Under Western Eyes

A mainland Chinese writer I know once paid a visit to a well-known Australian author in his home. The Australian asked the Chinese what he wanted to drink. “A Coke would be nice,” my friend replied. His outraged host demanded indignantly to know how he, a citizen of a communist country, could possibly desire the very symbol of American capitalism, yadda yadda yadda, neo-imperialism, yadda yadda yadda, exploitation, yadda yadda yadda. Chinese people, he informed his thoroughly ear-bashed Chinese guest, drank tea. Now, that over with, would he prefer jasmine or oolong?

In “The Chan’s Great Continent,” Jonathan Spence relates a bizarrely similar tale. But this one is from Oliver Goldsmith’s 18th century satirical novel “The Citizen of the World.” A British “lady of distinction” invites Goldsmith’s Chinese narrator, Lien Chi, to a dinner party in London. She expresses surprise that he hasn’t brought any opium with him, makes him sit on a cushion on the floor so he’ll feel more at home (though the other guests have chairs) and protests when he elects to eat with a knife and fork rather than chopsticks. As if this weren’t annoying enough for Lien Chi, one of the other guests proceeds to lecture him “ignorantly and at length” about Chinese geography and culture until, Lien Chi relates with exasperation, “he almost reasoned me out of my country.”

The China that lives in Western minds is clearly not always the same China in which Chinese people actually live. “The Chan’s Great Continent” explains why this is so. Taking its title from Hart Crane’s evocative lines “. . . biding the moon/Till dawn should clear that dim frontier, first seen/The Chan’s great continent . . . ,” it is a story, in Spence’s words, of “cultural stimulus and response.” It systematically examines the intellectual and emotional responses of Westerners to the “phenomenon of China” from the time of Marco Polo to the present day. Spence tells this story chronologically, beginning with the earliest travelers and moving through “the Catholic century,” the Enlightenment and the age of chinoiserie, leading us from exotic visions to radical ones, from Ezra Pound to Edgar Snow and Italo Calvino. Peering with Spence through the eyes of these observers, China seems to slip in and out of focus, sometimes too marvelous to be true, sometimes too terrible. As Spence notes in his introduction, “assessments of China and the Chinese people [throughout history] were often coarse-grained or inaccurate; they drew on imagination and stereotype as much as on any kind of informed application of intellect.”

Some of the blame for this must surely go to Marco Polo, the enigmatic Venetian whose elaborate traveler’s tales have influenced occidental views of China from the 14th century to the present. His book, “The Description of the World” or “Travels,” as it is more commonly known, was the first European book devoted to the subject of China. Yet as Spence relates, upon close analysis it appears to be “a combination of verifiable fact, random information posing as statistics, exaggeration, make-believe, gullible acceptance of unsubstantiated stories, and a certain amount of outright fabrication.” In fact, it is conceivable that Polo never stepped foot in China at all.

If that is true, then Polo was merely the first in a long line of Western image-makers of China who never actually visited the country of which they wrote so persuasively. For many commentators, past and present, China has been but a handy mirror through which to expose the shortcomings of their own societies, a springboard for a dive into philosophy or poetics or a blank plate on which to engrave fantasies of sensualism, danger and exoticism.

“One aspect of a country’s greatness,” writes Spence, “is surely its capacity to attract and retain the attention of others. This capacity has been evident from the very beginnings of the West’s encounter with China; the passing centuries have never managed to obliterate it altogether, even though vagaries of fashion and shifting political stances have at times dulled the sheen.”

Westerners have generally perceived that country through the prism of their own preoccupations. Early Jesuits, for example, paid much attention to the devotional activities and rituals of Chinese life. Yet they downplayed the religious nature of ancestor worship and of Confucianism, redefining both as homage rather than religion, not because that was closer to the truth but because that stressed China’s capacity for religious conversion.

Others have been more interested in China’s potential as a market. The rites that fascinate traders and investors tend to be the bureaucratic ones. Lord Macartney, who served as an emissary for the East India Co. and King George III in 1793, dedicated much of his ink to discussions of official court protocol. This is not surprising, considering that he was there on official business and was much vexed by the Qing court’s demand that upon meeting the emperor, he perform the full ritual kowtow. This involved prostrating himself and knocking his head on the floor. Macartney resiled, seeing such an action as an affront to British national pride. In the end, after seemingly endless and often elliptical negotiations, he agreed to go down on one knee.

Despite admiring certain aspects of China, Spence tells us, “the dominant feelings Macartney had acquired by the end of his visit were wariness and a kind of exhaustion that teetered on the edge of raw dislike.” Macartney’s reaction would not be unfamiliar to some travelers of our own day. Not just commercial travelers either. Spence’s summing up of Macartney’s feelings reminded me of some of the journalistic memoirs that have come out since China once again opened its doors to the West in 1978, some of which have had enormous influence on Western perceptions of China in our own time; Fox Butterfield’s best-selling “Alive in the Bitter Sea” would be one obvious example.

Spence doesn’t mention Butterfield or his many colleagues. There are other parallels and coincidences that, it seems to me, could have helped bring some of the historical material in “The Chan’s Great Continent” more to life. Spence writes of the Spanish Dominican Domingo Navarrete, for instance, who traveled to China in the 17th century and concluded that it was “the noblest part of the universe,” venturing that even Chinese urine was superior to that of Westerners and that Western women would benefit from the discipline of foot binding. This account immediately made me think of Rewi Alley, Ross Terrill, Han Suyin and others whose paeans to the Cultural Revolution in China were no less credulous or missionary--or, ultimately, ridiculous--in their zeal.

I found myself wishing that this otherwise marvelous book would have paid just a tad more attention to the influence of less literary sources and to other media, particularly in this century, on the West’s perception of China. At least as influential as books these days are movies: “Chinatown” and “The Joy Luck Club” and “The Last Emperor,” to name a few, have also contributed significantly to the picture of China in Western minds today at least as much as have Kafka, Borges and Calvino, the subjects of Spence’s last chapter, “Genius at Play.” What’s more, the Chinese have nicely complicated the situation by speaking up for themselves. There is now an enormous literature of memoirs by Chinese people, either written or translated into English, some of which have had a huge impact on Western perceptions of China, Jung Chang’s international bestseller “Wild Swans” being the most obvious example.

“The Chan’s Great Continent” has its origins in a series of lectures delivered by Spence at Yale University two years ago. Like everything else written by Jonathan Spence, it is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in China. Spence is one of the greatest Sinologists of our time, and his work is both authoritative and highly readable.