China, Cracked

FT.com / Arts & weekend / Books - China, cracked:

"Finally, argues Hutton, only if China and the US appreciate the enlightenment values of reason, pluralism, freedom and equality can these dangers be managed both domestically and through international co-operation. In the 20th century China succumbed to the west’s bastard intellectual child, Marxism. It is impossible, however, to create a modern society that does not recognise the enlightenment’s greatest truths: the case for a variety of competing institutions, for freedom of thought and expression, and for a legal system that curbs the executive. Somehow, China must graft these shoots on to its native Confucian stock.

The US, too, must nurture its enlightenment roots. The assault on science, the shrivelling of the public sphere, the brutal partisanship, the contemporary assault on the rule of law and the return to aggressive 19th century ideas of statecraft have diminished both the effectiveness and the wisdom of US policymaking, culminating in the catastrophe of the Bush administration. The US is the enlightenment’s greatest progeny. It made the world we live in. It must not turn its back on what it has so created."