Fang Weigui: The Transmutation of the *Zeitgeist* [1] and the Evolution of China’s Image
The Handbook of China (1974), edited by the German Sinologist and historian Wolfgang Franke, contains the following passage: "Even today, the image of China in the West, or rather the Western perception of China, tends to swing from one extreme to another; what these images display is more often the respective positions of the observers themselves than the observed object itself." This viewpoint of Franke’s undoubtedly touches upon varying historical backgrounds and the Zeitgeist (spirit of the age), particularly specific Western needs of the era, as well as the value judgments and observational stances of the image-makers.
From the late Ming and early Qing dynasties to the early 20th century, Western views of China manifested as two great "trans-century blocks." The positive and negative images of China from the Western perspective prior to the 20th century exerted an immense influence on subsequent Western views of the country. In other words, while later Western views might adopt different phrasing or reach new conclusions due to new historical conditions and social developments, on many fundamental issues they failed to transcend the basic viewpoints established by their predecessors at the positive and negative poles. Likewise, the "China fever" [1] of the early 20th century possessed distinct characteristics of its era.
Early Western narratives of Chinese literature focused primarily on Confucius and the Confucian classics. This was a result of a traditional "broad view of literature" [2] and was closely related to the Western construction of "Chinese culture"—a phenomenon also seen in the preference for Daoist works during the profound spiritual crisis of the West in the early 20th century. The history of the Western reception of Chinese literature clearly demonstrates that such reception has always depended on the cognition of Chinese culture and the construction of China's image across different eras.
China as the Mirror of the West
Before the mid-13th century, Westerners knew very little about China, their knowledge limited to vague imaginings and legends. Roughly toward the end of the pre-Christian era, Romans used "Seres" and "Sera" to refer to the distant land of silk production and its people, likely meaning "the land of silk" or "the silk people." The ancient Roman writer Pliny the Elder once praised Eastern silk garments: "In a distant land dwell a people of exquisite craftsmanship... even the garments worn by their women in public are transparent." It is evident that the initial image of China from a Western perspective was hazy.
The five centuries between approximately 1250 and 1750 can be viewed as one great block of the European view of China. The Venetian Marco Polo’s journey to the East in the late 13th century ended [the era of] indirect imagination and held epochal significance for the development of Western perceptions of China. Even as many fantastical legends persisted afterward, Westerners generally could not imagine that a civilized and enlightened nation existed outside of Europe. It was not until 1514 that China was "discovered" by the Portuguese under the name "China." If Marco Polo is called the first Westerner truly to know China, then his compatriot Matteo Ricci, leader of the Catholic Jesuits in China, deserves to be called the first Westerner truly to touch the Chinese spiritual world. The China introduced by the Jesuits was a country of enlightened government and education [3]; this not only brought about the first high tide of Western interest in China but also determined the Western view of China for the following century, lasting until the Enlightenment.
During the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, the two heterogeneous cultures of China and the West experienced their first historically profound encounter. While the Jesuits, represented by Ricci, traveled east to proselytize, they also brought the treasures of Eastern culture and the Chinese spirit back to Europe. The influence of the Jesuits in the West far exceeded their influence in the China they sought to evangelize. To the European intellectual class, the Chinese culture discovered by the Jesuits was like a "divine revelation," providing sudden enlightenment. The Enlightenment provided fertile soil for the reception of Chinese culture; it was truly a fortuitous convergence. China’s enlightened monarchs, religious tolerance, and Confucian doctrines—especially the status of Confucianism within the state and society—were highly esteemed by Enlightenment thinkers.
The two giants of German thought, Leibniz and Wolff, were deeply influenced by Chinese cultural thought. They combined the Chinese culture introduced by missionaries with Enlightenment ideas, exerting a significant impact on the development of European intellectual history and Western views of China. Leibniz believed that Europe and China were two components of a single global cultural whole. In the preface to his Novissima Sinica (Latest News from China), he wrote: "I believe it is a unique arrangement of fate that the highest culture and the most advanced technical civilization of humanity are today gathered simultaneously at the two ends of our continent: Europe and China. China adorns the other end of the earth just as Europe does the East." The two great French philosophers Voltaire and Diderot likewise revered this "gospel" from China.
