China also victim of Western Academia

[Guest guest]

China also victim of Western Academia

By Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment

Group.

Quotes from

THE ABDUCTION OF MODERNITY

Part 1: The race toward barbarism

By Henry C K Liu

 

 

"Chinese civilization has weathered successive occupation by barbaric

invaders, all of whom as rulers saw fit to adopt Chinese civilization

for their own benefit and contributed to the further development of

the culture they had invaded and subsequently adopted. The history of

the West's interaction with the rest of the world has been culturally

evangelistic, to suppress and encroach on unfamiliar cultures

Westerners arbitrarily deem inferior, often based on self-satisfied

ignorance. Until confronted by Western imperialism, China might have

faced military conquests, but Chinese civilization had never been

under attack. Barbaric invaders came to gain access to Chinese

culture, not to destroy it. The West is unique in its destructive

ethnocentricity. Under the domination of the West, Chinese or other

non-Western intellectuals who do not speak or read Western languages

are considered illiterate and ignorant, while Western "scholars",

including the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who

do not speak or read Chinese or other non-Western languages have

written erudite books on Chinese and other non-Western culture..."

 

 

"Tu Weiming, professor of Chinese history and philosophy and director

of the Harvard-Yenching Institute at Harvard University,

wrote: "Hegel, [Karl] Marx and Max Weber all shared the ethos that,

despite all its shortcomings, the modern West informed by the

Enlightenment mentality was the only arena where the true difference

for the rest of the world could be made. Confucian East Asia, Islamic

Middle East, Hindu India, or Buddhist Southeast Asia was on the

receiving end of this process. Eventually, modernization as

homogenization would make cultural diversity inoperative, if not

totally meaningless. It was inconceivable that Confucianism or, for

that matter, any other non-Western spiritual traditions could exert a

shaping influence on the modernizing process. The development from

tradition to modernity was irreversible and inevitable."

 

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