A great primer on China’s historical and cultural factors which shaped its civilization.
Much of the arrogance and dismissive attitude regarding China is viewed from the lens of Westerners having a large presence for the first time in China during the declining years of the Qing Dynasty which saw it wracked with famines, civil wars, revolutions and a decrepit military as technological progress had also become moribund.
Aside from the continued uprisings against the Manchus (“Depose Qing, Restore Ming”), the bloody Hakka-Punti Clan Wars in the Pearl River Delta, the Taiping Rebellion, etc, the Qing Dynasty was ill prepared to both stamp out the various rebellions while dealing with technologically advanced foreign interlopers.
Adding to this was the fact that the Han majority considered both the ruling Qing and the Western Colonialists to be hostile interlopers.
Ironically, many Western writers from the periods between the 19th Century until the mid-20th Century all predicted that China will eventually become a resurgent power and one without peer.
In the final chapter of Gerard Corr’s “The Chinese Red Army which was published in 1972 where the author states that it was only a matter of time before China would once again become a world power without equal. The added caveat was that China has never been an expansionist, imperialist power and that the world need not fear a resurgent China.
Another more recent book, the 2nd Edition of “Lords of the Rim” by Sterling Seagrave (published in 2010)was quite prescient in predicting the imminent return of China to her historical role as a global power.
15 years after Seagrave’s book it would appear his predictions are already coming on track to becoming a reality.
indeed. there was a time smart and insightful western commentators and scholars could publish thesis objectively. unfortunately they are replaced by narratives now or marginalized. People like Prof Sachs and Ambassador Chaz Freeman are deplatformed from mainstream media. the population is dumned down and propagandized into zombies.
Thanks, I always appreciate reading your posts. I suggest characterising China’s political system as multi-party democracy based on cooperation (under CPC leadership), whereas the Western political system is a multi-party democracy based on rivalry between political parties. All functioning political system balances is a balance between rivalry and cooperation. The Chinese system has much more cooperation, while the Western system has much more rivalry.
But true democracy is a political system that gives every individual a broadly equal say in how the country is governed. No political system achieves this ideal. The current American system gives the wealthy elite (including the security industrial establishment) a disproportionate say in governance. The Chinese system gives a “meritocratic elite” disproportionate say in governance.
Democracy is best viewed as an ideal state that all societies strive towards. Whereas the West tends to view political systems in dualist terms, a country is either “democratic” or “authoritarian”. This dualist mindset is sustained by a focus on narrow political institutions, ignoring actual outcomes. So “democracy” in the West is associated exclusively with certain neo-liberal institutions (eg elections, free speech, private property rights, free press, etc). Whereas I think in China, democracy is much more attentive to people’s actual living conditions.
I agree. procedural democracy (what the west has today) is different from substance democracy (which is what China tries to practice). the litmus test is whether public interests are truly incorporated into policies and whether there is accountability beyond election results.
Thanks, I suggest distinguishing between “comprehensive” vs “institutional”, not “substance” vs “procedural”. (I am just not sure what “substance” means.)
Procedural aspects of democracy are important, but they are not the only thing that matters. We also need to look at outcomes. (Elections by themselves do not guarantee equal say in a society where the majority of people struggle to get by.)
But we shouldn’t be “consequentialists” either, looking only at outcomes and ignoring processes. Elections, free speech etc also matter.
Mike Whitney makes some errors here, to an extent that some of his account is ahistorical.
1) China, at least from the 1980s until recent years, has not been the sort of meritocracy Whitney thinks its been, in fact, in some key ways it has been closer to the American Old Republic than contemporary America is. Its had very strong local governments with moderate local trade protectionism and forms of moderate local capital flow inhibitors. Local governments are strong and engaged in a wide range of policy areas that America decades ago made almost the sole purview of our national center. And the local parties' membership reflect a fairly broad amount of the local population spectrum, many dont have degrees and many of those that do have what Whitney would likely dismiss as "trade certificates". And while it can be exaggerated, and it varies place to place in how much its there, the CPC does actually have intraparty democracy.
2) The USA, after WW2, underwent an intensive de-democratization and political/economic/governmental/scientific centralization process, our two parties were transformed from decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties into deeply centralized and very publicly inaccessible exclusionary membership parties while our private sector consolidated, cartelized, and centralized as our governmental structures deeply centralized as well; and we instituted an intensive program of credentialism. For decades, very close to 100% of all Americans have been completely locked out from all private and public policy decision making. For decades, the USA has had the very hyper centralized technocratic dictatorship run by a management strata of credentialed experts that Mike Whitney says is the best way to organize society. Yet the results have been poor and the decision making architecture of our current system are demonstrably cognitively inferior to the prior ones we had when we were a decentralized democracy.
