Historian Tonio Andrade Tries to Understand, Through the Lens of War, Why Modern China Fell Behind the West | Interviews

China today is in a "Song dynasty Warring States era" — wars aren't as frequent as in the real Warring States period, but the Song coexisted with its neighbors in a state of lasting tension, locked into geopolitical rivalry for the long haul.

Over the past 20 years, more and more scholars around the world have returned to a classic question in history: how, after 1500, did the small states of Western Europe, perched at the edge of the Old World, rise to dominate the globe — while China, once the strongest power on Earth, stagnated and declined, falling behind Western Europe?

This question, now known as the "Great Divergence," has spawned countless explanations and arguments. From Montesquieu, Max Weber, and Karl Marx in the past, to Jared Diamond, Immanuel Wallerstein, Niall Ferguson, Andre Gunder Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz, and R. Bin Wong today, you'll find every conceivable fact and argument brought to bear on the question.

For the sake of clarity, we can roughly divide the answers into two camps: the traditional explanation and the revisionist explanation. The traditional explanation holds that Europe possessed a superior civilization compared to Asia — more advanced political organization, economic structures, science, and technology. Revisionist historians, however, have challenged this view, arguing that Europe held no clear advantage over Asia in property rights, per-capita income, labor productivity, or gunpowder weapon manufacturing — and that the notion of European superiority simply doesn't hold up.

"Historians with a truly global view have responded to this by reimagining world history altogether, proposing a revisionist model of world history. They argue that the most developed Asian societies actually followed a trajectory of development similar to that of Western European states, and that the divergence between Europe and Asia is a comparatively recent phenomenon... These revisionist historians point out that, whether in economic or technological terms, Western Europe and much of Asia were roughly evenly matched until changes brought on by industrialization and the accompanying economic revolution at the end of the 18th century. This is a radical view. Where the traditional narrative portrays Europe as a beacon of enlightenment shining into a dark world, revisionist historians see the rise of the West as part of a larger framework of Eurasian development — a long history of shared innovation in which Asian societies were themselves a driving force." So writes historian Tonio Andrade in Lost Colony.

Andrade chairs the East Asian Studies department at Emory University, where he is a professor. He earned his PhD at Yale, studying under the noted sinologist Jonathan Spence and the European historian Geoffrey Parker. His research focuses on Chinese history, global history, and comparative studies of colonialism. He is the author of How Taiwan Became Chinese, Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China's First Great Victory over the West, and The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History.

Chiang Chu-shan, an associate professor of history at Taiwan's National Dong Hwa University, has called him "the best global-history storyteller since Jonathan Spence and Timothy Brook". Andrade's former student Lu Cheng-heng has described his approach this way: "Andrade believes history can interpret everything, and that historical research lets us grasp how people at the time actually felt and experienced things — to inhabit the 'era' and the 'people' of centuries past, and understand how those people related to their own time and place. That's why he proposed 'micro-global history,' combining large theoretical frameworks with individual narrative, using the personal perspectives of historical figures to embody a given moment in time... He believes a historian should operate on two levels at once — as a builder of theory, and as a storyteller."

On the Great Divergence question, Andrade is fundamentally a revisionist, though he tries to strike a balance between Eurocentrism and an overcorrected Asia-centrism. "My first book [How Taiwan Became Chinese] examined the birth and growth of the Dutch colony in Taiwan starting in 1624. In that book, I argued that the Dutch were able to colonize Taiwan not because of any superiority in technology or economic organization, but because the Chinese government simply hadn't bothered to administer Taiwan seriously, and neither Japan nor Korea, its neighbors, had any interest in seizing it. That changed once Koxinga rose to power in the 1650s... So I strongly endorsed the revisionist model, and argued that the most important factor behind European expansion wasn't technological capability, but political will," Andrade wrote in his second book, Lost Colony.

But while writing that second book, he discovered that the Dutch actually did hold a decisive technological edge in certain areas — enough that they might well have defeated Koxinga. That challenged the revisionist model he had originally embraced. His research also ended up confirming a variant of a more traditional model in world history: the "military revolution" thesis. According to this thesis, pre-industrial European states held one crucial advantage over the rest of the world — frequent warfare. States in Europe fought each other constantly, the argument goes, and so grew increasingly skilled at war. Frequent conflict became a crucible of innovation.

