A bit off-topic, but what is the song used for the intro to the podcast?

-Cheers from Yunnan

Here's a link to the Caixin article mentioned in the podcast, "The Revolution of 1911"

http://english.caing.com/2010-12-21/100209405.html

I am in love with Sinica. Thank you!

-joanna

The Long arm of history

The Chinese are the most historical people in the world because they alone enjoy a historical superiority over all other contemporary civilizations. While all the latter emerged on the ruins of the first civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus, the Chinese tradition alone survived from the age of the first civilizations to the modern times. This explains its long arm of history and its echoes in the present of the Chinese people, for in fact they are the oldest civilized, urbanized living people on the earth. That is why they seem to be in such a rush for industrialization and urbanization.

This un-interrupted history gives the Chinese a great edge over the contemporary civilizations, for the disruption experienced by the latter, which led to their condemnation of the past and their ancestor civilizations, did not occur in Chinese experience and for which reason it bears the echoes of the oldest humans sounds. In this way it awakens great insights into the nature of man and civilization.

Its implications, though, are most profound. For until now it has been the Greeks, at least in the Western religious tradition which inherited them, who have been considered the philosophical model of antiquity, or the philosophical representation of antiquity. But in spite of all its sophistication, it suddenly falls pale in front of its contemporary Chinese thought, represented by Lao Tzu and Confucius and in Indian thought by the Buddha. From Pythagoras to Socrates and Plato, indeed all Greeks, as both Plato and Xenophon, the two great sources of Socrates, testify, believed in gods.

But both Lao Tzu and the Buddha discovered a language of emancipation spoken purely from the human reference point, which does not assume any reference to gods as a necessary condition for human discourse and emancipation. In this way Trevor Ling is right in calling them humanists, though he is speaking strictly of the Buddha. The truth is they were more humanists than ever produced in the Greco-Roman tradition, right through the Renaissance till the modern times, which has remained deeply under the deep shadow of the gods.

The Chinese are therefore the freest people in the world, if ever they come to know it. But once they know it, they will rein in modernity and turn their attention to the health of the planet. For I have no qualms in supporting John Gray’s prediction, an exercise in social forecasting, that this planet cannot bear the burden of more than eight and half billion people and that is soon to come in fifty years time, that is, in the sway of next two generations. Thinking fifty years ahead is not a big deal in these times. We can even dream it today and if can do so, we are faced with the interpretation of this dream and this immediately reminds of Joseph.

Remember Pharaoh’s dream that spanned the next fourteen years, divided into equal halves of seven years! Shmuel Kogan has written a brilliant piece on the methodology of the Joseph’s interpretation of the dream (