Interesting column by Jeff Yang in the SF Chronicle about President Obama, America’s first “Pacific President” and our need to re-embrace our “Asian Values.” Not sure I agree with his conclusion — check that, I definitely don’t agree with his conclusion — but the piece is worth reading, none the less:
“We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents’ generation — work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means — have given way to subprime values: ‘You can have the American dream — a house — with no money down and no payments for two years.’”
The result of this abandonment of Asian values has been the running aground of our economy (with devastating ripple effects on the world); the tarnishing of our public image; the impairment of our ability to lead. “We are not who we think we are,” Friedman wrote. “We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.”
We need to fix our listing ship, in a climate where the wind is blowing strongly toward the East. And if the solution is to reembrace our core “Asian values,” it stands to reason that a “Pacific president” is just who we need at the helm.
Read the rest on your own.
(HT to Oranckay)
{ 55 comments… read them below or add one }
Obviously, Jeff Yang has never read Max Weber…
http://books.google.com/books?id=fo9OIS7I0XAC&dq=Max+Weber&printsec=frontcover&source=an&hl=en&ei=RREOS4KRLobQtAPCi8DCDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBsQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=&f=false
A while back, Sonagi scoffed at my view last year that we’re headed for a major global economic crisis soon.
So was Sonagi right? Yes and no. Yes, the crisis was averted at the nick of time because the US unexpectedly pumped trillions of dollars of free bail out money left right and center. But a definite NO in the not so long term because all that did was to delay the inevitable and sacrificed the credit worthiness of the US government itself. The bailed out banks used the big chunk of the free money to reward themselves with bonuses so nobody knows where the money is.
I’ve not seen anything to alter the view that we are headed for an epic global crash. It will be triggered by a sudden US dollar crash caused by loss of confidence. Suddenly, Uncle Sam will not have the money to wage war in iraq or Afghanistan. It will have to clear out of Korea and Japan (that is if they can scrape enough boat ride fair).
We’re all in for some rough ride ahead. Call me crazy.
I heard it on the Korean news that it’s not totally out of question that the Chinese will one day end up buying GM.
And why not? The entire America could be on a fire sale in the not so distant future.
cm,
You’ve been hanging out with baduk too long…
LOL, you’re starting to sound like baduk.
Shit, that’s not plagiarism, I swear
Beat ya too it JW!
Traditional Asian Values my ass. What culture prides its self on laziness and excess?
cm, I recall you were predicting doom and gloom… much worse than we have seen. You were also preaching peak oil. Until now, it sounds like you continuing to announce the sky falling.
anyway… please continue to be wrong…
If the dollar collapsed the Chinese would be stuck with worthless reserves. And this would be the price they would have to pay for pursuing their mercantilist development strategy. They knew the risks involved. Not to say that they had a lot of good options, though.
Gold rising to 1200 US$/oz, with no max in sight, is an indication that many savvy investors think/feel that cm is generally right. I believe that 2010 is gonna bring some more really big trouble, including steep inflation in America and elsewhere. But i ain’t no econ-expert or biz-pro.
It’s too late for Americans to attempt to “return” to old-Protestant ethics or Asian values: the storehouses have been emptied, the pirate-ships have sailed off, the GW Bush Admin accomplished what it set out to do — “American Idol” culture and bankruptcy is all that’s left. Hence the rise of Palin…
If the dollar collapsed the Chinese would be stuck with worthless reserves.
In that case, the US may have to sell Alaska (with Sarah Palin in it, of course) to the Chinese.
China’s reserves (at least those in dollars) would be worthless as well.
sanshineon,
Dmitry Orlov’s “Collapse Gap” comparing the US and the USSR is interesting and worth a look.
#1
Unfortunately, Max Weber is also Eurocentric zealot. You need to read John M Hobson’s “Eastern Origins of Western Civilization”
http://books.google.com/books?id=KQN85hrJyT4C&pg=PA294&dq=eastern+origins+of+western+civilization#v=onepage&q=eastern%20origins%20of%20western%20civilization&f=false
I have the feeling that people know the consequences of loosing faith in the dollar, so they just aren’t going to let themselves loose it, if you follow.
