From: GBurch1@aol.com
Date: Fri Dec 24 1999 - 05:56:35 MST
In a message dated 12/23/99 11:58:43 PM Central Standard Time,
ronkean@juno.com writes:
> If China's trade balance has been consistently positive for 250 years,
> where is the money, or what happened to the money representing the
> cumulative trade imbalance?
I suppose I was engaging in a little hyperbole when I wrote that except for
the 19th century opium trade, China had had a positive trade balance since
"modern" contact with the West in the mid-18th century. For long periods
during the modern era, there has been very LITTLE trade, given China's
enormous population. During much of this time, China has been wracked with
civil wars, then invasion and pillage by the Japanese, then a mercantilist
communist regime, then 20 years of total economic stagnation arising from the
"Cultural Revolution".
But over the long, long course of its history, China has been a net exporter.
Evidence of the society's accumulated wealth over that period can be seen in
the massive public works that made China "work" as an
agricultural-engineering system (e.g. the great hydrological works of
central, western and south china) and the creation of the elaborate cultural
edifice that is the Glass Bead Game of Confucianism.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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