Declaration of China Experts from All Over the World

March 24 , 2021 (EIRNS)—The following Declaration is posted on the Schiller Institute website, including a list of signers:

For some time an international anti-China campaign has escalated, where Think Tanks, Mainstream Media, and strategic reports of all sorts paint a picture of China and its alleged intentions which is simply not true and is extremely dangerous. An enemy image is being projected that in the worst case leads to war.

We, the signers, all having had direct experience with China, be it that we have lived or worked there, or from repeated travel over longer periods of time, could thus follow how Chinese society has transformed itself in an unprecedented way since the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. Thanks to a policy focused on the welfare of the population by the state leadership of the People’s Republic, and the extraordinary hard work of the Chinese people, 850 million people could be freed from poverty, with the result that the population is fundamentally more optimistic about the future than the West, where poverty is increasing as a consequence of neo-liberal policies. Trust in the government is substantially greater than by us, a trend illustrated and strengthened by the effective way China brought under control the Covid-19 pandemic.

China is a 5,000 year old culture nation, leading until the 17th Century in technology, and it is thus not surprising that China today, with a population of 1.4 billion, strives for an equal place on the world stage. China’s socialism with its own characteristics for China is strongly shaped by the two and half thousand year old Confucian tradition, the orientation of its modern founder Sun Yat-sen on Abraham Lincoln, and even though the Chinese hold high the tradition of Karl Marx, their current economic system is more influenced by the American System of Alexander Hamilton and Friedrich List, the most famous non-Chinese economist in China. China learns from the best.

China has a rich culture of philosophy, poetry, painting, architecture, and wonderful folk music. President Xi Jinping emphasizes the importance of aesthetical education above all for youth as a precondition for the development of a beautiful soul, an idea promoted by the first education minister of the first Republic of China Cai Yuanpei, which furthermore originate from Friedrich Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt.

The success from China’s emphasis on science and technological progress and innovation, demonstrate that China is doing well with what we in the West have seemingly forgotten, and we would do better to respond to the offer of cooperation, than seeking confrontation.

We should better take up the view of the great philosopher and founder of modern mathematics, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and in a Dialogue of Cultures find a way to solve the crises challenging all of Humanity.