Dr Cunich (University of Hong Kong History Department) gave a public lecture at Parliament House, Hobart, on Thursday 17 November. This is the full text of his paper:
It is both an honour and a pleasure to be here in Hobart to share some of my thoughts on the relationship between Asia and the West in the early twenty-first century. It is not often that an early modern historian such as myself, whose academic interests are firmly anchored in the history of Europe in the sixteenth century, is given an opportunity to muse about the part of the world that he has called home for the last twenty-five years. But my intellectual engagement with East Asia goes back even further than that, for when I was at school in the 1970s, the curriculum was being transformed as Australia become aware of the need to engage more wholeheartedly with the countries to our north, and their ‘teeming millions’. In my last two years of secondary school, the history and geography curriculums in particular gave me an opportunity to learn about Asia for the first time. While our geography classes tended to focus on Southeast Asia and the former British colonies of Malaysia, the history course, although still dominated by the West and the two world wars (as I believe it still is to this day), had several units of study on East Asia. I learned about the Meiji Restoration in the mid-nineteenth century and the modernisation of Japan, all with a view to explaining the horrors of the Japanese aggression in the Pacific War. I also learned about the much slower opening of China to Western influence, the revolutionary activities of Dr Sun Yat-sen, the reluctance of the Qing dynasty in general and the Empress Dowager Cixi in particular to embrace change, and the eventual civil war which proved such a disaster for the most populous country in the world. Little did I realize when I was sitting at my desk all those years ago in intellectually isolated country NSW, that I would one day be teaching at Sun Yat Sen’s own university, the institution that he acknowledged as the ‘birthplace’ of his revolutionary ideas, or that I would be writing about him and his place in the evolution of modern China in my recent history of the University. So in some ways I feel that this talk is a particularly welcome opportunity to bring my own personal engagement with East Asia into some perspective as I begin to prepare for a retirement back in the familiar embrace of the West.I am also glad to be giving this talk under the aegis of the Christopher Dawson Centre. While Dawson is, of course, best known for his work on the cultural history of Western civilisation and the role of Christianity in the long development of the West, he also had a keen interest in the impact of Western civilisation on the rest of the world – and especially Asia. He made some preliminary observations in 1952 when he devoted a whole chapter to ‘Asia and Europe’ in his book titled Understanding Europe.[1] In 1955 he published The Mongol Mission, a selection of the written accounts of Catholic missionaries who were sent by the medieval popes to the Mongol emperors of China in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.[2] Dawson brought these musings up-to-date in 1956 when he published two influential articles in the Tablet on the impact of the West in contemporary Asia, released as a pamphlet in 1957 under the title of The Revolt in Asia.[3] Dawson was fascinated by the paradoxical role of Western nationalism in this Asian revolt, a movement that was rallying Asian peoples against the political, economic and cultural influence of the West, but at the same time was removing the age-old barriers that had prevented communication between East and West, ‘doing all in its power to diffuse Western education, Western science and Western political ideologies’. In the third and final phase of the ‘world revolution’ in Asia, Dawson asserted that ‘the internal transformation of oriental society by the spread of Western education and the rise of nationalist movements … represented at the same time a revolt against the West and the acceptance by the East of Western culture and political ideology’.[4] It seems to me that Dawson’s interpretation of the Asian Revolt is as relevant to us today as it was in the 1950s. Here we are sixty years after Dawson wrote The Revolt in Asia, and Asia appears to be revolting yet again.David, you asked me to speak ‘on any aspect of the history and influence of Western Civilisation, with particular emphasis perhaps on your own experiences in Asia’. I have taken you at your word and plan to give a very personal interpretation of where East Asia finds itself at present with respect to its relationship with the culture of the West. I am not a specialist in this field; in fact, when one of my colleagues heard about this talk he said, ‘But you have no expertise in that area!’ While that is true – I am not an expert on Asian history, politics, economics, society or culture – I have nevertheless lived in East Asia for nearly twenty-five years and have experienced some remarkable times of rapid change. I have also travelled widely throughout the region; this has given me an opportunity to watch the transformations that have been taking place in Asia over the last quarter of a century, especially in China. My own university attracts speakers from all over the world who regularly lecture us on Asia; moreover, I have learned a lot while simply listening to my students from different parts of East Asia as they discuss their aspirations, fears and hopes for the future. I am also an inveterate newspaper clipper, so I have trawled through my collection of news clippings from the last few years in bringing my thoughts on the present situation in Asia into focus for this talk. So what I lack in expertise, I hope I will make up for in basic experience.But first, let me define the geopolitical area that I have described as ‘East Asia’ in the title of this talk. It is that region which used to be known as ‘The Orient’ until such terms became taboo in the academic world because of political correctness. But even in the old days, ‘The Orient’ was a difficult term to pin down: it referred more to a set of cultural norms that were placed in opposition to the dominant Western belief systems than an actual place on the map. My definition of modern East Asia is based on a geographical and political understanding of a globalised world which has chopped the globe up into ‘regions’. It has always struck me as curious that, in an age of so-called ‘globalisation’, we still need ‘regions’ to understand how the world works, but this is, of course, linked to the way in which we try to understand the economic and political functioning of a global system that is far to difficult intellectually to swallow in one gulp. To me, then, East Asia consists of five major states bordering on the South China Sea, the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan, and perhaps one other developing nation which was for centuries associated with Chinese overlordship. These modern-day nation-states are:China, with a population of 1.357 billion in 2013, and the Chinese satellites of Taiwan (23 millions), Hong Kong (7 millions) and Macau (600,000)Japan, with a population of 127 millionsThe Philippines, with a population of 98 millionsSouth Korea, with a population of 50 millions, andNorth Korea, with a population of 25 millions (we think!)The final state that I would want to include in this list is Vietnam (population 90 millions) because I think that in many ways it is more integrated with the East Asia nations than it is with the Southeast Asian countries further south, both economically and culturally. Together, these six countries have a population of 1.778 billion people (25% of the world’s population) and are home to some of the most dynamic and fastest growing economies in the world – even Japan, which is now economically stagnant, was for a time in the second half of the twentieth century a similar economic dynamo, but it is worth remembering that Japan still the third-largest economy in the world in terms of GDP. It is self-evident that this area is one that is of enormous importance for the future of the world, especially in an economic sense. China and Japan are the second and third largest economies in the world by GDP ($11.4 trillion and $4.7 trillion), and South Korea is fast catching up to the other countries in the top 10 ($1.4 trillion, currently in eleventh place).[5] Everyone predicts that China will be the largest world economy by 2021, even though it is notoriously difficult to know exactly what China’s current GDP is.[6] With economic power comes political and cultural clout, so the whole world is watching East Asia as it moves forward to becoming the centre of the world economy in the next few years. Within the next decade, we are told, China will once again be the Middle Kingdom of old, albeit a Communist kingdom! There is, of course, a problem with using nation-states as the basis for an interpretation of East Asia’s place in the world today. In doing so we leave out a very significant part of the East Asian land mass – the Russian Far East, a huge area stretching from Lake Baikal to the Sea of Okhotsk. The problem is that this area has never really been included in the Western notion of the ‘Far East’ because its connections are largely with Russia and always have been. While it may be geographically East Asian, it certainly does not fit in economically or culturally. I have also left out Mongolia because, even though it is closely linked to China especially in sharing its very long southern border, it has no access to the Sea of Japan and is not generally thought of as part of East Asia – it is more normally spoken of as a Central Asian state. The other problem with taking the modern nation-state as the basis for an evaluation of East-West relationships is that we might be tempted to consider only the formal national policies as being valid measures of a people’s engagement with the outside world. I have rejected this approach, as you will see, because in many East Asian states today there is a marked and growing dichotomy between what the state says and what the people actually think.I would like to start this analysis by telling you what I found in East Asia when I first visited in the late-1980s. While it was already possible to visit China at that time, my only incursion into the sleeping giant of Asia was a brief hour-long walk over the border from the Portuguese enclave of Macau into the ‘special economic zone’ of Zhuhai to the north of the Gongbei gate. What I found there was extraordinary: a long narrow street brightly lit with fluorescent lights and lined with shops selling every type of modern consumer goods and appliances – I had not expected this in Communist China – but only a few yards on either side of the street the traditional China was still evident in all its faded and grimy dullness. The point at which we turned back was the local market, where we saw all manner of animals for sale in cages. As we watched the haggling going on we saw a pangolin being removed from its cage and being killed by clubbing its head against the pavement. This ghastly introduction