Thanks for this meticulous takedown of one of the dumbest narratives out there about China. I think the assumption Kissinger and Allison etc. are making, or counting on their readers to make, is that people are forbidden from learning other countries' history besides their own and that of predecessor states. But people's frames of reference come from every historical example they've been taught, foreign as well as domestic. Chinese leaders presumably have been educated in Chinese history, but they also have access to all the examples of Western history, as I would assume is common among the educated elite in developing countries. Xi Jinping would have to have been taught a bunch of Marxist theory, most of which draws on Western history. Knowledge of the West is all over The Three-Body Problem, Hao Jingfang's novel Vagabonds, and Chen Qiufan's novel Waste Tide. The "long-term thinking" canard reflects Western parochialism – because most of us know so little Chinese history, some Westerners assume the reverse must be true, but a couple centuries of European colonialism have made it otherwise. Outside of China, Western history and culture are referenced everywhere in anime (salient examples: Rose of Versailles, Princess Tutu, Fullmetal Alchemist), and friends from India and Singapore have told me that elite secondary schools in those countries teach more Western literature than local literature. For that matter, why don't these critics ever say that Indian, or Iranian, leaders think in terms of thousands of years? Those civilizations are quite old too. By this metric, is the most farsighted leader in the world Abdel Fattah el-Sisi?
The most charitable explanation for some of this line of thinking is that invoking the clichéd wise foreigner is a way to critique our own society, in the grand tradition of Montesquieu's Persians or Tacitus's Picts. The most uncharitable explanation starts with R and ends with -acism.
“Orientalism” is the slightly more precise and slightly less blunt word for this kind of thinking that the mysterious foreigner (traditionally from the Middle East but the Far East works too) has ways we cannot comprehend.
Actually there is no conflict between these hypotheses, because thinking in the long term is almost always wrong. So the fact that the Chinese did lots of stuff that worked out poorly might be evidence that they were thinking for the long term, and having as much success at it as everyone else who has tried.
Interesting and well constructed essay! I've been living in parts of Asia for over a decade now and follow China's politics quite extensively. You make some very valid points, thanks for sharing. I tend to look at the long-term vs short-term idea in terms of a much smaller timeline, as well as the different institutions longevity vs western ones. I often wonder what the difference would be if many of our democratic organizations had more permanence established, ie. like positions on the supreme court (bad example but I think it explains what I mean).
I can't help but feel most western countries now have far too much of their leadership nearly completely focused on getting re-elected every 2-4-6 years, rather than on improving the countries and lives of people they govern. I would never advocate for non-democratic governing at the top, but I do wonder if subsidiary organizations changed their system and how that could bring about positive (or negative) changes in the longer term.
Most do, but still, from Wiki: "As of 2016, there were around 4,000 political appointment positions which an incoming administration needs to review, and fill or confirm, of which about 1,200 require Senate confirmation."
It is certainly a tired orientalist trope that draws on the image of the wise monk on the mountain and/or the meticulous mandarin in the halls of Beijing. And yes, like all bits of foreign-policy, it is also often reflective of what we would personally prescribe to our own societies.
The Chinese don't think any more or less long-term than others.
But this entire debate itself is so labored and just....boring. It rests on so many faulty assumptions/premises and doesn't take core considerations into account:
a) what we retrospectively describe as evidence of 'long-term thinking' could have had very immediate goals/objectives; b) we deem someone to be thinking 'long-term' when they are relying simply on the perceived wisdom of the day; c) every single action has consequences, leaders have their own 'pros-and-cons' sheet and just because their prioritization might look different from your's/mine, doesn't mean it is evidence of not 'thinking things though'.
To expand on 'c)', too many arguments flow like this: "uhh....they did 'A' to get 'B' but they didn't foresee that 'C' and 'D' would arise as a result of doing 'A' and therefore they royally f*cked it up. QED". Which is just stupid....maybe the person/company/country in question deems 'B' > 'C'+'D' to hold true?
We see it in the China debate all the time. Intelligent people, who naturally want to put to bed the ridiculous idea that the Chinese are this sage-like group of long-term thinking 'perfectocrats', instead go to huge lengths to try and disprove it. Take the 1-Child Policy (1CP) for example. Given that it was dreamt-up in the malthusian environment of the 1960s and 1970s, it could easily have been presented as evidence of long-term thinking back then. Only now, in a post-Japan, post-'oh-why-are-US-births-so-low' environment, do we think of it as a long-term 'mistake'. But even then, a clear-eyed appraisal quickly reveals that 1) Chinese fertility rates, following East-Asian trends, were due a precipitous decline anyway and the 1CP at most brought this forward by 5 years, 2) China isn't actually aging as rapidly as other societies that didn't have a 1CP, nor are the other negative effects (i.e gender imbalances) too different from other emerging/middle-income economies (India), thereby lending support to the previous point and 3) this is hardly a long-term calamity given that the relatively unproductive Chinese economy still has enormous scope for hoovering up low-hanging fruit.
