Why did China started to stagnate so badly after being the world's leading civilization for millenia...

1/2 They experienced an economic golden age (technically a gilded age -- peasants got totally shafted in the long run due to a massive influx of silver which inflated the value of iron, the primary currency of the peasants, because of fixed conversion rates in a bi-metallic currency system) and felt no need to "innovate". they had economic, political, and diplomatic hegemony over the entire corner of the continent. after the collapse of the Yuan and the Song, the Qing came in and decided to assert themselves into Chinese society. seeing as how they were Manchu and therefore not actually even Chinese, they felt that introducing further changes witnessed among the few Westerners they encountered would delegitimize their rule in the eyes of the actual Han/Hakka/Cantonese/etc.

The West thrived and advanced technologically and politically because of all of the interaction between the cultures. the Renaissance started in Italy and gradually spread throughout the continent; the use of handcannons and arquebusiers became extremely popular in eastern Europe and ultimately spread over the course of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. when the Europeans arrived in China starting around the 1790s, the Chinese, with their "Middle Kingdom" and "celestial Mandate of Heaven" mindset, viewed the British and others as literal vassal states. During the Macartney Mission to China, the Qianlong Emperor literally referred to the British as "barbarians" in formal communiques.

even after the disastrous Opium War the Qing thought they had technically won: if they gave the British what they wanted (i.e. treaty ports and extraterritoriality rights), they presumed the British would leave them alone. clearly they were wrong. after the Arrow War and the Taiping Rebellion the Self-Strengthening Movement was formed to modernize the Qing military. over the course of the rest of the century the SSM evolved into a general reform movement to modernize the Chinese economy and

2/2 their political institutions. after the SSM was essentially defeated when the Japanese kicked the Qing dynasty's shit in in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, the SSM and its supporters went one of two ways:

1. re-adopt the old ways in an attempt to create solidarity among all Chinese; few took this position who were previously SSM supporters
2. China will only survive if the Qing are destroyed and a revolutionary state takes its place

after the FSJW republicanism became common among the most radical Chinese thinkers. it's funny, because even after the Boxer Rebellion the Qing actually started to perform well economically and militarily. the Qing army was well on its way to true modernization, and thousands of miles of railroad track were being laid down, which improved inter-province commerce and nurtured the creation of a small but growing Chinese middle class. but the arch-revolutionaries thought the change was too slow and that China was too far behind in any case, so the 1911-12 Revolution was instigated by pissed off army officers and the Qing, paralyzed because their last decisive leader (Cixi) died in 1908, collapsed after a few months.

Literally the opposite problem, idiot. Nice b8. 8/10 made me respond.

...

>Why did it take so long to reassert their old place of major importance after getting their wake-up call during the 19th century?
Because modernizing isn't just a button you click to advance to the next age. The European powers paved a road and anybody that wanted to follow had to abandon their setup and follow. You cannot flirt with it either, that's why all those self-strengthening movements failed. In corporate terms, it's like being told your entire org is rotten and needs to be restructured with new management. For a old civ like China, and especially since there was no precedence for this kind of thing, that was unacceptable, which is China sucked right up to Deng XiaoPing, who had no reserves about cozying up to Westerners if it meant improvement.
>It's kind of crazy if you think about it. An impartial observer during the first millenium AD would have reasonably expected for China to be the country that could most likely dominate the Earth.
Tech company history should be seen as an allegory for real history. Kodak, blockbuster, borders, they all tell the same story.

incompetent leadership and more intensive western leadership. there were attempts at self strengthening but a) they weren't as effective as the plan required initial western support that china couldn't get. Japan didn't have this problem because western powers didn't give a shit about some chinese vassal island until they had modernized. b) they gave up on self strengthening pretty early on, basically after dowager cixi came to power.

Damn that's poetic. China is humanities ultimate stoic monolith. The ages progress and it still stands since the dawn of civilization.

>then it all just kinda of fell apart
Stagnation didn't happen until the midst of Qing. That was due to the massive Opium dump the Europe/US was enacting.