to so-called ‘modern’ China will always be engraved in my memory.Back in Macau, I was amazed not by the Chinese-ness of the place, but by the feeling that I had seen it all before. Macau was, in many respects, a Baroque European city, with tree-lined civic squares, neo-classical public buildings and dozens of beautiful churches, all reflecting the cultural aspirations of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe. Most of the signs were in Portuguese, and the whole place closed down for the Mediterranean fiesta in the middle of the day. I found this both quaint and rather confronting. I had not expected Macau to be caught in such a time warp because Hong Kong had by that time lost most of its colonial charm and its public places had given way to the sorts of concrete and steel skyscrapers that you see in any other modern city. I have been going back to Macau every year since I arrived in Hong Kong to teach in 1993 because for me it is the perfect teaching resource for any course in early-modern European history. Not only does it have the architecture and the ambiance of a Mediterranean city, it was also the place where Europe’s modern engagement with East Asia began. It was Macau that St Francis Xavier used as a forward base for his missionary activities in Japan in the mid-sixteenth century; Macau then became the headquarters for the Jesuit missionary encounter with China, led by Matteo Ricci and a succession of priest-scholars who were among the few Westerners ever allowed to gain access to the imperial capital of Peking and even the Emperor himself.It was through this acquaintance with Macau and its history that I came to understand that contact and cultural interchange between China and the civilisation of the West stretched back over many centuries, from the diplomatic and trade contacts between the Roman Empire and China in the first century BC, to the great Nestorian migration of the Tang dynasty in the seventh or eighth centuries AD, and the European emissaries sent by the medieval popes to the Mongol emperors in the thirteenth century. The relics of the early Christian settlers in China can still be seen in Xian, even though the Chinese authorities like to play down the significance of the fact that Christianity was a well-established religion in the cosmopolitan court of the Tang emperors more than seven hundred years before the Portuguese reached south China in the sixteenth century. But there is even earlier evidence of contact between China and the West in the red-haired and big-nosed Westerners who settled in the Tarim basin of present-day Xinjiang nearly 4,000 years ago. Our historical gaze regarding the contact between China and the West tends to be directed by historians of the modern world towards the attempts by European imperialists in the nineteenth century to ‘open’ China to Western trade, but how many people realise that the Chinese economy, the largest in the world at the time, had been sucking the majority of European silver hewn from the mines in Mexico and Brazil out of the international system for three hundred years between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. The ‘unequal treaties’ of the nineteenth century therefore represented an attempt by the Europeans to take control of a long-standing globalised economy that had for centuries been largely controlled by the Chinese, despite Western notions that they were in control. At the same time, the Philippines had been colonised by the Spanish from the middle of the sixteenth century and integrated into their global empire and, like the Portuguese in Macau, was used as a bridge to China. I have started with this long historical aside because it is important for us to understand that the so-called ‘dominance’ of the West in Asia is a relatively recent phenomenon. The ‘modernisation’, or perhaps we should say the ‘Westernisation’ of Japan and China beginning with the Meiji restoration in the 1860s is therefore considered by many Asian scholars to be an aberration in the longer span of the world’s history. Consequently, they also have a rather different take on the current resurgence of Asian economies than we do in the West. What we can be certain of, however, is that the two dominant East Asian civlisations of the nineteenth century had a lot of catching up to do when they came face-to-face with the technologically superior Christian civilisation of the West. Japan was, of course, an early adopter of all things Western, even if she did retain the essential elements of traditional Japanese culture. For the Chinese it was a rather different path to modernisation, with Sun Yat-sen’s early attempts at bringing modern Western nationalism and democracy to China eventually descending into the chaos of a decade-long civil war and the ultimate victory of communism in 1949, at a time when the West was itself divided between democratic and communist blocs. By 1949, however, China had experienced one hundred years of intensive cultural interchange with the West, especially through missionaries who had come primarily to convert pagans, but in the process also brought with them Western education, Western medical advances, and a whole new system of ethics that was willingly adopted by many in the burgeoning urban middle classes. Western missionary activity also made significant inroads in Vietnam, Japan, and especially Korea after 1945; today, around 30% of the population of South Korea are Christian.In the years that followed communist victory in China, the Chinese, Koreans and Vietnamese all revolted against both the imperialism of the West and Western values