Study What We Want You to Study

When I was still at school and ended up in discussions on civilisations, I always felt that I needed to make the point to my English friends that the Chinese were living in cities when Europeans were still living in caves.

I think of this era of my life, because I’ve come to appreciate that Chinese history is very instructive to the current geopolitical situation. Whilst the Chinese were living in cities when the Europeans were living in caves, the Chinese also pioneered two of the worst sins of modern geopolitics – namely protectionism and intellectual arrogance. Sure, we started living in cities but 1500AD, protectionism and intellectual arrogance made China so stagnant that the people who were dwelling in caves when the Chinese lived cities, ended up pointing guns at them and the Chinese could only offer spears and wooden shields.

I blame two people for this. One is Confucius, the original bureaucrat who was obsessed with going back to a “golden age” that never existed. Thanks to him, the entire Chinese system was based on going back to a mythical golden age and nobody thought of shaping the future. The other person who is responsible is the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang who built the “Great Wall,” which cost dearly in lives and treasure. The Great Wall is a tourist attraction and we love to go on and on about how its only thing you can see from the moon. The truth is the “Great Wall” was a failure. The “Barbarians” inevitably found a way in.

The Qin emperor didn’t just build a physical wall. He built walls in generations of Chinese. As far as he was concerned, people would only know what he wanted them to know and he proceeded to burn books that he didn’t approve of on a regular basis. So, whilst China and Chinese history is filled with intellectual treasures, its also filled with so much more that could have been.

I start with this monologue, because if you look at what’s going on in the world, you’ll notice that these things from Chinese history are taking place in front of us. Ironically, its not so much the Chinese exhibiting these traits but the nation that was the anti-thesis of these values – America.

Many people have described the current president as trying to be like a “King” of 18^th century Europe. However, he seems more like a Chinese Emperor. Look at what he was bragging about in his first term – building a wall. As an ethnic Chinese, this sounds strangely familiar.

Now, in his second term, he’s on a mission to continue being like a Chinese Emperor. He wants to build walls of the mind. America, which has spent centuries being a free market of ideas, now has school boards talking about banning certain books.

This on its own wouldn’t be so bad if he wasn’t on a mission to make it worse by going on a war against America’s Universities, insisting that they teach an approved “non-woke” agenda. At the time of writing, Mr. Trump has frozen all federal funding to Harvard University, one of America’s most prominent universities, for refusing to comply with his orders:

 https://www.ft.com/content/5c8bca38-8e6d-4df1-bbb1-d84e0b2a5962

 

Given that Harvard has an exceedingly large endowment fund, one might argue that there’s no reason for them to receive federal funding. However, the issue is not so much the funding but the “interference” from the government and the government’s insistence that it has control over what universities teach. Mr. Trump is essentially arguing that the government needs to step in to stop the universities from teaching a “woke” agenda but whose to say what exactly is “woke” and who is to say that this won’t be used to interfere with the teaching of what the government doesn’t want to be taught, which is, given Mr. Trump’s reaction to medical advice dispensed during Covid, a real possibility.

If you look at what makes America such a dominant player in so many fields, you’ll find that America has inevitably done it through an ability to nurture the best brains into innovative and entrepreneurial ones. America has done this primarily through its universities. It is no coincidence that Silicon Valley, the place that has minted billionaires is centred around Stanford University.

If you look at the top ten universities in the world, you’ll find that only Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London are not American. What does this mean? It simply means that America has the best places to nurture the best minds. America doesn’t just nurture its own. It encourages people from the rest of the world to attend American Universities and then work and even become entrepreneurs, creating jobs and other forms of wealth in America:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/latest/world-ranking

 

 Mr. Trump campaigned on the premise of “Making America Great Again.” He talks about bringing back the manufacturing jobs and undoing years of environmental protections.

Yet, while he’s talking about making America Great Again, he’s going after the very things that make America great. Like it or not, hot beds of innovation and creativity don’t toe the line of dictation from the government.

Sure, China is a communist dictatorship and a highly effective police state. However, it’s a place that has understood that “Greatness” comes from an ability to innovate and create. It’s also learnt the lesson from history that it needs the global community to stay reasonably prosperous. So, when Mr. Trump was rounding up people he didn’t like, the Chinese were opening up to people with the ability to do work.

How it is possible for America to win with Mr. Trump at the helm. He’s trying to compete in the low-end stuff, where China has a clear advantage. Yet at the same time, he’s going out of his way to harm the pillars that make America a world leader in high tech and high value stuff. Instead of making friends, he’s alienating the ones he has. By contrast, the Chinese are keeping their edge in the low value stuff, investing in the high edge stuff and going out of their way to befriend the people Mr. Trump is screwing over.

China got lucky in that it was an ancient civilization and it didn’t feel the negative effects of its arrogance and isolationism for centuries. The world was simply not connected back then. So, the receipts of arrogance took a while to come in.

This is not the case for modern America under Trump. Our technologies have reduced the time it took to do things in the past by many folds. Any loss suffered will be a result of allowing the same arrogance and isolationism that brought down and ancient civilisation.