gradenko_2000 posted:

it's ridiculous how wide open China's tech tree is, on top of a powerful econ bonus. One of the best AOE2 civs.

Orange Devil posted:

I think factory towns are a normal and necessary part of an industrialized society. China built loads of them.

If you have a factory complex that needs tens of thousands of workers, it makes sense to make sure those people can live close by, and then it makes sense they can buy their groceries, educate their children, do sports and other recreational activities etc etc close by. Otherwise you are putting a huge tax on their wellbeing by imposing a shitton of commute time on them, which from a capitalist perspective is time they could be working, and from a socialist perspective is an unnecessary drain on quality of life.

Ardennes posted:

I would say in particular Rosatom is interesting in that they have something like 70 company towns across Russia, some of them closed cities, and there is a bunch of pride still in them. It is in some ways a dispersed country inside a country.

Frosted Flake posted:

The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History


A first look at gunpowder's revolutionary impact on China's role in global history

The Chinese invented gunpowder and began exploring its military uses as early as the 900s, four centuries before the technology passed to the West. But by the early 1800s, China had fallen so far behind the West in gunpowder warfare that it was easily defeated by Britain in the Opium War of 1839–42. What happened? In The Gunpowder Age, Tonio Andrade offers a compelling new answer, opening a fresh perspective on a key question of world history: why did the countries of western Europe surge to global importance starting in the 1500s while China slipped behind?

Historians have long argued that gunpowder weapons helped Europeans establish global hegemony. Yet the inhabitants of what is today China not only invented guns and bombs but also, as Andrade shows, continued to innovate in gunpowder technology through the early 1700s—much longer than previously thought. Why, then, did China become so vulnerable? Andrade argues that one significant reason is that it was out of practice fighting wars, having enjoyed nearly a century of relative peace, since 1760. Indeed, he demonstrates that China—like Europe—was a powerful military innovator, particularly during times of great warfare, such as the violent century starting after the Opium War, when the Chinese once again quickly modernized their forces. Today, China is simply returning to its old position as one of the world’s great military powers.

By showing that China’s military dynamism was deeper, longer lasting, and more quickly recovered than previously understood, The Gunpowder Age challenges long-standing explanations of the so-called Great Divergence between the West and Asia.

cat botherer posted:

The Qin's insistence of all mean wearing their hair in a queue has got to be one of the most policies I've ever heard. Seems like it did nothing but bring about resentment. It probably also didn't help that it was basically the dumbest looking haircut ever.

VoicesCanBe posted:

how on earth are they expecting to build a naval coalition against China?

cat botherer posted:

Goddamnit I looked up motivations on why they did the queue thing and the first thing I clicked on is clearly ChatGPT garbage.

https://reyabogado.com/us/what-was-the-queue-ordinance-in-1873/

stephenthinkpad posted:

The queue was a physical symbol of han people pledging their royalty to the new dynasty instead of the old Ming emperor, who were still hiding in some buttfuck forest in Myanmar, or Taiwan island. It's kind of like the (stupid) religious accessories you have to wear.

genericnick posted:

Are closed towns still closed in modern Russia?

VoicesCanBe posted:

This has probably been discussed in this topic already. But with the very obvious struggles the US are having to stop Yemen's blockade of the red sea - and Operation Prosperity Guardian appearing to fail before it even got started - how on earth are they expecting to build a naval coalition against China?

They're trying to provoke China into invading Taiwan despite not having anywhere near the assets to win such a conflict. If it comes to that threshold, China would just blockade the island until Taiwan has to yield, right? The US would not actually be able to do much to contest that. China isn't going to launch an amphibious invasion, that would be stupid.

cat botherer posted:

Yeah, but that doesn't actually prove loyalty. It just proves you don't want your head chopped off. The average peasant wouldn't have cared about the dynastic change anyway, until they were made to adopt the queue. I'm probably overthinking something that was basically a dumb decision.

Pistol_Pete posted:

The idea that Xi Jinping is going to throw a lifetime's cautious stewardship to the winds and launch a dice-rolling, full-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan, a polity that mainland China has a perfectly workable current relationship with, is one of the most bizarre ones floating around Western politics. Do they think China's the USA or something?

