Think Again: Asia's Rise

The augument that Chinese society is becoming more volatile or unstable because of the Urumqi Riot or some ethnic falt lines (between Han Chinese and Uighur muslim thugs or tibetan monks) is utterly false. Quite on the contrary, the ughiurs thugs' barbaric butchering of (even a single) Han's family will be the rally cry that binds the Han Chinese society together -- just as the single barbaric tibetan attack on the handicapped Chinese athlete in Paris last year. An unjust, barbaric attack on a single Chinese will be taken as an attack on the entire Chinese Nation - it is the equivalent of the NATO Arcticle 5, multiplying by a billion times.

Yes, China is more diverse than many westerner think -- China is a continent that contains great diversity -- even among the 92% Han Chinese. For example, as a Chinese American fluent in Mandarin I could barely understand the dialects of southern Chinese. However, on the other hand, most westerners fail to understand that China is not a "nation state" in the traditional european sense, but a "civilization state". What has always bound the Chinese Nation together for the past 5000 years is the deep-rooted and irradicable sense of belonging to a "superior" civilization -- the Chinese Civilization.

Chinese society has its historically, highly distinctive position on race, where about 92 per cent of the population believe that they are of one race, and therefore, from which is the lack of a conception of, or respect for, difference that flows from other minorities. The deep sense of China as a unitary civilisation, together with a pervasive belief in Han superiority, leaves little room for the claims of other cultural groups. That is where most westerners fail to understand that Chinese draw our deep-rooted sense of belonging and identification not from some religions, nation states, dialects, founding father principles or universal human rights, but from our ancient history, culture and civilization. For the majority of Chinese, no matter where he is and what citizenship he has -- mainland, taiwan, hongkong, or european or American -- he is, first, last and always, a Chinese. Ask a New York Chinese restaurant dish washer who he thinks he is, he will probably tell you, proudly, Chinese.

Han Chinese Dynasty comes and goes every several hundred years or so for the past 5000 years. Chinese probably have endured more civil wars and internal turmoils than any other civilization. However, whenever faced with an existential threat, attack or challenge to the "superior" Chinese way of life, the entire Chinese Nation has always rallied around the flag of Chinese Nationalism. That is why no other unitary civilization state, except China, has survived the entire 5000 years' human history.

The witless, end-of-history triumphalism that shaped western attitudes in the post-Cold War era is always good for a belly laugh and is nowhere more misplaced than in regard to China. History is on the move again – and it is not the delusional, teleological, self-congratulating history dreamt up by either the dimwitted, self-righteous neocons on the right or the naive,self-glorifying liberal rationalists on the left, which somehow always meets with themselves as the winners in the middle. The 21st century Pax Sinica is the real thing, a world-changing event that marks the end of dominance of western civilizaton.

I have always been of the idea that historically China [the east] was always a power. It is possible that instead of becoming powerful, it is just simply processing a few 20th century set backs and achieving the status it has historically enjoyed....