ABSTRACT
In a recent essay, German scholar Rolf Trauzettel has raised the problem of historical phenomena that took place in China and the West where the Chinese equivalent is thought to predate the Western one considerably. Can it be possible, for instance, that Chinese society developed feudalism long before Europe did? 1 Following this line of thought, I have recently looked into a similar problem: How can we explain that the Chinese started to appreciate and aestheticize nature at the end of Chinese antiquity (220 C.E.), whereas in the West there was no worship of nature until the beginning of modernity? 2 Scholars in Chinese studies have always been at great pains to show that many common technical methods and devices thought to be achievements of Occidental culture were in fact invented by Chinese; Joseph Needham is only one prominent example for this kind of scholarship. There is no doubt that in the two cases mentioned above China was actually the forerunner. What can be done, however, if a research topic exhibits characteristics that are essentially Western, so that nothing remotely similar can be found in the Orient? I have the impression that, in cases like this, a kind of deus ex machina sometimes is forced to act as midwife. This midwife is called political correctness. Just as the term philosophia perennis tells us that there is no philosophy that belongs to one culture only, we are tempted to think that every idiosyncrasy of Western culture must have its Chinese equivalent. To me, this kind of approach smacks of the rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when it was thought to be an insult to maintain that “China lacks oil.” The reaction to this statement was always the same: “How is it possible that such a great country as ours does not have any oil?” This kind of rhetorical question silenced any critical mind and, 312as everyone knows, finally culminated in the “invention” of the oil fields of Daqing. Although Daqing no longer plays an important role in Chinese political thinking, it still holds symbolic value for me. By asking certain questions we similarly might run the risk of creating “Daqing” in the field of Chinese studies, or put differently, of creating a Chinese chimera on the basis of a European context, just as the German scholar Günther Debon did when he unsuccessfully tried to read Daoist thought into the European Romantic movement. 3
