Max Weber and patterns of Chinese history

Max Weber’s The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (1951) has been regarded as a book containing many distortions, wrong characterizations, and politically incorrect arguments by the contemporary Western social scientists. This article, however, argues that while Weber has made his analyses based on very limited information, his arguments about the nature of Chinese cities and Chinese religions, and his explanation of China’s impossibility to achieve industrial capitalism before the advent of Western imperialism, are largely correct. This article further argues that the current attack on Max Weber, particularly by the so-called California school scholars, represents not a genuine intellectual advancement but fads and fashions of today’s Western scholarship.