The Written Word and the Development of the State in China and Europe

Yuhua Wang, Professor
Department of Government
Harvard University

State formation depends not only on demand-side factors, such as military competition, but also, fundamentally, on the supply of ideas and techniques in a society. We argue that these ideas can sometimes come from unexpected quarters before then being adopted by those who rule. Using prefecture level data for China during the Tang and Song dynasties, we show how woodblock printing techniques first developed by Buddhists in competition with Taoists and Confucians provided for a technology that could give a broad number of people access to the written word. This was critical for the development and expansion of the Imperial Examination system, which aided in constructing a state bureaucracy. In Medieval Western Europe, by contrast, the religious monopoly held by the Catholic Church gave it little incentive to develop new techniques to broaden access to the written word. This then helped contribute to the political divergence between China and Western Europe, as European rulers seeking to construct a bureaucracy had a more limited pool of talent to draw upon. The broader lesson here is that in order to better understand state formation, we may need to consider the incentives for social actors outside the state itself to develop new techniques.

Yuhua Wang is Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is the author of Tying the Autocrat’s Hands: The Rise of the Rule of Law in China (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development (Princeton University Press, 2022). His articles have appeared in American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Comparative Politics. His 2022 book won the Luebbert Best Book Award in Comparative Politics from the American Political Science Association. Yuhua received his B.A. from Peking University and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.