Sun, Jun 04, 2000 page19

• Dissecting the West's perception of Chinese culture through time

  Spence's book is a competent history of how Western literature has embellished and given occasional insight into Chinese culture, but leaves us wondering what influences have painted the Middle Kingdom's perception of the West

  • By Victor Fic / SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR
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  From modern China and Mao to the exploration of long-deceased dynasties, Jonathan Spence has been a regular and critical watcher of the Middle Kingdom. And with The Chan's Great Continent, Spence once again cast an analytical eye over the West's historical visions of China from 1253, forwarding a jumbled collection of perceptions and misperceptions that have shaped our view of the distinctive culture.

  Spence is an American historian of China who arguably leads the field. He can educate serious students of China's history, sociologists of knowledge, and one hopes policymakers astute enough to ask how and why China is being conceptualized, rationalized or judged before they ignore, engage or attack it.

  We encounter Marco Polo first. After summarizing Polo's book, Spence ponders why Polo wrote it. He repeats speculation that Polo sought to win an ambassadorship with his talent. This could be true. Machiavelli wrote The Prince to attain power.

  But while Machiavelli instructed, Polo simply entertained, spinning breathless tales that cast him as perceptive or presumptive, depending on the critic. Unfortunately, Spence does not weigh in with his viewpoint.

  As Spence moves on and delves into Islam's domination of Central Asia, he recounts how religious fervor eventually blocked overland routes to China until the early 1500's, when Magellan's ships charged in by sea. A Portugese trader, Galeote Pereira, eventually told Europe of gruesome Chinese tortures; in one, the victim's thighs were pummeled with split bamboo into bloody flesh. Pereira injected the prejudice of Chinese cruelty into the Western mind and Spence does not note that Pereira's West preferred to burn heretics at the stake.

  The Chinese speaking Jesuit Matteo comes next. He preached that one could follow both Confucious and Christ because ancestor worship was a social, not a spiritual, act. Ricci's often insightful writing hugely advanced Europe's grasp of China.

  However, a century later, the Spanish Dominican Domingo Navarrete exemplified those who hopelessly idealize China with comical hypothesis, including one that alleged that Chinese urine fertilizes crops while European urine burns them.

  Soon, men of power replaced men of the cloth. The representative George Anson, a practical and candid English Admiral, scorned Chinese cunning in the 1740s. He noted how sellers crammed chickens with water or stones to make them heavier, but he overlooked the many false prophets in Europe defrauding the gullible.

  Fiction writers were also significant. Often, writers before Daniel Dafoe had didactically used a "moral" China as their foil for excoriating the West. In 1719, Dafoe instead condemned China's decadence and self-regard to compliment English, middle-class sensibilities. Originally, he had been a China lover. Dafoe's case was an example of how China could stir up strong passion, leading to conversions that seem more emotional than rational.

  The most complex era for China watching was the Enlightenment. Its thinkers sought to understand smaller social and moral systems, and then integrate these into an over-arching one.

  The brilliant German metaphysician Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz essayed to fit China into his capacious world view during the early 1700s. One concurs with this conclusion that Chinese people are not warlike, but rejects his patronizing assertion that the West needs missionaries from China.

  Writers again added to the West's understanding or ignorance of China. In 1910, for instance, Englishman Sax Rohmer created the evil Fu Manchu, a racist, bony monster, served by a sexy, enslaved, reptile-like woman. After WWI, a resuscitated interest in traditional Chinese themes and romantic characters ensued. Fortunately, Pearl Buck countered Rohmer's racism with her hit novel The Good Earth in the 1930s. It chronicled the bitter-sweet life of the Chinese peasant, and indicated that the West's narrow mind can also open.

  A dense chapter explores Western intellectual conclusions about power and social justice in China.

  In his 1957 opus Oriental Despotism, American Karl Wittfogel identified China's towering Qin emperor, Qinshihuangdi, as the architect of a totalitarian state. In its Communist form, it rendered man lonely, afraid and doomed. Maybe capitalism will leave him selfish, corrupt and doomed, begging the question of whether there is a middle way for the Middle Kingdom?

  Literary lions, like the Italian wordsmith Italo Calvino, end the book. In 1972, he penned a subtle, sophisticated dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo.

  The king asks his servant if he will repeat his many tales once home. The young Italian tells the old Mongol, "It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear."

  Spence impresses with the range of his mind, which grasps each era's dominant theme, and its nuances, in a charging narrative. Polished prose embellishes this pithy, yet learned work.

  However, the author wrongly claims that his work is widely accessible.

  The challenging Wittfogel chapter melds history, politics and anthropology. Also, in several chapters, a question begs to be answered.

  Finally, Spence should tell us how China has viewed the West through the ages, which would surely add informative counterbalance and a few entertaining moments to this historical tour of a much misunderstood society.
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