That 6 out of 10 of the most deadly conflicts were Chinese civil wars is strong evidence China had a long history and a gigantic population relative to the rest of the world. (I think it’s evidence that China was prone to fewer, larger wars.) To me, history is the study of people. If most people are in a one place then that is where most of the history is too.
I think the crux of our intuitive gap lies in the identification of useful lessons and models. If Chinese history is a useful source of models then I should be able to think of several off of the top of my head. Here is a core dump. I doubt you’ll agree with all of these ideas, but I hope it will at least get you a better understanding of how I extract value from this body of knowledge. This isn’t a list of everything I gain from Chinese history—just the stuff I get from Chinese history which I don’t get from European history, Islamic history, American history, Russian history, prehistory, etc.
The three historical figures I can think of who built giant institutions lasting thousands of years are Paul the Apostle, Mohammad and Qin Shihuang. Two of them formed religious organizations each based around a single book. The Effective Altruist community has an interest in creating institutions that last a long time. They should understand how the Qin Shihuang pulled it off.
China has unique geography where large interconnected population centers are surrounded by territory historically impassible to civilized armies. You can’t find this anywhere else in Eurasia. This dynamic does exist in the New World, but they lacked guns, germs and steel.
As a consequence of China’s unique geography, you get an interesting dynamic where the empire was challenged not by rival empires but instead by nomadic peoples and internal threats. It is true you find similar challenges by pastoralists in the rest of Eurasia, on the Arabian peninsula and even in colonial America. But in China the distinction between civilized and pastoral was most extremized. You get maximally isolated variables. I think this is one of the most interesting conflicts in history. I draw on ideas from it regularly when I think about grand strategy in the tech sector. Hackers are analogous to the Xiongnu. Tech monopolies are analogous to the empire.
China does capitalism well without conflating capitalism with democracy. It’s useful to separate the two in your mind. If you’re interested in remaking a society then you should have a reference point for how China transitioned from the Great Leap Forward today’s effective economy.
Nor does China entangle religion with politics to the same extent you find in the Christian and Islamic worlds. This makes it easier to think about conflicts. I feel it produces a better understanding of political theory and strategy.
Not coincidentally, the concept of wuwei is largely absent from the Western intellectual canon. There is Libertarianism, federalism and nonintervention, but I don’t think they’re as well-developed as a philosophy.
The same goes for Daoist philosophical ideas. I feel they have a better-developed concept of “the map is not the territory”. (This might be present in Indian history too. I don’t know enough about India to say one way or the other.)
In The Man on Mao’s Right, Ji Chaozhu talks about farmers stealing pee from each other. The story helps me understand agriculture and poverty better than I did before I read it.
China has the best poetry in the world. This counts as history because most of it was written centuries ago.
Western people usually think of the rise of China as an anomaly. China was the global center of economic power for most of history. The “rise of China” is a reassertion to the mean.
Lastly, China is on its way to eclipse the United States as the world’s greatest superpower. If you want an accurate model of where history is going then you need a model of China. Robust models of a region usually depend on knowing the region’s history.
China was somewhat unified and had a big chunk of the world’s population and was more likely to record population levels—though I’d guess there are huge error bars around the Three Kingdoms War and An Lushan Rebellion. If you control for political unity and population, were Chinese death rates in armed conflict higher than other regions?
The three historical figures I can think of who built giant institutions lasting thousands of years
Why draw the cutoff at thousands of years? And I’d guess recent institution building is much more relevant to EAs than ancient.
China does capitalism well without conflating capitalism with democracy
There were already the examples of Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore. (One could also consider European and South American states that were right-wing dictatorships).
Nor does China entangle religion with politics to the same extent you find in the Christian and Islamic worlds.
Christian worlds? Secularism has been important in France since the French Revolution. What about India or Japan? What about Hellenistic culture or Rome?
Robust models of a region usually depend on knowing the region’s history.
The question is how much “memory” or “persistence” the time series has. Mostly history is screened off by the present and recent past. You wouldn’t predict North vs South Korea by looking at Korean history for any time period up to 1930s.
The three historical figures I can think of who built giant institutions lasting thousands of years are Paul the Apostle, Mohammad and Qin Shihuang.
