From: Grant Callaghan (grantc4@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun 15 Dec 2002 - 17:18:47 GMT
>Date: Sun, 15 Dec 2002 00:10:22 -0500
>
>Grant, you are a student of China. What is your sense of the comparable
>question, posed of China?
>
>Scott, Steve, Jeremy?
>
Ahh. Right back at me. Fair enough. But as you know you can't summarize
several centuries of history in a simple post. But I can point to two memes
that writers I respect have brought up over and over.
One meme is philosophical and had a lot to do with why China rejected the
scientific and political advances (if they can be called that) of the West.
The Chinese had a strong belief in personal advancement and a contempt for
using "machines." The man who needed a machine to increase his abilities
was less of a man. A man should, the sages said, seek perfection within.
And so things like clocks and guns and our concepts of science were rejected
as a way of advancing society. They weren't able to see past the clock as
to a concept of time and precision that superceded man's grasp of such
ideas. The gun was a stronger bow and arrow, but they weren't interested in
what made the gun superior to what a skilled archer could do. In fact they
didn't believe it measured up to a skilled archer. They couldn't see past
the early musket and cannon to the machines we built on our concepts of time
and space that superceded what human skill could accomplish. Our skill was
in seeing beyond ourselves and they placed their bets on seeing within
themselves. The machine was not the path to the future but a crutch that
got in the way of personal development.
The other meme was expressed in the name of China: Jung Guo or the middle
kingdom. They had dominated their hemisphere so completely and for so long
that they felt like they were the center of the universe and everything
revolved around them and their culture. All other cultures were inferior
and there was little for them to learn from barbarians. This despite the
fact that at the time they were being ruled by a barbarian (in Chinese eyes
at the time of the Ching conquest) tribe. The Manchus themselves believed
it, along with all the other mythology about the superiority of man. After
conquering China, the Manchus became more Chinese than the Chinese
themselves. The emperors became masters of calligraphy and Chinese poetry
and Chinese history and philosophy. It was much like the German tribes that
overcame Rome and then built their own kingdoms on Roman memes.
I can't pull the names out of my mind right this minute, but writers have
been referring to China as the sleeping giant for centuries now. And at the
end of the Ching dynasty, it was sleeping. The country was ruled by
mythology and politics based on that mythology. A woman took over the
empire and treated it like her own private fairy land. She took money
raised for a navy and built a terracotta boat in her garden that she could
walk around on. She tried to use the West to defeat the rebels of the boxer
rebellion and they did. But mainly because the boxers were as wrapped up in
the Chinese mythology as she was. The boxers were believers in martial arts
or what people today call Kung fu. That, again, was the worship of personal
development over external things.
It's an interesting contrast between the personal developmen of the
Christians that would allow them to enter into heaven and be with their God
and the personal development of the Chinese who believed it would make them
superior here on earth. Seeking a heavenly God took the Christians out of
themselves and caused them to look to heaven and discover the universe,
while seeking perfection within kept the Chinese locked within themselves
and a desire to make themselves one with nature rather than to understand
nature in an objective sense. It's funny that we have now come around to a
similar point of view that man and nature are one and inseparable.
What this caused in China was the rejection of ideas that were not Chinese
and thus, compared to what was happening in Europe, the Chinese were asleep.
The West had nothing to offer that the Chinese wanted because their search
for perfection was inward rather than outward. This does not mean that
every Chinese person felt this way, but that the people who were running the
government and came to their positions through the civil examination system
that was built on a knowledge of Confucian ethics and a worship of the old
masters and a deep understanding of poetry rather than science felt this
way. A man could spend his life studying the classics and then pass an
examination that would place him in a position of power within the
government. China became a country governed by poets.
I think you can get a good feel for this in Spence's book, Treason by the
Book. It is one of the best examples of Chinese thought and government in
the 1700s that I have come across and demonstrates all the memes that ruled
China at that time.
The overthrow of the Chings by the followers of Sun yat-sen and Mao tse-tung
is the story of China awakening but it is only now coming fully awake. Deng
Xiao-ping figured out how to absorb the more useful memes of the West into
the Culture of China and set the country on a course of coming fully awake.
America is the country that is performing the transfusion of memes into
their culture at incredible speed. You can credit IBM and Microsoft with
more of the change than the American government. They led the computer
revolution that spread the memes to the people.
The communist government had picked up ideas like atomic physics and rocket
science, but these ideas were forbidden to the general public. Everything
that might advance the people over the party was forbidden to the people.
Even statistics on economics were kept secret. People went to jail for
telling foreigners what was passed between the cadres in the party
newspapers. Therefore, most of what was in those papers was wrong. It was
based on inadequate science. Western economic science was kept from the
public and thus could not be used except by academics who studied it to find
weaknesses in our system.
The free exchange of ideas was a crime in China and was only encouraged
(reluctantly) by the party over the last 20 years. The adoption of the IBM
PC and the Microsoft system of Chinese for Windows opened a floodgate of
change and the development of computer piracy and the internet spread new
ideas like a virus that became a plague leading to the death of a Chinese
way of looking at the world. If not for the computer and the internet, I
think these concepts would only have made their way into China reluctantly
with the advent of civil war. Hong kong, Singapore and Taiwan were the
carriers of the virus (if you'll excuse the metaphor) and you can map the
spread of the influence of the West from these sources.
It's too bad the Mullas are following the lead of the Communist Party at the
time of Mao and rejecting the memes of modern science, economics and
technology. But then, from an ecological point of view, China is becoming
another America in the sense that they are now building roads and cars and
power plants and factories at a rate that threatens to overtake us in the
next decade. There's an article in the January issue of Wired titled: The
First Cloning Superpower, Inside China's race to become the clone capital of
the world by Charles C. Mann. The largest FAB companies in the world are
now Chinese and are being transplanted from Taiwan (TSMC and UMC) to
Shanghai. Instead of conquering Taiwan, China is absorbing it into their
economic sphere. The old Chinese memes are what you hear in the rattling of
sabers and shooting of rockets into the ocean near Taiwan.
Grant
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