In fact, many people who fail to find a satisfying job do so only because they are lazy. I believe there are more job opportunities here than in any other country in the world. China is so big, but the delivery of goods can normally be done within three days. In my country, it usually takes one week. Friday, Jan. It oppresses minority populations in Tibet and in Xinjiang, depriving them of religious freedoms and the right to national self-determination.
It persecutes religious sects like the Falun Gong. It behaves in a bellicose manner with many of its neighbors, like the Philippines, Vietnam, and India. It saber-rattles over disputed islands with its longstanding East Asian adversary, Japan.
It presses irredentist claims against Taiwan, which has functioned as an effectively sovereign state since It has pursued breakneck economic growth without sufficient heed to the devastation of the environment. It has not atoned for the crimes committed during the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward, when tens of millions died because of absurdly misguided economic policies. It jails rights activists. It let a Nobel Peace Prize laureate die in custody. I could of course go on. Why then would any American not ask this question?
Seems pretty obvious from the perspective of anyone from a liberal Western democracy that this is a political system that needs to go, that has failed its people and failed to live up to basic, universal ideas about what rights a government needs to respect and protect. He quotes this as gospel truth, ignoring the irony that many Americans advocated just such a trade in the aftermath of September Political liberty is held up practically above all else in the values pantheon of American political culture.
Their great work could be pursued because already the intellectual climate had changed in crucial ways — chiefly, that the stultifying effects of rigid, dogmatic theology had been pushed aside enough for the growth of scientific inquiry. That itself owes much to the Protestant Reformation, of course, which people tend to date from but which actually reaches back over a century earlier with John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, arguably Erasmus, and the other pre-Lutheran reformers.
And would the Reformation have been possible without the rediscovery of classical learning that was the animating spirit of the Renaissance? Would the Renaissance have been possible without the late medieval thinkers, such as Abelard, who sought out to subject theology to the rigors of Aristotelian logic and reason?
Would all this have been possible, if not for the continuous struggles between Emperor and Pope, between Guelph and Ghibelline factions — partisans for the temporal power of the Vatican and Holy Roman Emperor? The fact is that this series of historical movements, eventually carving out politics that was quite separate from — indeed, explicitly separate from — theocratic control, was only really happening in this small, jagged peninsula on the far western end of the great Eurasian landmass.
And in the rest of the world — the whole rest of the world — none of this was happening. Political theology remained the rule with rare, rare exceptions. What followed was a crisis that lasted, with no meaningful interruption, right up to Foreign invasion, large-scale drug addiction, massive internal civil wars the Taiping Civil War of killed some 20 million people , a disastrous anti-foreign uprising the Boxers stupidly supported by the Qing court with baleful consequence, and a belated effort at reform that only seems to have hastened dynastic collapse.
The ostensible republic that followed the Qing was built on the flimsiest of foundations. The Republican experiment under the early Kuomintang was short-lived and, in no time, military strongmen took over — first, ex-dynastic generals like Yuan Shikai, then the militarists who scrambled for power after he died in China disintegrated into what were basically feuding warlord satrapies , waging war in different constellations of factional alliance.
During this time, liberalism appeared as a possible solution, an alternative answer to the question of how to rescue China from its dire plight. Liberalism was the avowed ideology of many of the intellectuals of the period of tremendous ferment known as the May Fourth Period , which takes its name from the student-led protests on that date in , demonstrating against the warlord regime then in power which had failed to protect Chinese interests at Versailles at the end of World War I.
The May Fourth period is also referred to as the New Culture Movement, which stretched from roughly to Taking to the streets on May Fourth, they waved banners extolling Mr. Sai science and Mr. De democracy. But, with only very few exceptions, they really conceived of liberalism not as an end in itself but rather as a means to the decidedly nationalist ends of wealth and power. They believed that liberalism was part of the formula that had allowed the U. It was embraced in a very instrumental fashion.
And yet Chinese advocates of liberalism were guilty, too, of not appreciating that same contingency, that whole precarious historical edifice from which the liberalism of the Enlightenment had emerged. Did they think that it could take root in utterly alien soil? In any case, it most surely did not. It must be understood that liberalism and nationalism developed in China in lockstep, with one, in a sense, serving as means to the other.
That is, liberalism was a means to serve national ends — the wealth and power of the country. And so when means and end came into conflict, as they inevitably did, the end won out. Nationalism trumped liberalism. Unity, sovereignty, and the means to preserve both were ultimately more important even to those who espoused republicanism and the franchise.
After all, it was the standard bearers of liberalism — the U. Former liberals gravitated toward two main camps, both overtly Leninist in organization, both unapologetically authoritarian: the Nationalists and the Communists. Some looked to the Soviet Union, and to Bolshevism. Others looked to Italy, and later Germany, and to fascism. For anyone coming of age in that time, there are few fond memories.
It was war, deprivation, foreign invasion, famine, a fragile and short-lived peace after August , then more war. A friend of mine named Jeremiah Jenne who taught U. What of the Chinese? The Chinese nightmare is of chaos — of an absence of authority.
And such episodes of history are fresh in the minds of many Chinese alive today — only a handful are old enough to actually remember the Warlord Period but plenty can remember the Cultural Revolution, when Mao bade his Red Guards to go forth and attack all the structures of authority, whether in the classroom, in the hospital, in the factory, or in the home.
And so they humiliated, tortured, sometimes imprisoned and sometimes even murdered the teachers, the doctors, the managers, the fathers and mothers. In the 25 years since Deng inaugurated reforms in , China has not experienced significant countrywide political violence.
GDP growth has averaged close to 10 percent per annum. Almost any measure of human development has seen remarkable improvement. There's a lot of sense in that. I believe that the lack of a value system is also deepening the moral crisis. Before Mao, the indifference towards others once so accurately described by Fei existed but was mitigated by a traditional moral and religious system.
That system was then almost destroyed by the communists, especially during the 10 mad years of the Cultural Revolution from to Nowadays communism, the ideology that dominated Chinese people's lives like a religion, has also more or less collapsed. As a result, there's a spiritual vacuum that cannot be filled by the mere opportunity of money-making.
To drag China out of its moral crisis will be a long battle. The pressing question is how to make people act in cases of emergency and the solution is law. After the "Nanjing case", there have been discussions about introducing a law that imposes a "duty of rescue" as exists in many European countries. I am all for it, because that's probably the only way to propel action for a people who do not see a moral obligation in rescuing others.
The Yueyue incident revealed an ugly side of China. I hope the entire nation will take the opportunity to take a hard look at ourselves and ask ourselves what's wrong with society. There's at least hope in the action of the rubbish collector who rushed to Yueyue's side without hesitation. China's economy is galloping like a horse without a rein and its position in the world is rising.
We Chinese have every reason to feel proud about what we've achieved. Now we demand respect. But how can we possibly win respect and play the role of a world leader if this is a nation with 1. This article is more than 10 years old. Lijia Zhang. The death of the two-year-old run over as passersby ignored her is symptomatic of a deepening moral crisis. Reuse this content. Hopes for a coronavirus vaccine are creating market winners — and losers. Sumathi Bala. BNP Paribas says 2 things must happen for the yuan to go global.
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