Oliver

I think you have captured the essence of the problem very well. The challenge is to transform the increasingly mechanical character of Western daily life to make it more productivve and competitive. Mae-Wah Ho of www.i-sis.org.uk explores the comtemporary practical challenges of this very well

Reg

"This eternally dualistic subject-oject way of approaching the mototcycle sounds right to us because we are used to it. But that's not right. It's always been an articifial interpretation superimposed on reality, It is never reality. When this duality is completely accepted a certain nondivided relationship between the mechanic and motor cycle, a craftsman feeling for work, is destroyed. When traditional rationality divides the world into subjects and objects it shuts out Quality, and when you're really stuck, its Quality and not subjects and objects that tells you where you ought to be." - Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)

Oliver

Sadly,if one looks back over recent decades little has been learnt or applied in the West from such writings, whether the field is politics. commerce, finance, science, medicine, food or simple human health. As a consequence we have 'American Decline and the Australian Predicament'

Reg

"argued, very much against the otherwise consensus view, in the Australian Embassy in Beijing in 1976/77 that China would emulate Japan."

I agree with you.

The success of Japan in the 1970-80s, was very a result of the Cold War politics of the 1950s-1960s. Japan was built as a stalwart against Soviet and Communism. If the US was not a the sole nuclear power, the Soviets would have probably pushed harder for Japan to be divided like Germany [Russia had issues with Japan going bak to the turn of the nineteenth century]. The West needed Japan to counter-balance Mao. The occupying forces were unable to break the power of the Zaibatsu [or the rice farmers], which led to the Keiretsu. The Mitsu coal mine strikes of the 1950s led the "salaryman" philosophy and a job for life. The US open its markets to Japan but allowed Japan to protect its own markets. The Keiretsu, were able to place high margins on domestic products and use profitable product lines [also cheap products to third world countries] to fund Western market entry [often using loose brick segmentation]. The relationship between M.I.T.I. and industry was also very close. Low interest loans from Keiretsu banks also helped. Transformalist engineer entrenpreneurs developed new product types: e.g., solid state TV. None of thes matters are common to China.

I think your colleagues are seeing are a Meiji Restoration Mk II, because of West-East technolgy transfer and China's opening.

Not so:

As a GM of pharmaceutal groups once said to me, when I was writing a case, "Asia is not the same". Sure, there are some kernel underlying Asian antecedents, but there is also condierable heterogeneity.

.. More

... /cont.

China comes a tradition of being the Middle Kingdom with vassal states. Albeit, only self-ruled for only 250 years [?], the Chinese bureaucracy usually stayed in place. Capital works in Ancient China tended to break China into disparate familial farming groups and dialect groups. That is, as Redding states [and supported by history going back to the Shang dynasty], Chinese think terms of a series concentric circles moving out from the centre [the family, village, dialect group, country, foreigners].

In contrast, Japan is much more nationalistic, as has been said, like granite, not pebbles [China]. Japan is Japan. Japanese are Japan (spiritually animist). The Chinese are familes (spiritually ancestor worshippers.) China's emergence will not emulate, Japan's.

Historically, if memory serves, Veblen saw more commonality between Japan and Germany

Oliver

I have no argument with your historical facts. In the West also there are many distinctions to be drawn, not least between Britain and America. The central point remains that only in Confucian-Daoist East Asia have a succession of states all succeeded in outplaying the West (and particularly the Anglo-American world) in the global marketplace and in using the American fixation on Communism to great advantage. Even the Chinese managed this apparent oxymoron.

The details and mechanics of Japanese, Korean or Chinese success are much less important than the fact that they could all find policies to produce more or less the same highly successful outcome.

The problem today is that the Anglo-American world is like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a rapidly approaching vehicle and squanders the little remaining time on defendinng or legitimising causes that are already lost.

Strangely, even at this time most Anglo-Americans could learn much of value to strengthen their cause by a little humble study of the Chinese classics, while always searching for their contemporary applications

Best regards

Reg.