I am currently in China. And I am looking at how things are going there. And I must say, in China, matters are sometimes totally different from Germany. The things I see put huge question marks behind some of the things I took for granted. Some of my belief patterns, too, were radically shattered. In fact, I cannot even formulate it as quickly as it hit me.
I feel that the time when our “defining culture” as given by the USA – – God’s own country – ruled is over. What was it they said twenty years ago? We were in the USA and knew that what we experienced there would be similar in Germany ten years down the road.
However, the US dominance is about the end – for me, the only question is if the “Prussian China” will replace the USA or if the “chaotic India” will have a word to say about it. After my personal experiences in Mumbai early last spring and now in Peking, Pengyao, Xi-an and other cities, I currently tend towards China.
But be that as is may: China is definitely the country of walls. Both historically and today in the internet – where they actually show the Russian and other regimes how to build digital walls.
Allegedly, China spends more money on its censorship activities and also uses more employees for maintaining it than for its army. As unbelievable as this sounds, I can still imagine it quite well. The very concept has something special to its name and censorship is definitely something that consumes resources.
So this is another time I am going to visit and see the Big Wall. And I will climb some of it. And my personal explanation of the GREAT WALL is:
There is a huge Chinese Community (nation, empire, people, however you wish to call it). It took a long time to organize itself and find its own order. Over the centuries, it became huge and powerful. Around the middle of the second millennium, they noticed that the systems around their own dominion differed from their own system. The change happening all around them was considered a threat. Consequently, they built a wall.
Isn’t it the same today?
When all is said and done, the purpose of a wall is that your own system is protected. And China probably succeeded in this respect with their GREAT WALL. Now it is quite a moot point to ask whether building this great wall was useful for China in the short run or in the long run or anywhere in between. You can ask if the wall succeeded in preserving the values worth preserving. Basically, the answer to this question, along with its usefulness, is the most important argument in favour of such decisions as building a gigantic wall with all its monumental consequences.
I guess the great wall was quite useful for China in the short run. It conserved the stability of the huge empire and made it even more powerful and richer.
But I doubt that the usefulness of the wall was sustainable. Perhaps, in the long run, the wall actually brought considerable disadvantages? To be sure, it helped to preserve an old order, but as time went by, the consequence was that the country grew weaker and weaker? Because there were no dynamics left. And thus China lost the strength necessary for a meaningful future.
And perhaps, without the GREAT WALL, China would not, centuries later, have dived into this unfathomable phase of weakness from which it only knew how to liberate itself through a bloody and cruel revolution instigated by Mao-tse-Tung, a revolution that went on very complex and painful paths?
And perhaps, without the wall, there would never have been a radical cultural revolution as a late consequence. A revolution that actually led straight to an excessive and seemingly perverse turbo capitalism.
We are talking a success metric the desires and activities of which follow only one principle: the greed for money and the hunt for riches!
And the same will probably happen with all the Chinese (and Russian and other) internet walls: they will have special effects of their own we cannot even begin to understand today. And perhaps they will be most detrimental for those who today think they benefit from them?
These ideas about walls, fears and xenophobia are not restricted to dictatorships. European and EU- countries that, so far, still consider themselves democracies might be well advised to ask themselves if, in the long run, walls will really make sense. And they might all re-establish my idea that transparency and openness are usually the better maxims.
These kinds of ideas particularly move me in the upcoming era of natural catastrophes and the subsequent conflicts and migration waves.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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