Yup. Except some (not all) of the infrastructure was for pie-in-the sky projects like dams that don’t work.
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Nothing is perfect. And China is doing better for it’s poor - by a country mile- than India.
Which is something to think about I guess
How is Africa - massive generalisation- going to develop? Asymmetrical capitalism is quite likely not the solution.
Last I heard Africa was progressing along pretty well.
Almost exactly because of CCP capitalism, no?
Perhaps, at least in recent terms, the Indians arent trying to expand and control other nations on the large scale. Be it in land ocean, communications, logistics, debt traps or otherwise . China is (not sayin others arent). Because of this, it kind of makes it hard to believe chinas infrastructure projects are to better their people. Seems more likely its to oil their machine and simply do the absolute bare minimum to avoid yet another civil war. They are kinda known for civil unrest. Probably for obvious reasons. At least we got taiwan out of it. Hong kong showed the world that no matter how organized you are and how right you are, no one gives 2 shits if its against fast cash and long term oppression. Even if china has written international contracts. Means nothing and no one cares. Kind of like when the US showed up late for ww2 then took all the credit after nuking japan. The world hasnt really shown amazing maturity ,this worries me.
@OysterOmelet ok true. Romans didnt have wifi. So how about the south american civilizations and egypt? Hard to call them “for the people” in a modern sense. I mean the americas had friggen runners instead of wifi. Pretty hard core. Luckily the totally non authoritarian euro religions showed them some equality and how to invest in infrastructure 
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Modern political institutions appeared far earlier in history than did the Industrial Revolution and the modern capitalist economy. Indeed, many of the elements of what we now understand to be a modern state were already in place in China in the third century B.C., some eighteen hundred years before they emerged in Europe.
Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order, 19.
Guayana is now getting rich from oil.
Fukuyama says it’s more useful to study China than Greece and Rome to understand the emergence of a state because China was actually a modern state as defined by Max Weber, Greece and Rome were not.
That is, China succeeded in developing a centralized, uniform system of bureaucratic administration that was capable of governing a huge population and territory when compared to Mediterranean Europe. China had already invented a system of impersonal, merit-based bureaucratic recruitment that was far more systematic than Roman public administration.
More from Fukuyama:
It is safe to say that the Chinese invented modern bureacracy, that is, a permanent administrative cadre selected on the basis of ability rather than kinship or patrimonial connection. Bureaucracy emerged unplanned from the chaos of Zhou China, in response to the urgent necessity of extracting taxes to pay for war.
Yeah, but why? Fukuyama thinks he knows the answer.
- India did not endure prolonged periods of war like China did. It was under those years that Chinese entities were forced to create a merit-based military and a merit-based bureaucracy so they could tax people to pay for wars, leading to the creation of the first bureaucracy. The number of Chinese entities was reduced to one under the Qin, while in India it got bigger. This decentralization was good for democracy later on, but bad for concentrating power. Hard to create a merit-based bureaucracy.
- The ironclad caste system made it impossible to break up units and get living under the same set of rules.
- The Brahmic religion severely restricted literacy. Parchment was made of animal skin and thought to be unclean. I was taught in my Asian history class that the Hindus, like the Hebrews, only deemed religious stuff important enough to write down. But according to Fukuyama, even religious writings were hard to find. Monks came from China looking for sources of Buddhist tradition, only to be disappointed. Even rulers were mostly illiterate, so a strong bureaucracy was impossible.
The US modernized fast and went through an industrial revolution between about 1865 and 1900. Ireland and the countries of Eastern Europe have also become wealthy in remarkably short periods of time.
It is not at at all clear to me that Taiwan would not have become wealthy quickly had it been a democracy. Many think Taiwan became rich in spite of the KMT, not because of it.
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India has had its fair share of all out warfare. Fukuyama is simply wrong about this.
The Moghul empire probably accounted for 25% of world GDP in 1600. It had a vast and sophisticated bureaucracy. European visitor marveled at its wealth and power.
The Brahmic religion severely restricted literacy. Parchment was made of animal skin and thought to be unclean. I was taught in my Asian history class that the Hindus, like the Hebrews, only deemed religious stuff important enough to write down. But according to Fukuyama, even religious writings were hard to find. Monks came from China looking for sources of Buddhist tradition, only to be disappointed.
Indian scripture and books was written on palm leaves. There is a vast literature. The Tang monk Xuan Zang brought back more than 600 scriptures. Editions of the East Asian canon run to 50 million words. Most were translations of Indian works or works translated from Central Asian sources that were themselves from Indian works.
Oh, and Stalin industrialized the Soviet Union in a generation. Leninism seems far more important than the Qin model.
Russia is still not developed.
East Asia put together the same industrial revolution in a generation that took the West 200 years.
The US did not take 200 years to industrialize. Before the civil war it was an agrarian society. After the civil war, it became the world’s largest manufacturing country in about the same time as China did.
Their “bureaucrats” didn’t know how to read. Also, it’s 1600s, not 200 BC like the establishment of the Qin.
Russia is still not developed.
By the late 1930s, the Soviet Union was second only to the United States in industrial output. It clearly had an industrial revolution.
The European Union thinks Russia is one of 66 countries with ‘very high’ human development.
In a planned economy people make up numbers to satisfy output quotas.
Yeah, literacy is pretty high. You can be educated and poor.
Anyone with a passing acquaintance of Moghul India knows that its administrators were highly literate in Persian. While Akbar the Great was in fact illiterate, the founder of the dynasty Babur wrote one of the most famous memoirs ever and was a polymath. Akbar was a famous and generous patron of learning.
As for it being the 1600s rather than 200 BC, so what? The Qin empire survived for just four years after its founder’s death. The Yuan dynasty reconfigure the Chinese imperium radically. Like many dabblers in Chinese history, Fukuyama seems to think that the Chinese state stayed unchanged for 2000 years. Nothing could be further than the truth.
Ashoka may have created a state of equal sophistication a few centuries earlier building on Chandraguptra and early works of statecraft. We just know less about it because of the vagaries of historiography.
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Han dynasty lasted 400 years under the same political system. They were just ideologically Confucianist instead of the Legalist Qin.
They tried to, but soon they found out they couldn’t rule China without China’s more sophisticated political institutions.
He didn’t say that. He said after the Han disintegrated, China eventually reconstituted itself with the same system under the Sui, and by the Song its modern institutions were restored. There are two reasons for this.
First, even during the long fragmentary period, each entity tried to replicate the Han system.
Second, a common culture was developed.
The Roman empire never reconstituted itself.
I appreciate your engaging me on this.