I won't call that exchange of ideas or cooperation, the plow, cross bow, paper were never intended to be exported and the latter 2 were explicitly banned from being exported. Thus historically, it is much more like everyone stealing everyone else's ideas and technology.
Crossbows and gunpowder seem to have been invented independantly in the West (the Chinese contribution was saltpeter that was originally exported as a medicine, not a weapon ingredient). Export bans were on paper produktion technology and silk worms. Both were finally snatched through war and smuggling. The plow was exported without any troubles. China did have an export ban on multi-bow crossbows that were complicated to manufacture, but it's not clear if it was limited know-how or an explicit ban. Other great Chinese inventions are in salt mining (that was possibly invented independantly in the West or after hearsay knowledge). Porcellain production was also tried by the West, but they had no kaolin (notice the still Chinese name for the susbstance), until finding it per chance. The Chinese didn't make much of a secret about porcelain because they only knew one source for the suitable clay (the urine treatment for finer wares was know-how not exported to the Westeners).
Just to list a few examples, Chinese were open in exporting some know-how they didn't consider important and like everyone else guarded other knowledge as secret as possibly because their livelyhood depended on it. In my opinion state bans have much to do with the state participation in the economy.
Not really, I assume you mean brown water navy instead of green. the DF21 itself is a regional platform; the technology it represent is global. basically if you can make a medium range ballistic missile hit a moving target on the open seas, you can port that technology to a ICBM for a global strike capability. It is like a sputnik moment, if the soviet can put something in low earth orbit, they can put a nuke anywhere on the earth; so if the Chinese can hit a moving ship with a medium range balistic missile, they can also do it with a long range missile.
I do mean green water navy because that's the type of navy you need for the island chains China currently claims as her naval theatre of operation. The blue water navy is under development. The DF21 is a missile for this current green water navy and nicely covers their area of operations. I absolutely agree that when China goes towards a blue water navy, they will think about developing large missiles to support these ships further away IF the missile support approach works. But that's speculation about the future. We do have a DF21 system that can work fine for the current navy with both operating in a region not far away from the Chinese coast. The capabilities of this navy are beyond brown water and their ambition is blue water. Does this remove all misunderstandings?
I don't disagree with you here, but how many decades do you need? I also doubt China need a blue water navy anytime soon nor is it necessarily desirable. Since you live in Germany, Germany only needed the high sea fleet to be reasonably potent to basically incapacitate the royal navy in her actions. China only needed to be able to turn the sea within the first island chain into a chinese lake and be able to threaten anything within the pacific.
The German naval policy is an issue that has been discussed at length. The historian Nipperdey has in my opinion written the best account. Germany was more dependant on her SLOC than Britain and it was perfectly justified to develop a fleet that could protect these. The High Seas Fleet failed miserably in that task because the Germans were overly fond of Mahan and totally neglected SLOC protection and fleet in being operations. The British quickly wiped the oceans clear of German surface ships and the impressive battle fleet couldn't have exploited a possible victory against Britain because most of their ships, unlike their name, were not fit for the High Seas. In essence, the German navy had no chance to win from the start. Adding insult to injury, the Germans regarded themselves as strong and despised submarines as weak, so they weren't among the first developers of such and were very lucky that civilians in Germany took an interest in the subject. If the German navy would ever have been meant for a threat to Great Britain, it would have required amphibious capabilities in order to raid the island and force the British fleet to fight under conditions they didn't chose.
The German gun and resilence designs were good, but speed was too slow, so they never had a chance to outrun some British ships and shoot down lighter armoured ships. This development in the surface fleet just happened after WWI as part of the lessons learned. Another issue was the tonnage that the Germans keeped high instead of keeping the fleet small and modern. The old ships were a waste of money for little fighting value. The problem was that German naval build-up was based on numbers and kind of ships being fixed by law instead of modernizing a smaller fleet to have as much fighting power as possible for the buck with a tonnage that would have betrayed their capability. Naturally during such a period of rapid development it's very hard to adjust to something that new and it took till after WWII for that idea to enter the minds of the military.
in a degree, you are correct, but you had skipped eons of history. India was never a unified country until the British took over India. India never had the Chinese tradition of mass manufacturing (200 BC Qin factories thousands of miles apart made uniform weaponary with a strict tolerance of size, quality, weight etc.) or grand civil works like the grand canal or the imperial highway. India was also a caste system; more than a democracy with a very fractured language -> at least in China everybody writes Chinese even if they speak something else.
I disagree that India had a worst starting point than China, the soviets withheld knowledge such as blue prints and formulas to China, Chinese industry was fractured to serve what ever benifactory countries needed. the entire tungsten industry was developed for nazi germany. The industries in manchuria for Japan. India have an elite cadre of British trained scientists and technologists. Infact, if you look at the massive destruction in China prior to the proclamation of the PRC; China is at a very poor start. India actually have an operating arms industry.
