Orientalism In Sinology 9789781936005

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ORIENTALISM IN SINOLOGY

ORIENTALISM IN SINOLOGY

ADRIAN CHAN

ACADEMICA PRESS BETHESDA – DUBLIN - PALO ALTO

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Chan, Adrian, 1936Orientalism in sinology / Adrian Chan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 9789781936005 1. China—Study and teaching—History. 2. Orientalism I. Title. DS734.95.C39 2010 (pbk.) 951.0072—dc22 2010023694

Copyright 2010 by Adrian Chan

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Academica Press, LLC Box 60728 Cambridge Station Palo Alto, CA. 94306 Website: www.academicapress.com to order: 650-329-0685

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD: Gerald Chan

vii

PREFACE

xi

INTRODUCTION: Orientalism in Sinology

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CHAPTER ONE: In the Beginning: the Cosmogonic Divide

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CHAPTER TWO: Universalism and Ethnocentrism Christianity, Chinese Culture and Sinology

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CHAPTER THREE: A Supplanting Vocabulary

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CHAPTER FOUR: The Orientalist Odyssey: I

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CHAPTER FIVE: The Orientalist Odyssey II

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CHAPTER SIX: Contemporary Politics and Orientalism, Or the Empire Strikes Back!

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CHAPTER SEVEN: Reasons for its Persistence: By Way of a Conclusion INDEX

147 157

FOREWORD

For most of us trudging through the challenging terrain of China studies, we tend to focus rather narrowly on our chosen topics of study, paying relatively little attention to the approach that we use. We tend to accept what our teachers have told us and what their teachers had told them, and seldom question the methodology that we adopt in our area of study. We feel comfortable working within a paradigm that the majority of us share, under the guiding hands of our mentors. We happily conduct our ‘normal’ science, patting the back of our colleagues labouring under the same paradigm and largely ignoring those who disagree with us, for they rock the boat and demean us and our teachers. In his latest book on Orientalism in Sinology, Dr Adrian Chan points out that some of us, including those who lead the field, do precisely that. To him, Sinology is a study of aspects of Chinese culture and a report of findings of such study in a language other than Chinese. Sinology was started in Europe by missionaries, who worked hard to spread the message of the Christian god to save the souls of heathens from sins through salvation. They marched with soldiers and merchants to look for fortunes in various parts of the world, including the Far East (a reference to themselves as coming from the Centre). Early sinologists found interests in language, culture, philosophy, and religion, and their influence on how modern sinologists choose their topics and adopt their approach remains strong through their construction of the academic institution that conditions the work of us all, to a greater or lesser extent. Orientalism, on the other hand, is a term borrowed from Edward Said to refer to the extension of the European material world to understand the East, a social phenomenon that entrenches the use of European eyes to view and European minds to think about social developments in the East, to the extent of

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imposing ways, knowingly and unknowingly, on others to solve social problems in the East, using models developed and experiences gained in the West. Anything that does not fit into such models and experiences is regarded as ‘uncivilised’ and therefore subject to punishments according to ‘civilised’ rules and laws. A major clash between early missionaries and traditional Chinese Confucian scholars concerns the existence of a Christian creator-god and the inborn of sin. To the Chinese, there is no single god, neither are human beings born with original sin. These are foreign concepts imposed on them since their early contacts with the missionaries who crossed oceans to ‘save’ them. If the Chinese don’t have the concept or word for god and sin, then new words and new concepts have to be invented to name in the local language to capture them. Hence the sinologists use a supporting vocabulary to study China and things Chinese. Successive sinologists and scholars of Chinese history and culture inherit such tools of trade which discriminate Chinese way of thinking and behaving, a major point of critique offered by Dr Chan in his book. He is pessimistic that a way can be found to bridge the philosophical gap between the East and the West, which exists in academic scholarship and which underpins the schism between Roman Catholicism and Chinese traditionalism. In the study of a foreign culture, it seems the only available point of reference is fortunately or unfortunately one’s own. The important point is of course whether one realises one’s own bias or not: whether one is claiming universalism out of parochialism or not. One can ignore or reject such state of affairs and carry on researching and publishing based on one’s assumed higher moral ground, like a high priest or an academic hegemon in action. Or one can understand the situation, acknowledge the inequity in knowledge growth and development, and spell it out in order to strike a balance between knowing but ignoring the issue on the one hand and on the other knowing but taking action to address the issue in one’s academic endeavour.

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The latter group of scholars is a rare breed, and Dr Chan is one of them: a voice in the wilderness; a rebel with a cause; a child who cries the king is naked. For his warmth and courage to speak out from his personal odyssey, we have real reasons to be grateful. Gerald Chan Cambridge, England Auckland, New Zealand

PREFACE

Even before I started this project, a respected and senior colleague, on knowing my wish on the project, advised me that Professor Edward Said's critique in his ORIENTALISM is too imprecise and that sinologists are generally too precise to fall into that trap and advised me to stop wasting my time to continue with the project. I did not take his kindly advice. Upon publication, I sent a copy to an equally senior and respected colleague whose judgment I respect, his comment was that it was my best effort especially the arguments. That seems to equalize my seniors. Since then, many colleagues thought that I did not respect my elders and betters. To that, I have been assuaged by the Chinese adage that "the waves at the front are pushed by those at the back." To me, that shows that in scholarship, longevity does not necessarily lead to superiority. My Christian friends and relations thought that I have been influenced too much by my reading of the books of Professors Richard Dawkins and Anthony C. Grayling but they are countered by non-religious friends who thought that the message should have been 'required reading to all high schools and colleges students and that it should be read loud an clear. I am also indebted to my publisher, Academica Press, to bring out a paperback edition in April, 2010, hopefully in time for the new academic year. I am also greatly indebted to my colleague, Professor Gerald Chan [no relation] who honoured me with a Foreword. Professor Chan and I went back a long time when he was an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. He then went to the Durham University of Great Britain to be the Chair of its East Asia and Politics Center and the Director of Contemporary Chinese Studies at the School of

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Government and International Affairs. However, just prior to the recent severe European winter, he had the foresight to return to the warmer climes of New Zealand where he has accepted the Chair of Chinese Politics and International Studies at the Auckland University in New Zealand. I am most grateful for his encouragement and comments in his Foreword. I trust that if future readers have serious disagreements with my arguments, I am sure the Publisher will be generous enough if they will contact them for my e-mail and postal addresses.

Adrian Chan Sydney, Australia.

INTRODUCTION ORIENTALISM IN SINOLOGY Since the late and lamented Edward Said popularized the term Orientalism, it seems that the sinologists world-wide have been fighting a rear guard battle in trying to maintain their traditional of Orientalist mode of scholarship. By Orientalism, Said suggested it is ‘an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imaginary, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles.’ [Said, 1995 Orientalism, p.2] If this is so, I shall argue, was because the very subject of ‘sinology’ was founded by Christian missionaries who held a cosmogony that was in opposite with that in Chinese culture and whose very vocation demanded that they must regard theirs as universally valid and true, and so must called for the rejection the Chinese cosmogony. Indeed, the term ‘sinology’ has no Chinese equivalence which I shall take it to mean as the study of aspects of Chinese culture while reporting ones findings in a language other than Chinese. As this is a critique of mainly English sinological scholarship and I am writing in English, I shall continue to use that term if only it would be too inconvenient to invent another one. In the cosmogonic theory of Sinology’s Christian missionary pioneers, their cosmogony—the theory of the origins of the cosmos—their world was created by their Creator-God in seven days. They would regard this cosmogony as the only valid one. In Chinese culture, the origin of the cosmos was a hun-dun condition, an amorphous cosmic stuff with unlimited potentials, or cosmic soup, such as an Uncarved Block. {Tao Te Ching, Nos. 15 & 19 etc] So everything that

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exist has the right to exist and there is no word for the Christian concept of sin— transgression against the Creator-God. As the rationale of their profession as Christian missionaries was to save the heathen Chinese from rampant sins, sinology’s missionary pioneers had to reject China’s cosmogony and gave to Chinese culture not only sin—by substituting with zui—crime or transgression against a temporal authority. They also gave to the Chinese ‘god’ and ‘heaven’. The first chapter o this study is to explore the implications of this cosmogonic divide between sinology’s Christian missionary pioneers and the cosmogony in Chinese culture. As their cosmogonies also informed them how to achieve moral improvement, the Christians must reject the way of China’s major moral philosopher, Confucius, who endeavoured to improve himself from the age of 15 and hoped that by 70 he would achieve the happy state of having what he ought to do coinciding with what he wants to do. The Christians must reject that as spiritual pride while the Chinese moralists, mainly the Confucians, must reject the Christian idea of accepting the Free Gift of a Saviour who has atoned for our sins, as moral cowardice. The implications of this issue will also be explored in the opening chapter. As the basic incompatibility of their cosmogonies still has to be recognized by most mainstream sinologists, and as their different ways also constrain each to think only theirs ideas were universally valid, this led both sides to regard the other as ethnocentric. So China, or Zhongguo, we are told, means Central Kingdom, and the Zhongguo people, we are advised, tend to have the Central Kingdom Mentality, a condition that makes those who have it come to regard themselves as being in the centre of the world and the only civilized people while surrounded by barbarians. That is, they tend to be ethnocentric. Yet those who identified this condition in the Chinese have also located China in the Far East, without showing incongruity. To make such an observation that China is in the Far East, the observer would need to be in the centre. Would that be a centre marked by two copper strips embedded in a footpath in Greenwich, a London suburb? Indeed, cartographers in that Centre also placed London at the centre of their maps with China at the far left edge, geographically and politically. As far

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as I can ascertain, the people in China regard themselves to be at home and not far away.

So in the next chapter, the issue of universalism and its intendant

ethnocentrism will be explored. Of course, this does not mean that all modern mainstream sinologists are so orientalist. Indeed, Arthur Mote and Joseph Needham have warned against the use of a Creator-God in sinology decades ago, but their advices seemed to have been largely neglected. Then, I shall discuss, in two separate chapters the effects of such orientalism.

Firstly, I will explore the reasons and how so many modern

sinologists would search in China for cultural and social developments in China seemingly for no better reasons other than because they thought such developments had occurred in their West or Centre. Then as a mirror image of that, many modern sinologists have been searching for overarching developmental theories in China because they thought their own Western society’s development had gone through such an overarching development. In these cases, the basic cause, which I shall suggest, seems to be that the Orientalist sinologists thought that the history and method of developments in their own culture and society must be universal and so led them to investigate in China for similar developments. Finally, I shall give a discussion on signs of a rapprochement between China and some aspects of the Christian church. It seems the new pope, Benedict XVI, at least has the residence of China’s papal nuncio moved from Taiwan to the Philippines and has stopped trying to oppose the some appointment of bishops in China, or have worked out a face saving way as having both China and the Vatican to nominate three names so the other party will select one from the list. This will be discussed in the final chapter but will also mention that the long-term stumbling block of their mutually incompatible cosmogonies have yet to be discussed. If the Vatican takes over three centuries to accept Copernicus, then four and a half centuries may not be too long to wait for such a fundamental issue as their mutually conflicting cosmogonies.

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NOTES CHAN, Adrian 1997,‘In Search of a Civil Society in China’, Journal of Contemporary Asia v. 27 No. 2, 242-51. CHAN, Adrian 2002, Chinese Marxism, Continuum Books, London. JENNER W J F 1992,The Tyranny of History: the Roots of China's Crisis, Allen Lane the Penguin Press, London. JOHN G 1907, A Voice from China, James Clarke, London. LUKE, the third book of the New Testament of the Christian Bible. Any edition. NATHAN A 1990, ‘The Place of Values in Cross Cultural Studies,: the Example of Democracy in China’, in Ideas Across Cultures: essays on Chinese Thought in Honor of Benjamin I. Schwartz ed. P A COHEN & M GOLDMAN, Harvard University Press. SAID, Edward 1995, Orientalism, Penguin ed. London.

CHAPTER ONE IN THE BEGINNING : THE COSMOGONIC DIVIDE To write Chinese history, especially in a language other than Chinese involves, as the historian of Modern China Mary Wright reminded us, normally involves two steps. First, ‘we pick a subject for research because it seems likely to bear in some way on a problem of general interest to us at the time’ then, when we `underscore certain developments, we do so because they are either expected on the basis of what we know of comparable situations in other times and places, or because they are distinctly different from what might have been expected ... therefore challenge us to re-examine our general ideas.’ (Wright, 1964) In short, Wright advised that all historical thinking is comparative. While this is important, what seems even more important but not explicitly stated by her, is that when the historians write history they are really constructing a device to compare and clarify ideas, even if they are not conscious of doing so. That is, it is also a linguistic and philosophic exercise. The nature of doing so seems to have long been neglected but it will be explored here. Unless historians, especially those writing Chinese history in a language other than Chinese, realize this is what they are doing, they would not be aware of the arbitrariness and artificiality of their

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frames of reference as they make their comparison, that is, as they write their history. In this chapter, I will illustrate and explore this problem. To the sinologists in the Centre, irrespectively of whether they are of the Jewish, Christian or Islamic branch in the Abrahamic traditions or even atheistic or agnostic, the phrase `In the Beginning' evokes in them their shared cosmogony. This is so because the culture of the Centre informs them that their mythic beginning, as stated in the canonical scriptures of their traditions, whether it is the Bible or the Koran. To the Christians, that phase also evokes the first words of John's Gospel in the New Testament of their scripture. To those in the Abrahamic traditions, these words invoke the Creation by their Creator-God. While not only the book of Genesis but the entire Bible, the Talmud and the Koran have been translated to Chinese, as shall be explained, they could not have been originated in the Chinese culture. So `In The Beginning’ does not evoke such sentiments in the people of the Chinese culture. The absence of such an evocation becomes the fundamental problem for the scholars in the Centre as they try to decide on the referential framework when they engage in sinology.

What I suggest is that very few sinologists have

recognized this when they make their comparisons, as when they do history or other branches of sinology. This lack of awareness, as I shall argue, becomes the prime cause of Orientalism in sinology. Today, the fact that Orientalism is still maintained by so many mainstream sinologists, I suggest, is because they lack this awareness, whether they do so unconsciously or not. Instead, they universalize the peculiarities in their own cosmogony and impose it on Chinese culture. The problem for the sinologists, especially historians but practitioners of other disciplines as well, is quite real. As Frederick W. Mote reminded us `it lies not so much with the comparisons that the historian employs in rather explicit terms (whether the reader accepts or rejects them) than with those that remain invisible to the writers of history, and almost as often to [the] readers as well.' This invisible element, said Mote, is particularly important for historians of one culture to write about the history of another as they `very often over-extended assumptions about the "expected"... and often fail to underscore developments

Chapter One: In the Beginning: The Cosmogonic Divide

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that are distinctly different from what might have been expected. They fail to do so because they have not observed the differences.' (Mote, 1972:3) That is an apt explanation of the phenomenon of Orientalism, written even before Professor Edward Said raised that term to scholarly consciousness though that still escapes many modern sinologists. The problem is in China’s cosmogony. It has no over-arching creation narrative comparable to those in the Abrahamic cultures. While the Chinese were interested in the idea of origin, they do so to seek the significance of some original model of individual and social harmony in some distant past. The prehuman world in China's cosmogony came out of what they called a hun dun condition that may be described as an undifferentiated cosmic stuff or an amorphous primordial soup. Indeed, Bodde (1961), Mote (1971,1972) and Major (1978) have independently asserted that the Chinese civilization is the only major one without an over-arching and originating creation myth. To Major, `the Chinese organic world had a cosmogony but no first cause or creation, and the only eternal principle, Tao [Dao], was functionally equivalent to change itself.' (Major 1978:17) Earlier, Needham and Wang called the Chinese cosmogony `an ordered harmony of wills without an ordainer', an `organismic' cosmos. (Needham & Wang 1956, II: 287) Indeed, a generation earlier, Alfred Forke advised that `[i]n contrast to other nations, the Chinese have no mythological cosmogony; the oldest sources already attempt to account for creation in a scientific way." (Forke 1925:34) While we may debate whether we can call the ancient Chinese scientific, they certainly did not share the superstition of the Centre's pioneers of sinology in that they believe the universe was created in six days. This study will show how these advices by the above mentioned scholars have been largely ignored by most mainstream modern sinologists and hence the consequential Orientalism. In China’s culture, its hun dun cosmogony and the mythic logic associated with that undifferentiated cosmic stuff have never transformed the puzzle of cosmic origin into an epic or one-off event requiring the causal presence of some extraordinary created order. That is, the Chinese culture has no creator-god.

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Indeed, the Chinese cosmogony is quite mundane. The division of the primordial mass, the passage from one to two, happened spontaneously, by and of itself, naturally, throughout the ten thousand generations of the phenomenal world to the present. This lack of a dramatic spectacle of a purposeful act of creation by a creator at the beginning leads logically to the conclusion that nothing happened that is not always happening and all things that exist have the right to exist. If the Abrahamic cultures opt for a heroic and divine chicken that mysteriously and bravely produces and broods over a fallen omelet of a world, the Chinese counterpart denies this hovering avian spirit. The Chinese cultural imagination and tradition tend to find the cosmic egg metaphorically more nourishing than the divine chicken. So, at the beginning, rather than having a creator-god or prime mover, the Chinese perspective leads back to a natural prime movement which continues through primary resonance to now. This difference in the mythic past between Chinese culture and the JudaicChristian-Islamic traditions leads to serious difficulties in sinology particularly for those engaging in cultural, philosophic, and in a broad sense, theological pursuits in the context advised by Mary Wright, even if she did not seem to have these in mind. As their cosmogony does not inform them of a creator-god, Chinese culture does not have the concept of sin as understood in the culture of the Created people—a transgression against the Creator-God. Hence the Chinese language has no word for sin as they have no one to sin against nor any sin that needs to be extirpated. Yet as the cosmogony of the Abrahamic traditions informs their adherents of the nature of authority and the reasons for being good, the Chinese are also informed by their cosmogony on the nature of authority and the reasons for being good though the results are as different as their cosmogonies. This became problematic in sinology because the first interpreters of Chinese culture to the Created-people in the Centre were Christian missionaries whose vocation was premised on them being commissioned by their Creator-God to remove the rampant sins from the ‘sinless’ and creatorless Chinese.

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As the Chinese language has no word for sin, sinology's Christian missionary pioneers used as substitute the word zui which has very different meanings. To commit zui is to commit a crime or to transgress against a temporal authority not the Creator-God. While zui is also a transgression in Buddhism but as Buddhism also has no Creator-God, to commit a Buddhist zui is to transgress against one's conscience or the Buddhist transcendent nature. This lack of sin has led to conflicts and misunderstanding, not only in sinology but as I shall demonstrate in later chapters, also in the contemporary international political relations between China and the Created-peoples. From their first meetings, these cosmogonic differences led those of the Abrahamic cultures, especially the Christians, to deny the validity of the Chinese cosmogony. This, I suggest, is the basic cause of Orientalism in sinology. So, In The Beginning is a problem in sinology. While modern sinologists seem to have dropped sin from much of their own cultural discourse, we do well to remember that in the Abrahamic traditions, the issue of sin is basic to their value system. The existence of sin is derived from their cosmogony and also a reference point for their concept of authority and the reason for being good. The importance of this, and its contrast with the Chinese cultural values, may be illustrated with some quotations basic to the Abrahamic traditions. While they have Chinese translations, their sentiments could never be originated in China’s culture: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. (Genesis 1.1) In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1.1) Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe. You alone we worship and to You alone we turn for help. (Koran 1.1-4)

These injunctions of the Abrahamic cultures are derived from their cosmogony. If their adherents go against them and other injunctions from their one and only Creator-God, they would have sinned.

From their shared

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cosmogony of creation, these cultures derived their concepts of authority and being good. Though their cosmogony has no creator-god and hence no concept of sin, the Chinese have their own ways to define authority and goodness. It is secular, political, normative and practical, and also premised on their cosmogony. Since their cosmogony informs them that nothing happened that is not always happening, the most important thing to them to do during their existence is to be in harmony with this constantly changing cosmos. If `nothing happened that is not always happening' and `constantly changing' seems paradoxical, it was clearly explained by Xun Qing (298-238 BCE), the most lucid of the Classical Confucians. Briefly, his explanation was that there are now more people to share this constant and finite world, an oriental Malthus! (Xun: ch.19) Operating in this cosmogony, China's social theorists of all schools have come to regard their goal and duty as proposing solutions to maintain social harmony in this ever changing world. The impacts of their cosmogony are not only in their social and political goals but also their defining reference for being good. This is encapsulated by China's best known moralist, Kong Qiu, better known by his honorific Kong fuzi or Master Kong, and Latinized form by scholars from the Centre into Confucius (551-479 BCE)*, as the goal of his life-long pursuit: `At fifteen I set my heart on learning ... at seventy, [I hope] what I want to do will coincide with what I ought to do.' (Analects of Confucius II: iv) To Confucius, achieving this goal requires a life-long effort which he saw as a pursuit of virtue and, the nature and reasons for being good because to be virtuous is to be in harmony with nature. Furthermore, this goal can only be attained by one's own effort in a life-long process of learning and endeavours. Of course, one may choose not to take this path of life-long struggle, reject the path to virtue and be a person of mean spirit, a xiao ren. The problem began when the Created people, the Christian missionaries, arrived in China with the belief that they were commanded by their Creator-God to go forth and convert the Chinese to their ideology, value system and cosmogony and to deny the validity of different views. While their message was

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couched as a message of Love one must said those missionaries harboured a spirit of contempt towards Chinese culture. After all, how can one respect a culture when ones goal is to change its values? So when the Christian missionaries, who were also the first sinologists, arrived in China to save the Chinese souls they, as expected, told the Chinese to turn from their old sinful ways and embrace the free gift of Christ as the Saviour who had paid for their sins, for their own salvation. While their cosmogony exempted the Chinese from the sin of the Created people, it also posed serious moral problems for the evangelizing Christian variant of the Abrahamic traditions. The adherents of the Jewish and Islamic traditions had lived in a reasonably amicable state of peace with their Chinese hosts for centuries.

This was so because of the Created traditions, Christians are

distinguished by this purported deliberate command of their Creator to Go Forth and Save the others, that is, to universalize their own value system and tradition. In the other two branches of the Abrahamic traditions, active evangelism was no longer high on their agenda. Besides, while adherents of the Islamic and Jewish faiths went to China mainly for refuge from their Christian persecutors, the Christian missionary-sinologists went to China to save souls, and, during the 19th Century, in a spirit of triumphalism. Indeed, the very rationale for their vocation as missionaries would be called into question but for their belief in the universality of their cosmogony and the existence of rampant sins in China. As their cosmogony exempts the Chinese from sin, so in their coming together we have an impasse. This context provided a fertile harvest of Orientalism. While Christians may like to be known that their faith advocates Turning the Other Cheek, but when confronted with other traditions especially one as unlike their own as the Chinese one, they tended to respond by aligning with their God's First Commandment: that their Creator-God is the only true God and to accede to other gods becomes a sin, or crime to the Chinese understanding of the Chinese word zui. That is, Christians must insist that only their tradition and cosmogony is valid and universal, which fundamentally, is an intolerant and totalitarian system. As shall be shown later, Christians were constrained by their cosmogony to reject

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other moral systems, especially one like China's. This became the main cause of divergences and conflict between the culture of the self-styled Centre, that of the missionary-sinologists, and the culture of China in the Far East. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that these cosmogonic differences have since become the prime cause of Orientalism in sinology. These differences had inclined the missionary sinologists, and later the secular ones from the Centre, to insist on the universality of their cosmogony, with all that such a demand implied, and the invalidation of the cosmogony in Chinese culture. After more than four centuries of scholarly and evangelical efforts there does not seem to be much light at the end of this long sinological tunnel of dark ethnocentrism. Perhaps this is to be expected. While the missionary's vocation is premised on rampant sins and the need to save the heathens, such as the Chinese, from their sinful ways by urging them to accept the Christian Truth and the Free Gift of a Saviour, to those in the Chinese cultural tradition especially their Confucian moralists, this Christian proposition is morally repugnant and must be rejected. To those who saw the way to moral perfection as one of constant striving as the Confucian Moralists do, the Christian way of the Free Gift of a Saviour would be but moral cowardice and so had to be shunned. To the Christian missionaries, the Confucian way of constant striving is spiritual pride and so must be utterly rejected if one is to be saved. As the early missionaries were also the first sinologists or more accurately, those missionaries pioneered sinology, it is not an exaggeration to say that they provided the language of discourse and, for a long time, also the criteria for evaluation. Today, many of their baleful influences remain, as shall be shown in later chapters. This trend was set by Matteo Ricci, SJ, the modern era's most notable Christian missionaries in China. This Jesuit was aware of the cultural differences between China and his world and that these differences would present difficulties in the translation of Chinese cultural texts. But he felt justified to adopt `every effort to turn our way the ideas of the leaders of the sect of literati, Confucius, by interpreting in our favour things which he left ambiguous in his writings,' because in that way `our Fathers gain favour with the literati who do not adore the idols.'

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(Rule 1986:1, emphasis mine) So the end justified the means and saving souls overrides intellectual integrity, Jesuitically. However, we know the enterprise by Ricci and those who came after him found China a most unfruitful field in the annals of Christian missionary endeavours.

In spite of Ricci's efforts, the

Confucian moralists became the vanguards against Christianity, later leading a frustrated Jesuit to lament that the Chinese had no `correct understanding of sin.' (Wolferstan, 1909:75) How could they since their language has no word for it! The command by their Creator-God to Go Forth sustained the onward march of Christian Soldiers into China to save souls, and coincidentally laid the foundation of Orientalist sinology.

The most influential of these Christian

Soldiers was undoubtedly James Legge who was the first to translate systematically the Chinese cultural texts. When he became the Professor of Chinese at Oxford University upon returning home, his translations became authoritative, so much so that though his translations were published in the 1870's, they are still regarded as the standard and still in print.

Modern

translations may be technically more accurate, the influence of Legge's translation is still very pronounced. In 1948, the General Assembly of the new United Nations asked UNESCO, its education and scientific commission, to re-publish Legge's works as `the most representative of the cultures of certain member states ... of Asia.' (Legge: 1879/1988 v) As the UN was about to deny membership to China, it told the world what they should know about her culture. Through translation, he invalidated China's cosmogony and substituted it with his Christian one, or as Said wrote, made China's culture into `an integral part of European material civilization and culture'—the Orientalist's modus operandi.

As noted, a distinctive feature of China's cosmogony, from the

Christian missionary's perspective, is the absence of a Creator-God, for which a Christian missionary must regard as wrong and sacrilegious. So Legge changed Chinese culture by translation. As he insisted, `a few verbal alterations were made to make the meaning clearer.' The words are shang and di. Di can mean king, emperor, or ancestors of kings; and shang can mean high, superior, above, ancestor or senior. Legge was aware the Yi Jing (The Book of Changes) said:

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`When the former kings sought virtue, they sought the intercession of shang di.' Legge knew that in some Classical texts the terms refer to the mythic kings Yao and Shun.

He also knew Antoine Gaubil, SJ, the Interpreter-General at the

Chinese Court, (Ronan, 1981:II, 72) had rendered di as le seigneur and shang di as le Souverain Maitre, and Medhurst a Legge’s American contemporary had rendered di as Ruler and shang di as Supreme Ruler. `But, more than twenty-five years ago, I came to the conclusion’, Legge declared that: `DI, in Chinese, is equivalent to our GOD, and SHANG DI was the same, with the addition of shang equal to Supreme. In this view, I have never wavered, and I have rendered both the names as "God" in all the volumes of the Chinese Classics thus far translated and published.' (Legge 1879 Ibid.:xxiii) God may or may not be an Englishman, but the Chinese god was a gift from an Englishmen! After giving sin and God to Chinese culture, this man of God completed the New Trinity with the gift of Heaven. This was again done through translation, or mistranslation, just as Said explained, Orientalism would provide a `new vocabulary' for discourse. The Chinese word in this case is tian which can mean the sky, or more abstractly fate or providence, or as in the expression `Heavens!' But in the culture of the Centre, Heaven with the capital H means something specific. Given China's cosmogony, to render tian as Heaven is Orientalism, that is, to provide a new vocabulary. In so doing, the translator not only denied the validity of China's cosmogony but also universalized the Christian-European one. Had it been the reverse, using a Chinese cultural terms to explain Judao-Christian culture to the Christian world, the ready explanation would be that it was an example of Chinese Central Kingdom Mentality. All humans seem to have a similar capacity for ethnocentrism and self-delusion. Given what is required of the Christians by their First Commandment, it is understandable that Christian missionaries acted so. They really had no choice because if they entertained the

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idea that the Chinese cosmogony though different could be valid, they would be challenging the rationale of their vocation and would have sinned. That was not only a problem of the sinology’s pioneers but is also seems to have become a problem of the modern sinologists, including the ethnic Chinese ones.

In the widely available Penguin Classic edition of the Analects of

Confucius, translated by Professor D. C. Lau, formerly of London University's famed School of Oriental and African Studies and latterly at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has Confucius said: `When you have offended against Heaven, there is nowhere you can turn in your prayers.' (Analects III: 13) With translations like that, no wonder some ethnic Chinese Christian sinologists claim there is an element of natural Christianity in the teachings of Confucius. (Ching, 1977:112; Sih, 1957) In view of China's cosmogony, a more appropriate translation, and with less violence to the Chinese text and culture, may be: `One cannot expect help if one goes against fate/providence.'

I do not know the

religious affiliation of Prof. Lau, if any, but he is a scholar of repute given the positions he held and is holding. With this translation-derived Trinity, Chinese culture became part of Said's `European material civilization' in the Orientalist sinology. As long as this cosmic divide At the Beginning leads to the invalidation by sinologists from the Centre the cosmogony of China, their sinology will effectively continue to obfuscate our understanding of the culture of China. Orientalism will therefore remain the spectre that haunts sinology till those sinologists admit their works have effectively invalidated China's cosmogony. But this cannot be done as long as efforts to convert the Chinese remains the goal of Christianity. By invalidating China's cosmogony, such sinology also invalidates China's basis for being good, leading to demands for almost a total rejection of Chinese culture. A case in point is the Rev. Dr. Griffith John. After a service spanning the second half of the 19th Century for the China Inland Mission, he concluded that if China was to be `awakened' and to be `progressive', then its `essentially...unprogressive...non-Christian faith...Confucianism, Buddhism and

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Taoism...must pass away if countries which they dominate are to advance in religion, morality, and civilization...[because] they have no life-giving power.' (John: 1907, 79-80) John's view is clearly founded on the universality of the Christian cosmogony and its attendant value system. As mentioned, given the rationale of his vocation, he must reject both the Confucian concept of moral improvement and China's distinctive and un-Christian cosmogony which was principally Daoist. As Buddhism also has no creator-god, our missionary must reject it too.

To John, `in the missionaries the Chinese have the true

representatives of the intellectual, moral and spiritual culture of the West, and many of them know it.' (John : 29) Amen? While such a self-assured attitude in a 19th Century English missionary may be understandable, given it was the age of Pax Britannica and the Manifest Destiny of the United States of America, but to be so at the end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st Century by academic sinologists attests to the tenacity of Orientalist sinology. That is the view of W. J. F. Jenner, formerly a Professor of Chinese and Head of the China Centre at the Australian National University who described himself as a `middle-class Englishman'. To him, the Chinese have an `underdeveloped sense of independent personal identity' that he concluded `may be connected with the absence from all Chinese religions, except the minority ones of Islam and the two Christianities, of a strong relationship between an individual soul and an omnipotent and judging deity.' (Jenner, 1992:xi, 230) Nearly ninety years after Griffith John condemned Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism for having no life giving power, these fruits of China's culture are again condemned for lacking a `judging deity'. Perhaps like the other middle-class Englishmen, Joseph Jardine, who funded the original publications of Legge after he made a fortune importing opium to China, Jenner prefers the Chinese to use the Opiate of the People. To Jenner, for the Chinese to have an independent personal identity, they would have to reject their culture's cosmogony and other values otherwise the developments of their character and social morality would be stunted. So the missionaries and our modern Orientalist sinologists face a moral dilemma: can they have respect for a culture if they want to change its

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values? And, in the case of Jenner, is he an evangelist or scholar? Furthermore, what kind of `independent personal identity' would the Chinese have if they must reject their own culture? If we take a secular approach, since I do not know Jenner’s religious belief, his judgment reminds me of another professor, Prof. Higgins in My Fair Lady, who, exasperated by his protégé, Eliza, exclaimed: `Why can't they be more like us!' To Jenner, if the Chinese are to escape their character defects they need to embrace the god James Legge gave them and renounce their own culture, including their cosmogony. It also shows the Centre of Jenner's world is at the two copper strips embedded in a Greenwich footpath, in suburban London. Indeed, he betrays a severe case Central Kingdom Mentality.

Perhaps, this

`middle class Englishman' has decided to turn China into `part of the European material civilization', that is, Edward Said's Orientalism.

In the context of

Chinese culture, however, his attempt reminds one of the Frog in the Well parable in Zhuang zi, chapter 2., a Chinese version of the Mote and Beam Syndrome, first identified by a Dr. Luke in Palestine some two thousand years ago. (Luke 6:42) In this parable, the frog declined the invitation of the bird to play in the sky because from its perspective in the well, the sky is but a small blue dot while it could swim across the well or jump from its ledge. On the other hand, given China's cosmogony, one may well ask whether in Chinese culture there is such an entity as `an individual soul' for it certainly has no `omnipotent deity'.

But, even within the theologies and history of the

Abrahamic traditions, one is constrained to challenge Jenner's conclusion that `a strong relationship between an individual soul and an omnipotent deity' would necessarily develop `a sense of independent personal identity'. One can make out a contrary claim that an imagined strong relation between self and an omnipotent deity frequently produced a lemming-like mass hysteria, murderous lust and even genocidal, as shown by the Conquistadors, the Crusaders, the Thirty-years War, and the countless destructions and wanton killing brought about because of the belief in a close relationship with the omnipotent deity. Indeed, it is within Christian theology and tradition that if an individual soul has a strong relationship

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with its omnipotent deity, rather than developing an independent personal identity, one develops an unquestioning faith, not reason, and a denial of the self. So, Jenner's stricture was occasioned more by his ignorance of an omnipotent deity than the realities in China. Therefore, it seems that in sinology the primary reason for Orientalism is In the Beginning—the cosmogonic divide. It has become a spectre that has haunted sinologists for a very long time.

