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> China has a long history of civil unrest oh come on... China has a long history. (period) within that is periods of civil unrest and various degrees of pros

• brownbat 8y ago
  Interesting point. To expand on it... By analogy, western Europe has a long history of basically continual war, generally featuring some combination of France, Prussia, England, and Spain. No one analyzes Brexit as a return to literal western European warfare, at most as an analogy of interests. The last century featured advances in weaponry that changed the cost benefit of armed conflict in a way to make some types of historically prevalent warfare much more rare. You could argue that the difference with China is the fear that information control and the other authoritarian elements of the communist party are masking significant internal discontent, making the political situation more volatile than can be reliably observed. And... that civil wars aren't the type of warfare that technology has made more rare. (Really just limiting superpower territorial invasions of other superpowers?). But who knows. China is such an enormous complicated country that there are basically no parallel examples to help us predict its future... Even China's past is limited help. China of the Tang dynasty was more similar in population to present day Myanmar. Its problems and issues and politics might have basically no discernable relationship to China's real issues today.
• deleted 8y ago
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• PakG1 8y ago
  China has had 4 or 5 revolutions (depending on whether you want to count the Cultural Revolution; it was perhaps an anti-revolution where while revolutions normally attempt to overthrow the government, the cultural revolution attempted to maintain the government's power) in the last century. There are few countries in the world that can say they've gone through five revolutions within the last century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Revolution I believe it has a long history of unrest in the modern era compared to all large countries (measured by population) out there. The Chinese government knows their own history and people well, and I believe they are managing the risk with a serious mindset. Their methods may be up for debate, but they're not of the mindset that there's no risk.
  • Emma_Goldman 8y ago
    I don't think this is the best way of looking at things. China is virtually a continent unto itself. It's a huge and fractous territory. It is little surprise that when the empire fell at the beginning of the 20th century after 4000 years, in the most tumultuous period of world history, that it went through a long phase of war and revolution. It was divided among the West's great powers, repeatedly invaded by a rising Japan, hit by successive ideological waves of nationalism and communism - and had to navigate being the third cog of the Cold War. I don't it's helpful to chalk up the instability of China during this period to some 'essential' characteristic of China; it is not naturally unstable or violent - any country that endured what it has would be unstable and violent.
    • repolfx 8y ago
      But you could paint such a dramatic story for many parts of the world. At the start of the 20th century the UK controlled so much of the world they said the sun never sets on the British Empire. It led the industrialisation of the planet, lost millions of men to the trenches of the first world war, then was nearly wiped out and turned into a slave state by Hitler before successfully liberating Europe with its allies. It went through enormous social turmoil in the middle of the 20th century: socialist governments and ultra-militant unions repeatedly damaged its economy so badly that by the end of the 1970s it was significantly worse off economically than Germany - a country it had flattened in world war just 40 years earlier, and which had then been split in half by the Soviets. Professional and well armed terrorists repeatedly attacked the government, in one case almost managing to assassinate the Prime Minister [1]. That all sounds like a much more traumatic modern history than China's. Despite that there has never been a revolution in the UK. The closest you can find is probably the English Civil War in the mid 1600s, which ended with the king being invited back to become King again after the revolutionaries turned out to suck more than he did. So I don't think we can just write off China's history or concerns of its leadership by saying it's merely large, and not naturally unstable or violent. For whatever reason China does seem to have gone through far more revolutions than other countries have done despite the apparent lack of external events that could have triggered such instability. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing