‘니담의 질문’에 대한 비판적 검토 -중국의 관료제를 중심으로-

Abstract

In relation to ‘Needham's Why not?’ question, the purpose of this paper is to reexamine the "bureaucracy" that many previous studies have identified as the main cause of the stagnation of modern China from a medium- to long-term perspective. I believe that the 'bureaucracy' is a consequentialist judgment or a partial analysis of the situation in the short term. This study analyzes the characteristics of bureaucracy and traditional China from a mid- to long-term perspective, and illustrates the characteristics of China's unified, great, and imperial systems as the background for China's adoption of bureaucracy, as well as the long-term life cycle of China's technological civilization. Based on this, the problem of Needham's question is not limited to the modern era, but is examined from a medium- to long-term perspective from the period from AD to modern times. The results show that China, which has pursued and maintained a unified and great power system for more than 2,000 years, chose a bureaucracy and an emperor's autocracy that were necessary for the continuous and stable governance of its vast country, making it the world's leading technological civilization before the 18th century. However, since China is a region with a strong central power, it was difficult for modern science to occur before Europe in modern times because external territorial expansion, colonization, diversity pursuit, and information search for foreign civilizations were lower than in Europe.