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Essay on Traditional China's Influence on History
Aspirations to cultural control on a Chinese scale were never an option in Europe, and indeed were unimaginable in Europe's late medieval and early modern periods. Once articulated, the contrasts seem all too obvious, but a brief review is necessary in order to consider the less obvious implications of these differences. No state in Europe could aspire to the spatial scale of control conventional in Chinese history. With respect to issues of faith and religious belief, the Catholic Church represented in late medieval times the primary institution responsible for the moral wellbeing of the populace. But as successive schisms occurred in Christianity, no one view of the moral universe could dominate. Moreover, the institutional separation and functional equivalence of these religious organizations in different regions compelled an important recognition of difference.
The succeeding separation of secular and sacred assigned churches the responsibility to save people's souls, while states concentrated on less lofty concerns. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when European governments aimed to create "nations" of "citizens," the dimensions of belief that states aimed to shape left many other spheres of thought and cultural expression outside their concerns in circumscribed realms known under such rubrics as "private" and "religious." What belongs in each of these realms and their relationships to what is "public" have been contested in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the existence of such realms has never been doubted, so strong has been their cultural construction.
The Chinese state did not in fact achieve a thoroughgoing dominance over cultural expression at any point in its history. To stress its desire to assert itself over all manner of cultural matters does not mean, that there was not a considerable cultural space outside routine bureaucratic control. But the state could be called upon to intervene in extraordinary situations, whether the largely fabricated hysteria over queue-cutting spirits......
