B1: Start at 26.51
B2: Start at 27.35
B3. Start at 36.30
Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under US president Richard Nixon in the 1970s (Kissinger was the first American politician to visit Communist China under Mao), writes this in his new book, On China:
Since my first visit, China has become an economic superpower and a major factor in shaping the global political order. The United States has prevailed in the Cold War. The relationship between China and the United States has become a central element in the quest for world peace and global well-being. Eight American presidents and four generations of Chinese leaders have managed this delicate relationship in an astonishingly consistent manner, considering the difference in starting points. Both sides have refused to permit historic legacies or different conceptions of domestic order to interrupt their essentially cooperative relationship.
It has been a complex journey, for both societies believe they represent unique values. American exceptionalism is missionary. It holds that the United States has an obligation to spread its values to every part of the world. China’s exceptionalism is cultural. China does not proselytize; it does not claim that its contemporary institutions are relevant outside China. But it is the heir of the Middle Kingdom tradition, which formally graded all other states as various levels of tributaries based on their approximation to Chinese cultural and political forms; in other words, a kind of cultural universality. (emphasis added)This last paragraph will be the focus of much of the rest of the semester. In a nutshell, both the West (both American and Europe) and China consider themselves "exceptional"--better than, or more special than, all other civilizations. Your task will repeatedly be to argue the case for both sides as we move through the rest of China's history. This is where bias--"my culture is best because I was born in it"--meets the evidence of history. You'll decide and argue, based on that evidence.
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Next: Read this website about a stone inscription Zheng He left on Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and answer these questions:
1. How did Ceylon (Sri Lanka) treat Zheng He on earlier voyages? How did Zheng He react? How would Da Gama have reacted?
2. How many different religions were there in Sri Lanka during this time? Who were the main gods?
3. What was the Chinese reaction toward this religious diversity, based on the evidence of the trilingual inscription left by Zheng He?
4. How would the Christian explorers probably have reacted to this diversity?
Next: Download this file and read to answer the following questions:
Page 8: The Pope on Newly Discovered Lands:
1. What is the Romanus Pontifex, and what does it show about how the Christian (Catholic) Church thought about non-Christian cultures?
2. What is this idea of the Monarchia Universalis, and who would be the "universal monarch"?
3. Did the missionaries during the Portuguese and Spanish Age of Exploration--remember, only six or seven decades after Zheng He's voyages ended--show any curiosity about foreign ideas of religious truth?
Page 9-10: Requerimiento
1. What's the basic message of this Christian (Catholic) text to all non-Christians in the North and South American continents.
Stop there. Save the file, we'll return to it when Christian missionary Matteo Ricci--an amazing man--reaches and lives in Ming China 150 years after the Zheng He voyages are canceled.
HW: Finish the readings from this week. Write a journal entry on your blog of 400-500 words, informal, aiming to show your thoughts about what you're learning from this history. Answer this question:
What do you think about the civilizational differences between East and West at play here? What were the main differences in the two civilizations that created such differences in their behavior as they explored foreign lands? Can you equally defend each culture's behavior?
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