Sometimes, it pays to be a backward country

Who would have thought that Leon Trotsky inadvertently offered a theory to explain China’s economic leapfrog into the 21st century after bouncing back from history’s worst famine and the Cultural Revolution?

In recent decades, some people thought China was done for and would eventually collapse. They might have done better if they had read at least the first chapter of Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution. Here, he expounds on what he calls “the privilege of historic backwardness”, which seems to apply quite well to China’s economic and technological leapfrogging.

“A backward country assimilates the material and intellectual conquests of the advanced countries,” he wrote. “But this does not mean that it follows them slavishly, reproduces all the stages of their past.” Does that sound a lot like China in the past few decades?