The Clash of Civilization and World

Community: The West and China

Ban Wang

To claim that East and West can never meet is to make a false claim. But
in recent years, the myth of civilizational clash has become the currency
of international relations and cross-cultural understanding. This stance
spawns the stale but fake news that China and the West are locked in a
collision course over civilizational norms—individualism vs. authoritari-
anism, state capitalism vs. neoliberalism, democracy vs. autocracy. This
view is in the grip of “civilization” as if it were the genetic code of a
body politic that has remained unchanged across thousands of years and
countless generations. A cultural DNA is said to constitute the identity of a
national society, placing China on Venus and the West on Mars. The West
evolves liberal democracy as its vital essence, whereas China has been
bedridden with the century-old pathology of autocracy.
Here, “civilization” is a blanket and meaningless term because it
regards a political-cultural order as being sealed in an organic, unchang-
ing, and ahistorical totality. Now, if we probe into “liberalism,” surely a
core Western value, the term quickly dissolves in messiness and has meant
different things for different people and in different historical times. If the
twentieth century was the American Century marked by rising democra-
tization, critics of hegemony and imperialism have long questioned how
“democracy” can be meaningful in describing the identity of Pax Ameri-
cana and its military-corporate complex. Within the West, opinions over

Telos 199 (Summer 2022): xxx–xxx

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the centuries have been intensely divided about liberalism’s meanings,

polemics, and mutation in history. On the reverse side, controversies have
long raged about the pros and cons of authority and authoritarianism in all
civilizations. Do autocracy and democracy shun each other as water and
fire? Can authoritarianism grow out of a democracy? Can liberal insti-
tutions beget fascism and autocracy? Indeed, the current Western world
is attesting to this trend, for all the talk of the West as the bulwark of
democracy.
To have a meaningful comparison, we need to move out of the all-
encompassing labels of civilizational identity and delve into changing
historical contingencies, contexts, and responses. We need to attend to his-
torical circumstances and contextualize ideas and revise our understanding
of the inherited norms. Speaking of mutual interpretation between China
and the West, Benjamin Schwartz, an eminent scholar of Chinese studies
at Harvard University during the Cold War era, proposed a critical and his-
torical approach. In encounters between East and West, he noted, Western
observers habitually “assume that the West is a known entity.” But this
“deceptive clarity” of Western culture disappears as soon as we look at
its past and current history. Not only have the best minds of the West long
been divided in their efforts to grasp the meanings of Western modernity,
but many controversies have also surrounded such key words as liber-
alism, socialism, and nationalism.1 Turning to China, the observers also
feel confident about the culture as a known quantity and habitually resort
to “the spuriously lucid concepts” of civilizational proportions, such as
“preindustrial,” “Confucian,” or “ancient society.” But to achieve a genu-
ine cross-cultural understanding, we should begin by immersing ourselves
as deeply as possible in the specific problems facing both China and the
West—in the specific context and eras of history. The more we delve into
the complex details in the encounters and entanglements of two cultures,
the more we feel that we are not dealing with two known entities and
two civilizational identities. We will be forced to see how impoverished
and ill-equipped the ready-made and inherited perspectives and catego-
ries are. Indeed, we are dealing with two moving targets, which are to be
better known through research, fact-checking, and rethinking. We are in
fact dealing with “two vast, ever-changing, highly problematic areas of

1. Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), p. 1.
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human experience.”2 Schwartz’s advice projects a historically fluid and

variable ground for understanding differences and similarities between
two life-worlds. Furthermore, mutual reflection is not for the sake of
making cultural difference firm and absolute, and of drawing firm lines
between “us” and “them.” Although critics are necessarily culture-bound,
they should yearn for a common ground of human civilization: “One may
nevertheless hope that there does exist a realm of the universally human
lying below and beyond culture which makes a certain degree of self-tran-
scendence possible.”3
Inquiry into historically specific contexts may open the door to an
awareness of a cosmopolitan civilization shared by all humans. It becomes
possible to envisage how humans build institutions through evolution and
adapting to nature, and how different groups build differently but also
through learning, exchanging, adopting, and sharing among each other.
It is true that we are all raised and live within our own inherited cultural
spheres, but a horizon of human commonality lies below and beyond the
age-old cultural norms. Against the thesis of civilizational clash, the more
urgent question today for the cross-cultural critic is not how civilizations
are sharply different but how differences can be transcended and flow into
a common world.
The aspiration for “a realm of the universally human” puts Schwartz
squarely in the Chinese tradition of tianxia, which means “unity of all
under heaven.” Chinese thinkers have long harbored the aspiration that
different cultures and civilizations can and should contribute to and par-
take of a universal culture based on common humanity. Confucianism, for
example, urges that the gentleman strive for harmony but not uniformity,
and that in harmony each component remains distinct and different.
Rooted in ancient cosmology, tianxia has an ancient lineage in tianli
(principle of heaven). Dong Zhongshu of the Han dynasty elevated this
universal moral authority to a cosmic order where humans live in tune
with heavenly designs. Neo-Confucianists of the Song dynasty extended
the idea and conceived the principle of heaven as inner-directed reflection.
They deployed this transcendent principle to critique the political agenda
and practices that fell short of it. In Zhu xi, the prominent Song Confucian
philosopher, the principle of heaven comes to light through an arduous
practice of self-cultivation, reflection, and learning. Moral activity is both

