Brutal, oppressive, conformist, and ecologically devastating as ancient and classical China may have been, Chinese civilization was something amazing, colossal, novel, and stupendous in the world. Below, journalist Tiziano Terzani eloquently mourns its passing. The only thing missing from his elegiac summation is the obvious fact that the end was brought about by Western imperialism. What could the Chinese do? What could the Japanese of the late Tokugawa/Meiji era have done, faced with the Black Ships and long guns? It was "modernize" or die. Cf. my other 'Depth' link, "The Parable of the Tribes".

(About modern China) "The fate of this extraordinary civilization saddened me. For literally thousands of years it had followed another path, had confronted life, death nature and the gods in a way unlike any other. The Chinese had invented their own way of writing, of eating, of making love, of doing their hair; for centuries they had cared for the sick in a different way, looked in a different way at the sky, the mountains, the rivers; they had a different idea of how to build houses and temples, a different view of anatomy, different concepts of the soul, of strength, of wind and water. Today the civilization aspires only to be modern, like the West; it wants to become like that little air-conditioned island that is Singapore; its young people today dream only of dressing like "businessmen", of queing up at McDonald's, of owning a quartz watch, a color television and a mobile phone.

Sad, is it not? And not just for the Chinese, but for humanity in general, which lose so much when it loses it differences and becomes all the same.

If someone is able to look back at the history of humanity a few centuries from now, he will surely see the end of Chinese civilization as a great loss: because it ended a great alternative, whose existence could perhaps have guaranteed the harmony of the world.

Not by chance was it the Chinese who discovered that the essence of everything lies in the equilibrium between opposites, between yin and yang, between sun and moon, light and shadow, male and female, water and fire. It is by harmonizing differences that the world works, reproduces itself, maintains its tension, lives."