It also ignores the fact that the CCP likely weren't blind to the fertility-related issues, but maybe saw the rapid improvement in the economy and dependency-ratio as being worth the costs, especially given that a lot of these debates that took place in the 1980s and 1990s were in far more open environments where leaders didn't reflexively shut-out academia.
Again, we can make this same point Re Chinese environmental issues. It seems foolish to compare the timelines of American and Chinese 'Eureka' moments Re climate-change and environmental degradation...Evidence shows that middle-income, post-industrial, societies are the ones where people start to take environmental sustainability much more seriously. At some point, people want to stop dying of smog-induced lung cancer!
Who's to say the Chinese government didn't look at their country in 1980 (post-Nixon) and think "hey, we have 500 million peasants living below/at subsistence level and our first priority ought to be building this lot back up. Let the Americans, with their full-bellies, worry about smog/pollution/desertification. We can tackle those concerns when the country is at a point where half the women aren't dying from child-birth and the life-expectancy isn't 40".
I think there are two conclusions to draw from this. The first is that we shouldn't fear China; the Chinese aren't 10 feet tall and they're not an existential threat. The second is that we should plan long term about our relationship with China (and everyone else, for that matter). Right now, we seem to think about China in terms of an imminent threat to Tawain and to our hegemony. Why don't we think about our relationship in terms of decades, acknowledging that China will be hugely rich and a world power with whom we need to live with successfully, just as Britain learned to live with our becoming hugely rich and a world power?
I think the possibilities of foresight are pretty overrated everywhere and in every era.
I guess the idea of China as long-term thinkers stems from outsiders reading people like Sun Tzu and Mencius and the Tao Te Ching where there's so much more emphasis on long-term thinking, holism, and synthesis than there is in the West.
But it's a false dichotomy: in every society, there are people who try to consider the consequences of their actions and there are people who don't. Human character traits are not the special reserve of individual nations.
It may also seem that way because America has a far more transparent decision making process: if a decision making process is more transparent, you are able to see who is smart and who isn't, who is greedy and who isn't, etc. But this is actually a feature, not a bug.
With China, people should remember that absence of evidence of mistakes in politics is usually evidence of presence of a staggering number.
Just because evidence is invisible doesn't mean it's non-existent.
Moving forward, the same randomness goes for everything: America's founding fathers were not being prophetic or farsighted either.
They were just really smart people who had firm ideas about how a nation was supposed to look like and had the benefits of isolation plus extermination of the natives to try their political and economic experiments.
And so, history is more chance than we care to admit.
The American innovations that powered the world in the twentieth century did not come from foresight either.
Who knew how gps would link with satellite technology or how transistors would intersect with iPhones or the countless other accidents as such.
The problem now is America isn't having that close public-private relationship it used to have in the past: you need government for public research and private companies for turning that research into usable products.
Research is a public good: private companies are unlikely to take experimental risks like that and are more likely when they succeed, to lock them behind a wall of patents and lawsuits.
It's additionally sort of disingenuous to compare China's worst period(18th century to late 20th century) to America's best period. Indeed, most of America's modern existence.
The Chinese were the most powerful, most innovative, most resourceful civilization for hundreds of years: fiat currency, astronomy, gunpowder, petroleum, advanced shipbuilding, metallurgy, the compass, etc.
And then for an intriguing number of reasons, the centre could no longer hold and mere anarchy was loosed upon the civilization-state.
As we all know, The West and particularly America, picked up the slack.
But we should not forget that modern history of western domination is basically an anomaly and not the trend.
Perhaps, we are simply reverting to the mean again.
seems kinda disingenuous to say no recent Chinese dynasty has lasted 300 years, when the US has only had 246 years so far, and using that metric - the last 2 major dynasties have easily surpassed that...
I'm really not sure I would go so far as to say that Americans put the length of their own country's history into any "reasonable" or "objective" context, or that they do think directly about ancient Western history as anything real and connected to them. Ancient Greece and Rome just seem like a bag of metaphors we sometimes pull from, as is the case here. But this isn't just vis a vis China -- other "Old World" people have said this about Americans for, well, centuries.
