Arthur Kroeber

And the fundamental idea here goes back to the 1840s when you had this great Chinese empire that had been sitting around for a thousand years doing great.

They thought they were the best in the world.

And then these upstarts from England come and crush them repeatedly militarily and impose this very humiliating political settlement on them through the Opium Wars.

So the basic analysis among the Chinese elites was, oh, okay, we fell behind technologically, and so therefore we must catch up technologically.

This is the central thing that we need to do.

And this was kind of recognized among some elites, but it ran into a lot of encrusted political pressure in the late imperial Chinese regime.

They didn't get very far.

After the empire fell in 1911 –

You had a Republican government that basically, if you look back at the things that they were saying and doing, they're pretty similar to what the Chinese Communist Party has been saying and doing.

They just did them somewhat less effectively.

They were dealing with civil wars and various other problems.

But the basic insight remained the same, that we need to catch up with the West technologically.

This is the fundamental thing.

It's just a question of how do we do this.

And so what the current regime in China has been able to do is to take that basic idea and actualize it.

They have been successful at this task of technological upgrading and catch-up and so forth.

So this is really central to the conception of Chinese elite thinking, that the number one job of the government is to figure out how to mobilize the resources of Chinese society so as to maximize technology acquisition, creation, and upgrading, right?

starting in the 1980s, that was a big part of the philosophy.

But the other part of the philosophy is we just have to grow as fast as possible.

And we are fairly agnostic as to where the growth comes from.