A unique civilization

Book argues China cannot be judged through the prism of Western standards, David Paul Goldman writes.

China's 5,000-year-old civilization cannot be understood by Western criteria, nor can it be judged by Western standards, according to Professor Wen Yang. Rather, the Chinese civilization is a phenomenon sui generis with its own history, logic, and self-understanding, he writes in his new book, The Logic of Civilization: The Interaction and Evolution of Chinese and Western Civilization.

The differences between China and the West are so deep that Westerners fathom them with great difficulty. To Westerners, civilization simply is Western civilization, the progeny of Greek philosophy, Roman law and Hebrew revelation. China, the world's most populous country and until the late 18th century by far the wealthiest, is regarded as an anomalous backwater, the domain of an unchanging "oriental despotism" in a view promulgated by Western thinkers as diverse as Montesquieu, Hegel and John Stuart Mill.

Twentieth century America's view of China bore the stamp of Christian missionaries who saw in China the world's largest reserve of souls requiring salvation. The project by the United States of propagating US democracy throughout the world associated with former president Woodrow Wilson found its Chinese expression in the Christian missionaries who dominated US policy-making for East Asia. In a secular form, this Protestant perspective on China transmuted into a consensus US view that as China became more prosperous in the early years of the 21st century, its political system would evolve to resemble that of the US. US disappointment about China's failure to meet US expectations is an important source of Sino-US friction today.

One of China's leading theorists of civilization and a columnist, Wen proposes a diametrically opposite view: Civilization is not a Western matter but first and foremost a Chinese one. Chinese civilization has endured for 5,000 years; by contrast the Western nation-states began to form in embryo slightly more than a thousand years ago when barbarian invaders met the surviving remnants of the Roman Empire. The legal foundation of the Western nation-state did not take shape until the Treaty of Westphalia half a millennium ago. To identify civilizational history with Western history, Wen writes, ignores the duration and continuity of Chinese civilization over a much longer time frame.

Westerners will find Wen's thesis challenging. The West's own generative principle since it first emerged out of the ruins of the Roman Empire is universalist, and the notion that radically different modes of civilization exist runs counter to Western self-understanding. In quite a different way, China's civilization is universalist as well.