in general. As Christopher Dawson realised with such insight in the 1950s, the century-long presence of the West in Asia was leading to a revolt against Western political dominance, but paradoxically that revolt used the very same cultural and ideological tools of the dominant Western civilisation. In each part of East Asia this revolt was slightly different – anti-colonial in Vietnam, anti-imperial in China, and a programme aimed at beating the Westerners at their own economic game in Japan – and for that reason it led to different results in different parts of East Asia. In Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, there were stunning economic gains through full participation with the global economy from the 1950s. China, Vietnam and North Korea closed their doors to outside influence and aimed at self-sufficiency through a series of disastrous economic policies that blighted people’s lives and left their economies out-of-step with worldwide trends. Even their own cultural history was annihilated in an iconoclastic cataclysm that left millions dead and national treasures destroyed. The Philippines just muddled on, relying on Western aid and military support for its corrupt government and lackluster economy. When China opened itself to renewed economic engagement with the West from the late 1970s under Deng Xiaoping’s policy of ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’, a new age of economic development was ushered in which led to startling GDP growth of up to 10% per annum. China’s ‘economic miracle’ rapidly caught up with the rest of East Asia and has ultimately dragged Vietnam into the modern globalised economy through Mainland and Taiwanese investment schemes. This story of engagement between East Asia and the West obviously did not have an even impact across the region. The Vietnamese did not reach out to the West until after the 1991 Paris Agreements, and the Kim dynasty in Pyongyang has always seen the West (but more particularly the United States) as its enemy. More recently, Rodrigo Duterte has upset his country’s international relations by moving closer to China and rejecting Western concerns about extrajudicial killings as part of his war on drugs. His belligerent rhetoric towards Western nations and the Catholic Church (calling the bishops of the Philippines collectively ‘sons of whores’) has proven popular in a country that has always proudly boasted of being Asia’s only Christian nation, with 86% of the population being Catholic. In Japan, it has been pointed out that the current economic policy, popularly known as Abenomics, represents a rejection of Western fiscal and monetary norms. While Shinzo Abe’s ‘three arrows’ have fallen far short of their target in reviving Japan’s flagging economy, the policy has nevertheless allowed Japan to position herself more favourably in regional geopolitics and begin to dilute some of the pacifist provisions imposed by the West after the Second World War. Abenomoics is seen by many as a means of reasserting Japan’s place in the world, unrestrained by Western influence and more closely allied with her old enemy China.[7] Some commentators have recently argued that all East Asia really wants from the West is respect. Perhaps these anti-Western measures are simply part of a continuing campaign by East Asian powers to demonstrate that they deserve a respected place among the old Western nations in the twenty-first century?Unfortunately, all of these developments seem to indicate the gradual closing of doors that were previously open to Western influences of various kinds, but it is in China that opposition to the key elements of Western civilisation has recently been most startling. The confrontational actions of the Chinese government under the presidency of Xi Jinping since 2013 have sent a chilling warning to those of his comrades who would wish to continue accommodating prevalent Western cultural norms within China. While Xi’s determination to exercise control over the minds of the Chinese and rid the country of harmful Western ideas have been likened to a ‘Maostalgia’ for the good old days of the Cultural Revolution when Mao Zedong was prepared to do anything to crush opposition to the regime, the current programme of de-Westernisation in China has not been as brutal as that of the 1960s.[8] Nevertheless, worrying signs of an all-out war against Western ideas and beliefs have been growing over the last four years. In July 2012, the General Office of the Communist Party of China issued a confidential internal document warning against the infiltration of seven dangerous Western values that are representative of the ‘liberal ways of thinking’ by which the West attempts to subvert other cultures and polities. This warning was widely circulated within the Communist Party in 2013, becoming known as the notorious ‘Document Number 9’,[9] whose implementation led to a sudden crackdown against human rights lawyers, media outlets, academics and various other independent thinkers and artists. The document announced that ‘disseminating thought on the cultural front [is] the most important political task’ of the Party, especially the need to proclaim that ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics and the Chinese dream are the main theme of our age’. Party members were encouraged to ‘expand and strengthen positive propaganda’, and ‘strengthen the management of ideological fronts’ because ‘we must clearly see the ideological situation as a complicated, intense struggle’. The seven areas of concern to the central party machine were listed as:Promoting Western Constitutional