<font color='black' size='2' face='arial'><b style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: large;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">China's comeback kids</font></b><br>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">China faces a spirit issue.
It's goals since 1978 when Deng Xiaoping left ideology for a guided free
market economy, clearly accepting that some folks will get rich before others, has
been attained. In just over 30 years, advances
in science and technology fueled industrialization, along with a judicious nursing
of its military might, leaving China on top of the development heap while groping
for its soul. </font></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Development in the global race is on to increase GDP per
capita at a pace to fuel a consumption-production system at the expense of nature
and people. This purely economic
definition is doing much harm to the world's natural systems and the ever-continuing
creation of a democratic rather than a consumer culture. China's soul hit a vacuum groping for role
models.</font></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Today, the comeback candidates are Christ, Mao, and the
Buddha. </font></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The Chinese who sees comfort in the Christ has the underground
house churches that attract devotion because they defy authority, an
understandable reaction. Pastor pounded
pulpits trained to wear evangelical enthusiasm up their sleeves are zealously tied
to the emotional allure of a cultic "savior" that takes away the "sins
of the world" through communal fellowship that gathers adherents warmheartedly.</font></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The communal comfort in Christianity fits into the Confucian
ethos of family and the ethics that comes along. Its metaphors and belief-nets remain in the regal
language of a redeemer under a defunct three-story universe, a "belief"
in a heaven in the sky, and a penal colony under; it appeals to the elderly's
superstition but the secular and scientific young, at best, say,
"huh?"</font></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Mao is a tolerated Uncle whose centralized dictates belong
to, by his own measure, the 30 percent of his mistakes, but his dialectics aligns
with the 70 percent that was right. It defined
the conflict then prevailing between elite and worker, urban and rural, learned
and the <i>hoi polloi, </i>though hardly
fits in the current harmonizing and collaborative thrust of the "reform
and opening up" era<i>. </i></font></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The contradiction metaphor got the Chinese mind around the
reality of differing perspectives, and Mao would have been regarded an undisputed
statesman had he allowed his "a thousand flowers bloom" evolve into <i>vive le difference </i>rather than the
divisive and humiliating confrontational deterioration of the Cultural
Revolution.<i></i></font></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Ironically, Mao represents recognition of the virtue of
individual genius before it is straight jacketed into the commune. The assertive selfhood he exhibited is dubbed
as a personality cult by the west, gobbled up by prejudiced contra Sino, but
revered from a distance as his name is invoked, though without bothering with
the details. The halls of academia quickly
discard the mention of his name. </font></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Which brings us to the Buddha. If Jesus belongs to the Ptolemaic cosmology
of pre-Nikolaj Kopernik, and Mao brought down the elitist pretensions of the <i>illuminati</i> of academy into realistic
levels, ushered into Sino-consciousness Marx's dialectic and socialism with
Chinese characteristics, its contradiction understood from a deeply communal
view and cooperative perspective before it is the social conflict to resolve
layered social stratification, the saffron Buddha saunters with a Mona Lisa
enigmatic smile. Buddhists skew Christian
theistic escapism and Mao's dichotomy between decadent and progressive forces,
favors a psychology of a mind-full self.</font></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Buddhists meditate not to escape from any situation, or the
challenges of any given location, but to engage in the depths of the bottomless
abyss of understanding one's consciousness. This lends itself to the Sino orientation
of rootedness in space rather than the Euro-journey in time. The Buddhists, however, tend to be abstract in
their mindfulness against the practical activism that is a demand of cognition.
</font></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Pope Francis willingness to dialogue with China's officially
sanctioned Christian Church might be at the root of the recent pronouncement
that Beijing will not shy away from creating its own Christianity with its own "Chinese
characteristics", similar to its socialist economics and communal politics
of reform and opening up.</font></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Kung Fu Tzu (Confucius) is not being dismissed. His ethos will be around awhile but making a comeback
kid out of Jesus, Mao Zedong, or the Buddha is a backward step as each
tradition inadequately encompasses China's broiling spiritual hunger.</font></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Since 1968, we minded exploited and battered mother earth, cognizant
of her gracious support of the human specie.
We segued into a secular spirituality without the hocus-pocus of theism
though not a surrendered devotion to "all there is". It was rather a decision to be free, to make
choices, and own up to one's decisions. We
took to the ancient art of mindfulness and plumbed the depths of engagement in
human affairs, like the recent Peoples Climate Change March, allowing mother
earth's wellbeing a fighting chance.</font></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">In the care of Mother Earth will China finds its soul.</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"></font></div>
<br>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px; clear: both;"><i>j'aime la vie</i><br>
<a href="mailto:pinoypanda2031@aol.com">pinoypanda2031@aol.com</a><br>
<div><i>yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!</i></div>
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