In an essay for the Berkley Center at Georgetown University, Dmitry Uzlaner reports that the regime is casting itself as “the last bastion of Christian values” that keeps the world from descending into liberal moral chaos.Įven wannabe authoritarians in America and Western Europe are getting in on the game. Putin has long associated himself with religious philosophers like Ivan Ilyin and Nikolai Berdyaev. Vladimir Putin and the other regional authoritarians play a similar game. The Chinese internet is apparently now rife with attacks on the decadent “white left” - educated American and European progressives who champion feminism, L.G.B.T.Q. “Today, traditionalism is gaining momentum among everyday Chinese people as well as intellectuals and politicians,” Xuetong Yan of Tsinghua University wrote in 2018. The regime’s top-down moral populism is having an effect.
This is only one of the culture war forays designed to illustrate how the regime is protecting China from Western moral corruption. These are the delicate-looking male stars who display gentle personalities and are accused of feminizing Chinese manhood. Last week, the Chinese government ordered a boycott of “sissy pants” celebrities. China scholar Max Oidtmann says it is restricting independent religious entities while creating a “Socialist core value view,” a creed that includes a mixture of Confucianism, Daoism, Marxism and Maoism. But Xi’s regime has gone out of its way to embrace old customs and traditional values. Mao Zedong regarded prerevolutionary China with contempt. Xi Jinping is one of the architects of this spiritually coated authoritarianism. They reframed the global debate: It was no longer between democracy and dictatorship it was between the moral decadence of Western elites and traditional values and superior spirituality of the good normal people in their own homelands.
They unified the masses behind them by whipping up perpetual culture wars. They used religious symbols as nationalist identity markers and rallying cries. We settled into the now familiar contest between democratic liberalism and authoritarianism.īut over the last several years something interesting happened: Authoritarians found God. Authoritarians in China, Central and Eastern Europe and beyond wielded power. Then over the ensuing decades, democracy’s spread was halted and then reversed. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in China, a set of values seemed to be on the march - democracy, capitalism, egalitarianism, individual freedom. 10, 2001, I would have had a clear answer: advancing liberalism. What is the 21st century going to be about? If you had asked me 20 years ago, on, say, Sept.
0 kommentar(er)
