China was Five Centuries Ahead of Europe
The image of the Chinese trajectory as being the course of a ‘‘long, calm river” is certainly somewhat forced.
Ancient China, until the introduction of Buddhism in the first centuries of the Christian era, was constituted of multiple tributary formations, organized in principalities and kingdoms that were often in conflict.
There was, nevertheless, a tendency to unifying them into one single empire which had its early expression in the writings of Confucius, 500 years before Jesus Christ, in the Warring States period.The Chinese world then adopted a religion of individual salvation, Buddhism— although it was mixed with Taoism—following the example of Christian Europe. The two societies, feudal, Christian Europe and imperial, Buddhist China, had striking similarities. But there were also important differences: China was a unified, political empire which rose to remarkable heights under the Tang dynasty, while feudal Europe never achieved this. The tendency to reconstitute the right of access to land each time that it seriously deteriorated in China contrasted with the long- lasting fragmentation of European feudal property.
China freed itself from religion, in this case Buddhism, as from the Song period and definitively with the Ming. It therefore entered into modernity some five centuries before the European renaissance. The analogy between the Chinese renaissance and the later European one is impressive. The Chinese ‘‘returned to their roots” of Confucianism, in a free, rational and non-religious reinterpretation, like that of the European renaissance that invented a Greco-Roman ancestor to break with what the Enlightenment described as the religious obscurantism of the Middle Ages.
All the conditions were then met to enable the modern Chinese world to accomplish remarkable progress in all fields: the organisation of the State, scientific knowledge, agricultural and manufacturing production techniques, rational thinking.
China invented secularism 500 years before it developed in Europe. Modern China put forward the idea that it was man who made history, a notion which later became a central theme of the Enlightenment. The impact of this progress was reinforced by the periodic correction of dangerous drifts towards the private appropriation of land.The stability of the economic and political organisation of China constituted a model for the development of the productive forces based on the continued intensification of agricultural production which was in striking contrast with the model of historical European capitalism based on the private appropriation of agrarian land, the expulsion of the rural population, massive emigration and the conquest of the world associated with it. The model of this European capitalism was that of accumulation by dispossession, not only primitive but permanent (the other aspect of the polarisation inherent in capitalist globalisation). China was launched on a path that could have led to a capitalism of a different kind, closed up on itself rather than conquering. The prodigious expansion of commercial relations associated with the levying of tribute and not separated from it, show that this possibility did exist. But this association made the evolutionary process relatively slow compared with that of a Europe in transition towards full-blown capitalism.
For this reason China kept its advance—in terms of the average productivity of social labour—over Europe until the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. As I said before, the Enlightenment in Europe recognised this advance of China, which it saw as a model. However, neither the Europe of the Enlightenment of the mercantilist transition period, nor, later on, Europe of the full-blown capitalism of the nineteenth century, managed to overcome the fragmentation of the kingdoms of the Ancien Regime, then of the modern nation-states, to create a unified power capable of controlling the centralisation of the surplus tribute, then capitalist surplus, as China had done.
For their part, Chinese observers clearly saw the advantage of their historic development. A Chinese traveller, visiting Europe in the aftermath of the French/ Prussian war of 1870, compared the state of the continent to that of the Warring States, 500 years before Jesus Christ!
The decline of China, caused by a combination of the exhaustion of the model of the intensification/commercialisation of agricultural and rural production, together with European military aggression, was relatively short. It did not cause the break-up of this continental State, although the threat was apparent during the decline. Some of the essential characteristics of the Chinese revolution and of the path it took after its victory, in the successive Maoist and post-Maoist moments should be seen in this perspective of an exceptionally long duration.