Seeking the Soul of China

                                                                        

I have presumed to write about China’s Cultural Revolution without any formal academic training in the field. I circumscribed that presumption by concentrating on one day, a very important day in that period, August 5, 1966.  I have written about that day from the perspective of the American criminal law in which I do have formal training, as well as experience as a prosecutor and now a criminal defense attorney. American, criminal law, non-scholar, and I should add male: those are the, or among the, perspectives from which I have written about China’s Cultural Revolution, and perspectives are biases. With those same biases, and limitations, I have removed all circumscription and.since the fall of 2009 have begun to write about the soul of China. It is of doing such things that the English poet Alexander Pope cautioned, "fools rush in where angels fear to tread" but I am no angel, and I'm in a hurry. 

I do see China everywhere, as my girlfriend has bemoaned, even in American pop culture. I see the religious imagery associated with LeBron James and I think of China, one of the least religious nations on earth.  In the movie Chinatown, I hear John Huston say to Jack Nicholson, "I don't blame myself. You see Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of ANYTHING," and I think of the Red Guards.  In Crimes and Misdemeanors I hear Martin Landau explain how his murderer’s guilt eventually passed and he went on living his successful, prosperous life, and I think of the Red Guards again. It is this aspect of the soul that I have most thought about recently, the aspect that has to do with the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage and of the West’s most religious country, America. A significant sub-component of my American bias therefore is also this religious bias. That religious bias is derivative for I am not personally religious.

Foremost, I see China in my work, in the people charged with murder, whom I now defend, whom I formerly prosecuted.  There is no other human institution that so reflects the values of its people as the criminal law.  It is moral philosophy with teeth.  American criminal law is based on the English, and both are grounded in the Bible.  As our religious heritage divides heaven and earth into good and evil, Anglo-American law divides the courtroom between the prosecution (mostly seen as good) and defense (mostly seen as evil).  The Bible is judgmental, there is a Judgment Day where you’re either in or out; the criminal law is judgmental: the verdict is either guilty or not guilty and the ruler of the law is called a Judge. And I am judgmental.

China has little of this; has never had much of any of it. Its closest religious analogue, Confucianism, is more an ethical system. It has no comparable criminal jurisprudence.  Yet the Chinese civilization has endured, and not only endured but has always been one of the world’s great civilizations--for five thousand years. There is nothing comparable to that in the West.  Ancient and modern, Greek and Roman, Spanish and English, the great civilizations of the West have risen and fallen.  The ethical systems of ancient Greece and Rome did not prevent their decline, and Christianity did not sustain the greatness of Spain or England.

Is it just size that explains this?  Athens and Rome were city-states; England an island-nation; Spain a large country only by European standards.  Their civilizations were made by conquest.  There is a sense in which the West’s great civilizations were made vulnerable and ultimately defeated by their supply lines: “One hundred thousand Englishmen cannot control 350 million Indians,” Mohatma Gandhi is supposed to have said.(1) English and Spanish rule over their empires stopped when their subjects refused to be ruled by England and Spain.  China has never been too small, nor had too few people.

Numbers don’t explain it all, however.  China never had a supply-line problem because China has seldom had supply lines: China has never been remotely as imperial as the West’s great civilizations. China has never been remotely as interested in exploring the world as the West either. China did not make contact with the West; the West made contact with it; a Chinese did not discover the “New World,” a Norse (and a Genoan) did. A Portuguese circumnavigated the globe. And so on.  Nothing about China has made a bigger impact upon me than this. Here is Wikipedia’s list of explorers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_explorers.  It runs fifteen pages long and contains hundreds of names. There are four Chinese on the list. Four. The same number as followers of this blog.  Besides the usual suspects, there’s a Pole, a Finn, a Hungarian, several Irish, a Swiss, a Moroccan, and a few Croats.  And these are the areas of the world the Chinese on the list explored:


-Japan (Xu Fu, 3^rd century BC).  Whoa, that’s pretty adventuresome, huh?

-Central Asia (Zhang Qian, 2^nd century BC).

-Indian subcontinent and Central Asia—finishing up on what Zhang Qian started? (Xuanzang, 7^th century AD).

-South Asia, Southeast Asia (central Asia completed by Zhang Qian and Xuanzang), the Middle East, and the East African coast (Zheng He, 15^th century).

Only Zheng He ventured out of his hutong.  Perhaps significantly also, Wikipedia lists Zheng’s nationality as “Chinese Muslim” (proselytizing being imperialism by another name).  It is astonishing that the most continuously great of the world’s civilizations did not explore.(2)

Numbers don’t explain it all in another sense, too.  The context in which Gandhi is supposed to have made the statement quoted above is:

Lord Irwin’s Lieutenant: “You don’t think we’re just going to walk out of India?”

Gandhi (to Lord Irwin): “Yes, in the end, you will walk out because 100,000 Englishman simply cannot control 350,000,000 Indians, if those Indians refuse to cooperate. And that is what we intend to achieve—peaceful, nonviolent, non-cooperation until you, yourself, see the wisdom of leaving, Your Excellency.” (3)

"Non-Cooperation."  That is a very civilized tool for an independence movement to use. Mao Zedong said "revolution is not a dinner party."  Non-cooperation is a dinner party in independence movement terms. Gandhi’s strategy could not have succeeded without a receptive soul in his dinner companions, the English, and Gandhi knew England’s soul.  He was an English-trained lawyer, he knew the Christian religion that was the basis of English law and morality, he had a favorable view of Christianity (“I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians”), and Gandhi bet that England’s soul (and the supply-line problem) would not permit it to be so brutal.

China has never had a problem with brutality either.

  

(1)    I have not been able to verify this quote quickly.  It’s in the movie but not in an authoritative source on the web that I could quickly locate. If Gandhi didn’t say it however, the point is the same for the purpose here.
(2)  This is not a controversial point. See e.g. The Search for Modern China, Jonathan Spence, 136, citing to Hegel, The Philosophy of History.

(3)    Bullies, Tyrants, and Impossible People: How to Beat Them without Joining Them (Like I said, I couldn’t find an authoritative source.), 218.  Ronald M. Shapiro, Mark A. Jankowski, James Dale, Jim Dale. Crown Business. (2005)