The People's Republic

Ladies and gentlemen, I was here twenty years ago. I stopped in Provo in 1951, and this University was smaller, and you were not here. Coming back now after twenty years, it’s simply fantastic what has been accomplished. I’ve known Paul Hyer for a long time, and we’re two of a kind. I recognize a kindred spirit. He’s one of the people who has built up the Asian Studies activity on this campus, which of course has a great future anywhere in this country, just as Asia has a future on our horizon as a people. So it is a great pleasure for me to be here and see Mr. Hyer in his native haunt. I don’t know whether you know how much he has done, but he and others with him have put this University on the map in Asian Studies.

Now the topic announced, The People’s Republic: Communist or Chinese? used to be something that you would have to wrestle with, but fortunately now it’s fairly easy to deal with that topic. It can be said that the People’s Republic is Chinese; there’s no question about that. It is also some kind of a Communist state, but you can’t tell exactly what kind except that it is Chinese Communist. The Communist world is so fragmented—it is all broken up. The situation we had in the 1950s of feeling we were up against a monolithic, implacable international organization has now largely evaporated. We see the Russians and the Chinese lined up against each other, and other kinds of Communists disagreeing with other kinds of Communists. Communism has practically ceased to be a meaningful term. You have to speak of some kind, some part, some aspect, such as national communism. And then, when you look at the term communism in each national case it takes on various meanings. In a sense communism has become a nonword.

Now let’s look at Communist China, or the People’s Republic, as Mr. Nixon now calls it. It has been there for twenty years as the People’s Republic. First we called it Red China, then we called it Communist China, and then we called it Mainland China, sort of deflating the amount of feeling that we had about it. Now Mr. Nixon calls it the People’s Republic.

First let’s look at Communist China in a context of the world situation, which, instead of an ideological worldwide conflict between two great camps, now seems to be characterized much more by power politics between great nations, great peoples. The Japanese are expanding so rapidly in economics that they may overtake the Russians. The Russians comprise such an enormous country. We ourselves have an enormous capacity. The Chinese are a great and powerful people. Western Europe represents another more unified but important grouping. So today, we’re thrown less into ideological warfare and more into the conflicts of power politics. But these are different than they used to be. They are not just between rulers and diplomats; they’re between peoples, whole peoples, who are excited and concerned about their national interests, as they call them.

We have to recognize that the idea of national interest is also a rather backward idea, because there’s very little national interest that doesn’t move over into human interest. You take the American national interest in not getting destroyed. It’s a common interest of mankind. It’s difficult for us to destroy the rest of mankind and not be destroyed ourselves or for other parts of mankind to destroy us without getting destroyed themselves. We’re all in the same boat, and the idea of national interest is therefore no longer a sacred final answer to anything; you really have to consider the world interest. The question is, can mankind survive together? We know we can go to the moon, but we’re not sure we can stay here on earth.

In this situation there’s another theme that must be a part of our discussion of China, and that is looking at ourselves. Here we are, with our tremendous capacities, seemingly in the grip of technology and in the grip of institutions that are using technology. Here we are fighting a war, most of the public not sure why we are there, and the national policy is now to get out, to try to stop this war, because we’re not sure that it’s still essential. It seems to have gone too far somehow. We got in there and never stopped, and it wasn’t something we could win. In other words, we’re up against one of the great technological facts—war nowadays has to be limited war. Wars that you can win by an all-out victory are no longer feasible. Great powers get lined up on either side and can only win by destroying themselves. In other words, it’s quite plain that we cannot knock out the Russians; the Russians cannot knock us out, without mutual annihilation; and consequently limited war is imposed upon the military. It’s a grievous burden for them, and, in some ways, you have to sympathize with the military who have been trained to carry out their mission of winning victories if possible. Now they find that their mission is to fight but not to win a victory because there’s no win possible. Technology has fixed that and put us in a new age.

That is part of our context. Americans are finding that technology sometimes offers things that do not seem as progressive as they used to be. Consider the SST that people are debating. You make a big investment because it will go faster than anything else. What good is it? You can even argue about going to the moon. We got there, and it was a tremendous feat. It shows what you can do. What good was it? So we feel that we’re in the grip of a technology which is no longer the answer to everything. You’ve got to consider how you use your technology, and you have to place some limitations on how you use it. You can’t just go all out for progress technologically.

