It’s homogeneous, nationalist, and modernist

Thursday, April 19th, 2018

In an age of postmodern postnationalism, China is old-fashioned, Steve Sailer suggests:

It’s homogeneous, nationalist, and modernist. China seems to have utilitarian 1950s values.

For example, Chinese higher education isn’t yet competitive on the world stage, but China appears to be doing a decent job of educating the masses in the basics. High Chinese scores on the international PISA test for 15-year-olds shouldn’t be taken at face value, but it’s likely that China is approaching first-world norms in providing equality of opportunity through adequate schooling.

Due to censorship and language barriers, Chinese individuals aren’t well represented in English-language cyberspace. Yet in real life, the Chinese build things, such as bridges that don’t fall down, and they make stuff, employing tens of millions of proletarians in their factories.

The Chinese seem, on average, to be good with their hands, which is something that often makes American intellectuals vaguely uncomfortable. But at least the Chinese proles are over there merely manufacturing things cheaply, so American thinkers don’t resent them as much as they do American tradesmen.

Much of the class hatred in America stems from the suspicions of the intelligentsia that plumbers and mechanics are using their voodoo cognitive ability of staring at 3-D physical objects and somehow understanding why they are broken to overcharge them for repairs. Thus it’s only fair, America’s white-collar managers assume, that they export factory jobs to lower-paid China so that they can afford to throw manufactured junk away when it breaks and buy new junk rather than have to subject themselves to the humiliation of admitting to educationally inferior American repairmen that they don’t understand what is wrong with their own gizmos.

Reich doesn’t yet have much ancient DNA from China (the Chinese government tries to limit high-tech grave-robbing to Chinese researchers), but the basics are evident. The mighty Han ethnicity, which Reich describes as “the world’s largest group with a census size of more than 1.2 billion,” originated among two separate peoples: millet farmers on the Yellow River and rice farmers on the Yangtze River.

But over the past 5,000 years or so, the two original groups have largely merged genetically into one Han race, so only a north-south cline is left.

Why? The Chinese seldom had many caste restrictions on marriage; the Emperor would assign China’s most eligible bachelors, his mandarin bureaucrats, to rule regions far from their families to cut down on nepotism; and China was gifted with excellent east-west water transport on its rivers, and augmented that with the ancient north-south Grand Canal, which runs for 1,100 miles.

That all contributed to blending together a rather genetically homogeneous nation.

This Chinese lack of diversity is out of style, and yet it seems to make it easier for the Chinese to get things done.

Comments

  1. Bob Sykes says:

    Chinese higher education should not be dismissed so cavalierly. To a significant extent it is, in fact, American higher education, especially in STEM. Go to any American graduate program in STEM, and you will find that a majority of the MS and PhD candidates (often a large majority) are foreigners, and that most of the foreigners are Chinese nationals.

    Anyone who is familiar with graduate education in the sciences and engineering knows that it is the graduate students who do the actual lab work, write the computer programs, and do the mathematical derivations. The students are supervised by faculty, but the students are driving the scientific and technical advances being made in the US.

    Eventually, those students go home, to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, and they bring America’s most advanced technology with them. It was, after all, in part their achievement.

    One ought to remember pre-Deng China and the China of today, which is largely Deng’s achievement. Deng moved 300 million people from abject poverty to near Western living standards, and 600 million people from subsistence farming to a modern industrial economy. In any trade war with the US, China ends up with the modern factories (often automated) and the skilled workers, and we end up with empty store shelves and bankrupt companies like Apple and Walmart. China today has the two fastest supercomputers in the world and more supercomputers than any other country, including the US. They may have close to half all the supercomputers in the world. And they are home grown, chips and operating systems.

    So much for “Chinese higher education isn’t yet competitive on the world stage.” Our delusional, corrupt Ruling Class will destroy us yet.

