My Take | The West’s contempt for China has a long history
- Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn’s nasty tweet may have been racist, but it finds echoes in the greatest of Western thinkers about the moral inferiority of Chinese people
Her message has offended many people, but not me. Rather, it sent me on a quest. Being a lifelong student of philosophy, I am sure I have read similar sentiments expressed by some of the greatest Western thinkers about China and the Chinese. Blackburn is in good company.
It took me a few days to track down the texts. The passages were easy enough to identify, since I religiously underlined them as proof of guilt to implicate Western philosophy when I was in graduate school from another age. It was the old books that were left buried and unopened somewhere for decades in my house that couldn’t be easily found.
Well, voila! Blackburn is positively a philosopher. In echoes from centuries past, Montesquieu wrote in The Spirit of the Laws: “lt is strange that the Chinese, whose life is entirely directed by rites, are nevertheless the most unscrupulous people on earth. This appears chiefly in commerce …
“Everyone in China has had to be attentive to what is useful to him; if the rascal has watched over his interests, he who is duped has had to think of his own … In China, deceit is permitted … Let us not compare the morality of China with that of Europe.”
There was no comparison for Montesquieu because the Chinese were either knaves or imbeciles, and so couldn’t have morality. It’s not for nothing that he called the Chinese “the most unscrupulous people on Earth”, adding “this honour of which one speaks among a people to whom one can compel to do nothing without the blow of the stick”.
Everything sounds better in French: “… cet honneur dont on parle chez des peuples a qui on ne fait rien faire qu’a coups de baton”.