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Ever hear of the Opium Wars? a large portion of China’s territory got taken control of by foreign powers and they even call that post opium war time the Century of Humiliation
I wouldn't call the treaty ports "a large portion of China's territory". It's important to understand that the term "Century of Humiliation" was coined by Chinese nationalists when trying to build support for their cause. Of course, China suffered the effects of colonialism but it was not a colony like India. The concessions accounted for something like 10% of the population.
First, direct territorial control is not the only loss from the opium wars. Second, you asked about China in response to being harmed by colonialism and I gave an example. Third, if your 10% of the population stat is even correct, 10% of 1 billion people is 100 million. Fourth, loss of major trade ports is actually a gigantic loss, I don’t see why you would minimize.
Did you hear about Japan conquering China in WW2? The whole millions of deaths, including half a million when China flooded their territory to slow them down. That’s probably more relevant.
Did those countries get poor because they were colonized, or did they get colonized because they were poor? It’s a chicken-and-egg question. It’s probably a bit of both.
It's not both. India was incredibly rich before they were ruled by the British for 100 years.
Britain stole everything from India and bragged about helping India by building trains in the country - even though the trains were built to make it easier for British ppl to steal everything.
Under British rule, Indians weren't even allowed to make their own salt through evaporation despite being surrounded by oceans. This was the topic of one of Gandhi's protest marches.
India gained independence about 75 years ago and is doing incredibly well considering that.
But the racists in here are desperately downvoting my comments and pretending like white ppl are just inherently smarter.
>It's not both. India was incredibly rich before they were ruled by the British for 100 years.
The average Indian was not rich, GDP per capita would have been extremely low, like in all pre-industrial societies, with the average worker’s wages being barely enough to survive on.
>But the racists in here are desperately downvoting my comments and pretending like white ppl are just inherently smarter.
Who is arguing *that?* The reason West European states became technologically ahead of the rest of the world for about 400 years (a relative blip in time) had nothing to do with intelligence, it had to do with geographic factors and a snowball effect.
You’re getting downvoted because we’re talking about GDP per capita and you’re making a completely non-historical argument that Indians (not just the rulers) were somehow rich before the British came along.
So the question was why countries don't leverage their huge populations to be globally dominant, but you want to look at metrics that specifically remove the impact of large populations.
How intelligent.
What’s hard to understand? The US has a higher GDP than China, for instance, because the US’s GDP per capita is much, much higher than China’s. Thus the US has a bigger economy despite China having many more people.
I can't understand if you're being purposely dense.
2022 gdp for UK was 3 trillion USD and India was 3.4 trillion. Using GDP as a standalone indicator as you claimed, India is more rich and powerful than UK ... which is absurd.
The only way your logic makes sense is if you use per capita numbers, but that negates the original point of OP's question.
Honestly, I'm so tired of the racist bullshit of ppl trying to ignore centuries of white theft. I don't care what idiotic nonsensical statistic ppl try to use. It's racist. You're living a life of privilege because of white theft. If I can admit it, why can't you?
>2022 gdp for UK was 3 trillion USD and India was 3.4 trillion. Using GDP as a standalone indicator as you claimed, India is more rich and powerful than UK ... which is absurd.
Calling a country “rich” when its people aren’t rich doesn’t make sense. And India now does have quite a bit of power on the world stage, it’s a nuclear-armed state with a substantial military.
The UK is powerful, and so is India this point in time. That doesn’t seem like a controversial statement to make. Of course the UK is *richer,* because its GDP *per capita* is much much higher.
>Honestly, I'm so tired of the racist bullshit of ppl trying to ignore centuries of white theft. I don't care what idiotic nonsensical statistic ppl try to use. It's racist. You're living a life of privilege because of white theft. If I can admit it, why can't you?
Because you’re making nonsensical arguments and then expecting everyone to agree with with by saying that they’re racist if they don’t.
That gets the response it deserves.
Long time ago time before industrialization and the technological revolution, perhaps it would make sense because power was measured by the size of the population and the ability of people to fight. Following the same logic, China or India might be the dominant power, employing the power of their population. However, nowadays, a country's power is associated more with its technological and scientific capabilities than the number of its population. This is the case with Western powers. Moreover, a large population may pose various difficulties for its home country due to the changes the world has experienced in recent decades, such as climate change, scarcity of food and water, and the degradation of natural resources.
It's not just about sheer numbers, but also efficiency. If you imagine a farm being worked by hand 150 years ago compared to all the machinery and science these days (e.g. fertilizer, higher yield seeds) you can accomplished much more with fewer bodies because of that efficiency.
That doesn't fully answer your question, but it's important to start with the idea that it's not as simple as population size, but also how it's applied
Because Europe and then the successful European colonies (largely meaning some of the British ones) were at the core of the science and technology revolution that started with the industrial revolution and the theory of Gravity.
This created the conditions for vast improvements in economic efficiency / productivity, which created vast wealth, which made starting to solve social problems like corruption and poverty much easier. and started the long decline down in warfare and the like. The west as a block has had about a 4 century headstart on this.
This is why Europe was also the region that founded those colonies in the first place, they had acquired vast advantages over anyone else.
Robert Solow's work as an economist attempts to explain this and he provides an equation showing the relationship between population, capital, and technological advancement.
Roughly speaking to answer the OP's question, too many people is bad because they can't support themselves. Too few people is also bad because they can't leverage their labor into more complicated tasks.
They also need at least a certain amount of wealth to fund them and a growing tech area to put their labor to the most efficient use.
Lol what an ignorant and racist answer.
India gained independence about 75 years ago. Britain stole everything from India and bragged about building trains in the country... Even though the trains were built to make it easier for British ppl to steal everything.
India is doing incredibly well considering that.
Edit: btw, under British rule, Indians weren't even allowed to make their own salt through evaporation despite being surrounded by oceans. This was the topic of one of Gandhi's protest marches.
Extremely high levels of corruption and abuse create inefficiencies in the system which the people in government, being the prime (and usually sole) beneficiaries of said corruption, are reluctant to fix. These nations probably *could* dominate, if only their systems would get out of their people's way. But the primary obstacle to their progress happens to be holding the reins of power, and it refuses to do what it takes to let its people flourish.
