Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…Slavery, our original sin. Let’s talk about Taiwan. That's where the nationalists went after the Chinese Civil War. I think until recently the narrative has been that the CCP is incredibly competent and very good at engineering good policies and economic growth in China. And then we look at Taiwan and obviously it's so much richer than China on a per capita basis. Would that have been what China would have been like if the nationalists had remained in power? Unknown. Because when the nationalists came to Taiwan, they were in really deep, dark trouble. And one of the ways that Taiwanese have maintained the moral high ground, which is necessary for them in order to guarantee foreign aid, is by being democratic. Their really exposed position put enormous pressure on them to democratize. Because the United States is sitting on them that they need to get democratic. Also the nationalists engaged on a real comprehensive after action report on Taiwan asking why did we lose? Well, it was this incredible corruption and the need to do land reform. I don't think land reform was feasible for Chiang Kai-shek on the mainland. Why? Because that's his power base, all the landowners. And if you try to reform them, you'll get a headshot. Whereas in Taiwan, it got bloody doing land reform. The local Taiwanese did not appreciate getting expropriated and there were massacres over it.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.