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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.