作者：高大伟
出版社：上海译文出版社
格式: AZW3, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT
Limited Views On The Chinese Renaissance 中华复兴管窥试读：
Acknowledgment
While I am the only one responsible for the many imperfections of this collection, I wish to express my most sincere gratitude to Messrs.Zhou Shuchun, Shi Lingkong and Xu Hui.Introduction
The Huffington Post and China Daily have first published most of these short essays, but by having them in one publication the reader realizes that they are mere variations on one central theme: the (1)renaissance of the Chinese civilization.
The texts are presented in a reverse chronological order and they appear as they were published at the date indicated for each article. Except for "China's Subtle Power", the notes coincide with the beginning of what we call the "Xi Jinping's decade". Xi Jinping became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China on November 15, 2012 and the President of the People's Republic of China on March 14, 2013.
China is above all a living civilization. Her gigantic and complex society, her political life, economic dynamics and foreign policy can not be separated from her exceptionally long history and her rich culture. Therefore, one should not be surprised to find in this collection a (2)consideration on "Alexis De Tocqueville In The Middle Country" and remarks on tea, Chinese painting or even the Weiqi game.
"Global China" is not only one of the elements of multipolatity, but it is also a source of a multiconceptual world in which different forms of modernity have to coexist. It explains why reflections on international relations occupy a large part of Limited Views On The Chinese Renaissance.
As a French citizen deeply committed to the European integration project, I have paid special attention to the Sino-French relations and the Sino-European relations while I am aware that the Sino-American relations will largely define our century.
I hope that some of the ideas presented will stimulate more debates and reflections in order to better understand what could be one of the most significant stories of our time, the Chinese renaissance.
The patient observer of the Chinese world, who has learnt to be humble in front of the complexities of a mega-society, is both surprised and amused by those presenting definitive grand explanations on the Chinese realities.
The expression "limited views" does not only introduce to very short essays. Someone who would pretend to capture all the dimensions and implications of the Chinese renaissance should not be taken seriously.
We are convinced that while we are discussing the Chinese renaissance, this process is not only reshaping the world in which we live – the much commented power shift – but also the way we look at it – the less debated but arguably more fundamental phenomenon of cognitive shift. In that sense, it is, in any case, much too early to form a complete picture and full understanding of an epoch-making transformation.
We hope, through other essays which have yet to come, to continue on the path of describing with always more nuance the Chinese renaissance, a long but exhilarating intellectual journey.(1) The Chinese translation of Limited Views On The Chinese Renaissance is 中华复兴管窥, by using the characters 中华, zhonghua, we emphasize the importance of civilizational China, of China understood as a civilization.(2) For the rendition into English of "zhongguo", 中国, the two Chinese characters for China, we use Middle Country and not the traditional but highly debatable Middle Kingdom. The text in this collection whose title is "Chinese Centralities" is a commentary on the key notion, in the Chinese context, of "zhong", 中.- 1 -Variations On The Yin And The YangJuly 19, 2018
For China, being a gigantic market of 1.4 billion people, a potent geopolitical actor having influence across the globe and an ancient civilization is both a strength and a singularity. None of the other players of the international community combines these three dimensions of power.
The Chinese economic and socio-political dynamics are largely covered by the media, but the more arduous study of "civilizational China" as an object of sinology and cultural history is much less common even if it better explains the behaviors of the Middle Country.
The Chinese writing system which took form on oracle bones more than three millennia ago and which is still in use today, a taste as much as a quest for political unity more reminiscent of the ancient Romans than classical Greece, but also a set of more abstract principles can be considered as constant features of the Chinese civilization.
With the passage of time these constituting elements have certainly evolved but they withstood the internal revolutions and the external shocks of the incomparably long Chinese history.
Among China's philosophical concepts, the Yin (阴) and the Yang (阳) have always had a special status and significance. They stand as a key to decipher the classic Book of Changes (易经) and its combination of broken and solid lines forming the 64 hexagrams, they are the foundations of the rich and much alive Chinese traditional medicine but contemporary Chinese thinking, art, fashion, cooking or aesthetics can not be understood without a reference to these principles inherent to the Chinese mind.
