China and the West: A civilizational contest
Toro Hardy explains the current civilizational contest between China and the West, reviewing what each has represented through history and why the West is now at disadvantage.
China and the West are distinct civilizations currently involved in a contest for supremacy. Their histories evolved in opposite directions. From relatively early on, China became a civilization-State with a high degree of homogeneity and continuity. Conversely, the West always showed a conflicting identity and a fractious relationship among its members. Moreover, the glue that has exceptionally held its members together over the last eighty years seems to be dissolving.
Western civilization
Western civilization, the story goes, resulted from the interweaving of the Classical tradition -meaning the legacy of Greece and Rome - and Christianity. This merger took place when Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, in 312 AD, becoming a devoted patron of that faith. According to J.M. Roberts: “The church was now tied to the glamorous and prestigious tradition of Rome” (Roberts, 1985, p. 45).
However, far from merging easily, the Classical legacy and Christianity entered into bitter contention. Christian emperors and bishops tried their best to erase the pagan Classical World. In Catherine Nixey’s words:
“This was a war. The struggle to convert the empire [into Christianity] was nothing less than a battle between good and evil, between the forces of darkness and those of light. It was a battle between God and Satan himself” (Nixey, 2019, p. 36).
This entailed the closing of schools, the systematic destruction and desecration of old temples, the wrecking of statues, and the burning of libraries and books. It also entailed sending bands of thugs to kill enlightened pagan scientists, as was the case of Alexandria’s astronomer Hypatia, murdered in 415 AD on the orders of Bishop Cyril.
As Nixey puts it:
“… this is a story of forced conversion and government persecution. It is a story in which great works of art are destroyed, buildings are defaced and liberties are removed. It is a story in which those who refused to convert where outlawed and, as the persecution deepened, were hounded and even executed by zealous authorities” (Nixey, 2019, p. 142).
Ironically enough, Christian monasteries in Western Europe became instrumental in preserving Classical knowledge. In a world of illiterate warlords and populations, monks were expected to know how to read. Moreover, they were compelled to read to combat idleness, the enemy of the soul. This brought with it an extraordinary chain of consequences. Reading required books and, as vestiges of book markets fell apart, monastic rules demanded that monks copy those that they already possessed. Moreover, as papyrus makers had long vanished, the monks were forced to convert animal skins into writing surfaces. As a result, the contents of perishable papyri were copied into more durable parchments. So it was that, even abhorring pagan classical knowledge and seeing the process of copying as a low-class activity formerly carried out by slaves, the monks became the main preservers of antiquity within Western Europe. At least until between the sixth century and the middle of the eighth, when Greek and Latin classics ceased to be copied at all (Greenblatt, 2011, chapter two).
In the fifteenth century, the Renaissance came into being. As the word implied, it heralded a resurgence of ideas and themes from classical antiquity. However, as Hillary Mantel remarked: “History is not the past…It is what is left in the sieve when centuries have run through it” (Nixei, 2019, p. 25). And what was left of the Classical World, since the West came into being, was not much. According to Catherine Nixei: “Only one percent of Latin literature survived the centuries. Ninety-nine percent was lost” (Nixei, 2011, p. 22). Stephen Greemblatt, on his part, says:
“Everything that has reached to us is a copy. And these copies represent only a small portion of the works of the most celebrated writers of antiquity. Of Aeschylus’ eighty or ninety plays and the roughly hundred twenty by Sophocles, only seven each survived…At the end of the fifth century CE an ambitious literary editor known as Stobaeus compiled an anthology of prose and poetry by the ancient world’s best authors: out of 1,430 quotations, 1,115 are from works that are now lost” (Greemblatt, 2011, location 1138 of 6540).
However little could have effectively remained of Classical antiquity, the Renaissance saw an emphasis on classics and critical thought. This represented a significant challenge to the Church’s authority and monopoly on knowledge. Such an intellectual shift encouraged new ways of understanding the world that frequently stood in direct contradiction to religion.
The building blocks of Western civilization - reason and faith - were thus at odds with themselves, resulting in a conflicted identity. Moreover, the offspring of such a civilization were continuously quarreling among themselves. The history of the West has indeed been the history of warfare among its countries. These last eighty years, during which a liberal order has ruled the house, have been an exception within this inherently fractious relationship.
