In Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2007), Ha-Joon Chang offers both direct and indirect critiques of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, challenging not only Weber’s specific claims but also the broader tendency to treat cultural morality as the definitive explanation for capitalism’s emergence. Chang exposes the historical inconsistency and selective storytelling underlying Weber’s thesis, arguing that culture often operates as an ex post rationalization that obscures the decisive roles of power, state policy, and historical contingency in economic development. By re-centering these structural forces, Bad Samaritans dismantles the moralized narrative through which Western capitalism has been retrospectively justified.
The rise of modern China provides a powerful contemporary parallel to this critique. China’s development trajectory destabilizes the enduring Western habit of explaining economic success through culturally moralized narratives, much as Chang destabilizes Weber’s elevation of Protestant ethics as capitalism’s causal foundation. In both cases, culture appears less as an originating force than as a retrospective gloss applied to outcomes shaped by political authority, strategic intervention, and asymmetrical power. Together, Chang’s historical revisionism and China’s empirical experience call into question the explanatory primacy of culture in accounts of capitalist development.
The Crisis of Weberian Self-Explanation: Capitalism Beyond Protestant Virtue
Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism mounts a sustained—if often implicit—challenge to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, particularly to the way Weber’s thesis has come to function as a self-explanatory and self-congratulatory account of capitalism’s origins. Chang does not deny that culture can matter, but he exposes a deeper crisis in Weberian explanation: the tendency to mistake retrospective moral narratives for causal history, and to elevate Western success into an internally generated virtue story that obscures power, policy, and coercion.
A central weakness in the Weberian account lies in its historical selectivity. If capitalism were the natural outgrowth of Protestant values, its earliest and most dynamic manifestations should have been confined to Protestant societies. Yet Chang shows that advanced commercial and industrial development flourished in Catholic France and Italy, as well as in non-Christian Japan. These cases did not rely on a distinctive religious ethic to generate capitalist behavior; instead, they depended on deliberate state strategies—protectionism, industrial policy, and aggressive technology acquisition. The geographic and religious diversity of early capitalism thus undermines any claim that Protestant morality was a necessary or sufficient cause.
Chang further destabilizes Weber’s argument by reframing culture as a post-hoc rationalization rather than a prime mover. Cultural traits are often praised only after economic success has been achieved. East Asian Confucianism, once blamed for stagnation, was suddenly reinterpreted as a source of discipline and dynamism after industrial takeoff. Protestantism, Chang suggests, underwent a similar transformation: practices associated with thrift and discipline were retrospectively labeled “capitalist virtues” once capitalism had already taken hold. In this light, Weber’s explanation risks confusing ex post interpretation with ex ante causation.
The crisis of Weberian self-explanation deepens when one examines the international behavior of Protestant capitalist powers. Rather than diffusing capitalism abroad, Britain and other Protestant nations systematically blocked industrialization in colonies and weaker states through forced free trade and institutional constraints. This pattern contradicts any notion that a culturally driven capitalism naturally seeks universal expansion. Capitalist development, Chang shows, was selectively enabled and strategically denied, governed by power relations rather than moral example.
Equally damaging to Weber’s framework is its neglect of the structural foundations of capitalist growth. Chang documents how leading capitalist countries—including the United States, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands—rose through extensive technology copying, lax intellectual property enforcement, tariffs, subsidies, and direct state intervention. These practices sit uneasily with a moralized narrative centered on individual self-discipline and ethical motivation. Capitalism’s rise appears not as the ethical by-product of religious conviction, but as the outcome of pragmatic rule-breaking and institutional engineering.
Finally, Chang highlights the ideological consequences of elevating Weber’s thesis into a master explanation. By framing capitalism as the reward for cultural virtue, the Protestant ethic narrative legitimizes contemporary claims that rich countries succeeded because they had the “right values,” while poor countries fail because they lack them. This moral framing diverts attention from colonialism, unequal treaties, and deliberate policy choices, and it underwrites the modern practice of “kicking away the ladder.” In this sense, the crisis of Weberian explanation is not merely academic: it functions as a justification for global inequality.
