Excerpt

To claim that East and West can never meet is to make a false claim. But in recent years, the myth of civilizational clash has become the currency of international relations and cross-cultural understanding. This stance spawns the stale but fake news that China and the West are locked in a collision course over civilizational norms—individualism vs. authoritarianism, state capitalism vs. neoliberalism, democracy vs. autocracy. This view is in the grip of “civilization” as if it were the genetic code of a body politic that has remained unchanged across thousands of years and countless generations. A cultural DNA is said to constitute the identity of a national society, placing China on Venus and the West on Mars. The West evolves liberal democracy as its vital essence, whereas China has been bedridden with the century-old pathology of autocracy.