Chinese civilization
How different the history of Chinese civilization has been. As Henry Kissinger wrote: “Chinese civilization originates in an antiquity so remote that we vainly endeavor to discover its commencement” (Kissinger, 2012, p. 5). However, a sophisticated and clearly identifiable Chinese civilization can be traced back to 1500 BC (Ropp, 2010). This makes it as old as the Mycenaean Greek civilization, the oldest distinct antecedent of Western civilization.
What is striking, though, is that since the Qin Dinasty in 221 BC a unified Chinese empire is discernable, providing its history with a linear continuity. The Qin were replaced by the Han, after which came the Sui, the Tang, the Song, the Yuan, the Ming and the Qing dynasties. For more than two thousand years, and until the emergence of the Republic in 1911, a bureaucratic empire ruled China, turning it into a civilization-State with a continuous core-body of knowledge that dates to Confucius and Mencius, more than two thousand years ago. Not surprisingly, at the beginning of the 1400s, the greatest of the Ming emperors, the Yongle Emperor, was able to commission a compendium of Chinese knowledge that filled more than 11,000 volumes. (Ferguson, 2011, p. 22). Its political continuity and body of knowledge, though, were clearly autocratic in nature (Zhegyuan, 1993).
Also lacking in the West was a cultural homogeneity that defined a clear-cut identity. According to Martin Jacques:
“During the first millennium AD China was to acquire an unusually strong sense of cultural identity. One of the striking features of Chinese history has been that, although it has been invaded from the north many times - notably by the Mongols in the thirteen century and the Manchu in the seventeenth - all invaders once secure in power, sought to acquire the customs and values of the Chinese and to rule according to their principles and their institutions: a testament to the prestige enjoyed by the Chinese and the respect accorded to their civilization” (Jacques, 2009, p. 75).
Having been a continuous and commanding presence throughout recorded history, China was also immensely rich. Between 1600 and the beginning of the 19th century it accounted for between a quarter and a third of the global GDP, representing 30% of that GDP as recently as 1820 (Maddison, 2003; Leonard, 2008, p. 83). However, while parts of Western civilization, with Britain at its head, immersed themselves in the industrial revolution, China remained tied to its traditional economy.
At the same time, the West underwent a military modernization that, yet again, was not followed by China. As China resisted change, much smaller European nations outmaneuvered it. The result of this was the so-called ‘Century of Humiliation’, which brought this ancient and proud civilization to its knees. The itinerary of this dramatic downturn began with the first of the opium wars with Britain between 1840-1842. For the following one hundred a three-years, China would suffer all kind of exploitations by Western nations and by their Asian modernizing pupil, Japan.
Which might prevail?
But China is now back. According to former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, what happened in China is the equivalent to “the English Industrial Revolution and the global industrial revolution combusting simultaneously into not 300, but 30 years”. Rudd asks himself how China will exercise this new-found power: “Will it accept the culture, norms and structure of the post-war order? Or will China seek to change it? I believe this is the single core question for the first half of the 21st century” (Rudd, 2012).
Since those words were written, it has become evident that China wants to get rid of the post-war liberal order of the last eighty years, replacing it with one more akin to its autocratic tradition. Until recently, the West (and its Asian allies that fear China’s preponderance) were standing firm in defense of that order. However, as Trump repudiates it and flirts with autocracy, China’s aspiration to win the ongoing contest has been given a boost. Especially so as the inherent fractious nature of the West might emerge again.
Alfredo Toro Hardy, PhD, is a retired Venezuelan career diplomat, scholar and author. Former Ambassador to the U.S., U.K., Spain, Brazil, Ireland, Chile and Singapore. Author or co-author of thirty-six books on international affairs. Former Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor at Princeton and Brasilia universities. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations and a member of the Review Panel of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center.
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References:
Ferguson, Niall (2011). Civilization: The West and the Rest. London: Allen Lane.
Greenblatt, Stephen (2011). The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Jacques, Martin (2009). When China Rules the World. London: Allen Lane.
Kissinger, Henry (2012). On China. New York: Penguin Books.
Leonard, Mark (2008). What Does China Think? New York: PublicAffairs.
Maddison, Agnus (2003). The World Economy: Historical Statistics. Paris: OECD.
Nixey, Catherine (2019). The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical Age. New York: Mariner Books.
Roberts, J.M. (1985). The Triumph of the West: The Origins, Rise and Legacy of Western Civilization. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Ropp, Paul S. (2010). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rudd, Kevin (2012). “The West Isn’t Ready for the Rise of China”, New Statesman, July 11.
Zhengyuan, Fu (1993). Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
