The China Politics Thread - Page 8

On May 22 2022 02:51 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
chinese govt: the West are evil colonialists who want to treat us like they did africa and latin america
chinese ppl: no way
chinese people go overseas / read english forums and sees threads like this
chinese ppl: damn, xi was right. all hail ccp

On May 22 2022 09:59 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
Ya'll are racist af

On May 22 2022 04:41 Djabanete wrote:

People read this thread and conclude that the evil West wishes to colonize China? Would you mind unpacking that logic?

On May 22 2022 09:59 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
Ya'll are racist af and it strengthens chinese ultra nationalism in a reactionary manner

On May 22 2022 23:17 fakovski wrote:
I was totally wrong ,
on the fundamental level.
I tried to explain things that happend in China to westerners in their language and the 8-pages debate turned out to be a fierce wrangling, vicious words are at the lips. I suppose that my image here is a lying/sophistry/stone-head man, and should stop talking but facing the truth,
Which is EXACTLY the image of CHINA in western media.

Before I fleet away, I still have something to say, The arguing here is actually not me with some western guys, its core is not even human rights or democracy in China, it reveals the conflict between a rising China and a falling West, a conflict bewteen two great civilizations.

Westerners will never understand things happened in China without understanding China itself.

It's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture.

China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West. It will remain in very fundamental respects very differently.

China is not really a nation-state. Okay, it called itself a nation-state for the last hundred years, but everyone who knows anything about China knows it's a lot older than this. Now what is extraordinary about this is, what gives China its sense of being China, what gives the Chinese the sense of what it is to be Chinese, comes not from the last hundred years, not from the nation-state period, which is what happened in the West, but from the period, if you like, of the civilization-state. I'm thinking here, for example, of customs like ancestral worship, of a very distinctive notion of the state, likewise, a very distinctive notion of the family, social relationships like guanxi, Confucian values and so on. These are all things that come from the period of the civilization-state. In other words, China, unlike the Western states and most countries in the world, is shaped by its sense of civilization, its existence as a civilization-state, rather than as a nation-state. And there's one other thing to add to this, and that is this: Of course we know China's big, huge, demographically and geographically, with a population of 1.6 billion people. What we often aren't really aware of is the fact that China is extremely diverse and very pluralistic, and in many ways very decentralized. You can't run a place on this scale simply from Beijing, even though the westerners think this to be the case. It's never been the case.

So this is China, a civilization-state, rather than a nation-state. And what does it mean? Well, I think it has all sorts of profound implications. I'll give you two quick ones. The first is that the most important political value for the Chinese is unity, is the maintenance of Chinese civilization. You know, 2,000 years ago, Europe: breakdown -- the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire. It divided, and it's remained divided ever since. China, over the same time period, went in exactly the opposite direction, very painfully holding this huge civilization, civilization-state, together.
The second is Hong Kong. Do you remember the handover of Hong Kong by Britain to China in 1997? You may remember what the Chinese constitutional proposition was. One country, two systems. And I bet that barely anyone in the West believed them. "Window dressing. When China gets its hands on Hong Kong, that won't be the case." 25 years on, the political and legal system in Hong Kong is as now as it was in 1997. The westerners were wrong because they thought, naturally enough, in nation-state ways. Think of German unification, 1990. What happened? Well, basically the East was swallowed by the West. One nation, one system. That is the nation-state mentality. But you can't run a country like China, a civilization-state, on the basis of one civilization, one system. It doesn't work.

Let me offer you another building block to try and understand China -- maybe not sort of a comfortable one. The Chinese have a very, very different conception of race to most other countries. Do you know, of the 1.6 billion Chinese, over 90 percent of them think they belong to the same race, the Han? Now, this is completely different from the world's other most populous countries. India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil -- all of them are multiracial. The Chinese don't feel like that. China is only multiracial really at the margins. So the question is, why? Well the reason, I think, essentially is, again, back to the civilization-state. A history of at least 2,000 years, a history of conquest, occupation, absorption, assimilation and so on, led to the process by which, over time, this notion of the Han emerged -- of course, nurtured by a growing and very powerful sense of cultural identity. Now the great advantage of this historical experience has been that, without the Han, China could never have held together. The Han identity has been the cement which has held this country together.