Take the British, who came up with the following saying that they are very fond of: "An American thinks 100 years is a long time; an Englishman thinks 100 miles is a long way." They will also say things like, "my house is older than your country". (Of course, this can depend on when we are dating the start of "the US" from. If you agree with Nikole Hannah-Jones, as I do, than the colonial period is part of American history.) The British comedian Jimmy Carr (the guy who is justifiably in trouble now in the UK for a horrible bit he did about the Roma) once mentioned on a panel show that Hollywood producers, when they made movies about ancient Rome, would have *ruins* recreated as the set. "They didn't live in ruins at the time, you bloody fool."
So, "Old World" people in general think that Americans lack a historical sense beyond thinking that the history of the US is long and is all that really matters. I definitely don't think Americans think that the history of the US is comparable to one Chinese dynasty, because I don't think we have that length of historical reference, nor would we -- sorry -- usually reach to non-Western history for comparisons.
We think the American Revolution was a major turning point in world history. The revolutionary generation, however, while it did include some who projected out things like demographics over centuries, mostly was constantly anxious the US government would fall apart within a few years. Not unlike the uncertainty between Chinese dynasties?
But thinking that the Chinese not only have a longer and truer historical sense than Americans is not the same thing as thinking that Emperor Taizu 1,000 years ago commissioned a plan that culminated in the establishment of the PRC, or that the PRC in 1949 planned out everything to 2950. It is ridiculous.
If you have the time you should read “China: A History” by John Keay. I myself have not quite finished it and am still working through it (to be fair it is almost 400 pages), but one of the things that becomes evident is that although “China” today typically refers to the PRC, China would be better characterized as a civilization, more in the way we refer to Europe as a place which contains a subset of countries and languages rather than it being a single country. [As an aside the same could be said of India].
It is amazing how pockmarked Chinese history is with the meteoric rise and fall of kingdoms, micro-states and commanderies. “China” is a way to describe a continent within a continent.
I think you are on to something with your analysis here.
Started out well but again, failed due to apparent unfamiliarity with what China actually is and does.
First - comparing Qing dynasty China as some sort of continuity with modern China vs. the single nation United States? Huh? And even then, it fails - slavery?
Second - the assignation of outside goals to China. That's stupid. China actually publishes both short, medium and long term plans - perhaps you might read them. China always has a rolling 5 year plan, for example, but will also roll specific items from any given plan into future ones.
Let's compare with American plans...what exactly is the American long term plan?
An American leader will campaign on some goal - it may or may not even get formed into a bill in Congress - and the likelihood of said goal actually being implemented is pretty damn low. See: Gavin Newsome and single payer health care.
China has all sorts of flaws, but attacking fake ones just doesn't work.
From someone who has worked in and out of China since the 80s, this is a fairly good take on the question. I defer to Eli's comment below that express excellent insights. I used to rent a little apartment in a neoclassical house owned by the Chief Sensor of the Communist Party Shanghai and it contained a library of western everything. It was almost like home (San Francisco.) "Drink deep or taste not, the western spring." Deng or no Deng, we live in a profits-first world which hardly reeks of long-term planning. Extract Produce Consume—the heat engine's method of BTK. And today, don't you know, we are all still bound by the buck.
"China was engaging in the Great Leap Forward, a bizarre experiment in hyper-distributed industrial production that failed so catastrophically that tens of millions of people ended up starving to death. Shortly afterward, China switched directions and decided to engage instead in the Cultural Revolution, whose strategy was apparently something along the lines of: Get everyone in China to vilify and beat up on each other for a decade ??? National greatness!"
The GLF, a bold plan to develop both rural and industrial areas simultaneously, would probably have righted itself had the harvests been normal, but an El Nino event (that also devastated Canada's prairie wheat crop and Massachusetts agriculture) thwarted it.
A friend, Dongping Han, says, "I grew up during the Great Leap Forward, and I have done rural research in China during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. In 1958, the year when the commune was formed, we had the greatest summer and fall harvests in recorded history. People ate so well. That was true not only in my hometown in Shandong Province, but also in Henan and Anhui Provinces, where I studied.
"Peasants in Henan and Anhui told me that they were able to eat very well, better than ever before, in 1958. This indicates that the forming of the peopleʼs communes and the Great Leap Forward only improved peopleʼs livelihoods in 1958. In 1959, my hometown suffered a summer flood without precedent in the last hundred years. I still remember that my mother and my aunt took me to the fields in those days. After several days of rain, the ditches beside the roads were filled with water. All of our fields were water-logged. My mother pulled out some of the sweet potato plants which were planted about a month earlier, and saw no growth. I heard my mother tell my aunts that we were going to have a hard time that year. In the spring of 1960, my hometown had a very bad drought. On top of that, we had another very bad summer flood. The crops failed again. Quite a few people in my village migrated to the Northeast with their families, and quite a few young people left the village to look for opportunities elsewhere. Thus our region was hit very badly by natural disasters for two consecutive years.
