Jottings from the Granite Studio

Rather fascinating op-ed piece in today’s Shanghai Daily. In it the author argues that the spirit of interaction with the world, so essential to China’s recent development, was part of a long tradition of openness that predated the rise of Europe as a global center.

However, one question needs to be asked and answered clearly: What drove China to change in the 1970s?

Was a time-honored national spirit to innovate and open up ultimately revived, or was it worship of the Western model? Or both?

If not properly answered, the question may linger to puzzle the nation as it searches the best way of furthering reform, not just of its economy, but of its values.

If you believe that China has always or mostly been a “feudal and a closed” society in the last 2,000 years - as many Westerners claim - you probably would also believe that the best way of further reform is to copy the Western model.

If you believe that China has, for most of its civilization, been an open and innovative society - even more open one way or another than the Western world can imagine today - you might consider our Chinese ancestors as a unique source of inspiration, in addition to lending your ears to the Western voice.

The author cites the famous historian Qian Mu, who felt that China’s reputation as a ‘closed society’ was itself a product of Western arrogance and ignorance. Especially galling for Qian was the internalization of this discourse by Chinese, leading them to assume that the only true form for an open society was to ape the models of Europe and America.

According to Qian Mu (1895 - 1990), one of the most famous historians in modern China, China was open to trade, cultural and religious exchanges with India and the Arab world for about 1,400 years since the Qin Dynasty (221 - 206 BC).

Qian was especially annoyed at the notion that China was long a “feudal and despotic” country, a notion adopted by many Chinese and Westerners.

In Chinese dynasties, he said, it was impossible for an emperor to be a despot as was the case with many Western empires, because his prime minister was a powerful source of checks and balances.

China became somehow closed only from the Ming Dynasty (1368 -1644). Wouldn’t it be revealing if one studies what made China open and free for more than 1,000 years while Europe was in the dark, and what closed China when Europe was open and free?

Today, few historians in the West would argue that China was either closed, feudal, or despotic in the imperial age (roughly Han through Qing). The different dynasties themselves showed considerable variation in both their internal dynamics as well as their policies toward trade and foreign contact. Even the Ming, famous for bringing home the treasure fleets of Zheng He, could never really be considered a closed society as trade flourished between the merchants of China’s southeastern provinces and the kingdoms of Southeast Asia.

To call China in the imperial period ‘feudal’ is to apply the crudest of Marxist teminology. There was very little feudal about Chinese society after the decline of the Zhou. As for despotism, well that may be in the eye of the beholder. I might argue that China became increasingly despotic in the Ming, following the rather brutal style of the Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang (who was himself influenced by the ruling style of the previous dynasty-the Mongol Yuan). The first Ming emperor, one of history’s great micro-managers, also did away with the office of prime minister, making the subsequent Ming emperors their own heads of government and thus removing an important check on imperial power. Certainly China had no parallels with democratic Greece or republican Rome, but neither was it generally ruled by tyrants or dictators. Even the most powerful emperor needed the help of his bureaucracy and the scholar-official class to rule his realm.

The hoary old myth of closed, unchanging China has hopefully died an appopriate death. Here’s to wishing a similar fate upon the old chestnut about China’s entry into the modern world being the sole result of the “Western impact” and the “Chinese response.” The truth is that China was always a dynamic place, in many eras a key center in a multi-polar global order that spanned–at the very least–the Eurasian landmass. China’s dynasties absorbed a great deal of “foreign” influence–whether it was Indian Buddhism, the ruling style and policies of the steppe following the chaos of the Six Dynasties period, the cultures and customs of the indigenous peoples of Taiwan and Southwest China, or the ideas of Europeans in the 19th century. Far from being either static or homogenous, “China” is as much a product of its influences as any civilization.

Let us hope that today’s Chinese remember this glorious history of global interaction and continue on in welcoming the world. China has much to offer and the world has much to offer back. To accept this is not to bow to the West, it is to continue a tradition that dates back millennia, and it’s a tradition worth keeping alive today.