It’s fortunate that we can talk about our relations with China in a community here that has had missionary experience because missionary experience has been a large part of our experience with the Chinese people. You are not the normal American audience. This is a group of people who have a special background, a special competence to look at this problem of American relations with other peoples because much of our contact with China has been through missions. Much of our contact with East Asia, of course, still is.

With this context in mind, how should we view the Chinese Revolution? I propose to offer you a series of points and then perhaps we will have time for questions and answers. This great Chinese revolution of the twentieth century, of course, has many new things in it. Any revolution does, but it also has much of the old elements of continuity. This is only natural in the case of China for a number of reasons. You cannot expect China to become new overnight. In the first place the size of the country and the number of people are so great that you cannot reach them with new things very rapidly. Most people go along day by day habituated. Most of national life in China also continues to be habituated. Then they also have the Chinese language separating them from the rest of the world. Anything that goes into China, to be intelligible there, has to be translated into Chinese. It is different from our European languages. Of course, it’s true all around the world that you can have linguistic hangups and problems with translation, but in China when you’re going into an ideographic writing system, the characters already have set meanings, and you have to give them a new meaning. You have to make a new phrase, perhaps, with old characters. You don’t add to the number of characters; you’re still using old characters that have old meanings attached to them. You’re putting a new meaning on them which comes by definition of the new thing you’re talking about. Well, this has a certain slippage in it, and even if you bring in a new term, it really isn’t new to the uninitiated person in China. So the transmission of ideas from the outside into China is not as easy as it is in some countries, and that’s another factor for inertia or continuity.

Then there is Chinese pride. The Chinese people, after all, have always been a superior people in their part of the world. For a couple of thousand years they were the center of civilization. They have a national pride and sense of identity which is, if anything, greater than ours, and a degree of self-confidence—happiness in being Chinese—which is probably greater than ours. We know that we are a mixture of everything, and everybody here came from somewhere else through his ancestors. Except for the American Indians who may be among us (an honored remnant that we haven’t quite destroyed), everybody here is an immigrant’s descendant. In China it is just the opposite. Practically everybody there has an ancestor going back to Confucius. The Chinese have not migrated around the world the way the westerners have in coming to a new continent. All these facts make the element of continuity in their revolution much greater than you might expect if you’re just looking at it as an American.

Take a look at the Chinese scene today. Suppose you’re flying over the country. We used to be able to do that, and I suppose our spy satellites go over now and get pictures of it. What do you see? Of course, here the terrain is mostly mountainous and only about a fifth cultivable; yet the population is four times as big as our country’s, and that means very intensive cultivation in the areas that can be cultivated. You look down on this kind of region, and you find little clusters of trees every quarter or half mile, scattered over the landscape, something like going across Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, or Ohio farms. China is a land of villages. Instead of a farm family, of course, you have a whole village of maybe five hundred people because the land is very heavily cultivated and heavily populated. You will notice something about the configuration of these villages. There is a market center, a bigger town, surrounded usually by a half dozen villages. All these little villages are hamlets where the people live, from which they communicate with the “market town.” This is the real urban unit in which the Chinese peasant has always lived. It is a community the size of the distance you can travel carrying something easily going and coming back in the same day. You can’t go more than about five miles with any comfort to get into your market town, and then after you’ve made your trade, or whatever you came for, you come back, walking probably, or maybe on a donkey or on a little sampan, if you have a waterway. You go and come to the market center from your little hamlet where the peasantry are living among their fields.

That’s the unit in which the Chinese people have lived. If you look at it today, of course, it will probably be called a commune. It will have one of the Communist terms applied to it. Actually, it has always been something of a unit. The Chinese farmer just didn’t stay in his little hamlet of fifty or one hundred families in one little place; he was in touch with this market center. Somebody from the family would go to the market, which was held every few days in the market town, and so the community might be 5,000 to 7,500 people. You would know friends in other towns, other villages, through the market center. If you are going to arrange a marriage in your family, you might go to the market town and find a matchmaker and a bride from some other village. So this is a social unit as well as an economic unit, and this is where the Chinese have their livelihood. It’s a self-sufficient unit on the whole; it tries to make what is consumes. The trade that comes into the market town from other parts of the country consists of certain essential things like ceramics, which you may not make at home, or silk if you’re not in the silk-producing area. That this is a very self-sufficient unit explains why it has taken so long for the Chinese people to be drawn into a market economy trading overseas, or even a national market. They have lived pretty much to themselves. They have worked it out; they do not have to have all the contacts that we are accustomed to in our society.