"The Shandong Provincial Government, as well as the Central Government sent teams of investigators to our county to find out what was happening with the local leadership. The County Party Secretary Xu Hua and the Head of County Government Office Wang Changsheng were both dismissed by the upper government because of the grain shortage in the county. But during the two years of natural disasters, we got relief grains from the Central government, the provincial government, Qingdao City, Shanghai City and many other regions. I still remember the two dried wild vegetables shipped to us from Yunan Province: one with golden hair which we called ginmaogou (golden-haired dog), because it was shaped like a tiny dog, and another which was brown and shaped like a pig liver, called yezhugan (wild pig liver) by the local people. For many years, my parents kept a piece of each of these wild vegetables as souvenirs of the two hardship years, and also to remember the help we got from other people in China.
"People in Baoding Prefecture, Hebei Province, published a collection of memoirs titled During the Difficult Days, which describes how, amid the severe grain shortages, people worked together helping each other, and how the local government leaders shared the hardship of the common people. When I read the book, I was reminded that the reason very few people starved amid the natural disasters of the Great Leap Forward was because of the spirit of socialism. Whenever and wherever one place had difficulties, people from other places helped.
"I remember many peasants told me that if it were not for the help of the Peopleʼs Government, many people would have starved amid disasters like the one in 1960.
By contrast, in Northern Henan Province (where the grain shortage during the Great Leap Forward was supposed to have been severe), five million people had starved to death in 1942. The Government at that time had done nothing to help the local people. In the 1990s, I accompanied Ralph Thaxton, my advisor in graduate school, to study (on a Guggenheim scholarship) the regionʼs famine. When he said that he had come to study the famine, peasants thought that he was studying the famine of 1942-3. During that 1942-43 famine, not only did five million people starve, but many people had to sell their land, their houses, and their children, before fleeing their hometowns. The local government and national government did nothing to help the people there.
"But nothing like that took place during the grain shortage of the Great Leap Forward. Amid the grain shortages, my maternal grandfather died of a disease. My paternal grandfather also died that year at the same age. They were both in their sixties. (Chinese peopleʼs life expectancy was less than 60 years then.) They had been sick for a long time. The grain shortage might have weakened them, and they may have eventually succumbed to disease. But I think there is a significant difference between that and saying that they starved to death. Only people with ulterior motives would blame principally the Great Leap Forward, or the public dining halls, or the peopleʼs communes, for the grain shortage we faced during these three years amid severe natural disasters. The grain shortage was caused first and foremost by natural disasters.
"Like my mother, my father never went to school when he was young. He started working as an apprentice when he was 13 years old. When the Communist Party came to power, the Government set up night schools for workers who wanted to learn how to read and write. He learned how to read and write at the night school. Later, the factory sent him to get training from Shandong Industrial College in Jinan. Because of the training he got, he and a few others were put in charge of building a steel factory in my county (Jimo County) during the Great Leap Forward.
"The factory was set up in 1958, and in a very short time span, the factory recruited 2000 workers from the rural areas in the county, mostly young men in their late teens and early twenties. For three months, my father interviewed and recruited these workers. Two years later, faced with economic difficulties caused by the natural disasters and the souring of relations with the Soviet Union, the Government decided to close down the steel factory.
The 2,000 young workers my father recruited and trained were all asked to go back to their original villages. Mr. Sun Jingxian (who, as mentioned earlier, wrote a refutation of the inflated estimates of deaths during 1959-61) argues in his article that the alleged population loss (on paper) during the Great Leap Forward was partly caused by the fact that a large number of people moved in this period. First they moved as a result of industrialization at the beginning of the Great Leap Forward; and later they moved because the closing down of these factories led to workers being sent back.
"What happened in my fatherʼs factory could support Mr. Sunʼs argument. An important point I want to make here is that these rural youth received important training during the two years working in my fatherʼs factory.
