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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

China has a population of more than a billion people, the 3rd largest landmass controlled by a single sovereign entity. The only question is how they managed to fall so low that they weren't a competitive superpower.

It is entirely possible that we don't know what the reason for China's rise is over the short term. I wouldn't trust any article written in English to understand the ins and outs of China's special economic zones, special administrative regions and historical norms and customs.

It is very likely that governance is connected to their success and it is also unlikely that the government is wholly responsible for their success. The situation is complicated. Even deciding if they have achieved 'success' is complicated; I'm not envious of the people who live there.

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Your question is insightful. I think a major reason that China once fell so low is the Qing dynasty secluded itself from the outside world, and didn't catch up with the industrial revolution. So in 18xx-19xx, China was still an agricultural civilization and western countries have stepped into modern industrial form. And we know as to production efficiency, (non-modern) agriculture vs industry is like fist vs bombs. Besides, before 1911, China was still imperial, most people were not liberated and educated, so they can not effectively participate in industrial production (In some sense, being uneducated, they were not useful people). Now with 1.4 billion educated people, it's no wonder China is coming back to its normal place. And I believe today is not the end of China's rise, the Chinese people can do better as long as they continue working hard, especially on science and technology.

This, and western countries exploited that weakness and turned China in a protectorate with actual warfare, etc.

> industrialized countries

Japan isn't western.

You're right. But Japan is an example of an Asian country that forced itself to assimilate the technology and habits of the West. They ended up invading China before WW2, last of a long list of countries.

Japan attacked China with the blessing of Teddy Roosevelt, a secret 1905 treaty allowed Japan to expand into Asia without push back from the US.

Pearl harbor happened because we reneged on this "secret treaty" by backing China 30 years later in the 2nd Sino-Japanese War... we reneged because congress had no clue the treaty existed.

Side note: Is Teddy Roosevelt the reason we got dragged into WW2? Yes.

> Side note: Is Teddy Roosevelt the reason we got dragged into WW2? Yes.

This is the same fallacy as the UK "being dragged into WW1 and WW2". You just needed an excuse for joining. You joined because you couldn't accept Japan or Germany becoming hegemons of their regions. An united Europe or East Asia can challenge American supremacy.

1.4 billion educated people? China has made great progress in the area of education, but there is still a large percentage, especially from older generations and in rural areas, who never had any real educational opportunities (as you know, they were too busy fighting for survival).

Also, given that the current leadership is taking a very different path that that of Deng, why are you so optimistic that China's rise will continue? From my perspective, they seem to be alienating themselves once again, and straying from path to prosperity originally set by Deng.

1.4 may not be accurate, but nearly every child is educated. 9-year compulsory education is the lowest standard across the country. The number fighting for survival is very small compared to the whole population (the recent number is 20 million). Now the government's poverty line is <400$ annual income, and the gov has the goal to eliminate this absolute poverty in 2020. The current path is different from the last 30 years, but Deng's reform has never changed. In some area, censorship is more strict (this has to do with complicated political reasons), but in more areas such as science, technology, trade, and finance, China is becoming more and more open to the world. Things may seem that Chinese are alienating themselves, but that is not true. More and more people go abroad every year. And although there is the wall, actually people know what happens outside China.

People tend to significantly overvalue the executive branches power combined with the worst cases you hear in the news when evaluating the freedom of the average person in a country. The economic freedom indexes can be quite surprising compared to popular perception.

But still I read something like 1 in 4 people are party members whether directly or indirectly. That’s a whole lot of people directly involved in the snitch line.

there are 90 million party members among 1.4 billion people. I don't know how to count indirect party members. But I don't think that is near 1/4, that's too exagerating

I remember that stat from Evan Osnos book on China (a New Yorker journalist). It was between direct members, soldiers, student groups, workers groups, various retired people, and affiliate associations.

I’m sure that number is a bit inflated but the reach of the party at the local and individual level is quite significant.

China fell low thanks to external sabotage (opium) and espionage (stolen tea,spices,manufacturing processes) by 5+ of the future economic powers working together in the take down of the superpower. This attack and disruption of established Chinese/Indian trade routes allowed new Western industrial manufacturers to step in and supply the market.

The US/UK has had anti-Chinese policies since the early 1800s leading to the modern day (people we celebrate were some of the biggest opium dealers in the world). Teddy Roosevelt (inheritor of a drug dealing fortune) even used the Japanese to sabotage China again when he was president in 1900s when he authorized Japanese expansion into Asia with a secret treaty.

“I wouldn’t trust any article written in English...”

