网帖翻译

一个久经世故的成熟帝国为何无法现代化
——记传统中国对现代化的抗拒
作者：格威迪恩·M·威廉姆斯（Gwydion M. Williams）

译注：全文较长，共分为九个章节——《1949年前的中国是什么样子的？》、《三千五百年帝国史》、《有效的专制》、《创造的发动机》、《打破和重塑中国》、《墙挺好，邻居挺坏》、《太平天国运动的替代选项》、《三只布谷鸟:失败的现代化》、《附录：印度河流域文明及其连续性》，有删节。

What Was China before 1949?

一、1949年前的中国是什么样子的？

China in 1949 chose to turn its back on the West and go its own way. It has continues to do despite an apparent opening-up under Deng. (Itself a continuation of a process begun by Mao, who made peace with the USA in the early 1970s.)

1949年，中国远离西方，选择走自己的道路。对于大多数西方人而言，这个中国令人费解乃至各种负面印象。但中国的实际历史说明了另一种情况：在转向今天这条道路之前，中国已经尝试了大多数其他的可能性。

For most Westerners, the emergence of ‘Red China’ was an inexplicable; a baffling outbreak of evil and foolishness. But the actual history of China says something else. China had tried most of the other possibilities before turning to Communism.

传统中国可以明智地称为黄色中国——黄是帝王的颜色。大多数中国人把自己定义为“黄帝的孩子”，黄帝是一个传说中的人物，被认为是他们文明的奠基人。

Traditional China could sensibly be called Yellow China. Yellow was the Imperial colour. Most Chinese defined themselves as ‘Children of the Yellow Emperor’, a legendary figure regarded as the founder of their civilisation.[A] (It has nothing to do with the 19th century European concept of a ‘Yellow Race’, which included various other East Asian peoples with cultural origins quite independent of China. Genetic studies show that human diversity cannot be sensible split into a number of distinct races. Europeans seem to be a mix of African West Asian elements. The oldest population were hunters with blue eyes, black or brown hair, and dark skin.

这与19世纪欧洲的“黄种人”概念毫无关系，后者包括文化起源独立于中国之外的其他各个东亚民族。基因研究表明，人类的多样性不能合理地划分为若干个不同的种族。欧洲人似乎是非洲和西亚元素的混合体。最古老的人群是有着蓝色眼睛、黑色或棕色头发和黑色皮肤的猎人。

To begin at the beginning: the unchanging ‘yellow’ civilisation of Imperial China gets a bad press nowadays. It had plenty of faults, indeed. But Europe’s take-off in the 16th to 19th centuries would not have been possible without a slew of inventions that ‘Yellow China’ had made since the European high-points of Classical Greece and the Roman Empire. Europe’s era of domination was only possible because of paper, the printing press, gunpowder and the magnetic compass, all of which were developed in China:

绪言：始终如一的中华帝国文明如今受到了负面报道。它确实有很多缺点，但是如果没有中国自古典希腊和罗马帝国这一欧洲鼎盛时期以来所创造的一系列发明，欧洲在16至19世纪的腾飞是不可能的。欧洲的统治时代之所以成为可能，是因为纸张、印刷术、火药和指南针，而这些都是在中国发明的:

The Chinese invented the compass and were the first to use it in navigation. During the Song-Yuan period, merchant ships from China, Persia, and Arabia were very active on the high seas… The Chinese art of printing became known to Japan during the eighth century. It was introduced to Korea during the tenth century and to Egypt during the twelfth century or perhaps a little earlier. Not until the thirteenth century did the Il-Khanate of Persia learn it and then introduced it to Africa and Europe. Towards the end of the fourteenth century block printing appeared for the first time in Europe. Movable type was invented in China during the eleventh century. It was introduced into Korea during the thirteenth century and to Europe at a later date.

