By insisting on the superiority of its own standards of judgment and experience, western dominance distorts the realities of other societies.

Why didn’t China develop its own scientific and industrial revolutions when it made so many discoveries and advances over millennia? That is often called ‘Needham’s question’, named after the historian of Chinese science and tech Joseph Needham.

Why didn’t China develop capitalism during the Song dynasty when it was so close to achieving a breakthrough with trade, commerce, currency and semi-industrialisation, and an emerging merchant class? The Hungarian-French sinologist Etienne Balazs, among others, has famously asked this question.

Why didn’t China develop democracy, the rule of law and limited government when conditions during the Spring and Autumn, and Warring States periods so much resembled early modern Europe, out of which the modern western state model emerged? Many scholars and newspaper hacks have asked this question.

Why didn’t China become a globe-trotting and seafaring colonial power when the Ming dynasty had ships that sailed halfway or even further around the world? For that, just read any number of silly or sensational books like Gavin Menzies’ 1421: The Year China Discovered the World.

Individually, each question may be interesting or profound, and indeed became programmatic for research in universities and think tanks over many decades. Together, though, they trace an unmistakable Eurocentric logic of looking at China’s millennial history.

There is a fundamental failure of the imagination to recognise that Chinese history, like the history of any society, has its own distinct rhyme and reason. The enduring captivation of all those questions is a testament to the power of western discourse, which is really a subset of western imperialist power. Colonialism is not only about stamping a boot on the face of subjugated humanity, it also dictates the categories, assumptions and modes of thinking of people long after outright domination ends.

I have the utmost respect for great scholars like Needham and Balazs, who played a crucial role in recovering and preserving major aspects of Chinese history and civilisation at a time when China itself was broken – a role much like Arabic scholars who preserved the legacy of Greek civilisation during medieval times for the eventual emergence of western modernity.

(As a side note, that has always been how civilisations interacted, helped and borrowed from – rather than killing – each other. The ‘clash of civilisations’ is about as inaccurate as the ‘survival of the fittest’ in nature where creatures more often cooperate and coexist than eat each other.)

What I do argue is that the research programs of those great scholars easily became ideological justifications for western hacks, ideologues and politicians. Their ethnocentric historical logic predisposes others to think there is only one progressive history to the western apex – capitalism, science and technology, industrialisation, democracy – against which other non-western societies either approximate or deviate but never follow properly.

History is western history, the global stage on which everyone else is just a bit actor – showing up occasionally as a scene demands to carry forward the drama to a heroic climax, but whose life and death matter little or not at all.

Occasionally, a few non-western people may be admitted as second-class, honorary westerners, with more substantial, though never central, roles to play.

Recently, though, the hubris has been somewhat punctured, following disastrous wars (with one ongoing), financial crises (with another threatening to break out) and the spreading of fascist movements. More people even admit the west may be regressing.

That, I grant you, is a worthy self-criticism, but it is still a form of self-justification – the same western ethnocentrism that treats the west as the gold standard of civilisation, even when it fails to live up to its promise. The west still sees its historical experience as paradigmatic, leading to a consistent refusal to accept others on their own terms.

Papering over its imperialism, hegemony, genocide and ecocide, those dark deeds are divorced or disassociated from the universal betterment of western science and technology, industrialism and capitalism.

They are, however, projected onto other non-western societies that have learned from and mastered the science and technology, and industrialised, and which are now able to challenge the west.

It is not an accident that China is consistently portrayed as the long-term threat and Iran as the immediate threat, two societies with deep civilisational and historical roots that can only be properly understood on their own terms.

It’s essential to demonise or at least distort others so as to better propagandise your own citizens. How else can you convince them to drop bombs on the children of others?

Republished from South China Morning Post, 1 April, 2026