3) Singapore benefited mightily from the fact that it lay on the straights of Malacca, had a very long established position -- with associated infrastructure -- within that key maritime route, and that maritime route had decades of rapid growth ahead of it beginning when Lee Kuan Yew took over. Also, Singapore, as a city state allied with the US -- the regions hegemon at the time -- could serve as the headquarters territory for big Western firms who operated in the region which by extension also made them additionally a financial hub for the region. But by definition, thats a pathway that cannon be replicated by more than a handful of small territories around the world. And Singapore's ruling party, for well over a decade now, has actually dropped a lot of it "technocratic superiority" messaging because their performance in recent years has been locally perceived to have not been so great
thanks for the comments. first of all, Whitney only asked the question shown at the beginning of the article. The answers are all mine. Just to clarify on that. Secondly, I agree with your points 2 and 3, although I would give more credit to LKY to bootstrap his country to where it is now. Its geographic location is certainly favorable and cannot replicated. It is offset by a lack of other resources including fresh water. His governance approach is exemplary. I agree Singapore has stagnated in many ways today and is not what it appears to be to the casual visitor. In my view, it is merely returning to normalcy - it can be an Asian Switzerland but more is beyond its reach.
as for the democratic decay in the west, I wrote about it in the essay "the west is a demeritocracy", trying to highlight some of the symptoms and causes. there are a million books out there deepdiving into various aspects of this but something is for certain - something is terribly wrong with the system.
I agree about the new China has not always been a meritocracy. Its first three decades were beset with chaos and mistakes but those are historically normal as part of the consolidation and experimentation stage. Its governance and cultural traditions have made their comeback after the phase. While nothing is absolute, meritocracy is largely how the country is run today.
There are multiple hypotheses circulating currently about the success of DeepSeek. One current theory relates to the “resonance” of the ideographic system of the written language and its concomitant difficulties for western learners. Because of the grammar of Chinese (few inflections, meaning from context, etc) reading (particularly serious texts) requires care/attention.
This thought occurred to me in the context that someone could misread and misattribute the authorship of your piece. In Chinese, would this misreading be just as likely as in English? In my experience with colleagues in China, their reading and writing of “denotative” English seems quite precise, more so than the average American. Perhaps because it is not their native language?
Well I wish you and China the best, but in America, we became a "meritocracy" 40+ plus years ago and all its meant is that there is decision making in less and less hands, the people that hold it have less and less actual merit, and no one who's not in the inside who disagrees -- no matter how strong their arguments are, -- is allowed to disagree with any of the decision making because any one who is not on the inside is labelled as lacking the merit required to be allowed to disagree. "Meritocracy" has worked out terribly for the USA, its only delivered stupidity and dictatorship, I hope it works out better for China.
I hope you've been having a great start to the week!
Hi, Mayraj, thanks for the interesting reply! His line that we have a "donor occupied Govt." is greatly oversimplified, we have something in the mold of old twentieth century corporatist structures with various elements of Big Gov, Big Biz, Big Finance, the in-betweens (like the Universities and the NGOs), and a hodgepodge of others living in a symbiotic relationship with each other. They've been attempting to reconstruct Old Europe, here and by extension globally, capital "G" Globalization is in some ways a late-Holy Roman Empire 2.0
There’s truth in saying that the U.S. has long had elite influence but these analyses miss somethings, one big one is that the initial phase of the Republic is in these regards quite different than 1830s on because the gen 1.0 Democratic Party (the Jacksonians) defeated the proto-oligarchy that was at the time close to gaining complete control of America and radically reformed the countries governance in a way that both decentralized and diffused power and decision making. So their characterization of it as a purely elite-led country from the start has some merit for the early decades (although even there its exaggerated, they were accumulating power but it wasnt until the 1820s that they really became big and close to full control, but then they were defeated, and then the Jacksonians ushered in decentralization and genuine mass political participation.
The Jacksonians actively dismantled concentrated power structures: breaking the nexus of Northeastern finance, the Southern planter aristocracy, and London capital and expanding decision-making beyond a narrow elite. Their destruction of the Second Bank of the US and their emphasis on local financial control, diffused governance, and un-coordinated economic redundancy fundamentally altered governance, making it more participatory.
The Progressive Era and New Deal laid groundwork for centralization, but the Us remained decentralized well into the mid-20th century, with mass-member parties, local economic autonomy, and a private sector driven by competitive market structures rather than centralized planning.
The deep centralization we now have did not begin to really take hold until the Neoliberal Era, when the financial and monetary architectures, and the decentralized economic, political, scientific, and governmental architectures that once ensured regional diffusion of power was systematically dismantled.
And perhaps the biggest change that both enabled all that and then was excaerbated by all that, was the total tranformation of our political parties. The USA used to have very imperfect and limited but nonetheless still genuinely democratic governance structures based around our two formerly decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties, each --while still being full of a lot of BS-- was for the most part honestly named, the Democratic Party was a small "d" democratic party and the Republican Party was a small "r" republican party. And they operated in a politically, economically, governmentally, and scientifically decentralized system.
But due to the dirty deeds of some powerful special interest groups, for several decades now we've had two centralized and publicly in-accessible exclusionary membership parties. And our now so called Republican and Democratic parties are no longer republican and democratic parties, they are conservative party and a technocracy party, neither of which gives a flying **** about republicanism or democracy. And part parcel with that, they operate in a deeply politically, economically, and scientifically centralized system. So we've essentially lost most all of both our representation and our democratic governance structures.
