Joint interview with Anne Cheng, sinologist, holder of the Chair of Intellectual History of China, at the Collège de France, and Nicolas Idier, historian and sinologist attached to the Center for Research in the Far East, Paris-Sorbonne. These specialists are coming back on the rewriting of history that the Beijing authorities have been carrying out for several years, to better understand its genesis.
Anne Cheng, professor at the Collège de France and Nicolas Idier, from the Center for Research in the Far East, Paris-Sorbonne. In the background, a jade object presented during the exhibition "Liangzhu and ancient China, a 5000-year-old civilization demonstrated by jades", in Beijing, China (2019).
Sciences et Avenir:In every official speech, starting with President Xi Jinping, a Chinese civilization is evoked which would have been uninterrupted for 5000 years…. Is this historically correct?
Anne Cheng: This is a formula that has established itself quite recently in the 2000s. Until now, dating in China was based on Historical Memoirs by Sima Qian (145-89), the great historian of the Han period, who places the attested Chinese chronology beginning at 841 BC. BC, the beginning of the Western Zhou dynasty. That is to say a total of three millennia. In 1996, the Chinese government launched a vast project to determine a reliable chronology of the first three dynasties of antiquity (Xia, Shang and Zhou). In reality, the issue at the heart of this escalation of millennia was to "pull the rope as far as possible", to bring Chinese civilization back as far back in antiquity as the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations.
Why?
AC: After a trip to Egypt where he realized that the history of the ancient Egyptians dates back to 2350 BC, the chief manager of the program to establish a reliable chronology of the first three Chinese dynasties said to himself "we Chinese should achieve the same results than these civilizations of the Mediterranean. He convinced the Chinese government to fund the "First Three Dynasties Chronology Project" by including it in the 9 th Five-Year Plan (1996-2000).
Is that why the China launched an extensive archaeological program to substantiate the origin of its history in older times?
AC: Indeed, a special committee overseen by historian Li Xueqin - at the time director of the Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences - recruited 200 scholars in various disciplines (history, astronomy, archaeology, physics…) to collaborate, carry out carbon 14 dating and thus succeed in tracing the beginning of Chinese chronology to the year 2070 BC. This result was announced in a report in November 2000. The Xia dynasty, which until then had always been considered a mythical dynasty, now extends from 2070 to 1600 before the Christian era, followed by the Shang from 1600 until to the conquest of the Zhou in 1046. More recently in 2001, the Chinese government launched a sequel to this Three Dynasties project titled:"Exploring the Origins of Chinese Civilization" in an attempt to trace it all a little further back.
Nicolas Idier: For a long time, the built unit of Chinese civilization was based on this very strong factor that their writing appeared around 1500 BC. These new dates, set at 2070 B.C. from an earlier origin in China, shatter what has long been the main unifying factor of this civilization.
So a continuous history of China for 5000 years is a myth?
AC: If we understand history as the period for which the first vestiges of writing were found - on the shells of turtles and on the bones of ovidae and bovids - this is indeed inaccurate. The so-called oracular inscriptions, which are the ancestors of modern Chinese scripts, date at best to the Shang dynasty, around 3000 to 3500 years ago. We are therefore far from the official vulgate of 5000 years of continuous history….
Has this question of origins arisen at other times in Chinese history?
NI :In the 18th century, European Jesuits pursued a somewhat similar policy by questioning the oldest civilizations. Some considered it to be Egypt, others China.
AC :Since the 1950s, Chinese archeology has been a scientific discipline serving a political agenda:there is a close relationship between archeology and nationalism. This is not a Chinese exclusive because let us remember that Nazi Germany had acted in the same way (read Sciences et Avenir n°724 ).
Displays the "Twelve cardinal values of socialism", among which the term "wenming", the " civilization". © Sipa
In your College de France course, you say that the Chinese term wenming (civilization) is currently ubiquitous in official Party rhetoric and propaganda. Why is the use of this word so important to leaders?
AC: The appearance of the term wenming among the "12 cardinal values of socialism*", adopted since the 18 th congress of November 2012, is visible everywhere, whether on the street, restaurants, schools, hospitals or elsewhere. It is this permanent recurrence that intrigued me. After the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), a period during which China destroyed all that it could still destroy of its old culture, the country now puts civilization forward as if to replace what has been conscientiously demolished. Now, this concept… is a Japanese invention of the Meiji era (1868-1912)! The Japanese, as we know, took old terms from the ancient Chinese vocabulary, which they recombined in their own way to translate Western concepts such as "philosophy", "religion", or "civilization". And China has taken over these "turnkey" concepts. Wenming written in kanji - Japanese characters borrowed from Chinese-, no one remembered the origin of this term. So much so that the official story says that it is an expression originating in Chinese antiquity! What is wrong. In the ancient context, it describes something refined and luminous, which has nothing to do with the European definition of the word civilization!
Didn't the notion of civilization exist in China before?
AC: China, which calls itself Zhong Hua in Chinese, considers itself "THE" civilization! And everything outside of this Zhong Hua , what is peripheral is "others"!
Your course at the Collège de France is called: "Is China (still) a civilization"? Why such a question?
AC: I am precisely asking this somewhat provocative question because the Chinese official discourse delights in evoking the grandeur of Chinese civilization, while trying to make people forget all the violence of the Maoist regime. Whether the events of the Cultural Revolution or those of Tian'anmen Square (1989):or the "anti-rightist" campaign (1950-1960), which saw thousands of people perish in camps. The paradox that I denounce is that China gargles with its history while conscientiously erasing it. She cultivates amnesia and, at best, an extremely selective memory. Constantly using the reference to the "century of humiliation", (XIX e -XX e century), immediately after the events of Tian'anmen in the 1990s, it is precisely to make people forget what happened there and everything that preceded it. The sudden resurgence of the word civilization is not the sign of a rebirth, but an attempt to forget a past that does not pass. With the Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the ensuing implosion of the Soviet Union, Chinese authorities felt that Russian "perestroika" was not the example to follow. The collapse of the USSR is a key to understanding the Chinese turn of the screw.
NI: The Chinese want at all costs to create a national narrative showing the unity of this nation, out of panic fear of internal divisions! This monolithism - which many Chinese accept - serves to cement the people by showing them that what happens in democracies is only instability and disorder. This legitimizes all government discourse. All Chinese are watered, on social networks, in books or by audiovisual productions, cartoons or TV series touting a mythological golden age constantly rewritten.
Chinese Red Guards remove two ancient stone lions from a street in Beijing, August 25 1966. During the Cultural Revolution, the order deaths were:"Destroy the old culture". ©AFP
Is it for this reason that all the heritage places destroyed in particular during the Cultural Revolution were rebuilt as new, in cement?
AC: As Simon Leys (1935-2014) said, at the time of the Cultural Revolution, there was already not much left to destroy. Today, we are witnessing a "Disneylandization" of the country. At the same time as we rebuild cement temples, we reinvent a mythology. The new generations do not know anything else, all this goes very well. What matters most to the Chinese, especially the majority Han, is to live in a peaceful and prosperous country.
NI: Remember that the nationalist troops who left mainland China in 1949 for Taiwan took with them huge quantities of works of art:bronzes, paintings... Their political legitimacy was also based on this past. The few great Chinese works of art that were not destroyed are still in Taiwan!
You say that we must focus our attention on China to understand its future, adding "if she has one"…. Why?
AC: China in my opinion is a kind of ocean liner… which, if it continues its momentum, is heading straight for the iceberg. It will take time, but I think that all the countries which claim to be great civilizations and which are no longer such, cannot hold out for long. China "holds on" thanks to its economic prosperity, military and geopolitical power. But if we project ourselves beyond the smokescreen that we are served, we can see that she is losing her creativity. By dint of preventing people from thinking, of imprisoning them as soon as they step out of line, of preventing them from writing freely, new and innovative ideas are no longer forged. Power becomes technocratic, "Orwellian", holding all the levers of power but incapable of creating. How do you build a civilization on that? No country in the world has destroyed its heritage like China. Even Stalinist Russia did not do it on such a scale.
NI :The idea is to create a kind of "endless day", where everything would be harmonious. Everything becomes legendary. The past is a golden age, the future, science fiction. Still, there are individuals in China who will be able to open breaches when the day comes.
Find out more:
Link to Anne Cheng's courses at the Collège de France:https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/anne-cheng/course-2020-2021.htm
“Does China think ? », Inaugural lesson by Anne Cheng, Edition Collège de France/Fayard, reed. 2015, 45p., €10.20
"Chinese Library", biline collection directed by Anne Cheng, Marc Kalinowski Stéphane Feuillas, Les Belles-Lettres, (thirty titles published since 2010)
"New Youth ," Nicolas Idier, published by Gallimard, 2016, a novel that directly addresses the issue of impossible inheritance.