The chief of state decided that the past must he wiped out. He ordered all philosophical books burned, except for one copy to be preserved in the state library. Many scholars were denounced as economically useless. By contrast, the masses of disciplined peasants and workers were exalted. The state took over control of religion. When intellectuals protested, thousands were condemned to forced labor.
A partial account of Mao Tse-tung's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution? Not at all. The Chinese ruler who acted thus was called Shih Huang Ti, the Emperor famed for constructing the Great Wall. In the 3rd century B.C., he forcibly united most of China around the northeastern state of Ch'in and established a tyrannical rule that was soon swept away in civil war. It would be risky to draw any neat lessons from this parallel between past and present. Perhaps the only sure thing to be concluded is that nothing in the world's oldest continuing civilization is wholly new.
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." The Chinese seemed sober, industrious, cheerful, polite and stoical. But they also seemed superstitious, hostile, unimaginative, politically passive, and arrogant toward those not blessed by Chinese birth.
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 is sought above all, sooner or later the strain can become too much. The reaction is then apt to be more violent than in a society that is psychologically accustomed to struggle, and considers it a law of life.
The apparent serenity of China has often hidden the recurring tensions between central government and regions, between Emperor and officialdom or ambitious war lords—and, above all, the sometimes intolerable inner tensions of trying to maintain harmony. As China Scholar Etienne Balazs put it: "The smiling landscape is found to be a veil which, when torn asunder, reveals a craggy vista of precipices and extinct volcanoes, reminiscent of the visions with which most Chinese landscape painters were obsessed."
Action by Inaction