"One might trace the history of the limits, of those obscure actions,
necessarily forgotten as soon as they are performed, whereby a
civilization casts aside something it regards as alien. Throughout
its history, this moat which it digs around itself, this no man's
land by which it preserves its isolation, is just as characteristic
as its positive values."
--Michel Foucault
In the recent Italian film Il Postino, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda
teaches an uneducated mailman first the word and then the art of
metafor. The mailman is a quick study, and soon he is asking Neruda
an intriguing question: "Is the world perhaps a metaphor for
something else?" Neruda pauses and then says that he will have to
think about this question. But he never gives the postman his answer.
China has not been a nation for Americans, but a metaphor. To say
"China" is instantly to call up a string of metaphors giving us the
history of Sino-American relations, and fifty years of "China
watching" by our politicians, pundits, and academics: unchanging
China, cyclical China, the inscrutable Forbidden City, boxes within
boxes, the open door, sick man of Asia, the good earth, agrarian
reformers, China shakes the world, who lost China, containment or
liberation, brainwashing, Quemoy and Matsu, the little red book,
ping-pong diplomacy, the week that changed the world, the China card,
the gang of four, the four modernizations, China as insatiable
market, Tiananmen, butchers of Beijing, China shakes the world
(again), cycles of rise and decline (again), unchanging China (yet
again). Beyond all that, our pundits and experts remain captured by a
master metaphor: that of China's unfathomable-in-a-lifetime vastness,
its historical depth and profundity, and (therefore) its overriding
importance to the world we live in.
