11 - Network Structure and Economic Change: East vs. West

Summary

Europe’s network structure had evolutionary advantages in its adaptability in innovation and resistance to collapse. While China’s imperial dynasties bequeathed political, social, and ideological foundations for national unity that endured largely intact for two millennia, behind that legacy resides a source of enduring structural weakness. Its system stability comes at a loss of flexibility. Fear of emerging chaos is memorialized in the narrative by which the Chinese Communist Party justifies its grip on power. An awareness of how vulnerability has led to failures predisposes China’s leaders to take insulating measures, e.g., censoring the Internet, constraining academic course content, imposing party oversight on enterprise, and hindering the acquisition of power and prestige that is independent of the regime. But bolstering system stability by strengthening centralized control mechanisms may undermine system resilience, reproducing the very weaknesses its designers seek to avoid and causing a massive disruption in the future. As these two great cultural systems begin to impinge on one another, network analysis has much to reveal about the choice of separation or integration that is before us.