Phillip DeFranco is SLIGHTLY Wrong About China (Geopolitics & Trade).

this video is a set of reflections in
response to philip defranco and it's being done with complete respect and appreciation for philip defranco because let me tell you something i try to read news and political analysis on asia from every reputable and respectable source The Economist foreign policy magazine London School of Economics the most elite academic institutions and the most elite and distinguished news and journalism institutions and Philip DeFranco right now you do a better job than any of them and all of them when you deign to like one day a month take a break from covering Internet drama and YouTube gossip to talk about politics of Asia so Phil DeFranco does in general do a very good job however um I could do better if I had the time to dedicate it to it and we hope we're just now packing up and relocated in Taiwan I hope I will have the time dedicate to it in this video I'm in many ways bringing together observations from like 25 years of research it's not what I want to do though what I really want to do is challenge myself by doing original research new research learning things I didn't already know let me design philip defranco early on in his new video about china's hegemony over the oceans their control of oceanic trade and various disputed islands and territories he mentions pretty briefly that that part of the world is maybe responsible for like 21 percent of the world's trade he throws us some economic statistics really quickly that makes it seem like these obscure islands located in this strange tongue shaped formation extending out southeast from China there are this extraordinary economic value why in 2019 why the answer goes all the way back to the dark ages all right a scholar named only pillion wrote a famous famous monograph that started the question about how international trade shapes the course of civilizations cultural development politics all the other meaningful things we care about and he started it in a book that ended up being titled in English Mohammed and Charlemagne that book came out at a really interesting time and put a really realistic role in this and yes believe me this is not a digression this has everything to do with Europe's current relationship to China I kid you not I'm getting back there right he's started questioning for the first time why was there such a decline in the material quality of civilization from the Roman Empire period to what we call the dark ages the Middle Ages etc now there's a weird kind of parallel here again and Philip defranco's video there's this discourse about China's century of decline the idea that the Ching dynasty maybe even longer starting before the Ching dynasty that china became decadent degenerate self-indulgent weaker and weaker etc and then had to take back its rightful place in the world well actually Europe has a very similar discourse it's just several centuries earlier right that there was this period of greatness that hit its pinnacle maybe under Julius Caesar in the Roman Empire maybe somebody picks another Emperor Justinian your favorite emperor from the Roman Empire and then for some reason everything gets worse so Melissa and I Melissa's my girlfriend sitting off camera we were in a museum in the middle of nowhere in Germany Heidelberg right goofy not even Heidelberg the spire so the countryside outside of Heidelberg Germany and they had been part of the Roman Empire and they had trade goods from North Africa they had perishable trade goods they had stuff like wine in an earthenware jug being traded from North Africa all the way to basically Heidelberg Germany okay so the extent of international trade and the Roman Empire now seems spectacular and it didn't just go in that direction it went all the way from Rome to Thailand I kid you not I've seen it with my own eyes in the National Museum in Bangkok you can see a Roman lamp you saw some now in Germany - so that went all the way from Rome up to Germany well they also went all the way east to Bangkok now they could not send perishable goods to Bangkok they could not baked fresh brownies and then so Bangkok they couldn't export cheese or something like that that would go bad for those huge but yes something like a metal lamp those kinds of trade goods really did go all around the world and as is well known specifically the coin that has the name of Julius Caesar on it I believe is the single most attested artifact in the history of the world they're found everywhere it's troublesome to people they're even found here in North America every so often what turns up in Canada the United States so coinage durable metal objects spread everywhere in this scholarly work only pure n for the first time really started to question why did this decline happen and he challenged the tendency we all have and that again the Chinese also have to just look at this in terms of decadence as some kind of moral and aesthetic decay so remember like in terms of art history you're shown a picture of this statue from Athens and you go wow that's an unbelievably realistic well proportioned muscular statue from ancient Athens and then you see this statue from ancient Rome and then you go look at the Dark Ages and it seems like all of a sudden nobody knows how to draw an accurate picture of a human being right like Jesus looks like a miniature adult not like a baby and nobody's muscular anymore and like nobody's proportioned