Or let me give you my third building block, the Chinese state. Now the relationship between the state and society in China is very different from that in the West. In the West overwhelmingly seem to think -- in these days at least -- that the authority and legitimacy of the state is a function of democracy. The problem with this proposition is that the Chinese state enjoys more legitimacy and more authority amongst the Chinese than is true with any Western state. And the reason for this is because -- well, there are two reasons, I think. And it's obviously got nothing to do with democracy, because in western terms the Chinese certainly don't have a democracy. And the reason for this is, firstly, because the state in China is given a very special -- it enjoys a very special significance as the representative, the embodiment and the guardian of Chinese civilization, of the civilization-state. This is as close as China gets to a kind of spiritual role.

And the second reason is because, whereas in Europe and North America, the state's power is continuously challenged -- I mean in the European tradition, historically against the church, against other sectors of the aristocracy, against merchants and so on -- for 1,000 years, the power of the Chinese state has not been challenged. It's had no serious rivals. So you can see that the way in which power has been constructed in China is very different from experience in Western history. The result, by the way, is that the Chinese have a very different view of the state. Whereas westerners tend to view it as an intruder, a stranger, certainly an organ whose powers need to be limited or defined and constrained, the Chinese don't see the state like that at all. The Chinese view the state as an intimate -- not just as an intimate actually, as a member of the family -- not just in fact as a member of the family, but as the head of the family, the patriarch of the family. This is the Chinese view of the state -- very, very different to the western. It's embedded in society in a different kind of way to what is the case in the West.

And I would suggest to you that actually what we are dealing with here, in the Chinese context, is a new kind of paradigm, which is different from anything in the past.

Westerners try to understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts. Unfortunately, I think, I have to say that I think attitude towards China is that of a kind of little Westerner mentality. It's kind of arrogant. It's arrogant in the sense that westerners think that they are best, and therefore they have the universal measure. And secondly, it's ignorant. They refuse to really address the issue of difference. You know, there's a very interesting passage in a book by Paul Cohen, the American historian. And Paul Cohen argues that the West thinks of itself as probably the most cosmopolitan of all cultures. But it's not. In many ways, it's the most parochial, because for 200 years, the West has been so dominant in the world that it's not really needed to understand other cultures, other civilizations. Because, at the end of the day, it could, if necessary by force, get its own way. Whereas those cultures -- virtually the rest of the world, in fact, which have been in a far weaker position, vis-a-vis the West -- have been thereby forced to understand the West, because of the West's presence in those societies. And therefore, they are, as a result, more cosmopolitan in many ways than the West.

For 200 years, the world was essentially governed by a fragment of the human population. That's what Europe and North America represented. The arrival of countries like China and India -- between them 38 percent of the world's population -- and others like Indonesia and Brazil and so on, represent the most important single act of democratization in the last 200 years. Civilizations and cultures, which had been ignored, which had no voice, which were not listened to, which were not known about, will have a different sort of representation in this world. As humanists, we must welcome, surely, this transformation, and we will have to learn about these civilizations.

Remember, the West conquered the world with GUNS, not values, The westerners kept fight each other ,ignited WWI/II ,bringing war and millions death to other races too. They are fighting even NOW in East Europe. SO, it is VERY, VERY, hard for them to peddeling values and human rights to people in Arab/Afganistan or China.

On May 22 2022 23:17 fakovski wrote:
The second is Hong Kong. Do you remember the handover of Hong Kong by Britain to China in 1997? You may remember what the Chinese constitutional proposition was. One country, two systems. And I bet that barely anyone in the West believed them. "Window dressing. When China gets its hands on Hong Kong, that won't be the case." 25 years on, the political and legal system in Hong Kong is as now as it was in 1997. The westerners were wrong because they thought, naturally enough, in nation-state ways. Think of German unification, 1990. What happened? Well, basically the East was swallowed by the West. One nation, one system. That is the nation-state mentality. But you can't run a country like China, a civilization-state, on the basis of one civilization, one system. It doesn't work.

On May 22 2022 15:08 Vivax wrote:


The opium wars are an interesting read. Can't blame the Chinese for not thinking that they wouldn't get ripped off if the west had its way.