Jeff Yang’s article about Obama hopefully will inspire a few Americans to pay off their debts, lead a slimmer lifestyle, and open their minds to what diplomacy really means.
Indeed; what Yang describes were traditional American (and Western values) long before they ever were adapted by Asia.
Ditto for Yang’s ridiculous defense of Barry’s mistaken claim to be the first Pacific President. Notwithstanding the European origins and European orientation of the early Republic and the continuing European tilt (completely sensibly given geo-political realities until very recently) at the time, the US has long looked to the Pacific and Asia, beginning with the visions of Secretaries of State Seward and Hay (architect of the Open door Policy), Captain (later Rear Admiral) Alfred Thayer Mahan, Commodore Matthew Peary and Commodore Robert W. Shufeldt (architect of the first treaty between the US and Korea) and the Chief Executives they served, including especially Taft.
Maybe if Yang remembered, or had the integrity to acknowledge, some pretty basic history he’d qualify himself as a exemplar of the place of education among the universal values he purports to celebrate.
OK, I may sound like I’m screaming end of the world.
But I’m not.
Look at the numbers, ignore the rosy picture that’s been painted by those who benefit by it.
US dollar has depreciated again yesterday against all major and minor currencies. Watch out again this weekend.
Gold is at $1200, as investors around the world know what’s going on here. The only good asset these days are the hard assets.
Year 2010 may look like the year of the economic recovery in the US. But in truth, the US is heading into a shortest recovery phase ever in its history. Watch out for another round of real estate price collapse as there are no jobs and many Americans have no means of paying their mortgages. Failed mortgage plans like the Alt-A and Option-ARMs are coming due to be reset, and many American home owners are going to default. The big US banks who have played with the numbers are going to be right back in trouble and will need to be bailed out again massively.
Chinese will not have the power to stop the slide of the US dollar. When they decide they can’t stop the slide, they will try to dump the US dollar.
It’s law of gravity that says you cannot print massive amounts of money forever without undermining its value.
It is too late for America to return to “American Value” or “Asian Value” or any other “Values”.
cm and i are much in agreement, reflecting well all the reading i’ve been doing about this for 2 years. The pooch has already been screwed, as it were.
mkaplan #14: yup, i’m well-familiar with Dmitry Orlov’s blog-postings; he says much that is worth considering. Dr Micheal Hudson is one of the best essayists, IMHO, for truly deep and broad understanding of the situation.
Has he missed classes? Did he miss American history up till the 1920′s and beyond in some sectors? He is unamerican as it comes. He is a sorry product of asian values of image over substance. That said, cm has me buying yuan by the bucket!
NK and Sperwer,
In my senior thesis on the East Asian Economic Crisis of 1997, I actually wrote a chapter on Western vs. Eastern values. They both have strengths and weaknesses.
Yes, Max Weber was pretty hard on Confucianism because he wrote Protestant Work Ethic during the time when China was being carved up like the Thanksgiving turkey by the colonial powers but he did not properly weigh in Japan’s rise from a feudal society into a more modern one, somewhat on par with at least some of the less developed Western Powers, into his views on Confucianism. Max was right on pointing out some of the weaknesses of Confucianism as social model, but he didn’t have the knowledge base to properly analyze its strengths. NK, that doesn’t make him a Eurocentric zealot, but it does make him a product of his time. I believe it’s fair to not judge such people too harshly.
There is a direct counter to Weber’s views and it was written by University of Detroit economics professor Hung-chao Tai and titled Confucianism and Economic Development. I see that book as a compliment to Weber, because Tai acknowledges that Weber was on to something and he created a good model to dissect and analyze how a religion or social institution can affect a society.
Tai summarized the differences between Confucian and Protestant work ethics thusly (quoting from my thesis):
“Just as the reformation in Europe in the 16th century placed religions decisions on the individual rather than his allegiance to a church, Weber also believes that the drive, desires of the individual and his willingness to be productive and wealthy drive capitalism. Thus, the [Protestant] model placed its emphasis on a micro-level of psychological change; however, the Confucian model of economic development emphasized a macro-level of sociological change.”
