A Letter to China

Part I

The Matrix of Civilizations

The dominant idea of Western civilization, progress, is rooted in the Genesis. With the fall of man, history becomes a chain of causes and effects whose ultimate goal is the progressive reconciliation with the original divinity of human nature. Christianity by setting time on moving has offered meaning to life and suffering; man is no longer a twist of dice, but an indispensable moment of a universal project. But postponing the meaning of life to the afterlife, together with the insuperable obstacle of the original sin, made impossible the fulfilment of the theory of perfectibility of Enlightenment origins. Saint Simon, Herbert Spencer, and Auguste Comte all came with utopian visions assuming the inevitable advancement toward a desirable destination: Biological, physical, and social elements alike. To overcome the impasse, Faust thought better of dealing with the devil. The details of his story are familiar and need not be recounted here; however, I shall notice that Goethe’s Faust (1808–32) in Marshal Berman’s reconstruction becomes a symbol of modernity and the scientific irresponsibility that comes with it. Berman places Goethe’s hero in historical perspective, the decades 1770–1830 “one of the most turbulent and revolutionary eras in the history of the world,”¹ to Berman an epoch that goes from medieval material conditions to post-industrial revolution desires. But Faust, creator and destructor of modernity, is not looking for material possessions, power, or money. Mephistopheles has offered endless ←3 | 4→capitalist opportunities and Faust has turned them down. What he is seeking is a socialist utopia, a living space for the future of mankind. He wants to move the world and remake it and reshape its physical and moral code; he wants to win land from the sea and build new towns and industries, bridges, green forests, and canals. This is self-development, economic development, and the whole spectacle of modernity: Perpetual production, construction, and inevitable destruction. Yet the socialist utopia of public happiness clashes with his narcissistic will to power, the human-to-human arrogance of power. The whole world has been renewed, an extremely old Faust walks contemplating his creation, but he is not satisfied with it. There still is a small piece of ground. An old couple works in the land; they have a little cottage with a garden full of linden trees. There is a chapel also with a little bell. Reminder of the old society, the pre-modern world, they stand as an obstacle to the progress he invented: “The cottage and the linden grounds /Are not mine, nor that moldy church./And if I’d rest there from the heat,/ Their shadows would fill me with fear,/ Thorns in my eyes, thorns in my feet.”² In his restless arrogance, Faust does not feel a lack of achievement, but the terror of being scrutinized and condemned for his deeds. This is how the sweet perfume of the linden becomes the smell of a tomb; it is his soul to have perished. The sound of the church bells is the reason for rage because, of course, he bears guilt. He needs that little remaining space to disappear so to blind his consciousness and at last make room for his ultimate plan, a Babel-like tower from which to gaze into the infinite: “There I would build, better to see, A scaffolding from tree to tree, And thus a vision might be won Of all the things that I have done.”³ Needless to say, his modernity comes at a price. The old couple and their little cottage are violently washed away; the lindens are part of the past, and human suffering and death piles on the wasteland of his imagination. Meanwhile, Faust at midnight stands alone on his balcony contemplating the ruin of history and the unfinished tragedy of modernization. Has the project of modernity come to an end? The issue is aroused when Faust becomes Oedipus, blind all along. The project of modernity from the very start has always had fierce critics and that is because alike in Faust the promise of the future is accompanied by the threat to destroy everything we are.

