East Wind and West Wind

Author: Luo Zhitian / Ge Xiaojia
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1998-11-01
Features: The reason this book is titled "East Wind and West Wind" is not because one of the articles is particularly well-named by this title, but mainly because most of the articles discuss either Chinese culture, Western culture, or sometimes both their similarities and differences. We are all trained in Chinese history and have received some Western education to varying degrees. We deeply feel that not only do Westerners have many misunderstandings about China, but in China, which has respected and embraced the West for over a hundred years, the understanding of Western cultural academia among the Chinese remains superficial (including some influential publications like Dushu, some recent articles on Western studies published in recent years have often been like "clumsily describing a pagoda with a stupa"). More unfortunately, due to over a hundred years of respecting and embracing the West, our previous generation had already become quite vague about traditional Chinese culture, and the situation has only worsened since then. As a result, today some influential scholars use Western culture as our "tradition," while our "national scholars" and "post-learned scholars" can hardly distinguish between them, leading to a serious misalignment. At the beginning of the last century, Hu Shi, while advocating for "recreating civilization" for China, also promoted "full globalization," influenced by the traditional idea of a "world of one family" (or perhaps because his field of study was the lofty philosophy), always hoping for the existence of a harmonious world that transcends national cultural identities. The experience of human history over the past century and the preceding thousands of years suggests that such an ideal may remain just that—an ideal in name—within the foreseeable future (Huntington exposed this, which is not pleasing to some Chinese people with a mindset similar to Hu Shi). Everyone hopes that the world of the next century will be one with fewer conflicts, but the direction of effort might not be the commonly mentioned "seeking common ground while reserving differences" (humans indeed have commonalities, and what is common does not need to be sought; and each cultural ethnic group also has its own individuality, and seeking to make them the same may not work). Instead, Confucius's advocacy of "harmony in diversity" and Zhuangzi's idea of "seeing heterogeneity as homogeneity" might be more suitable for coexistence between different cultural ethnic groups and have a greater chance of being realized.