Henry Kissinger's new book, certainly his last, is On China. There is professional support there for certain amateur assertions (based on other professionals) made here on the fundamentals to China's soul: the absence of influenceof Western-style religion; the importance of Confucianism; the lack of Western-style imperialism; the related, not identical, lack of exploration; centralism of authority. I address this last first.
In Law and Modern Society Professor Roberto Mangabeira Unger contrasted the fractured power structure that developed out of feudal Europe with that in China. Key to the emergence of the rule of law in Europe was the development of Third Estate, the bourgeoisie, as a power locus. This came as the Roman Catholic Church was under assault from Protestant reformers. China never had anything like a Roman Catholic Church or the bourgeoisie as power loci.
Dr. Kissinger notes the importance of geography too. Europe was fractured geographically, which contributed mightily to the development of separate languages, ethnicities, and nation-states, and hence power centers. China was not as fractured geographically. The Gobi Desert in the northwest, the Himalayas in the southwest, the seas to the east and southeast, these were natural geographic boundaries to the Chinese empire. The sheer expanse of this land area--larger than all of Europe combined--and its variety of terrain and climate provided support, facts on the ground, to the idea that China was all that mattered, very nearly all there was, a self-contained, self-sustaining civilization that was the Middle Kingdom in the universe with an emperor who ruled with nothing less than a Mandate of Heaven. Why explore?
China today is 95% ethnic Han, a homogeneity incomprehensible to an American. It's written language, so important that the meaning of "writing" in Chinese is "when civilization began" has changed so little, Dr. Kissinger points out, that millennia-old classics, are eminently readable today. Why change?
Geography, ethnicity, language: it's hard to think of any other factors as fundamental to the creation of a distinctive people, and they did combine to produce a distinctive people in Chinese.
Geography made China hard to invade and made China wealthy. China was the wealthiest, most advanced civilization on earth prior to the Industrial Revolution in the West. That made it tempting to invade. And so the invaders came. Professor John Head relates a metaphor used by a colleague, of China as a giant with his back to the northwest, inward-looking, protective, defensive, fearful. Time and again in Chinese history the invaders came on horseback from the northwest.
Unity against the threat, real or imagined, of invasion was viewed by Chinese as key to survival and it is survival that I argue is the soul of China. The primordial survival "instinct," more pronounced (and less rational) in my view in the soul of China than in the souls of some other peoples produced the desideratum of unity which produced the incredible centralism of Chinese society throughout history and down to the present day. Kissinger argues that Confucius' Analects worked as both religion and Constitution for China. However that may be, Confucius' message to Chinese was "know your place." The individual was a cog, a "rustless screw," who legitimized the Emperor and the Mandate of Heaven, rather than civilization legitimizing the individual.
Unity's near opposite, chaos, is the dirtiest word in Chinese. Chinese had everything they wanted in China. There was no need to explore, no need to conquer. China was not nearly as imperial as were so many Western peoples. If it could remain unified it could survive and since chaos was the great horror China would sow chaos among her enemies. Kissinger points to the the maxim, barbarians fighting barbarians is good for China. The Chinese theory of war is indirect, defensive; the West's direct and offensive. When it failed on the battlefield, it won in the peace. China absorbed the conquerors, converting them to the use of the difficult Chinese language and putting the vast imperial bureaucracy at the new ruler's disposal. China survived.
Unity, grounded in survival, brooked no competing power loci. Confucianism was certainly not a religion in that sense and, as Unger and Head both wrote, so would have been a brokering rule of law. China is, in Kissinger's wording, a "singularity," more unified geographically, ethnically, linguistically, and in its power structure, than other civilizations, "a civilization pretending to be a nation-state," in his quoting of Professor Lucian Pye. Why compromise?
With no competing power loci and with a Mandate of Heaven, the Chinese emperor never had to compromise with internal groups, not with a Church, not with a burgeoning middle class, not with an aristocratic Second Estate, not with the rule of law. Compromise is the essence of democracy.
Image: Zhongnanhai, "The Center."
