My Take | Is modern China the end (goal) of history?
- A fully developed and industrialised country – with its people and state sharing the same or similar goals, aspirations and values in rational self-interest – is how Hegel describes the end point of political development, a state that is more or less harmonised, and free of radical polarisation
People are proud of their history, even when it’s not about their victories over some unfortunate groups worse off than they. Defeats, especially terrible ones leading to long periods of subjugation that happened long ago, often help rally the troops and citizens much more effectively.
So Chinese communists make a big deal out of “the century of humiliation”. During and after the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Serbian nationalists were obsessed with the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, which led to the subjugation of Serbs by the Ottomans.
People can be so proud of their history that they would regard it as a distinct mark of civilisation so that others allegedly less civilised or advanced have no history. This was, for example, how “civilised” men thought of “primitive” men and animals. But how can you not have history; or how do you have history?
There is a remarkable if bizarre statement from Thucydides: “There was nothing on a great scale, either in war or in other matters [before the Peloponnesian war].”
Consider these: the war took place between 431 and 405BCE; the end of the last Ice Age was about 12,000 years ago and Mesopotamian civilisations first emerged 6,000 years ago. That’s a lot of “non-history”!
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A chronology of the People’s Republic of China in the past seven decades
Of course, you can argue history is all about the writing of it. So, if there was no one around to write it, how do you know what happened, or if anything happened? Call this history’s equivalent to that philosophy 101 question – if a tree falls in the forest, and there’s nobody around to hear, does it make a sound?