2. Ibid., p. 2.
3. Ibid.
4 Ban Wang

personal and political, both moral and institutional: it expands from the
inner mind outward and becomes embodied in the fabric of community
and affairs of governance. Deemed immanent within rituals of everyday
experience, the principle of heaven takes on flesh and blood by being
enacted in the daily conduct of serving families and fulfilling mutual obli-
gation toward fellow humans. Participation in a dense welter of everyday
moral duty and deed not only generates spiritual meaning but also pro-
motes institutional reform.
At the turn of the twentieth century, when China confronted the West,
Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao transformed the principle of heaven
into the modern universal principle (gongli). gongli can be understood
as the universal principle applicable to a global public (gong), which is
closely associated with the humanist principle (rendao). As the principle
of heaven transitioned to the modern universal and humanist principles,
Liang Qichao saw the peacemaking initiatives in the Paris Peace Con-
ference as a renewal of the ancient heritage. Observing the League of
Nations in 1919, Liang wrote that the league, for all its backroom manipu-
lation detrimental to China’s sovereignty, heralded a dream of reconciling
cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Referencing Immanuel Kant’s idea of
eternal peace, Liang applauded the league’s work as projecting a vista
of “a grand human community,” an echo of China’s classical vision of
tianxia and datong (world unity). The Chinese world vision, wrote Liang
a few years later, had been reluctant to view the self-contained state, be
it an ancient kingdom or modern nation, as the ultimate unit of human
society, and had always held tianxia to be a higher order over separate
polities.4 Acutely aware of social ills on his European trips during the First
World War, Liang realized that China had something to offer to the world.
Addressing “Chinese Responsibility to World Civilization” in his book
Travel Impressions of europe, Liang suggests that the datong ideal calls
on Chinese intellectuals to absorb Western civilization and expand Chi-
nese civilization—in such a way to contribute our share to aid the West
and enrich the world. Such convergence will make it possible to create a
new world community.
The universal principle for all people (gongli) provided a lens to
understand the struggle of colonized people for national independence.
In a translation of the Japanese novel Chance encounters with Beautiful

4. Liang, liang Qichao quanji [Complete works of Liang Qichao] (Beijing: Beijing
chubanshe, 1999), pp. 3031–32.
 The ClaSh oF CIvIlIzaTIon and World CommunITY 5

Women (Jiaren qiyu ji), Liang invoked gongli to explain the uprising of
black slaves in the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). Under the banner
of human liberty and rights, black slaves summoned the universal prin-
ciple in their fight against colonial oppression.5 A half-million slaves in the
French colony of Saint-Domingue, an island in the Caribbean, “took the
struggle for liberty into their own hands,” forced France to acknowledge
the abolition of slavery, and built an independent nation. In Susan Buck-
Morss’s account, which affirms that of Liang, these “black Jacobins”
surpassed the metropolis in realizing the Enlightenment goal of human
liberty. The European humanists mouthed such slogans as “Man is born
free” and “All men are created equal” while turning a blind eye to slavery.
Although the French anthem “La Marseillaise” denounced “l’esclavage
antique,” it was the black slaves who struggled to attain freedom and dig-
nity with their own hands and sacrifices.6 In the thick of battles, French
soldiers heard a tune of what they thought was a tribal chant, which turned
out to be “La Marseillaise.” They were confused about who they were
fighting.7 The black slaves took the universal principles of liberty, equal-
ity, and fraternity far more seriously than the French themselves, and their
self-emancipation reasserted the humanist principle.
The Haitian Revolution marked the rise of the worldwide move-
ment to break colonial shackles, anticipating Bandung and Third World
movements.8 Paradoxical to some but music to the internationalist ear,
“La Marseillaise” sung by black slaves signals not an act of yielding to
colonialism but an assertion of universalism and humanism. In the revolu-
tionary era, Chinese singers of the French anthem were not Francophiles
or fans of Western culture but fighters for socialist internationalism.
Although France was one of the imperialist powers out to colonize China,
Chinese revolutionaries studied socialism and cosmopolitanism in Paris.
James Bertram, a British journalist who traveled widely in China and
interviewed Mao in the revolutionary base of Yan’an, witnessed the Red
Army soldiers singing foreign songs in battlefields and marches. “It was a
curious experience,” Bertram wrote, “to hear those mountain gores ring-
ing with the ‘Internationale,’ or ‘La Marseillaise,’ or a theme-song from a

