The Sunday News
THE question, do the Chinese think, is as awkward as the geopolitical situation that has led to it being asked in the first place. Geopolitics are so imbricated with power and knowledge that one Empire always believes that another Empire is thoughtless, different, and unnecessary. Hamid Dabashi, the Iranian intellectual, was tired of western prejudices that held that Asians had no thought that he wrote the classic book of 2015,: Do Non-Europeans Think? As an Asian scholar working in the West, he had been witness to students and fellow scholars openly wondering and loudly worrying that by virtue of being an Iranian he could not be associated with any thought, knowledge, or intellection itself. Today I treat the subject of the Euro-American skepticism concerning the Chinese and thought. In the western media and academy, including the cultural industry of music and movies, circulates the image of the Chinese people as backward, ignorant, and unhelpful in world affairs. There is a strong way in which the West wants the rest of the world to believe that anything Chinese is primitive, cheap, and unhelpful.
In Africa, where western culture and knowledge are widely and deeply consumed, the western constructed image of the Chinese is widely accepted and believed as true. The China we know is the China that we have been told about in the western academy and media. We do not, I observe, have an independent and African perception of China that is not mediated by the western view and construction of China. It is a decolonial effort on its own to seek to see, know and understand China from itself unencumbered by the western views of China that are as mesmerising and tempting as they are biased and contemptuous. In Africa, anyway, we understand very well the history of colonial and western prejudice against us, our thoughts, histories, and cultures. It should be easy to see ourselves in the way Hollywood and the western academy construct things and people Chinese. It would be interesting to check with ourselves what sought of image and imagination crosses our individual minds when the word China is mentioned within our earshot.
An idea made in China
The Western world boasts about its history, knowledge and thought. When Immanuel Kant exclaims, “dare to know!” and Rene Descartes shouts from his closet, “I think therefore I am,” they are doing a typical western and enlightenment thing. Now and then the West have always thought of themselves as the source of light, civilisation, and modernisation. To be western is to think and to know and to lead in everything under the sun. As such, the statement ‘go to China’ in the West actually means go to hell or actually go and hang yourself. Or just get lost. I wish I knew what statements circulate in China about going to the West. What I can say is that any idea made in China would not be taken seriously or with any respect in the mainstream western academy and society. But we only know too well that many Chinese philosophies and thoughts, and even inventions, have been stolen, appropriated and westernised, and we have received them as Western ideas or inventions when they are from China.
Talking about Chinese inventions that became precious and important world possessions can be very interesting. The saying, ‘like a bull in a China shop’ refers to a clumsy person who destroys delicate materials or disturbs order, does not value precious things. This saying originates from Porcelain, the delicate material used to make expensive cups and other materials that are now treasures of the world. The substance was invented in China, the products moulded from it came to be called China. Deadly gunpowder, the oxygen of all wars, is a Chinese invention. The printing press that changed the face of the world academy and media is Chinese in origin. So is paper and papermaking, and paper money. I am not going to waste words narrating about silk, the compass, mechanical clock, iron-smelting, and the rocket that are all Chinese inventions that have changed life in the world. If the Chinese were not hygienic as we are asked to believe I do not think, of all things, they would have gifted humanity with the toothbrush.
If anyone wonders why umbrellas come in a typically round shape, round like a Chinese face, it is because the umbrella is a Chinese invention. Where I think most of us will be grateful, is when we get to know that alcohol was invented in China. We would all be sober and boring jacks if the Chinese did not concoct the wise waters. That being said, I actually think the Africans had their own intoxicating beverages that did not emanate from China. African inventions that have been obscured by inventions from elsewhere is really a story for another day, I think.
The legacy of Chinese philosophy
China is rich in political philosophy in particular and philosophy in general. Whenever the West flash the card of their Plato and their Machiavelli, the Chinese mention Confucius, and the Sun Tsu and many others. These are formidable philosophers whose ideas are admired and used in the West. China is not just a Three-Thousand-Year-old civilisation with a present population of Two Billion people, no. They think. The Twenty First Century is called the Chinese Century because from a century of poverty and humiliation the Chinese have picked up their pieces to compete with the Euro-American Empire shoulder to shoulder in every sphere of life. The Euro-American world is going through immense geopolitical discomfort at the return and the rise of China to grace.
When philosophers of the West want to insult China and think small of the Empire they mention Chairman Mao Zedong and his Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward that the Chinese themselves are mainly ashamed of. They do not mention other ideas of Mao, the Mao who wanted women involved in politics and said, “women should hold half the sky” and men another half in politics. This is the Mao who loved ideas and said in terms of thought, “let a thousand flowers bloom.” China has a rich legacy of philosophy and science that is either being ignored or silenced for nothing but geopolitical reasons. Geopolitics do not allow the telling of the truth about others.
But the Chinese are no angels but are the Chinese. Thinking decolonially from Africa, we can actually claim that we understand that the Chinese exist, they think, they have achieved in some areas and failed in others, they have their own interests, fears, and desires. And we can freely and fairly relate with them as such without buying into the Sinophobia, hatred and fears of their civilisational competitors. What we may have to do, decolonially, is not to be told by their competitors, the Westerners, how to think about and relate with them.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes the University of Stellenbosch, Cape Town, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].