My Take | We never understood what ‘China’ meant

Everything we think we know about “China”, its history and culture is probably not quite right. That, at least, has been my own experience of personal study over the years. By and large, my own teachers from decades ago didn’t serve me well; in fact, rather badly. But I don’t blame them. Most teachers are not there to enlighten, but to indoctrinate. They did what they were paid for with me and my schoolmates – from a so-called elite school in Hong Kong no less.

One thing that fascinates me is Chinese philosophies before, and at the time of, Chinese unification circa 221BCE. It’s often claimed that the foundational philosophy (or philosophies) of a civilisation is a spiritual or material distillation of the time and place of its birth – what the Germans call zeitgeist. And that supposedly is also the case with the perennial Chinese philosophies.

Without considering their particular doctrines, but simply looking at their chronological order vis-à-vis political and military developments of over half a millennium over vast territories that came to be called “China”, this notion of zeitgeist can hardly be sustained with the philosophies of Confucianism, Taoism and Legalism.

Just to put my cards on the table, I opt for what the German philosopher and psychologist Karl Jaspers calls the Axial Age, a period of less than a millennium, for unknown reason, when foundational ideas emerged within the great civilisations. Or rather, to put it more accurately, they emerged as they came to articulate the foundations and formations of those nascent civilisations.

The key ideological tenet of practically all Chinese states and dynasties, from the Qin unifiers to the Chinese communists today, is their shared teleology of the 221BCE unification as the telos or purpose of the preceding ages – or if you like, the Chinese unification marks “the end of the Chinese prehistory”. After that, it was all more of the same of the millennial dynastic cycles that came to characterise Chinese history proper, or at least the version of history I was taught in school.

This is, actually, very much similar to the “end of history” notion of Francis Fukuyama, whereby Western democracy and free-market capitalism are considered the end point of historical development. After that, it’s all about spreading democracy and consumerism around the world – more of the same for everyone, everywhere. It’s just that some societies, Western ones, arrive earlier than others.