Was China destined to be a complacent civilization post Song Dynasty

Was it inevitable through geography political and real that the developments China saw throughout the Song dynasty would taper off? And sort of become complacent in its role in the world?
 

RousseauX

Donor
Was it inevitable through geography political and real that the developments China saw throughout the Song dynasty would taper off? And sort of become complacent in its role in the world?
No, the period when china was complacent was roughly between 1750-1850

there was a real possibility of a divided china innovating to fight each other as late as the 1600s
 
No, the period when china was complacent was roughly between 1750-1850

there was a real possibility of a divided china innovating to fight each other as late as the 1600s

I thought its greatest period of innovation came during the Song and that it sort of stayed the course from there? sort of satisfied with where they were until they realized how far behind in the 19th century.
 

RousseauX

Donor
I thought its greatest period of innovation came during the Song and that it sort of stayed the course from there? sort of satisfied with where they were until they realized how far behind in the 19th century.
military technology innovated a lot during the Ming era when the Chinese adopted cannons to fight the Mongols when the Yuan was overthrown

you also had adoption of hand held firearms by Chinese armies during the Ming era

and adoption of early modern military science during the early Qing

China was pretty on par with Europe until the industrial revolution in the early 1800s, only big exception I can think of is that Europe had better warships
 
While the warship point is true, let's not ignore that the late Ming did experiment with copying European designs. So even there...
 
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I thought its greatest period of innovation came during the Song and that it sort of stayed the course from there? sort of satisfied with where they were until they realized how far behind in the 19th century.

No. There was intense economic flourishing in parts of South China and change in China in general during the Ming-especially the Late Ming. Scholars have demonstrated how this continued even into the 18th century under the Qing dynasty despite the Qing regime being inherently oriented towards conservatism and against mercantile South China in important ways. Figures like Koxinga the merchant warlord demonstrate the potential course China could have taken if the trends of the Late Ming had been fully embraced. As an example, despite being based in the tiny island of Xiamen, Koxinga's organization brought in comparable income to the entire Dutch East India Company. There are also non-economic trends in the Late Ming like the relative flourishing of Buddhism, varied forms of "syncretism" and political thought that could be thought of as proto-democratic. The view of China as complacent or stagnant is tied in with Orientalist, dated views.
 
I don't want to play up the Ming too much. The DEIC wasn't the majority, or even plurality, of the source of Holland's prosperity. And those pro-democratic schools didn't amount to much and were largely dead by the Ming-Qing transition.
 
I don't want to play up the Ming too much. The DEIC wasn't the majority, or even plurality, of the source of Holland's prosperity. And those pro-democratic schools didn't amount to much and were largely dead by the Ming-Qing transition.

I didn't say the VOC was the main source of Dutch prosperity? What point do you think I'm trying to make?

I'm mainly talking about thinkers like Huang Zongxi who were part of a greater trend towards reform for the Ming. See Huang Zongxi in Context: A Reappraisal of His Major Writings by Lynn A. Struve:

Too often the thought and scholarship of Huang Zongxi (1610-95), a prominent Chinese intellectual and political activist of the Ming-Qing transition period, are treated in isolation, as though the man stood in a sphere above and apart from most other thinkers of his day. The greatness of his scholarly achievements and the incisiveness of his ideas are stressed, with little attempt to relate those to the accomplishments and ideas of his mentors and contemporaries.1 This approach has created the widespread impression that Huang was one of only three or four figures who had anything very original to say in the seventeenth century. But the more we study seventeenth-century thought, the more we recognize that Huang Zongxi's forte was less in originality than in a keen awareness, examination, and articulation of issues that were current in his time. The perpetuation of notions about Huang's creative singularity obstructs our understanding not only of his intellectual milieu but also of the man's own attitude toward progress in learning. I do not wish to challenge the idea that Huang was an outstanding intellectual of the later imperial era in China but to urge that he be viewed differently: as someone who placed in bold relief ideas that emerged in the late Ming period and brought to fruition in writings of enduring value various approaches to scholarship that had been gestating since the latter part of the sixteenth century. In short, Huang should be seen more as a -culminator than an instigator of ideas and as an advocate of much that did not long survive the late Ming rather than the "pioneering ancestor" of scholarly trends in the Qing. This study also points to the impossibility of validly assessing the greatness of a given thinker without thoroughly studying his immediate predecessors and contemporaries.

The Donglin met with misfortune but their ideas were an outgrowth of a greater trend that continued after them and only stopped with the Qing. The Ming government was not suited towards fully embracing these ideas (which contributed towards its crisis later). This is generally why I advocate for a Koxinga PoD that lets him succeed and impose a new government with a Yongli figurehead.
 
I didn't say the VOC was the main source of Dutch prosperity? What point do you think I'm trying to make?

Think about it this way. Taiwan and Indonesia are much closer to China and they are to the Netherlands. So while Koxinga made plenty of money off of it, isn't this more like comparing trade in the Baltic?
 
Think about it this way. Taiwan and Indonesia are much closer to China and they are to the Netherlands. So while Koxinga made plenty of money off of it, isn't this more like comparing trade in the Baltic?

I'm not really comparing the prosperity of Koxinga to the prosperity of Holland though. The VOC wasn't just an arm of the Dutch state but also effectively a sovereign empire. We can basically treat the VOC as a state supported by Holland rather than simply an extension of it. Going by this, the VOC empire was centered in Batavia with benefit of one of the most agriculturally rich places in the region (Java) as well as "technological superiority in shipbuilding (more maneuverable ships with more cannons), firepower, discipline, and even fortifications and siegecraft." The VOC was able to forcibly impose monopolies on native asian powers and even commit genocide in order to achieve dominance over the rich spice islands. Going by this, the ability of Koxinga to almost match profits with a base in tiny Xiamen and far less coercion is impressive.

EDIT: Wow, actually I misremembered. I significantly underestimated the Zheng organization. From Between Trade and Legitimacy, Maritime and Continent: The Zheng Organization in Seventeenth-Century East Asia By Xing Hang pp 108-109:

Hence, the VOC’s average annual commercial profits amounted to a little more than one-fourth of the Zheng organization’s sum of 1,365,000 taels, and about 60% of Chenggong’s direct income of 614,250 taels. Even at their height in 1651, these proportions only changed to one-third and 73.2%, respectively. In fact, the Company could not match the average performance of its competitor’s China-Japan trade alone. Zheng’s direct share of that profit, 330,750 taels (12.3 tons) out of 735,000 taels, compared favorably with his Dutch counterparts, and surpassed them for certain years.

In spite of the VOC’s attempts to monopolize intra-Asian commerce through anti-competitive measures, such as restricting the spice and pepper trade to Batavia and seizing shipping, and through the promotion of substitutes to Chinese goods, the Zheng organization remained the dominant economic power of the Western Pacific. Besides the spectacular profits earned by him and his officials and commanders, private merchants sailing under his flag could acquire sizable fortunes. After deducting the interest rate of 100% on loans, they would realize a 100% rate of return on the Japan trade but break even in Southeast Asia on the whole. The lower profitability in the latter market resulted from the Dutch presence, which increased the risks and restrictions of doing business. Hence, the number of junks sailing there had declined precipitously from the late-Ming highs of 44 vessels per year.218 Moreover, merchants headed to Southeast Asia also tended to diversify their operations by stopping in Japan before returning
 
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