Can we all agree this is the center of the world?

Typical self-absorbed Westerners projecting their own complex about needing to be the center of attention onto China.

中 in the context of 中國 doesn't mean "center of the world," it means "internal" as in "our internal affairs."

I'd argue that India is more relevant because many major religions and schools of thought originated from there. They also didn't isolate themselves and were always open to foreigners.

I disagree. The Mediterranean is the center of the world.

Europe maybe not the world.

>London
>Maybe for a few hundred years.

Not even
1840s-1930s at most

You mean they've been getting their ass kicked for 5000 years.

So, the PRC discovered Veeky Forums eh?

First /pol/ had to draw attention on this site, then nazimod removed quests from Veeky Forums

now chinks will spam how china was always the center of the world for the next decade while posting sina weibo memes.

There's really no argument.

Economic yes, everything else; no

Middle Kingdom meme. Zhou used 中國 to refer to the former lands of the Shang dynasty not their homeland.

Mostly kicking their own ass

>implying the West hasn't been sinoboos for fucking ever
Even the Romans went crazy over Chinese silk. Stop kidding yourself over an invented idea of national pride or "heritage". China has always been a dominant global culture.

Who said Europe? Egypt was based around the Mediterranean and so were a lot of other civilizations.

>Rome uses Chinese silk, Egyptian grain and Indian steel
>we dominant now

I'd rather have the grain and the steel, actually.

i doubt it was ever dominant "culture" maybe dominant country, but truth be told, it was only ever dominant in southeastern asia

Underrated post

>dominant global culture
sure buddy.

Exactly what cultural influence did china have on india?

What do you mean "we"? We Wuz Romans?

Chilli chicken

No, Mecca is the physical, spiritual and cultural center of the world.

All under heaven shall submit to the will of Allah.

There is no god but God. Muhammad is the messenger of God.

If I were a Roman, I would choose Egyptian and Indian imports over Chinese imports, because you can't feed a city of angry dagos with silk and you can't stab them with fine china.

Filthy sandnigger

youtu.be/zrv78nG9R04

You can't do shit like this and call yourself the center of anything, fuck off

nice

Early European maps had Eden as the center.

Stay butthurt kaffir

Eden is still located in the Middle East. And currently under Muslim control.

Goat fucker

That doesn't negate the demand for the product. China was a -if not the- global economic powerhouse throughout most of recorded history.There was a reason Marco Polo was absolutely floored when he visited Hangzhou. China got fucked up in the 19th century for a variety of reasons, culminating in the Brits addicting large portions of the population to opium and reversing the flow of trade. It is only just recovering with the establishment of its own nation state.

Well, Rome produced a lot more in terms of metallurgy, and neither one of them could fuck with the other.

It'd be dumb to treat compare the Chinese to Romans at a time when human civilizations were so isolated.

Even dumber to chart the beginning of European ascendance to any time after the 15th century.

5 cents have been added to your bank account for this post.

>tearing down an 18th century Ottoman citadel to build Las Vegas tier eye-soars.

>Even dumber to chart the beginning of European ascendance to any time after the 15th century.
When British diplomats first sought the Qing emperor for trade rights in 1793, they were completely rejected. If you check the trade routes of the era, everything is still flowing into the East. It's just not evident because most our study of history has, for much of its duration, been Eurocentric and heavily entangled in projects of nationalism. You only start to see the trade flow begin to reverse to the west in the 19th century.

There's more to civilizations than luxury goods.

Otherwise, Italy wouldn't suck.

Europeans developed better seafaring than the Chinese in the 15th century, better governments and contract law in the 16th and 17th centuries, and superior industrial capacity in the 18th.

Really, by the time you got to blast furnace iron, Newtonian physics, and the Glorious Revolution, China was fucked.

>London
centre for islam maybe

>Can we all agree this is the center of the world?
Can we also agree that this is the cancer of the world?

That and India. Largest sources of pollution in the world.

I'm not talking about luxury goods, man. That trade going into China is in silver.
>Europeans developed better seafaring than the Chinese in the 15th century
This is false. The reason why you believe this to be true is that Europeans were locked in competition with one another, which force their hand so to speak into seeking newer avenues of trade. Zheng He, for comparison, was sailing known waters as a show of force. China had no competition.
>Better governments and contract law in the 16th and 17th centuries
That's subjective, but I agree that the Qing Dynasty was pretty shitty. Before this, however, European travelers were enamored with Chinese statecraft.
>superior industrial capacity in the 18th
Which led to the West surpassing the East in the 19th century.
>Really, by the time you got to blast furnace iron, Newtonian physics, and the Glorious Revolution, China was fucked.
And put that into historical perspective. It's been less than 200 years since the Opium Wars fucked up the Qing. Again, I say that China has been a great - if not the great - economic and culture powerhouse for most of history.

