Why have East Asians not dominated?

Why have Asians not dominated?

Why have Asians not dominated human cultural evolution? How can it be that the racial
group which has the highest average IQ is not that which has reached, to date, the
greatest cultural achievement, wealth and power?

Before I answer that question, let me debunk some of the Western myths about China so
that we start from the proper historical and cultural place when assessing Asian
achievement and development. (The Asian population is of course more than China, but
China by population represents most Asians and Asians at their most culturally advanced
throughout history until perhaps the last century, since when Japan has arguably taken the
lead).

Insofar as people in the West think about China’s place in history – and most do not think
about it at all – they normally believe that China has long been a unified state sharing a
single culture and a single language with a continuous history stretching back thousands
of years (thus making it unique) and that it was always culturally and technologically in
advance of the West until relatively recently, the “relatively recently” being anything from
1500 to as late as 1800 AD depending on which authority you choose to follow. Joseph
Needham in his monumental Science and Civilisation in China is the prime example of
someone propagating this myth.

The reality is that the history of China has been as politically messy and fractured as that
of Europe, arguably more so because their territory is larger and their population
throughout history has been substantially greater than that of Europe. The country was not
even nominally unified until the third century BC – under the short lived Chhin dynasty
(221-207 BC) and has spent more than half of the time since being split between
competing dynasties, for example, the Northern and Southern Sung 960-1126, times of
general warlordism (5/6th centuries AD) or subject to foreign invaders such as the
Mongols (1279-1368) and the Manchu (1644-1912). Moreover, even at times of supposed
unification the actual amount of control exercised by Emperors was necessarily small
compared with that achieved by the modern industrialised state because the means to
govern vast territories and large populations was minute in the past compared with our
own day. China is also so far from being a single racial/ethnic entity that today it contains
within its borders approximately 100 million people who are in modern Western terms
ethnic minorities.

As for the supposed cultural unity, the spoken language is very far from being a single
tongue understood throughout China. The division between Cantonese and Mandarin
Chinese is reasonably well known in the West, but the fracturing of Chinese goes far
beyond that. For example, the erstwhile Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping spoke with such a
heavy accent and dialect that his daughter had to translate for him when he spoke in
public. Nor is the written language a single language similarly understood by all literate
Chinese – different characters are used in different parts of the country and the same
character may have different nuances depending on the origins of the reader.

In short, it makes no more sense to speak of China as a continuous state or single

civilisation than it does to speak of Europe as a continuous state or single civilisation.
Nor is it true that there is a special antiquity to Chinese civilisation. In matters such as
writing and the use of metals, the Chinese were at best no earlier than the civilisations of
the Middle East and Mediterranean, and arguably behind them, especially in writing.

The claim that the Chinese were throughout history more culturally advanced than Europe
until fairly recently is especially weak. It is only necessary to reflect on the archaeological
and historical evidence of the cultural achievements of the Egyptians, those in the Fertile
Crescent (Assyria, Babylon), the Cretans, Mycenaeans and the immense achievements of
ancient Greece and Rome to realise that the China of antiquity was not superior in terms
of their physical control of the world. To take one striking example, few Chinese buildings
pre-dating the Ming era (1368-1644) are extant; most buildings, including those of the
great, before that date being of timber. Compare that with the great stone buildings of the
European and Mediterranean ancient world, the magnificent castles, abbeys, cathedrals
and churches of the European mediaeval world and the amazing architectural diversity of
the European modern period.

Of course, it is very easy to cherry pick particular material accomplishments at particular

times and places, but fail to place them in their general historical context by posing
questions such was an invention followed through and did it become generally used? Such
a failure gives a wholly unbalanced picture of the relative merits of cultures. It is true that
before the modern period (say 1500 AD)the Chinese can be shown to have had certain
inventions before Europe but the opposite also applies, for example, the Chinese had the
compass before Europe, but Europe boast priority with the Archimedean screw.

