Ian Johnson: China’s ‘Fault Lines’: Yu Jie on His New Biography of Liu Xiaobo

"Over the past hundred years, China has studied a lot from the West but we haven’t studied the link between faith and liberty. Chinese have mainly learned from France and Germany: from France, the French Revolution, and from Germany, of course Marx and nationalism, which came to us via Japan. And from Russia we learned Leninism. But we haven’t learned much from this British-American tradition. Even in the early twentieth century we didn’t look very closely at the relationship between the political system and faith. Hu Shih, for example, never talked about the link between the separation of powers and religion. I think it’s only with our generation that we’re starting to think about this. One of the basic points is that the liberty to choose is God-given—not given by the state but by God. This means it’s higher than the state. It’s the foundation of Western democracy but many Chinese don’t understand this."

Mein Blog befasst sich in einem umfassenden Sinn mit dem Verhältnis von Wissen, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Ein besonderes Augenmerk richte ich dabei auf die Aktivitäten des Medien- und Dienstleistungskonzern Bertelsmann und der Bertelsmann Stiftung.