Salmoneus wrote:
I've got two suggestions.
First, there's more randomnity in this than you think. We just don't have enough examples to draw really powerful statistical conclusions. And you're ignoring one: Papua has had agriculture for quite a while now, but has never developed civilisation, even when it was in contact with other civilisations.
I understand what you're saying about multiple data points, but that doesn't have much to do with "randomness." We know why Papua New Guinea never developed cities; if we can just find the clues, and assuming we live in a deterministic universe, then we should be able to figure out why China deviates from the other examples (or why they deviate from China).
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Second, if there are specific factors, I'd suggest that crop yields may be a big one. In Ye Olden Days, China was a wheat-and-millet culture. Wheat and millet are not particularly well-suited to the Chinese climate, which meant that a) overall yields were a fraction of what they were in, say, Greece, and b) nowhere were there yields as high and as concentrated as they were in the Nile Delta, or in Mesopotamia. Less food, and less concentrated food = fewer cities.
Iirc, the big change (adoption of rice, which allowed population densities up to ten times higher than millet) came during the Han Dynasty, so it doesn't entirely explain why they had come good by then. but perhaps there's no mystery there: eventually their low-density crop did yield large populations and urbanisation, it just took a lot longer than higher-density crops did elsewhere.
This is an intriguing idea that I hadn't thought of. Evidence of rice cultivation is quite old in China, and predates the Han dynasty by quite a bit, but some sites, especially in the north, continued to rely on millet for some time. I'll look into this and see if it makes sense as an explanation.
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A bigger objection might be: how sure are you of your pattern that you think China breaks? North America took 5000 years to develop the rudiments of civilisation, and arguably never developed cities. Papua New Guinea has had agriculture for 9000 years - towns developed eventually, but never cities. Central America - more than 5000 years from agriculture to the first known civilisation. Peru took less than 4000 years it now seems - but that first civilisation appears to have been a dead end, with continuous civilisation needing another 2000 years. Egyptian agriculture never produced civilisation - it died out and was later replaced by mesopotamian agriculture. Ethiopian civilisation developed only under contact with other civilisations.
A lot of this will depend on your accepted earliest date of agriculture, cities, and so on. But from agriculture to the first sizable towns took no time at all in the Near East, as their precursors existed from the late Mesolithic, and large cities took only about 4000 years, unless you adopt the 9000 BC mark as the beginnings of agriculture in the Levant, which I find a bit unconvincing from what I've read. Meso-America took a similar length of time, although there the dates of earliest agriculture are far more controversial, ranging from 6000 BC to 3500 BC. Meanwhile in China it takes 6000 years just to get towns, and another half millennium before large cities show up. Of course there is no perfect formula that every regions is expected to follow. But it seems to be that China developed urbanization later than other civilizations (excepting those who never got that far, as you said), and yet still managed to turn out alright in the end. As I mentioned before, the real shocker is that they went ahead and invented bronze, even without civilization. No other society on Earth had large scale bronze production without civilization, unless it was imported. It's almost as if China developed right on schedule, inventing agriculture, bronze metallurgy, silk production, irrigation networks, and so on, and then at the last minute remembered "Oh wait, I'm supposed to have complex states! Quick, where did I put my Shang Dynasty?"
I guess this won't seem as interesting to some as it does to me, but oh well. Thanks for the thoughtful reply either way.