China industrialization

>Before the Qing they also had a long term ban on naval trade
No, the purpose of the Ming ban was to counteract piracy and protect against Yuan partisans, and the policy was dropped in the later Ming period. The Ming were otherwise trading heavily with Japan and Europe before the Qing took over and suspended all foreign trade.

But China had massive conflicts throughout its history on a scale that make European conflicts look like petty squabbles. They even had their own equivalent of the Enlightenment beginning in the 6th Century BC (the Hundred Schools of Thought) which produced philosophies like Confucianism, Legalism, Mohism, and Taoism in the first place.

China's conflicts are like Game of Thrones. Everyone was just fighting to sit on China's Iron Throne. The Mongols and the Manchus are the only time outsiders came in to conquer China.

meanwhile Europe sees wave after wave of steppe niggers and levant people moving in. each one trying to carve out their own new nation. No one really tried to be the "new roman emperor" even though there were a bunch of Rome-boo tier empires.

Taoism literally states that you should be happy with what you have.

>But China had massive conflicts throughout its history on a scale that make European conflicts look like petty squabbles.
He does have a point though: European powers were locked in eternal competition with each other, with geography playing a key role in helping these places maintain their autonomy.

China was a riverland civilization: once a new ruling power came to power, they could use the Yangzte and Yellow Rivers to economically strangle rebelling provinces, and there was nothing stopping them from completely consolidating power. In this way, if a regressive ruling regime came into power, they took the whole country with them.

>No one really tried to be the "new roman emperor"
it wasn't for lack of trying

The usual claim is the cultural lack of emphasis of individual ambition in a collectivist society with little to no social mobility.

I suspect, however, it's much simpler than that though: Industrialization is an aberration, perhaps even a unique aberration, rather than an inevitable step of a civilization's evolution as we intend to think of it. It took an absolutely perfect storm of events to create it in Europe - nearly all the elements of which also existed in China, among other places, for much longer - and it hasn't happened anywhere else, before or since. All subsequent industrialization has simply been the spread or copy of that model. It maybe as rare as the birth of language, or as rare as the start of life itself, in that, like those, industrialization is the result of the culmination of an unlikely confluence that nonetheless has all its roots in a single source and exploded outward from that point of contact onward.

If the black plague hadn't happened, if the wealth concentration that resulted failed to happen, if the linen craze hadn't lead to an excess of paper, if the mercantile craze hadn't lead to an excess of seal production and jewelry, if religious prohibition against usury hadn't concentrated wealth management into one segment of the society, if a popular widely sought and seeking document like the Bible hadn't been ready to go, the printing press and loom and all that cash never would have combined to kick start the industrial revolution, and there's so many more elements to that particular martini that I couldn't even begin to list them all within the character limit.

If any one of them hadn't come together in just the way they did, we'd probably still be living in a pre-industrial society today. It boggles the mind how unlikely a series of mishaps came together to make it possible.

Thank you for helping my cause.

I'm sure people are much happier away from their homes, 10 hours in front of the same production line while their environment is polluted.

My point is simply that Industrialization is not something everyone might strife for. It had a lot of nasty sides to it and it still has, it's simply ignored because these are the poor people and they are far away.
And yes, I'm fully aware of how poor farmer were back then.

Industrialization happened because of the particular conditions of the coal mines in Britain, where the steam engine became a viable method of pumping water out of the flooded mines because of the nearby source of coal to fuel them and water to keep them cool and not exploding. The Song Dynasty was burning coal as a fuel source but they never turned it into mechanical energy.

It's not just poverty, how the fuck do you plan on maintaining a farm with only a wife and two children. You need much more labour than that to make up for not having the products of industrialization like tractors and shit in order to produce enough to feed yourself and have product to bring to market.

>Thank you for helping my cause.
Without government support, being a subsistence farmer sucks. It's thankless, tedious, and lower paying than being a wagecuck on an assembly line (unless you own a giant farm stacked by hundreds of hands). The largest movement of humans in history was from the farmlands of southern China into the industrialized areas, and nobody made them give up their rural existence, it's that they were tired of being broke and starving all the time.

Also, like said, you'd need way more than 2 children to maintain profitability on a farm, you'd probably have more like 7 to 10.

People seek to liberate themselves from labor and drudgery. Unless you have modern farming equipment, it doesn't get more drudge than planting and harvesting your own crops by hand

My wifes son could also work.

I believe you could also have progress without industrialization. But I might be wrong.

