Chinese people find it hard to admit their mistakes and produce myriad reasons to cover up for them. There’s an old adage: “Contemplate errors behind closed doors.” Whose errors? The guy next door’s, of course! . . . Chinese people expend a great deal of effort in covering up their mistakes, and in so doing make additional ones. Thus it is often said that Chinese are addicted to bragging, boasting, lying, equivocating, and malicious slandering. For years people have been going on about the supreme greatness of the Han Chinese people and boasting endlessly that Chinese traditional culture should be promulgated throughout the world. But the reason why such dreams will never be realized is because they’re pure braggadocio. I need not cite any further examples of boasting and lying, but Chinese verbal brutality deserves special mention. . . . And in matters of politics and money, or in power struggles of any kind, the viciousness can be out of all proportion. This raises the additional question: What makes Chinese people so cruel and base? . . .
Stuck in the Mud of Bragging and Boasting
Narrow-mindedness and a lack of altruism can produce an unbalanced personality that constantly wavers between two extremes: a chronic feeling of inferiority and extreme arrogance. In his inferiority, a Chinese person is a slave; in his arrogance, he is a tyrant. Rarely does he or she have a healthy sense of self-respect. In the inferiority mode, everyone else is better than he is, and the closer he gets to people with influence, the wider his smile becomes. Similarly, in the arrogant mode, no other human being on earth is worth the time of day. The result of these extremes is a strange animal with a split personality.
A Nation of Inflation
What makes the Chinese people so prone to self-inflation? Consider the saying: A small vessel is easily filled. Because of the Chinese people’s inveterate narrow-mindedness and arrogance, even the slightest success is overwhelming. It is all right if a few people behave in this manner, but if it’s the entire population or a majority—particularly in China—it spells national disaster. Since it seems as if the Chinese people have never had a healthy sense of self-respect, it is immensely difficult for them to treat others as equals: if you aren’t my master, then you’re my slave. People who think this way can only be narrow-minded in their attitude toward the world and reluctant to admit their mistakes.
Only the Chinese Can Change Themselves
With so many loathsome qualities, only the Chinese people can reform themselves. Foreigners have a duty to help us, not in the realm of economics but through culture. The Chinese ship of state is so large and overcrowded that if it sinks many non-Chinese will be drowned as well.
One last point: China is seriously overpopulated. China’s more than one billion mouths can easily devour the Himalayas. This should remind us that China’s difficulties are complex and call for awareness on the part of each and every Chinese person. Each one of us must become a discriminating judge and use our powers to examine and appraise ourselves, our friends, and our country’s leaders. This, I believe, is the only way out for the Chinese people.
Developing a Personal Sense of Judgment
In the last four thousand years, China has produced only one great thinker: Confucius. In the two and one-half millennia since his death, China’s literati did little more than add footnotes to the theories propounded by Confucius and his disciples, rarely contributing any independent opinions, simply because the traditional culture did not permit it. The minds of the literati were stuck at the bottom of an intellectual stagnant pond, the soy-sauce vat of Chinese culture. As the contents of this vat began to putrefy, the resultant stench was absorbed by the Chinese people. Since the numerous problems in this bottomless vat could not be solved by individuals’ exercising their own intelligence, the literati had to make do with following others’ ways of thinking. If one were to place a fresh peach in a soy-sauce vat full of putrescent brine, it would eventually turn into a dry turd. China has its own particular way of transforming foreign things and ideas that enter within its borders. You say you’ve got democracy; well, we have democracy too. But the Chinese form of democracy is: You’re the demos (people), but I’ve got the kratos (power). You’ve got a legal system; we’ve got one too. You’ve got freedom; so have we. Whatever you have, we have too. You’ve got pedestrian crossings painted on the street; we have too, but ours are there to make it easier for cars to run pedestrians over.
The only way to improve the situation of the Ugly Chinaman is for each of us to cultivate our own personal taste and judgment. . . . I have my freedom and rights, whether the government gives them to me or not. If we had the capacity to make proper judgments, we would demand elections and be rigorous in our selection of candidates. But without this capacity, we’ll never be able to distinguish a beautiful woman from a pockmarked hag.
[Adapted from Barme and Minford, Seeds of Fire, pp. 170–176—RL]
SUN LONGJI: “THE DEEP STRUCTURE OF CHINESE CULTURE”
The following critique of Chinese culture is dressed in voguish psychological terms (supposedly Western) and reflects “modernist” attitudes dismissive of traditional culture. However, it shows little actual familiarity with traditional Confucian values or discourse and seems unaware that much the same critique could be made of current attitudes from a Confucian standpoint.
Pervading this, as in the preceding and following pieces, is a strong sense of despair over China’s decadence, most directly attributable to the failure of revolutionary expectations in the twentieth century, following the violent upheavals and relapses of 1911, 1949, and the Cultural Revolution. Also reflected here, however, are other ideological factors, both indigenous and foreign.
