"If the West does not adapt, it will die"

[donsu]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/HA28Ad02.html


Why the West must reOrient


-snip-

Yet while we help China to change, we overlook the fact that we should change ourselves, because China's growth has brought a systemic change to the world at large. As it spearheads the general growth of Asia, particularly Southeast Asia and India, it foreshadows a different world, where for the first time in at least two centuries the West will become an economic minority.

-snip-

We are the ones who should consider making important changes while looking at the Chinese reality and studying it in a very cold and non-ideological fashion. Thus ideological attacks against China and the Communist Party seem part of a larger misreading of China. They lend credence to the theory of a clash of civilizations. In fact China can be hardly called communist. Yet the calls to the Chinese communists to convert to democratic rule sound very similar to the past attitude when the West was saying to the Chinese and other non-Western people: You heathens must convert to Christianity and Western values or we'll send you to hell.

It is true that this approach worked with the poor native Americans in the 19th century. But even back then it did not work in China, which was too big and too complex to be completely overtaken by the West. In fact we had the opposite experience, for any power that has taken over China ultimately has become Chinese itself. It was true for the Mongols of the Yuan Empire, the Manchu of the Qing Dynasty, and could be also true of the Westerners: if they were to rule China, in a few decades they could well become Chinese. More important, after being sinicized the conquerors were upstaged by Chinese rebellions, which eventually took over the former victors and expanded the Chinese borders. For instance, the Manchu have become a de facto integral part of China with both their culture and their territory. The Qing in the Chinese modern imagination were not a foreign power winning China, they are part of Chinese history, fully digested in it

-snip-

Jared Diamond in his latest book Collapse speaks about civilizations that took a wrong turn and collapsed. It sounds as if he is speaking of us, the Western world: there is a huge change, and we fail to recognize it and adapt to it. As Diamond says, those who do so perish.
---------------------------------------------

it's not us that fails to recognize 'the change'; it's the criminal bushmilhousegang that only cares about their business bottom line.

[daleanime]

1. It's a poor road...

that runs one way. China has far more people then the US, if we are too slow to adapt we die. But we do have some advantages if we make use of them.

[MrPrax]

2. Rubbish...

NeoCon boilerplate...here they are talking about 'capitulation' to corporatism, not change.

Diamond makes a great deal of interesting points in his books and I highly recommend them, but the term 'civilization' is too imprecise for this serious discussion and, while attempting to draw analogies from 'empires' 2500 years can be informative about 'those' empires, the global homogenity that has occured, combined with technology, renders the informative value of such models useless. In short, there are too many qualitative differences to make the fit.

The thesis itself is never explained fully in that China hasn't really changed other than adapting to western economic models with it's attendent problems (rampant disease, urban crowding, enivironmental disasters, slave-like labour conditions, rapid growth, etc), but has done so without adapting to any of the social and political strategies of the west to deal with 'industrialization'.

So what is this article really saying? The change that is required is to 'jettison' those social and political strategies of course. The big problem is that those social and political strategies are vital to the working of this economic model.

What 'internalized rationale' is one going to be invented to handle these attendent problems? Religion? Confucinusism? Romanticism? Despotism?...corporatism, perhaps?

The other main point is that the west would probably not be effected that much if China collapsed tomorrow, however if the west's economy (esp. the US) were to collapse, that would effect them us and everyone greatly.

So...who is suppose to change? Why call for the collapse of a 'stable' economic system to make way for one that has might just be a flash in the pan like many economic models lately.

Anyone interested in this apocolyptic doomsayer stuff should check out how it is done and done well. Wolcott, I guess, just discovered this interview Will Pitt's truthout ran in september, by Emmanuel Todd.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/091205H.shtml
Emmanuel Todd: The Specter of a Soviet-Style Crisis


Read both these articles and make up your own mind...one gets to the nuts and bolts of the actual world and one comically tries to draw some imaginary line between Ghengis Kahn and 'change'!!!

[donsu]

3. I believe the article is pointing out :

"the West will become an economic minority"

very soon and that will change the world dynamics.

which doesn't bother the bushmilhousegang because they always follow the money to be made trail

america will become sucked dry financially and left behind.

[MrPrax]

5. I missed something...

The article you posted has virtually nothing to do with the American economy...like you pasted, 'the West will become an economic minority'?

The word American, United States, etc doesn't appear once???

The only time something American is even mentioned is an analogy where Florida's capital is confused.

As far as 'bushmilhousegang' goes...that makes no sense. Extensive and often sinister trade arrangements without reciporal demands for human rights, for instance, has been non-partisan from day one. Clinton was as big on expanding trade as Bush or any other elite in the US or the rest of the world.

This article is actually slagging some of the 'democratic' arrangements that the EU has imposed on trade by:

For instance in the European Union, many rules are dictated and imposed by bureaucrats who are not elected and possibly are less accountable than Chinese mandarins. There is a huge deficit of democracy in the EU. Why can these bureaucrats impose rules on milk or the content of my chocolate bar? What is their legitimacy? What is their interest, their goals? These notions are fuzzy in every single EU country, where lively domestic politics, with its tempo of lively, fierce political campaigns, draws more attention than distant and murky dealings in Brussels.

What can anyone possibly make of such a moronic Faux news like description?

(hint:One is granted legitimacy through democratically held elections and the other one isn't)...talk about Orwellian.

The article is rightwing, kow-tow Chinese govt agit-prop where the 'west' is reduced to some 'dreary' vulgar Marxist stereotype easily understood by 'chinese' communists and people who are sensitive about doing business with them.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

4. The delicious irony is that we sold them the rope.

And, now they are hanging us with it. We promoted capitalism to the Chinese and they have proven to be better at it than we are. So, now we whine about "outsourcing" while they build their markets.

Anyone for Chow Mein?

[malaise]

6. Wake up peeps

China has been a civilized country for about 3000 years.