China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience

by R. Bin Wong

The assumption still made in much social science research that Europe provides a universal model of development is fundamentally mistaken, according to R. Bin Wong. The solution is not, however, simply to reject Eurocentric norms but to build complementary perspectives, such as a Sinocentric one, to evaluate current understandings of European developments. A genuinely comparative perspective, he argues, will free China from wrong expectations and will allow those working on European problems to recognize the distinct character of Western development.

Genres: History, China, Economics, Nonfiction, European History, Asia, World History

352 pages, Paperback

Published December 29, 1999

About the author

Roy Bin Wong is a Chinese economic historian at UCLA. He was the Director of the UCLA Asia Institute from 2004 to 2016. He received his BA from the University of Michigan, and received his MA and PhD from Harvard University.

Reviews

[Jetske · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, that's a book I won't be missing.

[James Yu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book, excellently researched and written. I hate it.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 3 out of 5]

somehow, I feel underwhelmed by ambitious comparative projects ... but I'm buying the argument that bringing China (and other places) into the world history will help alleviate the teleology pestering current social theories (overgenralize based on contingencies of European experience).

[Harry Clennon · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are like me, with a passing understanding of the dynamics of European state-making as explained by North, Wallis, and Weingast; Fukuyama; and—especially, in this case—Charles Tilly, as well as some knowledge of the descriptive events of Chinese history, this is the book for you. And if you’re a normal human being (unlike me) without a background in explanations for state-building, this is actually a great introduction to the topic that touches on two key world regions!

By design, it develops a two-way bridge between our understandings of the political-economic experiences of European states and the Chinese state roughly from early modernity to the present. Wong demonstrates that it’s not really possible to understand the Chinese state simply as a deviation from the western model—it had its own unique competencies that often exceeded what European states were capable of in both pre-modern and early modern times. Moreover, he asks us to view the Chinese state of today as existing in continuity with the imperial state of the past, despite the enormous disruptions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Despite its relatively short length, the book gets into some of the more granular aspects of state building and economic development even as it maintains a broader perspective.

Ultimately as an academic work it may be a little bit inside baseball, concerned with ongoing debates within the scholarly community (that is, ongoing debates in 1997), but for an academically inclined layman such as myself it offered a uniquely robust comparison between the European and Chinese cases, and helped me develop an understanding of the trajectory of Chinese politics and economics on their own terms.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

China Transformed by R. Bin Wong is a study of how China and Europe evolved differently. There are some great nuggets of meta historiography in this book displaying the paths of how social structures, politics and economics developed in these two areas of the world. It is very pedantic and jargon heavy so it is not for a casual reader and assumes a pretty good working knowledge of historiography that I am admittedly rusty on. I really wanted to like it but I just could not get into it.