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Although China had been ahead of Europe in technological development for centuries in ancient times, Europe eventually caught up and outdid China. The causes can be retraced when comparing maps of the two regions.

Europe is home to a large number of significant peninsulas and islands, such as the British isles, Scandinavia, Denmark, Iberia, Sardinia, Sicily, Italy and Greece. At the same time the continent is divided by mountain ranges such as the Alps and the Pyrenees. As a result Europe was largely fragmented into a lot of independent states which were strong enough to defend themselves and keep their own languages and cultures. The natural barriers on the continent were enough to help divide the states, but they didn't hold back the knowledge of new technologies. This meant that when one state would disregard or ban a certain technology, another would adopt it and eventually the first state would have to adopt it as well to prevent lagging behind (and thus risking to be conquered).

For China the case seems to be the opposite because its coast is hardly indented, its rivers are much wider than Europe's (and thus provide an easier means of transportation). For this reason China's regions were united early (largely because of conquest). Now, when a technology was rejected inside China by whomever its leader at the time was, the whole of China would adhere to it and there were no other states which would have forced China to readopt it.

This is one of the many interesting conclusions Jared Diamond draws in his book Guns, Germs and Steel.

A while ago I read The Shock Doctrine, by Canadian writer Naomi Klein (published in 2007). It is one of those books that explains what is wrong with the world. In this case the privatisation of nations, and all the bad things that come along with it, are highlighted.

In her book Naomi Klein describes how shock therapy is applied to national economies as it is applied literally, to human beings (electroshock). She gives examples of Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Indonesia, China, Poland, Russia, South Africa and Iraq in particular. The economic shock doctrine as she describes it, was originally designed at the Chicago School of Economics, by Milton Friedman in particular. Milton Friedman argued that freedom and free markets exist together harmoniously, but Naomi Klein proves that in fact for a completely free market economy (laissez-faire) to exist, a democracy is not possible. She does this by giving a detailed account of the history of the aforementioned countries. In every single one of them democracy has been replaced by a dictatorship or a failed "democratic" government, in order to shock its population into obedience and to make it accept the exploitation by oppressive regimes, often to the benefit of US corporations.

One of the more prominent and recent of examples is the Iraq war. While to many it is now known that the Iraq war was mostly a corporate venture, Naomi clarifies how the war was accepted by using shock therapy in the US itself, in Iraq and in the Middle East. She lays out in great detail how major corporations such as Halliburton, Lockheed Martin and Blackwater carried out a privatised war with contracts awarded by the US government, followed by the "rebuilding" of the country by permanently privatising public services, resulting in a government that is a mere conveyor belt of public funds to corporations.

Besides the failed states in which these exploitations of the public by a corporate elite occur, Naomi mentions a number of different disasters such as the 2001 attacks in New York, the 2004 earthquake in the Indian Ocean and the 2005 impact of Hurricane Katrina. She explains how in each of those situations the respective governments seized the opportunity to force privatisation onto the local people, by using disaster capitalism.

In all The Shock Doctrine is a book that is really worth reading if you know or don't know about the practices I mentioned above, and want to know exactly how and why they happened and are happening. The analyses by Naomi Klein are both scary as well as having an angering effect on their reader, but are essential for anyone who wants to know what corporations are doing to this world.*

* An extensive account of what corporations are doing to people (sweatshop labour in particular) and the environment can be found in No Logo (2000), also by Naomi Klein.