A Question of Polotics (communisum?)

Lots of inventions are made during wartime, and they're usually financed by the governments of the warring countries and carried out by arms companies which are government owned, or at least the government gives them almost the entirety of their funding which is essentially the same thing.

And there have been laissez faire governments, usually a lot of absolute monarchies were pretty laissez faire because monarchs are often rather irresponsible and as such don't bother to govern very much.

What primarily has helped technological advance historically has mostly been freedom from religion, because usually heavily religious places were rather anti-progress, with things like dissections being illegal and heliocentricity being rather uncomplimentary to the idea that the earth is special. Generally as the rennaisance started to lax the rules a bit technology came on quite nicely in all countries.

A notable example is china, early china was, as far as I know, extremely heavily governed, but it also as far as I know more or less invented everything before everyone else had invented rocks, a strict government does not have any reason to dislike invention, because it will usually be able to give it more power, communication is after all essential in empire building, you can't run an empire if you can't travel across it quickly and tell every part of it what to do. It's religion that has reason to dislike invention because religious power is based on having all the answers already and keeping things the same, so invention is pretty much exactly opposed to religious power. Neither China nor Japan has anything like a western religion, Japan is predominantly shinto and buddhist, and both of those are very non-dogmatic, there isn't much by way of a centralised power controlling them and there are very few rules about membership, so they would not be so opposed to scientific progress. A strong government wants to control its country, so it needs to defend it from outside aggression, expand it to gain more resources, and more easily tell the people in it what to do, all of those three are best accomplished by technological superiority, a government will encourage invention, not oppose it.

A government which doesn't govern at all damages scientific progress, because in anarchy the technological progress would be horded, after all you don't want your enemies getting hold of it and using it against you, a government which strictly regulates its population and actively takes a hand in promoting scientific progress would help it enormously, because it removes the competitiveness and means scientists work together more, which means advances can be built on other advances rather than everyone having to invent everything themselves. Communication is vital for rapid progress.

 

ok now im thinking your just screwing with me, name a monarchy with lassies fair... or a despot who used it, or a strong government free of religion (not freedom of religon but free from religon) and no china was actually more or less a true republic at and after its birth.After the Yellow turban rebellion There were three main familys, Wu, Shu, and Cao, that wound up dividing the land and then Cao Cao conquered the other two and became Emperor, now in both philosophys the emporer was GOD in living form. thats why the elaborate tombs, now china did advance alot for asia, but war and great leaders did alot of it, Compared to Rome or Babylon wich pre-dated the Chinese accomplishments though i dont see them as greatly adept in that respect. Of corse its purely subjective as i think mathematics engineering and language are more important then chinas chemistry or mass buildings.