Reason Number 50 - The Voice of China

`Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great’ - Excerpt 97

“We have asked thousands of questions over the past twenty years and carefully considered each reply. We have read stacks of articles, documents, papers and reports, seeking one answer that seems impossible to find. 

Chinese people often wish to impress upon us the fact that 5,000 years of history holds great richness and meaning. But for as long as we have been in China, and as many times as we have put our ear to the ground to listen, what is it that we hear?

Absolutely nothing.

Who do Chinese people ‘think’ they are? Who do the Chinese people think they will become? Who do the Chinese people think the rest of the world wants them to become?

As we said in our introduction, this book has no balance. Some readers may feel that it also has no sympathy or comfort, and that it seems totally lacking in empathy. 

It is difficult to have these emotional qualities in a society that does not itself reflect them. It is hard to write positively about a people who care so little about each other, and indeed care so little about the rest of the world. The citizens who made the fake milk power to financially enrich their lives while babies died were not hardened criminals. The ‘chemists’ who make fake drugs which are delivered to patients and will surely cause the death of those patients are not lifetime crime barons. The owners and operators of the mines that catastrophically eliminate thousands of lives each year are not competing to see who can cause more deaths. They are all, most certainly, gentle, loving family men when they go home at night. They are ‘just’ average people in today’s China.”

`Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great’ - Excerpt 98

“It is not for the authors – or indeed anyone but the Chinese people themselves – to define greatness for China. But it is for the world to inform China that the automobile, CO2 emissions, and rubbish, all products of peaceful development, will not aid the achievement of greatness. Greatness for China must come from its uniqueness, its individuality of concept, its singular perspective. From the dream of what China could be.

But if this dream never becomes real, surely part of the world will die along with it. If this dream does not fill the world with cures for cancer, succor for the environment, and spiritual fulfillment for all the planet’s people, who should be found guilty?

If the Chinese people cannot grasp what their thousands of years of history really means, if they only listen to communist political theorists who merely offer ‘peaceful development,’ spoken in a single breath, then they will lose the chance to change humanity. And Armageddon will come. Apocalypse. 

Greatness shouts from the rooftops. Greatness is heard throughout the canyons of business. Greatness should echo across the planet.

But the voice of China is mute. 

And so is China’s greatness.”