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Opinion | Chinese exceptionalism, law vs etiquette and ‘chopsticks people’
- Former Singaporean foreign minister George Yeo shares his thoughts on Beijing’s simultaneous disdain and awe for the rule of law, the Chinese language and control, and a moral system built without religion
- The following is an edited excerpt from a speech given by Yeo to a school in Singapore
Reading Time:8 minutes
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Rudyard Kipling said in his famous ballad: “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”
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Whether we like it or not, the twain are meeting again, and creating and opening a new chapter in history. When we read about the trade war and Huawei, and we read about the anti-China – and increasingly anti-Chinese – sentiment in the United States, one recalls Kipling’s famous line. But for him the East was not China. For him East was South Asia, where he spent many years of his life.
For my address this morning, I would like to confine the East to the realm of the “chopsticks people”. There is a reason for this. There is a coherence to the culture of the chopsticks people.
It is not possible to understand the history of Vietnam, Korea or Japan without reference to the great drama on the Chinese mainland. Japan was the first to peel off from the Asian mainland to address the challenge of Western imperialism. By the time of the second opium war, any Japanese ship landing on the Asian mainland would be inspected by the Europeans, probably a Briton, and Japan knew it was only a matter of time before she would suffer the same humiliation.
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This led to the Meiji Restoration and a top-to-bottom overhaul of Japanese society to the point where she became an imperial power ravaging the Chinese mainland. But when we read about the quarrels between Japan and Korea, the roots are in the encounters of East and West.
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