Sunday, July 26, 2015

A Chinese scholar sees the bankruptcy of Europe

I had a busy few weeks, so I had not blogged for for some time and this made me review my reasons for blogging and my reasons for doing anything else. The challenge as I grow older is to keep going and to keep my mind alive and this is a good reason for writing my blogs. I had to make the effort to go to the National Library to hear a talk by Dr. Limin Bai of Victoria University, about Liang Qichao, a Chinese politician, scholar, writer and philosopher. Learning can involve digging deeper and deeper into a hole that you already know is there and it is only its size and depth that you need to explore, or scampering across a wide field tripping over things that you don't know and see how these can broaden your understanding of the bits you do know. Liang Qichao is certainly someone I didn't know, but found that he had a uniquely Chinese perspective on the world, on literature, the role of journalism, and on history. He was a democrat, a political reformer, and for this, he was exiled to Japan. After the changes in the political environment he returned to China, influenced Chinese reformist politics and politicians, but the talk by Dr. Bai focused on Liang's attendance at the Versailles Peace Conference at the end of the First World War and his great disappointment that Chinese claims were disregarded. What he saw in Europe was devastation, ruin, and he shared the view of an American journalist that Europe was bankrupt, morally, spiritually, and economically. He went to Europe to learn from Europe, but concluded that China had a lot to teach Europeans. Later generations saw Liang not as a reformer but as a conservative. Having fomented revolution he came to be opposed to revolution. In this generation there are some who believe that he was right, that China would have been better off had it not had a revolution. Liang, about whom I knew nothing, posed many questions.

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