Hu is on First

90 miles from tyranny:

John Kerry: Sir, I have the report here about the new leader of China. 

Obama: Great. Lay it on me. 

John Kerry: Hu is the new leader of China. 

Obama: That's what I want to know. 

John Kerry: That's what I'm telling you. 

Obama: That's what I'm asking you. Who is the new leader of China? 

John Kerry: Yes.

and so on...

China: A History

by John Keay

This is a great big book on the history of China.

The first point that jumps out at me is the fact that if you are not an emperor, then you'll be almost completely ignored by history.  Even if you are an emperor you'll likely get no more than a mention, unless lots of important stuff happened while you were in charge.

Then again, if we wanted to remember everybody, we'd have no time for anything else.

Another point of interest is that the name we know people by are different from what we think they are.  Confucius was not some guy's name.  His name was Kong.  The way it works "in the East" is family name, then first name or title.  Master Kong is "Kong Master," as in Kong then something approximating "fucius" for "master".  

The first Chinese emperor is known as Qin Shi Huang.  This is a "name" he picked for himself.  (I hear many Chinese pick the name they are known as as an adult, themselves.)  It actually means "first emperor."  It would be like referring to George Washington as "first president," and mentioning him by no other name or title.  First President was born in...  First President was a military officer in the French and Indian wars. First President lead the revolutionary army during the war of independence.

Apparently, the next guy was "second emperor."  And after that other dynasties took charge and changed their naming ideas.

Another interesting note is how much of China's history occurs after around 300 BC.  There is a chapter, or two, before then, but I don't recall anything about the earlier times.

One of the early empires was known as the Han.  Today the largest, numerically, ethnic group is the Han Chinese.

The Han empire was divided by some events into the "Former" and "Later" Han.  One of the most important characters in between the two empires was known as Wang Mang.  He was emperor for a while and wanted to reform the country to make it more prosperous.

He instituted price controls, divided the land equally among the citizens, and so on.

Guess what happened when he improved the lives of the poor by taking land from the wealthy, gave it to the poor, and did things like institute price controls?

A.  Prosperity ensued, Wang Mang was widely admired, and his dynasty lasted hundreds of years.

B. Nothing good, starvation and so on, his line ended with him, and all historians from the time despised him.

If you've visited this blog before, you don't need to be told which was the case.

That is not the only economic fact I found interesting.  A while before 500 AD land ownership was banned and whenever there was a war the citizens fled to wherever there wasn't a war.  Around 500 AD the various emperors determined that they needed to incentiveize staying in place, so they allowed private property to accumulate.  And the book explicitly stated that this was the last time, until Mao that China attempted to progressivize the country.  They seemed to notice that it never turned out well and they avoided much of it for around 1500 years.

Anyway, from my perspective, it seems that the various emperors can be grouped into four parts, in somewhat equal measure: the well meaning, the mean and awful, those with no interest in running an empire, and those who were too young and had regents run things for them, often to take up the title themselves and join one of the first two parts.

The succession of emperors takes up a large part of the book.  Their numbers and even the empires that they ran are too numerous to mention, or even understand after reading such a book.

***

This is a good book.  Even though I'm not as interested in India as I am in China I would read Keay's History of India if I was not already so far behind in my reading.

Recommended for those of you who are interested in lengthy readings on the whole history of China. 

Political Experiments

I have written some, on this blog, about having political experiments to see what works and what doesn't.

Deng Xioping is the Chinese leader responsible for moving China towards the more market friendly economy that it now is.  He apparently started doing so by going to the poor places where the people were starving and told them to do whatever they need to in order to survive; they no longer needed to strictly follow the communist laws.  Even the conservative* communist Chinese government officials would agree to allow starving people to do what they need to in order to live.

Surprise, surprise, the private family farms produced more food than the communist run farms and so then more of the country was allowed to privately farm.

When Hong Kong was turned over to China Deng allowed some of the neighboring areas to follow Hong Kong's non-communist lead.  And things improved for the surrounding areas.

Apparently he could not have said, "we need more free markets," because the conservative communist Chinese officials would have opposed him.  But because he allowed "experiments" instead progress was made.

I think that a fine case can be made for giving each state more freedom from the federal government.  Things that work can be copied and things that don't can be avoided.  This federal laws thing is a bad deal for everyone.

We don't have a near dictatorial government here, so having our strong leader suggest that some places be exempt from the federal laws for a while may not be a possibility; but it is something to think about.

Watch the book talk about Deng Xioping at Book TV: Deng Xioping and the Transformation of China

*Apparently, the Chinese government officials who want to stick to their communism are called "conservatives".  This should be a notice to those of you who only think of political labels as they pertain to American politics.

It would make some sense to use terms like "conservative" and "progressive" as their definitions are outside of politics.  The conservative Chinese officials are "conservative" because they wish to maintain the standard operating policies of their recent history (post-1949).

If "conservative" were to mean: "maintain things as they are," then shouldn't "conservative" mean the American democrats, greens, "liberals," etc?

Who is more conservative: a person who wants to maintain the income tax, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid as it is or someone who wants to radically change all of those?

The federal income tax is 101 years old.  The past 101 years is more than 1/3 of American history.  In China a conservative is someone who wants to maintain the politics of the last 60 years.  So shouldn't Americans who want to maintain the politics of the last 100 years be called "conservatives"?

A Chinese Guy Comes Close to the Truth

Read this and appreciate how close he comes to the red pill, while maintaining the blue one.

He starts by almost getting at the truth, but hold on to the baloney later.

