Some comments are so good that shouldn’t be allowed to sink in remote discussions threads.
Commenter Vendetta writes on China vs. Japan in the late 19th century:
The British did not provide any of this assistance for free. Japan had to pay for every weapon and every warship supplied by British yards. Its ability to do so came courtesy of its greater successes in governance and economic modernization relative to China.
European arms dealers and shipyards were every bit as open to business with the Chinese as they were to Japan. In fact, largest and most powerful battleships of the First Sino-Japanese War belonged to China’s Beiyang Fleet.
Not that it did them much good, because Japan succeeded where China failed by investing in the long-term development of institutional knowledge and its own national arms industry.
Japan invested not just in shiny new weapons but in the men who would use them. Japan spent hard currency to send officer cadets to study abroad in European naval academies, to keep observers aboard foreign fleets, and to maintain European military missions training its own sailors at home. These efforts paid off over time by creating a professional officer corps and pool of native military expertise.
Likewise on the industrial side of the military-industrial equation, where there was no direct leap from total dependency on British imports to building dreadnought battleships of their own. Building a native arms industry is a painstaking process that takes decades of sustained efforts and spending.
Japan started making those efforts in a way China never did until almost a hundred years later. They started off small, in the naval sphere learning just to do the maintenance work on the vessels purchased from Britain, then the repair work, then assembling minor components for them, then major components, ordering mostly completed vessels from foreign yards but finishing them off in their own, then building very small ships on their own, then working their way up to larger and larger vessels, building licensed copies or custom designs drafted to order by foreign naval architects. Finally, having accumulated decades of experience and practice in this way, by gradually expanding the share of work contracted to Japanese yards as well as sending observers to study at British shipyards, they were able make the leap to designing entire warships on their own and building them without any foreign assistance.
Japan started this process within years of the Meiji Restoration, and China made no comparable efforts until the latter half of the 20th century, which only began paying off in the last 10-15 years (in a very major way, nonetheless – China now holding third place as global arms producer, miles ahead of any fourth or fifth place contender, a rank Japan didn’t even come close to at its peak).
China’s arms production efforts were scattered, inconsistent, and half-hearted. The Japanese made conscious decisions to spend less on having the best fleet they could right now in order to set aside enough money to invest in being able to build and operate the best fleet 20-30 years from now. China had a similar, if not larger budget to work with than Japan throughout most of this time period – but never maintained as much of a priority on military development and modernization, and when it did it focused its spending on buying the shiniest and most prestigious new toys from abroad instead of investing in native capacity to build these modern weapons or operate them effectively.
To put this in more specific and concrete terms, China had one shipyard that saw any effort to turn it into a modern production center for warships, the Jiangnan Arsenal. For most of this period, operations at Jiangnan never went much farther up the chain of development I outlined above than being able to do maintenance and repair work or produce minor components for warships. Small, obsolete harbor gunboats were the only warships this yard was ever able to build from the keel up until the 1930s, when it was able to deliver its first and only major vessel, the Ning Hai, a small light cruiser that had been built to match its sister Ping Hai – which itself had been commissioned and built at Japan’s (!) Harima shipyard. Work on the Ning Hai was itself being completed overseen at Jiangnan by a team of Harima’s shipbuilders, and progress on the vessel more or less came to a halt once relations worsened and Japan withdrew these experts and their supervision.
Japan, by contrast, developed not just one but four major national yards to the point of being able to produce major warships – Kure, Yokosuka, Sasebo, and Maizuru. This in addition to several smaller yards assembling various weapons and components, not to mention several massive privately owned yards like those of Mitsubishi and Kawasaki which ended up capable of turning out dreadnought battleships of their own, as well as smaller private yards capable of producing lesser vessels as well – Harima, Fujinagata, Uraga, not even going to try listing them all.
Japan not only succeeded in producing a nationally owned and subsidized arms complex capable of producing modern weaponry across the full spectrum of arms, from a hand grenade to a capital ship (a major struggle for any up-and-coming nation), it even managed to develop a thriving system of competitive privately held firms alongside it.
This is not something the British could have just given to the Japanese, let alone something they would have wanted to give them. Vickers had no intention of being shut out of one of its most lucrative markets by creating Japanese competitors.
True, Japan still was dependent on the assistance it obtained from Britain at the time it overcame China and then Russia – but then again, China was just as dependent on European powers to supply its own warships, even more so in that it depended on European mercenary officers to actually run their ships for them, whereas Japan’s were merely manned by Japanese officers who’d been trained by Europeans.
Even Russia, too, was far from fully independent in supplying its own arms – most of the battleships sunk at Tsushima, as well as those commissioned to replace them, having been built in foreign yards or to foreign designs and relying on Britain, France, or Germany to supply critical compinents like their main armament.
What was different about Japan in this time period, however, as opposed to China, was that Japan kept a relentless and steady focus on self-strengthening, whereas China did not, and Japan took advantage of every opportunity that it saw, while China squandered most of its own.
Ah, but you say, Japan had more opportunities because those opportunities were just given to them, by the British, who needed a geopolitical partner in the region.
To that I counter that the Japanese not only proved better at taking advantage of opportunities, but also at creating these opportunities for themselves.
If you look at the bigger picture of British diplomatic history, the suggestion you’re making that the British took a backwater nation like Japan and deliberately turned them into a regional superpower just to have a counterweight to the Russians would be entirely unprecedented and out of character to how they always operated everywhere else.
Perhaps the nearest and closest example would be Britain’s defense of the Ottoman Empire against Russia in the Crimean War and at other times in its long decline. Yes, they did go to war for them – once, and regretted it afterwards. At no point however did they attempt to systematically modernize the Sultan’s armed forces and turn the Turks into a real great power again. On the contrary, they were all too happy take the lead in dismantling the Turkish Empire – shearing off Egypt, encroaching farther and farther in the Arabian Peninsula, and sponsoring the Greeks in the Balkan wars of independence.
This example illustrates a larger and consistent theme of British policy throughout the centuries – Britain had no use for weak allies, and would happily throw any of them under the bus or help themselves to the pickings if they proved too weak to stand on their own two feet.
The Confederate States are another prime example of this policy. Britain had the capacity to turn the course of the entire American Civil War by entering – the Royal Navy of 1862 was an order of magnitude stronger than the Union fleet, and the US arms industry was cripplingly dependent on British imports, down to the point of needing to import rifle barrels from Britain due to the lack of machine tooling capable of making them to a serviceable quality and quantity in the US. Most of the Union Army’s rifles were in fact manufactured in Europe outright, and a British blockade would have cut off these imports and allowed the Confederacy to buy them up instead, with its cotton able to reach the markets.
It could have been that easy for them, and any far-sighted strategists would have recognized the advantage of fracturing the emerging American empire and keeping the US tied down with a neighboring rival. They didn’t do it though, because the Confederacy couldn’t win on its own, and Britain wasn’t a nation in the habit of putting its own interests at risk to do charity for the weak (the Crimean War being a recent and rare exception that was still leaving a bad taste in their mouths).
Likewise with the Dutch, an on-again, off-again ally that had fought several naval wars against Britain but were their key partner in numerous wars against France. The Dutch were eventually conquered and subjugated by Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France. When France was defeated, the British had the chance to restore the Dutch as a bulwark against the French once more (which eventually might have turned into more of a bulwark against Germany).
Instead they took the opportunity to throw the Dutch out of Ceylon, South Africa, and Malaya, and several years later joined the French in preventing the Dutch from putting down the Belgian separatist uprising.
The British don’t get sentimental when it comes to alliances. Their oldest and most famous one is with Portugal. See the Pink Map dispute for how much that counted – Britain threatened Portugal with war over some remote and completely undeveloped wastelands in the center of Africa. Most countries are self-centered and bullying like that when it comes to dealing with their lessers, but have one or two little favorites they’ve got a soft spot for, who they might actually go out of their way to do a favor for. The French had the Poles. The Russians had the Serbs. The British had no one.
Now you’re trying to tell me that these same Brits would go and turn the Japanese into a major power at their own expense, just so they could have an ally against Russia? Ridiculous. Throughout its history, Britain would make alliances wherever it saw an advantage in doing so – but never did they go and try to turn weak nations into strong ones just for the sake of having an ally. They were happy to use the American Indians as allies when they found themselves at war with the Americans, but had no qualms about leaving them to the mercy of the US once that was no longer the case. They never tried to cultivate the Confederacy or Mexico into being long term allies against the US (and in their contingency plans for the case of an early 20th century war against the US, no British army would have been sent to fight in Canada). The Dutch were pilfered of half their colonies and deliberately hobbled from becoming a major power again, the Portuguese were shouldered aside in Africa, the Austrians were thrown under the bus in the War of the Austrian Succession (the Austrians bring ready and more than willing to continue fighting but the British calling it quits first and suing for peace before they had a chance to win back Silesia), and the Turks were plundered and short of various territories by the British, who only acted to keep Russia from seizing its own share of the spoils from them, not to arrest their decline or reverse it.
If you need yet another example, consider the case of Persia, another battleground of British and Russian influence in the same time period as the rise of Japan. Russian expansion into China was indeed a major British concern, but second to that of Russian expansion into India. Persia, then, would have been the more relevant bulwark against the Russians in Asia than Japan, the Royal Navy being more than capable of containing any seaward threat from the Russian Far East.
Why then, was Japan given the privilege of alliance with the British Empire, while Persia was treated like any other third world nation and carved up into spheres of influence with the Russians?
Because the Persians were weak, and the Japanese were strong. Same story for why the Chinese were treated one way and the Japanese another. Japan showed strength, determination, and unity, China showed weakness, vulnerability, and division. The Japanese envisioned a future of themselves as a modern power and worked diligently to build toward that goal. The Chinese mostly imagined the more glorious days of their past, and dithered and quarreled internally.
In Japan the priorities of the state and the people and between all the factions of the elite were in harmony with one another, as they all shared the same goal: make our country rich and strong (and when this happens, I too will then become rich and strong). This is much the same as the case of China today, in the midst of its own comparable golden age of prosperity and development.
In the China of over a century ago, however, this was not the case. Where there was a fundamental divide between the state and the people, as the state was dominated by a minority ethnic caste, where the factions of the elite were united only in the fact that they remained rich and strong by keeping the country as a whole poor and weak, and where the masses hardly had any stake in whether their country won or lost because either way, their lives would still be just as miserable.
