China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience.

China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. By R. Bin Wong (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997. x plus 327pp.)

At his Ph.D. oral examination, R. Bin Wong was asked by David Landes what European historians could learn from studying Chinese history. This impressive book is his reply. His fundamental argument is that Europe and China (and by implication other parts of the world) had different trajectories of economic and political development, and that the use of purely European models as a standard is a poor way of understanding even the European experience, still less that of other countries.

The book consists of three parts, each comparing Europe and China in a particular respect--economic change in early modern and modern times, state building from 1100 on, and patterns of popular protest. All three sections have many interesting insights, though the first and the second address the big issues more convincingly. The third also contains useful lessons for the application of a comparative method to specific incidents. Throughout, the author is probably most convincing in his analysis of late Imperial China, interesting and provocative about post-1949 developments, and least persuasive on China's trajectory of development between the mid nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries.

Basically the book is about Chinese history (p. 8), and the author is a China historian (as is the reviewer). In one way, therefore, it is perhaps a little ironic that the most salient intervention vis-[grave{a}]-vis the scholarly consensus relates to European history. (In a broader sense it is less surprising, as China historians have always been more conscious of European comparisons than vice versa.) Thus Wong's analysis challenges the current trend to see the Industrial Revolution in terms less of a "revolution" and more of continuity with pre-industrial change. Wong, in contrast, argues that up to the late eighteenth century, both Europe and China experienced "Smithian growth" of the market and the commercial economy, though both remained within the natural limitations identified by the classical economists as a feature of an agrarian economy. Neither in China nor in Europe (vide some of the proto-industrialisation literature) did such growth necessarily contain within itself the seeds of industrialisation. Europe, but not China, later experienced a sharp rupture caused by t he new industrial technology.

Wong thus argues that economic change is "modular" (p. 280), and the particular concatenation of economic situations and forces--"Smithian growth," capitalism and technological change--in Europe was contingent rather than necessary. The author perhaps controversially distinguishes capitalism (which developed only in Europe) from the market economy (found in both Europe and China) and designates capitalism (pp. 50-51), following Braudel, as centering around monopoly and force. While monopoly and force certainly played a role in the history of capitalism, whether most writers would see them as analytically fundamental to its definition is another matter.

Central to the second section on state-building is the attempt to avoid making the European state the sole standard, while not abandoning the comparative method in favour of a complete relativism. In an attempt to develop a non-Eurocentric framework for analysis, the author advances four (sensible but perhaps not terribly enlightening) categories--challenges, capacities, claims and commitments--to analyse the role of the state on both ends of the Eurasian continent.

In the second (as well as the third) section the author uses a two-way comparison: examining China's trajectory in the light of a comparison with Europe, and examining Europe's trajectory vis-[grave{a}]-vis a Chinese standard. A recurrent theme is that many aspects of the European state which are designated "modern" in relation to earlier European models can in fact be found in the Imperial Chinese State. Thus the late Imperial Chinese State was more like a modem state than were its European contemporaries in its concern (though sometimes as an aspiration rather than as an operational reality) for moral and ideological indoctrination, the people's welfare and the maintenance of pervasive social control.

An important part of the argument in this section is that the Chinese social order in the Imperial and the Maoist periods was "fractal" (p. 121: referring to the replication of irregular geometric patterns on different scales) in that actors at all levels had basically the same agenda and similar responsibilities, with few vertical or horizontal distinctions in functions. This is an interesting way to frame the well-known parallels between, for example, the responsibilities of the Emperor and those of the local magistrate (fumu guan--parent official).

Wong's broad survey also intervenes in debates about contemporary China. Having reviewed China's state building and its problems from Imperial times to the present, he concludes (p. 201) that "The conditions that sustain a unitary state no longer exist in China." The contemporary Chinese state has abandoned most of the commitments of the Maoist era, while losing its ability to combine a vertically integrated bureaucracy with a fractal vision of society. If Confucianism replaces Communism as the dominant ideology, it is no longer inextricably linked to a unitary state, so that the Chinese state may be heading for even greater changes in the future.

The final section uses a comparative method to argue that the phenomena of grain seizures and tax resistance, which appeared in superficially similar ways in China and Europe (especially France), nevertheless were part of very different historical dramas. The existence of a phenomenon in China which in Europe was closely linked with, for example, the rise of capitalism, should not be used to suggest that capitalism was developing in China.

Occasionally (though less often than one might expect in a work of this kind), one could question individual statements or feel that the author was arguing against a "straw man." I would question the contention (p. 281) that Jiangnan and North-east China were at the same level of economic development as the more developed parts of Western Europe in the 1950s, as well as the argument (p. 47) that technological change led to a shift away from rural industry in China during the eighteenth century. I also felt the author overstates the degree to which scholars of post 1949 China neglect the Imperial inheritance, and found it difficult to agree that "Most specialists argue that the Northern Expedition of the Nationalist Party in 1926 reunited the country, making the succeeding decade from 1927 to 1937 the only period between 1911 and 1949 that the country was united" (p. 169). But, more broadly, most of the author's judgments fall within the range of reasonable scholarly opinion.

In conclusion, this is a very important book for what it attempts. To expect it to deliver on every front would be asking too much, and all readers, whether Chinese or European historians, will benefit considerably from reading it.