Probably Mr Donald is referring to something he saw on TV about China's response (or relative lack of response) to Japan's Meiji Restoration.
China definitely did not respond to foregin ideas of industrialization and technology like the Japanese did. (Or at least, not at the time!) But it should be remembered that China did slowly and steadily evolve it's technology, and was well ahead of the western world until the Enlightenment.
However, blaming the Chinese response to the Meiji restoration on officially unsanctioned thought illustrates a complete cluelessness about China. During that time Chinese intellectuals (which at the time meant practically anyone who had any kind of an education) regularly debating notions of "Ti Yung", or the tension between what is esentially Chinese vs what's useful from the Western World (and by the 1860s it was starting to become clear that the west had some advanced ideas). This is far more than a top-down dictatorship in the Stalinist sense, just as the Cultural Revolution was for more than a bunch of teenagers "obeying orders".
In the end, a simplistic (though not clueless) argument could be made that China decided to remain "Chinese" rather than embrace what would have been a big disruption to their way of life. As it turned out, the 20th century (and the Japanese) more or less forced this new way of life on them.
Hell..come to think of it, the closest precedent to the US invasion of Iraq might be the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.
-TD
From: ken <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: cypherpunks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 15:40:27 +0000
China stagnated because no thought other than official thought occurred.
And when was this stagnation?
And what were the reasons China did not "stagnate" for the previous thousand years?