Andrade, however, doesn't fully align with historians who hold the traditional view — he argues that the military revolution was a phenomenon that spanned all of Eurasia. "It began in China, spread across the world, and eventually reached the volatile, war-torn states of Europe. European states rapidly absorbed these new technologies, then, through further warfare, carried the further-developed versions of that technology back to Asia, where Japan, Korea, and China eagerly adopted them. This view, grounded in detailed research, supports the revisionist position: the developed regions of Asia and Europe advanced along broadly similar paths."

Of course, it wasn't just guns and cannons that circulated globally — goods and ideas moved too. As Andrade puts it, "the Chinese adopted European guns, while the Dutch wore Chinese silk, added Brazilian sugar to their Javanese coffee, sprinkled ground Indian pepper on American potatoes, and served it all on Japanese porcelain. You can trace Chinese influence in Vermeer's paintings, and Chinese painting itself began to shift under the influence of European artistic trends." So, "modernization is itself a process of mutual adaptation." "The history of modernization isn't really a history of European domination — it's a process in which cultural phenomena spread at an ever-accelerating pace. Europe's own contributions — especially in science and its technological applications — were genuinely crucial and shouldn't be overlooked, but they need to be understood within a global context. What truly defines modernization is the unprecedented movement of people, goods, and ideas."

So in his third book, The Gunpowder Age, Andrade develops the military revolution thesis from a global-history perspective, comparing and connecting the military histories of Asia and Europe, hoping to draw a military model out of Chinese history that can help explain China's cyclical rises and declines. Where earlier literature on the Great Divergence focused mainly on economics, this book zeroes in on gunpowder warfare — what might be called the "military great divergence."

In his view, only certain periods of Chinese history actively discouraged military innovation — the Qing dynasty's era of pacification from 1760 to 1839 being a clear example. "Perhaps the Qing succeeded too thoroughly. Peter Perdue and Frederic Wakeman have argued that the Qing's unprecedented hegemony dissolved its own motivation for military innovation. At the height of Qing prosperity, from 1760 to 1839, the Chinese military stagnated, even as European militaries were undergoing unprecedented growth in scale, organization, and technological sophistication. The result was the military great divergence — driven by the pulse of war."

Still, Andrade is careful not to let his view be reduced to "the mystery of 19th-century China's weakness is simply a matter of how often it went to war." As he clarifies: "War is just one of many variables. Others include ethnic friction, unwieldy political structures, factional infighting, and the emergence of unusually powerful foreign adversaries. We also can't discard the many other models sinologists have used to explain China's puzzling stagnation — Mark Elvin's model of agricultural stagnation, Kent Deng's model of complex structural equilibrium, the classic theory that China lacked an active middle class (the view of Joseph Needham, the great historian of Chinese science and technology), and the remarkable geopolitical-competition, capital, and labor model developed by R. Bin Wong and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal."

"Similarly, I can't dismiss the cultural explanations traditional scholars favor, especially once you bring science into the picture. Although many scholars today downplay the role of experimental science in the economic Great Divergence — they tend to plant themselves at one extreme or the other of the revisionist debate — the evidence tells me that science was a key factor in the military great divergence... Beyond that, the degree of geopolitical instability can also help explain both the rise of the West and the decline of China across world history."

On this point, he offers the example of the First Sino-Japanese War: "Japan's tremendous success is on vivid display in the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War. It defeated China — but that victory owed less to any outstanding mastery of steam power or shipbuilding and gun manufacturing (China, in fact, was first to build steam turbines, and its 1880s warships were more advanced than Japan's) than to China's political paralysis. Late Qing China was ossified and moribund; Japan was dynamic and efficient." Japan achieved reform through revolution, while the Qing government's reforms failed. "Pushing through reform means taking on enormous, sustained risk, because vested interests content with the status quo will never willingly step aside. Reformers only get real momentum when both decision-makers and elites are shaken at once... and geopolitical insecurity is the key factor that produces that effect."

