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An Uncertain Future? Hopefully.
Having so far discussed linearity/nonlinearity in theoretical, practical, metaphorical, and methodological terms, it is worth finishing the job in largely historical ones. For if there is one especially perverse way in which linear bias, mind-sets and assumptions have distorted the American China debate, surely it is the zero-sum perspectives, antagonism, hubris and stridency which they have promoted and made the debate’s defining features. In particular, linear notions of knowable and predictable cause and effect have encouraged the development of simplistic, artificially rigid, and false (“either-or/all-or-none”) policy constructs. This was apparent a half-century ago during the “who lost China” debate, and it is equally apparent in the continuing “containment/engagement” and “Red Team/Blue Team” debates that discount the potential for differing perspectives and more flexible approaches.23
These examples, if taken as historical bookends for the modern debate, illustrate how excessively linear perspectives have helped feed the damaging cycle of unrealistic expectations, disappointment, infighting, and shrill incoherence to which the China debate has all too often succumbed. However, they also offer a useful contrast to the rare exceptions to this pattern that suggest things need not be this way. Mention of the “who lost China?” debate brings to mind historian Barbara Tuchman’s eminently reasonable treatment of that inane question and its implications when she concluded:
This assumption [that the U.S. had the wherewithal to save Nationalist China from her Communist fate] might have been true if Asia were clay in the hands of the West. But the “regenerative idea”… could not be imposed from outside…. [America’s] mission failed in its ultimate purpose because the goal was unachievable. The impulse was not Chinese. Combat efficiency and the offensive spirit, like the Christianity and democracy offered by missionaries and foreign advisers, were not indigenous demands of the society and culture to which they were brought…. China was a problem for which there was no American solution.24
While Tuchman probably did not think of herself as a nonlinearist, this passage is brimming with nonlinearity: positive feedback/reinforcement, ripeness, uncertain cause-and-effect, and incompatibility with physical/mechanical manipulation. And just as this nonlinear perspective helped bring a dose of warming realism to a debate that had been largely frozen for some two decades, one hopes that it might also serve as an example of the much-needed realism that similarly nonlinear perspectives might inject into the contemporary debate as well.
Geopolitics 308
The Chinese Dream: A Society Under Construction
What if you built the whole mass of Western Europe in 20 years? What if 400 million farmers then moved in? What would it look like? How would it work? Would you be able to go to sleep at night? And if you did, would you dream of somewhere else …?
… The Chinese Dream is a visual tour de force, both encyclopedic in scope and holistic in approach. Cutting across all levels of scale, the book synthesizes a vast body of research to tackle the big contemporary questions, and to unpack the paradoxes at the heart of China’s struggle for change.
Description taken from Amazon.com
Claims that Chinese cyber-spies are plotting world domination through the World Wide Web are greatly exaggerated.
Article from Spiked-Online.
This article is an edited version of Frank Furedi’s opening speech given on 12 July at The Battle for China, a Battle of Ideas satellite event organised by the Institute of Ideas in association with China Now, the UK’s largest ever festival of Chinese culture.
Here I have embedded the video on “China: New Hope or Threat?” where Frank Furedi makes the above argument on my daisanova blog.
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Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday was published in 2005 to a great fanfare. The book portrays Mao as a monster – equal to or worse than Hitler and Stalin – and a fool who won power by native cunning and ruled by terror. It received a rapturous welcome from reviewers in the popular press and rocketed to the top of the worldwide bestseller list. Few works on China by writers in the West have achieved its impact.
Reviews by serious China scholars, however, tended to take a different view. Most were sharply critical, questioning its authority and the authors’ methods , arguing that Chang and Halliday’s book is not a work of balanced scholarship, as it purports to be, but a highly selective and even polemical study that sets out to demonise Mao.
This book brings together sixteen reviews of Mao: The Unknown Story – all by internationally well-regarded specialists in modern Chinese history, and published in relatively specialised scholarly journals. Taken together they demonstrate that Chang and Halliday’s portrayal of Mao is in many places woefully inaccurate. While agreeing that Mao had many faults and was responsible for some disastrous policies, they conclude that a more balanced picture is needed.
