About 30 years ago, it seemed that the great tradition of China would prove no match for an all-conquering Westernism. Indeed, homegrown Chinese ways—for all their enormous achievements and past triumphs—appeared to have been superseded by a secular radicalism of European invention. The leaders of that Marxist radicalism, China’s ascendent Maoists, propounded a formula for restoring the humiliated imperium they had inherited to its former position of grandeur. And a large part of the formula consisted of what became famous as a “cultural revolution” directed againt the “olds,” especially the ancient body of ideas and practices lumped together as Confucianism.

Another part of the formula consisted of slogans—like “world revolution” and “national liberation”—which had also been invented by Westerners. No doubt to their surprise and delight, the Maoists found that Americans and Europeans could easily be scared by these mantras of their own making. Westerners were also readily unnerved when the prognosis of their doom—which they themselves had exquisitely detailed in their own philosophical and literary works—was read back to them by Chinese Communists.

These days, of course, China is showing itself amenable to a softer kind of Westernism, one without hard political edges or doom-laden visions, and preoccupied primarily with making money. Yet Western relief over this seeming conversion of one-fourth of mankind to a faith in “market forces” has been short-lived, and is now dampened by an anxiety which, in certain quarters, has already given way to dread.

One obvious source of the unease is the recurring prophecy, already a cliché, about the Pacific Century—a great shift in the world’s economic balance of forces and, therefore, of its power relations. In particular, “Greater China”—not merely the billion-plus in China, but their allies-by-blood in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and in the well-positioned Chinese diaspora worldwide—inspires awe.

A less obvious contributor to the same unease, one suspects, is a sense that this tectonic-like shift in the global balance may not rest on Western principle at all and may therefore not be so easy to understand or cope with. We have been told about the various “ethics”—Protestant, Catholic, Jewish—and their relation to the spirit of capitalism. Now we are being told about the spirit of capitalism and Confucianism—a faraway ethic of which we know nothing, save that it engenders “empowerment” of the sort we ourselves say we need.

The Confucian ethos, which emphasizes precisely the values which have suffered erosion in America. . . .

The Western alternative exhausted by excessive individualism and decadent habits. . . .

The East Asian model of development has great pragmatic appeal. . . .

Behind East Asia’s ever-growing trade surpluses lies an alternative world view that couldn’t more sharply challenge the assumptions of the West. . . .

In such observations (drawn from a variety of representative comments), there is a not so subtle hint that we will have to stop being like Americans and start being more like the Chinese—just as, up until very recently, we were being told (and still are, by some) that we will have to start being more like the Japanese. Certainly the Chinese are not yet as rich as the Japanese. But they are on the way; and besides, their overall power is already greater, and will continue to grow.

Hence we are very likely on the brink of a new curiosity about China—a China which is neither decrepit, as it was during the 19th and early 20th centuries, nor demented, as it was during the three decades of Maoism that ended about 1980. To be sure, political repression has outlived Mao, and the memory of the Tiananmen massacre of June 1989 is still fresh in many American minds. But the number of Americans who continue to be outraged by these crimes diminishes every day as compared with those to whom yet another new China is attractive, if vaguely threatening.

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It is, therefore, altogether fortuitous that there has recently appeared another installment of Asia and the Making of Europe, a masterwork of scholarship that has been a-writing for the past three decades, with more to come. Donald F. Lach, now professor emeritus of history at the University of Chicago, began the project in the early 1960’s in order to learn what early-modern Europeans—from the age of discovery on—really knew about the whole of Asia, and how that knowledge affected them. The first volume of Asia and the Making of Europe—itself divided into two “books”—appeared in 1965. Volume II, which added three more “books” to the set, followed in 1970 and 1977. In writing Volume III, whose four “books” about the 17th century have come out in the past year,¹ Lach has been joined by Edwin J. Van Kley, a former student of his, now professor of history at Calvin College. So, in the way these things are usually reckoned, there are nine volumes to heft.

