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Pretty bad when even the Dalai Lama is calling you out on this.
He feels it because his country is being ‘occupied’. If I were Chinese and the Tibetans had done what they did to my country, i’d occupy them too.
On the other hand, I don’t see the point in paying for the behaviours of the ancients or now dead et al. What does that achieve? And did china need to be any bigger than it already was?
back on point, we are not being occupied, we are using people for cheap labour and to keep the costs of that down, then complaining about it. people just need to understand that their wealth is from capitalism which requires growth, and richer nations needs that more, to stay rich and not fall into decline = immigration from poorer nations to the richer one’s.
Capitalism doesn’t require growth. Banks require growth for loans. The two aren’t inherently identical. In fact, can contradict one another at times.
You can have both growth and banks without capitalism. You can have capitalism without growth. We confuse our particulars, especially their compatibility, with the bare minimum of what these things can be, in order to be considered it.
In Feudalism, property was held as supreme, as well as your rights and duties within a system of vassalage.Growth wasnt a prerequisite for commerence or capital, and guilds were more than willing to shut the unemployed out of their trades. That is what capitalism grew out of, and still is to a amazing extent. We just prefer to look at the flash and glamor of enttrepreneurers and banking’ backing of economic enterprise. Banks under the Teutonic Knights didnt do this. They didnt support growth, quite the opposite, they hoarded riches, obstantky to fund distant military operations (and the Teutonic knights, like the Knights of Malta are still around. Last warrior monk died in the 70s, but the order carries on).
Did China need to be bigger? I’m assuming your talking about Mao? Or Ancient China?
Under Mao… yes. If anything, it needed to be bigger than what he achieved, in order to stave off war on three fronts. He faced it from the Soviet Union, Imperial Japan/US/South Korea, and French Indochia and British Hong Kong, and thirdly India. It didn’t quite happen simultaneously, but came close. Can still happen. Currently, China is divided into 7 independent military regions, they can only mutually support one another so much against national armies that may very well have localized air superiority, and the ability to blockage China’s shores and freeze it’s trade and assets.
A strike from 3 fronts could seriously collapse Communist China under Mao, as it was still recovering from WW2, the war with the Nationalist, and the mess that the fall of the Emperor and the rise of the cliques and warlords brought. Any of his governors and commanders could of formed a new clique… he was still using Beijing style centralization, which causes dispersive autonomy. China is a very fragile creature, then and now, splits easily.
He also needed ore for industry, natural barriers between India and China, and find allies… hence Pakistan, the Khmer Rouge, North Korea, to check other border states and their alliances… the harder for them to coordinate a lightening fast strike at the center of China’s heartland, the better. Don’t think Mao didn’t notice how bad the Soviets crushed the Japanese in the last week of WW2 in Northern China. It scared him.
In Ancient China? Yes too. The Xia didn’t need to expand anymore than the Shang, the states were too far apart, such as Shu in the south… these are tribal groups on the village to city state level in the west, if you want comparison. China itself adopted the Orphic Cosmology early on, turned it into a bureaucratic text on how the governing court should be ran, instead of the birth and attributes of the gods, but most parallels remain, I will do a published study on it eventually.
After the Shang collapsed, due to the Zhou, the Zhou suffered a lost of it’s western homelands, had to move east and into dependency with subordinate states. It lost it’s recruiting lands, required it’s feudal lords to carry out mandated missions. This went on for a while, but eventually everyone figured out the Zhou were militarily dependent on them, and they rebelled. Each state tried to gobble the other, and when they did so, barbarians would swoop in from the west and north, and try to establish their own states, or worst, their own emperors.
Eventually China incorporated enough “barbarians” in the west, north, and south into it’s culture that when a coup occurred from a non-dynatic entity, the surviving ruling members could flee, and continue the older official empire while the new dynasty would conquer a large percentage of the old, declaring itself a new dynasty.
Especially after the fall of the Han, with the three kingdoms radically expanding into new territory, in order to find the manpower and supplies needed to conquer one another (all three failed, balance of power to the death) China grew larger and larger… but was only centralized under a single dynasty part of the time. If you look at Chinese dynastic lists, you will find the tendency was
- One Overall Emperor
- Two Big Emperors, North and South, locked in generational war, each covering a state only half the size of “China” (so the necessity wasn’t that a Chinese state be big, but big enough to compete, which is relative.)
- Bunch of small states, with interesting patterns of alliances, such as the philosophical “School of Diplomacy” and it’s emphasis on studying the Vertical and Horizontal Alliances.
Obviously, little fish were swallowed up by the big fish. Emphasis was on ordering the agricultural estates, maintaining seasonal armies, guarding against barbarians, and administration of a centralized court, including diplomacy.
You should look into the school of philosophy known as Mohism. It opposed the drive to expand, and built a none-state entity that could equip a army to fight for and defend any city under attack.
If city A was attacked by City B, the Mohists would defend city A. But if A wanted to attack B in revenge afterwards, the Mohists would then defend B, if B would be trusting enough to let them in. On YouTube, there is a movie called “A Battle of Wits”, a decent intoduction to this philosophy.
Chinese during peacetime often had great difficulty maintaining a agitated state, rebellions would occur, ambitions would rise… so many held to the philosophical principle that Chins required a foreign enemy… even if you don’t have one, you make one. This underlines much of the Chinese outlook today. They claim to be idolstionalist, but are quick to provoke border confrontations, minor wars, or rally the population against the US, India, Russia, Japan, Taiwan. What they are doing in the waters between Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Phillipines is a case in point… Indonesia has captured over a hundred Chinese vessals, China doesn’t care… just needs the confrontation. It has very little desire however for a war with Indonesia, which is it’s most likely future ally in the region, it kicks and screams much louder with Vietnam and the Phillipines, and Japan… really bad with Japan. But nothing compared with the US. Why? It needs to distract it’s population from economic stagnation. Its hoping for oil, but I don’t think they expect to get much economically, it’s a complete bullshit enterprise… but it pays massive dividends in terms of nationalism and a excuse for the need of the CPC to maintain control of the helm.
It isn’t that bad, somebody has to do all the work while i sit at home playing starcraft 2, this is a great opportunity for these migrants they can earn a sense of civilized identity, work towards the future and build stuff that people seem to deem important.
There has indeed always been markets of one variety or another, but modern capitalism is an amalgamation of that with national debt/inflation growth [to combat that] economies. Its a bad thing when economies go into recession. I was just speaking generally with china, but that’s probably a western bias. Historically they certainly seam prone to breaking up, but perhaps those fractures have expanded beyond their former designations. makes me wonder what will haven when it properly opens up to the world/or maybe it wont.
Europe could have done a similar thing with the Romans, if not for poor management.
The Dalai Lama has missed another occasion to speak out… it is not a crisis but a planned INVASION
It is a bad thing to go into recession because.we don’t know how to do it with grace in a planned recession. Think the Chinese are the first to try this, and as planning goes, I can’t really say they got it under control.
A planned and purposeful recession reflecting a acknowledged contraction of the workforce would be as indespensible as growth when it is growing in population for a healthy economy.