What stopped China from being the world's superpower from 1500 onwards?

I do tend to agree with the "Who would the Chinese conquer" question in this regard.

However, I can think of one example, a significant one that would make a maritime China disgustingly wealthy (and protect them long-term)

Indonesia. Control of the Spice Trade, the Straits of Malacca, its food, its taxable wealth - its the only region besides India that could compare to China.

If you have that conquered and engage in settlement, it then opens up the door to settlement across the Indian Ocean (i.e. small trader colonies), but also in Australia.

When Zheng He died an outside observer would have every reason to expect that to happen. There were large numbers of Chinese in Indonesia then, Palembang had a Muslim Chinese ruler. A number of Zheng He’s Muslim crew got jobs supporting Muslim rulers in Java. After the Ming lost interest however the Chinese traders left and didn’t return until the late 16th century when the Chinese diaspora really started to grow.

It’s curious why the treasure fleet never looked to taxing trade or controlling spices to fund their operations. Perhaps their leaders were bureaucrats with no mind for commerce. Still it seems to me had the Ming maintained a presence in the Indies a generation longer, the wave of arriving traders would make this very likely.
 

Jerry Kraus

Banned
It seemed like China had everything going for it entering into the modern period? Massive both geographically and population wise, large amounts of wealth, relatively unified as a political entity.

It was a superpower that should have continued on as such into 20th century however it didn't. What went wrong?

The language was the problem. It was virtually impossible to communicate verbally given the pictographic script, which doesn't standardize verbal communication, at all. Even today, Chinese from different parts of China have a great deal of trouble communicating verbally. Once Europeans developed printing, their ability to readily disseminate information simply gave the Chinese no chance at all. It's only with the development of computer technology, which makes it easy to communicate with pictograms, have the Chinese become a world power again.
 
The language was the problem. It was virtually impossible to communicate verbally given the pictographic script, which doesn't standardize verbal communication, at all. Even today, Chinese from different parts of China have a great deal of trouble communicating verbally. Once Europeans developed printing, their ability to readily disseminate information simply gave the Chinese no chance at all. It's only with the development of computer technology, which makes it easy to communicate with pictograms, have the Chinese become a world power again.

Okay first of all Chinese characters are not "pictograms", they are ideograms and phono-semantic compounds. Second of all, the ability of different types of script to standardize language is irrelevant because the vast majority of people who drove linguistic change in both Europe and China (random peasants) were unable to read or write. Third of all, Europe was full of linguistic diversity on par with or even greater than China's prior to the advent of the modern nation-state and public schooling in the late modern era. The spread of Mandarin in modern China is very comparable to the spread of Parisian French in 19th and early 20th century France. And just like how Latin and later French served as linguas franca among the elites of Western Europe, there was always a lingua franca in China, Classical Chinese and later on Mandarin. People who need to communicate with each other will always figure out a way how, be that through using an existing language as a lingua franca or developing some sort of new trade pidgin.
 
Okay first of all Chinese characters are not "pictograms", they are ideograms and phono-semantic compounds. Second of all, the ability of different types of script to standardize language is irrelevant because the vast majority of people who drove linguistic change in both Europe and China (random peasants) were unable to read or write. Third of all, Europe was full of linguistic diversity on par with or even greater than China's prior to the advent of the modern nation-state and public schooling in the late modern era. The spread of Mandarin in modern China is very comparable to the spread of Parisian French in 19th and early 20th century France. And just like how Latin and later French served as linguas franca among the elites of Western Europe, there was always a lingua franca in China, Classical Chinese and later on Mandarin. People who need to communicate with each other will always figure out a way how, be that through using an existing language as a lingua franca or developing some sort of new trade pidgin.
Just one thing, Mandarin is not synonimous with standard Chinese, Mandarin itself existed for a long time and has many dialects, relevant number of them unintelligible with others.
 
Actually ideograms are amazing for linguistic unity. When the French took over Vietnam, you had mandarins fleeing to China. They didn't speak any form of Chinese but had "brush conversation" as they had the same "alphabet"
 
The language was the problem. It was virtually impossible to communicate verbally given the pictographic script, which doesn't standardize verbal communication, at all. Even today, Chinese from different parts of China have a great deal of trouble communicating verbally. Once Europeans developed printing, their ability to readily disseminate information simply gave the Chinese no chance at all. It's only with the development of computer technology, which makes it easy to communicate with pictograms, have the Chinese become a world power again.

The opposite is actually true. East Asian languages were far more difficult to adapt to computer technology than to block/type printing (which they invented), on account of the difficulty of developing uniform encoding standards for a character set involving thousands of characters.