Pistol_Pete posted:

The idea that Xi Jinping is going to throw a lifetime's cautious stewardship to the winds and launch a dice-rolling, full-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan, a polity that mainland China has a perfectly workable current relationship with, is one of the most bizarre ones floating around Western politics. Do they think China's the USA or something?

Pistol_Pete posted:

The idea that Xi Jinping is going to throw a lifetime's cautious stewardship to the winds and launch a dice-rolling, full-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan, a polity that mainland China has a perfectly workable current relationship with, is one of the most bizarre ones floating around Western politics. Do they think China's the USA or something?

Pistol_Pete posted:

The idea that Xi Jinping is going to throw a lifetime's cautious stewardship to the winds and launch a dice-rolling, full-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan, a polity that mainland China has a perfectly workable current relationship with, is one of the most bizarre ones floating around Western politics. Do they think China's the USA or something?

Frosted Flake posted:

The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History


A first look at gunpowder's revolutionary impact on China's role in global history

Pistol_Pete posted:

The idea that Xi Jinping is going to throw a lifetime's cautious stewardship to the winds and launch a dice-rolling, full-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan, a polity that mainland China has a perfectly workable current relationship with, is one of the most bizarre ones floating around Western politics. Do they think China's the USA or something?

cat botherer posted:

The Qing's insistence (on pain of decapitation) that all men wear their hair in a queue has got to be one of the most policies I've ever heard. Seems like it did nothing but bring about resentment. It probably also didn't help that it was basically the dumbest looking haircut ever.

Pistol_Pete posted:

"Xi Jinping will certainly be strongly motivated to launch an attack before 2028, as that is when his term as president expires and doubtless he will want to go out with a bang."

There, I can write moronic bullshit foreign policy wank too, give me a job on some thinktank called The Atlantic Council for Peace and Economic Development, cheers.

Pistol_Pete posted:

The idea that Xi Jinping is going to throw a lifetime's cautious stewardship to the winds and launch a dice-rolling, full-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan, a polity that mainland China has a perfectly workable current relationship with, is one of the most bizarre ones floating around Western politics. Do they think China's the USA or something?

Orange Devil posted:

This is inauthentic unless you write another article the very next day about how Xi Jinping is clearly trying to be president for life and might rule China with an iron fist for another 15 years.

Frosted Flake posted:

Frosted Flake posted:

100%

It happened on a smaller scale with Robert Moses, Huey Long, FDR and Fred Gardiner just because they built stuff during the Depression.

Frosted Flake posted:

There's a book on Manchu ethnic policies I would have to dig up, but the gist is that they were aware that previous dynasties that had conquered China, the Jurchen and Mongols (and probably others I am less familiar with) eventually became Chinese/Han/Decadent and had fallen.

So, they went about firmly establishing ethnic difference (in theory, not always practice, book gets into this), by forcing the Han to wear their hair in a Manchu style, maintaining the Banner System where all Manchu officials were technically in the army, and forcing bureaucrats to practice horsemanship and archery annually even after these were no longer used on the battlefield.

There's a logic to this, actually. We can see "conquest dynasties" like the Nubian XXV Dynasty of Egypt, Diadochi in the Near-East and even the Hanoverian line of the United Kingdom, the German kings of Greece and Bulgaria etc. vacillate between trying to maintain ethnic difference between them and the population and being absorbed by them. In cases where a large population was ruled by a small one, that didn't have a large group of colonists and soldiers accompany them, the distinctions disappear surprisingly quickly. This is a problem if the ruling dynasty's authority is based on being outside conquerors.

The Diadochi believed that living as "easterners", not maintaining their Macedonian lifestyle, forms of rulership and authority (stereotyped in opposition to the spectacle of an "oriental" court), and not drilling Macedonian colonists in the pike phalanx, would lead to their eventual defeat. There are still English historians, writing today, who accept this premise as essentially true. (Hysteria about Anglo-Indians becoming "oriental" was practically a genre in the Victorian era. There was a very popular story about an English boy raised by his Indian nanny who had to be converted to Christianity because he did not know any better) That being the case, is it so strange that the Manchu came to believe the same thing?

