Knowledge Diffusion and Intellectual Change: When Chinese Literati Met European Jesuits

One puzzling feature of the comparative economic history of China and Europe is their human capital divergence from the fifteenth century on. Europe experienced the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, which produced “useful knowledge” that levered modern economic growth (Mokyr 2017). China, however, became entrenched in Confucian scholasticism. Its intelligentsia was dominated by literati, cultural elites who focused on the study of Confucian classics, philosophy, and literature rather than science or concrete knowledge (Landes 2006).

Thanks to the missionary expansion of the Jesuits, China and Europe experienced their first wave of mutual intellectual contact (Tsien 1954; Gernet 1985). A scholarly Catholic order, the Jesuits managed to enter China in the early 1580s. To facilitate their missionary work in a Confucian culture, the Jesuits introduced European sciences to win over the Confucian literati. Given that China had remained autarkic for centuries, ¹ this constituted a knowledge shock for the literati. This knowledge diffusion in China facilitated by the Jesuits was sustained until the 1720s when the emperors began to expel them due to the Chinese Rites Controversy with the Pope.

There has been a long debate on China’s intellectual response to this knowledge shock from the West. A conventional view is that the conservative nature of Confucian scholasticism made the literati lack interest in sciences and learning from the West. ² Such lack of interest might have been compounded by the imperial examination system, which acted as an incentive scheme by facilitating social mobility (Cipolla 1967; Needham 1969; Lin 1995; Landes 2006). ³ An opposite view, however, argues that the Jesuits’ introduction of European sciences shocked China’s learned elites, stimulating their interest in scientific research. Many literati even began to criticize the metaphysical nature of Confucian classics and to emphasize studies of natural phenomena (Tsien 1954; Henderson 1984; Gernet 1985; Black 1989; Elman 2005). However, to the best of my knowledge, little quantitative work has been done to assess the merit of these different views.

This paper examines the impact of Jesuit knowledge diffusion on intellectual change in China. I constructed a panel data of 254 Chinese prefectures between the years 1501 and 1780. Given that Jesuits were the only knowledge intermediary between China and Europe at the time, I can clearly measure European knowledge diffusion...