The reason for this is striking and unusual, and originates surprisingly from the vein of “geography is destiny.”
The Yellow River has changed course many times throughout Chinese history. The technical reason for this is that it carries heavy silt load, which it deposits on riverbeds, continually changing the shape of the river and eventually causing the river to find new lower paths, especially during floods.
In the ~2540 years between 595 BC and 1946 AD, the Yellow River has been documented to have shifted its course 26 times.
Because a changing river redefines the shape of the land, it wreaks continual havoc on agriculture. By the cruel process of natural selection, it led to cultures that survived only if they were able to collectively enact flood control megaprojects, driven by sufficiently centralized state power. Tribes and communities who could not band together and execute sufficiently large-scale planning simply died from famines when the next flood destroyed their crops.
In the legends of ancient China, the first Xia dynasty was founded by a king named Yu the Great, or Yu the Engineer, who was purported to have spent 13 years devising a system of flood controls that redirected flood waters into fields and leading the farmers to build them, taming the waters for the first time and establishing the prosperity of the Chinese heartland.
This is why natural disasters are considered a sign of a government losing the “Mandate of Heaven.” An effective government in China is first and foremost responsible for keeping floods at bay and using state power to bring rapid and effective disaster relief to the people. Culturally, it is considered the first and primary function of the government.
Contrast this to American government culture, where the first and primary function of government is collective defense against adversaries. This is not a criticism of one or the other, but reflects an outgrowth of each under different historical influences.
The typical view in the West is that Chinese people accept an “authoritarian” government because they are more submissive and uncreative. This is not exactly true, but rather that there is a stronger cultural norm of supporting the vision of a grand plan (including some that may take years to come to fruition) because history has shown that doing so is sometimes an existential matter — and the upside can be huge prosperity gains for all.
Sometimes you have to spend years enacting flood control systems, or decades building a really huge wall, or developing a massive technology and industrial base, so that dangerous things don’t wipe you out. Having a history full of disasters AND averted disasters shapes culture in a certain way.
People talk about how Northern European cultures were forced to develop long-term planning because of seasonal cycles: they couldn’t just assume food would grow all the time, so they had to farm and harvest and save during the summer so as to have food during the winter.
Chinese culture developed in even more extreme ways: not only did seasons force that kind of long-term planning, but periodic disasters would wipe you out unless many many communities banded together to execute megaprojects necessary to defend against those disasters. It wasn’t just about sustained effort over months, it was sustained effort over years. The alternative was starvation, and the cultures that survived knew the value of collective long-term plans under practical leaders.
Natural disasters befell other cultures too, but the difference here is critical: some disasters are irresistible acts of God. Other disasters are difficult but not impossible — and periodic floods and changing rivers fall in that category: if you are good enough, smart enough, and work hard all together, you can beat the floods.
This is actually why China had a great respect for America, the only other country that could be seen to execute similar megaprojects: the Hoover dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority Dams, the California Aqueducts, the Manhattan Project, and of course putting a man on the Moon. These are enormous mobilizations of human collective action under visionary leadership. And they are practical.
In Wang Huning’s “America Against America,” one of themes motivating the research he did that led to the book was “How did such a young country rise to such accomplishments?” They were accomplishments on the (relative) scale of things done in earlier eras of Chinese history. America is literally the only other country that China really respects. And it’s not because America has a lot of guns. China got beat up by 8 different countries who all had a lot of guns, but only American builds big.
Unfortunately, that kind of leadership and the willingness to execute megaprojects has stalled in America since the 70s, and has been a source of quiet disappointment. What is viewed by China hawks in the US as hostile competition on the part of China is largely motivated by a sense of China witnessing a country that has accomplished things worthy of learning from. The drive to equal or surpass the US comes only partially from a desire for security but also because the US shows what’s possible, and excels at something deeply valued in Chinese culture.
It is easy to regard the geopolitical frictions of the day as an existential conflict between civilizations, but neither American culture nor Chinese culture are really built on the destruction of competitors. Both are built on a deep-seated constructivism, a belief that every problem can be overcome not by taking from others, but by building a solution at home.
