@Maoistic: Most of what you said is... plain wrong. From just the first page:
All being said, "constant invasions by European powers" was a minor factor in Chinese economic development. For one, there never were "constant invasions" of China by any sort of Europeans before the nineteenth century as opposed to what can best be termed occasional border skirmishes; for another, no European navy or army ever reached any of the great metropolises (Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, etc) of China's lower Yangzi economic core before the First Opium War.
As Rowe notes, "Eighteenth-century China faced few of the war-related fiscal pressures of contemporary Europe, and the prevailing political situation, Confucian ideology, and economic theory all combined to dictate that state financial comfort be translated as fully as possible into a policy of low taxation."
There is much dispute over what led Early Modern Europe to gain an insurmountable economic edge over Qing China. The two big theses are the old theory of the "high-level equilibrium trap," which (to simplify a lot of very complex historical and economical argument) says that the cost of labor was sufficiently low in China to reduce the advantages of investing in capital over increasing labor output, and the California school thesis, which argues that China ultimately failed to keep up due to their lack of colonial relationships and because European coal was located in a rather more advantageous region than the desolate hills of northwestern China.China's lack of modernisation has to do with the lack of colonies to exploit and constant invasions by European powers
All being said, "constant invasions by European powers" was a minor factor in Chinese economic development. For one, there never were "constant invasions" of China by any sort of Europeans before the nineteenth century as opposed to what can best be termed occasional border skirmishes; for another, no European navy or army ever reached any of the great metropolises (Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, etc) of China's lower Yangzi economic core before the First Opium War.
To cite Victor Lieberman's second volume of Strange Parallels and William Rowe's Saving the World, Qing China very clearly had no serious military threat for most of its existence and was indeed militarily "complacent" as a result. Consider, first, that after the Zunghar genocide of the 1750s, the Qing faced no political or military challenge whatsoever save kingdoms protected by harsh terrain (Burma, Nepal) and internal rebel groups (an administrative challenge, not a military one). Second, consider that following the collapse of Southern Ming, the Qing did not face any enemy force with even remotely comparable resources (with the arguable exception of Russians, but the Qing-Russian "war" was more of an extended border skirmish by frontier units).So no, there wasn't any "military complacency", China's military was just falling behind because of a rising Europe and the lack of a colonial empire.
As Rowe notes, "Eighteenth-century China faced few of the war-related fiscal pressures of contemporary Europe, and the prevailing political situation, Confucian ideology, and economic theory all combined to dictate that state financial comfort be translated as fully as possible into a policy of low taxation."
Gabor Agoston's Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire kills that trope quite decisively. It is now agreed that the Ottomans were not particularly behind in military technology compared to their European foes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To quote Gaborston, p. 200-201,The Ottomans were repeatedly getting their face punched in by the late 17th century and were noted for their lack of military modernisation.
Available evidence suggests that it was neither the Ottomans' "inferiority" in military technology nor their supposed shortcomings in ordinance production that brought on their first significant military failures at the end of the seventeenth century, and led to disastrous and humiliating defeats at the hands of the Russians in the latter part of the eighteenth. Such factors as double-front engagements and overstrained communications were obviously of greater significance... More importantly, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a thriving manufacturing sector in an empire where the economy as a whole experienced the contractions plaguing the entire Mediterranean region.
Logistics and economics, not technology. (And do note that it is almost universally agreed that the 17th-century Qing were lessHigh Qing China's GDP was not much less than Europe on the verge of industrialization. Europe had more, but the margin wasn't that big.the difference is that the Chinese didn't have surplus resources to create more powerful artillery like Western Europe did, much less at the speed Europe was doing it.