In stressing the continuity of Chinese civilization, it can reasonably be objected that over a period of more than two millennia, it has been through such huge and often violent disruptions and discontinuities that there can be little resemblance between China now and two millennia ago. At one level, of course, this is true. China has changed beyond recognition. But at another level the lines of continuity are stubborn and visible. This is reflected in the self-awareness of the Chinese themselves: the way in which Chinese civilization – as expressed in history, ways of thinking, customs and etiquette, traditional medicine and food, calligraphy, the role of government and the family – remains their primary point of reference. [602] Wang Gungwu argues that ‘what is quintessentially Chinese is the remarkable sense of continuity that seems to have made the civilization increasingly distinctive over the centuries. ’ [603] Given that since 221 BC China has been unified for 1,074 years, partially unified for 673 years, and disunited for 470 years, while experiencing several major invasions and occupations over the last millennium, this is, to put it mildly, remarkable. [604] Yet the very nature of those occupations points to the strength of Chinese culture and its underlying resilience and continuity: the proto-Mongol Liao dynasty (AD 907- 1125) was the first non-Chinese dynasty in north China; the Jin dynasty (1115- 1234) were Mongol; the Yuan dynasty (1279- 1368) were also Mongol and the Qing dynasty (1644- 1912) were Manchu, but they all sooner or later went native and were Sinicized. In each instance Chinese culture enjoyed very considerable superiority over its invaders. Even the earlier Buddhist ‘invasion’ from India in the first century AD was to culminate in the Sinification of Buddhist teachings over a period of hundreds of years. [605]
The challenge of the West from around 1850 was an entirely different proposition: key aspects of Western culture, notably its scientific orientation and knowledge, were patently superior to traditional Confucianism and plunged it into a deepening crisis as the Chinese reluctantly sought some kind of reconciliation between traditional and Western values. Between 1911 and 1949 virtually no institution of significance (constitution, university, press, Church, etc.) lasted in its existing form for more than a generation, such was the gravity and enduring nature of China ’s impasse. The Western challenge de-centred Chinese assumptions. Eventually, when all else had failed, the Chinese turned to Communism, or more specifically Maoism, which involved the explicit rejection of Confucianism. Yet during the Maoist period, Confucian values and ways of thinking continued to be influential, albeit in a subterranean form, remaining in some measure the common sense of the people. Even now, having succeeded in reversing its decline and in the midst of modernization, China is still troubled by the relationship between Chinese and Western cultures and the degree to which it might find itself Westernized, as we saw in the discussion amongst the students in Chapter 5. Somehow, however, through the turbulence, carnage, chaos and rebirth, China remains recognizably and assuredly Chinese. As it moves once more into the ascendant, its self-confidence inflated by its recent achievements, China ’s search for meaning is drawing not simply on modernity, but also, and as always, on its civilizational past. Confucian ways of thinking, never extinguished, are being actively revived and scrutinized for any light that they might throw on the present, and for their ability to offer a moral compass.
For many developing countries, the process of modernization has been characterized by a crisis of identity, often exacerbated by the colonial experience, a feeling of being torn between their own culture and that of the West, linked to an inferiority complex about their own relative backwardness. The Chinese certainly felt a sense of humiliation, but never the same kind of overwhelming and hobbling inferiority: they have always had a strong sense of what it means to be Chinese and are very proud of the fact. Such is the strength of Chineseness, indeed, that it has tended to blur and overshadow – in contrast to India, for example – other powerful identities such as region, class and language. This sense of belonging is rooted in China ’s civilizational past, [606] which serves to cohere an enormous population otherwise fragmented by dialect, custom, ethnic difference, geography, climate, level of economic development and disparate living standards. ‘What binds the Chinese together,’ Lucian Pye argues, ‘is their sense of culture, race, and civilization, not an identification with the nation as a state.’ [607]
