Britain can be compared to France – and Russia to America – but no country can sit alongside China.
It has three unique features;
- It has a five thousand years old continuous high civilisation – at least since President Jiang Zemin visited Egypt in 1997, saw the pyramids and added a thousand years on.
- Its population is almost a sixth of the whole globe’s – though in the long run it faces problems of ageing.
- And finally, until the irruption of Europe and the intrusion of Japan in the nineteenth century, China almost willfully isolated herself from other cultures.
A further distinguishing feature is the near-homogeneity of the population and a relative absence of religious fissures. Of its 1.4 billion people, ethnic Han Chinese constitute 93%. Muslims, the largest minority, are a mere 21 million. Tibetans represent five million and Mongols six. For all of Beijing’s problems in Tibet and Xinjiang province – where they have perfected the surveillance state – it is unlikely that China will ever allow any minority to develop a viable separatist movement – let alone to secede. China may celebrate colourful folkways, but it is deeply assimilationist too. Ethnic homogeneity and an increasingly common culture give the Chinese what the great medieval Arab historian Ibn Khaldun called ‘asabiyyah’, meaning a very strong sense of purposeful solidarity.
Unified under the first Emperor Qin in the third century BC, the country was later to suffer protracted periods of internecine warfare. If the Qin dynasty remains a reference point for the Chinese, it is as much for the severity of the centralised rule as for the successful unification. To this day Chinese leaders remain haunted by the menace of local fiefdoms – one of the reasons why the once mighty ‘neo-Maoist’ Chongquin party boss Bo Xilai is in a prison cell with grey hair and a long beard. In China, as you might have noticed, all leaders are clean shaven and their hair is jet black.
The notion that the Chinese are a race of plagiarists is belied by the richness and inventiveness of its past – in industry as in culture. When Europe was sunk in its Dark Ages, China enjoyed one of its most prosperous eras. The Tang dynasty (AD 618-907) was a highpoint of Chinese civilisation – notably it was the time when wood-block printing was invented. Writing paper had been discovered by the court eunuch Cai Lun in AD 105 and was used as lavatory paper from the 6th century.
This was also when the examination system for public office was elaborated. The advantage was its meritocratic nature – the reason that Europe introduced similar reforms a little later. One thousand years later. The downside was its scholastic approach. The examinations, with Confucian values (551–479 BC) at their core, placed a premium on rigid conformism rather than individual thinking. It was a tendency Mao Zedong understood and exploited to the full during his communist dictatorship.
The greatest mystery in Chinese history was its failure to expand its overseas exploration and trade at a time – the fifteenth century – when its shipbuilding capacities were far in advance of the West’s. Its command vessels, for example, were three times the size of Nelson’s HMS Victory. The epic voyages of Admiral Zheng He during the fifteenth century were never repeated.
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