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Our struggle with China is racial
There are aspects of human civilization which would, with enough time be understood and adapted by any sexually reproducing species of sufficient intelligence, simply because they are instrumentally valuable with regards to the instincts that all biologically similar animals share. Animal likes food too. Animal likes sex too. Animal plays games too. Animal fights enemies and wages war for resources too. Many animals beat few animals, so animals have incentives to form alliance structures or be outcompeted and exterminated. Yet wouldn't it be surprising if they valued the same things, or felt the same ways, where instrumental necessities didn't require it? Shouldn't we then expect to see, dramatic differences in what are superficially institutions, even amongst intellectually comparable animals?
Consider the family. Every functional civilization has been patriarchal at least until recently; and the physical and cognitive differences explaining this are seen in the animal world as well. Woman needs man, and man must find his mate. It'd be great if she were loyal though. Yes you could punish disloyalty after the fact but that's not exactly foolproof. Hey what if she literally couldn't run away? If every couple breaks the feet of every daughter then she'll make a perfectly suitable mate! The logic here is of course unimpeachable; and yet is there any reason to believe Nero himself wouldn't react with a similar disgust to it as modern (non-anthropologist) man?
Where unimaginable cruelty naturally pervades even the closest family bonds between the strong and the weak; concern for outsiders may be expected to be similarly lacking. A toddler bleeding out in plain view to the complete indifference of most passers by is not at all surprising when you remember what their close genetic ancestors did, nor are the countless similar videos you can find on the Chinese interwebs: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ECeC4R-Gjtc.
I don't need to mention that where humans cannot expect compassion, the fate of man's best friend is not at all uncertain.
Other areas of human life like the ability to be moved by beauty seem similarly lacking in a civilization whose pre-1800s painting and sculpture never approximated that of Ancient Rome, much less Michael Angelo, when portraying human subjects (as opposed to landscapes were they admittedly excelled).
A people with innately different instincts in one field, might also be odd in other ways, like committing mass cannibalism against political enemies in the absence of famine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre .
Their literature might include bizzare scenes, like a inferior man demonstrating his pious hospitality to his superior by secretly killing and cooking his own wife to feed him. https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ghmx4v/what_can_romance_of_the_three_kingdoms_liu_an/
Different from birth
Someone covers your nose or lays you face first against the bed. What do you do? Seemingly every non-disabled European American newborn that isn't cognitively impaired has the same reaction; to move, struggle and fight against this horrifying imposition. Nearly every Chinese American baby has a different reaction; complete non-reactivity.
Isn't this precisely the kind of difference common stereotypes, a history of slavish behaviour, and the above section would suggest? Can you think of a more elemental test of innately different instincts than a newborn's reaction when you screw with his breathing? Have you noticed that basically everyone still wearing a mask is Asian?
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/2241227a0
** The necessity of racism **
What does it mean to allow members of a high IQ species of alien fundamental moral and aesthetic instincts to increase their power in our institutions?
What does it mean, for an entire nation of them to become the dominant power on the planet?
China really is not so different from the West. There are weird practices and different paths taken, but they're basically in the same category of great civilizations. There are no fundamental qualitative differences.
For some reason the US has a practice of commonly mutilating the penis of babies. This doesn't cause so much harm as foot-binding yet it's bizarre and hostile. If you walked up to someone on the street and offered to cut off parts of their penis, a rude rebuff is the best you can expect. The Chinese thought small feet were attractive and high-status (and a part of it got mixed into resistance to Manchu rule when they tried to outlaw it), so what? Cultures do strange things from time to time. Weird foot fetishes are not unheard of. Right now, there is an emerging school of thought that non-heterosexuals are high status - thus LGBT parades, Pride events and so on. This is also very strange. A Chinese scholar might well say 'we selected eunuchs to run institutions for strategic reasons so they couldn't build dynasties or interfere with the imperial harem, why are you glamorizing it for the whole population, creating such perverse rituals?'
If you study Chinese history more deeply, you get the sense of a civilization which went down a different path at the beginning. Back in the era of Aristotle and Plato, the Chinese also had a period of division and many schools of philosophical thought. They had people who were interested in formal logic and mathematics, just as in the West. They had proto-utilitarianism too, in Mohism.
But in the end, Confucianism, Daoism and Legalism won out. These are more on the 'social science' end of philosophy, they're not concerned with whether something is true, logical sense but upon how society runs. Confucianism is about ritual, about stable relations between people (there's even an element of social contract in the mandate of heaven). Daoism is very abstract and consciously opposed to defining itself (it's a little bit like a cope-religion where terrible things happen but if you're a true galaxy-brain/sage you can just ignore the difference between good and bad so you're never hurt and eventually ascend to the astral plane). Legalism is about putting boots on the ground and cutting off heads, on min-maxxing your agricultural power base and conquering the world with blood and iron.
I think it's useful to think about China as a civilization that was more based on politics than technology. They were very good at the social end of things, running a gargantuan empire, organizing massive irrigation works. Of course they'll be better at moulding people and making them more disciplined. Their mainstream civilizational philosophy of Confucianism/Legalism was all about moulding people. There just wasn't so much emphasis on technology, mathematics and so on. They definitely had good mathematics and technology but it wasn't emphasized. As far as they were concerned, moving wealth around and administration was more important than growing the pie.
