China's wealthy bypass the banks

[James A. Donald]

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On 12 Nov 2004 at 14:29, Tyler Durden wrote:
> OK, Mr Donald. You clearly imagine the China of 2,500 years 
> ago to operate like a modern 20th century nation-state. You 
> need to rethink this, given a few simple facts:

My delusion is evidently widely shared:  I did a google search 
for legalism.  http://tinyurl.com/56n2m  The first link, and 
many of the subsequent links, equated legalism with 
totalitarianism, or concluded that legalism resulted in 
totalitarianism.

> 1. There were no telephones during Confucious' time.

Pol Pot's goons mostly murdered people by killing them with a 
hoe, and mostly tortured people with burning sticks.  Does this 
make Pol Pot's Cambodia not a modern nation state?

What made the Ch'in empire a modern despotism was total 
centralized control of everything, and a multitude of 
regulations with drastic penalties for non compliance. 
Telephones are irrelevant.  It was the liberal use of the death 
penalty for non compliance, not the telephone, that made it 
centralized.

> 2. Several provinces of China are larger than all of Western 
> Europe. Even a very high-priority message could take months 
> to propagate. 3. "Control' of China 2500 years ago was almost 
> nonexistent.

When a provincial commander marched fresh conscripts from place 
A to place B, he would do it in the time alloted, and be there 
on the date specified, or the Ch'in emperor would cut his head 
off.

It is the cut-his-head off bit, and the minute and overly 
detailed instructions concocted by a far away bureaucracy, that 
made it a modern totalitarianism.

Analogously, in the recent war, Iraqi troops failed to blow 
several bridges because they had to wait for orders from 
Saddam.  Wireless and telephone did not help.

> It was a geographically, ethnically, and linguistically 
> diverse set of quasi-nation-states.

So was the Soviet empire.

> "Law" in early China was NOTHING like what you imagine it to 
> be, and was a higly decentralized affair.

So was Stalin's Soviet Empire, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, in the 
highly unusual sense of "decentralized" that commie/nazis use. 
Pol Pot's Cambodia was, like Ch'in dynasty china, decentralized 
in that they had twenty thousand separate killing fields, but 
was, like Ch'in dynasty china, highly centralized in that the 
man digging a ditch dug it along a line drawn by a man far away 
who had never seen the ground that was being dug. 

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         James A. Donald
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