Great write-up. To me, democracies look chaotic but seem to learn faster. Lots of noise, disagreement, fragmentation...but at least the feedback loop is real. In closed systems like China’s political system, when everything is about appeasing one man, it may look stable or visionary from the outside, but it’s usually just brittle underneath.
Across thousand-year timelines, the real test of a political system isn’t unity or control, but whether its feedback loops are strong enough to survive bad leaders, blind spots, and ill-thought-out policies.
Especially the part about America's better science policy.
China is going to decarbonize the world, not the US.
Also, the pre Mao China wasn't as much of a basket case as the popular imagination suggests.
In the PRC, it was important to cast the ROC as irretrievably oppressive, foreign dominated, and illegitimate in order to justify the CCPs overthrow.
In the West, the narrative of "who lost China?" opened a market for scholarly work that emphasized how much the ROC was beyond saving, thus there was no point in questioning whether the US (or anyone else) could have done more.
Now, three things have changed. First, the modern PRC wants to reclaim the WW2 legacy of the ROC, which means rehabilitatiing the KMT which did 90% of the anti Japan fighting. Second, the legacy of McCarthyism is in the rear view mirror so questions about "How could US China cooperation during the war have been better?" can be asked without it devolving into accusations of "Roosevelt was Stalin's Stooge!" Finally, Chiang Kai Sheks diaries became available in ~2012, so we actually know what he was thinking about during that time.
Richard Frank, Rana Mitter, Sarah Paine, and Hans Van de ven have all written recent books that use the new information.
I suspect the stereotype of "pre-communist China was a basket case" was based less on the ROC and more on the Ming and Qing imperial dynasties, which inherited from their Yuan predecessor a system of government that was brutal but had remarkably poor state capacity: the Qing didn't even have standardized coinage (perhaps due to their lack of interest in international trade: they left a lot of their monetary policy to individual provinces) which was one of the factors which led to the Opium Wars.
There is a long-running dichotomy in Chinese civilization between the despotic, steppe nomad influenced culture of Beijing, versus the entrepreneurial and outward-looking culture of the south. The Guomindang who ruled the ROC were of southern origin, as were the medieval Song dynasty which may conceivably have given the world an industrial revolution centuries before it actually happened, had it not been for their conquest by the Mongols.
(You could also liken this split to that in East Slavic civilization between despotic Moscow and westward-looking Kyiv.)
China is going to have to decarbonize the world, they're the ones pumping it out. They account for roughly a third of world emissions. 12B tons of CO2 equivalent to the US' 5B tons (cursory examination of OWID). The US needs to cut back too, of course, but we haven't been the main contributor since like the 80s.
What exactly do you mean you say pre-Mao China wasn’t that much of a basket case? You mean late Qing? I’d disagree it wasn’t a basket case, but I’ve seen historians make arguments that it wasn’t as bad as I thought and I recalibrated a bit as a result?
ROC? It definitely was a basket case. Maybe it wasn’t its fault, but it never controlled all of China, having to deal with independent and semi independent warlords and generals (remember how one of them kidnapped Chiang and forced him to make peace with Mao?) and rampant banditry. By the time Chiang started to get a hold of things, the Japanese invaded.
Late Qing kind of was. If you want the one bad guy who doomed twentieth century China, you are looking at Yuan Shikai. He was in charge of the Beiyang army during the end of the Qing dynasty. This was the most advanced army in China.
When the empress dowager Cixi put the incoming guangxu emperor under house arrest and ended the hundred days of reform.... Yuan Shikai was one of the generals who allied with her.
When Qing were finally overthrown in 1911, Yuan Shikai demanded to be made president in return for not fighting the rebels.
When he was president, he assassinated the soon to be head of the legislature in 1913. This caused many southern governors to revolt again... Yuan crushed them. But it did sour a lot of powerful local leaders on the ROC.
In 1914, Japan makes the 21 demands of China which would give them control of the Chinese government essentially as a puppet and economic primacy throughout China. Yuan accepts most of the demands. Regular Chinese people start a mass boycott of Japan.
In 1915, Yuan Shikai had the idea to declare himself emperor. He did. The entire country had just had a whole revolution which was about "Let's not have an emperor" 4 years before. There was a new general revolt. This was the start of the Constitutional Protection War. 8 provinces formally declare war. Yuan Shikai says, "Just kidding about the emperor thing!" 83 days after becoming emperor.
Then, in June of 1916, he dies of kidney failure.