Like for the notion of "Dao" (道), the Way, or "Da Tong" (大同), the "Great Unity", a mere transliteration of the Yin and the Yang into other linguistic contexts is preferable to what can only be defective translations.
Traditionally, one paraphrases the Yin as the feminine, the negative or the shadowy side, while the Yang is depicted as the masculine, the positive or the luminous versant, but the Yin and the Yang should be taken as such, two opposite but interconnected forces, at the origin of everything being both distinct and inseparable, an infinite productive tension.
Represented as "", the Yin-Yang diagram (阴阳图), also known as the taijitu (太极图), the "supreme ultimate" that Zhou Dunyi (1017–1073) introduced in his Taiji Tushuo, is nowadays universally recognized.
Inspiring and explanatory, the diagram "" is a rich and profound symbol which gives access to the Chinese mind, its cognitive operations and its perception of the world.
The visualization of the Yin-Yang diagram reveals a positive approach of contradiction. The Yin is not the exclusive opposite of the Yang, they nourish each other, they are both separate and one, the Yin is in the Yang as much as the Yang is in the Yin, they are simultaneously within and outside each other.
Non-exclusive opposites are natural and familiar to the Chinese mind, while the Western mind would tend to ask, like Hamlet, "To be, or not to be", China would answer "To be, and not to be".
In the most common use of the Chinese language, linguistic opposite compounds are numerous, the contraries do not annihilate each other, their juxtaposition is a transformation into a third meaningful idea.
A beginner in the learning of Mandarin rapidly encounters examples of this lexical characteristic: duo-shao (many/few – how much), hu-xi (exhale/inhale – breath) or chang-duan (long/short – length).
This generative contradiction is also at the source of a more thsophisticated literary creation. In Cao Xueqin's 18 century masterpiece Dream of the Red Chamber, the often commented "when one takes fiction for reality, reality is fiction, when one takes nothing for being, being turns into nothing" (假作真时真亦假，无为有处有还无) is a reflection on the nature of a novel and it beautifully plays with the interactions among opposites.
In the field of philosophy, both Sun Zi (544–496 BC) and Zhuangzi (369–286 BC) make such a use of paradoxes and contradictions that the most intriguing part of modern quantum physics does not surprise those familiar with the Taoist tradition.
As the Yin and Yang philosophy fully recognizes the essentially contradictory realities, it is also a representation of a cyclical approach of time. It has to be noticed that the Yin-Yang diagram is made of circles and that not a single straight line enters in its composition.th
When the European continent of the Enlightenment in the 18 century began to believe in the notion of progress, it also gradually adopted a linear comprehension of time. Western modernity tends to assume that the future which has yet to come will be better than the present and it looks at the past as something which has to be overcome.
As an ancient civilization, China is not exclusively concerned with a future necessarily carrying with it progress, for it remembers itself as an alternation between rises and declines. Time passes but it does not have to be an advancement into another qualitatively discontinuous step, as the two monumental studies of the Chinese ancient history – Sima Qian's (135–86 BC) Records of the Grand Historian and Sima Guang's (1019–1086) Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance – show, it is a repetition of the same patterns.
Through her long history, China experienced moments of glories (the Tang or the Song dynasties) but also of painful moments of decays, the end of the Ming dynasty ending with the suicide of the young Emperor Chongzhen (1611–1644) or the long agony of the Qing Empire that Cao Xueqin (1715–1763) anticipated with the foresight of a real genius.
The incipit of Luo Guanzhong's Romance of The Three Kingdoms, thanother true masterpiece of the Chinese literature written in the 14 century, is an obvious reference to the cyclical rhythm of the Chinese history: "The world under heaven ("tianxia", 天下), after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide".
The rendition of an essentially contradictory reality, the illustration that, in a cyclical conception of time, the past can also be the future, the Yin-Yang diagram can also symbolize the organic junction between the East and the West.
In this perspective, the East and the West, like the Yin and the Yang, should not be interpreted as two definitive standing blocks absolutely external to each other, but as two active poles that complement and nourish each other.
