The country has stood up, but on Western terms rather than those its greatest leaders and thinkers once envisioned.
China wasn't always authoritarian, and in the past it successfully ruled as a soft state. The state was considered there to serve society, rather than the other way around.
China has fought back against the brutal Western imperialism, says Pankaj Mishra, with a counter harshness and industrialisation, but it's time for it to find its more gentle and tolerant tradition.
Xi may impress some with a display of Chinese military hardware. But the nationalism he seeks to turn into a civil religion is not only felt to be oppressive by many people -- whether Muslims in Xinjiang, Buddhists in Tibet or protesters in Hong Kong. It is also profoundly derivative, without Chinese characteristics.
Sun Yat-Sen, who is venerated as father of the Chinese nation in both the People’s Republic and Taiwan, was clear about this. Towards the end of his life, he warned his compatriots against adopting an idea of civilization developed in the West, which “when applied to society, will mean the cult of force, with aeroplanes, bombs, and cannons as its outstanding features.”
But what comes after development is significantly advanced, and the bullies lose their power to bully? Can China still offer something new and redemptive, just as its first generation of leaders hoped?
The possibility is kept alive by some Chinese thinkers at least. In a recent book, “Rethinking China’s Rise: A Liberal Critique,” Xu Jilin, one of China’s major public intellectuals, laments that the national pride sweeping the Chinese today is born out of beating the West at its own game rather than devising the rules of a new, less destructive game.
Refusing to be over-impressed by China’s material success, Xu delves into its moral, intellectual and spiritual traditions. He offers a vision of China as a tolerant society -- one that has recovered its civilizational values of pluralism and practices them domestically as well as internationally.
Bloomberg
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