In sum, Bad Samaritans treats The Protestant Ethic not as wholly false, but as profoundly overvalued. By mistaking correlation for causation and culture for structure, Weber’s thesis became part of a Western self-explanation that conceals the real engines of capitalism—state power, protection, imitation, and coercion. Capitalism was not born of Protestant virtue; it was constructed through policy and power, and only later wrapped in the language of moral destiny.
China and the Limits of Weberian Cultural Determinism
China’s rapid economic rise presents a striking challenge to Weber-style cultural explanations of capitalism. According to Weberian theory, sustained capitalist development is expected to emerge from a particular cultural-moral substrate—one characterized by individualism, Protestant ethics, and bourgeois virtues. China, however, defies these assumptions on nearly every axis. Its cultural foundations are non-Protestant and non-Christian, it maintains strong state ownership and planning, it explicitly rejects liberal individualism, and it enforces tight political control over markets and capital. Yet, despite these divergences from Weber’s idealized conditions, China has achieved rapid industrialization, technological upgrading, and integration into global capitalism.
This empirical evidence suggests that capitalist modernization is not inevitably rooted in a specific set of cultural values. Rather, China’s experience highlights the centrality of institutional design, policy choices, and strategic state intervention in shaping development outcomes. Similar patterns can be observed in historical cases such as Catholic France, Meiji Japan, or late-industrializing Germany, where modernization and economic growth occurred without the presumed cultural prerequisites. These examples collectively undermine the notion that culture is a deterministic force in capitalist development.
Ultimately, China’s trajectory demonstrates that the foundations of modern economic success lie less in moral or religious virtues and more in pragmatic governance, state strategy, and adaptive institutions. In this sense, China serves as a direct empirical refutation of the Weberian claim that capitalism is a cultural destiny, underscoring instead the primacy of policy and institutional ingenuity in driving development.
Post-Hoc Cultural Reinterpretation: Confucianism Redux
In contemporary discourse on economic development, Confucianism offers a striking case of post-hoc cultural reinterpretation. When China was economically stagnant, Confucian traditions were often blamed for rigidity, hierarchy, and a perceived lack of innovation. Yet as China achieved rapid growth and global influence, the same cultural heritage was reframed as a source of discipline, long-term thinking, respect for authority, and social cohesion.
This pattern closely mirrors Max Weber’s analysis of the Protestant ethic: cultural traits are rarely predictive but are instead invoked retrospectively to rationalize outcomes already produced by structural conditions, policy choices, or power dynamics. Confucianism did not “cause” China’s rise just as Protestantism did not inherently generate capitalist development. Rather, culture is selectively interpreted to legitimize success after the fact, providing a convenient narrative that aligns traditions with contemporary achievements.
Ideological Self-Defense: The West’s Ambivalence Toward China
The West’s unease with China’s rise extends beyond geopolitics; it is fundamentally epistemic. China challenges a central Western assumption: that modernization naturally entails liberalization and cultural Westernization. This equation, long embedded in Weberian sociology and the post–Cold War development consensus, frames Western progress as both inevitable and morally justified. If China can modernize successfully without following this prescribed path—eschewing privatization-first reforms, electoral democracy, or cultural alignment with the West—then the narrative of Western exceptionalism is destabilized.
This epistemic challenge produces a distinctive ambivalence in Western perceptions of China: admiration is tempered by denial, engagement is shadowed by moral condemnation. Such contradictory responses serve as a form of ideological self-defense, allowing the West to maintain its self-conception without fully confronting the implications of China’s alternative model. By categorizing China as an exception, a temporary anomaly, or primarily a threat, the West can admire Chinese achievements without acknowledging them as a legitimate alternative to Western norms.
Much like Weber’s original thesis shielded Western capitalism from historical critique, contemporary analyses of China often prioritize the preservation of Western legitimacy over genuine understanding. The ambivalence toward China is less a reflection of objective appraisal than a defensive strategy, ensuring that the West’s moral and institutional narrative remains unchallenged even in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary. In this sense, the West’s discomfort is not merely about power—it is about the fragility of its own ideological self-image.