Sounds all too much like the America of today, doesn’t it? Complete with the both of them having a massive opium crisis, going hand-in-hand with a failed war on drugs. They do differ in the details; after all, the Russians never sank the US Navy and unloaded crates of Afghan poppies on our shores, instead we invaded Afghanistan ourselves and put the poppy farmers back in business…
But there’s the same fundamental failure dooming the efforts of the China of over a century ago and the America of today to escape these death spirals, which is a failure of the national spirit and will.
Yes, the Chinese were outgunned in the Opium War, on a technological level. They were never going to defeat the British at sea. But that alone doesn’t mean they couldn’t have won the war. Think back to what caused the war in the first place. Britain and Europe had a massive demand for Chinese goods, but China didn’t need anything the British were producing. Pay up in silver or take a hike, you’re the ones who need to trade, not us. Opium was how the British turned the tables, by finding something the Chinese would want from them (and soon, need from them).
The point is, China was self-sufficient. All the British could do with control of the sea was cut China off from foreign trade – and China didn’t need that foreign trade at all. That and the British could sail up and down the rivers and lob shells at all of China’s cities.
There was no stopping that either…but what could that have accomplished, if the Chinese really were determined to carry on the fight? Think about the Vietnamese in their war with the US. There were individual towns in Vietnam that were hit with more firepower by the US Air Force in a day than every British gunboat could have brought to the shores of China in a year. But the Vietnamese persevered through it, year after year, until the Americans got fed up and went home.
Consider the losses that Soviet Russia was willing to endure to win against Nazi Germany, the worst any army has suffered in all human history. Or the Germans themselves, and their Japanese allies, fighting on and on after Allied bombers had burned dozens of their cities to the ground. The Taliban in Afghanistan, who’ve now spent an entire generation fighting the American empire, with no sign of slowing down. The Houthis in Yemen. The Dutch in the Eighty Years’ War. The French in the Hundred Years’ War. Paraguay in the Triple Alliance War. Too many examples to count throughout the ages of people who fought on past the point any sane person would’ve given up hope, because their hearts were set on it. Fight on, no matter what the cost.
The Japanese of this time were a people who had that kind of heart. They only lost it in 1945, once their entire navy was sunk, once every city in Japan was burned to the ground, once the entire nation was brought to the brink of starvation.
The Chinese of this time were not. China lost the Opium War because China as a nation never had its heart set on winning it. They took a few punches to the chin and threw in the towel in the third round. “Oh well, we tried.”
A failure of will that ran from the top of the nation to the bottom of it. A government too detached and alienated from the people to inspire them to make any sacrifice it would take. An elite that stood to gain more from being the middlemen of the drug trade destroying their nation than trying to fight against it (and were ready to quit in any case when a few of their expensive boats and palaces got blown up). A people who had no reason to throw their lives away for a state that if anything despised and abused them far more than the British did.
A system that is rotten like this from the top to the bottom will collapse under pressures that even a far smaller, but more spiritually healthy society, could find a way to endure.
That was China then, that’s America right now. You really believe the country with the most invasive and sophisticated surveillance system in the history of man, satellites in space, and troops in over 120 vassal countries around the world couldn’t figure out where all the heroin is coming from and stamp it out if it wanted to? The fact is though, it doesn’t happen. The elites who aren’t profiting from the situation themselves have more important things on their minds than the millions of people miserable enough to poison themselves for a brief escape from the world they’re stuck in, and the same goes for pretty much everyone else. Ask anyone who pays taxes if they’d pay more if they knew it would go to solving the opium crisis. Okay, you might get a lot who say they would. Then try asking how much more they’d pay for it. Put a price on halting the slow death of their nation. $5000? $2000? $1000? $500? $100? Odds are, not as much as they’d spend on buying a new TV.
If Japan had been as weakened, corrupted, and decayed a society as China, the British would have never offered them an alliance or assistance of any kind. They’d have found it more profitable to run the same scams on Japan and subjugated it in the same fashion as China.
Conversely, if it had instead been China that was powerful and modernizing, the British wouldn’t have hesitated to make an alliance of convenience against Russia with them instead of Japan. If push came to shove, the arms manufacturing lobby had far more clout with the British government than the opium growers in India, and Britain would have more than made up on its losses in the drug trade by selling the Chinese battleships instead.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
An old comment, but a masterpiece of subtle analysis, with good lessons for HBDers.
Sorry but this is a load of bs.
Britain and co. intervened in the Eastern Crisis to prevent Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt from crushing the Ottomans in 1840. As a result of this, Egypt became de facto independent and a vassal of Britain but de jure remained an Ottoman subject. Abdul Hamid “The Butcher” was basically too dumb to maintain this arrangement and lost Egypt entirely, it had nothing to do with British belligerence.
Britain was in the midst of delivering two modern warships to Turkey (which had built the world’s third largest navy with the help of Britain and others in the late 19th century) at the onset of WWI. Only a few prominent Turks preferred Germany, but they prevailed.
Britain (and France) was dragged into Navarino, they feared Russian unilateralism. Lord Byron was an honorable exception to British recalcitrance.
Britain only went to war to preserve Turkey once, but they intervened (along with Germany) diplomatically at the key moment in 1878 when Russia was on the brink of perhaps ridding Europe of Muslim powers for good to preserve “rickety sort of Turkish rule,” thereby setting the stage for the Balkans Wars and WWI.
Damn I think I am going to go back and read the discussion. Only seems that this comment summed up the discussion pretty well.
One crucial difference was Japan was ruled by the Japanese whereas China was ruled by the semi-alien Manchus who feared Chinese nationalism as much as European Imperialism.
Also, as Japan was much smaller, it didn’t have to worry about national cohesion. It was united as one and focused on foreign policy. In contrast, China had its hands full in trying to just hold the vast territories and regions together, esp as the imperialists were tearing China apart.
US also had to focus on settling its vast territories in the 19th century, which is why it lagged UK and France in naval power for most of the century. Only when the continent was secured could the US move into becoming a great naval power as well.
The U.S. behaves in the exact same fashion, with no true long-term allies (not even Israel, as the U.S. didn’t cozy up to Israel until relatively recently and sided against them in the 1950’s and 1960’s). On a long-enough timeline, the U.S. will stab all its allies in the back: Mubarak, Gaddafi, Saddam, the U.K. (in the Suez Crisis), the Serbs. Seems to be a product of the mercantile Anglo mindset.
The key difference is that while the U.K. spurned weak allies, the U.S. spurns strong ones, using Bioleninism to foment disorder and create vassal states that are utterly dependent on it (see: Canada, Bosnia, Kosovo, Ukraine, Georgia, ISIS). It’s a great strategy so long as there isn’t another power that is capable of rolling your vassals up.
By the time of Meiji Restoration, Japan is evolving toward capitalism, while China, under Manchu role, was still every bit a feudal society. The Manchu conquest of China in 1644 was an unimaginable tragedy for China’s development. It completely shattered the chance of the development of capitalism in China for the next 300 years.
I don’t understand why the Russians supported the Ottoman Empire against Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt. I think they thought that the Ottomans would just grant them permanent access to the Bosphorus for their favor in threatening war against Muhammad Ali Pasha. The Russians could’ve broken the Ottoman Empire then and there in the 1840’s. It feels so cringe to look back at history and see all of Russia’s foreign policy blunders.
The thing with this strategy is that it works fine for as long as the USA is strong enough to be able to back up it’s weak allies and vassal states. That’s exactly the problem all these weak allies/vassals are facing right now though. The USA is slowly, but gradually, cracking from within due to several forces. So, sooner or later (a few decades), it’s going to lose the ability to support it’s weak vassals. For instance, Bosnia and Kosovo would literally fall apart in 2 days by themselves without any foreign aid and international support.
Basically any US vassal that has a population of under 5 million, which is the minimum population amount required to be even theoretically capable of national sovereignty in the 21st century, would literally crumble in on itself without the USA. I would be very worried about the future if i were any of the USA’s current weak vassals.
It is important to know that Japan bothered no one until the United States forced it to “open” to the world order. This taught Japan that military force can yield economic benefits and is needed to protect itself from exploitation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_zgYqi6GRo
Bothered no one, seriously? Does attacking and invading Korea count?
Intervening to stop Ali’s war on the Sultan was once again a measure aimed at stopping the spread of Russian influence, with the Russians having made an offer of their own to bail out the Ottomans.
This whole post was in response to someone claiming Japan’s modernization was the result of the British building them up to serve as their proxy against Russia. My argument is no, this is something the British never did, there or anywhere else. A tactical intervention here or there to stop one of their rivals from expanding? Sure, plenty of those. “Nation building” to create strong allies? No.
“Third largest navy” is a Wikipedia factoid, at no point in the 19th century did the Ottomans have the world’s third most powerful or effective fleet. Refer to page 280 here for a snapshot of European fleets in 1878. The Russians and the Dutch both had them outnumbered in terms of ships total, Germany had them outnumbered in first-class ironclads, Italy had them outnumbered in combined first- and second-class ironclads.
https://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/6339/1/Dal15PhD.pdf
This is to say nothing of the fleet’s actual operational capability in terms of being able to use its ships effectively, which was definitely lacking. The Ottomans were just like the Chinese, buying a collection of ships instead of building a fleet by making long-term investments in expertise, personnel, and industrial strength (the only naval yard they had of their own at Golcük topped out at being able to do maintenance and repairs, and never laid down warships of its own).
Tellingly, their navy was unable to achieve anything of importance in the war of 1878, against the outnumbered Russian Black Sea Fleet. And even that brief period of claiming to be one of the foremost world naval powers was illusory and ephemeral. By the end of the century, the Ottoman Navy wasn’t even in the top ten, by any metric you can choose. For the reasons I mentioned above, focus on the short term rather than the long term. Warships depreciate just as badly as cars. Pay the premium price to import today’s world beater and in five or ten years it could be a fifth-rate tin can. Keep on doing this every five or ten years and you will run out of money (all these warships get harder and more expensive to maintain as they age and you’ll probably have to hire foreign help to keep them running) and be stuck with a fleet that is floating scrap iron the minute it goes into battle against a serious adversary.
The British weren’t selling ships to the Ottomans to try and make them a serious naval power. They were selling them for money. They got a ton of business for their yards, the Turks got to spend a few years deluding themselves they were relevant at sea again. It’s a good scam. Those British yards were all still around when World War I finally arrived. Almost none of those ships the Ottomans bought were.
