The territory of China varies from time to time. For example, the Republic of China began with what had been the Chinese Empire under the Manchus. China lost Outer Mongolia as the price of Soviet friendship but regained Taiwan (Formosa) from the Japanese at the end of World War II. Parenthetically, we may note here that Soviet Russia never delivered the goods though China paid the price. And speaking of Mongolia, one is reminded that the Chinese Empire under the Mongols once comprised about two-thirds of the continental land mass of Eurasia. The map of political China is truly protean.
What, then, is China as we Chinese understand the word to mean? As a working hypothesis, we might define China quite simply: China is the homeland of a fusion of peoples whom science may analyze into distinguishable ethnic groups but who subjectively feel themselves belonging to one another; that is to say, who feel and call themselves Chinese. This definition follows from the concept that Chinese nationality is neither racial, nor geographic, nor even political, but cultural. It was the criterion by which Confucius in his Spring and Autumn Annals judged the "Chinesivity"—if we may coin a new word—of the feudal principalities. We cannot do better than to follow the great master.
The Chinese Republic comprises five major geographic divisions: China proper, Manchuria, Mongolia, Chinese Turkestan, and Tibet. For our purpose, we shall focus our attention on China proper - which is however, naturally divisible into three regions: North China, drained by the Yellow River; Central China, drained by the Yangtze; and South China, drained by the Pearl River. The Huai River Basin, physically intermediate between the Yellow River and the Yangtze River basins, is culturally akin to the former. We shall not give it individual attention but consider it as part of North China. The remaining major divisions will be touched upon only incidentally. The total area of the Republic is about 3,877,000 square miles including Taiwan, and its population is about 600,000,000 according to current estimates.
The Loess Plain
Loess is a wind-borne dust of exceeding fineness. After a season of dust storms in Peiping, it is not unusual to find that dust has penetrated into the interior of one's wrist watch. About the end of the Pleistocene period, arid winds from the Central Asian plateau and the Gobi deserts began to deposit loess in North China. It forms a blanket of enormous thickness, completely obliterating the original underlying topography and leveling up the heartlands of North China into a vast featureless expanse.
If we were asked whether there was a single physical factor more potent than any other in its molding influence on Chinese civilization, our answer would consist of the single word loess. The loess plain of North China makes an ideal setting for peace and war alike: the patient farmer finds the soil exceedingly fertile and easy to till; the predatory nomad finds the plain easy to invade and richly rewarding in plunder. It was to remedy the lack of natural lines of defense that the Chinese built the Great Wall, one of the seven wonders of the world.
It is customary to ascribe the building of the Great Wall to Shih Huang-ti (3rd century B.C., the first emperor completely to abolish feudalism and rule the empire from the throne through 'a centralized government.) The imperial Ch'in dynasty he founded, short-lived as it was (221-207 B.C.), has been immortalized in the name China. Actually, Shih Huang-ti merely had the many then existing walls consolidated and vastly strengthened into a continuous rampart.
The Great Wall was first completed in 204 B. C. and later repeatedly repaired and extended. Its total length is about 1,500 miles. Its height varies from 15 to 30 feet, with thickness in proportion. It is surmounted with more than 15,000 battery towers and protected with a complete system of moats and trenches. The masonry of the Great Wall is sufficient for the construction of a strong retaining wall ten feet high right round the globe at the equator.
The Chinese have an inherent aversion to aggression. The entire weight of Chinese literature, especially poetry, militates strongly against aggression; indeed, against the waging of any war. A Western wit once remarked that his head boy (butler) was the embodiment of a working philosophy which can be best summarized as "to live and to let live". He might have pointed at the Great Wall for proof. It constitutes a most impressive, standing announcement to all concerned, pleading to be let alone and promising never to go beyond the self-imposed limitation. In other words, the loess inclines Chinese military mentality to skilled, heroic defense. The great Chinese pacifist Moh-ti (5th century B.C.), for example, sought to prove the futility of aggression by demonstrating the perfectibility of defense. The loess-dweller could see no reason why he should covet his neighbor's land, nor why the neighbor should covet his. Thus the loess sired not only the Great Wall but an important Chinese mentality.
