What kept China from industrializing for so long?

An unusual combination of high population, high overall economic output, but low wages.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_equilibrium_trap

Communism, particularly Mao.

M*nchus.

they were never going to industrialize. who the fuck started this meme that industrialization is just something that happens like in a fucking video game?

They actually had a preindustrial economy during the Song, with coal power, and steel factories and shit

UK colonies

This
The Chinese empire was too safe for its own good

No. with the communist revolution china became the first exporter or producer of iron in the world

lol, that's a nice joke

I did.

I've always been in the shadows.

for thousands of years I've pulled the strings.

Is chinese history as boring as it's ladnmass

There was a certain balance to the Chinese economy that could be destroyed with the weakest application of force. It was like a castle of cards. Everyone was already at their maximum possible productivity and efficiency. Allocating resources to industrialize China would damage the economy on the short term and destabilize the country on the long term. Besides it wouldn't be profitable.

I'd guess it was simply the status quo at the time. outside ideas were seen as dangerous to chinese culture, and china had already sustained itself on its agriculture for many generations previous, and the old ideas that they had built their country off of for so long seemed like they held true throughout, until the british came in with gunships and opium and skullfucked the shit out of the qing and made people turn more towards the nationalists and the communists, giving rise to leaders like Sun Yat-Sen and eventually Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung.

>Remember, the true decline in Chinese fortunes didn't start until the 1840s.

the west was acing them in technology way before that.

Jesuits had to teach the Chinese that the sun didn't revolve around the earth for god sake

lack of protestant/jewish banking

Political stagnation and instability.

Whenever the population is overload,they unconsciously start wars to reduce it.And then a new dynasty with fewer population and the land is enough to make a live.

Relative to China, m8.

The Qing Dynasty in the 18th century was still a pretty good place to live in. The good times came to an end when Qianlong died.

>Remember, the true decline in Chinese fortunes didn't start until the 1840s.
not true at all, the problems began arguably as far back as the 1770s-1780s. the first half of qianlong's reign was good but got crappy as it went on. by the 1820s-1830s they had huge financial problems and a runaway opium crisis that was compounding the financial problems. loads of records for the chinese themselves attest to this.

as to why they didn't industrialize, there are tons and tons of reasons. one was that you had an imperial govt that could(and did) just swoop in and seize your investment as it liked, so little incentive to invest.

another was their absolutely fucked taxation system, which was bloated and corrupt. to give you an example, there was a tax called the liqun(name might be wrong) that was levied on goods travelling away from their point of origin. the further away the goods went, the higher the tax was. besides this being a retarded regressive tax that disincentivized industrialization, it was levied multiple time by corrupt officials along the way, make it even less worth while. this really left the coastal ports the only good places to industrialize, and those were dominated by the westerners with whom the chinese could not compete.

the chinese also for a while tried to just pick and choose which aspects of industrialization they would adopt, which was all done badly as you might imagine. these gimped schemes were also tied to powerful individual government officials who spearheaded them. that part wasn't so bad, but it became bad when beijing re-appointed them elsewhere, and these officials would literally pack up their entire factories/arsenals/foundries/etc, and take it with to them to the their new location, and leaving the first location stuck at square one again.

there are many other issues, those were just the first big ones i could think of. others include the rebellions, crappy financial situation, and massive incompetence in the court.

Nice. Could you indicate any good reads about this?

>open thread
>no one says Confucianism
It was because of Confucianism.
That's why there was limited to no technological advancement in China from the Ming dynasty on.
Confucianism said the past was the best and everything will be okay as long as we cling to the ideals of our ancestors.

>Confucian scholars dabbling about engineering, hydraulics, and European cannon.
What did they mean by this?