Thanks for this meticulous takedown of one of the dumbest narratives out there about China. I think the assumption Kissinger and Allison etc. are making, or counting on their readers to make, is that people are forbidden from learning other countries' history besides their own and that of predecessor states. But people's frames of reference come from every historical example they've been taught, foreign as well as domestic. Chinese leaders presumably have been educated in Chinese history, but they also have access to all the examples of Western history, as I would assume is common among the educated elite in developing countries. Xi Jinping would have to have been taught a bunch of Marxist theory, most of which draws on Western history. Knowledge of the West is all over The Three-Body Problem, Hao Jingfang's novel Vagabonds, and Chen Qiufan's novel Waste Tide. The "long-term thinking" canard reflects Western parochialism – because most of us know so little Chinese history, some Westerners assume the reverse must be true, but a couple centuries of European colonialism have made it otherwise. Outside of China, Western history and culture are referenced everywhere in anime (salient examples: Rose of Versailles, Princess Tutu, Fullmetal Alchemist), and friends from India and Singapore have told me that elite secondary schools in those countries teach more Western literature than local literature. For that matter, why don't these critics ever say that Indian, or Iranian, leaders think in terms of thousands of years? Those civilizations are quite old too. By this metric, is the most farsighted leader in the world Abdel Fattah el-Sisi?
The most charitable explanation for some of this line of thinking is that invoking the clichéd wise foreigner is a way to critique our own society, in the grand tradition of Montesquieu's Persians or Tacitus's Picts. The most uncharitable explanation starts with R and ends with -acism.
“Orientalism” is the slightly more precise and slightly less blunt word for this kind of thinking that the mysterious foreigner (traditionally from the Middle East but the Far East works too) has ways we cannot comprehend.
Actually there is no conflict between these hypotheses, because thinking in the long term is almost always wrong. So the fact that the Chinese did lots of stuff that worked out poorly might be evidence that they were thinking for the long term, and having as much success at it as everyone else who has tried.
Interesting and well constructed essay! I've been living in parts of Asia for over a decade now and follow China's politics quite extensively. You make some very valid points, thanks for sharing. I tend to look at the long-term vs short-term idea in terms of a much smaller timeline, as well as the different institutions longevity vs western ones. I often wonder what the difference would be if many of our democratic organizations had more permanence established, ie. like positions on the supreme court (bad example but I think it explains what I mean).
I can't help but feel most western countries now have far too much of their leadership nearly completely focused on getting re-elected every 2-4-6 years, rather than on improving the countries and lives of people they govern. I would never advocate for non-democratic governing at the top, but I do wonder if subsidiary organizations changed their system and how that could bring about positive (or negative) changes in the longer term.
Cheers Noah, always a fun read.
JJ
Thanks!!
While the elected leadership at the top of governments change frequently, most of the bureaucrats stay the same no matter who is in charge.
Most do, but still, from Wiki: "As of 2016, there were around 4,000 political appointment positions which an incoming administration needs to review, and fill or confirm, of which about 1,200 require Senate confirmation."
Love your reference to the famous "underpants gnomes" episode of South Park.
I think there actually is something behind the concept of a "chess mindset" v. "Go mindset" dichotomy.
Of course, as you point out, that's completely irrelevant to a discussion of Chinese politics.
It is certainly a tired orientalist trope that draws on the image of the wise monk on the mountain and/or the meticulous mandarin in the halls of Beijing. And yes, like all bits of foreign-policy, it is also often reflective of what we would personally prescribe to our own societies.
The Chinese don't think any more or less long-term than others.
But this entire debate itself is so labored and just....boring. It rests on so many faulty assumptions/premises and doesn't take core considerations into account:
a) what we retrospectively describe as evidence of 'long-term thinking' could have had very immediate goals/objectives; b) we deem someone to be thinking 'long-term' when they are relying simply on the perceived wisdom of the day; c) every single action has consequences, leaders have their own 'pros-and-cons' sheet and just because their prioritization might look different from your's/mine, doesn't mean it is evidence of not 'thinking things though'.
To expand on 'c)', too many arguments flow like this: "uhh....they did 'A' to get 'B' but they didn't foresee that 'C' and 'D' would arise as a result of doing 'A' and therefore they royally f*cked it up. QED". Which is just stupid....maybe the person/company/country in question deems 'B' > 'C'+'D' to hold true?