Another offspring of the loess is the character' of the Yellow River, rightly described as China's Sorrow. Its current, flowing rapidly through the plain, carries a vast quantity of loess in suspension. Any slackening of speed causes immediate silting. Thus the river elevates its own bed from year to year until it flows in an aqueduct of its own creation high above the surrounding plains. In 25 centuries (from 602 B.C. to 1924 A.D.) the Yellow River breached its dikes more than 400 times, flooding thousands of square miles and causing untold loss of life and property. Within the same period, the river changed its course six times, emptying itself into the sea at an estuary sometimes as far north as Tientsin and sometimes as far south as the mouth of the River Huai, 400 miles away. Despite its great length of 2,500 miles and frightful volume of water at flood seasons, it is not navigable most of the time. It is truly China's sorrow. Yet it is principally on this very river and its tributaries that Chinese civilization first became Chinese.
Southward Ho!
The Yangtze River Basin presents a sharply different picture from the North China loess plains. While the dominant topographical characteristics of North China are its flatness and monotony, those of the Yangtze Basin are its diversity and charm. The 3,200-mile mighty river together with its countless tributaries—many of which rival the Rhine and the Rhone in magnificence—drains an area comparable to India in size and topographical variety. Geographically and culturally, the Yangtze Basin adds beauty and romance to the entire nation. Chinese poets are never tired of singing its praises. The Yangtze River and the Pearl River Basins were formerly covered with dense forests, haunted by poisonous reptiles and fierce beasts of prey. The chief obstacles to the march of Chinese civilization southwards during the classical times as well as in Chinese legends were principally resistances offered by forces of nature rather than by those of man. We pushed our cultural frontier southwards in much the same way the Western peoples did westwards in Canada and the U.S.A. Our Southward Ho! actually involved less bloodshed than their Westward one.
The Pearl River Basin is geographically separated from Central China but culturally forms a part of it. The nature of the terrain in both are sufficiently close to be classed together except in the matter of size, the southern basin being the smaller. Its relative inaccessibility rather tends to preserve the purity of the Chinese language and culture as they originally spread from North China. The inhabitants of these regions are closely affiliated with, though differing in minor points from, those in Central China and, together with them, are collectively known according to Chinese usage as Southern Chinese, in contradistinction to the Northern. South China southerners are usually smaller in stature but more venturesome than Central China southerners. They are the seafarers from China whom you meet all over the globe.
West and Southwest China as a geographic unit borders on the Tibetan Plateau and is highly mineralized on account of its numerous mountain ranges and extensive geological folding and faulting. It is the land of China's industrial future. The whole sub-continental peninsula southeast of the Himalayas is watered by rivers rushing down these highlands. For want of sufficient arable land, this part of China is unsuitable for extensive agriculture. The people are sturdy and independent. Some tribes still retain strange customs of great ethnologic interest.
Hub of Destinies
The Northeastern Provinces, or Manchuria, recognized in the Constitution of the Chinese Republic as one of its integral territorial entities, is the former homeland of the Manchus. Culturally, Manchuria in the northeast is as Chinese as, say, the province of Yunnan is in the southwest. The Manchus themselves nowadays look Chinese, feel Chinese, behave in the Chinese manner, and apart from a few scholars, speak only Chinese. They are Chinese at heart. The proper approach to understanding Manchuria is to regard it as the northeastern provinces of China proper.
One does not need to be a military expert to realize the strategic importance of Manchuria. A glance at the map, or better at a terrestial globe, will bring out forcibly the key position of Manchuria as the hub around which revolve the destinies of China, Russia, Korea, Japan, and Alaska. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894; the Russo-Japanese War of 1904; the Manchurian Incident on September 18, 1931 (which put the League of Nations on the scales and found it wanting and thus prepared the way for the League's own demise); the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) which began as a local incident and triggered a global war of unprecedented violence; the Yalta Betrayal (Feb. 4-11, 1945); the Sino-Soviet Treaty of 1945, which China has since denounced; and the Korean War (1950-53), together with its aftermath, the prolonged state of armed truce still dragging on uneasily today: each of these recent epoch-making events had its root cause in Manchuria.