Even where China produced an invention before Europe and then Europe introduced it at
a later date, it does not follow that Europe copied that invention from China or the
experience of using the invention was the same in Europe as in China. The classic
example of this is printing with moveable type. China and Korea had moveable type many
centuries before Gutenberg printed his great Bible in the 15th century, but there is no
evidence that Gutenberg was influenced in any way by the far Eastern example. Discrete
invention of the same thing or process in different cultures is common. Not only that,
whereas moveable type printing never gained widespread use in China it very rapidly
became the norm in Europe, most probably because written European languages
are based on an alphabetical system with a few characters while written Chinese is an
ideographic language with thousands of ideograms, each of which requires a single block
of type. Since 1700 at the latest, European technology has utterly dwarfed the
achievements of the Chinese.

There is of course far more to civilisation than its material consequences. The intellectual
and social science, philosophy, art, political structure and so on. Here China also falls well
short of Europe.

China never managed to develop anything worthy of the name of science. Throughout
their history the Chinese have been very inventive when it comes to producing artefacts
and practical solutions to particular problems but have displayed a remarkable lack of
interest in developing theory from those practical solutions to provide general explanations
of the world.

It is also noteworthy that although the Chinese produced many important inventions such
as gunpowder, they commonly failed to exploit them either at all or to develop them
substantially. When Europeans began to make regular contact with China in the
seventeenth century the guns of the Europeans were much superior to those of the
Chinese despite the latter having invented gunpowder. Looking at the frequent failures to
develop inventions, the suspicion arises that often an invention was produced to amuse or
serve the interests of a powerful person rather than with the idea of making it a commercial
proposition or from a simple interest in the challenge of making it and subsequently
understanding how it could be improved. Lord McCartney, who headed the first official
British diplomatic mission to China in 1793/4 noted “Most of the things the Chinese know
they seem to have invented themselves, to have applied them solely to the purpose
wanted, and to never have thought of improving or extending them further” (A Journal of
the embassy to China (Folio Society), while Adam Smith commented in the latter half of
the 18th century that “China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most
fertile, best cultivated, most industrious and most populous countries in the world. It
seems, however, to have long been stationary. Marco Polo, who visited it more than five
hundred years ago, describes its cultivation, industry and populousness , almost in the
same terms in which they are described by travellers in the present times”. (The Wealth of
Nations Penguin edition p 174.)

Philosophy as we would understand it in the West, that is, analytical thought examining the
nature of reality with, in theory at least, an absence of ideological baggage clouding the
issue, is virtually missing from Chinese history. Traditional Chinese philosophy never
divorced itself entirely from religion and was predominantly concerned with how society
should be ordered. Its primary purpose was social control. It is more a series of maxims
than an exercise in philosophical enquiry. The let-everything-be-challenged method found
intermittently in Western philosophy from at least the sixth century BC onwards appears
foreign to the Chinese mind. Interestingly, they were great compilers of what we would call
encyclopaedias. They delighted in recording what was already known or thought, rather
than investigating what was not known or might be thought.

A similar resistance to change can be seen in Chinese art and fashion. Look at
contemporary depictions of Chinese and the dress of a Chinese in 1000 AD is much the
same as the dress of a Chinese in 1800. Chinese art shows a similar stability over the
same period, being for the most part heavily constrained by artistic conventions. Where
there is a deviation from such academic artistic discipline it is mainly found in periods
where foreign invaders gained power, most noticeably under the Mongol emperors who
imported craftsmen and artists from here, there and everywhere. Looking at Chinese
fashions and art over time is similar to viewing Egyptian artefacts which show a
remarkable stability over several thousand years. This is the direct antithesis of the
general European cultural experience which consistently shows change in fashion and art.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the Chinese is their political and social development.
Politically, the Chinese never really moved beyond the rather primitive state of believing in
an absolute ruler who was a god or a man directly in touch with gods and warlordism.
There were attempts to introduce more rational and less absolute forms of government,
but these were invariably short lived. Ideologies such as Confucianism attempted to lay
down moral rules for rulers, but that was about the limit of any sustained attempt to
restrain emperors with anything short of violence. Ideas of constitutions restricting what
government may do, representative government or direct democracy were simply alien to
Chinese society.
State administration is often lauded as an area of great Chinese superiority, with the
Mandarin system put forward as evidence of this, appointment by examination having
begun as early as the 7th century AD. But was it really superior to that of the Roman
Empire, which pre-dated it by centuries, or more impressive than that of the Catholic
Church at the height of its power? Arguably, the Mandarin system was primarily an
expression of the general trait of Chinese society to control and categorise rather than a
system designed to meet a particular need, as opposed to the administrations of Europe
which developed to serve needs such as the management of money.

