Magazine / Current / China / Article | 13/08/2008

A more astute view

From the tales of Marco Polo to trading insults on the Internet. As soon as China and Europe pay attention to each other they revert to stereotypes. A survey of mutual cultural perceptions.

For some time now the political climate between China and Europe has been poisoned both here and there largely by media hype. In fact, contact between China and Europe has always been marked by a rhythm of alternating rapprochement and distance. The first direct contact dates back to shortly after the founding of the Mongolian empire by Genghis Khan in the 13th century, an experience that drove terror into the hearts of those in the Occident.

Photo:AP

While Marco Polo's account of his travels to China during the era of the Mongolian empire –Description of the World (1271–1295) – was still treated as a kind of fairy tale, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Novissima Sinica (1697), written several centuries later, was taken rather more seriously. In the foreword to this work he stated that "the highest culture and the highest technical civilisation of mankind are both, so to speak, gathered at the two extreme ends of our continent, in Europe and China”. Leibniz believed the Europeans were on a par with the Chinese when it came to craftsmanship and in the theoretical sciences even superior, whereas in the field of practical philosophy and above all in the theory of ethics and politics they were evidently inferior.

Educated ignorance

Yet at precisely the time that Leibniz and Voltaire were professing their belief in Confucian ethics and hoping for a synthesis of Occidental and Oriental views of the world, disparaging and condemnatory reports and treatises about China were on the rise. Leading European intellectuals of the late 18th and early 19th centuries contributed to producing a contemptuous and distorted picture of China in Europe – a trend that began with Montesquieu and Herder and continued with Hegel, Schelling and Marx. The educated 19th-century European thus knew far less about China than his predecessors in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Hostile images during the Cold War

Following the opium wars between China and Great Britain (1839–1842, 1856–1860), which marked the peak of the confrontation, it took one hundred years before China regained its independence and self-confidence – with the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. During the Cold War there was scarcely any cultural exchange to speak of. In both China and Europe hostile images of the other predominated, even if for a time some of Mao's ideas fascinated some members of the 1968 generation: radical young people, a minority sector of late industrial society, but also philosophers like André Glucksmann or Jean-Paul Sartre.

China as an opposite pole to Europe

As we know China has always been regarded in Europe as an "opposite pole to Europe” and not only in a geographical sense. While thirty years ago hardly any Chinese studied in Europe, today Chinese tourists are seen all over Europe, and China plans to found 200 Chinese cultural institutes, so-called Confucius institutes, world-wide by 2010. In the last five or ten years the media, in particular, have changed their attitude to China, and sporadic reports about the "far-off” country have now been replaced by regular "China specials”. And if previously China was regarded as a bastion of communism, nowadays it is a country "full of hope”, a rising economic power.

A new yellow peril?

Many people assume that today China is once again rising to become a central world power – in the early 19th century China's economy was the largest in the world. And while people hesitate to use the term new "yellow peril”, attitudes that tend in this direction, particularly in cover stories, are frequently found in respectable European newspapers and magazines. Although young Chinese still admire the West they have also become more critical of it. So while Chinese websites carry sensible analyses of the Western media, they are often denounced as well, particularly when they carry disparaging reports about China: for example when the German news magazine Der Spiegel called the approximately 27,000 Chinese students in Germany "yellow spies”.

Hypocritical double standards

China will at any rate not forget the Olympic torch relay in Paris in a hurry nor the many composed images in the Western media. They presented an excellent opportunity to study the Western discourse on China: "China is not an open society; China still shows major features of a totalitarian state system; China is still oblivious to human rights”. If one proceeds from these assumptions, then the natural tendency is simply to repeat stereotypes that are simplistic, that ignore many things, that sometimes hit the nail on the head, only then to draw inadmissible general conclusions. Casting China in the role of the bogeyman in such an overt and radical manner has come to be considered hypocritical not only by the man on the street but by many intellectuals as well. For in this respect the West applies double standards and uses the debate for its own interests. Seen in a long-term perspective, however, this is probably just an anecdote of history.

Weigui Fang

Born in Shanghai in 1957, Weigui Fang has taught theory of literature at Beijing Normal University since 2006. His publications include a monograph on Brecht ...
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