The traditional view of Chinese history tended to follow repeated cycles of dynastic rise and decline; thus in Huang Zongxi’s analysis of China’s troubles, his preface to Waiting for the Dawn (in 1662) cites Mencius’s view that periods of order alternate with periods of disorder and then adds: “How is it that since the Three Dynasties there has been no order but only disorder?”
From the West, at the turn of the century, came views of human progress and evolution, but with these also strongly negative views, especially marked in Adam Smith, Hegel, and Marx, of traditional China as stagnant and unprogressive, caught in an endless degenerative process. Indeed, it became a fundamental “Marxist” assumption of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party that only a radical, violent upheaval could lift China out of this historical rut. The writers who follow here struggle to get their footing in the backwash of such crosscurrents and erosive tides.
Stagnation in China may be explained in terms of the deep structure of Chinese culture. China has been “ultrastable” for thousands of years, and even now it is a country that still seems to be insensitive and slow in responding to the outside world. Throughout the twentieth century and especially since the establishment of the People’s Republic, Marxism has provided the dynamic [that has been] traditionally absent from Chinese culture. Nevertheless, the success of the Communist movement has largely depended on the fact that it developed during a period of transition, at a particular point in the cycle of order and disorder. After the Cultural Revolution, that Marxist-inspired motivation for action would appear to have died away. The Four Modernizations are no longer adequate to mobilize the hearts-and-minds of the people. In contrast, “stability and unity” are emphasized.
This tendency toward stagnation is also evident in the personality of every Chinese individual. A Chinese is programmed by his culture to be “Chinese.” In other words, inbred cultural predispositions make the Chinese what they are and prevent them from being full-blown individuals. Dynamic human growth is an alien concept to the Chinese. Growth is seen as just a physical process. Maturity is to know how to play a proper role in bilateral social relationships. Normally, physical growth is accompanied by mental development, but the Chinese are held back by their own culture, and they generally exhibit serious tendencies toward oral fixation. In short, the Chinese do not fully experience the various stages of persona
lity development. . . .
Disorganization of the self easily leads to a weakening of the will. In similar fashion, the rule of law is difficult to achieve in China because the Chinese do not enact appropriate legislation. They are too easily influenced by personal relationships or power. Today in the mainland when “the Party looks after everything for the individual,” the disorganization of the self has reached a critical stage. At home, at school, at work, a man cannot organize things for himself. He is forever looked after by an overprotective mother.
Some people think that the present Chinese policy of one child per family will result in a highly individualistic generation. In fact, the opposite may happen. Chinese parents tend to encourage dependence in their children, and if they concentrate all their attention and concern on one child, the Chinese may become even more lacking in personal organization in the future. A man must be fully developed before his life can be a dynamic process; only then can he attain self-actualization in body and mind, can he organize and control his life, his work, his future, his thoughts, his conscience, his interpersonal relationships, and so on. Only to such a man are human rights important.
The majority of the Chinese are unsure of their own rights. They submit meekly to oppression and allow others to encroach on their rights. The meekness of the Chinese people makes them particularly receptive to authoritarianism.
[Adapted from Barme and Minford, Seeds of Fire, pp. 136, 311—RL]
SU XIAOKANG AND WANG LUXIANG: “RIVER ELEGY,” A TELEVISION DOCUMENTARY
“River Elegy” is predicated on the imaginative notion that early China once partook of a seafaring Pacific civilization (identified with the sea and the blue sky), adventurous and open to the world like the civilization of Columbus and Magellan. In China, however, this was overtaken and hemmed in by a land-oriented continental culture (identified with the silt of the Yellow River delta), blocking access to the open sea and intercourse with the larger world. China thus became constricted, stagnant, and monolithic, in contrast to the dynamic, pluralistic West. Ironically, the reference herein to Adam Smith’s analysis of the China problem reminds us of Smith’s influence on Karl Marx’s view that the stagnancy of Oriental civilization differentiated it from the dynamic development pattern of Western civilization. Thus an early Marxist (and very Eurocentric) perspective still dominates this critique by intellectuals of post-Maoist China. Not surprisingly, then, it concludes with an exhortation to revive the sweeping May 4 attack on Chinese tradition—the only rhetoric readily available for challenge to the status quo.
The ocean was originally the cradle of life. In all the Earth’s traumatic changes and upheavals, it was the sea that once protected the lives of our ancestors. Later on, when human beings returned to the land, they could not adapt. In the process of forcing themselves to adapt to the continental environment, humankind created civilization.
The sphinxlike stone statues on Easter Island tell us that as far back as ten thousand years ago, there was an ancient and vital maritime civilization on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. The maritime tools that appear today [to be] so simple and primitive were the ones that brought humankind back to the sea from the land once again. What is the conviction that supported those primitive people in their attempt to cross this great ocean that even today’s people find forbidding? Can we not hear the grand melody of the destiny of humanity echoing in the maritime, seafaring activities of these primitive people, as well as in the great voyages of Columbus and Magellan, which established new ages of human history?
