It is all very well to point up the ease with which the elites can corrupt our American political institutions, but in the complete absence of such institutions, government can be very bad. I don’t mean morally bad; I mean incompetent, clueless, shortsighted, and utterly absorbed in factional fights. Chinese government usually takes the better part of a dynastic cycle to get that bad, a few decades at least. But some of the dynasties were very short.

On the other side, China has one great thing going for her: ethnic homogeneity. The Chinese authorities underplay this, designating the Zhuang (16 million) and the Manchu (10 million) as separate minority groups to get the Han proportion of the population down to 92 percent”€”not much different from the 90-percent-European USA of 1960.

This is disingenuous. I have lived in Manchuria and traveled all around the region. Without a degree in physical anthropology and a good set of calipers, you cannot distinguish a Manchu from a Han Chinese. The Manchus collaborated with the Japanese in 1931-45. When China regained the region, wise Manchus melted into the wallpaper as best they could, thoroughly Sinifying themselves. Similarly, the Zhuang are distinctive only when dressed up in traditional costume for a “minority” show; they are otherwise indistinguishable from other highland south Chinese, and most speak Mandarin for preference. Carleton Coon’s classic text on physical anthropology doesn’t even have an index entry for the Zhuang (not even under the older spelling “Chuang”).

Metropolitan China is at least 99 percent Han Chinese. Only in the troublesome outer regions of Tibet and Turkestan are there any large numbers of non-Chinese. The leadership boasts of their 56 “national minorities” mainly for the purpose of pretending, to themselves and us, that the Uighurs and Tibetans are just as Chinese as the Manchus and the Zhuang. If the Chinese had the good sense to give these outer regions real autonomy as I have urged them to (why don’t people listen?), China would be more ethnically homogeneous than Japan. Even as things are, non-Chinese persons are only three percent or so of China’s population.

China is thus spared a multiethnic society’s massive inefficiencies and vexations. Whatever may happen to their system of government, they will at least be dealing with each other without ethnic rancor.

The 21st century will not be like that for America. What will it be like? I think genetics blogger “TangoMan” gets it pretty much right in this very interesting comment thread on Chuck Rudd’s blog:

As the demography changes further and we become a minority-majority nation, the costs of maintaining equality of outcome become ever more onerous so more taxes must be raised, more spending must be dedicated towards social programs designed to equalize outcomes, more restrictions on freedom must be imposed to maintain good order and the burden on high income whites and Asians grows and the prospects for their children diminish as they enter a world ruled by a racial spoils system.

As TangoMan also points out (further down the thread): “The majority of children in kindergarten last year were NAMs [i.e., Non-Asian Minorities].” The die is cast.

I agree with Ron Unz: “[W]ithin the foreseeable future the torch of human progress and world leadership will inevitably pass into Chinese hands.” It will not be our “extractive elites” that bring down the USA, but the remorseless tides of demographic change and the implacable facts of human biodiversity.