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Comment by vinnyvichy | Hacker News Reader

This was not discussed in the older thread, but the complexodynamic graph can probably be used to model technological society.

My fave example is Mongolia.

The area started off developing horseback archery at the end of the neolithic, then in the 12th C they had the world's most advanced metallurgy, gunpowder, bioweapons, postal system, siege engines, and nowadays we are back at admiring their horseback archery.

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How does China fit in that scheme [1]?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China

For the benefit of the model you can consider china to be part of Mongolia from 12th C to 14th C

The background of my question is, that China is around for a long time, sometimes technically advanced, sometimes not. It is still around today. It does not seem to fit into your scheme.

That's why I focussed on Mongolia, and should have emphasized that china should not be thought of as part of mongolia after the fall of the Yuan. It was indeed most of the driving force for the temporary increase in Mongolian sophistication. Maybe we don't want to think of the "china phase" as geographic china but Chinese knowhow?

Another way in which geographic china doesn't fit into the scheme but historical Mongolia does is that china has never really been a closed system. Geographic Mongolia however was landlocked like the closed system in the featured article. (And this is why they fought hard but failed to expand to the seas)

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