The Moghul Empire united most of India as well as their religious based social system. The Muslims and other religious groups were kind of rebels against the caste system, but had their own problems of militaristic states that constantly needed money for some kind of fight that was meant to justify the existence of the empire and the life of the leader.
European accounts are quite astonished at the low level of Indian craftsmen's tools and amazed by their feats of outstanding skill that enabled them to create everything equal in quality to European products or even better. This wealth of craftsmanship enabled the Indians (and Indonesians) to produce ships of any size for Europe of highest quality that in turn greatly helped the whole globalization. Exactly this base of artisans was systematically harrased and their ascendancy to industrial production from the Moghul empire weapon production and early East India company Indian industry was destroyed during the late British raj. It's good to have a well educated engineer, but what can he achieve without craftsmen?
You are correct that the disturbance to the students were not that bad; but you are also missing an important point. China benefited from a lot of foreign Chinese expertise. The cultural revolution, terminated a lot of those links and funds; and more importantly the oversea Chinese expertise in science and technology was lost. The Gulags did not go as far as the cultural revolution did.
We agree that the cultural revolution gets overstated. I wanted to point out similarities in behaviour after such an experience. People start to cherish all they have in their head because none could take this away from them and they are most eager to increase their wealth of knowledge. in this sense the cultural revolution had a Mephistopheles-effect and actually boosted a Chinese Bildungsbürgertum that is at the core of the new middle class (
). It's a running joke in Germany that the Chinese must be Swabians because they also have Maultaschen
,but the comparison really goes much further in similar attitudes like building yourself a house, saving lots of money, working hard and being inventive to solve all kinds of problems plus speaking something hard to understand if you only know the official high language (Hochdeutsch or Mandarin).
The thing is, the soviets never gave China nuclear weapon technology. Making nuclear weapons are relatively simple affair. you just need ore, a lot of centerfuges and several years to run them and gather enough weapon grade material over the critical mass. Most of the physics are available in international journals.
The Soviets gave China a reactor that was meant to be a breeder. It didn't work because the Soviets gave them wrong data to run it. For centrifugation you need uranium flouride and fluoridized equipment. That's an art only few chemists can perform. Furthermore, the precision and technology to run these centrifuges is no trivial task. Finally, the critical mass isn't sufficient for an explosion, you need a reliable neutron primer, like beryllium (difficult to get), that is in sync with the creation of the critical mass under pressure, so it goes through enough neutron cycles before disintegrating the bomb. The math for advanced explosive coordination for bomb construction was a major reason for von Neumann to participate in EDVAC development.
China had American turncoats that supplied them with critical information.
I really don't know what the scare is about, the West stole from the East from the past; why is it such an issue even IF the east stole from the west? It is the same scare during the rise of japan, the same scare during the rise of Germany. Honestly, it is no big deal, history repeats itself.
Things get stolen all the time, but the victim of a theft still feels betrayed, even if he stole things himself. Do you suggest we stop persecuting theft? I highlighted the problem of theft from a Western point of view. I'm fully aware that Chinese inventions suffer from similar depredations and increasingly will. The problem is that the fear-mongering related to that theft gets politically exploited.
I watched "Bowling for Columbine", it's interesting that crime in the US dropped by 20% and reports increased by 600%, according to the interviewed sheriff, turning crime into a major perceived threat while it's really not that big an issue. This crime in turn justifies automatic rifles for "family defense". It seems just strange if you could protect as well with a rapid firing taser with integrated flashlight and laserpointer. That would be less likely to kill someone in an accident and knock out villains much safer by better aiming. The hunting guns can be safely locked away all the while because they suck at self-defense indoors. So the real problem is not self-defense, but a grasp for power to act in your own hands with all violence capability leading to paramilitary militias. Such an attitude makes it easy to bomb a country with a name you can't spell and maintain all the mean social exclusions that destroy the American dream of rising by own virtue.
As a result it allows to create an attitude that has a preset perception of the world and easily turns humans into dangerously agressive mobs that together go on a rampage called war for some reason they wouldn't be able to proof in a court-case (remember Afghanistan's suggestion to put Osama on trial before the invasion?).
Getting back to the DF21, there's a psychological build-up for a future clash with China ("because they steal our jobs and our know-how and want to rule the world") and all weapons that challenge current US supremacy are perceived threats. Don't bother with this logic of its own, this can lead into a self-fulfilling prophecy. You know the joke, the biggest army garanties world peace and all other armies, no matter how small, are threats of world peace.
