Hai Shang, Elegy of the Sea

The following sections are included:

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• About the Author
• Contents

It is doubtful that current European debt crisis, as a result of greater decline of European maritime civilization could be cured by further unification of the continent when this unification is but part of said civilization and thus as ill in ways of production, life, and thought. So, duplex perspective is important for both Catholicism and Europe like the Pope said, and while Europe may need to look around for external pathogens of this crisis, we as non-Europeans shall give Europe a thorough physical to the core to explain extraordinary crisis susceptibility of her as civilization.

Montesquieu found in the eighteenth century that political issues are not to be understood and resolved with ready-made answers from experience, contemporary or historical, but from an extensive study of history as a process, a conclusion still viable today when mysteries at core of civilizations and international order must be solved with a case study of European civilization. Though decline of European countries had not brought down Europe as a civilization altogether, problems of the European Union (EU) nevertheless revealed fall of maritime civilization a la Europe across the globe. So with Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution and modernity fused in universality, the very momentum of the rise and fall of the European Civilization, according to Guizot, is “the faithful image of the world: like the course of things in the world, it is neither narrow, exclusive, nor stationary. For the first time, I believe, the character of specialty has vanished from civilization; for the first time it is developed as variously, as richly, as laboriously, as the great drama of the universe, for it had entered, if we may so speak, into the eternal truth, into the plan of Providence; it progresses according to the intentions of God. This is the rational account of its superiority.” Through colonial exploitation and cheap industrial goods, European maritime powers floodgated the arteries of the world, forcing everyone else to be part of the European maritime civilization and paying tribute with the best they could offer to the European melting pot. Yet like any other brute force, sea power is less than an elixir and is neither a philosopher's stone for civilizations. The only way away from decline is the sustainable mode of production and innovation and more, but never imperialism dead or reanimated. As internet replaced the slow boat to China, the prestige of the sea sank with the civilizations built for maritime control. As Gresham's law could work on more than minted coins to make the “first to run first to fall,” and since development may not exempt defeat, the European culture of binary opposition sowed the seeds of conflict between Europeans different in achievement since ancient time. This, resulting in a barbarian tide that washed away the solemn Roman Empire. While problems of modern Europe includes unsatisfactory immigrant labor force, and grapes of fury is still there growing, as Europe is being unified with diversity of not only language and culture, but also level of development. This is a peril long described by ancient Chinese philosophers as discussed in the following sections.

It is sad that sometimes both the disease and the cure are too much for the patient. Likewise, though European integration could still carry on with efforts, it may be no good for Europe now to say the least, as globalization is no longer a monopoly of the West or a byword of Westernization. Such a integration like that happening in Europe today would be nothing more than self-seclusion. All precautions have been taken in Europe to avoid errors from the past without knowing whether, though much unlikely, they may once again happen, as done in Germany, where great wars of Europe and the world were planned and fought and lost, not without carnage of the Gypsies and the Jews in more places than the famous (or infamous) Auschwitz. It had become a collective memory borne by Germans today with sorrow and remorse in museums many and hearts more, resulting in the absence of General Staff, an invention of Deutsche Reich, in today's Bundeswehr. Merker's no to a common European bond for a Eurozone slow in structural reform with intolerable debt shows German fear for another Weimar Republic, when the first one died of malign inflation, a disease well abhorred in the land ever since but far from the only or worst one in Europe. Dr. Kissinger reminded, during the creation of this book, that the Second World War (WWII) is still unfinished in Europe for its lasting influence, or as per Chen Lemin, Europe carried too much history to be on the fast lane…

Acheson's mockery bit his own states after all these years but still, sadly, with all Europe. Though expansion and exploitation are often self-multiplying after initial input, the maritime civilizations of Europe are now too weak to tip again the first domino to reconquer the world and self-reliance or unification, though well-desired, remains without prototype or even plan, a paradox among many seen in decline of modern European civilization…

It is hard to ignore China's luck when she sailed to the same sea where the more maritime West was ungracefully stranded, with European debt disaster and the Wall Street ruin showing her what not to do in her own financial and welfare reform. But there is no joy for China in the fall of Europe, for luck may run out for any one and headwind knows no newcomer to spare…

René Etiemble is the French Sinologist busy busting Eurocentrist myths to educate his arrogant fellow Europeans on the influence of the Chinese on the European tradition…

Man is not a marine animal but readily goes to sea, as islands and peninsulas of Mediterranean placed European civilization at a starting line different from that of her Chinese continental sister, and the duo grew up further apart after great discovery and colony, with all disputes in civilization results of disagreement on role of sea, when Hegel described in the Prologue of his Philosophy of History the idea of a maritime civilization in verse prose, that The sea gives us the idea of the indefinite, the unlimited, and infinite; and in feeling his own infinite in that Infinite, man is stimulated and emboldened to stretch beyond the limited: the sea invites man to conquest, and to piratical plunder, but also to honest gain and to commerce. The land, the mere Valley-plain attaches him to the soil; it involves him in an infinite multitude of dependencies, but the sea carries him out beyond these limited circles of thought and action… The Ship — that swan of the sea, which cuts the watery plain in agile and arching movements or describes circles upon it — is a machine whose invention does the greatest honor to the boldness of man as well as to his understanding. This stretching out of the sea beyond the limitations of the land, is wanting to the splendid political edifices of Asiatic States, although they themselves border on the sea — as for example, China. For them the sea is only the limit, the ceasing of the land; they have no positive relation to it…

For Liang Qichao during his times, complementation of Chinese civilization and her western counterpart was but a real and remote possibility, yet today it has become the postulation for any global governance in the world. This is so different from the dreams of Voltaire and Leibnitz, who wanted China to throw light on dark Europe, and of those trying to cage the entire world with colonization and European ways labeled as universal. Yet there still remains a struggle without bloodshed and even hostility between China and Europe not for resources like steel and oil, but for universalism, when China urges Europe for one more Renaissance beyond the current blind arrogance, and Europe insists that China be enlightened in the first place by the same. Yet this conflict will not have one victor, but none, or both, if the two combatants could reconcile in New Humanism to bring peace during this turbulent times.

Voltaire saw too much Europeanness as miserable with his lament on too little Chineseness in Europe, when for him “it is a great pity that WE should not have been as fortunate as the Chinese,” a fact made and made so sad by Chinese civilization's past popularity in Europe and her once failure of globalization. The marvel of Man projected by a western scholar but never happened, is integration of civilizations Chinese, Indian, and Greek, which is fortunately and finally taking place now, with Chinese culture going global as a major trend and at the same time globalizing with values universal for Man like Freedom, Equality, and Dignity. So China, “ought to make a greater contribution to humanity” (Chairman Mao), shall refit her peaceful development for countries of the world as a responsible, confident civilization, when Europe, owning China so much for Enlightenment had even more to share as professional maritime civilization and modern power, a lesson too important for rejuvenating China to not learn. As China had reforged Indian teaching into Chinese Buddhism led by school of Zen, the same may work between European universal values and China model in building Global China, and help with an inclusive value structure made in China for a diversified world, to ensure, as could and should for China, a future uninterrupted for Mankind.

The following sections are included:

• Epilogue: From European Dream to Chinese Dream
• Bibliography
• Index