World Order

by Henry Kissinger

On October 1, 1949, in Beijing, the victorious Communist Party leader Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China with the words “The Chinese people have stood up.” Mao elaborated this slogan as a China purifying and strengthening itself through a doctrine of “continuous revolution” and proceeded to dismantle established concepts of domestic and international order. The entire institutional spectrum came under attack: Western democracy, Soviet leadership of the Communist world, and the legacy of the Chinese past. Art and monuments, holidays and traditions, vocabulary and dress, fell under various forms of interdict—blamed for bringing about the passivity that had rendered China unprepared in the face of foreign intrusions. In Mao’s concept of order—which he called the “great harmony,” echoing classical Chinese philosophy—a new China would emerge out of the destruction of traditional Confucian culture emphasizing harmony. Each wave of revolutionary exertion, he proclaimed, would serve as a precursor to the next. The process of revolution must be ever accelerated, Mao held, lest the revolutionaries become complacent and indolent. “Disequilibrium is a general, objective rule,” wrote Mao: The cycle, which is endless, evolves from disequilibrium to equilibrium and then to disequilibrium again. Each cycle, however, brings us to a higher level of development. Disequilibrium is normal and absolute whereas equilibrium is temporary and relative.

Sounds exactly like hegel