The literature on how, and why, China and Europe developed different social and political organizations is large; but, to summarize in the smallest of nutshells, the big theme is centralization in China and fragmentation in Europe.
The paper today, from Joel Mokyr of the Northwestern University and Guido Tabellini of the Bocconi University, Milan follows this established argument but gets under the hood of how these differing themes took hold and operated.
They focus on how ‘clans’ became the dominant social organization structure in China whilst at the same time ‘corporations’ (to include the Church, city states, craft guilds and universities) from around the 12th century were the principal organs of societal organization in Europe.
An important difference between the two is clan members had no choice about their participation but gentleman of Verona, say, could up sticks and move to Padua if they felt prospects were better there.
The difference implies a tendency to conformity on the one hand and competition on the other. Clans punished bad behavior by social suasion or in extreme cases ostracism. Corporations needed rules and a formalized enforcement system, which progressed to become legal systems with professional-classes tasked to operate them
The paper then goes into a detailed description of how the Western legal systems evolved crediting along the way the Church (i.e. the Catholic one) and self governing towns in shaping this development. China, lacking either of these institutions, progressed a top-down administration which had its advantages, a key one being stability.
This leads to the author’s closing remarks that these divergences “..also had profound implications for how education was structured, for what type of knowledge was accumulated, for how innovation took place, and hence ultimately for why the industrial revolution occurred in Western Europe and not in China.”
That final jump is too glib, IMHO, (even if, maybe, true) but in fairness to the researchers they don’t claim their work is the end of the discussion.
The paper does provides useful color for that broader argument about collective versus atomized development and helps, usefully, explain some of how China and the West continue to operate to this day.
You can access the work in full via this link Why Europe and China’s Institutions Diverged.
Happy Sunday.