The Ottoman side of World War I is a good note to end this on, because it offers the contrasting example of a country that did make a serious investment to try and restore them as a military power, Germany. The results speak for themselves. The British-built Ottoman Navy might as well have not existed for all the impact it had on the Russo-Turkish War in 1878, while the effects of the German training, reorganization, and equipment of the Turkish Army were felt decisively in 1915 and the years that followed.
The termination of the Lavi program under American pressure speaks to this. The US has a gay power bottom relationship with Israel. Yes, we’re going to let you boss us around, but no, you’re only charge when we say you are. You don’t really get to be independent from us.
Very similar story, though decades earlier, with the CF-105 Arrow and Avro Canada getting crushed under US pressure (America then poached most of the Canadian aviation industry workers who were left unemployed as a result).
It wouldn’t have made sense for Israel to spend billions on the Lavi when the USA would give them F-16s for free.
The USA has been on Israel’s side since LBJ was President.
I agree with the comment generally. I wonder if the author can further refine his comment by including details on the most intensive period of Chinese military reforms from between the 2nd Opium war and Sino-Japanese war (approximately 1870-1890).
During that period China did show some successes. It defeated inland rebellions by Muslims in the West. Russia agreed to a treaty on borders in Xinjiang and take a payment rather than annex most of Xinjiang through invasion because the Chinese army showed strength in the 1880s. During that decade a war with France in defense of Vietnam resulted in a weak victory by France. Chinese military reforms however in naval power were not equal to improvements by the army. In the 1880s China did build some modern warships at its shipyard in Fuzhou. It may be that China’s naval capabilities had deteriorated for centuries and could not be put back together in 2 decades while the land army was salvageable and could be reformed in a generation.
@Matt Forney,
That’s an interesting analysis. One though occurred to me: Is the shifting of alliances by the US and UK a result of them being maritime, island powers? Germany, for example, is always going to have to deal with France and Russia, the closest major powers. Does that create a strategy where stable alliances are preferred? On the other hand, because the US and UK don’t have powerful countries on their borders to worry about, they can pick and choose who they ally with.
Just food for though.
Just because you can break something doesn’t mean you will win because of that.
This is a very nice comment, but it should be pointed out that Japan’s military-industrial based on the eve of the Pacific War was technically deficient owing to the backward state of Japanese industry in general. As the naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan observed in naval shipbuilding, naval shipbuilding is only the apex atop a vigorous pyramid that is a thriving merchant shipbuilding industry.
The many deficiencies of Japanese industry at the time included:
• Inferior metallurgy meant that Japanese warships were constructed of mediocre steel and had defective seams
• The Japanese electronics industry was in its infancy, so Japanese radios were poor and radar non-existent (sets based on German designs and reverse-engineered captured American sets deployed late in the war)
• Poor manufacturing quality control (!) meant high rejection rates and high failure rates, even for small arms
• Near total dependence on imported machine tools and capital goods, so tooling continuously wore out as the war dragged on
• Insufficient shipbuilding capacity (!) owing to prewar dependence on merchant ship imports (mainly from Britain)
Japan’s Meijii modernization and Showa militarization would be familiar to critics of the Soviet economy as “unbalanced”. The only highly developed manufacturing sectors in Showa Japan were textiles (which already in the 1930s began to displace Lancashire) and the military-industrial complex.
The lesson is that a great power requires a complete techno-industrial base and must target the full spectrum of manufacturing. Targeting only the military-industrial complex will not only leave the rest of manufacturing underdeveloped, but saddle the military-industrial complex itself with deficiencies.
Postwar Japan clearly learned this lesson, whereas the victorious United States forgot it.
The US is a much stronger power than Britain was and thus has less need of strong allies.
That said America has a number of very powerful allies: Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea.
There’s a conscious strategy of preventing vassal states from being independent actors, but spreading Bioleninism is more of a case of getting high on your own supply.
The only constant in German strategy was that France was hostile. Germany’s other neighbors were at times enemies, neutrals, and allies. Even Nazi Germany attempted to form an alliance with Poland first.
The whole “mercantile Anglo mindset” bit is typical alt-right carping about the alleged “eternal Anglo”.
There’s nothing unique about Anglo-Saxon alliance culture. Prussia went from waging war on Austria to being Austria’s strongest ally in just thirteen years. Fifty years ago the USSR and China were on the brink of war, today they’re BFFs. Or look at the current bromance between Israel and the Gulf Arab states, who previously were committed to Israel’s destruction.
“good lessons for HBDers”
Please explain. What is the “lesson”?
???
Are you suggesting that breaking or dissolving the Ottoman Empire was undesirable for Russia in the 19th and early 20th century?
I agree, the Germans “went the extra mile” by providing excellent officers to aid in reorganization of the Turkish army. Also Wilhelm II declared himself protector of the world’s Mahommedans and tried to stop the French from taking Morocco; who’s to say if he was sincere or just trying to irk the Brits and French like usual, but it did gain Germany considerable goodwill in the Mideast and South Asia
The lesson is that culture, organization, willpower, planning, etc. matter. Good case study since China and Japan are relatively similar from an HBD standpoint.
HBDers of course don’t deny this–AaronB is setting up a strawman to knock down.
This is just circular though.
An equal explanation is that Japan has much higher HBD than China, and that explains their greater success.
Maybe the human capital difference between Japan and China is more than between Scandinavian and the Balkan races. Or maybe they are more similar like Germans and English, but just with a wild cultural divergence? Who knows (nobody).
Of course, without actual experiments, and real theory of what would be the genetic mechanism that could explain any of this, if there is any one – both explanations (whether cultural or human capital/genetics) are just childish speculations, although they produce value as online entertainment which is not a bad reason for anything.
If we look at the performance of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean diasporas, they are all remarkably similar. And certainly phenotype between these three ethnic groups is quite similar.
The human capital difference between Japanese and Chinese could well be non-zero, but I suspect it would be more like the difference between Germanics and French rather than Scandinavians and Balkanoid swine.
There is a difference between “admitting” something, and giving it the full importance it deserves.
While Japan eagerly embraced industrialization, Manchurian-ruled China foolishly rejected it. That is the story. An industrialized Japan vs a non-industrialized China. It changed the trajectory of both countries.
Imagine a coal mine in which one percent of workers have picks and 99% have shovels. The production of coal is predictably poor.
Do you tell the pickers that they shouldn’t forget shoveling is important?
I have no position in this argument – if I was going to bet on the position, I would even say any differences are much more cultural, than genetic. However, these arguments are not necessarily effective.
From performance of Indians in America, you would expect that modern India should be Wakanda.
While from performance of Japanese in America (who were mainly peasants and many of them were Christian), you would expect Japan to be another boring country like Korea.
So I’m not sure this is a very reliable indicator.
Because, e.g. – comparing India and Japan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qGiXY1SB68
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsCKg6RyTaU
Probably China itself has quite a lot of racial variation, I would guess.
Perhaps the lowest parts of their population are on the level of the Balkans, while the highest parts are more like Scandinavia? (We need some more experts on China to help here).
Even Japan seems to have significant regional variations (without saying whether these are cultural or genetic results).
In Okinawa in the Southern tip of Japan, their IQ is the same as Spain only. While in Northern Japan, it is higher than anywhere in Europe.
https://i.imgur.com/YD3FJ7F.jpg
Indian-Americans are primarily Brahmins. One would only expect India to be like Wakanda if one were completely ignorant of the nature of India’s caste system.
If mainstream culture emphasizes culture too much, I don’t think it’s wise to emphasize genes too much as a counterweight.
It’s understandable, but its merely reactive.
And yet, I admit there is something strangely unsatisfying about merely spelling out the ways in which both are important without finding any underlying structure.
All of us raised in Western culture have an inner yearning for a Unifying Grand Theory, for the One Factor That Explains It All.
This leads everyone to choose a different One Ring.
Other cultures would have no problem simply putting these contradictory principles side by side without finding any underlying unity.
Of course, what Western culture is really looking for underneath it all is….. 🙂
And if you had to choose which to emphasize, it’s obviously healthier to choose culture.
HBD tells us about our limitations. A healthy people would not emphasize this, although it would also keep in the back of its mind some sense of it’s limitations.
And since to find out our true potential we must constantly try and push beyond what we think are our limits, establishing limits with attempted scientific rigor can actually interfere with the process of finding out what our limits are. It can nip the process in the bud.
Sure, and same is potentially true with comparison between Chinese, Korean and Japanese diaspora.
Each could, potentially, represent different segments of country’s population. This is all a bit of blackbox for us.
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We know diaspora composition is often different even for the same race across different countries.
For example, Japanese diaspora in America, Brazil or Hawaii, were 19th century peasants, who assimilated to their new countries. Intellectually, their level is perhaps not different than the average of the natives of those countries.
(They are like Japanese equivalent of simple brown Italian peasants who immigrated to America, who do not necessarily have commonality with bourgeoisie of modern Milan, and are more known for producing mafia gangsters, than people like Enrico Fermi.)
While Japanese in Düsseldorf and London today, are mainly businessmen and engineers, and their families.
Average IQ of Japanese diaspora in London, Ireland or the UK, will be surely measure higher than 110, and be a lot higher than natives of those countries.
“The lesson is that a great power requires a complete techno-industrial base and must target the full spectrum of manufacturing.”
Or “closed technological cycles” in Andrey Martianov’s parlance.
No, this is not potentially true, because none of these nations has a caste system.
You’re in the category of “not even wrong”.
I recently wondered if there was some strange parallel between the Ming’s late-stage over-reliance on court eunuchs and globohomos promotion of gays at the centers of power.
The Chinese were quite relieved to learn that Europeans did not want to dispossess them. This makes parallels with modern America or the West difficult. Globohomo does want to dispossess Europeans.
One difference with Vietnam is that North Vietnam was politically protected because it had allies. It’s leadership were effectively free from the treat of invasion. Not true with China’s leadership in the colonial period. They had to cut a deal with foreigners or be captured.
Another difference is surely that Japan was probably inherently more stable. China is larger, harder to govern, and had unruly minorities like the Hakka (“Guest People” , like the Turks in Germany or Arabs in France) who were nucleus of the Taiping Rebellion and Muslims. Plus, it had all those canal workers who didn’t want to lose their jobs.