The "China fever" of that time did not stem solely from the idealized China promoted by the Jesuits. The aesthetic pursuit of "Chinoiserie" then rising in Europe was extremely conducive to the reception of Chinese culture. Much like the fate of silk in ancient Rome, Chinese porcelain—never before seen by Europeans—acquired a mythical quality as soon as it reached Western soil, its value comparable to gold. Additionally, Westerners were obsessed with traditional Chinese handicrafts such as lacquerware, silk fabrics, and embroidery; even Chinese goldfish were introduced to Europe. Most notably, Chinese gardens, with their unique charm and sensibility, were widely sought after.
Under the Western Gaze: Barriers and Prejudice
The Jesuit mission in China was disbanded around 1775, thereby severing the exchange between China and the West in the realm of ideas. The Chinese culture the Jesuits had introduced to Europe had served as a "guidebook" for Europeans to understand China. However, the times had changed, and the guidebook lost its efficacy. Thus, an attitude of skepticism, criticism, and rejection—or rather, a negative image of China—gradually gained ground and persisted for a century and a half until the early 20th century. This constitutes the other great block of the Western view of China.
During this period, people no longer believed in the prosperous age of civil and military achievement praised by the Jesuits and Enlightenment thinkers. Instead, they placed more faith in descriptions and treatises that despised China, portraying it as uncivilized, ridiculous, and inferior. This phenomenon began roughly with the negative image of China presented in George Anson’s A Voyage Round the World (1748), as well as various accounts from the Macartney Embassy at the end of the 18th century. These narratives caused the "myth of China" propagated by the Jesuits to gradually collapse. In the observations and travelogues written by luckless Western merchants and other visitors to China, the Chinese were largely depicted as rogues and swindlers. The defining characteristic of the Western view of China during this period was the critique of the Chinese spirit by thinkers such as Montesquieu and Hegel.
Even while Leibniz was enthusiastic about Chinese culture and advocating for a synthesis of Sino-Western thought, disputes regarding Chinese politics and culture had already broken out in France. Enlightenment thinkers like Montesquieu and Rousseau were representatives of the opposition to the "China fad." They engaged in a different reflection on the knowledge of China spread by the Jesuits, sternly criticizing "Chinese despotism." Based on his theories of republican, monarchical, and despotic forms of government, Montesquieu disagreed with his contemporaries' promotion of "enlightened absolutism." He believed that despotism was synonymous with tyranny and that no distinction existed between enlightened and unenlightened forms; China was precisely such a state. Rousseau, who was long regarded as an opponent of Chinese civilization, did offer some praise for Chinese political thought but remained convinced that the advancement of Chinese science and art ran counter to moral progress.
In the German territories, Johann Gottfried von Herder’s discourse on Chinese culture had an immense influence on subsequent generations. The conclusions he reached in his On China were extreme; he believed China "locked its borders against the outside, possessed national arrogance, compared itself only to itself, and neither knew nor liked the world beyond." Entering the 19th century, Hegel pointed out in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History that China was almost excluded from world history. He viewed world history as the history of the progress of the consciousness of freedom, and consequently believed that China knew no progress.
While various negative images of China shared many commonalities, they possessed two completely different basic paradigms. The first form used exotic literature or caricature-like sketches to satisfy the curiosity of the audience; various accounts of China by Dutch and British merchants belonged to this category. The second form focused on nations, states, and continents, seeking in-depth inquiry—that is, an investigation into the so-called "essence" and "commonality" of a national or continental group, distinguishing it from other groups. In discussing China, Leibniz, Wolff, Voltaire, and Diderot belonged to the positive category, while Montesquieu, Rousseau, Herder, and Hegel belonged to the other.
Cognitive Roots of the Western View of China
The aforementioned "trans-century blocks" of Western views of China are intended to mark the approximate position of pre-20th-century Western perceptions in the long river of history, which can be summarized as a history moving from "mythologizing" to "vilifying." The "trans-century blocks" are both a temporal division and a general summation of the positive and negative images of China in the West before the 20th century. Of course, these two trends also had stages of parallel development, differing only in momentum; the terms "positive" or "negative" image refer only to the general trend and mainstream. For over a century between the 17th and 18th centuries, the image of China in Europe was largely consistent. For nearly a century and a half thereafter, the keynote of the discourse on China also remained essentially uniform.
