A detailed in-depth study of Chinese interregna could be really interesting. There are so many ways for a government or state to collapse, and so many interesting things that happen through and after the collapse. I'd love to read it. #BooksThatHaventBeenWrittenYet
@22 I really like Mote's _Imperial China 900-1800_ for this. It covers the regnums :) as well as the interregnums, but I think you need that to make sense of either.
@clew thank you!!! I requested it through the library 📚!
Any other books you love and recommend? 😇
@22 There's a graphic novel series that is simplified compared to Mote but not frivolous, and there's a wonderful podcast of someone reading The Romance of the 3 Kingdoms and explaining the confusing bits. It's like having your really nice older cousin readin to you over the summer, or something. Respectively
http://stonebridgestore.squarespace.com/shop/understanding-china-through-comics
@clew Wow thank you!!! I hadn’t heard about the graphic novels and have requested them from the library as well! And I will give the podcast another try—a few years ago it was a hard medium for me to follow but I should try again for Three Kingdoms. Thank you, can’t wait for this stuff to arrive 😁!
@22 podcast, graphic novel, scholarly work -- *one* of these should be comfortable!
Oh, and this is loosely related except it does cover an interregnum and anyway I love it: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbarrow.html
Three Kingdoms is an enormously confusing story in itself -- I just sort of float along and trust the reader to remind me where we last met the character who just popped up and betrayed someone. (Lots of betrayals. Maybe they slow down near the end? I'm not there yet.)
@clew Oh my goodness, you are a veritable gold mine of awesome multi-modal material, thank you! I love this Low Tech Magazine piece, it's a great antidote to linear thinking about the technological innovation and progress. Some tech spreads really fast (like eyeglasses), but others doesn't, leaving visitors in the early 1900s astonished by it! Super!
@22 Also, I kind of want a center wheel barrow, though I don't need anything so big.
What made you curious about the interregnums?
@clew I’ve been reading Phil Tetlock's book Superforecasting and his 5-part masterclass on Edge.org and he talks about the importance of good questions as a key prerequisite to good forecasts, specifically questions that pass the clairvoyance test:
Which means questions can be handed off to an oracle who can answer yes/no without having to ask you what you mean by “is” or other words 😛. I’m interested in finding clairvoyant-ok questions about Chinese political futures.
@clew So I wanted to make sure I appreciated some of the various possible futures a “post-CPC” “China” could experience before trying to concoct clairvoyant-complete questions to ask people to forecast. Even questions like “how many National Congresses will be held” are tricky: something called a “National Congress” might continue to exist in a democratic China—OR the party may decide to halt Congresses long before its collapse. It’s hard to know what to ask!!!
@clew I think historians are a rascally bunch: they’ve trained us to want big picture stories about the past and the future—“how does it all turn out?” That’s not a clairvoyance-complete question of course, and it’s hopelessly mired in hindsight bias.
I want to instead start seeing the past and the future through clairvoyant-complete questions—exactly prescribe the set of possibilities I can grok (and change that set as time passes), and do a lot of research into what was and is knowable.
@clew and that’s hard!!! Clairvoyance-test-passing questions are tricky, and I’m reminded of how the early Lisp papers published in the 1950s are riddled with programming bugs because the authors lacked computers to run the code on.
But suppose we want to know when the CPC will fall. What do you mean by “fall”? Interregna come in a dizzying variety of shapes, including total or partial collapse of the central government, warlordism, shrinking of the government, etc.