But does the West want to understand China?

Jan Oberg

February 7, 2025

This is a chapter in a TFF anthology in the making
“If You Want To Understand China.”

Foreword, Introduction, Authors and Table of Content here.

We learn about other cultures than our own mostly through our media – however, in many cases, also through books, films, travels and personal encounters. All news are micro glimpses in time and space – something happens there and then, something else happens the next minute. In addition, the world is seen through negative lenses: dramatic and ’bad’ stuff makes the news. Bad news makes good news.

We look for causes behind news and events in the immediate past or present, like B did this because A recently did that. It’s all micro in time and space, and very seldom do we get the macro – the larger/broader or deeper space and time – call them macro-history, deep culture or non-material aspects. Perhaps because the media cannot make footage of such ’things.’

With a short and narrow world/reality focused on individuals and events happening here and there, we’re all at the mercy of a fragmented, individualistic, short-term, negative and material worldview.

This challenges us in at least two ways: how do we get a more accurate, holistic perspective of the world, which includes the macro – the deeper and broader connected aspects of time and space? And how can we ever understand each other across cultural diversity differences?

•

How can we approach that diversity and expand our lenses towards macro in time and space?

First of all, let’s take a look at the diagram below. It’s from ”Winning Peace. Strategies and Ethics for a Nuclear-Free World. Strategies and Ethics for a Nuclear Free World” by Dietrich Fischer, Wilhelm Nolte and Jan Oberg (292 pages, 1989), which contains much more explanation of these concepts than we can present in this shorter chapter.

Something ”happens” or some ”issue” pops up in our media. There is an actor perspective (left indicator/right example at (1). Digging a little, we find out that there are organisations involved in that ”happening” (2). There is a structure – individuals, states, corporations and there are different intellectual/academic angles from which (parts of) the event/happening/thing can be understood (3), and we have theories and concepts we can employ to test hypotheses about why it happened (4).

Then, further down in our ”archaeological” excavation, we find paradigms such as, say, ’national security’ – a kind of cluster of ways of analysing (5) and deeper down in society’s deep ’soil,’ we encounter values, ideas, and images (6) and at the very bottom a cosmology based on a dozen indicators (7).

In short, every event in the news can be connected vertically through socio-archaeological layers to the deepest cosmological layer and its dimensions that we do not ”see” – we see only the tip of the iceberg – and which are never even thought of in media and politics and very seldom in research.

This is, of course, only one way of approaching deeper meaningsm macro analysis and cultural dialogue. It’s by no means incompatible with other theories/conceptualisations of ’ways of thinking’ or social cosmology. Its approach and results display many similarities with Peter Peverelli’s analysis in the preceding chapter.

The main point is this: Most people live at the level of now and here – on ”the top” of the pyramid of real reality. Everything that we saw this morning happening in the news is only top-of-the-iceberg manifestations of something much bigger – longer and broader – further down.

And one more thing: On top of this ’pyramid,’ changes seem to take place constantly and rapidly. We are bombarded 24/7 with news/events/happenings/statements; in ’reality,’ they move up and burst into our visible, tangible world from really deep layers. But down at those deeper/macro layers, things change very slowly.

Thus, what we call Western civilisation, its cosmology, has changed very little over time. Its 12 fundamental cosmological indicators are relatively constant over long periods of time. But the world we experience and discuss appears dynamic, ever-changing… ”What’s the news today”?

Well, enough at this point of this sociological ’archaeology.’ Let us now move on to the 7th and deepest level of reality: Cosmology and its 12 indicators.

•

Social cosmology and its 12 indicators

What indicators do we have of societies, cultures and deep ways of thinking or mindsets? What kind of questions would you ask if you come from another, very different culture to find out what this culture is all about?

Here are some examples of aspects of ways of thinking that you would try to investigate and understand.

What is the collectively held image of the top guiding principle(s), authority/Truth: Is there one, more or no gods and possible truths in that culture/society? If god-based, is it female, male or something else? What is the relationship between the authority and people – faith combined with salvation, or what?

