‘The Rise and Fall of the EAST’: China’s ancient successes paint worrying picture of its future

If economist Yasheng Huang is right, the West shouldn’t be too worried about China winning the battle for technology leadership. It’s not that China can’t innovate; it produced the “four great inventions” — gunpowder, paper, printing and the compass — hundreds of years before the West. Rather, as Huang convincingly argues in his new book, “The Rise and Fall of the EAST,” the social and political construct imposed on China since the Sui Dynasty (581-618) has throttled the creativity that is essential to innovation.

The Rise and Fall of the EAST, by Yasheng Huang. 411 pages, YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, Nonfiction.

A professor of global economics and management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and author of magisterial assessments of the Chinese economy, Huang blames the “keju,” the imperial national civil service exam, for this decline. In their effort to govern a large and unruly state, successive Chinese leaders used the exam (E) to promote ideological conformity and obedience to the emperor (an autocrat, A), which promoted stability (S) and inhibited technological innovation (T).

His book makes this case by taking each “letter” (which creates the acronym “EAST”) and first exploring its historical roots in Chinese politics in one chapter and then applying that analysis to contemporary China in the next. The result is a compelling and easily digestible argument. He also draws on extensive databases that he and his colleagues created, mining historical texts as far back as China’s Warring States Period (475-221 B.C.) for lists of inventions — over 10,000 in total.

In Huang’s telling, Chinese innovation flowered in periods of political competition, when political units were small and there was a marketplace of ideas. The project to grow, unify and impose order on China, to promote ideological conformity through a highly competitive exam that bestowed considerable rewards on those who passed, stifled the country’s creativity.

The keju demanded intense memorization and thus laid “claims to the time, effort and cognitive investment of a significant swathe of the male Chinese population,” Huang writes. It allowed the state to monopolize the best human capital and deprived other sectors of access to talent. According to Huang, “(the) keju anchored Chinese autocracy.” Formally abolished at the beginning of the 20th century, its influence continues, not just in its successors — the “gaokao” university entrance exam and the civil service exam — but in the values and work ethic it inculcated.

Huang’s interpretation bodes ill for China’s prospects in the Xi Jinping era. While every member of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) leadership has been committed to retaining the party’s role at the apex of power within the country, there have been differences among individual figures regarding the space for innovation on some matters. Deng Xiaoping promoted openness in the economy and society even as he insisted on maintaining the CCP’s iron grip on politics; his followers adopted that approach as well.

Xi has diverged from that path, pushing for the consolidation of power and uniformity of thought and practice to ensure that his supremacy is unchallenged. Even though there can be — and often is — bloodthirsty competition at the firm level in China, the ceiling for independent thought and action has been lowered, imposing a stultifying uniformity and crushing the country’s innovative potential. As Huang explained last month in a seminar at The University of Tokyo’s Komaba campus, “scientific development and humanistic development go hand in hand.”

If he’s right — and the evidence is compelling — then China will face sustained and perhaps insurmountable headwinds as it struggles to emerge from the COVID lockdown and intensified competition with the West.