A problem of scale in a Western communist economic structure perhaps?
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Friday, February 10, 2012 9:39 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION; D & N Subject: Re: [Futurework] Why China won't win in this century As I've written before, acupuncture is useful to those who believe in it and so long as it's applied to cases where it doesn't harm -- or delay the use of more appropriate methods. Dogmatic acupuncturists who deny other treatment can be as dangerous to themselves and their children as Christian Scientists and Jehovah's Witnesses have been in the past. But why, if what you've written below is true, do the Chinese, except for the old, hardly use acupuncture at all? Young Chinese friends of mine in the choral world make fun of it when I ask them about acupuncture. To them it's as quaint as the 19th century practice of blood-letting is to us nowadays. Keith At 08:14 10/02/2012, D wrote: It was a statement based upon the history of religious oppression and educational indoctrination of a western system that appears to glorify the separation of body and energy (if you prefer) and thus treat the effect rather than the cause of illness. Whereas the drugless approach of re-aligning the energies to allow the body to heal itself and, if needed, the use of correct foods or medicinal herbs to rid the body of parasites (here I include bacteria and viruses) and we have, aside from the Ayurvedic, one of the oldest forms of medicine in the world today. Just because western medicine appeared to give quick results in some measure does not necessarily place it at the top of the ladder. Considering all the ways western civilization is making not just mankind less healthy but the total environment less healthy, I can only see the blindness of arrogance of a western 'civilized' education in throwing away something that has lasted for thousands of years to accept as gospel something that is, by comparison, an infant. Let us hope the infant has enough of a sponge-brain left to absorb something new that is old. For humanity to be here, now, our forebears had to be intelligent - for the most part. I'm unsure why you took it personally. D. On 09/02/2012 10:59 PM, Keith Hudson wrote: Darryl, There's no need for gratuitous insults. Having been put by you into the category of those of "limited spiritual intelligence" by you, I guess I'm in the good company of the majority of Futurework listers who may have visited conventional doctors many times but never once to an acupuncturist. Lawry's comment to my original posting of a year ago was fair comment. Your last sentence wasn't and should have been scrubbed. Keith At 04:37 10/02/2012, you wrote: Yes, Lawry, I have read that acupuncture is over 5,000 years old as a medical treatment. And at an early time in China's history laws were passed wherein if a 'doctor' lost a patient to death and did not hang a red lantern outside his door and a surviving relative noted same to the local authority, said doctor was publicly beheaded. However, that medical practice has had a hard sell in Britain. Perhaps because it treats that which cannot be understood by most 'western' thought processes. The treatment of energies (vibrations if you will) appears too difficult a concept for the limited spiritual intelligence of most of the brainwashed western hemisphere. D. On 09/02/2012 5:41 PM, de Bivort Lawrence wrote: 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 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China> has been the source of many significant inventions <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention> , including the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Great_Inventions_of_ancient_China> Four Great Inventions of ancient China: papermaking <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papermaking> , the compass <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass> , gunpowder <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder> , and printing <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_typography_in_East_Asia> (both woodblock <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodblock_printing> and movable type <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type> ). The list below contains these and other inventions. The Chinese <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_people> invented technologies <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology_in_China> involving mechanics <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanics> , hydraulics <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulics> , and mathematics <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics> applied to horology <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horology> ,metallurgy <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy> , astronomy <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomy> , agriculture <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture> , engineering <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering> , music theory <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_theory> , craftsmanship <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craftsmanship> , nautics <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_history> , and warfare <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warfare> . By the Warring States Period <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warring_States_Period> (403221 BC), they had advanced metallurgic technology, including the blast furnace <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_furnace> and cupola furnace <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupola_furnace> , while the finery forge <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finery_forge> and puddling process <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puddling_%28metallurgy%29> were known by the Han Dynasty <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknote> during the Song Dynasty <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_Dynasty> (9601279). The invention of gunpowder by the 10th century led to an array of inventions such as the fire lance <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_lance> , land mine, naval mine <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_mine> , hand cannon <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_cannon> , exploding cannonballs, multistage rocket <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket> , and rocket bombs with aerodynamic wings and explosive payloads <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huolongjing#Fire_arrows_and_rockets> . With the navigational aid of the 11th-century compass and ability to steer at high sea with the 1st-century sternpost rudder <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudder> , premodern Chinese sailors sailed as far as East Africa <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Africa> and Egypt <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt> . <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions#cite_note-0> [1] [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions#cite_note-1> [3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions#cite_note-2> In water-powered clockworks, the premodern Chinese had used the escapement <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escapement> mechanism since the 8th century and the endless power-transmitting chain drive <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_drive> in the 11th century. They also made large mechanical puppet theaters driven by waterwheels <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterwheel> and carriage wheels <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoke> and wine-serving automatons <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton> driven by paddle wheel boats <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddle_steamer> . ( 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 <mailto:[email protected]> To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, ,EDUCATION <mailto:[email protected]> 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/ _____ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/01/ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] <https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework> https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/01/ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] <https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework> https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com <http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/> _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] <https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework> https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com <http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/> _____ No virus found in this message. 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