From: kemnitz@netcom.com (Greg Kemnitz)
Subject: China never as prosperous as Europe?
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 92 11:16:04 GMT
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest) 
Summary: Europe's massive trade deficit wrt China, opium, etc
Distribution: na
Keywords: predestination

In article <1992Apr12.005212.6475@leland.Stanford.EDU> underdog@leland.Stanford.EDU (Dwight Joe) writes:
>You can lay your suspensions to rest.
>
>At no point in Chinese history has China ever been as prosperous
>and well off as the USA or Western Europe.  Even if you reach back
>3000 years like the way many China-philes like to do, you will find
>that China was far worse than modern Western society.  There was
>no penicillin, no antibiotics, no Bill of Rights, no human decency
>(but that's always been true, hasn't it?), etc. in China.

This contradicts the observations of Europeans who visited China in the from
the fourteenth century to the time of Napoleon.  Up until about the mid
nineteenth century, China was in many ways better off than Europe.

The insularity of the dotard emperors of the Late Qing, coupled with Europe's
rapid growth in economic and military power at the late 18th and early 19th
centuries, were the things that led to Europe's dominance over China in the
19th century.  BTW, do you know why the Europeans had to resort to selling
opium in China?  It was because China has a massive trade surplus with
respect to Europe in the late 18th century - there was little the Europeans
could sell the Chinese, but the Chinese were draining the silver coffers of
Europe by exporting furniture, silks, and porcelains to the West.  This caused
a massive shortage of silver in Europe which undermined the currency,
particularly in England.  Only massive sales of opium, which was illegal in
China, corrected the imbalance, as well as hastening the downfall of the Qing
by getting a substantial portion of China's elite hooked to the drug.

>
>Leninism is an inferior economic (& political) concept as far as
>generating wealth is concerned.  But interestingly, China before
>Leninism was far worse than China after Leninism.  Today, the Chinese
>are better educated and live longer than at any time in their entire
>history before the exposure to Western society (and Leninism).
>

"China before Leninism" was a country that was wracked by revolutions and
wars.  There was almost no twenty-year period from 1800 to 1950 during which
China didn't face some sort of massive calamity, including the Taiping uprising
lead by a man who thought himself Jesus's brother (26,000,000 killed), and the
Japanese invasion during WWII (estimates of 40-60 million dead), not to mention
numerous European incursions, the Sun Yat-sen revolution and the KMT-CCP civil
war.  For all the calamities the Chinese people have been subjected to since
then, 1950-1992 (perhaps more accurately 1976-1992) is the first period of
extended relative peace and organized government in China since the QianLong
Emperor.

>That, I suppose, is the strange part.  Leninism comes from an
>inferior realm of Western society, yet compared to what the Chinese
>had before Leninism, Leninism is quite good.  In other words,
>the best that the Chinese could muster without Western (or Japanese)
>influence was worse than the worst in Western (or Japanese) society.

What "Ism" would you use to characterise China before 1949?  War-ism? 
Revolution-ism?  British and Japanese imperialism (closest)?  There is no
"ism" to characterize it by, because there was essentially no government
strong enough to have a structure to be described by such an "ism".  

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Kemnitz                        | "I ran out of the room - I
MultiMedia Information Systems Inc. | didn't want to be killed by a pile
kemnitz@netcom.com                  | of VMS manuals" :-)
                                    |
                                    | --A friend at DEC Palo Alto in the Quake