Delving into the cultural roots
New book draws bright line between the settled Chinese civilization and ‘nomadic’ Western one
China’s 5,000-year-old civilization cannot be understood by Western criteria, nor can it be judged by Western standards, according to Professor Wen Yang. Rather, the Chinese civilization is a phenomenon sui generis with its own history, logic, and self-understanding, he writes in his new book, The Logic of Civilization: The Interaction and Evolution of Chinese and Western Civilization.
The differences between China and the West are so deep that Westerners fathom them with great difficulty. To Westerners, civilization simply is Western civilization, the progeny of Greek philosophy, Roman Law and Hebrew revelation. China, the world’s most populous country and until the late 18th century by far the wealthiest, is regarded as an anomalous backwater, the domain of an unchanging “oriental despotism” in a view promulgated by Western thinkers as diverse as Montesquieu, Hegel and John Stuart Mill.
Twentieth-century America’s view of China bore the stamp of Christian missionaries who saw in China the world’s largest reserve of souls requiring salvation. The US project of propagating US democracy throughout the world associated with President Woodrow Wilson found its Chinese expression in the Christian missionaries who dominated US policy-making for East Asia.
In a secular form, this Protestant perspective on China transmuted into a consensus US view that as China became more prosperous in the early years of the 21st century, its political system would evolve to resemble that of the United States. US disappointment about China’s failure to meet US expectations is an important source of Sino-US friction today.
One of China’s leading theorists of civilization and columnist, Professor Wen proposes a diametrically opposite view: Civilization is not a Western matter but first and foremost a Chinese one. Chinese civilization has endured for 5,000 years; by contrast the Western nation-states began to form in embryo slightly more than a thousand years ago when barbarian invaders met the surviving remnants of the Roman Empire.
The legal foundation of the Western nationstate did not take shape until the Treaty of Westphalia half a millennium ago. To identify civilizational history with Western history, Wen writes, ignores the duration and continuity of Chinese civilization over a much longer time frame.
Ding Yifan, a professor at the World Development Institute of the Chinese State Council’s Development Research Center, observed in a review of Wen’s book: “The starting point of Wen Yang’s civilization theory is the proposition of ‘civilization as a Chinese question’ for the long-existing and continuous Chinese civilization. It overturns the theoretical cornerstone of ‘civilization as a Western question’ long constructed by Western scholars and Western media, and reinvents the previous academic tradition of equating ‘civilizational history’ almost with Western history and ignoring or disregarding the achievements of non-Western civilizations.”
Westerners will find Wen’s thesis challenging. The West’s own generative principle since it first emerged out of the ruins of the Roman Empire is universalist, and the notion that radically different modes of civilization exist runs counter to Western self-understanding.
All civilizations begin with the problem of integrating disparate tribes who speak mutually unintelligible languages and dialects. Western civilization was founded on the universality of Latin first as an administrative language for the Roman Empire and later as the lingua franca of Christendom. Chinese civilization has integrated disparate peoples with a system of characters that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz so admired, plus the meritocracy of the examination system, and national infrastructure.
Unlike Europe, China is united by great river systems whose management has required an enormous centralized effort for at least 5,000 years. China’s geography made a centralized state indispensable.
America’s founding documents proceed from the rights of the individual as granted by “nature and nature’s God,” and view the state as a compact to which individuals assent freely for their mutual protection and benefit, limited by the right of each man to pursue his own mode of happiness, to speak his own mind, and live with a minimum of interference by public entities.
In China, the state is a precondition for a good life among its citizens. China, as Wen emphasizes, has distilled the experience of millennia of settlement; the Chinese were a settled farming folk for almost four thousand years when the ancestors of today’s Westerners — the Goths, Huns, Vikings, Slavs, and others who came to Europe after Rome collapsed — were still migrants.
If China is the epitome of a settled culture, America is the exemplar of a restless one. US culture is suffused with it, from the national novel Huckleberry Finn with its journey that can only begin again, or Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay on the frontier, or Stephen Vincent Benet’s 1943 epic poem Western Star with its opening motto, “Americans are always on the move.”
Wen inveighs against the idea that the West represents a civilizational norm. He is entirely correct: the civilizational norm, if by “norm” we mean the most frequent outcome, is extinction. Linguists estimate that nearly 150,000 languages have been spoken on earth since the dawn of humankind; of these a few thousands still are spoken, a number that will be reduced to a few hundred in a century or so.
But China defies even this normative definition; it is defined not by a spoken language, but by a written language that conveys meaning not by sound-meaning association but by visual representation.
Civilization must find ways to assimilate a myriad of tribes who speak different languages. America solved this problem in the past by assimilating immigrants into a common culture with a common language, such that Americans whose grandparents lived in Poland or Vietnam nonetheless share what Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone.”
Whether it will continue to do so remains to be seen, now that the US project is under assault by theorists who claim America was founded to promote African slavery and other forms of imperial oppression.
China grew from small civilizations in the Yellow River Valley to encompass the whole of the territory from the desert and the Himalayas in the West, the jungles to the south, the frozen wastes to the north, and the sea in the East. It assimilated peoples representing six major and three hundred minor language groups.
In this respect China and America have more in common than any other two countries: They found a solution to the problem of integrating disparate ethnicities into a common polity, albeit by radically different means. But the solutions are so radically different as to produce two cultures that communicate with the greatest of difficulty.
Wen draws a bright line between “sedentary” Chinese civilization and “nomadic” Western civilization. “By analogy”, he writes, “one can sum up the difference in the lives of two individuals by thinking of one as a ‘wanderer’ and the other as a ‘dweller,’ meaning that the former has spent most of his life wandering, travelling or migrating around and the latter has never left the his native land…
“The life of the ‘wanderer’ and the life of the ‘dweller’ are two very different lives. The life
experience and perception, the character, temperament, demeanor and even the appearance of these two individuals will have significant differences. That is especially true if the wandering life of the first individual involves robbing and killing people and taking over the homes of others. If these two individuals meet, they inevitably will feel different in every way and regard each other as belonging to a different kind.”
China, the professor argues, is a “sedentary civilization,” whereas “Western, Orthodox Christian and Islamic civilizations are nomadic or migrant civilizations. Chinese civilization “was continuously settled over 5,000 years in a nearly circular geographical area centered on the Central Plains.”
By contrast, “Western civilization as we know it today is a completely different entity. It is actually a third-generation civilization that was reborn on the ruins of the old civilization, and its birth, growth and expansion were always accompanied by large-scale migrations and invasions.
Wen concludes: “Except for Chinese civilization, the other living great civilizations were not formed by a continuous, large-scale sedentary farming history. Instead, they all inherited the prehistoric lifestyle of hunting and gathering and retained its characteristics long after the genesis of civilization….
“From the perspective of ancient China”, they “resembled the nomadic peoples who appeared from four directions surrounding Zhou dynasty. China viewed them from the perspective of sedentary societies that developed social complexity and a mature writing system, that is, as barbarians: wandering societies that lived without fixed habitation and migrated over long periods of time, whether they were horsemen, camel-riding or boat peoples. The ancient Chinese referred to such societies collectively as ‘Xingguo’ (Moving Kingdom), as distinct from the ‘Juguo’ (Settled Kingdoms) such as ‘Huaxia’ in China.”
“Sedentary” Chinese civilization and “migrant” Western civilization, Wen believes, differ fundamentally in their engagement with the world around them. Westerners should read The Logic of Civilization: The Interaction and Evolution of Chinese and Western Civilization, listen carefully to the professor and make the effort to see China through his eyes.