I agree that the chief blame (with respect to slave labor in China) may be laid at the door of the Americans. That is usually the case with the worst crimes committed here, there, and everywhere. (Although, the post about other nation's similar complicity is well taken.)
However, how can you say that governments always want high wages? Am I misunderstanding you? Our government, for example, does not want high wages. It's fiscal policy is designed to keep wages low (when circumstances permit - clearly at this moment, it is ever so slightly, and only slightly, moderated by countervailing demands of capital for liquidity).
I can believe that Chinese leaders do have a greater interest in inflating the working wage than do the Americans and Europeans (and even Japanese), but I don't believe that is their dominating interest. The primary goal of every ruling elite is to perpetuate its rule, and to enjoy the pleasures and comforts that come with it. A living wage for the working masses must be somewhere on a list of "other" concerns. (Naturally, every government wants a high wage, if some other government will pay for it. The Americans are always telling the Japanese to stimulate demand: what a joke!)
By the way, I've only read the first of Needham's many volumes - or is it the second? I've read the volume surveying general history and culture. Of course, I enjoyed it immensely. A real piece of creative scholarship is about as rare as a good symphony, and Needham's work impressed me beyond words. Perhaps this is only because I was so desperately ignorant about China and the East in general (still!). Even elementary enlightenment seems a monumental achievement.
ONE of the first areas in which I came into conflict intellectually with my Marxist father was his glaring, and seemingly willful ignorance about the East. In my father's Depression generation (correct me please if I'm wrong), the cultural superiority of the West was considered an essential aspect of Marxist politics and thought. At any rate, any importation of Eastern philosophy into my own thinking was considered, by my father, to be a rejection of the particular kind of materialist science he found in Marxism (it began with the Greeks, you know: from Aristotle to Marx, that was the gist of it).
I thought this was merely ironic. I had long wondered, for example, about Leibniz's receipt of the I Ching from his Jesuits contacts in China. I don't know of any reference to the I Ching in Hegel, but ask: could Hegel have written his Dialectic without the benefit of the I Ching? My father would consider this a preposterous question. But the indisputable historical fact stands out, it seems to me, as an odd philosophical coincidence. Why does the dialectic become so important just one generation after the appearance of the I Ching in the West? (Later, from Needham, I learned in much more explicit ways and in a fuller context just how ironic such notions about science as a Western invention really are.)
It is an idle question, I know, but have you ever considered how Marxism might have been different if Marx had been Chinese? To what extent does the emphasis on class "warfare", the emphatic obsession with evolutionary (and revolutionary) "progress", the intensely felt distinction between proletarian "good" and bourgeois "evil" - to what extend do these originate in the biblical culture of the West. (Is it impolite to touch on the matter of sacred texts?) We have ALWAYS been fighting some kind of bloody proxy battle between God and the Devil, and always citing some book or other as our scriptural totem and shield. In general, it seems to me that a basically biblical conception of life underlies all of Western culture, even when divorced from religion and God.
Naturally, there is class "warfare" all over the globe, and all through history. Good struggles with Evil in China as it does here. It is only a question only of what role the struggle plays in one's life and consciousness. And, the role it plays is conditioned by the culture. In this way, we attach expectations to the struggle that may be erroneous, or not: it must be examined.
>From a Judeo/Christian, "biblical", point of view, one can easily imagine a
world without class "warfare": indeed, the classless society of a fully
realized communism. This is surely a very good thing, but it seems always,
for us, such a small step from imagining Utopia to enlisting in some war to
obtain it. (Yet we know too well, to mix the metaphor, "'tis many a slip
'twixt cup and lip".) According to the Western view, to do otherwise would
be morally deficient. One is either on the side of the Devil or of the
Christ. There is no in-between.
The point I want to make is that we have taken this idea of battle to such a pitch that it is drowning out everything else. The fate of the world as we conceive it seems actually to be cast in the image of a biblical myth. Is it any surprise that millennial fears of the end of the world are so entrancing to us? After all, doesn't it really seem at this moment in time that evil is primed to WIN the battle? Don't we all love that clock of the Concerned Atomic Scientists, rising toward midnight? Good stands now near to being vanquished in a cathartic decimation of the web of life. Capitalism pollutes the air and water until the human race commits mass suicide in a military paroxysm of nukes (taking with us the birds and the bees). It could happen.
I'm not putting the battle down. Why shouldn't people get sucked into this vast drama of good and evil? Should we call an end to it now of all times? The best part of the novel or movie is the moment when it looks most hopeless for the heroine/hero. But, do you think Lao-tzu and his cultural children could possibly take the drama as seriously as we do here in the West? (Is the real influence of Marxism in China evidence that they do?) Do you think we might have done things differently, in the West, if we had paired Heaven, as the I Ching does, with something other than Hell?
As my father always said, "If we don't have socialism, we will have barbarism." I would always reply, "We already do." That was years ago.
Quincy