Today’s system, with two exclusionary parties and a highly centralized political and economic structure, is quite the opposite to the genuinely participatory and decentralized governance the US once had. While their claim that all states today are "controlling" has some merit, we must realize that we have a single centralized corporatist structures that extends down and throughout every level. But there are signals that this structure is beginning to crack and here and there i even see and hear people once again accessing Old Knowledge that the system has long tried to erase
“CPC in the first 30 years of its rule was a revolutionary party led by people who didn’t understand modern economics, science and technology.. Obviously the result was disastrous”.
For 25 years, Mao grew China’s GDP faster than any takeoff country has ever grown, by 6.5% pa, despite massive embargoes and constant attacks—and left the country debt-free. He also doubled the population and its life expectancy, quadrupled caloric intake and taught 400,000,000 people to read, write and vote.
there certainly were many achievements in the first 3 decades of the CPC rule. the return from a war-torn country to centralized control in itself was a major cause of much of the progress. Mao's forced industrialization via great leap forward and his paranoid cultural revolution caused wide spread chaos and damage to the country. both are true at the same time.
Thanks, Godfrey, for your injection of reality. Mao remains revered by China and its people because they have a keen grasp of their history and an ability for objective self-assessment. Without Mao, there would be no China as it is today.
Most western intellectual tradition/philosophy (Schopenhauer is an exception) is based on the subject/object paradigm. It inherently cannot understand Chinese traditional culture.
My metaphor is this: the west is Newtonian physics. China is quantum physics.
The west cannot grasp paradox and constantly works to simplify complexity. Light as both wave and particle was rejected at first due to its sheer inconceivability. Despite its scientific “backwardness” for most of the twentieth century, China caught up quickly and — as you consistently point out in the technology section of your brilliant newsletter — is rapidly moving to surpass the west in a new “scientific revolution”.
Here in the US we insist we have "the best government money can buy." It is, unfortunately, our 1st Ignoble Truth.
Also unfortunately, given our birth by genocide, our historic/karmic rebirth is not promising. Very poor karma is an understatement. More like "shit on a boomerang."
Thanks. This is the best synthesis on China's rise that I have ever read.
The most important point in your synthesis is assuredly that : "Marxism has never been a governance theory for China. For that, China taps into its own historical traditions and wisdom".
These traditions and wisdom are encoded in what the Chinese call their "Traditional Chinese Culture" which is not rooted in religion but in animism ! You recognize this yourself in your following sentence : "Daoism is essentially pagan and the ultimate philosophy/religion of peace".
It is essential to understand that the unification of China's civilization, from at least 4,000 BC to 220 BC (Qin Shi Guang), was realized essentially through cultural unification around animism and not though conquest by force of other ethnic groups which was typical of the Western practice. This is why Western concepts like religion, empire, and other fail to render the reality of China's true history.
US and much of the west is built on thesis-anti-thesis=synthesis system of Hermetic Kabbala - the profound sounding name for Egyptian Pharaonic Satanism which was theologised by the Hamitic Nubian Pharaohs elevated to magical status by the hamitic-semitic Meroe pharaohs and the created into a 'world class' system of governance by the Semitic Hyskos pharaohs whose system was laundered into Europe by dropping in the Ptolemies as intermediaries because to enforce the one world slave system on the world they needed the warrior capacity of the listless barbarian production castes of the Vikings or Normans under whose rampage entire civilisations gave away including the Roman. Rome is a hamitic-semitic project where closely-knit families of the aforesaid people govern the world with usury in London magic/theology in Rome and Military in Washington. They do this through ultra elite secret societies like Bilderbergs, Club of Rome, Pilgrims Society, Chatham House etc through pre-selected 'political-billionaire class who are initiates but not the real men in control. The left right - Labour - Conservative - Republican - Democratic is classical thesis - antithesis of Hermetic Kabbala with the synthesis forced on humanity as fait accompli - for eg: The thesis of Nazism and Fascism against the Anti-Thesis of Zionism and Bolshevism which gave the synthesis of Transhumanism which if you see the gang around Trump including two Nazi-Zionist (Synthetic) billionaires and various conmen - this will be unravelled to the world probably after the dollar is taken down. In fact these folks like communism a lot because the theological basis of it was laid by these hamitic semites in the Brotherhood of Snake in Egypt and similar semetic Manicheans in Persia - these are godammned old ideas and loved the oligarchy because in Egypt they had a continous 1000 year slave empire where these hamitic semitic pharaohs lorded over the 95% miserables using magic sorcery and witchcraft - which is why the illumined of Europe are heavily in pursuit of such experiences from Blavatsky to Besant to Bailey to Crawley including the Russian charlatan Dugin. Rome continues today and human civilisation had only two axis for the past 2000 years JudeoRoma and China. JudeoRoma is merely Babylon-Persia-Egypt recreated with exactly these same families pulling the puppet strings for two millennia and half. China's advantage is that the meritorcratic system through the gaokao floats the best and brightest from the peasant and middle classes to the ruling class and the dull and feeble of the ruling class is recycled back to the floor - so rulers have more empathy for the whole society and not just the ruling class. The west has the left-right hermetic farce called democracy and 13 family permanent rule.
