My understanding of history is that the Chinese insularism, is absolutely the optimum strategy. The principle problem wth the chinese was that they failed to solve the problem of competing interests, and tort law to resolve them, which prevented them from solving the problems of (formal) reason, and science.
If the romans had built the walls, (which they started) they would have given us ‘china’ in the same way that the mountains gave india, and the desert gave africa, and the oceans gave australia and the americas,
the central problem has been the tribalism of the people of the desert and steppe: the middle east.