My favorite theory about why the West and China diverged starting in the 16th century is that entrepreneurial capitalism thrived in the West. The ambitious acheived success by finding a competent master, learning a trade, and then making stuff people wanted, whether that be clocks or caravels. In China, the ambitious were sucked into the civil service exam system. They were judged by arbitrary tests rather than by producing useful things. The result was centuries of stagnation.
One of the factors, yes, but making such an attribution overlooks a lot: the Tang is often regarded as a renaissance in China. It follows the Sui, when the imperial exams started. General characteristics of each of the dynasties, and each of the rulers, have large effects on the policies and the culture of the era.
Simple example: if Bush was an emperor, and held power for a few generations, it isn't far fetched to see a dark age of bio research.
Good point. It should also be pointed out how difficult it was to sustain productive and fair policies in the dynastic system. All it took is one bad ruler to ruin centuries of progress.
This is why the integrity and structure of the system is more important than individual rulers. The best form of government may be a benevolent king, and even if that's somehow sustained for 5 generations, all it takes is one malevolent one to ruin everything.
"if Bush was an emperor, and held power for a few generations, it isn't far fetched to see a dark age of bio research."
The total federal research and development budget increased under Bush. The objection that some people have is his moratorium on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
This is a small part of all bio research that is morally contentious. I doubt your assertion of seeing a "dark age of bio research" is warranted.
I do admit a great bias in favor of stem cell research and consider it the new frontier. But "morally contentious" is highly subjective, whereas the applicability of bio research is not. That is also to say that you have more wiggle room in interpreting what is contentious research, whereas research results have no wiggle room (well, there is for bio, but there is always the option of disproving something).
Which means that it is easy to muddle the issues by drawing hazy borders around themes that vary from person to person, which is likely a source of impediment for bio research. Therefore, it isn't far fetched, at all. Funding is certainly good, but restricting what areas can be done, or even having a say in it, when it comes to pure research, is not helpful.
But, I am not very educated about these policies and you do make a good point. This is just a mostly personal interpretation of it, which I believe has a good likelihood :)
The first sentence is probably true. But the causes for this divergence are so complicated that I don't feel like I understand the question well enough yet to explain why it happened. For example, there was the court squabble that caused long trading voyages to be banned just at the wrong moment. If long distance voyages were a sufficiently powerful driver of European economic growth, that alone could have been enough to screw China. Especially since this was something of a zero-sum game.
Here is a great article comparing the Chinese and the Portuguese approaches to exploration. The comparison between ship sizes is just stunning. It's the 15th century version of Lisp versus Blub :-) : http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/10/how-to-succeed-or-f...
Decentralization was a major factor in Europe's success. The Chinese government could issue an edict and ban trading voyages for centuries. No European ruler could afford to be so foolish. There was no single point of failure. When John II of Portugal refused to fund a voyage west across the Atlantic, Columbus simply went to Isabella of Spain and convinced her to role the die.
China was one monolithic civil service state. Europe was divided into a dozen kingdoms that were essentially profit maximizing family businesses. The intense competition between these states propelled Europe forward at a rapid rate.
It wasn't so much that no European ruler could afford to be so foolish as Europe could afford to have foolish rulers. There were definitely bits of Europe that were screwed at various times in this period, but breakage tended to be contained by national borders.
Very interesting! This reminded me of the book "The Starfish and the Spider" where it discusses the power of leaderless organizations and how they can be better in certain instances.
Something interesting from the book is that these centralized groups become more and more centralized when they are attacked but the decentralized groups become more and more decentralized.
An example would be the RIAA vs Napster. Napster was replaced by more and more decentralized networks while the RIAA started asserting more and more control.
You may want to read Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond. You'll definitely enjoy it. The short answer is yes, the long answer starts with geography and how Europe's facilitated lots of small countries and China's one big empire. My favorite example is how Columbus asked three kings to sponsor his voyage to America. In China the first "no" would have been final.
I feel that it's one of the factors, but not the main one.
To me the main factor for China's stagnation is that unlike countries in Europe, China had no equal (or near equal) for thousands of years (well the majority of it). There was simply no competition. To make a long story short, China simply rested on its laurels too long until the arrival of the modern era.
