Achieving success through adding Chinese characteristics offers example to the world
Print Edition
China provides a good example of building success step by step in a largely turbulent world by adding Chinese characteristics to every form of foreign imported or forcibly introduced ideas, knowledge, system, values and norms.
This ability to impart Chinese characteristics on everything that has come into contact with China speaks volumes of the resiliency, depth and richness of Chinese culture, history and civilization.
The self-image of China as a leading and ancient civilization has current relevance and instills in the population and leadership the drive and mission to make this ancient and historical nation improve itself and contribute to the world.
Historical lessons
Let’s take a few examples.
In the late 1800s the Chinese nation was carved like a melon by imperial powers, triggered by Chinese attempts to ban opium in Canton in 1839. Unequal treaties brought Hong Kong under British rule, and forced China to allow foreign powers to establish themselves along the coast by installing treaty ports.
As well as trade, these brought the introduction of foreign legal systems along the coast, Christian missionaries and foreign control of tariffs.
Chinese arms were no match for foreign military. This humiliation led to the birth of a long resistance from the first Opium War to the victory of the Chinese nation on October 1, 1949.
Since the 19th century, Chinese efforts to meet the political and military challenges of the West relied in part in bringing to the forefront historical memory, culture and civilization that needs to endure and defeat the fears of that time, along with a positive uptake of military and Western technology and know-how.
China learned that it needed to build its science, technology and engineering and modernize and unify the country in order to remain free and independent from external forces that used military power to keep it in an inferior position.
In the 20th century, the May 4th Movement, the Chinese Communist party and other political, social and intellectual movements borrowed ideas of democracy and socialism that dominated the intellectual landscape.
These Western theories, along with science and technology, were given Chinese characteristics and helped stimulate the most powerful national renaissance that the Orient has ever seen.
After 1921, Marxism with Chinese characteristics also emerged to build a liberated, united and modernized Chinese nation.
After victory in 1949, the Chinese nation stood up and wished to build the Chinese socialist people’s republic and this it did with the particular Chinese slogan: nations want liberation, countries want independence.
Unique path of development
China originated a path of socialist development that was neither with the Soviet Union nor with the capitalist powers. It was pre-eminently Chinese.
Since 1979, China has opened itself more to the world and wishes to contribute to peace and development, both at home and abroad.
Today, in a turbulent world, China needs to find a stone to stand on and remain steady and rock-firm.
China needs to be pragmatic and go for results, and not fear opening itself to the world. When China opens to the world more and more, its own identity becomes even stronger, not diminished.
China needs to maintain stability and promote peace and development at home and in the world. To do so, China needs to maintain the leadership of the Communist Party, the primacy of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, the principle of serving the people and the growth of state-owned as well as private businesses.
The country now has more rich people than ever and there are persistent problems of inequality. A new slogan of a harmonious society is very appropriate.
We see China scoring ever more and more achievements, and we have seen this taking place very often in hard times as well as good.
What is constant is that China has never abandoned giving a Chinese character to the various challenges and confrontations in its 5,000-year history.
There is much that Africa can learn from China, not so much in the investment flows that is coming from China now, but in the software of culture that has helped her to maintain independence in the face of impossible challenges.
Mammo Muchie is Professor of Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa; Visiting professor in the School of Management of Shanghai University sponsored by the “Foreign High End Expert Program.” Yan Hui is Lecturer of the School of Management, Shanghai University: hui.yan@shu.edu.cn. Shanghai Daily condensed the article, which is provided by Fudan Development Institute.
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