Chinese vs. Western DIfferences Explained
Correct framing for Westerners.
(a) Europeans solved the problem of politics with a prohibition on authority by the Greeks: an alliance of aristocratic families and those who wished to join them, and the enfranchisement of all landholders who fought into that opportunity., under a rule of law of natural law (sovereignty) and concurrency (not democracy). The Chinese did not solve the problem of politics with Confucius – and directed the civilization to a family hierarchy, preserving authority.
(b) The Chinese are geographically isolated from the ‘hostile peoples’ of the middle east and less so from the steppe. The Europeans were far less so from both. So China had its consolidation period (warring states period) just prior to Europe having its wars against Rome. With the fall of Rome and the Christian destruction of the ancient world, Europe didn’t have its equivalent of the warring states period until the wars of religion (the birth of the nation-state) almost 2000 years later.
(c) And while China had her opportunity for imperial expansion over many centuries to slowly integrate near-peoples into the Han culture (even though they are not Han), they had the opportunity for world colonization at the same time as the Europeans but having found India and Africa found nothing of value (they were right actually).
So the Europeans benefitted from the age of colonization.
Moreover, the northern Germans (Hansa) developed the modern political culture, the Dutch invented the modern economic model, and the British invented the modern state, and once the trade was restored, wealth was able to return to investment in competitive technology, and Europe left the world behind in the steel age as it had in the bronze age with the horse, and the ancient world with political systems, military organization, technology, and that most wonderful innovation: money.
(d) So, in practical terms, China “should” have gone through the transition out of imperialism into economic nation-states as did Japan, but the political and economic burden was too great for a civilization that had failed to solve the problem of political cooperation by distribution instead of hierarchy. So, unfortunately, Mao chose communism and chose it poorly.
Today, it is evident that China would break up into nation-states for the betterment of all, at the cost of the communist party leadership that is almost as corrupt as the Russian. So to prevent another conflict, the CCP is trying to preserve the empire.
This is fine. The problem is that they’re trying to externalize this failure to manage their evolutoin from an empire into a federation, and it’s because they have a history of instability – precisely because their ancestors failed to solve the problem of politics. And it’s now ingrained in their culture.
(e) Our estimation in the West is that this power cannot hold indefinitely because the corruption is overwhelming, the population is collapsing, china is dependent upon american protection of her sea lanes of trade, and because the world was “kind to China’ in shipping our manufacturing there precisely in the hope china would grow into a modern rule-of-law, rules-based-order that would see the continued prosperity of the Chinese people and prevent the restoration of wars of empires and ideology.
So the West is playing a game of delay until collapse, while China, following tradition, is playing a game of delay and deceive until they can assert sufficient local power that the CCP and the empire can continue rather than evolve into more prosperous and independent nation-states, given that china is an empire over multiple ethnicities. It’s very easy to understand our differences. We believe that the Chinese population, like the European population, is capable of more if it has more liberty. And if it did so, the world would embrace China for something other than the money it would soon run out of, at the expense of its citizens, who need it more than foreigners.
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