So in short, the Protestant ethic made you work hard for yourself whereas the Confucian ethic made you work hard for the group. Tai does not make a value judgment as to which is better than the other, but I personally believe that both have its respective strengths and weaknesses and one can certainly borrow from the other as need be.
So, this is where I turn to you Sperwer. Did you really believe that Asia really didn’t have any of these values before the colonial period? Are you tactfully advocating the old (and discredited) “White Man’s Burden” viewpoint? Frugality, hard work, social conservatism, etc. do exist in other parts of the world. The West does not have a monopoly on human values nor does it have a monopoly on models of attaining modernity.
You see where Jeff Yang is going with this. Next it’ll be ‘Why can’t you be good little workers like Asians are?’, ‘Why can’t you spend a third of your income paying for education like Asians do?’, ‘Why can’t you live in small apartments with your parents until you’re 35 like Asians do?’, and so on…Anything for the sake of ‘growth’ and ‘the economy’.
@22
Talking of models of development, the Korean model of development, and before that the Japanese, aren’t really so different from the Western model of development if you consider that they follow the ‘do as I do, not as I say’ principle. In other words, lots of protectionism and subsidy from the state to get one’s national economy going, and bugger ‘free trade’: western countries developed that way too.
There’s also an interesting that in particular China’s tremendous savings rate isn’t so much because of an Asian propensity to save as it is because the profits of so many Chinese companies never reach the household level. By this logic China should return to expanding credit to rural households instead of large urban enterprises.
In what may be a good sign, lately Chinese companies and stocks related to domestic demand like Tsing Tao seem to be finding favor with fund mangers in China. They’re betting that the Chinese government will in fact manage boost domestic personal consumption,hopefully good news where global imbalances are concerned.
SS!… damn your slope is slippery!
Look for more and more of these kinds of stories. And they will intensify.
Russia trying to diversify out of the US dollar.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/russia-deals-fresh-blow-to-greenback/article1377631/
Dubai, fear of default
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/dubai-strives-to-ease-default-fears/article1378116/
Asian Value? American Value? Western Value? Who cares? We’re way beyond that point of arguing whose culture is better. None of all that will matter once the tsunami hits, because we’re all going to be hit hard.
Well for the sake of “growth” and “the economy” the American managerial class has been implementing over the past few decades what could be seen as a kind of giant stock dilution scam. Import increasingly lower wage workers, outsource jobs, prop up consumption with debt, etc.
The point being that you can pursue “growth” and serve “the economy” in many bad ways. A positive GDP number doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about the quality of the economy.
Which is/has been better? Well that’s a judgment call. Personally, I think both suck. And as of yet we don’t know the long term ramifications of each. Though we can certainly imagine them.
Jeff Yang is garbage.
I’ve read a few of his columns, and his shtick is mostly just “Asian-American” ethnic cheerleading and activism.
Debates and discussions about “values” are largely fruitless because they tend to become to mean whatever the interlocutors want them to mean. Likewise for arguments that claim values explain or cause complex phenomena.
The problem with Weber’s thesis is that had there not been that much economic development in Protestant communities at the time, it would’ve been quite easy to construct an argument faulting Protestant values for this lack of development.
“Values” are so rife with imprecision and sloppiness that the same set of values can be used to support contradictory propositions. Thus we see “Asian” or “Confucian” values cited as the cause of both the lack of economic development during Weber’s time, and the reason for it in more recent times.
Values can be used to basically fit any explanation that you want.
