SUE LAWLEY: I'd love to hear if there are any Chinese voices out there anywhere. If you'd like to put up your hand just to make a quick comment. But in the meantime, I'd like to go to the Archbishop of Canterbury no less who's sitting on the front row, Dr Rowan Williams, who went on an official visit to China a couple of years ago, didn't you?
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: That's right and the contacts I've kept up since then. But one of the things which struck me there was that we were not talking just about a moral vacuum in general, but a vacuum in what was once before the Cultural Revolution essentially something which guaranteed everyone's welfare. In the absence of that is quite a development of small local NGO's, a volunteer ethos beginning to grow, civil society beginning to spring up. But my question really is how all of that volunteer ethos with its inevitably pluralist assumptions, how that sits with a Confucian approach to society?
As Andrew Stuttaford points out the period that the druid is referring to includes the great man made famine of 1958-1960 where tens of millions of Chinese peasants were left to starve to death by the Chinese Communist Party.
If there is a moral vacuum it is the casual indifference of Rowan Williams to human suffering on a scarcely imaginable scale.
2 comments:
He's head of an organization in the UK - therefore he will act like this.
That's a fatalistic attitude isn't it?
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