“Western states are ruled by a clique of cosmopolitan burgeois thieves who have no loyalty to their own,” the Chinese president was quoted as saying in a lecture at Beijing University. It caused a minor stir in the Western press. For us in the West, it sounds quite hostile, but if you go through the bits and pieces that have been leaked to the Western press, it seems that the Chinese President has a very realistic idea of the political, cultural and economic changes that Western civilisation is going through. He certainly has a more accurate picture than the vast majority of Western politicians and journalists. It is clear that the Chinese are studying us.
…the Chinese President has a very realistic idea of the political, cultural and economic changes that Western civilisation is going through.
How sharply this contrasts with what is being presented by our politicians and intellectuals, for whom thousands of years of Chinese civilisation are reduced to two decades of Marxist modernisation. Who have never heard of Confucianism in their lives and are not interested in it. Who imagine a Stalinist-Brezhnev regime where everybody has slanted eyes and cannot understand how these men could have gained such a scientific, technological and economic lead.
In the 19th century, European anthropologists could study various bizarre savage tribes, and the most that the shamans of those tribes could do was shout out some kind of spiritual-emotional fantasy about white people. Isn’t a similar relationship developing between us and the Chinese?