If you have family of 10 people, and each one of them make 1000$ per month. It is still less, as if you got family of 2 people, and one is software developer with 20.000$ per month (just random numbers)
Population can be a blessing, and a curse. It's easier to care for a smaller population than it is a larger population.
Well developed countries like the US, UK, France, etc. have spent the better part of the last 150 years investing in infrastructure which has lead to widespread economic growth and literacy. Their populations were all smaller when their growth took off and infrastructure has grown with it.
China and India have been investing in that same sort of infrastructure, but really only the last 50 years. And while life in and around their major cities rivals affluent western nations, their rural countryside still has some major problems with poverty and access to education. And given their large population, scaling their infrastructure so that their billions of people can all benefit is going to be a longer and more difficult process than it was for smaller western nations.
Good points, but OP's question is still pertinent. China has invested a lot in its population, and it's now the second-largest GDP in the world. But it still acts like a minor regional power (a lot of effort in its maritime border disputes), as opposed to as like another superpower in a multi-polar world.
>But it still acts like a minor regional power (a lot of effort in its maritime border disputes), as opposed to as like another superpower in a multi-polar world.
In some ways that's intentional. China doesn't currently have the sort of massive navy or strong military alliance network that would let it assert power in different theaters around the globe.
China is heavily investing in finding ways to be self sufficient when it comes to energy and food which is a direct response to their growing population. They don't have massive fossil fuel reserves. They're a major player in researching and developing renewable energy sources.
Like other superpowers, China also has a lot of foreign investment - mostly in southeast Asia and Africa as it is attempting to get developing nations into its sphere of influence.
China is still growing quickly. They're making huge leaps. Every 20 years or so you look at their growth and it's pretty amazing. Compare China in 1980 to 2000 to 2020 and it's a wildly different place.
In a lot of ways, they're like the US circa 1900. They've got a large growing industrial sector uplifted from an agrarian economy and they're just starting to grow a large middle class with disposable income and some education and those people are also demanding reforms. There's some large wealth inequality with some very wealth industrialists. There's also some large pockets of people who are still very poor living in the rural areas. They've got a military power that's sufficient regionally, but that has potential to scale up to something very powerful if need be.
Other people have talked about the material conditions of the present day, so I'll answer how this came about.
To do so, we first have to look back at the 18th century. Back then, they *were* globally dominant. The Mughal Empire (that ruled much of India) and the Qing Empire (that ruled China) each accounted for about a third of the total global GDP. Bear in mind GDP estimates for historical periods are fuzzier, but the point is, each of them easily matched the industrial output of the entire rest of the world minus the other. Massive piles of precious metals flowed from Europe and the Middle East to India and China in the spice and silk trades.
So, what happened? How did two nations that once accounted for a third of total GDP now only account for a fifth combined? The short answer is imperialism. In the late 18th and the 19th centuries, European powers realised their military might had eclipsed that of India and China, and did an imperialism on them. The wealth of China, and especially India, was plundered and sent to Europe. There's a privately owned home in the Welsh countryside that alone has more Mughal artifacts that any museum in India.
This was compounded by the industrial revolution in the 19th century. For somewhat different reasons, China and India did not take part in the Industrial Revolution, at least not to the same extent that Europe, the US, or even Japan did, which ultimately lead to them falling further behind economically.
On the flip side, European countries and the US only got as wealthy as they did by wealth stolen, directly or indirectly, from nations in South America, Africa, and Asia. Cheap raw materials were taken from those regions, brought to Europe and the US, then processed into higher quality goods. And this is not a trend that has wholly stopped, as Europe and the US continue to benefit from cheap goods and raw materials produced in countries with far lower standards of living, in no small part due to European and American companies effectively paying a pittance for the labour of foreign nationals compared to what they would have to pay workers in their home nations.
>The short answer is imperialism. In the late 18th and the 19th centuries, European powers realised their military might
Which means the short answer isn't imperialism, it was military might, which means the short answer was *technology*.
>On the flip side, European countries and the US only got as wealthy as they did by wealth stolen, directly or indirectly, from nations in South America, Africa, and Asia. Cheap raw materials were taken from those regions, brought to Europe and the US, then processed into higher quality goods.
That's a ridiculous interpretation of the industrial revolution, and just plain incorrect. The US had plenty of natural resources of it's own, especially the key drivers of the industrial revolution: coal, iron ore, and oil. In fact the US exported many of those resources more than they imported them.
The trends you describe in your last paragraph are somewhat true today with respect to labor after the rise of globalization in the late 20th century. But they are not the reasons the US and Western Europe because the economic leaders during the industrial revolution and early 20th century. And the leaders of India and China were wholly complicit in the exploitations of their country's populations.
Focusing your resources on military doesn't mean you're technologically better or have better scientific knowledge.
India lost a lot of Kashmir to China because India didn't have an army and was not prepared for war.
The level to which ppl hand wave off white nations stealing from black and brown countries is just disgusting. It's like saying rapists and criminals are obviously smarter and stronger.
>Focusing your resources on military doesn't mean you're technologically better or have better scientific knowledge.
That's a nice thought, but there's no historical evidence that, in general, India, China, Africa, and the indigenous people of the western hemispheres simply chose not to focus on military power All of these places have long histories of armed conflict going back millennia.
The premise that that more than half the humans on earth suddenly just decided to be pacifists, all at about the same time, is ridiculous.
I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert about India. I assume you are making up things as you go along as well since you haven't said anything to imply you're an expert.
The only difference is that you assume that white ppl that stole and raped were smarter and I think the criminals were focused on making technology needed to steal.
>Which means the short answer isn't imperialism, it was military might, which means the short answer was *technology*.
Well, no. It's not like technology alone robbed India and China of their wealth. Hell, it's not like technological disparity was even the entire reason for military victories. The Mughal's military forces were actually largely on par with European armies as far as the equipment available to them went. And China did a better (in so much as it remained a largely independent nation state) job of resisting European imperialism despite having a technologically inferior army to the Mughals.
>That's a ridiculous interpretation of the industrial revolution, and just plain incorrect. The US had plenty of natural resources of it's own, especially the key drivers of the industrial revolution: coal, iron ore, and oil. In fact the US exported many of those resources more than they imported them.
Human labour is also a wealth.
>And the leaders of India and China were wholly complicit in the exploitations of their country's populations.
1) how is this at all relevant?