>The reason why you believe this to be true is that Europeans were locked in competition with one another, which force their hand so to speak into seeking newer avenues of trade

Well, it doesn't matter that much why they did it. They did it. Zheng He's treasure ships may have been big, but the Chinese were no match for the Portugese in open water navigation.

>That's subjective, but I agree that the Qing Dynasty was pretty shitty. Before this, however, European travelers were enamored with Chinese statecraft

See, the idea of a res publica or republic, a state run according to written laws that apply to every member of the state, that's a uniquely European invention as far as anyone can tell.

Colleges also apply here. Islam had their madrassas, but Islamic science petered out right as the Gutenburg press and universities were turbocharging it in the west.

And that led to the thing that clobbered China, which was large corporations that could rely on secure property rights and rule of law to keep them operating.

I'd have to say by the time of the Principia Mathematica, China was hopelessly outclassed.

>a state run according to written laws that apply to every member of the state
That's a legalist thought dating back to the late Spring and Autumn period. By the time of the Warring States, almost every state in China was legalist, where laws applied to every member of the state.

I agree with your basic proposition, but I am speaking from a chronological perspective. The ascendance of Europe, as you call it, happened rather late in our current historical timeline, which is my argument. Besides, today East-Asian countries have adopted these achievements, importantly that of the nation state, and are competing and out-competing many European nations. I don't even like thinking in these terms, but I do so for the sake of the thread.

wtf, i love mecca now

Legalism has an extremely important distinction.

In republicanism, the people running the state are bound by the law and are expected to be removed from power if they break it. There is no member of the society that is immune from criminal prosecution.

Obviously, checks and balances don't work 100%, but it works more often than an emperor.

This is really important, because there is little to no point opening a steel mill if some faggot noble is just going to take it.

It depends on what you mean.

Europe was superior in terms of technological and social achievements quite a long time before they actually came around east to start kicking ass.

I am deeply cynical about the ability of the East to exceed Europe.

They have education systems based on rote memorization, a corporate world based mostly on patronage and feudal levels of loyalty, and governments that are often republican only in name.

What Europe has isn't 50 years worth of work, or even 500.

You're talking thousands of years to get shit like the Magna Carta and a culture of political pluralism and individual rights.

>Obviously, checks and balances don't work 100%, but it works more often than an emperor.
Don't forget that in China, the Mandate of Heaven could be revoked and you had every right to dunk the shitter. Administration was also run by a scholar-elite to ensure stability.

The thing is, there is no system that doesn't have revolutions.

You can't ban revolutions, because they are illegal by definition.

The point of a republican government is to allow the body politic to remove shitters from positions of power with minimal disruption and greater frequency.

The Chinese civil service was indeed a great idea, but most of the stuff in the exams had nothing to do with running a country, and without a parliament and media to represent the interest of business owners, it's going to be a much more hazardous environment for economic and technological progress.

We can see this problem now with local governments in China seizing people's land, paying them pennies on the dollar, and then selling it to property developers.

Without elected officials and freedom of speech to redress these grievances, this shit is inevitable.

>We can see this problem now with local governments in China seizing people's land, paying them pennies on the dollar, and then selling it to property developers.

What is eminent domain?

You are cynical with the East because what you see are products of 19th century/early 20th century imperialism from which they are just now starting to recover. The current Chinese government is not basing itself off historic models.
>and without a parliament and media to represent the interest of business owners
At least in the Sung period, the powerful central government had business monopolies which gave it greater revenue and control of the economy, so greedy leach merchants couldn't fuck over the common man. You speak of business rights, what about people's rights?

See, Thailand was never an imperial possession.

The way I see it, what Europe had wasn't a lack of bad things happening, but very specific, unusual incidents of good luck.

The plague, the printing press, Greek and Roman republics, and the Christfags wiping out slavery. Without any one of these, the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution just wouldn't have happened.

>At least in the Sung period, the powerful central government had business monopolies which gave it greater revenue and control of the economy, so greedy leach merchants couldn't fuck over the common man. You speak of business rights, what about people's rights?

