Reflections on the Middle Kingdom

The author somewhere in western China. 

The contemporary People’s Republic of China is a far cry from earlier versions of the same entity under the dismal shadow of the Maoists. It remains a single party state, of course, and the said party is officially called the Communist Party, but as one gentleman, a German who has been living in Luoyang for many years, explained to the present writer over dinner one night, “there are no communists left in the communist party.” Instead, the Middle Kingdom has reverted to age-old patterns of rulership and the Party’s authority rests more upon a general perception of the “Mandate of Heaven” than upon credentials conferred by the historic class-struggle of the masses. All the same, there is no escaping the fact that the good people of China have, over the last few generations, been through a Marxist hell and signs of it are everywhere if one cares to see them. 

This is a place where all religion was officially banned, where the institution of the family was crushed under the One Child Policy and under collectivist fantasies, and where the Cultural Revolution attempted to forcibly eradicate 4000 years of tradition - one of the greatest crimes of the modern era. The Cultural Revolution, in particular, has left the Middle Kingdom impoverished at various levels. The Chinese boast of their modernization, but it is especially shallow and uncreative for all of that. China is a casebook study of a society in which there is no longer, or not obviously, a deep well of tradition from which to draw, but also of the fact that tradition is, finally, irrepressible: the patterns of the past remain as strong as ever somewhere below the surface. 

In Xi’an, at the end of the silk road, where the author sojourned, the entrance to the ‘Revolutionary Park’ in the city centre is now adorned with a larger than lifesize statue of Donald Duck. Most of the old city has been bulldozed and replaced with row after row of ugly, functional apartment blocks – that hallmark of Marxist social engineering. Yet, within the city’s historic Mahometan quarter, and elsewhere, life continues on much as it always has and there is a strong sense that nothing substantial has changed, really, in hundreds of years. 

For their part, the Chinese people prefer to forget about the Maoist nightmare. Chairman Mao is acknowledged by lip-service as the founder of modern China or, more significantly, is adopted into the pantheon of Taoist deities as the man who defined the notion of the “people”. Slowly but surely the wounds inflicted by the Marxists are healing and the Middle Kingdom reverts back to something like its old self, albeit transformed by modernity, or the sino- version of it. There are many paths to modernity. China chose a particularly nasty one. The Party justifies it by the manifest evidence of contemporary prosperity and the growth of the middle class. But this is a lie. The miracle of the Taiwan economy is there to show that the transition to modernization did not require such appalling violence. Similarly, the fact of Hong Kong, and Singapore, exposes the lie that it was the “colonial running dogs” who had held the Chinese back and that “thought reform” and “class struggle” and “reindoctrination” were the only path forward. The real success of modern China is purely a function of the size of its market, not the wisdom of the Party elders or the historical mandate of Marxist ideology. Indeed, the emergence of a prosperous market-driven China owes virtually nothing to Maoism. On the contrary, Maoism retarded the country for long dark decades and it was only when the Marxists all retired to their miserable godless graves that the place was able to begin to fulfill its modern destiny. 

The wonder of it is that the Chinese people are not outraged by the cost they have paid. When one stands under the ludicrous grin of Donald Duck at the entrance to ‘Revolutionary Park’ one wants to ask: so this is what all the suffering of the Great Leap Forward was leaping forward to?!! The Party seems intent upon the Disneyification of China now. The country is certainly well-managed, but it is rather like the management of a well-run amusement park.

The real essence of the Chinese tradition is a quandary to the Chinese themselves. What has become if it? There is an air of amnesia across the land. An example of this is the food. During Maoist times family traditions were so disrupted that the age-old heritage of traditional recipes and family culinary secrets were fundamentally disturbed. For those dreary decades the whole country – clad in their silly Mao suits – was nurtured on Party canteen food. The Maoists, of course, were peasant farmers who loathed peasant farming. It is estimated that some 30 million or more Chinese died of starvation under the wise guidance of the Great Helmsman. There is no gainsaying it: Mao really was one of the great lunatics of all time. The extraordinary thing is that the army allowed him to inflict the damage he did. What remains now is a much diminished cuisine. In truth, real Chinese food can more readily be found in the Chinese diaspora than in the homeland. The present author knows this as a fact. As previous posts to these pages relate, he spent months exploring the communities of the Malacca Straits Chinese, especially in Phuket and the Prince of Wales Island. One finds a rich Chinese culinary heritage there, unbroken and proud. Food in China, whether in the western outposts of Xi’an and Luoyang, or the modern metropolis of Shanghai, is a tale of disappointment, by and large. These days chefs from China travel to centres of the diaspora to relearn Chinese cooking. If this is what has become of the kitchen, one can imagine what impact the mad hand of Maoism has had in other areas of life. 

