Thinking beyond Western Democracy
Yes, time to think outside the box. I am not claiming that China has the answers (although there is much truth to what Eric X Li is saying, which I observed myself when I visited the country – I wish I could have been there long enough to study the popular, non-elitest component of the Chinese experience) but I think we ought to move, if fact we are moving beyond the conventional wisdom of western theory on politics and democracy; not only it is barely functioning in the West itself (America’s political system is in shambles), corruption and nepotism are rife, privacy is over, inequality doesn’t exist, etc, but it is also applied selectively as a political tool – the discourse behind almost all military and economic coercions applied by the West. Eric didn’t go as so far as saying that western democracy has failed. I won’t either, but I think it would be a mere hubris not to argue that it is failing, and in the American case in particular has reached the point where democracy is becoming more pronounced than ever in theory, yet quickly crumbling in actuality.
0 Comments