LET US AT this point recall a truism that, since we have been referring to ‘China’ so frequently as a collective, must nonetheless be repeated again and again: just like every country and every culture, China is in no sense a homogeneous entity. Since ancient times, China has always produced a variety of opinions, philoophies and, in times of crisis, proposed solutions. And yet, China is indeed a collective. Its people see themselves as such, frequently act as such and, indeed, must be regarded as such. Innumerable Chinese individuals made their fortunes by helping to enslave young Chinese men and sell them to Portuguese traders. Countless Chinese individuals also became rich by joining the opium trade and poisoning their own nation. All of these individuals are part of the Chinese collective, but this collective’s overall behaviour has not necessarily served the purposes of particular interests.
The collective’s behaviour has followed reaction patterns that transcend particular interests and are deeply rooted in Chinese culture. China is led by a party that calls itself ‘Communist’, and Marxism-Leninism is still broadly present in the country’s academic institutions. Still, the mentality which stems from a sense of helplessness and surrender, of transferring responsibility for unsatisfactory conditions to those who supposedly caused them or to some ‘responsible other’, has remained largely alien to China, both collectively and for individuals – and herein lies the key to understanding the country’s spectacular recovery.
Ideas that inform collective political action matured at some point in the mind of an individual. When, afterwards, many people choose, embrace and follow them from the great selection of ideas available at all times, these ideas must have fulfilled at least two conditions. They must meet certain basic values shared by these people and support solutions upholding those values, therefore appearing sensible. Over the long run the actions of a government, irrespective of its political system, generally reflect those shared values.
Up to the present day, China has remained a culture that integrates many different views of the world. Religious groups are just as much a part of this diversity as are those individuals who refuse to submit to the Communist Party’s officially sanctioned view of society and world events. On the Internet these dissenters can, at least for short periods of time, share their opinions with other Internet users before official censors delete their remarks. And yet, despite this irrefutable heterogeneity, one can just as irrefutably identify the overarching collective consensus of the great majority, if not practically the entire population, in the Chinese response to the country’s humiliation.
By the late nineteenth century, numerous Chinese observers had come to recognize the harsh reality that many aspects of their culture and science were inadequate as a means of curbing the inroads of Western nations into their land. Many of these voices began calling for profound and wide-ranging reforms. Other Chinese people vehemently opposed these demands. The advocates of reform prevailed and China went down the path of renewal.46
It was initially a feeble effort, with some reformers attempting to adopt only those aspects of Western technology, especially military technology, that were indispensible for defeating the invaders with their own weapons. Other more astute observers quickly recognized that this would not suffice. Gradually the need for a merciless self-analysis was acknowledged, along with the recognition that China would not only have to open itself superficially to the invaders’ culture, but radically, in the true sense of the word. The transformation would have to reach all the way down to the roots of Chinese values and traditions.
China did not go down the path of hating the West for violently and contemptuously destroying the unmatched continuity of Chinese civilization. The Chinese did not simply hand responsibility for the wrongs they had suffered to the perpetrators and go cap in hand asking for alms and compensation. Following the old maxim of Ge Hong and Tao Hongjing, ‘I, and not heaven, am responsible for my fate’, China turned its gaze onto itself, sought culpability in its own insufficiencies and resolved to make changes from within that would put the country in a position to deal with the agents of its humiliation on its own terms. This was in no way a simple reform or modernization as depicted in many works on modern Chinese history. It was a l00-year cultural revolution with the objectives of uncovering all weaknesses and making good the obvious deficiencies by adopting the characteristics and achievements of European culture.
For China as a whole and, more importantly, for countless individuals, the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, which was hostile to both Western influence and the country’s own traditions, was a brutal caesura in this path.
Tracing the path toward this interruption need not concern our account of China’s response to its humiliation at the hands of the West. The fact, however, that this break was overcome after only ten years, autonomously and without foreign help, despite the bitterest opposition and a gravely weakened economy, demonstrates clearly enough that the collective was willing and able to take a completely different course – and to see it through.