Democracy is now being hollowed out from within. It has been pointed out that the CCP's global strategy is to take the lead in exploiting and practicing this corruption of human civilization.
06/06/2019
The following is a continuation of an article by Terumasa Nakanishi in this month's issue of the monthly magazine Sound Argument.
And the Tiananmen Square incident should also serve as a bitter lesson for Japan's diplomacy: the "Emperor's Visit to China" in 1992.
As then-Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qihun later recalled, the Emperor's visit to Japan was the "fruit" of the Chinese authorities' efforts to break through the network of sanctions against China imposed by the Western powers immediately after the Tiananmen Square incident.
However, the time will come when China and Japan will achieve genuine reconciliation and coexistence, and this visit to China will be regarded as "a trigger for historic reconciliation between the peoples of the two countries.
However, on the occasion of the recent change, a Japanese TV special interviewed Mr. Ishizumi Ikeda, then Director General of the Asian Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who revealed that His Majesty the Emperor asked Mr. Ikeda, "Was my visit to China correct?"
We must remember that the visit caused concern for His Majesty the Emperor.
It is possible that Washington's implicit or explicit consent was behind Japan's decision to visit China.
In other words, why did the U.S. even move to lift sanctions against China here?
It is a serious question.
The Beginning of the Corruption of Human Civilization
The background to the easy compromises made by the United States and other Western nations toward China after the Tiananmen Square incident may be that they could not resist the "attractiveness" of China as a market with a vast population.
However, it is necessary to discuss in depth once again that the fact that the U.S. and Japan took the lead in overstepping the principles of freedom, democracy, and emphasis on human rights made today's "challenge to world hegemony" by China a reality.
I have often pointed out that the world order in the 21st century will be dominated by "enthusiasm" and "corruption" (see Terumasa Nakanishi, "International Order after the Cold War," in "Encountering Other Cultures," Kyoto University Press, 1998).
Enthusiasm" refers to, for example, radical Islamic fundamentalism or globalism as the 'New World Order' promoted by the U.S. as the sole hegemonic power.
Corruption is, put, the greed for money and money worship.
Individuals and nations are much more driven by money power today than in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the world is becoming a place where money worship is the norm.
It is nothing but a corruption of human civilization as a whole brought about by the emergence of the global economy.
It is a historical trend in the world of the 21st century in which values supported by the lawful and abundant sense of justice of the 20th century, such as democracy, freedom, and emphasis on human rights, are in retreat and being eroded by money power. One of the reasons for this is that the values of the 20th century, which were based on a sense of righteousness and justice, are receding.
One of the reasons for this may be that the ideologies that dominated the world in the 19th and 20th centuries are no longer attractive.
Marxist ideology, which aimed at liberation from labor exploitation and human alienation, was, in retrospect, serious and fastidious.
It is probably why its offshoots ran into the madness of fascism.
When such ideologies and values are weakened as motives for human behavior, it is self-evident that the desire for money and materialism will enter and replace them in the vacuum of the psyche.
The second reason for the infestation of money worship is the advancement of information technology.
With the advanced individualistic technology of social networking sites (SNS), the world is becoming one where everything is driven by a pseudo-reality called "advertising.
We live in a post-truth psychological space where "advertisements," in other words, propaganda, is all-powerful.
It is the reason why fake news abounds.
Democracy, which is based on the premise of calm and mature debate based on facts, is now being hollowed out from within.
It has been pointed out that the Chinese Communist Party's global strategy is taking the lead in exploiting and practicing this corruption of human civilization.
Stephen Halper, a fellow of Maudlin College at Cambridge University in the U.K. (who later became a hot topic for a while in the Trump administration's "Russia scandal"), analyzes this in his book "Beijing Consensus: The Chinese Way Moves the World" (2011, Iwanami Shoten), and according to the book, in economic activities, the "Chinese economic model" is to exclude "universal values" for Western countries, such as democracy and human rights, as positive for economic growth and even as an impediment to regime stability.
Halper warns that this Chinese model of extreme "economic growth universalism" rapidly expands in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and is gradually taking over the world.
To be continued.
2024/6/7 in Nagoya
