Page 2 of 4 CHINA'S MASSIVE WRENCH, Part 2 A new world under one Heaven
By Francesco Sisci
It entailed the concept of peace, with all things in their appointed places.
Disorder (luan) was chaos, disaster and death. Merchants and other
businessmen began, over time, to cause luan. The price of their goods
would change with time and place. Businessmen could become richer than the
local mandarin and jeopardize the order of a society in which the official was
supposed to be the richest and most powerful. But businessmen were a small
necessary evil - containable, but impossible to eradicate - like secret
societies or small-scale peasant uprisings.
But business is different in modern society and in modern China. If business
itself becomes an integral part of peace, encouraged as the driving force of
development, and military might leads to
greater stability for China in the international arena, then how can order and
peace be said to exist at all? What kind of order and peace can be expected in
a place of constant and growing business? How can we square this situation with
the Chinese historical preference of zhi over luan?
In a world in which wars are minimized and pushed to the periphery, war becomes
a form of large-scale policing. This new perception radically changes the idea
of war. In conflicts such as World War I, the lines between peace and war were
clearly demarcated. If war becomes a matter of policing rogues and criminals,
then one is always at war, because there will always be criminals. For these
matters, a different international framework is needed. The traditional United
Nations will simply not work, as it is not working now. Yet, it is not clear
what new structure should be established.
Similarly, if luan is an integral part of a new order that includes
international business, we need a new political structure to manage this
society, a structure that is different from the imperial past. Here things are
somewhat easier: experience in the West has proven that democracy has been
effective in preserving a large degree of order and stability while still
encouraging economic growth. In China, there are many students of Karl Marx,
who fervently believe that economics and politics go hand-in-hand.
Simply stated, if China wants to manage the turbo-capitalism it has ignited, it
will need a major political change. What the future will be is certainly not
clear, but some form of democratization might be unavoidable.
Culture reorganized
All of these changes clearly mean that China's whole cultural universe is being
shaken up and reorganized. This started at the end of the 19th century with the
massive arrival and translation of Western knowledge from the original
languages or from Japanese translations [3].
At that point, the traditional organization and categorization of knowledge -
dating to Sima Qian (ca 145-90 BC) and his first historic account in the Shiji
("historic records") of philosophers and literature before the Han empire -
fell apart. That is, 2,000 years of tradition had to be reshuffled and
re-systematized.
The study, for instance, of what were previously considered the "classics" (jing),
"masters" (zi), and "historical records" (shi) had to be
relabeled under the new code words coming from the Japanese: "philosophy" (zhexue),
"historiography" (shixue and "literature" (wenxue). What's more,
as Ge Zhaoguang put it:
It was as if what the past, which could not
just simply be called the study of classics, masters, or historical records,
could not longer hold the old grand unity. The study of the words and language
of the classics became an independent subject, and it was granted the honorific
title of "science" [another new, imported word] and other contents of the
written legacy started going into historiography, philosophy, or literature, as
if the wholly body of the classics was ripped apart in the execution by five
horses tearing the limbs of a cadaver. The study of the masters followed the
same destiny ripped apart into philosophy, ethics, logic, and even physics or
chemistry. [4]
It is hard to fathom the depth of the change and
the seismic waves that rippled through society and individual psychology. The
colorful and passionate language used by Ge (born in Shanghai 1950, over one
century after the first Opium War) reveals that this change still touches the
very soul of the Chinese people, even now when libraries, mass media and
education from primary schools have been following the new Western
classification for about a century.
When reading the classics, the scholar still feels the holistic soul of the
ancient Chinese world seeping through the pages. This vision, for instance, of
the Yijing (The Classic of the Changes, also found transliterated
as yi king or written as "I Ching") is almost impossible to ignore,
whether or not one believes in the prophetic powers of the book.
Its language and way of thinking have pervaded centuries of cultural tradition
and still pop up in proverbs. Its way of approaching problems, handling
situations and considering issues resonates with truth in the soul of the
Chinese reader. This truth is impossible to dismiss, as it would be for us to
dismiss the Greek and Roman tradition. Even Christianity had to digest Greek
and Roman culture to conquer the souls of that world, and Islam did so with
Greek culture when it stretched into the then Hellenistic lands of Asia Minor
or North Africa.
Then, we have a series of massive cultural problems. The Chinese have
reclassified their cultural world according to Western criteria and are still
digesting the problems and trying to find way to reconcile the old with the new
- a process that will take centuries. Buddhism took half a millennium to be
completely assimilated, and back then the pre-existing Chinese culture was not
as complex as the culture now embracing the Western world. [5]
Now, it is clear to all Chinese that Western culture is the root of wealth,
success, development and political survival - it is the essence of modernity.
