The Chinaman Is Not the Issue

There was a report on NBC nightly news last night, one of dozens of similar reports in the last decade or so, which treated the rise of China as a surprising and vaguely threatening turn of events. The report ended with the reassurance of "experts" that China would have to change its form of government before it could be a truly "great" nation.

It takes a special sort of narcissism and historical ignorance to be shocked that the oldest continuous civilization in the world, and a civilization which accounts for more than one fourth of all mankind today, could ever dare to drive for "greatness".

By the time the United States was founded, the place and culture known as "China" had already existed for THOUSANDS of years. This is not a nation that is rising from nowhere; it is a nation experiencing one of its cyclical rises just as surely as it has since Moses was in short pants.

Americans tend to think of their rise to dominance as without precedent and as having been preordained by one god or another, whether secular or religious, Jesus or Jefferson. There is some truth to this myth, as there are to all myths. But the Chinese may understand the arc of our history better than we do, because they have nearly 20 times as much history of their own to compare it to.

America and China are very different cultures, close to being as different as any two large cultures on Earth are from one another. But the rise and fall of empires is curiously not very contingent on culture; many different cultures have produced empires, and every single one has fallen. That implies that culture sort of cancels itself out when it comes to the relative efficacy of empire.

Chinese empires, because of China's vastness and geographical remoteness, are unique. Chinese empires and forms of government fall just like all others, but they are never fully conquered. Chinese governments fall to other Chinese. China as a whole has never been conquered from outside.

This is why we can say that China is the oldest civilization on Earth, even though people have been living in settled societies for just as long or longer in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India. All of those places have been totally conquered and colonized time and time again by foreign invasions. Not so with China.

Every time something in China is overthrow, it's another Chinese that it is doing it, so the broader culture has remained remarkably intact, even if its politics are just as violent as anyone else's. China's unbroken history gives it alot to learn from, suffice it to say.

The United States, compared to China, is brand new. When Chinese Premier Chou Enlai was asked when he thought the lessons of the French Revolution were two centuries later, he replied, "to soon to tell". Of all the cultural differences between East and West, perhaps the differing concepts of time is the most telling.

How long has America been a world power? There are many ways to measure this. By 1880, we were a huge country with a huge economy, but we largely did our own thing. By 1900, we were able to subjugate small, poor nations thousands of miles away (the Phillipines, Hawaii). By 1917, we were able to tip the balance in the Great War. By 1945 we had the power to destroy whole countries. By 1992 there was nobody left to get in our way if we chose to do just that.

That's quite a run from the American perspective, but from the Chinese perspective it barely registers. We've had an entirely unchallenged military since the fall of the USSR. In those nearly 20 years, we've actually increased our military spending despite the lack of competitors and spent trillions of dollars on two wars, neither of which will be over any time soon. We are much more impressed by that than the Chinese are.

The most important mental task for this country is to accept that we do not, never have, could not, should not, and never will control this planet. We have been, are, and will continue to be one of the greatest nations, but there will be others in the club.

This is not something that needs to threaten us, this obvious reality. What is a threat, however, is the attitude that prevails now. An insistence that nobody come close to challenging us in any realm is tied up with so many of our phobias and our dysfunctions.

Societies do not become great simply be believing that they are great; they must also actively create greatness in each generation. Here's a simple comparison: what percentage of American children could read the Chinese symbols pictured above? 1? Now, what percentage of Chinese children can read English? Catch my drift?