I had my left ankle replaced a couple of years ago. Before that, the ankle
would get very painful and difficult to walk on. I would go down to our local
Chinatown here in Ottawa to a shop that did accupuncture. I would come out of
there with the ankle feeling as though it was completely healed. However, it
only felt that way for a couple of weeks, then back to accupuncture again.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: de Bivort Lawrence
To: Keith Hudson ; RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION
Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2012 8:41 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Why China won't win in this century
Greetings, everyone,
I have a physician in NYC who I visit occassionally. He is both a (western)
MD and a doctor of Chinese medicine. He views them as complementary: sometimes
he uses the practices of one, and at other times the practices of the other.
This includes acupuncture, acupressure. His wife is an herbal/Chinese doctor,
and sometimes some of that is used, as well.
Cheers,
Lawry
On Jan 9, 2011, at 10:56 PM, Keith Hudson wrote:
You're not seriously proposing acupuncture are you? Even the Chinese
scarcely use it as a practical system!
Acupuncture was a great discovery in that it indicated that there are
neuronal "gates" in our bodies which, if over-stimulated, can block pain.
(Scratching ourselves when we feel an itch is an instinctive -- and effective
-- use of this phenomenon.) It can work, too, for some quite awe inspiring
surgical operations in the case of patients who believe deeply in it very
deeply -- virtual hypnosis. But if it's the "arrogance of our [the West's]
scientific society and the need for the present medical/pharmaceutical
businesses to maintain their grip on the lucrative resource at hand" why didn't
the Chinese use acupuncture more widely long ago?
They didn't because acupuncture has only very limited uses. Instead, the
Chinese long ago used various natural products to bring about anaesthesia for
serious operations, just as monastic hospitals did in Medieval Europe.
Keith
At 11:27 09/01/2011 -0800, Darryl wrote:
Add to the list below the study of the energy flows of the body and
acupuncture to treat dis-eases of the body (over 3500 years of use). This
style of medical intervention is still little understood by the western world
partly due to the arrogance of our scientific society and the need for the
present medical/pharmaceutical businesses to maintain their grip on the
lucrative resource at hand. Let's mention as well the vast knowledge of the
ancient Chinese of the medicinals of the natural world and the Chinese
achievements in astronomy.
The struggle to 'achieve' in anything (sports, technocracy,
business/economics, government, etc.) can lead to a blind arrogance toward
other aspects within a field or society or toward other cultures. It is this
unacceptance of 'differing ways and values' that can lead to misunderstandings,
conflict and disaster in the long run.
Darryl
On 1/8/2011 11:50 PM, Keith Hudson wrote:
Ed,
Yes . . . well I mentioned this in my piece. Over the centuries the
Chinese amassed a large number of inventions here and there in a vast country
which then drifted into Europe in the Middle Ages. The real problem for China
began at the time of the Ming dynasty (early 1400s) when multi-masted ships
(that is, international trade) was outlawed. >From then onwards they were no
longer receptive to catalytic ideas from the outside world. It's economy was
large enough (and its internal freight routes were adequate enough --
principally its grand canal linking the 'export markets' of the north and
south) for it to remain viable, but it never made any great strides from then
on. Its culture and economy was largely locked and introverted.
The original problem (that the abstract scientific ideas of the West
from about 1700 onwards couldn't be immediately written down in ideographic
Chinese) doesn't apply any longer. (Now that they've absorbed the ideas they
can be written down in Chinese -- albeit in railway length words!) The problem
today (which, as I said, the government is seriously worried about) is that
their children and young people are not curious or creative enough -- and they
(not I) put it down to the many years of intensive rote learning necessary to
acquire reading and writing.
Keith
At 12:28 08/01/2011 -0500, you wrote:
Interesting Keith, but despite the problem of their written language,
the Chinese do seem to have been able to come up with inventions in the past.