What is the relations between humans and Mother Earth: Does the individual control Nature, work with it in a respectful partnership or worship Nature from below?

What is the generalised image of ’the others’ in humanity, the less-known: as a danger, potential friends, ’barbaric’, below us and deserving contempt or as someone to always be curious about, explore and learn from?

What is the relationship between body and soul (inner/outer human beings): Separate or integrated in some balance? How does the medical science of the body relate to those of psychology, philosophy, and sociology in day-to-day decision-making? What does the given society focus most on?

What is time: linear measured by the clock versus organic related to the rhythm of nature? How is focus balanced between the past, the present, and the future? Is the time perspective basically short, long, or eternal?

What is the typical perception of space and organisation: Centre/Periphery (verticality), or Circular-Organic (horizontality) – or both? Many centres or only one? How fixed, how flexible?

What kind of epistemology has priority, how do people learn, how are things categorised: How do people come to believe that they know something? Are learning modes basically “primitive,” scientific, or rather related to intuition and wisdom? Are phenomenons mostly perceived as either/or or both/and? Is fragmentation or holism the stronger?

How is life and death conceived? Of course, this relates to the first point. And is it a continuum, a start-growth-peak-decline? Is re-birth recognised? What kind of social eschatologies exist – like environmental or nuclear catastrophe, God’s punishment, and the like? And what is considered to be the meaning of life?

How is good and evil perceived? As either/or or both/and? Located in individuals or in situations or structures? What kinds of ethics does society operate on? what responsibilities to others and the world?

Conflict and violence: Are conflicts – differences – seen positively or negatively? Rooted in the individual that does ’evil’ and must be punished when doing wrong – or rooted in structures, groups or circumstances that must be changed to eradicate evil and promote good? And closely related: What is the ideal and the de facto attitude to violence? What kinds of violence can be identified, and how are they legitimised?

Image of development: How is it defined, in material or more idealistic terms? What does the culture perceive as its raison d’etre, its mission? Is it welfare, sheer material growth or consumerism? conquering the world? Does it contain a clear start + ascendance + peak point + stabilisation + decline + final end? Or is it more circular, with many interconnected cyclical movements that come and go constantly? Linear stages or voluntaristic?

What kinds of peace ideas can be found? As harmony, dynamic change, passivity, An ever-ongoing struggle to achieve it (dynamic) or an end station based on some kind of balance? Permitting or not permitting violence on the road to peace? Is peace associated with death – Rest In Peace – or with conviviality and realisation of all human and social potentials?

If you obtain reasonably clear answers to these questions, you’ll know how the people in that society, that culture or civilisation, think and what it is reflected on higher levels of the pyramid above. You’ll know why certain things happen and are reported and discussed in that society (and others not) – at a deeper level. It is a solid clue to what that society’s collective identity and ways of thinking is made of – as shaped over time.

•

In reality, each of these indicators is a continuum and not sharp either/or dichotomies (that would be too Western). Societies and their ways of thinking can be placed more or less close to the extreme positions.

There are many other indicators of a society’s or culture’s ”program” – of what is deep down in its ’hard desk’ and has moulded it over centuries. All the daily news and events only scratch the cosmological iceberg and could be perceived through such indicators too; if so, we would approach what would be a deeper understanding of the world – one liberated from the ’here and now’ myopic interpretations.

It’s a bit like archaeology: Keep digging deeper, search for something interesting, and you’ll unveil how each of us and the world’s daily events are just tiny elements of a much bigger (hi)story, which deep down don’t change that fast. It’s the micro in the macro – in time and space – as well as the macro in the micro.

•

The East is East, the West is West – but the two can meet

The Western/Occidental collective deep consciousness – cosmology and ways of thinking – is obviously very different from that of the East/Orient, but I argue – and hope – they are also, in principle, complementary. That, in principle, they can drive towards synergy.

If space permitted, we could put indicator catchwords on both of them – and India somewhere in the middle as a civilisational importer and exporter in both directions on top of its own cosmology.