“中国人发明了指南针，并首先将其用于航海。宋元时期，来自中国、波斯和阿拉伯的商船在公海上非常活跃……中国的印刷术在八世纪为日本所知。它在10世纪被引入朝鲜，在12世纪或更早的时候被引入埃及。直到13世纪，波斯的伊利汗国才学会它，然后把它介绍到非洲和欧洲。14世纪末，欧洲首次出现了木版印刷术。中国在11世纪发明了活字印刷术。它在13世纪传入朝鲜，后来传入欧洲。

The introduction of firearms to the West was closely related to the Mongols’ western campaign early in the thirteenth century… During their military campaigns in Central Asia and Persia, the Mongols used weapons made of gunpowder. Fighting with the Mongols, the Arabs learned the use of firearms. The Europeans learned the use of firearms in the same fashion.[C]

武器传入西方与13世纪早期蒙古人的西进运动密切相关，13世纪早期，蒙古人在中亚和波斯的军事活动中使用火药制成的武器。在与蒙古人的战斗中，阿拉伯人学会了使用火器。欧洲人以同样的方式学会了使用火器。“

Classical China was a society that worked well in its own terms. Well into the 19th century, it was widely admired by foreign visitors. It had none of the self-destructive inner tensions of Europe. No one cared much what you believed or how you worshiped, so long as your beliefs did not make you a rebel against the political authorities. No one in China was expecting the End of the World, a great preoccupation for many of the Puritan pioneers of British industry. Before the 20th century, Chinese thinkers did not view their own past as sinful in the way Europe’s Puritans did. Nor did they see it as foolish, as the Enlightenment and the Radical Deists mostly did.

古代中国是一个以自己的方式运转良好的社会。进入19世纪后，它受到了外国游客的广泛赞赏。它没有欧洲那种自我毁灭的内在紧张。在这里，没有人关心你相信什么，或者你如何崇拜，只要你的信仰不让你成为对政治权威的叛逆者。在中国，没有人会想到世界末日，而这正是许多英国工业清教徒先驱者所关注的。在20世纪之前，中国的思想家并不像欧洲的清教徒那样认为他们的过去是罪恶的。他们也不像启蒙运动和激进自然神论者那样认为这是愚蠢的。

Classical China was also lucky enough never to have had philosophers like Plato and Aristotle – or else to have forgotten them if the existed. Socrates and his pupils were brilliant at successfully claiming knowledge that they did not have. Plato’s Earth-centred model of the solar system (outlined in The Republic) easily defeated rival Greek thinkers who had correctly deduced that at least some of the planets must go round the sun. Socrates’ pupils Critias and Alcibiades nearly ruined Athens between them: Critias created a brutal and unsuccessful oligarchy while Alcibiades defected to Athens’s rival Sparta after being sacked from leadership of a major military expedition. While Athens was still recovering from this, Plato’s well-intentioned but unrealistic advice to the rulers of Syracuse did immense damage to Greek-Sicily’s leading city. Messed up a growing city-state that might have unified the Greek world in a gentler and more productive manner than the later Macedonian conquest.

古代的中国也很幸运，从未有过柏拉图和亚里士多德这样的哲学家——如果存在，也会遗忘他们。苏格拉底和他的学生擅长于成功地宣称他们没有的知识。柏拉图的以地球为中心的太阳系模型(在《理想国》中概述)轻易地击败了其他希腊思想家，后者正确地推断出至少有一些行星必须围绕太阳运行。苏格拉底的学生克里提亚斯和亚西比德几乎毁了雅典:克里提亚斯创造了一个残酷而不成功的寡头政治，而亚西比德在被解雇后投奔了雅典的对手斯巴达。当雅典还在从中恢复的时候，柏拉图对锡拉库扎统治者的善意但不切实际的建议给希腊西西里的领导城市造成了巨大的破坏。与后来的马其顿征服相比，这个城邦本可以以更温和、更富有成效的方式统一整个希腊。

Phillip of Macedon hired Aristotle to teach advanced knowledge to his son Alexander and to the generation of hereditary nobles who should have been his close supporters. But this group ripped Alexander’s realm to pieces after his death, murdering Alexander’s son and other legitimate claimants.

