Controversies and Viewpoints
Page 42
Mr Jacoviello asserts:
In China, the patient is, above all else, a conscious subject that collaborates on health care.
In accordance with the Maoist principle which states that ‘one divides into two’, the Chinese physician makes use of the organism’s healthy part to ‘combat’ the one stricken with illness and thus put an end to the functional imbalance affecting the organs or their appendages. He is wary not to substitute his own personality for the patient’s and resorts to a great amount of psychotherapy.
Mr Alain Peyrefitte was highly impressed by the acupuncture-based surgeries that he witnessed, including the extraction of a four-kilo cyst, the ablation of ovaries, and trepanation. Once the surgical intervention had been carried out, those that had undergone surgery left in a most wing-footed manner, smiling and without ever having been rendered unconscious. In the spring of 1973, more than 700,000 surgeries of this kind were conducted.
The method itself dates back to the most ancient times: Chinese doctors contented themselves with re-reading a 2200-year-old Chinese treatise, the Huangdi Neijing, in the light of both Mao Zedong’s thoughts and modern science (in this field, the revisionism implemented by Liu Shaoqi consisted in discrediting all ancestral practice and following exclusively in the footsteps of Western medicine).
In response to Professor Jean Bernard, who, just like a number of his colleagues, manifested scepticism, Mr Peyrefitte chose to place emphasis on the phenomenon of civilisation, instead of the actual medical act:
What one should actually ponder is the following societal reality — the existence of an entire people whose members serve as lab rats in a historically and geographically unprecedented experiment and who bear it all very well indeed.
He adds:
Carried by the traditions of their own people’s therapeutics and customs, these Chinese practitioners display a will to resolve every national health issue very rapidly; they are stimulated by “mass enthusiasm”. What would European physicians, in a radically different context, be motivated by? […] What this fact does is grant policies a confirmation of the very relativity of social phenomena. As Anouilh has said, men are equal but not the same. This is even truer for societies than for individuals. In both medicine and other domains, the Chinese advance on a different path to ours, existing in another time frame and accomplishing their revolutions along an orbit that is theirs alone.
This mixture of tradition and innovation finds its justification in Mao Zedong’s (not very Marxist) watchword ‘may the old serve the new’.
Organicism
Twenty years ago, Mr Peyrefitte was fortunate enough to come across the twelve volumes of Lord Macartney’s Mission to China at a bookseller’s in Krakow: Lord Macartney had been the British Crown’s very first ambassador to the country. Since then, Mr Peyrefitte has turned this journal into one of his favourite bedside books. He writes:
Reading Macartney is just like reading Tocqueville’s956 writings on the United Sates or Custine’s957 on Russia: it allows China’s constants, the essence of its civilisation and its imperishable cultural mould to emerge. One thus realises that what one imputes to the regimes of Beijing, Washington and Moscow is actually due to the very reality of the Chinese, American and Russian peoples. Many political, economic and sociological analyses of contemporary China are prone to privileging ideological factors and minimising ethnic determinisms. While acknowledging the role played by Marxist-Leninist texts in the intellectual shaping of Chinese leaders, what is desirable is for us to render unto Marx what is Marx’s and unto China what is rightfully China’s.
In Le grand titrage, a compilation of various conferences published in France in 1973, Professor Joseph Needham, who runs the Science and Civilisation in China series in London (of which four volumes, from a total of seven, have been published since 1954), presents us with an inventory of Chinese discoveries, whose number, significance and ancientness he highlights. He also demonstrates the very specificity of Chinese knowledge, labelling China’s philosophia perennis as either materialism or organic naturalism. He points out:
The Chinese way of thinking has never developed any mechanistic worldview, and it is, in fact, the organicist perspective, according to which each and every phenomenon is connected to all others following a hierarchical order, that has universally prevailed among Chinese authors.
This natural philosophy, which places great emphasis on experience, rejects any and all separation between the physical and the metaphysical — in the 12th century, Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi had already spoken of a ‘spirituality that is inherent in matter’.
Chinese thought is not of an analytical but of a classifying nature. When taken literally, the Chinese term designating science, kexue, actually means ‘classifying knowledge’.
Likewise, Chinese mathematical theory and practice have always been algebraic, not geometric. Euclidian geometry only took root in China upon the arrival of the Jesuits.
It is this lack of geometric perception and absence of an unequivocal conception of the relations of finality and causality that accounts for the fact that Chinese science was unable to keep pace with post-Renaissance European science.
Inversely, these very same characteristics allow us to better understand the Chinese aptitude to master the concepts of modern science, especially those of quantum physics: the interdependence of wholes, modelisation, general relativity, non-Newtonian dynamics, non-Cartesian kinematics, etc.
