Tag Archives: China

Should Our Schools Begin Educating in Chinese?

The world used to be divided into Western, Communist, and nonaligned nations. More recently, the division has been between developed and developing countries. Lately, a new separation has appeared. The separation is between democracies and those countries, like China, whose leaders think democracy does not work and have instituted a more autocratic form of government.

Democracies stress open elections, freedom of the press and of religion, and an unbiased judiciary, among other requirements. Autocracies think the liberal ideas of democracy have failed. They point to dysfunction, partisan politics, the recent economic recession, and the importance attached to money in winning elections. They prefer a small group of elites who can, they believe, operate more efficiently, not to mention more cheaply.

Believers in autocracy don’t think the liberal ideas of the democracies work any longer in the world as it is. The more orderly, economically viable life of an autocracy like China supposedly compensates for the lack of individual freedom.

The survival of democracies may hinge on their ability to handle the polarization of the last few years between citizens with widely differing ideas of what a government should be and do. Perhaps playing to one’s base in a democracy doesn’t work as well as playing to the common good.

The Twain Meet: East and West

 

“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat . . .”

–Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West”

 

Despite Kipling’s oft-quoted phrase, the east and west meet regularly these days. Our boosters in the Seattle area back the much-touted “pivot” to Asia. Many of the goods to and from Asia pass through our western Washington ports.

Walter Russell Mead, writing back in 2000, suggested a common core that begins to bind east and west perhaps more than trade—the Abrahamic faiths. Mead believed the communism of China to be a descendant of the Abrahamic faiths, a back door to a belief in beginnings and endings, as opposed to the more circular views of some Eastern cultures. When communism became dominant in China, a whole society was wrenched from traditional teachings.

Still unresolved is how to encourage the most humane way toward an end point.

Kipling’s poem, one in which two young men from different cultures scorn warfare for friendship, ends:

“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!”

From China: One View of the United States

 

Eric X. Li, writing in Foreign Affairs (“The Life of the Party; The Post-Democratic Future Begins in China,” Foreign Affairs, January/February, 2013) states:

“While China’s might grows, the West’s ills multiply: since winning the Cold War, the United States has, in one generation, allowed its middle class to disintegrate. Its infrastructure languishes in disrepair, and its politics, both electoral and legislative, have fallen captive to money and special interests.”

We may question Eric X. Li’s belief that China’s example of governance is ultimately good for humankind, but we surely understand that events in the United States in recent years have demonstrated a less than sterling example of democracy for the rest of the world.

For several decades, American soldiers and diplomats have risked lives to bring democracy to countries that seem not to know what to do with it. We berate them for disintegrating into warring tribes.

Perhaps we should examine our own warring tribes. Democracy works only when a people evidence humility as regards their own opinions and show respect for those with whom they disagree. Hatred poisons democracy. We may be deeply saddened at certain trends, but we self-destruct if our response is to allow this poison to infect us.

None of us will obtain all we wish. We live in an imperfect world. Respect and compromise grease the wheels of democracy so that it works.