CM, the tsunami has already hit. Dubai could be a big deal, I’m not able to say, but the basics of the world crisis are simple enough:
Globalization and technology allowed a billion new workers to rise out of poverty. Being poor and in order to rise quickly, they made more than they bought, and they did this by exporting the gap between what they made and what they consumed. That gap was absorbed in the US and other markets in the form of Chinese imports. (I’ll use China and the US because they are the exemplars.) Globally this trade added to overall wealth, but if you effectively inject billion new workers into the system, you can bet that wages will fall in the US and other importing lands. The gap between what China made and what it consumed — its trade surplus — was also its savings, and these went into the bank. Well what do banks do? They lend! And they lent to rich guys because they didn’t want to lose their money. So these surplus savings were able to come out in the rich US as expanding credit. And it makes sense then that we saw in the US a “jobless expansion,” with wealth coming in the form of asset price increases, like increasing home prices. But why would house prices all of a sudden be rocketing? Because of all of these excess savings — the gap, or trade deficit — were finding themselves in US banks able to borrow cheaply from the Fed, itself unworried about fiscal US deficits because, well, it could borrow from (sell bonds to) the Chinese and others at such low rates precisely because of the savings the Chinese had built up. So now the US banks could lend easily, and to whom would they lend? To the rich guys, of course, since the US banks also didn’t want to lose their money. So it became cheap, for example, to buy a house if you were already rich. And that allowed more rich people to buy more homes, driving the prices higher. New employment tended to be in construction rather than manufacturing, to illustrate. When still more money came looking to be lent out, the rich guys you’d want to lend to had increasingly made their fortunes in real estate and wanted to continue, and so housing price rises begot housing price rises as investment in real estate grew into, to use the word of the year, a bubble. Because home prices were rising so much it became necessary for poorer people to borrow more in order to achieve the American Dream. Banks were encouraged to promote widespread home ownership, and to extend the Dream to those who had previously been kept out (often by design). This was in part accomplished through deregulation. When the bubble burst it brought the banks down with it, or would have if the Fed and Treasury hadn’t stepped in. Banking collapses have been the cause of many painful depressions. All of a sudden the credit was gone, and we had our tsunami, caused in large part as an after-effect of the earth-trembling rise of China.
To create a new era of wealth creation, China should increase its own consumption and develop its own demand. It may be able to. This talk of Asian values and savings seems a bit rich to me. More likely is that the Chinese will want Apple sexy and the rest of it (to use the term I saw here on Marmot), but of course it will take time. I think it’s poverty values more than Asian values that would be the worry, since memories of being poor lead one to save.
But its also a question of what happens to Chinese earnings — where the Chinese banks lend. And they’re lending, like crazy, within China. If they lend productively then China may not need so much of an export orientation. And it may be that lending to the rich guy because you don’t want to lose your money isn’t the best way after all. Because if you lend out a little to a whole lot of little guys, then all of them can spend more locally, and a market economy can grow and become robust. This is the hope, and the reason that I hope Chinese landing extends especially to the rural areas, so people can get out of agriculture and create local business, grow and prosper without having to rely on American consumers, who are by the way too busy rediscovering their “Asian values.”
cm,
I’m going to bookmark your comment # 19 so in Q3 2010 I can point out how wrong you were…
WangKon, do you by any chance work for any of the big US banks or investment houses by any chance? If you do, I’ll take your words with a grain of salt – a lot of it.
Which is why he still has a job while the rest of the Chron newsroom has been decimated.
Re: And they’re lending, like crazy, within China.
Well, my buddy’s family just got rejected for a loan to buy an apartment in Wuhan. I will hear more about this issue later. I suspect there’s no money fountain in China like there was in Bush America.
Don’t expect China to bailout the world economy. There is only one way out of this… new industries. This will have to be done by the creative class of workers.
A no-brainer for new industry development is to junk the automobile culture and all the wasteful infrastructure that goes with it.
Are you trying to say that he isn’t garbage, or that his shtick is why he still has a job?
Also, he’s a monthly columnist at the Chronicle and that isn’t his main job. And it’s mostly reporters that have been decimated across the entire newspaper industry, though of course all kinds of staff have been affected by the downsizings.
WangKon:
In two words, No and No.
