Word: westernness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Every country is not only a country but also an idea. The idea of China has haunted-and usually eluded-the Western mind ever since travelers set out to find the dream of golden-roofed Cathay. In the Renaissance, Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit who reported on China under the Ming dynasty, praised the country's "orderly management of the entire realm." In the Age of Reason, Leibniz suggested that what Europe needed was Chinese missionaries to teach "goodness." In the Victorian era, the U.S. Protestant missionary Arthur H. Smith was shocked by China's "indifference to suffering...
Many of the apparent contradictions are caused by one basic difference between the West and China. Western man, in the image of Prometheus or Faust, seeks to dominate nature; the Chinese seeks to live in harmony with it. The ideal of harmony-with the universe, with the past, within society-helps to explain China's durability, its long resistance to change, the subordination of the individual to the overall design. Above all, it helps to account for the periodic outbursts of violence in a land that values nonviolence. When society is repressed, when forms are meticulously observed, when balance...
...West, see a struggle between good and evil. The famous principles of Yin and Yang imply an alternate cosmic rhythm but not a struggle. Nor is there a relationship of struggle-or love or dialogue-between man and God. China is agnostic and scarcely knows a religion in the Western sense. Confucian teaching is not concerned with metaphysics. As the Master once told his disciples: "Till you have learned to serve men. how can you serve spirits?" In the Confucian view, man is essentially good-which is why the Chinese have a sense of shame...
...reported his father for stealing a sheep; the judge decided that the son should be put to death because he had shown greater loyalty toward the authorities than toward his own father. This extreme devotion to family explains why the traditional Chinese has no social conscience in the Western sense, for the community outside family or clan is an abstraction. One looks after one's own, not others: this is at the root of much Chinese corruption...
...Western notion of individualism, which insists on its own rights but respects the rights of others, is hard for the Chinese to understand. Author Lin Yu-tang describes a passenger in a crowded bus triumphantly settling into the only empty seat-the driver's-and refusing to give it up, even though it obviously means that the bus will go nowhere...