The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development (Princeton Studies in Contemporary China)

This book is a stunning achievement. The author manages to compress China's history since Tang (ca. 620 on) into under 300 pages, by exploiting the possibilities of "big data"--he has developed or used a monumental set of databases, covering everything from numbers of Imperial dependents to number of degree holders in early Qing. The book is densely packed with statistics and stories, but is also theoretically exciting. He uses political-science models to analyze the dynasties and explain the decline. Basically, China evolved from centralized government with powerful aristocratic clans in early Tang ("star" plan) to autocratic but rather open government relying on regions and lineages ("bowtie" plan), and finally maintaining an autocracy that failed to control the country well, and lost out in late Qing to local lineages that actually held much of the power ("ring" plan--the lineages being fairly independent in a ring around the isolated Imperial government). Dr. Wang also looks at intellectual trends, climate and environment events, wars, rebellions, and other stressors that threatened or brought down dynasties. I am left more convinced than ever that China's failure to keep up with the west after 1700 was due to China's autocratic but overextended government. As Dr. Wang notes, Europe was lucky in having a vast region of high mountains at the center, preventing the kind of centralization and autocratic control that China's geography facilitates. China is experimenting once again with overcentralized government, though the threat was well recognized as early as the Han Dynasty by thinkers like Liu Xiang. Such is empire....I made my own far more modest and less data-rich contribution to this literature (THE EAST ASIAN WORLD-SYSTEM, 2019) and thus can judge Dr. Wang's work with some authority. Dr. Wang's work is far more data-based and informed by political science.

This book by Prof. Wang is a work of real scholarship. Its analysis of ancient China's history contrasts starkly to the medieval Europe. The Chinese emperors' reign was getting increasingly secure and long after the Tang-Song transition, because the emperors were getting to consolidate their power against other imperial elites, while the European feudal, politically fragmented system was seeing a rise of checks and balances upon the power of kings and princes that counterintuitively stabilized and extended their reigns. With the development of representative assemblies strengthened state-society social contract and state's taxation capacity in Western Europe, divided and localized elite networks in Song and post-Song China weakened its state capacity. Different reasons for rulers' longer reigns lead to different paths of state development, part of the "Great Divergence" story.

It's always interesting, and usually rather depressing, when some political scientist, IR person or professor of government tries to write a sweeping treatment of any state or society, let alone one with such a rich and diverse history as China. They concoct theories that might sound good to uneducated laypeople and may provide comfort to policy-makers, armchair or otherwise. But the problem is that under any kind of educated scrutiny, their theories fall apart. This is for a variety of reasons. Usually, because they're trying to cover a lot of ground, they cherry pick from a fairly limited source base. Sure, they'll fill their books with charts and graphs, and variables and claim they're calculating from hard data, but it's all B.S. One can pretty much always amass as much, or more counter-data to refute the sweeping claims made. Additionally, because they are often trying to create some kind of master theory, they draw extensively from secondary literature. But not being experts in most (or maybe not any) of the fields they're covering, they often rely on flawed and/or dated works. So, since they're working from a flawed premise to begin with, any conclusions drawn therefrom are pretty much worthless.All of these observations apply to this work. One merely needs to read the introduction to realize that the author is almost entirely unaware of scholarly literature in history pertaining to state-building, empire, the military, or China's fiscal development published in the last 40 years. A quick look at the bibliography verifies this fact. The shocking omission of even the most basic and formative texts in these fields is laughable. It makes you wonder, who signed off on this at Princeton University Press? Have they fired all their competent peer reviewers? It truly reads like something that was written in the 1970s, full of ridiculously dated ideas about "Confucian culture" and the "underdeveloped Chinese fiscal state." Maybe the author just woke up from a 40 year nap or wrote this in a time machine.In fact, nearly every basic premise the author outlines about the "Chinese state" and political culture, not to mention the military in imperial China, has been significantly revised in the past few decades. And even when he does use more contemporary takes, he often misunderstands or mischaracterizes them. If you want to read takes on contemporary China that are informed by history but actually useful and insightful, check out the many works of David C. Kang. They're far better written, more interesting and rely on the latest insights rather than your grandfather's Cold War visions of China.