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CIVILISATION AND CULTURE

You would think that language was a topic, in which facts would be easy to find and to check. Yet there seems to be enormous controversy even over just how many written Chinese 'characters' there are. You would think it would be a simple matter to just pick up a standard dictionary, and make an estimate. And yet, the numbers cited by authorities writing in English range from one who says that the Chinese make do with only 420 basic words, to a Professor of lingusistics who claims
you have to know 125,000 before you can even read!

Now if a factual topic such as language causes so much disagreement and controversy, you can imagine what happens in discussions on civilisation and culture in which opinions, rather than facts, play such a large part.

Here are two particularly glaring examples:

These erroneous views are unfortunately so widespread that it has become very hard to convince people that they are wrong. The acceptance of these false ideas results from a sad ignorance of the Chinese language and of Chinese history, and although refuted by European scholars long ago, these views continue to be spread by many of the encyclopaedias and textbooks in common use in New Zealand.

Both assertions began being made only in the nineteenth century, by Protestant missionaries. They have been accepted in English-speaking countries as the gospel truth ever since, and go on being spread in contemporary media reports on China at every opportunity.

For these views not only provide us with a useful stick to beat the Chinese with, whenever they disagree with the western interpretation of concepts like 'democracy' or 'human rights', ideas which we tend to think were invented by us in the West, or when they refuse to act or behave as we do. Views like this also save people like us, trained in the Western tradition, from having to think about
the relevance of our own beliefs to those of another culture.


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This page last revised: 8 December, 2000

 

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