  2. Jim says:

    In the late 19th century Japan discovered that it was far, far behind the west in technology. The Japanese sent students abroad to study and bring back this technical knowledge to Japan. The Japanese worked feverishly to translate Western scientific and technological writing into Japanese. A Japanese student of physics in the late nineteenth century could read Newton’s Principia in Japanese at a time when an English student would have had to read it in Latin.

    In about thirty years the Japanese had largely closed the gap with the West. Japanese scientists were publishing articles in Western science journals and the Japanese decisively defeated the Russian Empire in the Russo-Japanese War.

    It has been claimed that Northeast Asians are less creative on average than Westerners. Whether that is true or not there is no doubt that Northeast Asians are very fast learners.

  3. Kirk says:

    Vis-a-vis Chinese capacity for innovation… Just remember that the Chinese were the most advanced civilization on the planet for a very long time, and that what did them in, in terms of that position, was not anything done to them… That all came later, after the internal BS caught up with them. Things like shutting down the Zheng Ho trading fleets, and going all insular and autarkic is what really did them in. Along with arrogance, and the certainty that they had It Going On, compared to the rest of the world. Discovery that that wasn’t so caused a bit of a cultural shock, one that lasted generations.

    China is an interesting country to watch. Not one I’d like as a neighbor, nor one I’d want to live in, but… Still, “interesting”, for a given value of that word.

  4. Wang Wei Lin says:

    “This Chinese lack of diversity is out of style, and yet it seems to make it easier for the Chinese to get things done.”

    Diversity is not strength or as the alt-right states, “Diversity plus proximity equals war.”

    Across all history societies inundated by migration/invasion eventually fail. The Romans succumbed to the Visigoths, the Levant and Mahgrib succumbed to the Islamic invaders, etc. The efficacy of a uniform people and culture was noted as an advantage to building the nation in the Federalist Papers. Not PC, but true. I’ll go with the true.

  5. Kirk says:

    Wang Wei Lin,

    Well, for certain values and with certain cultures, diversity isn’t a virtue or a strength. At the same time, neither is the opposite of diversity, which you can find in any number of hydraulic empires of yore, including in what became China.

    My personal belief is that the fractious disunity embodied in ancient Greece, the Warring States period of China, or Age of Exploration Europe is probably the best model–Many competing polities “going their own way”. The diversity problem comes into play when the asshole factor comes into things. The Dutch were probably some of the most diverse and cosmopolitan people on the face of the earth, during their era of economic expansion. Examine what that ferment of disparate views produced, and then take a look at the stable monoculture that was Ming China, and tell me which is the better model for human endeavor. Stability is a vice, over the long haul. There’s a reason China wound up in the state that it did, and it had more to do with that vaunted stability and cohesiveness than anything else.

    Life is chaos; attempt to impose order and stability, and you cause the whole thing to spin out of control. Dance with the chaos, and you thrive; attempt to tamp down on that factor in life, and it will blow up in your face.

    I think the mainland Chinese are about to experience a multi-generational life lesson, as they try to impose social controls via this new “Social Credit” scheme. It’s a totalitarian’s dream, but the innate Chinese proclivity for suborning such schemes is going to result in some very interesting side-effects. The more control you reach for, the less you actually have, in my experience–And the whole “Social Credit” scheme strikes me as shutting down the safety valves on a very large boiler. When the explosion inevitably comes, watch out. It won’t be pleasant for anyone.

  6. Jim says:

    Kirk,

    In what sense were the Dutch particularly “diverse”. I don’t think that there is a very large amount of genetic diversity among the Dutch population. Probably much less than exists in the huge Han population. Linguistically the dialectal variation form Low German to Flemish isn’t all that great. Nor was there much in the way of religious differences or conflict. The Netherlands were a small and fairly homogenous country.

  7. Kirk says:

    Jim,

    You need to familiarize yourself more with Dutch history. My French Huguenot ancestors fled there, along with just about every other displaced religious sect and ethnicity across Europe.

    The Dutch have had a long history of taking in any and all comers and blending them into the population. We’ve done genetic testing on the family and turned up Melanesian gene markers. The only possible place that could have come in was from Holland.

