As regular readers of this blog may know, we are fans of Eric X. Li. In this video below at the Aspen Institute, Anand Giridharadas (of NYT) interviewed him in front of a live audience. As Giridharadas said at the introduction, Eric indeed shakes the foundation of prevailing Western views present in the room. I especially liked his confident and forthright answers to a shaken audience towards the end. Eric characterized the Western peddling of values with universality – (in my view, a form of intolerance, really) – and the Chinese non-interference and acceptance of each culture’s values is in fact pluralism – IS SPOT ON. The video is a bit over an hour, but we highly recommend it.
Having emerged from the Cold War, the United States is the preeminent superpower. However, with the last decade mired in wars, and especially with the 2008 financial crisis, America is full of doubt. With China registering another 9% GDP growth in 2011, America is fearful of being overtaken. PEW Research conducted two global attitude surveys across 18 countries in 2009 and 2011 and concludes there is a robust growing sentiment that China will eventually overtake the United States. 1 To be sure, only 47% in the 2011 survey believed China will eventually overtake, so it is not a majority opinion yet. Read more…
Notes:
Richard Wike, “From Hyperpower to Declining Power, Changing Global Perceptions of the U.S. in the Post-Sept. 11 Era.” Pew Research Center. September 7, 2011. http://www.pewglobal.org/2011/09/07/from-hyperpower-to-declining-power/ ↩
The biggest hindrance of the West and the rest of the world in understanding China is the perceived lack of human rights tradition in China. China is an old civilization and a civilization cannot continue to prosper and grow if this most fundamental issue is never addressed. The Zhou dynasty is probably the most formative in that it is during that period that the modern Chinese language, culture and core belief are formed.
A U.S. or U.S.-backed attack on Iran seems to be a foregone conclusion if we simply look at how the U.S. media covers the issue. FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) recently had this to report while looking at U.S. media, “Do TV Networks ‘Practice’ for War?”
02/13/2012 by Peter Hart
Alexander Cockburn’s latest piece at CounterPunch (2/10/12) included this from a tipster:
I was visiting ABC News the other day to see a friend who works on graphics. When I went to his room, he showed me all the graphics he was making in anticipation of the Israeli attack on Iran; not just maps, but flight patterns, trajectories and 3-D models of U.S. aircraft carrier fleets. Read more…
This Op-Ed just published at the NYT from venture capitalist, Eric X Li, “Why China’s Political Model Is Superior” is a must read. Especially to the Western audience bought into democracy as a “faith” will find this opinion unsettling. And it is particularly unsettling because the West is full of doubts these days. Read more…
In a previous post I talked about the Liberal tradition (that is, the explicit and formal human rights framework, not to be confused with how people often use the term to refer to a political or economic “left” or being “progressive”) as being a byproduct of religious, political and other kinds of oppression in the west. I also talked about the importance of instituting rule of law and rights protection for China in the coming years in the comments section.
However, I always have had serious reservations about the Liberal model on philosophical grounds.
This blog will essentially be a second part to the important discussions Allen and raventhorn started about democracy. I will present a philosophical discussion so that we may better think from a different and deeper perspective about this notion than everyday people may be used to by looking at its fundamental structure.
It’s easy to accuse others. After all, as a well-known verse from the Christian Bible says, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” But isn’t this going a bit too far?
Recently, FAIR had an interesting article about the militarizing of the police in the U.S. and the aggressive tactics taken by police against the Occupy protesters throughout the nation.
[P]olice forces in various cites took a militarized, increasingly coordinated approach to the movement that began as Occupy Wall Street, reporters were frequently treated as the enemy—with tactics designed to prevent them from documenting exactly how activists were being removed from public spaces. Read more…
Last week, the WTO handed China a setback in its ruling over its appeal over export controls (herein the Ruling) covering “[c]rtain forms of bauxite, coke, fluorspar, magnesium, manganese, silicon carbide, silicon metal, yellow phosphorous, and zinc.”
A WTO appeals panel has upheld a ruling against China restricting exports of nine types of raw materials. The ruling, completely unreasonable to Chinese, will threaten China’s resource preservation and environmental protection efforts.
China has generally been following WTO regulations and rulings. But it should find the best balance between applying WTO rules and protecting its national interests. Getting approval from the West is not our top concern.