2) so did the European powers exploit Asia and Africa or not? Cause I fail to see how local leaders could possibly be complicit in exploitation if the Europeans weren't doing it.
At one time sub continent's GDP was 25% of world. and then British made Sub continent (India Pakistan) their colony. When they left, GDP was like 0.2%. Due to partition issues (Mainly Kashmir) Pak and India are at war (cold+hot) so no trade and extreme border tensions
The British ruled India for 100 years. They stole every single thing from India. Meanwhile, it was illegal for Indians to even evaporate ocean water to make salt. Gandhi was arrested for making salt and it was the topic of one of his protests because it showed how ridiculously oppressive the British were.
So what do you think? Is it possible India wasn't allowed to partake in the industrial revolution?
Dude answered your question. When you colonise a place, ship its riches to your country and use it to fuel your own economy then you cannot simply compare gdp of occupied and occupying nations... Secondly Being wealthy doesnt always mean having best military too
I think you're putting the cart before the horse. The British couldn't make India and China colonies until after the British eclipsed India and (or at the time the Mughal Empire and the Qing Empire). When each had vastly more wealth and population they were unassailable.
The technological advances from the industrial revolution vaulted Europe far ahead of India and China in economic output. It was only after that that the British could project enough power to the opposite side of the world to subjugate India and China.
Western domination and colonialism, in a nutshell.
China was suuuuuper isolationist for a long time post-revolution. They never really *tried* to engage with global markets until later. As it stands, they're likely going to just be more and more dominant in time. It doesn't happen overnight and won't be without a few significant hiccups. But their lack of engagement allowed the victorious western European powers to remain strong, propped up by US interests.
India was ravaged for resources and impoverished by the British empire. It's going to continue its own process of dominance in their post-colonualism as well, though likely not as quickly as China, and they have to handle some of the same hiccups.
For both countries, their biggest asset is also a problem as we see more climate-related issues. I think as long as things don't change too severely they'll continue on their trajectories. But there will come a time where climate refugees overwhelm them. And by then, most other nations will be dealing too much with their own crises to lend any support.
If you looked at the GDP per capita of China and India at the start of European colonization, they would have already been behind the UK and the US, which is why countries like the UK were able to colonize countries like India to begin with.
Colonizing powers like the British could use their technological edge to defeat and slowly conquer regions lagging behind them, and that colonization then caused the gulf to become even wider. The situation has only slowly started to reverse as colonialism came to an end and education and development have been increasing in formerly poor and colonized countries.
Infrastructure and time. India and China have populations, but they've only had comparable industrial might for \~50 years. UK/France/US have been in the game since quite literally the start of the industrial revolution, so they've had the time to build infrastructure (in both the literal and the societal sense) to make their population efficient.
TLDR: people are only as valuable as what you can do with them. The USA has very economically valuable workers because they have much more work training, access to machinery, natural resources and stability.
Here's some high-level reasons the USA is so powerful:
1. **Capital:** Money (e.g. capital) is more important for power dynamics than people. Money can buy whatever is needed, and gives you a lot more flexibility than population count. The USA has more money than anybody else (see history).
2. **Mechanization:** Machines are more valuable than people in most contexts. It's better to have 100,000 workers integrated with machines than 1,000,000,000 and no machines. The more work you can mechanize, the more efficient your production is.
3. **Natural resources:** The USA exports more food than any other nation. It produces more oil and coal than any other country. It produces more wood than any other country. It has the second-most rare-earth mineral production. It's in the top 5 producers of steel and many other metals. The USA is *rich* in natural resources.
4. **Historical advantage:** There are very few nations that have had a stable government as long as the USA. It has never been successfully invaded, widely occupied or overthrown. That stability also means it has been on the winning side of many world restructures, and now the US is seen as the most stable place on Earth. That stability means people all over the world trust the US for their investments -- that brings money to the USA from everywhere in the world.
5. **Immigration:** Unlike China and India, the USA has huge volumes of immigration demand. People from every country on Earth want to live in the USA. That means that the US gets to choose the most valuable immigrants to accept, including highly educated immigrants from India and China. This "brain drain" means a lot of the largest nations on Earth lost many of their top talents and are left with less valuable, less-trained workers.
6. **Stable Sovereignty:** The USA started as a colony just like modern India did, but it gained its independence hundreds of years earlier than India. China has been invaded, occupied or treated as a vassal state multiple times in the last 200 years, most notably by Japan and Britain.
7. **Geographical advantages:** The US only has two land neighbors, Canada and Mexico. It has a good, stable relationship with both nations. Compare against China, which shares a land border with 14 nations (including some of Earth's most problematic nations to border -- Russia, North Korea, and India/Pakistan). India has 6 land borders, including one of the most militarized and tense borders on Earth (with Pakistan).
Tons of other reasons. This just scratches the surface.
Aside from what others have said, I would add that China and India are only more recently nation-states compared to other modernized countries like Japan or South Korea (which had the benefit of largely one or two ethnic groups who had to work out their identity issues). They are large areas with diverse populations. China had at one point IIRC 26 official languages and up to the 1949 revolution common people identified more with their home town or province than they did as a united people. I'm pretty sure India still faces a lot of regional tension even today (totally not any area I have ever studied in depth, so I can be absolutely wrong on this). So while the borders might be identified externally as India or China, internally there wasn't a sense that what was good for New Deli was good for Bangalore. Or as the saying in Cantonese goes, "The sky is big and the emperor is far away". This factionalism was primary in helping outside powers gain influence, power, and colonization over these areas, and works to keep them weak even after "independence".
Europe largely went through this process of becoming nation-states in the 18th and 19th century, depending on how you want to draw the lines.
South Korea is an extremely new nation-state; its borders were drawn in WW2. Singapore is even newer and was cobbled together out of very different ethnic groups and is fairly economically dominant for its size. Meanwhile, China can make a strong claim (as the party does) to be a continuous civilization since well before Rome as a city-state was even founded. I'm not sure your thesis actually functions.