The spiritual vacuum is most noticeable. The lineages of Taoism were stopped in 1951 but resumed again in 1987. This represents the hiatus that befell China in all walks. In much of China the sacred places of Taoism are now Disney-style theme park exhibitions where the Party has erected signs – belatedly – commanding that abstract entity “The People” to “Respect Our Heritage!” Traditional Taoist medicine and other traditional sciences are now being reconstructed according to Party requirements. Again, if one wants the real thing rather than the Party reconstruction one needs to go to Taiwan or Hong Kong or Singapore, or George Town, or even San Francisco.

Similarly, the great guiding wisdom of Confucius still exists as a bedrock of Chinese social customs, but Mao had a particular disregard for the Confucians and tried to wipe their influence from Chinese society altogether. Taoism and Confucianism are a matching set, a heaven-ordained synergy that, together with Chan Buddhism, form a complex that is the spiritual core of the Chinese tradition. (Perhaps more on this in a later post.) Today, Confucius has been rehabilitated as a great pioneering “educator” in the Party’s official secular history but his true place in Chinese ideas is largely unrecognized. There are signs of renewal though. There is a ‘New Confucianism’ movement and the contemporary scholar Jiang Qing (ironically the same name as Mao's wife!) has bravely proposed a political Confucianism to replace the withering experiment of Marxism. He believes – a view with which this present author is in sympathy – that Confucianism represents the best and purest and most authentic genius of China and that many of the Middle Kingdom’s social and political difficulties in these present and coming times would be best addressed by a new embrace of the Confucian tradition. The present author was privileged to visit several of the great extant Confucian temple complexes during his recent travels. The temple in Soochow was especially impressive. Such once-sacred places are now essentially schools and universities but it was noticeable that many Chinese visitors greeted the temples with solemn reverence and there is at least a functioning priesthood again. 

The Confucian temple in Soochow

All the same, the symptoms of secularization of the tradition are evident everywhere, not least in the quite remarkable spread of evangelical Christianity in China. How can the spread of Christianity be a symptom of seculaerization? Chinese Leftism, like Leftism everywhere, is essentially a species of self-harm. The thing that motivates a Leftist above all else is self hatred - usually dressed up as a concern for 'justice' for others. It is always a self/other pathology. In China, it was the Chinese tradition that the Maoists hated first and foremost. And it remains expressions of the Chinese tradition – let us note the conspicuous example of Falun Gong – that the Party continues to persecute first and foremost. Into the vacuum thus created moves exotic ideologies and especially, these days, Christianity. These are boom times for Christian missionaries in China, although one needs to note that – remarkably – Christianity grew and advanced during the Cultural Revolution too. Again, that “revolution” took aim at China’s own traditions – it was an extended exercise in self-harm - and in doing so it created the space for external ideologies to fill the void, rhetoric about “colonialism” notwithstanding. 

For the present writer this fact is a salient lesson. In the contemporary West, Leftists – “cultural Marxists" who are conducting their own “cultural revolution" through the sophisticated tactics of “soft totalitarianism” – are first and foremost out to do as much harm to the Judeo-Christian tradition as possible. They are perfectly happy to have Mahometanism and Lamaism and other exotic creeds infiltrate the occidental spiritual arena purely because it advances the vandalism of their agenda. (How else is one to explain 'Feminists for the Burqa' or 'Gays for Shariah'?) This is what occurred in China, mutates mutandis. Why, one must ask, did the Party, does the Party, so tolerate Christianity yet crushes a movement like Falun Gong? The answer to this question reveals much about the real nature of Leftism everywhere. 

Throughout his travels across China the present author encountered converts to Christianity at every turn. Islam too is advancing, or at least holding its own. Maoism deliberately damaged the native traditions of China. The Party remains watchful lest unwholesome vestiges of that tradition arise again. The sublime play that is religion has been replaced for most of the population with the inane trinkets of Disney consumerism. But there is – this writer can report – thirst in the ground. Sadly, the Chinese are turning to Protestant forms of the Christian religion as a cure. It is estimated that in a few decades time, at the current rate, China will boast one of the biggest Christian populations in the world. Sadly, because it is actually a side-effect of the Marxist vandalism of the Chinese tradition, undertaken in the demonstrably false belief that it was a necessary step on the path to modernity. It is just as sad – in the same manner - that people in the West are turning to Boodhism and Kung Foo because their own heritage has been systematically and tirelessly sullied by the vicious social engineers who now rule over the institutions of cultural production. This writer’s travels and experiences in China have served to underline this for him and to bring such politico-cultural issues to some new clarity.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Garden Windows of Soochow

Relief sculpture from below a bridge illustrating the patterned windows as part of the heritage of Soochow city.