Aside from their self-sufficiency, there is another characteristic of the Chinese scene that keeps going today. Those villages are still there. With houses that were built two, three, or four centuries ago, and have been repaired ever since, they haven’t remade their society in its material aspects. The remaking is more in what you call the social organization.

There is another thing in addition to this social scene that you look at in imagination. That’s the tradition of the ruling class. This is something that we have to think about in order to understand because we don’t have it in our own tradition. Of course we know about an aristocracy in the old days of Europe and the feudal age. But in fact, the Chinese have had a ruling class throughout their history. It’s been very hard for them to get away from it. In fact, they’re still struggling with this problem. The ruling class in the old China was the most stable kind of leadership group you can possibly imagine because it was flexible. It always took in talented peasants. Anybody who was very good could rise into the ruling class. But on the whole, the peasantry continued as peasants, and only a few would make it into the ruling class. The ruling class would try to reproduce its kind, and some would drop out into peasant status because they weren’t good enough to stay with it. But on the whole, the tradition of the ruling class persisted. This is the chief thing that the Chinese revolution has been against.

You can see how this ruling class operated if you go back into historical studies. The ruling class, after all, came from the fact that you had an enormous country. It had a central government after 221 B.C. which was trying to maintain peace over the whole area; and peace, of course, is the thing you want. You want a unified China so you don’t have warfare, and you can go ahead without disaster. The ruling class were, first of all, the people that functioned in the government, but the government never extended down very far. There was a local ruling class, a local elite. This consisted, for the most part, of people who owned land, people who had official connections, people who had literacy, people who had studied enough so they could rise in the scholar class. This combination of owning some land, having contact with officials, and perhaps producing sons who could become scholars and take examinations, produced a sort of a three-point, three-based ruling group. They had an economic base in landlordism, they had an intellectual base in scholarship, and they had a political base in office holding. Put all this together, and you’ve got a very stable structure. They can take in any talent they can find, and they did so through the examination system, but they can also maintain themselves and maintain the tradition. It’s the ruling class that has run the country.

Now, that means that when you come down to modern times the ruling class becomes a barrier to progress. I think if you analyze the Chinese revolution of the last century, you see that it’s a long, drawn-out process by which the ruling class system has been overthrown. One of the great questions in the cultural revolution of the last few years has been whether Mao was correct that a new ruling class was trying to arise—a new bureaucracy. You can imagine it certainly was trying to arise. People still had this old idea in mind. Why not? I’m afraid the cultural revolution, in its rather vain attempt to get rid of the ruling class idea, did not succeed. As far as we can tell from the outside, China still has this tradition to battle with, because it is in conflict with modern potentiality.

Now, let’s look at what the old ruling class wanted to do; the way it tried to preserve Chinese culture. The main object of the old ruling class was to maintain social stability, to keep things going without too violent a change, to prevent rebellion. And for that purpose, the members of the local elite, the local families that were in positions of responsibility, would try all sorts of things to check rebellion. They would set up soup kitchens if there was a famine. They would try to get food to the poor. If there were rebel or bandit forces, they would arm and train some peasants as a fighting force to try to deal with them. If there were people that needed some relief, they would get help when the system was working right, and in the meantime the local elite would take care of local problems. They would build some bridges, repair the local temples, and try to keep society operating.

This was the ruling class ethos of responsibility—to keep society going, keep it stable. Part of this was a stay-at-home philosophy. You stayed in your local region and did your duty to the principles of Confucianism. I think probably you can understand this old ruling class best if you just look at the traditional principles of Confucianism. This was probably the greatest philosophy in numbers of people in an organized state that has ever been seen. Confucianism was the basic system by which government was operated. The Confucian principles are first that everybody has a place, but it is not equal. People are in different places according to their birth and circumstances. A wife is subordinate to her husband, women to men. This is the nature of things, or it used to be. The younger are subordinated to the older. You begin with babies, of course. The parents are superior to the children and the Chinese parents were able to figure it out so they could stay that way; so respect for age and for parents is a basic feature of the old Confucian teaching. In general, everybody had a status and he should behave according to his status. If you were a son you should be obedient to your father. You didn’t talk back to your father. If your father said “Do this,” you did it without grumbling because you were lucky you were born. He was the source of your being, and you might as well say yes and go do it. In fact the old legal system was set up in such a way that the father had absolute authority. Any son who struck his father could be decapitated, no question about it. Striking his father was the worst thing he could possibly do. On the other hand, if the son was disobedient and the father had to strike him, and maybe kill him, that could be condoned because he should have been a more obedient son. In other words, the legal system and punishment for things that happened were all set up to maintain this system of status and proper behavior according to status.

