 - Last login: 10 hours agoLaodan
- laodan is a guy from Milford, Pennsylvania, USA.
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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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Asia Times Online :: China News - Racing ahead, China resurrects its past
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May 7, 2007 7:34am
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•http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/IE...
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Racing ahead, China resurrects its spiritual past
 in AsiaTimes by Kent Ewing (teacher and writer at Hong Kong International School. )
As China races into its capitalist future, it is also rediscovering its philosophical and religious past. But can the country move backward as it goes forward?
Chinese leaders think so, and they are enthusiastically supporting a revival of the ancient philosophical traditions of Confucianism and Taoism.
In their quest to find a moral center, the leadership is also allowing room for religious imports such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, but the ancient Chinese traditions are clearly the main selling points. And the ultimate goal is to quell growing social unrest that has been the unwanted offspring of the country's economic boom.
... the country's new capitalist creed of greed needs some spiritual and philosophical checks and balances, and the ancient Chinese traditions have been resurrected to play that role, and other traditions have been called in to assist. The desired end is that mammon, while still alive and well, will be put in his proper place.
 Racing ahead, China resurrects its spiritual past
I agree with Kent Ewing that a revival of Chinese spiritual traditions is being fostered by China's central authorities.
For sure this is a move to try to glue the Chinese population in accepting the present changes being inflicted so ruthlessly on it by an elite that has an elaborate strategic vision of the role the Chinese nation should play in the future.
1. It all starts with the idea of societal conservation. I mean that the Chinese leaders understand the social and political risks of destabilization that their push for China's entry into modernity entails. They think rightly that if the entry of the country into modernity should conclude with the dissolution of the Chinese nation the experiment would not have been worth the exercise.
So the recourse to the Chinese spiritual traditions is meant to glue the individuals in a common worldview to assure the preservation and reproduction of the Chinese nation and society.
2. If the Chinese nation is successfully preserved through its long march towards modernity then unmistakably it will soon be playing a leading economic role in the affairs of the world. Nobody contests that point. But what is most often forgotten is that economic might has always been followed by cultural hegemony.
So the recourse to the Chinese spiritual traditions is meant to offer the world a typically Chinese worldview that could successfully compete with the Christian worldview for gaining the world population's acceptance.
Big game indeed!
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