>It had a lot of nasty sides to it and it still has,
But it's still better then being a third world backwater with little to no power to defend ourselves when facing foreign industrialized invaders. Or you just want China to remain poor and backward in order to keep enjoying Western superiority and exploiting Asia countries as America's lapdogs?

You couldn't possibly have no clues about what China / East Asia had being through when they first met European industrialized powers at 19th century, right? Also you must have heard of Sino-Japanese wars, yes? So you do realize what will happen when pre-industrial society meets with industrial society, no?

>But it's still better then being a third world backwater
Not really. Maybe in the "long run" it benefits later generations, but if you really think people are happier under an industrial regime you haven't read anything about real breakneck industrialization like in victorian england or china or whereever.

>Not really.
Yes, it really is better, judging by what actually had happened in China before. Are you living in fantasy hippy world? Do you want go back to live in a slum at India or Africa? I bet you'll even say you can go back to live in caves, right?

>you haven't read anything about real breakneck industrialization like in victorian england or china
I am Chinese, and I'm very happy about my country finally becomes an industrial great power. What China has to do now is just decrease or eliminate the pollution we create.

Industrialization is one of main reasons you can sit here comfortably to shitpost with your phones or computers.

>The largest movement of humans in history was from the farmlands of southern China into the industrialized areas, and nobody made them give up their rural existence, it's that they were tired of being broke and starving all the time.
usually these types of mass migrations happen because cheap foreign agricultural produce floods the markets, crashes commodity prices therefore preventing farmers from being able to sell their small surplus for other staples and equipment, effectively destroying their livelihood. That isn't to say you aren't correct though, but you're assuming that agriculture exists in a vacuum and that conditions are static and not constantly deteriorating for the small farmer.

> you can sit here comfortably to shitpost with your phones or computers.
>Yes, it really is better, judging by what actually had happened in China before.
I'm not talking about NOW, you dummies. You're using the logical fallacy "tu quoque". No. I'm tlaking about the people who had to SUFFER to make what we have possible. Their suffering was in vain as far as I'm concerned because they lived their whole lives as brutalized wage slaves. You think they cared whether some NEETS benefitted from their labor 200 years later?

>I am Chinese, and I'm very happy about my country finally becomes an industrial great power.
yes and thats the problem. you're all too happy to see the nation as a collective with a shared destiny (as all nations are) at the cost of ignoring that people wasted their whole lives toiling under a system they saw no benefits from. To you people are just expendable machines that are nothing more than a means to glorifying the nation, rather than as ends in themselves. But this is all to say that Industrialization is not a pretty process for most people.

as all nationalists do*

The people in power didn't want industrialization

Japan was the first Asian nation to industralize in the turn of the 20th century, peaked in the WW2 period, rebuilt by US occupation in the 1950s, by the 1970s-top 10 global industrial nations, by 1991-surpassed the disbanded USSR as 2nd most economic power nation.

>usually these types of mass migrations happen because cheap foreign agricultural produce floods the markets, crashes commodity prices therefore preventing farmers from being able to sell their small surplus for other staples and equipment, effectively destroying their livelihood
But that was happening long before industrialization. That's just the nature of a market economy

>I'm not talking about NOW
Yes, I'm also not talking about NOW. When I said "What China has to do now", I actually means "what China NOW should do in future" which is "decrease or eliminate pollution", and that's exactly what China is doing "now" and future.

>thats the problem.
No, it's only problem for you. You're probably a hippy Westerner who already lives in your comfortable, "industrialized" first world country and enjoy all the mass produced "industrial products" such as iPhone, iPad, PS4,TV, air conditioner, refrigerator...etc, while keep complaining about how these industrialization make your life so horrible and miserable. So of course it's problem for you.

Underrated post

I love how you are living in an industrialized country and condescendingly insisting that other people's poverty is something to be envied and strive for. "Oh no," he says, as he eats his frozen chicken tendies and plays War Thunder, "their lifestyles were beautiful xD. So wholesome. Unlike being an assemblyline wageslave *le sigh*."
Just shut the fuck up, you fucking imbecile. Jesus, how can one person be so fucking retarded? I've met inbred Muslim cousin fuckers brighter than this shit.

>Industrialization is one of main reasons you can sit here
>you
Yes, I have a comfortable life because others suffer. I don't have to work 10 hours, 7 days a week. I work every other day and my work is fun.
Feudalism is also pretty neat if you're a royal. Pretty much anything is neat if you're on the winning side.

