15 January

We're living inside a 2000-year period of history that has been mostly dominated by China. Our collective memory is about 10 minutes. The only thing that interrupted the total dominance of China was what they call their 'century of humiliation' between the First Opium War (1839), and 1945. When other major powers (see pic) tried to carve up China for their own gain, stripping them of financial and governance independence. The Chinese have never forgotten. All societies collapse, the genius of China is that it built a system that included that collapse as part of the daily business. That's when it invented its huge civil service to insulate itself from the revolutionary collapses other societies experience. The civil service retains the memory between collapses. Other societies stumble along blindly, repeating all the same mistakes between each revolution. Some China facts: - its growth has always tracked its population i.e. it isn't extractive or exploitative - China has had 25-33% of world GDP for two thousand years, far and away the largest power - for 1500 years, China dominated industrial technology - China was the first nation to solve large-scale governance, through its civil service - it was more prosperous than the next biggest 2 rivals (Europe and the Middle East), combined, and - 20-35% of world population has been Chinese for 2000 years.