What if the article was written by someone from China?

“Zhang Jun is Dean of the School of Economics at Fudan University and Director of the China Center for Economic Studies, a Shanghai-based think-tank.”

Yes, even then. If I'm getting my information from English-publishing Shanghai think tanks then I'm just going to assume that I'm wrong.

I mean, I know how many contradictory economic opinions are generated by universities where I speak the language and have a reasonable grasp of the economic fundamentals and understand what the various interest groups want. It would be a special form of madness to assume I know anything but the most basic facts about China from a survey of internet articles.

> What if the article was written by someone from China?

Read the Chinese version then

It's funny. I'd generally be more skeptical of an essay coming out of China because of China's ideological control. Few authors will argue contrary to the official narrative.

That said, here's another perspective on China's recent rise, translated from Chinese:

> The argument is simple: when China joined the world economy in the reform and opening era, capital flocked to China to take advantage of low-wage labor and what Qin calls China’s “low human rights advantage,” i.e., the state’s commitment to development at any cost (land-confiscation, suppression of workers’ rights, exploitation of migrant workers, etc.). Over time, China became the “world’s factory,” producing quality goods at low prices, at the expense of jobs and tax revenues in the developed world previously inhabited by the capital that had now fled to China. Despite a surplus of capital and increasingly frequent labor shortages, the naked power of the Chinese state keeps the machine running, lending the profits back to the developed economies so that the “exchange” can continue. Such debts only intensify the crisis of the developed world, as governments are already attempting to supply more “welfare” to increasing numbers of unemployed despite a fall in tax revenues.

https://www.readingthechinadream.com/qin-hui-dilemmas.html

Exactly. The language of the article itself doesn't affect on the content or the credibility.

If anything, the Chinese government has higher incentive to clamp down the Chinese version as Chinese content has a wider reach and thus higher impact on the local people.

> population of more than a billion people, the 3rd largest landmass

> how they managed to fall so low

There are countries with even larger landmass, and countries with roughly the same population, whose economies are doing worse than China, so I'm not convinced that landmass and population are fundamental requirements for economic prosperity. I should add that I'm not an economist in any shape or form and I'm happy to be proven wrong since I believe this is an interesting topic.

> There are countries with even larger landmass

Russia and Canada. I wouldn't want to call Canada an inhospitable frozen wasteland, but I'm happy to say that about Russia. I suppose on reflection China has a lot of deserts, but I suspect given the population difference that China has a massive edge on quality farmland.

If you look at the wiki page for landmass [0] China actually has a startling abundance of land and has 20% of the worlds population. It doesn't really have much competition on the land+people front.

With fundamentals that good, they really don't need to get much right to become a superpower. They needed to get something right, but realistically they aren't transparent enough for us to know what.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

And you'd be wrong saying that about Russia. Sure, most of the country landmass is located in pretty cold regions, but nobody lives there, most of population lives in european part with okish weather. And this part is still huge enough to have big agriculture landmass overall. It's like calling Denmark inhospitable frozen wasteland because of Greenland. Russia has much more arable and cultivated land than Canada even in percentage.

There is exactly one country with a comparable populatuon, India. It's not doing exactly bad, too. The next largest country is USA, with roughly thee times smaller a population.

Most countries with larger landmass have most of its landmass barely usable due to climate: Russia, Canada, Australia, Algeria. Most others from top 10 largest countries are doing OK: USA, India, Brazil.

China has a unique combination of very long subtropical shorelines, a decent amount of arable inland, and a very large population.

India has more arable land than China, no?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_India

"India's arable land... is the second largest in the world, after the United States. Its gross irrigated crop area... is the largest in the world."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_China

"Although China's agricultural output is the largest in the world, only 12.6% of its total land area can be cultivated. China's arable land, which represents 10% of the total arable land in the world, supports over 20% of the world's population."

> There is exactly one country with a comparable populatuon, India. It's not doing exactly bad, too.

There are however several other large population nations. There's no reason for eg one billion to be a cut-off point or similar. There are only 14 nations with 100m or more people, a sufficiently rare group to look at the nations that fall within it.

The parent's point: "I'm not convinced that landmass and population are fundamental requirements for economic prosperity" - is spot on. They're not requirements at all (just ask Denmark, Belgium, Singapore, Israel, Austria and Ireland) and outsized population is clearly not a booster.

Among nations with at least one million people, the median is around 11.x million population wise. So 100m stands as 9x larger, a very considerable gap in size.

