By Howard Dewhirst
After memories of WWII began to fade, Australians began to drift away from the mother country’s culinary habits, from meat and two veg, beans on toast and spam and chips to more exotic dishes such as Canton Cabbage. Almost every town of any size had a Chinese restaurant and a Greek café, and little else that was ‘exotic’. However, when Mao united China under his northern umbrella, Peking, the Cantonese name for the city, was replaced by the Mandarin language Beijing, and Canton became Guangzhou, even though Cantonese is its inhabitant’s first language. So, now that Canton is no more, do we need a new name for this exotic dish?
While naming places is China’s business, there is an argument that we do not need to change our language to please others, as some have done, witness the recent fad of spelling the English name of Turkey in the Turkish script as Tűrkiyé, because that’s what their President wants. Would you believe that two of the letters he is insisting we use, are not in our alphabet? Yes, I can import them on my PC or iPhone, but why should I?
We do not call Germany, Deutschland, nor Switzerland, Helvetia; like every other language, English has its own names for foreign countries and cities, and unsurprisingly so does Turkey, which calls England Ingiltere. Conversely, we have happily imported into English, place-names that English does not have a satisfactory equivalent for, such as Tierra del Fuego and Buenos Airies, and food items we did not invent such as croquettes. If and when China eventually changes its English language trade mark ‘Made in China’, to perhaps ‘Made in Zhōngguó’, the English language will be under no compunction to follow suit, as we have done with Mumbai and Myanmar; so, Canton Cabbage it should remain.
Post war China was as impoverished as the rest of Asia, and the primary mechanical means of transport were the bicycle and the two wheeled push cart, itself a development of the wheel barrow, which was invented in China around 222 AD, hundreds of years before it appeared in Europe. However, the absence of industrialisation in China until recently was not due to lack of creativity or intelligence, as the country has a long record of inventions that long predated their discovery in the west. This failure to achieve anything like the miracle we know as the Industrial Revolution, was due to the influence of a strong cultural mindset that lead the country down a very different path.
A short list of Chinese inventions in roughly chronological order includes deep borehole drilling, iron casting, clockwork escapement mechanism, iron chain suspension bridge, axial rudder, gunpowder, firearms, magnetic compass, paper, block printing, metal moveable type, printing and porcelain. Each invention seems to have arisen in response to a local need, block printing for example appeared after Buddhism was adopted in China, to satisfy the need to repeat prayers and invocations again and again. Even major and successful inventions such as the astonishing non-dam based, flood and irrigation scheme built in Dujiagyan, Sichuan around 200 BC[1] was never repeated. It was built to solve a specific local flood control need for just one river and is still in use today. It is hard to grasp why this marvel of engineering, which successfully tamed previously destructive annual flooding and irrigated extensive new croplands, and could surely have been used elsewhere in China but was never replicated.
There are many possible explanations as to why so many useful ideas seemed to lead nowhere, but one seems to dominate and that was the way that China conceived the workings of the human and natural worlds. As they saw it, everything in the natural world was part of a hierarchical cosmic pattern with no beginning or end, a concept which we might call ‘Natural Law’, in which everything in the universe resonates with everything else, each part influencing, but not causing or controlling everything else. Not for them the incomprehensible idea of the creation of the world out of primordial chaos by an omnipotent god.
Part of Buddhism’s appeal to the Chinese was and is because of the idea of constant, cyclical rebirth, world without end, or beginning. Thus, there was no search for ultimate causes and over time, there an eternal balancing of the opposing Yin and Yang forces. There was no need to formulate and test abstract laws that could explain why things happened; a new discovery such as the wheelbarrow was just accepted as being useful, and was not seen as a step forward or new beginning.[2]
To give a modern example, in Cambodia I recently met a group working for a French charity, called as I recall, Restauration sans frontiers. They were restoring faded paintings inside a local temple, and the European instructor told me that he was training local craftsmen in modern preservation and restauration techniques. He was happy with their abilities, but puzzled by their puzzlement about why anyone would want to restore something that was old. To them the temple’s destiny and life expectancy had been set when it was first built, and to try to postpone the inevitable end was to them, worse than pointless.
Unlike Europe which is defined by an agglomeration of many different terrains, countries and cultures, much of China is at first glance endlessly flat and uniform. Travelling down the major rivers from west to east, there appears to be relatively little variation in people, customs or crops, so little need in fact to travel or trade. Quite unlike say Ancient Greece, where every valley or island had its own unique way of life; some growing mainly olives, some mainly grapes, others wheat, none grew everything so, much as they did not trust anyone from the next valley, they had to trade with their neighbours near and far, and had to adapt to or conquer them.