For the ancient Greeks who gave Europe its intellectual foundations but also for classical China, civilization has been shaped by opposition with the barbarians. Barbarians were a degraded otherness in a divided mankind.
In the "Orientalism" that Edward Said (1935–2003) deconstructed or in the "Occidentalism" which mirrors it, the imagined other is always in a distant belittlement, but an East-West transformative dualism is the cultivation and the appreciation of meaningful interactions.
In today's world of unprecedented interdependence, the contrast between the East and the West allows the contours of their respective identities to appear with clarity, but at a higher level of awareness, differences are not what separates but what makes a concrete universalism possible.
Cultural identities, contrary to the globalists' fantasies, do exist and they should be allowed to flourish but, in their most accomplished forms, they are the realization that they thrive both from the reinterpretation of the traditions which made them what they are and from the equally valuable existence of the other.
In other words, sameness and otherness can be understood as another variation on the Yin-Yang principle, and they do not exist absolutely by themselves but through their interrelations.st
When 21 century renascent China proposes to the world the vision of "a community of destiny for mankind", it is fully itself in the reinterpretation of the ancient concept of "Da Tong" and, at the same time, it rightly assumes that the East and the West, like the Yin and the Yang, can infinitely cross-fertilize.
"The Silk Road effect" is not the exchange of goods across an objective physical geography, it is the constant transformation of the East and the West when they are wise enough to appreciate their vital and inherent interconnection.- 2 -From The Chinese Renaissance To "A Community Of Destiny For Mankind"June 16, 2018
Any serious discussion on the reinvention of the Chinese civilization implies both a long view of time and a broad consideration of space. In that sense, the notion of "renlei mingyun gongtongti" (人类命运共同体) is highly meaningful.
While various renderings of "renlei mingyun gongtongti" are in circulation, it is the expression of "a community of destiny for mankind" which arguably stands as the most appropriate translation in English of what has become one of the key themes of China's public discourses and a concept inscribed in the PRC's Constitution in March 2018.
Characterized by the interactions between a rapid economic reemergence and a profound socio-political transformation, the Chinese renaissance is also a process of opening up to the world in which China is a receiver of external ideas and practices but acts also as an emitter.
Following the strategic decision of "Reform and Opening-up" taken exactly 40 years ago by Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997), Western modernity has certainly impacted the Chinese society but the Middle Country has also in many ways influenced global affairs.st
The 21 century outward projection of China whose scope and depth have no precedent takes place around, at least, eight different axes: the export of goods, but also an increasing Chinese global presence through technology, people (tourists, students or simply the evolving Chinese diaspora), finance and corporate, art and culture, military, diplomacy but also ideas.
The notion of "a community of destiny for mankind" can be interpreted as an example of a Chinese intellectual outward projection, an overarching proposal originated in China for a world undergoing rapid change.
By insisting on the importance of co-building "a community of destiny for mankind", China opts for a geopolitical stance which is at the opposite of nationalistic unilateralism. While multilateralism is questioned and weakened by forces which have emerged in the country, the United States of America, which has been the main contributor to its elaboration in the aftermath of WWII, Beijing recognizes that in a world of unprecedented interdependence, cooperation, dialogue and compromise within multilateral organizations are indispensable.
Global interdependence is rightly perceived as an unavoidable reality, a destiny ("mingyun"), and one needs to manage and organize it (the notion of community, "gongtongti") not only at a country or macroregional level but at the largest possible scale, mankind ("renlei"). Four decades after her opening up to the world, China is a powerful advocate of an inclusive global governance for peace and shared prosperity.
"A community of destiny for mankind" also introduces to a defining feature of what is the renaissance of a civilization as anticipated and conceptualized by Hu Shih (1891–1962) in his rich 1933 Haskell Lectures.
It is in the Chinese historical and cultural context that the ideal of "a community of destiny for mankind" has to be interpreted, it echoes the universalism which has been a constitutive element of the Chinese classical understanding of humanism. "A community of destiny for stmankind" is a 21 century re-interpretation of the classical concept of "da tong" (大同), or the Great Unity or Harmony.