    So, yeah, diverse. More so than the average person might think.

  8. Wang Wei Lin says:

    Kirk, Ask Theo Van Gogh how that diversity worked for him or the many citizens watching their country dissolve. We need more Geert Wilders not 3rd world tribalists.

  9. Kirk says:

    Wang Wei Lin,

    There’s diversity, and then there is sheer ‘effing stupidity, which is what the Dutch are doing, these days. What they were doing back during the Reformation is one thing, and what the policies/effects of today are? Totally another.

    Monocultures are bad. China’s history shows precisely why that is so–You get rapid results, in some respects, and stability. Unfortunately, the universe does not trend towards stability in systems that aren’t overall chaotic and changing. Every monoculture we know about has eventually toppled over from the inherent internal inconsistencies and blind spots specific to that culture, while the little wads of chaos like ancient Greece and the Europeans of the Age of Exploration managed to produce a hell of a lot more, in terms of human improvement.

    Overall, you need a bunch of competing smaller entities in order to produce both long-term stability and improvement on things. Chinese conformity and stability got them precisely what, over the long haul? After they shut down Zheng Ho’s fleets, and withdrew, where did they have to go but down the path of stasis and ennui? That vaunted “stability” and conformity lent them enormous advantages in the short haul, but when the fractious Europeans showed up in Asia, there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it, because all that competition had levered the Europeans up to a point where they were essentially unstoppable. After all, who the hell invented gunpowder, again? China. Who had huge, multi-compartmented trade ships that were bigger than anything Europe put to sea for generations? Again, China–And, what did they do with all that advantage? Pissed it away, and built the Forbidden City, full of self-satisfied eunuchs and courtiers.

    Like as not, the Communists will make the same series of choices the various dynastic Chinese did, and wind up following the same path into stagnation and “stability”. And, somewhere on the periphery, maybe in Southeast Asia, maybe elsewhere, there will be more little nimble competitors that will leapfrog them again. It’s cyclic, and the biggest thing behind that nature is the Chinese desire for stability and cohesion. Long haul, that doesn’t do very well, once things solidify.

  10. T. Greer says:

    This is nonsense on stilts. China is a realm of stupendous diversity. Economically, it is pieces of Western Europe stapled to pieces of Africa. Linguistically, the range of languages spoken by Han alone exceeds that dividing Icelandic and English. The country is culturally fragmented, and that fragmentation is overlayed over vastly different economic systems, differences in terms exacerbated by the gap between developed areas and underdeveloped areas. China is not a monoculture. It never has been. The fact thag Han are genetically close hasn’t stopped them from.dividing themselves up into little quasi-ethnic groups and then waging genocidal wars with each other (see here for an example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punti-Hakka_Clan_Wars)

    I’ve said before that the most important scholarly book that could be written about China would be a China version of Albions Seed. The differences in China are far more dramatic than AS records for colonial America, and they stretch much further back into the past.

    Sailer is just engaged in the cheap game of picking the rising power and trying to attach it to his political program. What a chump.

  11. Graham says:

    I still try to think of China as an empire trying to turn itself into something as homogeneous as a European nationstate of their classic modern era, or 1950s America. So very homogeneous, but not all the way out to the edges or at every level.

    Then again, I also think of China as what would have happened in the West if the Roman Empire had kept reconstituting itself and the constellation of Italo-Latinate [or maybe Italo + Helleno-] ethnicities had kept managing to reconstitute their numbers and absorb everyone else so that the Mediterranean basin was more homogeneous now. They could still have segregated themselves into subgroups and warred on one another within or without the imperial superstructure [of the Gallo-Roman dogs smiting Hispano-Roman pigs sort of variety, or everyone ganging up on those barely even Roman Britons; you get the idea].

    But what can you do. These comparative metaphors are more useful for speculating about one’s own civilization in the light of China than for understanding China, and need to be kept in their lanes.

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