Soochow, or as some call it Souzhou, is known as the ‘Venice of the East’. An ancient city built on a series of canals, it is rightly famous as a showpiece of traditional Chinese culture. This is not to downplay the extraordinary damage it sustained during the Maoist’s so-called Cultural Revolution – damage that can be seen everywhere in China – but thankfully much of Soochow has remained intact. On his recent journeys throughout the Middle Kingdom, the present author made a largely unplanned detour to Soochow and was happy to be stranded in a city of waterways, boutique cafes and classical gardens. The latter – the gardens – are, they say, among the very best in China and represent the aesthetics and values of classical Chinese horticulture, albeit minus the guiding principles of feng sui which are among those elements that fell foul of the aforementioned ‘Revolution’. The gardens, that is to say, are largely secularized nowadays, and have been stripped of many traditional features. Nevertheless, in their essential design many of them go back several hundred years or in some cases nearly a thousand. 

The largest is the Garden of the Humble Administrator. It is the most famous but, as it happens, probably the least inspiring. Far better are some of the smaller gardens such as the Garden of the Master of Nets – the author took lodgings directly opposite this small garden and found it both beautiful and unique. Also worthwhile was the little-visited Garden of Couples – a lover’s garden – that is more compact and modest but appropriately intimate and romantic. Temples and other religious institutions were completely trashed during the Cultural Revolution – the most wanton outbreak of mass vandalism in history – but gardens largely emerged unscathed. Certainly, they were removed from private hands and placed under public control, and they were often turned into "fitness parks" for the ‘People’s Recreation’, but they generally remained as before. These days, some of the lost elements are being reconstituted. In the Garden of Couples, for instance, a public notice now explains to visitors – Chinese and foreign – that the ‘Book of Changes’ pavilion (a beautiful, quaint little building at the edge of a lotus pond) was used for a “type of Taoist fortunetelling once popular in the old days”. 

If you are looking for traditional China and want to learn about the Chinese tradition, the People's Republic is not the place to go. You would find more of the authentic Chinese tradition in San Francisco.  The Cultural Revolution was appallingly thorough. It is common to encounter Chinese with next to no knowledge of their cultural history. It is a country where religion was outlawed for an entire generation. The great Buddhist temple in Shanghai was turned into a plastics factory. Many Chinese have never even heard of Confucious. The Party, though, recently admitted for the first time that the Cultural Revolution was a "mistake" and have instituted a re-culturation program called "China Dream". It is only now that the Chinese people are slowly, slowly recovering something of what was lost. 

* * * 

One of the notable features of the gardens of Soochow, as well as the walls that define them, and buildings all along the canals of the city, are windows set with geometric, floral and other patterns. There are, literally, hundreds of different designs on display. They are everywhere, such that they form one of the conspicuous visual features of the whole landscape. 

Many posts ago, this present writer made mention of the similarities between the Chinese sense of geometric patterning and that of the Mohammedans. The garden windows of Soochow are, surely, another example. The writer, in fact, began his travels through the Middle Kingdom in the Mohammedan western provinces, following the silk road to Xi’an where one finds the oldest mosque in China. From there, he followed the Chinese Musoolmen tradition to Louyang, and then to other locations, and found to his own satisfaction that it extends all the way eastwards to Shanghai. There is no mosque in Soochow, but the city is near to Shanghai and there can be no doubt that Mohammedan influences, driven by trade, extended all the way from west to east, and could not have missed such a cultural centre. 

There is no need to prove “influences” and “contact” though. It is enough to observe that many of the patterns that adorn the garden windows throughout the classical gardens of Soochow, and much loved by the Chinaman, are identical to favoured patterns used extensively in the Mohammedan tradition. 

