The historian and philosopher René Girard famously posited that it is not so much differences that drive conflict, but the desire to possess what the other possesses. He called this “mimetic rivalry.” As Girard put it once in a conversation on the contemporary manifestation of this concept, “Today … we are aware that globalization hasn’t meant global friendship, but global competition and, therefore, conflict.” 

Gu Linshi via Wikimedia Commons

Indeed, the conflict with China today stems in many ways from its accelerated mimicry of Western modernization. Both today share the same materialist ideology of developmentalism, though China has been able to accomplish in decades what it took the West a century to achieve.

That process has been so complete that the children of this accomplishment are beginning to question whether besting the West at its own game was worth selling China’s soul in a kind of Faustian bargain. 

In this perspective, Karl Marx, who inspired the birth of the Communist Party, could be seen analogously as a Mephistophelean figure who lured the Middle Kingdom away from its civilizational foundations with the compelling promise of vanquishing poverty and colonial oppression through the so-called laws of inexorable historical progress divined by Western thinkers. Mao’s Cultural Revolution then wiped the old slate of tradition clean. Deng Xiaoping’s “opening up and reform” finished the job by filling in the resultant vacuum with the aspiration — and pragmatic realization — of catching up with the West along the “capitalist road.”

Now, as Jacob Dreyer chronicles in Noema, the disillusioned youth of prosperity are defecting from this developmenalist ideology, looking to recover meaning in life beyond the unfulfilling clutter of a mass consumer society purchased by becoming the world’s factory. For them, “a rich, urban, coastal China that is culturally deracinated and dependent on the global economy is no longer even China at all.” China may have swallowed the world economy, he notes, but now is trying to avoid being swallowed by it.  

“Across China,” Dreyer reports, “a new internal migration is underway. As the middle class has grown rapidly over recent decades, access to top-tier urban real estate, spots in elite universities and other scarce goods have not. The result is the creation of incentives for alternative lifestyles, and the cities, full to the brim, have started to spill over into the countryside. … [People are] looking for new ways of life amid old traditions.”

The historian and philosopher René Girard famously posited that it is not so much differences that drive conflict, but the desire to possess what the other possesses. He called this “mimetic rivalry.” As Girard put it once in a conversation on the contemporary manifestation of this concept, “Today … we are aware that globalization hasn’t meant global friendship, but global competition and, therefore, conflict.”  

Indeed, the conflict with China today stems in many ways from its accelerated mimicry of Western modernization. Both today share the same materialist ideology of developmentalism, though China has been able to accomplish in decades what it took the West a century to achieve.

That process has been so complete that the children of this accomplishment are beginning to question whether besting the West at its own game was worth selling China’s soul in a kind of Faustian bargain. 

In this perspective, Karl Marx, who inspired the birth of the Communist Party, could be seen analogously as a Mephistophelean figure who lured the Middle Kingdom away from its civilizational foundations with the compelling promise of vanquishing poverty and colonial oppression through the so-called laws of inexorable historical progress divined by Western thinkers. Mao’s Cultural Revolution then wiped the old slate of tradition clean. Deng Xiaoping’s “opening up and reform” finished the job by filling in the resultant vacuum with the aspiration — and pragmatic realization — of catching up with the West along the “capitalist road.”

Now, as Jacob Dreyer chronicles in Noema, the disillusioned youth of prosperity are defecting from this developmenalist ideology, looking to recover meaning in life beyond the unfulfilling clutter of a mass consumer society purchased by becoming the world’s factory. For them, “a rich, urban, coastal China that is culturally deracinated and dependent on the global economy is no longer even China at all.” China may have swallowed the world economy, he notes, but now is trying to avoid being swallowed by it.  

“Across China,” Dreyer reports, “a new internal migration is underway. As the middle class has grown rapidly over recent decades, access to top-tier urban real estate, spots in elite universities and other scarce goods have not. The result is the creation of incentives for alternative lifestyles, and the cities, full to the brim, have started to spill over into the countryside. … [People are] looking for new ways of life amid old traditions.”

NATHAN GARDELS - By www.noemamag.com