<UN> China: Promise or Threat? <UN> Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series Editor David Fasenfest (Wayne State University) Editorial Board Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Duke University) Chris Chase-Dunn (University of California-Riverside) William Carroll (University of Victoria) Raewyn Connell (University of Sydney) Kimberlé W. Crenshaw (University of California, la, and Columbia University) Heidi Gottfried (Wayne State University) Karin Gottschall (University of Bremen) Mary Romero (Arizona State University) Alfredo Saad Filho (University of London) Chizuko Ueno (University of Tokyo) Sylvia Walby (Lancaster University) Volume 96 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scss <UN> China: Promise or Threat? A Comparison of Cultures By Horst J. Helle LEIDEN | BOSTON <UN> This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the cc-by-nc License, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. Cover illustration: Terracotta Army. Photographer: Maros M r a z. Source: Wikimedia Commons. (https://goo.gl/WzcOIQ); (cc by-sa 3.0). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Helle, Horst Jürgen, author. Title: China : promise or threat? : a comparison of cultures / by Horst J. Helle. Description: Brill : Boston, [2016] | Series: Studies in critical social sciences ; volume 96 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016034846 (print) | lccn 2016047881 (ebook) | isbn 9789004298200 (hardback : alk. paper) | isbn 9789004330603 (e-book) Subjects: lcsh: China--Social conditions. | China--Cultural policy--History. | China--Social life and customs. | China--Religion. | China--Foreign relations. Classification: lcc hn733.5 .h534 2016 (print) | lcc hn733.5 (ebook) | ddc 306.0951--dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016034846 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1573-4234 isbn 978-90-04-29820-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-33060-3 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Horst J. Helle. This work is published by Koninklijke Brill nv. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re-use, use of parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. <UN> Contents Foreword: A Fascination with China vii David Fasenfest Preface xi Introduction: The Goal of This Book 1 1 Familism: A Threat to the Environment 5 The “Public Sphere:” Rights without Obligations 5 Two Types of Personal Association 9 Personalization of Law 11 2 Exchanges of Threats: The Opium Wars 14 International Relations: Britain 14 Russia, Japan, and Germany 20 The Chinese Experience: Threat and Disappointment 21 Why Did China Not Defend Herself? 22 3 China and the us: A Balance of Power? 24 Why Follow Thucydides? 24 Chinese Classics on Warfare 30 An Alternative to Thucydides: E.R. Service 31 Promises and Threats Based on Economic Interests 34 Real and Imagined Military Threats 38 4 Religions: Core Components of Cultures 40 The Task at Hand: What is a Religion? 40 Shared Origins of Contemporary Religions 43 Governmental Interference with Religious Affairs 47 5 Religious Vitality in Contemporary China 53 Types of Atheism in Party Politics 53 Ancestor Worship: The Religion of China 56 6 Max Weber’s View of Religion in China 59 <UN> vi Contents 7 Daoism: China’s Native Religion 71 The Fundamentals of Daoism 71 Nature and Life Everlasting in Daoism 75 Daoism as Seen by Confucians and Buddhists 79 8 Oracle-Bones: The Mandate of Heaven 82 How to Change – Forward or Backward? 82 The Splendid Age of the Oracle Bones 85 9 Confucius: Recapture the Lost Splendor 97 Heavenly Mandate and Objective Order 97 Finding Options for the Future 101 The Party or the Family as “Church” in China? 106 10 The West: Individualism at Its Limits 112 The Western Family as Fate and Tragedy 112 Evolution of Kinship in the West 115 11 China: The Kinship Society 123 Granet and the Analects: Cultural Evolution of Kinship in China 123 Fei Xiaotong: Field Work on Contemporary Family Life in China 128 Altruism and Selfishness: A Precarious Balance 133 12 China: A Threatening Promise to the West 138 Summaries of the Chapters 138 Concluding Queries about Threats and Promises 149 References 155 Index 160 <UN> Foreword A Fascination with China The name Marco Polo evokes images of exotic adventure and Europe travels east to explore the riches of the Orient. Everyone knows the story of how his travels brought to Europe new spices, gun powder and noodles. Just as the horticulture of the New World introduced tomatoes to Italian cooking, East and West collided to create the quintessential Italian meal of pasta and toma- to