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

Comparative historians have long indulged themselves by using “the Chinese case” as an example of failure, stagnation, or—at best—anomaly when measured against the standard of the European experience. In this book, Wong wrests the comparativist agenda out of its Eurocentric matrix to tackle the question that most China historians dread to hear from their Europeanist colleagues, What can a historian of Europe learn, after all, by studying China? Placing China and “Europe” on even sides of a comparative agenda, using terms that will make Europeanists feel comfortable and safe, Wong begins by stressing similarities between the market economies of Europe and China “until the fundamental discontinuities of the nineteenth century” (127). This strategy provides the context for a close look at state formation and transformation, about which Wong stresses long-term fundamental differences. A final section about state-society relations, focused on tax resistance and grain riots, precedes the broad and brief concluding chapter, which argues for an expansion of the capacities of social theory “through a more systematic grounding in multiple historical experiences” (293).

In the heart of the book, the middle section on state formation and political economy, Wong identifies “clusters of issues” (“challenges, capacities, claims, and commitments”) through which the differences between Europe and China are most sharply illuminated. Challenges and capacities are, in Wong’s definition, “structural,” encompassing problems that states attempt to solve and the human and material resources that states mobilize to confront challenges and to achieve goals. Claims and commitments, on the other hand, concern norms, values, and ideologies that shape expectations about what the state can or should do, and about how rulers should rule (82).

In a sweeping historical review that begins in the twelfth century and concludes in the twentieth, Wong stresses the limited capacity of the Western experience to produce theories that effectively address the diversity of global experience beyond the nineteenth century. His arguments are far too detailed and complex for a short review, but a few striking examples will suffice. The first has to do with motives and capacities for mobilizing resources; the second concerns ongoing struggles between a central government and “institutionally distinct and powerful aristocracies, clerics, and urban elites” (102).

As Wong emphasizes, the Chinese government enjoyed unparallelled access to individual taxpaying households and, in that sense, developed a state with a “reach” far deeper and more pervasive than that of any European counterpart. At the same time, the state’s extractive capacity—unopposed and uninhibited by the power of a church or a landholding or urban elite—was self-limited by an ideological commitment to sustaining the peasant household as a viable unit. Moreover, because China did not confront the arms race and the threats to sovereignty from the kind of powerful neighboring states that kept European politics continually on the alert to expand their defensive and offensive arsenals and to build their overseas empires, Chinese statesmen had little incentive to override their commitment to a stable growing agrarian base, which was defended cheaply by low-cost soldier-farmer military colonies along vulnerable inland borders. Finally, unlike its counterparts in Europe, the Chinese government historically displayed a “deep concern with elite and popular education and morality, active promotion of material welfare especially of the poor and of peasants, [and] invasive curiosity about and anxiety over potentially subversive behavior” (101). In other words, “late imperial Chinese rulers were engaged in moral, material, and coercive strategies of state making that were undertaken by Western states only in later centuries” (104).

None of these insights is new to China specialists, but the couching of the argument—in terms derived from models of state making developed by Tilly and others—allows the Chinese case to dramatize the anomalous character of the European experience: Fragmentary small states competing intensely with one another, highly contingent technological breakthroughs rare in any market economy, and rich coal deposits at strategic locations all are part of a unique historical context that...