The author made some attempt to collect photographs of as many instances of these windows as possible, but there are simply too many. Most are rectangular, some are circular, some irregular. All are abstract and, thankfully, none are representational. Only a few designs are repeated. In most gardens every window has a unique pattern. They allow veiled views from one space into another. It will be noted that in a modern relief sculpture situated under a bridge on one of the main canals, the subject of which is the illustrious history of Soochow (see the picture at the top of this page), these geometric windows appear as if they are regarded as part of the city’s heritage. The appearance of these patterns on bus stops and the like is, of course, a modern affectation, but it does seem likely that the origins of many if not all of these designs extends back into the city’s past. This page (see below) features examples of the garden windows of Soochow. They are much to this author's taste.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Difference Confucius Makes

The previous posting to this blog concerned the significant differences between the Indo-Vedic civilization on the one hand – which is to say the greater Indian sub-continent and thereabouts - and the Sino-Asiatic on the other – which is to say Southern and North-Eastern Asia. Various points of contrasts were noted – such as the Hindoo world giving way to the Boodhist – with a different relation to salt in the cuisine, and a different salt regime in general, being given as a crucial one. Readers can see the post, Salt and Civilisation, here.

The specific reason for noting the contrasts is that the present author has, in the past few weeks, traversed from one civilization to the other, crossing the invisible line that divides the two. After six months travelling around the sub-continent, most recently along the Malabar coast, he has now made it as far east as the Prince of Wales Island (or what the Malays call ‘Pe Nang’, the so-called ‘Pearl of the Orient’) to take up temporary residence in the elegant historic city of George Town. The contrasts between India and South-East Asia are marked, obvious and everywhere. As he adjusts to the relocation, more and more contrasts present themselves. There are still swastikas on the temples and the Musselmens still give the call to prayer five times a day, along with many other points of continuity with Hindoostan – indeed, there are plenty of Dravidians about and George Town includes an entire area popularly called Little India – so there is a definite sense of being in the same Asia as before, generally speaking. But the distinctions are more profound than the continuities. It is a different spiritual atmosphere, a different construction of traditions, a different culture. What exactly defines these differences? What factors are the most decisive?

One psycho-spiritual difference is immediately apparent: when one enters the Chinese or Chinese-influenced world one enters a new encounter with “luck”. The Hindoo, and even more the Mahometan, can be perfectly fatalistic and will indulge in prayers and amulets to confer good fortune and to attract blessings, but this is quite different to the Chinese preoccupation with “luck”. The Chinaman lives in a web of “luck”, which often manifests as a proclivity to gambling. The present writer saw no instances of gambling anywhere in India. No doubt it exists, but it is not a feature of Indian culture. It is, however, of the Chinese. And, as anywhere, it is unhealthy. “Luck” is surely a trivialization, a degeneration, of the ancient Chinese spirit, a symptom of metaphysical decline. In many respects the Chinese are not nearly as ‘religious’ as the Indians – depending, of course, on what we mean by ‘religious’ – but they are more directly ‘superstitious’ in a profane sense. It is the difference between being “blessed” and being “lucky”. The religious man still seeks blessedness (and whatever than entails) whereas “luck” is a desacralized and profane version of blessedness and is focused upon worldly things. In George Town one can see Chinese lighting incense sticks in temples to assist the outcome of a horse race. Indian superstition is rarely so crude. 

There are, all the same, ways in which the Sino-Asiatic culture is more refined and developed than the Indian. The present writer must relate that, to a great degree, it comes as a relief to be out of an Indian milieu and to be settled in the far more orderly – and clean – realm of the Chinese. A different social order prevails, a different sense of the civic. This is not merely sociological. It goes much deeper.

A friend of the writer, who was himself widely travelled and well acquainted with these distinct worlds, long ago made the remark that, in his opinion, the most fundamental difference between the Indians and the Asians – the Hindoostanis and the Sino-Asiatics – can be put down to one word, one name: Confucius. “Asia has Confucius,” he said, “Whereas India does not.” The two worlds have, as already noted, the Boodha in common, although the Asians embraced him and his fellow Indians did not (or not finally). And Taoism, indigenous to China, is pervasive in its influence in the Chinese world but has never made a mark in the Indian. But, more to the point, - more important even than Lao Tse - China had a Confucius and India had no equivalent.

Chinese culture and religious tradition is often stylized as an amalgam of three main streams: Boodhism, Taoism and Confucianism. Of these three, the latter is the one most often neglected by outsiders and especially by Western observers because it hardly seems like a “religion” at all, and yet it is the tradition that has made the deepest impression upon the Chinese and upon their wider world. Every aspect of Chinese life – the whole of Chinese civilization - is coloured by Confucius and the greater Confucian tradition, and this influence extends on every level throughout the entire sphere of historical and cultural Chinese influence, throughout the whole of South-east Asia as well as Korea and Japan in the north. Confucius and Confusianism, more than any other single factor, has created the very fabric of Sino-Asiatic life.