It preserved their authority and social status by saying they were superior to the Han by virtue of conquering them, and so a ritualized performance of conquest, with government tax attorneys riding around on ponies shooting bows, government appointments resulting from membership in Banners, a sort-of-Regiment, sort-of-tribe, reinforced that. You might compare this to the Marching Season reinforcing the Orange conquest of Ireland by a Dutchman. It's an annual reminder of the Battle of the Boyne, and membership in the Orange Order was required for most public offices in Northern Ireland (and Toronto).

The further humiliation of being forced to wear their hair in the Manchu style mirrors very closely mirrors Tsar Peter I of Russia instituting a beard tax as part of an effort to bring Russian society in line with Western European models. In both cases forcible shaving by the civil authorities asserted state power at the lowest level, showing that all public life was under the control of the state, specifically who was in charge of the state and what kind of state they wanted to be. After the Spanish Conquests of Latin America, certain Amerindian textiles or patterns were banned. The reason for the ban was the same as the above, it seems arbitrary to us, now because we're not living in a post conquest society where the hierarchy is still being reorganized. It's not really about the hair, or the beards, or the textiles per se, but about who was in charge.

Because we are a gluttonous burger people, the legacy of this in English memory is food related:

"Norman saw on English oak,
On English neck a Norman yoke;
Norman spoon in English dish,
And England ruled as Normans wish;
Blithe world in England never will be more,
Till England 's rid of all the four."

VoicesCanBe posted:

This has probably been discussed in this topic already. But with the very obvious struggles the US are having to stop Yemen's blockade of the red sea - and Operation Prosperity Guardian appearing to fail before it even got started - how on earth are they expecting to build a naval coalition against China?

They're trying to provoke China into invading Taiwan despite not having anywhere near the assets to win such a conflict. If it comes to that threshold, China would just blockade the island until Taiwan has to yield, right? The US would not actually be able to do much to contest that. China isn't going to launch an amphibious invasion, that would be stupid.

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Again, it's that problem of a lot of people thinking that History works like a strategy game tech tree and that China simply didn't research Steam Engine because they neglected science production etc. This is also what leads to takes such as "China lacked entrepreneurialism" as some supposed explanation for what happened, which is an utter dogshit of an attempt at serious intellectual work. The steam engine was known since Antiquity - did the Romans also lack it? Of course not, because that loving idiotic notion didn't even loving exist in that place and time. A technological development isn't the invention per se, but also all the societal activities necessary for that invention to become an economic factor. Why steam power would be necessary when there's very cheap labor in abundance? And why would it be used anyway if the extraction of surplus value isn't a priority of the social function of the landowning class? In that context, without a social function that is driven for surplus value, there's no justifiable gain for pursuing value efficiency.

Hatebag posted:

china has thousands of cruise missiles all along the coast so there's nothing the us could actually do for taiwan other than nuke china, which would also cause global nuclear war and reduce profits for several years. so as long as everyone is rational and clear headed there won't be any problems

stephenthinkpad posted:

They will steal the foreign reserve of mainland and Taiwan and then try and fail to sanction China's export business. We have see season 1 of this show already.

Hatebag posted:

well us ukraine policy has largely been successful if the goal was to isolate european markets from russia and economically weaken europe to make it easier to manipulate. that dovetails with brexit nicely, too.
so i guess the china analog would be to get china engaged in a proxy war? doesn't necessarily need to be on their borders either. korea is probably not gonna work. can't imagine china supporting the naxalites. maybe nigeria? i think it's gonna be tough for the us to get china to stick its dick in a blender, tbh

Hatebag posted:

well us ukraine policy has largely been successful if the goal was to isolate european markets from russia and economically weaken europe to make it easier to manipulate. that dovetails with brexit nicely, too.
so i guess the china analog would be to get china engaged in a proxy war? doesn't necessarily need to be on their borders either. korea is probably not gonna work. can't imagine china supporting the naxalites. maybe nigeria? i think it's gonna be tough for the us to get china to stick its dick in a blender, tbh

Danann posted:

sign a nine-figure contract with me and my llc first so that we can research how to bring the multipurpose joint tactical mechanical bolt thrower to fruition