I recalled reading something about them having invented gunpowder, so I looked
that up on Wikipedia and to my surprise found that they had not only invented
gunpowder, but a host of other things:<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns =
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
China has been the source of many significant inventions, including
the Four Great Inventions of ancient China: papermaking, the compass,
gunpowder, and printing (both woodblock and movable type). The list below
contains these and other inventions.
The Chinese invented technologies involving mechanics, hydraulics,
and mathematics applied to horology,metallurgy, astronomy, agriculture,
engineering, music theory, craftsmanship, nautics, and warfare. By the Warring
States Period (403221 BC), they had advanced metallurgic technology, including
the blast furnace and cupola furnace, while the finery forge and puddling
process were known by the Han Dynasty(202 BC AD 220). A sophisticated economic
system in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns =
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><?xml:namespace prefix = u1
/>China gave birth to inventions such as paper money during the Song Dynasty
(9601279). The invention of gunpowder by the 10th century led to an array of
inventions such as the fire lance, land mine, naval mine, hand cannon,
exploding cannonballs, multistage rocket, and rocket bombs with aerodynamic
wings and explosive payloads. With the navigational aid of the 11th-century
compass and ability to steer at high sea with the 1st-century sternpost rudder,
premodern Chinese sailors sailed as far as East Africa and Egypt.[1][2][3] In
water-powered clockworks, the premodern Chinese had used the escapement
mechanism since the 8th century and the endless power-transmitting chain drive
in the 11th century. They also made large mechanical puppet theaters driven by
waterwheels and carriage wheels and wine-servingautomatons driven by paddle
wheel boats. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions)
The quote mentions agriculture, but not the intensive agriculture of
the rice paddie. I recall reading somewhere that rice paddies were partly a
response to the need to feed vast armies.
Despite the problems raised by their written language, the Chinese
must have had some way of encapsulating their inventions because they were
quite widely used. And in the case of Europe, it wasn't so much language that
was essential to the spread of ideas. Rather it was the invention of the
printing press and the movement away from Latin to the vernacular that swept
ideas across the continent.
If their written language presents a problem currently, there is good
reason to believe that the Chinese will have no problem in adapting. A few
days ago, I saw a TV interveiw with Justin Yinfu Lin, Chief Economist of the
World Bank. The interview was in English, and Yinfu Lin's responses were in
English, but in an English so thick that I had a lot of trouble understanding
what he was saying. However, he knew exactly what he was saying.
My point is that if there is a problem, I'm sure that the Chinese
will find a way around it.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: Keith Hudson
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, ,EDUCATION
Sent: Saturday, January 08, 2011 5:44 AM
Subject: [Futurework] Why China won't win in this century
The reason why China will never win hands-down in its current
economic war with America is the same as why Japan didn't succeed in the 1980s
when all were expecting that its corporations and banks would eat America up
(Americans included). The reason is that both countries are good at copying
ideas and technologies; neither is good at inventing new ones.
It's their written language that's the main part of their problem.
It's non-phonetic. It means that in order to acquire a basic vocabulary -- of,
say, 2,000 or 3,000 words (the content of their average newspapers) -- children
have to learn uniquely-shaped characters (whole words) which have no, or very
little, relationship with their utterance. A Chinese or Japanese child can
learn to speak his language quite as readily as children do the world over, but
learning how to read or write each individual word takes many years. And
there's only one way, unfortunately for children, and that's by rote learning.
And thousands of hours of rote learning over many years under the strict
discipline of slave-masters in the schoolroom doesn't do anything for the
creativity of young minds -- or for older minds for that matter because the
basic mental skills are aptitudes are thoroughly laid down before puberty.
The Chinese and Japanese governments are well aware of the damage
that rote learning is doing to them -- and say so quite frequently. Although
both countries can churn out ten of thousands of science and engineering
graduates every year, there's scarcely an independent mind among them.
Independent 'garage inventors', as we have in the West, are as rare as hen's
teeth in China and Japan. For example, Japan has been industrialized for over a
century -- only a decade or two less than other Western countries -- yet it has
only won 15 Nobel prizes in the science subjects. Compare this figure with
those of America (261), the UK (91) and Germany (88). China has only won 10!