Starting no later than the 17th century, there always existed two qualitatively different images of China: a popular one and an intellectual one. Relatively speaking, the China in the eyes of the masses was quite stable; they sought mostly exotic scenery and fairy-tale stories to satisfy the common human desire for the curious. For the intellectual class, the view of China changed along with the shifts in the era, as well as changes in the intellectual class’s own historical fantasies, thematic concerns, and value systems. This distinction between the "popular" and "elite" views of China and their respective value orientations continues to this day.
We can essentially categorize Western perceptions of Chinese culture before the 20th century into an idealized side and a distorted side. The former is found in the works of the Jesuits, Leibniz, and Voltaire; the latter in Herder, Hegel, and especially in the writings of merchants in China and writers who merely parroted others. Due to the limitations of the era and the fact that Western introductions to Chinese culture were not yet comprehensive—and even more so due to the influence of value systems—the arguments and discourses of some thinkers were often biased or excessively radical.
When Europe first became acquainted with China, Confucianism was often treated as a synonym for Chinese thought, presented to the Western intellectual world in the 17th and 18th centuries. For a long period after the publication of the Latin Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (Confucius, the Philosopher of the Chinese), compiled by Prospero Intorcetta and Philippe Couplet, Western translations focused primarily on the Four Books and Five Classics. Leibniz and Wolff’s descriptions of Chinese society were likely based on the theory of the "Three Ages" found in the "Liyun" chapter of the Book of Rites: "Ages of Disorder," "Small Tranquility" (Xiao Kang), and "Great Unity" (Da Tong). These were originally Confucius’s ideals for a gradual progression toward a peaceful world, yet Leibniz and Wolff mistook that ideal social order and interpersonal relationship for a portrait of Chinese social reality.
The later negative images of China were mainly rooted in Eurocentrism: beyond modern European concepts such as progress, individuality, and humanity, the Christian spirit and the imperialist missionary consciousness were reaching a fever pitch. Another important reason was the lack of understanding of Chinese history. For a long time, European knowledge of Chinese history relied on the Italian Jesuit Martino Martini’s Sinicae Historiae Decas Prima and the French Jesuit Joseph-Anna-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla’s Histoire Générale de la Chine. This did not change much even by the 19th century. Little did they know that de Mailla’s Histoire Générale was a rewrite based on the Tongjian Gangmu [4], which evaluated historical events through a Confucian lens rather than being a history book in the strict sense. This led to a massive misunderstanding, as if China had undergone no substantive changes from 1000 BCE to the present, thereby fueling false claims that the Chinese were an "eternally stationary nation" or that "China has no history."
The European images of China in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment eras were starkly different, caused by different Zeitgeists, socio-cultural needs, and the worldviews of the image-makers. Even the indisputable fact of "China’s long history" was handled and judged in completely different ways: the Jesuits and Voltaire saw thousands of years of Chinese morality, lasting peace, and tranquility, whereas Montesquieu, Herder, and Hegel saw a stagnant China and a fossilized Chinese culture.
These "trans-century blocks" are often reflected in the continuous, almost archetypal cultural formulas or the "constancy" of certain images within Western narratives of China. Once many of these images were generated, they displayed a vitality that concerned both the content of the view of China and its inherent value judgments. During the era when the imperialist powers humiliated China, the image of China in Europe sank to its lowest point.
Another Oriental Fever: "Becoming the Chinese of Europe"
Around the time of the First World War, a historic turning point occurred in the Western image of China, which once again became an object of veneration. This was a movement from the Enlightenment thinkers' high praise of Chinese culture to the Eurocentrists' contempt, and finally to a revision of that revised image. Europeans were despondent due to the destruction of the Great War; having long been exhausted by their frantic pace of life, they now turned their mournful gaze toward the East, seeking a new spiritual anchor and a path to salvation. Thus—
"Oriental Fever" has surged once again, as people yearn for true harmony and tranquility; the historical image of China was perfectly suited to satisfy the universal human need of Europeans at that time for fairy-tale-esque scenery.
