Sunday, March 27, 2005

Guardian (UK): the future is china's

March 27th

interesting thought: there are chinese equivalents to india's p-secs.

but watch out, the young in china, subject to the greatest amount of
jingoistic brain-washing, are more into china uber alles. this is
ominous, as there are 30 million surplus chinese young men, who will
never find a wife (because of all the female fetuses that have been
aborted). they will be violent thugs (just think 'a clockwork
orange'): it is an established fact that woman-less young men are
prone to be testosterone-crazed. china will have to go to war to kill
these 30 million. most convenient, isn't it?

also, this fellow martin jacques once wrote to me when i accused him
of being pro-chinese, that his wife, an indian, had died in a chinese
hospital in a clear case of racism: they had ignored her because she
was, after all, a mere indian. yet, he seems overawed by china. i
wonder if some of you in europe know something more about him.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1445560,00.html

The future is China's

Although his combative opinions got him the sack from the university
of Beijing, Wang Xiaodong remains an outspoken champion of the Chinese
nationalist movement. He tells Martin Jacques why his country must not
trust the US

Friday March 25, 2005
The Guardian

Our knowledge of China is being transformed with each passing day.
Five years ago, virtually the only subject on people's minds was
Tiananmen Square. Now nearly everyone knows that the country has
undergone a huge economic transformation, and that the future belongs
to it in a way that was previously inconceivable. But knowledge about
China still remains of the broadest brush. There is little or no
perception, for example, of the political and intellectual debates
that shape the attitudes of either the Chinese elite or the population
at large. Indeed, there is still an underlying assumption that this is
an autocracy in which there are no real debates, just fiats handed
down from on high.

Article continues
This is a misconception or, at best, a half-truth. The extraordinary
success of China over the past quarter of a century is the product of
a sophisticated political leadership, highly attuned to the problems
and possibilities that it faces and informed by a plethora of debates
and arguments. Those arguments, however, take place within strict
parameters, are largely confined to elite circles and are often highly
coded. The most important recent such debate has concerned
nationalism, and one of its key figures is Wang Xiaodong, a Chinese
intellectual in his late 40s. Largely as a result of his book Chinese
Nationalism Under the Shadow of Globalisation, which was published in
1999 (just after the Nato bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade,
which led to angry demonstrations in Beijing), Wang is now widely seen
as a leading thinker of the nationalist movement.

His main target has been what he calls "reverse racism", or the
widespread attitude among Chinese intellectuals that denigrates China
and looks to the west for the country's future and salvation. In fact,
this kind of attitude is far from unusual in the Asian tiger
countries: as they have exploded into economic growth, they have
invariably looked to the west, at least initially, as their model and
their vision. ...

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