This is evident in many ways, but primarily in what we might term an elevated notion of ‘civic virtue’. These pages are not the place to explain the manner in which Confucianism operates as a religion and not merely as a philosophy in the lesser sense - it is certainly much more than merely a code of social behaviour. It has much deeper roots in the Asiatic soul. But in practical terms, and for our present purposes, its effect is to inculcate civic virtues. This is conspicuously lacking in the Indian. The Indian order promotes many profound virtues, of course, especially those pertaining to family and to caste, and yet there is a remarkable lack of civic virtues. This becomes all too evident once one has a different social order, such as the Chinese, with which to compare. One wonders why the Indian does not seem to have the slightest degree of civic pride? His virtues are private, and based in family and caste affinities, yet are conspicuously lacking at the civic level. It is a problem with which governments in India must contend all the time – to no great effect. The modern Indian has a newly concocted sense of nationalism, certainly, but that is a different thing again. There is, aside from that, a very definite lack of civic consciousness and civic obligation, virtues which are deeply ingrained in Chinese culture by contrast.

This aspect of Indo-Vedic civilization is on display at every point in the civic environment in every part of the sub-continent. As any traveler can relate, the dirtiness of the Indian civic environment is truly something to behold. The Indian, as many travelers have long remarked, is very clean in his personal habits, and also in his home, but that is where it ends. He feels no obligation to keep the streets clean. Nor does he feel any obligation to respect the beauty of Mother India more generally. This writer heard a story related of a traveler on an Indian train who was chided for putting a plastic wrapper in a rubbish bin. “No, no,” he was told, “you throw it out the window.” He resisted this, but after a while a bin attendant arrived and duly emptied the entire rubbish bin out the door of the moving train. It was suddenly apparent that the traveler had been chided for making the bin attendant’s job more difficult. 

It is such things that make India so incomprehensible to outsiders. Indians are punctilious about purity but think nothing about spitting in public places. This is to say nothing about defecating! Poor Mother India, in truth, is the biggest urinal in the world. The present writer was shocked and horrified to arrive in Cochin – assuredly a beautiful location – only to find the entire foreshore literally ankle deep in rubbish. Most remarkable is the fact that no one seems to notice. Indian families sit on the sandy beaches conducting picnics in amongst the junk and years of accumulated plastic bags. No one makes the slightest effort to clean up the mess. Without doubt the most appalling abuse to be seen is in Boodha Gaya where Indians have been throwing empty drink bottles into the compound housing the Bodhi tree and the Diamond Throne of the Boodha. India is very raw.

Once one enters a world under Chinese influence, however, there is a marked difference. A sense of civic virtue prevails. George Town is spotless. The streets are pristine. The same sense continues throughout all those parts under Chinese influence, the entire Sino-Asiatic realm. Once, in Japan, this writer and his fellow travelers noted an item of rubbish screwed up and shoved into a hedge. It was the only item of rubbish to be seen in the entire city. Someone quipped, though, that the miscreant responsible would probably spend sleepless nights about it and would eventually go back, throw the rubbish in the bin, and might possibly turn himself into the police in shame. This is the mark of Confucius. Such is the hold that Confucius has upon the Asiatic soul. 

It is very noticeable. Why is India the way she is? Why are the profound spiritual traditions of India accompanied by civic chaos? The answer is that India never had a Confucius. In many respects Sino-Asiatic spirituality is not as lofty, not as transcendent, as the Indo-Vedic, but it is consequently more grounded, more concerned with civic realities. This is exactly the nature of Confucianism. We may have difficulty appreciating the ways in which it constitutes a ‘religion’, but such is the very nature of Asian religiosity, certainly as it was shaped by Confucianism. This holds in check the otherworldliness of Boodhism and the emphasis upon nature that characterizes Taoism. India never had such a moderating influence to bridge heaven and earth. 

Confucianism, of course, is far more than merely a deeply rooted civic code. It was among the so-called Neo-Confucian sages such as Zhu Xi and his followers that China found a parallel to the metaphysics of Plato. Westerners are often drawn to Taoism, but it is actually certain schools of Confucianism that are nearest to the occidental temperament. This might be the subject of a later post. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black