We see it in the China debate all the time. Intelligent people, who naturally want to put to bed the ridiculous idea that the Chinese are this sage-like group of long-term thinking 'perfectocrats', instead go to huge lengths to try and disprove it. Take the 1-Child Policy (1CP) for example. Given that it was dreamt-up in the malthusian environment of the 1960s and 1970s, it could easily have been presented as evidence of long-term thinking back then. Only now, in a post-Japan, post-'oh-why-are-US-births-so-low' environment, do we think of it as a long-term 'mistake'. But even then, a clear-eyed appraisal quickly reveals that 1) Chinese fertility rates, following East-Asian trends, were due a precipitous decline anyway and the 1CP at most brought this forward by 5 years, 2) China isn't actually aging as rapidly as other societies that didn't have a 1CP, nor are the other negative effects (i.e gender imbalances) too different from other emerging/middle-income economies (India), thereby lending support to the previous point and 3) this is hardly a long-term calamity given that the relatively unproductive Chinese economy still has enormous scope for hoovering up low-hanging fruit.
It also ignores the fact that the CCP likely weren't blind to the fertility-related issues, but maybe saw the rapid improvement in the economy and dependency-ratio as being worth the costs, especially given that a lot of these debates that took place in the 1980s and 1990s were in far more open environments where leaders didn't reflexively shut-out academia.
Again, we can make this same point Re Chinese environmental issues. It seems foolish to compare the timelines of American and Chinese 'Eureka' moments Re climate-change and environmental degradation...Evidence shows that middle-income, post-industrial, societies are the ones where people start to take environmental sustainability much more seriously. At some point, people want to stop dying of smog-induced lung cancer!
Who's to say the Chinese government didn't look at their country in 1980 (post-Nixon) and think "hey, we have 500 million peasants living below/at subsistence level and our first priority ought to be building this lot back up. Let the Americans, with their full-bellies, worry about smog/pollution/desertification. We can tackle those concerns when the country is at a point where half the women aren't dying from child-birth and the life-expectancy isn't 40".
I think there are two conclusions to draw from this. The first is that we shouldn't fear China; the Chinese aren't 10 feet tall and they're not an existential threat. The second is that we should plan long term about our relationship with China (and everyone else, for that matter). Right now, we seem to think about China in terms of an imminent threat to Tawain and to our hegemony. Why don't we think about our relationship in terms of decades, acknowledging that China will be hugely rich and a world power with whom we need to live with successfully, just as Britain learned to live with our becoming hugely rich and a world power?
Nice Article.
I think the possibilities of foresight are pretty overrated everywhere and in every era.
I guess the idea of China as long-term thinkers stems from outsiders reading people like Sun Tzu and Mencius and the Tao Te Ching where there's so much more emphasis on long-term thinking, holism, and synthesis than there is in the West.
But it's a false dichotomy: in every society, there are people who try to consider the consequences of their actions and there are people who don't. Human character traits are not the special reserve of individual nations.
It may also seem that way because America has a far more transparent decision making process: if a decision making process is more transparent, you are able to see who is smart and who isn't, who is greedy and who isn't, etc. But this is actually a feature, not a bug.
With China, people should remember that absence of evidence of mistakes in politics is usually evidence of presence of a staggering number.
Just because evidence is invisible doesn't mean it's non-existent.
Moving forward, the same randomness goes for everything: America's founding fathers were not being prophetic or farsighted either.
They were just really smart people who had firm ideas about how a nation was supposed to look like and had the benefits of isolation plus extermination of the natives to try their political and economic experiments.
And so, history is more chance than we care to admit.
The American innovations that powered the world in the twentieth century did not come from foresight either.
Who knew how gps would link with satellite technology or how transistors would intersect with iPhones or the countless other accidents as such.
The problem now is America isn't having that close public-private relationship it used to have in the past: you need government for public research and private companies for turning that research into usable products.
Research is a public good: private companies are unlikely to take experimental risks like that and are more likely when they succeed, to lock them behind a wall of patents and lawsuits.
It's additionally sort of disingenuous to compare China's worst period(18th century to late 20th century) to America's best period. Indeed, most of America's modern existence.
The Chinese were the most powerful, most innovative, most resourceful civilization for hundreds of years: fiat currency, astronomy, gunpowder, petroleum, advanced shipbuilding, metallurgy, the compass, etc.
And then for an intriguing number of reasons, the centre could no longer hold and mere anarchy was loosed upon the civilization-state.
As we all know, The West and particularly America, picked up the slack.
But we should not forget that modern history of western domination is basically an anomaly and not the trend.
Perhaps, we are simply reverting to the mean again.
seems kinda disingenuous to say no recent Chinese dynasty has lasted 300 years, when the US has only had 246 years so far, and using that metric - the last 2 major dynasties have easily surpassed that...
I'm really not sure I would go so far as to say that Americans put the length of their own country's history into any "reasonable" or "objective" context, or that they do think directly about ancient Western history as anything real and connected to them. Ancient Greece and Rome just seem like a bag of metaphors we sometimes pull from, as is the case here. But this isn't just vis a vis China -- other "Old World" people have said this about Americans for, well, centuries.
