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1993-04-08
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SPECIAL ISSUE: MILLENNIUM -- BEYOND THE YEAR 2000 LOOKING BACK, Page 21Why China Missed Its Big Chance
When Father Matteo Ricci and his fellow Jesuit missionaries
visited Beijing in 1601, they brought two clocks of Italian
design as gifts for the Emperor Wan Li. The larger of the two
astounded his courtiers, Ricci later wrote, because it was "a
work the like of which had never been seen, nor heard in Chinese
history."
In fact, as historian Daniel J. Boorstin recounted in The
Discoverers, 500 years earlier a civil servant named Su Sung
had built a remarkably accurate astronomical clock for his
Emperor. But when a new ruler was crowned in 1094, officials,
according to custom, decreed that his predecessor's calendar had
been faulty. Su Sung's 30-ft.-tall "heavenly clockwork" was
abandoned. By the 17th century, it was a legend known to only a
few scholars.
Su Sung's clock points to a great historical puzzle. Why
did China, where so many things were invented, exploit its
creativity so poorly? The Chinese discovered paper and movable
type, yet the country was virtually illiterate until the 20th
century. Gunpowder was also invented in China, yet its cannons
were inferior to those made by Europeans. China's bustling
cities, despite their vitality, never stimulated the
intellectual ferment that in Europe led to innovation.
Part of the explanation is the dominant role in China's
history played by the bureaucracy, which was intensely
conservative, and by Confucian philosophy, which emphasized
order, continuity and stability. Ricci noted that the Chinese
word for their country, Thienhia, meant "everything under the
heavens." Believing that China was superior to other nations,
officials of the imperial court were leery of innovation and
humiliated to learn that something had been done better
elsewhere. Like its artists, historian J.M. Roberts notes,
China's governing elite "strove to imitate and emulate the
best, but the best was always past."