Fourth Question [Parfitt]:
Apart from business and trade, what does China have to offer the world?
Answer [Lofthouse]:
The PRC was the first Chinese government to attempt systematically to reduce both inequality and poverty offering the world a lesson on how to reduce poverty and illiteracy on a scale unmatched in global history.
In addition, the respect accorded to teachers and the merit-based educational system offered to the world a lesson when 15-year-old Shanghai students placed first in every category in the 2009 International PISA test. The only Western nation that came close was tiny Finland.
These achievements may be attributed to Confucius’s teachings.
Henry Kissinger says it best, and I agree. “China’s exceptionalism is cultural. China does not proselytize; it does not claim that its contemporary institutions are relevant outside China.”
However, China’s accomplishments to improve the quality of life since 1982 offer many lessons to learn from.
Chinese culture is mostly about the collective mindset of the family. Western culture focuses on the self-esteem and happiness of the individual to the exclusion of long-term cultural survival as Niall Ferguson points out in Civilization: The West and the Rest.
Ferguson says, “The West’s reign is coming to an end as it loses faith in itself.”
A better explanation may be found from a Gallup study by Richard Burkholder and Raksha Arora that concluded, “With greater levels of affluence, the importance of the capitalist work ethic begins to erode, and the end becomes self-expression…”
For these reasons, many in China want nothing to do with the evolution of the West’s political and cultural institutions.
Emperor Qianlong’s 1793 letter to King George III demonstrates what most Chinese believe. “As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious.”
In this letter, Emperor Qianlong points out the differences between the West and China and that the West has nothing to offer China.
That changed after the Opium Wars in the 19th century due to the West gaining a slight technological advantage in weaponry.
Today, we see China catching up and when it does, will it say that the West has nothing to offer China beyond technology already gained?
Response [Parfitt]:
The PRC reduced inequality (A) and poverty (B), offering the world an unparalleled lesson on how to reduce poverty (B) and illiteracy (C)?
In terms of GDP per capita, the IMF lists China in 94th spot, with $7,519. What, then, does China have to teach the 93 countries above it about poverty reduction? Ditto that question for literacy, where the UN lists China in 68th spot.
The CCP has made great strides toward improving the lot of its citizenry, and may have something to teach the developing world – but not the developed one. China is not a developed nation. It’s listed on the UN’s Human Development Index (a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education, and living standards) in 101st spot.
Moreover, though the CCP has worked to reduce poverty and inequality, it has adopted an economic model that, by its own admission, has created the world’s sharpest rich-poor divide.
Final Word [Lofthouse]:
The answer for “C” should be “ALL OF THE ABOVE”, which is correct.
I find the rankings you list interesting but meaningless.
In fact, a better measurement compares China’s poverty reduction with India, the world’s largest democracy. For example, the CIA Factbook says “absolute poverty” in China is 2.8%, while India is listed at 25%.
In addition, the CIA says China’s public debt is 17.3% of GDP while India’s is 50.6%.
Even more shocking, the CIA reports 15.1% of the US population lives in poverty while the US public debt is 61.9% of GDP.
Another example would be to discover what life was like in China before the CCP became the only government in China’s history to set goals that have reduced both inequality and poverty dramatically. To learn more, read a poverty study of China written by David C. Schak, an Associate Professor at Griffith University in Australia.
Continued on December 2, 2011 in Discussion with Troy Parfitt, the author of “Why China Will Never Rule the World – Travels in the Two Chinas” – Part 6 or return to Part 4.
See Discovering Intellectual Dishonesty – Part 1
______________
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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All,
In again bringing an alternative, broader, and deeper perspective to the narrative, I would like to weigh in on the matters of “equality” and “poverty” that are used as modern benchmarks when judging the success or failure of societal systems. Here it also goes a long way to explaining China’s recent rise, despite the degree to which communism was good or bad for the nation during its tenure.
While inequality and poverty are now considered great ills, and more or less immoral from the societal perspective, from the evolutionary perspective these are great virtues. For nothing will spawn maximal performance by individuals within a society like a great polarity between reward for an individual’s merit or punishment for an individual’s demerit. All one must do is consider what a maximal differential within a electrical, hydraulic or pneumatic will result in in terms of maximal flow. This precisely same thing will occur within a society’s economic system as individual attempt to flow from low to high status within a free marketplace.
But this is only one important element of free-market dynamics, as the great polarity effectively produces a stretched status bell curve, i.e., normal distribution (a pattern that defines all variation in nature), where the most pronounced feature is the bulging heart of the bell curve, representing a predominant “middle class” (noting that such a continuum really does not constitute any sort of class structure per se).
Meanwhile, those of very low status and very high status are remarkably few in number. Hence, while anti-capitalists regularly condemn the free market for creating one category of the rich and another of the poor, this is impossible in an uncorrupted free market. Indeed, large numbers of poor are created specifically by redistributing to them, largely promoting both subsistence and stagnation, creating an actual lower class.
At the same time, the anti-capitalist depiction of a free market as comprising only rich and poor, with the former exploiting the latter, also ignores the fact that a free marketplace is most characteristically defined by its fluidity, with the ranks of the lower status and those of the higher status constantly changing in who is there. Many in the lower ranks climb higher over time, and many in the higher ranks fall over time. It all depends on who is displaying merit and who is not.
Indeed, it is when those at the top exempt themselves from free market dynamics via corruption or the use of force, that a class structure become solidified in its traditional sense.
As a nation’s long term survival will depend upon maintain a high level of performance–economic and military–which in turn allows for the long-term survival of all within it, keeping both the poor and the rich around to provide incentive will lead to the overall greatest prosperity for a society, and therefore for the average individual within a society.