After the Sino-Japanese War, China fell into "nearly a century of unending attritional conflict." Andrade doesn't see this as a symptom of failed modernization, but rather as the turbulence of a dynastic transition. "From the mid-19th century to the present, China really does seem to be returning to a more standard pattern from its own history — one where wars were more frequent, and military innovation ran deeper and more actively. Today's environment may not resemble the original Warring States period so much as what I call the 'Song dynasty Warring States era.' Back then, wars weren't as frequent as in the true Warring States period, but the Song coexisted with its neighbors under lasting tension, locked into geopolitical rivalry for the long haul."

In March 2019, the Chinese edition of The Gunpowder Age was published, and we took the opportunity to interview Andrade by email. Looking at today's geopolitical situation in East Asia, he remains deeply worried. "What worries me is that some mistake could push these countries toward war — a clash in the South China Sea, say, where a communication error lets the fire spread. Many wars, in fact, aren't the result of a deliberate decision to go to war at all — they arise from mistakes, compounded by heated rhetoric, and end in hostilities whether anyone wanted that or not. Once a cycle of retaliation begins, it's very hard to turn back," he wrote in his email reply to QDaily.

Q = QDaily

A = Tonio Andrade

Greater geopolitical tension produces greater military innovation

Q: In The Gunpowder Age, you write: "I am by no means trying to reduce the puzzle of 19th-century China's weakness to a simple matter of how often it went to war. War is just one of many variables — others include ethnic friction, unwieldy political structures, factional infighting, and unusually powerful foreign adversaries." Could you say more about how these variables affected China, and how they relate to the frequency of war? One view, for instance, holds that political structure directly determines how often war breaks out.

A: This is a very complicated question. I don't think political structure has that strong an effect on how often war breaks out. In my view, war behaves more like a widespread, independent variable. And I'd say it's less a political question than a geopolitical one. For instance, some argue that democracies never go to war with each other, but I find that a strange and unconvincing claim. In fact, East Asia does seem to have gone through cycles of more war and less war. The scholar David Kang has proposed that the traditional China-centered state system produced longer periods of peace than the Western Westphalian system. I believe he's right to some degree — East Asia, for instance, enjoyed a long peace during the Ming and Qing periods. But I'd also argue that when war did break out in East Asia — say, from 1550 to 1700, or from 1830 to 1945 — it tended to bring extraordinarily severe upheaval, violence, and death tolls. That said, this is a field that needs much more research; there are far too many interesting open questions right now.

Q: In your book, you repeatedly criticize traditionalist scholars for blaming China's stagnation on deep-seated cultural and institutional traits, yet you also say we shouldn't dismiss the cultural explanations traditional scholars favor, especially once science enters the picture — you write that "we need much more comparative work on these questions, and scholars of East Asian history have made some fascinating advances here." Since most Chinese readers aren't familiar with this work, could you introduce a few of the more interesting studies?

A: There are too many great works to cover them all, but my favorite work of Asian history is Victor Lieberman's astonishing two-volume masterpiece, Strange Parallels. Lieberman began his career as a specialist in Burmese history, and he first noticed odd similarities between Burma's history and that of Western European states. After publishing his award-winning first book, he broadened his scope and found that across roughly a thousand years, from 800 to 1800, many regions of Eurasia seemed to follow strikingly similar developmental trajectories.

The number of political units shrank over time, while the ones that survived became more centralized, more stable, more densely populated, and more culturally integrated. At the same time, markets expanded, economies became increasingly commercialized, languages and cultures grew more standardized, and proto-nationalism emerged (Lieberman prefers to call this phenomenon "ethnic politicization"). Historians long assumed these were processes unique to the European experience, but in fact they appear to have unfolded in lands far removed from one another — France and Burma, for instance, saw remarkably similar developments from roughly 700 to 1800. That seems to suggest we need an entirely new model for Eurasian history.

One of Lieberman's most peculiar findings is this: despite the vast distances involved, and without any sustained contact or interaction, these processes of integration seem to have followed a similar timeline. This is especially clear in political integration — the founding, rise, and collapse of states, and their subsequent reintegration, seems to follow a schedule coordinated by some invisible force. Even the transitional periods — when a central government collapses, integrating trends are temporarily overtaken by centrifugal ones, and political units and sub-national groupings multiply at the expense of the center — follow a similar timetable. What's more, these transitional periods have gotten shorter over time: as the centuries passed, the intervals without centralized power kept shrinking. By the 18th century, power vacuums lasted one or two orders of magnitude shorter than they had 800 years earlier.