I just came back from abroad, and I keep hearing my Chinese male compatriots in China say our Chinese girls are relatively materialistic, practical [vs. idealistic], and gold-digging, that its impossible for men without an apartment/house to get married, that one can’t find a girlfriend if they don’t spend money, that its easy to be dumped just for failing to give gifts to one’s girlfriend every holiday etc. etc. etc.

But frankly speaking, I have no serious objections to this, because I think actually all women throughout the world are materialistic. After all, who doesn’t like rich and capable men? American women are the same, European women are the same, they all favor rich men, and it’s always easy for generous men to find girlfriends.

But what left me flabbergasted was that I also know a lot of laowai who are fooling around in China and they tell me China has a lot of “free girls” who don’t want any money and only want to go to bed with them, who want to marry laowai even if it means paying instead of getting money [to the foreigner], and who will take even the poor, the old, the fat, the disabled, as long as they’re laowai.

For laowai in China, the success rate for getting girls is around 50-100 times higher than those of local men, and the women that our compatriots can spend thousands or tens of thousands on but can’t get laowai can get with just a cup of coffee. Many of male compatriots are extremely angry over this, so let me share the ways laowai pick up girls and the reasons they succeed easily. You guys should also find your own shortcomings, and not just blindly complain.

Want to know how to get rich?  Copy and paste, and arrange, various posts from Roosh and Heartsie turn it into a book and go to China and sell it.  You could probably work out a deal with those two for their info.

The Chinese have limited internet access and the guys would probably kill to know what game is.

Someone who wants to publish and print a pile of that book could certainly sell them in China, if he knew how.

Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip

by Peter Hessler is a book by a magazine writer who lived in China for several years.

The book is about China and includes driving, but it is not really about a road trip.

The book is divided into three sections.  The first section is about the author driving along the length of the Great Wall.  He found that most people who live away from the growing eastern and southern China coast live there because they are too young or too old to move to where the action is.  This section of the book is interesting but not really about the driving or the roads.  This section, in particular, showed me how a magazine writer writes a book.  Interesting stories and information abound, but any depth is missing.  When full time book authors write books they cover subjects thoroughly.  This book reads more like a magazine.

The second part of this book is about the author living in his "vacation home" in the country just past the Beijing suburbs.  He spent several years living in this poor town and watched it grow from where the citizens averaged a few hundred dollars of income in a year to a few thousand.

The third part of the book was about the author visiting a growing factory town.  I particularly remember reading about how the factory the author looked at was designed.  The owners and the contractor drew a floor plan on a wrinkled piece of paper in a few minutes.  And a few months later it was up and operational.  This part of the book covered the lifestyles of the factory workers a bit, but the most informative part was about how businesses start and grow in China.

The second two sections of this book were not really about driving, but the book was reasonably good nonetheless.  If I didn't already have several books ready to be read I'd consider reading this author's previous books.

The Government's Results

I've been reading Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip by Peter Hessler (review to follow). 

For a while the author spent some time in a small village, during this time he learned about its history.  One aspect of its history was the ownership of the land.  The land has been leased, rented, privately owned and owned by the government.  China, as you know is communist.  When China was newly communist it had the goal of improving the lives of its citizens, so it collectivized the ownership of land. 

But now only the wealthiest and politically connected can afford to own land.

"A half century after the revolution, rural land reform has accomplished exactly the opposite of its original intentions." (p. 188)

I recently read a quote (perhaps from Milton Friedman) to the effect of: if you want to know the effect of a government program assume the opposite of its stated goals.

This book isn't about politics or economics, and yet the author, unknowingly, discovered for himself what happens when the government does something.

We should all understand that no government program accomplishes what it sets out to do, it achieves the opposite.

Another Argument for China

Even China has produced people who agree with Friedrick Hayek.

found thanks to The Circle Bastiat:

from a Wall Street Journal article:

Zhang Weiying’s warnings that stimulus spending would lead to malinvestment were once ignored. Now official ministries invite the follower of Hayek to speak.

The economic slowdown, he calmly says over tea, is actually good news that “makes the government think we need to change”—toward reform and away from priming the pump. We aren’t all Keynesians now in China, he insists.

and,

In the mid-1980s, under party leader Deng Xiaoping, officials were moving to liberalize the economy. Yet they were sometimes clueless. After decades of a planned economy, says Mr. Zhang, "the price [of everything] was distorted" and the government's solution was to "set up a price research center with a big computer . . . and adjust prices according to this calculation." Of course, "they couldn't get any results."

Another Argument for China

Apparently even the Chinese feminists make sense.

from the Spearhead:

In 2007, the Women’s Federation defined “leftover” women (sheng nu ) as unmarried women over the age of 27 and China’s Ministry of Education added the term to its official lexicon. Since then, the Women’s Federation Web site has run articles stigmatizing educated women who are still single.

Take this uplifting column from March 2011 that ran just after International Women’s Day:

Pretty girls don’t need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family, but girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult. These kinds of girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness. The tragedy is, they don’t realize that as women age, they are worth less and less, so by the time they get their M.A. or Ph.D., they are already old, like yellowed pearls.

Jiuzhaigou Valley

In my research to find interesting places in China I've found the Jiuzhaigou Valley.

Some pictures from Wikipedia:



 

 


 

Another Argument in Favor of China

Where Wealth Thrives and Innovates

First paragraph:

"A surprising wealth of information about the world’s most prosperous people can be discovered in two new reports. The Chinese Millionaire Wealth Report 2012, put together by GroupM and the Hurun Report, found that there are now a million millionaires in China. On average, a Chinese millionaire is 39 years old, has an average of four luxury watches, vacations in France, and owns a business."

If I am going to live outside of Wisconsin, China might be the place.