It has also become an almost

insurmountable dilemma, in that the sinologists can transcend it only if they are prepared to regard Chinese culture as an equal though different from their own, and not insist on the Chinese to reject their own culture and accept the cultural mores of the sinologists of the Centre as the only universally valid one. While some sinologists have accepted a multicultural humanity with Chinese culture as an equal but with legitimate differences, most sinologists in the Centre do not seem ready to accept Chinese culture on as of equal status as their own and be legitimately different. However, their position is quite understandable for to have done so would have the modern sinologists departing from their centuries-old tradition established by their pioneers, the Christian missionaries, who regarded major elements in China's culture, from cosmogony to moral and value systems, as inferior and must be rejected in favour of those of the pioneers’, the Christian missionaries. Therein lies the foundation of Orientalism in sinology. The victims of Orientalism are more than the Chinese and their culture since such sinological works would be read by few Chinese in China. The main victims are those sinologists themselves and their readers in their Centre. As their professional aim is to enlighten us on China and her culture, their Orientalist works have therefore failed to provide us with an understanding China and her culture as they have so effectively distorted them. In the following chapters, I will examine with some details the impacts of Orientalism on sinology and on our perception of China and the Chinese culture. I will also try to show how these impacts have been effected, especially by those sinologists who probably are not consciously aware or will vehemently deny they are Orientalists, that their works have distorted Chinese

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culture or led us to misunderstand and misconceive China and her culture. In short, while these sinologists are in the mainstream of modern sinology, they have become victims of Orientalism, albeit unwittingly.

NOTES Analects of Confucius any edition, my own translation is used here. BODDE, Derk (1961) `Myths of Ancient China' in S.N. Kramer ed. The Mythologies of the Ancient World, 369-408, (Chicago, Quadrangle Books). CHING, Julia (1977) Confucianism and Christianity, (Tokyo, Rodansha and New York, Harper & Row). FORKE, Alfred (1925) The World-conception of the Chinese (London, Probsthain). JOHN, Griffith (1907) A Voice from China (London, James Clarke). KORAN, (1993) tr. Dawood, N.J. (London, The Penguin Books) LEGGE, James (1879) The Sacred Books of China: the Texts of Confucius pt I The Shu King (She Jing), Preface, (ed. used Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass 1988 Reprint). LUKE, The Gospel According to Luke, the 3rd book in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. MAJOR, John 1978 `Myths, Cosmology, and the Origins of Chinese Science', Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 1-20, vol. V. No. 1. MOTE, Frederick W (1971) Intellectual Foundations of China, ch. 2 The Beginnings of a World View, (New York, Knopf) MOTE, F. W. (1972) `The Cosmological Gulf Between China and the West', in D.C. Buxbaum & F.W. Mote ed. Transition and Permanence: Chinese History and Culture. A Festschrift in Honor of Dr. Hsiao Kung Chuan (Hong Kong, Cathay Press). NEEDHAM, J.& WANG L. (1956) Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, II, 287).

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RONAN, Colin A. (1981) The Shorter Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). RULE, Paul A. (1986) K'ung-tzu or CONFUCIUS? The Jesuit Interpretation of Confucianism (Sydney, Allen & Unwin) SIH, Paul K.T. (1957) Chinese Culture and Christianity (Taipei, China Culture Publishing Foundation). WOLFERSTAN, B. SJ (1909) The Catholic Church in China from 1860 to 1907 (London, Sands; St. Louis, Herder). WRIGHT, Mary (1964) `Chinese History and the Historical Vocation' Journal of Asian Studies August, xxiii No. 4, 513-6. XUN, Qing Xun Zi (The Book of Master Xun), any edition.

* As the division of time into BC and AD implies a Christian perspective, it seems more appropriate to use the religion-neutral designations of BCE, Before the Common Era, and CE, the Common Era, in a study that challenges the assumption of the universality of the Christian perspective.

CHAPTER TWO UNIVERSALISM AND ETHNOCENTRISM: CHRISTIANITY, CHINESE CULTURE AND SINOLOGY Over thirty years ago, Frederick W. Mote reminded us that `the extent to which persons in one culture insert elements of their own culture into their understanding of others can nowhere be better illustrated than by noting the Western failure to understand the basic nature of the Chinese world view.' (Mote, 1971:17) What Mote wrote was the core of Edward Said's Orientalism though predating Said. It seems that since that time most of the modern mainstream sinologists have not heeded Mote's warning. So now, I like to follow that fabled little boy and point out the reality of the emperor's clothes. The questions I seek to answer in this chapter are: why is Orientalism so persistent in sinology? Are modern mainstream sinologists merely insensitive or unwitting victims of a tradition in their own profession, or both? Indeed, Mote was not the first to warn us. More than a generation earlier, in 1925, the great German sinologist, Alfred Forke, advised us of China's distinctive cosmogony saying `in contrast to other nations, the Chinese have no mythological cosmogony; the oldest sources already attempt to account for creation is a scientific way.' (Forke, 1925:34) To say that the ancient Chinese were scientific may well be flattering, though it was Mote among others who reminded us of this stark and significant problem in sinology.

It is not an

exaggeration to say that this problem persists into modern mainstream sinology,

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with some notable exceptions. While many sinologists may be remiss in their professional duty of care, the problem is more than mere carelessness. The problem, it seems to me, is rooted in the historical, cultural and social milieu operating in the culture of the Western scholars' Centre. As a serious academic discipline, sinology is less than two hundred years old or young. Its foundation was formed in a social and historical milieu of Western imperialist enterprises in China, including the Christian missionary enterprise. As the pioneers of sinology were Christian missionaries, the discipline was effectively developed in a cultural milieu where its pioneers confidently, but seemingly wrongly, thought that not only their own value system but also their culture's cosmogony were universal and universally true, though they knew their culture was quite different from that of the Chinese. Hence, sinology was born as an innocent victim of the ideology of its pioneers who insisted that their own culture and values were the only universally valid ones. This chapter will examine how and why this orientalizing process was done, and why this process seems still unrecognized by so many modern mainstream sinologists. I suggest there are mutually incompatible and exclusive elements in the cultures of the Centre and China, but these differences seem not be always realized by mainstream sinologists. I will explore the nature of these incompatible elements in this chapter, and their impacts on sinology. For this study, sinology is defined as the study of China and reporting of ones results in languages other than Chinese, especially in studies in literary and cultural areas. I decided on this definition because the term “sinology” has no Chinese equivalence, though there are Chinese scholars involve in this study in countries beyond China. Some dictionaries gave the Chinese term as Han xue, that is, the study of the Han people, but that is obviously inadequate because it would excludes the scholarship on at least the Yuan and Qing Dynasties who were nonHans. A basic element of incompatibility, I would suggest, is the language. As languages are culture-based expressions, there will be ideas and concepts peculiar to one culture that has no exact equivalences in the language of another cultures.

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In cultures that are distantly located and have little contact with each other, would usually have greater differences in their languages. This is so even in cultures of close geographic proximity as English and French. For example, the French term coup d'etat has no equivalence in English. A common way to overcome this is to adopt or incorporate the foreign expression or word into the home language. English is probably the most adept in this among European languages, so much so that today native speakers of English no longer have angst when referring to a political situation as a coup d'etat. But sinology in English seems to be the exception to this very reasonable practice, so that terms of concepts and entities that are distinctively Chinese have hardly been incorporated. Instead, English terms are routinely used though they may distort the meaning and nature of the concepts and hence the Chinese culture, as witness to Mote's warning. While Mote and Mary Wright have reminded us that sinology is a comparative enterprise, too many modern mainstream sinologists still seem unaware of this and so do not show due care in their selection of an appropriate framework of reference when engaged in this enterprise of sinology. I do not suggest such practices imply malice. It is more likely due to the incompatible elements between aspects of China's culture and those sinologists', who seem to assume that their own cultural mores are universally applicable. This leads those sinologists to effectively deny equality and validity to China's culture, especially those aspects that differed from the sinologists' own.

In sinological terms, those sinologists show the Central

Kingdom Mentality syndrome though they may come from a Centre, far from China. We must ask why that is so? As mentioned, while no malice is suggested or implied, the most likely reason, it seems to me, is the sinology's pioneers, the Christian missionaries, who realized that their culture and ideology have constrained them to make such distortions and chose inappropriate framework of reference for their comparative enterprise, sinology. It seems that from the days of their missionary-pioneers, sinologists have not only distorted China's culture but also thought what they did were for a good moral purpose, to save the heathen

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Chinese souls.

As they went to China, they were confident that they were

answering the call of their Creator-God to bear witness to and spread the Good News—the Christian message—to the non-believing Chinese. They regarded their actions as not only fulfilling the command of their God but also benefiting the heathen Chinese. And, if the Chinese accepted their Message and embraced the Free Gift of Salvation, they would be saved. So it is to be expected that the missionary-sinologists regarded their belief, values and worldview as universal, and beneficial to the Chinese. Furthermore, if the heathen Chinese resisted or rejected the Christian Message, they court retribution even eternal damnation by the God of the missionaries. One may safely assume that most Christians today still believe in some form of retribution for those who resisted and rejected the Message, and reward for those who accepted and live by it, though many Christians would not insist that theirs is the only way for all humanity. But sinology's missionary-pioneers had no middle way nor could they exempt anyone because they believed that they were called by their omnipotent God-Creator to go to China and convert the heathen Chinese to the Christian faith and worldview. That was why they were in China. The Christian ideology thus may be argued as having a totalitarian and intolerant element in that it regards those who reject it as not only wrong but also sinful. Furthermore, it can also be a powerful motivating force to its adherents, enabling them to think that when they are acting in the name of their God, as when they were in China, they are not only right but also righteous. It is an ideology that produces martyrs. The First Commandment of their God explicitly insists, `I am the Lord thy God ... thou shalt have no other gods before me.' If one serves other gods, this `jealous God' will not only punish them but also their `children unto the third and fourth generation'. Yet this God can also be merciful `unto thousands of them that love me.' (Exodus 20:1-6) A case in point occurred shortly before those commandments were given to Ancient Israelites whose leader Moses tarried on Mount Sinai communing with his God. The waiting Israelites who were this God's Chosen People, became

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impatient and asked Aaron, Moses' assistant, to `make us gods, which shall go before us; for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of Egypt, we were not what is become of him.' (Exodus 32:1) Aaron made a calf from the jewelry donated by the Israelites. When he finally descended from Sinai with the Ten Commandments and saw what had happened, Moses was very angry. That night, his God ordered a massacre of those who did not remain loyal to this God by those who remained loyal. As the Levite tribe remained loyal, Moses told them the God of Israel had told him to `slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour...that day about three thousand men' were massacred. (Exodus 32:27-8) To kill three thousand people for worshipping an unapproved god would now be regarded as a crime against humanity, and it was! The vocation of the missionary-sinologists was to carry out the command of this God. As the pioneers of sinology were missionaries, they would want to change some beliefs and value systems in the culture of China because they had no place for this god. So we really cannot expect those pioneers to respect those aspects of Chinese culture that they wanted the Chinese to reject—aspects that were different from their Christian belief and value systems. Had they respected or even accepted or just tolerated those cosmogony-related aspects of the Chinese culture, they would have sinned. So the claim that Christianity is universally applicable, a claim that the missionary's vocation was based, is also may be a claim of an exclusive moral rectitude. As the pioneer-sinologists saw their faith as the Truth and their efforts to convert the heathen Chinese as righteous acts, they could allow no legitimacy for dissent nor would they tolerate diversity. The invalidation of those aspects of China's culture that were different from the Christian ones were thus firmly held beliefs as their faith that their vocation were answers to the call of their Creator-God. A modern Christian may respond by saying what I have described is an Old Testament view of the Creator-God but in the Christian message, God is love and has given his only Son as atonement for our sins, though the concept of sin is alien to Chinese culture and its language has no word for it. (Chan: 1997) I will

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return to this issue later, but to dichotomize God into the Old and New Testaments is not only poor theology but also a remnant of anti-Semitism that has been an integral part in the history of Christendom. The Son of God, according to the canonical New Testament, said, `Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.' (Matt.5: 17-8) To fulfill the law does not mean to void its application.

Indeed, when this Jesus showed his righteous indignation, he

behaved like an Old Testament prophet. There are two vivid records in the New Testament which showed what this Son of God meant by fulfilling the law, and showed how he treated those whom he regarded as having violated the law. It was recorded that when he entered the temple in Jerusalem and saw moneychangers and merchants changing currencies and selling sacrificial animals, `he cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of them that sold doves.' (Matt. 21: 2). This incident was reported almost verbatim in another Gospel thus: “Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves.” (Mark, 11:15) The occasion was a pilgrimage season when Jews from various countries went to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices at the temple. The moneychangers were there to provide a service to the pilgrims from the various other countries so they can change their own currencies to the local one. The sellers of doves were also providing a service to the pilgrims who, to fulfill the law, must sacrifice life animals. It would be most inconvenient if the pilgrims had to carry life animals while travelling through the inhospitable terrains to Jerusalem. Strictly speaking, as the temple was a holy place, it was unlawful to conduct commerce but this law had been relaxed for practical reasons. It was a vivid example of what Jesus meant by fulfilling the law. Hence we can understand the missionary-sinologists' righteous indignation when confronted by the Chinese who willfully rejected the Free Gift of Salvation brought by the missionaries. It would also be difficult to expect the missionaries

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to respect the Chinese moral code and the Chinese way to improving ones morals when the missionaries' goal was to convince the Chinese to reject theirs in favour of the Christian ones. Hence, the modern sinologists who persist in rendering the Chinese cultural terms and mores into Christian ones are not only maintaining that missionary position but also a sign to show how the missionary-pioneers' influence persists. It also shows the Christian ideology makes its adherents feel what they do are not only right but also righteous—effectively a moral and intellectual strait jacket. A fundamental reason for the missionary-sinologists' failure to treat Chinese culture with equanimity, let alone respect, is their respective cosmogonies, the theories of the origin of the cosmos. To the Christian, it was the work of their Creator-God from whom the Christians derived their concept of authority and the nature and reasons for being good. It also informs them of the purpose of their being. Thus, it would be unthinkable that they would reject or compromise that because to them, their cosmogony is universally applicable. Such attitude may be called the Central Kingdom Mentality, a description applied to the Chinese by people from the Christian Centre, implying the Chinese tended to see themselves as in the centre of the world and surrounded by barbarians. As those who gave the Chinese this sobriquet also placed China in the Far East, so logically those people must think they are in the Centre and not China where, according to them, were in the furthest Far East. Indeed, regardless of whether they or the Chinese had the tendency to show the Central Kingdom Mentality, the behaviours of the missionaries and too many sinologists betray symptoms of the Mote and Beam Syndrome, reported by a Dr. Luke in Palestine. (Luke 6:41) Compared to the cosmogony in the Christian culture, China's culture could not have been more unlike. Though the Chinese also derive their concept of authority and reasons for being good from their cosmogony, as discussed in the previous Chapter, the most distinctive aspect of China's cosmogony is that it has no over-arching creative narrative as the Christian's. While the Chinese were interested in the question of origins, they do so to seek the significance of some early model for individual and social harmony in some distant past, and in the

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cosmogony in a narrow sense. In the latter category, the Chinese pre-human world is a hun dun condition which may be regarded as an undifferentiated cosmic stuff with no distinctive nor recognizable feature but has infinite potentiality, as an `uncarved block', to use a common Daoist metaphor (Dao De Jing: 15, 19, 28, 32). This does not mean China had no creation myth, but as Derk Bodde has pointed out only the Pangu legend can really be called a creation myth but it was not known in any Chinese record that can be dated before the third century C.E.(1). He suggested that the myth probably arose from being repeatedly asked: `What is China's creation story?' by foreigners who assumed all civilizations explain their existence in conceptually analogous ways, so this legend was invented as a response.

Bodde advised us to assume an alien,

probably Indian, origin. (Bodde: 1961) The Chinese cosmogony is an organismic process where the cosmos belongs to a spontaneously self-governing life process. Joseph Needham called it `an ordered harmony of wills without an ordainer.' (Needham, 1956:287) And as Mote explained, it `differed from other organismic conceptions, as Classical Greek cosmologies in which a logos or demiurge or otherwise conceived masterwill external to creation was regarded as necessary for existence. And it contrasts even more strikingly with the ancient Semitic traditions which subsequently led to the Christian and Islamic concepts of creation ex nihilo by the hand of God, or through the will of God, and all other such mechanistic, teleological and theistic cosmologies.' (Mote, 1971:20) Till the missionaries went to China, the Christian world had not met a civilization with a cosmogony like China's. As mentioned in Chapter One, in China's culture its cosmogonic tradition and the mythic logic associated with the undifferentiated cosmic stuff, hun dun, have never been transformed into a one-off epic of a creation that requires the presence of some extraordinary individual, some narrative persona, or hero of creation who stands outside the created order. That is, there is no Creator-God as in the Christian tradition or anything similar. This lack of a dramatic spectacle of a purposeful act of creation or a creator at the beginning, logically, leads to the conclusion that nothing happened that is not always happening. So, in such a

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cosmos, no part can be wrongfully present. Everything that exists belongs and has equal right to be and to exist, even if no more appropriately than as the result of a temporary imbalance or disharmony as accidents or natural disasters. So it follows that evil as an active or positive force cannot exist much less can it be frighteningly personified, and there is no devil to struggle with good forces for mastery of humanity or the universe. But one should bear in mind that in this cosmogony there is no claim to be exclusive as all existing things have the right to exist. Indeed, adherents of the Jewish and Islamic variants of the Abrahamic traditions who first went to China many centuries ago, and probably had been more harmonious with each other and their hosts than anywhere else they had been, and certainly more so than when had they lived in Christian societies. The main reason for their going to China was to seek refuge from persecution, mainly by Christians. So not all the adherents of the Abrahamic traditions have trouble dealing with Chinese culture even with its cosmogony, only the Christians did and some still do. This was so because the Christians, especially missionaries, went to China to proselyte and convert the Chinese from their cultural values to Christianity. As I have shown, there are great differences between the cosmogonies in China's culture and the Christian tradition.

These differences have serious

impacts on sinology because Christian missionaries pioneered that profession. Their impacts may still be regarded as still evident on both theological and temporal matters. Thanks to the works by the pioneering missionary-sinologists, Chinese culture in sinology—the study of China in languages other than Chinese—has acquired a Christian cultural tint. Given their vocation, it was not unnatural for the missionary-sinologists to regard their cosmogony as the only true and universally valid one, and regarded as their duty to convince the Chinese to regard the Chinese to reject their own culture's cosmogony and adopt the Christian cosmogony and worldview. Such cosmogonic differences have serious impacts in both the religious and temporal aspects of their cosmogonies for they are mutually exclusive. Furthermore, as

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both their moral systems were informed by their cosmogonies, being mutually exclusive meant that each must reject the other's moral system. This would, and did, lead to conflicts, at times violently. The missionaries regarded they were commissioned by their God to convert the Chinese from their moral system to the Christian one. The baleful effects of this issue still haunts sinology to this day though they seemed to have escaped the notice of too many modern mainstream sinologists who though strenuously deny being Orientalists or insensitive to the China's cultural mores, would still maintain that missionary position of denying the validity of China's cultural values. The works and their effects of these sinologists will be discussed in later chapters. Having shown how the cosmogony of the Christian missionary-pioneers of sinology had caused those pioneers to reject China's cosmogony and also many aspects of China's value system, I will now attempt to show how so many modern mainstream sinologists still retain that missionary position and reject both China's cosmogony and the core of her value system. The parts rejected by both the sinology's pioneers and their modern successors include the reason for being good and the way to improve their morality. Though many of the modern sinologists may not be Christians, they seem to be operating under the influence of this Christian ideology and see it as their duty to invalidate not only China's cosmogony but also much of the cultural basis of being Chinese. This was so because Christianity is premised on not only that its cosmogony being universally applicable but also theirs is the only true belief and value system. As to the modern sinologists, even the non-Christians ones, I will try to show how they have become victims of this Orientalism, if unwittingly. Just as their cosmogony informs the Christians that their God-Creator is the source of authority and to be obedient to its wishes is the basis for being good, in the context of Chinese culture, authority and goodness are also informed by their cosmogony. It informs them that as nothing happened that is not always happening, so the most important thing to do during their existence is to maintain harmony with this constantly changing cosmos. If `nothing happened that is not always happening' and `constantly changing' seem paradoxical, it was best

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explained by Xu Qing (d. 312 BCE) the most lucid of the Classical Confucians moralist. His explanation was that there are now more people than in the earlier days to share this finite world, an oriental Malthus! (Book of Xu or Xu zi, chap. 19) We have discussed how, due to their cosmogony, the Chinese social theorists through the ages until the Marxists, had always saw their tasks as proposing ways to maintain social harmony in their ever changing world. Furthermore, due to their cosmogony, the Chinese have come to regard both evil and goodness as part of nature and so have the right to exist. To the Christians, the source of evil is pride as exemplified by Lucifer, the fallen angel, an entity external to humanity but also a creation of God. This begs the question of why did God create evil, but that theological question is beyond the scope of this study. To the Chinese, as Mote so aptly summarized, in their `cosmos there is no parts wrongfully present; everything exists belongs ... evil as a positive or active force cannot exist; much less can it be frighteningly personified.' (Mote 1971:24) Naturally, there can be no struggle between the devil and the good forces over humanity or the world, and our errors are not sins and cannot threaten our future existence. To the Chinese, to achieve personal harmony with nature is not only their social and political goals but is also the defining reference for being good. This has been aptly illustrated earlier in this study as the stated goal of Confucius. It was his life-long endeavour to attain social harmony: `At seventy, [I hope] what I want to do will coincide with what I ought to do.' (Analects II: iv) To Confucius, we will recall, achieving this required a life-long effort which he began at fifteen in a pursuit of virtue. The nature and reasons for being virtuous and good are to be in harmony with nature. Furthermore, this goal can only be attained by ones own effort in a life-long process of learning and endeavour. One may, of course, choose not to take this path of life-long effort and struggle, reject this path to virtue and be a xiao ren, a mean-spirited person. In this journey to social harmony, the Confucian Prince should ideally be a philosopher and lives his life as a moral example to his subjects in loco parentis.

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This is neither ancestor nor emperor worship but the ultimate sanctuary. That is, in the Confucian Chinese culture, it takes the place of church-as-sanctuary in the Christian tradition. In the Confucian tradition, to serve ones parents, whether alive or dead, was a just and sufficient reason to decline service to an unjust prince. If the parents are dead, to tend to their graves was reason enough. The reason is quite logical: by nature, we owe our existence to our parents. And, as nature is harmony by definition, duty to nature takes precedence and so in loco parentis works to benefit the children, or subjects of an unjust prince. In practice, like the church-as-sanctuary, it was not always so. But even in this brief discussion of some of the important aspects of China's culture, it is obvious that many of them are very different from, and indeed quite incompatible with those in the Christian tradition and culture, especially the versions brought to China by Christian missionary-sinologists. We do understand why the missionaries had to reject China's cosmogony and value system because they were, and are, against the very rationale of the vocation of the missionaries. Besides, the very reason for them to be missionaries in China was to convince the Chinese to change their value systems and to accept the Christian ones. While some pioneering missionary-sinologists were aware that these differences were fundamental, their preferred resolution was to translate the Chinese cultural texts in such a way as to hide the differences, and so effectively invalidated and distorted Chinese culture. What is disconcerting is that many modern mainstream sinologists retain that missionary position and use the Christian cultural attributes as the norms in evaluating Chinese culture. Many would regard those aspects of Chinese culture that are different from those in the Christian tradition as evidences that Chinese culture is inferior and inadequate when compared to the Christian or Western cultures.

Some modern sinologists even claimed the Chinese language is

inadequate because they could not find exact equivalences in Western languages for the Chinese concepts.

For instance, Arthur Wright claimed the Chinese

language `by its nature and structure, inevitably distorted or deformed the foreign ideas expressed in it.' (Wright 1953:296) Like the missionary-sinologists, some

Chapter Two: Universalism and Ethnocentrism

33

modern sinologists seem to regard their own cultural values as universal. As if infected by the Central Kingdom Mentality, the sinologists in the Centre want the cultures in the peripheral, as China's in the Far East, to appear as part of the European civilization, a condition which Said called Orientalism. This tradition of transmogrification began by the Jesuit missionaries in the 17th Century though they had shown some awareness of the cosmogonic differences between their culture and China’s. As pioneer missionary-sinologist Father Matteo Ricci, S.J., confessed, `I make every effort to turn our way the ideas of the leaders of the sect of literati, Confucius, by interpreting in our favour things which he left ambiguous in his writings. In this way, our Fathers gain favour with the literati who do not adore the idols.' (Rule, 1986:1, emphasis mine) In doing so, he effectively distorted both the image and identity of both Christian and Chinese cultures, leading to a long-term misunderstanding between the two peoples. To Ricci, his proselytism was commissioned by his God-Creator so it seemed must take precedence over intellectual integrity and honesty. Thus, with the end justifying the means, Ricci began an enduring career in an ecumenical tradition, Jesuitically! Since the rationale for the missionary's vocation is premised on saving the heathen Chinese from their rampant sins, therefore, the fact that the Chinese cosmogony does not have a Creator-God and that its language has no word sin must be rectified, otherwise not only would the rationale of their vocation be questioned but also the validity of their universalist claim of their culture. This vital task was performed by a Protestant missionary in the way pioneered by Ricci. Hence, the ecumenical practice of reinventing Chinese culture persisted. This Protestant missionary was an Englishman, a James Legge, who became a most influential sinologist. He was the first to translate systematically the Classical Chinese cultural texts. We first met him in Chapter I. He gave to the Chinese culture a Creator-God on no better ground than that it had been his conviction that for over twenty-five years the term `shang di' was the term corresponding in Chinese to our “God", though he knew the term had been rendered as `supreme ruler' by Medhurst, a contemporary missionary from the

34

Orientalism in Sinology

USA, and into French as le Souverain Maitre by the acclaimed Antoine Gaubil, SJ. (Legge, 1879: xxiii) One may admire his audacity, but one has to say his action established the tradition of infusion, intrusion and selective rejection of aspects of Chinese culture in sinology. It may also be seen as the triumph of the ethnocentric universalist ideology of Christianity that impelled its missionaries to Go Forth to proselyte, an ideology that leads its adherents to regard what they do in the name of their Creator-God as not only right but also righteous. In Chapter 1, I have shown how the pioneering missionary-sinologists gave Chinese culture a Creator-God, and how they overcame the linguistic problem of a culture without a concept for sin by, mistakenly, substituting the word crime, zui, for sin. So in this comparative enterprise of sinology, when the pioneer missionary-sinologists were evaluating Chinese culture, they seemed to use as their norm the attributes of their own Christian culture while the distinctive aspects of Chinese culture were trenchantly rejected and invalidated. That these efforts failed was attested by the lament of Fr Wolferstan SJ, that the Chinese had no `correct idea of sin' (Wolferstan 1909: 75). How could they because their language has no word for it. Indeed, Wolferstan might as well say the Chinese had no correct idea of Salvation in the Christian sense. As stated earlier, the path to moral improvement for the Chinese moralists, the Confucians, was a constant endeavour by oneself. To the Christians, the only way to achieve moral improvement is to admit ones inability to do so and accept the Free Gift of the Saviour who has already paid and atoned for our sins. So to the Chinese Confucian moralists, the Christian way was but moral cowardice and had to be rejected. On the other hand, to the Christians, the Chinese way was but spiritual pride and must also be rejected. As the missionary-sinologists regarded their culture and values as universally appropriate and valid, they had to insist on rejecting the Chinese way to moral improvement as sinful, or criminal, the way of zui. The tragedy is, as shall be shown, few modern sinologists seem to realize this. This Christian way was not only insulting to the Confucians who regarded Confucius as their most revered moral philosopher but also led the Chinese moralists, mostly Confucians, to regard Christianity with contempt, as a morally

Chapter Two: Universalism and Ethnocentrism

35

inferior system. That being so, we may ask who then had the Central Kingdom Mentality? This innocent act of making zui (crime) into sin not only turned a spiritual entity into a temporal one, but also plagued the relationship between Chinese people and those of the Christian culture. Indeed, many modern sinologists, while not Christians, seem unable to appreciate why the Chinese rejected Christianity, at times violently.

Furthermore, the popular opposition to Christianity and

missionary activities were often led by the literati, the Confucian scholarsmoralists.

Rather than admitting that the image of China as created by the

missionary-sinologists was mistaken, some modern sinologists, though not Christian, such as Paul A. Cohen, blamed the impasse on the conservative ideology of the Chinese literati and their anti-foreignism which led to the antiChristian stance (Cohen: 1963). As Cohen's study was mainly concerned with the Chinese reactions to the expanding missionary actions in the second half of the 19th Century, we do well to remember that it was a period called the Dong Zhi Restoration, a self-Strengthening reform. It was a revivalist movement when the Chinese government wanted to learn the techniques to strengthen herself from the developed West. Students were sent abroad to learn new technologies especially military ones. Their reasons were both simple and complex. They rejected the moral system of the Christian West because they considered it as merely moral cowardice, but they were aware of their own technological backwardness. So they decided to take from the West what they thought as appropriate and beneficial, and rejecting what the Christian West regarded as universal—the cosmogony and moral system. It seems many modern mainstream sinologists, even Jewish one like Cohen, behave as their Christian missionary-pioneers did and demanded the Chinese to reject much of their own culture before they, the Created People, would grant them their approval as one of us, as equals. One would have thought it was the rationale of the missionary vocation that was anti-foreign because of its claim to have the only universally valid cosmogony and the only correct moral system, and demanded those who embrace that ideology to go forward to the

36

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heathen fields, as China, to bring the Chinese out of their spiritual darkness into the light of the Christian Centre. As far as Cohen was concerned, one is guilty of anti-foreignism if one regards as invalid the missionaries' ethnocentric claims. As the Chinese had the temerity to reject the Christian missionaries' message that demanded the Chinese to reject their own moral system and cosmogony, then according to those modern mainstream sinology, as Cohen, the Chinese were guilty of anti-foreignism. Writing nearly thirty years after Cohen, English sinologist, Professor W. J. F. Jenner, made an even more serious complaint against the Chinese. He found that the Chinese have an `underdeveloped sense of independent personal identity [which] may be connected with the absence from all Chinese religions, except the minority ones of Islam and the two Christianities (sic), of a strong relationship between an individual soul and an omnipotent and judging deity.' (Jenner, 1992:230) That put Jenner in the same camp as Cohen, that is, with an ethnocentric totalitarian ideology that denies anyone who do not accept their ideology as without `a fully independent identity'.

In short, to have an

independent identity, the Chinese must reject their cultural heritage, including their moral system, and be more like those in the Centre. The main cause of this rejection, I submit, is that the Christian moral system seems totalitarian and rejects the idea that a different system can be an equal. In the West where the Christian moral system has long held sway, its adherents have always claimed it as a universally applicable and valid moral system, brooking no deviation. As it can be quite totalitarian, it is not surprising its adherents would regard that the Chinese moral system as wrong and its method of moral improvement is mired in the sin of spiritual pride. Yet, according to the moral system of China's major tradition, the Confucian one, the Christian system is tainted by moral cowardice and must be rejected. So unless we are prepared to accept these moral systems have incompatible elements and that each system, though different, has the right to exist, we cannot heed Mote's warning to the Christian West and continue to `insert elements of their own culture into their understanding of others'. Hence, such sinologists will continue in their `failure to

Chapter Two: Universalism and Ethnocentrism

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understand the basic nature of the Chinese world view.' (Mote, 1971:17) What is even more ironic is that the works of such Orientalist sinology still continue to distort to the people in the Christian-Centre their understanding of China, her culture and moral values because those

sinologists will continue to make the

image of China's culture appear like those of the Centre, so affirming Said's definition of Orientalism. Cohen's book, entitled China and Christianity: the Missionary Movement and the Growth of Anti-foreignism, obliquely alluded to this but does not explore the issue. As the title suggests, it fits into Mote's foreboding: `the Western failure to understand the basic nature of the Chinese world', and led many Western scholars to `insert elements of their own culture into their understanding of [China's].' Cohen meticulously instanced the disagreements and clashes between the Chinese and the Christian missionaries and even lists the various amounts of fines and other punishments that the Chinese had to pay for their robust opposition to the intrusion of Christianity. (Cohen, 1963:Appendix 1)

The

missionaries, of course, had the right to evangelize in China conferred on them by the treaties, which the Chinese called Unequal Treaties which were extracted by their own governments from China after each of their many victories over the decaying Qing Empire. Indeed, missionaries were not bound by the laws of China because being foreigners, they enjoyed the privilege of extraterritoriality and came under the laws of their home countries even if their crimes were committed against the Chinese in China.

