A Quote by Martin Jacques
We still insist, by and large, in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts. If you want to know why we unerringly seem to get China wrong... this is the reason.
Related Quotes
The reason why China forecasting has such a poor track record is that Westerners constantly invoke the model and experience of the West to explain China, and it is a false prophet. Until we start trying to understand China on its own terms, rather than as a Western-style nation in the making, we will continue to get it wrong.
Of course in Turkey I'm seen as being on the 'Western' side, criticised by the nationalists, criticised by the communitarians as not belonging. Even, sometimes, criticised for looking at my country through Western eyes. And in the Western media I'm portrayed as belonging to the East.
China wants Western countries to be timid. Its strategic foreign policy has been to make any criticism of the Communist Party of China seem unreasonable or even Sinophobic.
My tendency to idealize Western civilization arises from my nationalistic desire to use the West in order to reform China. But this has led me to overlook the flaws of Western culture.
If some Western politician claims he is in a position to use the normal Western methods to feed and clothe 1.2 billion Chinese, we would be happily prepared to elect him president of China.
As I have pointed out, it is the Christian tradition that is the most fundamental element in Western culture. It lies at the base not only of Western religion, but also of Western morals and Western social idealism.
Western audiences can gain an impression of China from my films. This is an excellent channel for promoting China`s culture.
The Soviet transition to a new political structure shows that the Soviet strategists are thinking, planning and acting in broad terms, way beyond the imagination of Western politicians. For this reason Western politicians cannot grasp the fact that the Soviet intention is to win by 'democratic' means. Through transition to a new system, the Soviets are revitalising their own people and institutions, and they are succeeding. Contrary to Western belief, they are holding their ranks together.
The Western is as American as a film can get - there's the discovery of a frontier, the element of a showdown, revenge, and determining the best gunman. There's a certain masculinity to the Western that really appealed to me, and I've always wanted to do a Western in Hollywood.
There's this long history of colonialism and the colonial gaze when applied to matters related to China. So a lot of conceptions about China in literary representations in the West are things you can't even fight against because they've been there so long that they've become part of the Western imagination of China.
Typically, in Westerns, people who are in a Western feel like they're in a Western. It's almost like they know they do all these Western things.
It is one of the perceptual defects of Western government and press to assign Western-style motives to what people do in non-Western societies, as if these are universally relevant.
The governments and the communist parties in Vietnam and China are doing their best to develop their local economies. But the rise of countries in Asia is not in opposition to development and affluence in Western nations. It is a mutually beneficial development. The interests of Western investors are protected in our country. Both we and the West benefit from this in equal measure.
A lot of Americans desperately want to believe that China is full of poor people who can't innovate, and the only goods they make are cheap, toxic rip-offs our Western brands. They want to believe the only reason the Chinese economy is surging is because the West wants cheap goods and China knows how to make them that way.
In 1949, China declared independence - an event known in Western discourse as 'the loss of China' in the U.S. - with bitter recriminations and conflict over who was responsible for that loss.
Xi Jinping is a very strong and ambitious leader who is looking to make a lot of changes in China. He is not looking to follow a Western model based on universal suffrage. That is for sure.
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