[Book] 1493

 

The New World was created, not discovered, says Charles C. Mann. The impact of Columbus’ historic trip was felt worldwide, ushering in the Age of Globalization that we know today. Nearly everything, worldwide, changed so much as to make the pre-Columbian world unrecognizable. Can you imagine Italy without tomato sauce? Ireland without potatoes? Georgia without peaches?

I was surprised to see that this book is as much about China as it is about America or Europe. In fact, the author did much of his research in China. This is more obvious than it seems: after all, trade with China was the ultimate goal of Columbus and the generations that followed him.

There is a lot to this book and I know I’ll think about it for many years to come. If I had more time or motivation, I’d write a proper summary, but in these days of super-short tweets and instant-access Google, let me just summarize a few of the more interesting takeaways, since I know I’ll likely want to refer back to these ideas later:

• Columbus’ largest ship, Santa Maria, ran aground on his first voyage, so he had to leave 38 people behind. When he returned eleven months later, they were all dead—the result of conflict with the locals (called Taino).
• The non-human travelers to America were at least as important as the explorers themselves: bacteria and viruses caused epidemics, insects destroyed native crops.
• Earthworms were unknown in America until the Europeans arrived. Imagine the soil without them, and all the consequences on mulch and the types of trees possible and much, much more.
• Trade with China began in the 1560s in Manila.
• The period of unusual cold known as the Little Ice Age, from 1550 to 1750, may have been caused by the end of wide scale forest burning by native Americans.
• The Virginia joint-stock corporation shipped seven thousand people to Virginia between 1607 and 1624, of whom eight out of ten died.
• Tobacco saved England’s New World investments: by 1680 it was exporting 25 million pounds per year.
• Nicotine addiction was rampant worldwide by the early 1600s: in 1635 the khan Hongtaiji prohibited tobacco. Guangxi Chinese were making tobacco pipes by 1549.
• The flintlock rifle, which first became available in the late 1600s, was the first weapon that Indians recognized as superior to the bow. John Smith’s matchlocks didn’t work in wet conditions and required a tripod for accuracy.
• Malaria killed untold numbers of people in the Americas and was common even in New England. Africans, with their “Duffy antigens” were immune and became ideal laborers as a result.
• One reason Zheng He’s historic travels from China weren’t followed up: he never encountered a nation richer than his own. “For the same reason the United States stopped sending men to the moon – there was nothing there to justify the costs of such voyages”.
• The Ming prohibited all private seagoing vessels in 1525 (but reversed the order fifty years later in order to trade with Europeans in Manila).
• Wokou (倭寇) Japanese pirates were a serious threat to trade.
• Yuegang, near modern Xiamen, was one of the world’s most important ports in the 1600s.
• By the 1570s, 90% of Beijing’s tax revenue came in the form of silver coins.
• Potosi, Bolivia’s “mountain of silver” was discovered in 1545. By 1611, its population of 160K was as big as London or Amsterdam.
• The Qing dynasty enacted a program of smallpox inoculation.
• “Part of the reason China is the most populous nation is the Columbian exchange” (p177). New, highly productive crops like sweet potato and corn enabled cultivation in otherwise impossible areas.
• For 167 days in 1925 two Polish researchers lived on potatoes with butter and reported no health problems. [p197]
• “Roughly 40 percent of the irish ate no solid food other than potatoes”. [p209]
• Tenochtitlan fell on August 13, 1521.
• P.312 : 57% of the early descendants of Conquistadores tracked were of Indian descent.
• P.313 In 1640 there were 3x as many Africans as Europeans in Mexico.
• P323: Katana-swinging Japanese helped suppress Chinese rebellions in Manila in 1603 and 1609. When Japan closed its borders in the 1630s Japanese expatriates were stranded wherever they were.
• P.359: English Puritans launched two colonies, one at Plymouth and another off the coast of Nicaragua in 1631.

Like I said, very interesting and there’s a lot more. If you like history in general, or if you’re looking for a fresh take on China, this is definitely worth reading.

The Chinese Twitter (English version)

Now available on the US App Store: Sina Weibo 微博 download here: http://itun.es/igk6zp then follow me at http://weibo.com/2140336255 and see why 200M users like it.

Note: to create an account you'll need some rudimentary knowledge of Chinese (either from something like Google Translate or from a helpful friend).  I assume they're working on an English version of the web site too of course.

 

 

Books versus Conversations

There are two major ways we humans express ourselves: books and conversations.

A well-written book has the advantages of being an exhaustive treatment of a complex topic, but sometimes the length or completeness of a book is inappropriate. “I just asked him for a simple reply to my email but he wrote a novel instead.” If that novel wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, the effort to understand and then respond to it is greater than whatever result I’m hoping to get back.

