NOTES^553
- Peyrefitte, L'empire immobile, p. 286. The Staunton quote is from the French edi
tion of his travels: Voyage en Chine et en Tartarie (6 vols.; Paris, 1804), VI, 6. The Hue
is from his Souvenirs d'un voyage, TV, 81. Eric Jones, "The Real Question," pp. 12-13,
dismisses such personal recollections of stasis as "snapshot impressions." I think he is
wrong. These witnesses do concur; they report a state of mind; and their testimonies
do fit what we know about technological change in China. Jones recalls "similar" con
servatism in England after the war (worker rejection of American technology), and
England, he says, "soon adopted many American practices." Bad example. - Fairbank and Reischauer, East Asia, p. 291, citing Oshima, Economic Growth, p.
- Fairbank and Reischauer suggest that the reason for Chinese "stability" was "the
very perfection that Chinese culture and social organization had achieved by the thir
teenth century." The contrast with Europe, roiling with imperfection, could not be
sharper. Cf. Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies, pp. 172-73: "China is a star example of a
successful civilization.... China reached the pinnacle of economic development pos
sible under pre-industrial conditions and stopped: no forces pushing it in a different
direction are in evidence. ..." - Cf. Jones, "The Real Question," pp. 8-9, who is equally nonplussed by these
a priori objections to this line of inquiry: "I cannot see why; [the sinologists] are not
being blamed and the question does not seem tendentious with respect to a society
that had achieved so much and then passed so many centuries without achieving it
again." - Taton, ed., General History, II, 590.
- Cf. Goldstone, "Gender, Work, and Culture," who argues that support for such
constraints came from the imperial government, which saw its primary function as "en
forcing positional roles" (p. 25). China was very different in this regard from Europe
or Japan. - Cited in Lippit, "Development of Underdevelopment," pp. 266-67. I have
amended the translation slightiy, for purely stylistic reasons. - Sivin, "Science and Medicine," p. 195.
- From a publication of the Chinese Academy of Sciences addressed to teenage
readers—ibid. Interestingly enough, this exhortation was omitted from the English
translation, perhaps because the translators did not think the ideological agenda was
or should be of concern to non-Chinese. - Nathan Sivin, as cited in Spence, Chinese Roundabout, p. 148. Spence is skeptical
of the defensive arguments of the Needham school. On the other hand, he welcomes
the prospect of further study of the lines of inquiry that they have opened up. - Sivin, "Science and Medicine," p. 164. Cf. Needham, "Poverties and Triumphs,"
in Crombie, ed., Scientific Change, p. 149: "Modern universal science, yes; Western
science, no!" - Ibid., p. 196.
- This policy of the helping hand is analogous to the efforts of some scholars—many
fewer, to be sure—and so-called educators to promote or defend the new Afrocentric
view of the rise of Western civilization. Cf. Bernai, Black Athena, and numerous re
views.
CHAPTER 22- Cited in Wilkinson, Japan versus the West, p. 121. We have a similar disparagement
of Japanese productivity by an Australian expert in 1915: "... to see your men at work
made me feel that you are a very satisfied easy-going race who reckon time is no ob
ject. When I spoke to some managers they informed me that it was impossible to
change the habits of national heritage,"—Jagdish Bhagwati, cited in Meier and Seers,
eds., Pioneers in Development, p. 53.