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2 A century with Chinese
characteristics By David Gosset
The Quattrocento refers to the 15th
century Italian Renaissance; ershi yi shiji
- 21st century in Mandarin - can be used as a
reference to the current Chinese renaissance and
the way it is changing our world.
Arguably
the most significant process of our time, China's
renaissance is composed of three interrelated
elements: economic reemergence, socio-political
transformation and
intellectual reinterpretation
of the Chinese tradition.
After last
month's 17th National Congress of the Chinese
Communist Party, and before the 2008 Beijing
Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, not one
single day goes by without news, debates and
comments on China; confronting such a profusion,
one risks taking short-term variations or trivial
fluctuations for long-term tendencies and losing
any sense of pattern.
One question can
help us focus on what really matters: Are
Westerners ready to adjust to the effects of the
Chinese renaissance? In other words, is the West
prepared for a century with Chinese
characteristics, is it ready for the ershi yi
shiji?
Understanding the China
factor Fourteen years after the collapse of
the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), the writer Lu Xun
was asking in his essays: "When are we going to
stop bringing new bricks to the Great Wall?" A
defensive construction built and consolidated
through the centuries to protect the empire from
the invasions of the nomads, the Great Wall could
also be seen as the symbol of an immured Chinese
mind. In 1949, China fully recovered its
sovereignty; in 1978, Beijing adopted the
opening-up policy - today, the Great Wall is a
tourist attraction.
In a process of
unprecedented magnitude, one-fifth of mankind,
different from the mainstream (the West), is
entering the world stage. While Western scientific
and economic modernity will continue to have
influence on China - Beijing's overall strategic
goal is modernization - the Chinese world will
have considerable quantitative and qualitative
impact on the global village.
Americanization was a distinctive feature
of the 20th century; the 21st-century global
citizen's identity will have Chinese
characteristics. The West, on the rise since the
15th century and which, through its American
version, still dominates world affairs, will have
difficulty conceiving and accepting that it will
not anymore unilaterally dictate the global
agenda; that it will have to adjust.
To
look at China without passion requires constant
intellectual vigilance. One has to avoid the
idealizations of the Sinophile or the
demonizations of the Sinophobe.
True, the
People's Republic of China is a developing country
that is, as such, facing considerable challenges.
If one focuses exclusively on what has yet to be
done to catch up with the developed world or on
the various visible signs of Westernization within
China, the idea of serious Chinese influence on
the global village can appear illusory.
However, if one considers the scope of
post-imperial China's metamorphosis (the collapse
of the Roman Empire in the 5th century was
followed by at least 300 years of disorder in
western Europe), the speed of its transformation
since 1978, while keeping in mind the Chinese
empire's past cultural, economic and political
centrality in Asia, the question of the
Sinicization of the world makes sense.
The
presupposition of the "China threat" leitmotiv is
precisely China's capacity to influence on a
massive scale our world system, but it also
assumes that this impact will be negative. Between
two extremes, "China fever" and "China threat",
the analyst should stay rationally within the
limits of what can be called the "China factor":
China's opening-up means, to a certain extent,
Sinicization of the world, a process that has to
be integrated and explained and not adored or
condemned a priori.
Modernization does
not mean cultural alienation But how could
the global citizen be in any way Sinicized if
tomorrow's China is radically Westernized?
Looking at the young people in Dalian,
Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen or Chongqing, it seems
that Westernization is China's future. It gives
Chinese students "face" to speak some English -
more "face" if it is American English. On campus
they practice sports popular in the west, and
after graduation they would opt preferably for a
career in a joint venture where the corporate
culture is supposed to be Western - and the pay
higher!
But it is necessary to put these
trends into historical perspective. In China,
snapshots can be misleading. One has to integrate
different "clocks" and be attentive, behind
shorter developments or even ephemeral fashions,
to very slow movements, what Fernand Braudel
called the longue durée.
Past
interactions between China and what was foreign to
it show the unique resilience of Chinese
civilization. It has the ability to change without
losing itself; it could even be defined by this
singular capacity of renewal.
The Yuan
Dynasty (1277-1367) and the Qing Dynasty
(1644-1911) were established respectively by
Mongols and Manchus. However, the only way for the
"barbarians" - non-Han - to rule the empire was to
adopt elements of the Chinese tradition. Immutable
China is a myth - the long history of China is a
succession of clearly distinct periods - but
absolute discontinuity from one time to another is
also a narrative.
Buddhism and
Christianity have also been testing Chinese
civilization's capacity to absorb exogenous
elements. Entering under the Han Dynasty (Eastern
Han, AD 25-220), Buddhism penetrated deeply into
the Chinese world under the Tang Dynasty
(618-907); but this penetration has seen the
transformation of original Buddhism to fit Chinese
philosophical and linguistic context.
In
the age of European expansion, Christian
missionaries spared no effort to convert Chinese
people. The Jesuits' approach initiated by Matteo
Ricci (1552-1610) was to engage as much as
possible with China's elites; no one has ever
understood the Chinese world better than the
Sinologists of the Company of Jesus, but genuine
European intellectual excellence failed to change
radically the Chinese mind. How can one seriously
believe that current superficial material
Westernization in China - related to food or
clothes, the introduction of managerial skills,
the instrumental use of English, etc - is going to
affect essentially Chinese culture?
China's technical and economic
modernization does not mean cultural alienation.
China is once again translating into its own
context foreign practices and theories.
Democratization might be unavoidable for the
Chinese world - in fact, the process has already
begun - but it will be a democratization with high
Chinese characteristics, a very fortunate process
indeed. One should remember the words of Alexis de
Tocqueville (1805-1859) in Democracy in
America: "I am well aware of the influence
which the nature of a country and its political
precedents exercise upon a constitution; and I
should regard it as a great misfortune for
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