From the Book of the Rites, one of the five classics of the Confucian canon, to Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) or Li Dazhao (1888–1927) through the controversial but stimulating Book of the Grand Harmony ("Da Tong Shu") of Kang Youwei (1858–1927), the quest for a Great Unity, the ideal of "da tong" (大同), has been a recurring theme of the Chinese political and philosophical discourse.
One of the permanent features of the Chinese civilization has been the quest to unify what was known under heaven ("tianxia", 天下) by the Middle Country, without this effort of synthesis, without this attempt at harmonizing differences, it would have been impossible for China to build its first unified political construction and, more importantly, to maintain in the following centuries long periods of unity between moments, it is true, of fragmentations.
The incipit of the famous Romance of The Three Kingdoms encapsulates well the cyclical rhythm of the Chinese history : "The world under heaven ("tianxia", 天下), after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide". But this stinsight presents also China's recurring concern for unity. In the 21 century, China's overall impact on the world will be more unifying than divisive since she carries with her as an idiosyncrasy a tendency toward synthesis which has been the source of her own cohesiveness.
At the other edge of the Eurasian continent, the history of Europe with its fiercely independent city-states, kingdoms and, following the th18 century, its nations, has been standing in a sharp contrast with the Chinese quest for synthesis, but since 1951 the European continent has finally entered a logic of integration. It can be said that, the European Union, the political expression of the European unity, has been designed with the ideal of a community of destiny for Europeans in mind.
Obviously, a much broader and complex community of destiny for mankind will not be reached at once and it can't be externally imposed by one hegemonic power. A long and arduous path, it nevertheless offers the perspective of a political architecture aligned with deeper historical forces – the realities of an ever-growing interdependence in a world of intense technological connectivity –, and it stands as a principle which morally elevates those who adopt it.
A concrete advance on this path should be, to a large extent, a product of the synergies between Europe and China, which in their own respective ways and at their own speed found the political wisdom to harmonize their internal heterogeneity. Having reached an equilibrium between unity and diversity these two ancient civilizations are, therefore, more apt to progress toward "a community of destiny for mankind", an effort of harmonization on a much larger scale, but which can benefit from their respective experiences.
At the opposite of the "China Threat" narrative, the Middle stCountry's 21 century metamorphosis constitutes a historical opportunity much beyond material gains since the effect of the Chinese renaissance could be a global renaissance attached to the growing awareness across the world that "a community of destiny for mankind" has to be co-built.
The renaissance that Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) described with great mastery and which transformed the cities of the Italian ththpeninsula in the 14 and 15 century reshaped the entire European thcontinent, and the Enlightenment of the French 18 century gradually impacted human societies far beyond the European borders.
In our time, while the process of the Chinese renaissance is taking place, while an ancient civilization reinvents itself materially and reinterprets her philosophical, cultural and artistic traditions, her centrality and attractiveness expand.
As China's cultural and artistic renaissance develops, her characteristics will not be seen anymore as peripheral realities in an exotic Orient, we will not simply look at her values, achievements and ideals, including "a community of destiny for mankind", but they will also partly determine our outlook on the world and on ourselves.
There might be a new historical moment in a not too distant future during which, "da tong" (大同), the Great Unity, could stand as a worldwide criterion by which we would evaluate a diplomacy and judge the actions of a country. This would also be an indicator of the completion of the Chinese renaissance and of its true global impact, not a mere objective change in world affairs but a cognitive shift in the way we interpret them.- 3 -The Courage Of A Vision For Sino-American RelationsMay 20, 2018
By articulating its China policy as an alternative between engagement and containment, the US is not only misinterpreting the nature of the Chinese transformation, but it is also failing to develop what should be a long-term vision for a new era of interdependence.
For many in Washington, engaging China equals to the conviction that the US has the means to gradually shape the course of China's development so it does not fundamentally alter the status quo of an international architecture designed at the end of WWII. It is the attractiveness of soft power which is at the heart of the engagement doctrine advocated by a liberal approach of foreign policy.
Realists arguing in favor of the containment of the Middle Country put, by contrast, the emphasis on the different dimensions of hard power – economy, finance and military – in order to limit the influence of a re-emerging China.
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