This one is still slightly warm, originally posted 3/3/2008:
Interesting article on Chinese think tanks
Tagline: "Despite the global interest in the rise of China, no one is paying much attention to its ideas and who produces them. Yet China has a surprisingly lively intellectual class whose ideas may prove a serious challenge to western liberal hegemony."
Salil sez:
This is the most interesting part of the article to me:
Paradoxically, the power of the Chinese intellectual is amplified by China's repressive political system, where there are no opposition parties, no independent trade unions, no public disagreements between politicians and a media that exists to underpin social control rather than promote political accountability. Intellectual debate in this world can become a surrogate for politics—if only because it is more personal, aggressive and emotive than anything that formal politics can muster.
I kind of wonder how long this state of affairs will last. I'm not as worried about the "sheer numbers" question, since it remains to be seen how much truly innovative work will come out of China when anything that's considered dissenting or antithetical to the Party line / Party interests is quashed unceremoniously (hmm...are kangaroo courts ceremonious?). You can have 4000 or 10000 think-tankers or whatever, but if they're all largely saying things that are safe, then it doesn't matter so much, right?
1 comment:
Yes, it's nutty commenting on my own post -- but I suspect it's going to happen a lot.
Anyway, I think the state of affairs is going to last for a long time because in some sense it really hasn't changed all that much. What I mean is that Communism itself has been subverted and conquered by several millenia of Chinese culture and a way of thinking and being. My question would be, what would this state of affairs change back to?
I wonder if this is not going to be another case of East and West just not being able to talk the same language. The concepts discussed in the article have a certain meaning in the West, and to the extent that China adapts them for their own purposes, they're going to have a different meaning there -- they're going to be informed by a completely different cultural context. How long before one or the other of us blunders into a conflict because we just don't understand one another.
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