Both China and the West can learn a lot from any conflicts and collisions. China's progress in the past 30 years has not come without costs, e.g., human, ecological, and environmental. This is probably why "the focus on economic growth" has, for the first time in the post-Mao era, not been written into the Party charter at the Party's latest congress in October 2010 to guide China's future social and economic development.
At the same time, China's model of human development has been largely unknown to the West. China has been balancing between stability, control, state planning ("The visible hand") on one hand, and change, openness, and market ("The invisible hand") on the other. This dynamic approach to democracy and human rights has been little known to any established Western theory books. The question: Do we allow China and/or can we respect a country with 1,4 billion inhabitants (still increasing per year by 10 million - alltså twice as much as the entire Norwegian population) to do this experiment?
China's "both/and" way towards democracy and human rights is a dynamic and sophisticated scenario that goes beyond even the wildest imagination of any functionalist "either/or" teachers. This is a long-term seemingly irrational process of struggling and often self-sacrificing under many generations for the larger whole of aspiring to see China's re-rising. The film HERO - directed by Yimou Zhang - disclosed the analogy of such vision already from the first Emperor of ancient China.
Most Western experts including even some of Sweden's brightest minds are still wearing old ideological sunglasses to see China. This is one important reason why the West and even Sweden have started lagging behind. As far as I am concerned, for the first time in the human history, China is building up the world's largest Capitalistic Commmunist society (or Communistic Capitalist society), attempting to integrate the best components of both into China's future. This is not just the fantasy of a few individual decision makers but a natural response to the enormous challenges that China faces for the sake of stability of not just China but the world.
Nevertheless, China's attempt and the very process of such attempting is not going without serious problems. The integration of the "both hands" is not an easy job, often causing unwanted repercussions. But this seemingly paradoxical vision of human development has its deeper philosophical and practical underpinnings. The Chinese approach will have a fundamental impact on the future course of not just China but also the humanity.
I asked my students: If U.S. has five things to learn from China, can we in Sweden and Nordic countries name just one or two things that we can also learn from China so that our children and grandchildren would not blame us for self-inflated intellectual superiority and confidence?
Source:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1938671,00.html
