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| The past |
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Nowhere in the world is the past more woven into
present than in China, and no other country can boast
the sense of continuity that has been bred into the
Chinese people over at least three thousand years of
continuous civilization. |
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| Pressure of history |
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| Chinese history has been a source of great
strength and resilience in difficult times. Perhaps no
other county could have survived such a cataclysmic event
as the Culture Revolution to become one of the world’s
fastest-growing economies a mere 20 years later. In few
other countries, on the other hand, would the Cultural
Revolution have occurred in the first place. The pressure
to do as your forefathers have done and conform to ancient
ideas is very great indeed in China. Occasionally it
becomes too much for some parts of society to bear. The
stranglehold exerted by the past so frustrated the young
people of China in the 1960s that they were easily
mobilized by Mao, assisting in his radical but ultimately
futile attempt to sweep away all reminders of the past and
start all over again. Ironically, the communism that Mao
espoused has proved to be little more than former imperial
system under a new name. |
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| Inflexibility |
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| Sometimes it seems that age-old habits are
actually fused into the genes of the Chinese, so automatic
are they, and so widespread. One example of this is always
giving the answer that the listener wants to hear. For
more worldly Chinese this is frustrating, because these
habits seem almost impossible to break.
At its best,
Chinese conservatism—a determination not to change merely
for change’s sake, combined with a belief in the
overriding power of precedent—is admirable; at other times
it is tiresome, as when agreement is reached to do
something in one way, only to find that ultimately the old
way prevails. |
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| Outside influence |
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| In most civilized societies the past is
manifested in tangible remains, and, where they survive,
this is also true of China—and even in the case of
contemporary art and architecture the tendency is always
to evoke the past. But the material residue from Chinese
history is less important than the impact that the past
has had on the Chinese mind. Chinese history is remarkable
for the fact that outside influences have had almost no
effect on the national psyche. Without an appreciation of
this fundamental fact, it is impossible for the visitor to
understand modern China. |
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| The tiger awakes |
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| On several occasions this century, when it
seemed China was about to alter course, it was in fact
merely ret rimming its sails. Now, change seems more
certain; the challenge is to recover the best of the past
and marry it to the realities of the modern world. |
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