“Isn’t it just amazing the West has been playing this game of moral extortion…”
Uh… the thing about games is that they usually involve more than one player, especially if you’re viewing international politics as a sort of game among different countries. If one is sick of what the West is doing in this “game,” then shouldn’t one also look at how the Chinese government plays this game? Surely, Chinese sovereignty over its own lands should never be questioned by foreign opinion, so why does China insist in loudly voicing its opinions about how other foreign countries should conduct their internal affairs? Why does China meddle in the ceremonies of the Vatican City? Does China own the Vatican? If you extend that idea to its logical conclusion, then basically, China owns the world. We should relabel the EU as the European Union of China, and the US as the United States of China. Doesn’t this directly contradict China’s claims of a “peaceful rise” or “peaceful development” in the eyes of the international community?
People do not want to see China as a bully but unfortunately this is the perception that one can get seeing China’s meddling role in everything the world is saying these days. Moral extortion is on all sides, and there does not seem to be an end in sight, as long as this hypocrisy remains: the Chinese government, wanting to act freely, is coercing other states to act less freely in the process.
A belief in justice is not a purely a “Western” idea. If we take the example of Mencius: we have “Noble-minded people should admonish the government when it makes mistakes.” That sounds pretty much like anyone’s idea of justice, doesn’t it? Or should we say Mencius is Western too? That would be too condescending a gesture. While I don’t know enough about Hu Jia to know whether he deserves Mencius’ blessing, I do know that there’s no reason IN PRINCIPLE (i.e. regardless of your personal or national political leanings) to dismiss Hu Jia as working in the spirit of Mencius or other past Chinese thinkers. If anything, this is the sort of thinking that would get one nominated for the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. For China with all its political hangups to not accept that is just hypocritical, for then they would have to disown every Chinese thinker in history who didn’t strictly subscribe to the Legalist/authoritarian political tradition of China that the current China represents.

LikeLike

…isha, let’s be reasonable…
While I admit that any preemptive attack on China is ill-advised, I do not know what you’re trying to get at with your denial of China as a “bully”. So, only when you see Chinese soldiers running all over the world with their navies, Chinese bombers are raining smart bombs overseas, and everything’s run by the Chinese Communist Party, only then will you call China a “bully”? By that time, you know it’ll be too late for anyone to be calling China a “bully” ! By that same logic, I can say Stalin wasn’t a bully because he didn’t have soldiers running around the world.
You don’t have to be a superpower to mistreat your own people by suppressing any (even legitimate) political dissent and dissatisfaction, and drive a hard-line foreign policy that cannot admit anything that might in the least bit “offend the feelings of the Chinese people”. How silly that starts to sound if it’s your only defense against criticism? Okay, so it’s all about “face”, yes I know, but why aren’t Japan and South Korea as easily offended in their foreign policy (“Stop, you’re going to offend the feelings of the Japanese people!”)? You know, even George W. Bush doesn’t use that logic to justify his terribly-miscalculated war on terror. Sure, he had a “if you’re not with us, you’re against us” attitude at first, but he didn’t rephrase it like “if you’re not with us, you’re going to offend the feelings of the American people” when the criticisms came in against his unilateral use of power.
This is what I mean by Chinese coercion, bullying people into… well… it’s not exactly sympathy, but doubt, confusion, submission? Yes, I know that imperialist powers rushed into a weaker China of the past, but come on, is China still living in the last days of the Qing dynasty? That would give too little credit to the economic progress and relative economic openness China has made over the past few decades. Who exactly are these Chinese people who are offended all the time, if not the propagandists, the political elite, and the hyper-nationalists? While I’m saying nationalism is not bad in itself, there is a limit to how much one can play the aggrieved nationalist card without ignoring real problems in foreign policy and domestic affairs, and criticism, whether internal or external, is one way of recognizing what those problems are. I think it’s better if it’s internal criticism, for the sake of Chinese nationalistic pride, but at the same time, criticism produced internally in today China’s political climate will always have a chance of being stifled, so internal criticism should not always be sufficient. Not all criticism comes out of malice or illogicality, but it takes real wisdom to differentiate the types of criticism you get into “constructive” and “unconstructive”.
And about cultural genocide… well, it doesn’t matter if Chinese “classics” don’t have any talk about Western cultural genocide– cultural genocide wasn’t really “defined” back then when the “classics” were published. Well, what about something more modern. I don’t want to offend you, but if you get to bring up Malcolm X then I can bring up basically the literature coming out of Communist Tibet by Tibetans. Sure, modern Tibetan literature may be all-too-polemical and may portray China in a less-than-rosy light, but was Malcolm X’s writing devoid of any racial politics? But the reason Malcolm X was so notable was because he, along with the other Civil Rights Movement leaders, pointed out the many social problems in American society of that era. And nowadays, I think, Americans are thankful for their collective struggle. True, there might be some residual racism lying around, but American politicians today know when they are crossing the line when it comes to race.
If I have failed to convince you, then I am sorry. I really don’t have any ulterior motive in my response. I just want to pass along some constructive criticism, myself.

LikeLike