Chinese trust drain?

A forty-year bond of trust between entrepreneurs and the government, the backbone of China’s meteoric rise, is in jeopardy because of short-term mistakes and long-term neglect. Some Chinese are apparently voting with their feet or lack of activity against what they don’t like. It fuels and is also fueled by growing foreign mistrust of China.[1] It […]

Serious questions about Christianity and religions

There may be a missing bridge, a missing brother between the billion Catholics or self-proclaimed such, the Church, and people of other faiths. There may be other scriptures giving different names to their gods—the search for a theology beyond scriptures. It doesn’t eliminate scriptures, but it goes into a hitherto empty space unoccupied by scriptures, […]

From Peter the Great to Vladimir the Small?

The mobilization announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin on September 21 is not sure to bring a victory from the battered fields of Ukraine. Still, it declares loudly what a growing number of observers have been saying for months: that the “special operation” against Kyiv has failed and that Moscow has been defeated. Against this […]

Better call Trump

There is a strong China angle in the whole Donald Trump affair[1], the growing controversy engulfing America about the ex-president’s behavior during the January 6, 2021 tumult, and his insistence on rejecting the results of the election that brought Joseph Biden to the presidency. The Chinese political system is consistently vertical, unitary, and rational. It […]

American Crisis and China

One year after what amounted to a botched attempted coup in America, the January 6, 2021 supporters perhaps should have been arrested. They haven’t been for many reasons, mainly in hopes of not deepening the great divide of American society and trying conversely to bring the political movement behind it back into the mainstream. One […]

American Zhongguo

Different cultures see and represent reality differently. The West was keen on strict realism: reproduction of the naked anatomy of a body and of realistic visual perspective. China was more interested in representing the emptiness and symbolism of the mind. Different forms of representation entail different approaches to dealing with reality. Cultures of strategies, and […]