The difference is that the mainlanders never had to give up their cultural pride, their superiority complex, in the face of foreign culture. China was the center of the universe and everyone came to them. This made them intrinsically brittle, insecure and fearful of anything that contradicted their world view. They respond to the reality of the West with civil wars, revolutions and now irrational nationalist conspiracy theories about propellor driven planes ramming jet fighters.

The Taiwanese are overseas Chinese for the most part, the former KMT ruling class excepted. They knew foreigners were real and that they had to pay attention to them for survival. This made them adaptable to changing conditions.

Exposure to western culture and business practices (particularly the concept of lawyer enforced fiduciary responcibility via Silicon Valley) has changed the Taiwanese such that they can make many mid-to-large sized corporate firms without the government. (Something the mainlanders cannot do.) It has also seen the evolution of national politics to the western democratic model where parties and elites rotate through postions of power. In short, the bonds of trust don't rely on extended family-clan loyalty ties and are extended beyond them.

The death of the Long March generation and rising corruption has seen the contraction of mainland Chinese loyalty bonds to just those extended family-clans. The corruption is now so bad that large scale basic civic infrastructure cannot be built or maintained. Only 'heroic' projects like the Three Gorges Dam can be done.

These are classic symptoms of a failing nation state. Family-clans are to small a base of talent to draw on in order to run a state, particularly one as large as China.

If Mainland China goes down, where is there a large successful nation to compete with the USA?

The nature of the failed state threat means our national defenses are as much reliant on the Coast Guard, INS, and Center for Disease Control as it will be on missile defense.

Our military expeditionary forces are going to both very high tech andvery 'Victorian' in nature. 'Sloshing them with the Martini-Henry' is going to be the 'Sloshing them with the battle droids.'

Military expeditionary forces are often cheaper than welfare benefits for mass migrations, just look at Haiti and South Florida.

This isn't Republic versus Empire. It is self-defense by a successful culture against self-destructive ones.

----Original Message Follows----
From: "Jerry Pournelle"
Reply-To:
To: "Austin Bay," "John Ringo," Tom Holsinger"
Subject: RE: China's Defeat
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 14:28:53 -0700

George W. Bush is a reasonable President of a peace time Republic. Whether he can function as an Augustus for an Empire is a different matter. The question is which do we want to be?