The Included Third and the Contradiction Principle
The wave-particle antithesis comprised in the theory of waves fails to surprise those accustomed, since their very childhood, to taking into account the ebb and flow of the two fundamental natural principles. The use of ideograms is perfectly suited to the requirements of computer programming and facilitates symbolic reasoning. The notion of a basic identity of space and time corresponds to the relativistic truth which reveals to us that ‘both the time gradually eroded by our clocks and the kilometric space inscribed upon our maps are but arbitrarily chosen coordinates among the phenomena of our cosmos, a cosmos to which we rather conventiently connect these facts’ (as written by Mr Raymond Charles).
Mao Zedong’s theories on the principle of contradiction are also in agreement with both the modern logic of antagonism and the ancient notions of yin and yang. In no way are they indebted to Aristotle or Descartes.
The mother superior of the Carmelites of Bernanos once said: ‘It is not the monastic rule that keeps us, but we who keep it’. And upon hearing Mr Peyrefitte declare that the Chinese do not abide by the same logic as we do, a certain philosopher began to squirm with indignation and said: ‘There is no such thing as Chinese and Western logic. All that there is is logic itself!’
What actually results from the absence of syntax in the Chinese language is that anyone who has been educated in classical culture finds himself juxtaposing various propositions without ever contrasting them nor ordering them using logical conjunctions. Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ would thus be translated as ‘I think, I am’, or rather as ‘I am here’, since the verb ‘be’ has a specifically locative meaning in Chinese.
Mr Peyrefitte explains:
Instead of resorting to Western binary thought, which distinguishes the positive from the negative, the licit from the illicit, and the true from the false, what the Chinese follow is a ternary line of thought, comprising a thesis, an antithesis and the result of the latter’s opposition, which is not so much their synthesis as the product of their attraction and repulsion. […] When in the presence of two contradictory propositions, is it necessary for one to be true and the other false, with a third option remaining excluded? Ever faithful to Chinese tradition, Mao challenges these fundamental laws. For contradiction lies at the heart of all living things and it is its very presence that keeps them alive. Mao replaces the logic of the excluded middle with the logic of the included third resulting from the fruitful antagonism of the first two words.
I
n 1957, Mao Zedong declared:
To look upon one single aspect of things is to think in absolute terms, to envisage issues in a metaphysical fashion. In order to assess our work, exclusive approbation is as wrong as exclusive negation.
Instead of acting as a pitfall, contradiction thus becomes the very principle governing people’s thoughts. Somewhere between two options, there is always a third path to take, and China is truly the Middle Empire.
With the singular only acquiring its significance in relation to what is general, the issue of freedom thus takes on a rather specific shape. Mr Alain Peyrefitte observes:
Nowadays, there are simply too many testimonies regarding the infringements of individual liberties in China for anyone to doubt that the Popular Republic is founded on a powerful repressive apparatus ranging from plain monitored work or “re-education” to physical elimination, through all the subtleties of constraint, including open labour camps, concentration camps surrounded by barbed wire, prisons with or without cells, and capital punishment.
According to American experts, fifty to two hundred million Chinese people have allegedly been ‘eliminated’ since the start of the Revolution. In this regard, some interesting clarifications have been offered by Mr Simon Leys (in Ombres chinoises958 . UGE/10–18, 1974; and Images brisées. Laffont, 1976). Mr Peyrefitte goes on to say, however, that the Chinese ‘do not experience liberty deprivation the way Westerners do, because they have never genuinely exercised such freedoms. Indeed, liberty seems to them, just like Christianity and trade, a Western notion’.
Individual Freedoms Versus National Liberty
The philosophers of the School of Law, who were all Alexander’s contemporaries, used to say that ‘man is born bad and must, if at all possible, be persuaded to act correctly; should persuasion fail, he must then be compelled’.
In 1924, Sun Yat-sen, the ‘Father of the Fatherland’, made the following declaration:
Ever since the notion of liberty found its way into China, only scientists have, by dint of continuous research, managed to comprehend it. If one were to speak of liberty to a countryman, to the man in the street, the latter would know nothing of it. Liberty only makes sense to those who have studied abroad. If this notion were applied to each and every person, we would revert to being nothing more than dispersed sand. Whereas the individual must sacrifice his freedoms, it is the nation that is to attain complete liberty.