they don't have you know the people in the background they don't have realistic perspective right so it's very easy to prevent present to to students present in the classroom just this narrative of decline well what what does decline mean what does it mean so what only people I was pointing out is that the decline is in large part due to these networks that produce value so ultimately economic but includes things like education like when you have a trade in complex wares like glass and metal and wine and all kinds of other things over a huge area you have books manuscripts and in this time mostly handmade manuscripts there's some primitive printing around but you know being written and copied and passed around you have a network of Education a network of economic interactions that under the Roman Empire spread way way way beyond the Roman Empire and that really what we perceive as a cultural decline and a cultural collapse is in fact an economic collapse now the actual book I have read I have read on we appearance Mohammed and Shah main and most people who quote the book and give lectures about it have not it is a very poorly organized very scattered book and he died before it was published so as one of those cases were other people had to take the pieces and put them together as I recall but it became a symbol for this new movement towards economic history put it that way so there has never been a land barrier between Europe and China right this general analysis of world history why are all these boats even today why are they going through these obscure islands in the middle of nowhere of Southeast Asia why didn't we have continuous trade and development building up roads and railways linking Paris to Beijing the same way that we have between Paris and Berlin why don't we have the kind of Overland trade that Europe completely takes for granted extending between Europe and China why has that never happened again I'm not saying what happened overnight I'm seeing over the last 1,000 years there is no reason there was no strike there was no self-evident obvious reason I'm about to tell you the reason why trade had to go between Europe and Asia by going west out of the Mediterranean then they would stop at Portugal and this is why Portugal became a great empire Portugal had no other advantages Portugal the population was puny at that time they didn't have some kind of amazing technology you have to go from all the way around Africa all the way around India right and then to East Asia so this is before the canal was built in what's now Egypt Suez Canal etc etc right is unbelievably circuitous and indirect route it was so indirect it was so difficult to trade silk between China and Europe that a guy you may have heard of named Christopher Columbus managed to make a proposal to the king of Spain that he was gonna find a new more direct trade route by going straight west from Spain it didn't work out and by the way when he did that it was based on the maps by Strabo Strabo of Alexandria ancient Greek Maps during the Dark Ages in Europe there was so little progress in learning and academia and research they were still using geography that ultimately is from like Herodotus in ancient Athens unbelievable but an updated just a little bit after Herodotus but the level of ignorance is truly unbelievable we have we still have the maps in Strabo that were used to make this proposal to the king of Spain okay well here's the thing even the title Mohammed Charlemagne what it's getting at is a very pleasant very economically objective sounding re-evaluation of what we can frankly call Islamophobia right what does it boil down to why did quality of life in Western Europe but not even dodges Western Europe Western Europe and the whole Mediterranean the Mediterranean Europe there's really two areas right the northwest and the measure why do quality of life decline so dramatically and in one ant one word the answer is Islam Islam changed everything the discovery that only pure and made is hey everyone's ignoring how important Islam is to the history of Europe and in a sense it's obvious they conquered Spain but implicitly those people in Germany who would have been part of the Roman Empire before they couldn't get wine or oil or other goods from North Africa anymore the trade in glass and soap from Aleppo in Syria the anomic geography of europe was profoundly changed by the Islamic empires plural right and of course there were more salacious elements if we talk about the slave trade Oh suddenly everybody's interested everyone's interested in slavery the mystery of wine and oil glass and these other things but this is this dramatic deep impact on the social geography of Europe and here is the necessary sequel that still to this day nobody wants to deal with everyone knows this but it's easy to forget this Islam is not one religion the most profound effect on the social and economic geography of both China and Europe is the split between Sunni and Shiite that still exists to this day this is a real historical fact it was the split between Sunni and Shiite not the fall of the Roman Empire not the fall of any particular dynasty in China not the building of the Great Wall one thing ended over land trade between China and Europe and that was the basically constant state of war constant state of hostility between Sunni Islam and Shiite Islam that is what severed forever the most fundamental economic fact that had been taken for