Japan even have caste systems, but that’s not relevant for the discussion.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2772191
Of course, there are wide differences in composition of diasporas, and it’s not a result of castes.
Indian immigrants in America, are unrepresentative of Indians in India, not “because of caste system”, but because of paperwork required for their immigration.
This filter system could result in more Indians from high castes, than from low caste – but caste itself is not the factor causing this. Rather, it is caused by paperwork like H-1B visa.
If America had open borders with India, then the immigrants would become more representative of the Indian average population.
It doesn’t require castes, but just different types of immigration.
No, they don’t. They have the burakamin.
In India for thousands of years the population has been divided into endogamous groups that differ from each other biologically more than Swedes differ from Greeks, even within the same rural village.
When we’re speaking of different elements of the Japanese population, we’re speaking of variations in regional origin and class.
China of course has considerably more diversity than Japan owing to its vast size, north-south differentiation, and various non-Han ethnic groups. But still absolutely nothing like India, which is globally unique.
Russians and Poles in London were largely born in Russia and Poland. Japanese in the Americas mostly left the Japan in the 19th century. Chinese diaspora can in turn be divided into 19th century and postwar. The postwar Chinese diaspora includes elite elements, whereas the 19th century does not.
I think the rapid jump from $200 GDP per capita in 1980 to US$10,000 per capita today is evidence of high IQs in almost all provinces (except the far west where Uighurs live and southwest hill tribes in mainly Yunnan and Guizhou.
The Yangzte River Delta region (including Shanghai and other major cities like Nanjing and Hangzhou) are known to Chinese as a region with a more civilized past and people with higher intelligence than the rest of the country.
Yes, but having caste system or not doesn’t cause diaspora to be representative – or unrepresentative – of the home population.
Indians in America are unrepresentative of Indian general population, and one example of this will be different balance of castes (higher proportion of certain castes among diaspora than would be representative in India itself). Cause of this, however, is the immigration requirement selected by America, just is favourable for those castes.
But likewise, Russians in London, are unrepresentative of Russia’s population, because the UK immigration requirement used on Russia (student visas, working visas, investment visas).
So end result can be just as unrepresentative sample.
On the other hand, Poles in London, will be more representative as a diaspora, as a result of UK having open borders with Poland.
Japanese and Italians in America, I speculate, are likely unrepresentative of Japanese and Italians in the opposite (lower) direction than Indians in America.
There seem to be innate psychological differences between Japanese and Chinese. These are small and statistical in nature, but even minor differences can have major effects by influencing how a society grows and develops.
A good example is the 5-HTTLPR serotonin transporter gene, whose short allele is more frequent in collectivistic cultures than in individualistic cultures. Specifically, the short allele is associated with heightened responsiveness to the social environment. In a study of American toddlers (24 months old), carriers were more likely to imitate the way other people behaved. If we look at different human populations, we find that the incidence of this allele ranges from a low of 35% in Estonians to a high of 49% in Italy and 54% in Turkey. In East Asia, its incidence is 71% in Taiwan, 75% in China, 79% in Korea, and 80% in Japan.
Please note: I’m not arguing that 5-HTTLPR is the only gene that influences the collectivism/individualism spectrum. There are probably many others. But variation at that gene tells us which way the pressures of selection have been operating. It looks like collectivistic cultures have selected for a package of predispositions, personality traits, and emotional responses that ensure a high degree of conformity and consensus.
This may be one reason why Japan has done so well in some areas and so badly in others. Consensus can be reached more quickly than in most other societies. In the case of modernization, there was a consensus, even before the Meiji period, that the country should borrow Western science while protecting Japanese culture, and the Japanese acted on that consensus in a very systematic and thorough manner.
Yes, that’s what AaronB does, because he doesn’t want coal production to increase.
It’s not that India’s caste system caused its diaspora to be representative or unrepresentative of the Indian population as a whole. It’s that the Brahmins in America regress to the Brahmin mean rather than the Indian mean.
Japanese and Chinese diasporas, on the other hand, regress to the national means.
Even Japan seems to have significant regional variations (without saying whether these are cultural or genetic results).
In Okinawa in the Southern tip of Japan, their IQ is the same as Spain only. While in Northern Japan, it is higher than anywhere in Europe.
The Kenya Kura study that this comes from is sloppy and it has numerous problems, to say the least. For one thing, no IQ test is involved, as it is based on a yearly achievement test. The average score is not weighted by prefecture population, as nearly 80% of Japan’s population would fall below the unweighted average. The average score is automatically set to be equal to an IQ of 104 (instead of usual 105), and the SD is set to 15 (in reality, it may be lower in Japan’s case). If these scores are properly weighted and corrected, then Okinawa (lowest) moves to 100, Fukui (highest) is 109, and 90% of the rest fall between 104.5-107.5 (with the most populous regions being between 104-105.5).
Again, not actual IQ scores, but scores converted from an achievement test. And this is before taking into account the fact that the achievement test score gap between the lowest scoring prefectures and the national average have declined over the last few years since this study was published.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/08/28/reference/japans-annual-student-achievement-test-worth-cost/
This may be one reason why Japan has done so well in some areas and so badly in others. Consensus can be reached more quickly than in most other societies. In the case of modernization, there was a consensus, even before the Meiji period, that the country should borrow Western science while protecting Japanese culture, and the Japanese acted on that consensus in a very systematic and thorough manner.
I haven’t read the book, but here is Tanner Greer’s short summary of Kenneth Pyle’s “Japan Rising”.
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http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-road-to-beijing-runs-through-tokyo.html
I am suggesting that dissolving the Ottoman Empire by Russian force would not necessarily result in a real victory for Russia.
Look at the war of 1877-1878, it was costly for Russia, helped establish/expand new states who were not of much use for Russia and created opportunities for Russia’s great power rivals to expand in the Ottoman Empire.
I guess it’s curtains for Serbia then. Check out 21st century population projections some time.
They will regress to mean of their own extended family, and of the family of whoever the immigrants marry (for example, mean in genetics – and also culture which follows the same process – for academic skills).
If diaspora is unrepresentative sample of the population of the country in these traits, then they shouldn’t regress to mean of the population of that country.
On the other hand, if diaspora is representative sample of the population of the country, then they should (just statistically).
Caste is not relevant, because unrepresentative castes in the diaspora population is collateral effect of having unrepresentative immigration in things like education levels (Indians usually need certain skills to get the visa to work in America, and that just results in having immigrants from the more educated groups in India).
The problem with these arguments is that they claim a wholly unwarranted moral innocence for the group in question, in this case the Japanese. “Why, the Japanese were not the sort of people who’d have ever dreamed of hurting anyone else – until the big bad USA taught them how to.” It’s just too stupid for words.
Thanks for the interesting reply.
Ok, so it might be wrong to infer international comparisons (and I’m sure even Okinawa will probably be higher than Spain).
But it won’t change the orientation of the regional differences, which is the more interesting point in the map (not the particular scores which are assigned).
There could be an incompetent conversion. But the basis of the study itself – how is that different than using e.g. PISA scores for constructing the IQ scores from?
PISA really does seem quite arbitrary when you look at the test – would the Japanese test be a worse proxy for IQ test, than PISA?
Also what age was this achievement test given? (PISA, for example, is using only 15 year olds).
This is an issue also with using e.g. PISA.
Academic scores vary with environment factors.
Would have made a lot of sense if they’d been able to break out on the export market with it and recouped the costs of development.
Well, well, an AaaronB post I can agree wholeheartedly with. Never thought I’d see the day.
The attack on Korea happened decades after Japan was forcibly “opened” by the US. I think Carlton Meyer’s point stands.
IQ would have been relatively less important for success in 19th century Japan than in 20th century Japan. So 19th century Japanese immigrants would probably have been more representative of the general population than peasant migration is today.
Having a woman in charge of things in China for so many years probably didn’t help. How much money was spent reconstructing the Summer Palace?
There was probably a certain built-in instability in China before it industrialized. Densely populated, probably more prone to flooding than Japan. More economically and politically heterogeneous, due to large distances separating population centers with varying economic interests. All this led to consequences, like the giant indemnity from the Boxer Rebellion, not paid off until 1940.
Are the Chinese that different from the Japanese, or is it mainly a question of geography? The Chinese knew what happened to Poland and Turkey, but they had various difficulties. Some of their stronger leaders were busy suppressing the Muslim SW. Still, I guess it is pretty embarrassing that most of their railroads were effectively built by foreign nations, to further their own economic interests. Almost like Africa.
Nahh, you used to like and agree with lots of my anti-Jewish posts back when I was anti-Jewish.
But now that I’m Jewish again you’ll just have to agree with my anti-HBD posts 🙂
On a slight tangent, I think one of the major flaws of Christianity is that it doesn’t incorporate ancestor worship. But for the resistance of the Church to the idea, China might have become a Christian country. At any rate, a state-endorsed fusion of Christianity and ancestor worship may have been an effective check to the egalitarian radicals responsible for the Taiping Rebellion and the Communist Revolution.
This was wholehearted agreement.
Ah, I see 🙂
Even better, Christian Chinese preventing Manchu rule altogether and becoming the top Christian country.
https://archive.fo/tOBxJ/007dd2d0c46e3984155c96ead6703f9e11b9c6dc.png
The extended family of a Japanese is the entire Japanese nation.
The same is not true for an Indian–his extended family is limited to his caste, and actually quite a bit more restricted than that as there are also thousands of subcastes which are likewise fully endogamous. If you register for an Indian online dating website, there are literally thousands of options for this.
I have personal history with this sort of genealogy. My grandfather decided to produce an ambitious genealogy in his retirement. While he found many interesting ancestors (including that we are descended from four different imperial houses, if one goes back a millennium plus), his most important discovery was ultimately that all Swedes are related. Another finding was regional endogamy among lower status Swedes, national endogamy among those of middling status, and partly cosmopolitan marriage patterns among those of the highest status.
Regression to different means is known from American racial statistics as well. A black couple with a mean IQ of 120 has, on average, less intelligent children than a white couple with a 120 IQ. This shows up in statistics on the disappointing educational attainment, adult income, and criminal behavior of the children of America’s black bourgeoisie (naturally normally attributed to racism, of course).
So when we speak of Brahmins, they are always regressing to a genotypic IQ of perhaps 110. They do not share any traceable common ancestors with non-Brahmins, because extremely strict endogamy in Indian society has been the rule since before the birth of Christ.
