I wonder if there were any Chinese diplomats visiting northern England in the 1800s, and reporting back to the emperor on the conditions they found. If there were, it might have been a reason for the Chinese to sit back on industrial development for a couple of centuries, to see how the experiment panned out. A bit like Zhou Enlai being asked in the 1970s whether the French revolution was a good thing. "Too early ro say".
So much for ideology, but material conditions weren't so great for those people forced off the land into factories by the enclosure acts, and didn't improve much until universal suffrage was pushed through and the worker's Labour party started making political inroads in the early C20th. That century's progress in mechanisation, medecine and life expectancy finally convinced Zhou Enlai's generation that China needed to embrace development and modernisation.
I am not an expert in Chinese history. That said, I was recently skimming through Menzies books on 1421 Admiral He circumnavigation and 1434 Delegation to Venice. Unfortunately, neither event is well documented and so is controversial. The Mandarin 'Deep State' engineered a pull-back from international outreach. I believe this was a reaction to having been conquered and ruled by a Mongol Dynasty. When it ran out of steam in the 1420-30's period, they reasserted control in part by their 'Maritime Ban' which essentially involved China pulling in her horns for several centuries. They also, apparently, destroyed most documentation pertaining to He's voyages and delegations. (Censorship is not a recent innovation!) Therefore I suspect no such embassies happened in the 1800's. There is a famous letter from the Chinese Emperor to Queen Victoria deploring her tacit acceptance of the opium trade, but that letter really should have been addressed to the Grandees in the City of London who had been running Britain's foreign policy (and plundering conquests) for quite some time. Britain's monarch has been mainly ceremonial since they chopped of Charles's head back in the 1600's. If a King or Queen tried to interfere with foreign commercial or military operations they would quickly find themselves either deposed or with head separated from torso as in days of yore!
Things have their own momentum and one big one for sure as been infrastructural improvements from the Industrial Revolution making it relatively easy to enjoy booming population levels which of course is a bonanza for commercial operators of all sorts. It's a virtuous circle except when those same commercial operations are not well run in accordance with basic Laws of Nature, which is what we have seen. The Profit Motive tends to overlook such niceties. In any case, the rural-to-urban dynamic you describe has been a big thing - and still is in China and India I believe.
China talks a good game and is pulling off a miracle, for sure. But how they are really doing, especially once the high growth days are over probably in the next 2-3 decades, remains to be seen. Are they into more than materialist expansion? Time will tell.
I wonder if there were any Chinese diplomats visiting northern England in the 1800s, and reporting back to the emperor on the conditions they found. If there were, it might have been a reason for the Chinese to sit back on industrial development for a couple of centuries, to see how the experiment panned out. A bit like Zhou Enlai being asked in the 1970s whether the French revolution was a good thing. "Too early ro say".
So much for ideology, but material conditions weren't so great for those people forced off the land into factories by the enclosure acts, and didn't improve much until universal suffrage was pushed through and the worker's Labour party started making political inroads in the early C20th. That century's progress in mechanisation, medecine and life expectancy finally convinced Zhou Enlai's generation that China needed to embrace development and modernisation.
I am not an expert in Chinese history. That said, I was recently skimming through Menzies books on 1421 Admiral He circumnavigation and 1434 Delegation to Venice. Unfortunately, neither event is well documented and so is controversial. The Mandarin 'Deep State' engineered a pull-back from international outreach. I believe this was a reaction to having been conquered and ruled by a Mongol Dynasty. When it ran out of steam in the 1420-30's period, they reasserted control in part by their 'Maritime Ban' which essentially involved China pulling in her horns for several centuries. They also, apparently, destroyed most documentation pertaining to He's voyages and delegations. (Censorship is not a recent innovation!) Therefore I suspect no such embassies happened in the 1800's. There is a famous letter from the Chinese Emperor to Queen Victoria deploring her tacit acceptance of the opium trade, but that letter really should have been addressed to the Grandees in the City of London who had been running Britain's foreign policy (and plundering conquests) for quite some time. Britain's monarch has been mainly ceremonial since they chopped of Charles's head back in the 1600's. If a King or Queen tried to interfere with foreign commercial or military operations they would quickly find themselves either deposed or with head separated from torso as in days of yore!
Things have their own momentum and one big one for sure as been infrastructural improvements from the Industrial Revolution making it relatively easy to enjoy booming population levels which of course is a bonanza for commercial operators of all sorts. It's a virtuous circle except when those same commercial operations are not well run in accordance with basic Laws of Nature, which is what we have seen. The Profit Motive tends to overlook such niceties. In any case, the rural-to-urban dynamic you describe has been a big thing - and still is in China and India I believe.
China talks a good game and is pulling off a miracle, for sure. But how they are really doing, especially once the high growth days are over probably in the next 2-3 decades, remains to be seen. Are they into more than materialist expansion? Time will tell.