Take the steam engine. To build one you need certain capabilities like the ability to manufacture precision parts, each requirement in turn has its own prerequisites like foundries and water powered tools and so on. All this has to be done to a certain degree of efficiency, steam bursting from kettles and pots has probably been known since forever, harnessing steam to pump water from mines with an economical amount of fuel is a different matter. Furthermore this was done without hindsight, no one said "let's try to build a steam engine". The steam engine wasn't even a major component of the economy until after the industrial revolution was well underway, a variety of industries had to develop in order for things to pick up momentum.

Even during the early Ming dynasty they were centuries away from this. They had some innovations the west lacked at the time like the blast furnace, however this barely scratches the surface. They were a large polity, however size isn't all that relevant, the ancient Egyptians built pyramids so they could build factories if they knew how. China was relatively isolated as well, Britain, though smaller, was part of a much larger trade network.

Wasn't it already by the start of Ming dynasty that China had begun to lag behind Europe in clock building?

>What China has to do now"
we're not talking about your fucking country, we're tlaking about individuals, not abstract entities like nations. How hard is that for you to comprehend?
>hippy Westerner
not an argument, shithead
> "Oh no," he says, as he eats his frozen chicken tendies and plays War Thunder, "their lifestyles were beautiful xD
nothing but ad hominem. you know nothing about me, cunt.
> "their lifestyles were beautiful xD. So wholesome.
Where am i saying that? I'm the last to idealize the peasant's life.
> Unlike being an assemblyline wageslave *le sigh*."
You don't know anything about history, clearly. Industrial jobs are more than assembly lines.

3 of my uncles starved to death in their childhood.

That's the life of an "idyllic" agrarian farmer.

Being able to farm and not worry about starvation is a luxury, made possible by the industrialized portions of the country's economy.

Great argument, any books that you would recommend on that line of thought?

>insisting that other people's poverty is something to be envied and strive for.
I'm insisting that industrialization was bad if not worse for the people who actually powered industry. Unlike you I don't take a teleological view of history, that their is a "purpose" to everyone's labor going toward some invisible end, when most people lived lives as cheap automatons in hellish work conditions and they saw no ounce of happiness in their lives.

Ming is overall less technologically advanced than Song. The founding emperor of the Ming was a country was a peasant, then later a monk. Combined with the need to establish "Chinese identity" Yuan Dynasty, it made the Emperor, the court, and the bureaucracy extremely reactionary, bordering on the Luddite.

If the Mongol Invasion didn't happen, it's possible that the Industrial Revolution would have occurred from the Song-Liao arms race.

>Unlike you I don't have a teleological view of history
*tips fedora*

> that their is a "purpose" to everyone's labor going toward some invisible end
Yeah, the end being greater efficiency and material wealth available to society, which enables you to build bigger population, trade networks, and armies

>most people lived lives as cheap automatons in hellish work conditions and they saw no ounce of happiness in their lives.
The price of the above. Living for happiness is something children and dumb teenagers believe in.

Industrialization requires amassing of resources for a strategic output.

China was too entrenched (As was most of europe) with the farming lifestyle. It wasn't until the age of exploration and slavery in the new worlds brought in immense resources and wealth that allowed Europe to put more focus on utilizing the newly acquired mass of resources.

Well then why didnt China go an find the new world first? I am kinda interested in books that deal with these topics.

>Yeah, the end being greater efficiency and material wealth available to society, which enables you to build bigger population, trade networks, and armies
thats what we call whig history senpai. it's teleological view of history
>The price of the above. Living for happiness is something children and dumb teenagers believe in.
nobody's saying that. you can just as easily find another purpose than creating "greater efficiency". I ultimately agree with your view that it's worth forwarding mankind collectively, though, so whatever. If we don't escape the planet we're doomed though desu and it will all have been pointless.

When do you think China would have been able to explore the new world?

Well compared to Europe when did naval technology strongly advance in comparison to China?

>Have a single superstate for centuries surrounded by savages
>Have different states competing for centuries
Also the notion, that human society develops linearly into a better tomorrow is crap,

We don't know the exact details regarding China's ocean going ships. We do know that Zheng He made it far enough to East Africa and down to Australia on their return.

If these ships (barring the biggest ships, which might only be able to traverse close to home) are ocean worthy, then chances are China had the technology for a while.

>Also the notion, that human society develops linearly into a better tomorrow is crap,
what if it is an uneven meandering with occasional set-backs towards a better tomorrow?

I am wary of sociological explanations though. The search for answers begins with the technological and economic underpinnings of the industrial revolution anyway, then you can see more clearly what kind of effect social differences had.

We have just been trending towards increasing complexity which has not been disrupted for more than a thousand years now.
Humans tend to want leisure time and luxury goods, and the best way to get these is to create societies, trade networks, and more efficient tools. States and nation states help facilitate protection and trade. As a geopolitical necessity, states have industrialized.