5. Ibid., p. 5531.
6. Susan Buck-Morss, hegel, haiti, and universal history (Pittsburgh: Univ. of
Pittsburgh Press, 2009), pp. 35–39.
7. Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (New York: Verso, 2009), p. 112.
8. Vijay Prashad, “Dream History of the Global South,” Interface 4, no. 1 (2012): 43.
6 Ban Wang

Russian film—all rendered, with a difference, in throaty Chinese dialect.” 9

In the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, “La Marseillaise”
inspired the musician Nie Er to compose the Chinese anthem.
To Karl Marx, the French Revolution was not only about national lib-
eration but also inspired a new universalism. Writing in 1850 in the wake
of the First Opium War about Britain’s territorial claims on China, Marx
discerned a stirring of socialism in the Taiping Rebellion’s denouncement
of gaps between rich and poor and the demand for the “redistribution of
property”: “The oldest and the most shattered empire on this earth has
been pushed by the cotton ball of the British bourgeoisie toward the
brink of social upheaval that must have most profound consequences for
civilization.”10 The European colonialists, when reaching the Great Wall
on their next flight through Asia, would be shocked to see the following
inscription on the Wall:

République Chinoise
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.11

This gesture—of stoking flames of universalism from the far-flung ashes—

became a pattern of socialist internationalism. For Chinese “Marseillaise”
singers, France or even “Europe” signals not Eurocentrism or colonialism
but universalism of human freedom—as signs of “the struggle for free-
dom, equality, and fraternity.”12 For Mao, the universalism of the Western
Enlightenment was inspirational and instructive for Chinese revolutionar-
ies and socialists. In a speech at the founding of the PRC in 1949, Mao
stated that Chinese nation-builders since the late nineteenth century had
been eager to acquire “the new learning” from Western teachers. But the
chairman wondered aloud, “Why were the teachers always committing
aggression against their pupils?”13 Yet with little regret, Mao noted how
progressive and socialist ideas had indeed arrived and taken root in China

9. Quoted in Joshua Howard, “Music for a National Defense: Making Martial Music
during the Anti-Japanese War,” CrossCurrents: east asian history and Culture review 13
(2014): 3.
10. Karl Marx, Karl marx on Colonialism and modernization, ed. Shlomo Avineri
(New York: Doubleday, 1968), pp. 44–45.
11. Ibid., p. 45.
12. Lin Chun, China and global Capitalism (New York: Palgrave, 2013), p. 189.
13. Mao Zedong, Selected Works of mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press,
1961), 4:413.
 The ClaSh oF CIvIlIzaTIon and World CommunITY 7

under the West’s rod. He urged revolutionaries to absorb not only social-
ism but also the “progressive culture of the age of Enlightenment”—with
the caveat of exercising the critical faculty and using the foreign to benefit
China.14 Sinologist Joseph Levenson remarked that Mao-style revolution-
ary cosmopolitans go “against the world to join it.”
Critics of postcolonialism may find this embrace of Western universal-
ism disturbing. Protective of the integrity and difference of marginalized
groups, postcolonialism valorizes particular identities against all forms of
Western universalism. But flaunting difference, be it ethnic or cultural as
an end, is at risk of dropping the universal as the foundation of a common
world. The claims of cultural or ethnic difference, as Pheng Cheah has
argued,

do not seek to retrieve a lost authentic tradition oppressed by universal-

ism. In rejecting the false universalism of cosmopolitan culture, these
discourses already desire access to a true universal. The argument for the
autonomy of the local presupposes the universal value of autonomy and
proposes to apply it to every particular group or collective unit. This de-
sire for a polymorphic universal capable of respecting the particularities
of its constituent units sublates the oppositions between the universal and
the particular, modernity and tradition. Consequently, political claims
for cultural specificity posit the autonomy of cultural identity . . . as an
ideal-normative goal: all cultural groups should have equal access to the
social, economic, and political forces that constitute the world system
and the freedom to direct these forces according to their own interests.15

