chinese alues(中英文对照).docVIP

Introduction ?Each generation is a new society coming to life?. This quotation comes from a political scientist of the 19th century analyzing the American society, Tocqueville. Nowadays it perfectly applies to China: the new generation is a new society coming to life. A quarter of a century ago China painfully came out of a period of social upheavals with dramatic consequences. The Cultural Revolution and its spearhead, the red guards, had not only sealed the fate of a part of the population and ruined the economy but also destroyed the moral values of the society. By eradicating traditions, customs, and social codes, they set up violence in all its expressions as the ordinary means of action. At the end of this second revolution China found itself bewildered, having lost its references. Demographic pressure makes the social-economic situation even more unbearable. Here comes the major shift taken by Deng Xiaoping with the opening policy as part of the four modernizations that led to the present situation. The renewal of the values of the Chinese and especially of the urban society is not only real but also huge. If we consider the 5000 years of Chinese history, these last 25 years have proportionally elicited changes that no Western observer had really been able to foresee. We are speaking about changes, about an incredible evolution but not about a swing or an inversion of values. Some experts speak about mutation, shift or metamorphosis. These metaphors are not appropriate to characterize what is happening now in China because they assume a change in the nature of the society, which is not the case here. What we can observe is based on continuity. It is a fast evolution, not a disjunction, not a reversal. China absorbs modernity, integrates the world economy at great speed but China sinisizes modernity. The Middle Kingdom does not adapt to modernity but uses it as it has always done in the past, as a tool to serve its own purpose. Chinese civilization is a matrix