The road to inwardness : three essays on intellectual history of China

Abstract

This thesis is composed of three essays that apply empirical methods of economics to the study of Chinese intellectual history. The intended contribution of the thesis is, first, to provide quantitative evidence of the economic and political factors in determining the ideological preferences among intellectual elites, and, second, to try to account for the ideological disparity between China and the West in the context of the Great Divergence.

The first chapter is founded on a self-constructed chapter-level database on the writings of classical Chinese thinkers in the Spring & Autumn and Warring States era. By observing the frequencies of and correlation among six topics --- metaphysics, individual cultivation, political leadership, morality, institutions, and economy --- it offers new interpretations on the classical ideologies of China. It also reveals that external warfare contributed to more discussions on institutions and economy, partially supporting the “war make state” theory.

The second chapter studies the intellectual competition between utilitarianism and moralism within Song Dynasty Confucianism. The empirical finding proves that Utilitarian Confucianism, an ideology that encourages economic rationality in a similar way as Max Weber’s “spirit of capitalism”, was academically more popular in commercially prosperous regions. With various instrumental and heterogeneity analysis, this chapter argues that business entrepreneurship contributed to intellectual innovation in favor of capitalistic development. Yet such causation was impeded by the institutional and spiritual impact of the imperial bureaucracy.

The third chapter is targeted at the paradox that geopolitical challenges in Chinese history often gave rise to ideologies that were economically and institutionally regressive, which was contrary to the “divided Europe” theory. With a Hotelling model and several lines of empirical evidence, I argue that the combination of shocks and state capacity encouraged the state to adopt instrumental rationality, yet Confucianists, on the other hand, would be crowded into conservative moralism to maintain intellectual distinctiveness. This persistent ideological rebellion by the Confucian literati against the imperial state could thus account for the ideological inwardness of China.