sauce. China represents mystery, the unknown and unknowable, certainly with the isolation during the great dynasties of central China, and perhaps even more so today, China is a country both seemingly impenetrable yet ev- erywhere in the world. China is ever present in the Western press, is a topic of intellectual inquiry, and for many a symbol of the unknown that should be feared. What can’t be denied is that we have misconceptions borne of misun- derstanding, and anything that offers us a better understanding of the country and its people can only aid in fostering a safer world for all. Most of us think of historical China as a vast inland empire, in the North China Plain with it’s capital Beijing protected by a Great Wall that extended from the North China Sea across the northern border west to the mountains. It was a wall designed to protect the empire from the Mongols coming from the North. But China’s history included extensive navel adventures. During the end of the 10th Century to the end of the 13th Century (during the Tang [618-907] and Song [960-1279] Dynasties) Chinese merchants sailed throughout South East Asia, into the Persian Gulf, along the Arabian Peninsula, the Red Sea and there is evidence of trading with cities of Egypt and Ethiopia (Bowman 2000). Chinese ships traveled along the east coast of Africa and appeared in the chron- icles of North African merchants (Sun 1989: 310-314). The ongoing invasions by the Mongols meant that China’s rulers pulled back its naval forces for the de- fense of the Empire. But this fascination with China’s maritime exploits have led to some wilder (and generally disputed) claims about how far it’s fleets traveled (Menzies 2002, 2008). One can speculate; had the Mongol invasion not focused Imperial resources inland, continued merchant explorations down the coast of Africa might have resulted in a 13th Century voyage up Africa’s Western coast, perhaps leading to a very different dynamic of Chinese-European interactions. European misconceptions about China are long standing, and Max Weber’s essays under the title Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie (Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion) that appeared first from 1920 to 1921, in- cluded a section on China, later published as The Religion of China (1951), is but <UN> viii Foreword one example. In it he tried to understand China’s failure to develop the kind of bourgeois capitalism in place in Europe by the turn of the 20th Century. Build- ing on his general argument that there is both capitalist practices (instances of activities we might call production and manufacturing) and a capitalist spirit, a nation has to have the latter before the former can become the dominant sys- tem of production. So-called “modern” socio-economic development cannot occur unless there are proper (and religious) influences. Some of these themes resonate with this book’s content – that is, what are the essential characteris- tics of Chinese and Western cultures that can explain both the similarities and differences in the two societies. The desire to make sense of this uneven development led to explorations into China’s past for indications of how the economies of the West and China diverged. In his analysis, Elvin (1974) recounts China’s Imperial history, con- cluding that between the 8th and 12th Centuries China’s agriculture was trans- formed, unleashing productive forces that became “the dynamic driving force behind an era of economic revolution (113).” In essence, agriculture in China exceeded the practices and productivity of agriculture in Europe during this same period. Elvin goes on to document this economic revolution fuelled by significant advances in farming, water transport, money and credit, markets and urbanization, and finally a revolution in science and technology. Why, then, doesn’t China’s economic prowess and technology result in the kind of indus- trial transformation that can bring on an Industrial Revolution as had advances in the West? European productivity gains in agriculture starting in the turn of the 19th Century generated the surpluses needed to feed an every growing in- dustrial and urban population, as well as provided the wool (though at the cost of enclosures and displacement of communities) that fuelled early manufac- turing. Elvin concludes, perhaps in contradiction to Weber’s arguments, that China’s extensive bureaucracy and the domination of Imperial rule during this period created what Elvin called a “high-level equilibrium trap (298)” that froze the economy into a state of quantitative growth but a qualitative standstill.