Strange Parallels examines these "strange parallels" across Eurasian history through a series of case studies, including the three core polities of mainland Southeast Asia (Burma, Siam, and Vietnam), along with France, Russia, South Asia, China, and Japan. It's a stunning book, and it has inspired many people working in global history — a field that's developing rapidly and bringing entirely new ways of understanding human history.

Q: You've proposed a military model to explain China's cyclical rises and falls. You believe China today is in a "Song dynasty Warring States era" — a time when war isn't as frequent as in the true Warring States period, but the Song coexisted with its neighbors under lasting tension, locked into geopolitical rivalry for the long haul. Why do you say that? Could you analyze China's current geopolitical situation — is it likely to use force?

A: I'm not sure how one would even measure geopolitical tension or the perception of threat. Counting the number of wars over a given period sounds simple enough (though it's probably much harder than people initially assume), but how do you measure the perception of "threat"? There's no doubt the world today holds considerable tension, especially in the South China Sea and the western Pacific. Some scholars argue that war between the US and China is essentially inevitable — the so-called "Thucydides Trap" — but I don't believe that, and I hope it isn't true, because a war in East Asia would devastate not just China and the US, but people everywhere. In any case, China and its surrounding region clearly feel tension, and that has driven an arms buildup. What's frightening is that when people feel threatened, they rally around their leaders. And if leaders themselves feel their perceived enemy is threatening them, they too become more likely to threaten military retaliation. The problem is that people often make threats without any real intention behind them — but those threats trigger retaliation, which triggers further retaliation, and so on. Once that cycle of retaliation starts, it's very hard to stop. I hope leaders on both sides act wisely.

Q: You've argued that "science" clearly influenced the military great divergence. Besides "science," another word modern Chinese readers are very familiar with is "democracy." What do you think democracy's role was in the military great divergence?

A: Honestly, I don't think there's much connection between democracy and the military great divergence. In the 18th century, the states rapidly expanding their military effectiveness weren't democracies, yet military innovation grew very quickly all the same. I think military innovation has little to do with any particular form of government, and much more to do with the geopolitical environment. Greater geopolitical tension produces greater military innovation. China didn't fall behind because it lacked democracy, and Britain didn't get ahead because it had it. There may be some connection between democracy and economic growth, but that question remains unresolved. That said, I should add that I'm strongly in favor of democracy — I think it's good in its own right, and that people ought to have the right to choose their own leaders.

Modernization is a process of cross-cultural borrowing and adaptation

Q: In How Taiwan Became Chinese, you wrote: "I strongly endorse the revisionist model, and I believe the most important factor behind European expansion wasn't technological capability, but political will." Twelve years on, do you still hold that view?

A: I do — I think it's still fundamentally true. I do believe that in East Asia (and elsewhere), periods of more and larger wars looked very different from periods of longer peace. My research suggests that during wartime, East Asian states tended to support overseas conquest and promote overseas trade; but once they achieved internal unity and the East Asian international system stabilized, states tended to suppress overseas commerce and adventurism instead.

Q: In Lost Colony, you wrote: "Throughout my academic career, I've often felt as if I were walking a tightrope, trying to balance between Eurocentrism and an overcorrected Asia-centrism. Whenever I start to feel unsteady, I've found the best remedy is to turn to the primary sources for help." Where are you on that tightrope now, and how do you keep your balance?

A: I think the tightrope has gotten wider, and more and more people are walking it. Over the past decade, we've learned a great deal about comparative history, and the debate sparked by revisionist works like Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence has been genuinely productive. It's still too early to say a new consensus has formed, but one thing does seem clear: culture — and I believe science in particular — is now playing a larger role even among the earliest revisionist global historians. Strict materialist explanations still matter, but idealist factors are now taken seriously too.

