Diversity has become a code word for replacement. The diversity of the human race is not important enough to keep all groups alive, the West may tell you. Nay, it was always about ideas, innovations and history. In short, "the immaterial" matters, so the globalists preach: the body may exhaust and the soul abandon it.

Make no mistake. If everywhere is diverse, nowhere is. What the nations need to distinguish themselves by is their otherness. Let's call this wondrous piece of philosophy "the difference".

What is the difference in Asian culture? The difference is that the Asians maintained sanity and preserved their family values.

The West can no longer solve its environmental, demographic, and economic problems without Asia.

What is the difference in Asian culture? It is the Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Korean, Japanese or some of the Indian languages. Each and every one of those tongues could be promoted onto the global stage. Together, however, they are really the innovative future. That is because the new world order will be proclaimed and heralded in a new language, a hotchpotch of languages with an untrammeled recognition for Asian words, overwhelmed by Asian terminology.

What is the difference in Asian culture? It is its no to Western hegemony. That a "no" existed, our Western elevator sages, uxorious in their love for one God, did not calculate. It is Asian culture's "yes" to tianxia (all under heaven), "yes" to er (two: poise and counterpoise), yes to liang (equilibrium), the balance between East and West!

Behold this law of difference: The West once taught "divide and conquer". Division turned out to be humanity's strength, togetherness its arms. We want a world that is both one and different. How to perform such a herculean act?

How will cultures reconcile their differences while promoting that which is in the interest of all. Do so, and you will become so. We need tables the size of a planet to negotiate a globalist future that is decisively more non-Western and nowhere near the fever of that annihilating all-nothingness, that all-pervasive Western diversity that threatens to devour all cultures and nations.

What do our Western academics say? It pains to know the pangs have not yet rattled their cages. The joy and pride of having a multitude of cultural and national properties, and intellectual properties, are still misunderstood. In a nutshell: the multitudes are necessities and vitals, trials and errors, they are tat tvam asi (thou art that) and tian ren he yi (heaven and man are one), they are the two competing forces in all nature, the yin and yang of our being.

So the East must renounce radical Western ideologies and instead adopt the more peaceful Asian ways of a holistic coexistence, exchange, and ancient oneness that draws strength from our differences.

The author is a German cultural critic and philologist. The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily.