Building Network States with Long History

When other girls dream of being a princess, I desire to be a King. I played a nation simulation game called the NationStates and started to build up my own.

As time passed, my libertarian country fell apart and became a dictatorship country. I realized at a young age that good intentions don’t equal good results. It is always easy to raise and reveal the problems, but without a reasonable solution, nothing would change.

If you look back at history, many revolutions started with an ambition to remake society but ended with chaos, mass murders or economic recession. Those who succeeded in deposing the old state’s head followed the same pattern and fell into a similar regime. Starting a new The country is challenging in many ways.

Unless we can solve human beings’ fundamental problems, such as inequality, race differentiation, populations, geopolitical tensions, natural resources, and climate changes… There is no point in starting a new country under the current situation.

Balaji Srinivasan recently launched a book, The Network State , that made me rethink building a new country. I love his concept of building a cloud first and land last country, which offers a unique approach and perspective to solve societal problems with existing technology in a peaceful way.

Since I have a multicultural background and am always fascinated with history and culture, I’d like to share my thoughts on how network states can learn from the oldest living civilization to develop a long and continuous stream of culture.

Starting a new country is a long-term project, and every citizen hopes this country can stay long rather than an overnight success. According to philosopher Baruch Spinoza, “If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.” We must go back to history to learn the knowledge and avoid our ancestors’ mistakes.

China is an excellent example to showcase how to survive and thrive in the long run to protect cultural heritage and preserve and sustain civilisations. Like all other civilisations and ethnicities on earth, Chinese people have passed through primitive, matriarchal and patriarchal communes, the slave and Feudal systems.

From the middle of the Ming Dynasty onward, capitalism began emerging in some handicraft industries in coastal regions such as Hangzhou (nowadays Alibaba’s headquarters) and Nanjing in China. However, the successor Qing Dynasty carried out a series of national lockdown policies that stopped China’s globalisation . It kept the country isolated from political, economic, and cultural developments in the West.

Besides that, the British imperialists launched the Opium War against China. Other invaders from various western countries also joined the party to force the Qing government to sign a series of unequal treaties, resulting in China gradually turning into a semi-feudal and semi-colonial country.

Later on, the revolution led by Sun Yat-sen, the first leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party , overthrew the Qing Dynasty in 1911 and led to the founding of the Republic of China, thus putting an end to the more than 2,000 years of feudal and monarchic rule in China.

The Communist Party of China, founded in 1921, won the Civil War against the National Party and established the People’s Republic of China in 1949. A new socialist county was born, with rapid economic and social development till now.

Over twenty dynasties and kingdoms have come and gone throughout the Chinese thousand years of history. Still, the Chinese civilisation is an unchanging entity stretching in an unbroken line through the millennia.

What are the secrets? ​What can we learn from it to build up network states?

In the earliest recorded history of Chinese culture, the concepts of “together we’ll solve the problems” and “people-oriented thinking” were the two main ideas propagandised by the ruling class. Although hundreds of schools of thoughts existed throughout Chinese history, the majority followed these two basic ideas as an ethical guide to life.

Among all of the ideology, Confucianism has been a significant part of the Chinese social fabric and way of life. The unified vision to build a “cosmic harmony” society and a standard moral code of achieving the virtue of “humanity” has been written down poetically and memorably, contributing to its long-standing and well-established status.

The Silk Road is a prime example of China’s steep trade history throughout most of its history with trade routes connecting the East and West. It opened up long-distance trading and accelerated economic, political, cultural, and technical exchange between different civilisations. Fifty- six ethnic minority groups live in China now, thanks to the long history of trade and culture exchange that brings a wave of immigration and globalisation.

Followed by the Silk Road’s success, the Ming treasure voyages had further extended China’s trade with the rest of the world and have established the groundwork for the development of the modern world.

Fast forward to today’s world, the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the world’s largest Infrastructure project, is likely to boost world GDP by 2040 by $7.1 trillion per annum . The BRI will benefit more than 56 countries, including Russia, the US , Japan, Indonesia, Korea and the UK, in economic development and culture exchange.

From the 1st century to the 15th century, China held the world’s leading position in many fields. The Four Great Inventions from ancient China have the most significant global impact on world civilisation. They are the compass, gunpowder, papermaking, and printing.

Paper was invented in China during the 3rd century and arrived in Europe via the Silk Road, contributing to Gutenberg’s printing press’s eventual development that allowed for the mass production of books and newspapers (later). The gunpowder had been exported along the Silk Road routes to Europe as well. Those nation-states, such as England and France, had apparent advantages in wars that changed warfare and political boundaries with access to it. Other vital inventions were silk and porcelain, which lead to fast industrial development in Europe and the Middle East.

Nowadays, China implements the Shenzhen way of open innovation . Its policy allows people to go “beyond the planned economy” and encourage the freedom of movement (not limited to people with China household registration certificate). Shenzhen city attracts people from many cutting-edge technology hardware industries and serves as the significant bases of tech giants such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei. ​

During the first dynasty of Imperial China, the Qin Dynasty, China’s population had already reached twenty million, which was more than the combined population of Europe during the same period.

China’s population remained relatively stable for the rest of its history though sometimes decreased due to the interregnum (Mongols and the Manchus invasion). Other foreign ethnicities and countries also brought chaotic massacres and casualties to China. Take the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937– 1945) as an example. More than 35 million Chinese people had been killed and injured in this war. It is clear that without a massive population as a foundation, both China and Chinese civilisation would not have existed today.

That’s why the current fast-ageing and low-fertility-rate population put the policymakers under pressure. The world’s most populous country is at risk of entering an irreversible population slide if there are no adequate measures (ps China will release its latest census results, conducted in late 2020, in the coming days).

I’m sure Balaji and other people will write more articles on this massive topic of Starting a New Country. Here are a few questions I’m pondering about. I’m still an infant in the blockchain and cryptocurrency world with limited knowledge. So , please mind the dumb questions listed below.

1. Since everything is decentralised in the Cloud world, I assume there is no point to pay tax to a central organisation or governing institutions. Are we abolishing the taxation system in the new country?
2. Will we have multiple Cloud countries as an end goal or have ONE only? What criteria shall we follow to start a new country and join a new country?
3. How to protect citizens? Will we have a similar military system to defence as a country?
4. What’s the social contract people have to follow to be a good citizen?
5. Once we build the mature cloud country and ready to move it offline, how shall we solve the visa and citizenships problems in the physician world?
6. Are we using avatar or VR body to live in the digital world? Do we need an inclusion and diversity policy?
7. How do we deal with digital privacy?
8. Will we face the same inequality, class difference and social hierarchy in the cloud country?

In summary, Balaji started a good initiative that makes us think about the possibility in the near future. I use China as an example to argue how we could preserve our civilisation and apply the learnings into the digital world. I’m an advocate of a decentralised world and very interested in the approach of starting with a digital community first and then physical territory.

Let me finished this review from Friedrich Hayek’s saying in his book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism.
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The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. Revolution comes from a million individual voluntary actions. We all have something to contribute to making the world we want, and the next generation want to live.

​Let’s start from right here, right now.
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