As the foreigners enjoyed these

privileges was the results of conquest, they must expect resentment from the local Chinese people. If such foreigners would even insist that their moral system is superior and that if the Chinese do not embrace them and reject their own, they will court eternal damnation as criminals, people with zui, and be cast into a hell of fire and brimstones, and then for these scholars to turn around and condemn any Chinese who opposed such impositions as victims of anti-foreignism must be regarded as Orientalists. To blame the rising tide of resentment on the antiforeignism in the Chinese, as Cohen's title implied, then his position is like those observers who ascribed to the Chinese the Central Kingdom Mentality while

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located China in the Far East—an observation possible only if the observer is in the Centre. In short, it is Orientalism though Cohen would most likely denied being so. Cohen's study is useful for an understanding of Orientalism in sinology. His careful scholarship has given us parts of the sermon given on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the first Protestant missionary in China, Robert Morrison, in 1808. It was given by a new young English missionary who proved to be quite a success. His was like the Rev. Griffith John whose mission to China was sponsored by the China Inland Mission. As Latourette, the great scholar on Christian mission history advised, John established `many outstations hundreds of miles around Hankou' and translated the New Testament to literary Chinese. (Latourette 1929: 36, 431). His sermon was soberingly prophetic: `Recently Protestant missionaries have come to your China and have spent over 50 years preaching the Holy Way and commending the Scriptures. The people throughout the land should all have repented and believed in the Lord,' he thundered, `but in the end the believers are few and nonbelievers many. This ... is an obvious sign of human depravity. Hence, you Chinese, according to the laws of God, are all truly sinful, [or criminal].'(Cohen: 54, emphasis mine) This was exactly what Mote had warned against: inserting elements of ones own culture into China's and so failing to understand the basic nature of the Chinese worldview. But, from Rev. John's perspective, being in China to save the heathen Chinese from their sinful ways and convert them to Christianity, he could not be expected to respect the Chinese moral system which he had dedicated his life to change. It was this belief in the universalism of Christianity that was led to the incompatible core of the Christian culture to clash with Chinese culture. While one may regard such universalism as a form of the Central Kingdom Mentality, it is the core rationale of Christian evangelism. How many modern sinologists have this in mind when engaging in their comparative enterprise of sinology? Just before Fr. Wolferstan SJ published his lament in 1909 that the Chinese had `no correct idea of sin', the Rev. Griffith John had completed his

Chapter Two: Universalism and Ethnocentrism

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service in China and published his widely read memoire, A Voice From China, in 1907 to mark the `first hundred years of Protestant missions in China' (John 1907:12) While his tone was upbeat, he revealed, if unwittingly, why the Christian missionaries were not fruitful, making China the most unfruitful field in the annals of Christian missionary endeavours. Until foreign missionaries were removed by the government of the People's Republic of China in 1950, the normally accepted estimate of baptized members in all Christian sects were about 0.5% of the total population. After 141 years of Protestant efforts and more than double that by the Roman Catholics, that was pathetically meagre. While Cohen thought Chinese conservatism and xenophobia were the main reasons for their rejection of Christianity, if we take into account of how the missionaries saw themselves and their moral system, their lack of success is understandable, unless we regard Christianity as a religion that all should embrace, as Jenner advised. Seemingly unhindered by modesty, Griffith John, as befitting a Christian soldier, wrote `in the missionaries the Chinese have the true representatives of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual culture of the West, and many of them know it.' As to why missionaries were `almost invariably the victims of ... riots ... the answer ... is simple enough.

They are so because, as the true pioneers of

civilization, they are the most exposed to attack.' (John: 29-30) Why must China have a new civilization and why did John arrogate himself as among the providers of this new civilization that the Chinese must embrace? Indeed, why must the Chinese reject their civilization, as demanded by Griffith John? The answer given by this John `who has laboured [in] China for more than fifty years, and who is prepared to lay down his life at any moment for the good of the Chinese people' was the very nature of China's civilization, especially `the Confucian school' which `up to the present, has been strongly opposed to all changes.

In

their

essential

character

these

non-Christian

faiths

are

unprogressive.'(Ibid.79) The faiths John referred to were Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Reminiscent of Moses at Mount Sinai, our veteran servant of the same God condemned such schools of thought as `mere obstructions, and must be passed away, if the countries which they dominate are to advance in religion,

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morality, and civilization. They possess no moral or spiritual truth of any value which is not to be found in Christianity, whilst in Christianity there are truths in infinite moment to man of which they know nothing ... have no life-giving power.'(Ibid.: 79-80) That is, the totalitarianism that originated in the Garden of Eden, passed on to Moses then via the bloody Crusades and the Conquistadors and now to the missionaries in China. To the missionaries, China needs a new cosmogony and civilization or her people will remain `lost’ because of their antiforeignism. In refusing to accept this Free Gift, as Jenner advised, the Chinese now have an `underdeveloped sense of independent personal identity.' (Jenner, 1992: 230) This is more than inserting elements of the sinologists' culture but a complete replacement, a most virulent form of Orientalism. As I will show in later chapters, this is retained by many modern mainstream sinologists who, most likely, would deny being Orientalists. To overcome this hurdle of incompatibility, modern sinologists have employed many devices, as I will show in later chapters. Suffice for now, some still seem unaware or take no cognizance of what had happened. Some would see it indicate the inadequacies of China's culture and language. Some, especially ethnic Chinese sinologists, try to reconcile their heritage, China's culture, with their new found faith, Christianity, by ignoring the incompatible elements and so inadvertently distorted both cultures. Some would use a supporting vocabulary in their discourse so as to make China's culture appears Christian, and effectively distorting it.

These efforts may also be regarded as species of cultural

imperialism with the universalist message of their God following on the heel of the imperialists into China to extend the rights of missionaries to proselyte. This was done every time the Christian West invaded and defeated China. It was indeed Gold, God and Glory! At times the desire for gold and god went hand in hand. The works of James Legge was sponsored by Joseph Jardine, a founder of the Jardine business empire which was the largest English importer of opium to China. According to Legge, Jardine told him, `We make our money in China, and we shall be glad to assist in whatever promises to be of benefit to it.' (Legge 1893:iv) So, Legge's

Chapter Two: Universalism and Ethnocentrism

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work was for the good of China. God may or may not be an Englishman but the Chinese god, as noted, was a gift of an Englishman, the Rev. James Legge D.D., and sponsored by Jardine Ltd. Co. To this, the Rev. Griffith John D.D. must have concurred. He advised us of the evidence of the power of his God thus: `The progress of Japan in Christian civilization received a wonderful illustration in her struggle with China in 1894-5, and again in 1900, in connection with the Boxer uprising. But it was in her conflict with Russia in 1904-5 that Japan gave her most conspicuous proof of the reality as well as the greatness of the progress made by her during these forty or fifty years.' (John: 41) One wonders if our Soldier of God, the Rev. John, had disregarded or forgotten the fact that Russians have been Christianized for over a millennium? Perhaps he excluded the Russian Orthodox version from the Body of Christ? It would also be news to the Imperial Forces of Japan that they owed their victories to their embrace of the Christian God and Christian civilization. On the other hand, to see the handiwork of his god in such blood letting was as obscene as to order the slaughter of three thousands by the god of Moses, at least to atheists like me who prefers to stay humane. While the Enlightenment may have saved the West from the barbarism of religion, the missionaries and Orientalist sinologists seem intent to push China back to barbarism. Dare I say they are barbarians? If I, an ethnic Chinese, had written those words by John, I would almost certainly court being condemned as an example of the ubiquitous Central Kingdom Mentality. I must say not all modern sinologists are so crude. Some, especially those sensitive to linguistic issues in today's secular world, do not use such crude religious universalism in their evaluation of Chinese culture. They use a secular Orientalist approach. I will now examine an example of this approach. It is a recent volume in the famed Science and Civilization in China series founded by Joseph Needham, designated as Volume 7 Part I, on Language and Logic by the renowned Classicist Christoph Harbsmeier. (Harbsmeier: 1998) As a Classicist of European and Chinese cultures, he betrays his Orientalism in a classical way.

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Orientalism in Sinology In his Note which takes the place of the preface, Harbsmeier declared: `It

turns out that the Chinese language is reasonably well equipped to express rational argumentation, essential to Science, and the ancient Chinese have many current forms of argument in common with their contemporary Greeks.' (Harbsmeier: xxiii) How graciously patronizing of him to grant such an ability to Classical Chinese and how Orientalist of him to use Ancient Greek as the frame of reference to judge Classical Chinese! It would have been strange indeed if the two languages as diverse and unrelated as Classical Greek and Chinese do not have significant differences in terms of grammar and rhetoric of discourse, and it would even be stranger for a sinologist to use Classical Greek as his referential framework to analyze Classical Chinese.

His knowledge of both Classical

languages and his Orientalism has led him go boldly and orientally forth to where few sinologists, if any, have gone before. I do not mean Harbsmeier has departed abruptly from the approaches of traditional Orientalist missionary-sinologists.

Indeed, his modes operandi is

within the traditional Orientalist approach. A case in point is his discussion of the book of Liu Zi (465-522 CE) which `lists and characterizes the nine schools of Chinese thought—Confucianism, Daoism, school of Yin and Yang, logicians, legalists, Mohists, diplomatists, syncretists and agriculturalists—and give the weaknesses of each of these schools. It does not ask which school was right. It asks what point each school is getting at and how far it gets. This, it seems to me, remained a characteristic Chinese attitude even after the establishment of a Confucian orthodoxy during the Song.' (Harbsmeier: 208-9) While he made no attempt to explain such a phenomenon, that he should raise such points shows he lets his own culture's mores as the norm in evaluating attributes of Chinese culture. As if transfixed by a totalitarian Christianity, he regards it is normal to have an absolute truth as demanded by the First Commandment of his CreatorGod. If we all seek truth as a life-long endeavour, so as Confucius hoped that by the time he reached seventy what he wants to do would coincide with what he ought to do, Harbsmeier has become at least an unwitting victim of Orientalism though he would probably deny being so.

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But what Harbsmeier said is untrue. The Classical Chinese were quite critical of each other. How then are we to take the Hundred Schools of Thoughts contending with each other at the Warring State Period, the two centuries or so between Confucius and China's unification under Qin in 221 BCE. Surely, the argumentative Dong Zhongshu (179?-104? BCE) of the Han Dynasty cannot be so classified. Then Han Yu (768-824 CE) of Tang Dynasty was quite noted for his caustic arguments against Buddhism as in his essay Yuan Dao where he insisted on its termination. To say that Chinese philosophers did not claim their arguments were correct while their opponents were wrong is nonsense. Surely, for Dao De Jing No.3 to say that `in governing the people, the sage empties their minds but fills their bellies' was an attempt to ridicule the concerns of the Confucians who as Confucius himself likened seeking knowledge with truth. But I must return to the Orientalism of Harbsmeier. To use the attributes of the cultural expressions of the Centre as norms to evaluate Chinese cultural expressions has a long history and has been a typically Orientalist mode. It has been particularly so in the section on Phonology and Syntax of the Chinese Language in Harbsmeier's study.

He even mentioned the efforts of Joseph

Mullie, the Dutch scholar who published a three-volume study of Classical Chinese where he used Latin grammatical categories.(Ibid. 19-20). While no one would doubt the industry involved in such a study, but if one were to reverse the process and apply the grammatical categories of Classical Chinese to a study of Latin, one would realize what Mullie did was an act of wanton arboreal sacrifice without being a member of a Green Party.

What Mullie has done is like

evaluating an orange by the criteria of an apple. But that was what Harbsmeier did in his Language and Logic in the Needham Series of Science and Civilization in China. For example, he wrote `there is no standard Classical Chinese noun for truth. The Chinese have not tended to reify or hypothesize an abstract concept of truth as correspondence with facts. They have indeed shown a commendable reluctance, encouraged by the morphemic structure of their language, to hypothesize or reify any abstract concept. On the other hand, we shall see that the Chinese philosophers were in

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many ways concerned with semantic truth with the truth of sentences ... The Chinese have always tended to be interested in the practical aspect of truth. They have traditionally been inclined to ask of a statement not only whether it was true, but also what would happen if one held it to be true.' (Ibid.195) Translators have long been aware that however close are the languages concerned, no language have words that would be the exact equivalence of every word in another language. As English has no equivalence for coup d'etat, it incorporates it into daily English usage. Why should one demand that of Classical Chinese? Likewise, there are many words central to Chinese culture that have no exact equivalence in English or any European language. A case in point is ren, a concept central to the Confucian school of thought, but it has no equivalence in any European language. In Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary where it is listed as word No.3099 and given these meanings: `Perfect virtue, free from selfishness, the ideal of Confucius ... the inner love for man which prompts to just deeds ... Benevolence, charity, humanity, love.'(Mathews'1956: 464) Harbsmeier called it `goodness, humaneness'(Op.cit.:35). Other sinologists have rendered it as human-heartedness, humane and many more. The point is not whether such disparate languages as Chinese and English should have vocabularies that correspond exactly, the point for the sinologist is to note that as these two cultures have so many distinctive elements, their languages do not always have exact equivalences, as the absence in Chinese of the word sin. Anything more would border on ethnocentrism and Orientalism. But Harbsmeier persisted. `Collectively', he wrote, `Chinese intellectuals have tended towards a holistic view of meaning and truth which refuses to detach these concepts from their anthropological and historical context.

The neo-

Confucian term dao li which we may be tempted to translate as "truth" because this is what the word dao-li sometimes means in anglicized Modern Chinese, is in fact something much closer to our modern "point" as in "he has a point"'. He then cited Zhu zi: `The Poems of Su Tung-po's (Su Dongbo) later years are certainly good. The only thing is that much of the wording is haphazard and not at all to the point, dao li.' (Ibid: 208) But his `anglicized Modern Chinese' usage is but a

Chapter Two: Universalism and Ethnocentrism

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Christianized usage as referring to preaching a sermon as jiang dao-li, speaking the [Christian] Truth. Thus Harbsmeier's interpretation has effectively made a Modern Christian usage of dao li into indigenous Chinese usage albeit anglicized and qualifies him for what Said called using a supporting vocabulary, an act of Orientalism though he would no doubt deny it. Whether Harbsmeier is a willing or unwitting victim of Orientalism is not the issue but to judge it as a contribution to the Needham series, we can say that his modes operandi is Orientalist. In his opening chapter on Language, is this footnote: `The Chinese customarily refer to their words as tzu/zi "character", although they have a more westernized term tzhu/ci for "word". Thus the Chinese today can be heard to say things like "I didn't say a character" instead of "I didn't say a word".' (Ibid.:39) From a senior scholar, that is Orientalism. ci was first mentioned in the in the 12th Year of Duke Zhao (530 BCE) in Zuo Chuan, an ancient and venerated Chinese text, so it is hardly a Westernized term even if so declared by a Norwegian professor of sinology. Need I say any more? Undeterred, Harbsmeier ploughed on and opined that `Chinese words are not predominantly governed by strict functional laws and subcategorized into discrete word classes in quite the same way as Latin. They are importantly governed by flexible grammatical tendencies and subcategorized into a categorical continuum. Chinese words can have a stronger or weaker tendency to work like nouns, verbs or adjectives.'(Ibid.: 139) Non-Orientalists among us may ask whose functional law does Harbsmeier refer to? Is there a universal law of grammar applicable to all languages? Who has elevated Latin grammar to the position of a universal `functioning law'? Furthermore, Chinese is not the only language where words can work as nouns, verbs and adjectives, because English can be so too: we can operationalize and commodify the functionality of our stupidity and even professionalize our prejudices and ignorance, as Harbsmeier did with the Cambridge University Syndic? But more importantly, why should Chinese operates in Latin grammar rules be they Classical, Literary or Modern? Does Latin operate on Chinese grammar rules?

46

Orientalism in Sinology He continued thus: `word classes are less rigid in Chinese than they are in

Latin or Greek. Perhaps something similar is true of grammatical structure. Grammatical structures seem suppler, less rigid things in Classical Chinese than they are in Latin. Perhaps the ascription of grammatical structure to Classical Chinese sentences must even more often be taken cum granno salis, with a pinch of salt (Note the use of pinch versus granno) that is the case of ancient Greek. One does feel that the Romans used a more grammatical regimented language than the Chinese.' (Ibid. 142) Is an orange a bad apple? Is it significant that the Romans did not use chopsticks? As neither the use of chopsticks nor rigid grammatic rules are universal phenomena, why should we, or indeed Harbsmeier, judge Latin or Greek by Chinese categories, or indeed judging Chinese by Latin or Greek categories? The fault, to Harbsmeier, is the Chinese language. It is `elliptical and `insufficiently explicit'. (Ibid. 143) His examples need investigation. On the elliptical aspect, he gave two examples: zhi ren zhi mien bu zhi xin which he translated, word by word, to `know man, know face, not know heart'. The second one is jian yi bu wei yong ye, being `see righteous, not do, lack courage particle.' He then rendered it into English as `when you know a person, you know his face but you do not know his heart' and `if, when you see duty you do not act according to it, that is lack of courage.' While their meanings were clear enough to a fairly literate Chinese, they would be nearer the mark if I rendered them as: `to know one superficially is not to know the true person' and `seeing what is right and not act on it is lacking in courage.' One may debate the merits of his translation against mine but his next sentence is quite unacceptable: `are all these things that the translation makes explicit really properly understood by the Chinese?' (Ibid. 144) To any Chinese with a secondary school education, those two statements are abundantly clear. `The Chinese', whoever they are, may not understand Harbsmeier's English rendition but to suggest they may not understand the Chinese statements borders on impertinence because, by now, they are almost clichés.

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My unease with Harbsmeier is affirmed in the next page where he discussed `generally elliptic' arithmetic statements. He gave two examples: first, san qi er shi i which he renders to 3-7-2-10-1 and suggests `a Chinese reader or writer just picturesquely conjoins these numbers in his mind without structuring their relation precisely makes no historical or philosophical sense.' (Ibid.145) In fact, er shi always means 20 and that line is known to primary school children learning their 3x and 7x multiplication tables.

He further claimed `Chinese

sentences tend to be quite obviously designed not to make explicit but only to communicate whatever they are used to convey. This communication is often achieved with an admirable economy of articulatory effort which is hard to reproduce in modern English.

‘The stylistic ideal of Classical Chinese’,

Harbsmeier continued, `encourages the exploitation of grammatical possibilities for ellipses: the ideal is to leave out whatever can be understood from the context.' (Ibid. 145) He then cited the line in The Analects of Confucius (Lun Yu, XV:41) ci da er yi which he rendered to `words should get the point across and that is all.' He cited D.C. Lau who rendered it as: `it is enough that the language one uses gets the point across,' while Legge rendered it as `in language it is simply required that it convey the meaning.' To Harbsmeier, `the trouble is that what is sufficient to put across a point to Confucius' audience of disciples and therefore lived up to his ideal may not always be sufficient to put across the point to later interpreters like ourselves.' (Ibid. 146) Here he raised two points that tell us more about himself and his method than to enlighten us on discourse in Chinese. The first is: for those writing Classical Chinese, it is unlikely they would have in mind how would their writing be reproduced in modern English. Indeed, why should that be a concern to those writing in Classical Chinese? They are writing to, or addressing, a Chinese readership or audience? Secondly, ci da er yi is really a warning against verbosity in our discourse, a point that seems to have escaped Harbsmeier.

In fact, what he does when translating a Chinese statement to

English is to put his English version in the same word order as the Chinese original, then blames the Chinese language for lacking in explicitness. It is unlikely for two languages as distant as Classical Chinese and Modern English, or

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even as close as two in the Indo-European language family, to have the same word order. What Harbsmeier has done would seemed to be of questionable intellectual integrity at least, especially on the points he raised about the explicitness of the Chinese language. Unlike his profession's pioneers, Harbsmeier did not seek to invalidate the distinctive aspects in the culture of China nor to replace them with Christian ones of the Centre, nevertheless, he is still mired in Orientalism. While he accepted sinology is a comparative and linguistic endeavour, he has not attempted to seek an appropriate referential framework for the task. While he did not use as the standard of comparison the mores of the Christian culture of the West and so shown he was freed from the Opiate of the People, but to use Classical Greek and Latin as standard to compare Chinese grammar and the mode of discourse shows he has not escaped Orientalism. His method is as silly and ethnocentric as if I, an ethnic Chinese, were to use Classical Chinese categories to evaluate Greek and Latin. If I, an ethnic Chinese were to do so, I would be regarded as guilty of having a Central Kingdom Mentality. Would it be right for a Nordic sinologist to do it the other way round? Of greater concern is in the writing of a comparative intellectual history, such as a history of some aspect of Chinese culture, in English, as Harbsmeier does here. One's concern is not the Orientalist prism through which he views Chinese culture but his claim in the concluding remark: a `balanced comparison demands familiarity not only with the (sic) Classical Chinese but also with the classical European languages and intellectual heritage,' (Ibid.420) but without giving any reason for making this assertion. His brief in the volume, I thought, was to discuss language and logic in the context of Science and Civilization in China and report his findings in Modern English not Classical Greek nor Latin. It seems he had missed some important theoretical and methodological issues in his study of history of ideas including scientific ideas when debates on these issues rage on. While members of Cambridge University have made great contributions, Harbsmeier did not mention them, not even in the Bibliography.

To do a

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comparative history across two diverse cultures makes such omission doubly serious. To take a positivist view as Harbsmeier does is inadequate. Harbsmeier's task is not just interpreting certain ancient schools of intellectual development but also involves reporting and evaluating such interpretations in a language foreign to the ancient Chinese thinkers.

Such

exercises have many levels. First, the modern interpreters generally profess a different worldview and socio-political goal from those in the ancient Chinese writers. Secondly, and equally important, is that the interpreters and readers of the ancient records do not necessarily share the ancients' worldviews and sociopolitical goals, or even the direct cultural descendents of the ancients. So what the modern interpreter are doing is not only a trans-cultural but also a transideological exercise as they try to evaluate the ancient Chinese schools of scientific thought.

Besides, those ancients expressed themselves in Classical

Chinese while the interpreters use Modern English. Thus, we will need to define our terms and to ascertain what we are doing. In doing this exercise, we are doing cross-cultural and cross-linguistic history and so we must confront a number of problems. For the purpose of this discussion, I shall limit myself to a general one that is common to all students of history, especially in cross-cultural and crosslinguistic intellectual history, that is, how can we know the past? Some argue that in such matters all knowledge is exclusively present. The opposition claims all knowledge is past knowledge. As what we are doing here is the history of scientific ideas of the ancient Chinese but expressing in Modern English, one may raise the Banquoesque ideas of Michael Oakeshott, the late great historian of ideas at the London School of Economics. As the Needham series is published by the Cambridge University Press I had hoped Harbsmeier would mention the ideas of Quentin Skinner, the noted Cambridge scholar upholding Oakeshott's flame. While I do not intend to rehearse their ideas here, students of the history of ideas would recognize my oblique departure from these great scholars. As an exercise in history, more precisely the sub-genre of history of scientific ideas, it is really an exercise in reflection in the present. Since the history that we know is not, and cannot be, past experience itself because such

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experience is, by definition, past and thus out of reach. So when we say we know past experience, it is really only in the sense that this aspect of what we presently know we choose, for reasons good or bad, to call the `past'. But history is not merely the present otherwise we need not call it history. From the above brief account, we may say that what historical reflection— the study and writing of history—presupposes as present activities are activities which are both similar to and different from itself, the present. History is always present only in the sense that doing history is always reflections in the, or a, present. This does not mean that the subject of this reflection is also present. But this present only means that the evidence of it is now available. But the presently available evidence of a past event is not the same as the past event itself. We can no more seize a past event than a past thought. We can certainly express opinions and even present evidence, but in doing so we can at best approximate and hypothesize. History is not merely the present otherwise we need not call it history.

History is intuited and understood in the present.

It is a present

reflection. It is a present or contemporary attempt to portray or explain the past— a past which, by definition, cannot be re-entered. Furthermore, we have no evidence for this past as such. We can never know the `past' per se. The past is never seen, but only assumed. What evidence that we have of the past is set out as history according to this assumption. It is obvious that reading and writing history are present events as they are taking place in the present. Though history claims the past as its objective, it is a representation of present events. `History' cannot be the actual past but only a record or evidence or a hypothesis about the past. As it is written in the present, history cannot escape the reflection of the present—if only as a perspective about the past. This does not mean that the past is the present. To do so would be to say what is true is what we think to be true. However, in what is regarded as history of the past, be it history of kings or scientific thought, it comes close to this. Hence, there is a need for every generation to write its own history because every generation has a different present for historians reflect on the past.

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Furthermore any history of ideas, whether scientific or otherwise, is effectively a history of philosophy. On this, some scholars urge direct attention to the great texts. Others urge the reconstruction of the intricate contexts out of which these texts emerged. Some advise to be faithful to the past, yet others seek contemporary lessons which the past may teach.

There are also numerous

combinations of such advices. If the reconstruction of the past is difficult, the reconstruction of past arguments is an enduring task. We may assume thinkers address their thoughts to audiences. But we are on slippery ground to insist that those audiences are of some specific kind, unless that is revealed by the thinkers themselves.

Thus, if the thinkers are concerned with the overthrow or

preservation of a particular regime, then the interpreters must take cognizance. If the thinkers are concerned with the logic of the concepts or the understanding of social activities in general, the need for a specific interpretation is lessened. But Harbsmeier has not shown any awareness of the above problems when interpreting ideas across time and culture but merely plough on with Ancient Greek and Latin as the norm in comparing Classical Chinese. Apart from what we may call the text versus context problem, another problem for scholars engaging in the history of ideas is the relation between the text and the reader. We all have our cultural baggage as we come to the texts and make our own reconstruction of the texts we read. These problems are specially important in cross-cultural and cross-linguistic history, such as writing a history of Chinese scientific thought in English. Yet few sinologists seem to have the sensitivity to make use of these tools as they do their investigations, indeed, few have shown any awareness of these issues. If we combined these two issues— text versus context and reader and text—we may demonstrate that when reading ancient Chinese cultural texts, including ancient scientific ones, we not only can cast more light on our understanding of the history of Chinese science but also on the social and ideological contexts of the readers or historians, indeed these two are interdependent. In his Language and Logic volume in the Needham series of in Science and Civilization in China, Harbsmeier has shown he is totally unaware of these issues. There is no evidence of this in the text nor in his copious

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Bibliography. What he has done is to point out, repeatedly, that the grammar, the language and the style of discourse in Classical Chinese are different from those in Classical Greek and Latin, such as the lack of parentheses in Classical Chinese. As these points are more in the axiomatic realm than earth shattering discoveries, do we need a 500-page volume to show them? He further claimed that `balanced comparison [presumably between Science and Technology in China and Europe] demands familiarity not only with Classical Chinese but also with the Classical European languages and intellectual traditions.' (Ibid. 420) One would have thought his brief in writing that volume was to prepare a study in Modern English on the Chinese Language and Logic in the context of Science and Civilization in China, not to write in Classical Greek or Latin. Certainly, to know Classical Greek and Latin is indeed a privilege but is it a necessity if one's aim is to acquaint oneself with Language and Logic in China in the context of Science and Civilization in China? He also said Classical Chinese lacks explicitness compared to the two ancient European languages, yet his task is not to write his report in or about Classical Greek or Latin but in Modern English. There is a Chinese saying that quite explicitly describes what he has done, chu-kun fang-pi. If rendered into the most polite form of Modern English, it goes something like `removing ones trousers to break wind', in short, a superfluous act. This problem is not peculiar to Harbsmeier but seems endemic in modern mainstream sinology. In later chapters, I shall demonstrate how these sinologists seem to be more concerned to tell Chinese culture what it should be, or should have been, rather than to enlighten us on what Chinese culture is or the nature of Chinese culture.

If we recall Mote's warning cited at the beginning of this

chapter, it seems too many modern sinologists are still prone to insert elements of their own culture into their interpretations of the culture of China, including China's scientific culture, a position not unlike that of their missionary-pioneers. One wonders what would be the response of Dr. Joseph Needham had he known his great series on Science and Civilization in China has come to this sorry past— is his England being invaded by the Vikings again?

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Finally, to answers the questions I posed at the beginning of this chapter, I would have to say that many modern mainstream sinologists have maintain the position of the Christian missionary-pioneers of their discipline, in their study of China and Chinese culture, even if unwittingly. They use their own culture's attributes as the norm as they engage in the comparative enterprise of sinology. Some, as Harbsmeier used Classical Greek and Latin as the norm when discussing matters written in Classical Chinese. Also basic to this position is the sinologists' invalidation of the distinctive attributes in China's culture, that is, unlike those in the Christian culture.

NOTES

Analects of Confucius, any edition. My own translation used.

BODDE, Derk (1961)`Myths of Ancient China' in S. N. Kramer ed. Mythologies of the Ancient World (New York, Anchor). CHAN, Adrian (1997) `The Sinless Chinese: a Christian Translation Dilemma' in Karl Simms ed. Translating Sensitive Texts: Linguistic Aspects 239-43 (Atlanta and Amsterdam, Rodopi). COHEN, P.A.(1963) China and Christianity: the Missionary Movement and the Growth of Anti-foreignism (Cambridge MA, Harvard U.P.) DAO DE JING Authorship and date unknown, it is the best known Daoist text. Any edition. EXODUS, Second book in the Christian Bible, cited from the Authorized or King James version. FORKE, Alfred (1925) The World Concept of the Chinese (London, Arthur Probstrain). HARBSMEIER, Christoph (1998 China) Language and Logic being Vol 7 Pt.I of Joseph NEEDHAM, Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge, Cambridge U.P.)

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JENNER, W.J.F. (1992) The Tyranny of History: the Roots of China's Crisis (London, Allen Lane, the Penguin Press). JOHN, Griffith (1907) A Voice From China (London, J. Clarke). LATOURETTE, Kenneth Scott (1929) A History of Christian Missions in China (London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge). LEGGE, James (1879) The Sacred Books of China: the Texts of Confucius pt I The Shu King (She Jing), Preface. (ed. used Delhi, Motilal Bararsudass Reprint, 1988) LEGGE, James (1893) Confucius (Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of the Mean)(Oxford, Clarendon Press, ed. used Dover, New York, 1971) LUKE, The Gospel according to St. Luke, the 3rd book in the New Testament of the Bible. MARK, The Gospel according to St. Mark, the 2nd book in the New Testament of the Bible. MATTHEW, The Gospel according to St. Matthew, the 1st book

in

the

New

Testament of the Bible. MATHEWS’(1956) Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary, revised American Ed. (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press). MOTE, F.A. (1971) Intellectual Foundations of China (New York, A.A. Knopf) NEEDHAM,J (1956) Science and Civilization in China vol. II (Cambridge, Cambridge U.P.) WOLFERSTAN, B. (1909) The Catholic Church in China from 1860 to 1907 (London, Sands; St. Louis, Herder). WRIGHT, A.F. (1953) `The Chinese Language and Foreign ideas' in Wright, A ed. Studies in Chinese Thought, 286-303, ed. A. Wright (Chicago, University of Chicago Press), emphasis mind. (1) As the division of time into BC and AD implies a Christian perspective, it seems more appropriate to use the religion-neutral BCE, Before the Common Era, and CE, Common Era, in a study that challenges the universality of the Christian perspective, especially for sinology.

CHAPTER THREE A SUPPLANTING VOCABULARY

In the previous chapters, I discussed how the belief system of the missionary-sinologists has caused them to reject many distinctive features of China's culture. In this chapter I will examine how that practice had impacted on the work of many modern sinologists and how that effect is maintained in modern sinology, as distinct from those sinologists' attitudes on those aspects of Chinese culture that they rejected. Keeping in mind Mote's warning mentioned in Chapter Two, this chapter will show how Mote's warning on the insertion of `elements of their own culture into their understanding of others' happens in the practice and is still rampant in modern mainstream sinology. I suggest that discourses in such sinology not only fail to `understand the Chinese world view' and culture, as Mote feared but also distort them. This chapter will examine how this is achieved—by what Said called the use of a `supporting vocabulary' to distort distinctive concepts in China's culture. (Said: 2) This practice has the effect of making Chinese culture appears as a part of the culture of the sinologists' Centre. This legacy of the pioneering missionary-sinologists is inherited by many modern mainstream sinologists, even the secular ones. However, it has to be said that many modern sinologists often accepted this legacy unwittingly because this legacy has achieved what Gramsci would call hegemonic status, that is, exerting its influence by means of acculturation, to the

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extent that such distortions appear as natural. This is the modus operandi that Said called Orientalist scholarship. Its premise is the same as the invalidation and denial by missionary-sinologists of China's cosmogony that effectively denied China's culture has the right to be different from that of the Orientalist sinologists'. As noted, the Christian-missionary sinologists have rejected the cosmogony in China's culture and substituted it with their own, with the world created by a Creator-God. But as noted earlier, by the end of the 19th Century some missionaries were puzzled by the failure of the Chinese to have a correct idea of sin. It is natural for the Chinese to be troubled for their language does not have the word nor concept of sin. Since the missionary-sinologists regarded themselves as the chosen servants of their God, they were not deterred by this alleged inadequacy in China's heathen culture.

Instead, as noted, they gave

Chinese culture another gift: Heaven, by mistranslating the word tian. From the missionary-sinologists' perspective, that was a perfectly understandable act. After giving the Chinese a Creator-God and with it sin, the gift of Heaven would be a natural development. Tian normally means the sky, and more abstractly, it can mean providence or fate and also in exclamations as `Heavens!' or `Heaven knows!' whether made by the religious or not. In the Chinese cosmogony, tian should not be Heaven with an upper case or capital H for in the English language that has connotations that are absent in China's culture. But to translate tian as Heaven is now accepted by mainstream sinologists, seemingly without realizing that such action would make China's culture appear to fulfill Said's definition of Orientalism: `an integral part of European material civilization and culture' though a `supporting ... vocabulary'. Yet, such common mistranslation in mainstream modern sinology is not because of the translator's inadequacy in the Chinese language. A case in point is the Analects of Confucius in the Penguin Classics series, translated by Professor D. C. Lau which I discussed in Chapter One where he has Confucius proclaimed, `When you have offended against Heaven, there is nowhere you can turn in your prayer' (Analects III: 13), thus making Confucius sounded like a Christian divine.

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That he `read Chinese at the University of Hong Kong' when it was a proper colonial establishment `and ... went to Glasgow where he read philosophy,' (Lau 1979:1) may give a clue to how he might have acquired an Orientalist perspective. Having created an Orientalist Heaven, Lau concluded that `anyone who has read the sayings of Confucius carefully and without prejudices', presumably referring to readers of his translation, would agree `Confucius is ... the proverbial prophet.' (Lau Ibid.:55)

As prophets received their commission from their

Creator-God, one may wonder where did Lau find a reference to such a commissioning of Confucius. But Lau is in good company. Mei Yi-pao, an expert of Mo Zi, also had Mo, a philosopher who was a near contemporary of Confucius, talked about the Will of Heaven in his The Ethical and Political Works of Motse, a translation of Mo's works and in his Motse, the Neglected Rival of Confucius, a compendium volume of discussion. (Mei: 1929) As will be shown in Chapters IV and V, such religion-tinted vocabulary abound in modern sinology and used by sinologists in many disciplines. This is not to suggest Mei, Lau and the missionary-sinologists intentionally distorted Chinese culture, or have any evil intent. The missionarysinologists, as stated, were constrained by their religious ideology to regard their actions as necessary and for the good of the Chinese. The modern scholars seem to be under the hegemonic influence of the legacy by the missionary-sinologists that still pervades the imperial Centre and so have unwittingly accepted the missionaries' worldview, including their gift of the new Trinity of God, Heaven and Sin when translating Chinese cultural texts into English. So, in their efforts to translate the Chinese cultural texts to make them available to those without Classical Chinese. These modern sinologists use English terms which they regard as the equivalences of the Chinese, but in reality the choice of those terms have shown that they have become unwitting victims of Orientalism. This also shows how that Orientalism has achieved hegemonic status in Chinese cultural studies even before Edward Said raised that term to our consciousness in 1979—also the year Professor Lau first published his translation of The Analects of Confucius, by Penguin.