Below formal government it is difficult to discern in Chinese history anything which could
be described as civil society, those organisations and relationships which perform a civic
social function but which are not part of the formal political structure, for example,
charities, clubs, the co-operative movement and trade unions. Chinese life has traditionally
revolved around the family – including a strong dose of ancestor worship – with any social
organisation beyond that being the province of those in authority. There is nothing which
resembles the corporate charitable concern for the poor found within the Catholic Church
let alone a formal legal obligation such as the English Poor Law of 1601.

A society which leaves the vast majority of a society in abject penury and small elite with
immense wealth is a primitive form of social organisation. It is a form known since the
beginning of history unlike the settled societies which have spread wealth more evenly,
which are all of more recent growth. Left to its own devices Chinese society never went
beyond the great disparity of wealth state. When Europeans began to gain first hand
experience of China from the seventeenth century onwards a common observation was
the tremendous disparity of wealth. Here is Adam Smith again: “The poverty of the lower
ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe” (The
Wealth of Nations p174), but “the rich, having a superabundance of food to dispose of
beyond what they can themselves consume, have the means of purchasing the labour of
other people. The retinue of a grandee in China or Indostan accordingly is, by all accounts,
much more numerous and splendid than the richest subjects in Europe” (The Wealth of
Nations p310).

This brief de-bunking of the myth of Chinese cultural superiority carries within it
suggestions of why Asians have not achieved cultural supremacy, despite their superior IQ
distribution. IQ is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for cultural advance. What is
missing from the Asian mentality to have hindered their advance? Could it simply be that a
combination of sufficiently propitious circumstances have never arisen to drive them
beyond a certain point, that Europe surged ahead simply by luck rather than any innate
difference? This would seem to be most unlikely because of the length of time during
which China has been a sophisticated society with substantial technological and
organisational achievements.

Why did China never make the jump from by-guess-and-by-God technology to true
science? Why did China show so little interest in analytical philosophy? Why did China
never develop a political system more sophisticated than that of the god-Emperor when
Europeans ran through just about every form of political organisations there is in the past
2,500 years, most of them before the birth of Christ? Why was the idea of political
participation, so widespread in Europe in both the ancient and the late mediaeval world,
absent in China? Why was there an absence of civil society in China? These differences
would seem to be more than culturally determined, to be the cultural expressions of innate
tendencies in behaviour.

IQ is far from being the only measurable innate difference between races (insofar as IQ is
innate). J Philippe Ruston in Race, Evolution and Behaviour lists several dozen race-
dependent variables under the headings of Brain size, Intelligence, Maturation rate,
Personality, Social organisation and Reproductive effort. Under Personality are listed the
following: activity level, aggressiveness, cautiousness, dominance, impulsivity, self-
concept, sociability. On all of these except cautiousness blacks score higher than whites
who in turn score higher than Asians. With cautiousness the position is reversed with
blacks scoring lower than whites who score lower than Asians. It is not unreasonable to
interpret these differences as the Asian personality being less enquiring or adventurous
than that of whites, less sociable and more submissive.

The ascending ranking of black-white-Asian is steady throughout almost all the variables
described by Ruston – the odd men out are administrative efficiency and cultural
achievement which Rushton ranks as simply “higher” for both whites and Asians than for
blacks. Arguably, those are the two variables most open to subjectivity and, judged by the
entire sweep of human history; it would seem to be stretching a point to put whites and
Asians on the same level in these two areas. As previously mentioned whites managed an
industrial revolution from scratch, created modern science, developed analytical
philosophy and very early on evolved many varied forms of political life, including direct
democracy. Before European examples were put before those, Asians never advanced
much beyond by-guess-and-by-God technology, had nothing moderns would describe as
science, possessed no analytical philosophy and did not develop a political system more
sophisticated than that of the absolute monarch.

When they are a minority in high IQ societies Asians tend to fill technical posts – which
favour higher IQs – or engage in business, much of which is conducted within their own
racial group. They make surprisingly little headway in areas which require the highest level
“people skills”, such as formal politics or interest groups. Whether they as a minority live in
high or low IQ societies Asians display an extremely strong tendency to keep within their
own communities, but unlike many other minority groups they generally do not engage in
much overt antisocial behaviour – their crime tends to be directed at other members of the
racial group – and display little overt ethnic aggression such as portraying themselves as
victims of racism or by demanding racially based privileges for their group. This behaviour
also fits the Asian personality template described above.