However, what seems important is to recognise that the present Western Cold War-like policy against China is rooted in at least two things: a) in the denial of its own decline and coming fall and b) in its cosmology, which tends to prevent it from learning and integrating elements of other cultures and transforming them to its own best.

The truth is that #1 in a system usually teaches much more than it typically learns. Thus, the idea of a civilising mission and making others look and behave like Westerners.

In contrast, China does not suffer from a missionary cosmology. Generally speaking, the Chinese are proud of being ’different’ – they have no wish to turn other countries into various editions of Chinese-ness like, say, one-party systems, communist, Confucianist or collectivist – or whatever else. China seeks Peaceful Coexistence as embedded in its constitution, and it doesn’t roam the world with a Bible or a Sword.

Furthermore, China has learned from and eclectically integrated Western cosmological elements. It’s learned negatively from Western interference, occupation, and colonialism, which has caused it to emphasise defence in a broad sense and ’doing it my way’ (maximising self-reliance) the hard way without shortcuts. And whatever it has imported and assimilated from the West, it must have been considered a positive learning experience.

So, while modernising impressively, China has kept near and dear its traditional thinking of, say, collectivism/group/family, Confucianism, Taoism, Harmony, Yin and Yang, meritocracy, maintaining face, long-ranger visioning and goal-setting as well as adhering to the principle that the only constant is change.

Simultaneously – and positively – China has been curious about the West and ’imported’ and adapted elements of Western/Occidental ideas: Marxism, the idea of a party – but not any number of them – capitalism, consumerism, science and high-tech, education (Chinese students abroad) and art – think of Robert Motherwell’s and Robert Rauschenberg’s roles in China. Lang Lang is a virtuoso of Western classical music.

Furthermore, China today knows the West a lot better than the other way around; Chinese media focuses much more on the West and not only negatively, while Western mainstream media focuses very little and always negatively on China. Please see TFF’s “Smokescreen Report” about how this is done, orchestrated and financed.

Both/and adaptation, openness to others and a steadfast sense of one’s own cultural rootedness seem to me to be one important ’deep’ key to understanding China’s recent – and amazing – development. It’s also the key to the Belt & Road Initiative’s future. Indeed, the BRI could add a more explicit ’cosmological’ intercultural dialogue into its projects and serve, with BRICS and other formations, as peace accelerators.

•

Opportunities for dialogue

In recent years, with China’s ever-larger global reach devoid of Western-like colonial thinking, it has produced a series of urgently valuable, visionary conceptual documents. One only has to think of ”A Global Community of Shared Future: China’s Proposals and Actions, from September 2023; the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative and the Global Civilization Initiative. They all refer back to the brilliant peaceful coexistence philosophy in the 1955 Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, or Panchsheel, that is embedded in China’s constitution.

These trend-setting initiatives ought to receive constructive responses and like-minded proposals from all corners of the world. We need to discuss frameworks, concepts and principles before we make action plans; because they represent long-term thinking without which we cannot secure the future of humanity (and the West’s time perspective diminishes by the day); they are constructive (but also contain diplomatic criticism of the dominating, confrontational West); and instead of jumping to concrete solutions, they nurture creativity about the future as well as positive thinking in a world filled with negative energy.

Undoubtedly, it would be good for the world if all other countries presented their matching documents, took up the challenge and promoted constructive dialogue. But – sadly – we are still waiting: What was once called future studies in the West – reports like Limits to Growth and What Now? – seems to have been outmanoeuvred by almost daily reports about crisis management, short-sighted decisions and impending doom and gloom. To the West, it almost seems as if the future is behind it – while the past is catching up.

That said, the day principles shall be translated to on-the-ground practises, there will be both harmony and conflicts. Conflicts are mostly good, while violence is always counterproductive or even evil. Fortunately, China’s principled documents emphasise the UN as the foundation for the global community of a shared future, a central player in the future global governance – while the US/NATO/EU world has done little but to undermine the UN the last 30 years.

The UN builds on Article 1 – that peace shall be established by peaceful means. That fits well with the concept which China has also integrated, namely ’common security,’ which dates back to the Swedish Olof Palme Commission Report that advocated this concept in 1982 as the foundation of all security policies.

Naturally, the idea and concept of human security – first developed in 1977 by this author in collaboration with legendary peace and future researcher Johan Galtung (1930-2024) – would stretch from the individual in his and her society to the transnational and global level and would permit humanity to depart from the outdated Realpolitik concept of national (only) security that is always based first and foremost on weapons and offensive deterrence. More about that in the author’s future analysis here.

One could easily add the thinking of Sun Tzu, the Chinese general and philosopher living some 2500 years ago, and then list the negative and militarism-promoting elements of the present world community which would have to be abolished: Offensive weapons, including nuclear weapons and offensive doctrines like deterrence.

Security would have to be aligned with rational analyses of civil and military threats – instead of NATO’s absurd, anti-intellectual idea of tying military expenditures to the ups and downs of national GNP – and all Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complexes (MIMACs) would have to be dismantled because they produce only war and profits to their elites – never peace and security to the people.

Instead, the global community would share a future with a huge reduction in all kinds of violence and its means, invest in intelligent civilian conflict resolution, mediation, violence-prevention (not conflict-prevention) and peace-building in all spheres of countries and of the global community. Non-violence would be a basic, cherished norm coupled with defensive civilian and military means. A’s security would no longer be seen as threatening by B. And, therefore, permanent arms races, tension-building, and enemy images, as well as the ever-increasing re-armament, could then be relegated to where they belong, namely in the rubbish bin of history.

Or, in different types of words, swords would be beaten into ploughshares for the global common good.

Global community and unity in respect for diversity should guide us in the struggles for peaceful coexistence into humanity’s shared future. In contrast, confrontation, militarist offensive thinking, nuclearism, armament and mass-destructive warfare lead, sooner or later, to No-existence.

So, let’s dialogue more about differences and humane conflict-handling but focus more on similarities and common interests, thereby creating better opportunities for peaceful coexistence.

•

The First and Second Occidental Cold War and the Occident-Orient Cold War

In the old Cold War from 1950 to 1989, the parties were fundamentally Western/Occidental. One player was based on Karl Marx, the other on Adam Smith – to put it very crudely. Both were Christian – Protestant/Catholic and Orthodox. They shared deep ways of thinking about virtually everything. In reality, the Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact and the US/Europe/NATO party were only marginally different; deep down they were two versions of the same Occidental cosmology.

They were a bit like Siamese twins needing each other to behave – although in the military sphere, they were rather more like two scorpions in a bottle – but still dearly needing the other.

They also shared the idea of mission and global reach, a belief in violence, and tried to make the other be like themselves. Practically, they shared that armament is an integral part of ’security’ and so are nuclear weapons. They exploited nature and promoted that men should dominate over women – and humans over nature (anthropocentrism).

You can go on – we have to really twist our minds because, during all these 40+ years, we were told that they were enemies because they were so different. In terms of social cosmology, they had ongoing conflicts exactly because they shared so many characteristics, wanted the same and needed the other as a designated ’evil’ enemy to develop their two different versions of the same cosmology.

Thus, being so close, so identical at the deeper ways-of-thinking level compelled the present author to predict, already 44 years ago (1981), that with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact gone, the Western Occidental twin, the US-dominated world, would also decline and fall. It took longer than I thought at that time, but essentially, the prediction was based on a logical assumption.

As we said in peace research circles in the 1970s: If one of the superpowers fell into the ocean and disappeared forever, the other party would rapidly find someone else to perceive as an enemy. Why? Because they were both cultivating a Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex (MIMAC) and a Mission Civilisatrice and needed enemies – however, mostly imagined or invented. Militarism requires enemy images to extract resources, including taxpayers’ funds from civil society and to legitimise its function as an economic freeloader.

