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Maybe too much of meta tangent: mccarthyism 2.0 = take scholarship from Chinese Americans with grain of salt. Or at least be aware of motivations. Yasheng Huang slowly transiting to "house chink" - suspect Huang's trying to avoid becoming a Gang Chen in the next wave of China Initiative purges, so not surprising some of his analysis has gotten more "motivated" over the years. The one's who don't play the game, i.e. Cheng Li from Brookings, don't get the podium anymore. There's still "libtard" audiences in PRC who eats Huang's work up, the main propaganda pitch of this book is: > I really want to push back against this view that automatically you have a Western ideological view because you emphasize diversity, freedom, and competition, and that somehow is ideology rather than fact. I’m telling that story from China’s own history. I do hope that I win some hearts from people who have an automatic immunity to Western ideas. ... > I aim to convey this message through Chinese history, hoping to persuade people to reconsider their aversion to diversity and competition. ... >"Too much autocratic stability is detrimental" Gets challenged on Song innovation. No, no, I've rescaled importance of inventions, downplaying "four great inventions" that Chinese find significant, which conveniently illustrates Song is less innovative than Han-Sui interregnum, I hope the take away for PRC is that Chinese innovation the strongest when China most fragmented and mired in chaos. Get's challenged on commerce. No, no, historic/current Chinese commerce too restricted to launch industrial revolutions, see Jack Ma. NVM PRC explicitly did not want industrial revolution in unchecked financialization. Or PRC biasing scale in lieu of scope is pushing involution tier industrial revolution in many strategic sectors, i.e. PRC in a place to pick what revolution to scale. "In contrast, Western countries resolved this tension by embracing scope", except this came at the expense of scale, and one of PRC's biggest advantage is acknolwedging and pursuing quantity having quality of it's own. Funny how blob incentives map to imperial bureaucracy, think tanks another incarnation of posturing eunuchs vying for position (or not losing it) at the end of the day. |