"The structural reasons for China’s subsequent decline and the empire’s demise have been much discussed. Some point to what..."<p>To me it is very clear. It is the Invention of the Guttemberg mobile type printing press and the sharing of knowledge it created.
Latin has over 70 different writing symbols(Upper and lower case plus numbers), Chinese has thousands.<p>Printing a book in Chinese was orders of magnitude more work(and expensive). Remember that at the time it took years to copy a book.
Chinese already knew about printing presses, but Guttemberg discovered the way to make it in metal, and making new Glyphs from molds is very inexpensive thanks to latin.<p>After Guttemberg it took years to copy a book, but once you have it you could make thousands of copies. Chinese could not, because the plates deteriorated fast and was very expensive to recreate them.
The Japanese identified the problem and created a vocalic language from Chinese, the kana. The reason Japanese stated running circles around Chinese and humiliated them.(Chinese and Japanese hate each other so much)<p>The fact that Chinese today consider Confucius the "greatest philosopher of all time" is the evidence of Chinese lag.<p>Imagine Europeans considering only Aristotle or Plato, with no mention of Descartes, Kant, Nietze, Ortega and dozens of other brilliant philosophers.<p>Renaissance and science were the result of the printing press. Everybody could buy a Bible, and discuss it, without having intermediaries.<p>Before that a Bible or any other book was priced as years of the salary of a worker.
It misses an elephant in the room, India. Current policy from Beijing is driving Japan and India to become long term allies with a goal of containing and defeating China no matter what US policy is.
I know this is a nitpick, but I think it's really silly when articles have headlines like "What China Wants", as though everyone in China is thinking what the government is thinking. It's that kind of lumping-together that makes it easier for people to get wound up into "Us vs. Them" sentiments.
The article makes a giant leap right from the get-go:<p>"As China becomes, again, the world's largest economy, it wants the respect it enjoyed in centuries past. But it does not know how to achieve or deserve it"<p>In 1990 we would have been talking about Japan becoming the largest economy instead.<p>Turns out there are a lot of problems between here and there. For example, China is at a point where they're unable to grow their economy without taking on ever increasing amounts of debt. That has resulted in one of the greatest debt binges in world history in the last six years.<p>I'd argue it's far more likely China will see stagnation, and extremely challenging growth, over the next 30 years as a consequence of what they're doing to fake growth now, rather than see continual boom. Wherever China stops in their vast debt accumulation, the bill that will go along with it is going to be historical in scale. That will drag on their growth in a dramatic way for decades.<p>The Chinese boom ended in 2007/08. In the next few decades it will be very difficult for them to achieve even 3% to 4% real GDP growth. What is basically going to happen, is normalization. It seems to be a perpetual cycle of analysts and economists making terribly poor extrapolations for future outcomes based on temporary boom periods that originate from extreme lows.
So, in typical Hacker News fashion, I'm going to ignore the article and just say that this website is beautiful, and if I could read every news article this way I'd be thrilled.<p>Sent from my desktop computer.
This is fantastic, but IMHO missing one important point that I've learned from my Chinese friends: the Chinese Communist Party is well ... essentially communist, and differs in a few big ways from the European powers:<p>1. The current leaders want to colonize the rest of the world
2. They want to do so in the same heavy-handed manner that they use to subjugate their own people
3. With overseas dominance, use that "soft power" to increasingly assert themselves over their own people in China.<p>So the overseas expansion isn't for the sake of only resources, etc, they apparently want to use their external international influence to assert more control internally over the Chinese people as well.