RE: If Chinese parenting is so good, why has China been a backwater for centuries?
I can think of many reasons.
1) ARROGANCE. For many centuries ( especially during the Manchu dynasty ), the attitude was this — We have LITTLE to learn from the West, We are the Middle Kingdom, THEY LEARN FROM US, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
Well, that did them a lot of good — even as Japan was already learning and absorbing Western technology during the Meiji era ( mid 1800’s ), the Chinese were still rigidly clinging to the old Literati style examination system made formal during the Song Dynasty 800 years before.
2) Clinging to old Confucian traditional style of education is not a bad thing. But the moment you cling to old habits and ignore progress from the rest of the world, you guarantee that only the literati and the elite bureacurats prosper and the rest of the peasants don’t.
It is not a surprise that the Chinese who LEFT China during the dynastic periods to trade and learn from other countries were the ones who prospered.
3) Eventually, the Chinese themselves noticed their backwardness after they were unable to defeat the British and even the “inferior” Japanese who occupied a large swath of their territories in the late 19th and early 20th century.
This gave rise to the New Culture Movement ( Shin Wun Hwa Yin Tong ) that swept away the old educational order and opened China to Western style education.
Of course, we had the disastrous 30 year period from 1949 to 1977 with China again becoming enslaved by a Communist Regime ( which gave rise to the disastrous Cultural Revolution ) that impoverished and starved millions of Chinese and purged millions of intellectuals.
The Chinese have looked back at their history and are determined not to let that happen again. They are slowly getting there.... BUT... are till in effect CONTROLLED by one party.
That too, will slowly change. It is not a closed world and anyone can learn from everyone else ( both the good and the bad ).
One possible factor I’ve seldom seen mentioned is the drastic difference in social ranking between China and most of the rest of the world.
In most of the world, soldiers ranked highest, often becoming nobles and even kings. Merchants were next in the scale, with peasants at the bottom.
In China, and to a lesser extent in Chinese-influenced societies, the literati ranked highest, with peasants next, then soldiers at the bottom. The emperor was above and outside this scale, as a kind of God-King.
In western cultures, aristocrats and successful merchants could accumulate wealth for generations, building up sufficient capital to fund massive endeavors.
In China such wealth was always intensely unstable, subject to expropriation by the government whenever there was a shift in the political balance, often followed by purges of the wealth-holders and all their friends.
Partly for this reason, Chinese private enterprise has had a strong tendency to operate partly or completely underground, and/or drift over into actual organized crime. In traditional Chinese society there really wasn’t much difference in the way wealthy merchants and wealthy criminals were regarded, so why try to be honest?
These comments are overstated and simplistic, I am fully aware. But I think there may be some value to them.
BTW, per your ARROGANCE comment.
For at least two thousand years China HAD always been the most advanced and civilized nation of which they knew. It took most of the 19th century for them to get through their heads this was no longer true. But given the strictly limited contact most Chinese had with foreigners, it’s not surprising it took this long.