Page 3 of 4 CHINA'S MASSIVE WRENCH, Part 2 A new world under one Heaven
By Francesco Sisci
body of literary works. Those works were passed down through a strict education
system geared to producing the best administrators for the state. The hope of
social advancement or preservation pushed all Chinese to try their lot with
education. Therefore, even if they failed the harsh exams, everyone deeply
absorbed the tradition and language. There was no advantage in illiteracy:
government acts were written down all the way to the emperor who had to read
and vet them.
Language did not play the same role in the West, where the tradition since
Alexander and Caesar was for great political leaders to be great generals
earning their power with the sword. True, the West recognized that the pen was
mightier than the
sword (calamus gladio fortiori), but there were many illiterate kings in
the Middle Ages who were assisted in matters of state by learned clerics. The
Roman Empire was defeated by barbarians, highly literary Greece was won by
semi-barbaric Macedonians, and less-developed Romans conquered sophisticated
Hellenic kingdoms.
Chinese kings were masters of conspiracy and political plotting. They were
devisers of strategies; they read extensively and were imbued with the Chinese
literary tradition - but they were not fighting generals. Even Mao, famous for
his interest in military strategy, left the actual command of operations to Zhu
De and others.
Ideal generals were thinkers: bookworms willing to lend their literary talents
to the battlefield. They were people like 14th century Luo Guanzhong's
character Zhuge Liang in Romance of Three Kingdoms, a wise and
knowledgeable schemer. Zhuge had read all the Chinese books and thus could
assess the psychology of his enemy (born out of the same cultural tradition)
and devise a strategy fit to defeat him. In this tradition, the continuity of
physical monuments was not important; what counted was the language.
In the West, language was not unity. The Roman Empire was bilingual, with Latin
and Greek. The division carried on in the Middle Ages, when the kingdoms were
also bilingual, using Latin for their official business and local languages for
everyday life. Unity in the political body was created by the idea of blood
contiguity among one "people: - the bond of belonging to the same "ethnos" - at
least among the top echelons. This was true of the people of the Akropolis, of
the Senate, or of the Germanic aristocratic warriors of the Holy Roman Empire.
In China, unity came through the use of the same language, which carried a
tradition and a system of education. Whoever could master the language and
education was part of the "Chinese" polity, irrespective of ethnic origin.
Thus, language was far more important than in the West. Furthermore, the
largely ideographic written language was a fantastic instrument for keeping
unity among people speaking very different natural languages.
Chinese characters, largely indifferent to pronunciation, could be used in
Japan, Korea, Vietnam, southern China and northern China. People could keep
their dialects and still understand each other. Written languages reflecting
pronunciation, like Latin, faced considerable problems in adapting the written
form once the oral form changed, as occurred in Europe during the Middle Ages.
The Chinese language, conversely, could move along the centuries with only
minimal change. And so did it, until the 19th century.
Early on, in the first centuries AD, a difference developed between literary
Chinese (wen yan) and "colloquial language" (bai hua). The
differences between the two, though quite important, are minimal compared with
changes that occurred in the 19th century. Facing the massive inflow of foreign
texts and the resulting adaptations in thinking, China changed its language. It
introduced Western-style punctuation, including the previously unknown practice
of dividing text into paragraphs. Syntax, trying to mirror convoluted Western
thinking, became more complicated, a change that was possible thanks to a new
system of punctuation, which made clear the structure of the sentence.
Other major changes soon followed. The binding of many books and magazines
abolished the old order of writing first from top to bottom and then from right
to left. China began to adopt the Western style, writing first from left to
right and then from top to bottom. Furthermore, matching Western attempts to
create standardized pronunciation, China developed various systems of sound
transliteration for the characters. (This also meant having to teach adults
Chinese from scratch.)
There are, for instance, the Bopomofo method (adapted from the Japanese hiragana
and still used in Taiwan) and the pinyin system (which uses the Latin
alphabet and has been adopted in the mainland). These systems froze the
official pronunciation, preferring one elocution over another for the first
time. It also officially divided the country into different dialects and
accents. Before the standardization of pronunciation, it was perfectly
legitimate for scholars to express themselves in dialect.
Even Mao, who promoted the standardization of pronunciation, spoke unashamedly
with a very heavy Hunan accent. Radio and television have since contributed to
unifying Chinese pronunciation, but important differences persist without much
attention. In contrast, in many Western countries, proper diction is very
important, and people speaking with a vulgar, base accent are reviled.
In his drive for reforms, Mao went even further, going to the very heart of his
culture, the Chinese characters. After playing with the idea of using Latin
script for Chinese, he gave the green light to a widespread simplification of
the Chinese script. The break was so significant that for decades Chinese
intellectuals outside of China pointed at simplified characters as evidence of
Mao's total betrayal of Chinese tradition.