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_equilibrium_trap

Once I worked an accounting clerk in a Chaldean firm. They jewed down your pay rate. The job itself was so dumb, that I automated it. These people never advanced beyond themselves, due to low pay and steady supply of work. Asians, man.

it's a bit dated, from 1976, but i found "china: from theopium wars to the 1911 revolution" by jean chesneaux, marianne bastid, and marie-claire bergere covered all the main points in sufficient detail for someone unfamiliar with the subject matter. it doesn't go into to much depth into the start of the decline under qianlong in the late 18th century, but it picks up with all the problems that were now rearing their heads big time in the 1820s and 1830s.

there might be a more updated book, but i would recommend starting with broad overview like that. there are more specialized books out there, but for a topic as huge as china you really need some solid foundations

My dad's a sales manager at a meat company, and he says that he always dreads Chaldean clients because they attempt to chop down the price of anything you sell them even if the price is absolutely non-negotiable. They will literally spend hours haggling over $2.

By Chaldean you mean the Chinese?

>By Chaldean you mean the Chinese?

no,
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaldea

So you have a time machine to the 10th century? Tell me more.

at least they gave me a chance.
White people are a bunch of pussies who
hire only though references.

that just means they're too cheap to hire someone who's actually qualified for the job so they go and hire some dummy like (you)

where the hell are you that there are significant populations of assyrians?

>Ayo Song Dynasty how will you handle the Jin invasion
>JUST

NW suburbs of Detroit, MI USA

It was atypical. You're more likely to find folks like that one confucian japanese nationalists that figured that the best way to keep out euro's was a fuckton of turtle ships.

Madison Heights here buddy
11 n John R
You out in Dearborn or Flint?

Steppe niggers

>from the Ming dynasty on
That's critical.

Manchus kept themselves separate from the Chinese genetically, but they took to orthodox Confucianism quickly, which mean leaving behind any kind of innovation in technology or the arts.

In no way is Chinese history boring. At the very least, you have some absolutely WTF moments in their history.

>it was neo confucianism
FTFY

Industrialization has only ever happened once in the history of the world, in Britain, where the flooded coal mines were uniquely suited to the use of the early explosion-prone steam engines.

the mongols invaded in the 13th century

>forgetting about how the warlord era

Chink no had technology chink no think chink no progresd

I don't buy into this argument. The point of industrialization is to massively increase your productive capacities to a level unattainable by sheer human labor and just adding more workers. No amount of peasants pulling your wagon can ever come close to the speed and cargo of a steam locomotive on railways.
So it's not like this potential wasn't apparent just because you had a shitload of workers that can do a shitload of work, and even with a massive labor force the people in power should have been able to aspire to or recognize the potential of productivity-increasing technology.

Read up on the Moghul Empire and the Song dynasty.

heh, nice little civ you got going there, you are surely the middle kingdom, the center of the earth

*delays your industrial revolution and distributes your tech to the rest of the world*

>finally, we have vanquished the Mongol scourge, we can now enter a new era of peaceful developm....

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

this Anglo capitalists never gave a shit if they made 30000 weavers unemployed. The industrial revolution was always about undercutting competition.

*number of peasants, not amount. Slight correction to original post.

Before the Mongol invasions, the most densely populated region of China and the epicenter of its civilization was in the north along the Yellow River. This region also happens to have a shit-ton of coal, which is conducive if not essential for industrialization.
The Mongol invasion led to massive migrations of the Chinese from the northern home of their civilization towards the south of the country, meaning that many major settlements that were previously located near coal reserves ceased to exist.
This is one speculated reason for the delay of industrialization.
In short, steppeniggers.

England
>begin industrialising
>this brings peasants into cities to work as they are driven from the land
China
>cities already bloated
>industrialisation forces urban poor out of jobs
>they either stay and start to get restless (gommies)
>or go into already bloated countryside and ferment even more resentment with an essentially medeval peasantry
If China had industrialised any sooner they'd have fallen even sooner

The Qing dynasty knew that industrial society is cancerous in the long run.

The Jews

It might not be coincidence that the Mongols basically sacked every major Eurasian civilization except western Europe, and the whole discovery of the New World and then the Industrial Revolution kicked off a few centuries right afterward.

Its not Atypical.

The Confucian Academies of China did other things rather than just memorize Confucius. Engineering, the military arts, and even the despised economics and a whole lot of other things were studied. It was the Chinese equivalent of a University/Monastery.

