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?
1. Design a unified vision and ethics in writing.
In the earliest recorded history of Chinese culture, the concepts of "together we'll solve the problems" and "people-oriented thinking" were the two main ideas propagandised by the ruling class.
Since then, people have followed these two basic ideas because everybody regarded them as the basic ethical guide to life.
Although hundreds of schools of thought and ideologies existed throughout Chinese history, Confucianism has been a significant part of the Chinese social fabric and way of life.
Its unified vision to build a "cosmic harmony" society and a standard moral code of achieving the virtue of "humanity" has been written down poetically and memorably, contributing to its long-standing and well-established status.
Continuous written records of history are essential for cultural legacy. Many other civilisations, such as ancient Egypt and ancient Iran, lost their original languages. And old India didn't record many human histories but focused on the gods' world due to the different value systems and religious aspects.
China is the only exception among the four ancient civilisations that kept the unification of writing records by commissioning government officials to lead a project to compile a universal history of China in every major dynasty.​
2. Open to global trading and cultural integration.
The Silk Road is a prime example of China's connection with the rest world. Through trading and interracial marriage, China opened up long-distance trading and accelerated economic, political, cultural, and technical exchange between different civilisations. Followed by the Silk Road's success, the Ming treasure voyages further extended China's trade on the global stage.
Throughout history, foreign powers (the Xianbei, the Mongols, the Manchus, etc.) constantly broke through geographically and conquered part or all of the Chinese hinterland. But Chinese civilisation never went extinct because of its powerful centripetal force in economy and culture that assimilated other civilisations to some extent.
Although there have been times when China closed the border and was arrogant towards foreign countries, on the whole, it has always been moderately open to outsiders and benefitted from embracing globalisation and cultural integration.
3. Dedicate to innovation.
From the 1st to the 15th century, China held the world's leading position in many fields. The Four Great Inventions from ancient China have the most significant global impact on world civilisation, and they are the compass, gunpowder, papermaking, and printing.
Paper was invented in China during the 3rd century and arrived in Europe via the Silk Road, contributing to Gutenberg's printing press's eventual development that allowed for the mass production of books and newspapers (later).
Gunpowder had also been exported along the Silk Road routes to Europe. Those European countries, such as England and France, who adapted the use of those inventions, had apparent advantages in wars that changed warfare and the geopolitical landscape.
In modern history, China has implemented the Shenzhen way of open innovation. Its policy allows people to "go beyond the planned economy" and encourages freedom of movement (not limited to people with China household registration certificates). Shenzhen city attracts people from many cutting-edge technology hardware industries and serves as a significant base for tech giants such as Tencent and Huawei.
4. Focus on population growth.
During the first dynasty of Imperial China, the Qin Dynasty, China's population had already reached twenty million, which was more than the combined population of Europe during the same period.
China's population remained relatively stable for the rest of its history though it sometimes decreased due to the interruption (Mongols and the Manchus invasion). Other foreign ethnicities and countries also brought chaotic massacres and casualties to China.
Take the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937 - 1945) as an example. More than 35 million Chinese people were killed and injured in this war. Clearly, without a massive population as a foundation, both China and Chinese civilization would not have existed today.
That's why the current fast-ageing and low-fertility-rate population put policymakers under pressure. The world's most populous country is at risk of entering an irreversible population slide if there are no adequate measures.
Applying Learnings to Building a New Country
Conclusion
In summary, Balaji raised a good framework that makes us consider the possibility of building a new form of the 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.
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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