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Orientalism in Sinology Thus, Orientalism, is not merely the past efforts of the Christian-

missionaries-sinologists who distorted the identity and image of China and her culture by those in the Centre, but also how the many modern sinologists seem to have distorted our understanding of China. In both cases, their goal was achieved by removing the distinctiveness of China's culture by what Said called a ‘supporting vocabulary’.

This can be demonstrated by examining what are

commonly regarded as the quintessential elements of Chinese culture which Sir Arthur Waley called The Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China— Confucianism, Legalism and Daoism. (Waley: 1936)

Had the Orientalist

sinologists treated Chinese culture in the same way as they treated other cultures, say French, then those three ancient Chinese bodies of ideas would have had different names. Their current English names give them connotations that are not in the Chinese originals but are used to make the Chinese culture appears more like parts of European civilization. However, I have to point out that few modern sinologists who use those terms realize they were being Orientalist for they are unaware of it. They are the unwitting victims who regard their actions as natural. Since this is a legacy of the Christian missionary-pioneers of sinology, I cannot help but be reminded of what Luke recorded as one of the last words of Jesus on the cross: `Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.' (Luke XXIII: 24) As an atheist, I should be consistent with my position and remove the word Father but it stays here because this is a study of the impacts of sinology by scholars from cultures that are predominantly Christian. The term Confucianism, the first of Waley's Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, connotes a body of ideas or doctrines based on the writings or teachings of Kong fuzi, Master Kong, or better known by its Latinized form, Confucius. But it is not so, though to many sinologists and in the popular mind, it is a quintessential ancient Chinese social theory or even religion, based on the teachings or writings of Kong or Confucius. Indeed, many modern sinologists have claimed it is still relevant to contemporary China and East Asia. In recent years, it was held responsible for the economic developments of the Four Little Dragons—Hong Kong, Republic of Korea, Singapore and Taiwan.

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Tu Wei-ming and Roderick MacFarquhar, both eminent sinologists—China scholars—of Harvard University, claimed it as the East Asian equivalence of Weber's Protestant Work Ethics, enabling `the Sinic World to assimilate industrial capitalism in such a way as to present a total challenge [cultural, social, economic and political] to the West.' (Tu: 1989) This is a remarkable statement. It not only has a racist overtone by implying an industrialized West is natural while an industrialized Sinic world is but a challenging upstart but it is also silly and illogical though mainstream sinologists seem to share their opinion. Shortly after the cited statement by Tu and MacFarquhar, there was a co-operative effort between the Confucian Foundation of the People's Republic of China and Germany's Konrad Adenauer Foundation to sponsor an international symposium on the theme of `Confucianism and the Modernization of China' held at Bonn University, from October 31 to November 2, 1988. Tu was there together with a galaxy of stellar sinologists. They came to a conclusion similar to that by Tu and MacFarquhar. (Krieger and Trausettel: 1991) Therefore, it is not surprising to say that such views are accepted as Received Opinion by the unschooled journalists and the ubiquitous intelligent laity since it is expressed so seriously by so many leaders in the discipline of sinology. That judgment is silly because Confucius did not encourage the acquisitive spirit of capitalism. On the contrary, he had long regarded the seeking of profit as a negative pursuit to be avoided by those who like to follow his teachings. He said, `If one is guided by profit in one's action, one will incur much ill will' (Analects IV: 12). Meng, better known as Mencius, the St. Augustine of the Confucian tradition, has devoted the first book of his collected writings lecturing a king who sought his advice on profit (Mencius I:A). Since the model for Confucius was the Golden Past, especially in the reign of the good Duke of Zhou, a legendary and nearly mythically virtuous regent to his young orphaned nephew, then to seek from his teaching for directions of our future economic development is, to put it politely, peculiar. It is also illogical because if Confucianism or the teaching of Kong, is really so enabling, China should have been industrialized

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before England because Confucius predated Weber and Protestantism, or even Christianity—the alleged ingredients of Weber's Protestant Work Ethics. More relevant to this study is the very term Confucianism. It has no equivalence in Chinese. If translated to Chinese it would be Kong-zi zhu-yi, the ideology of Master Kong which is not a Chinese expression but a supporting vocabulary for an Orientalist discourse. Zhu-yi is an import, probably from Japan, for ideas of foreign origins as Marxism, Ma-ko-si zhu-yi.

A body of ideas

associated with a Chinese is styled si-xiang or thought, as Mao Zedong si-xiang, the Thought of Mao Zedong.

As what are subsumed under the term

Confucianism are more than the teachings of Confucius, the Chinese do not even use the term Kong-zi si-xiang, for the Thought of Master Kong. The Chinese terms for what are subsumed in the Orientalist term Confucianism are-jia xueshui, or ru-jiao, the Teachings or the School of Ru. Ru is the ideal to which all Confucians aspired to, including Kongzi himself. As English users have adopted coup d'etat without angst, then one may ask why English-using sinologists do not use more appropriate terms as ru, ru-jia xue-shui or ru-jiao which mean the science or theory of the ru school or just the ru school, rather than Confucianism. To do so, I suggest, demands or at least has an implication of treating Chinese culture as an equal to the culture of the Orientalist English-using sinologists. That would flout the long received sinological tradition of treating Chinese culture as inferior. The second of Waley's Three Ways, Legalism, suggests a concept or body of ideas about the Law or Rule of Law. The Chinese term is fa and it has little to do with either. Fa, Waley's Second Way, is a theory a government derived and departed from a branch of the Confucian School of government. It posits a method of government by strict and severe control. The people are told their social stations and duties, the rewards for their fulfillment, and punishments for not. The ideas of protection under the law or equality before it were absent except that all are punishable under fa. Reward and punishment are regarded as its Two Handles of Governance. (Han Fei: ch 7) Though ru was the major tradition and had long been in opposition to fa, the latter had enduring impacts on the

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governance of China, so much so that except for the brief period when Shanghai had Foreign Concessions, China had no independent legal profession but prided in the Rule of Good Men not Law. Today, lawyers in China, especially in criminal law, are public servants though the recent Economic Reforms have led to the emergence of an independent legal profession, mainly in commercial law. A more accurate translation of fa would be Methodism or Method but to the missionary-sinologists, those terms have been taken.

A more accurate and

simpler way is to render Legalism as fa and Confucianism as ru, but that would, again, mean treating Chinese culture as an equal and thus violate the sinological tradition. Daoism is, obviously, an Anglicization but to append ism to dao makes that term Orientalist. To render it as dao-jia or dao-xue is just as easy to write and pronounce. The reason for not doing so can only be regarded the same as not rendering ru and fa for Confucianism and Legalism, as acts of Orientalism and indictments against the Orientalist sinology. As these Chinese names are as easy to pronounce as their invented substitutes that distort the meaning of the originals, I am constrained to conclude that the rejection of the Chinese names and the invention of their substitutes were Orientalist acts. This process shows that such sinology is less concerned with enlightening us on China and Chinese culture than on how China and her culture should be portrayed.

To prefer distortion to

accuracy indicates at least a disrespectful act to Chinese culture, as shown by the missionary-sinologists who made the initial translations. To persist in the use of those terms in modern mainstream sinology, even if unwittingly, is a sad indictment of that scholarly discipline. The victims, as shall be shown later, are as much China's culture as the sinologists concerned. Such usages not only distort but also fail to understand its subject—China and her culture—even if the distortions were done unwittingly, by using them as a Supporting Vocabulary. Therefore, it seems many modern sinologists persist in failing, or trying not, to understand Chinese culture. This failure, as shall be shown later, has impacts beyond an esoteric discipline as sinology but extends

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into the political relationship between China and the home countries of those sinologists. While the world has come to regard these terms of the Three Schools of Thought as the quintessential Chinese concepts, few realize they are really Supporting Vocabulary being used to portray as an Orientalist Chinese culture in the modes operandi suggested by Said.

Since the days of the missionary-

sinologists, those Chinese cultural entities have been deliberately used by those who have no angst to describe a political situation as a coup d'etat. Thus, we must ask for the reason for refusing to use the Chinese terms for these distinctively Chinese cultural entities.

It is not an exaggeration to say the

dominant mode of discourse in sinology is Orientalist, in that `no one writing, thinking, or acting on [China] could do so without taking account of the limits of thought and action imposed by Orientalism,' as Said suggested that his understanding of Orientalism was informed by Foucault's The Archeology of knowledge. (Said: 3). Yet few modern sinologists seem to be aware of this. Therefore, can we say this distortion has been made deliberately?

While

Confucianism connotes a body of ideas associated with the writings and thinking of Confucius, ru-jiao is a social philosophy and praxis that became the major tradition of Chinese culture and was continually being enriched over 2400 years since the time of Confucius. It includes far more than what is connoted by Confucianism or Kongzi zhu-yi. Its continued use, therefore, constrain me to conclude that its has become a deliberate act of distortion. Such practice of distortion have impacts beyond the understanding of Chinese political and cultural theories. They also impact on our understanding of China's cultural and social history, indeed even the image and identity of being Chinese. After replacing these distinctive Chinese philosophic terms by distorting English ones, distinctive features in Chinese culture and history that have no exact English equivalences have also been given English cultural and historical terms making Chinese civilization appears even more as `part of European material civilization and culture.' Such acts seem to emphasize the point that in sinology,

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a cross-cultural and comparative enterprise, yet the norms must be those in the culture of the Orientalist sinologists' Centre. .

A case in point is the social relation in Confucian culture which the Chinese called feng-jian. In it, the social mores were those of the ru-jiao that Confucius had encapsulated thus: `Let the lords be lords, ministers be ministers, fathers be fathers and sons be sons.' (Analects XII: 11). That is, all members of the society should know their own social station and how to behave in it, in order to achieve social harmony. Again, many sinologists in the Centre refuse to adopt this Chinese term but use the English term ‘feudalism’ instead. As the culture of ru-jiao is alien to English culture, it is natural that its social organisation and relation would also be alien to English society. To render the feng-jian system as feudalism gives the situation an alien connotations. For instance, a hereditary nobility is integral to a feudal system but not the feng-jian system.

Since

seigniorial is accepted by the English language users and is closer to the feng-jian system than feudalism, it is difficult to fathom why feng-jian was not accepted when it is easier to pronounce and spell than the adopted French term, except that such a rejection demonstrates the dominant Occidental Centre would not accord to Chinese culture the status of equality to an Occidental culture, that is, Orientalism. This judgment is aptly demonstrated in that widely used text book on Chinese culture and history East Asia: the Great Tradition by the doyens of sinology, Professors Reischauer and Fairbank of Harvard University. They gave a fascinating explanation on the use of feudal for feng-jian which deserves to be quoted at length in order to demonstrate how Orientalism operates. `The word "feudal" has been much misused in recent years, and it is sometimes applied to almost any system that is felt to be outmoded and therefore bad. The confusion has been compounded by the Chinese use of the single term feng-chien (feng-jian) for the constantly evolving political system of the eight hundred years of the Chou (Zhou) period and also for Western feudalism.' (Reischauer and Fairbank 1958/66:52)

To these scholars, the fault rests with the confused Chinese

themselves, and the failure of Chinese history and politics to ape the Western

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model. The whole situation is worsened, it seems, because the Chinese have the temerity to use their term feng-jian for Western condition of feudalism. It is patently obvious that it was the scholars from the Centre that used the term feudalism for feng-jian. This must be one of the most brazen case of Central Kingdom Mentality in modern sinology.

The norm, it seems, must be the

Western Centre. The victims are not just the image or identity of Chinese culture but the generations of students in the Centre who used that book as their text on Chinese History and Culture. Before sinology was invented, the Chinese had called the socio-political relations, not just system, in the Zhou period of their history, from about 1000 BCE to 231 BCE, feng-jian. They had used that term for the socio-political relations in the next two millennia of imperial history down to the republican era which began in 1911 when their Marxists refer to it as semi-feudal. Indeed, the first reference of feng-jian as the socio-political relations was in the Shi-jing, The Book of Poetry [Shang song in Shi-jing], the most ancient of China's classical texts. To call the political and social conditions in the entire Zhou period as the feudal, as those sinologists do, would be distortion as the social and political relations of the Zhou period was not the same as in the feudal period of England or Europe and pre-dated feudalism in the Centre by centuries. That fault was not with the Chinese but with those sinologists who insist in calling the Chinese condition of feng-jian as feudalism, just as Legge had decided shang-di is the Chinese term for his Creator-God. Now that sinologists realized much of the social relations in the Zhou period and the subsequent imperial period were unlike the social relations in the feudal system in the West, these doyens of modern sinology we mentioned then decided the fault was the Chinese language: that feng-jian is not the same as feudal. Having come to that conclusion, we find Professors Reischauer and Fairbank then turned around and blamed the Chinese for confusing the issue. Those Orientalists seem to insist on the universality of their Western values and even nomenclatures, and that the Orientals must learn to fit in. If so, it is but an updated version of the contempt for Chinese culture which missionary-sinologists

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as Griffith John had shown. At least he openly declared so. While John's mistake was due to his innocence and the imperialist milieu in which he lived, the modern mainstream sinologists cannot claim such innocence as an excuse though a cultural imperialist milieu seems to remain. If sinologists had accepted feng-jian as the term for the socio-political relations in Zhou, as coup d'etat was accepted as the term for a type of political development, there would be no such confusion. For that to occur, however, sinologists would have to accept the culture of China, with its distinctive cosmogony, as valid and legitimate albeit different. That is, they have to accept plurality in human culture. It seems too many modern mainstream sinologists are still reluctant to be liberated into accepting equality. As citizens of the United States of America, Reischauer and Fairbank had as little choice as the missionarysinologists but to be Orientalists for their banknotes have declared, In God We Trust. That is, in spite of their nation's claim to separate the roles of church and state, a patriotic capitalist citizen of the USA has to trust in God. As the vocation of the missionary-sinologists was premised on being servants of their CreatorGod, they would be unfaithful to their vocation if they had accepted China's culture as equal and valid. Seen in this context, one can appreciate why some sinologists of the USA have difficulty in accepting pluralism in human cultures, especially the validity of the distinctive elements in Chinese culture because these sinologists also to trust the same God as their profession's pioneers, the Christian missionaries. We do well to be reminded that in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America are these words: `We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.' (Declaration 1776) Therefore as citizens of the USA, our two doyens of sinology must accept the ideology of the Christian missionarypioneers of sinology as they are patriotic citizens of the USA, even if that put them in conflict with fundamental aspects of China's culture. Of course, every signatory of that Declaration owned slaves and that the women in the USA,

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whatever their colour, could not vote for their president till 1916 election may explain the stance of these sinologists. If the patriotic sinologists of the USA are to achieve proper understanding of Chinese culture, they may need the pragmatism of their Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence. Every signatory of that Declaration were slave owners and so alienated their right to Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness' of some of their fellow men and women in the USA. Furthermore, when the Declaration said `all men are created equal' the Founders meant it literally because their womenfolk had no right to vote at presidential elections till 1916, irrespective of their colour. This may explain, as will be noted later, the strong Orientalist tendencies of so many sinologists in the USA, whether they are truly patriotic or just seeking refuge in patriotism. Another element of the sinologists' culture that has been foisted into Chinese culture by mistranslation is the term gentry. The gentry as understood in English society is absent in China. This term was used by sinologists to denote another distinctive Chinese cultural entity by giving it an Orientalist image to Chinese social history.

The English gentry generally have inherited wealth

mainly in land ownership and rank below the nobility in status and not necessarily in paid government service.

It has no equivalence in Chinese history.

In

sinology, the term is used for a distinctively Chinese phenomenon, a special group of people in imperial China that has no equivalence in English history. In China, certainly since the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) when the examination system was fully established, entry to the bureaucracy and so to power was by examination. Ricci called them the literati, the educated and cultural elite. If they passed the Imperial Examination, they would gain imperial appointments. If they failed and had only gained the first and second degrees from their local and provincial examinations, they might stay in the periphery of power by serving on the staff, mu-fu, of the successful Imperial Examination candidates while waiting for better fortune at the next triennial Imperial Examination. Or, they might eke out a living as village teachers or tutors to the sons of the rich and hoped for better results at the next Imperial Examination.

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Thus, they were quite unlike the English gentry though they are called such in modern mainstream sinological textbooks, including the mentioned and widely used one by Reischauer and Fairbank. The Chinese call them the shi-da-fu class while mainstream modern sinologists call them the gentry though some call them scholar-official class or literati. As the social situation in imperial China was quite unlike that in England, to use the term gentry in the Chinese context is a distortion especially to students because the connotations of that English term will always be foremost in their minds. Even the term scholar-official is better for it includes both the officials and scholars who did not hold imperial office, just

as in the term shi-da-fu.

Thus the term gentry is an Orientalist `supporting vocabulary' used to portray the Orient/China as `an integral part of European material civilization and culture' as Said suggested though Reischauer and Fairbank had ten paragraphs explaining the differences (Reischauer and Fairbank: 309-13). It would be more accurate and cause less violence to the Chinese term, and our understanding of Chinese culture, if the Chinese term shi-da-fu is used with perhaps initially, an explanatory note till the Chinese term settles into the English lexicon, as coup d'etat has. Again, there seems to have much resistance and angst to incorporate Chinese words into English sinology even for distinctively un-English concepts, as shi-da-fu, ru, and feng-jian. As they are easy for English-using students to pronounce and spell, one is constrained to ask if this non-acceptance of Chinese words involves the taboo against treating of Chinese culture as an equal, just as the rejection of the Chinese cosmogony. However, some modern mainstream sinologists continue to interpret Chinese culture within the groove created by their profession's missionary pioneers, and give Chinese culture a Christian Creationist gloss. As the pioneers distorted Chinese culture through their translation by giving a New Trinity to China's cosmogony, some modern sinologists interpret the ancient Chinese cultural texts as Creationist tracts. Indeed, we may say this method of operation is not unlike that distinctive US variant of Christianity that baptizes strangers into

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their Church posthumously. I refer to the Church of Jesus Christ of the LatterDay Saints, commonly known as the Mormons. * An example of this Christian particularism are the imaginative works of N.J. Girardot, a sinologist at the University of Notre Dame in New Jersey. Over a brief interval of two years, his view on a passage in Zhang zi went from agreeing with the judgment of an anonymous 19th Century missionary in China who thought it `looks somewhat like a burlesque of the Scriptural account of the Creation' (Girardot, 1976:305) to regard that passage has high scholarship and `a deeper and more universal level of religious meaning.' (Girardot, 1978:27) To say it has a `universal level of religious meaning' not only betrays Girardot's unexamined Orientalist assumption but also puts him squarely in league with Legge when the latter stoutly declared that shang di was the Creator-God in Chinese. To Legge, that declaration was self-evident because the only universally valid and true cosmogony is that created by his God; so naturally, the Chinese cosmogony was wrong. However, the Girardot case is more than `supporting vocabulary'. It is not an exaggeration to liken it to the practice of posthumous baptism of that peculiarly US variant of Christianity, The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, better known as Mormons.

Zhuang was a Daoist philosopher who,

according to tradition, probably lived in the Fourth Century BCE, long before Christianity was invented. Before we examine this audaciously creative effort by Girardot, it may be appropriate to cite this passage, the last seventy-four characters in Chapter 7 of the Zhuang zi from a reliable and easily accessible translation. Then we can decide if it is a Chinese version of Creation, a burlesque of the Christian version, or the imagination of our Orientalist sinologist from the USA. Since Girardot based his reading on Burton Watson's translation, I will use the same here: `The emperor of the South Sea was called Shu [Brief], and emperor of the North Sea was called Hu [Sudden], and the emperor of the central region was call Hun-tun [Chaos]. She and Hu from time to time came together for a meeting in the territory of Hun-tun, and Hun-tun treated them very generously.

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Shu and Hu discussed how they could repay his kindness. "All men," they said, "have seven openings so they can see, hear, eat, and breathe. But Hun-tun alone doesn't have any. Let's trying (sic) boring him some!" Everyday they bored another hole, and on the seventh day Hun-tun died.' (Watson 1964:95) As the most notable historian of Chinese philosophy, Feng Yulan, reminded us, the writings of Zhuang are `for the most part allegorical' (Feng 1994, I: 221) While the names of the North Sea and South Seas, Shu and Hu, were translated as Brief and Sudden by Watson, both may mean sudden. (Mathews' 1956:2194, 5885) While Girardot claimed `the mythological elements of the huntun story were quite probably related to a shamanic context; more fundamentally, this theme suggests a deeper and more universal level of religious meaning' (Girardot 1978:27). But it would only be so if one is ethnocentric and accepts as universal the Christian seven-day creation myth. If one does not accept such ethnocentrism, such a reading would be mere Orientalism. That tale is obviously allegorical but we can be sure that when Zhuang wrote it he would not have read as an account of the creation myth in the book of Genesis. So, to understand this allegory, we do well not to seek an external reference but within Chinese culture and particularly in the Daoist tradition since the Zhuang zi is a Daoist text. Unless, of course, one prefers an Orientalist reading by insisting on the universality of the account in Genesis. An obvious reference is the Dao De Jing, other ancient Daoist text. There, one will find the beginning is called the dao or the way from which `one becomes two' probably ying and yang, `and from two to three and three to the myriad things.' (Dao De Jing: 42). Dao also has another characteristic, if that is an appropriate word, that of `an unadorned uncarved block' (Dao De Jing: 15, 19, 28) meaning that the dao has unlimited potential like an uncarved block. But once it is carved, however beautifully done, that limitless potentiality is forever gone. Hence once a human visage is carved on it, it is no longer hun-dun. Unlike Girardot's explication, this one is at least consistent with Chinese culture, especially the Daoist tradition, and not trying to push it forcefully into a Christian creationist mould.

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any known contact with the Christian Centre, then for Girardot to claim this allegory refers to the creation myth in Genesis is, effectively, arrogating the latter into a universal cosmogonic myth, and is thus a case of extreme Orientalism. What Girardot has done is akin to baptising Zhuang posthumously which is not a practice of the Roman Catholic Church whose ideology is the guiding principle of the university which Girardot is employed but that most American variant of Christianity, the Church of the Latter-Day Saints of Jesus Christ, commonly known as the Mormons. But to accuse Girardot of heresy would be unkind. He was just another victim of the natural outcome of the centuries-old effort to distort and invalidate Chinese culture by the use of a supporting vocabulary to make it appear as an integral part of European civilization. Girardot, working in the Roman Catholic environment of the University of Notre Dame, may be regarded as a modern day victim of the tradition set by that notable Roman Catholic pioneer missionary-sinologist, Matteo Ricci SJ, who, we may recall, interpreted `in our favour things [Confucius] left ambiguous in his writings.' (Rule, 1986:1) If we assume Girardot to be a Roman Catholic on the ground that he teaches in a Catholic university, we can say he has been faithful to his illustrious co-religionist and interpreted, in favour of his religion, things left ambiguous in the writings of Zhuang, as Ricci did to the writings of Confucius centuries earlier.

Thus, it seems many modern sinologists still retain the

missionary position and see their task not so much to enlighten us on what Chinese culture is but to tell us what it should be. That, of course, puts Girardot squarely in the Orientalist tradition though he and sinologists like him would probably think they are doing exactly the opposite. To Girardot and those like him, the cosmogony of a seven-day creation has religious significances that are `fundamental and universal' to use his term, even if many of modern sinologists no longer accept it literally as did their professional forebears like Ricci who accepted the story in Genesis literally. However, when modern sinologists consider the use of such a framework to analyse Chinese culture as appropriate, they as well as the culture of China,

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become victims of Orientalism while the latter is being distorted by and in their works. Such victims, the scholars and their scholarship, are found in various disciplines in modern sinology, and those who tend to be culturally less sensitive can be quite explicit in their Orientalist attitude. While detail analyses of them will be dealt with in later chapters, it seems appropriate here to use it as a bridge to those chapters the ideas of two prominent contemporary sinologists who have pretensions to engage in cross cultural evaluations. They are Andrew J. Nathan, a citizen of the USA, a political scientist and colleague of Edward Said at Columbia University, and W. J. F. Jenner an Englishman whom we met briefly in the Introduction of this study and who until recently was a Professor of Chinese at the Australian National University. Nathan is a suitable example because his case shows the Orientalist tendency is hegemonic in the Political Science corner of contemporary sinology.

In a

discussion on values in cross-cultural studies, Nathan insists that `the values the investigator believe to be valid can validly be applied to societies other than his own—what might be called evaluative universalism'. The alternative `is to base the judgment on values the investigator finds among those indigenous in the subject society ... the choice as the standard of evaluation is founded on the claim that a society can validly be judged only by the values that are among its own. I label this position cultural relativism.'

Having come to this self-imposed

dichotomy, he decided that the `call for cultural relativism ... masked what was the projection of personal values critical of American Society onto the Chinese revolution under the claim that they were Chinese values.' (Nathan, 1990:295, 297) Such universalization of ones own nation's values is but a clear example of ethnocentrism, a syndrome that has been ascribed to the Chinese as the Central Kingdom Mentality. To those who are not citizens of the USA, such attempt to universalize the mores of that society is really no more than cultural imperialism founded on ethnocentrism. Jenner, on the other hand, reported that the Chinese have `an underdeveloped sense of independent personal identity because of the absence from all Chinese religions, except the minority ones of Islam and the two (sic)

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Christianities, a strong relationship between an individual soul and an omnipotent and judging deity.' (Jenner, 1992:230) I presume he meant the minorities who embraced Islam and Christianity.

While the Rev. Griffith John would have

applauded such sentiments, what Prof. Jenner proposed is that the Chinese can be fully independent and indeed fully human only by rejecting their cultural heritage and become foreign. So, the Orientalist's image of the Chinese has become the identity of being Chinese, at least according to Jenner and sinologists like him. One is reminded of what that exasperated Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady who asked of women: `Why can't they be more like us!'. As few women want to be men and few Chinese want to be like `them', sinology has a problem. No wonder some people think the Chinese are inscrutable! These examples represent two of the more common results of an Orientalist distortion of Chinese culture—the use of a supporting vocabulary. It is due to the sinologists’ refusal to adopt Chinese terms for distinctively Chinese cultural entities. These two examples represent two distinct faces of Orientalism. The first judges Chinese culture by using as yardstick and norm the culture of the West, specially that of the USA. This has led many Orientalist sinologists to deny the existence of developments in Chinese society because those entities, according to these Orientalists, have not occurred in the West or did not occur in the same order, while some interpret them as mere first. That is, those Orientalist sinologists insist China's society must develop in the same way or order as the West, presumably because the Chinese do not have an independent personal identity. This has led many Orientalist social scientists to search in Chinese society for signs of the development of distinctively non-Chinese social entities, if for no better reason than they thought those events had occurred in the West, the Centre. Ironically, Orientalist sinology is the victim of these misconceptions although all too often those sinologists would blame China or Chinese culture for their failure to develop in the so-called proper manners. Observing China through such Orientalist prism, these sinologists effectively fail to understand the culture of China as well as her social and political developments. However, we should point out that not all sinologists observe China through such Orientalist prism,

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though such Orientalist sinologists are very common. Their Orientalist sinology will be examined in the following chapters.

NOTES:

Analects of Confucius, any edition. Dao De Jing, date uncertain, any edition, cited in Chapter 42, my own translation. The Declaration of Independence July 4, 1776. FENG Yulan (1994) History of Chinese Philosophy 2 vols. trans by D. Bodde, (Princeton University Press, 1952): ed.used is Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1994. Girardot, N.J. (1976) `The Problem of Creation Mythology in the study of Chinese Religion',History of Religions: an International Journal for Comparative Historical Studies, XV, 4, 289-318. GIRARDOT, N.J. (1978) `"Returning to the Beginning" and the Arts of Mr. Huntun in the Chuang Tzu', Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 5, 21-69. HAN Fei Han Fei zi, (The Book of Han Fei), any edition. JENNER, W.J.F. (1992) The Tyranny of History: the Roots of China's Crisis (Allen Lane, London). LAU, D.C. (1979) Confucius: the Analects Penguin, London. LUKE, The 3rd book in the New Testament, any version, King James version used. MATHEWS, (1956) Chinese-English Dictionary, revised ed. Nos. 2194 Hu & 5885 Shu Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. MEI Yi-pao (1929) The Ethical and Political Works of Motse (Probsthain, London) MEI Yi-pan (1929) Motse, the Neglected Rival of Confucius, (Probsthain, London) MENCIUS, the Book of Mencius, any edition.

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NATHAN, A. (1990), ‘The Place of Values in Cross-Cultural Studies: the Example of Democracy and China' in COHEN P.A. and GOLDMAN M. eds. Ideas Across Cultures: Essays on Chinese Thought in Honor of Benjamin I. Schwartz (Harvard University Press, Boston) 229-316. Reischauer, E.O. & Fairbank, J.K. (1958/66) East Asia: the Great Tradition, (Houghton Mifflin, Boston; edition used by C.E. Tuttle, Tokyo, 1966.) Rule, A.P. (1986) K'ung-tuz or Confucius? The Jesuit Interpretation of Confucianism, (Allen & Unwin, Sydney.) SAID, Edward (1995) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, (Penguin, London.) SHI-JING (The Book of Poetry) any edition, Shang song is the last Section. The reference is Yin-wu, its last sub-section. SILKE K. & TRAUZETTEL R. (1991) Confucianism and the Modernization of China, (Hase & Koehler, Mainz). WALEY, A. (1936) Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, (Allen and Unwin, London.) Watson, B (1964) Zhuang Tzu, Basic Writings, (Columbia U.P., New York).

CHAPTER FOUR THE ORIENTALIST ODYSSEY : 1 The issues to be examined in this chapter are of the second type of Orientalist sinology mentioned in Chapter III: how the Orientalist perspective misled sinologists into searching in China for cultural and social developments for no other reasons than because they thought those developments have occurred in the West or during the developments in the West. Two types of examples will be used to illustrate such phenomena, one secular and one religious. The latter issue resonates with those views of the pioneering missionary-sinologists who, as have been demonstrated, had insisted that China must have a God similar to theirs in the West. The contemporary cases may be seen as the results of the hegemonic usage of the Supporting Vocabulary created by the pioneering missionarysinologists who have become part of contemporary Orientalist sinology. That Vocabulary seems to have conditioned the thought process and language of discourse of many modern sinologists as they try to explain the developments in Chinese culture and society. Of course, they would deny being Orientalists.

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insist on invalidating certain elements in China’s culture and the developments in Chinese society that do not have equivalences in the Occident. The two examples to be used here also suggest that the social sciences in sinology, especially the one with the Orientalist perspective, tends to lack theoretical sophistication and originality. In a way, they also show that such modern sinology is but an updated version of the missionary-pioneers’ premise. 1. The Secular Case I will use two examples to illustrate how the Orientalist sinologists in their studies of the development of Chinese culture and society have selected those tools to analyse China simply because those tools have been used to analyse societies in the West or their Centre. They do so probably because they have misunderstood and therefore misapplied social developmental theories that have been originated by scholars of developmental studies in the West to their study of the developments in China. In the process, they blatantly applied to their study of social and societal developments in China theories of development that were derived from observations by European scholars in their studies of social developments in Europe, without taking cognizance of the strictures they placed on the use of their theories or the appropriateness of the transference of those theories to examine other or non-European societies as the Chinese society. The first of these examples is the insistence by Orientalist sinologists, in many disciplines, to search for signs of an emergence of civil society in the social development in Modern and Contemporary China. In conducting their researches, I suggest because they really misunderstand and therefore misapplied the concept of civil society developed by Jurgen Habermas in his The Structural Transformaton of the Public Sphere (Habermas 1989) where he examined the social developments in Western Europe. The Orientalist sinologists mistakenly took his concepts and conclusions to be universally applicable. In so doing, they not only failed to understand Habermas but also betray their ignorance of the ambiguities of the very concept of civil society and the different ways it was

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understood and used by European social analysts who used this concept in their studies of their own societies, As for Habermas, he had insisted that his theory and conclusions are strictly history specific derived from his observations and studies of the social developments in 17th Century England and 18th Century France—events that led to the revolutions in those countries—and cannot be transposed to different times or cultures. That so many modern sinologists insist on that this theory is applicable to the study of the development of social development in China indicate the prevalence of Orientalism among those modern sinologists. The first case in this examination—the insistence by Orientalist sinologists in many disciplines to search for signs of an emergence of civil society in the social development of modern and contemporary China—I shall argue that such searches are really due to their misunderstanding and misappropriation of the concept of civil society as used by Jurgen Habermas in his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere where he examined social developments in Western Europe. The Orientalist sinologists mistakenly took his concepts and conclusions to be universally applicable. In doing so, they exposed not only their failure to understand Habermas but also their ignorance of the ambiguities of the very concept of civil society and the different ways it was understood by European social analysts who used this concept in their studies of their own societies. The second case is the concerned with the tendency of those Orientalist sinologists to regard Confucianism, ru jia, in China or Chinese, as playing the same role as Christianity alleged to have done in the West, as a religion. From this premise, those modern Orientalist sinologists would then attribute to ru jia a role that they think it should have in China because that was the role of religion in the West, their Centre. When the adherents of ru jia in China did not perform as some of their alleged counterparts in religion had done in Western societies, those Orientalist sinologists would declare ru jia as inadequate, inferior, or a failure. Both cases are really premised on the shared assumption that in social and cultural developments, the norm must be that in the West or their Centre, and that the

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developments in China should reflect those in the West, or else they will be regarded as failures. In so doing, those Orientalist sinologists have effectively invalidated the distinctive elements in China’s cultural and social developments, just as their pioneers, the missionary-sinologists, had invalidated China’s cosmogony. In this way, I shall try to demonstrate that their works have affirmed Said’s judgment that the Orientalism tries to portray the Orient as part of the European or Western material civilization. During the decades of the 1980’s and 1990’s, many sinologists searched for signs of the emergence of civil society in China. This was done with special vehemence among the English-using sinologists. A high point of this search occurred in August 1993 when a distinguished gathering of searchers come together to report and discuss their findings in the 34th International Congress of Asian and North African Studies, the politically-corrected name of that venerable institution, the Orientalist Congress. For the first time in its existence of more than a century, it held its meeting on Chinese soil, albeit in the then still colonized bit of Hong Kong. For the delectation of the over a thousand confreres, twentysix reports were organized into nine panels on the theme of Civil Society— Liberalism in East Asia with China as the main focus of the searchers. At the 9th session, the leading searchers gave their overviews and conclusions to the talkfest. It was a stellar gathering of Asianists, especially sinologists. Among the notable sinologists were experts in Ancient Chinese History and Philosophy as Leon Vandermeersch of the Ecole Francaise D’Extreme-Orient, Myron Cohen and Theodore de Bary of Columbia University, and among the Modernists were Marie-Clar Bergere of the Institue National de Langues et Orientale, Don Price of the University of California at Davis, John D, Young of Stanford University, Kjeild Broadsgaard and Leif Littrup of Copenhagen, and Erlangen-Nuremberg’s Wolfgang Lippert. Rather than listing the entire galaxy, it is not an exaggeration to say that they were almost the Who’s Who in their branch of sinology. Indeed, their reputation ensured that all sessions were packed, with the final session filling the main concert hall of Hong Kong’s Performance Centre, making an audience of close to two thousands in that final session.

