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:
that China has thought of itself as the 'middle kingdom' for thousands of years, and, as a consequence,
that the Chinese have always felt themselves to be so culturally superior that they developed their culture in isolation from the rest of the world and called and call everyone else 'barbarians'.
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