You see, monopolies have no incentive to introduce new practices. There's no competition, and nobody else can introduce new technologies either because lol monopoly.

Whereas in markets like Britain and the Netherlands, people got filthy stinking rich implementing things like blast furnaces, steam engines, canals, and railroads.

>You speak of business rights, what about people's rights?

The way I see it, you have to have the money before you can spend it. A healthy economy is a prerequisite to a government being able to look after its people. Better to directly tax the rich and give the money to the poor than attempt to manipulate the economy to serve the same end.

>You see, monopolies have no incentive to introduce new practices.
[citation needed]

DC

See, in the west there are a couple of mechanisms that just don't exist in China.

One, you can sue people, and there is quite a reasonable chance that the court will rule according to the law, and will be able to enforce its ruling and either get you your land back or more money.

Two, and more importantly, you are free to spread the word of the fuckery to anyone who will listen. This will prevent other people from investing in land that might get taken, and it's entirely likely that it will effect the outcome of elections. It might even reach somebody in a position of political power who is willing to intervene on your behalf.

None of this is foolproof, but together it's enough to make the world a lot safer for business.

>One, you can sue people

You can do that in China.

>Two, and more importantly, you are free to spread the word of the fuckery to anyone who will listen.
You can do this in China.

Also, in the "free" world you still have to go through the media middlemen first, and the vast majority of them won't even let you through the front door.

>be company in 18th century England
>you see, this new blast furnace barely requires any coal, we can put the bloomeries out of business
>excellent, do it at once

>China, 18th century
>I have a great idea, it's called a blast fur-
>how did you get into my office
>people are going to keep buying no matter what I do, and if the new technology fails, it's my ass

>One, you can sue people, and there is quite a reasonable chance that the court will rule according to the law, and will be able to enforce its ruling and either get you your land back or more money.

This does exist in China and the concept has been around since the Song dynasty.

>Two, and more importantly, you are free to spread the word of the fuckery to anyone who will listen. This will prevent other people from investing in land that might get taken, and it's entirely likely that it will effect the outcome of elections. It might even reach somebody in a position of political power who is willing to intervene on your behalf.

Currently does exist in China and it is hated by the public because a lot of arseholes spread false rumours to destroy competitive investors.

>>Two, and more importantly, you are free to spread the word of the fuckery to anyone who will listen.
>You can do this in China.
proofs

>but together it's enough to make the world a lot safer for business.

But not for people.

Fuck off, Zhao.

Chinese equivalent of Weibo.

Lots of huge shitstorms about injustice on Weibo get posted everyday.

It's pretty much injustice porn.

>You can do that in China

I really wouldn't want to rely on Chinese courts to enforce my property rights against a politically powerful man.

Like, no system is perfect, but from what I understand, the Chinese judicial system is pretty weak compared to the west even today.

>Also, in the "free" world you still have to go through the media middlemen first, and the vast majority of them won't even let you through the front door.

Really, in the US you still do have a large number of reporters jockeying for any scandal they can bite their teeth into.

Them niggas want Pulitzers, every time somebody powerful gets fucked, a reporters career gets made.

How do you think Watergate and Lewinsky happened?

B===D

>Despite heavy government monitoring, however, the Mainland Chinese media has become an increasingly commercial market, with growing competition, diversified content, and an increase in investigative reporting. Areas such as sports, finance, and an increasingly lucrative entertainment industry face little regulation from the government.[3] Media controls were most relaxed during the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping, until they were tightened in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests. They were relaxed again under Jiang Zemin in the late 1990s,

That would come later, as the outsiders made rich by the new industries used their economic power to make the political systems in the west more inclusive, and the middle class created by industry began to flex their muscle.

>I really wouldn't want to rely on Chinese courts to enforce my property rights against a politically powerful man.

As popular conception goes. However there are many cases of stubborn people who refused to move from their property even when ordered by the government and the court has given them enough room to retaliate. Despite the fact that they're directly challenging the government.

>Really, in the US you still do have a large number of reporters jockeying for any scandal they can bite their teeth into.

Same as China, especially under the current Xi's anti-corruption campaign.

>Them niggas want Pulitzers, every time somebody powerful gets fucked, a reporters career gets made.

They fuck over powerful people who don't have enough connections. How many Rothschilds have hit the headlines lately? I'm guessing none.

See, in the US, I can't think anything since the era of Teapot Dome and the Indian Wars that matches the current property crises in China.