The warlord period would start as his subordinates in the Beiyang Army and others all agreed that they were part of the "Republic of China" but they all disagreed on who was the legitimate central government.
In 4 short years, he sidelined the actually popular president of the republic, Sun Yat sen, made sure that the entirety of China saw the government in Beijing as illegitimate, and set a precedent for political power via the biggest guns.
It's easy to see the temptation of making the "China 5000 years of history blah blah" claim. Pundits like Dalio and clowns like Sachs can invoke this cliches and take advantage of general public (including most of the economic elites) in the West who still see China through a mystery lens. I don't think any debate or argument can correct this, not until the long term reality of autocratic system kicks in.
Does this mean that China, the US, and Russia (the great powers current run by authoritarians, or authoritarian wanna-bees) are all doing self-sabotage at the same time?
I always thought this tendency was THE major problem with the authoritarian system?
Another excellent piece! Thanks Noah. I really like what Quy Ma commented below: "democracies look chaotic but seem to learn faster. Lots of noise, disagreement, fragmentation...but at least the feedback loop is real." A great description of American democracy from 1945 to 2000. In a way that's analogous to scientific pursuits, democratic elections provide that feedback loop. And just like faulty methods or testing equipment in science causes significant errors in results, the US's election primary system promotes extremists from the 10-15% of each wing, so that the 70-80% of us who are more moderate and thoughtful and understand that sometimes we're wrong are forced to choose between people who are very confident that they are never wrong. I studied China and Chinese foreign policy in college and I simply am flabbergasted that this administration seems to be devoted to leading all of us into their version of the Cultural Revolution.
I really like the framing of understanding these books to be about shaping the way that one wishes America to be and presenting that in response to a major threat. It makes me think about the way that civil rights leaders like MLK were able to play to America’s insecurities in a productive way. That kind of strategy leads to more effective and lasting change than the way fear and anger have been used more recently.
I appreciate how seamlessly you connected your current observations to this older post.
This Substack simply outlines policy deficiencies in most Western countries. We all need better infrastructure, cleaner air and water, an education system that prepares the next generation for the environment in which they will live. Then we have Nigel Farage, et al who want to tell us that Britain is broken and they want the opportunity to fix it. No, they are not going to reveal their plans, which don’t exist, but the admiration of Farage for Trump tells us he wants an American healthcare system, with private enterprise running everything and no one allowed to complain. It is time we made up our minds that we have to pay for what we want, and make the sacrifices necessary to achieve our goals. That it cost £400 million to prepare for the Lower Thames Crossing, before a spade entered the ground, has got to cease. The Tories seeking to gain the credit for building HS2 yet leaving its London terminal miles from Euston is part of this myopia that stymies our development. However the Elizabeth Line is a joy and worth every penny spent on it. We need to repeat this experience in the Midlands and North of the country.
The west has great water. The flint crisis was rixed fairly quickly and was mostly Reddit bullshit if that’s why you think the west has bad water. If anything we spend too much gdp on water quality.
You may be interested in Alon Levy's recent blog post looking at why infrastructure in the UK (along with other UK-influenced countries like Canada and Australia) is so expensive.
Yes, there are definitely noticeable cultural differences between China and the West, even excluding those congruent with their free market/planned economy hybrid. But my (limited, mostly college educated) experience with actual Chinese people is that they have many of the same desires and aspirations that the "average" American or European has. Agree? Disagree?
The US letting in a horde of immigrants in the 70s and 80s wasn't a far sighted policy, it was a handout to oligarchs to destroy the power of the American worker. Btw this was only enabled by Hart-Cellar act, a traitorous piece of legislation that has permanently destroyed America's racial and cultural fabric.
You also can't criticize China for letting its economy become dominated by real estate as a bad long term decision and then criticize Xi Jinping for recognizing the long term risk and taking action to reduce that risk.
Do you really think that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s wouldn't have looked to overturn an explicitly racist immigration policy (which is what Hart-Celler did)?
Great write-up. To me, democracies look chaotic but seem to learn faster. Lots of noise, disagreement, fragmentation...but at least the feedback loop is real. In closed systems like China’s political system, when everything is about appeasing one man, it may look stable or visionary from the outside, but it’s usually just brittle underneath.
Across thousand-year timelines, the real test of a political system isn’t unity or control, but whether its feedback loops are strong enough to survive bad leaders, blind spots, and ill-thought-out policies.
This hurts to read in 2026.
Especially the part about America's better science policy.