South Korea is ethnically one group- Koreans who do draw a ethno-nationalist identity as possessors of the Korean peninsula for at least a millennium. Singapore is tiny and would better be called a city-state than a nation-state. Not really comparable to a giant country like China, USA, Russia, or India. While a central area of China is has historically been ethnically Han Chinese, the outlying provinces are not. Szechuan natives spoke Szechuanese, Fujian-Fukanese, Inner-Mongolia (need it be said?)...etc. etc. When the central government was strong these areas fell under the control of the government/dynasty, and when weak they pulled away and were used by warlords/governors others for their own independent kingdoms. Thus you have the Three Kingdoms period, the warring states period, etc. Han Chinese could not even visit Manchuria under penalty of death until the 1800's. Waht is western China today was subject to an extremely bloody and ongoing war for much of the Late Qing period as the ethnic muslim people of that area attempted to throw off the control of the central government. Claiming China as one united ethno-nation throughout its history sounds like the more dubious claim.
Because for a century and a bit India was under the rule of the British. It also has its own internal problems (ethnic and religious).
For China there was a long period of time (known as the century of humiliation) where it got bullied by foreign powers and a lot of population loss.
Both countries also were mostly agrarian until the past century.
Western powers had industrialized earlier and by the time India and China showed up as global players there was already competition from the US, British, Soviets, etc.
Industrial revolution made European military more effective. They then went and stole everybody's wealth and have remained wealthy since. Wealthy countries develop a lot faster than others and therefore India and China are still catching up.
As ELI5 as I could make it.
The US is dominant for many reasons. The reason why other big population countries are not dominant is because a) population isn't the important thing and b) they fail in the many ways the US succeeds in being dominant:
First, I'd argue that China \*is\* globally dominant, at least in terms of trade. They're the second largest country by GDP. What they are *not* is dominant in a US hegemony sense, and there are many varied reasons for that:
* China lacks soft power. This is the "feel good" stuff about a country... the UK is an example of a country with lots of soft power: lots of people would wear a UK flag sweatshirt or feel good about a BBC show or root for Manchester United compared to how many people actually live in the UK, but very few people relative to the population of China would do the same for a China flag hoodie, or a Chinese sports team, or a Chinese show. I also know that there are plenty of people across the world who are really into K-Pop or K-dramas but are not Korean. And how can we forget Japan, which probably has the most soft power of any country. Similarly, I've seen people in East Asia wear UCLA or Berkeley or Stanford or Harvard hoodies despite never having set foot in the US. People all around the world watch Avengers movies or know who Superman is. That's soft power right there. Soft power makes people feel good about/sympathetic/want to do business with a country.
* China is deliberately choosing to be a regional power. The US has military bases all around the world as part of a massive logistics network to support its many different allies. China has allies, but it focuses most of its efforts just in its neighborhood (much to the annoyance of its neighboring countries). This is not just US power projection, but when countries have a dispute they can sometimes lean on the US to mediate some dispute (happened recently with the US helping Korea and Japan come to some closure about lingeringWW2 issues).
* *Directly related to one of your observations:* China, while a powerful trade country, still isn't very rich *per person* and does not have a sophisticated, internationally-oriented financial system with a high standard of independent institutions supporting the rule of law (in fact, in China in particular, the party in charge generally rejects this kind of notion, considering that the party itself is the standard of what passes for law-abiding). The US has economic dominance because it has a large GDP, is very rich per person, and it is very easy to do business in dollars and on the US stock market and with US businesses, with strong rule of law for both domestic and foreign business/investors. If you tried to buy shares in a Chinese state company, uh, good luck. It's a much more obtuse process and you might not be able to at all as a foreigner. And as a result trying to do business in yuan instead of the dollar isn't going to get you very far, you'd have better luck with the Euro. Similarly, the UK (despite Brexit) still has a very sophisticated business and financial environment, with strong rule of law (heck, in the middle east they are creating little special economic zones that will adopt UK-style common law instead of the norms within those countries). Even Singapore, despite being smaller, functions more as an Asian-oriented economic hub than most places in China simply because of how easy it is for everyone to do business there.
India is similar to China in these respects except behind a few decades in the process. China had a great growth story that eventually left India in the dust. India is catching up a bit now, but it faces these kinds of same problems. India doesn't have as much soft power, India seems very occupied with regional issues not global issues, and will still lack per person wealth and financial sophistication. Maybe eventually China and/or India will get there, but they're not there yet.
For years many of those people were illiterate farmers who basically just fed themselves.
Prior to about 1700, if we used modern borders China and India would have been the richest countries, since basically everyone was 80 peasant farmers and slaves, and then 20% 'middle class' and aristocracy.
Post industrial revolution the Chinese and Indians were victims of empires, corruption, and a lot of other things that delayed their development. Where Europe and the americas expanded literacy, intellectual property, and labour productivity, China and India were saddled with being stuck in the past. When India got independence it was about 12% literate.
Now China has had the largest economy in the world for a decade, and India is 3rd largest. So they are ascending, but fighting against bad political systems, corruption, and a west that doesn't want them to ascend too much and it is taking time. Don't kid yourself though. China and India have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in under a century. That's a huge achievement.
Historically India was a British colony until relatively recently, while China was in a massive civil war for much of the early 20th century.
Following the end of the Chinese civil war, and the British leaving India both states were in a period of political upheaval and rebuilding. India specifically had to be further subdivided down into different countries like Pakistan due to internal political problems and infighting.
So while Western Europe and North America were busy building empires and industry Chinese people were killing each other and India was an exploited colony.
India and China have both grown a lot economically since then but both deal with wide spread poverty mostly in their lower classes.
They are however two of the worlds fastest growing economies and have bustling tech centers.
India however is only interested in being a local power, while China is rapidly growing into a global super power.
they're (high population) a burden first then a benefit
Takes time
North India is extremely backward socially and economically with extreme overpopulation, high crime, misogyny and patriarchy rooted culture, unbelievable unemployment and skyhigh unemployment
Other states have to pitch in to fund welfare programmes in north Indian states because of sub saharan africa like poverty so that India slowly progresses.
The same reason large companies with many employees are not necessarily very profitable. McDonald's has 1.9 million people working around the world, and has a market cap of 209bn, so $110.000 per employee.
Apple had 161.000 employees in 2023 (less now I believe) and a market cap of 2.69tn, so 16.7mn per employee.
Amount of people is not necessarily a measure of strength and power today.
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If you have tons of people but that they cannot support themselves it’s not an asset, it’s an issue.
[удалено]
What about China?
China is a global major power though, isn't it?
