The first unified China, the Qin Dynasty, lasted only fourteen years, from 221BCE. It was a highly suppressive affair that alienated everyone in society although there was a unification of the spoken and written language. It was replaced by the Han Dynasty, 202BCE to 220CE, where Confucianism came back and the moral of the emperor ruling for the benefit of the ruled moral came back from the Legalist tradition under Qin. In 5BCE there were 60m people in China together with 130,000 bureaucrats.
Today there are 1,350m people in China and it occurred to me that Deng Xiaoping in 1978 would never have embarked on the Chinese miracle if it had not been for the technology that no one dares to speak of. Controlling such an amount of educated Middle Class Chinese the way the party wants to would not have been possible. If I am right in my conjecture, this would mean that the protocol used by the 80m people in the Communist Party is a prerequisite for the state whereas the West is using the technology on preexistant functioning states.
This would mean that governing such large conglomerates as China and the EU needs the technology. Francis Fukuyama discusses how China’s development compared with that of Europe and it is interesting to note that the seemingly blind alley that the Chinese already embarked on in 221BCE with the first modern dictatorship is something they might have cemented with the technology today making it virtually impossible for a democratic development. Fusing Europe in the EU is also something that has reversed democratization.
The frustrating discussion that have been ongoing since the financial crisis in 2008 on the fate of the EU then in all probability to a certain extent revolves around the question if national states are going to let go of their regular governance to the governance aided by the technology and thus emulation of China. Historically Europe never mustered the coercion needed by Qin to unify China. The geography was configured so as to promote different cultures and languages and the brute force of unification never materialized. Furthermore, the Catholic Church induced a social development that never happened in China which lacks the rule of law and an accountable government still today.
The latest gossip on the EU is that a two-speed super-state will form on the Continent with Britain on the side. The question then is if Germany will lead the Continent in the Chinese technology dependent fashion and that democracy with functioning governments using the technology will remain in Anglo-America?
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