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Comment by missosoup | Hacker News Reader

If the alternative is China going unchecked and eating the world. I'll take the economic crash.

I grew up in poverty and I'd rather go back to poverty than live under a dystopian surveillance dictatorship.

I want to imagine the world with China as a democracy only to assure the world that xenophobia is the first thing that comes to mind when people take an anti-China stance and as a reminder that Chinese culture, their arts, the land and the people are wonderful. I am against this dystopian overwhelmingly powerful and suppressive government.

I imagine if 1989 was a turning moment for Democracy in China.

The wonderful culture and arts you're thinking about is historical. It doesn't really exist in China now. It was mostly wiped out during The Great Leap Forward, along with 30 million people give or take.

Fun fact: advanced Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners travel from China to Japan to learn. Japan preserved records of the TCM knowledge that China destroyed during the great leap.

As well as many of their people...

Not they preserve Chinese artifacts. China has been invaded so many times, the collapse of governments had led foreigners to scoop artifacts from China at no cost. Look at British Museum, Lourve. It happened to all countries have suffered from war. Japanese took most books, paintings, because those are not seen as valuable for westerners. British took most vase, china.

GLF was terrible, but the west shares a shame in throwing away our intellectual and cultural pursuits. There's an argument that a very long time ago, the islamic intellectual tradition preserved enlightenment values whilst we were off doing other things. I don't know the gritty details of the argument, so I'd be the first to say I'm wrong.

I think you mean they preserved Greek and Roman knowledge, which was the basis of the Renaissance. The Enlightenment was a few hundred years later, and consisted of new ideas.

They didn’t just preserve Greek and Roman knowledge. Averroes, Avicenna, the Mutazilites, al-Razi, Maimonides, al-Farabi and others made enormous and original contributions to philosophy, medicine, chemistry and other fields. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment would have been unrecognizably different without the contributions of the thinkers of the Islamic world.

Can you suggest some reading materials to those who want to know more about this?

My knowledge of this period is very shallow and mostly comes from the History of Phiosophy Without Any Gaps podcast. Lost Enlightenment is probably the best place to start.

https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00F8MIJMQ/geneexpre...

The Enlightenment was something new under the sun. The Islamic Golden Age was intellectually impressive but nothing in it presages the ideas of individualism and freedom that are at the heart of the Enlightenment project.

The heart of the Enlightenment project is the realization that educated, non-poor citizens are more effective at waging war with other countries.

That’s not an accurate description of the military revolution that began with Revolutionary France and the levée en masse or of the Prussian General Staff system, the two major military organizational innovations of the Enlightenment era. Prussia and France both had mass armies but neither was terribly well educated, officers aside, and calling Prussian subjects citizens is misleading in the extreme. It suggests participation in political life that was restricted to a tiny segment of the population.

Fun fact: Traditional Chinese Medicine is mostly a bunch of useless horseshit.

Too bad the great leap didn't totally destroy it.

Information should never be destroyed. There is a treasure trove of obsolete but preserved cultural knowledge out there, and China is a bit of a dark spot because of the great leap.

Preserving historical knowledge is not the same as perpetuating it or believing it's effective. Keeping a record of what societies did what is extremely important, regardless of whether it worked. If nothing else, so that a particular failed avenue of research isn't pursued again.

>I'd rather go back to poverty than live under a dystopian surveillance dictatorship.

Unfortunately there are too many people on earth who have been trapped in poverty for far too long, they will gladly to be like China.

I'm not arguing in favor of the current Chinese regime, just that change should come somewhat more slowly than a collapse.

It sounds to me like you're saying that you'd rather go back to poverty than live in 1984.

The more salient question, though, is whether you'd rather go back to poverty than live in Singapore?

Enjoy your dystopian surveillance democracy.

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