tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313752368184886397.post6648415187883869650..comments2023-02-28T07:45:51.853-08:00Comments on welcome economistdiary.com abedmooc.com,catholicuni.com : 2025report.com countdown - part 2 2007 to 20 dec 2019chris macraehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15269142429457914077noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313752368184886397.post-36493217204095870882021-05-09T09:14:35.096-07:002021-05-09T09:14:35.096-07:00continued... there has been a remarkable continuit...continued... there has been a remarkable continuity of Chinese commitment to self‐reliance and egalitarianism‐China's moral accommodation to the necessity of survival. China's unshackling, of its women, the “barefoot doctor,” the mass participatory harnessing of China's rampant rivers, and what Norman Macrae, deputy editor of The Economist, calls China's present‐day rural Keynesianism are expressions of that compulsion.<br /><br />Washington and Peking will enter into normal diplomatic relations with each other because doing so serves the self‐interest of both countries. Neither should entertain expectation that it can reform the other. We must respect China's right to be different, or, doing otherwise, expose ourselves to charges of self‐righteousness, demagoguety, and possibly even of imperial intent.<br /><br />China's now‐emerging personalities, procedures and political vocabulary offer promise of greater readiness by China to deal more forthrightly with other countries around the world. With respect and curiosity, Washington should hasten toward establishing normal diplomatic relations with Peking so as to ease exchanges of ideas, persons and goods from which the two countries can mutually benefit together and in their relations with other countries of the world community.chris macraehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15269142429457914077noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313752368184886397.post-50394928708892503552021-05-09T09:13:16.860-07:002021-05-09T09:13:16.860-07:00Make an Issue of Rights in China? By Robert W. Bar...<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1978/04/02/archives/make-an-issue-of-rights-in-china-no.html" rel="nofollow">Make an Issue of Rights in China? By Robert W. Barnett</a><br />April 2, 1978 Credit...The New York Times Archives<br />WASHINGTON—The nation is putting before itself a practical question: Should we make Peking's record in handling what Americans call the “human rights” of the Chinese people an obstacle to normalizing diplomatic relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China?<br /><br />We should not. I go further. We should want to seek better understanding of the moral content in how and why Peking has sustained the legitimacy of its authority through means alien to the political experience of the Western world.<br /><br />The psychic and philosophical premises upon which the Chinese system operates differ from those of other countries, whether or not Marxist, affluent or developing. But we should hesitate to condemn them as less moral merely because they are different from those of other societies. In fact, China could be giving clues to perception of moral necessities that we may be obliged to recognize if we begin to believe that we cannot assuage our economic and social dissatisfactions merely by perpetual opening up of new‐resource frontiers, geographical and technological.<br /><br />After World War II, Chiang Kai‐shek was supported by friends at home and abroad in an effort to restore pride and effectiveness to a Chinese ‐system crippled and demoralized by 150 years of humiliation and catastrophe. But the tragic fallacy in Chiang's leadership was that its legitimacy and moral sanction had stronger roots abroad than within his own Chinese environment.<br /><br />The People's Republic of China won its civil war because its authority was based upon strictly Chinese resources; its leaders achieved total national selfreliance through mobilization of the moral support of a population commatted to egalitarianism in the way it looks, it talks and behaves.<br /><br />Visitors from other parts of the developing world, awed by that achievement, can identify administrative mechanics, but cannot imagine infusing their own people with the moral devotion upon which the Chinese system appears to he built.<br /><br />Harsh national necessity shapes China's assessment of “human rights.” The “first right is to survive. With China's population of 900 million to 950 million growing at a thundering rate of 15 million to 20 million year after year, the challenge to China's survival has been pervasive, sustained and profound.<br /><br />China's responses, both voluntary and directed from Peking, reverse the stress in the freedom‐and‐duty matrix upon which Western democratic traditions are built. But in Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and in China there seems to be utterly natural acceptance of the age‐old Confucian tradition of subordinating individual liberty to collective obligation—for example, to the family. So here may be the clue to what deep in the imagination of Chinese everywhere is their moral equivalent to the individual human rights that Americans believe are sanctified by the Holy Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights in our Constitution.<br /><br />From the days when China's leaders lived in Yenan caves to the establishment of national authority in Peking, through the Great Leap Forward, through the Cultural Revolution, through the arrest of the Gang of Four, and the re‐emergence of the twice‐humiliated First Deputy Prime Minister Teng Hsiao‐ping, there has been a remarkable continuity of Chinese commitment to self‐reliance and egalitarianism‐China's moral accommodation to the necessity of survival. China's unshackling, of its women, the “barefoot doctor,” the mass participatory harnessing of China's rampant rivers, and what Norman Macrae, deputy editor of The Economist, calls China's present‐day rural Keynesianism are expressions of that compulsion.chris macraehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15269142429457914077noreply@blogger.com