Gee’s Reviews > The Soul of China > Status Update

the arrogant feeling of being the only civilized “Middle Kingdom” (Zhongguo) surrounded by “barbarians” has not altogether disappeared. Backed by the longest continuous civilization in history, the Chinese are not likely to be easy-going partners for other nations in the twenty-first century

If we go back to the onset of the Marxist revolution, and uncover the deep-rooted feelings which the Chinese had concealed for so long under layers of urbane courtesy, we find in the first half of the twentieth century an immense hatred for the West which had been constantly swelling for generations. This hatred was based on a multiplicity of sentiments: the despair of a collapsing civilization

its theoreticians now talked in terms of a “socialist commodity economy.” For the new leaders of Pink China, what was left of Marxism was no longer an ideology; it was simply a methodology.

Chinese, under the spur of the Confucian vision of things, have always been universalists. In the old days this universalism implied that the human race consisted of “civilized” men—that is, the Chinese—and “barbarians,” which included all the non-Chinese portion of the human race

universalism implied a unification of the entire human race and the elimination of frontiers between states and nations

revolution was to be ruthlessly brought about, and accompanied by the massive destruction of all the buildings and artistic treasures of a despised past. This cultural slaughter was carried out on a vast and breathtaking scale. Only the personal intervention of Premier Chou En-lai could, at times, save some of the precious heirlooms

this new orthodoxy had to conform psychologically to Time-conscious people who had replaced the religious cults of former times with Confucianism and ancestor worship; it has to be a secular philosophy of history which seduces the historically minded Chinese and merely substitutes for the old Confucian, outdated explanation of the past

In China, those liberal and democratic converts to Western ideals were bound to be crushed between the old, strong landlord-dominated Kuomintang and the new Communist faith, ruthless and determined to exploit all the weaknesses and blindness of Western-type liberalism

China was no longer an isolated, self-contained civilized world; she had acquired neighbors and was gradually becoming a nation in the midst of other nations. This fact alone was bound to put an end to her universalist vision of a self-enclosed world and induce the Chinese to seek another, higher form of universalism. But it was inevitable that, in the process, her old, petrified civilization and the exclusivism