There is a further consideration. IQ is not of a piece. Although Asian IQ is higher than

white IQ overall, it is not higher in all respects. Asians score substantially higher than
whites on non-verbal tests but are significantly inferior to whites on verbal tests. They
score particularly strongly on spatial tests. These differences in the quality of racial IQs fit
neatly into the differences listed by Ruston and to work such as Freedman’s. The inferior
verbal ability of Asians fits with the idea of reduced sociability. The greater aptitude on
non-verbal tests could be plausibly be interpreted as meaning that the Asian mind is
adapted to solving what I would call bounded problems, that is, problems which have
objective boundaries such as how do we build this canal? rather than problems without
such boundaries such as what is the good? and what is art?
The limitations of the Chinese intellect can be seen in their adherence to an ideographic
form of writing. If one set a genius and a dullard the task of developing a system of writing,
the genius would come up with an alphabetical system and the dullard some form of
pictorial representation. The genius would produce the alphabetical system because he
would see beyond the obvious and immediate and eschew the literal representation of a
thing or idea, while the dullard would see only the obvious and immediate way of
representing a thing or idea. The genius would go for the less obvious for he would see
that it was both more economical and powerful a means of representation because it
required only a small number of signs to express infinity of things and ideas. The dullard
would merely see a need to keep on adding to the number of signs.

Of course the Chinese went far beyond crude pictograms which each literally depicted
something, but by retaining a pictorial system in which each thing or idea had to be
represented by a particular sign or group of signs they retained the problems associated
with a non-alphabetical system, namely its lack of economy and flexibility, there being
several thousand characters associated with written Chinese. The sheer number of
characters makes the learning of written Chinese a monumental task, especially for those
learning the written language as an adult. Many, probably the large majority, of foreigners
who speak Chinese cannot read and/or write it. Nor is this purely a non-Asian trait. When
the Chinese communists attempted to create a literate China in the 1950s they found that
many pupils simply were not up to the task – there was a spate of suicides at the time
amongst those being forced to learn to read and write Chinese. The Chinese met this
difficulty by introducing a system of 1,000 simplified characters and a 25 letter Roman
alphabet was introduced into Chinese primary schools in 1957 to help with pronunciation.

Why did the major representatives of the group with the highest IQ not only start down the
dullard’s path with a written language but continues on that path today despite its very
obvious disadvantages? Perhaps the answer lies in their IQ and other psychometrically
measurable traits. If Asians have minds which are orientated toward the visual, perhaps it
is natural to prefer a pictorial system of writing. Nonetheless it is strange that such an
obviously cumbersome system should have been retained for so long by the Chinese – the
racially similar Koreans adopted an alphabetical system of writing in the 15th Century. Of
course, literacy in China was very restricted and it may have been retained simply
because it was the system known to the elite (who were its prime users) and cultural
inertia became the controlling force. It also had the advantage for the elite of naturally
restricting literacy, because of the considerable mental demands the written language
makes on the individual when they are learning it. However, such an advantage in the past
is a positive disadvantage today and has been since the Chinese first had to compete with
modern advanced societies.

We have the experience of more than a century of industrialisation and Westernisation in

Japan and several generations of such behaviour in South Korea and Taiwan. China has
gone down the industrialising road intermittently for over a century and full-bloodedly for
the past quarter century. These societies have had the example of the white experience of
industrialisation, science and general cultural heritage before them. Despite this and
whatever their economic success, and that is patchy vide Japan‘s post-1980s stagnation
and the oceanic gulf between coastal city China and the vast Chinese interior, compared
with white societies there has been in Asian societies since their opening up to the West
remarkably little evidence of fundamental scientific discovery or technological innovation
which goes beyond the adaptation of what has been invented or discovered elsewhere.
Nor, despite the very large numbers of Asians living in advanced white majority societies,
can one find front-rank scientists or technologists in proportion to their proportion to the
population, a surprising fact when Asian academic achievement and business involvement
is on average higher than that of whites (anyone who doubts Asian under-representation in
this area should try identifying Asians living in white majority societies who fit the
description of front-rank scientists and technologists).

