Unschuld - The fall and rise of China : healing the trauma of history

A nations past is easily forgotten
and also not so easily forgotten

A Cheng

IN JANUARY 2011, when Hu Jintao, the president of the Peoples Republic of China, was welcomed by U.S. president Barack Obama on a state visit to Washington, DC, the official protocol conveyed the impression that here, two heads of state were meeting as equals. Pundits even called the Chinese leader the most powerful person in the world a designation long reserved for the American president.

During the preceding century and a half China had been consistently humiliated, first by the Western imperial powers and then even more by its smaller island neighbour, Japan. For a time the Middle Kingdom seemed on the verge of becoming a pawn of foreign interests. Toward the close of the last imperial dynasty, internal conflicts further eroded the great countrys global standing to its nadir.

Then, in a process probably unmatched in history, this great culture laid low by another, younger civilization recovered vigorously from its seemingly hopeless plight so much so that today the state and its leaders, with its burgeoning economic and military might, are again globally acknowledged and not infrequently feared.

This Herculean task could only be accomplished because China, confronted by the evident superiority of Western science and technology, had committed to an unsparing self-diagnosis which identified the aspects of Western civilization the country had to adopt in order to remove the cultural impediments to Chinas own renaissance. Instead of venting its many individual aversions to the West as collective hatred of the aggressors, China took a path of reason and fundamental renewal.

In the course of their confrontation with Western culture, Chinese intellectuals and policy-makers swiftly recognized that their country could not hope to stand up to the imperialist powers simply by buying Western weapons and technology. Beginning in the early twentieth century, therefore, attention was lavished on the full spectrum of Western thinking. Discussions over how best to pull the country out of its misery quoted the most diverse philosophers from the past and present of both Europe and America. In the middle of the century, ongoing intellectual disputes and violent conflicts culminated in the Peoples Republic of China, which, gripped for two more decades by extremist political turmoil, itself appeared closer to economic oblivion than to a new age of regional let alone global dominance. Only from the early 1970s did China begin to reap the rewards of having examined its own cultural past and the Western civilization that was believed to be superior in so many ways.

The first half of this book traces the course of Chinas agony in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The facts are familiar to anyone who knows the country; I have sequenced them here in a concise form. The second half of the book explores a distinctive feature of Chinas resurgence that has not previously been identified as such. China sought responsibility for its predicament, as well as the healing of its collective trauma, exclusively within itself. The long-prevalent mentality in Europe of blaming ones own misfortune on the actual or alleged parties that caused it, and of demanding their future support, was and remains alien to China, irrespective of the countrys adoption of Marxist thought and the Communist Partys leading role in society.

Profoundly wounded by both the Western nations and Japan, China prescribed for itself a therapy that followed the same principle that Chinese medicine uses in treating individual illnesses: the cause lies first and foremost within oneself. Evil can penetrate from outside only if one opens up a breach for it. Prevention and therapy must therefore always begin with ones own deficiencies and mistakes.

One can certainly characterize the patterns of Chinas relations with the West as a clash of cultures, but this struggle is not marked by terrorist attacks and counterstrikes. It is a quiet and subtle conflict, and it is still far from clear which side will be victorious.