The important thing to remember, though, is that things must be considered systematically. Sure, one can find a few of the same, and more somewhat analgous, individual values in “Asian” and Western cultures, broadly speaking. But that’s neither here nor there. What counts in history is the systemization of such values in a more or less coherent, collective array, and the way in which individual values are given a specific valence by the relationship to others in the system and other elements of the system as a whole. In that regard, I think Weber’s analysis was right on the money, despite the fact that some of the details of his scholarship have been superseded. The West stumbled into creating a system of values that enabled it to achieve what Rostow later would call take-off velocity; the East did not, even though it manifested some, but not all – and cerainty not the critical – individual values that propelled the West’s rise. In large part, this was because the actual social systems in the East only VERY imperfectly instantiated the tenets of Confucianism (I think Korea is the poster child here, where the gap between Confucian theory per se and the manipulation thereof by a very tiny aristocratic-bureacratic elite that even subverted the purported meritocratic character of the civil service examination system for its own advantage), and those tenets themselves were not particualrly conducive to economic progress. in themselves and certainly were not part of a system that took as a significant part of its raison d’etre econoic progress and development. Significant progress in Asia only occurred, as a matter of fact, (i) once the purportedly Confucian-based systems of the East were shattered in their encounter with the west – more, I would argue, because of their inherent incapacity to respond effectively than because of Western imperilaism,which is to say that the more dispositive of two principal factors, stated at the highest level of abstraction, was the East’s relative lack of vitality rather than the undeniable aggression of the West.; and (ii) once the East assimilated Western values, more precisely the Western version of what I really believe are more appropriately simply identified as (universal) values (if you delete the the covert identification of universal=Western variant that often afflicts discussions of these topics. In the process of doing so, of course, the East did not simply substitute the Western system for what had gone before; history doesn’t work that way except in the fevered imaginings of totalitarian thugs. Instead, those assmilated values and their original arrangement were per force modified and adapted to the existing social structures, belief systems, customs and mores, which retained enormous inertial force notwithstanding their effective hisotircal bankruptcy and some discrete elements of which were cultivated deliberately in order to faciliate the transition – see e.g., the promotion of “Confucian” values by Park Chan Hee, notwithstanding his wholesale denunciation of Confucianism as a derelict and debilitating system.
“systematically”
- yes that, too: but I meant to say “systemically”
Sperwer, that makes some sense, but what about Japan? Japan didn’t adopt Western values after Meiji, but it did industrialize. Or would you say Japan did adopt key Western values?
On the broader topic, I would generally agree that cultural values make a difference, but also that it may be harder than we suspect to qualify that difference. Weber’s ideas were certainly brilliant. But what about Venice’s renaissance for example? Or the Industrial Revolution — it began in Britain instead of Belgium probably not because of Protestantism but because coal was so much cheaper there. In the early days of coal the French monarchy invested to create coal-based industry, but the higher price of coal and price of wages made it unworkable.
I also believe that what we call Confucianism plays a large role in Asian growth, but find it hard to pinpoint exactly how or why. At some stages Confucianism seems to retard growth, at others to foster it.
Yes, to that last; the historical record is very clear; in fact, Japan was the only Asian nation at the time “successfully” to adopt and adapt the most important Western values and systemic features (which BTW is why it was so successful – more even than its Western mentors – in colonizing big chunks of the rest of Asia. But NB that that successful adaptation also involved the adjustment of those Western values in such a manner that it produced a rather unique and ugly form of fascism. One can of course argue counterfactually about the possibility that Japan would have gone in the direction it did regardless of the nature of the Asian values that it chose to integrate with the Western ones, and that the dispositive factors in its totalitarianization were the economic and social dislocations produced by “late development” , but that’s — well, counterfactual and just a waste of time; history ain’t social
scientismscience, so we’ll never be able to resolve that hypothesis one way or the other. The fact remains that the Meiji oligarchs initiated/followed a path that involved the modification of the Western values/systemic features involved by ones designed to preserve traditional Asian ones, and it produced the horrors of Japanese militarism and the Japanese colonial states in Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan, China, etc. It never fails to amaze me that Koreans, being among the primary and greatest vicitms theroe, often are so blind to the role of Asian values and the risks thereof inherent in this sort of strategy, particularly since it was replicated to a significant extent by themselves between 1945 and 1988 (although the latter may be why they don’t WANT to see it).Yep, I’m sure it was Asian Values(tm) that booted out the Limeys, overcame slavery, settled the West, won two world wars, built the transcontinental railway…oh, wait…
booted out the Limeys
-Replaced British tyrants with slaveowning tyrants.
overcame slavery
-Continued slavery 50 years after it was banned in the British Empire.
settled the West
-Massacred the Natives.
won two world wars
-Late.
built the transcontinental railway
-Sacrificed the Chinese.