The more direct routes of trade and invasion from the west thread themselves within a corridor through the province of Sinkiang (Chinese Turkestan). Prior to the age of modern sea-borne communication, our alien conquerors preferred to descend from Central Asia into North China from all points along the corridor wherever they could break through, though sometimes detouring by way of Mongolia or Manchuria. The land in Sinkiang and Mongolia is arid, consisting largely of deserts, with the exception of the great Tarim River basin and some smaller oases. For reasons of trade and defense, the capital city of imperial China up to the T'ang Dynasty (618-905 A.D.) always sprawled itself astride the most important of these highways in Northwest China.
The Mongols are nomads but otherwise almost as Chinese as the Manchus, although they retain their language more than the latter do. Their religion is a variation of Lamaism derived from Buddhism. The Mongols are more warlike than any other race in the Republic. It is, therefore, interesting to observe that they have remained loyal to China for three centuries until Soviet Russia pried off Outer Mongolia from the Chinese Republic as a result of the Yalta sell-out.
Chinese Turkestan is referred to in our history as the Western Regions (Hsi Yu), the breeding ground of predatory nomads who were at one time ever on the lookout for chances of invasion into China proper. It is still inhabited by a mixture of peoples speaking different languages and believing in different religions. Nevertheless, Sinkiang has become more Chinese than Mongolia or Tibet, and there was no difficulty when its status within the Chinese Empire was changed from that of a semi-independent vassal state into one of a regular province toward the end of the Manchu dynasty. The cultural affinity between Sinkiang and China proper is the result of a long history of migration and counter-migration, of peace and war.
Land of Mystery
Tibet is proverbially a land of mystery. It is a vast plateau nowhere lower than 10,000 feet above sea-level, forbiddingly barren and practically inaccessible. It is a land in which to be able to get a square meal at all is a "special intervention of the gods", and that conviction very understandably has wrapped up its religion in mysticism and magic. It is an ideal home for the hermit wishing to run away from the world and for the ascetic desiring nothing better than to mortify his flesh in order to accrue spiritual merit. In other words, Tibet withdraws to itself spiritually as well as geographically. The Tibetan language is Chinese in syntax but written in a script derived from Sanskrit. The Tibetan soldier is a tenacious fighter renowned in history for heroism in self-defense.
Tibet is the most highly mineralized region in the world. Its immense underground resources together with its tremendous waterpower promise a future of magnificent industrial development. It is the one place in the world that can best withstand a shower of nuclear-headed missiles or serve as a hideout for their manufacture and launching. Strategically, Tibet and Sinkiang, taken together, dominate the teeming millions of China, Russia, Siberia, Pakistan, and India—roughly half of the world's population. This is why Mao cannot leave these regions alone.
We have seen how the various regions of the Chinese Republic exhibit marked contrasts in topographic features, economic resources, and ethnic characteristics. Politically, despite the existence of an overall monarchy in China proper for milleniums, the Chinese people have enjoyed (except under the Communists) almost complete local autonomy. There is an astonishing amount of economic and political laissez faire in China. So much so that the Japanese half a century ago used to caricature the Chinese people as 400 million separate grains of sand—entirely lacking in cohesion! There is some truth in the Japanese appraisal of the Chinese body politic. Chinese political philosophy does favor decentralization. Confucianism and Taoism both converge on an idyllic social order in which a poet may sing:
Rising with the sun to work,
Retiring with it to rest,
I drill a well for water
And till my land for food:
What have the emperor's efforts to do with me?
