Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History

The Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures

by Alexander Barton Woodside

In Lost Modernities Alexander Woodside offers a probing revisionist overview of the bureaucratic politics of preindustrial China, Vietnam, and Korea. He focuses on the political and administrative theory of the three mandarinates and their long experimentation with governments recruited in part through meritocratic civil service examinations remarkable for their transparent procedures.

The quest for merit-based bureaucracy stemmed from the idea that good politics could be established through the "development of people"--the training of people to be politically useful. Centuries before civil service examinations emerged in the Western world, these three Asian countries were basing bureaucratic advancement on examinations in addition to patronage. But the evolution of the mandarinates cannot be accommodated by our usual timetables of what is "modern." The history of China, Vietnam, and Korea suggests that the rationalization processes we think of as modern may occur independently of one another and separate from such landmarks as the growth of capitalism or the industrial revolution.

A sophisticated examination of Asian political traditions, both their achievements and the associated risks, this book removes modernity from a standard Eurocentric understanding and offers a unique new perspective on the transnational nature of Asian history and on global historical time.

Genres: China, History, Theory

160 pages, Hardcover

First published May 30, 2006

Reviews

[Ansel Zhang · Rating 4 out of 5]

Woodside challenges the Eurocentric notion of ‘modernity’ by examining the mandarinate societies of China, Korea, and Vietnam, all of which developed processes of rationalisation separate from Western industrialisation and capitalism. These modernities (in the plural) were ‘lost,’ because of a disinterest from the West, and China’s own adoption (Yuan Shikai) of mass education and nationalism as alternative ways of social integration (The Western, Andersonian notion) He argues that many features conventionally associated with modernity emerged independently in East Asia - bureaucratic governance, merit-based selection, and welfare-oriented statecraft.

He asks the provocative question ‘What time is East Asia?’ East Asian societies cannot fit neatly into Western, academically contrived periodisations of ancient, mediaeval, and modern, because it exhibits features associated with multiple historical ‘times’ at once - meritocratic ideals, administrative rationality, and textual scepticism coexisted with slavery, hereditary monarchies, and a ritual moral economy. This shows that ‘modernity’ can sometimes be a provincial European category retroactively universalised to the whole world

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very nice reflection on the Confucian East Asian imperial civil service examination system in Korea, China, and Vietnam, and on the broader concept and problems of bureaucracy itself. He paints his work as an East Asian reflection on Herman’s work on Western law, but I see this book as an excellent spiritual successor to Ettiene Balaz’s book on Chinese bureaucracy.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

Woodside is a very substanial scholar of Nguyen Vietnam as well as China and in this set of lectures, he looks into the precocious development of merit based bureaucracy in China, Korea and Vietnam as well as its absence in Japan. Bureaucracy was for a thousand years in China, the norm but it created some unique problems as well. Korea, although it instituted an examination system, had a strong aristocratic Yangban tradition.

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good information, but it could have all been handled in a shorter article.