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I duly attended and asked questions from the floor, at least in the first four sessions. But as none of my questions were, to me, satisfactorily answered, I sat through the monologues in the later sessions in silent bewilderment.

That

experience, I have to confess, did not give me a contended feeling of having partaken in an intellectual banquet but that of an insipid MacBurger. This is not a reflection of the scholarship of the contributors which was unimpeachable. Each paper was obviously the result of meticulous research. A common and collective problem, however, was the rationale of the entire exercise and its methodology. They were premised on the assumption that the concept of civil society was a valid and correct analytical tool to investigate the social development in Modern and Contemporary China, and that the Chinese society will develop a `civil society’ along the way that Habermas had mentioned in Western Europe. However, none of those scholars tried to define their analytical tool—civil society. To the extent that anyone attempted, they simply assumed that the model developed by Habermas as being appropriate to analyse the development of Contemporary Chinese society. Not one of them evinced any awareness that the concept of civil society as a tool of social analyses was ambiguous and diverse, even as used by European social analysts to analyze European social development. Hence, not one of the sinologists at that Hong Kong Congress had felt the need to justify why the model of civil society of Habermas, or indeed why any version of this very imprecise tool of Western European social analysis, was appropriate to the study of social development in Contemporary China, apart from the assumed universality of Western culture and cultural development. It has to be said that this neglect was not peculiar to this group of scholars in the 1993 Hong Kong meeting.

This phenomenon is also evident among

sinologists in many disciplines who have engaged in the search for civil society in Contemporary China. This study will examine the more widely available reports published in the 1990’s to illustrate this genre of scholarship. To list them chronologically are works by historian of Modern China William T. Rowe (Rowe: 1990), political scientists Dorothy J. Singer (Singer: 1991) and Gordon White, who must have thought his report very satisfactory because he published it twice.

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His work has the distinction of being `sponsored and financed by the United Nations’s Research Institute for Social Development in Geneva’. (White: 1993/4) Appropriately timed for the Hong Kong congress was a special issue of that politically correct journal, Modern China, which was devoted entirely to reports of the searches for civil society in China. (April 1993 issue) The devotion of so much attention to the development of civil society in China is not merely a coincidence nor a mere rhetorical matter, but goes into the very heart of Orientalism in sinology. Indeed, we may say that the existence of such endeavours constrains one to question the motives of these endeavours. A question that has escaped the notice of these searchers is whether the concept of civil society, especially that of Habermas’s, is an appropriate tool to study the social development in contemporary China. As it is my view that it is not, this study is a challenge to their findings. But before doing that, we should briefly visit the concept of civil society to illustrate its ambiguity as a tool to study social development even when used by European social analysts in their study of social developments in Europe, where the concept of civil society originated. This is an important point because my proposition here is that the very use of civil society by modern sinologists is really another affirmation of Orientalism. Though the results of these searches to date have all been negative, these searchers do not seem to realize that their efforts really maintain the tradition of invalidating the distinctiveness of Chinese culture and cultural developments. What I suggest here is that those sinologists who used the idea of Habermas on the civil society as an analytical tool to investigate the social developments in Contemporary China not only failed to understand Habermas but also betrayed their own ignorance of this concept. Their use of civil society, it seems, is motivated more by Orientalism than to understand China. At this juncture, it seems it is necessary to make a detour into the traditional discourse of civil society. In the tradition of modern English social discourse, we may start our brief detour into the history of the use of civil society for social analysis from Hobbes.

To him, civil society is the civilizing state to

overcome the raw natural condition. However, in his 1690 Second Treatise of

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Civil Government, Locke maintained that the mutual conflicts of private interests make necessary some appeal to an impartial judge which he located in the institution of civil government, as distinct from natural society. With Locke, society in nature and the state becomes an instrument of society, thus melting together the civil society and the state. But this civil government must also serve to guarantee the property and freedom of private individuals and so perpetuate the fragmentation of the underlying economic society which Locke called natural society. The anarchist Thomas Paine pushed this further and saw civil society coming into conflict with the state, and from his position, the state should be a delegation of social powers for the common good of the society, and if this position were absent, he justified the overthrowing of the state. Crossing to mainland Europe, we shall briefly visit Hegel, Marx, the Marxists and their derivatives, and the contemporaries as Habermas. There, we will find an equally muddled pool. While our sinologists should have been aware of this, they seem unaware. Hegel saw the trouble of modern civil society as its power of egotism reigns alongside ever-increasing interdependence. As he argued in his Doctrine of the State, that `particularly by itself, given free rein in every direction to satisfy its needs, accidental caprice and subjective desires, destroys itself … in this process of gratification. At the same time … [it] is in thorough-going dependence on caprice and external accident, and it held in check by the power of universality. In these contracts and their complexity, civil society affords a spectacle of extravagance and want as well as of physical and ethical degeneration common to them both.’ (Hegel, 1942: 122-3, emphasis in the original) While some of the aforementioned sinologists have mentioned Hegel, not one of them cited Marx, which may be taken to indicate that the persistence of the Cold War in sinology. If so, this is very unfortunate because while they were searching for signs of civil society in China, her government announced its First Guiding Principle remained Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. Indeed, the puzzle deepens because at about the same time, the Chinese Communist Party leadership resurrected Confucianism, ru jia, to be yet another probable guiding

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principle.

This announcement was enthusiastically received by leading

sinologists in China and beyond. (Chan: 1993) What those searchers did not seem to realize was the contradiction, and mutual; exclusion, between the ideals of civil society as mentioned by all the above-mentioned European social theorists on one side and Confucianism, ru jia, on the other. If so, this seems to suggest that those sinological searchers may be suffering from a case of the poverty of philosophy. In view of China’s formally proclaimed First Guiding Principle was Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, even if her revolution was experiencing its Thermidorian Reaction, it is incumbent upon any scholar who is serious about investigating whether there were signs of a civil society emerging in Contemporary China to revisit Marx, however briefly. In his above message, Hegel obviously disagreed with Locke where Locke suggested in the Second Treatise of Civil Government that the conflicts of private interests call for an `impartial judge’ which he located in the institution of `civil society’ as distinct from `natural society’. This would, naturally, put Marx in opposition to Locke. To Marx, `the deeper truth is that Hegel experiences the separation of state [Locke’s civil government] from civil society is a contradiction.’ (Marx 1843/75: 141). Marx further declared that Hegel’s position has a `two-fold contradiction: 1. A formal contradiction. The deputies of civil society are a society which is not connected to its electors by any “instruction” or commission. They have a formal authorization, but as soon as this becomes real, they cease to be authorized. They should be deputies but they are not. 2, A material contradiction. In respect to actual interests … they have authority as the representatives of public affairs whereas in reality they represent particular interests.’

Earlier, Marx called

Hegel’s civil society `an allegory, to confer on some empirically existent thing or other the significance of the realized Idea.’ (Marx, Ibid: 99) What then are we to make of those searchers looking for a civil society in a society that claims Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought as its First Guiding Principle? Are they looking for signs of social disintegration, or are they, as Orientalists, insist that social development in China must follow the path taken in their Centre—the West? Perhaps these scholars are behaving in the way

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suggested by an unflattering Chinese proverb on the behaviour of some scholars: like grass bending before the wind! It seems almost certain that it was not their familiarity with the writings of Marx that led them to embark on the search for civil society as they analyse the social development in Contemporary China. Perhaps it was due to an accidental conjunction of two events: the publication of the English translation of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere by Jurgen Habermas and an event in China in that halcyon year, 1989. I shall argue that both events have been grossly and outrageously misread, otherwise one has to say that these searchers have been driven by their political prejudices! That, of course, may well have been true. These are serious charges but really not difficult to demonstrate. The misreading of Habermas can easily be demonstrated. Habermas insisted that he based his analysis of the development of modern Western European society on very specific historical moments in Modern European History—17th Century England and 18th Century France—events that led up to their respective Revolution. The misreading of Habermas and European History seems to have referred to that begun with his American translator who referred to that period as `the European High Middle Ages’ (Habermas Ibid: 17) When he referred to the vigorous political discussions in the coffee houses and pubs in 17th Century London, Habermas knew that those who attended such meeting places shared a general ideological orientation. That is, those places were informal political clubs where one went for the discussions rather than for what one drank. In this briefly detour into how the concept of civil society was used by analysts of European social development, two things are certain. First, the nature of civil society is like beauty, it depends on the eyes of the beholder. Secondly, it was meant to be a tool to examine certain stages in the development of Western European society only, not in China. In spite of these strictures by Habermas, a prolific searcher of civil society in China, is historian William T. Rowe of Johns Hopkins University, who advised that `the boldness of Chinese historians in appropriating this category of analysis of the process of late Imperial and early Republic History seems justified on several grounds. Most basic, of course, is the similar—limited, but real—social

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grounds.

Like Western Europe, China after the 16th Century witnessed a

qualitative intensification of the volume of long-distance trade … the institution of teahouses, China’s equivalent of the pub or coffee houses.’ (Rowe: 1990) There, he also claimed that sinologists with inadequate German were unable to read Habermas except indirectly `second hand’ till 1989. As one must assume Professor Rowe was serious and not being ironic, then one is constrained to point out to him that to Habermas, civil society was not the result of the chemical reactions due to imbibing caffeine in coffee nor alcohol in pubs, nor indeed the tannic acid in tea. If we accept the analysis of Habermas, it was the result of the discussions of like-minded colleagues, though one may lubricate one’s throat with the liquids containing those active ingredients during the discussions. Besides, anyone with access to a reasonably good library, and I am sure the library at Johns Hopkins University is a good one, one will find that writings of Habermas were available in English since at least 1972. Furthermore, `long distance trade’ in the context used by Habermas refers to the imperialist expansions of Europe into other continents. China had effectively ceased such acts since mid-15th Century, 1453, after her fleets had visited East Africa, the Arab world, India and Southeast Asia. On the other hand, to transport tea, silk, or ly-chee from the southern to the northern parts of the Chinese Empire would be long distance trade but to equate the two would really be stretching the point, even from the perspective of Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore, the Spiros Agnew country. The English coffee houses discussions were conducted over the political background of the English Revolution when a king was found guilty of `treason against the people’. Poor Charles I thought his mandate was from his God, thus gave him the divine right to rule, almost like that of the Chinese emperors who thought they received their mandates from tian, the `heavens’.

Then, after

another king was exiled for life, followed by a republican interregnum, new monarchs were invited to England to reign, not rule. To equate all these with the going-on in the Chinese teahouses is really creative scholarship, beyond Orientalism. Even for a specialist on Modern Chinese History, such judgment is

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strange and is only equaled by the declaration of the translator of Habermas that 17th Century England and 18th century France was ‘High European Middle Age’, a claim that must have the approval of the publisher, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. The late Professor Gordon White, a US-educated English political scientist, seemed more aware of the ambiguities of the idea of civil society and delineated four types of civil society. Being a more careful scholar, he admitted to `detecting only embryonic elements of anything that could be described as “civil society” in the precise sense discussed earlier.’ (White: 86) However, he did not explain why any or his four types of civil society should be an appropriate tool to analyse and evaluate China’s social development except perhaps in the Orientalist mode that demands the periphery, China, must develop along the way of the Centre. That he should detect even an embryonic form of civil society may, therefore, be more an indication of his ideological perspective. Another political scientist, Dorothy J. Solinger, tackled this issue from a refreshing perspective through a study of the liumang, literary the blind vagabonds, the peasants rendered landless as a consequence of the much lauded Rural Reforms in post-Mao China and they are flocking to the cities to look for work. She also concluded in the negative thus: ~ at first glance might pinpoint this group as a kind of sprout of civil society … but in truth, these transients pose no serious challenge.” (Solinger: 30) Rather than imposing a European reading into the history of social development in China, Solinger turned her gaze on contemporary issues, the peasants who lost their land due the post-Mao Economic Reform. Instead of conflating coffee houses with teahouses, she likened the dispossessed in China to the dispossessed after the Enclosure in England though she did not say so explicitly. That she should regard civil society as a challenge betrayed her ideological perspective. However, unlike Rowe, she did not allow her ideological perspective to override the evidence and to determine her conclusion, and so concluded that the existence of liumang were not a precursor of civil society.

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Orientalism in Sinology In this context, some sinologists may be regarded as semi-sceptics. They

are not as enthusiastic as Rowe but nevertheless, are willing to go along with this search. A prominent one among them is Frederic Wakeman of the University of California at Berkeley. His scholarship constrained him to point out the false dawn of Rowe as reported in the latter’s studies of the Hankow (Hanzhou) district in central China in the 19th Century. But like Rowe, he seemed to have become another audacious victim of philosophic poverty among Orientalist sinologists and fell into the trap of evaluating China and Chinese culture with those at the Centre as the norm, from whence observers have located China in the Far East. This has led him to proclaim `for Habermas, as for Marx, the experience of civil society and its attendant public sphere was inextricably connected to the emergence of the bourgeoisie. That linkage alone fixed both ideal types in a particular historical setting; and if we allow ourselves to be hobbled by teleology, then neither concept is going to fit the Chinese case very well. But as terms of social practice, which can be gingerly universal, civil society and public sphere may afford a better understanding of recent events in China.’ (Wakeman 1993: 112) Perhaps we may regard Wakeman as a gingerly Orientalist. It is at least debatable whether Marx would agreed with Wakeman, but one would have thought such an application of Habermas is not only audacious but also arguable unscholarly. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that to universalize ones own experiences as Wakeman does bears the symptom of being afflicted by ethnocentrism. We know, of course, the Chinese suffer from it and it is called the Central Kingdom Mentality. It seems that Wakeman’s perspective is typically Orientalist and shows signs of suffering from the Mote and Beam syndrome which was first identified by a Dr. Luke, a Palestinian, nearly two thousand years ago. (Luke 6:41) Ironically, in spite of much arboreal sacrifice, sinologists have not had a confirmed sighting of civil society in China. Of course, we may delay our judgment until those who orally reported in the Hong Kong conference publish their sightings. But at the time of this writing, I have not read any of them though that may well be my fault.

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However, their subtext seems clear enough though it was never articulated except unintentionally by Wakeman. It is their Orientalist perspective. To them, including the Hong Kong confreres, the propelling motivation in their search was that as civil society is a stage in the developmental process of their Occidental society, it must also be the path for the social development of China to follow. These scholars will probably deny they are Orientalists. In his usually generous disposition, even Edward Said conceded that `during the 1960’s in the ranks of East Asia specialists’ was `a revolution’ to challenge Orientalism, (Said: 301) That, alas, was not to be. Since the above mentioned searchers are scholars of some renown, we must examine the reason for this serious international syndrome. Wakeman has given us a clue. In the passage cited, he made mention that civil society may be understood by some `recent events’. By that, he probably meant the events in June 1989 at Tiananmen Square. In short their searches are examples of how a present ideological position influences their view of the past. In other words, these reports represent, or are informed by, the present ideological perspective of the searchers. One may, of course, question whether such re-reading of the past constitute scholarship, or whether one should be less disingenuous and call it propaganda, though they may well be victims of that propaganda. Students of Marx and Mao are well aware that historians write for their own classes, so I am not surprised by their abuse of Habermas, only saddened and disappointed. On the other hand, since bourgeois scholars have long abused Chinese sources in their study of China, especially Modern and Contemporary China (Chan: 1995), it is heartening to know their abuse of sources is not ethno-specific though the result is the same—to distort the perspective of China’s culture by making it as, to quote Said again, `an integral part of European material civilization and culture”, even though these sinologists may deny being Orientalists. As to that recent event in Tiananmen Square on June 1989, it is legitimate to ask whether they represented the sprout of civil society? A sinologist-journalist from the USA who was in Beijing in June 1989, whimsically reported a remark by one of those ubiquitous student-leaders during those halcyon days thus: `I

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don’t know exactly what we want, but we want more of it.’ (Schell: 1989) Whatever were the causes of the events in Beijing in June 1989, they were hardly the results of teahouses or coffee shop discussions, and much less that of long distance commerce whether it was the imperialist type or merely transporting over long distances, as from the south to the north of China. However, as the searchers began their tasks with a misreading of Habermas, no wonder then when they have misread recent reports of social phenomena in China as reports of sprouts of civil society.

As they really do not know what they are looking for, it is

understandable that they would go into blind alleys, as mistaking social drifters (Solinger) as possible harbingers of civil society. A common motivation seems to be that because civil society, however misunderstood, has developed in their societies in the Centre, therefore it must also develop in Contemporary China and probably had roots in the Modern History of China. In short, the searchers are not only Orientalists but also victims of Orientalism, truly a case of the empire striking back. Indeed, we may liken this search for civil society in China to a search for the Enlightenment in Europe, from a Buddhist perspective. The result, as with the searches for civil society in China, would be negative. The validity of a search for the Enlightenment in Europe from a Buddhist perspective would have been immediately denied by scholars in the Centre because to them the only universally acceptable perspective is that of the Imperialist centre, never the Colonial South! If the non-Marxist readers eschew my suggestion of imperialism as resembling too closely the ideas of Said, we must ask what prompted our otherwise seemingly rational sinologists in the Centre to undertake the search for civil society in China? Would it be ethnocentrism?

II.

The Religious case

By religious, I do not imply modern sinologists ape their missionary pioneers and try to convert the Chinese to Christianity, but the ways the Orientalist sinologists maintain their pioneers’ practice in projecting into their evaluations of Chinese culture a religious dimension akin to that in their Centre even though the

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sinologists themselves may well be secular. A common practice is to ape Max Weber and ascribe to ru jia, or what they call Confucianism, a role in Chinese society and culture similar to Christianity in the societies of their centre. Even if we excuse such practices to Weber, a 19th Century sociologist, it would really be stretching the point to grant such a dispensation to modern sinologists as they investigate Contemporary China. Yet, such practices continue even by senior sinologists. They range from judging the fate of Confucianism in modern China using the fate of Christianity in the modern West as the norm, to the judging of the social behaviour of the Confucianists and their relations with their emperors with that of the ancient Hebrew prophets and their relations with their kings as the norm.

Such practices are really akin to the evaluation of the European

Enlightenment

from

a

Buddhist

perspective

and

using

the

Buddhist

Enlightenment as the norm—a process by which we will find that Europe had not experienced any Enlightenment at all. The scholars in the Western Centre will immediately condemn such efforts as methodologically wrong and are rightly so as that would be an extreme case of ethnocentrism. However, far too many modern sinologists from the Centre have been, and are still, doing exactly the same. A case in point is a recent book by a senior sinologist, Professor William Theodore de Bary, a colleague of Edward Said at Columbia University and a renown scholar of Chinese Philosophy. de Bary was also a contributor at the aforementioned 1993 conference in Hong Kong on the search for the Habermastype civil society.

His book, entitled The Trouble with Confucianism, was

published in 1991 shortly before that Conference, (de Bary: 1991) and received much accolade from his peers. The China Review International. A US-published `journal of review of scholarly literature in Chinese studies’ organized a group of leading scholars in `a roundtable discussion’ which it also published. (China Review: 1994) All participants at that discussion agreed with the premise of de Bary’s modus operandi and the rationale of his methodology. According to de Bary, his study is meant to compare and contrast `the prophetic tradition in ancient Israel to illuminate Confucianism’s ambiguous

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relation to dynastic rule in China.’ As he sees it, `the Confucian conception of Heaven and its Mandate, without a covenant between God and His people, and without the people becoming actively involved in fulfilling it, the responsibility for transforming the world falls entirely on the ruler and those who assist him. In other words, the entire burden falls on the self-cultivation of transformation of the noble man (chun tzu/jun zi) … the Confucians’ relationship to the ruler and people was an ambiguous … one. Confucians professed to serve the people but did so as an elite especially called and qualified to do so. Even when they attempted conscientiously to serve the people’s interest, their admonitions and exhortations were directed toward those in power. Without participation by the common people themselves as responsible parties in the process, and thus without any mediating infrastructure or channel or communication from the people, government could not in any meaningful sense by spoken of as “of the people”.’ (China Review: 10-11, emphasis mine.) The emphasized words echo the political slogans of the United States as a government by, for, and of the people and `all men are created equal’—as in the Declaration of Independence by the thirteen rebellious North American British colonies. If this is what de Bary has in mind, then the trouble is not with Confucianism but with de Bary’s methodology. The trouble is not unlike how he and his Hong Kong confreres were looking for a Habermasian civil society in China. To put it bluntly, and shall be shown, such an approach it not only Orientalist but also anachronistic though he shows no awareness of either and would probably deny such an accusation. Whatever was the alleged trouble with Confucianism, ru jia, the real trouble seems more to be the implications behind the decision of de Bary to undertake such a comparison. By undertaking such a comparison, de Bary showed a rather selective understanding of the relation between the Hebrew God and the ancient Israelites. One aspect that I have touched upon during the discussion of the problems of translation resurfaced here—the translation of tian to Heaven with the capital H because the English word has many connotations absent in the Chinese word. While one may permit this oversight from an undergraduate student without the mastery of Classical Chinese, this is certainly not the case

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with de Bary. Thus, I am constrained to conclude that de Bary used Heaven for tian deliberately, regardless of how its use would distort the meaning of the original Chinese text. In short, his use was either Orientalist or an indication of the hegemonic impact of Orientalism in sinology. A more fundamental trouble with de Bary was his claim that both JudaismChristianity and ru-jia si-xiang aim at changing the people in a similar way or towards similar end. He also insisted that the nature of these changes are the same though the Confucians did not allow the people a voice. I shall show that the Hebrew god also did not allow the ancient Israelites a voice. One would have thought that anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of either Judaism, Christianity, and ru-jia si-xiang would have thought the reverse is the case. Indeed, what de Bary did was to invalidate the right of ru-jia si-xiang, indeed Chinese culture, to an independent existence and that the norm for the evaluation of all cultures must be Christianity or Judaism. Of course, that was the position of the Rev. Professor James Legge and sinology’s missionary pioneers centuries ago. That de Bary wants to maintain the missionary position is his privilege, but to insist that it is the only valid position is more in the realm of missionary propaganda than modern scholarship. The basis if his trouble is the denial of the legitimacy of the distinctive Chinese cosmogony that I have discussed earlier. Given the distinctive cosmogony in China’s culture, it makes no sense to decry the fact that the Chinese do not have a covenant between God, presumably an entity like the Creator-God of the Abrahamic traditions, and themselves as de Bary did. Students of the Analects will recall that when Duke Jing of Qi asked Confucius about good government, he replied that there would be good government `when kings be kings, ministers be minister, fathers be father, and sons be son.’ (Analects XII: 11.ii) That is, when all know their positions in the social hierarchy and behave accordingly, there shall be good government. Therefore, to argue that the Confucian scheme of things was `not in any meaningful sense be spoken of as “of the people” is anachronistic. Still less meaningful is de Bary’s lament that `the classical Confucian sense of transcendence brought with it no sense of a radical break in the divine-human

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continuum that had been characterized the religious belief in Heaven up to this point.’ (Review: 15) Like the pioneer Orientalist sinologists, as the Christian missionaries before him, it seems de Bary simply does not accept that in China’s cosmogony, there is no divine-human continuum. Indeed, none of the indigenous Chinese religions, and even Buddhism, has such a `sense of transcendence’. However, what can be said for the Confucians is that they were not as disingenuous as the signatories of the Declaration of Independence of de Bary’s USA who, while declaring `all men are created equal’, remained life-long slave owners. Sadly, not one in the panel of sinological experts invited by the China International Review to discuss de Bary’s The Trouble with Confucianism pointed this out. Perhaps they share de Bary’s anachronism. On the other hand, in the classical Confucian text Zhong Yong, The Doctrine of the Mean, we find Zi Cheng said, `Zhong [translated as the mean or harmony by Legge) is the nature of all under tian, and harmony is the Way.’ (Mean I: 4) To be sure, that is normative and even prescriptive but not transcendental and has no divine-human continuum, unless one insists on translating tian into Heaven, Orientally. Indeed, one expert in the invited panel, Professor Chang Hao of the University of Ohio, though tian was a `sacred beyond’, the `ultimate source of the noble man’s (jun zi) authority”; and that `in classical Confucianism, the noble man also appeared as a sort of cosmic agent who, by dint of his inner linkage with the sacred beyond, could transform his self morally [and] spiritually into a vehicle of making manifest the mandate of heaven on earth. In this way, the noble man stood for a rival center of meaning and authority vis-à-vis the imperial center. By the same token, we may [be] justified in seeing a parallel between the Confucian noble man and the ancient Israelite prophets in their relationship with the existing social political order.’ (Review: 14, my emphasis) I am not aware of any evidence that any Confucian jun zi, or even Confucius himself, had received a direct order or commission from tian let alone an order to do something.

The Israelite

prophets, however, claimed they were commissioned by their Creator-God directly, an authority higher than their kings. Indeed, Confucius who saw good government as when all know their places and act accordingly to their status

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would regard this suggestion by Professor Chang was the very opposite of a jun zi’s duty because for a jun zi to establish himself as a `rival centre of authority’ would amount to treachery. Any true Confucian, Classical or not, must regard Chang’s proposition that he should be a rival centre of authority to his king as preposterous because that would be against the vary basis of the Master’s teaching. When a minister murdered the King of Qi, Chen Wen whom Confucius regarded as a pure official, left Qi to seek a state where a righteous lord rules (Analects V: 8) rather than setting himself up as a rival authority to the usurper as Chang Hao had suggested. Indeed, in the final passage of the Meng Zi, the Book of Mencius, this very Classical of Confucian text, suggested sages of just kings are no more. (Mencius 7B: 38) The idea that there should be an alternate source of power and authority and be legitimately so is a very modern idea. To use such a modern idea to judge the ideas of Confucius who lived between 551—479 BCE is an anachronism. After all, the 1st Commandment of this Judiac-Christian God denies its adherents any other gods but called them false ones. And, to regard the absence of a legal opposition or a separate power base as constituting a trouble in ru-jai, or Confucianism, as de Bary does, is Orientalism for such a system is a modern Western political invention and not the norm for all times and cultures. That is exactly what de Bary asserted. (de Bary: 49) But he went even further with a series of rhetorical questions thus: Did [the late Ming Dynasty] Confucian scholars cease to offer a challenge to the state in the succeeding Manchu Dynasty? Did the prophetic function lapse with the rise of a new and more efficient autocracy?… Did China, for want of such prodding, lapse into inertia or fall into a torpor from which it could be roused only by the more dynamic transformative power of the West?’ (Ibid.: 59) While it is a moot point as to whether it is appropriate to apply the term `prophetic function’ to Confucius and the Confucians, what we can safely say is that the Confucian noble man, jun zi, would be most reluctant to serve the autocratic God of Moses, the archetypical prophet of the Israelites. A case in point was when Moses came down from Mount Sinai and found the Israelites

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`gave voice’ and worshipped an unapproved god—a golden calf which `came out’ of the fire. Moses then told the men of the Levite tribe: `this saith the Lord God of Israel. Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour … and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.’ (Exodus 32: 24, 27-8) Those who were massacred had given `voice’ that they preferred to worship the golden calf to which they contributed their gold and Aaron `threw it into the fire, and out came this calf.’ (Exodus 32: 24) Facing with such a situation, the Confucians would, like the purehearted Chen Wen, walked away to find a master with the heart of jen, often translated as human-heartedness. Dare I say that on that episode, the God of Moses had committed a crime against humanity? It is a commonly known historical fact that many scholar-officials at the end of the Ming Dynasty agonized over whether to serve the new Qing Dynasty when the decaying and corrupt Ming Dynasty finally collapsed. Many decided like their forebears in the Han dynasty who gave the service to Liu Bang though he went back on his words and defeated Xiang Yu to win the empire. Indeed, they devised a theoretical mandate for the victor. Many retired as some of their forebears did. Many of those who served the new master were later killed by their new Qing master on trumped-up charges of disloyalty in serving two masters. Such murders can be committed by a Chinese emperor or the God of the Ancient Hebrews, However, to suggest that a trouble with Confucianism is that it had led China to lapse into a torpor shows the Orientalism of the missionary sinologists is still very pervasive among modern historians and sinologists in the Centre. It led Hegel to proclaim `the Orientals have not attained the knowledge that Spirit— Man as such—is free; and because they do not know this, they are not free.’ (Hegel 1956: 18) This Hegelian view seems it seems is shared by many modern sinologists who, after examining the culture of the East, would conclude that the Christian or Western way is the only true way to view human history. So, we find the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, Herbert Butterfield

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told London University’s famed School of Oriental and African Studies, on the occasion of the publication of the Historical writings on the Peoples of Asia, a two-volume study that grew out of a conference on that theme, that `the Western students ought to look to China if only to learn how historical scholarship may go wrong..’(Butterfield, 1961: 423)

And, R. G. Collingwood wrote in his famous

The Idea of History that `in China or India or among the natives of America, there is no true historical progress but only a static unchanging civilization or a series of changes in which old forms of life are replaced by new forms without that steady cumulative development which is the peculiarity of historical progress.’ (Collingwood, 1946: 90) If the Chinese are to be Man and Free, it seems they must embrace the Centre’s Christianity and reject their culture and cosmogony, otherwise they would fall into a torpor. The missionaries would be pleased to know their views are maintained by scholars in modern universities which are supposed to be secular or at least no longer required religious tests for membership. To de Bary, the inadequacy is in Confucius, not just the latter-day Confucians because, as he claims, `the key to the whole political and social order, and observance of traditional rites is seem by him as a more effective means of governance than all the laws, punishments and regimentation a ruler might impose on the people.’(Trouble: 26) He then gives us the source of his argument: The Analects of Confucius II; 3. de Bary made this judgment just after he excoriated Confucius for being `respectful of the ritual traditions that come down from the past … stand[ing] in apparent contrast to the Old Testament prophets’ frequent indignation against the religious establishment.’ (Trouble: 25) These statements showed de Bary is creative, Orientalist and anarchronistic. As no participants in that symposium challenged this point. It is necessary to read what Confucius actually said that raised the ire and contempt of de Bary. I will quote from two of the most widely used translations: that by James Legge and D.C. Lau’s Penguin Classics edition. In Legge, `The Master said “If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishment, they will try to avoid the punishment, but have no sense of shame. If they be led

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by virtue, and uniformity sought to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of shame and moreover will become good.”’ Then, he said how he began this process from fifteen and hopes that by seventy, what he wants to do will coincide with what he ought to do. Lau rendered the same passage thus: `The Master said, “Guide them by edicts, keep them in line with punishments, and the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. Guide them by virtue, keep them in line with rites (li), and they will, besides having a sense of shame, and reform themselves.”’ If we read this passage in context, what Confucius said was that rather than prohibitions, the point is to reform the thinking of the people, and that a virtuous life required a life-long endeavour which he began at fifteen and was still striving. To read Confucius as de Bary does is creative indeed but is it scholarship? Besides, why should the behaviour of the Old Testament prophets be considered as the universal norm of moral behaviour?

The Old Testament

prophets claimed to receive their commissions from their `jealous God’ (Exodus 20: 5) who gave Moses their exclusivist First Commandment shortly before it ordered Moses to massacre three thousand men for worshipping a god not approved by this `jealous’ one before those hapless 3000 actually received their Commandments. Both Confucius and any good Confucian would reject such an arbitrary god. Furthermore, as Chinese culture has no Creator-God, to compare the Old Testament prophets with the Confucian scholar-officials borders on anachronism, if not grossly so. The perspective of de Bary is obviously Orientalist though he would most probably deny it. Yet, his ideas were enthusiastically accepted by the participants of China Review International’s symposium. Princeton University’s Yu Yingshih even said de Bary `has offered an unusually apt diagnosis of the troubles with Confucianism.’ (Review: 23).

It seems part of the problem is translation, a

problem discussed earlier when only one member of the symposium mentioned in passing, Frederic Wakeman (Review: 19) that `Confucianism’ has no Chinese equivalence. This has led to the tendency by sinologists to conflate the ideas of Confucius recorded in the Classical texts as The Analects and The Great Learning

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Their relations are more tenuous than that between the

recorded words of Jesus and acts done in the name of Christianity. Many modern sinologists seem to persist in invalidating the distinctiveness of China’s culture, that is, they still insisted on practicing Orientalism. Why should Old Testament prophets be the criteria to judge the Confucian scholar-officials?

