A unique civilization

Book argues China cannot be judged through the prism of Western standards, David Paul Goldman writes.

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 project by the United States of propagating US democracy throughout the world associated with former 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 US. 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 a columnist, 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 nation-state 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.

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. In quite a different way, China's civilization is universalist as well.

Chinese civilization has integrated disparate peoples with a system of characters that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz so admired, the meritocracy of the examination system, and national infrastructure.

China's geography made a centralized state indispensable. The US' 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 4,000 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, the US is the exemplar of a restless one. Our culture is suffused with it, from our 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". Hollywood made migration to the West a metaphor of redemption, as in John Ford's 1939 film Stagecoach. In the US journey, it is not the destination but the journey that matters, and it is a journey that by its nature cannot reach its destination, because the "heavenly city" is not to be found on Earth.

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 thousand 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. The US 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 that the country 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 300 minor language groups.

In this respect, China and the US 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, traveling or migrating around and the latter has never left 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, argues Wen, 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. The major historical events were, respectively, the invasion of the Roman Empire by the barbarians around the 5th century AD, the crusades from the 11th to 13th centuries, and the great exploration and colonization of the New World after the 15th century. These three great migrations have constituted the main line of this civilization throughout its history, from its birth to the present day, and are characterized by Leopold Ranke as 'three deep breaths'."

He 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 the Zhou Dynasty (c.11th century-256 BC).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 kingdoms), 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 Wen and make the effort to see China through his eyes.

The author is deputy editor of Asia Times.