The Garden of Eden to the Chinese mind is anything but a strongly centralized, tightly regimented social order. But the looseness of the 400 million grains of sand is only apparent. Chinese affinity is natural and spontaneous and, therefore, politically unbreakable.
Mongolian Appearance
The typical present-day northern Chinese is tall, big-framed, and long-headed, resembling the Khams Tibetans on the one hand and the Japanese on the other, (if we neglect some tell-tale differentiating physiological features.) By insensible degrees, the typical northerner grades into the typical southerner, who is much smaller in build and is round-headed. In facial features and temperament, he gradually shades southward into the Melanesian. But all Chinese share the general appearance loosely described by Western ethnologists as Mongolian.
Archeologically speaking, in the remote past (the Pleistocene period), there was a grand dispersal of hominids (early-men) from Central Asia. One of them migrated westward, and we meet him as the Heidelberg Man. Another found his way to Chou K'ou Tien about 30 miles southwest of Peiping; and we meet him as the Pekin Man (Sinanthropus pekinensis), whose cave was the home of some very primitive industry. Later arrivals at Chou K'ou Tien left behind them evidences provoking rich speculation as to their former domicile. One artifact would have us trace its owner to north India (of the early Soan culture period.) An upper cave would have us label its owners as distant cousins germane of proto-Greeks, perhaps even of the Heidelberg Man. The use of hematite (an iron ore) for painting in the upper cave makes one wonder if our cave ladies powdered their faces with rouge! The farthest traveled hominid to arrive in China was perhaps the Kwangsi Cave Giant, (gigantopethecus). Not withstanding the grand dispersal, "all within the four seas are brothers" says Confucius. Nationalism based on racial incompatibility has never held much sway in China.
The Loess Mentality
To go back to the loess, the constant threats of invasion and the urgent need of salt, stones, and metals were motivating forces for the enlargement of intertribal trading areas and the striving for universal peace and harmony. Though the feudal states in China before Shih Hwang Ti fought often, and sometimes fiercely, among themselves; a sense of mutual affinity was growing with time and trade. If the loess plain is monotonous, it is impartial; if it does not inspire adventure abroad, it fosters an exceeding love of the home; if its inhabitants often come out the worse in fighting against intruders, they get even with them by absorption and assimilation; if it is frugal in its supply of minerals, etc., it is liberal in its gift of the limitless horizon, so important to one's sense of proportion. Reflecting the loess in our mentality, we are as a people tolerant, long-suffering, pragmatic, and tending to take the macroscopic rather than the microscopic view of any complicated situation. For milleniums we underestimated the importance of differences and division, and foolishly thought we were the world! Sense had to be knocked into our heads by the kindly West with big guns mounted aboard ironclads!
Things More Congenial
Let us leave guns and ironclads alone and talk of something more congenial. Stones and metals being buried deep beneath the loess, early Chinese civilization adapted itself to materials like clay, fiber, wood, bone, and leather. Though flints and bronzes fill the Chinese sections of the world's museums, these materials were too difficult to obtain for large-scale utilization by our forefathers. Moreover, stones and metals are inanimate, therefore lacking the warmth and cheer that Mister Wang—the ideal Chinese - likes to feel and reciprocate. In architecture for example, the difference between mahogany and marble is that the former is more friendly and ever ready to greet you with warm affection. A Chinese prefers, even in the choice of gems, the less brilliant but more friendly jade to the cold, hard, dazzling diamond. Chinese poetry, for another example, is noted for its qualities of wen, rou, tun, and hou, that is to say, gentleness, meekness, sincerity, and generosity. We do not admire needle-sharp satire or cold-blooded intellectuality. These are not the best qualities of the loess, and consequently not of the Chinese. The Chinesivity of the Chinese is based on their sense of belonging together. They like to extend this sense to what they create or enjoy.
