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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?
Enh, see, I want to agree with you. I really do. And I hate that I have to qualify this by saying that I am Chinese, because I hate that I feel the need to state my race before applying my argument, especially here. Ideas should be colorblind no matter where they originate from.
I want to tell you that you are simultaneously both spot on, and that you are overthinking it.
I think the best way to put it is that (mainland) Chinese are ruthlessly value-optimizing. They hold fundamentally different values, because of course they do. Whether these values are inherent, or they are taught, is not my concern - nature/nurture debates do not interest me, and modern Chinese history involves enough bloodshed to justify the color of the flag. What they are is what they are, and given that a multipolar world seems very likely barring dawning American AI dominance or continued military dominance, it causes me regular frustration that the vast majority of westerners fail to grasp that they're working off of fundamentally different values, let alone understand that they will naturally optimize for those values. Chalk it up to the American belief in universalism, or the standard American practice of saying (or believing!) one thing while doing another.
You may be absolutely right that your struggle with China is in fact racial. You may even be right in fearing a high-IQ species with alien fundamental moral and aesthetic instincts.
But at the end of the day, China is simply optimizing for its own values. Everyone does this. Your examples are entirely valid. Foot-binding conferred status and sexual market value at the time, so they did it. The weak exist at the mercy of the strong, so they are subservient to the strong. There are millions of Chinese people who are competition, losing the competition means you are one of the weak, so the toddler will eventually grow to be competition, so why care for it? Man's best friend is made of meat, and meat is protein, so why not eat it? Your political enemies can potentially threaten your existence, so why not eat them? You can sell a literature book by describing a scenario where the lower class gets a moment of catharsis by screwing over those more powerful, why wouldn't you?
I am entirely convinced, given the mess that America is in, that they are also subservient to perverse incentives. While they are not remotely comparable, the mechanisms behind it are the same.
It's simply more naked in China. Everywhere, the weak exist to be destroyed, or to be subservient to the strong. Losing in China is existential. The culture has a long history of genocide, either by the hard, physical method, or the soft method of cultural assimilation. Whatever chance that the weak had of affecting any kind of change was run over by tanks in the streets of Beijing as they were reminded what it meant to be weak, and what it meant to be strong.
You can't change anything about China without changing the values - or, well, as Chinese would put it - the dog-eat-dog nature of reality. If you don't wish to change the values, then there's nothing for it - nuke the bugmen, or attempt to practice isolationism. There are millions of Chinese. The preferred method of problem solving through the years by China's rulers was to throw bodies at the problem. Life is, and always has been, cheap. Winners win, and losers lose. If you can't grasp what this means, you haven't lost hard enough. Losers in China know what it is to lose.
(I lie, maybe I will bring up nurture after all - I have noticed that Chinese-Americans, especially the born-in-the-US generation, have poor comprehension of "winners win, and losers lose". Even if they lose, they assume family, community, social security, academia, the federal government, will be there for them and have managed to optimize for America in many ways. They will wear their "Chinese-ness" on their sleeves to get ahead for diversity points and wouldn't be caught dead wanting to move back to Mainland China. They know how the game is played.)
Maybe Chinese TFR being as critically damaged as it is will change some things. I'm not optimistic, because China will simply apply a top-down brutalist attempt to fix this. Or, alternatively, the opposition will become strong and eat the top, and apply their own fix that might be just as bad if not worse.
Great post, you've made lots of interesting points, thanks for sharing your perspective.
Context, I'm a white American currently in East Asia (not China) and this exact point I think is the hugest difference between the mindset of rich countries and poor countries (or more specifically, today, rich old countries like USA and Japan and currently poor/recently poor countries like China, Thailand and South Korea.) There is more of a palpable understanding of the risks and dangers of reality in the cultures of poor countries that the US and our aging allies seem to be increasingly oblivious to. Your statement above reads as extremely low class and would probably be shocking to most people in the US but it's so blatantly true that I can't help but feel like any culture that understands it is bound to outcompete any that ignores it for political or social reasons.
Yes, that's exactly it. The west is too myopically focused on the belief that everyone is equal that they fail to even imagine that a civilization halfway around the world and thousands years older could possibly have a different set of values, for fear that they come across looking racist, when a bit of cultural pragmatism could really help steer things in a more sane direction.
