Two of the most obvious continuities in Chinese civilization, both of which can be traced back to Confucius, concern the state and education. The state has always been perceived as the embodiment and guardian of Chinese civilization, which is why, in both the dynastic and Communist eras, it has enjoyed such huge authority and legitimacy. Amongst its constellation of responsibilities, the state, most importantly of all, has the sacred task of maintaining the unity of Chinese civilization. Unlike in the Western tradition, the role of government has no boundaries; rather like a parent, with which it is often compared, there are no limits to its authority. Paternalism is regarded as a desirable and necessary characteristic of government. Although in practice the state has always been rather less omnipotent that this might suggest, there is no doubting the reverence and deference which the Chinese display towards it. [600] Similarly, the roots of China ’s distinctive concept of education and parenting lie deep in its civilizational past. Ever since Mencius (372–289 BC), a disciple of Confucius, the Chinese have always been optimistic about human nature, believing that people were essentially good and that, by bringing children up in the right manner through the appropriate parenting and education, they would acquire the correct attitudes, values and self-discipline. In the classroom, children are expected to look respectfully upwards towards the teacher and, given the towering importance of history, reverentially backwards to the past in terms of the content of their learning. Education is vested with the authority and reverence of Chinese civilization, with teachers the bearers and transmitters of that wisdom. A high priority is placed on training and technique, as compared with the openness and creativity valued in the West, with the result that Chinese children often achieve a much higher level of technical competence at a much younger age in music and art, for example, than their Western counterparts. Perhaps this stems partly from the use of an ideographic language, which requires the rote learning of thousands of characters, and the ability to reproduce those characters with technical perfection. [601]
In stressing the continuity of Chinese civilization, it can reasonably be objected that over a period of more than two millennia, it has been through such huge and often violent disruptions and discontinuities that there can be little resemblance between China now and two millennia ago. At one level, of course, this is true. China has changed beyond recognition. But at another level the lines of continuity are stubborn and visible. This is reflected in the self-awareness of the Chinese themselves: the way in which Chinese civilization — as expressed in history, ways of thinking, customs and etiquette, traditional medicine and food, calligraphy, the role of government and the family — remains their primary point of reference. [602] Wang Gungwu argues that ‘what is quintessentially Chinese is the remarkable sense of continuity that seems to have made the civilization increasingly distinctive over the centuries. ’ [603] Given that since 221 BC China has been unified for 1,074 years, partially unified for 673 years, and disunited for 470 years, while experiencing several major invasions and occupations over the last millennium, this is, to put it mildly, remarkable. [604] Yet the very nature of those occupations points to the strength of Chinese culture and its underlying resilience and continuity: the proto-Mongol Liao dynasty (AD 907- 1125) was the first non-Chinese dynasty in north China; the Jin dynasty (1115–1234) were Mongol; the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) were also Mongol and the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) were Manchu, but they all sooner or later went native and were Sinicized. In each instance Chinese culture enjoyed very considerable superiority over its invaders. Even the earlier Buddhist ‘invasion’ from India in the first century AD was to culminate in the Sinification of Buddhist teachings over a period of hundreds of years. [605]
The challenge of the West from around 1850 was an entirely different proposition: key aspects of Western culture, notably its scientific orientation and knowledge, were patently superior to traditional Confucianism and plunged it into a deepening crisis as the Chinese reluctantly sought some kind of reconciliation between traditional and Western values. Between 1911 and 1949 virtually no institution of significance (constitution, university, press, Church, etc.) lasted in its existing form for more than a generation, such was the gravity and enduring nature of China ’s impasse. The Western challenge de-centred Chinese assumptions. Eventually, when all else had failed, the Chinese turned to Communism, or more specifically Maoism, which involved the explicit rejection of Confucianism. Yet during the Maoist period, Confucian values and ways of thinking continued to be influential, albeit in a subterranean form, remaining in some measure the common sense of the people. Even now, having succeeded in reversing its decline and in the midst of modernization, China is still troubled by the relationship between Chinese and Western cultures and the degree to which it might find itself Westernized, as we saw in the discussion amongst the students in Chapter 5. Somehow, however, through the turbulence, carnage, chaos and rebirth, China remains recognizably and assuredly Chinese. As it moves once more into the ascendant, its self-confidence inflated by its recent achievements, China ’s search for meaning is drawing not simply on modernity, but also, and as always, on its civilizational past. Confucian ways of thinking, never extinguished, are being actively revived and scrutinized for any light that they might throw on the present, and for their ability to offer a moral compass.
For many developing countries, the process of modernization has been characterized by a crisis of identity, often exacerbated by the colonial experience, a feeling of being torn between their own culture and that of the West, linked to an inferiority complex about their own relative backwardness. The Chinese certainly felt a sense of humiliation, but never the same kind of overwhelming and hobbling inferiority: they have always had a strong sense of what it means to be Chinese and are very proud of the fact. Such is the strength of Chineseness, indeed, that it has tended to blur and overshadow — in contrast to India, for example — other powerful identities such as region, class and language. This sense of belonging is rooted in China ’s civilizational past, [606] which serves to cohere an enormous population otherwise fragmented by dialect, custom, ethnic difference, geography, climate, level of economic development and disparate living standards. ‘What binds the Chinese together,’ Lucian Pye argues, ‘is their sense of culture, race, and civilization, not an identification with the nation as a state.’ [607]
To describe China in terms of a nation-state, thus, is largely to miss the point. ‘ China is a civilization pretending,’ Pye argues, ‘to be a nation-state.’ [608] The consequences of the fact that China is really a civilization-state are manifold. [609] The civilization-state generates, as we shall see later, a very different kind of politics from that of a conventional nation-state, with unity, rooted in the idea of civilization rather than nation, the overriding priority. As a civilization-state, China embodies and allows a plurality of systems, as exemplified by Hong Kong, that is alien to the nation-state, which demands and requires a much greater degree of homogeneity. The civilization-state has engendered distinctively Chinese notions of race and ethnicity, with the Han race regarded as more or less coterminous with ancient Chinese civilization, as we shall see in the next chapter. The civilization-state embodies a far more intimate relationship not simply with China’s relatively recent history, as in the case of the average nation-state, but, most strikingly, with at least two millennia of history, such that the latter is constantly intervening in and acting as a guide and yardstick in the present. And it is the civilization-state which serves as a continuous reminder that China is the Middle Kingdom, thereby occupying, as the centre of the world, a quite different position to all other states. The term ‘civilization’ normally suggests a rather distant and indirect influence and an inert and passive presence. In China ’s case, however, it is not only history that lives but civilization itself: the notion of a living civilization provides the primary identity and context by which the Chinese think of their country and define themselves.
[600] Tu Wei-ming,
[601] Howard Gardner,
[602] Interview with Huang Ping, Beijing, 10 December 2005; Huang Ping, ‘“Bei jing Consensus”, or “Chinese Experiences”, or What?’, p. 7.
[603] Wang Gungwu,
[604] Diana Lary, ‘Regions and Nation: The Present Situation in China in Historical Context’,
[605] Tu Wei-ming,
[606] Also, Shi Anbin, ‘Mediating Chinese-ness: Identity Politics and Media Culture in Contemporary China’, in Anthony Reid and Zheng Yangwen, eds,