A Blog from NY Times

Being Chinese myself and living in the US and Europe for the last 15 years, I’m deeply aware of the staggering difference between Chinese and Americans/Europeans in cultural and conceptual habits. I believe the notion of family as it is valued in Confucianism plays and will continue to play a defining role in China’s attitudes towards what is the ideal political model. The family metaphor consists of parental nurturing and filial respect which has been understood as a political top-down system. People will agree with the government as long as they are taken care of. In return, people feel the filial responsibility to respect the government and support it as if it was their parents.

Another vital element of the family metaphor is harmony. This notion I think is at the root of people’s preference of a peaceful and prosperous life in the country as a whole family over the individual right to vote and express individual opinion. Opinions can now be expressed in the Internet anyway.

The Tibet event has been perceived by the Chinese as a disturbing force against the family ideal especially because outsiders tried to intervene in the name of human rights and religious freedom, two concepts that are subordinate to the entirety and harmony of family.

The family metaphor correlates with the Chinese style of conceptual thinking. Chinese think holistically, Europeans/Americans think analytically and in non-connectionist terms, exactly in the way Western medicine suppresses only symptoms instead of curing the organism as a whole. Non-connectionist thinking tends to isolate religious freedom and human rights from the larger historical context in which China and Tibet are situated. Therefore Westerners see the Dalai Lama only in the light of his presumed democratic cause and not in the historical light in which he and his monks were the theocratic class exploiting the majority creatures being enslaved in Tibet.

Holistic thinking leads to the preference of maintaining a higher order, sometimes at the expenses of individual causes.

In a sense the earthquake in Sichuan must be serving as catharsis for many Chinese simply because they witness so many lives destroyed which could’ve been their own. Apart from sympathy, catharsis itself is uplifting and that can work to improve people’s awareness of humanity and moral obligations. In a spiritually unanchored nation, what could be more needed?

Jo Jing from Köln

— Posted by Jo  (May 22, 2008)