ABSTRACT
This chapter examines that in Chinese culture there has been a consistently cyclical view of history and civilization. The Chinese mentality was also aware of conflict and struggle of conflicting principles in the process of a people's existence. The eschatology of monotheism the doctrine of movement towards a final outcome was reinforced and secularized under the influence of the economic growth of industrialism. The end of history thesis would absorb all other civilizations into the triumphant apotheosis of an Americanized West. Civilizations, however, are historical phenomena, ways of looking at the world, forms of collective consciousness, evolving each initially from within one of those distinctive processes of human development to which Shirokogoroff gave the name ethnos. Civilizations of collective consciousness are the inside story in the process of global self-organization. The purpose of the dialogue of civilizations is not to remake world order in some definitive way, nor is it to create a new structure of world governance.
