Wang: In the last century Chinese culture became marginal while Western culture became dominant. The Chinese have been much more preoccupied with the past, with their history, than the West. We have to understand why we are behind other countries, why we haven’t been able to develop our country. The West has won a very great victory and this has meant a big crisis for Chinese civilization.
Gao: Our traditional values are always in conflict with modern Western values. We are always at a loss as to how to deal with this. These two value systems are always in conflict. We constantly feel the need to return to our long history to understand who we really are. The reason why we pay so much attention to our history is because the traditional way remains very powerful.
Are you more optimistic for the future? Do you think that Chinese culture will remain marginal?
Wang: Our civilization is entering a critical period. In the last century we used Western thinking to develop Chinese society and culture. That is not good. We must build up our own knowledge, our own methodology, in order to develop the country and our culture. We must build up our own things, not just bring Western thoughts to our country. That’s mostly what we have done in the twentieth century. But this century I think the Chinese will develop their own knowledge.
If China does this, can it become more central and important in the world?
Wang: Not the centre of the world, but China will realize its own modernity, which will not be the same as that of the United States, nor, by the way, will it be like the Soviet Union. It will be something new.
What will be distinctive about it?
Wang: We can build our own modernity based on Chinese culture. Of course, we will use some elements of Western culture but we can’t transplant that culture to China. A mistake that Western countries make, especially the United States, is to want to transplant their systems and institutions to other countries. It’s wrong because it ignores the cultural core of a country. I always like to focus on the cultural core: to transform or remove the cultural core is impossible.
And the cultural core is…?
Wang: Five thousand years of history.
What are the values of this cultural core?
Wang: It’s composed of many elements: our attitude towards life, the family, marriage and so on. During the long history of Chinese civilization — because our country is so big — we have developed many different ideas and attitudes.
You and Zhang are both studying international finance and yet your argument is all about the distinctiveness of China.
Wang: Globalization is Westernization. But it should be a two-way process: we accept Western ideas while at the same time people in Western countries should seek to understand and maybe accept some of our ideas. Now it is not like that: we just accept Western ideas, there’s no movement in the opposite direction. That’s the problem. As a result, we lose something from our own culture, which worries us a lot. Now we are afraid of losing our own culture. We accept Western ideas not because they are good for us but because of their novelty. They are new to us so we accept them. But on the whole I don’t think they will be good for us. Maybe in twenty years’ time we will give them up.
Zhang: Historically, there is a part of the Chinese that wants to change and a part that wants to remain the same. We are in a state of conflict, both as individuals and as a society. In the Qing dynasty we shut ourselves off from the outside world, mainly because we wanted to keep our culture and our civilization. Part of the reason for this was unacceptable: we thought we were superior to the rest of the world. When we finally opened our doors, we found that we were backward compared with Western countries. Now we have opened our doors again and with this openness we are, and will be, more and more influenced by Western countries. We are afraid we will lose our culture, our characteristics. I want to change, because the current situation in China is not so satisfactory, but at the same time I worry that when we eliminate the shortcomings in our culture maybe we will also lose the essential part of our culture, the good part of our culture.
Huang: Even now, when Western influence is considerable and intrusive, I don’t think the Chinese will lose their culture because this represents a very thick accumulation of history. It cannot change easily, even if some of the surface things change. There is a very strong core culture inside every one of us. Even if our way of life changes, that culture will not change. Our long history constantly reappears and recurs. Now we are in a period of loss. I cannot deny that. We are lost because of the underlying conflict between modernity and tradition. But I believe that something new will come out of this: a unique China will remain.
Gao: We have been through worse periods, for example when we were colonized. I am more confident. We are in a new period when we are not being invaded but we are being influenced by the West. But for sure we will not be Westernized, the core culture will still be there.
CONTESTED MODERNITY
The balance of power in the world is changing with remarkable speed. In 1973 it was dominated by a developed world which consisted of the United States, Western Europe and Japan, together with what Angus Maddison describes as ‘Western offshoots’ like Australia: between them, they accounted for 58.7 % of the world’s GDP but only 18.4 % of the world’s population. By 2001, the share of global GDP accounted for by these countries had fallen to 52.0 % while their share of the world’s population had declined to 14.0 %. The most dramatic change was the rising share of global GDP accounted for by Asia, which, excluding Japan, increased from 16.4 % in 1973 to 30.9 % in 2001, while its share of the world’s population rose from 54.6 % in 1973 to 57.4 % in 2001. [412] This picture will change even more dramatically over the next few decades. It is estimated that by 2032 the share of global GDP of the so-called BRICs, namely Brazil, Russia, India and China, will exceed that of the G7, namely the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Japan. And by 2027 it is projected that China will overtake the United States to become the world’s largest economy. [413] To illustrate how increasingly diverse the world is likely to become, it is envisaged that the combined GDP of another eleven developing countries (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey and Vietnam) could reach two-thirds of the level of the G7 by 2050. [414] Meanwhile, the developing world’s share of the global population will steadily rise, though Asia’s will remain relatively constant at just below 60 %, with that of India and China, the two most populous countries in the world, enjoying a combined share of 37.3 % in 2001, [415] projected to fall very slightly. The proportion of the world living in the developed countries, meanwhile, will continue to fall steadily.