The path of 'civilization state' as against the road of 'nation state'
- By Tan Chung
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, November 20, 2015
The 6th World Forum on China Studies in Shanghai, which opens today, has gathered over 300 renowned scholars from China and abroad to deliberate on "China's reform and the opportunities for the world."
Living in Chicago with news fed by CNN, FOX, MSNBC and other television channels, I can see China's growing impact on the international communities.
China is increasingly becoming a factor in the stability and fluctuation of the New York stock exchange. Her name is increasingly invoked in political commentaries even in the absence of thorny issues between Beijing and Washington. The Americans are increasingly feeling good that there is a stable and booming Chinese economy while, at the same time, nursing a hidden fear of a rising China.
There is universal admiration for China while, in some quarters, more fear than love. I think this should be borne in mind when China celebrates its own achievements.
It is a pity that an ancient civilization that has been so warmly endearing to the world for thousands of years is now a neophyte to the art of winning hearts and minds abroad.
Historical developments
The 6th World Forum on China Studies has a Herculean task to perform. Drawing from my six-decade experience and findings in China studies from abroad, I wish to take the readers of Shanghai Daily on a tour of historical developments of civilization as well as the "nation states."
The great writer, Rabindranath Tagore, described the phenomenon of many ancient civilizations turning into ruins while only in China and India the lamps of civilization never extinguished when they were first lighted millennia ago.
His observation contrasts the different roads of development between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. I am categorizing them as the road of development in the "civilization state" and the "nation state."
I hope China will embark on the "civilization road" steadily and firmly and avoid the beaten tracks of the great powers of the West.
The concept of the "nation state" was born at the Westphalia Conference in Europe in 1648.
The "nation state" path advocates individualism, subjugating culture to the law of the market with "free" competition to implement the survival of the fittest theory. The greater the national economy grows the severer is the social disparity.
The "nation state" flexes muscles before other countries and expands horizontally, treating other countries (especially neighbors) as rivals of competition.
Big "nation states" are renowned actors in the trilogy of rise-climax-decline.
The other road is the "civilization road." To begin with, China and India are civilization twins of the "Himalaya Sphere." There flows from Himalaya Ganga River into the Bay of Bengal and Indus River into the Arabian Sea. The two rivers join the Indian Ocean to draw the contours of a "sphere of Indian civilization." Similarly, the third longest river on earth, Yangtse, and the fifth longest, Huanghe, flow from the same place of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau with one towards the south and the other towards the north. The two great rivers carved out the contours of the "sphere of Chinese civilization."
The ancient civilizations of the Western Hemisphere were not blessed by such "sphere of civilization" processes, thus plunging into the rise-climax-decline trilogy to be buried among the historical ruins today.
From the ancient times Chinese and Indian civilizations have conceived the ideas of "common entity."
Ancient Chinese sages observed: "All within the four seas are brothers" while ancient Indian sages observed: "vasudhaiva kutumbakam" (the world is one family).
The Indian tradition believes in the prevalence of the universal and infinite paramatman (Supreme Soul) over atman (individual life). China internalized this concept to develop a cultural tradition of subordinating xiaowo (micro-me) to dawo (macro-me) and even sacrificing xiaowo for dawo.
Recently, there is a loud entreaty in China for constructing three "common entities": the "common entity with a shared destiny," the "common entity with a shared interest," and the "common entity with a shared responsibility" in Asia.
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