#type/ref/video #a/status/done/finished [Open](https://youtube.com/watch?v=6StPC4atEVg&si=jGvTvPkQyJ11JpZ4) Title:: Why China Doesn't Identify with the West, Explained Authors:: [[Siming Lan]] Published:: 2022-09-23 Description:: Date added:: [[2023-09-17]] ## Notes ## Thoughts ![[Pasted image 20230917152305.png]] Individualism and collectivism are two strongly opposing ideologies. But both are ideologies. Both have people that believe in them. Hollywood tends to promote the former. The main character of Red Panda was “ From the Chinese perspective, individualism is definitely NOT something you want to fight for, it’s something you need to fight against, infiltrating China through western influence, and through human's natural greed. For Chinese, collectivism is ethically the right thing. What’s right and wrong differs for different people. If Americans think individualism is right, and Chinese think collectivism is right, both believe they’re fighting a right war. Individualism and collectivism both have their strengths and weaknesses. And I would argue they’re not 100% mutually exclusive. As people, we first need to accept the differences in what we think is right or wrong. If we can see that another people’s view is different than ours, maybe we’ll be able to see that there’s not one perfect political system for everyone, and stop applying our own perspective to somebody else’s situation. Another thing is that it’s easy to not realize how much of our thinking is influenced by the history of our region. Different regions have collectively drawn different conclusions over the course of history. In the end every country is striving for a good society, but methods and emphasis differ. Confucianism was mentioned in this video, but besides that there are also Taoism and Buddhism that have greatly influenced Chinese thought throughout history. It’s easy to not realize how much of our modern western thought comes from Greek philosophers, Christianity, etc. And that is not to say that we have been lucky to have those, and that we have reached the right conclusions here. We can see our society still hasn’t solved all problems. At the same time, the Chinese region has also had their fair share of philosophers. They have solved some of the problems we haven’t yet. And they are still facing some problems that we do have solved. It’s easy to look at a strange country and say “what strange people, I don’t understand why they would act like that, there must be something wrong with them”. But in reality there’s always a reason behind the “strange behavior”. We’re all people and on average we all behave somewhat similarly if we’re exposed to the same situation or grow up in the same country.