One of the participants in book club passed along an article in Law & Liberty by David Goldman ("Spengler") on the origins of Chinese governance.
China’s unique geographic conditions required from antiquity a centralized tax system to fund infrastructure and a centralized bureaucracy to administer it. It never persuaded the peoples it absorbed into the Chinese empire to speak a common language or to confess the same religion. Ethnicity has no role in Chinese statehood.
The book club member, who lives in Silicon Valley and whose wife is from China, says he agrees with about half of the article. He didn't say which half.
1 comment:
This aligns with what I've heard Peter Zeihan say about China, really the Han ethnicity that dominates the north China. The southern coastal cities have always tended to become more closely tied to their dominant trade partners with only a loose connection to the bulk of the Han population in northern China because of the difficult geography that must be traversed to move from the southern coast to the northern interior.
Post a Comment