26 BEIJING REVIEW MARCH 26, 2020 http://www.bjreview.com
NATION
The author is professor
of politics and director of
the International Graduate
Program in Politics at East
China Normal University in
ShanghaiT
he emphasis on developing science and
technology and closing the gap that had
emerged historically between China and
the West has been and remains a key goal of
Chinese leaders who have long understood
that the Chinese nation’s rejuvenation depends
on it. Today, on many fronts, these efforts have
paid major dividends, with China increasingly
drawing even with and in some cases surpass-
ing leading international competitors. This in
turn has led increasingly to what I call a rising
Sino(techno)-phobia, i.e., a fear of Chinese tech-
nological advances, particularly in Washington,
which has targeted especially China’s 5G leader
Huawei, as a threat to Western technological
dominance.
Technical to technological
society
China has long been an advanced technical
society as popularly attested by the Four Great
Inventions (papermaking, compass, printing
and gunpowder), as underscored exhaustively
by British biochemist, historian and sinolo-
gist Joseph Needham’s series on the history
of Chinese science and technology. As D.E.
Mungello, a U.S. historian, describes elsewhere,
when Europeans traveled to China to visit the
Ming (1368-1644) court in the 16th century, the
technological and cultural advances observed
by these visitors led some to classify Chinese
people as “white.” It was only later, when the
Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) was in decline and
Europe was on the rise that Orientalism colored
Chinese both yellow and scientiĶ cally inferior.
Among those initial European encounters
were Jesuit priests and scholars, who brought
their best propaganda with them aiming to con-
vert Chinese to Christianity and extend Western
inß uence.
The development of European art and
aesthetics had led to advances in realism in
artwork, and their religious themed paintings
sought to impress both hearts and minds.
However, according to Peter Golas, a pro-
fessor of history at the University of Denver, the
Chinese were not impressed. While Chinese
acknowledged the technical marvel of realism,
they found the mish-mash of brushstrokes
used to produce it to be too inelegant. They
also judged realism to be both inartistic and de-
ceitful. In other words, they viewed these works
as being technologically flawed insomuch as
art must be found Ķ rst in the stroke and Ķ nally
in the aesthetic purpose of the work. And what
was the aesthetic value of reproducing reality
except to present it in an unrealistic way, e.g., to
promote religious ideological narratives?
In the 20th century, scholars began to
debate the so-called Needham puzzle. They
asked, why did China fail to develop as Europe
did the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution
despite enjoying essential cultural and scientiĶ c
advances at least a century ahead of all others?
Dozens of scholars have addressed the
Needham puzzle and put forward a great
number of theories aimed at solving it. Their
arguments variously emphasize cultural, institu-tional, geographical and economic differences,
and there are many other possible explanations,
including the destabilizing impact of the Mini
Ice Age, as Chinese meteorologist Zhu Kezhen’s
groundbreaking research Ķ rst explored almost a
century ago.
In fact, many of these views are compelling,
especially when they are combined with each
other, insomuch as the conditions they de-
scribe are deeply intersectional; but all of them
fail to differentiate between a technical and a
technological society.
In China’s case, its incredible expertise in
flood control, irrigation, development of effec-
tive professional governance in a large state
and other forms of technological development
indicate its achievements as a technical society. It
ought to be clear to everyone that Chinese writ-
ing among other cultural products is among the
most technically oriented in the world. However,
a technological society is one that transcends
the mere utility of techniTue and instead puts
technology in the first position, and that is what
happened first in the West and then elsewhere.
The French philosopher and theologian
JacTues Ellul introduced the concept of the
technological society in 1954, and with con-
cerns similar to those raised by the German
philosopher Martin Heidegger, marked its
emergence in Europe as a moment when the
West inverted a longstanding hierarchy: Instead
of tools serving people, the order was effec-
tively reversed and people instead served tools
or simply became more like a tool. Ellul and
Heidegger were both horriĶ ed by these devel-
opments, and the latter even drew inspiration
from Japanese Zen Buddhism, which originated
in China, in his lifelong criticisms of technology’s
growing supremacy.Emergence of
A Technological
Society
Sino techno Shobia rises among Western technological leaders
By Josef Gregory Mahoney