Legends often reveal the mentality of a people better than does actual history. Chinese legends canonize and enthrone inventors of useful arts and sciences. Yiu Ch'ao Shih the Nest-Builder, Sui Ren Shih the Fire-Tamer, Shen Nung Shih the Divine Husband-man and herbalist doctor, Nu Kua Shih who repaired the heavens—to mention a few of the most remote as well as most exalted legendary engineers or artisans—were all honored and elevated by legend to the rank of monarchs. Creativity and universal service captured the imagination of the Chinese. The spirit of the artisan and the engineer runs strong in Chinese civilization. This is why Chinese civilization has always been eminently practicable and why the purely theoretical aspects of it, while greatly esteemed, never quite succeeded in producing mentalities like that of Euclid in the West.
One aspect deserving especial mention is that Chinese legendry invariably couples saintliness with pragmatism. All its sage-emperors rendered civilizing services not for selfish gains, but for the benefit of all people of all time. There is an inner yearning for ethical satisfaction that refuses to be ignored by even the most pragmatic phases of Chinese civilization. A sense of belonging together necessarily motivates a sense of sharing and of rendering practical service. This idea has found expression in Chinese legends by raising their engineer or artisan monarchs to sainthood. No legendary hero ever won imperial dignity by military prowess alone.
Military Thinking
Warmaking can never be totally divorced from theories and practices normally considered criminal in times of peace and prosperity. But Chinese military thinking is unanimous in relating victory to moral justification. This conviction probably stems from a mental defense-mechanism which desires nothing better than the abolishment of war itself. To one who condemns aggression, every war shall conclude with a lesson for the aggressor to remember. Hence our readiness to base victory on righteousness. Only righteous causes are able to emerge ultimately triumphant in any sustained struggle. Even in the 20th century, this conviction is as strong as ever. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese settlers in the South Sea Islands enjoy wealth and prestige. But they never entertain any thought of persuading China, or banding themselves together, to seize and convert these islands into vassal states of the Chinese. No aggression for the Chinese please: again excepting the un-Chinese Mao Tse-tung and his cohorts.
The grand mixing of widely differing blood lineages partially accounts for the survivability of the Chinese in all climates and under extremely varied conditions. It presumably also predisposes Chinese mentality towards philosophies and religions which are rationalistic, pragmatic, tolerant, and worldwide in outlook. The Chinese civilization is geared to a built-in faith in the golden mean and eschews extremism. It, therefore, emphasizes synthesis and harmony rather than analysis and rivalry. The Logos or Tao is something that both creates and conserves. Reality is at once unified and unifying. To the Chinese, the constant application of a mental microscope to discover split-hair lines of demarcation in a continuum creates a mentality that militates against the natural evolution of broad-mindedness so essential to harmony and peace and the Golden Mean. One result of this rejection of the mental microscope is that Chinese civilization can domicile itself anywhere in the world and be welcome.
Confucianism, Taoism and Chinese forms of Buddhism, as well as Chinese arts and science, have domiciled themselves in Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and countless locales in Southeast Asia. The virtual absence of juvenile delinquency in the so-called China-towns in the United States and other lands is evidence of Confucianism in action in alien environments. The negative point we have noted is that Chinese civilization carries with it no territorial or political ambition. The positive points to take notice of are self-respect, poise, goodwill, universal harmony and laissez faire. They constitute the chief message of wisdom from venerable China.
The Uncrowned King
The Chinese legends claim that all men are created sinless and remain sinless at heart—at least potentially so. In keeping with this belief, Confucius (551-479 B.C.) has been held by common consent throughout China to be the Uncrowned King, ruling over an invisible universal empire of righteousness and benevolence which he inherited from our legendary saint-monarchs. The Chinese apostolic succession, so to speak, descends from legendary personifications to Emperor Yao (2357-2255 B.C.), Emperor Shun (2255-2205), The Great YÜ (2205-2197), King Tang (1766-1753 B.C.) King Wen (1185-1135 B.C.), King Wu (1122-1116), and Duke of Chou (12th century B.C.)—all real persons—right down to Confucius, the first commoner in the whole succession. In Confucius we find the consummation of all the moral enlightenment and vitality that had come to him from remote antiquity. And as a fountainhead of moral inspiration for man's social order to commune, so to speak, with heaven's cosmic order, Confucius has been unfailing—enough for everyone to drink his fill from.
