormously powerful imperial workshops was critical to building momentum in technology, but at some point, that support withered away.?