Best Practices and Elite Belief: International Competition and State Modernization in Qing China and Meiji Japan
Best Practices and Elite Belief: International Competition and State Modernization in Qing China and Meiji Japan (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/jea.2025.1) was written by Alexandre Haym and Dylan Motin in 2025. It was published in Journal of East Asian Studies (vol. 25, no. 1).
A simple economic model suggests that bureaucracy would converge towards best practices. States would be forced to adopt innovations that prove more efficient because of competition. Empirical evidence contradicts this model.
The authors explore the comparative study of Qing China and Meiji Japan. They argue that incentives to modernize and adopt best practices are tempered by embeddedness, as captured in two factors: leadership beliefs and elite cohesion. Leadership must be willing to believe that tradition is less efficient then modernization, and then the elite class must be cohesive enough for modernization to actually be adopted.
The Tokugawa shogunate held little power beyond fealty, had no national standing army or navy to emanate power, and did not exercise central control over domestic economic or monetary policies. There were calls for modernization among notable elites, especially following Commodore Perry's landing, but the largest scale that was actually achieved was importing French officers to train western-style units recruited from the samurai class. The Meiji Restoration was largely brought about by an elite class that was dissatisfied with the shogun's efforts to modernize. Meiji emperors thus inherited a weak state, a transformed elite class, and a clear mandate to strengthen the state through westernization.
In Ming China, powerful local governors implemented centralized laws and policies. They also became the regional hegemon with the collapse of a central Japanese government. The Qing did not institute any meaningful reforms upon succeeding the Ming, which helped to keep peace and stability through the High Qing period. Contact with the western world was gradual rather than abrupt, and the prevailing belief was that China coexisted out of restraint. Exceptional leaders like Cixi wanted to westernize; she was hampered by the reactionary elite class. There was greater fear for internal stability than external competition, e.g. the Taiping Rebellion, and the Imperial Court was decentralizing rather than centralizing. The turning point for leader beliefs was the Boxer Rebellion and the fall of Beijing, but cohesion continued to dissolve, e.g. the civil service exams were abolished in 1905.
"The research closest to ours is Wojciuk (2021). Like us, she noticed that the Japanese elite understood the changing balance of power far more quickly than the Chinese did, due to Japan’s longstanding weakness while China remained cloaked in a complex of superiority. Focusing on leadership beliefs, Wojciuk finds that it took until 1900 for the Chinese to react. Although we agree, this does not explain why Chinese balancing failed even after the leadership acknowledged the new distribution of power. Consequently, our two-step argument combining institutional embeddedness with leadership belief and state cohesion offers more explanatory power."