03 March 2012

Understanding Chinese politics (in pictures)

Highly interesting and edifying graphic on Chinese politics over at Tea Leaf Nation, courtesy of CNPolitics (and a helpful glossary of political terminology in popular use on Weibo as well)! Browsing through Tea Leaf Nation, there are quite a number of such resources for those interested in modern China and the way more and more of its (net-literate, urban) youth are expressing themselves. Here is the graphic in its entirety:


One thing I had noticed prior to reading this is that the political instincts of the Chinese left are almost entirely derived from Rousseau (particularly with regard to how they construe the right meaning of ‘democracy’ and, therefore, the rights of the people) where as those of the Chinese right are almost entirely derived from Locke. French revolutionaries versus American revolutionaries once more, but with a hitch: as Tea Leaf Nation rightly notes, not all Chinese people on Weibo identify entirely with one side or the other. This may be encouraging, as it opens people up to thinking about politics in another, possibly more radical (and at the same time more conservative) way. I myself do not identify wholly with the Chinese left, even though my economic and cultural instincts are quite firmly on that side, and I am an avowed fan of certain thinkers on that side. At the same time, what is needed is not a return to Mao and to ‘left-wing’ nationalism, but a return to Meng and the humanistic and cosmopolitan (if at the same time organic, traditionalist, pro-family, agrarian and distributist) discourse of traditional Confucianism.

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