From the Identity, Gender, and Self Cultivation Forum
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Roger Ames
Transcribed by Lindy Cameron
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China is coming politically and economically, but China is not yet here culturally.We are part of a very slow Western appreciation of the fact that China is on its way.We have to change in order to understand it, to appreciate it, and to grow along with it.
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What I’m talking about is economic China.When I first went to Mainland China it was 1985.At that time the twelve story Peace Hotel was the biggest building in Shanghai.Today, twenty years later, there are 1500 skyscrapers, more than New York City.In twenty years, less than a generation, Chicago happened in this place called Shanghai.This same thing is happening all over China. Economically Wal-Mart in America, is China.Take a look at the label on your clothes. The power of the Chinese economy is absolutely staggering. So economically, we have to pay attention to China.
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In November of 2006, forty-eight of the political leaders of Africa descended on Beijing. All over Beijing there were big billboards with African scenery and language expressing ideas of collaboration and cooperation. People would interview the African leaders and say, “Don’t you know that China just wants your natural resources. There is a sucking sound, and it’s China? This new China is absorbing into itself, all the resources of the world.” And the African leaders would say, “Yeah, we know that.We’re not stupid.But it is collaboration.China is not trying to make us into something that we’re not. China is not telling us how we are to develop.China is not saying you have to grow according to somebody else’s pattern in order to move into the contemporary world. China is not interested in hegemony. China simply says: ‘You do better, we do better.’It is mutual collaboration, and most importantly, there is respect.” So politically, we have to pay attention to China.
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But there is also something very important to be derived from Chinese culture that can instruct the world as we try to make this twenty-first century better than the holocaust of the twentieth century.If young people don’t do better than the older generation, we will not have a twenty-second century.What we need is to make a difference. There are elements within the Chinese tradition that are important when we look for the answer to fix a broken world. China is not a country, China is not a Canada, a France, or a Ukraine. China is a continent.It is an Africa, it is a Europe, with all of the differences that continents entail.Within the political boundary of China resides 22.5 percent of the world population.And that number does not include South East Asia - Taiwan, Hong Kong or Singapore.
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What does China have to offer? We should be paying attention to Chinese culture.The Chinese have an expression: “I can’t see the true face of Mt. Lu because I’m standing on top of it.”What does this mean?It means: “What knows he of England, whom only England knows?”That is, to know yourself, you have to be able to step out of your own world and look at yourself from a different perspective. In appreciating the Chinese tradition from a different perspective, we will increase and hence, “appreciate” its importance. Is Beethoven solely a German musician?Do only Germans appreciate Beethoven?When Beethoven becomes world culture, Beethoven becomes really important. When Chinese culture, following its growing economic and political prowess, becomes world culture, it too will become really important.
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The concept of a person in the Chinese tradition is a consummate person.
(see picture of consumate person "ren" in pictures on this site)
Chinese word ren is composed of two parts: You have the “human being” on the left, and the number two on the right.In English we say “Everybody please stand up” or “Everyone, please stand up.”We use our bodies.We use the idea of one to distinguish ourselves as individuals.We are first individual people and then we come into some kind of relationship with other people.In the Chinese world it’s very different.You don’t say “Everybody, please stand up”—you say “Big family, please stand up.”In the classroom teacher is “teacher-father” or “teacher-mother” and we have “student younger sister,” “student older sister” and so on.In the Chinese world all relationships are family relationships, everybody is an auntie or uncle. The Chinese feel that “human becomings” (not human “beings”) must make their roles and relationships robust and important to become fully a person. To appreciate somebody is to acknowledge the magnitude and complexity of another human being.To appreciate another human being is to grow meaning in the world.As we appreciate each other the cosmos gets bigger.Appreciate means to make meaning.To love yourself in this Chinese world is not to love yourself independent of other people, but to love yourself as you are constituted by the role and relationships that locate you within our world—to love yourself as sister, daughter, and friend.
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It is difficult to be a moral human being. In Chinese culture, being moral is not about following rules.It has to do with using all the wisdom that you can in each circumstance with each unique person to try to find what is most appropriate in the particular relationship.Morality emerges out of family feeling. Family is at the center of Chinese morality. Confucianism doesn’t talk about being courageous, temperate, or wise. It talks about “younger brothering,” “mothering,” and “befriending” somebody. It relies on the most concrete guidelines for prompting us to think about how to behave in our relationships with others.
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In Chinese culture, the prime directive is to cultivate yourself in your relations with others. In so doing, you make the family right, you govern the country properly, and you bring peace and harmony to the world, to the cosmos.Cultivate yourself in the family and the entire world will find peace.
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