more closely at what has happened since then, though my examination was still very superficial relative to what
was there to study.
[2]John Wang, Tso-chuan, in The Indiana Companion to Traditional Literature, 805.
[3]I’d like to thank Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister of Australia and current President of the Asia Society
Policy Institute, for pointing me to these books and helping me understand Chinese politics.
[4]Because China has a population about four times the US population it only takes an income of half as much per
capita to have twice as much in total. There is nothing that I can see that stands in the way of China and the US
having comparable per capita incomes with time, which would make China four times the size.
[5]The Made in China 2025 plan is for China to be much more self-sufficient in most areas and to be world leaders
in high-tech fields including artificial intelligence, robotics, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, aerospace, and
automotive.
[6]In October they will come up with their 14th five-year plan and targets for 2035.
[7]Similarly I read an article by Yuhua Wang that said that about half the emperors left office unnaturally, and “of
these unnatural exits, about half were deposed by the elites (murdered, overthrown, forced to abdicate, or forced to
commit suicide)…The next category is death or deposition in civil wars; very few (seven) were deposed by (or in)
external wars.“ He presented a table showing the reasons emperors lost power. These stats make clear that in the
past the “biggest threat was friends within.” When I discussed the risks to the emperors and the people around
them with a Chinese friend, he said that there is a famous Chinese saying about it, which is “to accompany the
leader is to accompany a tiger.”
[8]If you haven’t read The Art of War I suggest you read it to get a flavor for what I am referring to.
[9]The China historian John Fairbank, in his excellent book The Chinese World Order, described relations with
non-Chinese states as follows: “The graded and concentric hierarchy of China’s foreign relations included peoples
and countries which we may group into three main zones: first, the Sinic Zone, consisting of the most nearby and
culturally similar tributaries, Korea and Vietnam, parts of which had anciently been ruled within the Chinese
empire, and also the consisting of the most nearby and culturally similar tributaries, Korea and Vietnam, the
Ryukyu Islands, and, at brief times, Japan. Secondly, the Inner Asian Zone, consisting of tributary tribes and states
of the nomadic or seminomadic peoples of Inner Asia, who were not only ethnically and culturally non-Chinese
but were also outside or on the fringes of the Chinese cultural area, even though sometimes pressing upon the
Great Wall frontier. Third, the Outer Zone, consisting of the ‘outer barbarians’ (wai-i) generally, at further distance
over land or sea, including eventually Japan and other states of Southeast and South Asia and Europe that were
supposed to send tribute when trading.”
[10]I produced the diagram to apply this template to Chinese monetary history through working with Professor
Jiaming Zhu.
[11]For instance, the devaluations in 1985-86 and 1993 came after a period of opening up trade and an expansion
in Special Economic Zones. These openings created immense demand for foreign FX and imports to build
production capacity—but it would still be a couple more years until those SEZs yielded much higher exports. That
mismatch contributed to growing current account deficits.
[12]China began its nuclear-weapon research in the early 1950s and acquired nuclear-weapon capability in 1964.
[13]From US News & World Report: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/rankings
[14]The massive Taiping Rebellion, one of the bloodiest wars in human history, which led to an estimated 20 to 30
million killed, along with other internal and external conflicts, caused giant fiscal crises that led to an issuance of
debt.
[15]Though I’m no expert on Marxism the dialectical materialism process sounds similar to the process that I
discovered works well for me by struggling with conflicts, reflecting on them, writing down the principles, and
improving—and doing that over and over again in a never-ending evolutionary “looping” way. Also, for reasons
previously explained, it is my opinion that capitalism—an incentive system that rewards people who are the most
inventive and productive and that has capital markets that allocate resources in ways in which people are rewarded
for good capital allocation decisions and penalized for bad ones—will lead to a) more productivity over the long