In the span of several decades, half a billion people shifted from an almost zero traditional education environment in rural, very poor third-world style villages - to rapidly developing, modern, economically considerable, urban, very high density environments with intense competition and far higher education attainment.
Then imagine how wild that must be as all of these different forces and cultures collide and meld in real time, and it's essentially a population group the size of the EU trying to make an epic adaptation leap in 20-30 years. I expect it produces at times a large gap between people in regards to their personal evolution.
It would be like if the EU went from knights and castles to making fighter jets in half a generation.
Do you have any further reading on this? It doesn't strike me as too crazy of a statement - but I'd be very interested in seeing how one would go about actually quantifying it.
Wikipedia has a good summary both of the Economic history of China [1] and the Great Divergence [2] (really comes to a head with the collapse of the Qing dynasty). Although devestated by civil war and WW2, IMO China really doesn't descend into complete craziness until the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution [3] that devastated China economically, socially, and culturally (lost generation, send-down movement, red guards, etc).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_China_befo...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence#China
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_China_(194...
ED: outside getting a book, the main characteristic to look at is China having the lion's share of historical world GDP, especially during the Yuan and Ming dynasties. The Spanish Empire gained much of its early wealth from Ming China's seemingly insatiable demand for the silver it found in South America - like thousands of pounds at a time.
I keep hearing the same line about India as well but that does not mean that the common people were rich and educated just the upper class. So were the common people in China rich and educated in the time period which you are talking about?
And now their grandkids are almost as rich as Americans.
I guess what the previous OP meant by “potential of its people” is their historical culture, akin to why the Jews are generally quite successful on the whole (attributed to their culture).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/28/why-t...
China and Europe are different in many ways, but one is that after the Mongol conquest in the 12th century, China remains a unified empire run by a single Mandarin bureaucracy. There is nothing that competes with or threatens China. China does get invaded by Manchu tribes in 1644, but they don’t change the structure of the state. They learned to speak Chinese, dress like Chinese and eat like Chinese.
In Europe, no one ever succeeds in unifying it, and you have continuous competition. The French are worried about the English, the English are worried about the Spanish, the Spanish are worried about the Turks. That keeps everybody on their toes, which is something economists immediately recognize as the competitive model. To have progress, you want a system that is competitive, not one that is dominated by a single power.
I think that is the major difference. It isn’t just that China doesn’t have an Industrial Revolution, it doesn’t have a Galileo or a Newton or a Descartes, people who announced that everything people did before them was wrong. That’s hard to do in any society, but it was easier to do in Europe than China. The reason precisely is because Europe was fragmented, and so when somebody says something very novel and radical, if the government decides they are a heretic and threatens to prosecute them, they pack their suitcase and go across the border."
[...]
"I believe the fundamental reason is China’s position as a single empire, and also its bureaucracy, which is a unique and peculiar animal. On the one hand, it is very progressive, because it is a meritocracy. In Europe, the people who were in power were the sons and nephews of other people in power. But in China there’s an examination, and the people who did the best rose in the Mandarin civil service. So you’d think, “Wow, that’s very progressive.” Except if you look at what they were studying for these exams, they were simply regurgitating the classics. It was the perfect tool to keep reproducing from the same mold generation after generation.
In Europe, something different happens. People study classical knowledge, Ptolemy and Hippocrates and Archimedes, and they begin to say, “Most of this stuff is wrong.” You couldn’t do that in China. If you said “This stuff is wrong,” you failed your exam. But in Europe, the ability to challenge received wisdom is irrepressible."
False.
US: mean wealth $388,000. medium wealth $55,000. gdp per capita: $60000.
China: mean wealth $26,000. medium wealth $6,000. gdp per capita: $8000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
Also, "median".
The annual income for rural residents averaged $1,797 last year
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2089654/chin...
There was even one incident where a group of people lifted a car up to save the girl that was run over. Or how a taxi driver jumps into a manhole to save a girl who fell in. Or how a group of delivery guys caught a child that was hanging on a several story perch. However, those news reports are rarely ever reported in Western media.
All we see are the bad things.
The default behavior in China seems to be "ignore and keep moving" while everywhere else usually at least one person will help immediately. I couldn't believe that so many people could look at someone so obviously in distress, bleeding on the street, and none willing to even call for help.
It's a big city versus small town thing. In the remote wilderness everyone helps each other. In the city it's assumed you are gong to get help from someone else.
Giving any consideration to strangers doesn't even cross their minds and it shows in all kinds of little ways: refusal to yield any space, be it a lane on the road or part of an aisle in a store, public spitting, urination, and yes, defecation, refusal to queue or allow people to exit trains, elevators, or other vehicles before pushing in. Also, strangely, it's not the young punk kids annoying their neighbours with their load music, it's hordes of middle aged dancing aunties.
Actually, all we see are the things we see. No one has a terribly precise way of knowing what the real world distribution of good and bad behavior are, yet there is no shortage of people who believe very strongly that they do. It's one of those quirks of the human mind, but it can be overcome with effort.
Hans Rosling says we are instinctually inclined to watch for danger (aka bad news) than for safety. Ha. Makes me ask when was the last time someone pointed out a safe thing. "Watch out, that pizza in the fridge is still good."
Edit: Source for Hans Rosling: the book "Factfulness" (highly recommended—it is really a meta-discussion of how do you talk about good news with people)