Today, the high-speed growth of the People’s Republic is transforming Western attitudes once again, attracting excitement and enthusiasm in business and media alike, with a wave of fashion and fascination recalling the chinoiserie of rococo Europe. Sinophobia has by no means disappeared. But another round of Sinomania is in the making.
China is not like other nations, indeed is not really a nation-state at all. It is something vaster and deeper, a ‘civilisation-state’, inheritor of the oldest continuous history in the world, whose underlying cultural unity and self-confidence are without equal. Long before the West, its rulers created the first modern bureaucracy, imbued with a Confucian outlook at once authoritarian and democratic, controlling domestic subjects more by moral education than force, and organising adjacent regions into a consensual tributary system. By absorbing feudal aristocrats into impersonal state service, they freed market forces from customary constraints to develop a commercial society of unparalleled dynamism and sophistication. Only the accident of more readily available coal at home, and ruthless colonial pillage of resources overseas, allowed 19th-century Europe to overtake this great proto-modern economy, as industrialised in its way as the West, and much larger. But this Western predominance will prove a brief interval. Today, China is returning once more to its historic position as the dynamic centre of the global economy.
Yet we also need to be aware that ‘the Chinese regard themselves as superior to the rest of the human race,’ inheriting a Middle Kingdom mentality that has always been more or less racist, and traditions of tributary statecraft that may have been conducive to stability, but were always based on hierarchy and inequality. Might this heritage compromise the fair prospect of a democratic inter-state system? Not necessarily, since while ‘the Western world is over, the new world, at least for the next century, will not be Chinese in the way that the previous one was Western’. The book, in other words, disowns its own title, confected purely to increase sales. China is not going to rule the world. All that is happening is that ‘we are entering an era of competing modernity’ in which China will ‘increasingly be in the ascendant and eventually dominant’.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n02/perry-anderson/sinomania
China is not like other nations, indeed is not really a nation-state at all. It is something vaster and deeper, a ‘civilisation-state’, inheritor of the oldest continuous history in the world, whose underlying cultural unity and self-confidence are without equal. Long before the West, its rulers created the first modern bureaucracy, imbued with a Confucian outlook at once authoritarian and democratic, controlling domestic subjects more by moral education than force, and organising adjacent regions into a consensual tributary system. By absorbing feudal aristocrats into impersonal state service, they freed market forces from customary constraints to develop a commercial society of unparalleled dynamism and sophistication. Only the accident of more readily available coal at home, and ruthless colonial pillage of resources overseas, allowed 19th-century Europe to overtake this great proto-modern economy, as industrialised in its way as the West, and much larger. But this Western predominance will prove a brief interval. Today, China is returning once more to its historic position as the dynamic centre of the global economy.
Yet we also need to be aware that ‘the Chinese regard themselves as superior to the rest of the human race,’ inheriting a Middle Kingdom mentality that has always been more or less racist, and traditions of tributary statecraft that may have been conducive to stability, but were always based on hierarchy and inequality. Might this heritage compromise the fair prospect of a democratic inter-state system? Not necessarily, since while ‘the Western world is over, the new world, at least for the next century, will not be Chinese in the way that the previous one was Western’. The book, in other words, disowns its own title, confected purely to increase sales. China is not going to rule the world. All that is happening is that ‘we are entering an era of competing modernity’ in which China will ‘increasingly be in the ascendant and eventually dominant’.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n02/perry-anderson/sinomania
No comments:
Post a Comment
PLEASE send comments to
cheeverspeter@hotmail,com