Though it is only one of the nine that will provide points of reference for the speculations here, we should not proceed even to that one without noting, if only in passing, that the work as a whole is an astonishing achievement. In this latest volume, covering the 1600’s alone, the authors set out to study every book published in Europe in that century about East, South, and Southeast Asia. In an age bloated with babble about multiculturalism, we are indebted to Lach and Van Kley for reminding us how difficult it is to practice the real thing, and how much one really needs to know in order to do it. Here, after all, is a project that displays facility in arcane Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Dutch, German, and English, and a mastery of subsequent modern historical study of Asia, against which the earlier European writings can be weighed.

But the real achievement is neither linguistic nor bibliographic. It is, rather, genuinely intellectual, a lesson in how one goes about learning things and making judgments about them. It is a reminder, too, that “scholarship for its own sake” will sometimes come in handy in unanticipated ways. Could we, a generation ago, have foreseen that our understanding of and expectations about China would be as radically transformed as they have been in recent years? Would we, under the aegis of “strategic studies,” have sponsored an investigation of European Sinology of the 17th century on the grounds that it might conceivably help reorient us at the onset of the 21st?

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Then as now there were aspects of Western interest in the East that were decidedly unromantic. Seaborne commerce between Europe and Asia expanded to the point where national economies all over the world became irrevocably linked. International trade was an increasingly profitable undertaking for Europeans and Asians alike, with all the risks, rewards, and complaints of our own day. New World silver flooded into China and caused prices to rise. In Mexico, a silk industry which the Spanish had established collapsed because of cheap Asian imports. The European textile industry of the 1680’s was comparably battered, leading to protectionist agitation.

At the same time, however, new commercial opportunities led to innovations in technology and organization. There were improvements in ship design and construction, new forms of business enterprise, new ways of raising larger sums of capital, new experiments in market manipulation and monopoly.

Beyond the importation of goods, information about the East arrived in substantial quantity. Lach and Van Kley aver that China was probably the part of Asia best known to European readers. During the 17th century, 50 major independent works on China were published, many of which were among the most popular publications of the era. And there were histories, travelogues, letter-books, atlases, encyclopedias, and specialized treatises of all sorts—extending even to detailed accounts of Chinese flora and Chinese medicine.

And when, courtesy of the extraordinarily energetic Lach and Van Kley, we are provided a recounting, in extenso, of the quality of Western observations about China ca. 1670, and when we weigh them against our own living memory of comparable observations ca. 1970, the cumulative effect is quite sobering. For a literate Westerner could have gained a more trustworthy grasp of contemporaneous China from Jesuits, traders, and casual observers three centuries ago than was to be had from Sinologists, journalists, and “political pilgrims” three centuries later in the age of Mao.

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I offer these reflections principally to stress the kind of intellectual effort that was involved then, and that is still required now. In retrospect, we recognize that the early modern Sinology described by Lach and Van Kley sought to make sense of the high achievements and great endurance of Chinese civilization as ever more of it was becoming known. Thus, Chinese government, in its administrative complexity and moral and philosophical underpinnings, was widely praised. The central role of the Chinese family was appreciated and admired, the scale of commercial activity in the major cities was deemed remarkable by European standards, and memorable impressions were recorded concerning the sheer size of the country and the mass of its population.

Across the entire range of China’s accomplishments, the highest regard was accorded to moral and political philosophy and historical studies, as against the natural sciences. This particular fascination led to a general infatuation with Confucianism as an outlook, and with the sage himself as a personality. As time went on, he became a symbol of rationality, urbanity, and humaneness and, even later, the basis for an 18th-century craze extolling the Chinese state as the proper model for all enlightened despots.

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Despite all these wonders, natural and man-made, Europeans had soon to confront and try to understand the collapse of a Chinese ruling house that had been in power since 1368. The Ming dynasty began to crumble about 1620 or so, and was finally dispatched in 1644 by the Manchus, one of the peoples who lived beyond the Great Wall and who created the last of the dynasties, the Ch’ing, which ended in 1912.