Meanwhile in European, Chinese, or Japanese society one finds examples in every generation of people marrying outside of their class as well as changing their social class. This was also true in feudal times. Commoners could be ennobled, and nobles could also lose their lands and titles.
Production of bastards with mistresses was also common for high status men in the past, and even today to some extent. Boris Johnson for instance is reported on Wikipedia to have “5 or 6” children.
How does it feel to be wrong Thorfinnson 🙂
You are in great danger of becoming a wrongist .
Oh Lord, have mercy on this poor wrongist, and nip his wrongism in the bud!
E. Michael Jones, who has been referenced by commenters here, has the idea that what separates Africa and Europe is 1000 years of the Catholic Church. Undoubtedly, a crazy idea, but withal amusing, like Taleb’s idea of “Meds”, a term being inclusive of North Africans, as the world’s super men.
Even if it is silly, it is an interesting scenario to think about. Would it have caused gene-cultural coevolution? And to what degree? It doesn’t seem to be taking there now in the population as a whole, but there are probably opportunity costs for a more modern arrival vs. an older one. Ethiopia seems to be more advanced than other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, even when it comes to non-Christian related groups like the Somalis. Is that just the geography, Eurasian influx, or something else?
Might have been a harder sell in China vs. Europe due to varying political natures of the two regions. The Chinese with stronger central authority might have considered it redundant. Still, it is interesting to consider what effects it might have had.
That would have been quite difficult and risky.
The Japanese also invaded Korea in 1592-98. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_invasions_of_Korea_(1592%E2%80%931598)
Japan and South Korea are impotent puppet states that refuse to get babies.
The British did invest directly in Japanese ship building. The Japan Steel Company of Hokkaido was set up by Vickers to supply large forgings for Japanese ship building – propellor shafts. Hitachi is now a front runner in the UK nuclear reactor stakes (large PWRs). because it now owns the Japan Steel Company which now handles the worlds largest forgings, alongside Sheffield Forgemasters of the UK. It has more capacity than Sheffield forgemasters.
Russia needed to buy UK forgings to repair the generators for the hydrodam in Siberia. So building forging capacity has been a priority. Russian capability has recently shifted from 50 to 60 tonnes. Still not world class but progress. At the moment they are celebrating that they can now compete with Siemens on turbines. Siemens once tried to buy Power Machines of St Petersburg but … strategic industry. Having strategic industries imposes a lot of costs on the economy. You need productivity elsewhere to afford them. Russia has 42 strategic industries. Thats a big cost burden.
That comment was a work of art
I’m sure you think the Rape of Nanking is really Murica’s fault too (so Japan doesn’t need to apologize).
I’m sure you believe the inhabitants of North America before Whitey showed up were noble savages too.
Breaking the Ottoman Empire in the 1840’s while it was fighting Muhammad Ali Pasha, is with hindsight, clearly something that would’ve been desirable and advisable for Russia since it would reduce the problems Russia would have with the Turks in later decades. The same thing applies to the Habsburg Empire in 1848. Instead of decisively intervening to save the Habsburgs in 1848, Russia could’ve broken or severely weakened them in the 1840’s and solved the problems they would face with them later. In one decade from 1840-1850, Russia had 2 opportunities to decisively break or weaken the 2 artificial empires that would decisively turn against it later and cause major problems for Russia. Russia missed and squandered both of these opportunities to break the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires with crucial consequences for its future.
Russia fought several wars against the Ottomans with good reason. Until the 19th century, the Ottomans posed an existential threat to Russia and effectively blocked Russia from accessing the Black Sea. In the 19th century, the Ottomans blocked Russia from accessing the Mediterranean. Russia could access the Mediterranean through either Balkan states or through the Bosporus Strait. There was also the importance of securing a strategic position in the Caucuses for Russia as well. The prospect of Russia accessing the Mediterranean through either the Bosporus or a Balkan state, especially after the Suez canal was built, terrified Britain and other West European powers. They became pathologically obsessed with denying Russia access to the Mediterranean regardless of the cost, because Russian access to the Mediterranean meant that Russia could cut off West Europeans from all their holdings in Asia. Considering what’s commonly known as “The Great Game” was being played between Russia and Britain in the 19th century, Russian naval presence in the Mediterranean would have given Russia an important geo-political tool of leverage over Britain.
You are wrong about the Russo Turkish War of 1877-1878. That war in 1878 was an effective Russian success. Just look at the battles of Plevna and Shipka Pass. The Treaty of San Stefano was also a massive success and an effective victory for Russia, where through Bulgaria, it would get access to the Mediterranean. Russia only lost at the Berlin Congress in 1878 where West Europe intervened against Russia and the Balkan states in order to sabotage their victory and hard-won territorial gains. Also, the Ottoman Empire was not actually dissolved by force in 1878 and it was artificially preserved by the Berlin Congress of 1878. The Ottoman Empire would only be dissolved by force from the 1st Balkan War in 1912 through to WW1 and the post WW1 era.
Relevant family, is person’s family – between generations, which we assumed is selected. Regression in children will be towards family mean across generations.
The fact there is some stupid guy in your hometown, is relevant to the extent you might not have further information, from which to estimate the genetic mean in your own family, and therefore we need to use the control population.
In reality, he might not have the heritable genetic basis for intelligence which you may or may not have within your family, so whatever his family mean is, could be causally irrelevant to you.
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If you want to understand regression to mean – it’s statistical statement about luck, in which they try to filter out which component is random, and therefore heritable component should match what is averaged across generations.
It’s purely epistemic. There is no “ontological regression to mean” – rather, the mean is just statistical tool to predict what heritable traits are in the person from limited information.
Understand – all this is only because of limited information.
If less specific information is available about what genes you might have inherited, or had specifically selected for from a population, then it is useful to compare you with the traits in the population to produce the estimate.
Black parents with IQ of 120, will on average have children with lower IQ than they have, to the extent the trait is inheritably genetic – if their own IQ is lower than that of their family across several generation. Same with white parents.
You have to understand assumption of this is that the mean across generations will correspond with the inherited degree of the trait.
So if a family of Brahmins, have selected genes for intelligence in their family- then this will be expressed in higher mean in their family, than the general population.
Set of Brahmins themselves, might have a higher ratio of people selected with genes for intelligence.
But if you can find a family of Dalits who have a mean IQ of 120 across several generations. This is the mean that we will assume the next generation in this family will regress towards. I.e. let’s say the next generation has an IQ of 100. Then we’ll expect this is bad luck, as it is below the intergenerational mean.
Mean IQ of Dalits in general might be 80, but this is only relevant for predicting the IQ of the next generation in this particular Dalit family, if we have incomplete information, and didn’t realize they have a family mean of 120.
It might explain strange features of Indian culture, but is irrelevant to discussing differences between already selected populations.
If you and your wife have IQ is 110, while your nationality’s IQ is 100. Then if you know further information, you might assume your children’s IQ will more likely regress to the mean of your nationality. In other words, the regression will be downwards.
However, if you discover that you and your wife’s ancestors were quantum physicists with IQ 180. Then which mean will be the more accurate predictor of what your children will regress to? The IQ of your nationality, or the IQ of your ancestors?
Of course, the more accurate prediction, will be using the mean based on more specific information. In this case, your children will likely regress upwards (i.e. be more intelligent than you and your wife, not less intelligent as would be predicted by the population mean).
Oops a wrong word here –
It should write:
“if their own IQ is higher than that of their family across several generation. Same with white parents”
^ Text written in an early morning rush before needing to do some work….
Also missing word here
“If you and your wife have IQ is 110, while your nationality’s IQ is 100. Then if you don’t know further information, you might assume your children’s IQ will more likely regress to the mean of your nationality. In other words, the regression will be downwards.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wokou
1) ” ….because Japan succeeded where China failed by investing in the long-term development of institutional knowledge and its own national arms industry.”
“Investing”? Where do you think the japs get the money and resources from? They were a dirt poor country even after Perry landed his “black ships” to “force” its opening in 1854. They launched the naval war in Oct 1894 in the Bohai sea and destroyed the entire chinese fleet. Then they forced the corrupt and inept qing government to pay 220 million taels (1 tael = 1.333 oz) of silver in reparation. At current rate, this amounts to almost USD 5 billion. In addition to the silver loot, they also forced the qing court to hand over taiwan and liaodong peninsula. All these was documented in the treaty of shimonoseki in 1895 – a la the british Nanjing Treaty.
From then on, the japs knew china was ripe for the milking. In 1931, they false flagged the railroad incident in shenyang (known as “mukden” then) to occupy and eventually plunder the northeast’s vast mineral resources. Millions of tons of coal, iron ore, petroleum and others were shipped to japan to fuel its military industrial complex for the full scale conquest of china by 1937 and south east asia.
2) ” Think about the Vietnamese in their war with the US. There were individual towns in Vietnam that were hit with more firepower by the US Air Force in a day than every British gunboat could have brought to the shores of China in a year. But the Vietnamese persevered through it, year after year, until the Americans got fed up and went home.”
“Preservered”? Someone had their backs. Against much criticisms from his colleagues in view of the dire circumstances china was in at the time, Mao decided to provide the full monty of logistical, equipment and expert advise on guerilla war tactics to Ho Chi Minh’s vietminh army. This support, together with the soviet union’s, enabled the dongs to fight the french from 1945 right up to the empire scuttling away in a helicopter on the rooftop of their embassy in april 1975. Between 1950 and 1954, Mao shipped more than 4,000 tons of equipment per MONTH to the vietminh. He also provided hundreds of military advisers including his best guerilla war strategist, General Chen Geng to help the dongs planned and executed the war against the french which ultimately resulted in their defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Later, Vo Nguyen Giap (lionised by the fake media as the general who defeated the french and the empire) admitted to a hungarian diplomat that Dien Bien Phu was the “last desperate exertion of the vietminh army”.
The support and assistance continued when the empire took up the fight from the french after 1954 all through 1975. Mao even ordered one of their medical labs to develop a vaccine against malaria as the dongs were dying in scores from the disease upon an appeal from Ho chi minh. The drug is now known as artemisinin and its creator, prof Tu youyou was recently awarded a nobel prize, albeit much belatedly.
3) The Chinese of this time were not. China lost the Opium War because China as a nation never had its heart set on winning it. They took a few punches to the chin and threw in the towel in the third round. “Oh well, we tried.”
