Dialogues across Civilizations: Sketches in World History from the Chinese and European Experiences (review)

We should see more of this kind of world history as the field matures to a stage where informed cross-cultural meditations can interest a gen-eral audience. In Dialogues across Civilizations, Roxann Prazniak demonstrates the value of the approach with sketches comparing European and Chinese experiences from Confucius to Claude Monet.

Each of the eight essays begins with comparative biographies, one Chinese and one European, which provide points of departure for reflections on the two great civilizations and world history. Most of thebiographical subjects are roughly contemporary: Confucius and Socrates, Saint Augustine and Huiyan (founder of Pure Land Buddhism), neo-Confucian Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi) and Saint Thomas Aquinas, and the painters Claude Monet and Qi Baishi (Ch'i Pai-shih). Two chapters compare individuals at a considerable chronological distance, while one chapter compares not people but the cities of Paris and Hangzhou in the fourteenth century.

The two chapters comparing noncontemporary individuals are methodologically the most interesting. The chronologically contemporary biographies suffer from the obvious discontinuities between Chinese and European histories before the modern period. Consequently, the author is forced to explain parallels between Zhu Xi and Aquinas with such vague generalizations as "the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were periods of fundamental change at both ends of Eurasia."

In the chapter on the Han dynasty writer Ban Zhao and Christine de Pisan (more than 1,300 years apart), and the one on Thomas Muntzer and Hong Xiuquan (the Taiping leader 300 years later), the author ignores chronology for structural similarity in parallel historical processes. Ban Zhao and Pisan, she argues, were both "born into a scholarly family at a time in which political and economic changes were undermining feudal relations." In both Han China and Renaissance Europe, she continues, the decline of "warrior aristocracy" and rise of "centralizing bureaucratic state authority" encouraged values that were more universal (Chinese ren and Christian humanism) but also "premised on the intellectual and social confinement of women."

One can always quibble. This "declining Chinese feudalism," stretching from the Zhou to the Tang, takes a long time to decline. Further, the argument of this chapter runs counter to that of the chapter on Muntzer and the Anabaptists (who flourished only 100 years after Pisan) as structural contemporaries of Hong Xiuquan and the Taipings. Prazniak emphasizes the anticapitalist character of both rebellions. An alternative comparison of the Anabaptists with their contemporary neo-Confucian reformers (like Wang Gen and the Tai-zhou school) could emphasize cultural similarities. But such quibbles are a testament to the richness of these essays.

The last essay, one of the best, illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of the author's approach. The biographies of the painters Monet (1840-1926) and Qi Baishi (1863-1957) are sketched separately with conventional detail and an occasional vague comparative foray. We are told, for instance, that both "conveyed social and emotional messages in their works"; both "were participants in processes of cultural intervention, which contributed significantly to the emergence of their own innovations"; both demonstrated "longing for connection to nature in daily life"; and both "challenged artistic conventions." Praz-niak is too good a social historian to let these biographies stand alone, however, so she uses them (as she does throughout) as points of entry to a comparison of the social and historical conditions of Europe and China at the time. But here, as often in the other chapters, it is the social differences that are striking. Monet came of age in industrializing France "under a corporate bureaucratic government," while Qi Baishi came from a rural, preindustrial China which was "moving through an encounter with imperialism and capitalism into socialism."

Fortunately, the chapters do not end with biographies and social histories that do not quite connect. Especially in the better chapters, these introductory excursions merely set the stage...