Democracy as an attempt to undermine the current leadership and the socialism with Chinese characteristics system of governance;Promoting ‘Universal Western Values’ in an attempt to weaken the theoretical foundations of the party’s leadership;Promoting Civil Society in an attempt to dismantle the ruling party’s social foundation;Promotion of Neoliberalism (unrestrained economic liberalisation) in the guise of Globalisation by Western powers in an attempt to change China’s Basic Economic System;Promoting the West’s Idea of Journalism (‘freedom of the press’), thereby challenging China’s principle that the media and publishing system should be subject to Party discipline;Promoting Historical Nihilism in the guise of ‘reassessing history’ in an attempt to distort Party history and the history of New China; andQuestioning the Reform and Opening of China Policy in a way that deviates from the dogma of Socialism with Chinese characteristics.Party members were enjoined to guard against failures in the so-called ‘ideological sphere’ being promoted by ‘Western anti-China forces’ in their ‘attempt at carrying out Westernisation’. Protection and strengthening of the ‘ideological sphere’ was to be achieved through:Strengthening leadership in the ideological sphere: key leaders must react swiftly and effectively and preemptively resolve all problems in the ideological sphere;Guiding party members to distinguish between true and false theories: resist ‘false tides of thoughts … uphold strict and clear discipline’; ‘We must not permit the dissemination of opinions that oppose the Party’s theory or political line’;Unwavering adherence to the principle of the Party’s control of the media: in political matters the media must be ‘of one heart and mind with the Party’; andConscientiously strengthening management of the ideological battlefield: the management of propaganda ‘on the cultural front’ must be reinforced and absolutely no opportunity or outlet must be allowed ‘for incorrect thinking or viewpoints to spread’.The ‘conscientious strengthening of the ideological battlefield’ that has been attempted through the implementation of Document Number 9 since 2013 has taken various forms, but chief amongst them are (1) a crackdown on media outlets selling Western books, (2) tightening of control over publications entering China (including the kidnapping and detention of five publishers and booksellers from Hong Kong),[10] (3) monitoring of textbooks used in schools and universities to ensure that Western ideologies are not taught in the Chinese education system,[11] (4) close surveillance of academics in universities to ensure that ‘further advances in Marxism’ are made in the social sciences and philosophy,[12] (5) tightened control over news media, (6) greater supervision of the internet in China and the blocking of ideologically unsound content, (7) a clampdown on political activists promoting democracy or Western liberal principles (including in Hong Kong where students involved in the Umbrella Movement of late 2014 have been arrested and convicted for their political activities), (8) the targeting of artists who use political satire in their work, (9) making it more difficult for Western expatriates to enter and stay in China for work,[13] and (10) implementing tighter controls over Christian churches whose religious practices the Party has long perceived as an ‘existential threat to its rule’.[14] In all these areas, the Chinese government has attempted to enforce its control over the minds of its citizens in order to rid China of politically destabilising Western ideas. How successful have they been? In answering this question I would like to start by making an obvious point of which the Chinese government is itself fully aware. People do not always believe what they are told to believe or do what their governments tell them to do, even within a totalitarian state such as the People’s Republic of China. While it is clear that the Chinese government wishes to restrict the continuing impact of Western ideas through repressive measures, it seems to me unlikely that they will achieve these aims given the existing penetration of Western ways of thinking throughout China, but particularly in the cities. In assessing why I think China and the other countries of East Asia will continue to be influenced by the West, whether they want it or not, I am going to be focusing on the agency of individual people as a conduit for these ideas to spread. In my experience, people within a state such as China actually continue to do whatever they think is right or most expedient for themselves, despite what the government tells them. In exploring the continuing relevance of Western civilisation to East Asian peoples I am going to use the analytical categories that David employed in his book, Soul of the West.