Foreign Policy in Focus<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAmerica\u2019s Clash of Civilizations Runs Up Against\nChina\u2019s Dialogue of Civilizations\u201d<\/strong><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n May 28, 2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n Emanuel Pastreich<\/p>\n\n\n\n When asked about relations with China,\npolicy planning head of the U.S. State Department Kiron Skinner<\/a> declared\nthat the United States is in a \u201cfight\u201d with a \u201cdifferent civilization.\u201d She\nthen added, \u201cIt\u2019s the first time that we will have a great power competitor\nthat is not Caucasian.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That line was no slip of the tongue,\nand it has the fingerprints of Steve Bannon\u2019s racial essentialism all over it.\nSkinner was not simply hearkening back to the Cold War and to the geopolitical\nstruggles of the 1950s, as terrifying as that prospect might be given the\nvastly improved technologies for destroying life. Her reference to a fight with\na \u201cnot Caucasian\u201d civilization hearkened back to the \u201cYellow Peril\u201d fear\nmongering that swept through the United States in the nineteenth century. That\ndrive to posit Asians as a cultural threat led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of\n1882 that made immigration from China illegal (and greatly limited immigration\nfrom East Asia).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Skinner went on to suggest that\nbecause China is a fundamentally alien civilization, arguments for human rights\nthat worked when the United States confronted the Soviet Union are now \u201cnot\nreally possible with China.\u201d Skinner\u2019s comments echoed Senator Albert\nBeveridge\u2019s infamous speech to the Senate in 1901:<\/p>\n\n\n\n We\nwill not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee under God, of\nthe civilization of the world\u2026China is our natural customer. The Philippines\ngive us a base at the door of the East\u2026it has been charged that our conduct of\nthe (Spanish American War) has been cruel. Senators, it has been the reverse.\nSenators, remember that we are not dealing with Americans or Europeans. We are\ndealing with Orientals.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The warning that Skinner and Bannon\nare offering to Americans has nothing to do with the principles of free trade,\nor even of democracy and the rule of law, but rather is of a threat from an\nincurably alien value system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The speech delivered by China\u2019s\nPresident Xi Jinping at the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations in\nBeijing on May 14 was intended as a clear response to Skinner\u2019s remarks (and\nsimilar comments by Steve Bannon).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Xi avoided condemning the United\nStates directly, suggesting rather that China, and all citizens of the Earth,\nshould maintain a mind that is \u201cable to take in the waters of a hundred rivers\nlike the ocean.\u201d Xi used the phrase \u201cexchange and mutual learning between\ncivilizations\u201d to describe the process by which humanity advances, suggesting a\nuniversality in human experience that goes beyond a Western, post-enlightenment\nsystem of values and methods. He markedly refused to assign any developmental\nhierarchy to civilizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How deep a shift Xi\u2019s words imply was\nnot clear, but the repeated use of the term \u201cequal dialogue\u201d suggested that,\nwhether it is neckties and hamburgers, economic growth calculations and\nFreudian psychology, the absolute authority of a single civilization needs to\nbe replaced by an ongoing dialogue. The speech was grandiose filler, but\noffered a serious critique of the Eurocentric cultural order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Xi traced Asian civilization back to\nthe peoples who arose along the Tigris River in Mesopotamia, the Indus Rivers\nin India, and the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers in China. He named achievements in\narchitecture, in painting and in philosophy, referring to masterpieces of\nliterature like the Japanese novel The Tale of Genji<\/em>, the ancient\nIndian poem collection The Rigveda<\/em>, and the Arabic collection of\nshort stories One Thousand and One Nights<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Xi proposed three conditions necessary\nfor Asia to play a central role in the dialogue of civilizations and four\nprinciples that support his imagined \u201cCommunity of Common Destiny\u201d for the\nEarth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The three conditions for dialogue in\nAsia are that Asians anticipate a peaceful and stable Asia, they prepare for an\nAsia of mutual prosperity, and they prepare for a financially open Asia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The four principles for future\ncooperation are 1) maintain mutual respect and treat each other as equals; 2)\nrecognize that there is perfection in all civilizations and that they can\ncoexist; 3) uphold an open and accepting environment for reciprocal learning;\n4) continue to progress through innovation in accord with the changing times,.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whereas the Trump administration takes\nits inspiration from Samuel Huntington\u2019s reactionary \u201cclash of civilizations\u201d\nand nineteenth-century xenophobic writings, the tradition of a dialogue of\ncivilizations that Xi describes can be traced back to Leo Tolstoy. We can find\nprecedents in the UNESCO intercultural dialogue of 1974 and Kofi Annan\u2019s\ndeclaration of 2001 as the UN Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations. The\nAlliance of Civilizations launched by Turkey and Spain in 2005 promotes a\nsimilar vision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Xi spoke of Chinese culture in terms\nof a series of exchanges with other civilizations throughout history: with\nBuddhism from India and Nepal, with Islam, and with European culture in the\nmodern period. He mentioned Marxism as a part of the impact of European civilization,\nbut otherwise the speech avoided the term socialism (although there were a few\nhints of Mao Zedong\u2019s essay \u201cOn Contradictions\u201d in his arguments).<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have attended many events in China\nthat presented Chinese culture as the pinnacle of human achievement and\nemphasized a hierarchy of status among countries. I have worried about the\ndisappearance of newspapers and books from Chinese society and the growth in\nits big cities of a voracious consumer society, about the treatment of Chinese\nworkers in factories and the increasing power of the central government, all of\nwhich are global trends as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nevertheless, the intellectual\ncomplexity of the speeches at the Dialogue of Civilizations, the open call for\nan internationalist perspective (as opposed to a globalist one), and the\npresumption that all civilizations are fundamentally equal provided a\ncompelling alternative to the \u201cclash of civilizations\u201d rhetoric that is quickly\ndegenerating into thoughtless xenophobia in the United States. The speeches I heard\nin Beijing reminded me of the intellectual complexity once found in the\nspeeches of American politicians like Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stephenson.\nWhen it comes to a philosophy that can save the world, the old adage of ex\noriente lux<\/em> (the light comes from the East) seems to once again\napply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Foreign Policy in Focus \u201cAmerica\u2019s Clash of Civilizations Runs Up Against China\u2019s Dialogue of Civilizations\u201d May 28, 2019 Emanuel Pastreich When asked about relations with China, policy planning head of the U.S. State Department Kiron Skinner declared that the United States is in a \u201cfight\u201d with a \u201cdifferent civilization.\u201d She then added, \u201cIt\u2019s the first time that … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9296425,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9296425"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}