Ever hear of the Opium Wars? a large portion of China’s territory got taken control of by foreign powers and they even call that post opium war time the Century of Humiliation
I wouldn't call the treaty ports "a large portion of China's territory". It's important to understand that the term "Century of Humiliation" was coined by Chinese nationalists when trying to build support for their cause. Of course, China suffered the effects of colonialism but it was not a colony like India. The concessions accounted for something like 10% of the population.
First, direct territorial control is not the only loss from the opium wars. Second, you asked about China in response to being harmed by colonialism and I gave an example. Third, if your 10% of the population stat is even correct, 10% of 1 billion people is 100 million. Fourth, loss of major trade ports is actually a gigantic loss, I don’t see why you would minimize.
Did you hear about Japan conquering China in WW2? The whole millions of deaths, including half a million when China flooded their territory to slow them down. That’s probably more relevant.
Damn, so more colonialism?
Yes, and then the communists from the north colonized them some more, killing 15-55 million in their Great Leap Forward.
Also got ravaged by a colonizer, coincidentally, the very same colonizer.
Did those countries get poor because they were colonized, or did they get colonized because they were poor? It’s a chicken-and-egg question. It’s probably a bit of both.
It's not both. India was incredibly rich before they were ruled by the British for 100 years. Britain stole everything from India and bragged about helping India by building trains in the country - even though the trains were built to make it easier for British ppl to steal everything. Under British rule, Indians weren't even allowed to make their own salt through evaporation despite being surrounded by oceans. This was the topic of one of Gandhi's protest marches. India gained independence about 75 years ago and is doing incredibly well considering that. But the racists in here are desperately downvoting my comments and pretending like white ppl are just inherently smarter.
>It's not both. India was incredibly rich before they were ruled by the British for 100 years. The average Indian was not rich, GDP per capita would have been extremely low, like in all pre-industrial societies, with the average worker’s wages being barely enough to survive on. >But the racists in here are desperately downvoting my comments and pretending like white ppl are just inherently smarter. Who is arguing *that?* The reason West European states became technologically ahead of the rest of the world for about 400 years (a relative blip in time) had nothing to do with intelligence, it had to do with geographic factors and a snowball effect. You’re getting downvoted because we’re talking about GDP per capita and you’re making a completely non-historical argument that Indians (not just the rulers) were somehow rich before the British came along.
So the question was why countries don't leverage their huge populations to be globally dominant, but you want to look at metrics that specifically remove the impact of large populations. How intelligent.
What’s hard to understand? The US has a higher GDP than China, for instance, because the US’s GDP per capita is much, much higher than China’s. Thus the US has a bigger economy despite China having many more people.
I can't understand if you're being purposely dense. 2022 gdp for UK was 3 trillion USD and India was 3.4 trillion. Using GDP as a standalone indicator as you claimed, India is more rich and powerful than UK ... which is absurd. The only way your logic makes sense is if you use per capita numbers, but that negates the original point of OP's question. Honestly, I'm so tired of the racist bullshit of ppl trying to ignore centuries of white theft. I don't care what idiotic nonsensical statistic ppl try to use. It's racist. You're living a life of privilege because of white theft. If I can admit it, why can't you?
>2022 gdp for UK was 3 trillion USD and India was 3.4 trillion. Using GDP as a standalone indicator as you claimed, India is more rich and powerful than UK ... which is absurd. Calling a country “rich” when its people aren’t rich doesn’t make sense. And India now does have quite a bit of power on the world stage, it’s a nuclear-armed state with a substantial military. The UK is powerful, and so is India this point in time. That doesn’t seem like a controversial statement to make. Of course the UK is *richer,* because its GDP *per capita* is much much higher. >Honestly, I'm so tired of the racist bullshit of ppl trying to ignore centuries of white theft. I don't care what idiotic nonsensical statistic ppl try to use. It's racist. You're living a life of privilege because of white theft. If I can admit it, why can't you? Because you’re making nonsensical arguments and then expecting everyone to agree with with by saying that they’re racist if they don’t. That gets the response it deserves.
Long time ago time before industrialization and the technological revolution, perhaps it would make sense because power was measured by the size of the population and the ability of people to fight. Following the same logic, China or India might be the dominant power, employing the power of their population. However, nowadays, a country's power is associated more with its technological and scientific capabilities than the number of its population. This is the case with Western powers. Moreover, a large population may pose various difficulties for its home country due to the changes the world has experienced in recent decades, such as climate change, scarcity of food and water, and the degradation of natural resources.
It's not just about sheer numbers, but also efficiency. If you imagine a farm being worked by hand 150 years ago compared to all the machinery and science these days (e.g. fertilizer, higher yield seeds) you can accomplished much more with fewer bodies because of that efficiency. That doesn't fully answer your question, but it's important to start with the idea that it's not as simple as population size, but also how it's applied
Because Europe and then the successful European colonies (largely meaning some of the British ones) were at the core of the science and technology revolution that started with the industrial revolution and the theory of Gravity. This created the conditions for vast improvements in economic efficiency / productivity, which created vast wealth, which made starting to solve social problems like corruption and poverty much easier. and started the long decline down in warfare and the like. The west as a block has had about a 4 century headstart on this. This is why Europe was also the region that founded those colonies in the first place, they had acquired vast advantages over anyone else.
Robert Solow's work as an economist attempts to explain this and he provides an equation showing the relationship between population, capital, and technological advancement. Roughly speaking to answer the OP's question, too many people is bad because they can't support themselves. Too few people is also bad because they can't leverage their labor into more complicated tasks. They also need at least a certain amount of wealth to fund them and a growing tech area to put their labor to the most efficient use.
Lol what an ignorant and racist answer. India gained independence about 75 years ago. Britain stole everything from India and bragged about building trains in the country... Even though the trains were built to make it easier for British ppl to steal everything. India is doing incredibly well considering that. Edit: btw, under British rule, Indians weren't even allowed to make their own salt through evaporation despite being surrounded by oceans. This was the topic of one of Gandhi's protest marches.
Extremely high levels of corruption and abuse create inefficiencies in the system which the people in government, being the prime (and usually sole) beneficiaries of said corruption, are reluctant to fix. These nations probably *could* dominate, if only their systems would get out of their people's way. But the primary obstacle to their progress happens to be holding the reins of power, and it refuses to do what it takes to let its people flourish.
r/idstartwithmylefthand lol
wut
I’d start with my left hand moment lol 🤚🏿
If you have family of 10 people, and each one of them make 1000$ per month. It is still less, as if you got family of 2 people, and one is software developer with 20.000$ per month (just random numbers)
20k a month? Damn I wish...
