Poor Chinese! The fate of this extraordinary civilization saddened me. For literally thousands of years it had followed another path, had confronted life, death, nature and the gods in a way unlike any other. The Chinese had invented their own way of writing, of eating, of making love, of doing their hair; for centuries they had cared for the sick in a different way, looked in a different way at the sky, the mountains, the rivers; they had a different idea of how to build houses and temples, a different view of anatomy, different concepts of the soul, of strength, of wind and water. Today that civilization aspires only to be modern, like the West; it wants to become like that little air-conditioned island that is Singapore; its young people dream only of dressing like ´businessmen´, of queuing up at Macdonald´s, of owning a quartz watch, a colour television and a mobile phone.
Sad, is it not? And not just for the Chinese, but for humanity in general, which loses so much when it loses its differences and becomes all the same. Mao understood that in order to save China it had be closed to the Western influence; it had to seek a Chinese solution to the problems of modernity and development. In posing the problem Mao was truly great. And he was great in being wrong about how to solve it. But always great, Mao: a great poet, great strategist, great intellectual, great murderer. Great like China, great like the tragedy it is now enduring.
If someone is able to look back at the history of humanity a few centuries from now, he will surely see the end of Chinese civilization as a great loss: because with it ended a great alternative, whose existence perhaps have guaranteed the harmony of the world.
Not by chance was it the Chinese who discovered that the essence of everything lies in the equilibrium between opposites, between yin and yang, between sun and moon, light and shadow, male and female, water and fire. It is by harmonizing differences that the world works, reproduces itself, maintains its tension, lives. So in fact there is some reason to regret the end of Communism - not for itself, but as an alternative, a counterweight. Now that it no longer exists there is a great disequilibrium, and even the side that thinks it has won no longer has the tension that stimulated its creativiy.
Sad, is it not? And not just for the Chinese, but for humanity in general, which loses so much when it loses its differences and becomes all the same. Mao understood that in order to save China it had be closed to the Western influence; it had to seek a Chinese solution to the problems of modernity and development. In posing the problem Mao was truly great. And he was great in being wrong about how to solve it. But always great, Mao: a great poet, great strategist, great intellectual, great murderer. Great like China, great like the tragedy it is now enduring.
If someone is able to look back at the history of humanity a few centuries from now, he will surely see the end of Chinese civilization as a great loss: because with it ended a great alternative, whose existence perhaps have guaranteed the harmony of the world.
Not by chance was it the Chinese who discovered that the essence of everything lies in the equilibrium between opposites, between yin and yang, between sun and moon, light and shadow, male and female, water and fire. It is by harmonizing differences that the world works, reproduces itself, maintains its tension, lives. So in fact there is some reason to regret the end of Communism - not for itself, but as an alternative, a counterweight. Now that it no longer exists there is a great disequilibrium, and even the side that thinks it has won no longer has the tension that stimulated its creativiy.
A fortune-teller told me. Earthbound Travels in the Far East. 1993.
Tiziano Terzani.
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