Why was China always richer and more developed then the Europe until the Industrial Revolution?
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Why was China always richer and more developed then the Europe until the Industrial Revolution?
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You're actually wrong. You see, I hate chinks.
Population
Even for their population, they were richer.
China and India's share of the world's GDP was higher than their share of the world's population. Not by a lot, but still.
The Chinese didn't really pull ahead in population until the modern era. Their numbers in Antiquity and the Middle Ages only seem big because "China" refers to an Area the size of the entire European continent. Like if I counted all of Europe as one big country no shit it would have a gigantic population.
Among the causes of the great divergence is that China's geographical location was so generous and good that the incentive to develop pettered out.
Europe hit a major low with the black plague and in the process of recovery they faced challenges that put them in a much better position than the Chinese to expand into world spanning empires, particularly poltical and military sophistication.
>Europe hit a major low with the black plague
China was more advanced than Europe for thousands of years until the Industrial Revolution
>put them in a much better position than the Chinese to expand into world spanning empires, particularly poltical and military sophistication.
China was the suzerain of every country that bordered it and had the pacific ocean.
Where are their colonies
They had vassals like Korea and Japan
I the income from those two is negligible compared to what spain was raping form the new world and the Dutch spice trade
Ming China had a population and land mass comparable to all of Western Europe along with an economy that only spain could feasibly hold a candle to. China never settled and colonized foreign lands because their Muh Middle Kingdom homeland was so fricking big and important. /Thread
pretty much everywhere that was outside of modern day henan was colonized by the han and absorbed into china
Large population, massive access to resources allowing civilization to develop much earlier than most of Europe, etc. Shang dynasty was established in the 1000s BCE while most of Europe besides Greece were still dwelling in huts and worshipping trees.
The reason Europe caught up so quickly is because of the industrial revolution. Europe doesn't have that much resources, so the richest countries were the ones that had the most trade, like Venice or the Ottoman Empire. When it happened Britain and other European countries that joined the revolution became almost unstoppable, technological innovation increased exponentially, while CHina was still stuck with tech they had for thousands of years. Qing armies barely adopted muskets and rifles and most were still equipped with swords and bows.,
China didn't have their own industrial revolution because they had no incentive to. They were rich, had massive access to resources, and colonization just seemed like a waste of time. After Zheng He's expeditions China never tried again to explore the seas.
No israelites.
They weren't. At times they were, such as periods of the Song and Tang dynasties, but at other times they lagged behind other parts of the world. That whole shithole period between the Han and Tang for instance. Or there were times when they were roughly equal, such as the Han and Roman Empires being more or less equal in all matters. Or the Tang were roughly equal rivals to the Abbassids.
china was unironically (and correctly) seen as a backwards african-tier shithole until a british sinologist called joseph needham told them and everyone else that china was actually amazing and had a very sophisticated ancient culture
>Never read Marco polo
What exactly DID Marco Polo say about china? Got any quotes? Didn’t he visit during the yuan mongol dynasty? I’m too lazy to read it myself
I mean, he wrote a whole book, it's hard to quote it all in a post. To be short it's a weird mix of truth and fantasy, like he'll talk in-depth about court politics and taxation, then all of a sudden say that Japan fought off the Mongol invasion with Magic Stones (Nioh used that bit to explain it's whole "Sengoku with magic powers" setting)
Marco Polo visited Hangzhou in the late 13th century. He refers to the city as "beyond dispute the finest and the noblest in the world." .
ibn battuta wrote that china was surely the richest country in the world. he visited like every place on the eurasian continent in the 14th century so i would take his word for it
By the 1600s Europe was more developed. Better architecture, better mechanical machines, better weapons, better ships, better science.
Chinese people have to learn of European mathematicians of the 1600s like Descartes or Fermat or Pascal. Europeans don't have to learn of any Chinese mathematician or scientist of that period because there was none who had contributed anything.
Europe didn't suddenly become more powerful in the 1800s for no reason, Europeans had been developing at greater rates than the rest of the world since their very low period of the early middle ages, but as early as the 1200s Europeans had the tallest buildings on the planet, a century later the first philosophers with new ideas since the ancient Greeks appeared, like the nomalism of Scotus, and then came the Spanish and Portuguese exploration, the printing press, the spread and standarization of the University System, and the advancement of maths beyond what the rest of the world knew, and the advancement of military technology. For the Chinese of the 1500s and 1600s, their most advanced weapons were Portuguese muskets.
Again, even before the 1600's China was not always in "First Place". Rome was just as advanced as the Han, The Abbasid Caliphate was a peer competitor to the Tang, and China itself has waxed and waned through good times and bad. "5000 Years of History!" is just nationalist cope.
This is what Daniel Defoe wrote about China in his pre-industrial revolution 1719 Robinson Crusoe sequel
I mean, even the Chinese view the Qing Dynasty as a stagnant shitheap. "Century of Humiliation" and all that (It was really more like 200 years).
Nobody said anything about the Qing being good THOUGH
arguably OP did seeing as the Qing came to power way before the industrial revolution.
Nonetheless, the early Qing were the largest economy on earth for a time but I’d still say China stopped being truly great in the economic/cultural sense after the Ming died.
Ming were pretty bad too. Almost as bad as Qing. Ming was basically a Han reactionary movement brought on by the trauma of the Mongols.
early song was the peak of chinese civilisation
CCP's got a good shot of taking the pole position again. Who knows what'll happen.
>daniel defoe
Literally the biggest China hater in Europe and probably one of the most posted images on IQfy in recent times
I don't even give a shit about China good bad memes, I just see this constantly.
It's been posted 7 times since 14 Jul 2021 according to the archive
Defoe never visited China. How was he so spot on about the country?
Literally every major account of China prior to the boxer rebellion is the embodiment of the
>let me tell you about your country
meme. Neither Dafoe who hated China nor Voltaire who loved China ever set foot there and went overboard interpreting what they thought it was like. Just complete silliness
I'd argue that European perceptions of China got worse over time, as the two became competitors rather than friendly trade partners.
I don't really like China, but it's sad to see how arrogant and disgusting the English are, their peasants were no more superstitious than a Chinese one. I think Defoe was pissed at a non-European country exceeding his inbred island.Especially since he never visited China, and no country could hold it, all of Europe had to force unequal treaties on it.
>but it's sad to see how arrogant and disgusting the English are
not all of us anglos are bad. Several of the American founding fathers admired Confucius’s teachings and China’s isolationist stance on the world at that time quite a bit. even though they obviously weren’t politically attached to the British empire anymore, the early US was still by and large a byproduct of Anglo civilization.
Brits are the most influential people in history. They have every right to be arrogant
England was irrelevant during his lifespan
Nah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_Britain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3%A6_Naturalis_Principia_Mathematica
Ok Chang.
I love how all chinese threads are made just for propaganda purpose and rape pasta spamming.
The Qing aren't to blame
Chinese were too culturally arrogant to realize the progress of Europeans. They only would have realized that Europeans were progressing a lot and had to be imitated, after being surpassed by Europeans.
Imagine a scenario in which China invents European scholars to teach math, physics, shipbuilding, weapon design, military strategy in China, it's impossible.
The same happened to the Arabs. Arabs only realized they had been left behind by Europeans when Napoleon invaded Egypt.
Tell me about the Manchu period.
colonised non sinitics in the south, even today south china is much more prosperous and higher iq than their savage northern brothers