“Took a few punches?” China took more than a few punches. The military and industrial might of the empire, britain, russia, japan, france, germany and austria-hungary were forced upon a decrepit and crumbling qing government, starting with the opium war of course. ( Hyenas often hunt in packs)
The general population of china at the time was so emasculated; they were poor, illiterate, hungry, hooked on opium and dispirited that many even assisted the 8 nation alliance armies to try to oust the corrupt, inept and abusive qing government in the summer of 1900. After their victory, these foreign aggressors went on a rampage to loot and burnt beijing. On this score, the brits did a marvellous job of decimating an entire population with opium 60+ years earlier. The act of pushing a highly addictive and potentially fatal narcotic was knowingly approved by the british parliament at the time. What happened to “rules based order”?
Chinese began to “preservere” after the May 4th movement in 1919 when university students started massive demonstrations that fired up nationalism to force the new republican government to stand up against more western and jap aggressions – after the versailles treaty allowed the japs to retain shandong province. That was when the entire chinese polity began to fragment and boil with more warlords, KMT dissensions, formation of the CCP, etc, that culminated in the CCP being victorious in 1949.
From 1840 to 1949 (during china’s century of humiliation), no one had china’s back! The chinese owe their existence to NO ONE!
Those very small countries might do well to link up with Russia, if that can prevent them being drawn into China’s orbit and eventually subjugated.
You sound bitter.
they never really committed to anything beyond rhetorics. The relation simply went from unspoken to public. Diplomatic or commercial. I know Israelis have been discretely doing business in the emirates long before this so-called thawing. I wouldn’t be surprised it was the same for Saudi Arabia
The reason we’re now in this discussion is that I brought up the diasporas of East Asian countries as relevant for demonstrating the similarity of the quality of the nations.
Emigration from China, Korea, and Japan to other countries has been going on since the 19th century. And actually longer in the case of Chinese in the Philippines.
Everywhere they go the performance of all three groups is remarkably similar. With respect to China, performance also appears to be similar for Chinese from different regions.
This has been going on for a long time now, so we are in fact talking about many generations.
We also have writings from Europeans of the past on the characteristics of these peoples, including when they were first in economic competition with whites in the old American West and in the wild days of Australia. The general consensus was that they were formidable competitors.
The situation is therefore unlike that with Indians in America. Not only does India have its caste system, but Indians in America are mostly from India itself or the first generation in America. This makes the selective effects of their immigration more relevant.
There are also Indian diasporas elsewhere who have different origins that can be studied. Under the influence of religious reformed and cack-brained economists, the British abolished negro slavery in the West Indies and were surprised to discover that free blacks refuse to work. The solution was to import Indian coolies. These people are not Brahmins and are much less impressive.
The 1973 oil embargo was more than just rhetoric.
Japan was ousted from China as a consequence of the Pacific War. The US destroyed Japan and the Soviet Union swept up the remnants of the Kwantung Army.
One difference between the US now & the UK then?
The UK could accept being first among its “equals”. The US, on the other hand, denies ANY equals. It’s is the exceptional, indispensable nation.
(example: even if China agrees to any settlement on trade etc with the US, the US reserves the right to keep ALL sanctions on China until it decides otherwise. This is treating China as it was a dog — the insult is profound)
Very good food for thought, too.
Sure, it was an interesting and original discussion point you have made.
But I note their diasporas are not very similar and also it’s not easy to infer about the home population from them because the sample is often unrepresentative.
For example, Japanese in London, are businessmen and engineers, and their wives.
While Chinese in Spain, are the poor people who are cashiers in almost every small convenience shop.
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Diasporas are not necessarily representative samples of the home population (Indians in America are one example where highly educated – and therefore often Brahmin – part of the population is selected by the immigration).
Children of these diasporas might regress to the mean, but it will be mean of families who were selected as a probably unrepresentative sample by that immigration process (so not necessarily mean of representative unselected population).
However, traditional Chinese in San Francisco today (excluding the students or new residents), seem like quite a shabby population, even a century after their arrival. (That was my impression of the Chinatown).
So perhaps old Chinese immigration to America of that epoch, was selecting a lower quality population than in home country.
A lot of Indian immigrants in countries like England, were not really selected by any traits? I guess the UK had a very loose immigration policy with those populations.
Japanese in London by and large are expatriates, comparable to white executives and bankers in Tokyo (Tokyo of course also has white weebs).
Chinese in Spain, on the other hand, are much like the Chinese who arrived to the New World and Southeast Asia in the 19th century. Over the next fifty years, it is almost certain that their children will earn higher incomes than actual Spaniards.
Chinatowns in America are by and large not inhabited by old, settled Chinese. Most of the population consists of recent immigrants, often illegal. The old Chinese and Japanese Americans both exceeded white income levels by 1965, despite being under severe legal restrictions in California until the end of the 1940s. And in the case of the Japanese their property was confiscated by the state (and apparently sold at knock-down prices to Jewish gangsters according to Ron Unz).
But if you compare these Chinatowns to black ghettos or Mexican barrios, you’ll find that they’re very well maintained and bustling with commerce. The energy and diligence of the Chinese is irrepressible.
I don’t know the quality of Indians in the UK, but presumably they have taken more types of Indians than America has owing to imperial links. I do know there’s a major difference in the type of Pakistanis taken. British Pakis are best known for their grooming gangs, while American Pakistanis are mainly affluent professionals not so different from Indians in America.
Perhaps a similar example: America with Italy – where they had open borders with Italy, but due to configuration of push factors for immigration, the process has likely selected a negatively unrepresentative diaspora.
Italian base population in Italy – usually adequate and normal looking, nerds. (Italian girls especially, always seem to have a high proportion of nerds).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-dp9EJFi5s
And stereotypes of Italian diaspora in America?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHE-2bL8Ajs
You post a video of urban North Italians, when rather you should post a video of South Italian peasantry.
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~molna22a/classweb/politics/Italianhistory.html
“you’ll find that they’re very well maintained” – Nonsense. They are dirty and they stink. Take a walk on narrow streets behind the restaurants. But yes, they are “bustling with commerce.”
Sure, diaspora population in America, had also become unrepresentative in terms of region of origin.
But main thing was probably simply overrepresention of illiterate lower classes, even as they were already the majority of the country.
And this creates a dominant culture and self-stereotypes of the immigrants as well, when they arrive in a new country.
Southern Italians (Calabrians) of today still have plenty of nerd looking people, like in the North.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u05C37CvFI
But stereotypes of American cousins (who still identify as Italian in media) seem generally like they culturally have to be the opposite of nerds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRAITnvKavg
According to YouTube, Chinatown in Vancouver is ironically has too little commerce, after materialistic and culturally alienated new Chinese started investing in the city
See from 10:40 in the documentary video – originally Chinese were just imported as low cost slaves, although they had at least remembered the old culture of China.
https://youtu.be/IZs2i3Bpxx4?t=640
What’s important is not your limits. It’s other people’s limits.
In countries without immigration HBD is an abstract thing. Eastern Europeans can afford caring about culture and institutions first and foremost. In Western Europe and Russia they have minorities that number in tens of millions and constant inflow of low quality human capital from abroad. They have to keep HBD in mind. The US had to keep HBD in mind 50 years ago but now it’s too late for them I guess. No amount of magic dirt and religious vigor can fix half of the population being low IQ goblins. You can always fix culture later. Can’t fix genetics yet, and this whole discussion would be utterly irrelevant if we were able to.
Also what age was this achievement test given?
Since you are curious, I’m surprised you’ve not actually examined the study (or the JT link), as it is listed as 11 and 14 year olds.
IQ is not genetics, it is a test score. Imo, AaronB is 100% correct in his assessment that HBD defeatism will only accelerate the decline of the West if it continues to gain traction.
“If Sweden can do it, why cant’t we?” is what I imagine them asking themselves
Which imperial houses are you specifically descended from?
“The Japanese also invaded Korea in 1592-98.”
Worth noting here is the fact that Japan had by then been introduced to expansionist European Empires (Portuguese and Spanish) and had copied their modern weapon, the matchlock gun. Until then the Japanese were known to the mainland Asians as pirates.
Interestingly, the English islanders at the other end of the humongous Eurasian landmass were also notorious for their pirates.
It doesn’t sound like you have heard of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Cool character, probably is the most famous historical figure in Japan. Check him out when you get a chance. There are more than a few movies and books about him.
While we are on the topic of Japan and China, I’ll expand a little bit. China and Japan fought 3 times in Korea.
The first time was in 663. That was during China’s Tang dynasty at its zenith of power. China was so much more powerful and technically advanced than Japan. Its powerful navy smashed hundreds of Japanese little ships. The battle was over in a couple days. For the next hundred year or so, Japan turned the whole country to learn from Tang China. From architecture, metallurgy, to religion to pretty much everything, Japan tried to absorb as much as it could from China just like it did a millennium later from the West.
The second time was Toyotomi Hideyoshie ‘s adventure in Korea(1592–1598). AK already posted the link. It was during China’s Ming dyansty at its last breath. (less 50 years later the Ming was gone, conquered by the Machu) China sent its troop in Korea to fight the Japanese.
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The third time was the one you mentioned. A decaying “Qing” China vs an industrialized Japan. China lost the war and Korea was colonized. China also paid a heavy price for it – lost Taiwan to Japan, paid a huge amount of war indemnity to Japan which accelerated Japan’s march to modernity , stalled China’s development and pushed China into a century’s humiliation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation
Trade war between Japan and South Korea is on the news recently. If you remove history and just talk business, the problem can be resolved in 5 minutes. But people and nations are what they are because they are shaped by their history.
80% (of roughly 3.2 million troops) of japan’s imperial army were bogged down in china when the war started proper in 1937. The chinese suffered 35 million casualties, combatants and non-combatants. The japs suffered heavy casualties and had to resort to recruit men from places like taiwan, phillipines and malaya. The empire only set up shop in china between April 1941 to jul 1942 to operate its bombing runs from bases in the southwest but later found out that it was impractical to bomb japan from so far away. For all their involvement in china of 15 months, only an average of 60 planes were employed and it hardly matter to the chinese who were battling the japs on the ground. With or without the atomic bombs, japanese defeat in china was only a matter of time after the KMT and CCP joined forces. Had china thrown in the towel in the early stage of the war; places like australia, new zealand, india and central asia would very likely had been swallowed up by the jap demons. After all, this was their grand plan crafted for the conquest of asia and also to realize the axis fascists’ dream of ruling the world with the nazis taking up the western half of eurasia.