The Chinese Adam
Legend is usually inseparable from ancient cosmogony. In Chinese cosmogony, P’an Ku created heaven and earth out of chaos by the sheer fact of growth. For 18,000 years he grew six feet taller every day with stoutness to match, thus forcing apart heaven and earth while all the time forming the celestial bodies and assigning them to their appointed orbits. Having completed this magnificent work, he died a unique death. He died only to live as mountains and rivers, herbs and trees, animals and fishes, thunder and lightning, and, of course, men and women. The Chinese Adam created the cosmos but was himself uncreated. Perhaps he never realized that he had perched Chinese philosophy firmly on a rock pinnacle of humanism. Like Jesus Christ, he died in order that lothers might live. But unlike Jesus, there was no resurrection. P'an Ku lives in his creation.
In conclusion, we may say that the effect of the background to Chinese civilization is best seen in the manner the ideal Chinese reacts to his environment. Diverse geographic, ethnic, and cultural influences compete for his submission. He masters and makes use of them all by ever trying to discover their common ground and ignoring their frontier disputes. Thus he may well be a Confucian, a Buddhist, and a Christian at one and the same time. His personality is ploynomial but not schizophrenic.
He manages to avoid schizophrenia by avoiding too much or too rigid application of logic. He is never quite sure of the completeness and accuracy of his premises. There is always a margin of observational or factual uncertainty, and allowance must be made for it in logic. What then is the justification of deifying the conclusions to be deduced therefrom? Hence his tolerance is both rational and pragmatic. "To live and to let live" is his motto, and the application of which includes "to believe and to let believe."
This tolerance of margins of uncertainties is not favorable to science. By the middle or end of the Ming Dynasty, China came to lose its leadership in science and engineering in comparison with the West. Western science (if I may insult science by localizing it to any particular territory) depends on the discovery and exploitation of split-hair division lines in continuums. The Chinese is at a disadvantage in this respect. He is too prone to sink differences for the sake of harmony and unification.
How then, we may ask, did present-day young Chinese like Li Tsung-dao and Yang Chen-ning manage to win their spurs in some of the most exacting of sciences amidst worldwide competition? The answer is to be found once more in Chinese mentality. Pure science is hindered, not promoted, by too much profit motive. The Chinese is lucky to have his propensity for the pragmatic and the utilitarian counterbalanced by an ability to rise above them. We saw that all the major schools of Chinese thought respect the recluse. The ideal Chinese gladly serves, but he honestly spurns fame, power, or profit. Did not Confucius declare that "the superior man delights in being righteous while the little man delights in profit and wealth"? There is something of the Confucius in the Nobel prizemen Li and Yang which enabled them to pursue truth for its own sake. Chinese practical sense can always narrow down the margin of uncertainty enough to satisfy a modicum of logic.
The Chinese pride themselves on detachment from worldliness. This may be a kind of inner rebellion against, as well as sublimation of, the loess mentality. In his heart an ideal Chinese is at peace with every person, with every thing, with heaven and earth, and last but not least with himself. He enjoys quiet contemplation and detached speculation on the mystery of nature's ways and meaning. If he continues true to himself, we have no fear that he will again lag far behind the West in science or abstract philosophy.
Tranquilizers
A Chinese individual's contentment overflows his mundane environment and speculative intellectuality. He exudes peace, poise, and purity of enjoyment as soon as he relaxes, sings, carves, paints, or molds. A glance at an Yin Dynasty bronze, a Tang Dynasty carving, a Sung Dynasty vase, or even a Ch'ing Dynasty vestpocket snuff-bottle can soothe Chinese nerves. They are tranquilizers without side effects.
A people capable of producing Lao Tze and Chuang Tze and the like is bound to have a strain of mysticism coursing in their blood vessels. Normally, however, we Chinese hide our mysticism behind a facade of superstition. The difference between the two is that while superstition is either amenable to or scared of philosophizing, mysticism enjoys and thrives on it.