During the Qing (before Opium) they were modernizing their forces at steady pace. They were still the biggest economy in the world, the US only caught up to China near the end of the 19th and beginning of 20th century. Qing's economy was doing fairly well in the early 19th century, however by mid 19th century the Opium was taking its tool. First Opium war happened right around the early 1840s. The second Opium War took place about 15 years after.

Qing was destroyed within a generation or two of Opium addiction.

It is much less that China fell apart and much more that everyone arround them became much much stronger. People don't realize how quickly and how much the Europeans advanced in the early modern era. It wasn't just technology but the power of th bearacratic state and more efficient economic models meant that these countries could concentrate a tremendous ammount of resouses.

China struggle more because it was giant sprawling empire with several competing centers of power. The ability for the leaders of the nation to unite in purpose was non existent. This made it much more vulnerable to the machinations of foreign powers. Also, most nations failed to modernize quickly. Japan is the exception to that trend.

Japan didn't even modernize that quality.
Their industry failed to compare to European tech even up till WW2. It was only until the 70s and 80s did they fully modernize (as in catch up and even succeed the Western powers)

They modernized enough to be able to take advantage of their distance from Europeans and take some power from them. They are exceptional in that regards. But their power and process has been overrated because of the Russo Japanese war and the fact that they fought the Americans (even if they did lose to an America that.quite literally wasn't focussing on them)

they had no real competitors after the mongols got their shit kicked in,so they became stagnant and apathetic while everyone was progressing
by the time everyone else was advanced enough to threaten them they couldn't catch up and got fucked by things such as cannons,ship of the line and drugs

Its funny because they did the exact opposite.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macartney_Embassy

Apparently being insular and closed off leads to decay and decline.

>autarky
>in the current year

They were never great

WHITE PRIDE
SEIGE HEIL!

/pol/ getting popular was a mistake

China was already in decline by the Qing retard. And considering how Perfidious Albion had systemically enslaved India by that time and later one made their number one export fucking opium, they were right to reject them.

>hey were on the verge of industrialisation
What? Care to explain?

Song had a lot of innovative stuff until they got defeated by mongols

The amount of iron which the Song were outputting would not be matched on Earth until England in the industrial revolution.

To get an industrial revolution you need labour shortages and lots of iron ore and coal. China had none of these things. Same goes for India and the Ottoman Empire.

Qing

>they had no real competitors

china got manchooed up the ass

Kind of irrelevant.
They had a large population so it just means people were living an existence comparable to other places. They never used it to make armor plate or clocks like europeans.

True, but that was because civil war and a traitor. I'd argue it was basically a cheap shot

They hated their military because of the example of the Tang.

I’d fucking execute any Br*t*sh scum who entered my nation.

They are cancer that will tear your nation apart within a generation.

>armor plate
>clocks
What does this have to do with iron?

>Song had a lot of innovative stuff
Like what?

>The amount of iron which the Song were outputting would not be matched on Earth until England in the industrial revolution.
Yeah and they had a massive population.

a loss is a loss, m8

You need to be extremely good at making things before you can have a revolution in making machines that make other things. Even in the middle ages the Europeans were best in the world at making things. Nothing else compares to their armor or cathedrals.

>Population alone matters.
Retards, then under the more or equally populous Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties Iron production should have continued soaring. But it didn't because many of strides made in the production of iron such as the increasing usage of machinery and coal were lost or curtailed under the Yuan dynasty and would not reemerge until England in the Industrial Revolution. The Song iron production was benefited by its population but it wasn't the only factor.

[Citations needed]

>Nothing else compares.
>Making things before you can have a revolution in making things.

Fuck off retard you don't know jack shit about the Industrial Revolution or China. The Song dynasty had functioning armillary spheres during its time and mechanical clocks were recorded to exist throughout the period and into the Ming. Further the first industrial revolution had nothing to do with machines making other machines and far more to do with the enclosement movement, the development of the factory method and wage labor, and the usage of machines to AID in difficult tasks.

