Why the West Rules--For Now (77 page)

The biggest gift the Jesuits brought, though, was astronomy. The missionaries knew that calendars were a weighty matter in China; celebrating the winter solstice on the wrong day could throw the cosmos out of joint just as badly as getting Easter wrong would do in Christendom. So seriously did Chinese officials take this that they would even employ foreigners in the Bureau of Astronomy if the aliens—mostly Arabs and Persians—demonstrably knew more about the stars than did natives.

The Jesuits sensibly saw this as their best route to China’s rulers. Jesuit mathematicians had been deeply involved in reforming the Catholic calendar in the 1580s, and although their astronomy was out-of-date by northwest European standards (they resolutely stuck to Earth-centered models of the universe), it was better than anything available in China.

At first all went swimmingly. By 1610 several senior civil servants, impressed by Jesuitical mathematics, secretly converted to Christianity. They openly promoted Western scholarship as superior to Chinese and translated European textbooks. More traditional scholars sometimes took offense at this unpatriotic attitude, though, so in the 1630s the Jesuits’ main backer began taking a subtler line. “
Melting the material
and substance of Western knowledge,” he assured his compatriots, “we will cast them into the mold of the [traditional Chinese] Grand Concordance system.” Maybe, he even suggested, Western learning was in fact a spin-off from earlier Chinese wisdom.

When the Manchus seized Beijing in 1644 the Jesuits proposed—and won—a public tournament of solar eclipse prediction. Their prestige had never been higher, and for a few heady months in 1656 it even looked as if the emperor might convert to Christianity. Victory seemed at hand, until the teenage monarch grasped that Christians could not keep concubines. He turned Buddhist instead. Traditionalists then struck back, denouncing the Jesuits’ leader as a spy.

In 1664 another trial by telescope was ordered, with the Jesuits, the Bureau of Astronomy, and a Muslim astronomer each predicting the time of an upcoming solar eclipse. Two fifteen, said the Bureau; two thirty, said the Muslim; three o’clock, said the Jesuits. Lenses were set up to project the sun’s image into a darkened room. Two fifteen came and went with no eclipse. Two thirty: still nothing. But at almost exactly three a shadow began creeping across the fiery disk.

Not good enough, the judges decided, and banned Christianity.

That, it seemed, was that—except for the niggling fact that the Chinese calendar was still wrong. So, as soon as he took the throne in 1668, the emperor Kangxi arranged a rematch. Again the Jesuits won.

Convinced of the Jesuits’ superiority, Kangxi threw himself into their teaching, sitting for hours with priests, learning their arithmetic, geometry, and mechanics. He even took up the harpsichord. “
I realized
that Western mathematics has its uses,” the emperor wrote. “On inspection tours later I used these Western methods to show my officials how to make more accurate calculations when planning their river works.”

Kangxi recognized that “the ‘new methods’ of calculating make basic errors impossible” and that “the general principles of Western calendrical science are without error,” but still resisted the Jesuits’ larger claims for their science and their God. “Even though some of the Western methods are different from our own, and may even be an improvement, there is little about them that is new,” Kangxi concluded. “The principles of mathematics all derive from the
Book of Changes
, and the Western methods are Chinese in origin … After all,” he added, “they know only a fraction of what I know.”

In 1704 the pope, worried that the Jesuits were promoting astronomy more vigorously than Christianity, sent an emissary to Beijing to keep a closer eye on them, and Kangxi, worried that this amounted to sedition, sidelined the missionaries. He set up new scientific academies (loosely modeled on the Academy of Sciences in Paris) where Chinese scientists could pursue astronomy and mathematics free from Jesuit influence. The mathematics the Jesuits were teaching, with little algebra and less calculus, was already decades behind northern Europe’s, but as soon as Kangxi cut this link with Western science the East-West scholarly gap widened into a chasm.