I will not exactly classify Qin Shihuang as in that vein. While the idea of the Mandate of Heaven and the idea that China should be unified into one dynasty has been fully established by him (Almost all rebellions in Chinese history were about overthrowing the emperor and replacing it with a new one, but only rarely about changing their government structure), the Qin dynasty collapsed with his son. Qin is not exactly known for being a long-lasting nation.
I believe Confucius is a much better example. His philosophy and teachings have been passed down all the way to today’s China, and has held its importance for thousands of years.
>Nor does China entangle religion with politics to the same extent you find in the Christian and Islamic worlds. This makes it easier to think about conflicts. I feel it produces a better understanding of political theory and strategy.
Does not entangle? I thought China is the only country of note around that enforces their version of Catholic church with Chinese characteristics (the translation used by Wikipedia is “Chinese Patriotic Catholic Church”, apparently excommunicated by the pope in Rome). One can discuss how it compares to Church of England’s historical past or more recently, the protestant skepticism about JFK’s Catholicism, but it is kind of remarkable on its own right.
(edit. Thinking about the little bit I do know about Chinese history … Taiping Rebellion?)
The Chinese fight Catholicism this way precisely because Catholism is politic in a way that their homegrown religions weren’t.
The Chinese Patriotic Catholic Church is not going to have any influence on the way the CCP governs China. You can’t say the say thing for either Christianity or Islam for most of their history.
The Church of England still has bishops that vote in the house of lords.
>The Church of England still has bishops that vote in the house of lords.
That is argument for particular church-state relationship. The original claim spoke of entanglement (in the present tense!). For reference, the archbishop of Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Finland has always been appointed by whomever is the head of state since Gustav I Vasa embraced the Protestantism and the church was until recently an official state apparatus and to some extent still is. The Holy See has had negligible effect here since centuries, and some historians maintain that most of the time the influence tended to flow from the state to the Ev. Lut. church than other way around despite the overall symbiosis between the two.
The aspects of political power in such conflicts were not alien to Catholic cardinal Richeliu of France who financed Gustav II Adolf’s war against the Catholic League in Germany while repressing the Huegenots at home.
It is very enlightening to read to the other responses below concerning the history of Confucianism, and I can be convinced China & Confucianism have very different history about the matters we (or I) often pattern-match to religion. And it makes sense that peculiarities of the Taiping rebellion or the CCP’s current positions concerning Catholicism are motivated by them being in contact with European concepts of religion only relatively recently on historical timescales. Yet however:
In my understanding, the conflict between CCP and the Catholic church indicates that the party views Catholicism in terms of national identity and temporal power in ways both different and not so different how Catholicism was viewed in Protestant countries of 17th/18th century. The CCP apparently do not want Catholicism or specifically the Church of Rome’s interpretation to have significant presence in the local thoughtspace, presumably in favor of something else which plausibly serves an analogous role (otherwise there would be no competition about that thoughtspace).
In this case, I find it likely that the parable about fish and water also applies to birds and air: there are both commonalities despite the differences, while water is no air, and the birds have more reason to differentiate the air from the ground. Maybe the Chinese are like more like to rockets in the vacuum of space, but that would take more explaining.
Writing out the argument how there is no entanglement and why the clarity arises (and why linking to Sun Tzu is supposed to back that argument) could possibly help here.
Consequently, the original remark and some of the subsequent discussion reads me to as “booing” all things that get called “religions” and cheering for the Chinese tradition as better for being not a religion.
The Chinese fight Catholicism this way precisely because Catholism is politic in a way that their homegrown religions weren’t.
Confucianism is extremely political. If I remember right, when an emperor’s government began to severely fail, their priests practiced rites to determine whether they had lost the Mandate of Heaven and a new emperor should be chosen, opening the way for religiously-legitimated rebellions to replace the distrusted dynasty.
This influence of religion on politics in part explains the reason the CCP is always so worried about, and ruthless towards, any religion that deviates from its ideology du jour.
China is nowhere near the power of America. A huge majority of their population are still peasants. Its power comes from the abuse and misery of the humans within it.
China does not have the best poetry in the world, that is just your opinion.
China doesn’t entangle religion with politics because all the people of culture were killed or fled to Taiwan. Communism banned it.
