ness31 wrote:I don’t think Eastern cultures think there is anything superior about Western ways - from it’s medicine to science to its social systems. They have harnessed the fascia of all things Western to treat what are ‘Western’ problems with Western ways.
It's not really about who we think is or is not superior. When your cannons have a reach of 50 meters while the cannons on the other side have a reach of 100 meters, the outcome is predictable even if you feel very superior.
Superiority always implies a value judgement, yet the objective facts of technological advances make havoc of our subjective feeling of superiority.
The Chinese were undoubtedly more advanced than Europeans during the Tang and Song dynasties. Even by the 16th century, there were more books published in China than in the rest of the world put together. The question is why they fell back in relation to Europe or why Europe advanced during the European Renaissance. In Sinology, it's called the
Needham Question. Needham was a British sinologist who, together with collaborators, compiled a massive multi-volume work on Chinese Science and Civilisation. His question has been variously answered. I think there are multiple factors, but the two most important are:
1) The monolithic structure of totalitarian China suppressed innovation, while the competition between numerous small political entities in Europe promoted innovation.
2) The two foreign ruled dynasties Yuan and Qing during which the Mongols and Manchus respectively ruled China as a foreign ruling class suppressed cultural advancement since the foreign rulers were more interested in maintaining their hold on power than in the advancement of Chinese culture.
When I studies Chinese more than 40 years ago, most of us thought that the CCP would not be able to modernize the country without modernizing the political system. We have been proven wrong. China, by learning from the West, has made enormous advances in the last 30 years in developing technology, while at the same time, rejecting all development in the political field. But I suspect the last word hasn't been said about this because the totalitarian rule by the CCP is inherently corrupt. Without freedom of press and checks and balances, it cannot be any other way. We'll see what happens when China has to become an innovation leader instead of just follow the West.
When Chinese scholars started to realize the superiority of Western science in the 19th century, they, as a face saving measure, created a dichotomy in which they admitted that the West was superior in natural science but that the Chinese were superior because of their human sciences (Confucianism), and that it was the latter that mattered.
After having first banned Confucius, the CCP has now revived Confucianism because they realize that Communist ethics wasn't sufficient to rule the country. However, I don't believe that anybody could claim that even neo-Confucianism provides a valid basis for ruling a modern state. The Chinese elite will sooner or later question why the Chinese have to be deprived of democracy and human rights.
Rather than the question of cultural superiority, the question of which system is better suited to deal with the problems of the future is of greater interest. We cherish our individual rights, but aren’t Asian collective-style societies more suited to deal with future problems? The answer isn’t that simple because Asian societies are just as greedy for material possessions as Western consumerist society.
The pandemic confirms both of the ideas I posited above: 1) the inherent corruption of CCP rule will always lead to problems like the cover-up 2) the Chinese system, which puts the interest of the collective above individual rights, is better at dealing with exceptional situations swiftly. But which will be better in the end ....