China's big Retreat

Six decades before Columbus and Vasco da Gama, huge Chinese treasure fleets journeyed to India and Africa. Their ships dwarfed the European vessels in both size and numbers. It seems very unlikely that Europe could have prevailed against such fleets if ever they had met, but in one of the strange turns of fate on which whole empires depend, China withdrew from the seas, abandoned ship building, and forbade foreign trade.

Why did they do it? The answer is probably not simple, but one aggravating factor was that due to turbulent successions and other problems, the Chinese throne lost much of its tax base - the rich had largely escaped taxation altogether.

I wonder what lessons there are for the US in the blunders of the foolish emperor who tossed away China's world eminence and condemned it to centuries of relative backwardness and foreign domination. We have recently seen the damage one fool can do to our Nation and its place in the world. We are seeing today the continuing damage an oligarchy can inflict in its grasping greed.

The lessons of history are complex, of course, and more empires have fallen through overweening ambition than inappropriate diffidence.

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