It's all a matter of degrees. If China wants to build accountability and rule of law, by all means, but I don't think they're going to get to where the US is without some substantial political fights.

>I really wouldn't want to rely on Chinese courts to enforce my property rights against a politically powerful man.
You'd lose extremely often in America as well. Rich people are statistically proven to recieve lighter jail sentences than the poor for equal crimes.
>Like, no system is perfect, but from what I understand, the Chinese judicial system is pretty weak compared to the west even today.
I never claimed China's justicd system is good. It is shit actually, but a lot better than your memepost above.

Furthermore, it is miles ahead of India's
justice """"""system""""" or that of Africa/Middle East.

>Really, in the US you still do have a large number of reporters jockeying for any scandal they can bite their teeth into.
Statistically, eminent domain cases in America are won by the government over 90% of the time.
>Them niggas want Pulitzers, every time somebody powerful gets fucked, a reporters career gets made.
Not over an eminent domain case that'll take 2 years to settle.
>How do you think Watergate and Lewinsky happened?
It involved the President of the United States and not Billy Joe complaining about a new school on his property?

I agree about government monopolies, but Chinks had blast furnaces first.

Once it's Christian (which is happening at breakneck speed) it truly will be.

Not to mention they invested in muskets and therefore had a head start at modern firepower (at that time).

>it is miles ahead of India's
>justice """"""system""""" or that of Africa/Middle East

I have this suspicion that if India had started out with a Mao and China had started out with a Gandhi, India would be a larger version of the Congo and China would be two or three times as powerful as the US.

China has just always been more squared away, I don't think it's a reflection of their political system so much as the weight of millennia of culture.

>Statistically, eminent domain cases in America are won by the government over 90% of the time.

Well, do people get paid fair value for their land?

The important thing here being that it's safe for relatively small investors to go into business.

>China had no competition

Then how come they never took the opportunity to colonize portions of the new world?

Well, I was specifically referring to the Darby Ironworks in England.

I could make the same point for Bessemer or Watt.

>Well, do people get paid fair value for their land?
No. There's the famous New Haven case where the government seized houses to give the land to big business, then the company pulled out and the people didn't get their fucking property back.

China is roughly in the state of economic development of America in 1950 and the state of legal development of America in 1930.

The justice system is not good, and the party protects itself, but it is nothing like your memepost.

Chinese farmers get screwed over by regional governments because of corruption in the system of land purchases. Not the justice system.

The difference is that in places like India, people don't even get paid for the land that is taken.
The Chinese meanwhile have made enormous legal reforms to strengthen the credibility of the justice system.
m.english.caixin.com/m/2016-09-08/100986809.html
All 31 provinces now have indepedent panels of law degree-holding lawyers, with no CCP members, choosing the top judges and court officials.

>I have this suspicion that if India had started out with a Mao and China had started out with a Gandhi, India would be a larger version of the Congo and China would be two or three times as powerful as the US.
Actually, it'd be closer to the opposite.

Say what you will, but Mao helped make the most stable Chinese political system in centuries.
If Gandhi was the ruler of China, the country would have split into multiple warring states.

>China has just always been more squared away, I don't think it's a reflection of their political system so much as the weight of millennia of culture.
As 1850-1950 shows you, that is simply incorrect.

>Well, do people get paid fair value for their land?
Not usually. Hence why their are so many eminent domain cases.

>The important thing here being that it's safe for relatively small investors to go into business.
China's private businesses made up 75% of China's GDP in 2014. Closer to 80% by now desu.
Obviously some businesses feel safe.

Generally in 2016 China, domestic business is taken care of and presented strong assurances, while foreign business is shitted on.
Kind of like Japan/Korea/Taiwan.

Well, OP was talking about why the West went past China, and I was just using China's present day issues as an illustration of the historical problems that stifled their development.

As I mentioned, I don't think it's fair to China to compare them to India.

China has a history of state unity, central administration, and civil service that simply doesn't exist in India.

Honestly, I think the simple fact that India is not a failed state is a testament to the strength of republican government.

Like, if I were a betting man, and somebody offered me odds on Indian democracy surviving 50 years after partition, I'd give him like 20 to 1.

This is absolutely true.

Is India a bigger beneficiary of British rule than any of the other former colonies? They certainly learned a lot from the UK.

>As 1850-1950 shows you, that is simply incorrect.

Compared to India? Hell no.

Even in China's moment of greatest weakness, foreign powers weren't able to totally annex it like they were with India.