It is precisely because of the continuous and unflagging existence of maritime life that human civilization came to be separated into two major elements—or continental civilization and the maritime civilization.
This country stands on the rim of the western Pacific Ocean. At the same time, it stands astride, mightily, the eastern part of the great Euro-Asian land mass. Its body is yellow, and the great river running through it like a spinal column is also yellow.
As we look at this ancient wooden boat, excavated from the Hemudu archaeological site, it is as if we can see that faraway fountainhead of Chinese civilization glimmering with the light of azure waves.
Yet as far back as the periods of prehistory that were still shrouded in myth, the inland civilization that came from the loess region of the middle stretches of the Yellow River was already continuously overcoming the lower stretches and the coastal areas. Even today we can hear the deep, muffled voices of the history of this period, in the sounds of the stories of the great battles of the Yellow Emperor with the Red Emperor and Chiyou.
Eventually, the Zhou people’s conquest of the Shang people proved that this force that came from the heartland was an irresistible one. The epic battles in the late Warring States period, in which the state of Qin defeated and conquered the state of Chu, represent and symbolize how the yellow civilization that fed on wheat, fought with chariots, and was influenced by the nomadic tribes and by the culture of Persia eventually overcame and defeated the azure civilization that fed on rice, fought with ships on the water, and was influenced by the cultures of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. . . .
The recession of the azure laid down a destiny for the nation and the civilization. . . .
The unending azure waves of the Pacific Ocean have always beckoned this ancient nation that slept on the continent. Occasionally they might stir up for a while and send sailing ships to venture out on their waters, even as far as the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula. Yet, in the end, the attraction of the azure ocean would prove to be much weaker, after all, than the magnetism of the yellow earth.
The mysterious power that provided this yellow civilization with an amazing and tremendous centripetal force was the fact that the Confucian culture gradually attained supremacy on this land.
Confucian thought, as a whole system, expressed the ideals and boundaries of the life of a continental, inland civilization. In the heyday of the oriental feudal society of the Orient, this system had the clear advantage of rationality. Its unitarian ideology, however, also weakened the possibility for the development of pluralism. The elements of the maritime civilization that had been rich and abundant in ancient life deteriorated into a few feeble streams . . . that disappeared instantly.
Nonetheless, while the continental civilization was flourishing in the land of China, another azure civilization of the sea was cropping up, a bit more quietly perhaps, along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.
Back in the time of ancient Greece, at the same time that Athens’ sea power emerged, so too did its democratic ideas, and thus maritime power led to a democratic revolution.
The Western bourgeois revolution in modern times was also predicated, socially, on the opening of the sea lanes of the European nations. The galleons that navigated between sea and sky starting in the fifteenth century not only raised the curtain on world trade and colonial activity, they also conveyed the hopes of science and democracy. With these ships, puny as they were, the color azure symbolized the destiny of the modern world.
The vast markets of the Orient, and of the “New World” of the Americas, made Europe rich almost overnight.
To cross the great oceans, large, sturdy, yet carefully and intricately constructed ships were required. Mathematics and physics were needed for the building of these ships, and technological sciences were also needed. In 1636 Galileo published his work Dialogue on the New Science. It was in a shipbuilding factory that this “dialogue” took place.
Britain was the first to obtain great profit from overseas trade, which promoted the primitive accumulation of capital as well as the popularization of the ideas of freedom. It was in Britain that the first bourgeois revolution, led by Oliver Cromwell, took place. In 1651 Cromwell’s government, in turn, promulgated the Navigation Act; in 1690 John Locke published his Two Treatises on Government. The theory of free trade became the slogan of, and the principle to serve, the bourgeoisie.
Capitalism, churning the wheels of
the industrial revolution and free trade, began to bring about tremendous leaps in history, and so began the dual historical chorus of science and democracy.
All this was closely related to the ocean.
What was China doing at the time?
When Magellan was sailing around the globe, the Jiajing emperor of the Ming dynasty formally “closed” China to the outside world because of a quarrel with a Japanese tribute-bearer.
In 1776 Adam Smith published his famous book The Wealth of Nations. In this book he declared that China’s history and civilization had stagnated. He said: “The stagnation is due to China’s disregard for overseas trade; to close up the country is bound to lead to national suicide.”
Unfortunately, not a single Chinese ear heard these ominous words in time. . . .
Even today, in the 1980s, in the great debate over “the craze for Chinese culture,” people still seem to be caught in this century-old and unresolved controversy over the relative strengths of Chinese and Western cultures. Whether people seem to hold illusions of “wholesale Westernization” or whether they one-sidedly wish for the appearance of “the third age of the flowering of Confucian civilization,” everything seems to still be marking time in the same spot; nothing seems to have really changed. No wonder younger scholars today lament: A tremendous cultural heritage has become nothing but a tremendous cultural burden; a great sense of cultural superiority has turned into a great sense of cultural guilt. This must be considered a major psychological obstacle in the course of China’s modern cultural progress.
Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 2 Page 85