When China embraced Western culture, as it has been doing since Deng Xiaoping's
times (de facto leader from 1978 to the early 1990s), it began growing; when it
had closed down, as it had under Mao in the decades after 1949, China sank into
defeat, utter poverty and political collapse.
So, there is only one road to modernity and success - Westernification. And the
shorthand for Westernification is America. For this reason, over 200 million
Chinese people are studying English (the results are often poor, but that is a
different issue), and English is now being taught in primary schools.
Meanwhile, their souls are torn between East and West, between old and new, and
uncertain to which they should pledge allegiance. They are hoping that there is
a way to have them both.
In the end the result will be that, as Chinese residents in the many Chinatowns
of the world are showing, they will have both, one way or another. This is
apparent also in the cultural language, which still uses old sayings like "ming
zheng yan shun" ("when names are right speech is consequential"), drawn
from the Analects of Confucius but also from "Pandora Box", a Greek
myth.
This will create another problem, this one for us as Westerners. Since the
Romans assimilated Greek culture in the 3rd century BC, the Western world has
never met a massive cultural challenge. Even in colonial times, other cultures
were dismissively branded as inferior and were never the object of wholesale
incorporation, as the Romans did with the Greeks.
There has been piecemeal curiosity and interest, such as being incorporated
into the conferences of geographic societies, carried out with great erudition
and the careful "scientific" dissection of foreign texts - as if they were
insects. But that was it.
However, China's economic and political growth is leading the growth of all of
Asia, and there could be a time in the not too distant future when the economic
and political might of Asia - or even just that of China - could be as great or
even greater than that of the entire West. The West will then have to try to
come to grips with the newly Westernized Chinese culture. This will shake
Western culture to its roots and its soul, perhaps as it has shaken the Chinese
culture.
We might remember that we were already Sinicized at one point in the 17th and
18th centuries, when China appeared to the West as a model for development.
Europe was coming out of the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants,
and hyper-Catholic Jesuits provided inspiration to both camps with translations
of Chinese classics and accounts of Chinese culture. Their work stirred massive
changes in the West, in fields ranging from mathematics (German Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz - 1646 to 1716 - invented the binary numbers inspired by the
diagrams of the Yijing) to politics, the civil service and the idea of
officials being promoted on grounds of merit, not birth). It's possible that
even the idea of the abolition of monarchy through a popular revolution was
inspired by Chinese ideas.
It might be helpful to remind the Chinese that the West they are conversing
with was already Sinicized, in a way - some of the modern concepts they are
adopting are remodeled versions of Chinese ideas. Conversely, the West, which
could face a massive "Sinification", should remember that it was already
Sinicized in the past, and that the present and future China is largely
Westernized.
This Westernification is not just in the heads of a handful of pundits, it is
also in everyday life, as those who have been to China have seen. The changes
hit the sentiments and the basic feelings of the people. There are several
examples.
Language changes
In the past century, China saw dramatic changes in the language, which is the
one element that more than any other "made" and unified China. It is hard to
overemphasize the importance of language in the making of Chinese civilization.
Western civilization recognizes itself through a body of "literary lore" that
has been translated from language to language, moving from Greek to Latin to
national European languages. At each passage, the lore may be slightly adapted.
However, there are remaining monuments that hold present Westerners
"accountable" to their past. These monuments, scattered all over Europe and the
Mediterranean Sea, prove the continuity of the past into the present and impose
architectural canons that can be reproduced in modern cities. The works give
modern Westerners established ways to organize cities, their lives and even
space or the concrete relationship between humans and nature.
In other words, even without the same language, even forgetting the body of
classic literature, the columns and the domes of Washington DC's buildings make
known to the passerby the uninterrupted continuity between the United States
and the SPQR (Senatus Populus Que Romanus - The Senate and the People of
Rome).
But China's evolution was different. Each dynasty made a point of tearing down
all the buildings of the former masters to erect new ones. This was possible
because of the greater wealth in China compared to Europe after the demise of
the Roman Empire. Even in rich renaissance Rome, the popes extracted the marble
for their palaces from ancient Roman relics - it was cheaper to dig stone from
the Coliseum than from mountains in Carrara.
China does not seem to have had this problem and has many times chopped down
entire forests to construct splendid residences for its princes. Continuity was
guaranteed by a rich
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