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Beyond Orientalism 211
crumbling Great Wall, was emblematic not only of cultural rot but of China’s
long isolation from enriching contact with the rest of the world. According
to The Nation, China had lost “that mysterious something . . . which gives
nationality its vigor, its self- reliance, and without which the finest body of
philosophy in existence has but little more influence on national life than the
sighing of the idle wind.” 23
Why had China fallen so far behind? The question, and its competing answers,
anticipated debates that would take place a century later between those
who blamed the culture and those who pointed to structural causes of paralysis.
On the one hand, China was nearly everyone’s outstanding example of how
cultural inertia could produce backwardness and decay. Every Chinese, according
to this argument, was “an inveterate hater of innovation in any thing
that has become time- honored and venerable from thousands of years’ usage.”
China’s immobility and the seeming paralysis of its institutions were explained
by a slavish “veneration for antiquity.” China’s high culture had fallen prey to
the cultural equivalent of foot- binding, in which the finest minds of each generation
were permanently hobbled. “We could not help but regret that, in China,
men’s brains, like women’s feet, must be so cramped,” said one author of a piece
on the examination system. Education, which should have been a progressive
and intellectually liberating experience, “really promoted ignorance by arresting
intellectual development, and forbidding the spirit of inquiry.” For others,
the root cause lay in vested interests, the system of oriental despotism that formerly
had served the Chinese well but which now repressed the individual freedoms
essential to cultural advance. It was as if the West continued to be ruled by
Tory squires hostile to all modern improvements. But inertia was no longer an
option. The choice, according to Raphael Pumpelly, was between reor ga ni za -
tion and progress or disintegration. 24
For all the complaints about China’s attachment to tradition, only a few skeptics
doubted its capacity to modernize. Numerous statements attested to the native
intelligence of the Chinese people. Former Secretary of State William H.
Seward, following a stopover in China during his round- the- world tour, asserted
that “the Chinese, though not of the Caucasian race, have all its po liti cal,
moral, and social capabilities.” Despite ethnocentric conceits and other shortcomings,
General James Harrison Wilson, the author of a book on commercial
possibilities in China, contended that “the Chinaman’s natural intelligence . . .
is quite as great as that of other races.” He went on to predict that he “may be