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Frank
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What, in your view, is the biggest misconception about China in the West?
The single biggest misconception is that you have a wicked government and a good people. The Chinese have had 3,000 years for the government and the people to shape each other. The institution in the West that most closely resembles the Chinese system is, in fact, the Sicilian mafia. You have a capo di tutti capi who prevents the other capi from killing each other. Because they’re natural anarchists, they don’t like any form of government. They’re loyal to their families. The emperor is nothing but a necessary evil. The idea of public trust and subsidiarity that’s fundamental to democracy is unknown to the Chinese.
What holds a country of anarchists together, if not the emperor?
There’s an old joke about [former American President] Eisenhower and [former Israeli Prime Minister] Ben Gurion from the 1950’s. Eisenhower tells Ben Gurion, “It’s hard to be president to 200 million Americans.” And Ben Gurion says, “It’s even harder to be prime minister of 2 million prime ministers.”
Well, China is a country of 1.4 billion emperors. Everyone wants to be an emperor. Everyone strives for his own and his family’s power. There’s no sense of Res publica. Certainly no Augustinian sense of common love to hold a country together. What holds the country together is ambition. Therefore, it’s critical that the meritocracy be fair.
Xi Jinping’s daughter goes to Harvard, but no Chinese president can get his child into Peking University unless she gets the right score on the gaokao, the university entrance exam.
So, all hope is not lost for the West when the Chinese ‘capo di tutti capi’ is educating his offspring in one of America’s Ivy League schools?
Well, the one thing that we’re much better at than the Chinese is innovation. As I mentioned, Huawei is very much dependent on Western employees for innovation. I’m not saying the Chinese can’t innovate. During the Tang dynasty (618 to 906 A.D.), which is considered a golden age of Chinese arts and culture, the Chinese invented the clock, the compass, gunpowder, printing and, virtually, all of the elements of the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. However, the Chinese form of meritocracy, which is based on standardized exams, is the second-best way of running that meritocracy. Albert Einstein, who sat in the Swiss patent office because he couldn’t get a university job …
… and then invented the theory of relativity at his private home …
Right. This is unimaginable in China. If you ask the Chinese what worries them the most, many will say, “How come we have no Nobel prizes?” Eight Chinese have won the Nobel prize in sciences, but they are all Chinese who lived in America.
The Chinese system is very bad at identifying those eccentrics, like an Einstein, who make fundamental contributions. We are much better at that. The Western idea of the divine spark in the individual simply doesn’t exist in China. So, I think we do have a chance against the Chinese.
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Chinese Communist Party Propaganda (Read 32662 times)