However, this comparison is unfair because China's have only been won since it
woke up in the 1970s. America's number also needs to be modified because about
a third of its prizes have been won by foreign-born scientists who became
American citizens after migrating there.
It's all Emperor Qin Shi Huang's fault (yes, the same as is famed
for his terracotta army). Once Qin had conquered several countries and unified
China in 221BC, he standardized as many things as possible from weights and
measures and currency through to the written language. All the various scholars
throughout his empire, speaking scores of different languages (some with and
some without a written form) were forced -- on pain of death -- to produce a
composite, but common, written language. And this could only be non-phonetic,
of course. Even the mighty power of Emperor Qin couldn't force millions of his
subjects to learn a new common spoken language but he could certainly force his
relatively few scholars to produce a new common written one. One popular
penalty in those days was to cut someone through his midriff, mount him on a
platter of hot tar and take him around the town, gesticulating and shouting
before he expired.
And herein lies a paradox, because the industrial revolution in
Europe would never have happened without starting from a basic stock of scores
of innovations -- such as canal locks, differential gears, sowing grain in rows
and so forth -- that had drifted in from China along the Great Silk Road over a
period of centuries. However, this doesn't signify that the Chinese had been
more inventive than Europeans. But its common written language had meant that
when one innovation -- say a wheelbarrow (very important indeed for both China
and Europe) -- had been invented by a genius in one tucked-away corner of
China, then the local mandarin could write and tell hundreds more all about
this wonderful new device.
But what once had been an accelerator for both Chinese and European
civilizations actually became a retardant for China when the Western
Enlightenment and scientific revolution stirred into life in the 1600s and
1700s. The Chinese had no way of encapsulating these new ideas. A Chinese
mandarin visiting Europe in, say, the 1700s or 1800s, and learning about the
new exciting scientific ideas (if he'd learned Latin or another European
language of course) had no way of disseminating them widely in China because
there he had no method of writing them down in Chinese words that would have
been instantly recognizable by fellow Chinese scholars or engineers. He could
only convey the new ideas vaguely by speaking of them face-to-face when he
returned home.
Thus Japan (which had inherited thousands of Chinese words) and
China were left behind by the industrial revolution in England, Germany and
America. They didn't begin to catch up in earnest until the the 1870s (the
Meiji Revolution) and the 1970s (the Deng Xiaoping Revolution) respectively.
And this is still -- largely -- where they are today. Both the Chinese and
Japanese governments are trying to phoneticize their written languages but only
very slowly, such is the cultural conservatism of two thousands years to
contend with.
What might be significant in China (though not yet happening in
Japan), is that all their college and university entrants have to learn spoken
and written English these days. All their top government officials speak
English and most business and science faculties in their universities use
English widely in their seminars. Also, thousands of their brightest young
post-grad scientists go to America or England for research experience and
qualifications. Indeed, once they are here for a few years they become quite as
inventive as Western scientists (if not more so when you look at the authorship
of many papers in heavyweight subject, say genetics or particle physics).
Unfortunately for the Chinese and Japanese governments many, if not most, of
the most innovative scientific minds elect to stay in their adoptive countries
rather than to return.
But the problem is even more serious for China and Japan. Almost as
important as are the original ideas of innovative individuals is the necessity
of other individuals who will give a welcome to new ideas and help to develop
them. And it's this open-minded hinterland which is still limited because of
their deep, conservative, authoritative cultures. Goodness knows, new ideas
often have a hard time being accepted in the West. Even here, the crazy ideas
of yesteryear sometimes have to wait until its die-hard opponents are dead and
buried and a brand new generation appears. Only then are the ideas seen to be
not so crazy after all.
There we are then. Japan came close to hollowing out America and
Western Europe 30 years ago with its superbly made (Western-invented) products.
China is threatening to do the same in the coming years. But the innovative
momentum is still with the West and this sort of cultural momentum takes a
century or two to die down -- if it ever does -- or a century to acquire -- if
it ever does in China and Japan.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/01/
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