Wu Guangqiang

    jw368@163.com

    BRILLIANT wisdom always sparkles in the exchange and clash of Western and Oriental ideas.

    I found new inspiration from the dialogue between Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, at a panel discussion held as part of the China Development Forum at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing on March 19.

    The two great entrepreneurs covered a wide range of topics from artificial intelligence to expectations of young dreamers.

    What intrigued me most was Ma’s comment on wisdom and knowledge. He said, “Chinese culture lays emphasis on wisdom while Western culture on knowledge.” “Only by combining both, can one be a better winner,” he concluded.

    Ma’s remark hit the nail on the head. It explains why Westerners have sharply contradicting ideas with Chinese on a host of affairs regarding China and the world.

    As the words suggest, knowledge is about knowing or understanding something such as facts, data, formulas, equations or rules, while wisdom is about being wise, being able to use knowledge or experience intelligently to predict a trend, prevent a catastrophe, or identify the essence of things through complicated presentation or appearance.

    Historically, Chinese society did well in cultivating wisdom and fostering wise sages. We can name numerous ancient philosophers such as Confucius, Mencius and Lao Zi, whose inspirational teachings and moral edification have been influencing Chinese for thousands of years.

    Unfortunately, on the other hand, China has lagged far behind the West in producing masters of knowledge, particularly ones of science and technology, until recent decades. Though we do have quite a few excellent inventors and discoverers, they have been by far outnumbered by Western ones.

    Despite its retarded development in civilization compared to the ancient Chinese civilization, the West strode by leaps and bounds in the development of science and technology after major ideological and cultural movements such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

    The advent of the modern education systems and schools fundamentally changed Western societies and brought them into the modern era.

    Knowledge is gained through learning facts. Someone who knows a lot about a certain subject like science or history can be considered knowledgeable. Information found online or in books can help someone expand his knowledge on a topic.

    Wisdom comes from observing experiences and learning from them in a way that affects future decisions and behavior; it is the capacity to see the truth of a matter, in spite of illusions or distractions.

    Wisdom acknowledges correct knowledge and applies it to practice, identifies erroneous knowledge, and sublates it or revises it before adopting the useful part of it.

    It is an irony of knowledge to treat a certain sort of knowledge, though partly, or temporarily correct, as perpetual and universal truth.

    One of the examples of dogmatism among social elite around the world is the worship and blind imitation of Western political and economic systems regardless of local conditions.

    For decades, most economic and social experts in China as well as the rest of the world have acquired their knowledge through Western textbooks or were taught by Western teachers, so their knowledge has been limited in perspective.

    If it were not for Chinese wisdom that has localized Western knowledge before turning it into Chinese knowledge, China would have ended up as another Soviet Union or any other nation that suffered from swallowing Western ideas without digesting them.

    It has been the mainstream idea in China that traditional Chinese values should outweigh Western knowledge while learning from overseas. Countless examples have demonstrated the correctness of this attitude.

    Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, both late Chinese leaders, were sages of reshaping China with their extraordinary wisdom.

    Jack Ma is one of numerous modern Chinese using their wisdom to create miracles. He started Taobao, a C2C platform, by imitating the giant eBay, but he repeated the tale of David killing Goliath by adopting Chinese wisdom to cater to Chinese users.

    The recent Hillary Clinton fiasco shows that even in the U.S. or other Western countries, those who stick to their outdated and dead knowledge without discerning the real situation at the grass-roots levels will inevitably be eliminated by changing times.

    (The author is an English tutor and a freelance writer.)