When other girls dream of being a princess, I desire to be a King. I played a nation simulation game called the NationStates and started to build up my own.
As time passed, my libertarian country fell apart and became a dictatorship country. I realized at a young age that good intentions don't equal good results. It is always easy to raise and reveal the problems, but without a reasonable solution, nothing would change. If you look back at history, many revolutions started with an ambition to remake society but ended with chaos, mass murders or economic recession. Those who succeeded in deposing the old state's head followed the same pattern and fell into a similar regime. Starting a new country is challenging in many ways. Unless we can solve human beings' fundamental problems, such as inequality, race differentiation, populations, geopolitical tensions, natural resources, and climate changes... There is no point in starting a new country under the current situation. Balaji Srinivasan recently launched a book, The Network State, that made me rethink building a new country. I love his concept of building a cloud first and land last country, which offers a unique approach and perspective to solve societal problems with existing technology in a peaceful way. Since I have a multicultural background and am always fascinated with history and culture, I'd like to share my thoughts on how network states can learn from the oldest living civilization to develop a long and continuous stream of culture. Start a New Country with Long History
Starting a new country is a long-term project, and every citizen hopes this country can stay long rather than an overnight success. According to philosopher Baruch Spinoza, "If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past." We must go back to history to learn the knowledge and avoid our ancestors' mistakes.
China is an excellent example to showcase how to survive and thrive in the long run to protect cultural heritage and preserve and sustain civilisations. Like all other civilisations and ethnicities on earth, Chinese people have passed through primitive, matriarchal and patriarchal communes, the slave and feudal systems. From the middle of the Ming Dynasty onward, capitalism began emerging in some handicraft industries in coastal regions such as Hangzhou (nowadays Alibaba's headquarters) and Nanjing in China. However, the successor Qing Dynasty carried out a series of national lockdown policies that stopped China's globalisation. It kept the country isolated from political, economic, and cultural developments in the West. Besides that, the British imperialists launched the Opium War against China. Other invaders from various western countries also joined the party to force the Qing government to sign a series of unequal treaties, resulting in China gradually turning into a semi-feudal and semi-colonial country. Later on, the revolution led by Sun Yat-sen, the first leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party, overthrew the Qing Dynasty in 1911 and led to the founding of the Republic of China, thus putting an end to the more than 2,000 years of feudal and monarchic rule in China. The Communist Party of China, founded in 1921, won the Civil War against the National Party and established the People's Republic of China in 1949. A new socialist county was born, with rapid economic and social development till now. Over twenty dynasties and kingdoms have come and gone throughout the Chinese thousand years of history. Still, the Chinese civilisation is an unchanging entity stretching in an unbroken line through the millennia. What are the secrets? What can we learn from it to build up network states?
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Lessons Learned from China
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Application in Network States
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Vision and record history
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Global trading and cultural integration
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Innovation
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Population
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Conclusion
In summary, Balaji raised a good framework that makes us consider the possibility of building a new form of country in the near future. I use China as an example to argue how we could preserve the new civilization and apply the learnings to building the network states.
To finish this essay, I'd like to quote Friedrich Hayek's saying in his book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism.
To finish this essay, I'd like to quote Friedrich Hayek's saying in his book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism.
"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralising decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralisation actually leads to more information being taken into account."
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. Starting a new country comes from a million individual voluntary actions toward one goal. We all have something to contribute to making the world we want and the next generation want to live. Let's start from here right now.
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