for possibly significant parallels to their present conditions. They would do well to look for these parallels in the specific experiences of the West or other Asian lands at comparable technological levels and not indiscriminately in a voluminous grab bag of universal historical experience.
If we were to forget Western history long enough to take a steady look at Asian historical experience without our usual preconceptions, we might perhaps emerge with some other new concepts which would not only be useful in interpreting various aspects of Asian history but might also throw new light on the Occident.
No idea is more firmly established in the modern West than the concept of progress; but in China the chief historical theory has been that of simple cyclical repetition without over-all motion. No one, no matter how cynical he may be about man’s intellectual and spiritual progress, would deny the usefulness of the Western concept as a generalization about mankind’s steadily increasing technological competence. But the Chinese view also has its merits. The Chinese have made their cyclical theory seem a much more comprehensive interpretation of their history than it actually is, simply by tailoring the facts to fit the theory, just as we have often adjusted the facts of our history to prove our assumptions of steady progress in all fields. There is, nonetheless, considerable validity to the Chinese view of a dynastic cycle, as they call it, not as an over-all explanation of Chinese history but as a definite economic-administrative pattern that has often repeated itself.
A careful study of this Chinese historical pattern, I believe, will reveal that it has relevance for the West today. Ever since the West in modern times began to approximate Chinese levels in matters of centralized political administration and bureaucratic organization, certain aspects of this same cycle have been showing up in the West.
A feature of the Chinese cycle, for example, has been the tendency of government, after an initial period of consolidation, to become less efficient, as the organs of government proliferated and the bureaucracy grew in numbers without any commensurate increase in accomplishments. The same phenomenon has shown up in modern Western government and business and has recently been given the facetious name of Parkinson’s Law. It is, however, an old and well-recognized aspect of the Chinese dynastic cycle, and Chinese historical experience provides a great deal more data on this phenomenon that we have as yet built up in the West.
Another aspect of the Chinese cycle is the steady growth of the costs of government. The Chinese Empire for more than a