The natural laws of Copernicus (1473–1543), Galileo (1564–1642) and Newton (1642–1726) announced a new era: Scientific principles govern not only the universe but human history as well. Sometime later Positivist Materialism renewed trust on man by glorifying the fruits of his reasoning: Progress. Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) understood history as interplay between epochs of construction or prosperity and epochs of, more or less violent, revolution, or criticism. When in 1859 Charles Darwin (1809–1882) published On the Origin ←4 | 5→of Species, the Biblical myth of man’s creation was attacked by the hypothesis of transformism or evolution of life. But can evolution be applied to society? That was the argument of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) who interpreted Darwinism in key of Social Darwinism, ergo extending the theory from biology to society and ethics. Based on the assumption that the laws of evolution involve an increase of happiness, it follows that our environment tends to move toward perfection: “Nature in its infinite complexity is ever-growing to a new development. It would be strange if, in this universal mutation, man alone were unchangeable, and it is not true.”⁴ Evil, imperfection, deficiency all depend on the non-adaptation of the social organism to its environment; ignorance and prejudice are the roots of injury rather than innate disabilities. Hence, as man learns to dominate nature, to mold his society, fallacy tends to disappear. Indeed, the growth of universal human reason is what the historian J. B. Bury (1861–1927) in his book The Idea of Progress (1920) termed the “Theory of Perfectibility.” On the whole, the post-Enlightenment utopian belief that behind the survival of the fittest there is a necessary move toward the greatest harmony: “The ultimate development of ideal man is logically certain—as certain as any conclusion in which we place the most implicit faith; for instance, that we all must die.”⁵ A common place in popular estimation, the doctrine of perfectibility has encountered obvious difficulties due to the fact that the progressive movement toward harmony cannot reconcile with the violence of history. Nietzsche’s (1844–1900) nihilism and sense of disaster is well known; the West is not progress but decadence. Rousseau’s (1712–78) view is somewhat darker: As we moved from a primitive state to more complex societies we lose in terms of happiness and morality. Inequality was introduced the moment someone enclosed a piece of land and declared it his, greed and envy invented the moment, and the others believed it true. Civilization, thus modernity, had deprived man of his original freedom while enlarging the Pandora box of possibilities, “our souls are corrupted as our sciences and arts advance to perfection,” nor is dissoluteness a product of modernity but the heritage of being humans: “The evils due to our vain curiosity are as old as the world.”⁶ Karl Marx (1818–83) converted the utopian thinking of the Enlightenment into a materialistic science with political force. The engine of history, struggle between classes, has in the universal commodification between objects and labor power the last step before the collapse of the world-capitalist system. Modernity is fated to melt its creations in a perpetual wave of desire and revolution for “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober sense the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.”⁷ Powerful visual images fill the apocalyptical visions of the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) ←5 | 6→foresaw the loss of the aura of the work of art, synonymous with authenticity and uniqueness in the age of mechanical reproduction thus changing the social role of the artist, by now a tool for political aims. In a postmodern-populist view, reproduction in large scale, coupled with the invention of photography and film, jeopardized the essential value of art, yet Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) had already brought to life the maelstrom of ambiguities that affects the aesthetics of modernity. What is art? Under the new condition of production art as well becomes commodity exchange, not displayed because it is art, but it becomes art because it is displayed. Georg Simmel (1858–1918) more coldly theorized an impersonal, blasé society, where punctuality, calculability, and exactness replaced instinct, impulses which otherwise were human traits required by pre-modern communities. The sociological conflict between the hypertrophy of the objective culture versus the atrophy of subjective culture is the postmodern condition of modernity: Meaning our incapacity for comprehension, perhaps control, before the changes of that systematic society we have created. More specifically, the struggle modern man is called to face is against the indifferent metropolis, the fear of anonymity, the inevitable process of homogenization that turns the individual into a faceless crowd: “The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.”⁸ Being unique then becomes the modern battle against a cultural realm that tends toward alienation. Further, the burden of freedom, the effects of overstimulation, and the growing importance of monetary value sounded as a warning also in Max Weber (1864–1920) who predicted how the spirit of capitalism was bound to destroy its Protestant foundational ethic since materialism corrupted the original asceticism of the fathers. The technical and economic condition of production defines people’s lives so that external goods and mundane passions become dominant to an extent to imprison humans into the unbreakable imaginary of an iron cage: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”⁹ The iron cage shapes a dehumanized society with one set of rules and laws we must adhere to; the enlightened dialectic reason—freedom breaks open, affected by an invisible process of depersonalization, infected by a bureaucratic instrumental structure with consequent loss of autonomy and individuality. Somewhere along the line, Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69) and Max Horkheimer (1895–73) write another epitaph for the project of the Enlightenment arguing that the logic behind the Enlightenment rationality is in fact a deceiving process of domination where the culture industry, the realm of entertainment industry, ←6 | 7→creates standardized goods so to elicit the same response from everyone. By having the same expectations, control, dependency, and mental atrophy are achieved. By creating a correct reaction the masses, at last, are reduced into passivity, and the individual is belittled to the level of abstraction: “The individual is an illusion not merely because of the standardization of the means of production. He is tolerated only so long as his complete identification with the generality is unquestioned.”¹⁰