Mr Alain Peyrefitte writes that the poet and philosopher Kuo Mo-jo ‘represents the regime’s cultural glory and is honoured as the greatest Chinese figure in the world of science, literature and art’. During the Cultural Revolution, however, he was accused of being a ‘Mandarin’. Wearing a dunce cap and constantly targeted with jibe, he was forced to publicly embrace self-criticism and declare himself ‘more foetid than manure’. ‘He then emerged from the ordeal enjoying greater respect than ever before’, adds Mr Peyrefitte.
Freedom of action or freedom of creation? That is the eternal question. In a country governed by group psychology where only the collective ‘I’ is ever cultivated, it was inevitable for ‘individual rights’ to come across as a dissolution factor.
Following in the footsteps of Marx, Mao Zedong repeats that ‘to be free is to acknowledge necessity’.
On the religious level, the Chinese have Sinicised Buddhism, just as they have done with Marxism. They have, however, rejected Christianity. In the early 20th century, Christians represented a mere 0.4% of the entire continent’s population; today, there are hardly any left at all.
Mr Peyrefitte explains:
Within China’s revolutionary logic, could the Catholic clergy, and even the faithful, ever be considered anything but agents acting at the behest of adverse powers? The orders that they follow disregard both China’s national interests and the proletariat’s revolutionary ones. They also have their own information network. And what do they live on, exactly? They are either given subsidies from abroad, which is an insult to the Chinese nation, or live off the alms given by the faithful, thus further impoverishing the already poor population. What they constitute is a state within the state, and this could never be tolerated.
Cultural Specificity
At the end of this journey, what takes shape before our eyes are the outlines of a universe which, although neither better nor worse than ours, is profoundly different from the latter. Deploring the ‘conformism according to which any acknowledgement of the plurality of the human races is synonymous with one’s approval of the cremation ovens’, Mr Peyrefitte, a trained anthropologist, remarks:
It is difficult not to believe in ethnic realities when one has seen how the Chinese live and studied their past.
He adds:
The fact of imagining that all men are granted the same talents at birth and that all peoples are endowed with the same faculties can be classified as a mental disorder, the kind that was once known as “vesania”. For men are indeed different, peoples irreplaceable and experiences non-interchangeable.
This leads him to formulate the following hypothesis:
The Chinese are neither one hundred years ahead of us nor one hundred years behind. They do not live in the same time nor the same period as us, and do not advance upon the same path. The progress they make and the revolutions they conduct are strictly adapted to what they themselves are.
The Chinese model may well be a model, but not one for Europeans to abide by. Conversely, European systems are certainly worthless from the Chinese perspective. To evaluate a culture in accordance with the criteria of another is to expose oneself to accumulating misinterpretations.
‘We, the Chinese, consider the civilisations of Europe and America to be barbaric’, Sun Yat-sen once declared.
And in a display of witty humour, another Chinese native stated that ‘to indulge in prophesying is a dangerous endeavour, especially when the prophecies concern the future’.
*
Quand la Chine s’éveillera… le monde tremblera, an account by Alain Peyrefitte. Fayard, 475 pages.
In Cina due anni dopo,959 an essay by Alberto Jacoviello. Seuil, 218 pages.
The Long Revolution, an essay be Edgar Snow. Stock, 320 pages.
La science chinoise et l’Occident. Le grand titrage, a compilation of texts by Joseph Needham. Seuil, 264 pages.
***
As expected, Mao Zedong’s death has not altered the reality of the Sino-Soviet antagonism at all. If anything, it even seems to have increased the threat with which the Kremlin has been burdening the Chinese nation and people. In Le XXème siècle fédéraliste960 (number 4, 1976), Mr Thierry Maulnier remarks that ‘this antagonism is more geopolitical than ideological in essence and cannot, therefore, be genuinely reduced through a mere change in political leadership’. He then adds that ‘a reconciliation between the enemy brothers of Beijing and Moscow — the one-billion-people bloc — would put both world peace and the West in a state of immediate mortal jeopardy. Let us not forget this fact in our prayers — in the event that we do pray, of course’.
On 13th November, 1976, the Xinhua agency published the following text:
‘After years of military expansion and war preparations, Soviet social-imperialism is tightening its grip on Western Europe. […] In connection to Western Europe, the Kremlin’s strategy is clearly geared towards a surprise offensive and attack allowing it to take the initiative in the war. So as to ensure this strategy’s success and achieve supremacy over the West, Soviet revisionists intensified their military expansion during the 1970s, while simultaneously speaking of “peace” at every turn. As part of their military preparations in Europe, they have placed an ever-increasing emphasis on the joint increase of their nuclear and conventional capacities in the developed regions that border on Western European countries.’
*
Ammerland am Starnberger See, 18th October, 1975;
Vernouillet, 22nd February, 1977
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