…wait…wait…wait…still can’t punctuate…
Can you specify what exactly these values and systemic features were, particularly those that could be considered solely or largely to be non-material, disembodied “values,” as opposed to those whose status is more ambiguous and have or could be conflated with concrete material realities (like “science,” technology, etc.) that may have played the major or sole role in causing complex phenomena such as Japan’s rise?
@35
Amen. Car culture is supremely retarded. It’s more than 100 years old, and should have evolved to something better decades ago. Gridlock – millions and millions of dollars worth of highly engineered metal, polymers, and massive amounts of fuel… all just moving along at a snail’s pace, wasting most of the energy and polluting, all because everyone wants to go the same direction at the same time… massive inefficiency and pollution. Perhaps single passenger cars have their place, but it’s not in a city like Seoul.
@26
SS!… damn your slope is slippery!
lol
@37
@37
Yeah, but what does that *mean*?
Damn these blockquotes.
Trying to read Sperwer’s comments is about as fun as having a concrete block crash on your head.
The real thesis behind Max Weber’s book is that John Calvin put a religious OK stamp of approval on the pursuit of profit. Becoming rich became a God-willed mandate. That proved to be an extremely powerful impetus. It’s the same kind of motivating power that compels Islamic fundamentalists to wage jihad and become suicide bombers today. Except in the case of Calvinism, you are not to blow yourself up, but to become rich.
He was wrong that the rationalization of economic activity owes itself to the Protestant ethic however; that was a consequence of the Industrial Revolution.
#22
WangK:
Yes, Max Weber was pretty hard on Confucianism because he wrote Protestant Work Ethic during the time when China was being carved up like the Thanksgiving turkey by the colonial powers but he did not properly weigh in Japan’s rise from a feudal society into a more modern one, somewhat on par with at least some of the less developed Western Powers, into his views on Confucianism. Max was right on pointing out some of the weaknesses of Confucianism as social model, but he didn’t have the knowledge base to properly analyze its strengths. NK, that doesn’t make him a Eurocentric zealot, but it does make him a product of his time. I believe it’s fair to not judge such people too harshly.
I don’t know why you are being such a stubborn apologist. Being a “product of his time” is no excuse for being wrong.
I present to you page 298 of Dobson’s book:
Alternatively, we could go back to the year 1100. Were we to set up a university and an accompanying social science department, we might set out to try and answer the compelling question at that time. That is, how did Sung China make the breakthrough to industrial production and intensive per capita economic growth while Europe remained mired in a backward agrarianism and relatively weak commercialism? We might offer the following explanation. China embodied unique properties and institutions that were absent in the West. China enjoyed a strong state, which created a stable and pacified environment and actively promoted the background conditions necessary for capitalism. By contrast, Europe was fragmented into a plethora of states, none of which was strong enough to promote a sufficiently pacified domestic environment to enable capitalism to develop. Moreover, while China had solved its internal problems as early as 221 BCE and was peaceful thereafter, Europe was in effect a realm of warring states. In addition, China enjoyed a strong work ethic contained in its uniquely rational Confucian religion. Europe, by contrast, was held back by Catholicism, which specified respect for authority and a long-term fatalism that prevented the emergence of parsimony, hard work, and rational restlessness. Perhaps a book would have been written entitled, The Confucian Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which would definitively demonstrate why Catholicism was inimical to economic progress, and why only Confucianism embodied the correct set of virtues that made significant economic progress inevitable.
The obvious problem here is that in explaining Islamic or Chinese success and European failure, we necessarily end up ascribing permanent causes to a situation that has always been fluid. Similarly, we we to sit down say in 1900 and enquire into the West’s rise to prominence, it would be no less problematic to stand the previous theory of Islamic or Chinese superiority on its head. But that is exactly what happened. Thus we find in all mainstream Western explanations of the rise of the West a tendency to ascribe permanent attributes to the West that rendered inevitable its breakthrough to modern capitalism (i.e. the Eurocentric ‘logic of immanence’), while simultaneously presupposing a backward East that was permanently incapable of progress. But given that the East had pioneered significant economic progress after 500 and that it was more advanced than the West up to 1800, it is clear by now that such a fruitless exercise would necessarily flow from the question that Eurocentrism begins with.
cm, I work for a boutique and macro-economic analysis is not a part of my paid job description.
