OK, I admit it, I LOLed:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20178655
This article argues that the People's Republic of China is more legitimate than the West because, and I quote the money shot here:
In China's case the source of the state's legitimacy lies entirely outside the history or experience of Western societies.
Let's see here, the Chinese overthrew the last Imperial dynasty, run by ethnic Manchu as it was and thus not 'Chinese' as Chinese civilization would have defined it. Problem the first with this argument's analysis. The elephant in the room?
China's three major influences on its 20th Century history were an ideology invented by a Lutheran economics writer from Germany, a Russian Revolutionary, and a Georgian bank-robber. The Chinese system nowadays is Marxist (or at least run by a Communist Party, which is itself for obvious reasons completely unrelated to the Middle Kingdom, and the Chinese political culture of the present was created by a guy who directly transplanted Stalinism, context be damned, and whose successors still give lip-service to Leninism.
And then there's this gem:
Not surprisingly, the Chinese have a quite different attitude towards government to that universal in the West.
True, our attitude depends in part on where we stand on the political spectrum. If you are on the right, you are likely to believe in less government and more market. If you are on the left, you are likely to be more favourably disposed to the state.
But both left and right share certain basic assumptions. The role of the state should be codified in law, there should be clear limits to its powers, and there are many areas in which the state should not be involved. We believe the state is necessary - but only up to a point.
The Chinese idea of the state could hardly be more different.
They do not view it from a narrowly utilitarian standpoint, in terms of what it can deliver, let alone as the devil incarnate in the manner of the American Tea Party.
Let me introduce you to a concept known as the Mandate of Heaven:
http://www.archaeology.org/9803/abstracts/china.html
See, in Chinese culture, when a government became obviously run by idiots, it was time to replace it and have a new one take its place. Whoever won the ensuing war had the Mandate of Heaven? Why? Because he'd won and unified all of China. It's a beautifully circular system that lasted for 2,000 years and *maybe* to the Communists if we ignore the Taiwan is or isn't China issue.
If *this* is what passes for a repubtable analysis across cultures on the Beeb, I think its standards have been slipping for a while. The idea that there are degrees of legitimacy that differ among 'cultures' such as 'China' the unified bloc (when it's very often been anything but) and the unified West that is a heavily sanitized view of the West that isn't even recognizing the deep divergences in Western politics is itself troubling, but a viewpoint that requires a larger, longer discussion than I'm willing to write after sundown on a Sunday night. For the short and nitty-gritty version, the point is a terrible one that has too many failing in-built assumptions without proof in them, using a word that has no consistent or coherent definition, and creates too many new questions instead of answering old ones, so the whole article is for lack of a better word a joke, not to be taken seriously.
Your thoughts?