An interesting hypothetical scenario is one where Apple had all iPhones assembled in the US. Assuming that the wage of American workers is ten times as high as those of their Chinese counterparts, the total assembly cost would rise to $68 and total manufacturing cost would be pushed to approximately $240. Selling iPhones assembled by American workers at $500 per unit would still leave a 50% profit margin for Apple.
A Revolutionary Discovery in China
These competing ideas were lost after China was unified in 221 BCE under the Qin, China’s first dynasty. In one of the most traumatic episodes from China’s past, the first Qin emperor tried to stamp out ideological nonconformity by burning books
.. But the fact is that for over two millennia all our knowledge of China’s great philosophical schools was limited to texts revised after the Qin unification. Earlier versions and competing ideas were lost—until now.
.. For Gu Jiegang and his allies, Chinese history was much like the West’s, founded in myth and oral traditions that only slowly evolved into written works at a much later date. These were plausible theses, but Gu had no archaeological evidence to back his ideas, instead relying on close readings of the transmitted texts to find inconsistencies.
.. Academics in China have responded with thousands of books and articles, discussing every detail of the new texts. Western scholars have joined in a bit more slowly. But, perhaps with the benefit of distance, they are drawing broader and more provocative conclusions.
But the most revolutionary implications of these texts are political.
.. philosophers were grappling with the best way to organize and lead states. Should one be loyal to one’s family (and thus support hereditary rule) or should one put the best interests of the state (and the people) first, and accept that the best person should run the land?
.. For many of these skeptical Westerners, Chinese efforts to prove the antiquity of their culture is closet chauvinism, or part of a project to glorify the Chinese state by exaggerating the antiquity of Chinese civilization.
But the new discoveries should give pause to this skepticism.
.. Besides theDaodejing, only a few of the texts excavated over the past twenty years have mnemonic devices or rhyme. She writes that even the texts that claim to be speeches of ancient kings originated as literary compositions.
.. Some Westerners have dismissed this, saying that it did not make sense to speak of “China” before the Qin unified China in the third century BCE. Instead, they argue, the states that existed before the Qin should be viewed as separate cultures. But the discovery of these manuscripts at least partially backs the traditionalists.
.. The Party’s continued rule is likewise justified by China’s economic development, which proves heaven’s support (“history’s judgment,” in Communist parlance). But true to Chinese tradition, the Party makes clear that its rule is hereditary
.. the creation of a quasi-hereditary class that has coalesced around “red” families that helped found the Communist state.
.. “I don’t know if it’s especially Chinese, or a result of the past decades [of political turmoil], but people often don’t try to make bigger conclusions,” she told me. “They write the papers and do the research with the big picture in their head, but rarely write it down.”
.. When I asked Professor Liu about this, he told me that up until the 1970s, “We had these classics like the Shangshu[the Ancient Documents], and for two thousand years they didn’t change. Now we can see them before that and the texts are different!”
Panama Papers: President Xi Jinping (3/7 top leaders)
Given my years covering China, I’ve been particularly interested in the fact that three of China’s top seven leaders have family members with accounts at this one law firm in Panama. It’s sort of astonishing in China: You get on the Politburo, and your family members magically become billionaires! One of those leaders tied to the Panama Papers is President Xi Jinping, who has used an anti-corruption campaign to oust his rivals and consolidate his power — even though his own family has amassed many hundreds of millions of dollars in dubious wealth. There are mutterings against Xi among Chinese elites (although he is still popular on the Chinese streets, largely because of the anti-corruption campaign), and it will be interesting to see whether his rivals try to use this scandal to undermine him.
From Illusion to Empire: The Creation of the Chinese Economy
With the largest navy, the most advanced technology, and unprecedented agricultural productivity, the Ming Dynasty remained the most extensive and powerful political structure in the world. In every way it matched and surpassed Europe, and the question of China’s “failed” transition to capitalism (known as “Needham’s Paradox”) would become a sort of initiatory riddle for future scholars of the region.
.. Instead, it was the curious fact that, among all the “Chinese” people he spoke to, none had heard of “China,” nor any of its supposedly native correlates (variants on Zhongguo—the “middle” or “central” country or countries). Pereira himself travelled exclusively in what is today Southern China, traversing Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi and Guizhou provinces. These regions were host to a myriad of local “dialects,” most as mutually incommunicable as European “languages” are from one another
.. The people Pereira asked had trouble even understanding the question of what “country” they were from, as there were no clear indigenous correlates to the concept. Ultimately they explained that there was one ruler, but many countries, which still used their ancient names. The combination of these countries composed the “Great Ming,” but each retained much of its local specificity.
.. Unlike the nationalists, we do not hope to uncover any secret lineage of culture, language or ethnicity in order to explain the unique character of today’s China. Unlike many leftists, we also do not seek to trace out the “red thread” in history, discovering where the socialist project “went wrong” and what could have been done to achieve communism in some alternate universe.[3]
.. Instead, the socialist developmental regime designates the breakdown of any mode of production and the disappearance of the abstract mechanisms (whether tributary, filial, or marketized) that govern modes of production as such.