• Thomas Carlyle – “Heroes and Hero Worship” (6 Lectures) – 1841
In Lecture (or Chapter) 5 – “Hero as Man of Letters” - Carlyle writes:
“By far the most interesting fact I hear about the Chinese is one on which we cannot arrive at clearness, but which excites endless curiosity even in the dim state: this namely, that they do attempt to make their Men of Letters their Governors! […] There does seem to be, all over China, a more or less active search everywhere to discover the men of talent that grow up in the young generation. […] The youths who distinguish themselves in the lower school are promoted into favorable stations in the higher, that they may still more distinguish themselves,--forward and forward: it appears to be out of these that the Official Persons, and incipient Governors, are taken.”
Who would have thought that in 1841 (!) Thomas Carlyle was virtually writing the script of the rise to power of President Xi Jinping?
I respect you and your knowledge very much, Hua Bin, but I think you're mistaken when you wrote:
"It produced not only Trump’s first term, but his second term when anyone with eyes can see he is a fraud and bully, has low intelligence and thin skin, and behaves like a mafia don."
Trump, in his second term, stopped the bombs falling on Gaza, and now has stopped military aid to the criminal Zelensky regime. As someone whose main political focus has been against wars of choice for the last few decades, I can say these are hugely positive developments, not like anything I've ever seen coming from the US. I certainly hope Trump will stop being so belligerent against China, and won't get roped into attacking Iran for evil Israel, but I must bear witness to the clearly good actions performed so far.
Mike Whitney makes some errors here, to an extent that some of his account is ahistorical.
1) China, at least from the 1980s until recent years, has not been the sort of meritocracy Whitney thinks its been, in fact, in some key ways it has been closer to the American Old Republic than contemporary America is. Its had very strong local governments with moderate local trade protectionism and forms of moderate local capital flow inhibitors. Local governments are strong and engaged in a wide range of policy areas that America decades ago made almost the sole purview of our national center. And the local parties' membership reflect a fairly broad amount of the local population spectrum, many dont have degrees and many of those that do have what Whitney would likely dismiss as "trade certificates". And while it can be exaggerated, and it varies place to place in how much its there, the CPC does actually have intraparty democracy.
2) The USA, after WW2, underwent an intensive de-democratization and political/economic/governmental/scientific centralization process, our two parties were transformed from decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties into deeply centralized and very publicly inaccessible exclusionary membership parties while our private sector consolidated, cartelized, and centralized as our governmental structures deeply centralized as well; and we instituted an intensive program of credentialism. For decades, very close to 100% of all Americans have been completely locked out from all private and public policy decision making. For decades, the USA has had the very hyper centralized technocratic dictatorship run by a management strata of credentialed experts that Mike Whitney says is the best way to organize society. Yet the results have been poor and the decision making architecture of our current system are demonstrably cognitively inferior to the prior ones we had when we were a decentralized democracy.
3) Singapore benefited mightily from the fact that it lay on the straights of Malacca, had a very long established position -- with associated infrastructure -- within that key maritime route, and that maritime route had decades of rapid growth ahead of it beginning when Lee Kuan Yew took over. Also, Singapore, as a city state allied with the US -- the regions hegemon at the time -- could serve as the headquarters territory for big Western firms who operated in the region which by extension also made them additionally a financial hub for the region. But by definition, thats a pathway that cannon be replicated by more than a handful of small territories around the world. And Singapore's ruling party, for well over a decade now, has actually dropped a lot of it "technocratic superiority" messaging because their performance in recent years has been locally perceived to have not been so great
The USA, after WW2, underwent an intensive de-democratization and political/economic/governmental/scientific centralization process, our two parties were transformed from decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties into deeply centralized and very publicly inaccessible exclusionary membership parties while our private sector consolidated, cartelized, and centralized as our governmental structures deeply centralized as well; and we instituted an intensive program of credentialism. For decades, very close to 100% of all Americans have been completely locked out from all private and public policy decision making. For decades, the USA has had the very hyper centralized technocratic dictatorship run by a management strata of credentialed experts that Mike Whitney says is the best way to organize society. Yet the results have been poor and the decision making architecture of our current system are demonstrably cognitively inferior to the prior ones we had when we were a decentralized democracy.
A great primer on China’s historical and cultural factors which shaped its civilization.
Much of the arrogance and dismissive attitude regarding China is viewed from the lens of Westerners having a large presence for the first time in China during the declining years of the Qing Dynasty which saw it wracked with famines, civil wars, revolutions and a decrepit military as technological progress had also become moribund.
