The Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History

Is There a Chinese View of Technology and Nature?

Is There a Chinese View of Technology and Nature? Peter C. Perdue The envirotech program aims to promote discussion between scholars from two distinct fields of study: environmental history and the history of technology . These two historical subfields have di√erent origins and di√erent outlooks on processes of social change. Environmental historians derive, on the one hand, from the interest in historical geography and long-term social and natural change represented by French historians of the Annales school and, on the other, from the interest of historians in the transformation of the American continent by European settlers.∞ Both schools tend to focus on agrarian change, stressing either its continuity over the longue durée or the inevitable transformation of agriculture as a result of settlement and industrialization .≤ Much environmental history either expresses a sense of loss or emphasizes the limits to humans’ ability to transform nature. We may feel nostalgia for the vanished old-growth forests or regret the reduction in biodiversity created by agriculture and industrialization. At the same time, we may find sobering evidence of human limitations in analyzing the impact of natural disasters. In either case, nature and human activity are polarized in a zero-sum game. Historians of technology, more closely allied to the engineering profession than to natural history, tend to focus on the ability of humans to transform their environment at will. The predominant theme of much recent work is the industrialization of the late nineteenth century, when the word technology took on its modern meanings.≥ Even though they try to overcome the lingering influence of ‘‘Whig’’ history and recognize the inherent contingencies of technological advance, historians of technology argue that for better or worse, industrial technologies have radically changed human and natural life over the past two centuries.∂ Where environmental historians often follow a 102 | Peter C. Perdue ‘‘declensionist’’ narrative, historians of technology tend to have a more positive tone.∑ Yet despite di√erences in tone and approach, both schools again rely on an artificial binary distinction between humans and nature. The envirotech approach seems to represent a promising e√ort to overcome this binary distinction by recognizing the inevitable imbrication of human and natural processes. Since humans are, after all, animals, and nature responds to the same physical and social forces as human societies, this distinction has always been artificial. By stressing the interaction, or rather ‘‘inneraction,’’ between humans and nature, the envirotech program promises to develop a truly dialectical approach that may help to overcome many of the endless controversies about the value of technological change.∏ These issues also need to be discussed from perspectives outside recent European and American history. In the case of China—and to answer this essay’s title question—I maintain that no single Chinese view of nature and technology has emerged over the centuries. Moreover, on many questions Chinese writers’ views have been similar to or overlapped with those of many Westerners. For these reasons, we ought to seriously examine Chinese discussions of social and technological change. Ever since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Jesuit missionaries sent back reports about the Chinese empire, European thinkers have used China as a mirror to reflect upon the limitations and advantages of their own society. Some French political philosophers, such as François Quesnay and the physiocrats, saw China as an ideal land of productive agriculture, low taxation, and enlightened autocratic rule; others, such as Baron Montesquieu , stressed the despotic elements of the Chinese state, arguing that Chinese subjects lived in a state of ‘‘universal slavery.’’π These debates inextricably mixed assumptions about nature and technology in both societies. The physiocrats felt that the ‘‘natural laws’’ that governed the regular patterns of the planets and of processes on Earth could provide guidance for Chinese emperors and Western kings, telling them to be modest, to intervene only in limited ways with agrarian production, and to pray constantly for beneficial rains and good harvests. Montesquieu and the proponents of China as a despotic state argued that the emperors could easily defy any laws of nature, because they had mastered an e≈cient bureaucratic technology that gave them absolute power. With no strong aristocracy to resist them, an examination system that indoctrinated scholars in obedience to static classical norms, and complete control over the salaries and posts of their o≈cials, emperors could rule arbitrarily. Nothing blocked their indulgence of their whims. The primary concern of these theorists was not China but Europe. Their...