The willingness to imitate white societies extends to culture. The Japanese in particular
are famous for aping both high and low white culture, from Beethoven to the Beatles.
Asian Harry Potter fans are amongst the most frenzied in the world. The architecture of
whites is copied enthusiastically and extensively and is accompanied by a widespread
willingness to destroy indigenous architecture, the white concern for giving a special value
to the old and preserving being weak in Asian majority societies. An equivalent mass
response to Asian culture simply does not exist in white societies – the most that can be
found are periodic outbreaks of the use of oriental art and motifs by white designers. This
willingness to imitate might seem odd in view of the traditionally static cultural nature of
Asian societies. It might be ascribed to the feelings of inferiority which Asian societies felt
when faced with the power of industrialised societies and at least in China’s case, a sense
of humiliation because of past white quasi-colonial involvement in China. If this explanation
is believed Asians copy white behaviour because they are proving to themselves that they
are not inferior to white society by emulating what white societies have achieved.
However, that shows a strange lack of ambition. Why not aspire to do something beyond
what whites have done? (Many Chinese would say they are industrialising and
modernising generally now simply because they were held back in the past by white
control and manipulation of their societies, but difficult that is to fit with the facts that
foreign influence over China effectively ended in 1949 and their general failure to advance
before Western meddling began in the 19th century).

An alternative explanation is that Asians imitate so readily because it is natural for them to
do so because their general personality traits lead them to do it. Or rather, it is natural for
them to imitate in certain aspects of life but not others. Where Asians do not show such an
appetite for imitation is in social structures. The Japanese and South Koreans may have
formally adopted systems of elective government from white examples, but within these
the traditional social relations remain – practices are accepted which in the West would be
considered straight forward bribery of voters or undue influence over them, for example
“clan” loyalties. Or take the rule of law. In Japan, supposedly the most Westernised of
Asian societies, hardly anyone who is brought to trial for a criminal offence is acquitted, a
nonsense for any meaningful system of justice As for China, uniquely amongst Communist
countries, the Communist elite have managed to retain control whilst allowing capitalism
but eschewing democratisation or the idea of the law being above manipulation by the
state.

Why do Asians imitate in some ways but not others? I suspect that the answer rests on
what is the elite view of society. Traditionally, the Chinese elite were always contemptuous
of other peoples, routinely treating them as subordinate peoples who owed tribute to the
Emperor (Lord Macartney‘s. gifts to the Emperor in 1794 were described as tribute).
Macartney, who visited China before white interference in the country, constantly referred
to the fact that the Chinese had what we would now describe as a monstrous superiority
complex and that when presented with products of the early Industrial Revolution, the
equivalent of which were unknown in China, they frequently refused to show any overt
interest in them. Macartney left China having failed to gain what he had been charged with
obtaining, namely, the right of British merchants to trade in China.
A similar refusal to engage with white societies can be found in Japan, which after some
experience of white merchants and priests took the dramatic step of sealing off Japan from
all but the most limited European contact for three centuries until the American
Commodore Perry forced trade with the white world upon them in 1853.

Once Japan had engagement with the West forced upon them a new elite ideology
emerged which saw imitation of certain aspects of white society as the way to compete
with those societies. This new elite ideology was accepted by the mass of their population
with astonishing readiness bearing in mind the previous refusal to engage with outsiders
(there was even a proposal in the 1870s for English to replace Japanese as the language
of Japan.) Why did this happen? Most probably because the general personality profile of
Asians makes them unusually susceptible to authority. Imitation of white social
relationships did not occur so readily because such relationships are themselves the
product of innate personality traits. (It is worth bearing in mind that Japan decided to
modernise without being quasi-colonised in the fashion of China.)

In summary, despite their higher average IQ, Asians have probably failed to become the
culturally dominant race because their innate personality traits work against them. They
are too passive, too unquestioning, too lacking in initiative. The shape of their IQ with
higher non-verbal scores and lower verbal scores may be wholly or partially the cause of
these personality traits or, conversely, the shape of the IQ is simply an expression of the
personality traits. Other biological traits such as low testosterone levels may also promote
such behaviour.