Aside from the continued uprisings against the Manchus (“Depose Qing, Restore Ming”), the bloody Hakka-Punti Clan Wars in the Pearl River Delta, the Taiping Rebellion, etc, the Qing Dynasty was ill prepared to both stamp out the various rebellions while dealing with technologically advanced foreign interlopers.
Adding to this was the fact that the Han majority considered both the ruling Qing and the Western Colonialists to be hostile interlopers.
Ironically, many Western writers from the periods between the 19th Century until the mid-20th Century all predicted that China will eventually become a resurgent power and one without peer.
In the final chapter of Gerard Corr’s “The Chinese Red Army which was published in 1972 where the author states that it was only a matter of time before China would once again become a world power without equal. The added caveat was that China has never been an expansionist, imperialist power and that the world need not fear a resurgent China.
Another more recent book, the 2nd Edition of “Lords of the Rim” by Sterling Seagrave (published in 2010)was quite prescient in predicting the imminent return of China to her historical role as a global power.
15 years after Seagrave’s book it would appear his predictions are already coming on track to becoming a reality.
indeed. there was a time smart and insightful western commentators and scholars could publish thesis objectively. unfortunately they are replaced by narratives now or marginalized. People like Prof Sachs and Ambassador Chaz Freeman are deplatformed from mainstream media. the population is dumned down and propagandized into zombies.
Thanks, I always appreciate reading your posts. I suggest characterising China’s political system as multi-party democracy based on cooperation (under CPC leadership), whereas the Western political system is a multi-party democracy based on rivalry between political parties. All functioning political system balances is a balance between rivalry and cooperation. The Chinese system has much more cooperation, while the Western system has much more rivalry.
But true democracy is a political system that gives every individual a broadly equal say in how the country is governed. No political system achieves this ideal. The current American system gives the wealthy elite (including the security industrial establishment) a disproportionate say in governance. The Chinese system gives a “meritocratic elite” disproportionate say in governance.
Democracy is best viewed as an ideal state that all societies strive towards. Whereas the West tends to view political systems in dualist terms, a country is either “democratic” or “authoritarian”. This dualist mindset is sustained by a focus on narrow political institutions, ignoring actual outcomes. So “democracy” in the West is associated exclusively with certain neo-liberal institutions (eg elections, free speech, private property rights, free press, etc). Whereas I think in China, democracy is much more attentive to people’s actual living conditions.
I agree. procedural democracy (what the west has today) is different from substance democracy (which is what China tries to practice). the litmus test is whether public interests are truly incorporated into policies and whether there is accountability beyond election results.
Thanks, I suggest distinguishing between “comprehensive” vs “institutional”, not “substance” vs “procedural”. (I am just not sure what “substance” means.)
Procedural aspects of democracy are important, but they are not the only thing that matters. We also need to look at outcomes. (Elections by themselves do not guarantee equal say in a society where the majority of people struggle to get by.)
But we shouldn’t be “consequentialists” either, looking only at outcomes and ignoring processes. Elections, free speech etc also matter.
We care about both outcomes and processes.
Mike Whitney makes some errors here, to an extent that some of his account is ahistorical.
1) China, at least from the 1980s until recent years, has not been the sort of meritocracy Whitney thinks its been, in fact, in some key ways it has been closer to the American Old Republic than contemporary America is. Its had very strong local governments with moderate local trade protectionism and forms of moderate local capital flow inhibitors. Local governments are strong and engaged in a wide range of policy areas that America decades ago made almost the sole purview of our national center. And the local parties' membership reflect a fairly broad amount of the local population spectrum, many dont have degrees and many of those that do have what Whitney would likely dismiss as "trade certificates". And while it can be exaggerated, and it varies place to place in how much its there, the CPC does actually have intraparty democracy.
2) The USA, after WW2, underwent an intensive de-democratization and political/economic/governmental/scientific centralization process, our two parties were transformed from decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties into deeply centralized and very publicly inaccessible exclusionary membership parties while our private sector consolidated, cartelized, and centralized as our governmental structures deeply centralized as well; and we instituted an intensive program of credentialism. For decades, very close to 100% of all Americans have been completely locked out from all private and public policy decision making. For decades, the USA has had the very hyper centralized technocratic dictatorship run by a management strata of credentialed experts that Mike Whitney says is the best way to organize society. Yet the results have been poor and the decision making architecture of our current system are demonstrably cognitively inferior to the prior ones we had when we were a decentralized democracy.