Take the British, who came up with the following saying that they are very fond of: "An American thinks 100 years is a long time; an Englishman thinks 100 miles is a long way." They will also say things like, "my house is older than your country". (Of course, this can depend on when we are dating the start of "the US" from. If you agree with Nikole Hannah-Jones, as I do, than the colonial period is part of American history.) The British comedian Jimmy Carr (the guy who is justifiably in trouble now in the UK for a horrible bit he did about the Roma) once mentioned on a panel show that Hollywood producers, when they made movies about ancient Rome, would have *ruins* recreated as the set. "They didn't live in ruins at the time, you bloody fool."
So, "Old World" people in general think that Americans lack a historical sense beyond thinking that the history of the US is long and is all that really matters. I definitely don't think Americans think that the history of the US is comparable to one Chinese dynasty, because I don't think we have that length of historical reference, nor would we -- sorry -- usually reach to non-Western history for comparisons.
We think the American Revolution was a major turning point in world history. The revolutionary generation, however, while it did include some who projected out things like demographics over centuries, mostly was constantly anxious the US government would fall apart within a few years. Not unlike the uncertainty between Chinese dynasties?
But thinking that the Chinese not only have a longer and truer historical sense than Americans is not the same thing as thinking that Emperor Taizu 1,000 years ago commissioned a plan that culminated in the establishment of the PRC, or that the PRC in 1949 planned out everything to 2950. It is ridiculous.
Noah,
If you have the time you should read “China: A History” by John Keay. I myself have not quite finished it and am still working through it (to be fair it is almost 400 pages), but one of the things that becomes evident is that although “China” today typically refers to the PRC, China would be better characterized as a civilization, more in the way we refer to Europe as a place which contains a subset of countries and languages rather than it being a single country. [As an aside the same could be said of India].
It is amazing how pockmarked Chinese history is with the meteoric rise and fall of kingdoms, micro-states and commanderies. “China” is a way to describe a continent within a continent.
I think you are on to something with your analysis here.
Started out well but again, failed due to apparent unfamiliarity with what China actually is and does.
First - comparing Qing dynasty China as some sort of continuity with modern China vs. the single nation United States? Huh? And even then, it fails - slavery?
Second - the assignation of outside goals to China. That's stupid. China actually publishes both short, medium and long term plans - perhaps you might read them. China always has a rolling 5 year plan, for example, but will also roll specific items from any given plan into future ones.
Let's compare with American plans...what exactly is the American long term plan?
An American leader will campaign on some goal - it may or may not even get formed into a bill in Congress - and the likelihood of said goal actually being implemented is pretty damn low. See: Gavin Newsome and single payer health care.
China has all sorts of flaws, but attacking fake ones just doesn't work.
From someone who has worked in and out of China since the 80s, this is a fairly good take on the question. I defer to Eli's comment below that express excellent insights. I used to rent a little apartment in a neoclassical house owned by the Chief Sensor of the Communist Party Shanghai and it contained a library of western everything. It was almost like home (San Francisco.) "Drink deep or taste not, the western spring." Deng or no Deng, we live in a profits-first world which hardly reeks of long-term planning. Extract Produce Consume—the heat engine's method of BTK. And today, don't you know, we are all still bound by the buck.
your article comes across as very defensive.
Why don't you go cry about it
The other country I have heard this about is Iran of the Ayatollahs. In your opinion, is it correct there?
"China was engaging in the Great Leap Forward, a bizarre experiment in hyper-distributed industrial production that failed so catastrophically that tens of millions of people ended up starving to death. Shortly afterward, China switched directions and decided to engage instead in the Cultural Revolution, whose strategy was apparently something along the lines of: Get everyone in China to vilify and beat up on each other for a decade ??? National greatness!"
The GLF, a bold plan to develop both rural and industrial areas simultaneously, would probably have righted itself had the harvests been normal, but an El Nino event (that also devastated Canada's prairie wheat crop and Massachusetts agriculture) thwarted it.
A friend, Dongping Han, says, "I grew up during the Great Leap Forward, and I have done rural research in China during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. In 1958, the year when the commune was formed, we had the greatest summer and fall harvests in recorded history. People ate so well. That was true not only in my hometown in Shandong Province, but also in Henan and Anhui Provinces, where I studied.