China and the Washington Consensus: Echoing the “Bad Samaritans” Development Path
China’s development trajectory stands in marked contrast to the prescriptions of the Washington Consensus, echoing the historical patterns described in Bad Samaritans. While the Consensus emphasizes rapid market liberalization, China has pursued a gradual and selective approach, carefully testing reforms and adjusting policies over time. This cautious sequencing allowed the country to maintain stability while fostering sustained economic growth.
Similarly, the Washington Consensus prioritizes privatization, yet China has retained state ownership in strategic sectors, leveraging state control to guide industrial upgrading and economic transformation. In trade policy, the Consensus champions general free trade, whereas China has employed strategic protection and phased liberalization to nurture domestic industries. This combination of state coordination and careful market management has been central to China’s success, highlighting the effectiveness of active industrial policy over laissez-faire prescriptions.
Beyond economics, the divergence extends to governance. The Washington Consensus often links assistance to political conditionality, whereas China emphasizes sovereign autonomy and non-interference, asserting that development strategies must be tailored to domestic contexts rather than imposed externally. The irony, as Dani Rodrik and Ha-Joon Chang highlight, is that China achieved remarkable growth by following the same strategic principles that today’s rich nations historically applied—but now deny to developing countries. This pattern underscores a broader tension in global economic policy: the reluctance of established powers to recognize the lessons of their own development experiences.
Prioritizing Governance Capacity Over Moral Theory
China’s global significance lies not in presenting a universal ideological model, but in demonstrating an alternative standard for evaluating political and economic effectiveness: the primacy of state capacity over moral or ideological purity. Success, in this framework, is measured less by theoretical elegance or ethical consistency and more by the practical ability of institutions to coordinate complex systems and achieve tangible outcomes.
This emphasis manifests in several distinct dimensions: the construction and management of infrastructure at scale, rapid and effective responses to crises, long-term planning under conditions of uncertainty, technological self-reliance, and the orchestration of energy and industrial transitions. Together, these capabilities underscore a form of governance in which societal and economic outcomes are engineered through institutional coordination rather than emerging spontaneously from individual moral dispositions or ethical commitments. In this sense, China’s model challenges classical Weberian assumptions: capitalism and development are not simply the products of disciplined, morally oriented actors, but the result of deliberate, high-capacity governance.
Challenging the Foundations of Western Thought
China’s rise presents a profound challenge to Western intellectual foundations. Just as critiques like Bad Samaritans have exposed the Protestant Ethic as an overvalued, self-congratulatory narrative, China’s emergence forces a confrontation with a broader Western tendency: the assumption that historical dominance equates to universal truth. For centuries, the West has framed its political, economic, and cultural models as natural, inevitable, and universally desirable—but China’s trajectory calls that assumption into question.
China demonstrates that capitalism, modernity, and prosperity need not be tethered to Western paradigms. Capitalism can thrive without Protestant ethics, modernity can emerge without liberal democracy, and national prosperity can be achieved without wholesale Westernization. While this does not claim China’s model is inherently superior or universally replicable, it decisively undermines the West’s monopoly on self-explanation and challenges the notion that Western experiences define global possibility. The implications are profound: the intellectual foundations of Western superiority are no longer self-evident, and alternative paths to progress demand serious recognition and engagement.
Key Takeaways
Just as Bad Samaritans dismantles Weberian explanations by re-centering power, policy, and historical contingency, China’s modern rise dismantles the cultural–moral foundations of Western development ideology. Western ambivalence toward China is therefore not confusion but resistance: a refusal to accept that the West’s own ascent was neither inevitable nor morally preordained. In both cases, the same illusion is exposed—capitalism is not a reward for virtue, but the outcome of strategy, coercion, experimentation, and institutional power, retrospectively naturalized as destiny. China’s rise thus does more than rebalance global power; it destabilizes the intellectual narratives that once served to justify that power.
References
- Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. By Ha-Joon Chang, 2007
- Kicking Away the Ladder: An Unofficial History of Capitalism, Especially in Britain and the United States. By Ha-Joon Chang, 2002
- The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Max Weber, 1905