Size Matters

Unlike Reihan and like Matt Frost, My Sino-optimism is very limited. But after picking my way through thickets of ethnonationalism all throughout the past two weeks in Spain, I’ve got to give Alex Massie an amen:

I imagine China is too busy being China (On the March!) to worry too much about anyone who isn’t Chinese, let alone what they might think of China… In this sense, size – and a communal sense of improvement – matter. This can be refreshing, liberating stuff for the outsider.

Foreigners often mock Americans for their ignorance of the world outside their borders while forgetting just how vast those borders are. We forget – or choose to ignore – that even in this homogenised age there’s something startlingly different about New Hampshire and New Mexico, Wisconsin and Louisiana. We forget that you can travel across – and through – cultures while remaining on US territory. And we forget that the American people have, by and large, a startling capacity for generosity, hospitality and, if it comes to this, forgiving you the mistakes you made in your previous, non-American life.

If all goes well, hopefully we may one day be able to say something similar about China.

Read the whole post and you’ll see he also analogizes America and China to New York City, which opens a can of worms I can’t quite do justice to here. (Smallness and bigness have some strange similarities.) Both China and the US have had (and continue to have) some problems with regionalism, and regionalism is always a problem for a country so large. But it’s also its boon. Spanish regionalism seems absurd because the regions in question are almost laughably small and self-sufficient, from a large-country perspective, only in a petty and dissatisfying way. Back in the old days, Western political theorists worried that a large republic was impossible. De Maistre joked that in all history’s rolls of the regime dice, the side marked LARGE REPUBLIC [his caps] never came up. Not even once. Well, today we might have to ask whether today the small republic has become unthinkable.