He appeared in conversation with Dr. George Koo, contributor to the online Asia Times, a member of the Committee of 100, and a past Bridge-Over-The-Pacific interviewee.
George Lewinski, former foreign editor of Marketplace and a lecturer at U.C. Berkeley, served as moderator.
Following are some of the highlights:
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| Dr Koo, Professor French and George Lewinski |
George Lewinski: Professor French, in the acknowledgements for the book, you write
that the idea came when you were a correspondent in Tokyo in the 1990s, and you
were struck by the similarities between the three countries in northeast Asia:
Japan, China and Korea. And yet you were kind of puzzled by how they seemed
trapped in the kind of loop of recrimination and distrust compared to let’s say
the three major powers in Europe: France, Germany and the U.K who seem to have
sort of gotten over the centuries of war that they had. Can you explain that?
Howard French: If you look at the principal countries of
northwestern Europe and the principal countries of northeast Asia what you find
is a common basis in a lot of really important things: writing, religion,
philosophy, legal ideas, etc. that go back a really long ways.
And yet you find something striking happens…. after what is probably the world’s worst war, the Europeans found a way to overcome their past divisiveness and killing, and form a golden union. And the northeast Asians were not able to do that.
And yet you find something striking happens…. after what is probably the world’s worst war, the Europeans found a way to overcome their past divisiveness and killing, and form a golden union. And the northeast Asians were not able to do that.
Once I got to know China…I came to understand that China is
this gigantic country that is completely out of proportion with surrounding
societies. China has the longest record
of continuous government and civilization.
These other societies have borrowed much more heavily from China than
China borrowed from them. And so this is not a mirror of western Europe at all.
It’s quite a different path.
(To Be Continued: No Such Thing as Chinese.)
It is difficult for Asian countries to be like Western countries because they have totally different traditions, culture and religion. They have very few similarities in different aspects of life.
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