In reading this post by Barry Brownstein at the Foundation for Economic Education on Chinese students’ reaction to reading Hayek’s essay, “The Use Of Knowledge in Society”, it caused me to reflect on the experience of our two countries over the last 20 years.
China’s economy has blossomed, by some accounts becoming the largest on the planet. Ours has seen cycles of boom and bust and a long decade of phlegmatic growth.
I continue to believe that however things appear now we have little to worry about and that the contradictions inherent in China’s system will prove disastrous for it.
If the contradictions inherent in our own system don’t get us first.
By any number of studies the Chinese people have the highest average IQ in the world. Yet they have produced only one notable invention in three millennia – gunpowder. Something’s amiss there boss.
There are any number more. The printing press, the compass, paper, come to mind. However:
Yes. Their language. It’s poorly suited to an alphabetic or even syllabary system like Japan’s. That limits literacy.
The reformed writing system has helped but the literacy rate is still quite low in China. The official numbers are jiggered—they redefine “literacy” to correspond to one’s station in life. If you’re a peasant, you’re literate if you can recognize your name when you see it, a few signs, etc. Until relatively recently China also had a literary language, i.e. you didn’t write in the vernacular. That limited literacy, too. The Arab world has a similar problem.
“contradictions inherent†please stop the marxist hooey.
The fact is that China has moved 300 million people from poverty to near middle class status, and 600 million peolple from subsistence farming to an urban industrial economy. They have created from scratch a huge infrastructure, including the world’s largest hydrpower project, high speed bullter trains, hundreds of supercomputers, a large modern military, the world’s largest most comprehensive economy, and a (sometimes) manned space program.
The is the greatest achievement in human history, and Deng, its author is the greatest statesman in human history. Sogive the Chinese a break.
You can’t type on an ipad
There’s a good case that up to 1000AD, China was the most technologically advanced society in the world.
500 – 800 years of autarky can do an amazing thing in bottling human potential.
I don’t think there’s any denying that the Tang Dynasty (from about 600 to 900) was tremendously influential. Before that and after that I’m not nearly as convinced. I’m not prepared to give an opinion as to whether the source of their influence was technological superiority, military might, economic power, or the distances over which they traded. It is possible that the Chinese invention of the horse collar enabled both the military might and their trade.
Song Dynasty scholars were remarkably effective in re-writing China’s history to the extent that even the Chinese believe the version of history that they created.
The Han dynasty was advanced for its time. Literary Chinese is the Chinese of that era. Some of the canals built during that era are still in use.