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Originally Posted by 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.
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How is liberalism a western value? It's a social axiom. Might just as well say all paper in the world is "Chinese", because it first originated in China long ago, or that all cars are German, because it originated from there long ago.
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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.
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That's a big over-simplification at best. First of all, it's not a religious war. Islam is not at trial, the only target here is on some extremist groups in the Middle East and a few states. Islam is still practiced by many in the US and any social stigma against the practice stems from under-educated individual opinions within America. Second of all, the US in the Middle East is toppling states, not religion in the region. There has been to religious reforms in Afghanistan or Iraq beyond fundamental justice. And there won't be, it wouldn't be rational at all to turn this into a religious ideology. This is so unrelated to religion that Iraq was actually seen as an enemy of Al Queada during Saddam's rule, for their "perversion" of Shiira law. Third, this has nothing to do with US relations to China. The US (meaning the state) is not stuck on religious ideology, only some people within its border.
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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.
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I hate multicultural ideologies in the US. It's all a game of legitimacy and cultural isolation. Culture and religions don't have to be isolated. If Muslims want to call a mortgage a strawberry, then that's their freedom. There's no reason to say that there is a dominant imposing culture over others.