We could get blown back to the Stone Age, and human civilization will have reached its apogee today. But we haven't. It's just a possibility.

There is no end purpose. Everything has been a means to arbitrary ends. I don't believe in inevitability or progress. We are just intelligent apes that have manipulated our environment and developed social constructs to enable more calories, more living space, and stronger weapons systems.

Think about it this way. The government in place in China generally maintained control by insisting that there was nothing better outside of its borders, that the world was behind China. Why in god's name then would you invite in industrialization, a system from outside that actively shows the people that things can get better when they don't just depend on the Chinese government?

Maybe in terms of technology, but in terms of the development of human society, no.

How do you (((better))) human society without interpolating morality?

>Maybe in terms of technology, but in terms of the development of human society, no.
But doesn't one drive and inform the other? Aren't we better humans now that we have books and other means of informing ourselves? Don't labor saving devices allow for humans who have more time to sit and reflect? Could the Christian religion really have spread as rapidly as it did had it not been for the Pax Romana, which itself was only possible because of advances in iron metallurgy and civil engineering?

This guy is right.

To elaborate a little more on why "cultural lack of emphasis of individual ambition in a collectivist society with little to no social mobility" is a nonsense explanation:

1. The reason a lot of Chinese philosophy tried to emphasize collectivism over individual ambition was because excessive individual ambition kept on being a problem. Chinese civilization has always been one of the most rebellious ever, and Chinese history is jammed full of ambitious individuals who ended up screwing over the rest of civilization as a result. Hell, Qing failure to modernize quickly was partly because a bunch of powerful and ambitious officials at the top were afraid of being toppled by subordinates embracing the technological revolution.

2. There was in fact a ton of social mobility. Confucian schools of thought taught the perfectibility of anyone through education, while Legalist schools of thought argued for equality before the law. The concept of official hereditary positions were basically destroyed by the Qin, with early versions of civil service exams appearing even back then before the official adoption during Sui and Tang. Loads of famous powerful officials from Gongsun Shu to Wang Anshi started off as poor nobodies, while the founding Emperors of Han and Ming started off as peasants. Hell, the founder of Ming was begging for food a mere 16 years before he became Emperor of the largest country on Earth.

The basis of technology is materialism. The goals are clear, to increase posession. What is the basis of a good society? Morals. Once materialism replaces morals (which can be seen just in our time) we have a decline of a good society.
What one has especially to consider, is that whenever a new set of values is formed, which manifests itself in the very fabric of a society, a new culture is formed and a dark age starts to end (e.g. the development of western (or arab) thought after the great shism (or life of Christ)).
Before that, a dark age has appeared, with people living rual lifes, from which the seed of these spiritual movements has started.
The answers of the questions posed by these base values are being searched in the following centuries until they are either found or found not be solvable by the means of this culture (e.g. the quadrature of the circle for the old greeks).
Once every question was answered, or found not to be answered at all, a decline has to happen, since no real creation can occur in this culture.
Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West has shown itself useful to me describing historic events and refuting linear history.
Memes aside, the German subtitle is outlines of a morphology of world history and this gives a better description of its content.

>If any one of them hadn't come together in just the way they did, we'd probably still be living in a pre-industrial society today.
In another timeline the pendulum clock could have been invented before the saddle tree, however both would have been invented eventually anyway, it didn't have to happen exactly the way it did.

No, inventions very much occur as a result of one another, break the chain anywhere and a whole lotta stuff never happens. No one invents the nuclear bomb without first inventing the stirrup.

Not that things can't happen in other ways - some civilization that never had horses may come up with a clock - but there's very much a chain of cause and effect, and only a very few things are inevitable. Advancements we take for granted and consider fundamental, quite often only were ever happened upon in the all the world and all of history, and only as the result of a myriad of converging circumstances. Others happened in the distant past, but were ignored and turned to dust, as their application wasn't dreamed of at the time.

Progress isn't inevitable like in Sid Meier's games. It must not only be fought for and nurtured, brought forth through struggle and adversity, but also requires some dumb luck.

bullshit fucking overstated meme

>(which can be seen just in our time)
People have been thinking of their society as being on the cusp of caesarism from almost as soon as Spengler published it. I sometimes think that was the entire point, and in hundreds of years people will still be reading Spengler, and still finding reasons to think of their society as teetering on the brink of Caesarism.

Be careful with Spengler, there's a reason he wasn't a proper academic (he literally couldn't hack it). He wrote beautiful romantic poetry, but he did not base his arguments in empirical data.

