I have been criticized for my harsh stance on China. While the Chinese are clearly not the same kind of existential threat the Nazis and Soviets were the threat is more insidious because it is a highly rational hundred years plan to inculturate the world.

There are many aspects of Chinese culture I appreciate. Perhaps foremost among them is the concept of Yin and Yang, the tradition of scholarship and meritocracy is also admirable but there are problems.

An easy way to understand the difference between Western and Eastern philosophy is in terms of priorities. The East prioritizes obligations and the West rights. Both lead to their own set of problems. The Western obsession with rights leads to an irresponsible population and the Eastern obsession with obligations leads to the crushing of individual rights and by extension individuality. What is hard to see from the Western perspective, where a lack of responsibility or obligation leads to chaos, is how a focus on obligations has the same effect.

In a civilization where obligations are placed before rights the purpose of obligations gets lost. We do not have rights so that we can have obligations but obligations so we can have "God" given rights. Obligations are meaningless at the individual level if there purpose is not to create a secure place for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Periodically the Chinese culture has experienced a crisis in which the population no longer sees the point in the burden of obligations. When the Emperor no longer has the mandate from heaven.

For the Western mind it may seem almost superstitious the way the Chinese interact with authority but it is a very superstitious culture despite having no religious tradition equivalent to what had bound Western cultures together. You could say the Chinese God is authority not vested in a person such as a God king like is so common in the West but in an abstract representation of society itself. The Emperor or the Chairman may appear as a God king but they do not have divine rights but divine obligations. It leads to a particular type of instability because without rights how are obligations to be assessed. A king may fail but generally he is held partially responsible and retains his divine rights but when an Emperor fails, even through no fault of his own, he loses the right to rule.