China: Objectives, Contradictions, and Social Currents

Abstract

The contradictions in China may be suited to the yin yang philosophy but they could lead the United States into a situation similar to that faced in Iran. Foreign investors scientists and educators are being imported and an intense shift to energy and capital-based technology is being encouraged in the struggle for modernization. The headlong rush to modernization coupled with a desire for protection from Soviet hegemony will impose a new system of values upon an entrenched society with strong traditions of collectivism and a labor-based economy. What will happen when computers replace people in a country with an extremely large population? China has no anthropologists or sociologists to consider future repercussions from adaptation to entreprenuerial industrialization and/or Western enculturation. Managers and planners are needed. Institutions originally designed according to Soviet bureaucratic structures are being reinforced rather than redesigned. Communication of precise scientific and engineering terms is difficult in Chinese. A Chinese contradiction can be found in medicine where doctors emphasize the sensational: they can reattach severed arms when what they need most is an effective public health program.