China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (review)

At his Ph.D. oral examination, R. Bin Wong was asked by David Landes what European historians could learn from studying Chinese history. This impressive book is his reply. His fundamental argument is that Europe and China (and by implication other parts of the world) had different trajectories of economic and political development, and that the use of purely European models as a standard is a poor way of understanding even the European experience, still less that of other countries.

The book consists of three parts, each comparing Europe and China in a particular respect—economic change in early modern and modern times, state building from 1100 on, and patterns of popular protest. All three sections have many interesting insights, though the first and the second address the big issues more convincingly. The third also contains useful lessons for the application of a comparative method to specific incidents. Throughout, the author is probably most convincing in his analysis of late Imperial China, interesting and provocative about post-1949 developments, and least persuasive on China’s trajectory of development between the mid nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries.

Basically the book is about Chinese history (p. 8), and the author is a China historian (as is the reviewer). In one way, therefore, it is perhaps a little ironic that the most salient intervention vis-à-vis the scholarly consensus relates to European history. (In a broader sense it is less surprising, as China historians have always been more conscious of European comparisons than vice versa.) Thus Wong’s analysis challenges the current trend to see the Industrial Revolution in terms less of a “revolution” and more of continuity with pre-industrial change. Wong, in contrast, argues that up to the late eighteenth century, both Europe and China experienced “Smithian growth” of the market and the commercial economy, though both remained within the natural limitations identified by the classical economists as a feature of an agrarian economy. Neither in China nor in Europe (vide some of the proto-industrialisation literature) did such growth necessarily contain within itself the seeds of industrialisation. Europe, but not China, later experienced a sharp rupture caused by the new industrial technology.

Wong thus argues that economic change is “modular” (p. 280), and the particular concatenation of economic situations and forces—“Smithian growth,” capitalism and technological change—in Europe was contingent rather than necessary. The author perhaps controversially distinguishes capitalism (which developed only in Europe) from the market economy (found in both Europe and China) and designates capitalism (pp. 50–51), following Braudel, as centering around monopoly and force. While monopoly and force certainly played a role in the history of capitalism, whether most writers would see them as analytically fundamental to its definition is another matter.

Central to the second section on state-building is the attempt to avoid making the European state the sole standard, while not abandoning the comparative method in favour of a complete relativism. In an attempt to develop a non-Eurocentric framework for analysis, the author advances four (sensible but perhaps not terribly enlightening) categories—challenges, capacities, claims and commitments—to analyse the role of the state on both ends of the Eurasian continent.

In the second (as well as the third) section the author uses a two-way comparison: examining China’s trajectory in the light of a comparison with Europe, and examining Europe’s trajectory vis-à-vis a Chinese standard. A recurrent theme is that many aspects of the European state which are designated “modern” in relation to earlier European models can in fact be found in the Imperial Chinese State. Thus the late Imperial Chinese State was more like a modern state than were its European contemporaries in its concern (though sometimes as an aspiration rather than as an operational reality) for moral and ideological indoctrination, the people’s welfare and the maintenance of pervasive social control.

An important part of the argument in this section is that the Chinese...