[FooBarWidget]

A book from 1922? That's back during the Republican era, pre-civil war. I think any resource from before 30 years ago is totally irrelevant in today's setting, except maybe to explain how Chinese modern history developed.

[simonh]

It's shocking how accurate his predictions were, and I think it's really important to understand that these weren't lucky guesses. They were the product of a deep and insightful analysis of Chinese culture and society that is still very much relevant today. The personalities have changed, but in many ways China is still China.

[FooBarWidget]

Do you have an example of something that you think was a very good prediction that has panned out?

[simonh]

He warned that their society is prone to endemic corruption, that merging the worst aspects of Chinese culture with Capitalism would be a very dangerous combination. He said that China could become an economic and military rival only exceeded by the united States over the next few centuries, so he was explicitly thinking long term. This was at a time when most Westerners thought of China as an archaic, irrelevant joke.

[FooBarWidget]

Oh man, maybe you're right.

I scrolled to a random section and I read:

"In fact, [the west] have quite as much to learn from [China] as they from us, but there is far less chance of our learning it."

"[There's] a great eagerness to acquire Western learning, not simply in order to acquire national strength and be able to resist Western aggression, but because a very large number of people consider learning a good thing in itself"

Nothing has changed in 100 years...

[thu2111]

But is there something specific to Chinese culture that he argued made them more corrupt? Because it seems to me like basically all poor countries are corrupt, that they tend to get less corrupt as they get richer (or rather, they get richer as they get less corrupt) and China in 1922 was very poor indeed.

[simonh]

Honestly it's very hard to tell. It's quite short. My wife is Chinese and I've spent a bit of time over there. It's hard for me to tell which aspects of cultural behaviour over there are a product of several generations of communist rule and which date back earlier. What I can say is the business environment over there is bare naked ruthless. It's always possible to make a deal, right up to the moment it isn't and then you're done. As for social order, the Chinese believe in the rule of authority, not law.