TinyChan

A while ago I had some debate on the internet with someone about colonialism. This isn’t really what the argument was about, but there was one comment the other person made that didn’t quite sit right with me, it was something along the lines of, "All innovations come from FREE countries, America, the UK, Japan."

Obviously that’s a very reductive way to look at things. It ignores that freedom is a subjective concept and it also ignores that countries people wouldn’t consider as free today had significant technological achievements. For example, historically, China invented guns and solid rocket motors, and today, China is probably the only country in the world that has domestic equivalents to America’s software giants. So it’s not really fair to say that authoritarian countries aren’t innovative, even if you hate authoritarianism. The Soviet Union basically invented space travel, they had the first man in space, the first woman in space, the first satellite in orbit, the first robotic probe on the moon (before NASA landed either humans or probes on the moon), the only nation still to successfully land a probe on the surface of Venus with an atmospheric pressure 90 times Earth’s with a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead.

Japan though… Japan is interesting. People say that the Japanese have a very hardworking culture, and people say that Japan today is a free country. So people look at all the innovations and technology produced by Japan and they attribute it to the modern democratic capitalism of Japan. But this "hard working" industrial culture had to come from somewhere. Japan a thousand years ago wasn’t making cars. Where did it come from? If you look into it, Japan became industrialized during the Meiji restoration. It was a top-down decision by the Japanese emperor to focus on industrialization and modernization of Japan. It was not democratic or free. (Coincidentally, from what I understand the "emperor worship" thing people mention when talking about World War Two also came from the Meiji restoration in the 1800s and it was the emperor’s idea, and not actually a deeply rooted thousands of years old ancient part of their culture, but that’s beside the point.)

People say Japan and China are different, because people say that Japan is free today and China isn’t free today, so Japan must be successful because they’re a free country. But Japan didn’t become an industrialized power after the United States occupied Japan, gave them a democratic institution, and gave them the virtue of some vague concept of "freedom." Japan was already an industrialized society before they were a free country. They became industrialized through a top-down authoritarian approach. But isn’t that the same way the CCP made China rich? If you think about it, are China and Japan actually that different, or are China and Japan just two examples of the same process, but offset by a hundred years? Hundred years ago, Japan was an industrialized power because of the authoritarian decision of an individual leader, which led them to war, which led them to losing, which led them to democracy, freedom and prosperity. China is an authoritarian country led by one party led by one man, Xi Jinping, who criticism of is not tolerated, who commands the state capitalist economy of China to be more productive to become more industrial to produce more ships, to produce more missiles, so that China can become a military power. Isn’t that just the same story as Japan, but we haven’t seen the war yet?

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Even if you think about aspects of Japanese culture people talk about, they’re a homogenous society, they are hardworking, they follow the rules. Don’t those traits seem suspiciously authoritarian in origin?

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Or if you think about Africa which was originally what that debate was about with that other person: every single country on the African continent today is a capitalist nation. There is not a single Marxist nation in Africa, yet African nations are more poor than China, a self described "communist" nation. So the fact that Africa is poor can’t be evidence of the triumph of capitalism over communism, it’s something else. When Europe decided to colonize the world, "western values" didn’t yet exist. They were authoritarian top-down feudalistic societies led by absolute monarchies. In order for a nation to become wealthy, it must weed out foreign forces from within itself that seek to undermine it. This is impossible to do with a free and open system, it can only happen under a stable, unchallenged authoritarian government. Authoritarian governments do exist in Africa, but for the most part, they are neither stable nor unchallenged.

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Then if you think about the industrialization of Germany, and the Nazi party, that wasn’t anything close to freedom that made Germany an industrial power.

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Or now that I think about it, people in the west have this idea in their heads that if the Chinese economy continues to grow, then that’s dangerous because China will become more powerful than the US and go to war. But if you think about Germany in World War Two, isn’t that sort of the opposite of what actually happened in the past? There was a global depression, this inspired political radicalization in Germany, they developed an authoritarian mindset, increased military production, and went on an insane genocidal war. If China does continue to develop economically, maybe that’s better than if they don’t. Because if they don’t, they’re not quite as militarily powerful as the United States, but they are legitimately incredibly powerful. If they can’t dominate the world economically, then what alternative would they see other than military action?

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