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Ruan Wei, Shenzhen University (China)
Eurasian civilizations and especially recent researches in the
world system indicate that the major civilizations of the
Eurasian Continent have for a long time been developing
parallelly in economic, social, administrative and intellectual
terms. To put it simply, the China ‘Puzzle’ to a great extent
could be accounted for by the major civilizations’ parallel
progresses throughout history. But what is this parallelism
after all?
It is for the various civilizations of the world to share the
same historical course, nature or tendency. It is for them to
have macro-historically equivalent development levels. In
some cases the development of the civilizations is
synchronous with each other in terms of proto-capitalism or
commercialized agriculture and credit, protoindustrialization
(or mechanized handicraft industries),
population density and size, urbanization, and sophisticated
government. Yet these are only ‘hardware’ parallelisms.
There are also ‘software’ parallelisms between the
civilizations in the way of education and of philosophic,
literary, artistic sophistication. Although in some aspects
one particular civilization can do better than the others, its
lead is generally temporary and insufficient to disrupt the
overall equivalence pattern.
One example is that before democratization the West
European countries all underwent a historical phase of
absolutism or centralized government (think of the Spanish,
French and English monarchies); yet before 1800 China for
two thousand years had had this piece of ‘modernity’.
Another example is that in the process of democratization
and modernization, West Europe adopted civil service and an
exam-based institution of selecting civil servants, so as to
replace the prevailing mode of government that was
monopolized by the aristocracy and was undemocratic,
inefficient and unable to meet the needs of a new society; yet
twelve hundred years before this, China had introduced its
own civil service and the related Keju or imperial
examinations to select civil servants fairly, even
democratically. In fact, the Western idea of civil service was
borrowed from China. However, the lead China enjoyed in
these aspects could not possibly have tipped the overall
parallelism pattern.
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