Cheah’s insight resonates with Kang Youwei’s notion of universal access

to the world community. Kung-chuan Hsiao, an eminent historian, identi-
fied three ways for Chinese thinkers to approach the West. The first is the
outright dismissal of the reformist agenda of “learning from the barbar-
ians.” Echoing the tenet of civilizational clash, the conservative remnants
of the Qing dynasty insisted that China, boasting five thousand years of
civilization, already had the best. The second view sought to jump on the
bandwagon of Western civilization. China, says this view, is ill-equipped
for modernity, and a partial or total embrace of Western civilization is the
way to move forward. But Kang followed a more synthetic and universal

14. Ibid., 2:380.

15. Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: on Cosmopolitanism and human rights
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2006), p. 101.
8 Ban Wang

path. Upholding the tianxia principle that conceives human knowledge

to be common property for all, Kang assumed that “differences between
East and West were more nominal than basic.”16 To transform “China’s
outmoded political, economic, and educational systems was not Western-
ization but in reality universalization—bringing Chinese culture up to that
stage of civilization to which all mankind should do well to attain.” This
universalism dates back at least to Song dynasty Confucianism, which
maintained that “the truth permeates all under Heaven” and that the same
principle holds good for all.17
In the light of the aspiration for a global public, the claim of civili-
zational clash proves to be trapped in an identity politics that is turning
the public sphere of multiculturalism into silos of tribalism and parochi-
alism. The view makes diversity absolute and widens the abyss of ethnic
and cultural divides, thus naturalizing the fact of domination and inequal-
ity between the privileged and underprivileged, powerful and powerless.
Divisive multiculturalism masks a hidden racism and aggravates ten-
sions between rigidly formed identities. Cultural knowledge and inherited
“core values” are seen as more and more local, more particularistic and
parochial, hermetically sealed from communication, mutual borrowing,
and dialogue with others. Public shared culture traditions are fragmenting
into numerous pockets of ethnicity, moral value, locality, gender, custom,
and nation. When making a point, one is often required to ascertain who
is speaking, what is his or her ethnic or religious background, from what
place and what time he or she is speaking, and so forth. The singular “I”
is favored over the plural “we,” and assertions of individual and ethnic
identity are privileged over collective and public discussion. Discourses of
universality become suspect as partisan agendas of a hegemony, apologia
for interest groups, and alibi of manipulation. Indeed, the voice of recon-
ciliation and common pursuit is frequently deemed suspect as a sinister
rhetoric of ideology and deception. Critics of Western hegemony guard
against applying a “Western” or “foreign” lens to “non-Western” China,
as if Western discourse should remember its colonialist guilt, stay at home,
and never be allowed to meet the other.
What fatally obstructs mutual understanding, sympathy, and commu-
nication is this impenetrable stone wall of the absolutized difference. This

16. Hsiao Kung-chuan, a modern China and a new World: Kang Yu-Wei, reformer
and utopian, 1858–1927 (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1975), p. 413.
17. Ibid.
 The ClaSh oF CIvIlIzaTIon and World CommunITY 9

view divides America and China and places two peoples and societies in
parallel universes. It declares that differences between the two are so huge
and so absolute that the two cultures cannot coexist under one heaven and
on planet earth. But this view has been belied constantly by history. The
history of Sino–American cultural and intellectual exchange, cooperation,
and friendship has proven that the two cultures have been able to help each
other and thrive together. People of both countries have always been able
to understand and sympathize with each other and share certain values—
both as human beings and as national citizens. The Chinese revolutionaries
admired George Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. Chinese citizens
applauded and supported America’s civil rights movements. Chinese col-
lege students admire Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain,
Ernest Hemingway, and numerous other American masters. Fans of Amer-
ican pop culture and film are legion all over China.
When COVID-19 is threatening all humanity regardless of nations
and cultures, when climate change is making the earth uninhabitable and
pushing the biosphere to the brink of collapse, a vision of common human
destiny becomes more urgent and significant. As nationalist sentiment is
fueling chauvinist pride and stoking tensions between China and the West,
intercultural learning and sharing become imperative and necessary. The
slogan “We are all in this together” looks for a life-saving boat for en-
dangered humanity, but the claim of civilizational clash keeps the boat
stranded. We need more than ever to heed Schwartz’s advice and keep
alive the “hope that there does exist a realm of the universally human lying
below and beyond culture which makes a certain degree of self-transcen-
dence possible.”

Ban Wang is the William Haas Professor in East Asian Studies and Comparative
Literature at Stanford University. His publications include The Sublime Figure
of history (Stanford UP, 1997), Illuminations from the Past (Stanford UP, 2004),
history and memory (lish yu jiyi) (Oxford UP, 2004), and China in the World:
Culture, Politics, and World vision (Duke UP, 2022). He has edited eight books
on socialism, film, memory, culture, and China.