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Basalla
identifies several factors that have appeared in the past to influence
the selection of novelty to be incorporated into the technology of a
society. Two factors, economic and military, are obvious.
Basalla's discussion of cultural factors is of more interest.
The three inventions that Sir Francis Bacon
identified as the source of great changes in Renaissance Europe -
printing, gunpowder, and magnetic compass - were products of Chinese,
not European, civilization. According to the English philosopher, this
triumvirate was responsible for revolutionizing literature, warfare, and
navigation. if these discoveries were of monumental importance in the
making of the modern Western world, why did they not exert a similar
influence in China? There is no wholly satisfactory answer to this
question, and the search for an explanation will take us into an
exploration of the cultural values of the Chinese elite.
. . .
Second, the claim that the Chinese had the
essential technological knowledge but that they suppressed it or
diverted it into trivial uses is not persuasive. Printing, gunpowder,
and the magnetic compass were put to practical uses by the Chinese
early, with enthusiasm, and in ways that paralleled ones later developed
in Europe.
. . .
According to (historian Mark) Elvin, in the eighteenth
century the Chinese economy reached a state that made it incapable of
generating and sustaining internal technological changes. Traditional
technology has been exploited to its highest level to serve huge markets
in China. When there was a local shortage of goods versatile Chinese
merchants acted to alleviate the situation by using available means,
such as cheap transport, instead of seeking and adopting innovative
technological solutions to their problems. In addition, the Chinese
economy was so much larger than those of any of the European countries
that it would have been impossible to increase it by two- or threefold
as was done with the much smaller Western economies. Small-sized
economies, more responsive to change and capable of great growth, worked
to the advantage of the European nations, especially England. China's
technological stagnation, therefore, was due to a high-level equilibrium
trap that was built into its economy.
. . .
Sinologist Joseph Needham singles out the
structure of Chinese society and government, and not a static economy,
as the source of the profound differences between Chinese and Western
technology in modern times. In the third century B.C. China's warring
states for the first time were united under a centralized monarchy and
the form of government that was established persisted in its essentials
until the twentieth century - an imperial government that required large
numbers of competent and loyal civil administrators to collect taxes and
carry its rule to the far corners of a vast country. Thus was born what
has been called Asiatic bureaucratism or bureaucratic feudalism.
Entrance to the bureaucracy depended on an extensive knowledge of
literary and philosophical classics, notably those by Confucius, and
competence was determined by a series of state sponsored examination.
According to Needham, the existence of the
bureaucratic feudal system mitigated against the rise of a Chinese
mercantile class powerful enough to affect government policies and
actions, By contrast European merchants were in a position to shape
social and political decisions and institutions to suit their needs and
thus fostered scientific and technological progress.
Everything considered the absence of a powerful
merchant class is a negative argument for a Sinophile to make about
Chinese society; therefore, Needham compliments it with a more specific
positive one. China's long-lived bureaucratic government, he declares,
introduced a stability that was unmatched in Western societies, which
continued to be convulsed by recurring social, political, and
intellectual revolutions. Given their "steady-state" society, the
Chinese were by no means technologically stagnant. They made slow and
continuous progress on all scientific and technological fronts for a
long period of time until they were overwhelmed by upheavals from the
West. If there is any question that needs to be settled, concludes
Needham, it is why Western society and culture was so prone to
instability. Whichever explanation we accept, after social and economic
components of the Chinese response to Western science and technology
have been studied, we are left facing issues that call for a
consideration of prevailing cultural attitudes and values. Even
Needham, who offers a strong defense of the socioeconomic approach,
admits that hitherto unexamined ideological factors may yet prove to be
crucial in explaining China's failure to match the scientific and
technological achievements of the Western nations in modern times and
its reluctance to adopt the results of those achievements.
. . .
The steady-state society that Needham praised
can be seen from another perspective as a conservative one bound by
traditional Confucian principles, convinced of its superiority over the
rest of the world, and suspicious of technological innovations,
primarily those coming from the West. In the opinion of some modern
historians, the Chinese scholar-officials were men of letters with
little interest in, or sympathy for, science, commerce, and utility.
Furthermore, the focus on ancient Chinese authors as a field of study
was not conductive to an acceptance of the ideas of novelty and progress
that had come to the forefront in Renaissance Europe. A Jesuit traveler
in the late seventeenth century remarked that educated Chinese were more
attracted to antiquities than they were to modern things. He observed
that the Chinese predilection for the past directly countered the
European's love of novelty for its own sake. Needham's research has
shown that the Chinese did have a conception of technological progress;
however, their definition and application of the concept was distinctly
different from that used by western Europeans.
In addition to being conservative, Chinese
society was xenophobic. It was exceedingly reluctant to adopt foreign
technologies lest they displace an indigenous, superior mode of life.
At this point the interpretation of Chinese behavior and attitudes must
be handled with care. A hasty, and oversimplified, explanation is that
the Chinese, blinded by their sense of cultural superiority, stubbornly
refused to find any merit in the novel artifacts and techniques of alien
cultures. A more subtle analysis is that the highly educated officials
of Confucian China all too clearly recognized the superiority of Western
technology, especially in weaponry. They were willing to risk military
defeat by rejecting Western guns and cannon rather than accept them and
thus jeopardize the humanistic culture in which they were trained and
held power, and which had served as the foundation of Chinese government
and ethics for two millennia.
Some Chinese thinkers in the nineteenth century
believed that an accommodation could be reached between Eastern and
Western ways. They suggested that the Chinese deal with Western
technology selectively, carefully separating the artifact itself from
those values and customs they found repugnant. Wiser men pointed out
that the artifact and value system were inseparable. If, to take for
example, China adopted European cannon and mechanical clocks, it must
necessarily acquire the Western technological methods that made them
possible as well as the Western ideas of warfare and time they embodied.
By way of conclusion let us return to Bacon's
list of epoch-making inventions and now ask why typography, gunpowder,
and the magnetic compass were so readily adopted by Westerners even
though the three were products of a remote, foreign land? The answer is
that Western culture was not monolithic; Europeans were eclectic, open
to new ideas, influences, and things. Because novel artifacts posed no
threat to their way of life, Europeans incorporated the Baconian
triumvirate into their culture and soon forgot about the innovations'
alien origins. By the seventeenth century Francis Bacon could write
about these inventions as if they were the results of European, and not
Oriental, ingenuity.
Basalla [1988, 169-174]
Basalla's observations on fads and fashions is worth noting. Basalla
sites the atmospheric railway [1988, 177] and nuclear propulsion
vehicles [1988, 181] as two examples and the home computer as a more
recent example.
By the mid-1980s the home computer boom appeared
to be nothing more than a short-lived and, for some computer
manufacturers, expensive fad. Consumers who were expected to use these
machines to maintain their financial records, educate their children,
and plan for the family's future ended up playing electronic games on
them, an activity that soon lost its novelty, pleasure, and excitement.
As a result a device that was initially heralded as the forerunner of a
new technology era was a spectacular failure that threatened to bankrupt
the firms that had invested billions of dollars in its development.
Basalla [1988, 185]
Of
course Basalla wrote before the home computer market did in fact take
off. But this reemphasizes the point that selection and spread of a
technology depends on many factors. The environmental factors changed.
We have another example of this with the facsimile or fax machine. It
was not adopted when first introduced but a decade later the adoption
was fast and very extensive. The situation had changed.
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