Even old texts are being reprinted with modern punctuation and paragraphs that,
for many reasons, are not totally faithfully to the originals but are a partial
"translation", Expanding on Ge Zhaoguang's feelings, we can say that this
change to the language was like putting the parts of an executed body in a meat
grinder.
The result is a totally different world. Yet, many things persist. In recent
years, China has seen a surge in long TV series that have a narrative process
similar to classic novels like Shuihu zhuan ("Outlaws of the Marsh,"
written in the 14th century by Shi Nai'an). Here, the story advances without a
plot that leads to a cathartic moment of solution [6], a definitive end, as you
find in Western novels, Greek tragedies and products of the modern film
industry. These TV series can spawn new episodes forever without an ending, but
always projecting into an open future, like human history.
It is a storytelling structure resembling Shuihu zhuan, with chapters
that end while opening to the next development, and not like American TV
programs, in which each episode is self-contained and self-concluded. It is as
if the thing coming out of the meat grinder still remembers the original body.
But what is this thing?
Houses-apartments
Tall belvederes and towers for the observation of enemies, hunting or religious
purposes (like Buddhist stupas) have an ancient tradition in China. Yet, houses
and living quarters were flat, rising two or three stores at most and ideally
protected by surrounding walls. No house could be higher than that of the local
mandarin or the residence of the emperor. Since ancient times, tall towers were
considered extravagant and therefore restricted. The prohibition against
buildings taller than those of officials reinforced this idea.
Even as late as the early 1990s, Chinese cities were flat. Beijing was an
endless sprawl of houses, with the tips of a few old Song-dynasty stupas
spiking the horizon here and there, as if only Buddha and his holy men could
reach for the sky. A decade later, the skyline of Beijing - and of every
Chinese city and even villages - has dramatically changed. Everyone is allowed
to put up his own stupa or hunting tower. Skyscrapers have rapidly become a
common feature in China, as if anybody can be higher than the officials or the
emperor, anybody can be a Buddha, a holy man!
The philosopher Liezi in the 3rd century BC wrote:
The towers and
belvederes built upon their heights were all made of gold and jade, the birds
and beasts living there were all spotlessly white. Trees of pearl and coral
bore thick masses of flowers; their fruit was delicious to the taste, and those
who are thereof knew neither old age nor death. The inhabitants all belonged to
the race of demi-gods and immortals, and in countless numbers they would fly
across to meet one another within the space of a single day or night. [7]
In this case, the Western model played a strange trick with the backdrop of
Chinese traditional culture. The West opened the floodgates of ambitions and
desires stifled for thousands of years: reaching for the sky, something
formerly possible only to immortals.
Now, literally, golden towers made of Italian marble, crowded with imposing
"roman pillars" and guarded by monumental stone beasts - lions larger than
mythical dragons - dot every city. Anybody can have an apartment in these
immortals' abodes, if he can afford it. And even if he cannot afford it, he can
still live in a more modest apartment block that stretches quite a few meters
above the ground.
The psychological change is immense.
In the West, tall buildings were traditionally for poor people. In ancient
Rome, there was a prohibition against building what we now call apartment
blocks that were higher than seven stories. There were many cases of tall
buildings that caved in or collapsed. In buildings, plebeians would lead
crowded lives, while patrician senators and generals enjoyed the luxury of
one-story villas with gardens.
The pattern was followed in future centuries in the West: the poor had small
badly built homes where families would live dangerously on top of each other,
and the rich had large estates. The issue was resolved with the invention of
steel and concrete technology, allowing the safe construction of towers
hundreds of meters high. This made it possible for people with lower incomes to
have good, although cheap, houses. It also made it attractive for rich people
to live in apartments, which could be as luxurious as villas. Essentially, this
created a real sense of middle class with people living in the same
neighborhood, maybe in the same apartment block, in apartments not too
different from one another, despite large differences in income.
In other words, towers in the West had a leveling effect, cutting extreme
differences and making everybody normal. In China, towers made everybody
special and everybody immortal. One could say that in the end the result is the
same: everybody is equal. But actually, it is not an identical result - it is
very different.
In the West, towers humble the ambitions of everyone. In China, they stir up
aspirations. In a way, towers in China are similar to suburban houses in the
West. The houses may remind the inhabitants of the old villas, and it is like
everybody has a villa, so everybody is well-off.
Being immortal is about being well-off, but it is more - it is also about being
beyond any control, satisfied, happy and unrestrained. But the apartments are
modern and imported from the West with the philosophy of the middle class still
stuck to it.
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