As for the soviet union, stalin’s intention to crush the kwantung army was never to help china. He had his eyes fixed on the north eastern territory and mongolia. True enough, his forces remained in the northeast well after the jap surrender and china had to do some hard persuading to have the red army eventually removed but not before it was arm twisted to grant independence to outer mongolia.
Sure you can.
Lifetime monogamy + rule of law + five generations of stable, above-replacement fertility will do the trick.
Unfortunately, no country in the world has all three, so we get dysgenics instead.
But it requires no special technology or resources. Our caveman ancestors did it, and so can we, if we had the will.
Polygamy is more eugenic, since high status men pass on their genes.
If it is true that the Japanese invasion of China was doomed from the start, that makes the Japanese invasion of China even dumber.
In any case I do not get that impression, but will readily admit to not being an expert on the Second Sino-Japanese War. I do question the claim based on the fact that the Japanese 1944 offensive in China, Operation Ichigo, was a success.
At the same time in the Pacific the US was busy sending the last remnants of the Imperial Japanese Navy to a watery grave and starting the strategic bombing campaign of Japanese cities.
Japanese expansionism was limited by merchant shipping. The entire “Centrifugal Offensive” (a postwar term coined for their 1941-1942 assaults on the Western Powers) was conducted with only eleven divisions and a shortage of shipping.
Invasions of Australia and Hawaii were discussed at Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo and ruled out as a result of this shipping shortage.
It is certainly true that Operation August Storm was not conducted out of a generous desire to aid China, but none the less it swept up and annihilated the entire Kwantung Army in under two weeks.
My personal opinion is that the US made a strategic mistake in choosing to oppose Japan. Japan’s invasion of China was a failure and kept it bogged down in a massive war with no end in sight. At the same time, this war obviously made the unification and modernization of China impossible.
An almost ideal situation for America.
The result of American victory in the Pacific War was that many Japanese industries eclipsed American ones, and now China is set to eclipse America.
Thankfully we do have “control groups” in form of Singapore, HK and Taiwan, as well as oversees Han communities around South east Asia. All of these areas were populated by different groups of southern Han and they are all performing very well. As for Korea and Japan, in most economic fields South Korea has caught up with Japan or is close to catching up. This includes GDP per capita (PPP), scientific output ect, not to mention that it took them far less time to get to such a height then it took Japan. There is no indication at all that Koreans are in any HBD way inferior to Japanese (especially since the only thing that separates them genetically is about 20% native hunter gatherer ancestry in the Japanese gene pool.) Despite many economic problems Taiwan (Republic of China), populated largely by Fujianese lower classes with a bit of native Polynesian ancestry, has a higher GDP per capita then Japan, Singapore is one of the richest places in the world and Malaysian or Indonesian Han have first world living standards despite living in third world countries. Also if one can make judgments about the genetic inferiority of Koreans and Chinese compared to the Japanese based on 19th and 20the century performance, one could do it just as well using earlier history and arrive at the opposite conclusion. Except for one math genius in the Edo period Japan before Meiji didnt make a single invention in the fields of science or technology. Meanwhile both China and Korea have made many such inventions. As for things like hygiene, manners ect, Taiwanese and SP Han are very good in this field, even better then South Koreans, North Koreans meanwhile are worst then the worst of mainlanders, not to mention that much of Europe was very bad in this field a mere 2 centuries ago and that when it comes to things like urban hygiene Japan and China were not different till the 19th century. Such things have much more to do with culture then with IQ in the long run and today even most African Americans in inner cities of the US are far more hygienic then most 18th century Europeans. The problem with the claim that Han Chinese have a lower IQ then other east Asians is that there are just too many control groups spread around the world. Now what is far more interesting is why Koreans in the US are doing so badly.
Now when it comes to cultural output, firstly its hard to measure and secondly we can just look at Europe to see that IQ and cultural output do not go hand in hand. Till the late 19th century it was France and Italy that had the greatest “soft power” in Europe, while the likes of Germany were dwarfed by them, does this mean the Germans had lower IQs then Italians? Closly related Anglos have developed very different cultures all arround the world with strongly differing “soft power” output. Japanese Americans do score about the same on IQ tests as Japanese in Japan do, arguing against them being non representative, same goes for Han (the Han in Singapore are an exeption, they are unrepresentative due to high human capital concentration).
My main problem with such an aproach to HBD as displayed by Dmitry is that it basically takes a snapshot of the present (often guided by subjective experiences) and then tries to build an HBD theory based on it. It reduces HBD to post hock rationalizations of the percieved state of things, robbing it of any predictive qualities and hence scientific value. One of the mainreasons why I got “converted” to HBD was that In the 1970s, the likes of Rushton or Jensen did make correct predictions, while mainstream economists made worng ones. For example they did predict the rise of South Korea and Taiwan to first world levels, despite the fact that if anything these places were more prolish, materialist and rustic then the modern PRC (a good source are memories of US troopers serving in SK in the 1950s-1980s). Meanwhile mainstream economists did predict the rise of places like Brazil, Peru or even Nigeria more then that of South Korea. This did show to me that the HBDers had a superior model. Meanwhile the method of just looking at the level of development of each country arround the globe today and then invent a genetic explanation for it ispretty much worthless.
From Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs
There is a Youtube video of it in which Lee Kuan Yew talked about his ancestors and recounted his conversation with Deng.
That is what HBD is.
It’s worthless as science, but it has a very important role to play in the decline of the West. White people are fated to decline, and they must believe in HBD in order to decline.
introduced to expansionist European Empires (Portuguese and Spanish) and had copied their modern weapon, the matchlock gun.
Yep. Noel Perrin, in his book Giving up the Gun, claims that by the late 16th century Japan had produced more guns than any single European country.
For the next hundred year or so, Japan turned the whole country to learn from Tang China.
Japan would take much influence from China throughout the entire Tang dynasty, but not as much in the few decades immediately following the fall of Baekje in 663.
80% (of roughly 3.2 million troops) of japan’s imperial army were bogged down in china when the war started proper in 1937.
Japan maintained roughly 1 million troops in China (not including Manchuria) for the duration of the war, but not at the outset of the war, as total IJA strength back then was much smaller.
It is certainly true that Operation August Storm was not conducted out of a generous desire to aid China, but none the less it swept up and annihilated the entire Kwantung Army in under two weeks.
The Soviets bypassed the vast bulk of the Kwantung Army. Their plan was to penetrate deep into the wide expanse of Manchuria (e.g. passing through the Greater Khingan mountains), and to capture strategically important cities, as well as to disrupt Japanese supply lines. It was very well planned out, and the Soviets had overwhelming superiority in tactics and equipment. In addition, the Kwantung Army lacked mobility, as much of their equipment, weapons, and supplies had been earlier spent in the Pacific theater. Regardless, the Japanese were still putting up fierce resistance and inflicting large numbers of casualties on the Soviets, right up until the point where they were informed of the surrender order. It’s hard to imagine that this resistance would not have continued if the Soviets had to fight the entire Kwantung Army to the death. As it stands, the Soviet’s main contribution was in hastening the Japanese decision to surrender, which came just 6 days after the Soviet invasion began.
I have been regularly impressed by the ability of Chinese to hold a grudge. I wish it could be emulated by Europeans, but I think it is something innate.
Part of the contrast was definitely geography.
It was hugely expensive to operate a modernized army in a vast China that was nearly pre-modern. It didn’t have the tax base to pay for a modern army without borrowing huge amounts and repeated deficits. Then it had to be employed in fighting warlords because the country wasn’t economically integrated.
Japan, by contrast, is relatively compact and arguably has the same natural advantages as Britain, where a navy is really all that is needed to maintain stability.
Probably didn’t help being next to the Soviet Union either.
“originally Chinese were just imported as low cost slaves, although they had at least remembered the old culture of China” – This makes sense.
Since then a lot of smart mainlanders migrated to Singapore, its cognitive elitist migration policy did most likly support a net raise in averege IQ after the opening up of China proper.
But I do agree that most old Chinese diasporas (Including Taiwan) were made up of the poorer segments of Chinese society. The fact that they did do so well wherever they went looks promising for Chinese in general. This especially makes it strange why Koreans in the US are so poor.
Carolingian, Macedonian, Ottonian, and Rurikid.
From where does the productivity needed to support strategic industries usually come from, if not the strategic industry itself?
Only bad HBD is post hoc rationalization of the current state of things.
Good HBD has predictive potential. Jensen did for example predict Koreas and Taiwan’s rise, despite the fact that in the 1960s many countries in Latin America or the middle east were more developed.
HBD is in my opinion about filtering out the noise and finding the inborn factors that distinguish different groups of humans from each other as well as making social predictions based on these distinctions. For example predicting the changes to a country who’s population shifts due to migration. I do think that Mr.Karlin is doing it right in that he is working in this direction.
Sadlymany others just use it to explain their personal preferences.
Please, the CCP had nothing to contribute, also they were content to build up their strength while the Nationalists exhausted themselves.
You keep repeating that Koreans are doing badly in the US. What metric do you use to come up with that conclusion? There are many Korean high achievers. The college graduation rate among Koreans is one of the highest among all other groups, and Koreans are over represented in West Point and Ivy league schools. Their household income is in the middle of the pack, one above the Irish and one below the German. Not great, but certainly not poor.
As for Singapore, there was almost no migration from China between 1949-1985. Singapore was already highly developed when Lee was having that conversation with Deng.
The CPP mostly engaged in guerrilla warfare, and they were pretty effective.
When they had the opportunity, they did go full throttle.
See Battle of Pingxingguan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Pingxingguan
They did some guerrilla fighting, but even there the large majority was done by NRA. The CCP’s Hundred Regiments Offensive was an impressive mobilization and pretty effective, but it was basically an attack on the Japanese rearguard and the Jap counterattacks severely damaged the PLA. After that they licked their wounds and built their strength up for the civil war. I don’t really fault them for that, since the Japanese weren’t very interested in their territory and more attacks would’ve left the PLA crippled and the CCP irrelevant in the postwar settlement.
These are great relatives to have. I have two, from different branches, who have done this; each produced a book.
Do you have lower status relatives?
Have you seen this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Son-Also-Rises-Surnames-Princeton/dp/0691168377
There is a section on Sweden showing that surnames predict income over 10 generations (as they do elsewhere).
