COLUMNIST: U.S. DOESN’T UNDERSTAND CHINA’S DIALECTICAL WORLD VIEW

South China Morning Post (SCMP) columnist Andrew Sheng thinks US policy towards China has become a Gordian knot, and Washington needs an Alexander the Great to unravel it, or cut it loose.

Writing for SCMP, Sheng said “cultural generalizations tread on dangerous ground, because modern China has been shaped by its tumultuous engagement with the rising West since the 17th century. In the first millennium, Buddhism came from India. In the last 300 years, China absorbed communism and science and technology from the West. Both Buddhism and communism no longer prevail in their countries of origin.”

Sheng stressed the US and the West at large must understand that Chinese thinking doesn’t tread the reductionist route, “because it instinctively saw the whole as more than the sum of its parts. What is so special about Chinese correlative thinking? It is organic, systemic and indeterminate, recognizing chance, contradictions and paradoxes, different time cycles and the inseparability of observer and observed. Contrast this with the standard economic analysis that is partial and context-free and, other things being equal, timeless, random yet predictable, depending on rational man as the agent in a free market.”

“The Chinese Taoist ‘correlative cosmology’ saw life as systems of interacting ‘pposites – male and female, cold and hot, engaging with each other in constant change and evolution. Life therefore is seen in cycles or feedback loops that are mathematically difficult to predict with exactitude. In short, ancient Chinese thinking was dialectic in nature, always seeking contradictions – good events may have bad outcomes, failures can end up with successes. The Chinese revolutionaries took to communism because of the Marxian dialectic methodology that resonated with the Taoist correlative world view.”

In short, China’s policy is both superstitious and practical, wrapped with party discipline and presented in glowing terms for the best interest of its Han majority.

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