[15] These seem to me to be a good starting point for understanding why it is impossible in the modern world for Western civilization NOT to continue to have an impact on East Asia, with the one possible exception of North Korea. David’s first category in analyzing the ‘primary structural components of our complex [Western] culture’ is language. While he focused on Latin as the ‘principal vehicle of Western civilisation’ in the past,[16] I think in the modern world most people would agree with me that English is now the universal language of Western ideas. This is something which is readily recognised by people in East Asia. People living in Hong Kong or the Philippines have a valuable cultural advantage in the modern globalised economy because they possess higher levels of competence in the use of the English language. Other East Asian nations understand this and have been pursuing national programmes of English language instruction for many years. In China, English is the most popular foreign language (having long overtaken the previous favourite, Russian), but there are a number of other languages that are also thought to have practical value in today’s world, especially French, German and Spanish (all European languages), which are considered to be the most important means of communication (apart from English) that people use for international business transactions. Places on foreign language programmes in Chinese universities are highly sought after, and the same is true in Japan and South Korea. You will no doubt be surprised to learn that Latin is also flourishing at China’s top university, Beida in Beijing, where an American Benedictine monk has been teaching Latin to large classes for several years after running a similarly successful programme at a Catholic university in Taiwan for more than a decade. Almost everyone in East Asia seems to want to learn a Western language. The importance of this development for cultural interchange is obvious: in order to acquire a foreign language these days, students do not just learn grammar and vocabulary, they also read Western texts, many of which are drawn from the great canon of our Western civilisation. It is therefore difficult, if not impossible, to learn a Western language in Asia without being exposed to Western ideas.This brings us to David’s second category: literature. David made the point that ‘echoes [of the Bible] are everywhere’ in Western literature, from the early church fathers through to Dante, Shakespeare and most of the modern authors before the twentieth-first century.[17] What we do not realise in the West is that so much of our literary canon has been translated into the vernacular languages of East Asia. I am not sure how Shakespeare’s plays would sound in Chinese, or whether Petrarch’s sonnets still have a noticeable rhyming scheme when translated into Japanese, but the extraordinary truth is that so much of the West’s great literature is being published and circulates relatively freely within East Asian nations. While most of this literature is perhaps known only by the intellectual elite, we should remember the old Jesuit maxim about what you teach a boy when he is young – some of the future leaders of China are already deeply imbued with Western literature, and this literature has been consumed within the seemingly closed intellectual borders of China, not in courses taken in Western universities. But it is not just the Chinese intelligentsia who are frequently exposed to Western texts. One of my favourite statistics is the fact that the world’s largest publisher of Bibles is located in Nanjing: the Amity publishing company printed 13.22 million Bibles in more than 100 languages in 2014. Established in 1987, Amity had printed more than 130 million Bibles by the beginning of 2015, 60 % of which were distributed within China.[18] When a communist country such as China allows the Western civilisation’s Sacred Scripture to be printed and distributed so widely within its borders, it is surely impossible for Western ideas not to have some impact on an increasingly large percentage of the population who can now read. The same is true in Taiwan and Korea where active evangelisation of the non-Christian population has been in progress for many years. In the field of law, philosophy and government, East Asia is similarly exposed to a whole range of Western ideas. Half of my East Asian nations are democracies (Japan, Taiwan and South Korea), while the other half are ‘communist republics’ (China, North Korea and Vietnam). Only Japan retains its ancient imperial monarchy, although these days that is stripped of its old powers. The point that I want to make here is that both representative democracy and communist totalitarianism are Western inventions, and even though China may insist that her political system is ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, the basic political philosophy is a nineteenth-century Western notion. Even within present-day China there are two small islands of executive-led representative government which are closer to Western democracy than Chinese communism – Hong Kong and Macau. Although tiny by comparison with the enormity of the Chinese state, both places represent a serious threat to the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party through repeated demands for a more representative and responsible system of government. Beijing realises the threat that is implicit in such calls, and is reacting by trying to suppress the democracy movement in Hong Kong. Despite attempts to restrict news media and the internet, many Mainlanders (Chinese Mainlanders) are fully aware of the battle that is taking place in Hong Kong. I am told by my students that one of the reasons that some Chinese people want to visit Hong Kong is so that they can see the local democratic movement in action, especially at the key annual events such as the June 4 Vigil in Victoria Park to commemorate the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. While resistance to Western democracy will no doubt continue for a long time as communist regimes in China, Vietnam and North Korea attempt to retain political control of their countries, an awareness of democratic principles cannot be easily purged from the collective memory, especially in China which had nearly fifty years of democratic government in the first half of the twentieth century. North