It is amusing to see Western political talking heads constantly telling us with certainty and confidence how Asians leaders want to 'save face' and move on to patronizingly supposedly make allowances for them. This is often a way for the clueless or cunning politician from the West to deflect attention and responsibility away from themselves and appear to be 'liberal' and worldly wise. This is on display today in the issue of trying to pin the blame for Covid-19 response disasters in the USA or Europe.. Even Australia is in the game. The supposedly two sides of the issue in the Western media are those that call for outright attack ('the nuke them') crowd versus the more 'peaceful reasonable approach' where supposedly the Chinese leaders are afraid to 'lose face' with their people by accepting responsibility for all the Covid-19 problems around the world and hence need to be scolded in private, delicately. Me thinks, it is more a case of the Western political leaders who have failed miserably and publicly and want to save their own a$$es and their 'face' with their electorates in future elections. It does not appear to me that the Chinese leaders need any 'face saving' with their people, who seem to have cooperated well with their government to control the spread. Quite a different situation in many Western countries!
The whole situation reminded me of an old article I wrote on this subject of the supposed obsession of Western and Eastern cultures with two different ends of the body.
https://yarnsfromalex.blogspot.com/2015/08/saving-face-or-saving-a.html
Copyright (c) Kannan Narayanamurthy 2020
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