I think that's certainly the case, China is a country of vast differences between people. To the extent China has seen arguably the fastest dash of economic development in history, imagine what the corresponding, linked cultural & educational development has looked like.
In the span of several decades, half a billion people shifted from an almost zero traditional education environment in rural, very poor third-world style villages - to rapidly developing, modern, economically considerable, urban, very high density environments with intense competition and far higher education attainment.
Then imagine how wild that must be as all of these different forces and cultures collide and meld in real time, and it's essentially a population group the size of the EU trying to make an epic adaptation leap in 20-30 years. I expect it produces at times a large gap between people in regards to their personal evolution.
Lets not forget the Meiji Restoration! When it started Samurai walked around the streets armed with katanas. Japan was extremely isolated and had little to no industry. No railroads, no exports.. In ~30 years they put down 11,000 KM of railroad track, built 1500 steamships, and basically upgraded from a feudal society to an industrial one. They increased their annual coal production from nearly nothing to 20~ million tons in that time.
It would be like if the EU went from knights and castles to making fighter jets in half a generation.
This isn’t true: at various periods during world history, China has been one of the richest and educated countries in the world. The potential of its people was already there and all that was needed was a peaceful environment with an enabling government.
> at various periods during world history, China has been one of the richest and educated countries in the world.
Do you have any further reading on this? It doesn't strike me as too crazy of a statement - but I'd be very interested in seeing how one would go about actually quantifying it.
Wikipedia has a good summary both of the Economic history of China [1] and the Great Divergence [2] (really comes to a head with the collapse of the Qing dynasty). Although devestated by civil war and WW2, IMO China really doesn't descend into complete craziness until the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution [3] that devastated China economically, socially, and culturally (lost generation, send-down movement, red guards, etc).
First 3 chapters of Kissinger's On China do a good job, but I'm certain you could find better sources.
ED: outside getting a book, the main characteristic to look at is China having the lion's share of historical world GDP, especially during the Yuan and Ming dynasties. The Spanish Empire gained much of its early wealth from Ming China's seemingly insatiable demand for the silver it found in South America - like thousands of pounds at a time.
> China has been one of the richest and educated countries in the world.
I keep hearing the same line about India as well but that does not mean that the common people were rich and educated just the upper class. So were the common people in China rich and educated in the time period which you are talking about?
If you want to go there, the same was true in the rest of the world as well, including Western Europe if we are comparing European and Chinese peasants. And yes, India has similar potential to China.
That's true, but not in the 20th century. For lots of reasons, China broadly missed the industrial revolution. By the time of the communist revolution, they had... basically nothing indigenous. There was no export industry, most people were at a subsistence level, and essentially the entirety of the social elite were foreign-educated aristocracy simply living off of assets worked by a staggeringly large underclass. I mean, sure, "the potential of its people was already there", but you can say that about anyone. Objecvtively, it was a mess.
And now their grandkids are almost as rich as Americans.
In case anyone is curious, the “various reasons” are the Opium Wars, collapse of the Qing dynasty/monarchy, World War 2, the subsequent civil war and the Great Leap Forward.
I probably wouldn’t use “a mess” to describe all those events though.
I guess what the previous OP meant by “potential of its people” is their historical culture, akin to why the Jews are generally quite successful on the whole (attributed to their culture).
China and Europe are different in many ways, but one is that after the Mongol conquest in the 12th century, China remains a unified empire run by a single Mandarin bureaucracy. There is nothing that competes with or threatens China. China does get invaded by Manchu tribes in 1644, but they don’t change the structure of the state. They learned to speak Chinese, dress like Chinese and eat like Chinese.
In Europe, no one ever succeeds in unifying it, and you have continuous competition. The French are worried about the English, the English are worried about the Spanish, the Spanish are worried about the Turks. That keeps everybody on their toes, which is something economists immediately recognize as the competitive model. To have progress, you want a system that is competitive, not one that is dominated by a single power.
I think that is the major difference. It isn’t just that China doesn’t have an Industrial Revolution, it doesn’t have a Galileo or a Newton or a Descartes, people who announced that everything people did before them was wrong. That’s hard to do in any society, but it was easier to do in Europe than China. The reason precisely is because Europe was fragmented, and so when somebody says something very novel and radical, if the government decides they are a heretic and threatens to prosecute them, they pack their suitcase and go across the border."
[...]
"I believe the fundamental reason is China’s position as a single empire, and also its bureaucracy, which is a unique and peculiar animal. On the one hand, it is very progressive, because it is a meritocracy. In Europe, the people who were in power were the sons and nephews of other people in power. But in China there’s an examination, and the people who did the best rose in the Mandarin civil service. So you’d think, “Wow, that’s very progressive.” Except if you look at what they were studying for these exams, they were simply regurgitating the classics. It was the perfect tool to keep reproducing from the same mold generation after generation.
In Europe, something different happens. People study classical knowledge, Ptolemy and Hippocrates and Archimedes, and they begin to say, “Most of this stuff is wrong.” You couldn’t do that in China. If you said “This stuff is wrong,” you failed your exam. But in Europe, the ability to challenge received wisdom is irrepressible."
China missed the industrial revolution, but didn’t lose 5000 years of development in the process. Look st how fast Germany and Japan bounced back from being bombed into oblivion? Once development is in your DNA, recovery is much easier, it’s not like starting from a mostly undeveloped country in SE Asia or Africa.
Sigh. It was hyperbole. You took, the point, right? They were the poorest of the poor, and now their iPhones jiggle in their pockets as they dance on the world stage with the big kids.
In the span of several decades, half a billion people shifted from an almost zero traditional education environment in rural, very poor third-world style villages - to rapidly developing, modern, economically considerable, urban, very high density environments with intense competition and far higher education attainment.
Then imagine how wild that must be as all of these different forces and cultures collide and meld in real time, and it's essentially a population group the size of the EU trying to make an epic adaptation leap in 20-30 years. I expect it produces at times a large gap between people in regards to their personal evolution.