Absurdity, Allegory and China

There is an ever-growing list of books and authors writing on the ‘new’ China, and while I do not claim to read much of it, I am always reading about China, though often the works I read are not focused, per se, on the new. One of the newer books I particularly like is Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present. Hessler informs us by digging into the past and doing his best to clear a path up to the present. It is a style that allows a longer and more complicated view of what’s happening in China today. That his title refers to the roots of Chinese written language, from the latter part of the second millennium BCE, is something that suits me well. My interests also lean in that direction. I have been known to spend long hours with my doorstop copy of Jia Gu Wen Zi Dian, the dictionary of Shang characters, a modern work that is still very much a work in progress. The meanings of less than one-third of the jiagu characters have been deciphered. I don’t pretend to understand it. I just like looking at the characters, playing with the various elements used to frame up particular ones, a kind of “Oh, this is how they built this one!” dazzle. More fun than watching bad television, to be sure.

Seems odd to dig into the very distant past to flesh out the present, but this is a country with a cultural continuity that can neither be denied nor avoided. This particular road to understanding is rife with potholes, since suggesting uniformity in thought and action can be, and has been, used wrongly and naively to describe present-day China. But sometimes it is not, and the question becomes, as always, “Who do you trust?”

One of the people I trust is David Nivison, a professor emeritus at Stanford, who began his work at that university in 1948 as a Chinese professor, though he eventually held joint appointments in three different departments: Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Chinese and Japanese. Though he didn’t publish all that much, he was known as a philosophers’ philosopher. One of his books which I have is entitled The Way of Confucianism: Investigations in Chinese Philosophy. The first four chapters are lectures he delivered at Stanford, and the first one is titled “Virtue” in Bronze and Bone, where he comments on the character and concept of de, what is often translated as “virtue.” Nivison on de: “appears to be a quality or psychic energy in the king that the spirits can perceive and are pleased to see in him; and it appears to be something he gets, or something that becomes more evident in him when he denies or risks himself, does something for another…human being.”

There are two passages I’d like to pass on, and I can only hope they stand somewhat on their own. Again, Nivison is speaking in terms of ancient China, though he brings some of it forward to the present.

[So] military dé is not really military. It is the combined impact of awe, perceived prestige, fear and gratitude for the leader’s restraint; and this impact as a felt force actually makes using military measures unnecessary. I would offer this as a paradigm of a “de-campaign”: part of the Shang king’s function, revealed in these inscriptions, seems to have been to lead his forces forth each fighting season, to overawe the borders, showing the flag, and doubly impressing the border peoples by his restraint in showing his weapon’s edge.” [25]
…
“The feeling of a debt of gratitude for a kindness or a gift or service is something we all know. It is part of being human. But in some societies it is greatly magnified, in countless ways, by socialization and social pressure, until it comes to seem to be an ambient psychological force. Chinese society is like this. I think it is now, and I think it has been, for as far back as I have been able to study. In this kind of society the compulsion I feel to respond appropriately, now or sometime, when you do something for me or give me something, is a compulsion I feel so strongly that I come to think of it not as a psychic configuration in myself, but as a psychic power emanating from you, causing me to orient myself toward you. That power is your dé – you ‘virtue’ or ‘moral force.’” (25-26)

Riding around, showing the flag, awing the border people.