Korea may, of course, be a slightly harder nut to crack! We must also remember that the reach of Western law in both its common (British) and civil (European) manifestations has been so extended beyond their home jurisdictions in the last half century that Western legal norms are now considered to be the guiding principles of international trade, business and finance. With the possible exception of North Korea, all the East Asian nations are now major players in the world economy and all have surrendered to the need for contracts to be negotiated and adjudicated according to Western norms. Major international law firms (mostly American, British and Australian) are present throughout East Asia, as are the world’s largest accountancy firms, which also operate under Western principles. Tens of thousands of East Asians are being trained in Western legal and accounting standards so that they can take part in the global boom in trade and finance. Once released, these principles will be difficult to restrain. And as David says, these principles are based on the fundamental Christian notion that ‘each human being has absolute value’.[19] To uphold Western ideas of ‘the intrinsic value of every individual’ goes completely against the traditional Asian belief in ‘the total subordination of the individual to the sacred traditions that have been handed down from antiquity’,[20] yet East Asian nations, particularly China as the emerging economic superpower of the twenty-first century, know that they must play by the legal and accounting rules that govern international trade and finance. In this way, notions of basic human rights have been creeping into China for decades, a trend that has not gone unnoticed by the Communist Party. Whether China will be able to maintain its international presence economically and not eventually embrace the wider ramifications of using Western legal codes is yet to be seen. Another major factor in bringing Western influence to East Asia has always been education. Initially it was the foreign missionaries who brought Western learning to the orient, but now such learning is fully embraced by the state, even when it is carefully controlled, as is the case in China and Vietnam. It is simply not possible for modern professionals to function in the global economy without a comprehensive Westernised education. This is fully recognised by all East Asian nations, even North Korea. You will be well aware that millions of Chinese have been educated outside China over the last thirty years in every field of academic endeavour, some of them at my own university in Hong Kong and very large numbers here in Australia. Not all of these graduates return to China, but those who do return take with them not just a theoretical knowledge of how the Western system works, but an intimate acquaintance with daily life and how it reflects the intellectual foundations upon which the Western academy is founded. There are many senior people in China who choose to tow the party line, but who nevertheless hope for a better future when Western principles become more acceptable to the masses and the Party. There are already some important cultural areas in which it is clear that Western ideas dominate. Whenever I visit a Chinese city I am absolutely amazed at the extent to which the built urban environment that has suddenly arisen over the last twenty years is an almost exact copy of what we have in the urbanised West. You might expect to discover in China, or Japan or South Korea architecture in an established vernacular style, but you would be wrong. Most of the large public, commercial and residential buildings that are being constructed with such alarming speed in these countries today are recognisable to the Westerner as neo-classical in style. It is as if someone had taken all the architectural conventions of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries in Europe and applied them religiously to the new urban landscapes of East Asia in the early twenty-first century. You will also hear Western music played everywhere in East Asia; not just the pop tunes that are churned out by the modern Western music industry, but also the great music from the classics of the Western repertoire. Colin Thubron was surprised in the mid-1980s when he heard ‘The Blue Danube’ being broadcast over the tannoy in a public park near Beijing.[21] Many Western visitors to China have had similar experiences of cultural dissonance in China; just a few weeks ago I took an Australian friend across the border to Zhuhai and we heard ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ being played in a shopping centre! Moreover, the Chinese have long had some of the best Western orchestras in Asia, and many Chinese children learn a Western musical instrument. Many of you will also be aware of the Suzuki method of violin education, pioneered by the Japanese musician Shinichi Suzuki. I could say more about Western music in East Asia and also Western art in general, but my time is running short. Suffice it say that western art, music and architecture have penetrated deep into the East Asian psyche and will be difficult to evict. There are many other areas that I could have quoted to show you that Western civilisation is alive and well in East Asia. Mass tourism to the West from Japan, China and South Korea over the last forty years has brought tens of millions of East Asians into direct contact with the wonders of Western art, architecture and culture in cities across Europe. Modern consumer culture has placed a high premium on Western goods that reflect and refract Western culture to an eager East Asian market. Western sport has slowly become another prism through which East Asians learn something of Western values of co-operation and teamwork. Just consider the baseball-mad Japanese and the soccer-crazy Chinese, or the way in which Rugby has been spreading its tentacles throughout Asia.