China is going to decarbonize the world, not the US.
Also, the pre Mao China wasn't as much of a basket case as the popular imagination suggests.
In the PRC, it was important to cast the ROC as irretrievably oppressive, foreign dominated, and illegitimate in order to justify the CCPs overthrow.
In the West, the narrative of "who lost China?" opened a market for scholarly work that emphasized how much the ROC was beyond saving, thus there was no point in questioning whether the US (or anyone else) could have done more.
Now, three things have changed. First, the modern PRC wants to reclaim the WW2 legacy of the ROC, which means rehabilitatiing the KMT which did 90% of the anti Japan fighting. Second, the legacy of McCarthyism is in the rear view mirror so questions about "How could US China cooperation during the war have been better?" can be asked without it devolving into accusations of "Roosevelt was Stalin's Stooge!" Finally, Chiang Kai Sheks diaries became available in ~2012, so we actually know what he was thinking about during that time.
Richard Frank, Rana Mitter, Sarah Paine, and Hans Van de ven have all written recent books that use the new information.
I suspect the stereotype of "pre-communist China was a basket case" was based less on the ROC and more on the Ming and Qing imperial dynasties, which inherited from their Yuan predecessor a system of government that was brutal but had remarkably poor state capacity: the Qing didn't even have standardized coinage (perhaps due to their lack of interest in international trade: they left a lot of their monetary policy to individual provinces) which was one of the factors which led to the Opium Wars.
There is a long-running dichotomy in Chinese civilization between the despotic, steppe nomad influenced culture of Beijing, versus the entrepreneurial and outward-looking culture of the south. The Guomindang who ruled the ROC were of southern origin, as were the medieval Song dynasty which may conceivably have given the world an industrial revolution centuries before it actually happened, had it not been for their conquest by the Mongols.
(You could also liken this split to that in East Slavic civilization between despotic Moscow and westward-looking Kyiv.)
Indeed. The ROC never even established full control of China.
China is going to have to decarbonize the world, they're the ones pumping it out. They account for roughly a third of world emissions. 12B tons of CO2 equivalent to the US' 5B tons (cursory examination of OWID). The US needs to cut back too, of course, but we haven't been the main contributor since like the 80s.
Thanks, is these any book you might especially recommend to a reader who was immensely impressed by Frank Dikotter's books about Mao's China?
What exactly do you mean you say pre-Mao China wasn’t that much of a basket case? You mean late Qing? I’d disagree it wasn’t a basket case, but I’ve seen historians make arguments that it wasn’t as bad as I thought and I recalibrated a bit as a result?
ROC? It definitely was a basket case. Maybe it wasn’t its fault, but it never controlled all of China, having to deal with independent and semi independent warlords and generals (remember how one of them kidnapped Chiang and forced him to make peace with Mao?) and rampant banditry. By the time Chiang started to get a hold of things, the Japanese invaded.
Late Qing kind of was. If you want the one bad guy who doomed twentieth century China, you are looking at Yuan Shikai. He was in charge of the Beiyang army during the end of the Qing dynasty. This was the most advanced army in China.
When the empress dowager Cixi put the incoming guangxu emperor under house arrest and ended the hundred days of reform.... Yuan Shikai was one of the generals who allied with her.
When Qing were finally overthrown in 1911, Yuan Shikai demanded to be made president in return for not fighting the rebels.
When he was president, he assassinated the soon to be head of the legislature in 1913. This caused many southern governors to revolt again... Yuan crushed them. But it did sour a lot of powerful local leaders on the ROC.
In 1914, Japan makes the 21 demands of China which would give them control of the Chinese government essentially as a puppet and economic primacy throughout China. Yuan accepts most of the demands. Regular Chinese people start a mass boycott of Japan.
In 1915, Yuan Shikai had the idea to declare himself emperor. He did. The entire country had just had a whole revolution which was about "Let's not have an emperor" 4 years before. There was a new general revolt. This was the start of the Constitutional Protection War. 8 provinces formally declare war. Yuan Shikai says, "Just kidding about the emperor thing!" 83 days after becoming emperor.
Then, in June of 1916, he dies of kidney failure.
The warlord period would start as his subordinates in the Beiyang Army and others all agreed that they were part of the "Republic of China" but they all disagreed on who was the legitimate central government.
In 4 short years, he sidelined the actually popular president of the republic, Sun Yat sen, made sure that the entirety of China saw the government in Beijing as illegitimate, and set a precedent for political power via the biggest guns.
