Sunday, January 15, 2017

Xinhua — Xi's world vision: a community of common destiny, a shared home for humanity


The chief value for Western liberalism is personal freedom. The chief value for traditional Chinese culture is harmony. 

President Xi is positioning China to reassert its traditional role as the Middle Kingdom, which can also be rendered as Central Realm or even Center of the World based on harmony among all peoples.

Economically, this pits the market state, in which distribution is based on competition among wants, against the welfare state, in which distribution is based on a constellation of needs.

This is often or usually characterized in the West as the distinction between a free market economy and a command economy, but it is actually different approaches to a managed economy, since government necessarily plays key roles in each. There are many such approaches possible and some of them have already been tried.

The looks like it may be the beginning of a new stage in the historical dialectic as China and other non-Western countries become developed countries capable of competing with the West not only economically and militarily but also in the conflict of ideas that drives the historical dialectic from the Hegelian point of view.

In in the view, different ideas clash in the conflict of ideas and some have their moment as dominant before being replaced by a fresh idea in the succeeding moment. However, the idea that is replaced is also subsumed and continues to influence historically. 

A previously subsumed idea may also reemerge subsequently in a fresh form to do battle in the conflict of ideas that drives history. Chinese traditionalism is reemerging in a fresh form to confront the dominant liberalism of West on the world stage. 

They will both be subsumed in another moment in the series of moments that constitutes the temporal unfolding of the historical dialectic. What that might look like then we can only guess at now.

Ecns.cn
Xi's world vision: a community of common destiny, a shared home for humanity
Xinhua

9 comments:

Peter Pan said...

There is vision and there is the reality of ordinary people:
http://video.aljazeera.com/channels/eng/videos/chinas-left-behind-generation---101-east/5231110112001

Matt Franko said...

"The chief value for traditional Chinese culture is harmony. "

and the path to this is to accrue as many USD balances as is humanly possible?

Does Confucius say: "USD balance accrual is path to harmony!"

Noah Way said...

Imagine if US fleets were search and recover instead of search and destroy. Imagine the good will generated by such humanitarian action the the benefits we would reap - not just as a nation, but as a global civilization.

For the US, "humanitarianism" is a 2-second shot of US Aid boxes in a 30-second advertisement of advancing fighters, tanks, troops and helicopter gunships.

Peter Pan said...

Reunification with Taiwan = more harmony

The Rombach Report said...

"Reunification with Taiwan = more harmony"

For China maybe. Size matters and there is little doubt that China will at some point in the future eclipse the U.S. as a military power. If so, it would be far better if by that time China had evolved into a multi-party democracy, as Taiwan has because democracies are generally less likely to go to war with each other.

There are 50 million young men in China of military age for which there are no wives, thanks to the Chinese cultural preference for male children and the disastrous one child per family policy that was only recently repealed. Let's hope that when those 50 million young Chinese men start roaming the world in search of wives, that they're not carrying guns.

Maybe the U.S. should make a Statue of Liberty size gift to Taiwan of the Goddess of Democracy statue from 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Who knows?

https://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-goddess-of-democracy/

Perhaps the expanding middle class in China will want to have a greater say governing themselves. It's not inconceivable that the impulse for democratic self government could spread from Taiwan and Hong Kong to mainland China.

Andrew Anderson said...

The chief value for Western liberalism is personal freedom.

Then why may only depository institutions (~7000 in the US) deal with the Nation's fiat in convenient, inherently-safe account form while the rest of US must work through a government privileged* usury cartel or be limited to unsafe, inconvenient physical fiat, bills and coins?

Where's the freedom of citizens not to have to work through a cursed usury cartel?


*e.g. government insurance of private liabilities including privately created liabilities.

Noah Way said...

The chief value for Western liberalism is personal freedom.

The chief value for Western liberalism is personal profit.

There, fixed it for you.

Matt Franko said...

Maybe its "freedom to make a profit"...

Peter Pan said...

As usual, some are more "free" than others.