"Peasants in Henan and Anhui told me that they were able to eat very well, better than ever before, in 1958. This indicates that the forming of the peopleʼs communes and the Great Leap Forward only improved peopleʼs livelihoods in 1958. In 1959, my hometown suffered a summer flood without precedent in the last hundred years. I still remember that my mother and my aunt took me to the fields in those days. After several days of rain, the ditches beside the roads were filled with water. All of our fields were water-logged. My mother pulled out some of the sweet potato plants which were planted about a month earlier, and saw no growth. I heard my mother tell my aunts that we were going to have a hard time that year. In the spring of 1960, my hometown had a very bad drought. On top of that, we had another very bad summer flood. The crops failed again. Quite a few people in my village migrated to the Northeast with their families, and quite a few young people left the village to look for opportunities elsewhere. Thus our region was hit very badly by natural disasters for two consecutive years.
"The Shandong Provincial Government, as well as the Central Government sent teams of investigators to our county to find out what was happening with the local leadership. The County Party Secretary Xu Hua and the Head of County Government Office Wang Changsheng were both dismissed by the upper government because of the grain shortage in the county. But during the two years of natural disasters, we got relief grains from the Central government, the provincial government, Qingdao City, Shanghai City and many other regions. I still remember the two dried wild vegetables shipped to us from Yunan Province: one with golden hair which we called ginmaogou (golden-haired dog), because it was shaped like a tiny dog, and another which was brown and shaped like a pig liver, called yezhugan (wild pig liver) by the local people. For many years, my parents kept a piece of each of these wild vegetables as souvenirs of the two hardship years, and also to remember the help we got from other people in China.
"People in Baoding Prefecture, Hebei Province, published a collection of memoirs titled During the Difficult Days, which describes how, amid the severe grain shortages, people worked together helping each other, and how the local government leaders shared the hardship of the common people. When I read the book, I was reminded that the reason very few people starved amid the natural disasters of the Great Leap Forward was because of the spirit of socialism. Whenever and wherever one place had difficulties, people from other places helped.
"I remember many peasants told me that if it were not for the help of the Peopleʼs Government, many people would have starved amid disasters like the one in 1960.
By contrast, in Northern Henan Province (where the grain shortage during the Great Leap Forward was supposed to have been severe), five million people had starved to death in 1942. The Government at that time had done nothing to help the local people. In the 1990s, I accompanied Ralph Thaxton, my advisor in graduate school, to study (on a Guggenheim scholarship) the regionʼs famine. When he said that he had come to study the famine, peasants thought that he was studying the famine of 1942-3. During that 1942-43 famine, not only did five million people starve, but many people had to sell their land, their houses, and their children, before fleeing their hometowns. The local government and national government did nothing to help the people there.
"But nothing like that took place during the grain shortage of the Great Leap Forward. Amid the grain shortages, my maternal grandfather died of a disease. My paternal grandfather also died that year at the same age. They were both in their sixties. (Chinese peopleʼs life expectancy was less than 60 years then.) They had been sick for a long time. The grain shortage might have weakened them, and they may have eventually succumbed to disease. But I think there is a significant difference between that and saying that they starved to death. Only people with ulterior motives would blame principally the Great Leap Forward, or the public dining halls, or the peopleʼs communes, for the grain shortage we faced during these three years amid severe natural disasters. The grain shortage was caused first and foremost by natural disasters.
"Like my mother, my father never went to school when he was young. He started working as an apprentice when he was 13 years old. When the Communist Party came to power, the Government set up night schools for workers who wanted to learn how to read and write. He learned how to read and write at the night school. Later, the factory sent him to get training from Shandong Industrial College in Jinan. Because of the training he got, he and a few others were put in charge of building a steel factory in my county (Jimo County) during the Great Leap Forward.
"The factory was set up in 1958, and in a very short time span, the factory recruited 2000 workers from the rural areas in the county, mostly young men in their late teens and early twenties. For three months, my father interviewed and recruited these workers. Two years later, faced with economic difficulties caused by the natural disasters and the souring of relations with the Soviet Union, the Government decided to close down the steel factory.
The 2,000 young workers my father recruited and trained were all asked to go back to their original villages. Mr. Sun Jingxian (who, as mentioned earlier, wrote a refutation of the inflated estimates of deaths during 1959-61) argues in his article that the alleged population loss (on paper) during the Great Leap Forward was partly caused by the fact that a large number of people moved in this period. First they moved as a result of industrialization at the beginning of the Great Leap Forward; and later they moved because the closing down of these factories led to workers being sent back.
"What happened in my fatherʼs factory could support Mr. Sunʼs argument. An important point I want to make here is that these rural youth received important training during the two years working in my fatherʼs factory.