[22] This is surprising because East Asians were always considered to be disinterested in sport and not very good at it. We might also want to consider the national priority that is placed on being selected to host the Olympic Games: China desperately wanted to host the 2008 Olympics to showcase its role in the modern world, and Japan did everything it could to secure the 2020 Games in Tokyo. People cannot play and watch Western sport without being influenced by it. I would also perhaps want to talk more about the new ‘Belt and Road’ policy of China, a scheme which seeks to connect China indirectly via Central Asia to Europe through a new twenty-first-century Silk Road. This will be a permanent and powerful artery for the transfer not just of trade goods and resources, but also of people and ideas. I agree with David that, ‘Ideas are the most powerful things in the world’,[23] and for this reason I believe that the great tradition of Western civilisation will become more visible to East Asia as the years go by. When Dawson wrote The Revolt in Asia in the mid-1950s, he suggested that ‘the oriental world is being transformed before our eyes’ and that the influence of Western civilisation was ‘seeping in by a hundred channels and nothing can prevent its ultimate triumph’.[24] While I think it would do us well to be cautious about the Western triumphalism of Dawson’s rhetoric, I find the metaphor of Western civilisation ‘seeping’ into the cultures of East Asia to be very convincing. As I have tried to argue this evening, Western culture IS seeping into East Asia, and has been for centuries. I do not think that this process is reversible – when even the brutal totalitarian machinery of communist China has failed to arrest the spread of Western ideas and beliefs in the People’s Republic, it seems unlikely that any other political or intellectual system will be able to prevent this seepage in the modern globalised world of the internet and the relatively free flow of information. There will always be gaps and fissures in any system of mind control, and into these crevices will seep ideas and beliefs, especially ideas and beliefs that are already partially known or even familiar. So I believe that the ‘great tradition’ of the civilisation of the West will continue to meet and mingle with the even older traditions of the East. And while some of East Asia will continue to embrace the gifts of Western civilisation, even those nations that are currently resisting its influence will ultimately be engaged and changed by it. Like Dawson, then, I believe that this process is unstoppable. Once the genie is out of its bottle, it cannot be squeezed back in.
[1] Christopher Dawson, Understanding Europe (London & New York: Sheed and Ward, 1952).[2] Christopher Dawson, Mission to Asia, originally published as The Mongol Mission in 1955 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980).[3] Christopher Dawson, The Revolt in Asia (London & New York: Sheed and Ward, 1957).[4]Ibid., p. 35.[5] While different institutions have their own means of calculating GDP, China and Japan come second and third in ranking tables of the IMF estimates for 2016, World Bank calculations of 2015, and the United Nations list for 2014.[6] Prableen Bajpai, ‘The World’s Top 10 Economies’, Investopedia (18 July 2016), http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/022415/worlds-top-10-economies.asp, retrieved 9 November 2016.[7] Tom Holland, ‘The hidden agenda behind Japan’s Abenomics’, This Week in Asia (12 September 2016).[8] Niall Ferguson, ‘In the grip of a new cultural revolution’, South China Morning Post (26 May 2016).[9] Its full title is ‘A Communique on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere’, see https://www.chinafile.com/document-9-chinafile-translation, retrieved 27 May 2016. See also Chris Buckley, ‘China Takes Aim at Western Ideas’, The New York Times (19 August 2013), and The Washington Post editorial, ‘China’s pathetic crackdown on civil society’ (22 April 2015).[10] Raquel Carvalho, ‘Official booksellers to be missing from Guangzhou event’, Sunday Morning Post (23 October 2016).[11] Mandy Zuo, ‘Warning to private schools in Shanghai’, South China Morning Post (27 October 2016).[12] Cary Huang, ‘Academics must remake Marxism for 21st century: Xi’, South China Morning Post (18 May 2016).[13] Julia Hollingsworth, ‘Good old days may be over for expats in China’, Sunday Morning Post (23 October 2016).[14] Mimi Lau, ‘The New Commandments’, South China Moring Post (24 October 2016).[15] David Daintree, Soul of the West: Christianity and the Great Tradition (Ballarat: Connor Court, 2015)[16]Ibid., p. 29.[17]Ibid., p. 33.[18] Cang Wei, ‘Spreading the Word: China’s Bible Industry’, The Daily Telegraph (21 April 2015).[19] Daintee, Soul of the West, p. 45.[20] Dawson, Revolt of Asia, p. 32.[21] Colin Thubron, Behind the Wall, originally published in 1987 (London: Folio Society, 2016), p. 13.[22] Jun Mai, ‘China lays down plan to dominate World Cup’, South China Morning Post (12 April 2016); Nazvi Careem & Chan Kin-wa, ‘Ambitious plan to grow rugby in China’, South China Morning Post (11 April 2016).[23] Daintree, Soul of the West, p. 70.[24] Dawson, Revolt in Asia, p. 39.
Published by The Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies