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China history is a warning sign against centralism and the ability of humanity to get stuck in loops, economic and culturally - where it from a ruling partys po

China history is a warning sign against centralism and the ability of humanity to get stuck in loops, economic and culturally - where it from a ruling partys point of view doesn't make sense to do anything to escape the loop. Impressive is that china at least kept- enforced by the layout of the country, a centralized state. At least it did not decay as much as the middle east or africa - after reaching peak people.

erikb 9y ago
This is so western propaganda boilerplate. What is the warning sign? China lifted more people out of poverty than all other countries combined. Actually the whole world is recognizing how centralism seems stronger than western federalism, and many western populations complain about their governments moving their power into a more and more centralized system. Have you for instance seen how Philipines and Turkey have moved away from a pro-western position?
- kylell 9y ago
  Turkey indicted 30k people and ruined lots of lives, just because someone hacked their wifi and added a link to some gullen (made up state enemy) website app, and just visiting that app website would put you in jail, but their didn't even do that. Philipines is worse with drugs regular killings, you must be quite an idiot to say this.
- barkxyz 9y ago
  It was the mistakes of a highly centralized government that helped thrust those same people into poverty in the first place. Why should centralism be credited for helping pull them out but not for putting them there in the first place? Meanwhile the West long ago eradicated the kind of poverty that still persists in China. Is that to be credited to our system of government too?
- adventured 9y ago
  > What is the warning sign? In the span of about 12 years, China became the world's most indebted nation. They have to accumulate about $4 trillion in debt annually to add $600 to $700 billion in GDP expansion, of which 1/3 to 2/5 goes just to paying for new debt interest costs. That debt scenario keeps getting worse each year. Local government defaults are a common discussion now, it's assumed they're going to suffer vast bankruptcies all over the nation. In just the next five years, they'll increase their already shocking pile of debt by another ~75% or so, adding between $20 and $30 trillion in new debt. > the whole world is recognizing how centralism seems stronger than western federalism That's incorrect. The whole world, including China, has attempted to partially emulate the developed nations of the West. China has gradually abandoned Communism and shifted to a market based economy, as one example. Their former system failed entirely, their shift to market based systems is an obvious admission of that. That process continues. All the developed Western nations have far superior standards of living at the median than China. The top Western examples are four to five times higher than China, and that's before accounting for the near total dearth of human rights in China. That gap is even greater when it comes to the poor. In China ~250 million people are still living on $3 per day or less.
cepth 9y ago
The counter argument is that post-1949 communist rule has been an aberration in the amount of central control that the Communist Party has been able to exert. In Chinese, there is a saying, “the mountains are high, and the emperor is far away”. If you took a hard look at Chinese history, I think you’d find that there has never really been central control. Governors and bureaucrats of the various provinces and regions have long been able to defy directives from Beijing, Nanjing, or wherever else the dynastic capital happened to be at the time. The sheer size of China, and the dizzying differences in language and culture, made true central control a fantasy until 1949. In a sense, maybe the greatest gift to the Communist Party was the outbreak of WW2 that set the stage for the subsequent civil war. Instead of dozens of regional warlords, you had a “clean” battle between two sides. When the Communists won, they finally assumed more or less total control of the country. Contrary to there being some kind of group think that dooms China every century or so, the more proximate causes of political turmoil have been intense, irresolvable infighting that occurs contemporaneously with a natural disaster or foreign invasion.
- thanksgiving 9y ago
  > In a sense, maybe the greatest gift to the Communist Party was the outbreak of WW2 that set the stage for the subsequent civil war. Instead of dozens of regional warlords, you had a “clean” battle between two sides. When the Communists won, they finally assumed more or less total control of the country. I hadn't heard this before. From what I've heard, the Communists has to fight at least in two fronts: against the government as well as against Japan.
  - cepth 9y ago
    You’re correct in that the narrative of Mao and communist guerrillas fighting both the Japanese and Nationalist Army is a very common one in China. However, with the exception of the Hundred Regiments Offensive, the communist armies never engaged in the kind of the regular, brutal combat that occurred near China’s major cities against the Japanese. For political reasons, namely to portray the Nationalists as an ineffective and corrupt government, until the last decade there were few Chinese TV series or movies that depicted Nationalist armies effectively fighting the Japanese. When you look at Nationalist efforts to secure the critical Burma Road into Burma and India, and the hundreds of thousands of casualties involved in fighting rearguard actions as civilians and governments fled inland, the casualty counts are not even close. Nationalist military fatalities are generally estimated by historians to outnumber Communist military fatalities by nearly an order of magnitude. One of the reasons I wrote that WW2 set up the communists for a clean victory in the resumption of the civil war is that Japanese surrender left vast swaths of China under communist control, simply because there was not a nationalist presence in many of those areas. Hundreds of thousands of firearms, rounds of ammunition, and artillery pieces were surrendered by the Japanese to communist armies. As a result, the Communists were for the first time able to equip a large regular army, as opposed to fighting irregular war as guerrillas. I highly recommend reading Forgotten Ally by Rana Mitter. This is maybe the best popular history of China in WW2. P.s. I say this as the descendant of soldiers who fought on both sides of the civil war.

