Covert & Overt Values

rock wisdom - Zhengzhou

My own first intro­duc­tion to Chi­nese thought and polit­i­cal econ­o­my was a uni­ver­si­ty course in New Zealand in 1974. I espe­cial­ly recall one book, Mark Elvin’s “The Pat­tern of the Chi­nese Past”. If you are not famil­iar with the argu­ments in this book already, there is a rea­son­able sum­ma­ry at Ama­zon http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Chinese-Past-Mark-Elvin/dp/0413286304 . Of course, Chi­na is any num­ber of “coun­tries”. With 20% of the world’s pop­u­la­tion it could hard­ly be oth­er­wise. Noth­ing is more fool­ish than the out­sider who pre­tends to “know” Chi­na, but cer­tain­ly the sec­ond most fool­ish is the Chi­nese per­son who pre­tends to “know” Chi­na. Yet we are gen­er­al­iz­ing crea­tures. Prob­a­bly we have form stereo­types to func­tion at all. Look­ing at that vast con­glom­er­a­tion called Chi­na we can all dis­cern flavours, ten­den­cies, pref­er­ences, pat­terns…  that are dif­fer­ent from, say, the Euro­pean mix, although we may argue about what the vari­eties mean.

con­tin­ue read­ing

pensive child - Zhengzhou

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