Song Dynasty China was a model of intellectual advance, that might well have started the Industrial Revolution half a millennium early. After a destabilizing century of foreign Mongol rule, China’s next dynasty, the Ming, was thoroughly intellectually retrograde, closing China off from the world, imposing a rigid Confucian orthodoxy and shutting out ideas that questioned it. The result by 1700 was a China that, however rich, was open to conquest by the West. The parallels with today’s Europe are clear, and the result for Europe may be similar.
One should not overstate the achievements of Song Dynasty China, but there is no doubt that, compared to anything else going on in the 11th and 12th Centuries, it was a bright beacon of light (the other beacon was the Caliphate, but it was nowhere near as bright). Song dynasty scientific advances included movable-type printing, military gunpowder, the magnetic compass, mechanical clocks, mechanical water pumps and windmills.
The Song regime’s main economic problem, seen from today’s viewpoint, was the tight control by a Mandarinate selected by a long-established examination system that was admirably fair and suitably rigorous, but ignored both science and technology. I have always liked the idea of an elite selected by its ability at versification (would they have accepted limericks?) but even though some of that elite made scientific and even technological advances, they did not regard such things as their proper business.
Accordingly, the truly impressive intellectual and scientific achievements of the Song regime (even beyond the jade and porcelain, which were as good as Humanity has ever produced) did not result in the intellectual Scientific Revolution that was necessary before we got the practical and technological Industrial Revolution. The hardware got close to industrialization in Song Dynasty China, but the intellectual “software” did not.
The Ming Dynasty from 1368 was a far less imaginative society than the Song, focused on orthodoxy and Confucian tradition, perhaps scarred by the previous wars and foreign domination. Most notably, when it used the Song advances in ships and navigation to launch Admiral Zheng He (1371-1435) on his voyages after 1405, those voyages were not for exploration but to demonstrate the glory of Chinese civilization. That they certainly did, especially as Zheng He’s flagship was far larger than contemporary European and Arab vessels, indeed larger (though according to modern scholarship, only modestly so) than H.M.S. Victory of three centuries later.
However, Zheng He’s voyages added little to the corpus of Chinese knowledge about the world. The longest voyage terminated in East Africa, not making contact with the embryonic mariners of Henry the Navigator (1394-1460). Also, they did not venture eastward across the Pacific (either directly or hugging the coast past Alaska) thus failing to discover California. Then, after 1433, the voyages were abandoned, the big-ship technology for long voyages was forbidden and the Ming state became more decisively inward-looking. As for technological advances, the Ming were far from matching the Song achievements but did at least come up with the bristle toothbrush!
Of today’s major powers, the United States still retains some of the creative fire of Song Dynasty China, and its bureaucracy is, thank goodness, less socially powerful, so the bureaucracy’s preferences only moderately adversely affect societal innovation. On the other hand, its porcelain is nothing to write home about, and President Trump’s taste in décor would truly horrify the fastidious Song emperors.
Today’s China has much of its Song ancestor’s creative force, although again lacking its taste. Its major disadvantage compared with the Song regime is that modern technology enables it to enforce a far more draconian control system than was inflicted on Song dynasty peasants. This may well sap innovation in the long run, since the state bureaucracy will control what gets innovated. The Ming, with its Confucianism fetish and its paranoia about foreign influences, imposed a tighter control on its subjects than the Song, but nothing like that available to Xi Jinping.
India today is a curious mixture. It is unquestionably a more productive and innovative society than under the Moghuls, whose sole objective appears to have been acquiring giant piles of rubies that would amaze foreigners but were eventually dissipated when their capital was sacked in 1739. On the other hand, freedoms such as free speech and free association that were inherited from British rule increasingly appear to be merely skin-deep, to be swept away any time the Indian regime wishes to do so. While less tyrannical than Aurangzeb (1618-1707) therefore, the current Indian government appears to be moving in the wrong direction. Nevertheless, both India and China are suitably cynical about the self-destructive “climate change” religion that infects Europe and so will probably survive economically and indeed prosper.
And so we come to Europe, initially the instigator of the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution (if you include Britain) and the far more prosperous world in which we now live. Europe now has speech controls similar to those of Ming China but enforced by draconian technology. Europe has given up its entrepreneurial spirit, to replace it with an ever-widening bureaucracy. Europe now enforces a woke orthodoxy that is every bit as deadening to progress as Confucianism and far more economically damaging. Europe’s courts have become enforcers of that religion, so that economic rights, especially that of property, are continually denied.
Instead of looking outwards, to new intellectual fields to conquer, Europe is devoting an increasing proportion of its economy to the mania of climate change, thereby raising energy costs to intolerable levels and preventing Europe from ever being competitive in AI, for example. Not content with that, Europe is the principal enforcer of the irrational destructiveness of the Davos World Economic Forum, whose hope for the future was “You will own nothing and be happy.” That formula aspires to reduce Europeans to a position considerably inferior to that of Song peasants, and similar to that of Ming peasants or mediaeval serfs, in which rising above your position in life is forbidden. With such a society, even a bristle toothbrush is unlikely to emerge – it certainly won’t be an electric toothbrush, given the power cuts.
The AI revolution itself, today’s version of the voyages of Zheng He or Columbus, is prevented in Europe by high energy costs. The rulers have noticed that they now have none of the world’s 25 largest companies by market capitalization, and an increasingly untenable position in the tech sector, so they hope to become the “capital of regulation” whereby the mandarinate will impose regulations that prevent any activity of which it does not approve. Again, that deadening idea in Ming, not Song.
By turning inward and focusing on ancestral religion and past glories, Ming China became a society in decay, utterly unable to resist European encroachments when they came after 1700. Japan’s Shogunate, an equally old and distinguished civilization, had through the reforms of Tokugawa Yoshimune (Shogun, 1716-45) decentralized its society and encouraged innovation in rural areas, away from bureaucratic control. Consequently, when threatened by modernity, Japan was able to reorient itself quickly through the 1868 Meiji Restoration and become a vibrant and innovative part of the global economy. China instead from the early 19th century was continually vulnerable to invasion and insult, and eventually descended into Maoism, that most destructive of all philosophies.
If Europe does not reform, removing the dead statist grip of the central unaccountable bureaucracy and irresponsible courts such as the European Court of Human Rights, it will not have the ability to regenerate itself, as did Japan. Instead, it will descend into helpless impoverished Maoism, no doubt with some unpleasant Islamist and Nazi special features.
The food was good in Ming Dynasty China, too. It is nevertheless not a path down which a sensible continent would tread.
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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)