Robert C. Solomon - From Africa to Zen: An Invitation to World Philosophy

David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames

Late in the evening of June 4, 1989, government tanks rolled into Beijings Tiananmen Square, the symbolic center of China, to clear the square of protesters. Snapshot: Scorching lights advancing across the square reduce everything to outline as a tent is caught and half-flattened beneath the treads of a tank steamrolling its straight line across the square. Snapshot: A terrified young soldier with rifle still hot and smoking is being dragged from a jeep by faceless arms into the maw of a frenzied crowd. Snapshot: Three students stand atop a tour bus that has been detained and searched, and as proof that its civilian occupants are Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers, the students hold up an automatic weapon and two helmets for the crowd to see. Snapshot: The plaster Goddess of Democracy lies broken in several pieces. A heavy armored vehicle has pulled it from its wooden stand, and it has toppled through the many institutional flags that still fly around its base. Snapshot: A student turns back with contorted face as he sees the young woman in a pink dress running beside him reel and fall face forward onto the pavement. Snapshot: The stiff, charred body of a PLA soldier, naked except for his hat and shoes, is kept upright against the shell of a burned-out bus by taut wire wrapped around his neck; He killed four people is written with masking tape on the bus beside him.

Unfortunately, we have become increasingly familiar with scenes such as these over the past generation. The news media have provided vivid accounts of events apparently similar to the Tiananmen incident: protesters with placards and loudspeakers exhorting liberal reforms and proclaiming certain victory for their cause; soldiers, in helmets and khaki uniforms, firing upon their fellow citizens.

Were we to look at Tiananmen through Chinese eyes, however, would we really see an event explicable in the terms used to explain student protests in our own country or, for that matter, the broader acts of governmental violence in the Middle East, South Africa, or Eastern Europe?

Instinctively, we believe that pain and the brutality that causes it are the same around the globe. But much of what we are coming to understand about China and its people tells us that there is an otherness about the Chinese sensibility which defies immediate understanding in either the terms of our common sense or the terms of the abstract categories and principles associated with the sort of intellectual analysis philosophers are apt to attempt.

For example, how are we to interpret the incident at Tiananmen as a democratic revolt if in our democracy there is a prevailing conception of personhood that entails natural rights, free choice, independence, autonomy, and so on, while in China such values, far from being self-evident and normative, have traditionally been regarded by even the sagest Chinese as sociopathic?

Of course the rhetoric of a democratic society such as ours must insist that the dictum all men are created equal applies to all human beings and that, therefore, the Chinese are fundamentally the same as us, differing only in such incidentals as their use of chopsticks, the shape of their eyes, and so forth. Such rhetoric was responsible for the blithe, clichd interpretation assumed by much of the American news coverage of Tiananmen: An unpopular and tyrannical government crushes young George Washingtons.

Yet this belief in a common humanity is belied by the xenophobic stereotypes that have become part of our understanding of things Chinese. The most familiar associations of the word Chinese in our popular discourse are puzzling, confusing, absurd. There are many examples of this sort of understanding. A perplexing puzzle that is found to have no solution is called a Chinese puzzle. When someone does mischief to himself to spite another, he has taken a Chinese revenge. A Chinese flush in poker has only the same color to recommend it. Chinese screwdriver is Australian slang for a hammer. A Chinese fire drill is a college prank in which, while stopped at a traffic signal, students leap from an automobile, run around in circles, and reenter the car just as the light changes. Finally, to end this rather ignoble litany, there is a familiar expression: Someone or something has a Chinamans chancethat is, practically no chance at all.