It must always be remembered that, from the evolution perspective, moral form will always follow moral function, not the other way around. The Chinese are currently figuring this out as they embrace capitalistic reforms. While the West has decided that the pursuit of equality is where it’s at. Natural selection will beg to differ, as the West will soon discover, perhaps in the harshest of terms.
K.D. Koratsky
http://www.LivingWithEvolution.com
http://www.LivingWithEvolution.com/blog
“Apart from business and trade, what does China have to offer the world?”
After reading Mr. Koratsky’s comments in an earlier post, I have an additional answer to Mr. Parfitt’s question for this post.
ANSWER: Survival of the human species [but only if the CCP continues as it has for the last thirty years and keeps merit as the cornerstone of advancement and success in the Chinese culture as it did for most of its more than 2,000 year history, which may explain all of the innovation and technological advances over the West until the 19th century.]
In fact, since the Qing Dynasty did not allow capable and talented Han Chinese to rise in the ranks through merit, this may explain what happened to China during and after the Opium Wars and why the West gained an advantage over China at this time—not Mao’s belief that Confucianism caused the change but the absence of the ancient merit system created by Confucianism leading to a lack of talent by the 19th century and into the 20th century until Deng Xiaoping and the Party put merit based advancement back in place as it had been before the Qing and Mao Dynasties.
If this is so, the West does not stand a chance unless it returns merit-based selection to its rightful place instead of quota systems that favor minorities or those living in poverty. Under a merit based system there would be no quota systems that favor anyone
In addition, racial discrimination in America by Caucasians has kept talented minorities from advancement and is as damaging as quota systems for minorities (reverse discrimination). In China’s case, having more than 90% of the population of one ethnic group, Han Chinese, does away with most of the problems of racial discrimination that exist in the West giving China another advantage when merit is the basis for advancement.
Terry,
Again, you said, and I quote – please see the quotations:
“China has not started a war for more than half a century,…”
Then I offered evidence that China has indeed started a war within the last half century, the Sino-Vietnamese War, February 17 – March 16, 1979.
So, I ask you, again, directly – please do not eqivocate or raise another subject – has China started a war in the last half century?
This is a very simple question. Either it has, or it hasn’t.
Thank you.
Well, if low level skirmishes are also counted, then I guess that the US supporting the MEK should mean that it is currently at war with iran.
Mr.Parfitt asked how developed countries could learn from China. Western powers like the US, UK, and France could certainly learn from China’s attitude of non-interference, no preaching, and avoiding conflict as much as possible. Maybe then the middle easterns would have a better view of them. Just a thought.
Mr. Parfitt,
No problem. Just a typo.
I tend to write all my comments in Word, run the spell and grammar check in Word, and then copy and paste into the comment section. Even then, correctly spelled typos slip by. In fact, I wrote this short response in Word and ran it through the spell check to catch a missing “e” on “paste” and that typo was spelled as a correct “past”.
These little comment boxes in WordPress tend to make it a challenge to edit.
Lloyd,
Yes, I was thinking I should do that.
Good advice.
Troy
The Sino-Vietnamise War…less than 30 days…ahahahahha, Parfitt is really very funny
Alessandro,
Yes, Mr. Parfitt was very funny. And from what I’ve read, China didn’t accomplish much during that short border conflict, which had more to do with the regional politics of Vietnam being supported by the USSR, and then China faced a series of quick and expensive defeats and then left to avoid a deeper loss of face.
However, by comparison, the US spent more than a decade in Vietnam killing millions and left behind “Agent Orange” in the earth and water and the birth defects caused by that cocktail of chemicals has damaged and ruined the lives of millions more and continues to do so.
Fact: The US has caused more global misery and death with its endless wars in the name of the “national interest (spelled oil and profit)” than China probably ever will.
Terry,
We’re not talking about China’s “peaceful rise to power.” We’re talking about what China has to offer the world. Mr. Lofthouse and I are having a debate. He’s very fond of China, it’s culture, and so on. Therefore, I was curious to know if he believed China had anything to offer to the gobal community. He’s given his answer, I’ve responded to it, and he’s given his final statement. I asked that question to better understand Mr. Lofthouse’s point of view – to see if he could provide a sound answer, and one that might make me reevaluate my own, unstated, position.
However, if you want to talk about peace…
You said, “China has not started a war for more than half a century,…”
What about the Sino-Vietnamese War, February 17 – March 16, 1979? Certainly, the books you’ve read about China’s history mention it, yes?
You have read books about China’s history, haven’t you?
Mr.Parfitt,
Whether China has anything to offer or not is not my point. My point is that China does not have an obligation to offer anything. Having a peaceful rise to power is the most anyone can ask for. Seeing that China has not started a war for more than half a century, I would say that their rise has been as peaceful as anyone’s.
Terry,
Certainly, China must have something to offer the world. There must be at least one Chinese practice, belief, or cultural aspect that non-Chinese nation-states/cultures could consider, adopt, benefit from, etc.
Are you saying there’s nothing at all? Zero?
In light of China’s emergence onto the world stage (entry into the WTO, hosting of the Olympics, second largest economy, etc.), do you think it’s unfair to ask what China has offer the global community?
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “A hallmark of Confucius’ thought is his emphasis on education and study,” something missing in Western philosophy.
The west could learn from this.
Mr. Parfitt, why is it important what China has to offer the world? As vice president Xi jinping said: “We do not spread hunger or poverty, we do not preach our way of governing, and we do no meddle with your internal affairs. What more do you want?”