Cultural Advantages in China: Tale of Six Cities

Nowadays, plenty of factories from Europe and other developed countries have been relocated to this country, considering its tremendous economic scale and rapid growth rate during the past three decades. But most of what happens inside the China nowadays is deeply hidden from the outside world (“the foreigners” as China people would call). This fact is partly because most reports on China were written by the so‐called fly‐high experts who are busy completing their reports despite a busy schedule. Very few books or reports were written by people inside, or at least “foreigners” who spent a few years in China. Therefore in this book, we took a different approach, by inviting local scientists and other writers to describe what happens surround them. It is the purpose of this book to bring these cultural advantages into more focus, in order to bring into light some ‘human’ aspects of the country, and how these can be integrated into the broader context of economics development. At the end of the day, their achievements cannot be measured by economic progress alone, but also how the people can have the proper sense of meaning (i.e. ‘feel’ at home) in their own homeland, instead of being just another ‘bolt’ in the obsolete industrial engine of economics. As shown in history that China/Eastern cultures can shed some light into modern science (cf. Fritjof Capra etc.), it is of our belief that both cultures can learn from each other, rather than suppressing the Eastern cultures under the spell of modernization. As with other books on development economics, it is beyond the objective of this book to give the final word. We would rather see the purpose of this book is to invite further dialogue over a long‐time issue on how the modernization can be given a more humanized interpretation. This perhaps will include rethinking on the meaning of modernization and development themselves, beyond classical debates between inward‐outward looking development programs