This is because on the one hand, all block printing standards are "interoperable", no reader would be confused by 夾 (jiā) or 㚒 (shǎn). However, to a computer, these may be considered two different characters entirely, or even erroneously encoded as the same character.

Historically, the separate standards developed in China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan were not interoperable at all, and of course, non East Asian computers were rarely equipped to handle them. This is why well into the 2000s, reading Chinese text on a computer was very likely to get you a block of ASCII or UTF errors, whereas no such problem would exist if you read a printed book. Even if you used East Asian computers, you might still have problems. For example, in part due to problems relating to the earlier example, the character 㶷 (xū) was encoded as both U+3DB7 and U+2420E. While unification was achieved for most common characters by 1991 (before this, most East Asian computer scientists got by with Latin letters), it was not until the 2000s in practice that any sort of proper standard for CJK unicode became widely implemented, and frequently, non East Asian software can expect to still run into unicode errors parsing Chinese/Japanese/Korean text. And of course, if you do have a parse error, it is much much easier to determine some meaning from examining the raw data with Latin characters rather than a string of meaningless unicode character ids.

Again, as is worth emphasizing, this problem is trivial when using human eyes (and movable type) instead of computer character encoding tables.
 
Also, in answer to OP, for historic societies where data is lacking, economic and technological progress is frequently estimated using urbanization and literacy rates, two areas where China was sorely lacking relative to most rising powers post-1500.

The commonly supposed answer of "stifling bureaucracy" or "suffocating literary culture" is *not* the answer, for the reason that the actual penetration of these phenomena is proportionate to how urbanized and literate that society is. That western contact with Chinese until the 19th century was entirely with the educated and literate proto-bourgeois scholar-bureaucracy and merchant class (that formed at best a percentage of the Chinese population in the low single digits) is the source of this misconception
 
Last edited:
Mechanical movable type printing of the form invented by Gutenberg and not present in East Asia was at a disadvantage under a Hanzi system, and this probably did have some effects for East Asia and the development of mass literacy and the culture of ideas. But it's obviously not that useful to explain 19th century divergence given Japan caught up more quickly than China (both under Hanzi system) well before anything to do with computerisation, and the overall effect of Gutenberg printing is hard to say.
 
Mechanical movable type printing of the form invented by Gutenberg and not present in East Asia was at a disadvantage under a Hanzi system, and this probably did have some effects for East Asia and the development of mass literacy and the culture of ideas. But it's obviously not that useful to explain 19th century divergence given Japan caught up more quickly than China (both under Hanzi system) well before anything to do with computerisation, and the overall effect of Gutenberg printing is hard to say.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type#Metal_movable_type_in_China
 
Gutenberg type *mechanical* metal movable type printing, as I said, a distinct process and invention:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asia

"Mechanical presses as used in European printing remained unknown in East Asia.[45] Instead, printing remained an unmechanized, laborious process with pressing the back of the paper onto the inked block by manual "rubbing" with a hand tool.[46] In Korea, the first printing presses were introduced as late as 1881–83,[47][48] while in Japan, after an early but brief interlude in the 1590s,[49] Gutenberg's printing press arrived in Nagasaki in 1848 on a Dutch ship.[50]"

with consequences such as

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper

"However despite the initial advantage afforded to China by the paper medium, by the 9th century its spread and development in the middle east had closed the gap between the two regions. Between the 9th to early 12th centuries, libraries in Cairo, Baghdad, and Cordoba held collections larger than even the ones in China, and dwarfed those in Europe. From about 1500 the maturation of paper making and printing in Southern Europe also had an effect in closing the gap with the Chinese. The Venetian Domenico Grimani's collection numbered 15,000 volumes by the time of his death in 1523. After 1600, European collections completely overtook those in China. "
which probably relates to changes in the paper production process such as

"The use of water-powered pulp mills for preparing the pulp material used in papermaking, dates back to Samarkand in the 8th century,[32] though this should not be confused with paper mills (see Paper mills section below). The Muslims also introduced the use of trip hammers (human- or animal-powered) in the production of paper, replacing the traditional Chinese mortar and pestle method. In turn, the trip hammer method was later employed by the Chinese."

(I'd guess paper is *the* path breaking invention by China; while printing in some form is much more inevitable once you have paper, and a large enough market to serve that mass produced volume is worthwhile.)
 
Im not very well versed in chinese history at all, but id assume mass civil wars and unstable leadership at key times did a lot to keep them from world dominance.
 
Top