>under the more or equally populous Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties Iron production should have continued soaring
Not necessarily, the quality of life of the average Chinese probably just diminished.

One thing that hasn't been touched upon is that historically, Chinese government have been extremely hands off with the economy, to their detriment.

In the middle Ming, the government had 1 bureaucrat for every 1000 inhabitants, which is an extremely low number. This number would not change until the republic. This degree of autonomy hampered the central government's ability to collect taxes. Combined with the lack of a central bank, this meant the central government was unable to gather revenue in case of an emergency, say, a yellow river flood, or a mass famine, or the peasant rebellion as a result from that famine.

I do not understand how quality of life diminishing affects iron production.

>the world's leading civilization for millenia?
lol
>on the verge of industrialisation
LOL

if you're gonna ask a question, don't load it up with idiocy and stupid crap.

Are you trolling? Everything in your post was either wrong or made no sense.

>HURRRRRRRRRRR
FTFY

>industrial revolution
>nothing to do with machines
my sides
Ok. We are clearly talking about completely different things. I'm an engineer so I tend to take a machine-centric view of things. But please tell me how you can go from 80% of the population needing to work the land to less than 5% with only better labor organisation.

His millennia statement was overblown, but the Song Dynasty is wildly considered to have been close to the point of becoming an industrial society. Not that it was inevitable, but it was close.

You misunderstood my post retard. I said machines making other machines. Which is what your original post talked about as being essential to the Industrial Revolution which it was not. Secondly the majority of England's agricultural output improved not from machinery but from simple improvements to crop rotation, land enclosure movements, animal husbandry, along with the nascent Empire being able ship in fertilizer from around the globe to aid their fields.

>the world's leading civilization for millenia?
It's a myth that China was always the most advanced civilisation in the world. East Asia has been the poor relation to west Asia and Europe for the majority of history. Out of 6000 years of civilisation, it's only the roughly thousand years between 600 and 1600AD that China had a clear advantage. It just so happened that Europe first came into regular contact with China during that period, so our perception of them has always been a little skewed.

> During the Song dynasty they were on the verge of industrialisation - centuries ahead of Europe at the time! - but then it all just kind of fell apart. Why?
Firstly, China's huge population meant that labour was always extremely cheap. There was never the same economic pressure driving innovation that there was in Europe. Secondly, lack of flexible social structures to allow for growth. Autocracy is bad for entrepreneurs. If Europeans hadn't had Parliament-government England sitting off their north-west shore they probably would have got stuck in the pre-industrial phase too.

>yet they were utterly humiliated.
Japan was humiliated too. In fact, it was humiliation that convinced the Japanese elite of the need for modernisation. China's problem may well have simply been that it was big enough and powerful enough that it took longer for the humiliations to sink deep enough to have an impact.

Apart from that, it's somewhat down to chance. If China hadn't been ruled by the conservative, ruthless Cixi during the critical period then modernisation might have progressed a lot faster.

>An impartial observer during the first millenium AD would have reasonably expected for China to be the country that could most likely dominate the Earth.
There are signs that the Roman Empire was coming increasingly close to industrialising during its later period, with the expansion of mining and more evidence of things like water mills. The problem is that there seems to be a ceiling on that sort of activity that is very hard to break through. Deforestation fuels iron smelting, but forests get used up quickly. Deforestation leads to soil erosion, damaging agriculture and silting up harbours. Pouring resources into the cities grows the artisan class, but agricultural workers - the foundation of any economy - suffer as a result. I don't know as much about China as I do about Rome, but I do know that at least a few of these problems were seen both in the late Roman Empire and medieval China. The ecology simply can't sustain a highly productive agricultural society for very long, so if they don't make the jump up to industrialisation quickly they don't make it at all.

To put it simply, increased production does not make an industrial revolution. You can't simply throw in money and resources and expect them to turn into better technology automatically - it really took a complete overhaul in the way societies organise themselves and the very way people think to make the leap to an industrialised economy.

