Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 46

MODERN AGE

Modern China's ruling class is the result
of the twentieth-century struggle between
the followers of Sun Yat-sen, who professed
republicanism and Christianity, and those of
Mao Tse-tung, who professed Marxist Com-
munism. Neither set of creeds had anything
to do with China's five-thousand-year-old
civilization or with its two-thousand-year-
old Confucian tradition. Today's ruling
party bureaucracy, nominally Communist,
works much as did the ancient Chinese impe-
rial bureaucracy. Nevertheless, the language
they speak and write is a version of Chinese
so intentionally bowdlerized that it permits
less access to the Chinese classics than to the
Internet. The culture of modern Chinese,
then, is complex. Five-thousand-year-old
habits of obedience to authority, devotion to
family, and a hunger for order and learning,
codified by two thousand years of Confu-
cianism, continue to exist, as do curiosity
and openness to Christianity, whose fires are
spreading beyond anyone's control. It is no
exaggeration to say that the soul of China is
up for grabs and that, among the Chinese,
the FSO can expect to encounter an amazing
variety of people.
A generation ago, the notion that a "Trilat-
eral Commission," composed of American,
European, and Japanese elites, might rule the
world was all the rage. But its assumption that
the Japanese people-worldly, urbane, and
technically proficient-are commensurable
with Westerners is ignorant. In fact, Japanese
civilization's core-the belief that race and
circumstance set Japan apart from the rest of
mankind-has remained constant despite its
people's integration into world affairs. Japan
is a tribe of 125 million people that is as self-
referential as any small tribe anywhere. Japan
has seen significant cultural changes: while
militaristic and prolific during the first half
of the twentieth century, it became increas-
ingly pacifist and collapsed in number during
46

FALL 2014

the second. But consensus and unity remain
for it what custom is to Confucianism and
the laws of nature and nature's God are to
Judeo-Christian civilization.
In our time the Muslim world is engaged
in civil war. Three strands of political
Islamism-Salafism, the Wahhabi sect, and
the Muslim Brotherhood-animate some
Muslims, while Islam's Hanafi and Sufi
tendencies move others. The Islamic world's
Westernized elites fight to ride these clashing
waves. This struggle overlays the millennial
conflict between Sunni and Shia, who are
found in all three camps. In this war no
one is fighting to distance Islam from the
proposition that God dictated the Qur'an to
Muhammad, which contains all that man
needs to know or should know, and hence
that reason-inquiry about natural causes
and effects-is blasphemous. Intra-Islamic
struggles, then, have not and should not be
expected to change the Islamic mind's fun-
damental hostility to other civilizations.
Islamic civilization's sociopolitical aspects
depend at least as much on the character of
the peoples among whom Islam took root as
they do on the Qur'an. Islamic civilization
has always been divided by those who want
to keep Islam close to its Bedouin roots and
those who are rooted in societies very differ-
ent from those of the Arabian Desert. But
in our time, the Islam of the desert has the
money to spread its ways.
Moreover, while Muslims have always
followed customs repugnant to Western-
ers and treated women roughly, now as
ever the practical ways in which Muslim
peoples express hostility to other civiliza-
tions depends not on their social customs
but rather on the balance of forces between
Muslims and other peoples. Islam was the
West's biggest problem before its host was
defeated at the gates of Vienna in 1683, and
Muslim pirates continued to take Christian
Modern Age - Fall 2014

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