Admittedly, joining the WTO has boosted China’s rise. However, entry was granted at the cost of China accepting some unfair terms, from which the aftereffects have gradually emerged, including this ruling. They may become a hidden problem for China’s economy. Read more…
If not for the United States, Shandong Province (山东省), map to the left, may still be a Japanese territory today. Reader perspectivehere brought to our attention tomorrow (Feb. 4th) will be the 90th anniversary of the Washington Naval Conference of 1929 which gave back sovereignty of Shandong Province to China. It was The Treaty of Versailles marking the end of WW1 in 1919 that transferred this German “sphere of influence” territory to Japan without China’s approval.
History has many twists and turns. If not for the United States defeating Japan in WW2, the China today might not be intact. John Woo is now making a new epic film about the Flying Tigers to commemorate this important period when the two countries aided each other.
The United States also has China to thank for – for resisting and bogging down the Japanese army in China’s large land mass. Read more…
There has been a lot of coverage in the U.S. media lately about America’s Asia ‘pivot.’ In particular, U.S. seems to be taking sides with Vietnam and Philippines in their disputes with China.
The U.S. relationships with these two countries are nothing but complex. When the Philippines was colonized by the Spanish, the U.S. took sides with the Philippines to oust Spain. Little did the Filipinos knew they would have to fight the Americans in yet another attempt to gain freedom. Filipinos estimated 1+ million were killed as a result of that war. The story in Vietnam was not that dissimilar. The Vietnamese were fighting to end French aggression. After the French withdrew, the United States went in on the grounds of stopping Communism from spreading. From the North Vietnamese perspective, it was a new imperialist, and they were fighting yet again for their freedom. Again, with millions dead. Read more…
‘So solidly built into our consciousness is the concept that China is conducting a rapacious and belligerent foreign policy, that whenever a dispute arises in which China is involved, she is instantly assumed to have provoked it.’
— Felix Greene, 1965.
When a superpower is engaging in full hegemonic and supercilious display, another country with slowly increasing economic clout and rising international status can raise apprehension. When countries are used to a bigger country that is settled for some years in a bullying position, someone starting to come close to that bully’s level of power, however remotely, has the potential to raise various concerns.
This rise is often wrongly construed as a zero-sum game – the newcomer challenging the bully’s position. In such a case, the existing bully, in its efforts to manipulate popular conceptions about the comparatively-unknown newcomer, will (hypocritically) spread the myth that the newcomer is, and always has been, overtly aggressive. If this myth-making and spreading is successful, even to a small extent, it can negate the effect that the newcomer might have in compensating for or balancing the bully’s hegemony and its hubris. The newcomer’s assurances about its peaceful rise will then be dismissed as deception. The focal point of the bully’s containment policy will be to encourage and manipulate various types of pawns against the newcomer. If such pawns already exist, then they will be fostered and strengthened, and in case they don’t, new ones will be created (Or as Stephen Walt terms it, “a competition for allies”).
As you may know, there is a heated high-profile war being waged in the U.S. now over a new bill called SOPA (“Stop Online Piracy Act” in the House) and PIPA (“Protect Intellectual Property Act” in the Senate). The bills have been temporarily put on hold, but the issues highlighted by the controversies will not go away.
I have watched this debate much earlier but caught up in too many things to bring it to your attention. In order to go further it is advisable to watch an earlier talk given by professor Deborah Brautigam earlier on the same subject. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BZfDYnOLw5w
After reading DeWang’s recent post on Dan Harris’ post titled “Chinese Students In America. It’s Bad Out There”, I couldn’t but help to saunter over to China LawBlog to have a look – and boy, was I in for a shock! Here is what appears to be an intelligent person – a practicing lawyer (ok, I may biased, maybe most lawyers aren’t that intelligent, after all) – spouting what looks to me to be hate epithets towards a specific group of people.
Dan started out the post by quoting from a MSNBC story on the skyrocketing number of Chinese students applying to study in American schools. But then without analyzing any aspect of the story, he turned around to say - hey, that got me thinking: I’ve heard many bad things about students from China, such as: Read more…
Zhang Weiwei was a translator to former Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping. We have a prior article (translated from Chinese) of his arguing there is a progression for which ‘democracy’ can be achieved, but more than that, China should borrow and adapt practices that are useful for China’s own conditions. In this interview (use this link if the embedded video below doesn’t show) with Al Jazeera (h/t Ray), Zhang provides a ‘Chinese’ response to strongly held notions in the West about “multi-party democracy,” explains how China is advancing her ‘model’ through localized experimentation, and details what he means by the ‘civilization state.’ (See also Martin Jacques.)
(On January 5, 2012, I sat down with Shaun Rein, founder and Managing Director of the China Market Research Group, to talk about China. He gave us his insights into major events of 2011. You may listen to the podcast or read the transcript below. Click on the play button or right-click on the link to save the podcast for local listening: link. In this hour-long interview, we touched on many topics: pollution, CNN and Christian Bale’s recent run-in with Chinese police, food safety, Weibo, and so on.)