Would sinologiosts reverse the process and fault the Old

Testament prophets, and indeed even their God, for lacking jen? Certainly, Yu Ying-shih would not do so because he said `for a modern reader, passages in The Analects dealing with the art of government are no longer relevant, even though historically interesting.’ (Review: 27)

He then gave an example of this

irrelevance: `The rule of virtue can be compared to the Pole Star which commands the homage of the multitude of stars without leaving its place.’ (Analects II; 1) That for Professor Yu to judge a 2500-year-old political treatise by whether it is literally totally relevant today on the art of government may be argued as an anachronistic approach! An example of Yu’s idea of the irrelevance of Confucius in the modern world is that in that passage Confucius lauded steadfastness of purpose, a quality which I hope is still prized in civilized societies, even in academe in the USA. Therefore, one is constrained to conclude that Yu’s judgment tells us more about himself than the relevance of Confucius in today’s world. While Wakeman reminds us there is no equivalence in Chinese for the term Confucianism, he shared de Bary’s view that Confucianism lacks an `intermediate that is at the heart of the debate now over civil society’, a debate which he participated actively. (Review: 22)

Their present concern was the

statement in The Great Learning: that the ancients who wish `to order well the states, they first regulate their families. Wishing to regulate the families, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things’. (The Great Learning, Text: 4) To these scholars, there should be an `”intermediate institution” between the individual and the state’ and

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they rejected the idea of Tu Weiming of Harvard University that a fiduciary community `inspired by a dynamic conception of the transformative power of self-cultivation, leading outward and upward from self and family through the universal state and even to the universe itself.’ (Tu, 1988: 116) I would argue that all these three positions—Wakeman, de Bary and Tu—are really essentially Orientalist in that they insist on judging Chinese culture with a modern Western norm and so invalidating any distinctiveness in Chinese culture. This judgment is confirmed by Wakeman who after the above cited passage, continued thus: `and which is also at the heart of the debate over the difference between political articulation and intellectual self-expression in both the modern West and modern China.” What Wakeman has in mind was whether modern China will develop a civil society in the manner Habermas found in Western Europe. Since I have already discussed that issue, I will now discuss a related issue in my analyses of de Bary, Wakeman and Tu. As Confucius lived between 551-470 CBE, his comments on politics were not meant for verbatim application to modern China. He lived in a time when what is now China had a large number of independent political entities at war with each other and in constant changes and confusion. Hence it was called the Spring and Autumn Period which led into the Warring States Period when warfare became more intensive.

Confucius was putting

forward solutions and suggested that a series of rectifications to make the point that if an ordinary man were truly rectified, he can join in the governing of the state. There are ample examples of such cases in Chinese history. The Confucian solution was a meritocratic government based on, as Yu reminded us in the symposium, a `moral and intellectual elite … not … by birth.’ (Review: 25) That passage in The Great Learning, a treatise on self-cultivation, echoes the remarks by Confucius in The Analects (II: 4) where he explained his striving for virtue was a life-long process of `learning’ which he commenced at fifteen. The modern reader, whether Western or Chinese, would be missing the point of the passage in The Great Learning is read as an analysis of social structure or societal development rather than a discussion on self-cultivation. Reading it the way the

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scholars in the Review symposium did is therefore both anachronistic and Orientalist.

Indeed, those sinologists seem less about to be informed by

Confucius than to inform him and the Confucians that they did not behave like the Old Testament prophets and so were therefore inferior. It seems a rather pointless exercise except to make the Orientalists feel more comfortable and superior. There are other types of religious Orientalism.

As these sinological

writings seem to have a Weberian gloss, I shall call them neo-Weberians. In his The Protestant ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5), Max Weber (17581843) argued that the Calvinist emphasis on hard work had helped to develop business enterprise and saw Confucianism in China playing the same role. Likewise, our new-Weberian Orientalist sinologists see Confucianism, however defined, playing a similar role in China as Hinduism, Islam and Christianity play in countries where they were the dominant religion. While no serious sinologist would accept such a direct equivalent role for Confucianism, however defined, as the cause for China’s socio-economic development and future. Occasionally, some sinologists would use this neo-Weberian concept to base their evaluation of cultural development in China. These neo-Weberians would evaluate the cultural developments of China using as the norm of their evaluation the developments in their Western Centre. Again, like de Bary and his colleagues, such sinologists would regard any difference in the Chinese culture vis-à-vis those cultural expressions in the Centre as indications of inferiority or at least as inadequacy. The first type of such neo-Weberians are far more numerous and will be discussed in a later chapter. The remaining part of this chapter will examine the latter type. In a very real sense, they may be regarded more as unwitting victims of the hegemonic impact of Orientalism than willful perpetrators.

To them,

Confucianism played the same role in Chinese society as Christianity did in their Western Centre and so in their evaluation of China’s social and cultural developments, they would use the developments in their Western Centre as the norm and the differences would become indications of China’s inadequacies though the Chinese Communists have a share in their blame. While this type of new-Weberians are not really numerous, they may be regarded as a type of

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religious Orientalism as both have the same rationale and conclusion which are equally pointless as means to understand China’s cultural developments. However, such sinologists seem intend to inform and advise China and as Said advised, also use a special vocabulary in their discourse or rather victims if that vocabulary. In short, their works tend to be political, and if so, this study will try to show who paid the piper. A typical judgment of this genre would go like this: `It is obvious that during the early period (which we may loosely define for East Asia as 1840-1950) the specific superstructure collapsed much more completely than did those of Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism in other parts of Asia, even if certain underlying predispositions in thought and practice that we tend to label “Confucian” remained quite strong.’ (Elvin 1986: 112) In most cases, this genre of scholarship tends to be political, as being involved in the dispute of whether China or Taiwan is the True China.

In short, it borders on political propaganda and often

sponsored by the Chiang Chingguo Foundation, the influence-buying arm of the Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party. KMT. Of course, this does not necessarily mean all the scholars who accept funding from the KMT have already prostituted their intellectual integrity but there may be a wink and a nudge here and there. As to Professor Mark Elvin, a professor of Chinese History at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies in Australian National University, he proposed an intriguing reason for Confucianism’s so-called superstructural collapse. He claimed it was due to `the near-absence of a creative conservatism in China [which] may have made the development of a smooth tradition/modern synthesis difficult to achieve. Hence, the Chinese tradition to modernity has had a peculiarly fitful and jerky quality, full of temporary excesses and temporary reverses.’ Then, as if to pay homage to the paymaster, he went on thus: `In more recent times, after the middle of this [20th ] century, such a pattern has evidently continued on the mainland under the Communist Party, whereas the Republic of China on Taiwan has managed a steadier evolution, based on something like an updated equivalent of the conservative/modern combination desirable but largely missing in the earlier period.’ (Elvin 1986: 115). As one with pretensions in

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economic history, one would have thought Elvin would seek the reasons for the mode of economic development in China during the first half of the 20th Century, and the different economic developmental paths between China and the Nationalist rump in Taiwan in the second half of the 20th century in more materialist terms. From 1899 to 1949, China had almost continuous war. The empire collapsed into a period of warlordism during which rose the Communist Party. Japan began to invade in 1931 and when the League of Nations expressed mild displeasure, it left the League. Even in the so-called Nanking Decade, China was in a civil war between the Communist Party and the KMT, not to mention the increasing encroachment by Japan. In the post-1949 period, one would have thought the huge economic aid from the USA to Taiwan and the USA-instigated international economic blockade of China had serious effects on the economic developments of China and the US protectorate of Taiwan. Propaganda aside, Elvin’s argument of the need of viable conservative force as a milieu for modernization is certainly a debatable proposition.

In

Elvin’s Britain of say the 18th century, one would have thought the absence of such a conservative counterpoise and a consensus for modernity was the case. Certainly a contemporary French observer, Voltaire, thought so. (Voltaire: 1733) However, Elvin’s judgment that by the middle of `1970’s, China was left spiritually and intellectually resourceless certainly cannot be allowed to go through without challenge. (Elvin, 1986: 116)

Whether China was really

intellectually resourceless in the mid-1970’s is most debatable. By then, China had managed to built the fission and fusion weapons, A and H bombs, and their delivery systems, the intercontinental rockets, by her own effort and without foreign aid. Indeed, the mid-1970’s China also managed to engineer the collapse of the US Cold War policy of isolating China by winning an overwhelming majority support to reclaim her seat in the United Nations and Security Council, and the overwhelming international acceptance of her as the rightful and legal government of China from the US-supported rump led by the KMT. Those successful diplomatic manoeuvres must be considered as indicative of intellectual resourcefulness, even if one does not share China’s political agenda.

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the mid-1970, the situation is rather more complex than implied in his bald statement. If by spiritual he meant what in the Christian sense of the spiritual and temporal dichotomy, then given what has been said in this study about the cosmogony of China, such spirituality is irrelevant except to the Orientalists. As I am not sure if he had in mind the Christian understanding of spirituality when he used the term `spiritually resourceless’, nor am I sure what the Chinese term he had in mind when he used that term, so in here I can only presume that he had in mind the most commonly used term—jing shen—which has long been used by Orientalist sinologists as spiritual in the Christian sense, as tian is used to denote the Christian Heaven. However, there are many English terms that are more in accord with the Chinese term jing shen and may be freed from the Orientalist connotation. Some obvious ones are temper, vitality, even mentality as the state of the mind. That is, jing shen refers to temporal not Christianity’s spiritual issues. If we accept these more accurate and less religious terms for jing shen, then whether China in the mid-1970’s was spiritually resourceless in the Christian sense is an issue beyond the scope of this study and my ability, being a student of the history of idea and not in metaphysics. There are other translation problems in Elvin’s study.

If he had translated Liang Qizhao’s term shijie zhu-i as

internationalism and not `a millennial age’, it would be less metaphysical because Liang was certainly not metaphysical. The main point in Elvin’s study, however, is what he claimed the sudden and complete collapse of Confucianism and its inability to stage a revival in the spiritual and cultural life of China as Christianity, Buddhism and Islam have done in countries where they predominate.

As this study concerns more with

Orientalism than the politics of the sinologists, I shall take leave of Elvin’s political orientation which is his private affair, and turn to the problems that he claimed to have discovered. Certainly, in the name of Confucianism or ru-jao sixiang, many Chinese down the ages have developed what may be called religious practices. The collapse of Confucianism and its lack of revival in the term used by Elvin only makes sense if one accepted an Orientalst approach by

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deliberately interpreting the role of Confucianism or ru-jia sixiang in Chinese society as that of Christianity in his Centre, thus invalidating the distinctive aspects of Chinese culture. In short, it only makes sense if one accepts the rationale and modus operandi of the pioneers of sinology, the Christian missionaries. As we are entering into a new millennium, it is time the sinologists adopt a modes operandi other than the missionary position. After ascribing to Confucianism in China the role that Christianity has been in his Centre, Elvin then faults Confucianism and the Confucians for their inability to respond, as the adherents of Christianity have done. This echoes what de Bary and his colleagues have done, and have been Elvin’s position for some time. In a recently republished collection of his essays, there is one entitled The Collapse of Scriptural Confucianism, where he reminded readers of his earlier essay, Double Disavowal. There, he claimed `the extinct Confucian system’ failed to preserve a `scriptural religious core analogous to that which still preserves the Christian Bible, the Torah, the Koran, and a vast gamut of Sanskrit and Pali scriptures as subjects of a uniquely believing study and, in a large number of cases, of memorization.’ (Elvin 1996: 352) To those who are not Orientalists, Elvin’s modus operandi seems to set up an Aunt Sally then proceeds to demolish it. What is ironic is that while both essays have very long quotes in both the body of the text and footnotes, he did not seem to have taken notice of them as he plough towards his Orientalist destination. He might have fallen victim of what Said called `supporting vocabulary’ in Orientalist discourse. Having ascribed Confucianism as the religion of China as Christianity is in his Centre, Elvin then called the writings of Confucius and the Confucians as Scriptures, with a capital S. In so doing, he has conferred to the Chinese word connotations absent in the original, just as calling jing shen spiritual. The words Elvin called Scriptures are known in Chinese as qing or shu and if rendered as treatise or book respectively, he would not have to set his mind so Orientally. It seems he has been a victim of Said’s “supporting vocabulary’. He might also have been distracted. In a 515-word footnote of 43 lines in Double Disavowal, he has answered his own Orientalist question. It reads `the

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Six Scriptures are books that have a use and the learning of Confucius is meant for the management of the world,’ (Elvin, 1986: 122) If Scripture is rendered as books in that passage, then that statement becomes: “the six Books are useful, their study is for the management of the world.’ and would have wrought less violence to the original and there will be no need to compare the fates of Christianity and Confucianism, however defined. Furthermore, that quote is from Kang Youwei’s Memorial in the Candidates’ Revolt—gongche shangshu— written in 1896 when about a third of the Imperial Examination’s candidates, risking their careers, petitioned to the Throne asking for fundamental reforms. It and the easy defeat by Japan of China’s New Military built at the Dongzhi Era marked the end of the piece-meal Dongzhi Restoration. While that petition and other events led to the Reform Movement of 1898 which Kang participated, it was short-lived and known as the Hundred Days Reform when Kang was forced into temporary exile.

Those events had a fundamental impact on the role of

Confucianism and those Six Books. In 1901, the Imperial Government decreed that by 1906, the Examination System which was based on the knowledge of those Six and other Confucian texts would be no more and a new education system would be introduced. Thus in one stroke, the honoured position of those Confucian texts was abolished. In many dynasties over the centuries, bright and ambitious young men diligently studied those texts in the hope of passing the Imperial Examination for it was their path of upward social movement and entry to power and wealth. By 1906, that path was no more, and with that the rationale for a place of honour that those Confucian texts enjoyed was no more. The study of the writings of the Confucians and even Confucius had never been religious as the Bible Studies have been to the Christians. The study had a worldly goal: social advancement into positions of influence, power and wealth in the management of the Chinese world. To ascribe to the Confucian texts the same role as the Scriptures of Christianity, Islam and Judaism world would naturally be disappointed if one is to expect a Chinese Confucian revival. Confucianism suffered its most abject and humiliating failure in the 20th Century when Yuan Shikai, after usurping power from the new republic, tried in 1915, to make rujia

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sixiang, Confucianism, a state religion but was rejected by all and sundry. Today, the study of the Confucian texts remain a pursuit in the academies and universities as a school of political and moral thought, albeit the major tradition in much of the history of China. It never regained its role as the pathway to power, influence, and wealth because of the political changes decreed by the last dynasty and not because of any innate inability or of its followers.

Besides, while the two

examples Elvin used as defenders of that tradition are favourites of

those

sinologists who are not favourably disposed towards the Chinese Revolution, as J.R. Levenson’s Confucian China and its Modern Fate (Levenson: 1958), they are really rather poor examples.

While Kang Youwei and Liang Qizhao were

regarded as progressive scholars at the end of the 19th Century when China went through a tumultuous period which ended the millennia-long imperial system and brought in a republic, Kang ended his days as a man left behind by history by remaining a monarchist. Liang, a follower of Kang, became an Anglophile and was probably why he became a favourite of Western sinologists but he also ended his days in ignominy by serving the Beiyang regime warlords. If they were regarded by Orientalist sinologists as the last hopes if Confucianism, no wonder it failed neither to revive nor to provide a credible conservative opposition as Elvin had wished. Elvin did not help his own case by arguing that `the lack of a fully developed transcendental domain in the Chinese Confucian tradition may also have been a weakness in so far as survival potential was concerned, making it more vulnerable to the cruel buffeting of early Chinese history than a less reasonable faith might have been.’ (Elvin, 1996: 354) Such an argument is silly and Orientalist because it really faults rujia sixiang, Confucianism, for not being a religion. Kang, as cited by Elvin, had said that the study of the Confucian texts may enable one to manage political affairs, but not for metaphysical or transcendental ends. So, Elvin’s approach may be akin to an investigation of the European Enlightenment from a Buddhist perspective. Naturally, one would find no such enlightenment. But if one then turns around and says `a weakness’ of the European Enlightenment was the absence of `a fully developed’ appreciation of

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Buddhism, then one would well expect to be red-carded from the field of scholarship.

But as Elvin holds the only research professorship in Chinese

History in Australia and previously was the Director of Chinese Studies at St. Anthony’s College at Oxford University, he should not be so easily dismissed. His ideas are more complex and multi-layers than mere Orientalism. It is true that like the Orientalists before him, Elvin also seem to need to invalidate some of the distinctive aspects of Chinese culture by insisting that the mores of European culture are universal, and any culture lacking them is a sign of weakness.

However, he is quite aware that many aspects of the history,

development, and nature of Chinese culture are distinctive. He was aware that `while Chinese parallels of a sort can be found for most of the main beliefs and ideas held in the Western half of Eurasia … Chinese culture, as a whole, remain untorn by those uncompromising oppositions that., in their extreme form, opened up such a wound in the European soul. By that I mean a self-existent and perfect God and an imperfect transient Creation, Good and Evil as all-pervading aspects of the universe, locked in a perpetual or at least long-term struggle.’ (Elvin, 1986: 326) Little wonder then that in spite of centuries of efforts, China was the most unfruitful area in the annals of Christian missionary endeavours. When the atheist Chinese Communist Party under the leadership of Mao Zedong defeated the Nationalist regime led by the Christianized Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, in 1949 it was generally accepted that the total membership of all the Christian sects numbered less than 0.5% of China’s population. Are we then to say that it was a sign of the weakness of Christianity, or do we agree with Elvin’s colleague, Professor Jenner, that this was a cultural weakness of China that has resulted in `the underdeveloped sense of independent person identity.’ (Jenner: 230) I would certainly not say either Elvin or Jenner is racist or holds nasty thoughts towards the Chinese people. And, Elvin has assured me that he is not an Orientalist and thinks that Said’s concept of Orientalism is too imprecise as a tool of scholarly analysis.

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While I have no reason to doubt his sincerity, yet I feel constrained to suggest he was a victim of what Said called the ‘Supporting Vocabulary’ Syndrome. Since our thoughts are expressed by words, and the words we use may be conditioned by our habit of thinking, to the extent that if we step back and think carefully about an issue, we may use different words. A case in point is what is called the politically incorrect use of certain terms. For example, the use of the masculine singular form for both the masculine and feminine does not necessarily mean that the user is a misogynist, but only a victim of a hegemonic usage in a culture that regards the male as dominant and so that the masculine form becomes the norm. Likewise, the language of discourse in modern sinology reflects a heritage of the pioneers of sinology—the Christian missionaries. The language of discourse of many modern sinologists seem to regard as natural the linguistic heritage of their Christian missionary pioneers who, among other things, had tried to invalidate the cosmogony in Chinese culture and to replace it with a Christian one of special creation by their Creator-God. Thus, in modern sinology, English language discourse in Chinese culture would mention God, Scriptures, and Heaven with capital G, S and H in spite of the connotations of such usages in the English language is based on the culture of the Centre. Some even use the word sin.

The hegemonic influence of the Christian

missionary pioneers seems to be so strong that many modern sinologists seem unaware that in doing what they do, they are really distorting the image and thus the readers’ understanding of the culture of China. This is so even among many ethnic Chinese sinologists educated in the Centre. If an ethnic Chinese scholar raises this issue as what I am doing here, that effort would probably be dismissed as an expression of parochialism or the Central Kingdom Mentality—without intentionally insulting, of course. In the preparation of this study, I had the good fortune to discuss my work with many senior sinologists, including ethnic Chinese, whose scholarship I have the highest respect. Overwhelmingly, their advice to me was that I should not continue this project. Later, I have discussed some of their works here.

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discuss parts of this study will continue to regard me as a colleague and friend, therein lies the danger of Orientalism in sinology. Often, and may well be most of the time, that approach was made by people who consider what they did was in the highest motive and for the good of the Chinese. Four centuries ago, Mateo Ricci made `every effort to turn our way the ideas of the leaders of the sect of literati, Confucius, by interpreting in our favour things which he left ambiguous in his writing.’ (Rule: 1) Four centuries later, that innocent and pious act of turning ideas to `our favour’ seems to have taken on a life of its own, and Said called it a `Supporting Vocabulary’. Ideas in Chinese culture are being turned, and in the process distorted, without the realization of the practitioners because they thought that was the natural thing to do. The elevation to naturalness surely betokens the hegemonic status or Orientalism in sinology. The next chapter will examine how Orientalism has gone on the offensive as it were, and actively tried to change the reality of Chinese culture by reinterpreting Chinese cultural texts by the innocent use of such a Supporting Vocabulary.

NOTES de BARY, W.T. (1991) The Trouble with Confucianism (Cambridge MA & London,

Harvard University Press)

BUTTERFIELD, H. (1961) `History and Man’s attitude to the Past’ The Listener, Sept. 21, 1961, 421-3) CHAN, A (1996) `Confucianism and development in East Asia’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, v. 26, No 1, 28-45; also his `Confucianism and Deng’s China’ in Modernization of the Chinese Past, 16-24, M Lee & A.D. Syrokomla-Stefanowska, eds. (Sydney, Wild Peony, 1993) CHAN, A. (1995) `The Liberation of Marx in China’ Journal of Contemporary Asia, v. 25, No 1, 93-108. Also see his Chinese Marxism (Continuum, 2003) where the abuses of Chinese sources are detailed.

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CHINA REVIEW INTERNATIONAL (1994), I, 1, 9-47, (Hawaii, University of Hawaii Press). These words are its own self-description. COLLINGWOOD, R.G. (1946) The Idea of History (Oxford, Clarendon Press) ELVIN, M. (1986) `The Double disavowal: the Attitudes of Radical Thinkers to the Chinese Tradition’, in Y-M Shaw ed. China and Europe in the Twentieth Century, 112-137 (Taipei, Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University Press) ELVIN, M. (1986) ‘Was There a Transcendental Breakthrough in China?’ in S. N. Eisentadt ed. The Origins and Diversity of the Axial Age of Civilizations, 325-73, (Albany, State University of New York Press) ELVIN, M. (1996) `The Collapse of Scriptural Confucianism’ in Another History, Essays on China from a European Perspective, 353-89 (Sydney, Wild Peony) EXODUS, The Second Book of the Old Testament of the Bible. King James version used. GREAT LEARNING, James Legge’s translation used. HABERMAS, J. (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge MA, MIT Press) HEGEL, G.W.F. (1942) Philosophy of Right, ed. T.M. Knox (London) HEGEL, G.W.F. (1956) Philosophy of History trans. J. Sibree (New York) JENNER, W.J.F. (1992) The Tyranny of History: the Roots of China’s Crisis (London, Allen Lane). LEVENSON, J.R. (1972) Confucian China and its Modern Fate, a Trilogy (Berkeley, University of California Press) LUKE, The Third Book in the New Testament, King James Version used.. MARX, K. (1843/1975) `Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State’, in Early Writings ed. L. Colletti (London, Penguin Marx Library) THE DOCTRINE OF THE MEAN (ZHONG YONG) any ed, my translation used MENCIUS (MENG ZI) any edition.

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ROWE, W.T. (1990) `The Public Sphere in Modern China’ Modern China No. 16, July 1889. He also published books on this theme and were discussed in Modern China, (April, 1993 issue.) RULE, P. (1986) K’ung-tzu or Confucius? The Jesuit Interpretation of Confucianism (Sydney, Allen and Unwin) SCHELL, O. (1989) `China’s Spring’ New York Review of Books, June 29, 36. SOLINGER, D.J. (1991) China’s Transients and the State: a form of Civil Society? (Hong Kong, Chinese University of Hong Kong Press) TU, Wei-ming (1988) Centrality and Communality: An Essay on Confucian Religiousness (Albany, State University of New York Press) VOLTAIRE, (1733) Letters Concerning the English Nation, any edition. WAKEMAN, F. (1993) `Civil Society and Public Sphere Debate, Western Reflections on Chinese Political Culture’ Modern China, April, No 19, 108-38, cited in 112. WHITE, G. (1993) `Prospects of Civil Society in China: a case study of Xiaoshan City’, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, 53-89, Jan 1993. Also published in 1994 as China’s Quiet Revolution: New Interactions between State and Society ed. D. Goodman & B. Hooper (Melbourne, Longman) The sponsorship was in its Acknowledgement)

CHAPTER FIVE THE ORIENTALIST ODYSSEY: II

The issues to be examined in this chapter are the impacts of Orientalism on the scholarship of the economic and social developments in Contemporary China. Special attention will be given to the reasons these Orientalist scholars who allocate so much time and attention to what seems to be an irrelevant issue— rujia sixiang or Confucianism—to prospective and current developments. Here again, we can also see the impacts of the linguistic legacy of sinology's missionary pioneers on contemporary sinology. A notable impact of this legacy on the modern sinologists is their penchant to use a Christian framework of reference in their works on sinology, a comparative enterprise, though to these sinologists and the issues concerned are not religious but secular. Once again, we note particularly in English language sinology, these scholars would use terms that convey connotations or ideas that are absent in the Chinese original or Chinese culture. Therefore their usage would again distort the perceptions, and even the appearances of, important and basic aspects of, China's culture, making such scholarly works mere Orientalist renderings of China and her economic and

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social developments. I must stress that while I am not suggesting that all these scholars have set out to deceive their readers nor willfully to distort the situation in China, but only to suggest that they have become victims, if unwittingly, of Orientalism—victims through the use of a `supporting vocabulary' which to Said was a natural expression in Orientalist scholarship. Hence, their works tend to project the impression that China's culture and developments are parts of European civilization which is a key aspect of Said's Orientalism. A corollary to the above approach is, again, due to what I regard as the misapplication and misinterpretation of rujia sixiang, Confucianism. This is so because many modern Orientalist sinologists on Development Studies tend to insist China must have an overarching theory of social and economic developments just as what they thought Max Weber's (1864-1920) so-called Protestant Work Ethic was the overarching theory that underpinned the developmental experience in their own society, their perceptual centre. Actually, the economic and social developments in their own societies were far more complicated than what I would regard as the simplistic misapplication of Weber’s theory or any single theory, but were multifaceted. Therefore, as with their Orientalist colleagues who searched for a Habermas-type civil society in China, the Orientalist scholars on economic and social developments in China also betray a similar innocence of the developmental history of their own societies. Hence, unconstrained by the knowledge of the complexity in the history of the social and economic developments in their own societies, these Orientalists sinologists go boldly forward and pontificate on whether China has followed what they regard as the correct and approved way to social and economic developments, based on no firmer ground than what they thought had happened in the developmental history in those Orientalists' own societies. To them, the correct way for China to develop her economy and society is to follow what the Orientalist scholars imagined as the way their own societies had developed. Furthermore, while the Orientalists, from a wide varieties of disciplinary backgrounds, seem to be more concerned to instruct China on how to develop than to enlighten or instruct us on the actual theories and practices of the

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developmental processes in China. That is, they seem more concerned with the evaluation of the developments in China by using as the norm what they imagined as had happened in their own societies. In short, they are Orientalists as defined by Said. If this sounds familiar, it is because it reflects on the way which most Orientalist sinologists have been educated in their societies, their Centre. This is not to question the education system of that Centre per se, nor do I intend to reflect on the intellectual ability of those sinologists concerned, for both are of very high standards. In the education system of the Centre, however, if the bright students have successfully completed their secondary education and wish to attend university to read the Greats, it is expected they would read for an Honours degree by choosing all the papers in the Classics, either both Greek and Latin or just one, and probably Ancient European History of the appropriate and relevant periods. That would be a very satisfactory degree. Likewise, to those who choose to read Chinese would enrol in a degree where they would select all papers in China Studies: language, literature, history, philosophy, etc. Upon graduating with a First Class Honours degree and if they wish to pursue higher studies, they would most likely obtain a scholarship to read for a postgraduate degree, probably a D.Phil.

For that they will, by definition,

investigate quite deeply into a relatively narrow topic.

When they have

successfully completed that in another three or four years, they would then have been exposed intensively to an alien culture for a total of six or seven years, a culture which they knew little when they enter the halls of academe. With their D.Phil. on top of their First, they would then become China experts or sinologists, and with luck, they will become lecturers in China Studies in the universities and start the cycle again by teaching another generation of bright young students about China and Chinese culture. The problem, however, is that by the time these new sinologists completed their formal education in Chinese Studies, their formal education in their own culture and society had effectively ended at the Upper Six or senior high school levels. Little wonder that we should meet so many modern sinologists who would

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treat the social theories of their own societies so carelessly as the searchers of the civil society in China had been in treating so cavalierly the ideas of Habermas, as well as the very history of the concept of civil society in their own culture. Indeed, in the education of these modern sinologists, few would have formal exposure to the conflicting and burgeoning theories of economic, social, political and cultural developments in their own societies, let alone having adequate expertise or knowledge to evaluate comparatively the developmental policies, processes and priorities in alien China. It is against such a background, with some honorable exceptions and variations, dependent on their places of origin, that we should evaluate modern sinological scholarship on China's developments, contemporary and ancient. If, as shown in Chapter Two, that a renown senior sinologist in language and logic, such as Professor Christoph Harbsmeier, can write such irrelevances and yet be accepted by syndic of the Cambridge University Press for their prestigious Needham series on Science and Technology in China, it may be in order for us to show some charity here. To avoid ethnocentrism, we should avoid confusing modernization and industrialization on the one hand with Westernization on the other, though one may argue that the developed economies tend to appear more similar with each other than with the pre-industrialized ones. Historically, industrialization and urbanization were twins, with one leading to another.

The results of their

developments on the society can be devastating. The poet William Blake (17571827) described his industrializing England as intimidated by the `dark satanic mills,'* while the description of the living conditions of the ordinary people, especially the poor who worked in those `satanic mills', has immortalized the name of that great novelist of the time, Charles Dickens (1812-1870). Today, the very term Dickensian conjures up the injustice, inequality, privation and suffering that industrialization wrought to the masses of the urban poor.

That is,

industrialization brings forth great social consequences as well as economic ones to a society or economy that experiences it, from the first case in England onwards. They included great social disruptions and upheavals due to rapid

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urbanization, which in turn brought dehumanizing sufferings as expressed by Blake and Dickens. Certainly, the invention of machinery brought increased productivity and great wealth to those whom Marx called the owners of the means of production. That is, industrialization increases social and economic inequality. While Western Europe was industrialized in the 19th Century in a process known as the Industrial Revolution, in Asia including China, excepting Japan, their societies did not experience industrialization in any real sense until after World War II when the colonies of the European empires began to gain their political independence.

Upon gaining that, they then looked for ways to

industrialize and modernize their economies, that is, looking for ways to develop economically and socially. While China was not colonized as such, she was carved into spheres of influence and control known as concessions by foreign nations. Her people regarded themselves as exploited and subjugated while her own historians refer to that epoch as semi-colonial, which extended well into the 20th Century. It was only in 1923 that the consortium of foreign powers that controlled China's custom service and tariff for some 70 years returned that control to China, including the power to set the tariff rate and collect the incomes from customs. Furthermore, since 1842, foreigners in China were not subjected to the laws of China. This was a provision of the 1842 Nanking (Nanjing) Treaty imposed on the much weakened and corrupt Chinese Empire by the victorious Great Britain in the First Anglo-China War which the Chinese called the First Opium War. The arrangement was called the extraterritorial provision whereby foreigners in China did not come under the laws of China but those of their home countries even when they had committed crimes in China and against Chinese nationals or institutions. It is necessary to recall these events in China's recent past because they have considerable impacts on China's economic and social developments during her time of industrialization. While it is helpful to understand such events, they are not the only determinant factors in the industrialization process in Modern and Contemporary China. How a society or economy become industrialized had long exercised the minds of scholars of Development Studies prior to the process of

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decolonization had became a worldwide issue in the late 1950's. Development Studies is a discipline that has closely linked to the political ideologies of the Cold War. We must also remember that the establishment of the People's Republic of China was a contributive event to the Cold War.

The Cold War not only

dominated international politics but sinology also because China also became a theatre of the Cold War. Indeed, scholarship on Modern and Contemporary China has been very much part of that tussle, and so adding obstacles to our efforts here. (Chan: 2003, Chinese Marxism, esp. chap.4) With the termination of the empires of the Western European powers and the formation of newly independent states from their former colonies, many scholars from the industrialized Western European and North American nations began to examine their own countries' economy so as to propose lessons for these new or newly independent or newly freed from the Western imperial states, as China, to adopt for their own development. Not unexpectedly, the advice of many scholars of the developed countries gave to the new countries was to adopt as model of their own nations’ developmental process that had occurred in North America and Western Europe. Among some of the leading scholars in this genre were expatriate Australian Colin Clark (1957), Britain's Arthur Youngson (1959) and American Walt Rostow (1960) whose book, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, was an unabashed polemical effort in the Cold War tussle at the time though others are not far behind as apologists of the Western model. This genre was soon attacked for their ethnocentrism in that they expected the West to be the model or aspiration for the developing world. These writers were further accused of neglecting the fact that nations that wanted to be industrialized and developed had been exploited as the colonies by those very model economies. Since these new countries cannot be expected to repeat the history of those models in North America and Europe by having their own colonies let alone empires, the critics of these earlier scholars thought that to use the West as model was irrelevant to the development of the newly independent and pre-industrialized states. The more notable in this second genre are the works

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of Gunter Frank (1971) and W. Rodney (1971). They argued that the alleged models of development for the new states—Western Europe and North America—got developed because they had forced their colonies to be dependent hence they cannot be models as the newly independent ex-colonies do not and will not have colonies of their own, and so impossible to repeat the process of economic development of those European and North American states. To the extent that the newly independent states are, by definition, not industrialized because it had not been the intention of any imperialist to industrialize their colonies, these newly independent ex-colonies will require help if they are to industrialize, especially in such areas as technologies, capital and skills. As these can only be acquired from the developed economies in North America and Europe, then the economic and political interests and priorities of these developed countries become very relevant in the development of these same newly politically independent states, if only because the developed states also want to further their own development. It is most unlikely that the developed and industrialized countries would help the newly independent states if their leaders in the developed states thought that new state may embark on a political path which the developed states regarded as inimical to their own economic and political interests. So, the desire of the new states to be politically and economically independent may conflict with the realities of the self-interests of their former colonial masters. These are some of the basic and more common problems facing newly independent states trying to industrialize and modernize. That is, the paths to industrialization and economic development of the new states are strewn with political problems that may compromise their political independence because of the power and economic relations between the developed and the newly independent nations are asymmetrical, favouring the developed nations. While being modern is almost synonymous with being industrialized, the history of industrialization in North America and Europe, as alluded to earlier, was one of much suffering and indeed dehumanizing. To industrialize needs capital, technologies, a ready supply of low cost labour, sources of raw materials and markets for the goods produced, and above all, governments prepared to

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ensure the maintenance of these conditions so that plans could be made and profits could be gained to re-invest in the enterprises, and enabling them to grow. That is, a state willing to support the interests of the owners of the means of production even if by so doing the workers would suffer exploitation, as what had happened in the industrialized European and North American nations. Of course, not all the workers were docile. Some would rise to demand that working conditions be improved. To help them obtain their demands, they would organize into unions for collective actions as withholding their labour, or even to rebel against their oppressive governments.