A parallel line of debate is whether progress depends entirely on human will. Descartes (1596–1650), with the axioms of the supremacy of reason and the immutability of the laws of nature, had God replaced by science, the reign of providence overthrown by the reign of science. Ernest Renan in The Future of Science (1849) in the best tradition of the nineteenth century positivism offers a declaration of faith in science “because the true world which science reveals to us is much superior to the fantastic world created by the imagination.”¹¹ He proves his assumption by taking our old conception of the universe as a case in point. We conceived it as similar to a disc, a closed space with the earth in the center and stars in concentric spheres. Beyond would be the world of angels and the temple of God. It was the scientific method to show us not just the intellectual mistake but an infinity impossible to glimpse even with our imagination. In Hegel (1770–1831), the dialectic necessity to refer to an external Will brings the idea of progress to lapse back into the idea of providence that in secular terms he names “cunning reason.” History is driven by men, great men, such as Socrates, Cesar, Napoleon “a world soul on horseback,” they bend, mold history according to their interests and whims unaware that History has beforehand some specific purpose or designs (historicism). Ergo, they become historical-providential tools, they are in fact used by the spirit to move toward the realization of progress, reason, and human freedom. A century later, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) and Albert Camus (1913–60) with their atheist humanism by rejecting the role of providence restore man in the center of the infinite plan. Life events do not occur because of any logical or historical necessity but out of free will, we exist before our essence, thus stressing the beauty and yet the heaviness of the human condition, the burden of loneliness which is altogether freedom and duty of universal responsibility.

Seemingly, the process of modernity, and the progress it is doomed by, has been esteemed in retrospect to have arrived at a full stop, in Max Horkheimer’s evaluation “man has lost his power to conceive a world different from that in which he lives.”¹²Namely, the end of history. For the political theorist Francis Fukuyama (1952), the end of history arrives in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The collapse of Soviet-style Communism is the culmination of the historical process which has in Western liberal democracies and market capitalism the ←7 | 8→final form of human history. Yet history for the moment has proved him wrong, at least in part. Fukuyama had not considered the advent of China, the return of Russia, the Islamic fundamentalism, nor the financial crisis in 2008. Freedom of conscience, political competition, and rule of law are far from being embraced on a large scale meaning that more than an end of history, what we are facing is Martin Jacques’s (1945) definition of “contested modernity.” The balance of power is shifting; for the first time since the industrial revolution, modernization is distinct from Westernization, and it is provoking neither the Westernization of non-Western societies nor the coming-of-age of a universal civilization. Being modern, developed, and civilized is no more a monopoly of the West, but an experience of competing modernities in which of course China will play a leading role. Even though the Western package is flourishing in the midst of different civilizations, science and capitalism are available nearly everywhere; nonetheless, it would be naïve and somewhat parochial to assume that non-Westerners will become “Westernized” by acquiring Western brands. Precisely, Samuel Huntington’s (1927–2008) insight is revealing:

In the view of the American political scientist, modernization and Westernization are then two distinct phenomena. But has history ended? History, in the age of globalization, the Magna Mac Huntington refers to, has in Baudrillard’s (1929–2007) analysis its vanishing point. To him, unlike Fukuyama and similar to Lyotard’s (1924–98) disbelief in metanarratives, the end of the Cold War is not to be considered an ideological victory as it is the disappearance of utopian visions, the desegregation of great ideologies-illusions, thus in this sense, the end of history is the collapse of the historical progress:

In The Illusion of the End (1994), the French leading theorist of postmodernity, pinpoints a metaphysical outlook with the definition of ‘hyper-history,’ the complex nature of time, based on which we are moving backward rather than moving forward. Rather than approaching the end of history, we are engaged in a process of historical involution. Events follow up one another in a state of indifference, an oedipal process of obliteration where events neutralize history, and in turn the masses neutralize the individual. Baudrillard’s hypothesis is that the end of history is to be understood as the vanishing of history, so to speak the linear progression of history has changed into an immense flashback. Indeed Baudrillard concludes: “Deep down, one cannot even speak of the end of history here since history will not have time to catch up with its own end. Its effects are accelerating, but its meaning is slowing inexorably (…).”¹⁵ It is as if humankind has somehow left reality while the whole circuits of media, technology, communication has absorbed the vacuum left by man’s retreat. Desires, consciousness, progress are no longer able to reach out their consequences, or to pull away from the culture industry, the whole of which reduced to a succession of meaningless facts. History is then behind us.

The same gloomy intellectual atmosphere and the same nostalgic mode prevail in Fredric Jameson’s (1934) speculation. In his postmodernity, the end of history he describes, becomes a space wholly occupied by the market proliferation; equally, it is a time, the age of late capitalism (or the third stage of capitalism) where the market has reached its limits, and the Marxist prophecy of universal commodification is finally achieved.¹⁶ As outcome, two are the most visible signals of our incapacity to think historically being the first “the failure of the new.” The blockage of the historical imagination, as he defines it, is, within the aesthetic production, the artist’s incapacity to create new styles, alternative combinations, innovative techniques, and contents. Consequently, the imprisonment in the past, forces postmodernism to reproduce rather than create. Similarly, in terms of economic expansion, the significant role played by late capitalism on the world stage, the collapse of Communism in East Europe, and the threat of planetary ecological disaster make it difficult for this generation to imagine additional conquest, economic conquest, and conquest of nature. Promethean challenge in a world that has reached its limits of development. Being the new no longer new is another way to say that we live in a chronic condition of stasis in which the crisis of ideology makes difficult to establish new prospects to explore. The pluralism of postmodernity has created a complex set of activities, changes are everywhere but they change in a static world, illustrated by Leonard Meyer as a “fluctuating steady-state.” Essentially, while the past five, six centuries were characterized by ←9 | 10→Kuhnian paradigmatic changes, our epoch goes through a history suddenly no more hierarchically articulated into epochs, movements and the likes. Equally, the evolution of visual arts has reached a cultural impasse in which alterations happen without cumulative development but a coexistence of styles:

But an art that does not construct becomes an anti-art; the shocking aesthetic of modernism turned into a predictable artistic stasis that is as well the failure of our time to create convincing hierarchies of values. To darken the scenery some more, Jameson has to think that our lack of Faustian creativity comes with a second feature which is our impotence to politically, socially, and economically delink from the systematicity of our world, as if we were all encaged in an Orwellian society no one can secede from. Considerably affine is the argument of the molecular biologist Gunther Stent (1924–2008) who, following the discovery of the DNA, conjectures on the same dimension of exhaustion:

Hence, Stent emphasizes, social evolution, as much as economic development, so much as art and science are self-limiting, progress has stopped in its tracks. Now, the arguments sound all logical but not conform to reality, this is at last my reading. If man was a rational animal, Jameson and Stent would be right, not just: The end of history might as well be the most valid interpretative key to decode our age. T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) put it beautifully: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”¹⁹ But human beings do not act as Henry James’s (1811–1882) characters, always morally constant, attached to the ideal-type they represent. Humanity is molded on the carcass of the Underground Man, morally inconstant, acting not always out of profit and personal interest, but independent whims, wanting, caprice, fancy, and perhaps madness. We take risks larger than ←10 | 11→the possible advantages because “man is so partial to systems and abstract conclusions that he is ready intentionally to distort the truth, to turn blind eye and a deaf ear, only so to justify his logic.”²⁰ Ergo, it seems to me Huntington’s theory on the clash of civilization is more convincing:

History does not end then, nor does the Promethean need for knowledge. The revival of religious fundamentalism, la revanche de Dieu, as Gilles Kepel labelled it, the sinicization of Asia, the economic decline of the West, the possible conflict between forced interactions, and the uncompromising cultural differences, this is the new path of history. And to identify the other so to coexist together is the new act of creation. By the same token, the Faustian Man of Goethe and Spencer, the Titanic civilization that stole the fire so to create machine to dominate the universe, even if punished and the fire of knowledge became a source torment, has met its own Jihad. Faust’s construction is unfinished, striving in the path of creation, being ceaselessly bent toward further realization, it is the essence of his existence. T. S. Eliot wrote in a passage “when a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once and for all and cannot be achieved again.”²² This fin-de-siècle pessimism is the postmodern challenge the West is called to fight back. Gunther Stent wants us to believe that as a result of artistic evolution, some no well-specified cultural Darwinism; the artist has set himself virtually free from any canons governing creative expressions, thus the act of creation becomes a moment of random disorder incapable of adding meaningful statements. Dramatists of the absurd such as Beckett and Ionesco, Pop Music, experimental composer, the music of John Cage, and the novels of Alain Robbe Grillet and James G. Ballard are some of the most quoted examples of exhaustion, anti-art, and anti-literature. But from the perspective of the nineteenth century, Realism was already anti-aesthetic before people grew accustomed to the daily occurrences of common characters in Austen, or the repulsive truth, the ugliness of life in Zola, the melancholy shades of misery of the lowest classes in Balzac, and the dying surrounding of starving children in Dickens. So was Modernism for the twentieth century, shocking, repulsive, dissonant, and provocative before being established in the academy and ←11 | 12→becoming commercially successful. Jurgen Habermas (1929) should be our reference: The project of the Enlightenment has not failed simply, and it has not been fulfilled yet; we move forward together with postmodernity, outside modernity, and beyond modernity, however, ignoring the destination. What we find might as well be undesirable, but it is still fascinating thinking about us having gone beyond modernity, the ultimate triumph of human reason.

But while for the West belief in progress is an act of faith, so was not for China. Beyond the Himalayas, in the Far East, Montesquieu (1689–1755) believed that “there reigns still a spirit of servitude which has never left it; and in all the histories of that land, one cannot find trace of a single feature which marks out the free spirit.”²³ Because there is no temperate zone in Asia, thus in China, nations living in hot climes becomes lethargic and indolent, somewhat weak and easy prey of Northern empires (i.e., the Goths, the Mongols) otherwise aggressive and more active. To Montesquieu, China was the very antithesis of enlighten society, a society subject to despotism, ruled not by laws but by customs and manners, ergo, devoid of ethical content:

What was significant about China was not the illusion of stability fostered by the appearance of order, but its immobility, its moral paralysis due a politic of isolationism which, until the nineteenth century, believed the country to be the center of the globe. In reality, China suffered an endless number of imperial divisions, often invaded by foreign “barbarians” if not shaken by internal usurpers. Hence, due to endemic disorder and instability, China developed an anti-Faustian philosophy which realizes itself, not so much in individual will to power, as in the accommodating gospel of Confucianism and Socialism where identities are grounded in class memberships, and civilization turns toward egalitarianism. Culturally and geographically produced by numerous ethnic groups and historically divergent lands, since the legendary Xia (下) dynasty, China had to deal with an endemic disorder, a melting of races, languages, and cultures that had to be kept together for the sake of unity. The Tang Dynasty (7th–10th centuries) in the seventh century went to conquer a portion of Mongolia from the Turks adding within the borders Turks, Uighurs, Persians, Arabs, and Hindus. How to keep together Southern China and Inner Mongolia? How the Song Dynasty (960–1279) could cohabitate with Mongols? Stability is the key to decode Chinese essence. ←12 | 13→Chinese philosophy is an ethical system focusing on the need to achieve harmony between the ruler and the citizens. Social-political equilibrium is the goal of a civilization that projects itself into eternity. Law, in imperial China, was chiefly penal; it functioned vertically from the state to the individual, weighted on the side of the State. Within the broad view of Confucian philosophy, the imperial code aimed to preserve the social order based on hierarchical relationships rather than protect the individual who could otherwise be detained, arrested, and presumed guilty until when proved innocent. Ergo, a son who struck his father could be decapitated, but a parent who beat his son to death would receive only forty blows as punishment. Legal, moral, and political system shaped a civilization concerned about enduring rather than developing, and duration is often synonymous with repetition. The millenarian ancestral worship, the status of the family system, organized kinship, rituals, the dynastic political apparatus, the extremely complex bureaucratic area, and the everlasting mandate of the members of the Party are all attempts to maintain China as it is. The imperial examination is an example in this direction, not the ability to innovate from the side of the candidates was tested, but their ability to memorize Confucian classics. By so doing, China succeeded in establishing a static bureaucracy, where conservatism shaped the soul of a civilization and together placed China out of history for a few centuries. Historians speculate that capitalism failed to prosper in China until recently because the traders were never able to succeed alone outside the control of landlord gentry and the official patronage of the bureaucracy.²⁵ In Western perspective, a case of bureaucratism with systematized corruption and atavist personal relationships where colleagues are replaced by superiors and subordinates officials with the addition of the customary of “gifts.” But nepotism and personal arrangements are not new to the West. Evidently, in China, the complex structure of business was a segment of the larger net of friendships and kinships supporting the whole Chinese social life which can be traced as far back as 2000 years. Inevitably, progress and modernity were practices slow to arrive. However, I firmly believe that beneath the economic surface, the reasons why the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911) achieved so little industrialization are mainly cultural. In the fifteenth century, through a tributary system state, China virtually ruled over the whole East Asia, in the words of the Chinese historian William A. Callahan as “one civilization, many systems” depending from State to State, from dynasty to dynasty, but surely with one common thread: The acceptance of Chinese institutional superiority.²⁶ With the formidable navy the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) possessed, the other half of the world was within grasp. But China did not want it. To simplify to the extreme, the barbarian West did not appeal to China; the belief that the Chinese ←13 | 14→was superior to the other civilizations, as the ancient Greek and Roman did once, froze China in time. Of course there is more to it than that, in China, the myth of the great leap forward has always been blurred by the necessity to endure. The case of Zheng He provides a frame of reference.

One of the most suggestive questions when engaging with China is the reason for Chinese geographical unity, if not cultural, in light of its size. After the unification (sixth century AD), China has been immune to fragmentation, heavily conquered (Mongols in the thirteenth century, and Manchu in the seventeenth), but it has never broken up into separate states as otherwise happened in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Waves of invaders were actually absorbed by the Chinese society in which laws were manners and manners principle of morality. The indivisible character of private and public matters made virtually impossible for the conquerors to produce any change save the annihilation of the entire population. And because nothing could penetrate the teaching of millennia, the conquered changed the conquerors. The historian Mark Elvin’s overview introduced an additional element: “The Chinese must on the whole have managed to keep one step ahead of their neighbors in the relevant technical skills, military, economic and organizational.”²⁷ Not just resilience then, but some sort of superiority. Consequently, outnumbered by Han Chinese and outshined by the superiority of their institutions, the invaders were absorbed into Chinese culture. When Marco Polo (1254–1324), a resident of Venice, visited China in the thirteenth century, the era of the Song, Europe was plunged in the high-middle age, the time of the Crusades. China was a reference in terms of productivity, farming, water transport system, and commercialization with an economic growth that Europe would have met some six centuries later. Hangzhou had roughly a population of one million making China the most urbanized society in Asia if not the whole world. Marco Polo was impressed: “It has twelve principal gates and at each of these gates are cities larger than Venice and Padua.”²⁸ Amazed by the size of China’s Grand Canal compared to the little canals in Venice, which was the best Europe could offer, the number of the ships, the capacity of the Yangzi River, Marco Polo commented so:

