this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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hard to invent your own stuff when you have no social mobility or intellectual property and torture individualism.
China has been a centralized autocratic state for a couple thousands years and has invented almost everything in that time.
More seriously though, it's just not true to suggest that collectivist societies or autocratic states can't invent new things. The briefest glance at history shows it's just not true.
New things come from people having the time and resources to sit around and think about how to improve on the things we have. IP, social mobility and individualism just don't really come into it.
No, this is incorrect. China was a bunch of kingdoms, constantly at war with each other for longer than it's ever been forcibly "united" by external forces, such as the Western powers in the 19th century, dividing up and ruthlessly controlling economic spheres of influence. It's fascinating how ethnic, religious and cultural differences have been manipulated by so many governments for so long to feed their pockets and it isn't over. The CCP is going to be nothing but a footnote in a research paper someday.
There has been a centralized bureaucratic autocracy in china since the legalist reforms of qin, a couple thousand years ago. Yes, the empire once united must divide but even during the long disunity before the sui and tang, there were multiple centralized autocratic states. Unity across all of the territory called modern china is not necessary to have a centralized state, and you'll notice I never once used the word united.
Wait were western powers dividing or uniting china? You're claiming both in the same sentence. But that's kind of immaterial to my point that the centralized autocratic state has existed in china for a couple thousand years and that many important new technologies came out of the cultures governed in that way.