Confucianism is an enormous system with many philosophical principles, but it all adds up to the idea of maintaining a society with everybody doing his part according to his duty. You can see this is not individualistic, and this is one feature of the old China and the old ruling class. It’s a feature that comes over to the present day.

There’s one further thing to say about this old order, and you can see the continuity of this into the revolution. In the nineteenth century when the westerners came in, they became part of the ruling class. They couldn’t help it; China was a ruling-class country. If you came in and demanded your privileges, as the westerners did, you were treated as a member of the ruling class. But, as in the Opium War, the privileges of traveling around and trading were enforced with gunboats. If you did that, you were inevitably part of the ruling class. You were people of literacy from abroad, to be sure, but no more foreign than the Mongols had been when they conquered China in the thirteenth century. And so the nineteenth century invasion by the West brought us into the scene. And we regarded it, of course, as a great adventure to go abroad, to do great things in China and to study the country. The Chinese regarded us as a latter-day version of the Mongol invasions from inner Asia. These Mongols had been able to fight better than the Chinese so they came in and conquered. Others had done it too. The Manchus did it again in the seventeenth century when they took over the government. All of these ruling groups from outside were taken into the Chinese ruling class and made part of it and functioned in it. And that’s what happened with us.

So in the nineteenth century the western missionary who came into China found that he was an upper-class fellow. He couldn’t help it; he had his special privileges. The officials couldn’t arrest him because he had his foreign consul as protection. He was a scholar because he was literate; he had his own teaching, and in general he had a higher living standard and was part of the ruling class. If you keep that in mind, you can see what the basis is for the modern Chinese revolution to attack the foreigner. If they were getting rid of the ruling class in general, they were also getting rid of the foreigner. They call it imperialism, a Marxist term which means somebody who muscled his way in. And that’s where we come into the sights of the revolution. They’re against us.

Now let’s look briefly at the process of revolution. I mentioned these elements of continuity that you can see in it. Before we get into questions, let me try to bring out some highlights of the revolutionary process that have wound up with Chairman Mao today. I’ve said this is a revolution against a ruling class. On the whole the process has been one of bringing the Chinese common man up to the ruling class level. Instead of being just a peasant who by definition is a farmer without any politics, pays his taxes when he has to, and doesn’t think about who’s going to do what in running things (he’s supposed to have no political ideas) instead of that, the revolution has brought the organization and mobilization of the peasantry. It has brought the masses of the Chinese people into political light and out onto the street, demonstrating, waving around, participating and acting in politics.

This is, I should say, part of the technological process of modern times. You’ve seen this in other countries too. As soon as literacy can be spread more easily, as soon as communication can reach anybody through radio (and transistor radio, of course, is a tremendous spreader of things), then you’re in for it. The whole populace is going to participate. Now we’re accustomed to that in this country. We got over this hurdle some time ago, and everybody in this country is quite aware of the idea. Anyone can write a letter to the editor, or he can sound off in some way, just marching down the street making noises if he wants to. As a matter of fact, a lot of people are now doing just that. In China it is a new idea. It’s something that the old ruling class was very careful to prevent, because they knew it could get out of hand. In the old days under the last dynasty down to 1912, even officials who had policy ideas were supposed to give them only to their superiors. They were not to spread them around and not to discuss them even with each other. The public was not supposed to have any policy ideas. If the public couldn’t stand it any longer, they could get out and rebel, and then if possible you’d suppress them, separate the leaders from the followers at least, and kill off the leaders to discourage the followers.

So the modern process of the people coming into this kind of political life has been a pretty rough one. It has been violent in process because the old guard, trained to the idea that the peasant should remain on his field and do his work there and not fiddle around with policy, naturally took a dim view of all this organization.

