ABSTRACT
On 24 September 1984 Bo Yang gave a conference at Iowa University that was to become 8 years later a chapter of a book entitled ‘The Ugly Chinaman and the Crisis of Chinese Culture’.1 But prior to the English translation, an anthology of articles about the Ugly Chinaman by Bo Yang and others, originally published in Chinese in Taiwan, was translated into Japanese and Korean, and in 1986 five different Chinese editions were published in mainland China. Many Chinese people and intellectuals were shocked by the book, and several sharp criticisms were published in China and abroad, some of which are reproduced in the English translation of the book. In fact Bo Yang had drawn a terrifying picture of the traditional Chinese culture, that he qualifies as the ‘soy past vat’ culture: filth, sloppiness, noisiness; quarrelling, squabbling amongst themselves; Chinese do not understand the importance of cooperation; a reluctance to admit errors; Chinese are addicted to bragging, boasting, lying, equivocating, and, worst, slandering others; lack of tolerance for others; chronic inferiority complexes, but also overbearing arrogance; and Chinese are divided into two categories: those with a chronic inferiority complex (i.e. slaves) and those with a superiority complex (i.e. tyrants). Moreover, Bo Yang’s comparison with the American culture is systematically in favour of the latter. And by reading Bo Yang’s descriptions of the two cultures one could do nothing but accept the thesis of many Western sinologists; that is, Chinese culture is fundamentally different from Western culture, and even more, it is fundamentally unintelligible for foreigners.