Much of it back then could be seen as a Samuel Beckett-like story out of the Theatre of the Absurd. The First Cold War was like ’Waiting for Godot’ – either in the shape of the invading ’Other,’ the enemy that actually never came or in the sense of making the Peace that also never materialised.

Now, the Occident – which may well become an Accident to borrow an apt quip by Johan Galtung – is in a totally different situation vis-a-vis China.

The reason is that there you find a cosmology that is – on virtually all 12 indicators – very very different from that of the West/Occident. And while China knows/understands the West quite well (from negative as well as positive experiences throughout history), the West has never bothered to learn about China. It ruled, it led, it masterminded, it taught – but it didn’t learn. Even after China’s amazing rise over 3-4 decades, the West is still not curious at all and not even asking: How did they do it?

Furthermore, besides the deliberate Cold War policy that we have already analysed, there is this – deeper – dimension: The West doesn’t understand China, doesn’t even try, and will – predictably because it is in decline – make one counterproductive move after another and basically harm itself. Oh, Sun Tzu: Know thyself and your opponent very well, and you will not lose one of a hundred battles…but such wisdom is not embedded in the NATO Church of Deterrence and Expansion.

And that is precisely what the Occident – accidentally – is heading for.

•

Western politics is now emotional and delusional, not rational and analytic

Let us finally add yet another dimension that explains the Occident’s hopeless and dangerous approach to China: Everything the West does in terms of foreign and security policy becomes less and less comprehensible by means of an intellectual approach such as those of political science, international relations, strategy and national interests – all concepts based on some realism – some would say geo-political Realpolitik but that is a different paradigm.



I have hinted at that in these paragraphs in an article in October 2023 about the Hell called Gaza, shortly after Israel’s genocide had taken off for everyone to see (but doing nothing to stop, indeed helping to continue), thus:

”What we are going to see in weeks and months to come in the Middle East will make the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia and the war in Ukraine pale. Western foreign policy can no longer be understood by rational analysis, political science or international relations thinking.

We need concepts and theories from psychology, psychiatry and religion to understand the blame games, emotionalism, psycho-political projection, presumed innocence, denial, compulsive repetition, paranoia, scapegoating, revenge, and aggression that get full blast in various blends in the policies of the US/NATO/EU countries.”

Therefore, words like conflict analysis, conflict-resolution, mediation, peacekeeping, negotiations and reconciliation – not to mention peace – no longer belong to the vocabulary of Western foreign ministries – and neither of state-financed research institutes nor of the (often state-financed) mainstream media such as public service.

The Occident is heading for an Accident. Its reservoirs of legitimacy, knowledge and ethics are even more depleted than its arsenals of weapons.

Beyond tragic, this is all of its own making. No one has been out to destroy the US or the West. It’s utter self-destruction, militarising itself to death, is exactly what declining empires often do because they lack the capacity to grasp that the times they are a-changin.’

This chapter was finalised and published right after the Trump 2.0 administration took over. It seems likely that that self-destruction will only accelerate.

The US and the West would be so much better off – and so would humanity – if the US-NATO-EU world could adapt to the perfectly natural macro change towards a new world order with many players and layers, perhaps poles but more networks or nodes, a new mixed cosmology and much win-win with equal costs and benefits.

It doesn’t feel like – and rational analysis backs up that feeling – the Occident can do that. It’s programmed to dominate. It will, therefore, lose. That is an unspeakable tragedy because if we combined the best of the West with the best of the Rest – and that is a perfectly possible idea – there could be a bright future for all. And much less cold and warm wars, much less waste of resources, much less hatred and more respect and kindness. And much more peace.

However, even when dark clouds hang low, it’s every intellectual’s duty to continue to lift the eyes beyond them to the blue sky across which is written in grand letters that Peace, development and harmony with Nature are still possible. And that the East and the West can still join hands in respect for humanity and its overriding common best.

•

  A TFF Anthology, China and US compatible, China knows the West, If You Want To Understand China, is China and the US able to cooperate, social cosmology, ways of thinking, West is ognorant about China, what is social cosmology