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The seven years of China & the US

“When I sat in the seat of a Chinese stadium and enjoyed the magical performances of thousands of Chinese dancers, drummers, singers, and acrobats on stilts, I could not but recall the past seven years. Different experiences in the United States and China

By Thomas Friedman

China has been busy with various infrastructure projects, and we are busy dealing with al-Qaeda (terrorists); they have been building better stadiums, subways, airports, roads and parks, and we have been working on the construction of better metal detectors, Hummer military vehicles and drones…

 Differences have begun to show. You can compare the dirty old LaGuardia Airport in New York and the beautifully shaped international airport in Shanghai. When you drive to Manhattan, you will find out how dilapidated the infrastructure is along the way. Experience Shanghai’s maglev train at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour. It uses electromagnetic propulsion instead of ordinary steel wheels and tracks. You have already arrived in Shanghai. Then ask yourself: Who is living in a third world country?

 I think: As a modern country, China has accepted the main concepts of modern national sovereignty and human rights. However, the various qualities of Chinese civilization make it unique. One of the characteristics of China’s development model is that the scale effect of learning + innovation + huge population affects China and the world. Many foreign companies investing in China have a slogan. If they can achieve the first in China, they will be able to achieve the world’s best.

With the rise of China, this trend is beginning to expand into more and more areas such as tourism, aviation, film and television, sports, education, new energy, modernization models, and high-speed rail. Some of us are more envious of the lives of small countries and small people, in fact, the difficulties of small and small countries. Small countries can’t afford storms, while big countries face waves and have much more room for manoeuvre.

Chile is a comparatively more-developed developing country. However, in a major earthquake in 2010, GDP fell a large chunk, and the entire economy could not breathe for two years. Even if China encounters such a large-scale natural disaster as the Wenchuan earthquake, the entire country’s economy remains unaffected.

For most countries, industrial upgrading often means that the industry migrates to foreign countries, and China can carry out large-scale industrial gradient transfer within itself, which extends the life cycle of Chinese manufacturing. Culture – The collision of Chinese and Western cultures over the past thirty years has not caused most Chinese people to lose their cultural confidence.

The Chinese people today embrace Confucius’s heat, Lao Tzu’s heat, reciting hot, calligraphy and painting fever, tea ceremony heat, old house heat, cultural relics, Chinese medicine fever, and heat of health, all reflect the revival of Chinese traditional culture.

The food culture, health culture, and leisure culture derived from Chinese culture are also incomparable to other cultures. Street restaurants in any part of China can make 30 to 40 dishes. In the vast majority of American restaurants, there are only hamburgers and potato chips. There are three or four dishes that are good. European restaurants have more dishes but rarely more than seven or eight varieties.

Some of us are always worried that Chinese people lack religious feelings. In fact, anyone who is a little familiar with the history of the world knows that religious conflicts in human history have led to countless wars. The conflict between various Christian denominations and between Christianity and Islam has had a history of thousands of years, resulting in human tragedies in which countless lives were brutally murdered. Therefore, our people do not have to believe in religion.

Economics–China’s traditional economics, strictly speaking, is not “market economics” but “humanistic economics.” In the long history of China, if a government fails to develop its economy and improve people’s livelihood, it cannot handle disasters and disasters. It will lose support from the people and lose its “destiny” and will eventually be overthrown by the people.

Today’s political party in China is a continuation of the historically unified Confucian ruling group tradition, rather than a Western party that competes on behalf of different interest groups. Many people in the West only agree with the legitimacy of the regime resulting from multi-party competition. This is a very shallow political concept.

I once met an American scholar who questioned the legitimacy of the Chinese regime. I asked him why he did not first question the legitimacy of his own country: You took the land of others and passed colonial, immigration, extermination of Indians, and formed the United States today. . I asked him to explain to me where the legitimacy and legitimacy of such a country lies. In the end, he can only tell me that this is history.

Can we doubt the source of the legitimacy of Western regimes by using the concept of “selecting and selecting talents” in China? Xiao (Small) “Junior” Bush’s rule brought an economic downturn to the United States in eight years and brought disaster to Iraq. Bringing financial tsunami is an example.

The most important feature of China’s historical legitimacy is the “political tradition of selecting the able and capable people and governing the country with the support of the people”. In the political culture of China, the concept of “one game at a time”, “hardship on one side, support from all sides”, and other cultures cannot be produced.

I once discussed the Chinese model with Indian scholars. They said that on the face of it, China is centralized, but every reform in China actually has strong local characteristics. They compete and complement each other. Therefore, the Chinese system is better than India’s. The system is more dynamic.

They have studied the West and have established a powerful modern government system. At the same time, they have their own unique political and cultural resources. The combination of the two makes it easier for us to overcome the populism, short-sightedness, and legalism that plagued Western democracy today. And other issues.

At the political level, many people in the West also take it for granted that China will accept the political model of confrontation with the West as the Chinese middle class grows. However, they also discovered today that the Chinese middle class today seems to value China’s political stability more than any other class. They understand that the “democratization” of the West has brought chaos and turmoil to many countries.

Understanding their hard-earned wealth accumulation has actually benefited from more than 30 years of political stability in China. Frankly speaking, what China has demonstrated today is definitely not an oversimplified or even simple concept of “advanced” and “backwardness,” “democracy,” “autocracy,” “high human rights,” and “low human rights.”

This is the article written by Thomas Friedman, an American columnist, *Seven Years of China and the United States.”

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