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| July 28, 2000 | atimes.com | ||
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China
BOOK REVIEW: China in Western minds Jonathan Spence, "The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds" (New York: W W Norton and Company, 1999) By Victor Fic At first, the cover picture on Jonathan Spence's book about China seems prosaic: a stoical, mustachioed Chinese archer straddles a charging, white horse and reaches into his hip-mounted quiver for an arrow. When one finishes the book, one realizes that the bowman prefigures the book's deep theme: the West's historical visions of China from 1253 forward are a welter of ideas and emotions reflecting the spirit of the age. Is the archer an aggressor or a defender? Should one compliment or calumny him? Spence is an American historian of China who arguably leads the field. He can educate serious students of the Middle Kingdom's history, sociologists, and one hopes policymakers astute enough to ask how and why China is being conceptualized, rationalized or judged a certain way before they ignore, engage or attack it. We encounter Marco Polo first. After summarizing Polo's book, Spence ponders why Polo wrote it. He repeats speculation that Polo sought to win an ambassadorship with his talent. This could be true. Machiavelli wrote "The Prince" to attain power. While Florentine Machiavelli instructed, however, Venetian Polo entertained: would breathless tales cast him as perceptive or presumptive? Unfortunately, Spence does not say. Islam's domination of Central Asia soon blocked overland routes to China, but in the early 1500s, Magellan's ships led the way. A Portugese trader, Galeote Pereira, eventually told Europe of gruesome Chinese tortures; in one, the victim's thighs were pummelled with split bamboo into bloody flesh. Pereira injected the prejudice of Chinese cruelty into the Western mind. Spence might have emphasized that Pereira's West preferred to burn heretics at the stake. The Chinese-speaking Jesuit Matteo came next. He preached that one could follow both Confucius and Christ because ancestor worship was a social, not a spiritual, act. A century later, the Spanish Dominican Domingo Navarrete exemplified those who hopelessly idealize China. He insisted that Chinese urine fertilizes crops while European urine burns them. Soon, men of power replaced men of the cloth. The representative George Anson, a practical and candid English admiral, scorned Chinese cunning in the 1740s. He noted how sellers crammed chickens with water or stones to make them heavier, but he overlooked the many false prophets in Europe defrauding the gullible. Fiction writers were also significant. Often, writers before Daniel Defoe had didactically used a "moral" China as their foil for excoriating the West. In 1719, Defoe instead condemned China's decadence and self-regard to compliment English, middle-class sensibilities. Originally, he had been a China lover. Defoe's case warns that China can arouse strong passions, leading to conversions that seem more emotional than rational. The most complex era for China-watching was the Enlightenment. Its thinkers sought to understand smaller social and moral systems, and then integrate these into an over-arching one. The brilliant German metaphysician Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz essayed to fit China into his capacious world view during the early 1700's. One concurs with this conclusion that Chinese people are not warlike, but rejects his patronizing assertion that the West needs missionaries from China. Writers again added to the West's understanding or ignorance of China. In 1910, for instance, Englishman Sax Rohmer created the evil Fu Manchu, a white-hating, bony monster served by a sexy, enslaved, reptile woman. After World War 1, a resuscitated interest in traditional Chinese themes and romantic characters ensued. Fortunately, Pearl Buck countered Rohmer's racism with her hit novel "The Good Earth" in the 1930s. It chronicled the bitter-sweet life of the Chinese peasant, and indicated that the West's narrow mind can also open. A dense chapter in Spence's book explores Western intellectuals' conclusions about power and social justice in China. In his 1957 opus "Oriental Despotism", American Karl Wittfogel identified China's towering Qin emperor, Qinshihuangdi, as the architect of a totalizing state. In its communist form, it rendered man lonely, afraid and doomed. Maybe capitalism will leave him selfish corrupt and doomed. Is there a middle way for the Middle Kingdom? Literary lions, like the Italian wordsmith Italo Calvino, end the book. In 1972, he penned a subtle, sophisticated dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. The king asks his servant if he will repeat his many tales once home. The young Italian tells the old Mongol, "It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear." Spence impresses with the range of his mind, which grasps each era's dominant theme, and its nuances, in a charging narrative. Polished prose embellishes this pithy, yet learned work. However, the author wrongly claims that his work is widely accessible. The challenging Wittfogel chapter melds history, politics and anthropology. Also, in several chapters, a question begs to be answered. Finally, Spence should tell us how China has viewed the West through the ages. What indicative picture would grace the cover of such a work? Perhaps Socrates, whose love of truth cost him his life? Or the Marlboro man, whose love of freedom keeps him armed? Spence's great lesson is that be it past or the future, when Caucasian eyes focus upon the red-robed archer upon his thundering steed, they will see both Cathay and themselves. (Special to Asia Times Online) |
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