In Search of Wealth of Power

"In Search of Wealth of Power: Yen Fu and the West by Benjamin Schwartz. This is all about a wonderful translator and philosopher at the turn of the last century, Yen Fu, who went to Britain. He had one question that he really wanted to answer: Why is the West so possessed of dynamic, Promethean energy, and why is China not? He got to England and began to read Herbert Spencer about social Darwinism. He concluded that the industrial revolution, and European and American dynamism, came from the fact that the West was open to challenge and kept having to supercede itself in a Darwinian survivalist dialectic. He felt on the other hand that China had been closed to these very forces, obviated the Darwinian process and thus denied itself this process whereby the strong survive and the weak perish. I think it’s part and parcel of the same argument, that China did not welcome and open itself up to conflicting perspectives and viewpoints, which had to struggle against each other until one triumphed over the others. It was like a hermetically sealed room. You know that great Lu Xun metaphor of people trapped in an iron house. They’re asleep and the house is on fire. But the question is if you should bother waking them, because they can’t get out. Yes they did, and they have had a pretty good run since then in a sense. But the question is ultimately one of identity and whether they believe in themselves, after this long century and a half of viewing themselves as second rate and wondering why they were not strong, powerful and dynamic. China is still living in the syndrome of being the victim, and we don’t know when that syndrome will finally be cured. It’s going to take a while. That’s right. I think the rejection of its own past has created a kind of self-loathing that we’re paying for now, because people who are self-loathing tend to be extremely defensive. And the self-loathing was I think the other side of the worship of Western dynamism and power and wealth. It’s an extremely complicated basket of sentiments."