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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 4, 2009
Mourning China
The 20th century was a disaster in the history of China, even before the Communists came to power in 1949.An ancient empire that was also an ancient civilization had already endured a massive collision with the civilization of Europe, in which Europe had prevailed. The latter was quite aggressive, the former by its circumstances mostly passive, and the conventional wisdom is that this alone explains the dissolution of the former. Conventional views are usually wrong, but can be interesting insofar as they may point to the truth by their very inversion of it. The Opium Wars and other military encounters are perhaps over-emphasized in what was more comprehensively a "clash of civilizations" -- a collision between European and Chinese understandings of the world itself, in which the self-confidence of the Middle Kingdom was lethally undermined. The mind of China became partially westernized; the mind of Europe, for all the pleasure it took in acquiring a taste for Chinoiserie -- from the admirable Analects of Confucius to the incomparable stoneware pots of the Song Dynasty -- did not become Sinified. To my dangerously self-tutored historical sense, it seems that China had been overrun by "barbarians" before -- by Mongols, and Manchurians -- and yet assimilated each conqueror and "raised" them to the standards of Chinese civilization. But the European "barbarians" who began arriving at China's gates half a millennium ago were the end of everything. The final demise was projected in the hopeless revolt of the "Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists" (or "Boxers"), at the turn of the last century, against imperialist flunkeys, foreign investors, evangelical missionaries. The rebellion fatally weakened an already tottering Qing Dynasty, which needed foreign help to put it down -- and thereby enabled the nationalist and republican overthrow of the Qing regime in 1911. China's independence became predicated on its transformation into an explicitly western-style nation state, with parodies of western subsidiary institutions and constitutional principles. The vast territory and population remained ungovernable, however. A Communist Revolution was enabled by the further catastrophe of the Second World War. Mao Tse-tung -- one of the great monsters of history, whose human victims numbered in the tens of millions -- was long respected in the west for establishing order, and more strangely, for "restoring Chinese self-respect." Yet his regime was the parody of a parody of western ideas, several times removed: a Chinese "peasant" adaptation of Lenin's murderous Soviet interpretation of Marx's narrowly socialist recasting of false Enlightenment doctrines that were themselves a parody of naive millenarian and utopian tendencies within earlier Christian heresies. It was a regime that murdered history as well as men, a regime that from its first triumph eradicated everything that remained of China's old order with puritanical zeal, including the highest received moral and spiritual attitudes of her people. No Imperial power could ever have dreamed of wreaking destruction on the Maoist scale. This Maoist heritage was saluted Thursday, in the baldly fascist choreography of a vast lock-step parade, with military hardware, through a Beijing locked down against civil disturbance. Mao himself has been exhumed as symbol, with a new portrait by anonymous retouchers, presenting the old psychopath as the perfumed embodiment of an ageless benevolence. At Tiananmen Square, 20 years ago, Mao's successors demonstrated that they had learned from Soviet mistakes. To retain power they would henceforth embrace an almost wild-west capitalism and found military strength on economic success, while retaining Big Brother's instruments of domestic oversight. The loyalty of their subjects would be guaranteed by the pay-off of a superficial prosperity, combined with emotional appeals no longer to a defunct ideology, but instead to a frank racial chauvinism. Mainland Chinese statistics are probably no more reliable today than they were when Mao was alive, but it is obvious to the senses that urban China at least has become, by conventional historical comparisons, remarkably wealthy. Yet not as wealthy as Taiwan, which effected a proportionally greater transformation with no help from Communist tyranny. The current wealth of China owes everything to the focused industry of individual Chinese, nothing to the State that harvests it. Conventional historical comparisons are also wrong, however. The centre of Shanghai may gleam today with incredibly crass displays of an overbearing materialism. But we should be haunted by the memory of Suzhou -- a few bends up the Yangtze delta. The centre to this day of Chinese silk production, Suzhou was a very wealthy trading city 1,000 years ago. That wealth was combined with extraordinary beauty, and cultural refinement. Ghosts of its laneways and tree-lined canals, its gardens and pavilions, theatres and tea shops, temples, pagodas and lake vistas -- the objects of much fanatic vandalism in the Maoist heyday -- lie today mostly under the sprawl of highways and shopping malls; the surviving fragments from a continuous history of 25 centuries tarted up and pimped to ignorant tourists. Were I Chinese, I would observe every anniversary of Oct. 1, 1949, as a day of fast and mourning, for the sacrifice of all that was best in China, for all that was worst in the West. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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