All from class discussion
Monday, January 11, 2010
Japan and Westerniztion
In class, we talked about how Japan westernized but China didn't. This was because Japan saw how the western ways were and how they worked pretty efficiently. Japan decided to westernize but in class we said "Japanese spirit, western things." They thought that they needed to keep their religion and faith but they decided to make some changes in their culture. China didn't change because they were very traditional and they thought that they had it all and the perfect life in a sense already. That is why they stopped Zheng He from exploring more of the world because they felt that there was nothing else they needed. The Chinese government was also split at the time and it was sort of chaotic because some wanted to adapt to part of the western policies but others strictly refused. Going back to Japan, the samurai also had to adapt which was hard but they made the switch. They lost their swords and had to deal with the new modernized state. The Meiji Restoration was also very important because they rose with reinstalling their emperor. Japan went up because of these changes while China went down because of no change.
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I totally agree. More recently China has been forced to start its Westernization. Until recently China has not had a very big impact on the world economy. In 1978 China finally started to increase its standard of living. According to Martin Ravallion, a researcher for the World Bank, between 1981 and 2001, the proportion of population living in poverty in China fell from 53 percent to just eight percent. They finally started to catch up in terms of Westernization. They don't want to be lost in a world of modernity. I think that hosting the Olympics in 2008 helped the rest of the world notice the progress they had made.
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