Author(s)
Author’s Reflection
My project was a video which covered five main weapons or military technologies over China’s history in chronological order. I love the ability for a video to combine audiovisual presentation with entertainment as well as with education. Therefore, I leaped at the chance to produce a video with music, slides, and several pictures and video clips to present about this topic.
My interest in this video stems from my general love of military history in general, and also on the puzzle of the stagnation of Chinese military technology. Chinese military technology was generally competitive with the rest of the world, and it was the first to introduce innovations such as the crossbow and gunpowder. Yet, after the 1450s, major innovations in military technology ceased to be made. The stagnation in military technology is part of the general stagnation of technological innovation in the late Ming and Qing dynasties, and is the subject of much debate. Fairbank, Peers, Lin, and Elvin all offered valid and supported theories. Political factors, substandard mathematical research and examination criteria, and certain cultural factors would have contributed to this in all likelihood. I favor Elvin’s theory that military technology stagnated due to a lack of a competitive environment combined with there being no need to further develop Chinese military technology to pursue its political aims.
I conclude that if we are to learn from this, it is to continue to innovate and develop ourselves and to invest in things which have yet to fully reach their potential, even if they seem unimpressive right now. Technologies such as iron weapons, crossbows, cavalry, and gunpowder were not groundbreaking when they were first adopted. Instead, they earned their historic places through continual development and innovation over time, through the pressure from competition against rival states and to survive. A disinterest in further innovation and a lack of that competitive environment, where inventiveness would have been incentivized, led to China’s gunpowder technology stagnating. Personally, I believe we should also seek out new avenues of innovation and self-improvement, and continuously put ourselves into environments where we are challenged to improve and to grow rather than to stagnate.