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I was tempted to join the other commenters in replying directly to Lepidus about why their post was wrong and offensively misguided, but I'll just springboard off of your comment instead:
The conflict between America and China is not racial at all. It is, rather, down to culture and government. As you note, Chinese tend to be competitive, self-serving (where possible/convenient), but also subservient. Probably the biggest argument against this being a "racial" conflict is that, as you get at in your parenthetical, once you take the Chinese out of China, you pretty much also take the China out of the Chinese (to an extent). Someplace like America is still pretty damn competitive, but it's also a much more relaxed environment compared to the earlier People's Republic or the older Empire. It's in a place like America, with all the slack afforded by the general material wealth and opportunity, where you see the Chinese get ahead because the competitive spirit still persists, but also there's less consequences for failure and less holding them back.
Insofar as this conflict is existential, I suppose it might be a general improvement for the world if all Chinese around the world behaved more like Chinese-Americans than Mainland Chinese, but that is a memetic battle that is far from decided.
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This seems pretty heavily coloured by recency bias. It was only less than 150 years ago that the modernisers in the ranks of the Qing elite were arguing that China was too frivolous and insufficiently receptive to Western efficiencies. Indeed, as the Self-strengthening movement wore on some of its greatest advocates complained that most of the Chinese bureaucracy were more or less uninterested in modernising the military at all. Chang Chih-Tung wrote in 1898 that ‘Zuo Zongtang established a shipyard near Fuzhou… Shen Baozhen set up the shipyard administration… Ding Baozhen instituted arsenals to make foreign guns and bullets… current opinion cavilled at every point’ and in consequence ‘their establishments went to waste or operated in a reduced form, none of them could achieve any expansion’, something their licking at the hands of the Japanese had proved in 1895.
Indeed, the controversial Heshang documentary, shown on Chinese television in 1988 argued that Chinese culture was entirely deficient precisely because it privileged tradition and even backwardness instead of the science and progress that they considered to be paramount in the West.
In general I think these sorts of arguments about national character are almost always overwrought and fairly meaningless.
Not to disagree with the overall point, but often the decisions made sense in context, at least in terms of securing power for an individual or tribe. Modernisation would have ceded massive amounts of power to the Han Chinese, something that the Qing were running pretty low on after the Taiping. Resistance to modernisation, iirc, was often as much fear as it was traditionalism.
Anyway, to add onto this.
I think this is understandable when you think about it. China has gone through a period of dynastic collapse, warlordism and anarchy, international war, civil war, and massive civil unrest pretty much one immediately after another, after which there was a blistering pace of market liberalisation under and after Deng Xiaoping.
In fact I would put the direct causative element of this cutthroat-ness to be the latest liberalisation under/after Deng, which is definitely something of an adaptation of Western capitalism, even if you can argue that it’s not directly a Western import. The Chinese had a lot to catch up to in the 1980s.
Perhaps, but worth noting that post-Sino-Japanese war the Guangxu emperor was generally rather reformist, and presumably many of the opponents of the reformers in the civil service were Han.
Yes (and Guangxu was a reformist even before the first sino-japanese war), but Cixi who blocked him had the bulk of the Manchu aristocracy behind her (not to mention the conservative neo-Confucians), and Cixi won. Nor was Cixi necessarily opposed to reform - she didn’t depose Guangxu until 1898, after all - but only that which threatened Manchu power. There were definitely both social and institutional factors to the ineffectiveness of reform in the late Qing era, and the Han themselves were often traditionalist, I don’t mean to downplay that. I just meant that oftentimes being conservative was a pragmatic choice for many elites at the time to try to maintain their grip on whatever power they had.
I tend to think that it was less important at this point, though. By 1898 much/most of the power was held in Han hands, simply because after the Taiping rebellion (a rebellion where the death toll of which would only be surpassed by WW2, and with the Taiping + other rebellions controlling key industrial areas like the Yangtze delta for years) the central government apparatus had bled much power to its Han officials to combat it, many of which were warlords but in name.
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I am less enthusiastic about your and OP's explanation of all this as a race struggle. In fact the Chinese are one of the few nations where there are different type of societies with arguably the same culture/history: that of Mainland China vs that of Singapore, Hongkong and especially Taiwan. Other examples of similar natural experiments are that of North/South Korea and East/West Germany.
Not everything is inevitable and racially/culturally conditioned to run in the exact same way.
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