Typically, the critical component is the usage and mining of coal as a resource. The Song had begun to move away from wood burning to coal, but were then conquered.

Industrialization and the successful harnessing of steam power was not a progression of technology, it was an aberration that could only happen from scratch in the particular conditions of the flooded British coal mines. Note that the Song were burning coal as fuel, but they were not able to translate that to labor without the steam engine.

>Japan managed
Japan was much smaller and easier to govern as a single unit, and had the political will after seeing China BTFO.

Okay, I will clarify my original point. To make a steam engine you need a big, powerful lathe to bore out the cylinders and cut the pistons. No amount of black smithing will do the job, you HAVE to have lathes. Lathes and mills are often referred to as "machine tools" the process of using machine tools to make metal part is called machining, obviously a human operator is needed, sorry if that wasn't clear. If your revolution dosen't have precision machining, then it doesn't have steam engines and there's not point calling it industrial.

If seen Chinese clocks, and they are fucking made of wood! Sure the Chinese had hand cannons, but they were unable to improve them into lighter more powerful muskets. Their sails were made of small strips of canvas because they didn't have the technology to made large square sails like europeans.

The Romans were boss. They used aqueducts in a manner similar to modern electric grids, with water wheels powering mills, ore crushers and other industry.

Some of clocks were wooden, but metal clocks existed. Su Songs armillary and clock was made of cast bronze. They also had access to the lathe. However, you are correct in accessing that Chinese machining did not become very widespread. This is why it is said they came close to industrializing, but did not industrialize. Many of the necessary social components were there as well as the technological requirements. Had the Song survived longer perhaps clock towers such as the one designed by Su Song would have spread in popularity fostering a need for the spread and development of machining.

I guess that would have been cool. They wouldn't have been the first in the world though. The Greeks had clocks and steam engines 2000 years ago.

Its always a civil war/traitor.

>His millennia statement was overblown

Cause OP is a fucking chinkshill shitposter. He just pretended to ask

>Qing was destroyed within a generation or two of Opium addiction.

B-but drug legalization is good!

>China should have initially been in a far better position than Japan to close the gap, yet they were utterly humiliated.
Not really. They had way too many internal problems. They were having literally hundreds of revolts and rebellions every year, and actually they managed to put down all of them until 1911. But ultimately the court was too backwards and resistant to change, they wanted to remain as a medieval China into the 20th century, that couldn't happen, but they did their best to hold China back, which is why Japan smoked them.

>Making drugs illegal prevents people from using them

>seige hiel
droolingbrainlet.jpg

Genociding drugies prevent them from damaging themselves.

>you need labour shortages and lots of iron ore and coal. China had none of these things
What the fuck are you talking about you retard?
China has shittons of iron and coal.

The song chinese actually solved the deforestation problem by inventing coke, something the romans never did and the english would do a couple hundred years later.

Can you explain pls

China was fine, european cucks and their enlightenment crap ruined this world.

Pretty much mongol invasions, China only became static during Manchu

But they had a extremely strong craftsman culture

okay and?

There would be government and social sanctions for anyone that tried to replace a traditional craft-ship with a Taylorist manufacture.

Genociding all people prevents all the problems.

>world's leading civilization
???????????????

>Why did China started to stagnate so badly after being the world's leading civilization for millenia? During the Song dynasty they were on the verge of industrialisation - centuries ahead of Europe at the time! - but then it all just kind of fell apart. Why?

just blame it on qin hui

You shilling for multiculturalism and race mixing? The nation's that fit those descriptions are Brazil and we all know how well mixing is over there.

>spoonfeed me

The song didn't really have those either.

>It wasn't so much China stagnated as Euros pulled ahead.
this

Song hired governmental sort of people instead of military sort of people as the head of their armies. Song also focused more on culture and tech than stuff like military. They also got rekt by both the Jin nomads who took all of north china then the Mongols.

The coal was located in the north western half of china. Separate from centers of commerce and labor.

Samurai swords and Damascus steel are memes, europeans were the best in the world at metal working and so they were the first people to make steam engines.

