Modern China Before Europe
European thinkers were aware of the superiority of China, which became the ‘model’ par excellence, as Etiemble and others recognized. It was a model of administrative rationality: China very early on invented the public service, independent of the aristocracy and the religious clergy, recruiting a State bureaucracy, with competitive entrance examinations.
Hundreds of years had to pass before Europe discovered this form of administrative modernity (only in the nineteenth century), which was gradually imitated by the rest of the world. It was a model of rationality in the way it implemented advanced technologies for agricultural and artisanal/manufacturing production. This admiration for the Chinese model only disappeared when the Europeans succeeded, through their military superiority (and by that alone), in breaking the Chinese model.China was therefore engaged on the path of inventing capitalism along lines that would have been very different from those of the conquering globalised imperialist capitalism.
Why did the modern Chinese path, the beginnings of which predated that of Europe by at least 500 years, not take off? And why did the European path, which started later, take definite shape in a short space of time and which was then able to impose itself at the world level? My effort in trying to explain this is based on an emphasis of the ‘advantages’ of the European tributary societies on the periphery (the ‘feudal’ path) as opposed to the inertia imposed by the solidity of the central form of the Chinese tributary mode. This is a more general expression of what I have described as unequal development: the peripheral forms, because they were less solid and more adaptable, made it easier to overtake the contradictions of the old system, while the centralised forms, which were more solid, slowed the movement down.
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