A word of warning may be in order. The Chinese may be steeped in superstition, and much of Chinese superstition is really dramatized wisdom serving some useful social purpose; the Chinese are not very religious in the sense the word is used in India or the West. A high-caste Indian would rather die than eat any food defiled by the shadow of an outcaste. A Chinese will act differently. He will simply chant an incantation and weave some magic passes in the air. Lo! The food is purified. Why waste good food? But he will not have his wife deliver a child in a room haunted by the ghost of a mother who died of childbirth in it. Pure superstition? Yes, but science takes cognizance of this ghost. Her name is germs, and the germs of puerperal fever are apt to persist in the room for decades. The fact is: a Chinese is no Chinese if he divests himself of the wisdom of ages, a wisdom accruing often at the cost of bitter experience.
Quem deus perdere vult, prius dementat. (Whom a god wishes to destroy he first makes mad.) Humanity faces extinction today. And that by its own hand. Another Cuba in Latin America, a Soviet Russian supported Arab attack on Israel, an accidental firing of some nuclear missile, or even the mere throwing of a boot in a U.N. General Assembly session, may well touch off a global conflagration. A timely injection of a drop of the spirit of Mister Wang - the ideal Chinese—may be the wisest thing to do to save mankind from unthinkable carnage, if not from total annihilation. And Wang owes it primarily to the hitherto largely unsung and little noticed loess—at least unsung and little noticed abroad—and to the mentality and civilization that has nurtured, shaped, and guided their development. Wang being an incorrigible optimist, this remains his outlook; and it is a long, long vista of universal peace and harmony, freedom and justice, that he is envisaging.
Righteousness Survives
Because Chinese are more commonsensical than scientific, more integrative than analytic, more reasonable than legalistic, more integrative than divisive, more defensive than predatory, they are better conditioned for a world of universal peace and harmony than one of mutual throat-cutting. You can't pit a policy of live-and-let-live against one of live-and-kill and expect it to come out top dog. Chinese are not meant to be inmates of a madhouse, but unfortunately we are in one. This is our greatest misfortune.
Man is created master of his environment. Time and again we have been conquered and ruled over by alien aggressors. We have survived them all. Says Clausewitz, "War is an extension of politics." Chinese history will show him the other side of the coin. Politics is also an extension of war. What Chinese have lost on the battlefield, they have always won back by statecraft, which in the Chinese view must be equated to the art of making right triumph over might.
Chinese pragmatism constrains us to yield everything to force majeure. Yes, everything - everything but righteousness. To yield one's moral stand is to be lost forever! To die for a righteous cause is to win in the long run. The victory of Jesus over sin and its wage was scored on the Cross. P'an Ku died to live in his creation. Death is not the last word. No, neither for the Christian, nor for the Chinese. In peace or in war, victory in the long run always goes to the party less disobedient to Tao, to the Logos, to the Will of God.
What if victory went to the unrighteous, as it has in many parts of the world these days? Supreme Chinese concern is like that of a true sportsman - not with victory or defeat, but with his conduct in the game. This is how it is according to the Book of Chung Yung:
Confucius remarked:
"For God in giving life to all created things is surely bountiful to them
according to their qualities. Hence the tree that is full of life he fosters and
sustains, while that which is ready to fall He cuts off and destroys. The
Book of Songs says: 'That great and noble Prince displayed
The sense of right in all he wrought;
Adjusting justly, grade by grade,
The spirit of his wisdom swayed
Peasant and poor; the crowd, the court.
'So Heav'n, that crowned his sires, restored
The countless honours they had known;
For Heaven aye keepeth watch and ward,
And through the son renews the throne.' "
Chinese leave the task of renewing the throne to the lap of the Giver of Life Himself. The Chinese are undefeatable as long as their sons and daughters remain, by the grace of good, loyal to their unique heritage.