A conversation, on the other hand, is tentative and ephemeral. If I speak poorly, you can ask me for clarification; if I make an error, you can correct me. A conversation, by definition, is a collaborative act. A one-sided conversation is an oxymoron.

Some conversations are just idle chit-chat, a way to pass the time; but a good conversation, like a good book, leads somewhere, bringing you to an ending that feels like progress on the road of life.

Social networking services are moving us more to a conversational lifestyle rather than a book-like consumption lifestyle. A blog isn’t much fun if nobody responds to what I write; Twitter and Facebook resemble blogs except they’ve made the interactivity—the conversational aspects—much easier.

A book is the distillation of a long series of conversations. A well-written book has value because it saves the reader the time it would have taken to have the conversations that led to the conclusions in the book.

Photo thanks to http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtsofan/

Facebook’s addicting even if you don’t admit it

It’s a few minutes before the next meeting. Or maybe it’s right before dinner is ready. Or there’s a commercial on TV. Or it’s time to go to bed. Or get up.

What’s your first thought at each of these moments? Check Facebook! It’s a continuous stream of what’s happening among the people and interests in my life, and it gets more and more useful every day. No wonder more than 100 million Americans log in daily. It’s the most popular web site in the world, and it will keep getting more so.

Many of my friends are silent on Facebook, but I know they’re there, lurking, watching, reading all of my updates. Even the shy ones, or those who think they have nothing themselves to say…they still watch.

Japan’s Mixi social networking service (of which I am a member, though rarely active) has a great feature that lets you know when somebody has visited your profile. I wish Facebook had something like that. I bet we’d all be surprised – impressed – at the number of our silent friends who actually watch everything we do.

Hard to know for sure

I keep running into this problem of the limitations of knowledge. Today, a professor friend of mine reminded me how the one thing you take away from earning a PhD is how little you know of your field of study. We were discussing the old saying that after your first week in China you’ll feel like you could write a book about the place; after a year you’ll think you could write a magazine article; after a few years you give up writing anything.

The Useless Tree Blog discusses (via China Law Blog) a recent interview with Chinese official Wang Qishan claiming that China is only understandable to insiders like himself, but my first thought is “what does it mean to understand in the first place.” Does anybody really know?

Then there’s Peter Norvig’s excellent review of a recent remark by Noam Chomsky dismissing the use of statistical techniques in linguistics. Chomsky apparently thinks real scientific understanding requires more than a statistical analysis of a bunch of data—you have to synthesize that knowledge, presumably into simpler, fundamental rules that describe the Universe. That’s super-hard, and except in Physics almost always turns out to be an approximation anyway.

This is just restating the problem identified by Hayek in The Use of Knowledge in Society and by countless others who reflect on the limitations of what we know.

Society gives too much credit to people who appear to know, but I think self-confidence is no substitute for understanding.

You’ll never understand China

This week’s Sinica podcast notes how a foreigner will never be accepted as a China expert, that Chinese people will always claim that true understanding of China is the exclusive domain of native Chinese.

You hear the same excuse in Japan, though possibly less so as the Japanese become more comfortable being thought of as a Western, not Eastern power.

Americans just don’t think that way. Anyone can offer a perspective about the United States and be regarded as an “expert” if they put in the time or show some quality in their observations.  We’ll even accept a foreign publication, like The Economist or the BBC, as a better arbiter of the truth than many homegrown equivalents. Somebody like Alexis de Toqueville is respected as one of the best American observers of all time.

You can tell the self-confidence of a culture to the degree that respects external experts.

Weibo: The Chinese Twitter++

I bet at least 50% of my work friends check Facebook every single day. For those under age 30 it's probably closer to 100%.

Twitter isn't nearly as popular, as far as I can tell; maybe 5% of my colleagues actively post messages under their real names. It's hard to say how many people check their Twitter streams regularly. I'm sure it's higher, but not that much higher.

Contrast that with China, where Weibo is absolutely dominating. Here among my work colleagues I'd guess maybe 25% are active users -- a couple times a day -- under their own names, and probably 2/3rds are active under pseudonyms (though for obvious reasons it's hard to tell for sure).

Why is Weibo better than Twitter? Because it's the first social networking system I've seen that adds a competitive element to status updates. On Twitter, some people obsess about their number of followers; on Foursquare people obsess about mayorships.  But on Weibo, there's an entire scoring system based on how often you post -- and critically -- how well your posts are received. The result is that people are incented to produce better and better content, which results in more readership, which drives more reasons to make content.

Like Twitter (or Facebook), Weibo has the concept of posting links to news items. But thanks to the incentive system, 60% of Chinese microbloggers say Weibo is their main source of news (versus only 9% for Facebook or Twitter-using Americans).

If I can find a good way to post automatically from Weibo to Twitter to Facebook, I'm switching, and I bet you'll want to switch too.