Why Did the Chinese Economy Lag Behind?
Why Did the Chinese Economy Lag Behind?
This chapter discusses why the Chinese economy lagged behind in the nineteenth century. One of the major reasons was China's difficulty in acquiring steam technology due to its state of traditional technology and nineteenth-century politics. China did learn about steam engines, but too little and too late. By the 1880s, breath-taking advances were coming on in the science of stream in Western technology: the Second Industrial Revolution was supported by research in the laboratory and it was sustained by mathematics. In 1800, China might have acquired some of the industrial advances of the West with the minimum change to the traditional curriculum, but to do so in the 1880s meant reforming school education to put a premium on a new mathematics and the forever elusive superiority of Western technology. China was doomed, therefore by the impossibility of timing.
Keywords: Chinese economy, nineteenth century, steam technology, Second Industrial Revolution, Western technology
Hong Kong Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