DeWang:2011 was another eventful year for China. Just when her bullet train seems unstoppable, a fatal collision left the whole country in doubt. China achieved space docking, something only the U.S. and Russia have managed. Then there was Tiger Mom.
I have invited a real China expert to weigh in on these events and other events that mattered to China. What were the Chinese narratives? How did the Chinese feel about them? I couldn’t have found a better person to do this with. Read more…
As the new year approaches, we should take some time to reflect that 2012 is the 50th anniversary of the Sino-Indian war of 1962. The war has shaped and will continue to shape the attitudes of people towards each other from two global nuclear (presently or soon to be) superpowers.
The war was not only interesting in itself but interesting in how current powers in the west and India have viewed it since. Tens if not hundreds of millions of Indians today continue to believe that China is blameworthy for it. They imbibe their media’s version of the events and the versions fed to them from their politicians past and present. Since India is an ally of the US, an important strategic partner in “containing” China, criticisms of India’s policies are often muted or events described to give India a favorable light and China is treated with the opposite response. Read more…
Earlier this year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton laid out the blueprint for U.S. foreign policy in pursuit of “Internet Freedom” around the world. As I stated in a prior post, I believed this is a way to ensure U.S. government can support political oppositions in countries around the world and to lend them a voice with propaganda on the Internet. Glenn Greenwald recently labeled U.S. hypocrisy on Internet Freedom “egregious and shameless,” while responding to Secretary Clinton’s December 8, 2011 speech at The Hague. Read more…
The following analysis came via William Hooper at the Oligarch. Much of it resonates with me. It is in response to the latest politics between the U.K. and the European mainland where U.K. is decidedly against Germany’s and France’s efforts in dealing with the Euro financial crisis. Hooper’s characterization, eloquently, of U.K.’s latest actions is apt too, in my opinion, of the prevailing mindset in the U.S. mass media towards everyone else:
Once someone seriously looses sight of everything except their own self interest, they become a “wild beast” held in check only by “fear of punishment” not “shame”.
I plan to blog about this general issue sometime soon. Right now however, I just can’t help commenting on just two points for the time being, particularly because many westerners have humongous misconceptions about these issues. Almost every article on the topic contains at least a reference to these two fallacious points.
The TED interview below (video at the end of the post) was conducted in July 2010 with Julian Assange talking about the need for the public to keep an eye out for government conduct. Americans cherish freedom of the press, and by that, it is generally understood that the media’s job is to be the watchdog of the government and any other organization of power.
Do Americans have freedom of the press? I don’t think so. Or definitely not in function as how Americans understand their purpose to be. Assange is about to release a new documentary film criticizing the Western media. Referring to the New York Times, he said: Read more…
Former U.S. Ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, in a televised Republican primary debate told Americans he would reach out to the 500 million Chinese Internet users; to lead them towards change which would ultimately “take China down.” Video below has been circulating in China. It contains what Huntsman said captioned in Chinese. I want to share reader silentchinese‘s response.
Former CIA agent of 20 years, turned historian, Dr. Michael Scheuer, recently discussed his views with Russia Today about America and the Muslim world. U.S. political leaders should absolutely heed what he had to say. The only disagreement I have with Scheuer is his view that the U.S. is inextricable in her feud with the Middle East. The U.S. and the West have the might to help strengthen the U.N., and to sincerely uphold international law. When that happens, the world at large will be much more willing to stand behind U.N. in whatever steps it takes to resolve the feud between the West and the Muslim world. That is the way out of the feud.
Remember the 1990s and early 2000s hunt for WMD in Iraq headed by the former director-general of the IAEA, Hans Blix? No WMD has been found, but during that period, the propaganda within the NATO countries arguing for war ultimately led to the 2003 Iraq invasion.
Now, fast forward to 2011. I get the sinking feeling we are witnessing the repeat of that. Remember the supposed plot by Iran to hire some Mexicans to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. just few weeks ago? And now the IAEA report? Given the headlines in the NATO countries, does it really matter what the real truth is? Patrick Hayes from spiked summed up the sentiment, as expressed in this China Daily opinion column comic, rather well: Read more…
“韬光养晦，永不出头. Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) - Judging from the context of when Deng used the phrase, a more accurate interpretation would be that he warned Chinese officials to be careful in expressing opinions on international affairs in international settings, to maintain humility and not to be too eager to grab the spotlight. (Wei Jing June 06 2010)
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