While Cixi and of course Mao are both rightly infamous, most of us did indeed overlook how much damage Yuan Shikai did!
Regardless of any evolving history, China had some long and brutal civil wars (often called rebellions) in the 150 years before Mao's victory.
It's easy to see the temptation of making the "China 5000 years of history blah blah" claim. Pundits like Dalio and clowns like Sachs can invoke this cliches and take advantage of general public (including most of the economic elites) in the West who still see China through a mystery lens. I don't think any debate or argument can correct this, not until the long term reality of autocratic system kicks in.
Does this mean that China, the US, and Russia (the great powers current run by authoritarians, or authoritarian wanna-bees) are all doing self-sabotage at the same time?
I always thought this tendency was THE major problem with the authoritarian system?
Democracies aren't immune to periods of unrest or authoritarian backsliding. Democracy is not a perfect panacea, unfortunately.
I hope your bunny gets well soon, Noah
He's ok. He's just getting old, and sometimes has some problems, but he's ok for now! Thanks!!
I hope this is right, as America seems intent on self-sabotage right now.
Another excellent piece! Thanks Noah. I really like what Quy Ma commented below: "democracies look chaotic but seem to learn faster. Lots of noise, disagreement, fragmentation...but at least the feedback loop is real." A great description of American democracy from 1945 to 2000. In a way that's analogous to scientific pursuits, democratic elections provide that feedback loop. And just like faulty methods or testing equipment in science causes significant errors in results, the US's election primary system promotes extremists from the 10-15% of each wing, so that the 70-80% of us who are more moderate and thoughtful and understand that sometimes we're wrong are forced to choose between people who are very confident that they are never wrong. I studied China and Chinese foreign policy in college and I simply am flabbergasted that this administration seems to be devoted to leading all of us into their version of the Cultural Revolution.
I remember in the 1980s and early 90s when exactly the same claim was made about Japan.
I really like the framing of understanding these books to be about shaping the way that one wishes America to be and presenting that in response to a major threat. It makes me think about the way that civil rights leaders like MLK were able to play to America’s insecurities in a productive way. That kind of strategy leads to more effective and lasting change than the way fear and anger have been used more recently.
I appreciate how seamlessly you connected your current observations to this older post.
Whoops meant to leave those as separate comments. Hard to be seamless.
This Substack simply outlines policy deficiencies in most Western countries. We all need better infrastructure, cleaner air and water, an education system that prepares the next generation for the environment in which they will live. Then we have Nigel Farage, et al who want to tell us that Britain is broken and they want the opportunity to fix it. No, they are not going to reveal their plans, which don’t exist, but the admiration of Farage for Trump tells us he wants an American healthcare system, with private enterprise running everything and no one allowed to complain. It is time we made up our minds that we have to pay for what we want, and make the sacrifices necessary to achieve our goals. That it cost £400 million to prepare for the Lower Thames Crossing, before a spade entered the ground, has got to cease. The Tories seeking to gain the credit for building HS2 yet leaving its London terminal miles from Euston is part of this myopia that stymies our development. However the Elizabeth Line is a joy and worth every penny spent on it. We need to repeat this experience in the Midlands and North of the country.
The west has great water. The flint crisis was rixed fairly quickly and was mostly Reddit bullshit if that’s why you think the west has bad water. If anything we spend too much gdp on water quality.
You may be interested in Alon Levy's recent blog post looking at why infrastructure in the UK (along with other UK-influenced countries like Canada and Australia) is so expensive.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2026/01/13/british-construction-costs-and-centralization/
Yes, there are definitely noticeable cultural differences between China and the West, even excluding those congruent with their free market/planned economy hybrid. But my (limited, mostly college educated) experience with actual Chinese people is that they have many of the same desires and aspirations that the "average" American or European has. Agree? Disagree?
The US letting in a horde of immigrants in the 70s and 80s wasn't a far sighted policy, it was a handout to oligarchs to destroy the power of the American worker. Btw this was only enabled by Hart-Cellar act, a traitorous piece of legislation that has permanently destroyed America's racial and cultural fabric.
You also can't criticize China for letting its economy become dominated by real estate as a bad long term decision and then criticize Xi Jinping for recognizing the long term risk and taking action to reduce that risk.
Do you really think that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s wouldn't have looked to overturn an explicitly racist immigration policy (which is what Hart-Celler did)?
re Chinese succession gossip says it was disagreement over replacing Xi with his illegitimate son.