It is tempting to see Kangxi (
Figure 9.7
) as the solution to Needham’s Problem, the bungling idiot who could have brought Chinese science into the eighteenth century but chose not to. Yet of all the men (and the one woman) who sat on the Celestial Throne, Kangxi is surely among the least-deserving of such a label. Saying that the Jesuits knew only a fraction of what he knew was immodest, but not altogether wrong. Kangxi was a true intellectual, a strong leader, and a man of action (including fathering fifty-six children). He looked at the
Westerners in a larger context. For two thousand years Chinese emperors had recognized that nomad war-making was superior to their own, and had usually found buying the horsemen off less risky than fighting them. When that changed, Kangxi was the first to recognize it, and personally led the campaigns that began closing the steppe highway in the 1690s. With the Westerners, things worked the other way around. Kangxi had engaged with Westerners since the 1660s, but after 1704 ignoring them started to seem less risky. Some Southeast Asian rulers had reached the same conclusion in the sixteenth century, and Japan’s shoguns followed suit by 1613. A violent, Christian-tinged uprising in Japan in 1637 only seemed to confirm the wisdom of this decision to sever links with the West. In this context, Kangxi’s decision seemed no bungle.

Figure 9.7. The great bungler? Kangxi, emperor of China, painted by the Italian artist Giovanni Gherardi around 1700

And in any case, there is another question we must ask. Even if Kangxi had foreseen where Western science would go and had promoted it, could he have kept Eastern social development ahead of Western in the eighteenth century?

The answer is almost certainly no. China did face some of the same problems as northwest Europe, and some of its thinkers did move in similar directions. In the 1750s, for instance, Dai Zhen (like Gu Yanwu, a low-level functionary who never won the highest degree) propounded something like the Western vision of a mechanical nature functioning without intentions or goals and open to empirical analysis. But Dai, an excellent philologist, always grounded his arguments in ancient texts; at the end of the day, preserving the glories of the past seemed more important in China than addressing the kind of questions that global expansion was forcing onto Westerners’ attention.

The challenges of the Atlantic frontier produced Westerners who clamored for answers to new kinds of questions. The Newtons and Leibnizes who responded won fame and fortune beyond anything earlier scientists could have imagined, and new kinds of theorists, the likes of Locke and Voltaire, traced out the implications of these advances for the social order. China’s new steppe frontier, by contrast, produced much milder challenges. The well-paid scholars in Kangxi’s scientific institutes felt no need to invent calculus for themselves or figure out that the earth went around the sun. There seemed to be much more profit in turning mathematics—like medicine—into a branch of classical studies.

East and West each got the thought they needed.

THE IRON LAW

When Kangxi died in 1722, social development was moving higher than ever before. Twice in the past, in the Roman Empire around 100
CE
and Song dynasty China a thousand years later, development had reached forty-three points, only to generate disasters that drove it down again. By 1722, though, the steppe highway had been closed. One of the horsemen of the apocalypse was dead and social development did not collapse when it hit the hard ceiling. Instead, the new frontier
along the edge of the steppes allowed Eastern development to keep rising, while northwest Europeans, shielded from steppe migrations by the Chinese and Russian empires, opened their own new frontier on the Atlantic. Western development rose even faster than Eastern, passing it in 1773 (or thereabouts). It was a new age at both ends of Eurasia.

Or was it? If someone from Rome or Song China had been transplanted to eighteenth-century London or Beijing he or she would certainly have had many surprises. Such as guns. Or America. Or tobacco, coffee, and chocolate. And as for the fashions—powdered wigs? Manchu pigtails? Corsetry? Bound feet?
O tempora, O mores!
(“Oh the times! Oh, the customs!”), as Cicero liked to say.