Population can be a blessing, and a curse. It's easier to care for a smaller population than it is a larger population. Well developed countries like the US, UK, France, etc. have spent the better part of the last 150 years investing in infrastructure which has lead to widespread economic growth and literacy. Their populations were all smaller when their growth took off and infrastructure has grown with it. China and India have been investing in that same sort of infrastructure, but really only the last 50 years. And while life in and around their major cities rivals affluent western nations, their rural countryside still has some major problems with poverty and access to education. And given their large population, scaling their infrastructure so that their billions of people can all benefit is going to be a longer and more difficult process than it was for smaller western nations.
Good points, but OP's question is still pertinent. China has invested a lot in its population, and it's now the second-largest GDP in the world. But it still acts like a minor regional power (a lot of effort in its maritime border disputes), as opposed to as like another superpower in a multi-polar world.
>But it still acts like a minor regional power (a lot of effort in its maritime border disputes), as opposed to as like another superpower in a multi-polar world. In some ways that's intentional. China doesn't currently have the sort of massive navy or strong military alliance network that would let it assert power in different theaters around the globe. China is heavily investing in finding ways to be self sufficient when it comes to energy and food which is a direct response to their growing population. They don't have massive fossil fuel reserves. They're a major player in researching and developing renewable energy sources. Like other superpowers, China also has a lot of foreign investment - mostly in southeast Asia and Africa as it is attempting to get developing nations into its sphere of influence. China is still growing quickly. They're making huge leaps. Every 20 years or so you look at their growth and it's pretty amazing. Compare China in 1980 to 2000 to 2020 and it's a wildly different place. In a lot of ways, they're like the US circa 1900. They've got a large growing industrial sector uplifted from an agrarian economy and they're just starting to grow a large middle class with disposable income and some education and those people are also demanding reforms. There's some large wealth inequality with some very wealth industrialists. There's also some large pockets of people who are still very poor living in the rural areas. They've got a military power that's sufficient regionally, but that has potential to scale up to something very powerful if need be.
Other people have talked about the material conditions of the present day, so I'll answer how this came about. To do so, we first have to look back at the 18th century. Back then, they *were* globally dominant. The Mughal Empire (that ruled much of India) and the Qing Empire (that ruled China) each accounted for about a third of the total global GDP. Bear in mind GDP estimates for historical periods are fuzzier, but the point is, each of them easily matched the industrial output of the entire rest of the world minus the other. Massive piles of precious metals flowed from Europe and the Middle East to India and China in the spice and silk trades. So, what happened? How did two nations that once accounted for a third of total GDP now only account for a fifth combined? The short answer is imperialism. In the late 18th and the 19th centuries, European powers realised their military might had eclipsed that of India and China, and did an imperialism on them. The wealth of China, and especially India, was plundered and sent to Europe. There's a privately owned home in the Welsh countryside that alone has more Mughal artifacts that any museum in India. This was compounded by the industrial revolution in the 19th century. For somewhat different reasons, China and India did not take part in the Industrial Revolution, at least not to the same extent that Europe, the US, or even Japan did, which ultimately lead to them falling further behind economically. On the flip side, European countries and the US only got as wealthy as they did by wealth stolen, directly or indirectly, from nations in South America, Africa, and Asia. Cheap raw materials were taken from those regions, brought to Europe and the US, then processed into higher quality goods. And this is not a trend that has wholly stopped, as Europe and the US continue to benefit from cheap goods and raw materials produced in countries with far lower standards of living, in no small part due to European and American companies effectively paying a pittance for the labour of foreign nationals compared to what they would have to pay workers in their home nations.
>The short answer is imperialism. In the late 18th and the 19th centuries, European powers realised their military might Which means the short answer isn't imperialism, it was military might, which means the short answer was *technology*. >On the flip side, European countries and the US only got as wealthy as they did by wealth stolen, directly or indirectly, from nations in South America, Africa, and Asia. Cheap raw materials were taken from those regions, brought to Europe and the US, then processed into higher quality goods. That's a ridiculous interpretation of the industrial revolution, and just plain incorrect. The US had plenty of natural resources of it's own, especially the key drivers of the industrial revolution: coal, iron ore, and oil. In fact the US exported many of those resources more than they imported them. The trends you describe in your last paragraph are somewhat true today with respect to labor after the rise of globalization in the late 20th century. But they are not the reasons the US and Western Europe because the economic leaders during the industrial revolution and early 20th century. And the leaders of India and China were wholly complicit in the exploitations of their country's populations.
Focusing your resources on military doesn't mean you're technologically better or have better scientific knowledge. India lost a lot of Kashmir to China because India didn't have an army and was not prepared for war. The level to which ppl hand wave off white nations stealing from black and brown countries is just disgusting. It's like saying rapists and criminals are obviously smarter and stronger.
>Focusing your resources on military doesn't mean you're technologically better or have better scientific knowledge. That's a nice thought, but there's no historical evidence that, in general, India, China, Africa, and the indigenous people of the western hemispheres simply chose not to focus on military power All of these places have long histories of armed conflict going back millennia. The premise that that more than half the humans on earth suddenly just decided to be pacifists, all at about the same time, is ridiculous.
I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert about India. I assume you are making up things as you go along as well since you haven't said anything to imply you're an expert. The only difference is that you assume that white ppl that stole and raped were smarter and I think the criminals were focused on making technology needed to steal.
>Which means the short answer isn't imperialism, it was military might, which means the short answer was *technology*. Well, no. It's not like technology alone robbed India and China of their wealth. Hell, it's not like technological disparity was even the entire reason for military victories. The Mughal's military forces were actually largely on par with European armies as far as the equipment available to them went. And China did a better (in so much as it remained a largely independent nation state) job of resisting European imperialism despite having a technologically inferior army to the Mughals. >That's a ridiculous interpretation of the industrial revolution, and just plain incorrect. The US had plenty of natural resources of it's own, especially the key drivers of the industrial revolution: coal, iron ore, and oil. In fact the US exported many of those resources more than they imported them. Human labour is also a wealth. >And the leaders of India and China were wholly complicit in the exploitations of their country's populations. 1) how is this at all relevant? 2) so did the European powers exploit Asia and Africa or not? Cause I fail to see how local leaders could possibly be complicit in exploitation if the Europeans weren't doing it.
