Introduction

In 1842, British guns and ships defeated the Qing dynasty of China in what has since been known as the Opium War. Given the superiority of Western armament, one might have presumed that the experience would have prompted the Qing government to acquire the new technology which played a significant role in its defeat. Yet, the Qing government only did so after another Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion in the 1860s. Historians blame that delay on the Qing government being in its decline, inept in facing up to the technological challenge. That argument culminated in John King Fairbank’s Western stimulus-China response model and dominated the Modern Chinese History field before it gave way to the skepticism bred by the distrust of “Orientalism”. The contemporary China historian is more likely to seek an explanation for Qing China’s woeful experiences in the hands of foreign powers in the internal socio-economic or political dynamics. Nevertheless, elements of political ideology, sometimes referred to as Confucianism, education, politics, and economy have not yielded an explanation either for Qing China’s technological backwardness or for its tardiness in taking up the new technology coming from the West. This book is driven by an urge to break that impasse. While, like many China historians, I do not accept that the technological imbalance of the mid-nineteenth century between China and the West necessarily reflected backwardness that may be generalized to many other aspects of Chinese culture, I begin from the position that that imbalance is undeniable. China historians, much like some of the Qing dynasty officials they criticize, do not seem to appreciate the fact that the history of technology has to be studied in relation to its techno-scientific settings.