Based on the founding and core principles of capitalism, China fails, it succeeds at theft. Almost all their technology is stolen from the rest of the world.
You can get people to look at Chinese history all you want but no one will take you seriously if you sidestep the atrocities, that are even still happening.
That 6 out of 10 of the most deadly conflicts were Chinese civil wars is strong evidence China had a long history and a gigantic population relative to the rest of the world. (I think it’s evidence that China was prone to fewer, larger wars.) To me, history is the study of people. If most people are in a one place then that is where most of the history is too.
I think the crux of our intuitive gap lies in the identification of useful lessons and models. If Chinese history is a useful source of models then I should be able to think of several off of the top of my head. Here is a core dump. I doubt you’ll agree with all of these ideas, but I hope it will at least get you a better understanding of how I extract value from this body of knowledge. This isn’t a list of everything I gain from Chinese history—just the stuff I get from Chinese history which I don’t get from European history, Islamic history, American history, Russian history, prehistory, etc.
The three historical figures I can think of who built giant institutions lasting thousands of years are Paul the Apostle, Mohammad and Qin Shihuang. Two of them formed religious organizations each based around a single book. The Effective Altruist community has an interest in creating institutions that last a long time. They should understand how the Qin Shihuang pulled it off.
China has unique geography where large interconnected population centers are surrounded by territory historically impassible to civilized armies. You can’t find this anywhere else in Eurasia. This dynamic does exist in the New World, but they lacked guns, germs and steel.
As a consequence of China’s unique geography, you get an interesting dynamic where the empire was challenged not by rival empires but instead by nomadic peoples and internal threats. It is true you find similar challenges by pastoralists in the rest of Eurasia, on the Arabian peninsula and even in colonial America. But in China the distinction between civilized and pastoral was most extremized. You get maximally isolated variables. I think this is one of the most interesting conflicts in history. I draw on ideas from it regularly when I think about grand strategy in the tech sector. Hackers are analogous to the Xiongnu. Tech monopolies are analogous to the empire.
China does capitalism well without conflating capitalism with democracy. It’s useful to separate the two in your mind. If you’re interested in remaking a society then you should have a reference point for how China transitioned from the Great Leap Forward today’s effective economy.
Nor does China entangle religion with politics to the same extent you find in the Christian and Islamic worlds. This makes it easier to think about conflicts. I feel it produces a better understanding of political theory and strategy.
Not coincidentally, the concept of wuwei is largely absent from the Western intellectual canon. There is Libertarianism, federalism and nonintervention, but I don’t think they’re as well-developed as a philosophy.
The same goes for Daoist philosophical ideas. I feel they have a better-developed concept of “the map is not the territory”. (This might be present in Indian history too. I don’t know enough about India to say one way or the other.)
In The Man on Mao’s Right, Ji Chaozhu talks about farmers stealing pee from each other. The story helps me understand agriculture and poverty better than I did before I read it.
China has the best poetry in the world. This counts as history because most of it was written centuries ago.
Western people usually think of the rise of China as an anomaly. China was the global center of economic power for most of history. The “rise of China” is a reassertion to the mean.
Lastly, China is on its way to eclipse the United States as the world’s greatest superpower. If you want an accurate model of where history is going then you need a model of China. Robust models of a region usually depend on knowing the region’s history.
China was somewhat unified and had a big chunk of the world’s population and was more likely to record population levels—though I’d guess there are huge error bars around the Three Kingdoms War and An Lushan Rebellion. If you control for political unity and population, were Chinese death rates in armed conflict higher than other regions?
Why draw the cutoff at thousands of years? And I’d guess recent institution building is much more relevant to EAs than ancient.
There were already the examples of Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore. (One could also consider European and South American states that were right-wing dictatorships).
Christian worlds? Secularism has been important in France since the French Revolution. What about India or Japan? What about Hellenistic culture or Rome?
The question is how much “memory” or “persistence” the time series has. Mostly history is screened off by the present and recent past. You wouldn’t predict North vs South Korea by looking at Korean history for any time period up to 1930s.