Whatever backwardness there was in the social end of things was due to the Qing government maintaining an ideological small-government stance for a few centuries, refusing to raise taxes and increase the size of the administration even as the country's population tripled. Obviously this caused administrative issues and corruption, it inhibited statebuilding and military efficiency when the Europeans showed up. The weakness of the Chinese state in the 19th and 20th centuries was fundamentally due to choice and then bad luck as they kept getting pummelled by outsiders and didn't have time to build up or modernize.
The Mandate of Heaven predates Confucianism, it being what the Zhou used to justify their overthrow of the Shang (at least in classical understanding).
I’m not sure that Europe was too different, at least until recently (historically speaking)? Perhaps the Chinese did go super-super-hard into what (iirc) Leibniz calls “practical science”, but I don’t get the feeling that Europe was consciously emphasizing science and technology until at least mid-modern history.
Honestly I would date it to the Ming. The Qing in many ways just continued with Ming policy, and the Ming were often a basketcase, just not so obviously; and while Ming society was undoubtedly commercial, much policy reversed previously industry- and merchant-friendly tendencies in the Song. The Qing may have simply done the best they could with the existing trajectory and the limited knowledge at the time.
Though Kangxi declaring that land taxes would never be raised after him, among other things, didn’t help.
Good post.
I was sort of thinking of people like Henry the Navigator and Leonardo da Vinci. European sovereigns would fund all kinds of technology to get ahead - they wanted to make money, thrash their enemies, obtain land. Zheng He is the obvious counterexample yet his voyages seem more political to me. They sailed around the Indian ocean showing the flag and scaring the hell out of the natives, brought back some animals but nobody was terribly interested in profit, conquest or expansion. It was more like the moon landings, a cool way to show off Chinese power rather than achieve anything substantive. Of course, they had other problems to deal with on the steppe front.
Likewise, I recall some of China's tributaries eagerly wanting to have more tribute missions because they'd actually get more in gifts than they 'paid' in gifts. It wasn't even an extractive scheme (though there were all kinds of gradations in the tributary system). They were interested in maintaining social order internationally and domestically, there were huge redistribution systems to take money from the rich agricultural regions to fund nomad defense in the harsh interior.
A better parallel may be the Song dynasty from 970-1279, then; quite a lot of innovation happened during that time, and had a serious threat in the Liao, then the Jin.
Even the Ming were happy to get their hands on superior European designs, though, after they started lagging behind - the idea of the Chinese being unaware that the frontiers of technology were passing them by isn’t really true, at least for the elite.
Surprisingly, there are examples of “military conquest” during the treasure cruises. Off the top of my head, the voyages deposed a Sinhalese king and a Samuderan usurper. Of course, while they then installed someone favourable to the Chinese, the treasure cruises largely then fucked off and left the territories alone. On the whole I think your point is well made, however - only to add that they were thought as useful to signal that China was returning to form after a century of Mongol rule, and once the voyages had made their point the balance of utility of the voyages shifted pretty dramatically for the court (new emperor being against it also did not help).
The sea ban and deconstruction of the treasure ships also meant that China went from being (iirc) the greatest naval power in the world to being almost entirely land-bound in its aspirations. A lot of shipbuilding knowledge was lost in the 15th century in China. While it might’ve made sense at the time, it was also an enormous self-own in the long run.
That might be another sort of thing to look at as for why China didn’t manage to stay ahead.
Indeed!
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Damn it random-ranger, here I was preparing the theory that adherence to non-racism makes Europeans into a moral mutants capable of suppressing their most basic moral instincts, and now I'm gonna have to add anti-semitism to the list. Seriously, I share a revulsion towards circumcision but let's compare the acts shall we.
Circumcision:
Brutal painful act lasting a few minutes, with additional suffering during recovery period
carried out against a creature who will not remember or know the difference,
reducing sexual fitness by (I'll just guess) 20%,
carried out by medical professionals beyond the sight of Non-Jewish parents.
Footbinding:
Several rounds of brutal painful acts distributed over several years, with additional extreme pain in between them,
carried out against a creature who will remember every moment of it, and is fully aware of the difference (she used to have fully functional feet),
permanent partial crippling into this disgusting... (I'll omit any words, you either feel it or you don't)
Carried out by the parents themselves with full knowledge and awareness of their actions as their daughter screams, over and over and over again.
/images/16772047502996655.webp
I agree that footbinding is worse than circumcision, I said it myself!
But they both belong in the category of 'really weird things that you'd surely not expect to be cultural practices'! China thought for some reason that small feet are better, that they were high-status. Then it got locked in as a cultural trait, this is what high-status women do and how you get married. As for 'extremely disgusting pseudo-medical operations carried out by parents thinking they're doing good for their child', we can hardly claim the high ground. I won't post images or testimony of gorey botched gender transition surgeries because I don't really want to see or think about the things that are happening right now, in our countries, today.
People are prepared to die for status! They'll cut off their balls for status, flagellate themselves for status, people will do anything for status.
Fundamentally both the West and the Sinosphere + Japan are great civilizations. We basically have the same problems in terms of diminishing fertility, technological anomie and so on. It's a symmetrical situation.
Edit: Chinese and North East Asians are categorized as 'white adjacent' for the purpose of getting discriminated against in our education system. There's a certain essence of whiteness that they have possessed by few others.
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This is just basic signaling theory. It's high status to have bound feet because its a credible signal that:
I don't have to work. You know this because I physically am unable to work, and yet am obviously not malnourished.
I come from a high-status household. You know this because they bound their daughter's feet instead of putting her to work.
I care about my future husband. You know this because I had my feet bound to be more appealing to him
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