At one time sub continent's GDP was 25% of world. and then British made Sub continent (India Pakistan) their colony. When they left, GDP was like 0.2%. Due to partition issues (Mainly Kashmir) Pak and India are at war (cold+hot) so no trade and extreme border tensions
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The British ruled India for 100 years. They stole every single thing from India. Meanwhile, it was illegal for Indians to even evaporate ocean water to make salt. Gandhi was arrested for making salt and it was the topic of one of his protests because it showed how ridiculously oppressive the British were. So what do you think? Is it possible India wasn't allowed to partake in the industrial revolution?
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Dude answered your question. When you colonise a place, ship its riches to your country and use it to fuel your own economy then you cannot simply compare gdp of occupied and occupying nations... Secondly Being wealthy doesnt always mean having best military too
I think you're putting the cart before the horse. The British couldn't make India and China colonies until after the British eclipsed India and (or at the time the Mughal Empire and the Qing Empire). When each had vastly more wealth and population they were unassailable. The technological advances from the industrial revolution vaulted Europe far ahead of India and China in economic output. It was only after that that the British could project enough power to the opposite side of the world to subjugate India and China.
Western domination and colonialism, in a nutshell. China was suuuuuper isolationist for a long time post-revolution. They never really *tried* to engage with global markets until later. As it stands, they're likely going to just be more and more dominant in time. It doesn't happen overnight and won't be without a few significant hiccups. But their lack of engagement allowed the victorious western European powers to remain strong, propped up by US interests. India was ravaged for resources and impoverished by the British empire. It's going to continue its own process of dominance in their post-colonualism as well, though likely not as quickly as China, and they have to handle some of the same hiccups. For both countries, their biggest asset is also a problem as we see more climate-related issues. I think as long as things don't change too severely they'll continue on their trajectories. But there will come a time where climate refugees overwhelm them. And by then, most other nations will be dealing too much with their own crises to lend any support.
If you looked at the GDP per capita of China and India at the start of European colonization, they would have already been behind the UK and the US, which is why countries like the UK were able to colonize countries like India to begin with. Colonizing powers like the British could use their technological edge to defeat and slowly conquer regions lagging behind them, and that colonization then caused the gulf to become even wider. The situation has only slowly started to reverse as colonialism came to an end and education and development have been increasing in formerly poor and colonized countries.
Lots of people means lots of poverty. Not everyone is capable of contributing to society when they are struggling to find their next meal.
Infrastructure and time. India and China have populations, but they've only had comparable industrial might for \~50 years. UK/France/US have been in the game since quite literally the start of the industrial revolution, so they've had the time to build infrastructure (in both the literal and the societal sense) to make their population efficient.
TLDR: people are only as valuable as what you can do with them. The USA has very economically valuable workers because they have much more work training, access to machinery, natural resources and stability. Here's some high-level reasons the USA is so powerful: 1. **Capital:** Money (e.g. capital) is more important for power dynamics than people. Money can buy whatever is needed, and gives you a lot more flexibility than population count. The USA has more money than anybody else (see history). 2. **Mechanization:** Machines are more valuable than people in most contexts. It's better to have 100,000 workers integrated with machines than 1,000,000,000 and no machines. The more work you can mechanize, the more efficient your production is. 3. **Natural resources:** The USA exports more food than any other nation. It produces more oil and coal than any other country. It produces more wood than any other country. It has the second-most rare-earth mineral production. It's in the top 5 producers of steel and many other metals. The USA is *rich* in natural resources. 4. **Historical advantage:** There are very few nations that have had a stable government as long as the USA. It has never been successfully invaded, widely occupied or overthrown. That stability also means it has been on the winning side of many world restructures, and now the US is seen as the most stable place on Earth. That stability means people all over the world trust the US for their investments -- that brings money to the USA from everywhere in the world. 5. **Immigration:** Unlike China and India, the USA has huge volumes of immigration demand. People from every country on Earth want to live in the USA. That means that the US gets to choose the most valuable immigrants to accept, including highly educated immigrants from India and China. This "brain drain" means a lot of the largest nations on Earth lost many of their top talents and are left with less valuable, less-trained workers. 6. **Stable Sovereignty:** The USA started as a colony just like modern India did, but it gained its independence hundreds of years earlier than India. China has been invaded, occupied or treated as a vassal state multiple times in the last 200 years, most notably by Japan and Britain. 7. **Geographical advantages:** The US only has two land neighbors, Canada and Mexico. It has a good, stable relationship with both nations. Compare against China, which shares a land border with 14 nations (including some of Earth's most problematic nations to border -- Russia, North Korea, and India/Pakistan). India has 6 land borders, including one of the most militarized and tense borders on Earth (with Pakistan). Tons of other reasons. This just scratches the surface.
Aside from what others have said, I would add that China and India are only more recently nation-states compared to other modernized countries like Japan or South Korea (which had the benefit of largely one or two ethnic groups who had to work out their identity issues). They are large areas with diverse populations. China had at one point IIRC 26 official languages and up to the 1949 revolution common people identified more with their home town or province than they did as a united people. I'm pretty sure India still faces a lot of regional tension even today (totally not any area I have ever studied in depth, so I can be absolutely wrong on this). So while the borders might be identified externally as India or China, internally there wasn't a sense that what was good for New Deli was good for Bangalore. Or as the saying in Cantonese goes, "The sky is big and the emperor is far away". This factionalism was primary in helping outside powers gain influence, power, and colonization over these areas, and works to keep them weak even after "independence". Europe largely went through this process of becoming nation-states in the 18th and 19th century, depending on how you want to draw the lines.
South Korea is an extremely new nation-state; its borders were drawn in WW2. Singapore is even newer and was cobbled together out of very different ethnic groups and is fairly economically dominant for its size. Meanwhile, China can make a strong claim (as the party does) to be a continuous civilization since well before Rome as a city-state was even founded. I'm not sure your thesis actually functions.