The majority of countries with large populations have done poorly economically. Great economic success with a very large population is a rare exception:

(shown with per capita output rank)

Among the 15 nations with 97m+ people, there are only two standouts:

US #8 ($62606), 330m people | Japan #24 ($39306), 126m people

The poor performance doesn't stop at 100m either, it continues for most other large population nations below 100m as well. Including: Thailand, DR Congo, Turkey, Iran, Tanzania, South Africa, Myanmar, Kenya, Colombia, Uganda, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Morocco, Peru, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Malaysia, Angola, Mozambique, Ghana, Nepal, Madagascar, Yemen, North Korea, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon

Between the 100m and 25m population line, you have around 40 nations. At least 26 of those are between very poor and moderately poor.

Here is how the highest per capita output countries rank in total territorial area:

Luxembourg (#167), Switzerland (#132), Norway (#67), Ireland (#118), Iceland (#106), Qatar (#158), Singapore (#175), US (#4), Denmark (#130), Australia (#6), Sweden (#55), Netherlands (#131), Austria (#113), Finland (#64), Germany (#62), Belgium (#136), Canada (#2), France (#42), UK (#78), Israel (#149), New Zealand (#75), UAE (#114), Japan (#61), Italy (#71), South Korea (#107)

Having a lot of territory to look after, is more often an immense burden.

Thank you for putting this together. It’s helpful perspective.

Being economically successful and being a global superpower are not the same thing. There are plenty of small wealthy nations today, but with the decline of colonialism there probably won't be any more global powers with small populations.

Algeria? It is not as big as Argentina or Kazakhstan.

Algeria: 2.381 sqkm.

Argentina: 2.780 sqkm.

Kazakhstan: 2.724 sqkm.

It's pretty close.

The population argument makes little sense. Chinese like Indians speak a multitude of languages and have very different cultures.

I don’t think there are 2 places in mainland US that have as distinct cultures as pretty much every region of China has from each other (primarily because everyone speaks English in the US, while people speak different languages in different regions of China).

Different dialects of Chinese you mean, and mandarin works well enough in most places as China also has a lot of transplants. You could love and work in Chengdu without without speaking sichuanese, for example.

In India, the unifying language is English, though it isn’t as widespread in India as mandarin is in China.

> Different dialects of Chinese you mean

No, the use of the term “dialect” is propaganda from the diversity-denying central government; describing Chinese languages as “dialects” is a gross abuse of the English word “dialect”, comparable to saying that French, Portuguese, and Romanian are all just dialects of Latin. “Chinese” consists of many mutually unintelligible languages (hundreds?), each of which has multiple dialects.

Mandarin works well enough as a lingua franca because (a) there has been a tremendous effort to force it on the population and suppress local culture (e.g. forcing children to speak it in school, force mass media to use it, etc.), and (b) there has been a massive internal migration in China so that a large proportion of the population is no longer living in their native land.

In some ways it is similar to the way young people from different European countries now speak English as a common language.

Sichuanese is much more of a dialect than Cantonese. Even my sorry laowai Chinese can make some of it out. Cantonese and fujianese are about as far away from mandarin as dialects get, and they still are somewhat intelligible with manadarin and each other. The real different languages of China are like Tibetan, Mongolian, zhuang, Miao, Uighur, and a plethora of minority languages, but < 10% of the population speak them.

Mandarin gets you far for work or life in China in most Chinese cities. It stops working that great once you get to heavy minority areas outside big cities.

> Even my sorry laowai Chinese can make some of it out

In a similar way, as a not-great Spanish/French speaker, I can understand lots of Italian words and grammatical constructions, and often get the gist of random Italian quotations that pop up in books written in English.

Doesn’t make them the same language.

You are seriously overestimating how much Chengdu hua or Kunming hua differ from mandarin. Yes, they are crazy weird accents, but no, it’s not like a Spanish speaker picking out some Italian words, not even close. Same goes for dongbei hua or shandong hua, it only starts getting weird in south east China (Cantonese, fujian/min yu, kejia hua, etc...), and even then, those dialects are still Chinese with lots of nuances, not to mention they are similar to each other as well.

According to Wikipedia, Sichuanese shares <50% of its vocabulary with Beijing Mandarin. That is significantly further apart than French or Spanish to Italian. (Disclaimer: I know very little about the relation between Sichuanese and Beijing Mandarin, and would be happy to see better explained quantitative comparisons.)

Maybe you are underestimating how close Romance languages are.

In any event, I think everyone would agree that Sichuanese is much closer to Beijing Mandarin than other Chinese languages (like Xiang, Wu, Hakka, Min, etc. etc.).

