From a recent editorial in BILD: “…you have made your country the world champion in intellectual property theft. China enriches itself with the inventions of others, instead of inventing on it’s own. The reason China does not innovate and invent is that you don’t let the young people in your country think freely. China’s greatest export hit (that nobody wanted to have but which has nevertheless gone around the world) is Corona.”
China doesn’t encourage its children to think outside the box; to imagine a different rocket, or battery, and then set that different thing as a goal to work towards by experimentation and failure, until finally, success. The Chinese government is adept at stealing our ideas and then copying them. They are proud of their sparkling bridges, trains, dams, wi-fi, but it’s all Western technology.
Are children allowed to show feelings in China? When they accompany parents to the wet market, and watch animals, dogs and cats among them, being boiled or fried alive, do they mimic the stoic faces of the adults, or does their empathy gene grow numb gradually? From animal torture comes a tasty and inexpensive meal, that’s what the children learn.
Dictators hate bad news. When the U.S. invaded Iraq the first time in the 90’s, Saddam shot the messenger who told him; that’s the story anyway. It’s possible that Xi Jinping didn’t know about the outbreak for awhile. Meanwhile scientists and community leaders were concealing the fact that so many people were getting sick; the chance to curb the outbreak at the local level was gone.
The East and the West are so vastly different; the East is an honor/shame culture. The Judeo-Christian West is based on guilt/ forgiveness/ redemption. In the East, if one shames one’s self or family, suicide is the honorable door out. In the West you get a second chance.
4 replies on “Truth from a German newspaper”
Great point at the end there. I took a class on Japanese Culture and Civilization last semester, and I find the practice of Seppuku (ritual suicide by slicing your own stomach open as a way to regain some honor after you have incurred shame in some way) to be unthinkable and baffling.
Yes, I have heard of this horrifying practice. Also, so-called “honor” killings: If I shame my family and don’t kill myself, it’s my family’s duty to kill me.
One interesting aspect of the practice is that the moment the person started to show signs of pain, it was his second’s duty to slice his spinal cord from the back of neck to spare him from the agony. It was only practiced by the samurai class, which was not so much an occupation as a caste of nobility.
Thanks for the details. I didn’t know this.