Those cunts built the Grand Canal during the Tang period, for starters.

>pretty good place to live
for a Manchu

In my opinion, civilization and industrial society are necessary transitional evils that in time progress towards a semi-utopia. It's better to face the suffering of this transition and eventually achieve an approximately utopian society than to go back to being hunter-gatherers and nomads.

Combination of things, namely too much mystification of what should have been take apart from pagan religions

Why do you think the CCP is so technocratic, it is a direct response to how luddite the late Qing were

they are more technocratic in response to their earlier maoist period, not the qing. the qing were slow as shit in modernizing, and absolutely shit at it for the most part, but they were not luddites.

It's not about 'the point', it's about incentives. Until the train was under development it wasn't really seen as something that was even possible

Outdated beliefs.

Well, that's the root cause. This root cause caused so many problems, rebellion, foreign humiliation, economic troubles, poverty, that industrialisation on a large scale became impossible when having to deal with all these problems.

Problems which stem from the Qing government basically putting its hands over its eyes and ears and shouting LALALA I CANT HEAR YOU, NO, NO REFORM!

>Remember, the true decline in Chinese fortunes didn't start until the 1840s.
You can see the decline start at the end of the 1790s.

Just because a steam train seems obviously better to you now doesnt mean the 9th-18th century economy of china agrees. The simple fact was that for most of chinas existence there wasnt really much reason to ever invest in new technology that might not work to accomplish tasks you could just pay a bunch of people basically nothing to do. One of the main reasons indusdrialization took off in europe was that comparativley lower population, labour shortages and high wages meant it made economic sense to invest in technologies that increased efficency. China had no labor shortage so that didnt apply.

Jesus Christ nigger, have you ever heard of the term hindsight? Because if I had to summarize your post in one word that would be it.

>So it's not like this potential wasn't apparent
If someone never has seen a train, that potential is not apparent at all.

I mean the Song Dynasty might've done it if they repelled the Jin (and not full autismo and executing any general that does good), but it's hard to tell if they actually would.

>lets turkic scum populate central asia

well, nobody else really gave a shit about the region

Better than the indigenous population

And then they eventually take over Constantinople! YES!

They didn't have capitalism. The reason Europe industrialized was because of the heavy competition caused by capitalism. If you go further you'll find that capitalism was a result of the age of exploration... So ye it was basically caused by Columbus discovering America.

This

this is what happens when intellectuals and scholars are the ruling class. never forget this Veeky Forums

And also learning the wrong lesson from the Tang

There wasn't such a big surplus before industrialization. It's hard to talk of capitalism as a system before the industrial revolution. People more or less tended to think that putting heavy regulations on trade (with tariffs, mostly) and hoarding precious metals was the best way to be wealthy, rather than having capital working for you by investing in increasing efficiency.

The "let the market sort itself out" thing wasn't really on top men's minds until you started to hit massive surpluses made possible by industrialization and the optimism of early industrialists and inventors.

This. They don't have any competition in their region. China either dominates or is subjected.

>Be Qing
>have shitloads of resources
>Europeans want some
>"lol lets limit trade lmao"
>Europeans attack you and capture parts of your empire and get rich as shit in the process
oops

>Song China Industrializing
Now there's an idea for an alt-history scenario

They lacked Ashkenazi genius

tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/167289/nanjing-jewish-studies

Already done.

But user, that one is an alt-history about Europe being annihilated by the Black Death.

what kept Europe from inventing confucianism?

>retards on this board think Industrialisation could happen without British empiricist philosophy

I hate the anglos and their Bacons and Locke's but you got to hand it to them.

extreme isolationism and xenophobia

Constant Mongol and truck Raid made them focus more on military innovations.

Manchurian Rule erased most of their progress.

tfw you will never get together with the other great powers and have a party in China

Chinks are dumb.

like the fishing rod that killed 40 million people?

British

I'm with you user. I've tried to get into it but it's all incredibly gay shit until the twentieth century.