No. But they’re not getting the full value of the troops either.
This theory is problematic for a variety of reasons:
- In one very significant area of social welfare policy-namely healthcare-the US spends a far higher percentage of GDP than any European country (or any other developed liberal democracy for that matter) in addition to our higher spending as percentage of GDP on defence.
- Many of the best features of European social market economies come from their alternative Bismarckian corporatist model of State-Labour-Business cooperation and regulations such as paid parental leave, vacations etc., the spending costs of which are minimal.
- Government spending as percentage of GDP is higher in most European countries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#International_government_spending) with the US at 41.6% as opposed to Germany at 45.4%, the UK at 48.5%, and France at 56.1%.
But could this model have been born had the cost of facing down the Soviets been born from the onset?
Well, technically, they did bear the cost of facing down the Soviets from the onset.
The US was on the Soviet side then.
Absolutely. I mean, my little city got noticeably more developed in the mere two years I was there. My uncles visited that part of China in the 2000s, and they were stunned by the number of bicycles. By the time I got there, there were too many motorcycles to even consider biking, and those were quickly being replaced by cars.
Parking a car is an issue, because a decade ago planners never considered that one day everyone might own a car and didn’t plan spaces for apartment buildings. I lived in a nice, fairly new complex and people had to park three or four deep. The type of infrastructure needed to accommodate the new wealth is being built at breakneck speed.
In the Great Leap Forward, 1 in 6 people in my province died of starvation. During the 1980s, the economic disasters were over but things were stagnant and grim. People my age (mid-30s) bear signs of stunting and childhood malnutrition. My student’s baby pictures (well, often they have only one or two) show clearly poor surroundings.
In the 1990s, economic restrictions were lifted, private business was allowed, and things took off.
In think you have to realize that the potential for wealth was always there. The changes aren’t a mystery. Until the 1990s, even things like running a private restaurant was illegal. The economy was being actively being sabotaged. When they stopped preventing growth and joined the modern economy, there was a burst of opportunity and growth.
Not really. The US troops in Europe didn’t do very much to hold back the Soviet Union. If the Soviets invaded western Europe, the war would have been over in a matter of weeks. It was the bomb that defended Europe.
And put that in historical perspective: That was what life was like for most Chinese for thousands of years, yet for thousands of years China was the world’s most brilliant and advanced civilization, the First World.
They werent there to physically repulse a massive Soviet invasion. They were there to die to justify a nuclear response.
The UK and France had their own independent nuclear forces.
Cite, please about China being the most advanced and brilliant civilization? They made some brilliant discoveries but rarely followed through with them. They also closed themselves to outside ideas which fueled discovery in Europe and the mideast.
From author Daniel Boorstein:
The Disoverers:
Yes they did although France wasnt part of NATO. But that doesnt change the fact that the US had what amounted to a token force in Europe (in relation to eastblock troop levels) so that it would immediately be drawn into the next Euro war.
Yes, and that was why European civilization began to overtake Chinese civilization starting with the Renaissance. But before that, China was it, not even the brilliant civilization of medieval Islam could quite compare.
From The Problem of China, by Bertrand Russell (1922):
Responding to a post noting thousands of years of progress with a dismissal based on a 16th century event does nothing to make your point.
But what progress? And why hadnt it filtered down to its people? The Emperor that BrainGlutton speaks of wasnt Chinese. China had been conquered by its much smaller northern neighbor. Two of the last three Dynasties were foreign. The posted link is good reading but it certainly isnt authoritative.
Was China more advanced than classical Greece in its time? More advanced than Rome? What advances from ancient China have influenced other cultures? The Chinese alphabet but the alphabet wasnt unique to China.
China was one of the great civilizations. But the greatest? Im not sure.
By what measure? The Chinese people certainly benefited from say advances in agricultural techniques. But nonetheless in most preindustrial societies education and culture was the province of only a relatively small proportion of the population, and in this aspect the the Chinese until comparatively recently had a large proportion of the population that was literate.
Maybe not ethnically Chinese but for all intents and purposes the Qing Dynasty emperors were products of Chinese culture. You might as well say England hasn’t had a truly English monarch in almost a thousand years with them being from France (William the Conqueror), Scotland (James I/VI), and Hanover (George I).
The comparison is more appropriate to the Middle Ages since many of the greatest Chinese technological advances occurred in the Tang and Song Dynasties.
Erhm… Gunpowder? Paper? Compass? This isn’t exactly obscure knowledge.
There is no such thing as the Chinese alphabet.
Who said it was the greatest?
Didn’t they open up the economy in the late 70s? Or was it mostly just half-hearted tokenistic measures until the “real change” in the early 90s? I know McDonalds opened in 1990 in China. Would you consider that the real start of capitalist China?
Nah, I don’t think China in the 80s and 90s was more similar to Dynastic China than today. That’s going a bit far. Even during the early Communist years (if not before) it was already modernized to a large degree, even though it was mostly agrarian. At least for the wealthy, which is still largely the case today though China’s “wealthy” demographic is larger.
That’s kind of an unanswerable debate IMHO.
What you can almost certainly say is that overall ( not per capita ) China was the world’s wealthiest state until the early 19th century. The enormous agricultural productivity of the eastern core combined with strong internal transportation/communication lines ( flat land, numerous navigable waterways filled in with canals ) made for large populations and consequently enormous landed wealth. And of course landed agricultural wealth was the prime source of wealth until the modern era. Ready access to enormous excess capital by the ruling class allowed for the development of technology and infrastructure. Paper for example is one product we can definitively trace from its origins in China to its transmission to the west ( via the Arabs mostly ). Other things like moveable type, the magnetic compass and gunpowder seem to have arose in China first, but we’re not sure how ( or in the case of moveable type, if ) it transmitted its way west.
As to trade and isolationism, it has been much exaggerated based on certain late Imperial ideologies and politics. Some of the Chinese dynasties ( and not just the foreign ones ) were highly expansionist and Chinese traders have frequently dominated the southwestern Pacific. The Southern Sung in particular were the greatest naval traders of their time. The reason it was never central to most Chinese governments was a) customs and tariff fees were usually a drop in the bucket next to the enormous land revenues and b) China was largely self-sufficient in both common and luxury goods and so large area-wise that internal production could specialize regionally to satisfy most every corner of the state. One thing they didn’t produce ( at first ) - opium. That turned out to be a particularly serious achilles heel ;).
Greatest civilization of the pre-modern era? Maybe, maybe not. Wealthiest ( again, in aggregate )? Definitely.
The history of the invention of gunpowder is rather controversial and the sources questionable. But it was the Mongols who spread gunpowder, not the Chinese. The Chinese kept many of their inventions state secrets and this hindered the advancement of science. And the Olmecs might have invented the first compass…again the evidence is mixed. Yeah the Chinese made some great discoveries but they didnt spread them and sometimes lost them.
You are being a bit pedantic about my use of the word alphabet.
The English havent been conquered since William the Conqueror. Also Euro monarchy operated differently from Asian monarchy. My argument was that how could such an advanced and massive nation be conquered by relativly small nomadic people. China was rotting from the inside because of corruption and peasant revolts; a reaccuring theme in its history.
Thats a excellent overview. Agree totally. But mustnt we differentiate between the wealthy and hate to say it but the other 99% who lived in relative poverty and always ready to rebel?