This is where Chairman Mao comes into the picture. You can take him as a symbol of the whole process. Of course, he’s only the front man who has been shoved up by the historical necessity for one leader at the top in the old Chinese tradition, but he can be somewhat typical of the process. In the first place, he can only come at a certain time. He emerges in the period of the First World War. It’s a time in 1911–1914, when China has lost its monarchy and the old system with the emperor at the top. That revolution knocked off the monarchy which had been the kingpin of the social structure. The pyramid of power and status began to crack. They couldn’t maintain it without the emperor. At the same time the ideas that upheld it began to crack because Confucianism could no longer be accepted in the modern world.

When Sun Yat-sen appeared on the scene back in the 1890s, he was at an earlier stage. He was against the Manchu dynasty, and he was trying to knock out the emperor system, the Manchus, and the foreign rulers of China. His main concern was national unity and getting rid of the monarchy. Before he died in the 1920s he also got the idea of opposing the privileges of the imperialist powers in China. But he never got the point of really organizing the people at the grass roots. He was too early for that. Mao Tse-Tung got onto it as an idea after the dynasty had disappeared, when the western example was somewhat tarnished from World War I and when the Soviet revolution of 1917 had begun to bring in ideas.

Mao came to maturity about 1919 just when the Communist party was being organized. You can see, however, if you look at his personal career, how he became a leader. Mao was a boy from a peasant family. His father had worked hard and was a pretty tough fellow who pushed others around, a sort of rich peasant. Mao fought with him. His father seemed to him a pretty inhuman fellow. Mao rebelled against his father and in that period he could do it and get away with it. Still he had to work on the farm, and so he got his education rather late. By the time Mao was able to go to school and get up to the middle or high school level, he was older than the other students. He was big, a leader, and a rebel. He finally got his education in his twenties. Having a very rigorous mind, he read everything he could find and eventually became a teacher.

At the same time, the Soviet model of how to organize for revolution was coming in. He picked it up and was one of the organizers of the Chinese Communist party. Even so, he never had Soviet training. He never went to Moscow for indoctrination. He was never subordinated to the party system fully. He was always a leader, and by staying on the top, he could remain himself, quite independent of the party structure. As it turned out, in recent years, he’s been able to denounce the party and turn against it, which very few of these people trained by the party would have done.

As the Chinese revolution emerged and Mao began to rise, they developed several of their own particular characteristics. One was that in China, in order to organize the people, you could not confine your work to the city. In order to get a real base of organization in China, you had to go to the countryside where most of the people lived. That is quite different from this country, or even the Soviet Union, where the cities are great centers of power and population. Organizing in China means organizing peasants. So immediately Mao, having picked up Marxism, began to change it. He found that peasants were the people to organize, and according to Marxism, you don’t begin that way. You begin with the so-called proletarians.

Another feature of this, of course, was the glorification of the Communist Chinese party. In the proper Leninist fashion, it was the group that was trying to carry on this great task of revolution according to the insights and vision of Marx and Lenin. This means that people put great faith in the Chinese Communist party. It is the great repository of your belief; you think that it can bring about the revolution. It can carry us through because the party knows that any individual, of course, can be fallible. The leadership will change, and you yourself may be sacrificed in the cause of the party, but the party will go on. So there’s great faith in the party as the agent of the revolution. This feature was obvious to us in the 1940s when some of us were working under the embassy in Chungking and saw Communist representatives there. Chou En-lai had his office in Chungking. Talking to these people, you knew that when their eyes shone about the Chinese Communist party that it was the object of their faith. Mao grew up with that, and his break with the Chinese Communist party, his turning on it to try to purge it, reform it of its evils in the recent culture revolution, has been a very serious breakdown in the system. The revolution is still probably recovering from that. It has to heal over that wound.

Mao is an example of how the Chinese revolution has deviated from a Leninist norm. It has used the Leninist system but found that it had to be changed to suit the Chinese case. It’s no longer a Soviet system; it’s a Chinese system today.

