In Search of the First Civilizations by Michael Wood

Author:Michael Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448141647
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2013-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

THE LEGACY OF CHINA

Today the Chinese people are living through a time of great opportunity. Though they are still without political power, their country has become an economic giant, with nearly a quarter of the world’s population. Over the past twenty years the Chinese Communist party has shed its Marxist ideology and is now an authoritarian bureaucracy with uncanny resemblances to those of imperial times. And the future? One of the older generation of republicans, Liang Shu-ming, writing in the 1920s, boldly prophesied that the future world civilization would be reconstructed Chinese civilization! Though admiring of some Western values, such as individual freedom and our scientific traditions, which he hoped China might someday embrace in synthesis with its own humanistic values, Liang condemned wholesale imitation of the West as a false path. Western market democracy in particular he thought at odds with Chinese tradition: ‘The fundamental spirit of China was to seek harmony and synthesis, that of the West to go forward to change: a path which has been destructive of nature, and of the spirit.’ What the West would in time come to need he believed, was Confucian jen: humanity. Such hopes now seem misplaced.

China’s contribution towards the history of humanity has been enormous. Its political system brought peace and stability for long periods to a large proportion of the population of the world: no mean achievement even today. The government may often have been harsh and autocratic, but by a thousand years ago they had developed sophisticated examinations for the selection of officials on merit which were unparalleled elsewhere till our own time. In science and technology they were far ahead of the rest of the world until the modern era. The Chinese were perhaps the finest craftsmen of any civilization; in bronzes, silk, jade, porcelain and lacquer. Their matchless calligraphy and painting are another side of their sensibility. Their literature too is full of wonderful achievements, especially in poetry. Theirs was also the earliest and longest tradition of historiography. But of all their legacies, perhaps their greatest was also the most characteristic: the ideal of harmony and reconciliation of opposites propounded by the Taoists, coupled with the Confucian vision of practical morality. At the root of their civilization lay the shamanistic culture of the Bronze Age with its reverence for the ancestors, for virtue and for the magic of writing. So deeply ingrained were these conceptions that in spite of all the vicissitudes of Chinese history, their civilization was able to regenerate itself without ever breaking the cultural continuity right down to the end of the empire and the communist revolution. After the terrible traumas of the twentieth century, it is not yet clear how the next renewal will come about, or whether it will draw on the past for its models as so often before. Whether Mao and his followers have indeed severed the link with the great tradition of classical China, it is, as he liked to say, too early to tell.

But of one thing we may be tolerably sure.

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