Embracing Western Cultural Greatness

If we were talking about anyone else, we would naturally applaud the effort. We would applaud a country that provides its children with advanced education in math and science and engineering. And we would praise a country that encourages children to study classical music and to learn to appreciate the greatness of Western art and architecture.

But, we and especially David Goldman, are talking about China, so, as you know, speaking well of China is strictly forbidden. The result has been a rank paucity of clear thinking about China. We believe that they are violating human rights, so we refuse to accept that they have gotten anything right.

While the Chinese, and especially the Huawei corporation, extols the value of Western art, we are making a fetish of hip-hop music and are teaching children anti-racism theory. Those of us who believe in the value of the great books, of great music and of great art have long been dismayed at America’s descent into idiotocracy. How  many of us will praise a country that still values merit?

Or better, that takes seriously Isaac Newton’s notion that we see further when we stand on the shoulders of giants. In today’s America, standing on the shoulders of an intellectual or creative giant will probably get you denounced for bigotry, if not for abuse.

So, Goldman assesses the charge that China has been stealing intellectual property. He points out that many American countries have set up research facilities in China, because the human capital to do the work exists there, and does not exist here.

China stands accused of wholesale theft of intellectual property, cited in Senate, House, and Administration reports, at a cost estimated by the FBI at $225 to $600 billion a year. Nonetheless, American corporations with the most to lose from IP theft are eager to augment their research presence in China. Take for example Intel Corp’s new chip innovation center here in Shenzhen, or Big Pharma, which lives and dies on patent protection. Nokia, one of the two main Western competitors to China’s telecom giant Huawei, conducts most of its R&D in Shanghai Bell Labs, one of the 10 largest corporate research centers in the country. The Chinese government counts 531 foreign-funded R&D centers in Shanghai alone. US companies spent $8.2 billion on R&D in China in 2019.

Stranger still, is the Huawei headquarters, where the company has reconstructed and reproduced classic European art and architecture. Surely, appreciating the greatness of Western art does not threaten China. 

Rising over the landscaped woodlands, lawns, and lakes of Huawei’s sprawling headquarters is the Oxhorn Campus, a newly-built city filled with reproductions of classic European architecture, housing 25,000 research and development personnel. It bears a passing resemblance to Disney’s Epcot Center, except that the buildings are real, built to scale, and occupied by people who come to work here every day. The choices are eclectic. Heidelberg is featured prominently, with a reproduction of the Marktplatz and the famous Old Bridge, plus bronze statues of Einstein, Beethoven, the Curies, Tesla, and other scientific and cultural figures.

The founder of Huawei believes that the classics, especially in art and architecture, foster creative research in telecommunications. Go figure:

“Mr. Ren [Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei] believes that classical art and architecture foster creativity, which is what Huawei expects from its researchers,” explains a Huawei executive as we alight from the Swiss-manufactured light rail line that shuttles employees across the facility.

So, while China is outproducing the world, and certainly America in engineers, it is also training more classical musicians than all other countries combined.

Goldman, a classical musician himself, points out:

China graduates more engineers than the rest of the world combined, but it also trains more classical musicians than the rest of the world combined. That is a killer combination. Not by coincidence, classical music has been the avocation of great scientists and mathematicians for the past three hundred years.

And, Chinese universities are offering courses on the Great European philosophers. Such studies have now just about died out in American universities:

China’s top university offers four undergraduate courses on Kant, including a full semester on the Critique of Judgment; Harvard by contrast offers not one (just a survey of “post-Kantian” European philosophy). Neither did Columbia when I studied there half a century ago; as a freshman I talked my way into a graduate course on Kant taught by a visiting German).

So, we are not innovating. We are not producing a talent pool that can foster research in either the arts or the sciences. We do not have the human capital to run advanced technology-- keep in mind that most of the tech staff in Silicon Valley was educated in China.

Instead, we hate everything Chinese, because if the political left has made white people its sworn enemy, the political right has declared war on China. 

As I said, Goldman tends to get excoriated for examining some of what China is getting right. And yet, as he points out, the problem is that we are falling behind, especially in education and in culture. If you no longer understand great art or great music or great philosophy you will be handicapped-- and you will be looking overseas for your research and development. If you dismiss it all on the grounds that it is racist, you will be consigning yourself to terminal mediocrity.