Introduction Part I. Reviews in non-specialist academic publications 1: Dark Tales of Mao the Merciless 2: Jade and Plastic 3: Portrait of a Monster Part II. Reviews in the China Journal 4: The Portrayal of Opportunism, Betrayal, and Manipulation in Mao’s Rise to Power 5: The New Number One Counter-Revolutionary inside the Party: Academic Biography as Mass Criticism 6: Pitfalls of Charisma 7: “I’m So Ronree” Part III. Reviews in other specialist academic journals 8: Mao and The Da Vinci Code: Conspiracy, Narrative and History 9: Mao: A Super Monster? Part IV. Chinese reviews 10: Mao: The Unknown Story, A Review 11: Mao: The Unknown Story: An Intellectual Scandal 12: A Critique of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story Part V. Other reviews 13: Mao Lives 14: From Wild Swans to Mao: The Unknown Story
Gregor Benton is Professor of Chinese History at Cardiff University. His book Mountain Fires: The Red Army’s Three-Year War in South China, 1934-1938 won several awards, including the Association of Asian Studies’ best book on modern China. Recent work includes Chinese Migrants and Internationalism: Forgotten Histories, 1917-1945; Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution (also published by Routledge)
Lin Chun is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics, UK. She is the author of a number of books, of which the most recent is The Transformation of Chinese Socialism.
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Other critical reviews or responses can be found here:
http://www.uefap.com/reading/exercise/crit/crit2ex.htm
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAC41.htm
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n24/letters.html
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Reading List and Textbooks for 2008 by Routledge (US)
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I’d like to use the “PC” and its evolution in the current tech-world as an example. One can easily recognise the transformational process when observing the continuous upgrading and integration of each preceding construction or tweak. A few models and positive experiments later, out pops the the new “so-and-so” with “such-and-such” capabilities, newly integrated components, and redesigned technical and visual stimulus, which ultimately succeeds the previous model, and in true Darwinian fashion leaves its predecessors to extinction, or at the least, seriously endangered. And so it is the pc geeks behind the pc tweaks which become the muscle driving the tech-market. Now if the pc-world or tech-world was to be used as an analogy for our market driven society, then let us equate the pc tweaks to ‘reform’ and the hub (lab) of pc geeks to social innovation. In this way, it is easier to understand the role of social innovation in today’s society. Policies can be continously reformed or changed as PC’s can continously be tweaked and customized here and there given that you know a couple of tricks. But tweaking is simply not the answer to designing a new model, that is awesomely more efficient, capable, and powerful. You need a lab, or a hub of committed people and resources to be able to build a new model that is able to efficiently succeed the current one. There needs to be dedication and commitment to the innovative process. Indeed, there will be failures, and setbacks and risks. But in the name of progress and an ongoing, all-transient benefit; this dedication is definitely advantageous and worth it. What do I mean by this; Social Innovation as an industry? No. That could be disastrous. But Social Innovation as a reference, as a designer, and as advisor.
This means that social innovation should embody the laboratory of pc geeks who are analysing the flaws and shortcomings of the current model and check whether it needs an upgrade, to integrate, to install a new component, or to create and totally redesign the whole system, or adjust its target focus and central function.
We have PC geeks, the individual entrepreneurs and innovation gurus who are constantly looking for the ways of the future, or transforming the focal point of interest, and expanding their vision of the capable. But, what we’re missing is the lab. The central force of actors who are never satisfied with one change, with the ‘current’, but always concerned with designing improvements, solutions, new opportunities, and preparing change FOR change; being ahead of change, so that it seems like change almost never happens.
Currently a central form of social innovation is about fixing problems that already manifest themselves in ways which are creating great common concern, if not in a process of complete failure.
Often when we find a suit that fits, we stick to that suit until we grow out of it and need to get it tailored or get one completely remade. Well how about, if you could have a suit that is elastic, it grows when you grow and shrinks when you shrink? Social innovation is about being flexible. It is about suiting your needs, by suiting everyone’s needs. Ironically, it is about decreasing risk by smoothing out the plane, and sedating that volatility.
Sounds too good to be true.
But it has been done before. Usually in times of crisis, social innovation is required and implemented and then when things are at work again, it is pushed to the side, ‘til yet another crisis calls out for help.
Let’s have our compass out the whole time. Not just when we’re lost.
Key titles and Reading Lists for 2008
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Let’s see what top “transformational” content I can grab out of that period, in regards to analysing the ‘superpower’ potential of China in the late 1900’s from a realism vantage-point.
Research for GOVT1201: World Politics
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On the link itself:
The CPC are being very ‘flash savvy’ with their swf application in presenting the “volumous” book. Then the starry content title links lead to a separate page of text devastation. Dissapointingly unformatted and so unsympathetic towards the eyes. :) Ofcourse, that’s why we use such sources as Tumblr, and my lovable Adobe applications. What would I do without life-simplifying widgets and apps? (Sigh.)
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