One thing that’s worth noting when you go over the history of the revolution is the question of Chinese expansion. Just a few days ago Mr. Nixon was talking about Chinese expansionist tendencies. This bears examination, in fact, requires it. If you look back at Chinese history, one thing is quite striking, and that is that the Chinese lived in their settled, cultivated areas in inner Asia and Southeast Asia inside the great wall and were constantly up against the raids and invasions of people from outside the great wall such as the Mongols. These cavalries could come in through the wall and terrorize the settled farm land. So from a very early date the Chinese problem became a defensive one. How do you ward off these attackers who come in with their cavalry from the grasslands of Mongolia? The Chinese military tradition began in this defensive style. Of course, one way to defend is to attack. You can go out there and send an expedition into Mongolia and try to catch these fellows or try to split them up or try to seize the leaders, but you cannot stay out there indefinitely. There is no food supply out there. Any Chinese army going into Mongolia has to come back within a month or two. They could not occupy Mongolia and cultivate it. There is no rain supply. It’s just there and you can’t do a thing about it. No Chinese wanted to go out and live there. They didn’t want to become Mongols and ride horses all the time.

This source of invaders remained an insoluble problem, and the Chinese military tradition became heavily defensive. You build a great wall and you bribe them, buy them off or maybe give them a princess in exchange for peace. When you can’t do anything, then they come in and conquer you, and you deal with them. Since you outnumber them, they can’t run China—they don’t understand the Chinese language. Another way to deal with them is to collaborate. The Chinese learned all these different devices from hard experience over hundreds of years. Their military tradition was largely defensive.

Secondly, they have had no naval power. The Chinese were living on a continental area. If you went by sea, where were you going? There was nowhere to go. Japan was not there in ancient times; trade around India was too far distant and not very fruitful. The Chinese had little incentive to trade. They stayed at home; they had everything they needed. After all, the country extends farther north to south than our country—from the latitude of Havana to that of Newfoundland—and you get furs in the north and sugar in the south with everything else in between. The Chinese had little need for foreign trade. That is another reason for their nonexpansive tradition. They did not develop naval power to go overseas; therefore, they never developed any colonies. It’s an amazing thing that the colonies in Southeast Asia are right next door to China, but they are European colonies. Now how could that be? It’s because the Chinese weren’t interested. They had everything they needed at home; they were the center of things.

You can understand the modern world, in other words, if you look at the Europeans as “have-nots.” The Europeans lived off there in Europe, which was a wonderful place to get out of in the wintertime, and they raised no sugar or cotton in Europe, and sugar and cotton are two basic staples. They did develop a lot of seafaring around their peninsulas, in the North Sea and in the Mediterranean. So when the Europeans began to expand, they were getting riches abroad. They came to Asia to get what Asia had to offer. Asia was a richer area, a bigger area. The Europeans became dynamic and expansive fighting men.

Until very recently they conquered these colonies in Southeast Asia right next door to China. The Chinese did not bother.

There is one other thing to crank into this picture for perspective. We must realize that the Chinese, for the first thousand years of the Christian era, were probably ahead of western civilization. We judge this by their inventions. Western civilization in Europe, of course, we esteem as the source of all great things that came later. Now this point is in need of some rectification. Take paper for example. Without paper how could you operate? We wouldn’t have a university, certainly. The Chinese invented paper many hundreds of years before paper got to Europe. The Europeans were slow to pick it up. The Chinese also invented printing, which took about a thousand years to get into Europe. Printing by movable type was also invented in the Far East and moved to Europe by degrees several hundred years later.

Those are not exceptional, those are just examples. There are many other things. You take a simple matter of nautical technology. How do you steer a ship? You steer a ship with a rudder, and without one you are not going to do much steering. The Europeans for many hundreds of years steered their ships with a sweep oar at the back because their ships were made with prows that went up at either end like the Viking ships. Steering with an oar at the back, of course, is no way to run a ship. The Chinese invented the stern post rudder. We have an example from Canton in the first century A.D. Here’s a ship made in compartments (another Chinese invention) with big ports across and a square stern, and on this square stern is a rudder. The Chinese invented it. It didn’t come to the West until a thousand years later. The Chinese also invented gunpowder, and used it in siege fighting. It was only when the Europeans got it that they, being more warlike, put it into more advanced weapons and took it back to China.

The Chinese examined little things like snow crystals. I have never examined one in a microscope, but a snow crystal is six-sided, I’m told. The Chinese knew this and had recorded it before the birth of Christ. You don’t find any record of it in the West till a thousand years later. The Chinese also recorded sunspots, and the West didn’t get on to that for a thousand years. They invented the compass, cast iron, the examination system—which we all suffer from here—but we didn’t have it until the nineteenth century. There were many political inventions in China. All of this means that they were a superior people in their earlier days, and there is the basis for their national pride and sense of identity.

But out of all this they did not become expansionists, and their tradition is not an expansive one.