WTF, are you seriously considering cultural revolution, great leap forward some kind of westernization that China must endure in order to achieve progress? Are you nuts? I am sorry but if those are positive events that China should endure in the future in order to progress, I would rather live in backward India or backward China. You can emigrate to a true "western" country.
Even though I live in the U.S. I still cling to my Chinese traditions. I never celebrate Christmas or any western holidays. I only celebrate Chinese holidays. I go to Buddhist temple that was established by people from Taiwan. I do drink coffee but I don't go to Starbucks like some young Chinese in China to show off how modern and westernized they are. But I am pretty sure I am more enlightened about political systems, cultures, etc than those "westernized" young Chinese in China. Therefore, you don't have to adopt western cultures in order to be progressive. I am disgusted at post-1949 China, first following Maxism,then Russia, then Hollywood.
Modernization =/=westernization. Humanity has progressed prior to Europe dominance and China has built up its own unique culture for millenniums. I don't want to be dragged into "westernization," in my generation and to see China totally abandon its uniqueness within such short span of time. If you want another cultural revolution, most Chinese are educated enough not to be fooled.
You live in a english environment but can't understand it?
What I use the word devastated, which last time I checked is not a praise. Westernization started after words under Deng, didn't say it started because of it, simply after it.
The cultural revolution and great leap forward are terrible events that should never be repeated. But everything is not one sided. There is bad, there is also good.
It eliminated superstition, eliminated the wealthy, and pretty much gave China a clean slate of which to build. We don't come with nearly as much baggage as the Indians because we destroyed all ours. We drove ourselves to a corner, tasted desperation, and now we march full speed ahead no matter how much sacrifice we have to make, because we have seen the alternative.
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Chinese traditions, what is that? The song dynasty can be considered the last true Chinese dynasty, the Yuan is mongol, the Ming is han, but it was started by a peasant and much of Chinese tradition has been lost even before that, another hundreds of years of Qing, the westernization of late Qing and early republic, how much of our traditions are really left anyways.
Being Chinese doesn't mean they know anything about China, most Americans don't even know how many people are in the supreme court, does that mean they are not American? While some educated American knows more about China than I do or most Chinese.
Depends on the person, not the race, or even living location.
What do you consider Chinese? The cloth Sun Zhongshan would wear? The cloth the Qing dynasty wears? The cloth the Ming or even Han or Tang? It's hard to define Chinese, because our culture evolves, we don't stand still, today a suit and a coffee to go with a laptop is as Chinese as any.
Westernization isn't modernization, but at this point it is, the West is superior, we can either admit it and move on, or blindly think everything ours is better which by the way is why the Qing got schooled so easily by the Western nations who BTW, adapts strategies, weaponries, and everything from each other.
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IND151
look at a picture of pre Meiji japan and read on the systems of government as well as society. Look at another post Russo Japanese war and read a few things, then during WW2, then 1990s and tell me how how Japanese are they compare to when they started.
The Japanese at one point abandoned almost everything Japanese and adopted everything western. It was seen as backwards to have anything Japanese. This of course changed later, but still the damage has been done and the products of westernizations were kept and American occupation certainly didn't help bring back the old traditions.
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To indian members would you guys abandon your culture, of course not all of it, but to an large extent, and religion and thing like that to achieve modernization?
From what I read the answer is no, which is weird, because you guys have actually been conquered, and I thought you would be even more willing to do things to make sure it would never happen again.
What are your thoughts?
An example would be Russia, the Russians before Peter the great, had long beards, and weird clothing and of course all kinds of traditions and what not. Peter the great made sure he changed everything about his people by force and anyone who won't is of forced to or death.
By the time he died, Russia is no longer Russia in the sense that they completely adapted European culture. He even changed his title from Tsar to Emperor of Russia and changed his crown to match the European styles.
This of course made Russia a leading power and soon THE European power that dominated Europe.
Would you guys do this? Cut your beards and hair, take off the turban, wear suits, and abandon, or at least put it in the back burner and not let it interfere with daily life, religion and superstition, and stuff like that?
EDIT: some words or phrases maybe wrong, this apple autocorrect is stupid, sorry don't have time to correct but you get the gist of it hopefully.