So, the rise of

industrialization was also accompanied by the rise of organized labour and socialist ideas to resist the exploitative capitalists and to gain benefits for the workers. Thus, while industrialization brought forth increased wealth, it also brought economic inequality and therefore social discontents. That, at least, was the social history of industrialization in the developed countries under a market economy regime. A common way to ensure the labour cost stayed low was an important role played by the state though not always planned. In England, the Enclosure Acts ensured many farmers lost their livelihood on the land and came to the towns and cities looking for work, thus helped to depress the cost of labour.

The

commercialization of agriculture in France resulted in more and more farmers losing their land, a situation which Marx described thus: `a large proletariat foncier has grown out of it ... what separate the peasants from the [urban] proletarian is, therefore, no longer his real interest, but his delusive prejudice'—of regaining his land. That was how Marx argued as one of the reasons the uprising in France, known as the Paris Commune Movement, failed because the urban proletariat, the urban revolutionaries, failed to enlist the proletariat foncier into the Movement. (Marx, 1871:256-7) However, the Chinese Marxists took this lesson to heart. They published three different translations of this Marx’s tract, Civil War in France, in the first seventeen years of the history of the Party and thus ensured that their movement shall not commit the same mistakes. (Chan: 2003) The massive influx of migrants into the USA during her industrialization in

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the 19th Century had the effect of ensuring a ready supply of labour, and hence lowering the costs of labour, as the Enclosure did in England. That Marx had insisted there should be a vital role for the dispossessed peasants whom he called proletariat foncier in a socialist revolution in Western European is most interesting if only because current received bourgeois Marxian scholarship ignored this. This scholarship tended to regard the involvement of the peasantry as a development invented by Mao in a predominantly agrarian China (McCellan, 1986: 202) and so not Marxian, according to a leading sinologist (Schwartz, 1967: 4). Though that is interesting for it really tells us much about how received bourgeois scholarship is in dealing with Marx and Chinese Marxism, but to pursue this issue here will be a diversion. Therefore we must return to our discussion on industrialization in the newly independent states, including China. When the colonies gained their independence from the imperialists from late 1940's onwards, it was also about the time, in 1949, that a Chinese government was able to put an end to the civil wars and foreign invasions and occupation for the first time in more than a century and to unify the mainland. To be sure, as this government had no navy, the defeated rump in the civil war was able to flee to the island province of Taiwan where it has since been continually under the protection of the USA. With the help of the US military, the USA and Taiwan maintained the myth for the next twenty three years that the regime in Taiwan was actually the government of all China. And, at the insistence of the USA, the Western European world and most of the newly independent states were bullied into accepting this myth and together kept the Taiwan regime as China in the United Nations Organization. At the time of writing, in 2005, the USA and the regime in Taiwan still arrogate to themselves the right to make trouble for China through the USA’s decision to sell to the Taiwan regime weapons. The USA could not accept the fact that its protégé, the Guomindang or Nationalist regime, had failed to match the People's Liberation Army of the Chinese Communist Party, in spite of the massive military and financial aids given to its corrupt protégé in China’s civil war. The USA then dragooned all the

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developed capitalist countries into a joint capitalist campaign to punish the new People's Republic of China, PRC, by declaring an economic embargo against her. Another reason to punish the PRC was her temerity to declare she would not take the capitalist road for her economic development but declared that her goal was a communist society. So, from the beginning of her existence, China, as the PRC, was denied the freedom to trade, instigated by the USA and its pliant allies while they all professed free enterprise. Its aim was to thwart China in her chosen path of political, industrial and economic developments because they were at variant with those of those developed capitalist nations.

So the only developed and

industrialized country China could turn to for help was the Soviet Union, itself had been devastated during World War II, especially by the destructive invasion by Nazi Germany. Such was the hostile international political environment when China embarked on her reconstruction, industrialization and development after more than a century of continuous foreign invasions and civil wars that left her economy devastated. That situation left China little option other than to be as self-reliant as possible and used whatever help she could get from the Soviet Union though she was also devastated by wars and invasions. Given this recent history, China developed a sense of urgency because she was confronted by a powerful and hostile USA and its allies who were determined to `roll back communism', that is, China's destruction. Using its power over the war-weary Europe and other nations, the USA not only denied China her rightful place in the new United Nations Organization and maintained the myth that the Taiwan regime was the government of all China for the next twenty three years, down to 1972.

Every year at the General Assembly of the United Nations

Organization, Australia and New Zealand, pliant allies of the USA would move in the Assembly that the admission of the government of the PRC constituted an ‘Important Issue’ and so required a two-thirds majority in the Assembly before China’s admission would be accepted. The new government in China quickly brought under control the legacy of hyper-inflation left by the protégé of the USA, the Guomindang or Kuomintang,

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KMT, regime. To attenuate the long period of economic inequality and the massive poverty in the rural areas, drastic new policies were introduced. A program of land reform by collectivization was introduced as were plans to curtail internal migration.

The aim was to create an acceptable, and hopefully

improving, the living standard in the rural areas and to prevent the formation of slum settlements around the cities by rural migrants going to the cities looking for work—a condition that still plagues all large cities in most of the other newly independent states. Meanwhile, every effort was made towards industrialization but her treasury was bare. While the Soviet Union helped, it was a small amount compared to what Taiwan got from the USA. Yet, in spite of such disadvantages, the economic developments in the years under the leadership of Mao Zedong were quite remarkable. According to reports by the World Bank (1980) and scholars [Rawski, 1979:35; Eckstein (1977:229)], by 1975 while 76% of China's labour force were employed in agriculture including forestry and fishery, industries had provided 54% of her gross domestic product, GDP. But her path to achieve this was not smooth. Her friendship with the Soviet Union not only ended in 1958 but by 1960 they had border skirmishes. These political developments led the Chinese leadership to the felt need of diverting more of their desperately short personnel and materiel resources to the development of nuclear weapons and a missile delivery system. It was generally believed that these efforts began in 1958 and within a decade a thermonuclear devise, H-bomb, and a missile with an intermediate range were successfully tested. These showed that while China was not yet a developed economy as those in North America and Western Europe, in 1972 she had won enough support among the members in the UN to overcome the recalcitrant US-led rump and got the ‘two-thirds’ requirement moved by Australia and New Zealand at each annual General Assembly meeting and replaced the Taiwan regime as the holder of the China seat in the UN. When the votes at the General Assembly exceeded the twothirds requirement, the delegation of the Taiwan regime at least had the decency to walk out of the Assembly rather than to face the ignominy of facing an

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expulsion. So through her own efforts she had largely overcome the US-led threat for her destruction. Shortly after the death of Mao in 1976, China's new leaders in 1978 took the Chinese revolution into its Thermordian Reaction phase. As Deng Xiaoping had argued in 1975, in his interpretation of Mao Zedong's three revolutionary Key Links—that class struggle, unity, and push the national economy forward were equals, and as China has already achieved the first two links- that is, class struggle and unity—the task ahead, so argued the post-Mao leadership, would be to push the national economy forward. To Mao, class struggle would always be the most important. (Deng: 1975, Chan, 2003, last chapter) While the speech got Deng his second dismissal from office for putting productive force ahead of productive relations, he returned to power after Mao's death and changed the direction of China's economic development. The PRC adopted a market economy mode for its economic development which they called Socialist Market Economy or Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Like the Western European and North American countries that by adopting the market economy mode, China also especially initially experienced rapid economic growth and similar social consequences. However, as we know, within 25 years of introducing a market economy regime, China introduced a welfare system to give relief to the victims of the market economy regime: the unemployed. China's decision was made sooner than any other country that has adopted a market economy regime for industrialization as those in North America and Western Europe, and that may well be the socialist aspect of China’s market economy. This brief detour into China's modern economic history is to give us the background to judge how much of the current scholarly discussions on the economic and social developments of China have been impacted by Orientalism. More recently, China's economic development during her Thermidorian phase of market economy has been seen as being parallel to the four East Asian economies—Hong Kong, Republic of Korea, Singapore and Taiwan—the socalled New Industrialized Countries, NICs, or the Four Little Dragons. Those

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four began to industrialize in the 1970's and 1980's under the market economy regime. Since independent, trade unions were not permitted nor effective in the NICs, So their pliant labour forces would ensured that their manufacturers could undercut the labour costs of the developed economies. Many manufacturers of the developed economics took advantage of this and transferred their labourintensive productions to these areas and to China. Those industries range from garments, consumer electronic and electrical goods to shipbuilding.

These

economies flourished rapidly and, at least initially, the workers had to endure Dickensian social conditions, just like their counterparts in North America and Western Europe in the earlier time when their economies were industrializing. After China adopted the market economy regime and followed the NICs to allow foreign investments, especially in manufacturing, her economy also experienced rapid growth.

In the 1980's and 1990's scholars from different

developed countries with diverse cultural backgrounds and scholarly disciplines began to proffer explanations for such phenomena and many tended to conclude that it was cultural. They claim that the economies of China and the four NICs in East Asian developed so rapidly were because of their shared culture rather than their shared political economic theories and conditions. They attribute that these economies succeeded was due to their shared Confucian cultural heritage, claiming that this cultural heritage is East Asia's equivalence of the Weberian Protestant Work Ethic in Europe and North America. While many volumes and articles have been published to support their claim, such efforts, as I shall argue, are but wanton arboreal sacrifices made to appease the ideological and Orientalist demands of that received mainstream sinology. There seem to be two broad myths that plague most of the mainstream modern sinologists.

The first may be argued as not strictly Orientalism but

merely a sacrifice to an ideology that insists that the market economic regime is beneficial to progress and human society, and so should be universally adopted. And, for anyone to point out the negative effects would only indicates that such a person is being contaminated by the evils of an anti-capitalist Marxist perspective, later to become the Evil Empire. That is, the new states should follow the way of

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the developed countries in North America and Western Europe. It is really a replay of Rostow's The Anti-Communist Manifesto. While such interpretations, as mentioned, have been contested by scholars in Western Europe and North America yet few of today's sinologists who credit culture as the reason for China's rapid economic development seem to be aware of the debate by development economists in the West a generation earlier. The second is Orientalism though that may be regarded as another result of their ideology and education mentioned. Those sinologists who claim that the common cultural heritage as the cause for the economic developments of China and the four East Asian economies, NICs, tend to assume that the economic and social developments in their own societies were the results of a single-factor theory—Weber's theory of Protestant Work Ethic—even in Roman Catholic areas in France, Italy and Germany. So they argue that there must also be an equivalent single-factor theory for the economic and social developments in China and indeed East Asia, which they credit to Confucianism, whatever it may be in Chinese in their calculation. In making such a claim, these scholars show not only their misunderstanding of Confucianism or rujia sixiang but also the history of economic and social developments in North America and Western Europe, their own countries. As a detailed analysis of the history of economic and social developments in Western Europe and North America is beyond the scope of this study other than the earlier brief discussion, I shall now try to show how irrelevant Confucianism was to the industrial and economic developments in China as well as to the other East Asian economies, the NICs, though one may argue that such a claim for Confucianism is traditional in Chinese political history though this is not obvious in the explanations of these sinologists. One of the most consistent and persistent advocates of Confucianism as a key factor in the industrialization in East Asia is Professor Tu Weiming of Harvard University. Since the 1980's, he has travelled around the world: to Europe, North America, China and Australia to spread the message. To Tu, if the Confucian institutions are `revitalized and reformulated ... as the central bureaucracy, the educational system, and the social structure including family and

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local self-governance', they would `re-emerge as more sophisticated ways of dealing with an increasingly complex pluralistic world'. This is so because the `basic Confucian ideas that government assumes full responsibility for the well being of the people remains persuasive in East Asia', in the `post-Confucian states, governments are omnipresent, if not omnipotent. The idea that the central government has the responsibility to play a maximum role in the life of the people is predicated on the belief that politics is far from being a contractual framework for the purpose of providing law and order in society; comprehensive leadership is obligated, in a classical Confucian sense, "to provide, to enrich, and to educate" the people'. (Tu in Krieger & Trauzettel, 1991:34-5) That is from a paper given to a conference on Confucianism and the Modernization organized by the Confucian Foundation of the People's Republic of China and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in 31 Oct to 2 Nov, 1988, attended by `100 scientists (i.e. scholars in English), parliamentarians, journalists, and representatives of interested organization' in the East and West. (Krieger and Trauzettel, p. ix) What Tu said was a very round about way to tell his European audience that his ‘reformulated’ Confucianism remains authoritarian, just like the unreformulated or original one. Not long before making that observation, Tu told a conference of sinologists in Taiwan that a political science colleague at Harvard, Roderick MacFarquhar, shared his ideas.

MacFarquhar is a sinologist with a truly

Confucian career path, being a scholar-turned-politician in Britain where he became a Labour Party member of the House of Commons and again returned to scholarship in the USA. Tu reported that his colleague shared his conclusions that in their attempt to find `a way of understanding why the Sinic world, [the Chinese culture area] has been capable of assimilating industrial capitalism in such a way as to present a total (cultural, economic, political and social) challenge to the West' (Tu, 1989:66) particularly in explaining `the dynamics of Japan and the Four Mini-Dragons (Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore)'. He ascribed their ability `to challenge the West' as due to their `post-Confucian characteristics such as self-confidence, social cohesion, the subordination of the

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individual, education for action, bureaucratic tradition and moralizing certitude.' (Tu, 1989: 66) It is unfortunate that MacFarquhar, a former Labour member of Britain's House of Commons, failed to recognize those `post-Confucian characteristics' he and Tu identified were really very similar to social mores in late 18th Century Britain or mid-19th Century USA when they were industrializing, and without being Confucians. This interpretation of Confucianism is not peculiar to Tu and MacFarquhar. As sinologist Peter Berger argued `more and more evidences show ... it is unimaginable that Confucian values such as positive attitude of thisworldliness, the rule-abiding and active seeking of well-being of life, the respect for authority, the emphasis on frugality, and the strong concern for a stable family life, could be without any relation to the job ethics and the attitude of the whole East Asian community.' (Berger, 1984:22) I would have thought those attributes were much lauded in Victorian England as well as most of industrializing Western Europe.

Indeed, Lau Kwok-Keung of Singapore's Institute of East Asian

Philosophy responded thus: `it seems hard to imagine that Confucian ethic or virtues could have no relevance to the East Asian prosperity.' (Lau, 1991:210) As much as one admires the ingenuity and creativeness of the scholarship of these Capitalist ‘Neo-neo-Confucianists’, one needs to be reminded of the instruction of Confucius himself that `if one is guided by profit in one's actions, one will incur much ill will.'(Analects IV: 12) Can we have truly capitalist Confucians? Or, are they simply oxymorons imagined by our Orientalist sinologists? The conclusion of Singapore’s Lau Kwok-Kueng points to Orientalism. To him, the economic and industrial development in the West was due to Max Weber's Protestant Work Ethics hence in the East its economic and industrial development should also have a similar overarching theory. As he explains: `following the footsteps of Max Weber...[scholars] begin to inquire into the relationship between culture and the economic prosperity of these countries and regions', that is, the East Asian Sinic region. `They want to see whether Confucian ethic has contributed to the economic prosperity of these countries and regions.'(Lau: 210) As I mentioned earlier, the industrialization in the West was a

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multifaceted process and not a single-factor development. It does not seem to have occur to our Orientalist Sinologists that as Confusianism pre-dated Max Weber’s theory of Protestant Work Ethic, then if Confucianism was really so powerful in causing ‘the East Asian Sinic region’ to industrialized, why did not cause this “East Asian Sinic region’ to industrialize before Europe and North America, before the latters had the benefits of Weber’s theory? Undeterred by the specific teaching of Confucius as cited above, Lau insisted that the `universal success and prosper (sic) of overseas Chinese after they settle (sic) in a new country for one or two generations supports our judgment.

On one hand, overseas Chinese embody in themselves some

Confucian virtue. On the other hand, they are more emancipated from the rigidity of traditional rites and norms as they are away from China. They could adjust to the environment more freely with the spirit of Confucian virtues.

Again, if

Confucian virtues such as loyalty and obedience are not confined to the relationship between emperors and their subjects, under a democratic system, these virtues can increase the efficiency of the government. Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are good examples where the government could have a more dominant role to play in modernization without being a totalitarian state.' (Lau:224) At the time of his writing, 2005, Hong Kong has just left its colonial status to be part of China as a Special Administrative Region while the other three were hardly democratic nor were they so enamoured with Confucianism when they were industrializing. As a member of the Institute of East Asian Philosophy in Singapore, it may not be politically convenient for Lau to recall that as late as May 1971, in the crisis over the suppression of the English language newspaper Singapore Herald, the Prime Minister of Singapore at that time, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, was prepared to put the Chinese-stream educated citizens offside with that memorable but derisive remark: `the English-educated do not riot.' (George, 1973:29) As to the necessity of democracy for its development, we do well to recall Lee told his Tokyo audience in Dec. 1992 what is necessary is not democracy but `good government'. (Lee: 1993) By then, he had destroyed the

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liberal-minded administration of David Marshall, an English-educated Iraqi Jew, imprisoned, tortured and destroyed the career of a former colleague and ethnic Chinese, Lim Chin Siong, with a McCarthyesque charge of Lin being a communist but never able to produce any evidence, (George: 31-5) so much then for democracy. As to the Republic of Korea, or generally known as South Korea, it experienced rapid industrialization during the rule of Park Chung Hee (1962-76), a graduate of Japan's elite military college. He was a military dictator though with democratic trappings, such as periodic but controlled elections. Whatever were his faults he did not hide the source of his vision. In his autobiography, Korea, the Revolution and I and in his visions on Korean history and prospects, Our Nation's Path: Ideology of Social Reconstruction (Park: 1970), he saw the `parliamentary government system (as England’s) as the result of the industrial revolution' (Park, 1970:191) but `the Asian peoples want to attain economic equality first and build a more equable political machinery afterwards.' (Park, 1970:196) `Therefore democracy should be established by administrative means, not by political means.' (Park, Ibid:199) His goals were a powerful Korea with its people cleansed of their Confucianism which Park saw as that which holds back their creative spirit. So to claim Korea's development as due to Confucianism would be a cruel irony, like assassinating him a second time. At about the same time, in the late 1980's, some Hong Kong observers did see the Chinese capitalist entrepreneurs in that city as basically Confucian in nature (Redding, 1985) while another one found it was Low Confucianism that gave the Four Little Dragons a common thread. (Wang, 1988:8-9) Also at about the same time, scholars and officials in China were also trumpeting the idea that Confucianism was beneficial for economic development, instancing Singapore and Hong Kong as cases of success. (Beijing, 1988:8-9) It was a circular argument that contradicted the judgments of the Chinese Communist Party since its foundation on the social impacts of Confucianism. Such judgment became the basis of the May Fourth Movement in 1919. However, as stated in the Singapore case, while none of these scholars were able to explain away the `anti-profit'

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teachings of Confucius and Mencius (Mencius: 1A). What was more to the point was that to both China and the four Little Dragons, Confucianism, however defined, served as a legitimator, a role it had long served well but had nothing to do with industrialization. In late 1980's and early 1990's, there was an avalanche of publications by prominent sinologists in all continents, including China, praising Confucianism and lauding it as the appropriate theory for social and economic development for China and the Four Little Dragons. On hindsight, these writings by the galaxies of scholars have not enhanced our knowledge or understanding of rujia sixiang or Confucianism, nor have they given us any new insight on it. Perhaps because they were such prominent scholars in their own fields that their works and ideas were published by the leading academic presses.

As this is a critique of

Orientalist scholarship in sinology, these works need to be examined in some detail if only to find their motives for such an undertaking because few of these scholars have previously dabbled in development studies but all come to this common conclusion. As suggested, the invocations of Confucianism for the developments in China and in the four Little Dragons during their period of economic development were more due to the need to have a legitimator for the regimes concerned and were much less to do with their need for theories and policies on social and economic developments or industrialization. As to the reasons for such eminent sinologists to make such linkages, one may speculate it was due to an Orientalist compulsion, albeit unwittingly, just as their colleagues who searched for a Habermas-type civil society in contemporary China's social development. As I have mentioned earlier, while Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew liked to argue for Asian Values, he has not been always so. Likewise, in the Republic of Korea or South Korea, its rapid industrialization occurred during the rule of President-General Park Chung Hee, a military dictator who blamed Confucianism for the allegedly lethargic attitude of the Koreans and demanded a dose of discipline to rid the Koreans of their Confucianism. So, to credit the industrialization of Korea during the rule of Park to Confucianism would be akin assassinating him again.

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Orientalism in Sinology If the development of Hong Kong is to be credited to Confucianism, then

its citizens must have their very own interpretation of Confucianism which amounted to standing Confucianism on its head, and rewriting what Confucius said that `if one's actions are guided by profit, one will incur much ill will,' (Analects, Lun yu, IV: 12) and turning the warning that Mencius gave King Wei of Liang: `Why seek after profit!' (Mencius:IA) into `I came to provide you with counsels for profit.' But that is what Professor Redding of the University of Hong Kong claimed to have observed among the Hong Kong ethnic Chinese capitalists. What then are we to make of all these claims: that ru-jia si-xiang, or Confucianism, wrought such wonders. We should also notice that this claim for the miracles that Confucianism wrought subsided almost as quickly as it began. We may regard it as a transient aberration but we still have to seek the answer to the question: why so many otherwise learned scholars from distinguished universities in every continents suffered from this mass aberration or hysteria? If we are to be generous to these sinologists, we can either say they were victims of collective amnesia and have forgotten what they knew about ru-jia sixiang, or an attack of the relevance syndrome—an attempt to make their bit of sinology—Classical political theory—relevant to the contemporary world. As neither of these explanations could adequately explain such a worldwide phenomenon, we must seek another explanation. I prefer the reason alluded to earlier in this chapter: what these scholars thought was that as the industrialization of their own countries occurred allegedly according to an overarching theory of Weberian Protestant Work Ethic, then the industrialization of China, being in their periphery, must also have a similar single-factor overarching theory which they credited rujia sixiang, Confucianism. That is, Orientalism. For if they think their Centre’s, their own countries', developments were due to a single-factor all embracing theory, then so must the situation in the periphery, China's developments. An example of the influence of Confucianism on the modernization of China was a conference jointly organized by the Confucian Foundation of the People's Republic of China and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation of the Federal

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Republic of Germany held in the Sinological Department of Bonn University from October 31 to November 2, 1988. It may be considered as the high point of the worldwide new Confucianism fever.

According to the editors of the

conference papers `it was attended by a hundred scientists, parliamentarians, journalists and representatives of interested organizations from the Federal Republic of Germany, the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), Singapore, the Soviet Union, the U.S.A., France, Poland, Hungary, Italy, Israel, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.' (Krieger and Trauzettel, p. ix) Indeed, those who presented papers may be regarded as the Who's Who among scholars in the own fields. While I do not, by any means, question their eminence in their own areas of China Study, yet none was noted as a scholar in Development Economics in Europe, North America, or China. However, the tenor of their contributions was that as the West, their Centre of Reference, was supposed to have been based on an overarching theory—Weber’s, Protestant Works Ethic, then China’s development must need a similar overarching theory which they attributed to Confucianism.

However, to explain away the anti-capitalist sentiments of

Confucius and Mencius, they resorted to ’reformulate’ Confucianism to make it as encouraging the acquiesce to the accumulation of wealth, as capitalism does, under a regime of market economy. Why then do these scholars, and many others, did such a thing? It seems that they were, if unwittingly, victims of what Professor Edward Said called Orientalism, “that the Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting …...…vocabulary,’ {Said, 1995, p.2, emphasis in the Original} Indeed, no one of the scholars at that august conference mentioned the sentiments of the two leading Classical Confucians, Confucius and Mencius, who warned against a life whose goal is to seek capital accumulation and to seek after profits. Perhaps these anti-capitalist ideas were not convenient to their interpretations. I am not against seeking an overarching theory of development, whether in the West or in China, if such a

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theory did exist. But as the social and economic developments in Western Europe and North America were multi-faceted, though Weber’s “Protestant Work Ethics’ might have played a great role. But then, we find that predominately Roman Catholic societies as France and Italy managed to developed and industrialized surely show that one needs more than Weber’s overarching theory of Protestant Work Ethic to industrialize and develop. As I have suggested, one of the precondition is that social and political conditions of the regime, or government concerned, is conducive for a Market Economic Regime: a ready supply of cheap labour, a ready market and a ready and preferably cheap source of materials, and a government that tolerates social inequality that invariably accompanies a development under a market economy regime. The conditions for the economic and industrialization of China and the Four Newly Industrialized Countries, NICS—the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) all fell into such category to some extent. Hence, they may be regarded as Sinic and at some stage in their history, had Confucianism, to different extent, as their major social ideology but certainly during their periods of development, such was not the case.

NOTES

ANALECTS of Confucius (Lun Yu), any edition. BEIJING REVIEW (1988) No. 48 pp.8-9 summarized the views of `Chinese and foreign scholars' on the advocacy of Confucianism as an appropriate development theory. BERGER, P. (1984) The China Forum Semi-Monthly, Oct. No. 222, p. 22 cited from Lau K. K. 1991, Infra. CLARK, C. (1957) The conditions of Economic Progress (London, Macmillan)

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CHAN, A. (1993) `Confucianism and Deng's China' 42-60 in Lee, M. & Syrokomla-Stefanowska, A.D. eds. Modernization of the Chinese Past (Sydney, Wild Peony). CHAN, A. (1996) `Confucianism and Development in East Asia', Journal of Contemporary Asia XXVI, 1, pp. 28-45. CHAN, A. (2003) Chinese Marxism discussed the Cold War Influences on the leading sinologists, and the rural nature of Marxism. (London, Continuun Book) DENG, Xiaoping (1975) On the General Program for all Work of the Whole Party and the Whole Country, speech made on 7 Oct. 1975, cited from Selections from People's Republic of China Magazines No. 921, 25 April 1977. ECKSTEIN, A. (1977)China's Economic Revolution, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. FRANK, A.G.(1971) Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, (Harmondsworth, Penguin). GEORGE, T.J.S. (1973) Lee Kuan Yew (London, Andre Deutsch). KRIEGER, S. and TRAUZETTEL, R. eds. (1991) Confucianism and the modernization of China.

They are papers given at an International

Symposium on `Confucianism and the Modernization of China' in Bonn, from Oct 31 to Nov. 2, 1988. (Mainz, Hase & Koehler, Verlag) LAU K. K. 1991 `An Interpretation of Confucian Virtues and their relevance to China's Modernization' in Krieger & Trauzettel, op.cit. (1991), 210-28. LEE Kuan Yew 1992 `Is Democracy Necessary?' speech in Tokyo on Dec. 1992, see Australia and World Affair, Autumn, 1993 issue (Canberra). MARX, Karl. (1871) Civil War in France (First Draft) from The First International and After, Political Writings of Marx vol. 3, Chapter on Peasantry, ed. D. Fernbach (Middlesex, Penguin). McCELLAN, D. (1986) Marxism After Marx 2nd ed. (London, MacMillan). MENG ZI, MENCIUS, The Book of Meng zi, any edition.

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PARK, C.H. (1970) Korea, the Revolution and I and Our Nation's Path: Ideology of Social Reconstruction (Seoul, Hollym Corporation Publishers). RAWSKI, T.G. (1979) Economic Growth and Employment in China (Oxford, Oxford University Press for the World Bank) REDDING, S.G. 1985 `Operationalizing the Post-Confucian Hypothesis: the Overseas Chinese Case' in K.C. Mun ed. Chinese Style Enterprise Management. (Hong Kong,

Chinese University of Hong Kong Press)

RODNEY, W. (1971) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Publishing House). ROSTOW, W.W. (1960) The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. SAID, W.E. (1995} Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Penguin Books, London) SCHWARTZ, B.I. (1967) Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (New York, Harper Torchbooks, Harvard University Press, 1958). TU Wei-ming (1991) `A Confucian Perspective on the Rise of Industrial East Asia', in Krieger & Trauzettel, op. cit. pp. 29-41. TU Wei-ming (1989), `The Confucian Dimension’ in East Asian Development Model in Conference Series No 13,(Taipei, Chung Hua Institute for Economic Research). WANG, Gungwu 1988, `Trade and Cultural Values: Australia and the Four Dragons', Current Issues in Asian Studies No. 1, 8-9 (Asian Studies Association of Australia). WORLD BANK (1980) World Development Report 1980, Tables 1 & 19, (Oxford University Press for the World Bank). YOUNGSON, A.J. (1959) Possibilities of Economic Progress (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

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* From William Blake' poem Milton. Its Preface has these lines: ‘And was Jerusalem builded here/Among these dark Satanic Mills?’

CHAPTER SIX CONTEMPORARY POLITICS AND ORIENTALISM, OR THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK!

Since Orientalist Sinological cartographers in their Centre have assigned China to the periphery, in the Far East, many Orientalist sinologists from the various branches of Sinology have attributed to the Chinese, allegedly in this periphery, the Central Kingdom Mentality. That is, the Chinese were considered to have a tendency of ethnocentrism, but without showing any sign of irony, given a history of this assignation. I think it is timely that we should ask why is that so. This is particularly so when such oriental sinologists and cartographers in England seem to agree that the centre of the world is actually marked by two copper strips embedded in a footpath in Greenwich, a London suburb. If we accept their version of geographic determinism—in that the Chinese have the Central Kingdom Mentality because they imagined they are in the centre of the world—then we may conclude that many Chinese should share with many of their English colleagues this ‘central Kingdom Mentality’, especially when England still remain a monarchy, that is a ‘kingdom’, while China had forsaken the monarchical form of government for nearly a century and had taken on a republican form of government.

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Orientalism in Sinology We may well also ask why those otherwise learned and clever scholars in

Chinese Studies in general and Chinese Philosophy in particular; as the starstudded participants in the 1988 International Conference mentioned earlier on the theme of “Confucianism and the Modernization of China” sponsored by Confucian Foundation for the People’s Republic of China and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Germany (Krieger & Trauzettel ed.1991), then the Federal Republic of Germany or West Germany, which would seem to insist that Confucianism, whether that is Chinese equivalence ru jiao or just feng jian , was China’s equivalence to Max Weber’s theory of Protestantism in their West/Centre, as being the overarching theoretical underpinning theory in the developmental philosophy of their society and that was instrumental in the economic development of China since the 1980, when China had actually adopted the market economy model of development in place of their previous centrally planned strategy.

The fact is that there is little in the recorded writings of

Confucius that were concerned with economics or anything that may be considered as approaching an economic theory, and though Confucius predated Max Weber by centuries yet economic and industrial developments in China occurred so much later than in Europe. Why then did such eminent scholars insisted on being so ‘orientalist’ —that is, they seem to insist that what they thought that what had happened in Europe and North American must be universally applicable and the peoples in the other countries seemed fated to follow their steps? We have also examined how some social scientists in Europe and North America, whether they be ethnic Chinese or otherwise, have declared vehemently that the development of the Civil Society in China must be a pre-condition for its social development, basically, as I suggested earlier that was due to their misreading of Habermas, even though users of the concepts of Civil Society as a theoretical analytical tool for social development in the West, especially Europe, had held different views on the nature of the very idea of Civil Society. I like to suggest that this sad state of confusion among these scholars could be a direct result that these scholars in the field of Comparative Religions and Comparative

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Theology in relation to China who should be expected to give their colleagues in the other branches of Sinology some guidance have distinctly failed to do so. Hence in this Chapter, I will examine some of these scholars in Comparative Religions and Comparative Theology to find out why there were confused conclusions of among these scholars. Again, I would suggest that the underlining reason for such confusion is ”orientalism,” that is, they thought what had happened in the ‘West’ must also eventually happen in China. The basis of this study is that since the cosmology of China had no place for a Creator-God, the Chinese language therefore has no word for the Western concept of sin—transgression against this God—since in the Chinese scheme of things, without a God, they would have no need for sin—a transgression against this Creator-God. I have also shown that to the Christian missionaries—the founders of sinology—a sinless civilization was unacceptable to them because that would invalidate their own vocation and their very reason for being in China—to save the sinful heathen Chinese. But the problem in their insistence to Christianize the heathen Chinese had given them problems they have failed to solve, mainly because of their mistaken premise. The main problem, it seems, is that since these missionary-pioneers had insisted that the Chinese should be candidates for Christian conversion, they had to find a Chinese name for their ‘gift’—god—after all, if the heathen Chinese were to be converted, they should have a name for this creative deity, in Chinese. I have also shown how the English missionary-translator thought that the Chinese term for this Creator-God was Shang-di..

