Word: westernness
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...Staten Island's motto, "Don't dump on me," comes from the fact that its western shore was long dominated by the Fresh Kills landfill, the repository of much of Manhattan's garbage. Culturally, the island nestling at the southern tip of New York state is a world away from New York City's other four boroughs. It has just one-tenth the population density of Manhattan, and its mostly Republican denizens have more in common politically and demographically with the Deep South than with the heavily Democratic and diverse Gotham. In fact, Staten Island tried to secede from...
...fair, many Chinese feel the U.S. is mindfully hurting China's interests too: surrounding it with military bases, pressing for currency change, meddling in its internal affairs by selling arms to Taiwan and acknowledging the Dalai Lama. Even Western-oriented Chinese now aver that the U.S. wants to slow the country's rise. And many Chinese worry about what they see as the aimlessness of a weakened U.S. The Chinese want to like Obama, but they regard even his most prized initiatives, like the new U.S. posture on the use of nuclear arms, as a sign of weakness. (No Chinese...
...problem with China isn't simply that we misunderstand each other. Mao used to say any problem could be divided into a "main problem" and "subsidiary problems." Our main problem is that China often feels only limited attachment to the power system that has evolved in the Western world. It has often been victimized by this system and has never felt the ownership over it that Western nations do. And of course China has centuries of native strategic culture that, overlaid with the neuralgia of Marxism, shapes its thinking. Calls for China to be a responsible stakeholder have failed...
...many in Beijing, the U.S. looks weak. Chinese intellectuals often pair 9/11 with what they call 9/14 - the day news broke of Lehman Brothers' 2008 collapse - as mileposts of Western decline. There is a sense of American haziness that is reinforced by the fact that our leaders have often shown only a rudimentary understanding of what we might call Real China - the harsh, smashmouth China familiar to anyone who works in its streets and corridors of power. This is the China that has grown for 30 years at an average rate of some 10% a year with no rule...
...often though, that privileged Western observers lament disappearing cultures when they are usually in ways quite oblivious and somehow complicit in the cultural tendencies. For that reason, it has lost any kind of credibility. That is a reason we were interested in it. And although this ended up being the last herd ranched in this way, we also wondered how this could be happening in the 21st century United States...