Link?

Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese

Officially sichuanese isn’t even considered another variety of Chinese (nor are any other western Chinese dialects). It’s even just called southwest mandarin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwestern_Mandarin

The page specifically for chengdu mandarin doesn’t mention anything about 50%...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengdu-Chongqing_dialect

This analogy doesn't include the part where the written language is mutually intelligible due to thousands of years of imperial record-keeping.

To be a developed country you simply need 2 things. Average IQ >= 100, and a free market.

Every country that has these (north america, non-communist europe, japan, south korea, singapore, taiwan, hongkong, israel) is a developed country.

Every country that has not, is not.

Having oil helps a little, also.

The article mentions, China for the first part of 20th century, and before 1980s, isn't a stable country.

Qing government is overthrown at 1911, which follows by a loose governance of various warlords, and KMT merely reins the power to control them. Before stuff can get better, the Japanese invasion happens, drags China into even bigger misery well into 40s. Tens of millions people died in WWII. After WWII, the Chinese Civil War happens immediately between KMT and CCP, with CCP ascending to power after 4 years.

At this stage, China finally regains a strong central government as it usually does in its history. Unfortunately, Mao is an ideology fueled dictator, who knows nothing about economy development. So China missed the golden age of economy and technology development worldwide before 80s. When its leader finally comes to sense, the world is a far different place than they would want to admit, and China is way behind already and have so much to catch up.

After which, it does something right about itself. Cheap affordable, mass education offered to its populace. Student loan was unheard of in China (not sure it is still case nowadays). And freedom to do business is offered to its citizens, and they are encouraged to get rich by the party. CCP would like to claim all the credits, but in reality it is mix of everything, it does something right, but more like catalyst that starts something even beyond its own imagination, driven by the desire of one billion people to seek a more abundant life.

Yes, I think what really happens in China today is that it finally comes back at the world stage, not as a catch-up, but as a player, with its own pros and cons.

Such coming back should be regarded as the normal of the world order, but I guess it will have to earn the status before the rejection from the post cold war, western liberal order is significantly weakened or defeated.

> how they managed to fall so low

I'm amazed that in so many English discussions about China's fall since the 17th century, there are absolutely zero mentions of the Manchus. On the other hand, read any Chinese discussion on it and you'll always see the Manchu domination popping up as a reason if not one of the main causes.

The Manchus took advantage of internal strife within the Ming dynasty during the 17th century and conquered China after the last Ming emperor killed himself when rebels surrounded the palace and a Ming general let them through the Great Wall.

The problem with the Manchus is that they were semi agrarian/semi nomadic and had very little desire for technological progress. Unlike the Han Chinese who always had to frequently rely on technology to overcome the nomads on horseback from the North, the Manchus only believed in horseback and arrows. In fact the late Ming had more natively produced cannons than the Qing dynasty had during the opium wars hundreds years after. Even the western expansion wars conducted by the Qing dynasty early on had gunpowder teams that were only staffed by the Han Chinese because the Manchus initially looked down on guns and cannons.

Lastly the administration was sclerotic because a minority group of 1% was supreme over the other 99%. The Manchus/Mongols/Tibetans owned most of the land in China during the Qing dynasty even though they were a tiny minority. The Manchu/Mongol/Tibetan officials were also of higher status than the Han Chinese. During imperial court, the Qing dynasty had two sessions. After the first one, the Han Chinese had to leave because they were not trusted. In fact up until the late Qing dynasty when the Qing dynasty was ravaged by foreign powers, senior court officials even mentioned to give China to its friends (Europeans/Japanese) rather than give it back to their slaves (the Han Chinese).

This is not to say the Manchus were the only reason for China's downfall (in fact the Ming had started to stagnate a little), but they were absolutely a very large part of it. What many non-Chinese think about Chinese today are actually from the Manchus. The Qipao, the pigtail (Manchu Queue), etc.

> The only question is how they managed to fall so low that they weren't a competitive superpower.

In-fighting because they weren't a cohesive whole? It's like asking how "Europe" wasn't a competitive superpower pre-EU (if it even counts as one now).

> The only question is how they managed to fall so low that they weren't a competitive superpower.

Well, first of all, they had two thousand years autocratic Imperial rule. This was overthrown in 1912, but then came the Japanese invasion, then WW2, then a civil war.

The civil war ended up being won by a somewhat anti-intellectual group of people (the Communists) who had all sort of economic backwards programs (not to mention social upheaval by sending intellectuals to "re-education" camps).