The translation and introduction of Chinese classics in the West followed the sequence of "Confucianism first, then Buddhism and Daoism," remaining primarily focused on Confucian classics for a long period. Stemming from an earlier, broader conception of literature [5], China was long regarded by many Europeans as a "nation of literature." For a sustained period following the Enlightenment, Confucius was not only seen by Westerners as the sole representative of Chinese culture, but his status as a man of letters was also beyond doubt. If the Enlightenment thinkers found kindred spirits in the Four Books and Five Classics—that is, in Chinese ethics and morality—to help them assert their own heterodoxies, the scene two hundred years later was quite different. From the 1860s to the early 20th century, the first localized fever for translating the Dao De Jing [6] emerged in the West. Moreover, the teachings of Laozi were not only more favored by Westerners than those of the Confucian school, but the volume of translations soon surpassed that of the previous Confucian classics.
Although the translations of the Dao De Jing and the Daoist advocacy of "inaction" (wuwei) did not initially create a sensation, the gradual rise of cultural pessimism at the end of the 19th century—represented by Nietzsche—changed the tide. In particular, Nietzsche’s famous dictum regarding the "revaluation of all values" [7] and his fierce critique of modern materiality caused Daoist thought to resonate ever more strongly within Western intellectual circles at the start of the 20th century. Especially as World War I triggered a spiritual crisis in the West, it was during this period that Daoist thought became the primary characteristic of Chinese culture in the Western mind, just as Confucius and Confucianism had been synonymous with Chinese culture or the "code" for the Chinese spirit two hundred years prior.
A new generation of intellectuals and literati rediscovered Chinese culture, yet what they praised was a different China. They discovered Laozi, Zhuangzi, the I Ching (Classic of Changes), and Zen Buddhism. The obsession of Western philosophical circles at the time with Daoist teachings exerted a lasting influence. Taking Germany as an example, as early as before the war, Martin Buber published The Sayings and Parables of Zhuangzi with a profound postscript. Max Weber authored The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, in which he regarded Laozi as a fashionable philosopher. Simultaneously, he pointed out the commonalities between Confucian and Christian ethics.
The "Daoism Fever" originated first from the apocalyptic atmosphere and decadent sentiments of the time, especially the worldview of the "Generation of 1920," who saw their own cultural pessimism and pacifism reflected in Daoist thought. In the 1919 journal The Revolutionary, the German Expressionist poet Klabund addressed his compatriots with the startling piece "Listen, German!", calling on people to live in the "sacred spirit of the Dao" and to "become the Chinese of Europe." Klabund became one of the most famous and successful German poets of that era due to his imitations of Chinese poetry; he called Li Bai "perhaps the greatest poet of all times and nations." It was also in this era that Li Bai supplanted Confucius as the most prominent symbol of Chinese culture. However, some left-wing writers were more interested in Bai Juyi and Du Fu, valuing them for their social critique.
It was as if only a century ago Westerners discovered that China was a traditional "nation of poetry." It was precisely this immense interest in Tang poetry that largely stimulated the fervent Western gaze toward China, a trend fully embodied in the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler’s masterpiece The Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde). The six movements of this symphonic song cycle were based on four poems by Li Bai and German translations of poems by Meng Haoran, Wang Wei, and Qian Qi. The "Daoism Fever" spread among literati and artists, exerting a massive influence on the poetry, drama, and fiction of the time. In the German literary world, the influence was particularly deep on famous writers such as Hermann Hesse, Alfred Döblin, and Bertolt Brecht.
Observing the level of understanding and evaluation of Chinese literature across different Western eras reveals much about the Zeitgeist (spirit of the age) [8]; this remains true today. In recent times, the Western reception of Chinese literature has taken on a heavy veneer of utilitarianism. For various reasons, the criteria used by translators and publishers when selecting Chinese literary works are often not based on literary merit or aesthetic quality, but rather on the critical content, explicit political tendencies, or topicality of the works.
Since the 18th century, Europe’s affirmation or negation of China has stemmed from Europe’s own needs, depending on the era and the intellectual background in which specific images were generated and developed. As time as passed, a hundred years have gone by from the "China Fever" of the early 20th century to today; yet the characteristics of contemporary Western views on China largely remain the same as before—that is, proceeding from Westerners' own specific needs and stances to express their views on changed realities and situations, often infused with a Cold War mentality.
(The author, Fang Weigui, is the lead expert of the National Social Science Fund Major Project "Research on the Compilation and Influence of Early Western Histories of Chinese Literature" and a professor at Chongqing University.)
Source: Guangming Daily (January 22, 2025, Page 11) Web Editor: Huihui