Yet more, in fact much more, would have seemed familiar. The modern world’s great gunpowder armies were certainly stronger than those of antiquity and far more people could and did read than ever before, but neither East nor West could boast a million-strong city like ancient Rome or medieval Kaifeng.
*
Most important of all, though, the visitors from the past would have noticed that although social development was moving higher than ever, the
ways
people were pushing it up hardly differed from how Romans and Song Chinese had pushed it up. Farmers were using more manure, digging more ditches, rotating crops, and cutting back on fallow. Craftsmen were burning more wood to cast more metal, and, when wood grew scarce, turning to coal. More and bigger animals were being bred to turn wheels, lift weights, and pull better carts along smoother roads. Wind and water were being harnessed more effectively to crush ores, grind grains, and move boats down straightened rivers and artificial canals. Yet while the Song and Roman visitors would probably have conceded that many things were bigger and better in the eighteenth century than in the eleventh or first, they would not have conceded that things were fundamentally different.

There was the rub. The conquest of the steppes and oceans had not shattered the hard ceiling that the Romans and Song had encountered around forty-three points: they had merely pushed it up a little, and by 1750 there were alarming signs that development was once more
straining against it. The right-hand side of
Figure 9.3
, showing real wages, is not a pretty picture. By 1750 living standards were falling everywhere, even in Europe’s dynamic northwest. As the Eastern and Western cores strained to push the hard ceiling upward, times were getting harder.

What was to be done? The bureaucrats of Beijing, the salon-goers of Paris, and every self-respecting intellectual in between threw out theories. Some argued that all wealth came from farming, and set about persuading rulers to dole out tax breaks to farmers who drained marshes or terraced hillsides. From Yunnan to Tennessee, shacks and log cabins crept farther into the forests where less-developed communities hunted. Other theorists insisted that all wealth came from trade, so rulers (often the same ones) poured even more resources into beggaring their neighbors by stealing their commerce.

There was immense variation, but on the whole Western rulers (who had been fighting so furiously since the fifteenth century) thought war would solve their problems, while Eastern rulers (who had generally been fighting less furiously) thought it would not. Japan was the extreme case. After pulling out of Korea in 1598 its leaders decided that there were no profits in conquest, and by the 1630s even concluded that overseas trade was merely losing them valuable goods such as silver and copper. Chinese and Dutch (the only Europeans allowed into Japan by 1640) merchants were hemmed into tiny ghettos in Nagasaki, where the only women allowed to join them were Japanese prostitutes. Not surprisingly, foreign trade dwindled.

Protected from aggression by the wide blue sea, Japan flourished until about 1720. Its population doubled and Edo grew into perhaps the world’s biggest city. Rice, fish, and soy replaced cheaper foods in most people’s diets. And peace reigned: having surrendered their guns to Hideyoshi back in 1587, ordinary Japanese never rearmed. Even the touchy samurai warriors agreed to sort out their quarrels by swordplay alone, which amazed the Westerners who bullied their way into Japan in the 1850s. “
These people seemed
scarcely to know the use of firearms,” one remembered. “It strikes an American, who has from his childhood seen children shoot, that ignorance of arms is an anomaly indicative of primitive innocence and Arcadian simplicity.”

After 1720, though, the picture steadily darkened. Japan was full. Without a technological breakthrough there was no way to squeeze
more food, fuel, clothing, and housing out of the crowded landscape, and without trade there was no way to bring more in. Japanese farmers displayed astonishing ingenuity, and Japanese officials realized the damage that fuel hunger had done to their forests and actively protected them. Japanese elite culture turned toward an austere, beautiful minimalism that conserved resources. But still food prices rose, famines increased, and hungry mobs protested in the streets. This was no Arcadia.

The only reason Japan could take this extreme path was that China, the one credible threat to its security, moved the same way. China’s broad, open frontiers meant that population could continue growing through the eighteenth century, but the Qing, too, increasingly shut out the dangerous world across the waters. In 1760 all foreign trade was restricted to Guangzhou, and when Britain’s East India Company sent Lord Macartney to complain about the restrictions in 1793 the emperor Qianlong imperiously replied, “
We have never
valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures.” Further contact, he concluded, “is not in harmony with the regulations of the Celestial Empire [and] … is of no advantage to your country.”