3) Singapore benefited mightily from the fact that it lay on the straights of Malacca, had a very long established position -- with associated infrastructure -- within that key maritime route, and that maritime route had decades of rapid growth ahead of it beginning when Lee Kuan Yew took over. Also, Singapore, as a city state allied with the US -- the regions hegemon at the time -- could serve as the headquarters territory for big Western firms who operated in the region which by extension also made them additionally a financial hub for the region. But by definition, thats a pathway that cannon be replicated by more than a handful of small territories around the world. And Singapore's ruling party, for well over a decade now, has actually dropped a lot of it "technocratic superiority" messaging because their performance in recent years has been locally perceived to have not been so great
thanks for the comments. first of all, Whitney only asked the question shown at the beginning of the article. The answers are all mine. Just to clarify on that. Secondly, I agree with your points 2 and 3, although I would give more credit to LKY to bootstrap his country to where it is now. Its geographic location is certainly favorable and cannot replicated. It is offset by a lack of other resources including fresh water. His governance approach is exemplary. I agree Singapore has stagnated in many ways today and is not what it appears to be to the casual visitor. In my view, it is merely returning to normalcy - it can be an Asian Switzerland but more is beyond its reach.
as for the democratic decay in the west, I wrote about it in the essay "the west is a demeritocracy", trying to highlight some of the symptoms and causes. there are a million books out there deepdiving into various aspects of this but something is for certain - something is terribly wrong with the system.
I agree about the new China has not always been a meritocracy. Its first three decades were beset with chaos and mistakes but those are historically normal as part of the consolidation and experimentation stage. Its governance and cultural traditions have made their comeback after the phase. While nothing is absolute, meritocracy is largely how the country is run today.
Just curious — respond as you see fit.
There are multiple hypotheses circulating currently about the success of DeepSeek. One current theory relates to the “resonance” of the ideographic system of the written language and its concomitant difficulties for western learners. Because of the grammar of Chinese (few inflections, meaning from context, etc) reading (particularly serious texts) requires care/attention.
This thought occurred to me in the context that someone could misread and misattribute the authorship of your piece. In Chinese, would this misreading be just as likely as in English? In my experience with colleagues in China, their reading and writing of “denotative” English seems quite precise, more so than the average American. Perhaps because it is not their native language?
Hi, Hua! Sorry for the oversight.
Well I wish you and China the best, but in America, we became a "meritocracy" 40+ plus years ago and all its meant is that there is decision making in less and less hands, the people that hold it have less and less actual merit, and no one who's not in the inside who disagrees -- no matter how strong their arguments are, -- is allowed to disagree with any of the decision making because any one who is not on the inside is labelled as lacking the merit required to be allowed to disagree. "Meritocracy" has worked out terribly for the USA, its only delivered stupidity and dictatorship, I hope it works out better for China.
I hope you've been having a great start to the week!
--Mike
Hi, Mayraj, thanks for the interesting reply! His line that we have a "donor occupied Govt." is greatly oversimplified, we have something in the mold of old twentieth century corporatist structures with various elements of Big Gov, Big Biz, Big Finance, the in-betweens (like the Universities and the NGOs), and a hodgepodge of others living in a symbiotic relationship with each other. They've been attempting to reconstruct Old Europe, here and by extension globally, capital "G" Globalization is in some ways a late-Holy Roman Empire 2.0
There’s truth in saying that the U.S. has long had elite influence but these analyses miss somethings, one big one is that the initial phase of the Republic is in these regards quite different than 1830s on because the gen 1.0 Democratic Party (the Jacksonians) defeated the proto-oligarchy that was at the time close to gaining complete control of America and radically reformed the countries governance in a way that both decentralized and diffused power and decision making. So their characterization of it as a purely elite-led country from the start has some merit for the early decades (although even there its exaggerated, they were accumulating power but it wasnt until the 1820s that they really became big and close to full control, but then they were defeated, and then the Jacksonians ushered in decentralization and genuine mass political participation.
The Jacksonians actively dismantled concentrated power structures: breaking the nexus of Northeastern finance, the Southern planter aristocracy, and London capital and expanding decision-making beyond a narrow elite. Their destruction of the Second Bank of the US and their emphasis on local financial control, diffused governance, and un-coordinated economic redundancy fundamentally altered governance, making it more participatory.
The Progressive Era and New Deal laid groundwork for centralization, but the Us remained decentralized well into the mid-20th century, with mass-member parties, local economic autonomy, and a private sector driven by competitive market structures rather than centralized planning.
The deep centralization we now have did not begin to really take hold until the Neoliberal Era, when the financial and monetary architectures, and the decentralized economic, political, scientific, and governmental architectures that once ensured regional diffusion of power was systematically dismantled.
And perhaps the biggest change that both enabled all that and then was excaerbated by all that, was the total tranformation of our political parties. The USA used to have very imperfect and limited but nonetheless still genuinely democratic governance structures based around our two formerly decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties, each --while still being full of a lot of BS-- was for the most part honestly named, the Democratic Party was a small "d" democratic party and the Republican Party was a small "r" republican party. And they operated in a politically, economically, governmentally, and scientifically decentralized system.
But due to the dirty deeds of some powerful special interest groups, for several decades now we've had two centralized and publicly in-accessible exclusionary membership parties. And our now so called Republican and Democratic parties are no longer republican and democratic parties, they are conservative party and a technocracy party, neither of which gives a flying **** about republicanism or democracy. And part parcel with that, they operate in a deeply politically, economically, and scientifically centralized system. So we've essentially lost most all of both our representation and our democratic governance structures.