China did go through industrialization. They had very complex machinery systems to harness stuff like natural gas vents to produce salt. Why did China show stifled development? Consistent decline in the vibrance of the people as the government failed to cope.
For example, they had the largest man-made canal system to connect their capitals along with complex levee systems for the flooding of China's rivers and to handle silt polluting the water as it's river ran past the deserts in the West. But during periods of weak leadership the entire society collapsed and cultural pessimism occurs.

I'm nowhere close to expert on the period, but wasn't Britain the only place to industrialize without slavishly imitating already-industrialized nations (because they had no existing examples)? If so, isn't the actual question why Britain is so fucking weird as to produce something that has occurred by accident exactly once in the entirety of human history?

That's still pre-industrialization, and the advanced Song techniques/technologies were lost during the Mongol Invasion, and not re-established by the Ming.

Britain was protected from every possibly hostile by the sea, while the similarly advanced in the 1700's low-countries were not. Britain could devote it's pursuits to driving up productivity, the Dutch had countless wars to fight just to keep their sovereignty.

If technological progress like the industrial revolution were inevitable than we would be able to predict what the next revolution is and when and where it would happen, like a Sid Meier's Civilization game.

I was not refering to death of religion. At least in Europe one can speak about that.
What is the exactly criticism on Spengler, beside him not using sufficient references?

But we already know the end of this timeline as it is assuredly nuclear disaster.

>Britain was protected from every possibly hostile by the sea
*cough* *cough*
(Nevermind repeated issues with the French and the Spanish.)

>Risking starvation because tractors and pesticides are "too modern"
>Risking disease and your children/wife dying in childbirth (which was ocne distressfully common) because hospitals are "too modern"
>Risking not finding a market for your surplus crops before they spoil because trucks and supermarkets are "too modern"
>Not wanting electricity or plumbing to keep your living quarters hygienic and light because both are "too modern"

If you want to live like that you could go join the Amish, I guess, but their numbers are dwindling because most of them hate that kind of life, and with good reason. I work in a hospital, I get Amish patients occasionally, and they don't usually do too well because they don't come here until it's too late because they wanted to avoid the modern friendly hospital that could've saved their grandma if they didn't hesitate on coming here for two weeks.

Modernization can mean the difference between life and death for your loved ones. Why risk your children growing up with scurvy because you rejected vitamins, or your wife dying in childbirth, or your kids dying from something super easy to treat like the flu?

>Years ahead in ship building (bulkheads/sails)
>Years ahead in metallurgy (chrome plating in 1000 BC - wasn't rediscover again until the early 1900s)
>Had better mummies than Egypt (Lady of Dai)
Two people are solely responsible: First Emperor Qin and Mao Zedong. It was like destroying the Library of Alexandria twice

By the time industrialization started, the Viking were long gone.

The French and Spanish threat actually helped, rather than hinder industrialization, since it required the building of a large navy rather than a massive levy army. The skillset needed to build and operate a large navy are very similar to the ones needed to start and run a factory.

Go back to /fit

>What is the exactly criticism on Spengler, beside him not using sufficient references?
That prudent referencing has been the keystone of academic history since Edward Gibbons invented academic history with his exhaustively cited "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", as virtually every sentence he wrote was backed up by a primary source.

And the point of romantic poetry is that it is supposed to be timelessly classic, to appeal to any people of any age. Decline of the West builds off of our heuristics and our shared understandings of the world to construct a narrative which, on the surface, seems compelling.

Appreciate Spengler as much as you want for writing some of the most beautiful romantic poetry ever put to print. But understand that he is not taken seriously by academic historians, and it's not because they're stodgy fun-hating ultra-liberals

Europe's scientific revolution made the Industrial Revolution possible.

Okey, if you don't want to call him a historian, this is nothing I am insisting on.
Still this idea of a life cycle of different cultures is a concept which is very appealing to me (and without a doubt contains descriptive power). What are historians who have treated this subject?
Also in regard to scientific method and history, what are the fields in history which treat referencing the most slackish?

So... Britain's industrial revolution came about specifically because it was unsafe - that, oddly, I'd be more willing to accept. Necessity being a whore and all that.

This is basically the line of thought that many historians have today that take a closer look at the industrial revolution.
Dumb shit like Guns, Germs and Steel is still in the popular conciousness but academia is pretty much 20 years ahead of mainstream anyway.
One of my history lecturers on University had one nice quote: 'The industrial revolution happened for the same reason we have birds today: It just happened and we will still bicker about reasons why it happened in centuries to come."