Sun, Jun 11, 2000 page19

• The true impact of foreign cultures on China

  Western perceptions of China being a culture closed to outside influences has subjected it to scrutiny from other nations, who feel that repression is the natural result of such isolation. Waley-Cohen's fresh look at the past forces us to see it in a new light

  • By Bradley Winterton / SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR
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  This book argues that throughout its history China has been in enthusiastic contact with other civilizations, has traded with them, and been eager to engage in a two-way dialogue with them. In this, it challenges the assumption, wide-spread in the West, that the Celestial Empire was invariably introspective, closed to foreign influences, and permanently reluctant to take part in any form of cultural exchange.

  An air of serene self-sufficiency may sometimes have characterized the pronouncements of the imperial court, but usually the merchant and scientific classes were simultaneously busy forging links with foreigners wherever and whenever they had the opportunity.

  Buddhism, for instance, a belief system of foreign origin, has been influential in China for two thousand years, and huge numbers of Buddhist texts were brought from the Indian subcontinent in the seventh century (many destined to be pillaged by the British explorer Aurel Stein in 1907). Also, from the earliest times China had trading contacts as far away as the Middle East, both by sea and along the Silk Road.

  During the Tang dynasty, several foreigners occupied high positions in the Chinese army, and foreigners are often depicted in Tang pottery figurines. Foreign dance styles, notably from Persia, were fashionable and considered charmingly erotic.

  Later, under the Mongol Yuan dynasty, China was effectively part of a cosmopolitan empire stretching from Korea to the Caucasus. And when the Portuguese arrived on the scene in the early sixteenth century, China's range of contacts became even more extensive.

  Professor Waley-Cohen argues that Chinese technology was often already superior to what was being offered from outside. When Chinese astronomers and mathematicians were skeptical about the Jesuits' information on European developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they had every reason to be.

  Not only were the Jesuits simultaneously telling them a man born in Palestine fifteen hundred years previously was the son of god and that his body had been elevated to heaven on his death; they had also, not long before, been trying to convince them that the stars and planets were embedded in seven transparent crystal spheres that surrounded the earth, when the Chinese already understood them as objects moving according to set rules in an infinite space.

  Nevertheless, after 1644 the newly-established Qing emperor, perceiving the superior skills of the Jesuits in predicting eclipses, appointed a Jesuit to the position of Director of the Imperial Bureau of Astronomy. A sequence of Jesuits held this important post, which included responsibility for regulating the state calendar, for the next 150 years.

  The observatory that still stands in Beijing containing a collection of sextants, and other navigational and astronomical aids made by the Jesuits, is a testimony to both their influence and the Qing emperors' openness to new ideas.

  The author cannot, of course, disregard the so-called "Mandate of Heaven," the perception that peoples were more or less civilized depending on how far they lived from the Chinese heartland. But what she points out is that China has "necessarily and often" departed from this formula since ancient times.

  What she also concedes is that a tension always existed between the reluctance of the emperors to allow foreign ideas undue influence (because they might undermine their own authority), and the enthusiasm of the merchants, intellectuals and diplomats for foreign goods and foreign ideas in virtually every historical period.

  As for the situation at present, according to Professor Waley-Cohen little has changed. The view that China remains obstinately opposed to ideas emanating from outside its borders -- on, for instance, the question of human rights as defined by the West -- she argues is a continuation of the ancient misunderstanding of China in foreign minds.

  And just as the belief that China was locked in a trance of its own making had its uses in justifying attempts to dominate and coerce Beijing with unequal treaties and demands for exorbitant reparations in the past, so today the idea is valuable to American politicians in their efforts to pressurize China into joining a world-order led by the US, and organized to a considerable extent to Washington's advantage.

  Behind the book lies the awareness that China was a great power before most other nations had emerged as states at all, and the belief that before long it will regain that status.

  The author is everywhere conscious of China's extraordinary achievements over a long period of time, and of the wrongs it suffered at the hands of the West in the last 150 years.

  Half the book deals with this later period, a time when the idea that China was "closed" and had to be forced to "open up" began to take hold.

  Events that had a baleful influence on Chinese-foreigner relations, such as the importing of opium by the British to pay for their extensive purchases of Chinese tea, the forceful annexation of Hong Kong after the dispute over the same drug trade, and then the specifically anti-foreigner Boxer movement, all take their place in the narrative.

  Incidentally, the eighteenth century Enlightenment had by contrast been a period of considerable enthusiasm for things Chinese, with progressive thinkers such as Voltaire thinking highly of a society that was perceived as being essentially rational and secular, in contrast to the priest-dominated, backward-looking Europe of the ancient regime.

  This is an excellent book, rooted in scholarly research but accessible, and indeed highly readable.

  It is both clearly and cogently argued.

  It follows in the footsteps of scholars such as the great Joseph Needham in drawing attention to China's intellectual, and especially scientific, achievements in former times.

  If these have been routinely neglected, it is as a result of a pride in the West -- seeing itself as the source of all developments beneficial to humanity -- that is almost indistinguishable from the arrogance and introspection attributed by ignorant outsiders to what was often the cosmopolitan world of China itself.
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