Petruchio

14th century Chinese explorer Zheng He's ship compared to Columbus's.

A lot of the responses to this image have used it to argue that China had the technology to explore the world, chose not to, and thereby missed the great age of European expansion through cultural sclerosis or bureaucratic timidity. The argument has the comparative outcome right, but the structural picture it implies is wrong, and the actual story is more interesting than Twitter's little morality play would suggest. Zheng He was a Muslim eunuch admiral of the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty, who between 1405 and 1433 (the original poster say "14th century", which is wrong) led seven enormous diplomatic-tributary expeditions across the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia, India, Arabia, and the East African coast. The voyages involved fleets of over 250 ships and 27,000 personnel, with the largest treasure ships running probably 200 to 250 feet long, several times larger than anything contemporary Europe was building. The purpose wasn't commercial. The voyages were prestige projects designed to enroll foreign rulers in the Ming tribute system, with the Chinese state distributing more wealth in gifts than it received back. They projected the Yongle Emperor's status as the cosmic center of a world order that extended to the African coast, and they were one element in his broader program of grand imperial assertion that included the construction of Beijing as the new capital and the campaigns against the Mongols. After Zheng He's death on his seventh voyage, the program was discontinued. The largest treasure ships were broken up, the shipyards were closed, and the technical knowledge of building vessels at that scale was lost within a generation. The standard explanation for this is that Confucian officials, suspicious of foreign contact and hostile to the eunuchs running the program, persuaded the emperor to abandon it. The actual reasoning, though, was less ideological. The voyages cost enormous sums and did not produce an economic return commensurate with their cost. The empire's strategic threat lay overland on the Mongolian steppe, where naval power was useless, and the post-Yongle state was already running deficits the agricultural tax base could not sustain. The bureaucracy that argued against the voyages was making a budgetary case rather than a cultural one. The Tumu Crisis of 1449, in which the emperor was personally captured by Mongols at a battle the Ming should have won, vindicated the people who had argued that the empire's military attention needed to be on the steppe. The deeper question is why the Ming did not subsequently develop a global navy and colonize the world the way the European states would. The answer is structural rather than cultural. The European maritime expansion was driven by Ottoman closure of land routes to Asia, by the search for precious metals to fund European debt, by Christian missionary imperatives, and above all by competitive pressure among rival European states forced to match each other's overseas capabilities. None of these conditions obtained in the Chinese case. China already had access to the goods Europeans were crossing the oceans for. It had no debt crisis overseas gold could solve. It had no missionary religion. And it had no rival of comparable resources whose maritime expansion would have forced China to respond. For the Ming to have undertaken European-style colonization would have been the strategic equivalent of Rome at its height pivoting to Atlantic exploration. The technology was available but the incentives were not. The framing that China was sclerotic for not colonizing the world treats European maritime imperialism as the default trajectory any healthy civilization would have taken. The reverse framing is at least as defensible: European colonization was the response of small, capital-poor, militarily-pressured peripheral states under specific competitive and ideological conditions, with consequences the responding states themselves often could not predict or control. China's continental imperial form, sustained for two thousand years across multiple dynasties, is the historical norm. European maritime imperialism is the historical anomaly. The Ming made a defensible decision to remain the historical norm.

If you are obese and go to China, they will all stare and mock you since it's revolting everywhere except America. 😒

A useful follow-up case for the religious-licensing framework: Catholics. China has roughly ten to twelve million Catholics, organized for the past sixty years into two parallel structures. The state-licensed body, the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, was founded in 1957, and its bishops were initially selected and ordained without papal approval. The underground Catholic Church, an unlicensed network loyal to Rome, ordained its own bishops with papal approval, sometimes in secret. Its members were periodically arrested and harassed, and the two churches regarded each other with mutual suspicion bordering on (mutual) excommunication. Western observers generally read the situation as straightforward persecution of authentic Catholics by China, which demanded an inauthentic and unacceptable alternative. In 2018, the Vatican and the People's Republic of China signed a provisional agreement that has substantially resolved the dispute. Under the agreement, Chinese bishops are now jointly approved by the Pope and the Chinese government, with each side holding veto power over candidates the other proposes. The result is that the great majority of practicing Chinese Catholics today, including those worshiping in legally recognized Patriotic Association churches, are in canonical communion with Rome under a procedure the Vatican has accepted as an acceptable, if imperfect, compromise. The agreement has been renewed every two years since, most recently in 2024. The structural point worth highlighting is that this is the Chinese state's licensing framework functioning as advertised. The state identified a religion whose internal authority structure ran outside Chinese institutions and refused to register it on those terms. The religion's central authority eventually agreed to a procedural arrangement that satisfied the state's monopoly on legitimate religious organization while preserving the religion's essential theological commitments. The Yellow Turbans, the White Lotus, the Taiping, and Falun Gong were all unauthorized parallel networks that the state suppressed. Catholicism was, from the Chinese state's perspective, a similar** kind of network with the unusual feature of being headquartered abroad, and the eventual accommodation looks different from suppression only because the negotiating partner was the Vatican rather than a fugitive guru. Westerners watching the Vatican-China agreement have often described it as a betrayal of authentic Catholicism by a Pope willing to compromise with a hostile state. Chinese Catholics living under the agreement have generally described it as a workable arrangement that lets them practice their faith openly. ----- **I don't mean similar in any other way except that Catholicism was likewise a religious network in an unacceptable state of 'noncompliance' with regulations until 2018. This is not to say--and I am not doing apologetics here--that it shares any other nontrivial aspects with, for instance, Falun Gong. Nor that it doesn't, either. That is, anything outside the aforementioned institutional concern is quite beside the point of this post.

14th century Chinese explorer Zheng He's ship compared to Columbus's.