Q: You've said: "The history of modernization isn't really a history of European domination — it's a process in which cultural phenomena spread at an ever-accelerating pace. What truly defines modernization is the unprecedented movement of people, goods, and ideas." Could you say more about how you understand modernization? Is modernization the same thing as globalization?

A: I do think modernization is a process of cross-cultural borrowing and adaptation, and I believe it stretches back much further than most people assume. For example, I think the early emergence of gunpowder weapons during China's long Song dynasty — what I call the "Song dynasty Warring States era" — was itself an aspect of deep modernization. At the time, the Liao, Jin, Western Xia, Mongol, and Song states (both Northern and Southern Song) were competing with, borrowing from, and adapting to one another constantly. Gunpowder weapons emerged as effective military technology during this period and into the following Yuan dynasty. Partly through the Mongol conquests, these weapons spread across the world and took root in Europe, becoming a key part of Europe's own early modernization. Amid Europe's intensely competitive states, guns were refined further, then re-exported back to other parts of the world, including China, where they saw heavy use in the late Ming and early Qing. To me, the later phase of modernization — the 19th and 20th centuries — is simply a variant of this much deeper process of cross-cultural borrowing, so I believe globalization and modernization are two sides of the same coin.

Q: Related to this — many people today worry that globalization has deepened inequality worldwide, and brought on problems like financial crises and migration crises. As a historian, how do you view the problems globalization has created?

A: That's an important point. Globalization brings many benefits, but it isn't inherently good. As citizens, we have to do what we can to mitigate its worst effects.

I feel like I have one foot in Chinese history and one in European history

Q: You started out studying science, then switched to anthropology, and finally settled on history. Why the shift? It seems you were influenced by Long Sheng Yu and Malachi Hacohen?

A: My path to history was strange and long. When I started college, I assumed I'd major in science — biology or neurophysiology. But in the summer after my freshman year, I worked in a science lab, where I met someone who changed my life: Long Sheng Yu. I've since lost touch with him, so I don't know what he's up to now, but he was a wonderful person — kind and extremely intelligent. He told me about the Cultural Revolution and introduced me to his family. The lab was full of people from all over the world, but I found him the smartest, kindest, and most inspiring of all.

In any case, that's how I got interested in Chinese. At first I thought I was just learning the language to communicate with my scientist colleagues. I later spent a semester studying in Taipei, and that experience changed me. By the time I returned to the US, I knew I wasn't going to become a scientist — I wanted to study culture and society. I declared anthropology as my major mostly because I wasn't sure what else to study, but in my last two years of college I took two wonderful history courses with Malachi Hacohen (now at Duke University), and that's what convinced me to study history instead. So when I went to graduate school, I studied history, not anthropology.

Gradually I decided to make Chinese history one of my areas of research, though I don't consider myself a standard sinologist — I see myself as part of the newer field of global history. Global history tries to move beyond the individual cultures of particular societies and states, aiming instead to study humanity and human history as a whole, with an emphasis on connections and comparison. So I feel like I have one foot in Chinese history and one in European history. It's a fascinating field, because there's still so much left to explore.

Q: Where does your Chinese name, Ouyang Tai, come from? Is there a story behind it?

A: My Chinese name was given to me by my first Chinese teacher, back when I took my very first Chinese class at UC Berkeley. I liked that it was a two-syllable surname — "Ouyang" stood out compared to my classmates' surnames, so I kept it.

Q: Your writing is a real pleasure to read — very much like your advisor Jonathan Spence's. Do you have any thoughts on writing you could share?

A: Good writing is a crucial part of a historian's craft, but it's not something we're taught in graduate school. There, our academic training focuses on research — how to use sources and research methods. And yet, in truth, many of the greatest historians have also been great writers. My advisor, Jonathan Spence, is considered one of the great historical writers of our time. When people asked him how to write well, his advice was to read great literature. I've found that to be genuinely important. I follow my grandmother's advice — "read the Russians" — while also trying to stay enthusiastic about reading everything else.