Another major difference is the unique experiment in government in China which saw feudalism and serfdom replaced with bureaucratism, an idea whose time is only just arising in the West. Dynasties maintained control not through an aristocracy, but through a centralised non-hereditary and competent bureaucracy staffed by individuals chosen through competitive examination. The essence of control, where there was no beginning or end, was to achieve consensus:
‘The bureaucratic style was to follow accustomed ways in accordance with proper procedure, find expedient solutions based on certain principles in spirit, make reasonable compromises after due consideration of all sides, and achieve smooth reconciliation of divergent views.’[3]
These civil servants owed their very existence to the ruler, and were intensely loyal, unlike the aristocracy whom they replaced, troublesome and powerful individuals whose involvement in the affairs of state, other than war, had always been difficult to control.
Such a mindset directed curiosity towards describing what was seen in nature without being much concerned about the cause, an attitude that developed a strong and lasting distaste for abstract codified laws, such as those in the west, which allowed for a logical approach to the law. When judging an apparent breach of conduct, Chinese judges prefer to ask ‘what happened’ rather than ‘which law has been broken?’ In contrast, the west followed law-making protocols and arguments designed to find an apparently unique, incontrovertible conclusion. This western way augmented by a strong belief in original or ‘first’, causes, became one of the stepping stones towards the development of what we might call the ‘Laws of Nature’ as exemplified perhaps by the Periodic Table, quite different to China’s ‘Natural Law’.
Despite the huge strides made by China with its own present-day ‘Industrial Revolution’, the UN still classifies the country (and much of the rest of Asia) as ‘under-developed’, even though China has ‘lifted 600 million people out of poverty’, while taking over the position global manufacturing behemoth from the western world.
Being ‘under developed’ may seem to be a label that countries such as China would want to escape from, but this apparently demeaning status brings many advantages. Even though China has agreed in principle with the demands of the Paris Accord to limit greenhouse gas emissions, being ‘underdeveloped’, it is not obliged to do so.
Thus, China is currently building up to two modern coal fired power stations a month, and opening the requisite number of new coal mines. They clearly understand what the ‘developed’ nations do not, namely that cheap reliable energy is the cornerstone of wealth and health in the modern industrial world. While paying lip service to the need to turn to unreliable renewable sources of power, the reality is that they are more like window dressing, for it is obvious that coal will continue to satisfy China’s ever-increasing demand for cheap reliable power well into the even distant future (Fig 1).
The disappearance of oil from their power mix (Fig 1), has nothing to do with emissions, it is much too valuable and scarce a manufacturing commodity to be wasted on power generation other than for transport.
Fig 1 Chinese Electricity Production by source 1990 – 2020
Comparing China’s emissions and those of India, USA and the UK, shows that the latter could disappear under the North Sea tomorrow, and the world would not notice. It also shows that even for example, America’s gradual cutting back on emissions, will not compensate for the expansion taking place in China, let alone the rest of Asia. Will the western world’s move to net zero save the world from the threat of Global Warming? Apparently not. What it will do, is increase poverty in the west, and if Australia’s coal production were to be cut to zero, would the climate notice (Fig 2).
Fig 2 China & Australia’s Coal Production 1990 – 2020
If the planet is dying because of emissions, surely everybody would be doing their best to cut emissions? Do the Asian countries which have the same global climate data that we have, know something we don’t? Yes, they know that modern coal fired power stations are no longer ‘dirty’, and emit only steam and CO2, and that the latter helps to increase crop yields and feed the ever- increasing population. It would seem then that they must believe that cheap reliable energy is needed to build a modern civilisation and reduce poverty, and that CO2 does not cause unmanageable climate change.
They also realise that electricity alone produces little more than heat and light, and that without coal, and crude oil, which in its unrefined form is of little value, most of their manufacturing miracle would vanish. With this realisation, and their appreciation of the manifold blessings that the still developing Industrial Revolution bring to mankind, they are not about to throw it all away in pursuit of the western chimera of net zero.
The only way that emissions could be curtailed in the western world, would be if those living there were to ceases and desists buying anything made in Asia, which is just about anything that makes the modern world function. Exporting the emissions from the ‘developed’ world to Asia, makes no difference to levels of atmospheric CO2 and as the West’s emissions and its purchasing powers both decline, Asia’s are expanding.
It can be seen to be in China’s best interest to encourage the western world to ‘decarbonise’ their economies, and so price themselves out of the market. Making things that others want to buy has always driven human invention, from flint knapping in the Stone Age and trading walrus tusk from Greenland during the European Dark Ages, to the miracle of the Industrial Revolution. Each step on the ladder from coal and steam to electricity, to oil, gas and nuclear energy has powered the western world’s growth. That growth is now being wilfully and willingly discarded as the West pursues the UN/IPCC obsession with net zero. Meanwhile underdeveloped Asia takes control of the latest phase of the Industrial Revolution and the West slides inexorably into the status of newly ‘underdeveloped’.
[1] https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology-ancient-technology/legacy-dujiangyan-china-s-ancient-irrigation-system
[2] Based on The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China J Needham, abridged by C A Ronan 1978
[3] Encyclopedia Britannica
Original article: https://howarddewhirst.substack.com/p/canton-cabbage-or-china-revisited