Japan bled themselves dry trying to accomplish in China what the British did effortlessly in India.

>Say what you will, but Mao helped make the most stable Chinese political system in centuries.

I think after about 1950, most of what he did was counter-productive.

Especially the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.

I don't think Indian society could have withstood that without turning into Somalia.

I'd have to say that America holds the title of biggest beneficiary.

Of course, that's pretty much cheating being that the US was founded by a WASP upper crust that looked almost the same as the one in the UK.

India certainly benefited from the republic and civil service that the British left, but the British didn't have any interest in helping India beyond making themselves a profit.

I think one of the nice things about republics is that they can function as well as oligarchies as they can democracies. India is an example of a country that has managed to get some of the benefits of a republic, without having their shit together enough to get rule of law that worked for the average person.

>Well, OP was talking about why the West went past China, and I was just using China's present day issues as an illustration of the historical problems that stifled their development.
Okay. Let's just say that neither of us are qualified to really say for sure what the reasons were, but we can generalize something close.

>As I mentioned, I don't think it's fair to China to compare them to India.
It is. They were in quite similar positions in 1949.

>China has a history of state unity, central administration, and civil service that simply doesn't exist in India.
China 1750-1950 was a barely unified cultural entity that couldn't even defeat 4,000 British soldiers.
India meanwhile had cultural connections with all its regions, and had been forcefully united by the British for 200 years.

I wouldn't chalk up the difference to levels of unity.
For example, the Phillipines is a shithole worse than China even though it is much more unified and has been free since 1945.
>Honestly, I think the simple fact that India is not a failed state is a testament to the strength of republican government.
It is good at optimizing stability over development.
>Like, if I were a betting man, and somebody offered me odds on Indian democracy surviving 50 years after partition, I'd give him like 20 to 1.
I disagree. The Hindu states were unified enough to forcefully keep or invade those states that tried pulling away.

For example, India invaded 12 provinces 1947-1990 and forcefully annexed them.
India is a lot like China. People just think they are good guys because muh largest democracy.

>Compared to India? Hell no.
I think that India as an entity was less unified than China, but that the difference is not as great as you argue.

>Even in China's moment of greatest weakness, foreign powers weren't able to totally annex it like they were with India.
China also was a single massive Empire much further away from Europe. If Europe arrived in 1300 China, the colonization would be like India.
India in 1700-1800 was in a warring states period, and cucked by Muslims. It was extremely weak in relative terms.

>Japan bled themselves dry trying to accomplish in China what the British did effortlessly in India.
Different timeframes. Bad analogy.

>I don't think Indian society could have withstood that without turning into Somalia.

India was worse than Somalia until 1982 or so.
The GLF probably wouldn't have been able to fuck up India any worse than it already was.

its sort of like egypt was pre sacking of jerusalum

>China 1750-1950 was a barely unified cultural entity that couldn't even defeat 4,000 British soldiers.
The 18th Century was the height of the Qing Dynasty, with it;s heartland, "China Proper", being the core of chinkdom for almost a millenia by then.

>India meanwhile had cultural connections with all its regions, and had been forcefully united by the British for 200 years.
The 18th Century saw India return to the European-style mess of culturally similar yet diverse states that is it's default existence for much of history with the collapse of the Mughals. Heck even other Indian states could not abide their fellow Hindus- Maratha- supremacy. In historiography of 18th Century India, Hindu Indian princes consider Marathas foreign rulers.

The sheer fact that India has no functioning native lingua franca other than English should tell you this.

are you a mong? London is still the de fact financial capital of Europe and probably shares the status of financial capital of earth with New York

Chinks have been spamming 'china stronk' shit in /k/ for a long time now

More like trolls.

/k/ is the most easily trolled board on the site.

you seem to fail to understand the several deep layers of ironic humor of that board. its not trolling....

>Asia rise again
Against China, fuck yeah

>China 1750-1950 was a barely unified cultural entity that couldn't even defeat 4,000 British soldiers.
Remember that during this period, the Qing were putting down a fuck ton of rebellions, and their own administrative system had become corrupt.

>and the Christfags wiping out slavery.

That's the best theory anyone has for why there was so much slavery in Europe in 300 AD compared to 1300.

>Furthermore, it is miles ahead of India's
t. Zhao

>india's courts give landmark verdicts that regularly check the government's powers and interpret the constitution to ensure citizens are entitled to a better life

>the court is a major arbiter of human rights and completely free from govenment infetterence.
>Chinese court's do ???