(英文版)中西文明比较:秦汉与罗马

Preface China and the West are already well-acquainted with each other’s science, technology, and economy. They have certain understanding of each other’s political system. However, they are complete strangers with regard to each other’s civilizational core. Moreover, Western political and intellectual elites are even less familiar with the Chinese civilization than their Chinese counterparts are with the Western civilization. For more than a century from the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) to the present, generations of Chinese have been tirelessly studying Western history and civilization. Today, English is part of compulsory education even in the remotest mountainous areas of China where it may never be used. From top to bottom, Chinese officials are required to be tested on their knowledge of “international conventions” (which means conventions of Western Europe and the United States). There are many great Sinologists in the West, but their wisdom is marginalized in the body politic. A few Western politicians have read The Analects of Confucius and The Art of War by Sunzi, but almost none has systematically read Chinese history. Thus, even in a famous study like The Thucydides Trap, which deals with a potential conflict between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, none of the examples are from Chinese history. All come from Athens and Sparta, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Britain, and the United States. The book is entirely about the West’s own history of hegemony (the only non-Western exception being Japan). This habitual resort to the Western historical experience when judging China’s strategy is the root of the West’s repeated mistakes. What are China’s strategic goals? The answer depends on what is the length of Chinese history you are acquainted with. If you think that China has a history of only 30 years of “communist tyranny” plus 40 years of “reform and opening up,” then you may think China’s major goal is to move from “autocracy” to “freedom.” If you know only China’s history that started in 1840 with the “century of humiliation” following the Opium War, then you may think the country must have a “feeling of victimhood” and “will retaliate against the West after its rise.” But what about China’s history before the Opium War? Pre-1840 China remains terra incognita for the vast majority of Western elites. This is not accidental. Hegel, one of the most influential Western philosophers, said about the imperial China: “This empire ever remained autonomous, ever remained what it was.... And so it is an empire untouched by history (ungeschichtlich), for internally it developed undisturbed; it was not destroyed from without. No alien principle came to displace the ancient one. To that extent it has no history.” Hegel was aware that China has “a continuous, well-ordered, and quite well-attested history,” but nonetheless considered the Chinese empire as an “a-historical” entity. The problem was that he did not know Chinese language and could never approach the wealth, complexity, and heterogeneity of China’s history. Nor could other great masters of European thought do it.