I will not exactly classify Qin Shihuang as in that vein. While the idea of the Mandate of Heaven and the idea that China should be unified into one dynasty has been fully established by him (Almost all rebellions in Chinese history were about overthrowing the emperor and replacing it with a new one, but only rarely about changing their government structure), the Qin dynasty collapsed with his son. Qin is not exactly known for being a long-lasting nation.
I believe Confucius is a much better example. His philosophy and teachings have been passed down all the way to today’s China, and has held its importance for thousands of years.
I realize this is a 3mo old comment.
>Nor does China entangle religion with politics to the same extent you find in the Christian and Islamic worlds. This makes it easier to think about conflicts. I feel it produces a better understanding of political theory and strategy.
Does not entangle? I thought China is the only country of note around that enforces their version of Catholic church with Chinese characteristics (the translation used by Wikipedia is “Chinese Patriotic Catholic Church”, apparently excommunicated by the pope in Rome). One can discuss how it compares to Church of England’s historical past or more recently, the protestant skepticism about JFK’s Catholicism, but it is kind of remarkable on its own right.
(edit. Thinking about the little bit I do know about Chinese history … Taiping Rebellion?)
The Chinese fight Catholicism this way precisely because Catholism is politic in a way that their homegrown religions weren’t.
The Chinese Patriotic Catholic Church is not going to have any influence on the way the CCP governs China. You can’t say the say thing for either Christianity or Islam for most of their history.
The Church of England still has bishops that vote in the house of lords.
>The Church of England still has bishops that vote in the house of lords.
That is argument for particular church-state relationship. The original claim spoke of entanglement (in the present tense!). For reference, the archbishop of Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Finland has always been appointed by whomever is the head of state since Gustav I Vasa embraced the Protestantism and the church was until recently an official state apparatus and to some extent still is. The Holy See has had negligible effect here since centuries, and some historians maintain that most of the time the influence tended to flow from the state to the Ev. Lut. church than other way around despite the overall symbiosis between the two.
The aspects of political power in such conflicts were not alien to Catholic cardinal Richeliu of France who financed Gustav II Adolf’s war against the Catholic League in Germany while repressing the Huegenots at home.
It is very enlightening to read to the other responses below concerning the history of Confucianism, and I can be convinced China & Confucianism have very different history about the matters we (or I) often pattern-match to religion. And it makes sense that peculiarities of the Taiping rebellion or the CCP’s current positions concerning Catholicism are motivated by them being in contact with European concepts of religion only relatively recently on historical timescales. Yet however:
In my understanding, the conflict between CCP and the Catholic church indicates that the party views Catholicism in terms of national identity and temporal power in ways both different and not so different how Catholicism was viewed in Protestant countries of 17th/18th century. The CCP apparently do not want Catholicism or specifically the Church of Rome’s interpretation to have significant presence in the local thoughtspace, presumably in favor of something else which plausibly serves an analogous role (otherwise there would be no competition about that thoughtspace).
In this case, I find it likely that the parable about fish and water also applies to birds and air: there are both commonalities despite the differences, while water is no air, and the birds have more reason to differentiate the air from the ground. Maybe the Chinese are like more like to rockets in the vacuum of space, but that would take more explaining.
Writing out the argument how there is no entanglement and why the clarity arises (and why linking to Sun Tzu is supposed to back that argument) could possibly help here.
Consequently, the original remark and some of the subsequent discussion reads me to as “booing” all things that get called “religions” and cheering for the Chinese tradition as better for being not a religion.
Confucianism is extremely political. If I remember right, when an emperor’s government began to severely fail, their priests practiced rites to determine whether they had lost the Mandate of Heaven and a new emperor should be chosen, opening the way for religiously-legitimated rebellions to replace the distrusted dynasty.
This influence of religion on politics in part explains the reason the CCP is always so worried about, and ruthless towards, any religion that deviates from its ideology du jour.
China is nowhere near the power of America. A huge majority of their population are still peasants. Its power comes from the abuse and misery of the humans within it.
China does not have the best poetry in the world, that is just your opinion.
China doesn’t entangle religion with politics because all the people of culture were killed or fled to Taiwan. Communism banned it.
Based on the founding and core principles of capitalism, China fails, it succeeds at theft. Almost all their technology is stolen from the rest of the world.
You can get people to look at Chinese history all you want but no one will take you seriously if you sidestep the atrocities, that are even still happening.