Today’s system, with two exclusionary parties and a highly centralized political and economic structure, is quite the opposite to the genuinely participatory and decentralized governance the US once had. While their claim that all states today are "controlling" has some merit, we must realize that we have a single centralized corporatist structures that extends down and throughout every level. But there are signals that this structure is beginning to crack and here and there i even see and hear people once again accessing Old Knowledge that the system has long tried to erase
“CPC in the first 30 years of its rule was a revolutionary party led by people who didn’t understand modern economics, science and technology.. Obviously the result was disastrous”.
For 25 years, Mao grew China’s GDP faster than any takeoff country has ever grown, by 6.5% pa, despite massive embargoes and constant attacks—and left the country debt-free. He also doubled the population and its life expectancy, quadrupled caloric intake and taught 400,000,000 people to read, write and vote.
there certainly were many achievements in the first 3 decades of the CPC rule. the return from a war-torn country to centralized control in itself was a major cause of much of the progress. Mao's forced industrialization via great leap forward and his paranoid cultural revolution caused wide spread chaos and damage to the country. both are true at the same time.
Thanks, Godfrey, for your injection of reality. Mao remains revered by China and its people because they have a keen grasp of their history and an ability for objective self-assessment. Without Mao, there would be no China as it is today.
Most western intellectual tradition/philosophy (Schopenhauer is an exception) is based on the subject/object paradigm. It inherently cannot understand Chinese traditional culture.
My metaphor is this: the west is Newtonian physics. China is quantum physics.
The west cannot grasp paradox and constantly works to simplify complexity. Light as both wave and particle was rejected at first due to its sheer inconceivability. Despite its scientific “backwardness” for most of the twentieth century, China caught up quickly and — as you consistently point out in the technology section of your brilliant newsletter — is rapidly moving to surpass the west in a new “scientific revolution”.
Thank you for this.
Here in the US we insist we have "the best government money can buy." It is, unfortunately, our 1st Ignoble Truth.
Also unfortunately, given our birth by genocide, our historic/karmic rebirth is not promising. Very poor karma is an understatement. More like "shit on a boomerang."
Thanks. This is the best synthesis on China's rise that I have ever read.
The most important point in your synthesis is assuredly that : "Marxism has never been a governance theory for China. For that, China taps into its own historical traditions and wisdom".
These traditions and wisdom are encoded in what the Chinese call their "Traditional Chinese Culture" which is not rooted in religion but in animism ! You recognize this yourself in your following sentence : "Daoism is essentially pagan and the ultimate philosophy/religion of peace".
It is essential to understand that the unification of China's civilization, from at least 4,000 BC to 220 BC (Qin Shi Guang), was realized essentially through cultural unification around animism and not though conquest by force of other ethnic groups which was typical of the Western practice. This is why Western concepts like religion, empire, and other fail to render the reality of China's true history.
US and much of the west is built on thesis-anti-thesis=synthesis system of Hermetic Kabbala - the profound sounding name for Egyptian Pharaonic Satanism which was theologised by the Hamitic Nubian Pharaohs elevated to magical status by the hamitic-semitic Meroe pharaohs and the created into a 'world class' system of governance by the Semitic Hyskos pharaohs whose system was laundered into Europe by dropping in the Ptolemies as intermediaries because to enforce the one world slave system on the world they needed the warrior capacity of the listless barbarian production castes of the Vikings or Normans under whose rampage entire civilisations gave away including the Roman. Rome is a hamitic-semitic project where closely-knit families of the aforesaid people govern the world with usury in London magic/theology in Rome and Military in Washington. They do this through ultra elite secret societies like Bilderbergs, Club of Rome, Pilgrims Society, Chatham House etc through pre-selected 'political-billionaire class who are initiates but not the real men in control. The left right - Labour - Conservative - Republican - Democratic is classical thesis - antithesis of Hermetic Kabbala with the synthesis forced on humanity as fait accompli - for eg: The thesis of Nazism and Fascism against the Anti-Thesis of Zionism and Bolshevism which gave the synthesis of Transhumanism which if you see the gang around Trump including two Nazi-Zionist (Synthetic) billionaires and various conmen - this will be unravelled to the world probably after the dollar is taken down. In fact these folks like communism a lot because the theological basis of it was laid by these hamitic semites in the Brotherhood of Snake in Egypt and similar semetic Manicheans in Persia - these are godammned old ideas and loved the oligarchy because in Egypt they had a continous 1000 year slave empire where these hamitic semitic pharaohs lorded over the 95% miserables using magic sorcery and witchcraft - which is why the illumined of Europe are heavily in pursuit of such experiences from Blavatsky to Besant to Bailey to Crawley including the Russian charlatan Dugin. Rome continues today and human civilisation had only two axis for the past 2000 years JudeoRoma and China. JudeoRoma is merely Babylon-Persia-Egypt recreated with exactly these same families pulling the puppet strings for two millennia and half. China's advantage is that the meritorcratic system through the gaokao floats the best and brightest from the peasant and middle classes to the ruling class and the dull and feeble of the ruling class is recycled back to the floor - so rulers have more empathy for the whole society and not just the ruling class. The west has the left-right hermetic farce called democracy and 13 family permanent rule.
