Opinion | In the Year of the Ox, understanding what makes the Chinese world view so exceptional may be crucial

The Chinese world view is organic, systemic and indeterminate, recognising chance, contradictions and paradoxes, and different time cycles

Within the next few decades, the Chinese, Indian and Islamic world view will all inevitably challenge US exceptionalism

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Published: 8:45am, 15 Feb 2021Updated: 8:59am, 15 Feb 2021

The Lunar New Year is time for family and reflection, when Chinese families look back at the year gone by and speculate on the next cycle. The Gengzi Year of the Rat, historically associated with disaster – the Opium War (1840), Boxer Rebellion (1900), and famine (1960) – brought a calamitous pandemic and global recession.

Ironically, the disaster coexisted with outperforming stock returns, thanks to excess liquidity from the new gods of wealth, aka central banks.

In the Year of the Metal Ox, optimists pray for the next stock market winner like Kuaishou, which appreciated 161 per cent on its initial public offering this month. Pessimists worry that US-China relations will take a turn for the worse. Was 2020 the end of American exceptionalism and the rise of Chinese exceptionalism? What is so exceptional about the Chinese world view?

Cultural generalisations tread on dangerous ground, because modern China has been shaped by its tumultuous engagement with the rising West since the 17th century. In the first millennium, Buddhism came from India. In the last 300 years, China absorbed communism and science and technology from the West. Both Buddhism and communism no longer prevail in their countries of origin.

People visit the Longmen Grottoes in Luoyang, in central China’s Henan province, on April 11, 2018. The grottoes feature stone carvings from the late Northern Wei and Tang dynasties. Photo: Xinhua

Nevertheless, the earliest Western sinologists noted how China was different. French historian Jacques Gernet’s A History of Chinese Civilisation observed how “its fundamental traditions – political religious, aesthetic, juridical – are different from those of the Indian world, of Islam, of the Christian world of the West”.