Book Review

Methods/Theory

R. Bin Wong. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1997. Pp. x, 327. $39.95.

As G. W. F. Hegel reported it, Napoleon Bonaparte once said that "this old Europe" bored him. In his important, courageous, and timely new book, what bores R. Bin Wong is not so much Europe as "Eurocentric" social scientists. These he condemns for having failed to recognize that the late imperial Chinese state sometimes outperformed early modern European states and that contemporary social science will not work until it "achieves symmetry" by "looking at Europe from a Chinese perspective" (p. 282) as well as the other way around. Wong sets out to show how Chinese history differs from "the paradigmatic Western cases" and how projects in world history can be developed in which the questioning runs both ways. "Strategies of comparison" have to be created that get us beyond one or two key differences such as wet rice agriculture or Confucian cultures. If nineteenth-century European "social theory"—by which Wong means, in practice, Karl Marx and Max Weber and twentieth-century standard bearers of Americanized Weberianism like Talcott Parsons—is to be rebuilt, we must do it by examining civilizational similarities, not the differences. In other words, although he does not say so, we need an academic version of the seventeenth-century Jesuit approach to China rather than the nineteenth-century Orientalist one. All this makes very good sense.	1
The book is courageous for a number of reasons. Wong does not try to subtract the politics from comparative history and take refuge in the global study of ecological processes, trading networks, disease epidemics, or migrations without fully connecting these things to the formation and deformation of political systems. Fully accepting that a convincing world history must compare states and their politics, he suggests that we compare such important state functions as tax collection and social control management. Indeed, the book is at its best when Wong examines tangible institutions and activities like granaries and tax resistance.	2
Wong is very eloquent indeed (pp. 101–104) about how little "European narratives of state formation" have to say about China. "None of the key dynamics for European modern state formation—warfare coupled with fiscal centralization and expansion or shifting authority relations from royal rule to popular sovereignty—matter to China's late imperial state dynamics" (p. 101). On the other hand, the Chinese state's maintenance of material welfare—through its granary system—was "beyond anything imaginable" in early modern Europe, whose states never even created "modest networks" of granaries. To think of welfare states as recent political forms thus makes sense only in Western terms, not Chinese ones. Moreover, the Chinese state's attempted surveillance of its population, including its peasants, also anticipated behavior that in Western historiography is thought to be modern, but in fact is not. So if we look at European state-making from a Chinese perspective, we will get a more useful, less Eurocentrically provincial, definition of institutional modernity.	. . .