loved by the oligarchy - sorry for the typos
Matthew (‘Matt’) Galat – aka ‘JaYoe Nation’:
• Chinese Government Officials Corrupted My Videos! | JaYoe Conversation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smnVeGR15GI
• Change in China - Has China and the Chinese Government Changed? - Cyrus Janssen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6jBayUuB4A
Cyrus Janssen features this talk by Eric Li
• Eric X. Li: A tale of two political systems – TED Talks July 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0YjL9rZyR0
• Thomas Carlyle – “Heroes and Hero Worship” (6 Lectures) – 1841
In Lecture (or Chapter) 5 – “Hero as Man of Letters” - Carlyle writes:
“By far the most interesting fact I hear about the Chinese is one on which we cannot arrive at clearness, but which excites endless curiosity even in the dim state: this namely, that they do attempt to make their Men of Letters their Governors! […] There does seem to be, all over China, a more or less active search everywhere to discover the men of talent that grow up in the young generation. […] The youths who distinguish themselves in the lower school are promoted into favorable stations in the higher, that they may still more distinguish themselves,--forward and forward: it appears to be out of these that the Official Persons, and incipient Governors, are taken.”
Who would have thought that in 1841 (!) Thomas Carlyle was virtually writing the script of the rise to power of President Xi Jinping?
• Xi Jinping: Scholar in a cave
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGDm_mWtXmU
I respect you and your knowledge very much, Hua Bin, but I think you're mistaken when you wrote:
"It produced not only Trump’s first term, but his second term when anyone with eyes can see he is a fraud and bully, has low intelligence and thin skin, and behaves like a mafia don."
Trump, in his second term, stopped the bombs falling on Gaza, and now has stopped military aid to the criminal Zelensky regime. As someone whose main political focus has been against wars of choice for the last few decades, I can say these are hugely positive developments, not like anything I've ever seen coming from the US. I certainly hope Trump will stop being so belligerent against China, and won't get roped into attacking Iran for evil Israel, but I must bear witness to the clearly good actions performed so far.
Mike Whitney makes some errors here, to an extent that some of his account is ahistorical.
1) China, at least from the 1980s until recent years, has not been the sort of meritocracy Whitney thinks its been, in fact, in some key ways it has been closer to the American Old Republic than contemporary America is. Its had very strong local governments with moderate local trade protectionism and forms of moderate local capital flow inhibitors. Local governments are strong and engaged in a wide range of policy areas that America decades ago made almost the sole purview of our national center. And the local parties' membership reflect a fairly broad amount of the local population spectrum, many dont have degrees and many of those that do have what Whitney would likely dismiss as "trade certificates". And while it can be exaggerated, and it varies place to place in how much its there, the CPC does actually have intraparty democracy.
2) The USA, after WW2, underwent an intensive de-democratization and political/economic/governmental/scientific centralization process, our two parties were transformed from decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties into deeply centralized and very publicly inaccessible exclusionary membership parties while our private sector consolidated, cartelized, and centralized as our governmental structures deeply centralized as well; and we instituted an intensive program of credentialism. For decades, very close to 100% of all Americans have been completely locked out from all private and public policy decision making. For decades, the USA has had the very hyper centralized technocratic dictatorship run by a management strata of credentialed experts that Mike Whitney says is the best way to organize society. Yet the results have been poor and the decision making architecture of our current system are demonstrably cognitively inferior to the prior ones we had when we were a decentralized democracy.
3) Singapore benefited mightily from the fact that it lay on the straights of Malacca, had a very long established position -- with associated infrastructure -- within that key maritime route, and that maritime route had decades of rapid growth ahead of it beginning when Lee Kuan Yew took over. Also, Singapore, as a city state allied with the US -- the regions hegemon at the time -- could serve as the headquarters territory for big Western firms who operated in the region which by extension also made them additionally a financial hub for the region. But by definition, thats a pathway that cannon be replicated by more than a handful of small territories around the world. And Singapore's ruling party, for well over a decade now, has actually dropped a lot of it "technocratic superiority" messaging because their performance in recent years has been locally perceived to have not been so great
Democracy –The Most Dangerous Religion
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Democracy-The-Most-Dangerous-Religion-.pdf
The USA, after WW2, underwent an intensive de-democratization and political/economic/governmental/scientific centralization process, our two parties were transformed from decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties into deeply centralized and very publicly inaccessible exclusionary membership parties while our private sector consolidated, cartelized, and centralized as our governmental structures deeply centralized as well; and we instituted an intensive program of credentialism. For decades, very close to 100% of all Americans have been completely locked out from all private and public policy decision making. For decades, the USA has had the very hyper centralized technocratic dictatorship run by a management strata of credentialed experts that Mike Whitney says is the best way to organize society. Yet the results have been poor and the decision making architecture of our current system are demonstrably cognitively inferior to the prior ones we had when we were a decentralized democracy.