NK, I believe context matters… also, not everyone is 100% wrong or 100% right. I disagree w/Max Weber and his analysis of Confucianism, but hey, he saw China fall like a house of cards. If I were him and I saw the same thing happening, I may conclude the same thing.
Oh, and Dobson’s analysis is flawed. Europe during Sung China’s time was going through something called the Middle Ages where Europe’s identity was in the formation phase after the destruction of the Western Roman Empire.
What I will grant you is that China has a better ability to absorb barbarians than the Roman Empire. Hell, why are Northern Chinese so much different looking than Southern Chinese, right? I would argue that Confucianism played a role in organizing that society, but I’d also argue that so did Chinese characters, which made sure a land as diverse and big as China always had a universal language. What also helped is that Chinese emperors had to attain the mandate of heaven, whereas in the West it was divine right of kings. In Chinese philosophy, only one can attain the mandate of heaven whereas in Europe any number of kings can claim to have the divine right of kings. So the Chinese tend to duke it out until one comes out supreme and in Europe kings tend to fight each other both saying they have the divine right of kings then retreat to their respective “kingdoms.” Another factor is rice culture. Rice culture tends to increase human populations due to it’s greater season over season yield vs. the wheat culture of Europe. It’s harder for barbarians to conquer a more populous land. Typically, in China, barbarians would conquer the North and the South would hold out to invasion because of it’s denser population. When the barbarians expended themselves, the South would move back into the North. There are geographic considerations as well. Having something called the Mediterranean sea created a lot of commerical dynamism in Europe, but it also created a lot of incentive to stay independent politically as wealthier states did not want to join with poorer states. So, there are lots of reasons why China came out more unified by the 12th century, not just Confucianism.
By the way, I don’t understand your stubborn apologist tendencies either! Keep in mind that I’m not an apologist of Eurocentrism… but it clearly has it’s strengths and I think it’s strengths should be understood. The West reached the age of merchantilism and colonialism before everyone else did. That’s fact. Don’t you want to know why? I do and so did Japan back in 1880. That’s how they avoided being ass rapped by the West and did a little European ass rapping (the Russians) of their own. The Chinese and Koreas? They believed in their sinocentric world with such blind conviction that they buried their heads in the sand like ostriches and lost critical time so they could get ass rapped by the West first, then by Japan later. Don’t you want to know why that happened? I do.
Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I believe history is not a tool by those that feel they need to skew it to defend the indefendable or exaggerate insignificant successes. I believe there are a lot of lessons to be learned from what happened in the past and it also tells you why people act and behave the way they do in the present.
*raped* not *rapped*
“Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay”
Speaking of Weber, there’s a new paper out that’s probably the most thorough statistical test of the Weberian hypothesis to date.
The Economic Effects of the Protestant Reformation: Testing the Weber Hypothesis in the German Lands
Abstract:
“Many theories, most famously Max Weber’s essay on the ‘Protestant ethic,’ have hypothesized that Protestantism should have favored economic development. With their considerable religious heterogeneity and stability of denominational affiliations until the 19th century, the German Lands of the Holy Roman Empire present an ideal testing ground for this hypothesis. Using population figures in a dataset comprising 276 cities in the years 1300-1900, I find no effects of Protestantism on economic growth. The finding is robust to the inclusion of a variety of controls, and does not appear to depend on data selection or small sample size. In addition, Protestantism has no effect when interacted with other likely determinants of economic development. I also analyze the endogeneity of religious choice; instrumental variables estimates of the effects of Protestantism are similar to the OLS results.”
I don’t think comparing individual Germanic cities is a good model to test out the theory. I think England and the U.S. are better models.
Well then you’d be testing out something else.
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