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Contrasting Factors in the Modernization of China and Japan, Reviewed
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14269 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1988 |
8,279 Words |
| Author
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Marion J. Levy, Jr.
Marion J. Levy, Jr., is Musgrave Professor of Sociology and
International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Studies, Princeton University. |
This article reviews an essay written over three and a half decades ago. Although the term industrialization was used throughout the essay, the term modernization replaced it in the title. Even then it was clear that if one used the term industrialization one could not get one's readers to think one had in mind anything but industry in the narrow "factory sense." The modernization of agriculture is too important to be ruled out of consideration by the use of the term industrialization, especially if it is to have implications for social development in general and economic development in particular. The essay states seven general hypotheses:
1. It was not differences in the new "Western" forces introduced in China and Japan that accounted for their different experiences in industrialization. It was rather differences in the social structure into which these new forces were introduced.
2. Difference in "nonsocial" factors, such as raw material resources, do not account for the differences. Insofar as they are relevant they would indicate an outcome opposite to that which occurred.
3. Essential for Japan's industrialization was the fact that the basis from which change took place in Japan was such that the transition did not undercut the system of control over deviance or the possibility of highly controlled direction of the members of the society as it did in China.
4. Japan contained a group of individuals who could be easily converted to the planning and administrative roles required by the conversion.
5. There existed a possibility of eliminating without internal breakdown the influence of those individuals not relatively well adapted to make the changes required by the conversion.
6. The differing systems of control over individuals in China and Japan made for much of the differences in their respective experiences with industrialization.
7. What on the surface in the early nineteenth century might have seemed like a comparatively small difference in the roles of the merchants in the two societies was also crucial for the different experiences of the two countries. This difference between the merchants was directly related to the general and specific characteristics of Japanese
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