orange dave

Not to name names, but there are those on this board who argue that China will have to adopt western values like liberalism and democracy in order to survive into the 21st century. None of this is false - but I suspect the people making this argument usually don't understand that much about China or how their system works. In fact, the same argument is true - EQUALLY true - going the other way around.

America finds itself in the midst of a religiously motivated war right now, a concept that almost doesn't exist in Confucian Asia. It is religious on both sides - you get people arguing in political contexts that Mohammed was a pedophile, for instance. And we, living in a democracy, can't quite so easily dismiss these people as nuts, becuase they do actually have influence on their respective political systems. These people, or actually their slightly more mainstream compatriots, are the ones who got the US into Iraq as a response to 9/11, without the attention span to see the thing through. China never bows to these short-term shifts in public opinion.

Using their response to the Xinjiang problem as a prototype, we can see how the Chinese would respond to a similar problem. Their approach is two-pronged: forced assimilation, but with some deference to their culture as a culture, not a religion. We can see the latter with their relations with the Muslim world: they are actually trying to broker peace between Pakistan and India, partly in an attempt to gain the favor of their Muslim minority. At the same time, the US never would never be able to simply disconnect Islam from its underlying culture the way China has, without any regard to political correctness or cherished ideals. Suppose for instance in the area of Muslim finance the US could just ban anything that was clearly the result of religion, and not economically productive. For instance, some Muslims have to call home mortgages something else because of a religious ban on usery. Doing something like this would give someone the political capital to take a more scientific approach to economic development in the Mulsim world, and stand up to public opinion on something like Iraq for instance.

There definitely are aspects of China's Confucian culture, such as their (lack of) regard for historical truth, which have to go. On the other hand, their ability to cut right through religious bull is something that I admire in their culture very much. I hope that current anti-Chinese sentiment does not keep us from learning from their political culture and applying their experiences to our own.