I think the hardest part of writing is learning to be yourself. That sounds easy, but it's actually extraordinarily difficult. It means knowing who you are and how you want to engage with the world you live in — questions that are genuinely hard, and never fully resolved. In truth, at bottom, writing is fairly simple: you decide what you want to say, and you say it, and see whether it works. If it doesn't, the best fix is usually to cut whatever isn't working. (One historian, who also happens to be a very good writer, once told me: good writing is just cutting everything that's bad.) But you do have to make some hard decisions, and the hardest one is what order to tell things in — when do you reveal what to the reader? What has to come up front, and what can wait? A good writer thinks very carefully about the reader, and about how to make their journey through the text as pleasant and clear as possible.

Q: What's your next book, and what questions will it explore?

A: My current project focuses on a little-studied episode: the Dutch embassy to China in 1795, the 60th year of the Qianlong reign. Scholars have long framed Sino-European relations as a story of cultural clash — the standard narrative holds that Chinese and Europeans held opposing views on how states should interact, and that this led to the brutal wars of the 19th and 20th centuries. But that narrative is built almost entirely on the British experience, and Britain's diplomatic failures have dominated the story. I hope to challenge that narrative by focusing on what I consider the most important non-British European embassy to China in the 18th century — the understudied Dutch mission of 1794–95. It's full of remarkable figures and fascinating encounters. I'm taking a microhistorical approach, using individual human experience to illuminate larger themes. It's closer to Jonathan Spence's style than any of my earlier work.

The coming crises will affect all of humanity — and climate change worries me most

Q: Over the years, which books have shaped your thinking the most?

A: Victor Lieberman's book, which I mentioned earlier, may have influenced me the most, along with Geoffrey Parker's masterpiece, The Military Revolution. And, of course, the Russian novels have had a big influence on me too.

Q: Besides history books, what else do you like to read?

A: Ha! The Russians! I love Leo Tolstoy deeply, especially Anna Karenina. I'm also a big fan of Bill Bryson — he makes me laugh out loud. Hunter S. Thompson's intensely personal, cynical style has influenced me too. Right now I'm a bit obsessed with Marcel Proust.

Q: In December 2016, you wrote an essay, "Dangerous Waters: China, the USA and the Western Pacific," in which you said: "The long-term future is clear: China will strengthen its grip on the western Pacific. But it's hard to know how much this adjustment will vary — will it be wise, or will it be violent? Unfortunately, the possibility of a dangerous miscalculation seems higher today than ever before, at least on the American side." More than two years on, the situation has shifted somewhat. How do you feel about it now — are you still worried?

A: I'm still worried, but I hope dialogue wins out. What worries me isn't that Americans or Chinese would deliberately decide to go to war — most people on both sides are far too sensible for that. What worries me is that some mistake could push these countries toward war — a clash in the South China Sea, say, where a communication error lets the fire spread. Many wars, in fact, aren't the result of a deliberate decision to go to war at all — they arise from mistakes, compounded by heated rhetoric, and end in hostilities whether anyone wanted that or not. Once a cycle of retaliation begins, it's very hard to turn back.

Q: You teach a course on modern China, and I noticed that the final section of the syllabus is titled "What's Next for China?" What are your own thoughts on that question?

A: China is in its strongest position since the Qing dynasty, though economic growth appears to be slowing, and there are signs the Chinese economy may be headed for a major adjustment. Even so, China remains stable and prosperous today, and is better equipped than any other major power to handle the disasters the 21st century has in store. The crises ahead will affect all of humanity, and the one that worries me most is climate change. China will have to adapt quickly to a rapidly changing world, especially by the middle of this century, when the effects of climate change begin to accelerate: droughts, floods, massive storms, wildfires, rising sea levels. These could trigger severe geopolitical instability — states could collapse, wars could break out, and huge numbers of migrants could go searching for safety and refuge. Interestingly, during the two previous major global climate crises — in the 14th and 17th centuries — the Chinese government collapsed, and war and famine killed millions. This time, though, my guess is that China will stay relatively stable while other countries collapse instead. Maybe that will happen — and I'm afraid that may include the United States. But what would that mean for China, and for the rest of the world? That's hard to say.

Cover image: Destroying Chinese War Junks, by E. Duncan, 1843, depicting the First Opium War. Source: Wikipedia. Banner image: a Ming-dynasty rocket-launching cart. Source: CITIC Press.