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”.
In his famous Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel elaborates on Montesquieu’s theme, though neither ever visited China or knew the language. Hegel did know a few key Chinese terms from the I Ching and the Analects of Confucius, judging from his contemptuous dismissal of them in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. (Just as Chinese had no morality, so Confucius was no philosopher.)
“It is not their own conscience, their own honour (i.e., the mandarins) which keeps the offices of government up to their duty, but an external mandate and the severe sanctions by which it is supported,” Hegel wrote.
But If the mandarins had no sense of honour, commoners were worse.
Hegel continued: “As no honour exists, and no one has an individual right in respect of others, the consciousness of debasement predominates, and this easily passes into that of utter abandonment. With this abandonment is connected the great immorality of the Chinese.
“They are notorious for deceiving wherever they can. Friend deceives friend, and no one resents the attempt at deception on the part of another, if the deceit has not succeeded in its object, or comes to the knowledge of the person sought to be defrauded. Their frauds are most astutely and craftily performed, so that Europeans have to be painfully cautious in dealing with them.”
I wonder how many times you have read the same or similar sentiment expressed in business and travel books written by Westerners in recent decades about doing business in China. All the howls of outrage about “intellectual property theft”, you have to wonder, are not the contemporary Western version of the Chinese being “the most unscrupulous people on Earth”.
Blackburn did get one thing right: “Something will never change.”
Where do all the current anti-China contempt, hysteria and paranoia in the United States, Australia and a few other Western countries come from? Are they well justified or unexamined opinions and beliefs buried deep within their culture and world view, and made worse by social media and politicians?
Who knows? I am not a psychologist or anthropologist. I just read books. And I am Chinese.