That was how the English

Protestant Christian missionary-sinologist, James Legge had claimed. The Roman Catholics, however, demurred. In the field of Chinese Foreign Mission History, this issue is called the ‘term question’ and has not been resolved even after many often heated debates and disputes among these ‘soldiers of Christ’, the Missionaries of the various sects or denominations, over the past three and a half or four centuries, if we start from Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) who arrived in China and was allowed to reside in the capital of Peking (Beijing) in 1601. Sometimes, some of them had resorted to calling in their Chinese converts to ‘arbitrate’ as it

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were, but such a practice was not always acceptable, as we shall see. In fact, such phenomenon in the area of Bible translation is not just limited to China but Asiawide. Lee was formerly the Henry Luce Professor of World Christianity at the Union Theological Seminary in New York and presently in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies in the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He wrote in a recent report (Lee, 2004) that “finding an appropriate Asian term to render Elohim and Theos and, failing to locate one, inventing a brand new name.” To Lee, the matter was “further complicated” by the “colonial project and local resistance, as well as the missionary enterprise and religious conversion.” It seemed that crucial to the project was what Lee called “politics of triumphalism or religious pluralism: do the colonized subjects even have any knowledge of the divine? Is there any room given to the so-called ‘pagan religions’ within the absolute claims of the revealed Christianity? “ The answers to Lee’s rhetorical questions, from what we have discussed so far, is a resounding No!! Those ‘pagan religions’ according to the triumphal imperialist missionaries, especially the Protestants in the 19th century such as the Rev. Griffith John, whom we have met earlier and who regarded the native Chinese and other non-Christian religions as inferior and wrong. As this debate or dispute dragged on, the Chinese Christian converts were inextricably drawn into this issue. But their participation may be best summed up by an anonymous foreign missionary in his correspondence to that prestigious mission journal published in English, the Chinese Repository, in 1846. He not only objected to have a Chinese voice in the discussion but also gave us a window on his, and probably his type’s general attitude of these ‘soldiers of Christ’ about having the ‘heathen’ Chinese taken part. He also stated his intention to tamper with the Chinese language by educating the Chinese to the new meaning: It is not common to bring the heathen in as arbiters to decide for Christians by what terms they must worship the true God. We do not admit their authority, especially when we have apostolic authority for our guide. The people can be taught to use the word Shin [Shen]*, and connect with it the idea we wish to teach respecting the true God, far better than they can divest their minds of their heathenish associations with the word shangdi and

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make that word the representative of the true and living God”. (Chinese Repository XVI, 600-1) Here, we can see the great divide between the Roman Catholics and Protestants, of which we will discuss the former later but to which did not really concern the ‘heathen’ Chinese, but were still too strong and surfaced into a different though vital area, all in the name of Christian charity and love. Though the word shin, or shen in the Han-yu pin-yin spelling, needs some clarification. In the great Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary, it is listed as word 5716 and which means a spirit or a god. In modern English, it would be nearer to ‘gods’, or at best the ‘patron saints’, as in the ‘kitchen god’ as in folk religions. Fortunately, not all foreign missionaries in China at that time were so imperialistic nor triumphal, though their ideological divisions must have puzzled their Chinese converts in their congregations. A recent American scholar in Mission History on China was able to show a more democratic, republican, and non-imperialist tendencies in opposition to our imperialist anonymous writer. Shangdi was a term associated with the emperor’s annual sacrifice to the heavens on behalf of the Chinese empire. That might have led our writer to prefer that term.

Irwin T. Hyatt wrote a very useful study of three nineteenth century

American missionaries working in the Shandong Province in the northeast of China. And he quoted, at some length, an American missionary in that province who seemed to have long championed the naming God as shen, again on ideological grounds by seeing it as a “people’s word” and regarded shangdi as associated with the civil religion of the Chinese empire which shangdi ‘enjoyed’ exclusive use by the emperor and the higher officials of the government that we mentioned earlier here. This American Presbyterian missionary, Calvin Mateer (1836-1908), must have rubbed up the British imperialist types in a wrong way, as our anonymous writer to the Chinese Repository, the wrong way by his American democratic political position. Mateer claimed that: Was God, that is simply the eternal all-powerful being—which was the idea that shangdi basically conveyed—or was He, as Shen implied to many missionaries, rather the proven true one or a

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Orientalism in Sinology multitude of historical spirits, and perhaps identical with the individual human soul. (Hyatt, pp. 231-232)

Either way, this political and theological dispute would not failed but add to the puzzlement of those Chinese who, from their own cosmogony, knew there was no Creator-God, and did not really add to the ease of Christian conversion as even among those who might have supported shen against shangdi, would not share Mateers’s rather inclusive nature of the notion of God as the term also applies to the various gods in China’s folk religion Missionaries to China had long debated on the proper rendering of the biblical god as Elohim and Theos. By simply transliterating the Hebrew proper name of God in the Tetragmmaton, YHWH, as Yehehua, being the Chinese transliteration of Yahweh or the modern transliteration of the Hebrew Uncommunicable Name of the Supreme Being—has been largely accepted but without taking much consideration of the Hebrew piety and practice of not pronouncing it.

This cultural-linguistic equivalent is deemed “acceptable”

(Loewen 1985, p.402). As to the appearance of Adon and Adonai, the Chinese character zhu, meaning master or lord, is adopted by the Roman Catholics. But as the Roman Catholics’ translation of Tianzhu (the Lord of Heaven or its equivalence of the Creator-God for Elohim has not been supported by the Protestants was due to their fear of being confused with and mistaken for Catholics.*) As to the Roman Catholics: Jesuit Mateo Ricci (1552-1619) with whom we met earlier, arrived in China on 1583 and was allowed to live in Peking, the capital, in 1601 asserted that the Chinese had knowledge of the One True God as espoused in the Confucian Classics before the later was being deteriorated and contaminated by the commentarial tradition, especially that of the Song Dynasty scholar, Zhu Xi (1130-1655) who was regarded by the Christian missionaries as being corrupted by Buddhism. Ricci therefore separated the canonical writings from the commentaries and advocated that the Christian God was the Chinese term Shangdi as in the Chinese Classics the Shi Jing—the Book of Poetry, the

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oldest Chinese Classical text,. Ricci’s successor, Nicolo Longobardi (1565-1655) took a different stance by taking the Classical Canons and commentaries as a whole, by arguing that in Song Confucianism, the accidental formation of heaven and earth from the transformation of the Great Ultimate into the original principle, li, and the Vital Energy, qi.

So he, perhaps correctly. had rejected Ricci’s

assumption that the Chinese had a prior knowledge of God and the Creation. This ‘Term Question” was later to tangle with the Rite Controversy in China. This debates was only concluded with the papal decree of 1742 which had temporally banned all the use of Chinese rites and rituals, such as the veneration of their ancestor as a type of superstition or ancestor worship as well as the use of the name of Shangdi for God excepting Tianzhu.. That the Jesuits were ‘informed’ by the Dominicans who were somewhat jealous for their success in China also contributed to the former being banned for a period by the Vatican Due to the importance of the issue—the very name of this Creator-God— foreign missionaries in China began to engage the Chinese Classics and the various commentaries in order to search for the divine and to negate the others. They, and later together with some of their Chinese converts, carried out much research and writing into this must be core issue. They had to condemn the Chinese practice of what the Christians regarded as the Chinese practice of idolatry while they tried to ‘impose’ into their studies, glimpses of what they imagine as a monotheistic belief or faith and such ‘natural’ signs of Christianity in the Chinese Classics. This effort of reading into the Chinese Classics echoes of the Christian myth went on very long and lasted to contemporary times. Let me mention but two examples. One is a Canadian-Chinese, the late Professor Julia Ching of the University of Toronto. Her efforts may be regarded as typical of the Christian Chinese scholars trying to reconcile their cultural heritage with their new faith— she was an expert on ‘Confucianism’ though I do not know the Chinese equivalence when she used that term, and a Catholic nun. In this vein, as if trying to overcome the Chinese tradition’s secularism, she examined their similarities and differences, while concluded that:

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Orientalism in Sinology The dominant tradition in Confucianism resembles the Jewish tradition and the Christian Gospels in refraining from proving God’s existence, while acknowledging it explicitly. (Ching, 1977, p. 112)

The facts that the Jewish prophets and Christians talk to their God and thought they have direct instructions from their God, while the Confucians are told it is more important to learn how to live than to speculate on the hereafter, have been conveniently side-stepped. The other one is an American sinologist, a philosopher whom we have met earlier, Theodore W de Bary of Columbia University in New York. In his 1991 study, (de Bary, 1991) he compared the Jewish prophets with the Confucian scholar-officials and found that latter wanting is not standing up to bad kings or emperors.

What de Bary seems to have failed to realize is that the Jewish

prophets claimed to derive their authority and commission from their CreatorGod, a higher authority that the kings or emperors to whom the Confucian scholars-officials owed their positions. In any case, whether one is wanting or not seems more a factor of the ideology of the observer than the nature of the two systems themselves. Sin, however, is not even in the index of either study.

NOTES Chinese Repository (1846) XVI/12, pp 577-601. Ching, Julia (1977) Confucianism and Christianity, (Kodansha and Harper & Row, Tokyo and New York) De

Bary,

Theodore

W.

(1991)

The

Problems

with

Confucianism.

(HarvardUniversity Press, Cambridge, MA) Hyatt, Irwin T. (1976) Our Ordered Lives Confess: Three Nineteenth Century American Missionaries in East Shantung [Shandong] (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA)

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Lee, Archie C.C. (.2004) ’Naming God in Asia: Cross-Textural Reading in MultiCultural Contect’, Quest: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Asian Christian Scholars. 3 (1), pp. 21-42. Loewen, Jacob A. 1985, “Translating the Names of God: How European Languages have Translated Them”, The Bible Translator. 36 (4) 1985, pp. 401-09. :

* An exception to the avoiding of the catholic Tianshu is the advocacy of the socalled Peking Committee of 1890 promoted by Samuel Schereschewsky (18311906)

CHAPTER SEVEN REASONS FOR ITS PERSISTENCE: BY WAY OF A CONCLUSION

In its history of more than four centuries of Christian missionaries’ activities in China—say, since the Jesuit Adam Schall, who fist went to Beijing in July 29, 1644—to 1951 when the People’s Republic of China expelled all foreign missionaries—the

total

number

of

Chinese

Christians,

including

all

denominations, is generally reckoned as to number less than 0.5% of the total population of China. In spite of the vagueness of statistics in those days, if we accept this figure, then China must be the most unfruitful field in the history of Christian missionary endeavors. We must ask why this was so. Here, I would like to suggest that the troubled relations between the Christian churches and China may be found within the Christian churches. With the Roman Catholics, the dispute over the very Chinese name for the Creator-God had, over those years, become quite an open political issue and more recently this situation has re-emerged. The Vatican seems to insist on retaining the rights to ordain Catholic bishops in China without the prior approval of the Chinese Government. But the truth of the matter seems more complicated. I would like to suggest that it is due more to do with the desire to have the power to control. Even given its history with the England at the time of King Henry VIII, I would suggest that the continuing dispute between the Vatican and China has more to do with the contemporary politics than the ideological and theological differences between China and the Vatican especially as the latter’s continued desire to control events in China. With the 1742 Papal Decree which effectively decreed

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that the official Chinese name for the Creator-God shall be Tianzhu, the lord of Tian or “heaven” and so the Roman Catholic brand of Christianity in China shall henceforth become known as the Tianzhu jiao—the religion of the Tianzhu. While the Protestant denominations, collectively, as we have discussed in the previous chapter, are known collectively as ji do Jiao, the religion of Jesus Christ. Of course, theologically, this division does not make sense for in the theology of Roman Catholicism, Jesus Christ also has as central a roll as do the Protestants. So this division is really theologically meaningless except through the prism of the history of the political and theological disputes between the Roman Catholics and Protestants in Chinese history, especially their foreign missionaries in their respective claims to be the missionaries of the ‘true’ church or Creator-God in China, as we have discussed in the last chapter. Since in theology alone, such a division does not make sense, thus we can say that the very name of this CreatorGod in Chinese and the names that its different brand of followers called ‘One True God’ are linked inextricably with politics. So much for the separation of church and state in China which some contemporary foreign observers have urged, seems to be a call that is innocent of the history of Christianity in China. Of course, until the Chinese Communist Party ushered in the People’s Republic of China, the various governments in China did not have the ability to make such a separation, even if they had wanted to do so. As the privileges that foreign missionaries enjoyed in China, till the advent of the People’s Republic, were mostly granted to them by what the Chinese people called ‘Unequal’ treaties—that meant that Governments of China, especially that of the Qing dynasty, was forced to grant these privileges and conditions to the foreign missionaries after every defeat of China, at the hands of these imperialist powers. That is, they were directly the results of political decisions. In 2006, disputes again occurred between the Vatican and China over some decisions of the Catholic Patriotic Association of China, the ‘Open’ Catholic Church in China, the brand of Catholicism accepted by the Chinese Government, consecrated three bishops without seeking the prior approval of the Holy See. The Pope, Benedict XVI, was reported to express his “deep

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displeasure” when the first two cases were announced, and threatened to excommunicate those two bishops, even though both had long experiences in church administration and government. (BBC, 2006).

The threat of

excommunication, however, was not carried through. But with the third case, the Vatican was muted, without giving any reason for the differences in responses. In the third case, Father Zhan Silu was elevated to become the bishop of the Mindong Diocese in Eastern Fujian Province without seeking the prior approval of the Holy See. This occurred two weeks after Beijing had announced the consecration of ‘first’ two bishops, also without the prior approval of the Vatican that sparked Papal criticism.

Zhan Silu, aged 45, was already consecrated as

bishop in 2000 but had been serving as a deputy to another bishop who died last year, 2005. (BBC, 2006) Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, religious affairs have come under the control the Catholic Patriotic Association and the Protestant Three-Self Movement.

They are essentially political movements,

established and supported by the Chinese Communist Party to keep watch over the different Christian Churches. Here, it is necessary to give some explanation regarding the structure of the Roman Catholic Church in contemporary China. We are fortunate to have a report on this by the former Secretary of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission of Australia who was a member of a delegation to visit China in 1991, Mr. Chris Sidoti, QC. His report was published in the journal. World Outlook, a journal published by the World League for Freedom and Democracy in Taipei, a vehemently anti-communist organization. So, we can be confident to regard this Report as ‘reliably’ non-Communist, at least not pro-communist. He reported a discussion he had with Bishop Jin, the Bishop of Shanghai. As Sidoti reported, “For me, with my background, the time with Bishop Jin was the best hour and a half I spent in the two weeks I was in China.” (Sidoti, 1992)

Bishop Jin had been imprisoned for 27 Years and was

then, at the time of this interview, the leader of the Catholic Patriotic Association. This Association, said Jin, is ‘essentially a political movement or bodies, established and supported by the Communist Party to keep watch over the

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Christian Churches. Bishop Jin acknowledged that, but argued that increasingly the official ecclesiastical life of the church in China is occurring outside the control of the Patriotic Association. That such developments need to be fostered and the two organizations distinguished. It helps no one to say, the Bishop argued, that the two of them are regarded as exactly the same. Seeing the open church as an expression of the will of the Chinese Government is no longer correct, even if it may have been correct at certain times in certain places.” (Sidoti, 1992, p. 12) As to the future relations between the Vatican and the Church in China, Sidoti concluded, is that it is “simply continue a history of illconceived, misjudged and ultimately unsuccessful Vatican policy towards China.” (Sidoti, p. 13) Sidoti further reported that Bishop Jin “saw the current hierarchy of the underground church as exacerbating the prospects of an internal reconciliation’. He explained that “in 1981-2, in order to ensure the continuation of the Church in China, the present Pope [i.e., John Paul II], reflecting his Polish experience, granted a special dispensation to the Vatican approved Chinese Bishops to episcopally ordain Chinese Bishops without Vatican’s approval.”

[My

emphasis] . Bishop Jin saw two problems with that. Firstly, the Pope has now given the underground church exactly the authority that the open church has been seeking since 1955 and has been denied to them. The open church is being told that it is cannot be in communion with Rome because it is defying the Pope and yet the underground church is now doing what it wants. That reference to the “Polish experience” of the Pope referred to what happened to the Holy See at that time, 1981, when the Reagan Administration of the USA was trying to improve its relations with the Vatican and so the Pope was given regular briefings on the situation in the Soviet Union especially Eastern European Communist affairs by the CIA.

John Paul II must have regarded his Papal Triple Crown rather

seriously.

(Bernstein & Politi 1997, pp. 365ff).

The USA was trying to

destabilize Poland by supporting the Solidarity Movement and US General Vernon Walters was sent to see Pope John Paul II, as a personal emissary of the CIA Director, Mr. William Casey. Walters came away feeling “that John Paul II

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was becoming more sympathetic to the broad goals of American policy and more cognizant of the common interests of the Church and the United States”. (Bernstein & Politi, pp. 365-6) Bishop Jin described the second issue as more troubling. As liberalization and opening continue in China, the open church is able to function more and more freely; Jin told Sidoti, for example, seminaries are operating again. (He quite proudly told me that his seminary is the best in China … and that his is the only seminary in China allowed to have foreign lecturers, that he has had lecturers from the United States, Western Europe and even Australia. He has seminarians studying in Catholic seminaries in Belgium, France and Germany. Bishop Jin further said, “there is a renewal of theological education and training underway in the open church and that more and more people are prepared and able to worship and take part in ecclesiastical life through the open church. As that is happening, the underground church is becoming much more defensive of their position. In his view the underground bishops are using the dispensation granted by the Vatican to ordain bishops willy nilly. They, the bishops of the underground church,. are now quite old themselves and as they approach death they are confronted by the same issue as Le Febvre faced: ‘Do I die and quit the struggle?’ Or do I start ordaining episcopally so that (my view of) the apostolic tradition can be handed on? According to Bishop Jin the problem is that the underground bishops are ordaining people who are ill-trained and not sufficiently qualified for leadership within the church, [my emphasis] people who for those reasons would have difficulty in obtaining an episcopal position in a fully established Chinese church. They therefore have a personal interest in maintaining the division within the Chinese church to maintain their own positions of leadership.” (Sidoti, p.13, emphasis mine.) Now, one of my acquaintances, a retired bishop of French Polynesia, whom I met in Hong Kong in 1981 have called the Polish Pope, John Paul II, “a Provincial priest from a Provincial country” but that certainly cannot apply to his successor, the German Pope, Benedict XVI. Though he had inherited John Paul II’s relations with China but the entire international situation has changed much

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changed since the of the Cold War days of Pope John Paul II, and even the attitudes of the USA towards China. So, with these changes in the international scene, one may be more optimistic that the two sides can find a way out of this dilemma. In a way, there seems a way forward, unless the international situation takes a turn for the worse.

At the present, there are at least forty (40) Chinese

Catholic dioceses with vacancies. So in the coming years, we shall be seeing more ordinations to fill such leadership and administrative posts. As far as the Open church in China is concerned, Bishop Jin told Mr. Sidoti that “we pray for the Pope every day; he has never been excluded from our eucharistic prayers; we recognize the Pope; the problem is the Pope does not recognize us.” (Sidoti, p 13). For the Polish John Paul II who saw his relations with the US Administration was to help his Polish mates as far more important. So there was little hope that this ideological Pope will change for he saw his Triple Crown too literally. In the last few years, things seem to have changed, rather quietly. As the seminary-trained priests of the Open Church were academically far more superior to the untrained ones in the Underground church, it is to be hope that a scholar such as Benedict XVI would place more importance on scholarship. So, they—the Holy See and China—resorted to a method of least resistance. According to the BBC internet news, “In recent years, when it comes to the selection of candidates for ordination, either the Chinese government or the Vatican would select three candidates and the other sides would choose one of them.” (BBC, 2) The gobetween was the Roman Catholic Bishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Joseph Zen who is the first Catholic prelate in Hong Kong to be elevated to a cardinalship and has been at the forefront of the efforts to improve relations between Beijing and the Holy See. But the obverse side of this hoped-for development seems to be that Pope Benedict XVI seems to be ‘accident’ prone. Firstly with his unguided lecture in his Germany visit when he cited an unflattering Emperor Manual II of Constantinople on the Prophet Mohammad. And later with the appointment and later the removal of Stalleslaw Weilgus as the Archbishop of Warsaw. Furthermore, currently, the papal nuncio, the ambassador of the Vatican, to China has always resided in Taiwan. Now, this person is now living in the

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Philippines, the most Catholic country in Asia. This may eventually help if the Vatican should decide to join most of the other members of the United Nations Organization and decides to establish full diplomatic relations with China. If that comes to past, then the ambassador, the papal nuncio, would not need to be removed from Taiwan as he shall be transferred to, or located in, Beijing, the Chinese capital. This move to the Philippines may well be a prelude to eventual diplomatic recognition. While such political issues of the appointment of bishops and the official residence of the Vatican’s residence may be resolved rationally and diplomatically, there are intrinsic issues that may not be solved so easily, if at all. I refer to the issues discussed in this study—the issues that arisen due to their distinctive, and probably incompatible cosmogonies. While we may expand the meanings of the word ZUI to include the English meaning of sin, what to me is insoluble is their differing accounts of the origins of the cosmos. It would be almost impossible for the Chinese to forget their own culture’s concept and their way of moral improvement by daily endeavour, it would be well neigh impossible for the Catholic, or even the Protestants, to accept the Chinese cosmogony and to deny the universality of the seven-day Creation. Of course, it has taken the Catholic Church three centuries to accept C|openicus, then, it may not be too unreasonable for the Chinese and the Christians to accept each other as different but equal, in our increasingly multicultural world with the increasing strong all of atheist scholars as Professor Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hutchins in their many popular publications. Now, more and more Christians and others have come to reject the literal Six-day Creation story and regard that as a myth. So, it is not impossible that the official churches will come to accept the Chinese cosmogony as one of the possible alternative cosmogonies. As to China, whether it is imperial China or the People’s Republic, just really want to be treated as an equal among many. Today, at this time of writing in early 2008, that equality is more in the realm of a hope-for future than a reality. It is true that China is now a Permanent Member of the Security Council of the

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United Nations Organization, but much of the economic issues and policies of the world are determined by nations that exclude China, I am referring to that group of nations known as the G-7 or mainly Western European nations, the USA and Japan, which have now expanded into G-8 by including the Russian Republic. Now, with Reform and Modernization, the economy of China is larger than the total of at least 4 of the European nations. To China, this arrangement smacks too much like the last gasp of the old imperialists trying to maintain their influence. Therefore, in international politics, the so-called Developed World still have some way to go to treat China as an equal. But with these Developed countries all suffering from economic troubles while the economy of China is enjoying unprecedented strength, with a reputed $1.5 trillion in reserves which China has dedicated $200 Billions to its sovereign funds as attempts to acquire equities in other countries’ companies, it would be a sign of the maturity of those troubled developed nations to allow China to have a share in their trouble companies, especially financial firms. This way, China would have an interest to see that those ‘developed’ capitalist countries would stay afloat as she has financial interest to do so. But it would be a test of the maturity of the ‘developed’ nations to see if they would be mature and equal enough to allow China to integrate her economy with theirs. I have yet to see any sign of this maturity, though the Cold War has long been dead and ‘buried’.

NOTES BBC (2006) BBC Internet Edition “China risks new row over bishop” (14 May 2006) hppt://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/4769501.stm: BBC 2(2006)

BBC news “Viewpoints: china and the Vatican” (03/05/2006

14:34:53 GMT Http://news..bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/4969276.stm Bernstein, Carl. & Politi, Marco.. (1997)

His Holiness: John Paul II and the

hidden history of our time (Bantam, Great Britain, 1997)

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Sidoti, Chris (1992) “The Australian Human Rights Delegation to Mainland China”, World Outlook, (World League for Freedom and Democracy, March-April, 1992, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp.3-14, 34) cited in p. 12.

INDEX

Abrahamic, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 17, 29, 91 Adenauer, Konrad, 59, 125, 130, 138 Asianists, 78 Australia, 106, 120, 121, 124, 133, 134, 149, 151 Banquoesque, 49 Beam Syndrome, 17, 27 Benedict XVI, 3, 148, 151 Berger, Peter, 126 Bergere, Marie-Clar, 78 Bible, 4, 6, 19, 53, 54, 103, 104, 109, 140, 145 Blake, William, 114, 115, 135 Bodde, Dirk, 7, 28, 73 Broadsgaard, Kjeild, 78 Buddhism, 9, 15, 16, 39, 43, 92, 100, 102, 106, 142 Buddhist, 9, 88, 89, 105 Butterfield, Herbert, 94, 95 Cambridge University Press, 19, 20, 49, 114, 133, 134 Casey, William, 150 Catholic, 20, 54, 70, 124, 132, 143, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153 Central Kingdom, 2, 14, 17, 23, 27, 33, 35, 37, 38, 41, 48, 64, 71, 86, 107, 137 Chinese Communist Party, 81, 106, 119, 128, 148, 149 Ching, Julia, 1, 15, 143, 144

Christian, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 45, 48, 53, 54, 56, 58, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 92, 93, 94, 102, 103, 106, 107, 111, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 149 Christianity, v, 13, 15, 19, 20, 21, 25, 29, 30, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 53, 60, 67, 68, 70, 72, 77, 88, 91, 95, 97, 99, 102, 103, 104, 106, 143, 144, 148 Clark, Colin, 116 Cohen, Myron, 78 Cohen, Paul A., 35, 36, 37, 38, 39 Cold War, 81, 101, 116, 133, 152, 154 Communist Party, 81, 100, 106, 119, 128, 148, 149 Confucian, 12, 13, 16, 31, 34, 35, 36, 39, 42, 44, 54, 59, 60, 63, 91, 92, 93, 96, 97, 98, 100, 103, 104, 105, 109, 110, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 133, 134, 138, 142, 144 Confucianism, 15, 16, 19, 20, 39, 42, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 74, 77, 81, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 108, 109, 110,

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111, 112, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 138, 143, 144 Confucius, 2, 10, 12, 15, 19, 31, 33, 34, 42, 43, 44, 47, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 70, 73, 74, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 103, 104, 108, 110, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 138 Copernicus, 3 Creator-God, 1, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 24, 25, 27, 28, 33, 34, 42, 56, 57, 64, 65, 68, 91, 92, 96, 107, 139, 142, 143, 144, 147 Daoism, 16, 39, 42, 58, 61 Daoist, 16, 28, 53, 68, 69 Dawkin, Richard, 153 de Bary, Theodore, 78, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 103, 144 Dickens, Charles, 114, 115 Dickensian, 114, 123 Elohim, 140, 142 Elvin, Mark, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106 Enclosure Acts, 118 England, 52, 60, 64, 67, 77, 83, 84, 85, 114, 118, 126, 128, 137, 147 Enlightenment, 41, 88, 89, 105 ethnocentrism, 3, 12, 14, 44, 69, 71, 86, 88, 89, 114, 116, 137 fa, 60, 61 Fairbank, 63, 64, 65, 67, 74 feng-jian, 63, 64, 65, 67 feudalism, 63, 64 Forke, Alfred, 7, 21 Four Little Dragons, 58, 122, 128, 129 France, 77, 83, 85, 118, 124, 131, 132, 133, 151 Frank, Gunter, 117 Gaubil, Antoine, 14, 34 General Assembly (United Nations), 13, 120, 121 Germany, 59, 120, 124, 131, 138, 151, 152 Girardot, N.J., 68, 69, 70, 73 Gospel, 6, 19, 26, 54

Gramsci, 55 Greek, 28, 42, 46, 48, 51, 52, 53, 113 Guomindang, 119, 120 Habermas, Jurgen, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 98, 112, 114, 129, 138 Han, 22, 43, 60, 94, 141 Hankow (Hanzhou), 86 Hao, Chang, 92, 93 Harbsmeier, Christoph, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 114 Heaven, 14, 15, 56, 57, 90, 92, 102, 107, 142 Hee, park Chung, 128 Hee, Park Chung, 129 Hegel, Georg, 81, 82, 94, 109 Hinduism, 99, 100 Hobbes, Thomas, 80 Holy See, 148, 150, 152 Hong Kong, 15, 19, 57, 58, 78, 79, 86, 87, 89, 90, 110, 122, 125, 127, 128, 130, 132, 134, 140, 151 hun dun, 7, 28 Hungary, 131 Hutchins, Christopher, 153 Hyatt, Irwin T., 141, 142, 144 Industrial Revolution, 115 industrialization, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 126, 128, 129, 130, 132 Islam, 16, 36, 71, 99, 100, 102, 104 Israel, 25, 89, 94, 131 Italy, 124, 131, 132 Japan, 41, 60, 101, 104, 115, 125, 128, 154 Jardine, Joseph, 16, 40, 41 jen, 94, 97 Jenner, W.J.F., 16, 17, 18, 36, 39, 40, 71, 72, 106 Jesuit, 12, 20, 33, 74, 110, 142, 147 Jewish, 6, 11, 29, 35, 144 Jin, Bishop, 149, 150, 151, 152 jing shen, 102, 103 John Paul II, 150, 151, 152

Index John, Griffith, 6, 9, 15, 16, 19, 38, 39, 41, 65, 72, 78, 140, 150, 151, 152, 154 Judaism, 91, 104 jun zi, 90, 92, 93 KMT, 100, 101, 121 Kong, Master, Kong Qiu, 10, 58, 59, 60 Koran, 6, 9, 103 Korea, 58, 122, 125, 127, 128, 129, 132, 134 Kuomintang, 100, 120 Kwok-Keung, Lau, 126, 127 labour, 117, 118, 121, 123, 132 Latin, 43, 45, 46, 48, 51, 52, 53, 113, 133 Latourette, 38 Lau, D.C., 15, 47, 56, 57, 95, 96, 126, 127, 132 Legalism, 58, 60, 61 Legge, James, 13, 14, 16, 17, 33, 34, 40, 41, 47, 64, 68, 91, 92, 95, 109, 139 Leninism, 81, 82 Levenson, J.R., 105 Lippert, Wolfgang, 78 Littrup, Leif, 78 Locke, John, 81, 82 Longobardi, Nicolo, 143 MacFarquhar, Roderick, 59, 125, 126 Manchu Dynasty, 93 Manifest Destiny, 16 Marshall, David, 128 Marx, Karl, 81, 82, 83, 86, 87, 108, 109, 115, 118, 119, 133 Marxism, 4, 60, 81, 82, 108, 116, 119, 133 Marxist, 88, 123 Mateer, Calvin, 141 May Fourth Movement (1919), 128 Mei, Yi-pao, 57 Mencius, 59, 73, 93, 129, 130, 131 Ming Dynasty, 93, 94 missionaries, 1, 2, 9, 11, 12, 13, 16, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32,

159 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 42, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 70, 75, 76, 78, 88, 91, 94, 103, 106, 107, 111, 139, 140, 141, 147 Mohists, 42 Mormons, 68, 70 Morrison, Robert, 38 Mote, Arthur, 3, 17, 19, 23, 31, 36, 37, 38, 55, 86 Mote, Frederick W., 6, 7, 21, 27, 28, 37, 52 Mullie, Joseph, 43 Nanking (Nanjing) Treaty, 115 Nathan, Andrew J., 71 Needham, Joseph, 3, 7, 28, 41, 43, 45, 49, 51, 52, 114 Netherlands, 131 New Industrialized Countries (NIC), 122, 123, 124 New Testament, 6, 19, 26, 38, 54, 73, 109 New Zealand, 120, 121 Newly Industrialized Countries (NIC), 132 Oakeshott, Michael, 49 Old Testament, 25, 26, 95, 96, 97, 99, 109 organismic, 7, 28 Paine, Thomas, 81 Philippines, 3, 153 Poland, 131, 150 Price, Don, 78 proletariat foncier, 118, 119 Protestant, 33, 38, 39, 59, 60, 99, 112, 126, 131, 132, 139, 148, 149 Protestant Work Ethic, 123, 124, 127, 130, 132 Qing Dynasty, 94 Qizhao, Liang, 102, 105 Reischauer, E.O., 63, 64, 65, 67, 74 Ricci, Matteo, 12, 13, 33, 66, 70, 108, 139, 142, 143 Rodney, W., 117 Roman Catholic, 70, 148, 149, 152 Rostow, Walt, 116, 124 Rowe, William T., 79, 83, 84, 85, 86

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ru, 60, 61, 62, 63, 67, 77, 81, 89, 90, 93 rujia sixiang, 91, 105, 111, 112, 124, 129, 130 ru-jiao, 60, 63, 138 Said, Edward, 1, 7, 13, 14, 15, 17, 21, 33, 37, 45, 55, 56, 57, 58, 62, 67, 71, 78, 87, 88, 89, 100, 103, 106, 107, 108, 112, 113, 131 Saviour, 2, 11, 12, 34 Schall, Adam, 147 shang, 13, 14, 33, 64, 68 shang di, 14, 33, 68, 141, 142 Shikai, Yuan, 104 shin (shen), 141 Sidoti, Chris, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155 Silu, Zhan, Fr., 149 sin, 2, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 25, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 44, 56, 107, 139, 153 Sinic, 59, 125, 126, 132 Siong, Lim Chim, 128 Solinger, Dorothy, 85, 88 Song Dynasty, 142 South Korea, 128, 129, 132 Soviet Union, 120, 121, 131, 150 St. Augustine, 59 Taiwan, 3, 58, 100, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125, 127, 131, 132, 152 Talmud, 6 Tang Dynasty, 43, 66 Taoism, 16 Theos, 140, 142 Thermidorian Reaction, 82 Thermordian, 122 tian, 14, 56, 84, 90, 92, 102 Tiananmen Square, 87 Tianzhu, 142, 143, 148 Tu, To, 59, 98, 124, 125, 126 uncarved block, 1, 28, 69 UNESCO, 13

United Nations, 13, 80, 101, 119, 120, 154 USA, 34, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72, 87, 92, 97, 101, 118, 119, 120, 125, 150, 152, 154 Vandermeersch, Leon, 78 Vatican, 3, 143, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154 Vikings, 52 Wakeman, Frederic, 86, 87, 96, 97, 98 Waley, Arthur, 58, 60 Walters, Vernon, Gen., 150 Watson, Burton, 68, 69, 74 Weber, Max, 59, 60, 89, 99, 112, 124, 126, 127, 131, 132, 138 Weberian, 99, 123, 130 Wei-ming, Tu, 59, 98, 110, 124, 134 White, Gordon, 79, 80, 85 Wolferstan, Fr., 13, 34, 38 World Bank, 121, 134 World War II, 115, 120 Wright, Mary, 5, 8, 23, 32, 54 Xi, Zhu, 142 xiao ren, 10, 31 Xiaoping, Deng, 122, 133 Xun Qing, 10 Yew, Lee Kuan, 127, 129, 133, 140 Ying-shih, Yu, 96, 97 Youngson, Arthur, 116 Youwei, Kang, 104, 105 Yulan, Feng, 69, 73 Zedong, Mao, 60, 81, 82, 106, 121, 122 Zen, Joseph, Cardinal, 152 Zhongguo, 2 Zhuang, 17, 68, 69, 70, 74 Zhuang zi, 68, 69 Zi, Mo, 20, 42, 57, 92, 93 zui, 2, 9, 11, 34, 35, 37