The West As the Other: A Genealogy of Chinese Occidentalism

4. Easternizing the West, Westernizing the East

FOUR Easternizing the West, Westernizing the East In the “prehistoric” worldviews, the intermediaries between Heaven and Earth were the pentology (wufang) of the quarters and the middle, correlative both to the celestial patterns and territorial grids. Within the framework of such perspectives, the polities in the subsequent age “rotated” to command the linkages. The framework was not taken as the same; on the contrary, it was “interpreted” in different ways, and it allowed alternations. During Shang, the king followed a cosmology that, being more vertical than that adopted in the preceding dynasty (Xia), permitted his own person to monopolize axial mundi in terms of what Keightley (2000, pp. 121–122) calls the “time-space grid of cosmology.” In overthrowing Shang and in maintaining its world order, Zhou became more “inclusive” cosmologically: “Where Shang rulers had venerated and sought the guidance of their own ancestors, the Zhou claimed their sanction to rule came from a broader, impersonal deity, Heaven (tian), whose mandate (tianming) might be conferred on any family that was morally worthy of the responsibility” (Fairbank & Goldman, 2006, p. 40). The world in which the Zhou king assumed the position of the supreme was extended horizontally.1 The king performed ceremonies to forge ties not only between Heaven and Earth but also between There and Here. Seen in the light of King Mu’s journey to the West, the Zhou cosmology located the linkage to Heaven in the directions beyond the middle, outside the center. The “Wild West” became especially “holy,” imagined as certain remote mountains where all the treasures of other divinities, other things, and other TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 87 TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 87 19/12/13 10:41 AM 19/12/13 10:41 AM THE WEST AS THE OTHER 88 humans could be discovered as the sources of efficacy necessary for the mandate in the East. So far, much of our inquiry has been focused upon the “myths” and “realities” of the Zhou geo-cosmography. Though later the Zhou model was often promoted as the “Good Way,” it was nevertheless neither “successful” nor eternal. Unlike Shang, Zhou was more like a “confederation.” As Chinese archaeologist Li Xueqin (1985) notes, In the areas surrounding the royal domain, which were directly under the administration of the king of Zhou, were a large number of so-called feudal states (zhuhou guo) of various sizes established by members of the Zhou clan or other clans. Then in between these lords and surrounding the states of the lords were a large number of states and tribes that were, to varying extents, subordinate to the royal Zhou Dynasty. The rulership of the states of the lords was also hereditary, but the lords had prescribed political and economic obligations toward the Zhou royal house. (p. 3) The weaker verticality along which it established its “confederation” made Zhou a looser unity.2 Thus, “[c]ompared with the rule of the Shang, the Zhou rule was not particularly successful” (p. 4). During the reign of King You, the last ruler of the Western Zhou, political corruption , social turmoil, and an invasion by the Quanrong people in the West caused the downfall of the royal house. A great many changes took place thereafter. Yi-Xia, East-West In an essay entitled “Speculating about Yi-Xia in terms of East-West relations” (1933), Fu Sinian—a great Republican scholar, the founder of Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology, and the advocate of an alternative “Orientalism”3 —says the following: Since the Eastern Han Dynasty [A.D. 25–220], Chinese history has been written through distinctions made between the South and the North, partly because there was indeed a split of political powers between the South and North, and partly because the North was several times conquered by foreign nations. However, this distinction cannot be applied to the history of antiquity. The Yangtze valley area did not prosper until the Eastern Han. The area was not an independent political entity before the reign of the Sun family of the Wu state. Before that, in prehistory and in the three TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 88 TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 88 19/12/13 10:41 AM 19/12/13 10:41 AM EASTERNIZING THE WEST, WESTERNIZING THE EAST 89 royal dynasties of Antiquity, political evolution from tribe to kingdom took place mainly in the valleys of the Yellow River, Ji River, and Huai River. In this extensive region, the main politico-geographical...