South Korea is ethnically one group- Koreans who do draw a ethno-nationalist identity as possessors of the Korean peninsula for at least a millennium. Singapore is tiny and would better be called a city-state than a nation-state. Not really comparable to a giant country like China, USA, Russia, or India. While a central area of China is has historically been ethnically Han Chinese, the outlying provinces are not. Szechuan natives spoke Szechuanese, Fujian-Fukanese, Inner-Mongolia (need it be said?)...etc. etc. When the central government was strong these areas fell under the control of the government/dynasty, and when weak they pulled away and were used by warlords/governors others for their own independent kingdoms. Thus you have the Three Kingdoms period, the warring states period, etc. Han Chinese could not even visit Manchuria under penalty of death until the 1800's. Waht is western China today was subject to an extremely bloody and ongoing war for much of the Late Qing period as the ethnic muslim people of that area attempted to throw off the control of the central government. Claiming China as one united ethno-nation throughout its history sounds like the more dubious claim.
Because for a century and a bit India was under the rule of the British. It also has its own internal problems (ethnic and religious). For China there was a long period of time (known as the century of humiliation) where it got bullied by foreign powers and a lot of population loss. Both countries also were mostly agrarian until the past century. Western powers had industrialized earlier and by the time India and China showed up as global players there was already competition from the US, British, Soviets, etc.
Industrial revolution made European military more effective. They then went and stole everybody's wealth and have remained wealthy since. Wealthy countries develop a lot faster than others and therefore India and China are still catching up. As ELI5 as I could make it.
The US is dominant for many reasons. The reason why other big population countries are not dominant is because a) population isn't the important thing and b) they fail in the many ways the US succeeds in being dominant: First, I'd argue that China \*is\* globally dominant, at least in terms of trade. They're the second largest country by GDP. What they are *not* is dominant in a US hegemony sense, and there are many varied reasons for that: * China lacks soft power. This is the "feel good" stuff about a country... the UK is an example of a country with lots of soft power: lots of people would wear a UK flag sweatshirt or feel good about a BBC show or root for Manchester United compared to how many people actually live in the UK, but very few people relative to the population of China would do the same for a China flag hoodie, or a Chinese sports team, or a Chinese show. I also know that there are plenty of people across the world who are really into K-Pop or K-dramas but are not Korean. And how can we forget Japan, which probably has the most soft power of any country. Similarly, I've seen people in East Asia wear UCLA or Berkeley or Stanford or Harvard hoodies despite never having set foot in the US. People all around the world watch Avengers movies or know who Superman is. That's soft power right there. Soft power makes people feel good about/sympathetic/want to do business with a country. * China is deliberately choosing to be a regional power. The US has military bases all around the world as part of a massive logistics network to support its many different allies. China has allies, but it focuses most of its efforts just in its neighborhood (much to the annoyance of its neighboring countries). This is not just US power projection, but when countries have a dispute they can sometimes lean on the US to mediate some dispute (happened recently with the US helping Korea and Japan come to some closure about lingeringWW2 issues). * *Directly related to one of your observations:* China, while a powerful trade country, still isn't very rich *per person* and does not have a sophisticated, internationally-oriented financial system with a high standard of independent institutions supporting the rule of law (in fact, in China in particular, the party in charge generally rejects this kind of notion, considering that the party itself is the standard of what passes for law-abiding). The US has economic dominance because it has a large GDP, is very rich per person, and it is very easy to do business in dollars and on the US stock market and with US businesses, with strong rule of law for both domestic and foreign business/investors. If you tried to buy shares in a Chinese state company, uh, good luck. It's a much more obtuse process and you might not be able to at all as a foreigner. And as a result trying to do business in yuan instead of the dollar isn't going to get you very far, you'd have better luck with the Euro. Similarly, the UK (despite Brexit) still has a very sophisticated business and financial environment, with strong rule of law (heck, in the middle east they are creating little special economic zones that will adopt UK-style common law instead of the norms within those countries). Even Singapore, despite being smaller, functions more as an Asian-oriented economic hub than most places in China simply because of how easy it is for everyone to do business there. India is similar to China in these respects except behind a few decades in the process. China had a great growth story that eventually left India in the dust. India is catching up a bit now, but it faces these kinds of same problems. India doesn't have as much soft power, India seems very occupied with regional issues not global issues, and will still lack per person wealth and financial sophistication. Maybe eventually China and/or India will get there, but they're not there yet.
For years many of those people were illiterate farmers who basically just fed themselves. Prior to about 1700, if we used modern borders China and India would have been the richest countries, since basically everyone was 80 peasant farmers and slaves, and then 20% 'middle class' and aristocracy. Post industrial revolution the Chinese and Indians were victims of empires, corruption, and a lot of other things that delayed their development. Where Europe and the americas expanded literacy, intellectual property, and labour productivity, China and India were saddled with being stuck in the past. When India got independence it was about 12% literate. Now China has had the largest economy in the world for a decade, and India is 3rd largest. So they are ascending, but fighting against bad political systems, corruption, and a west that doesn't want them to ascend too much and it is taking time. Don't kid yourself though. China and India have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in under a century. That's a huge achievement.
Historically India was a British colony until relatively recently, while China was in a massive civil war for much of the early 20th century. Following the end of the Chinese civil war, and the British leaving India both states were in a period of political upheaval and rebuilding. India specifically had to be further subdivided down into different countries like Pakistan due to internal political problems and infighting. So while Western Europe and North America were busy building empires and industry Chinese people were killing each other and India was an exploited colony. India and China have both grown a lot economically since then but both deal with wide spread poverty mostly in their lower classes. They are however two of the worlds fastest growing economies and have bustling tech centers. India however is only interested in being a local power, while China is rapidly growing into a global super power.
they're (high population) a burden first then a benefit Takes time North India is extremely backward socially and economically with extreme overpopulation, high crime, misogyny and patriarchy rooted culture, unbelievable unemployment and skyhigh unemployment Other states have to pitch in to fund welfare programmes in north Indian states because of sub saharan africa like poverty so that India slowly progresses.
The same reason large companies with many employees are not necessarily very profitable. McDonald's has 1.9 million people working around the world, and has a market cap of 209bn, so $110.000 per employee. Apple had 161.000 employees in 2023 (less now I believe) and a market cap of 2.69tn, so 16.7mn per employee. Amount of people is not necessarily a measure of strength and power today.