| Volume 8, Number 4, October 2011 |
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社论‧ Editorial |
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A Financial “Golden Rule”
WITH this issue, Chinese Cross Currents [CCC] closes the eighth year of its publication. There is nothing to celebrate in particular, yet it is the right time to express sincere gratitude to all, authors, book reviewers, friendly colleague periodicals—for permissions received to reprint and translate, the translators whose work has permitted this quarterly to reach a larger public, both in China and abroad, and of course the local team of contributing editors, proof readers, production editors and staff members: without such a large group of collaborators, the generosity of benefactors of the Macau Ricci Institute who particularly support its periodical would not have been duly rewarded in this common effort. The editorial team is glad to offer to all its heartfelt gratitude.
This Fall, major world events present themselves largely disconnected, at least if accepted at face value and according to their newsworthiness. What the media sums up in two words, the “Arabic Spring”, which shook the world with its fiery violence in Tunisia and Egypt, is still smouldering after a long Summer of in-fighting in Libya and brutal repression in Syria, not to speak of other tense places. The games will probably not be over yet soon, for the dynamics of engaged popular forces stem from deeper sources, sources that historians will later analyse.
Meanwhile, on another front of different turbulences, the world financial crisis lingers on, with its social impact on the job market: what triggered it in the “credit crisis” of the “subprimes” and their banking domino effect, has now reached the credit habit of a good number of states, from the strongest one in America to some smaller ones in Europe. The crisis is the same; it just changed its name, not its nature, to a “debt crisis”. Would it be appropriate to call it also, from top to bottom, a “cultural crisis” through which the “golden rule” of not spending more than one has at hand, state or citizen, has to be revived? Moralists should tell…
Here in China, leaders worry that the “golden rule” would naturally translate itself to not acquire more than one can use, due to the risk of depreciation. Any way one reads it, in state or domestic budgetary policies, the “Golden Rule” that needs to be inserted in many modern constitutions becomes an ethical call to arms in the present turbulences.
These have, for various reasons, slightly obscured in 2011 the centenary of the Xinhai, or the 1911 Chinese Revolution that started with the Wuhan uprising on the 10th October 1911. Already mentioned in the previous issue of CCC , the 1911 Revolution was certainly in China an epoch making event that waited to resonate progressively into the entire world all during the last century. Some articles in this issue situate the event, not only in relation with Dr. Sun Yat-sen or with other revolutionary movements of the time, but also with the present day rise of China, the roots of which could be traced back to the China trade that anticipated the crisis’s that were to follow.
Other contributions will happily raise the mind of the reader in this publication with their discussion of the living tradition of Chinese music and the interest shown by various young musicians, individually or in groups, to cultivate this ancient art that deserves larger audiences in China and abroad. Similarly, very rarely can one be lead to discover that modern science opens up in the understanding of the universe the door to the spiritual value of scientific knowledge.
Yves Camus 赵仪文
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| Issue 8.4 |
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The Double-Ten
Uprising
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