Phillip Adams' Travels in China - Future Political Directions

Thursday 14 July 2011 10:05PM (view full episode)

As celebrations for the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party of China subside, internal debates continue over the need for further reform and jostling for next year's leadership change continues to be played out. How ready is the Communist Party for change?

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Simon Elegant
Former correspondent for TIME Magazine.
Paul Mooney
Senior Reporter with the South China Morning Post


Net Virgin
Chui Juin
Chui Juin
Duration: 50 secs
CD details: HD CD 399
Holy Incense
Sa Dingding
Sa Dingding
Duration: 1 min
CD details: 1732006

Further Information

Phillip Adams in China series


Gail Boserio

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  • Les Peterson :

    24 Jul 2011 11:21:17am

    I've heard you ask a number of times, why Chinese civilization stopped innovating. I can, from my own studies suggest the outline of an answer. In some ways it is similar to the take over of the West by Christianity: the Chinese civilization came to be dominated by a profoundly conservative, indeed reactionary, ideology.
    Prior to the Mongol conquest of China, the empire was not just a Confucian society, but was equally influenced by Taoism. Taoism had two main strands: mystical, and magical. Magical Taoism was a bit obssessed with obtaining immortality and magical powers ( such as flying, invulnerability, breathing underwater, etc,) mainly by wishfully literal interpretations of the Tao Te Ching and the Chuang Tzu, the two major texts of Taoism. In pursuit of these things they became involved in alchemy, which in turn became chemistry and their experimentation led to gunpowder, amongst other things, and great advances in metallurgy, such as blast furnaces, the Siemens process, cast iron, wrought iron and accurately controlled production of different grades of steel as well as alloys and other stuff , all centuries in advance of the west. They are further more or less reliably credited with inventing hot-air balloons, parachutes, hang-gliders, the screw propeller and the helicopter rotor.
    After the disintegration of Mongol Power and the reestablishment of Chinese rule by the Ming dynasty, around 1320--1360, the Chinese bureaucracy, which had more influence than the Emperor himself, gradually came under the influence of an evolving Neo-Confucian Philosophy. By 1430 this bureaucracy was dominated top to bottom with very reactionary ideas. Confucianism is itself a rigid. hierarchichal and patriarchal philosophy, and under the Neo-Confucianists became even more so. They appropriated Taoism, which was fundamentally anarchich, individualistic and democratic, and thus served as a counterbalance to the stultifying rigidity of Confucianism, and, by all the tricks of linguistic sleight-of-mind, slick sophistry and semantic chicanery so familiar in Christian Theologians, inverted its meanings to support their own ultra conservative ideas.
    The fact of a hundred years of foreign barbarian domination had led to a huge loss of face and was a horrible insult to the Chinese mind. The Neo-Confucianists determined to rid China of everything that they saw as characteristic of the Mongol dynasty. The Mongols had abolished civil service exams and Confucian education; then they would re-establish it in spades, more rigid than ever. The Mongols had opened the country to the ideas, religions, arts and crafts and all facets of the whole of Europe and Asia; then they would close it off and prevent any outside influences on what was self-evidently the most superior culture in the world, which needed nothing from elsewhere. The Mongols welcomed all that was new in ideas and technologies; then they would stop