Nanjing, in Ming China, was probably the largest city in the world; when in 1420 the Forbidden City was completed, Beijing arguably became the cultural center of the world’s most advanced civilization, by fifteenth-century standard a metropolis with 700.000 inhabitants. Paris (200.000) and London (50.000) in comparison were little towns. As late as 1776, Adam Smith (1723–90) in Wealth of Nations refers to China as “one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in world.”³¹ And if the Qing dynasty might be accused not to be Chinese, the Ming dynasty was one of the most advanced empires of all ages. China seemed to one of the leader of the Enlightenment, Voltaire (1694–1778), everything Europe was not: A country free of religious repression and political violence instead ruled by religious tolerance, meritocratic class of scholar, and an enlightened Platonian-like philosopher-monarch. Thus, he has to write in 1764: “One need not be obsessed with the merits of the Chinese, to recognize …. that their empire is in truth the best that the world has ever seen.”³² To the German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), the Chinese were not simply great technicians but an example of morality and practical philosophy. Due to China’s longevity, “the oldest of the entire world, the best governed doubtless because it was the longest lasting,”³³ as Voltaire put it, Leibniz concluded that the Chinese understood the art of government and human cultivation. Surely more advanced than Europe in understanding the precepts of civil life: “Scarcely anyone offends another by the smallest word in common conversation. And they barely show evidence of hatred, wrath, or excitement.”³⁴ As China became progressively commercialized, an industrial revolution, production on large scale did not happen, but certainly China was the first to produce an industrious revolution. The British sinologist Joseph Needham (1900–95) in Science and Civilization in China (1954) gives evidence of Chinese industrious mind through the documentation of inventions originated in China long before being introduced in the West. Besides the over-quoted, gunpowder, compass, paper and printing, acupuncture is dated back to the Paleolithic period, silk was already in use in the fourth millennium BC, the first furnace for iron and steel smelting was not built in England but in China during the Zhou dynasty (1046 BC–256 BC). At the time of the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), mechanical clocks were in use to illustrate astronomical phenomenon as planetary movements and eclipses; wheelbarrows used to carry military weapons, injured, and dead soldiers from the battlefield. Porcelain perfected during the ←15 | 16→Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD) and then exported to the Middle East and Europe; the compass, already used for the practice of Geomancy as early as the Qin Dynasty (221 BC–207 BC), will change between 9th and 11th centuries (Song Dynasty) into a tool for navigation. Meanwhile, the West, at the time of the Ming dynasty, must have appeared as a province of Asia. Europe was miserably ravaged by the Black Death (bubonic plague), typhus, and smallpox; North America was a misruled wilderness, the legendary empires of Aztecs, Mays, and Incas about to be slaughtered by ruthless Spanish conquistadores. In the absence of deadly epidemics, violence was pervasive: France and England were permanently at war, and the Dutch-Portuguese War in the seventeenth century was contemporary to the Netherlands-Spain conflict, the Anglo-Dutch War, the Anglo-Spanish War, and the English Civil War (1642–51). Most importantly of all, the Reformation had brought down the unity of the Catholic world and produced one of the most ferocious clashes in European history; the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) concluded with the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which changed forever the cognitive map of Europe. When it was finally over, a third of the population of central Europe was dead.³⁵ The economic historian Niall Ferguson put the concept into numbers:

Due to its endemic conflict no industry, no art, no science, no society was ever possible; Thomas Hobbes with reason did not hesitate to describe Western man in his state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But then history has its turning points. In the eighteenth century, European enthusiasm for China died away. The rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment owns much to the humanism of the Renaissance, which had triggered the shift in religious thoughts (Protestant) and destroyed dogmatic certainties. But it had also prepared the ground for the Scientific Revolution. The technology that spread from it gave the West the lead: Newtonian laws of motion granted the West science for accurate artillery, the knowledge of ballistics, for instance, to calculate the trajectory of a projectile or the impact of air resistance. From Bacon (1561–1626) to Descartes (1596–1650), from Galileo (1564–1642) to Locke (1632–1704), the intellectual innovation that followed gave start not just to the industrial revolution but to modern human and natural sciences, all those academic disciplines—moral philosophy, economics, sociology, anthropology—that today still explain how we ←16 | 17→live. The universe was finally opened and modernity appeared. Even Voltaire, one of the panegyrist of China, had to accept that: