The China Code

At the beginning of the twenty-first century the focal point of economic and political power gradually shifted to the East and relocated itself around the new Middle Kingdom. We first have to get used to this because for centuries it had been a part of the foundations of our culture that we feel superior in China’s company. Immanuel Kant, the most prominent exponent of this wisdom, believed that only people in the most progressive region in the world — which for him were exclusively the Europeans — were capable of freeing themselves from their self-inflicted immaturity and understanding the world. ‘The sovereignty of Europe is justified through its activities, its science and its inventions’, is also how the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder praised his cultural group in theories for the ‘Philosophy of the History of Mankind’ in order to immediately afterwards grind the noses of the Chinese in the dirt: ‘This human race in this region will never be the same as the Romans and Greeks. The Chinese are and remain a people that was furnished by nature with narrow eyes, short noses, a flat forehead, little beard, long ears and protruding bellies; that what their institutions could produce, they have produced (already)’. China, so read his summary, was so inflexible and non-progressive, ‘as a church mouse in hibernation.’1