China's Rise

While we in North America and Europe are tearing down our statues, no longer teaching history, deliberately discouraging memorization, and otherwise committing cultural suicide, the Chinese are learning all about Western culture.

I am currently teaching Chinese students of high school age online. It is extremely rewarding. I discover they have all had, in effect, a solid Western education. They have been taught all the little bits of traditional wisdom. They have read all the books and know all the history. Not excluding books I might have thought might be sensitive for political reasons, like 1984 and Animal Farm. No problems of political correctness there, it seems. In their free time, they have read comic books summarizing elements of Western culture. It is pretty clear the entire country is making a concerted effort to understand and assimilate what it can from the West. They know more about Western civilization and history than the typical Canadian or American university graduate.

The big gap is perhaps Christianity. But there are signs that, despite the government, the average Chinese is very interested.

For years, the league tables from the OECD have shown that students in Singapore, Shanghai, Taiwan, or Hong Kong do better on their standardized tests than anyone in America or Europe.

People have scoffed, and claimed the Chinese system is good for standardized tests, but does not teach how to think creatively. That may be so; I have no opinion at this point; other than to say it sounds odd to me to claim that the typical Canadian public school teaches creativity. Set that aside. Even if true, they are surely gaining a major strategic advantage: they understand us Westerners. We do not understand them.

“Western civilization” has been dying in Europe since about 1900. It started dying in America too as of about the 1960s.

I find it consoling that China might be able, in future, to carry that torch, the torch of civilization in general, without losing all that has been accomplished in Europe in the past two thousand years. Granted that the present government is a problem, and is holding this process back; but I expect the present government to be gone, one way or another, soon. I invoke dialectical materialism here: once any population has reached a certain prosperity level, around $10,000 US GDP per capita, a transition to democracy seems inevitable. Witness South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, or Singapore.

If those now in charge do not mess it all up on the way out, as they almost seem to be striving to do, the long-term future of a non-Communist China looks promising to me.