China’s Sustainability: Asynchronous Revolutions by Jiang Jun
The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics broadcast China’s Four Great Inventions as the contributions of an ancient and creative power. However, the historical distinction among the four inventions, as well as the differentiation in their global effects, has long been ignored. Two of the four inventions, gunpowder and the compass, had a clear military application, while the other two, paper making and type printing, had more to do with cultivation.
Sustainability, a modern description of “long life”, was the latent principle behind all dynasties of pre-modern China. It was based on three aspects of civilization: unitive politics as the organizational model of the state, agriculture economy as the social model of production, and Confucian culture as its ideology. Unitive politics minimized internal exhaustion by virtue of its centralized instruction system and national collectivism. Agruculture economy stabilized local power via its land-oriented production mode and local collectivism. Confucian culture synchronized the two into “oneness” with its state-family isomorphic structure. The stability and sustainability of pre-modern China was defined by this trinity. The sustainability of the state was therefore resolved into the sustainability of all those local families. The repression of demilitarization and the extrication in self-organization resulted in periodic massive population increases. Most mechanical inventions were supposed to merely reinforce human power not replace it. (Source)