History of Science and Technology in China - Scientific and Technological Stagnation

Scientific and Technological Stagnation

Further information: Great Divergence

One question that has been the subject of debate among historians has been why China did not develop a scientific revolution and why Chinese technology fell behind that of Europe. Many hypotheses have been proposed ranging from the cultural to the political and economic. Nathan Sivin has argued that China indeed had a scientific revolution in the 17th century and that we are still far from understanding the scientific revolutions of the West and China in all their political, economic and social ramifications. John K. Fairbank argued that the Chinese political system was hostile to scientific progress.

Needham argued, and most scholars agreed, that cultural factors prevented these Chinese achievements from developing into what could be called "science". It was the religious and philosophical framework of the Chinese intellectuals which made them unable to believe in the ideas of laws of nature:

It was not that there was no order in nature for the Chinese, but rather that it was not an order ordained by a rational personal being, and hence there was no conviction that rational personal beings would be able to spell out in their lesser earthly languages the divine code of laws which he had decreed aforetime. The Taoists, indeed, would have scorned such an idea as being too naïve for the subtlety and complexity of the universe as they intuited it. —

Similar grounds have been found for questioning much of the philosophy behind traditional Chinese medicine, which, derived partly from Taoist philosophy, reflects the classical Chinese belief that individual human experiences express causative principles effective in the environment at all scales. Because its theory predates use of the scientific method, it has received various criticisms based on scientific thinking. Philosopher Robert Todd Carroll, a member of the Skeptics Society, deemed acupuncture a pseudoscience because it "confuse(s) metaphysical claims with empirical claims".:

More recent historians have questioned political and cultural explanations and have put greater focus on economic causes. Mark Elvin's high level equilibrium trap is one well-known example of this line of thought. It argues that the Chinese population was large enough, workers cheap enough, and agrarian productivity high enough to not require mechanization: thousands of Chinese workers were perfectly able to quickly perform any needed task. Other events such as Haijin, the Opium Wars and the resulting hate of European influence prevented China from undergoing an Industrial Revolution; copying Europe's progress on a large scale would be impossible for a lengthy period of time. Political instability under Cixi rule (opposition and frequent oscillation between modernists and conservatives), the Republican wars (1911–1933), the Sino-Japanese War (1933–1945), the Communist/Nationalist War (1945–1949) as well as the later Cultural Revolution isolated China at the most critical times. Kenneth Pomeranz has made the argument that the substantial resources taken from the New World to Europe made the crucial difference between European and Chinese development.

In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond postulates that the lack of geographic barriers in much of China (essentially a wide plain with two large navigable rivers, and a relatively smooth coastline) led to a single government without competition. At the whim of a ruler who disliked new inventions, technology could be stifled for half a century or more. In contrast, Europe's barriers of the Pyrennes, the Alps, and the various defensible peninsulas (Denmark, Scandinavia, Italy, Greece, etc.) and islands (Britain, Ireland, Sicily, etc.) led to smaller countries in constant competition with each other. If a ruler chose to ignore a scientific advancement (especially a military or economic one), his more-advanced neighbors would soon usurp his throne.