granted under Alexander the Great the Roman Empire and that indirectly had fuelled Central Asia North India Europe and extended its tendrils all the way into China for durable goods things like silk and metal things that could really go a long long way even tea buffle a different story history of the tea trade well that's right sir there was there was the Silk Road and then parallel to it was what was called the the tea horse road it sounds better in Chinese but yeah tea was one of these trade goods they could go away etc etc right oh the end of the Silk Road it still continues to this day do you want to build a high-speed rail network that connects China to Europe you got to go through Iran and Iraq right and the generalized state of low-level chaos and hostility today we do have the Suez Canal boats don't have to go all the way around Africa but it's an unbelievably indirect and circuitous route to still go all the way around India whoa by the way guess where you get to stop on our new super efficient trade route to China where do you get two more your boat Yemen peaceful ready for business open for world trade Yemen the happy harbor of Aden in the country of Yemen where there's a sir this is 2019 there's a major civil war still ongoing in Yemen Yemen does still matter for world trade for that reason so you got to go past Yemen you got to go around India and you got to go through these waters that guess what China wants politically to control but that's why those waters are so important now you may say when I've talked about this with professors and with PhDs and stuff I've never once had anyone even ask this question it's an intelligent question when I discusses the people they normally sit there absolutely shocked and say I can't believe any of the textbooks I was taught I can't believe any of the seminar discussions I had at Cambridge or Oxford or London School of Economics or wherever was so as or wherever was they studied I can't believe we never dealt with this even when they did hold unquote economic history it's so and like normally I'm talking to people and they know enough that like you know this is just a missing puzzle piece they know all this other stuff and economics terrine they're like oh my god you're right that's this huge piece of the puzzle right it would be intelligent to say back well yeah you know the Silk Road was super important until you know this constant state of war until Islam transformed the social geography of the world and specifically the city Shiites but but you know you look at the map it's not the only Road couldn't people have compensated by building trains through Mongolia couldn't they have compensated by building streams through Russia or on the southernmost cusps the Train they are building right now a train that will finally connect India to China through the eastern most little span of India going through me more than going through good old dongjun and China through you Nana to China that is finally being built now in 2019 yes historically fantasies have existed of either replacing the Silk Road or at an earlier time competing with the Silk Road by building major trade routes either further north or further south through the enormous landmass of of Eurasia there is space it was not impossible but the more you know the more you realize why it was just barely possible okay like have you tried walking through the mountains of northern Myanmar into you nan have you tried walking have you tried using a mule have you tried building a train really tough and okay sorry until the day before yesterday well there's still a civil war in those Mallen so it's gonna see there's Pacific actually distill our armed insurgent groups they're fighting several Wars plenty of them including anyway including right where we work you know just just across from just across the border from from the home anyway so you know he'll they're actually still today in 2019 there are armed groups went war is there but a hundred years ago even more so these were really really kata carries so I mean that that's just the southern route through you nan we talked about the northern route you gonna have to look into stuff like the Keaton Empire if you go through century by century when was there an opportunity to build and sustain some kind of route like that yeah historically there's a parallel universe where that was not completely impossible but there are reasons why it it really didn't work out and then ultimately the fantasy of really making it work the French Empire wanted to build that train they wanted to build a train going from Vietnam to India the Russian Empire wanted to build a train they did build a train a very very thin rickety strip of track connecting their empire on the Pacific to to western Russia and ultimately to to Eastern Europe um there were attempts but so far I mean those have been the kind of rickety feeble attempts to compensate for a thousand years in which that world trade system has been broken and cut off so that is the background to the bizarre and fascinating history that Philip DeFranco has just reminded us of that we're still in a situation where these islands that seems so meaningless in and of themselves remain pawns in a chess game that spans the whole wide world and that seems to you know determine who's gonna control world trade to an unbelievable stat and yeah guess what there are many roads to peace but sometimes the road to peace is literally building a new road