It was rare (though not as rare as inter-caste marriages in India). And it may have, if anything, bolstered higher abilities among the upper classes by adding talented commoners and throwing out inferior outliers.
They seem to have been with ladies from better families. But in general, if nobles had kids with their servant girls, this would raise abilities among the servants a little bit, producing some equalization.
The CCP used guerrilla warfare tactics effectively against the Japanese, as did the Vietnamese against the Americans. I don’t know why you want to dismiss their efforts simply because they avoided fighting conventional battles.
I know about Singapore, I am just thinking, that its current IQ ishigher then it was in 1980, due to migration.
As for Koreans. Their median household income is 58,5 000 vs 69,5 for Chinese and 70,2 for Japanese, Im just wondering why it is significantly lower.
They didn’t even fight much in terms of guerrilla warfare
I have no low status living relatives, but I do have some ancestors from both peasant and proletarian stock.
Clark’s work is excellent and should be required reading for all people in public policy.
The production of bastards by high status men with servants seems like it peaked in the Victorian era, with the high status men mainly being bourgeois rather than noble. This is just the impression I get from history and literature mind you, as I haven’t seen data on this.
A lot of the IQ stuff are shaped by environment. Singapore has a very good education system, thus their people do pretty well in this kind of test. Foe example, the Malays in Singapore do better than the Malays in Malaysia. Mainland Chinese immigrants have insignificant impact on the national average.
Most Japanese American are born and raised in America, where most Chinese and Koreans aren’t. Native borns tend to have advantages over immigrants. It is not surprising that Japanese have higher household incomes. The Filipinos have higher household incomes than the Japanese. This metric doesn’t alone tell you much about each group.
How do you quantiy that? It seems Nobody did much against the American troop in Afghanistan. But Americans aren’t winning in Afghanistan.
The Ccp were controlling a lot of areas. That shows you that what they were doing were pretty effective.
Do you by any chance have seperate IQ scores for the 3 races that inhabit Singapore?
Yes environment is important, still I doubt that Singapore had an IQ of 110 by 1980.
Chinese and Japanese americans have similar income, despite the fact that most Chinese americans are imigrants.
“The Filipinos have higher household incomes than the Japanese.”
This is a question that has occupied myattention for quiet a while. I did hear that most “Filipino Americans” are actually Chinese from the Filipines, do you know anything about this?
As I said, the IJA wasn’t particularly interested in those territories, so the PLA contented to build up their strength until the war’s end.
Laqueur, Walter. Guerrilla Warfare: A Historical and Critical Study.
I think that’s a good distinction, between good HBD and bad HBD.
Done correctly, HBD can be rather innocuous and mildly informative about likely performance of groups within a very limited time frame, without making insane generalizations across centuries and trying to enshrine current realities as permanent.
There are also certain other negative psychological attitudes that a preoccupation with HBD and an unbalanced sense of its importance seems to promote.
But an HBD limited in importance and modest in its rope, would be a useful minor element in any intellectual toolkit. Even an essential one.
And I can imagine a few answers, such as:
Sweden is neutral. If Israel follows Sweden’s path, Israel might lose some of the massive benefits it gains from being an alleged USA ally.
Israel has a comparative advantage in lobbying.
Aerospace already has too much competition already. The aerospace industry in the EU and USA receives massive implicit and explicit subsidies. For Israel to be competitive, they’d have to subsidize their aerospace industry, too.
The guy you are quoting is talking nonsense. First of all, The CCP occupied a huge swath of land. The Japanese surely would like to control it for obvious reasons if they could. Secondly, the Japanese were able to stamp out the guerrillas only when they could find them. They had a hard time to locate the CCP guerrillas. This wasn’t for lack of effort on the Japanese part. They tried and failed. The one thing the Japanese could do was to cut down their food and water source. If they found something, they would burn down whatever they couldn’t take and poison the wells. But that practice seemed to have not much effect on the CCP.
I don’t know if you have heard a guy named “Lin Biao”, who played a huge role in the CCP’s win over the KMT in the civil war. Years prior to the civil war, he was shot and almost killed by one of his own soldiers. He was out of action for years in which he spent in Moscow recuperating. In one of the guerrilla wars he led against the Japanese, his army got a lot of war booty. Exited, he put on one of the Japanese thick coats and picked out a nice looking white horse. As he was riding back to his base, one of the soldiers mistook him as a Japanese officer and shot him from afar. Anyway this kind of small guerrilla wars happened all the time. The CCP hit and ran. They weren’t waiting for the Japanese to get them.
Yes, when the Japs actually made a concerted effort to fight the PLA after the Hundred Regiments Offensive they decimated it and took about 1/2 of the CCP’s territory. After that the CCP focused on recruitment and expanding territory elsewhere, their guerrilla attacks were minor and they mostly fought against Japanese collaborators, not the IJA. The PLA by the end of the war was 10x its antebellum strength according to Chalmers Johnson, meanwhile the Nationalists had been utterly exhausted, left with only poor quality conscripts.
*Forgot to mention that the Red Army turned over boatloads of captured IJA equipment (and industrial areas) to the PLA after conquering Manchuria, so not surprising to see PLA wearing Jap gear
Who killed more Japanese troopers? Certainly the KMT. The CCP build up its powerbase but did not provoke the Japanese too much, mostly they just fought Wangs coloborators, who were not used by the Japanese against the KMT. By 1945 the CCP had a lot of power and had Japan not surrendered the CCP could have done a lot of damege had they wanted to. They didnt though. The KMT killed close to a million Japanese and paid with a lot more lives for this, it sacreficed their best troopsand equipment in this war. The CCP killed far fewer Japanese, rather it mostly killed other Chinese.
The KMT was the Chinese government, so to speak. The CCP was the rebel. The Chinese government used to call the CCP “bandits”. All the CCP leaders were on the most wanted listed, and the KMT army had been fighting the CCP’s red army for years and almost annihilated them at one point. But the CCP army escaped and started the famous long march.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March
When the Japanese invaded, the KMT army of course would be on the first line of defense because the KMT ran the government and China. The KMT arm force was the national army force.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/shanghai-1937-chinas-forgotten-stalingrad-16396
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/35-million-people-under-siege-how-japan-sacked-shanghai-during-world-war-ii-50207
I am not arguing that the CCP did more than the KMT in fighting the Japanese. The KMT did a lot more. But the CCP’s guerrilla warfare had been very effective in neutralizing Japanese expansion.
Just look at the Vietnamese guerrilla warfare in the Vietnam War or the war in Afghanistan now. Guerrilla warfare could frustrate and exhaust your enemy.
Marcus’ attempt to dismiss the CCP’s effort against the Japanese is ridiculous. It is so based on one sided view and not based on reality.
The XiAn Incident forced Chiang to work with the CCP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Incident
I thought such mixing was historically rare; your commoner ancestors must have been exceptional in some way.
One of my grandparents is from a peasant family, other three are from untitled gentry families. I have no ancestors of bourgeois origins or other origins. Peasants were all peasants, gentry all gentry, with the exception of one woman five generations back, a German officer’s daughter. I suspect keeping the bloodline so clean in these families was not an exception, but the rule.
Agreed. The detailed gentry family histories show remarkable similarity in relative income and social standing across continents and regimes. Even under the Soviets, after an initial culling the survivors’ descendants got back to a very comfortable position, very comparable to before if not slightly improved due to the upper strata being wiped out completely. All that suffering and bloodshed was for nothing.
Interesting article on the phenomenon in pre-Revolutionary Russia:
https://www.academia.edu/12589069/Olga_E._Glagoleva._The_illegitimate_children_of_the_Russian_nobility_in_law_and_practice_1700-1860
I don’t think it was as rare in Sweden as on the continent. Since the country was traditionally small and poor, the social distance between elites and ordinary people was smaller. Sweden also never really had manorialism or feudalism. There was also a strong state and strong army which were both meritocratic, so opportunities for advancement also existed.
Of the four lines traced on my paternal side, they can roughly be divided into:
• Peasants
• Foresters
• Mining & metallurgical bourgeoisie
• Nobility
To your point, my paternal grandfather himself was of humble origin (peasants and foresters) but had exceptional ability and advanced through the army.
On my mother’s side her mother was from the working class and her father from the the petty bourgeoisie.
Unfortunately no one else is likely to see our replies, but getting comments from Mr. Hack and then one of the other Swedish commenters would at this point be useful.
Similar development in the PRC. Lots of high officials descended from the surviving pre-revolutionary nobility, and now of course the state is controlled by the “princelings”–the red nobility. This includes Xi.
This illustrates why it’s my view that leftist political thought, at least in the sense of outright denying reality, must be eradicated from human consciousness.
Thanks, I’ll look at this.
Yes, Chiang stupidly wasted most of his excellent German-trained units in the doomed struggle at Shanghai in order to gain international sympathy. If he hadn’t, the war would’ve turned out very differently.
I didn’t dismiss it, I said that the Hundred Regiments Offensive was an impressive mobilization and successful, but they were crushed by IJA counterattacks afterwards, and consequently did very little. To compare them to the Viet Cong who played as big a role as the NVA before Tet Offensive is insane (though I guess you could say the Hundred Regiments Offensive was to the PLA what the Tet Offensive was to the VC: being their last major battle after which their role diminished). Overall I think 97% of Chinese casualties were NRA and most of the rest were 8th Route Army (which included Communists but was technically part of the NRA)
Most of the Ukrainian gentry were not that rich (they often worked their own lands and were basically just free farmers), but they simply found it unacceptable and shameful to mix with people whose ancestors had been enserfed. So they lived in their own villages, or in different parts of the same village, sat in different sections of the church, etc.
My only non-noble paternal ancestor (at least, going back to the late 1700s beyond which records are scarce) was a Sudeten German who began service in the Austrian military as an enlisted man, and somehow rapidly rose through the ranks during the Napoleonic wars (my aunt discovered that his unit was in some famous battle, perhaps he performed well) to become a captain. Afterwards, he was stationed in Galicia and his kids married local Poles and Ruthenians/Ukrainians. His Polish and Ukrainian descendants were active in politics in the late 19th century on opposing sides, and fought against each other during the Polish-Ukrainian war in 1919 (two of them were very significant historical figures in both nations but I won’t doxx myself by identifying them here).
I suppose because he was a German and an officer, the children’s “commoner” social background was more acceptable.
Agreed.