As for the reason why things remained static during the Imperial rule: this was actually the norm for most civilizations. If you look the world in 1600, just before the invention of the telescope, Western Europe, the Ottoman's, the Mughals ruling in India, and Imperial China, weren't too different. The non-Europeans were actually ahead of the Europeans by some metrics.

Once the Scientific Revolution was embraced by the Europeans, and generally rejected by everyone else, the Euros left everyone else in the dust. The real question is: why were the Europeans the only ones to embrace it.

The book Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution by Toby Huff explores this question. Highly recommended.

>The real question is: why were the Europeans the only ones to embrace it.

I haven't read Huff's book so here's my stab in the dark. Europe has a lot of mainland coastline and the Mediterranean, which favors the formation of many small nation states and trans-Mediterranean trade. Among a large number of diverse and competing states, political, military and social ideas are more likely to be employed somewhere, and if successful, will rise to prominence within the local trade cluster by the process of natural selection.

If you have a large number of independent nation states, many of which import products and ideas from the far East, one of them is likely to put together a new military innovation that gives them an edge in warfare. Since the area sees frequent competition, other nations will quickly come into contact with the new technology and be forced to adopt it, or risk swift decline. A period of rapid innovation in metallurgy, chemistry and navigation (to name only a few) would develop a political culture that values technological development over traditional ideals.

I guess this would increase the demand for scientists/intellectuals and engineers. The total fund allocated by the political elite towards academics either through patronage or universities would increase the number of scientists in Europe. Ease of communication through mail channels and access to wider array of materials, both developed due to the increased volume of trade, would allow more scientists, to do more complicated research and exchange ideas more easily than ever before.

Another interesting observation there was much more of a Church-State separation in Christianity compared to many other belief systems:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_unto_Caesar

Certainly the (Catholic) Church had a lot of temporal power, especially in the Papal States, but sovereignty was a bigger thing than in Imperial China or Muslim conquests or caliphs.

Huff also cites the legal framework (amongst other factors): the independence of the judiciary (even from the Church, even though clergy sometimes acted as judges) and a focus on a documented due process acted as checks on runaway power.

The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession by Brundage is also an interesting read:

* https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo56...

It even covers Roman law, and how it managed to be salvaged (to an extent) and be used as a base for European law, especially starting in the 1200s.

> The only question is how they managed to fall so low that they weren't a competitive superpower.

Because for pretty much their entire history, anytime they tried to achieve anything, they were either conquered by an aggressive imperial power, stuck with a terrible repressive government, or both in rapid succession.

To be fair, throughout most of history, as long as China was under unified rule, it was almost consistently had the largest GDP in the world for any political entity, usually amounting to 25% share of the global GDP.

Compared to their historical performance, China hasn't even reached its peak.

I'd say political turmoil and conquests didn't harm the Chinese economy that much, but political stagnation during the crucial 19th century did. It was first disinterest of the ruling class in international trade (admittedly this started much earlier), which effectively handed over a lucrative business to European powers, who could in turn outgrow China.

The same political stagnation, as long as losing their position of advantage, has made China completely miss out on industrialization which was a great multiplier for GDP growth. This explains how a smaller neighbor like Japan (which embraced industrialization and Western-style colonization) could quickly surpass China and threaten it.

> anytime they tried to achieve anything, they were either conquered by an aggressive imperial power

It seems to me, the opium wars and the resulting partitioning was solely a fault of the Qing government. Sure, the Brits were big bullies but China was playing on a home field and could overpower invaders with sheer numbers.

Qing state was already breaking from inside by then. No wonder the didn't survive long after.

> The only question is how they managed to fall so low that they weren't a competitive superpower.

Political issues. They might be the mighty sole superpower by now. Imagine the knowledge, passion and intelligence of all the people living there, and what they could have already achieved without being suppressed or held back.

They were getting kicked around by other powers in the 19th century. Communism isn’t the explanation.

Look at the last 50 years.

The last 50 years has been a sharp rise. The fall was long before.

That was only the last 20 years. Imagine what would have been possible last 50 years already.

Yeah, last 20 years were rapid growth. Places like Pudong didn't really exist just 20 years ago... hard to believe now.

Communism.

Any society with majority chinese population (singapore, taiwan, hong kong) that has a free market is a modern developed country. China stuck behind for 50 years, and is now catching up.

Communism was a roadblock, but China's relative decline (which really just means stagnation) started back during the Qing dynasty in the 19th century.

There are plenty of countries without any communist history that are in much worse shape than either China or Russia, so this can hardly be a sufficient explanation.

It is sufficient for the case of china.

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