While reading the “Sources of Chinese Tradition” piece, I found a very strong comparison from that society and our modern American society. That is the idea of Xenophobia. While they are afraid of different groups of people, both of these societies seem to have a strong Xenophobia embedded in their cultures.
In the Chinese society, they discuss a lot about what is China. They want to define China as a relatively small area of land compared to all of the land that is controlled by China. They don’t believe that all of these other areas are part of China because they are “others.” They are outsiders who depend on China, but are not actually Chinese. This xenophobia shocked me at first, but then I thought about how similar it is to our society.
In modern society, there is xenophobia all over. A huge population is very afraid and hateful towards many other countries. The other factor that goes into this is that the countries that we hate are almost all non-white countries. There is a distinct racism in our xenophobia, and it is causing us to build border walls and distrust anyone who identifies as a Muslim.