My Country And My People
by
by
Speaking to the Dead
I acquired this book mistaking it for a recent analysis of Chinese society. So I was more than a little confused by the introductory Baroque paean to China. The flowery, wandering prose says nothing important except about the writer’s self consciousness. It is an extended throat clearing.
The book, of course, is not about the China of Xi Jinping but of the somewhat lesser known Lin Sen. It describes a China of eighty years ago, a China which was oppressed, conquered, and in a state of political and economic disintegration. And it begins with a denunciation of what the world, the Western world at least, believed China to be: a permanently crippled place of chaos. To be reminded of that misconception is the obvious point of the book’s republication.
It is impossible for an outsider, at least this one, to identify the vestigial cultural tropes that might remain from 1935 in today’s China. Not many, I suspect, after the profound dislocations of the Japanese occupation, World War II, civil war, Maoism, famine, Communist persecution of tradition and religion, and an almost miraculous industrialisation. Certainly assessments like “the Chinese soul revolts against efficiency” are simply quaint. While the claim that “China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world” is true but in ways the author never could have imagined.
There’s another problem as well. The book is aimed to influence a reader who is absent in the twenty-first century - primarily the English Old China Hand, whose experience is that of the commercial colonial overlord. This type was educated in a particular style at Eton and Harrow. He was immersed in certain Western cultural references from Marcus Aurelius to Bertrand Russell. It is these references, with the occasional allusion to American practicality (and the lack of culture represented by the boxer, Jack Dempsey), that Lin uses to make his points about ‘common humanity’ and the uniqueness of Chinese culture. By making these references he is establishing his bona fides. But neither the social class nor the colonial type exist any longer. Lin is speaking to as well as of the dead.
Lin’s descriptions of the regional differences of China are often racist to modern sensibilities. How else can this typical sort of evaluation be considered? “Down the south-east coast, south of the Yangtse, one meets a different type, inured to ease and culture and sophistication, mentally developed but physically retrograde, loving their poetry and their comforts, sleek undergrown men and slim neurasthenic women, fed on birds’-nest soup and lotus seeds, shrewd in business, gifted in belles-lettres, and cowardly in war, ready to roll on the ground and cry for mamma before the lifted fist descends, offsprings of the cultured Chinese families who crossed the Yangtse with their books and paintings during the end of the Ch’in Dynasty, when China was overrun by barbaric invaders.” Is this anything but regional profiling to serve some unstated purpose?
Lin’s more general historical, political and aesthetic prejudices are obvious and persistent. He presents caricatures rather than characters of contemporary Chinese leaders like Chiang Kaishek. Mao, as far as I can tell isn’t even mentioned, despite the fact that he had already established a break-away republic at the time of original publication. The purported virtues of the Chinese people like ‘mellowness’ and ‘conservatism’ are farcical given subsequent history.
I suppose My Country and My People could serve as a case study for what colonial oppression does to the intellectual layer of a society. Lin had been in a certain sense conned into his role as explicator of Chinese culture to the West. On the one hand he has his Chinese heritage; on the other he has his Western education. So he has some street cred on both sides. But what he writes is apologetic tripe which is largely fictional and doesn’t offend the dominant powers. Ultimately it’s insulting to everyone.
Postscript: it is interesting to compare this book with a more recent assessment of Chinese culture. See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I acquired this book mistaking it for a recent analysis of Chinese society. So I was more than a little confused by the introductory Baroque paean to China. The flowery, wandering prose says nothing important except about the writer’s self consciousness. It is an extended throat clearing.
The book, of course, is not about the China of Xi Jinping but of the somewhat lesser known Lin Sen. It describes a China of eighty years ago, a China which was oppressed, conquered, and in a state of political and economic disintegration. And it begins with a denunciation of what the world, the Western world at least, believed China to be: a permanently crippled place of chaos. To be reminded of that misconception is the obvious point of the book’s republication.
It is impossible for an outsider, at least this one, to identify the vestigial cultural tropes that might remain from 1935 in today’s China. Not many, I suspect, after the profound dislocations of the Japanese occupation, World War II, civil war, Maoism, famine, Communist persecution of tradition and religion, and an almost miraculous industrialisation. Certainly assessments like “the Chinese soul revolts against efficiency” are simply quaint. While the claim that “China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world” is true but in ways the author never could have imagined.
There’s another problem as well. The book is aimed to influence a reader who is absent in the twenty-first century - primarily the English Old China Hand, whose experience is that of the commercial colonial overlord. This type was educated in a particular style at Eton and Harrow. He was immersed in certain Western cultural references from Marcus Aurelius to Bertrand Russell. It is these references, with the occasional allusion to American practicality (and the lack of culture represented by the boxer, Jack Dempsey), that Lin uses to make his points about ‘common humanity’ and the uniqueness of Chinese culture. By making these references he is establishing his bona fides. But neither the social class nor the colonial type exist any longer. Lin is speaking to as well as of the dead.
Lin’s descriptions of the regional differences of China are often racist to modern sensibilities. How else can this typical sort of evaluation be considered? “Down the south-east coast, south of the Yangtse, one meets a different type, inured to ease and culture and sophistication, mentally developed but physically retrograde, loving their poetry and their comforts, sleek undergrown men and slim neurasthenic women, fed on birds’-nest soup and lotus seeds, shrewd in business, gifted in belles-lettres, and cowardly in war, ready to roll on the ground and cry for mamma before the lifted fist descends, offsprings of the cultured Chinese families who crossed the Yangtse with their books and paintings during the end of the Ch’in Dynasty, when China was overrun by barbaric invaders.” Is this anything but regional profiling to serve some unstated purpose?
Lin’s more general historical, political and aesthetic prejudices are obvious and persistent. He presents caricatures rather than characters of contemporary Chinese leaders like Chiang Kaishek. Mao, as far as I can tell isn’t even mentioned, despite the fact that he had already established a break-away republic at the time of original publication. The purported virtues of the Chinese people like ‘mellowness’ and ‘conservatism’ are farcical given subsequent history.
I suppose My Country and My People could serve as a case study for what colonial oppression does to the intellectual layer of a society. Lin had been in a certain sense conned into his role as explicator of Chinese culture to the West. On the one hand he has his Chinese heritage; on the other he has his Western education. So he has some street cred on both sides. But what he writes is apologetic tripe which is largely fictional and doesn’t offend the dominant powers. Ultimately it’s insulting to everyone.
Postscript: it is interesting to compare this book with a more recent assessment of Chinese culture. See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
posted by The Mind of BlackOxford @ April 08, 2018
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