It took the Manchus about 40 years to mop up the last of the Ming loyalists, surely long enough for European Sinophiles to speculate on the implications and causes of this great event. Some recognized that the Manchu conquest was an event of world-historical significance. There was debate over whether the fall of the Ming house meant the fall of Chinese civilization as such and its replacement by an inner Asian barbarism. The calamity was attributed to bad government at court, and even worse in the provinces. It was even bruited that the Manchu conquest was God’s vengeance against one of the last Ming emperors for his sometime persecution of Jesuit missionaries. There was intense speculation that the international system in Asia, and the relations between East and West generally, would be profoundly affected.

As the 17th century came to a close, none of the worst fears of either the Chinese or the foreigners was realized. The Manchus quickly became even more Chinese than their new subjects, and proceeded to raise the country to unprecedented heights of wealth, power, and sophistication. In the end, the prediction of doom turned out to be a false alarm, and the European accounts of China became all the more flattering for that.

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Here, then, was a cycle of understanding, reached without the intervention of any of the “modern” social sciences and by men whose qualifications would surely be suspect today. They were, after all, believing Christians, rapacious traders, committed royalists. They both embodied and foreshadowed a tough Western imperialism, an age when Eurocentrism was not some self-denigrating construct but rather a fighting faith, a Church militant, a fleet of gunboats, an Opium War and, ultimately, an atomic bomb.

Today, however, no matter how we may rate the West’s ability to make a forceful impression on the East, by now it has surely done its damnedest; it is no longer of a mind or a mood to do more. At the same time, the more benign method of influence-by-example seems also to have reached its limit of effectiveness. Has our comportment these past few years been intimidating or even inspirational?

Against this background of self-doubt, the support of many Westerners for political liberty in China is all the more impressive. Like the persistence shown by indefatigable missionaries centuries ago, this support is a mark of true faith and deep optimism. For imagining a democratized China in our age of Western confusion involves conviction and commitment to principle as great as the one which envisioned a Christianized China in an earlier age of Western certitude.

In that same earlier time, when the survival of China as an independent entity was itself in doubt, Chinese had to be attentive to things Western. Now, it is certain traditional Chinese virtues—cooperative endeavor, not rampant individualism; regard for the public good, not unrestrained self-assertion; respect for inherited culture, not unbridled decadence—to which Westerners are becoming attentive.

Indeed, such is the criticism of contemporary Western society built into these polarities that the growing admiration in the West for tough-minded Confucianism is reminiscent of what Simon Leys once called “right-wing Sinophilia,” an approving response to the Puritanism of Mao’s China, now transferred to Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore.

Yet, whatever the “populist” appeal of Confucian authoritarianism for those who have heard about a tidy Singapore and find it preferable to a tawdry Manhattan, the underlying Confucian creed has never been populist at all, but elitist in every sense. The Jesuits knew this in the 17th century, and it was one reason they were optimistic about the missionary prospects for their own intellectually impressive, highly cultivated, and immensely learned Catholic faith. Later, the philosophes also knew it, and were comparably beguiled by the utopian potential of an enlightened despot advised by intellectually accomplished, highly refined mandarins. And there was more than one echo of this sentiment in the Western intelligentsia’s worshipful deference to Chinese Communism and its vanguard party.

This last group, like the Chinese to whom it once deferred, may talk much nowadays about markets and democracy, but if the past is any guide, it will cast about for arguments that establish its own right to rule in any scheme of things.

Indeed, it may be that the growing fascination of Western intellectuals with China reflects their recognition that, with the end of socialism, Confucianism in action is the last remaining thing around that demonstrates what rule by the “best and the brightest” can really achieve. No wonder, then, that intellectuals seem to suffer so much less from the uneasiness that has come to afflict others as “Western liberalism” confronts the new power of the “Confucian ethic” and begins to retreat before it.

¹ University of Chicago Press. Book 1, 674 pp., $85.00; Book 2, 568 pp., $75.00; Book 3, 504 pp., $65.00; Book 4, 627 pp., $85.00.