📌 TFF Anthology "If You Want To Understand China"
Foreword, Intro, Content and 8 Chapters of a TFF anthology for mutual understanding, dialogue and peace.
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📌 "If You Want To Understand China:
Foreword, Intro and Content of a TFF anthology.
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It’s not necessary to be anti-China or pro-China. But not to be CURIOUS-China and learn something about it is downright foolish.
The 8th and last chapter in this anthology is now published and all yours - like everything else we do, free forever. Please do something for peace today: SHARE this tool for dialogue and understanding between the West and China!
Thanks!
Jan Oberg, TFF director
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Foreword
August 25, 2024 – July 7, 2025
The Board of The Transnational Foundation in Sweden has decided to publish an easy-to-read, scholarly anthology that addresses one of the most important – and potentially dangerous – issues of our time: Why are the political, economic, and medialised Western images of China so consistently negative – and what can you do to understand China better?
These images may be expressions of a political will to present only various shades of grey and black with the aim of building a consciousness about China as an enemy and not a partner. They may also be seen as a sort of world-dominating ethos of ignorance based upon the assumption that “we’ve-got-nothing-to-learn-from-others,’ we are the teacher.
Another possibility is that the West, deep down, feels that it is becoming relatively weaker from a macro-historical perspective and comforts itself with denial and accusations against “the other” as the reason for its manifest problems. (Topdogs of various kinds invariably encounter perception problems when feeling challenged).
Whatever the explanation, we face a profoundly complex shift in the world order. The West reacts with its constructed self-portrait as a world leader on a civilising mission and the most civilised, superior values that deserve to be universalised through Bibles of politics, economy, culture, etc. or, if ‘necessary’, The Swords of militarist intervention, regime change, warfare, etc.
This isn’t as simple as it may sound.
What is absolutely unavoidably involved here is psychology in a broad sense, eschatological assumptions (thanks to nuclear weapons), economy, innovation, education, ways of thinking, media, politics and theology – and how they interact over time with each other and at what depth in our ‘social cosmology’ they do.
We believe that it is imperative for Western governments as well as civil societies, grosso modo, to begin to try to learn what China is about and how to go about producing a more relevant, deep, and broad understanding of China, not only as a country but also as a 5000-year civilisation. As a matter of fact, the Chinese know much more about the West than the other way around.
In the process, the West – the Occident – must apply more humility, curiosity, and respect than what we have seen in the last 10-20 years - or hundreds of years.
Why? – you may ask. Simply because there is so much more to win from mutual understanding and cooperation in respect for diversity than from confrontation, threatening, ‘red lines,’ provocations, sanctions as well as Cold and Warm Wars. Given humanity’s situation and the need for solving the ‘real’ problems of our global future, it's better to begin today than tomorrow.
We call the anthology “If You Want To Understand China.” We know that some may not want to, but that will be self-defeating and self-marginalising. The world system – and the times – are changing faster than ever. And for those who do want to, we provide a series of analyses that – so we sincerely hope – can help the reader move in the constructive direction of dialogue.
And that path will also be the path that leads to peace. As the Danish philosopher Piet Hein allegedly formulated it: It’s either coexistence or nonexistence.
Finally, for various reasons, TFF doesn’t publish printed books. Books tend to limit global readership, and their costs exclude less affluent but discerning readers. They also land profits in the wrong pockets on the market, i.e., publishing houses instead of writers, and last only for a short time after publication.
Online publishing circumvents all this and also allows for publishing a larger study chapter by chapter. We have, therefore, published the various chapters (see below) during 2024 and into 2025, and now the entire volume is there.
Now access “If You Want To Understand China” – a TFF anthology for peace through dialogue and mutual understanding.
We really want to hear from our readers. Please use the Comments field at the end of this chapter.
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The Authors
Gordon Dumoulin
Peter Peverelli
Thore Vestby
Wang Yuewei
Johan Galtung
Jan Oberg
TFF • The Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research in Lund, Sweden • TFF@transnational.org • The Transnational • Ph +46 (0)738 525200 • August 2024 •
© TFF & the authors 2024 to present
Cover photo: Jan Oberg
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Table of Contents
Introduction
How to understand China and why it is important – See below
Gordon Dumoulin
Echoes Of Volatile And Delusive Memory: Challenging Historical Interpretations
Peter Peverelli
Enemy or mirror image?
Jan Oberg
Complementarity is Possible: Chinese and Western ways of thinking. But does the West want it?
Thore Vestby
What Is It About China?
Peter Peverelli
How the Western media try to manipulate our impression about China
Wang Yuewei
How to treat others ? On the traditional Chinese political wisdom
Johan Galtung
A Theory of China
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