We still insist, by and large, in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts. If you want to know why we unerringly seem to get China wrong... this is the reason.
Interpretation
Understanding China requires a perspective beyond Western concepts and experiences.
This quote by Martin Jacques emphasizes the limitations of applying Western frameworks to comprehend Chinese society, culture, and politics. He argues that such an approach leads to persistent misunderstandings, as it overlooks the unique historical and cultural contexts of China that cannot be accurately interpreted through a Western lens.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion on international relations to highlight cultural misunderstandings.
The era when the United States was the dominant global power is steadily coming to an end, and it must find a way of acknowledging this and framing its ambitions and interests accordingly. Instead of claiming the right to continuing primacy in east Asia, for example, it should seek to share that primacy with China.
If you are white, racism is too easily ignored and forgiven, regarded as of burning concern only to the ethnic minorities, and therefore of relatively marginal significance.
For 200 years, the West has been so dominant in the world that it's not really needed to understand other cultures, other civilizations. Because, at the end of the day, it could, if necessary by force, get its own way.
Just six years into the 21st century, one can say this is not shaping up to be anything like an American century. Rather, the U.S. seems much more likely to be faced with a very different kind of future: how to manage its own imperial decline.
While the West has enjoyed overwhelming global power, its moral preachings have been legitimised, and in effect enforced, by that power. But as that power begins to ebb, then the morality of its actions will be the subject of growing scrutiny and challenge.
For 200 years, the dominant powers have also been the colonial powers: the European countries, the U.S. and Japan. They have never been required to pay their dues for what they did to those whom they possessed and treated with contempt.
The poor dog, in life the firmest friend, The first to welcome, foremost to defend, Whose honest heart is still the master's own, Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone, Unhonour'd falls, unnoticed all his worth, Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth, While man, vain insect hopes to be forgiven, And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.
I fear that, with our current veneration for the natural and the real, we have arrived at the opposite pole to all idealism, and have landed in the region of the waxworks.
People who have a religion should be glad, for not everyone has the gift of believing in heavenly things.
In failing circumstances no one can be relied on to keep their integrity.
Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can't reach.
I am baffled by the way sophisticated theologians who know Adam and Eve never existed still keep talking about it.
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