America is multicultural and literally the most powerful nation in the world. Even places like Russia, China and Japan have a lot more ethnicities than you'd expect.

>world's leading civilization for millenia

The non-meme answer to the primary reason of political failure or 'stagnation' in East Asian countries is unironically their absolutism, absolute to an extent that Westerners struggle to comprehend. All it takes is one rubbish Emperor to neglect his duties which incurs dynastic death spiralling

If an Emperor who had a more assertive and levelheaded disposition, perhaps from being raised in slightly more humbling conditions, could've prevented the entire clusterfuck that was turn of the century China and Mao's eventual victory in the civil war. Had there be anyone instead of Puyi who fucked up in nearly everything (I recommend reading his biography, if not at least the wikipedia summary of it, the nigga bursts into tears literally all the time at trivial bullshit)

Indians were on par, if not more advanced, with medieval and renaissance Europeans in metallurgy. They didn't invent something as advanced as full plate armour, in fact their armour technology was fairly behind the times for most of their history, but their steel quality was superior and they did have other stuff like bows made entirely out of steel.

The Tang Dynasty, giving the military way too much power for any singular Chinese dynasty.

To be fair, it made sense:
>Be Tang.
>"This system of soldiers having to wait for orders from central command is stupid as fuck. Let us streamline this system by making a special military rank where frontier commanders can act with autonomy.

That rank was called the Jiedushi (lit. Military Commissioner). But then.
>Lets give them even greater autonomy by giving the Jiedushi the same status as provincial governors in the frontier with civil/military authority (unprecedented), the ability to collect taxes & raise their own household troops and the right to wage war in the Emperor's name as he sees fit.
In effect, what Tang pretty much did was create militarized provinces that acted like their own countries to defend the overall empire.

That was fine for almost a century until some Sogdian-born Chinese general thought he wanted to be Emperor and took the entire fucking western army with him to war.

So the Song dynasty went completely the opposite: LET US POLICE OUR MILITARY THOROUGHLY WITH ASS-RETARDED SYSTEM OF SURVEILLANCE. CANT TRUST THESE JOCKS.

The irony being the Song Dynasty descended from one of the 10 Jiedushi Families (the Zhao Family) that broke China apart in the 900s when the Tang fell.

Because the ideas that led to the scientific method and accountable government were created in the West and have no parallel in eastern thought.

Modern historians like to meme about how per capita GDP was higher in India and China through the early 1700s but they totally miss the advances in philosophy and politics that had already set western Europe up for success centuries before. It's basically soft SJWism. "No the West isn't in any way superior, look at this GDP chart," never mind that the successful eastern nations all copied western political structures and the scientific method to pull themselves up. Even China is based around communism, a European invention in response to the changed of the Enlightenment.

China in the 1970s-1990s unironically had a similar Tang era system.

I am not kidding. Deng himself set it up.

Mongolians destroyed to much of their society that caused the breakdown of infrastructure. Kinda like the plague that caused the breakdown of the roman society.

Because they hadde everything they needed, no progress. European states were competing against eachother, progress, then domination.

Thank you user did that mean Tang were the most powerful dynasty ( military speaking )

They were meh.
Military power rankings (by Dynasty).
>Best Tier (Native Dynasties)
Qin, Han.
>Best Tier (Barbarian Dynasties)
Yuan Mongol, Manchu Qing (early Qing).
>Meh tier.
Ming, Tang.
>Lost half of country but defended the other half well tier.
Sima Jin, Southern Song Dynasty.
>Bad tier
Northern Song.
>Shit tier
Sui.
>Can't unify country tier
Every cunt in the three kingdoms period, the nanbeichao, and the 5 Dynasties 10 Kingdoms period.

Horse archers.

> An impartial observer during the first millenium AD would have reasonably expected for China to be the country that could most likely dominate the Earth.

No that would be Rome

America is white majority its not Brazil level yet.

Maybe the indans never developing plate armour is due to the climate? I heard one french kinght deid of heatstroke in winter because fo his armour.