erikb 9y ago

This is so western propaganda boilerplate. What is the warning sign? China lifted more people out of poverty than all other countries combined. Actually the whole world is recognizing how centralism seems stronger than western federalism, and many western populations complain about their governments moving their power into a more and more centralized system. Have you for instance seen how Philipines and Turkey have moved away from a pro-western position?

kylell 9y ago
Turkey indicted 30k people and ruined lots of lives, just because someone hacked their wifi and added a link to some gullen (made up state enemy) website app, and just visiting that app website would put you in jail, but their didn't even do that. Philipines is worse with drugs regular killings, you must be quite an idiot to say this.
barkxyz 9y ago
It was the mistakes of a highly centralized government that helped thrust those same people into poverty in the first place. Why should centralism be credited for helping pull them out but not for putting them there in the first place? Meanwhile the West long ago eradicated the kind of poverty that still persists in China. Is that to be credited to our system of government too?
adventured 9y ago
> What is the warning sign? In the span of about 12 years, China became the world's most indebted nation. They have to accumulate about $4 trillion in debt annually to add $600 to $700 billion in GDP expansion, of which 1/3 to 2/5 goes just to paying for new debt interest costs. That debt scenario keeps getting worse each year. Local government defaults are a common discussion now, it's assumed they're going to suffer vast bankruptcies all over the nation. In just the next five years, they'll increase their already shocking pile of debt by another ~75% or so, adding between $20 and $30 trillion in new debt. > the whole world is recognizing how centralism seems stronger than western federalism That's incorrect. The whole world, including China, has attempted to partially emulate the developed nations of the West. China has gradually abandoned Communism and shifted to a market based economy, as one example. Their former system failed entirely, their shift to market based systems is an obvious admission of that. That process continues. All the developed Western nations have far superior standards of living at the median than China. The top Western examples are four to five times higher than China, and that's before accounting for the near total dearth of human rights in China. That gap is even greater when it comes to the poor. In China ~250 million people are still living on $3 per day or less.

cepth 9y ago

The counter argument is that post-1949 communist rule has been an aberration in the amount of central control that the Communist Party has been able to exert. In Chinese, there is a saying, “the mountains are high, and the emperor is far away”. If you took a hard look at Chinese history, I think you’d find that there has never really been central control. Governors and bureaucrats of the various provinces and regions have long been able to defy directives from Beijing, Nanjing, or wherever else the dynastic capital happened to be at the time. The sheer size of China, and the dizzying differences in language and culture, made true central control a fantasy until 1949. In a sense, maybe the greatest gift to the Communist Party was the outbreak of WW2 that set the stage for the subsequent civil war. Instead of dozens of regional warlords, you had a “clean” battle between two sides. When the Communists won, they finally assumed more or less total control of the country. Contrary to there being some kind of group think that dooms China every century or so, the more proximate causes of political turmoil have been intense, irresolvable infighting that occurs contemporaneously with a natural disaster or foreign invasion.

thanksgiving 9y ago
> In a sense, maybe the greatest gift to the Communist Party was the outbreak of WW2 that set the stage for the subsequent civil war. Instead of dozens of regional warlords, you had a “clean” battle between two sides. When the Communists won, they finally assumed more or less total control of the country. I hadn't heard this before. From what I've heard, the Communists has to fight at least in two fronts: against the government as well as against Japan.
- cepth 9y ago
  You’re correct in that the narrative of Mao and communist guerrillas fighting both the Japanese and Nationalist Army is a very common one in China. However, with the exception of the Hundred Regiments Offensive, the communist armies never engaged in the kind of the regular, brutal combat that occurred near China’s major cities against the Japanese. For political reasons, namely to portray the Nationalists as an ineffective and corrupt government, until the last decade there were few Chinese TV series or movies that depicted Nationalist armies effectively fighting the Japanese. When you look at Nationalist efforts to secure the critical Burma Road into Burma and India, and the hundreds of thousands of casualties involved in fighting rearguard actions as civilians and governments fled inland, the casualty counts are not even close. Nationalist military fatalities are generally estimated by historians to outnumber Communist military fatalities by nearly an order of magnitude. One of the reasons I wrote that WW2 set up the communists for a clean victory in the resumption of the civil war is that Japanese surrender left vast swaths of China under communist control, simply because there was not a nationalist presence in many of those areas. Hundreds of thousands of firearms, rounds of ammunition, and artillery pieces were surrendered by the Japanese to communist armies. As a result, the Communists were for the first time able to equip a large regular army, as opposed to fighting irregular war as guerrillas. I highly recommend reading Forgotten Ally by Rana Mitter. This is maybe the best popular history of China in WW2. P.s. I say this as the descendant of soldiers who fought on both sides of the civil war.