马其顿的菲利普雇佣亚里士多德将先进的知识传授给他的儿子亚历山大和本该是他亲密支持者的世袭贵族。但在亚历山大死后，这个组织将他的王国撕成了碎片，杀害了亚历山大的儿子和其他合法的继承者。

As a practical guide to good living in the face of the temptations of power, the Socratic school were worse than useless. They could talk eloquently about virtue, but smuggled in shoddy ideas amidst their complex webs of words. Their most remarkable achievement was to be thought wise despite the visible damage that they did.

在权力的诱惑面前，良好生活的实用指南这一苏格拉底学派比一无是处还糟糕。他们可以滔滔不绝地谈论美德，但在他们复杂的语言网络中，却偷偷地夹杂着一些劣质的思想。他们最显著的成就是，尽管他们造成了可见的损害，但仍被认为是明智的。
原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

Chinese philosophy was another matter – the leading schools produced useful results. The standard picture is of a ruthless ‘School of Law’ reunifying the realm under the Qin First Emperor, followed by nice Confucians making a harmonious society. I suspect that this is much too simple a view: Chinese philosophy was sorted out into different ‘schools’ by scholars in the Han Dynasty. The Han Dynasty began as successful rebels against the Qin dynasty, but then built a formidable new order of their own. Still, a unified realm that had been created with ruthlessness was only sustained because most people found it an excellent way of life. Without modern technology, you could not easily build an advanced culture that encouraged civilised life and that could also deal with rampaging nomadic warriors and other would-be conquerors.

中国的哲学则是另一回事——一流的学派产生了有用的结果。标准的画面是严酷的“法家”统一了秦始皇统治下的国家，然后是善良的儒家创造了一个和谐的社会。我怀疑这种观点过于简单:中国哲学在汉代就被学者们分成了不同的“学派”。汉朝在反抗秦朝的斗争中取得了成功，但随后也建立了自己强大的新秩序，一个以无情方式建立起来的统一王国之所以得以维持，单纯是因为大多数人认为这是一种极好的生活方式。没有现代技术，你不可能轻易建立一个鼓励文明生活的先进文化，也不可能对付狂暴的游牧勇士和其他潜在的征服者。

Confucianism was widely admired in 18th century Europe. Before the rise of modern industry, Confucianism was the only creed with strong political power that was not burdened by a mass of superstition. Many people who’ve looked at the lix think that the example of China was a big inspiration to the European Enlightenment. The decision by the Papacy to end the Jesuit mission to China was entirely sensible if you started from a viewpoint that traditional Catholicism was true and needed to be defended against subtle heresies. The Jesuits were making progress among educated Chinese with a disguised version of Catholicism, but there was a real question about who was converting who.[D] If Christians could view Chinese ancestor-worship as a harmless cultural oddity, then why not take exactly the same view of Transubstantiation, the Resurrection and other miraculous happenings?

儒家思想在18世纪的欧洲广受推崇。在现代工业兴起之前，儒家思想是唯一一个没有被大量迷信所拖累的具有强大政治力量的信条。许多看过这一思想的人认为中国的例子对欧洲启蒙运动是一个很大的启发。如果你从传统天主教是正确的、需要抵御微妙的异端邪说的观点出发，那么教皇决定结束耶稣会在中国的传教活动是完全明智的。耶稣会在受过教育的中国人中取得了进展，他们信奉的是一种变相的天主教，但真正的问题是谁皈依了谁。既然基督徒可以把中国祖先崇拜看作是一种无害的文化异类，那么为什么不能对其他变形、复活和奇迹般的事件采取完全一样的看法呢?

But Confucianism was only rational up to a point. I don’t think it ever claimed that there was any underlying logic to its traditions. It successfully marginalised Buddhism – education remained Confucian, unlike most countries where Buddhism is widespread. The Buddhist monks had no control over most of those who got educated or what they were taught. I suppose Tibetan Buddhism also had its role, a creed with reputed mystical powers that was also safely far away from the centres of wealth and power, lands that were very nearly useless from a Confucian point of view.
(There’s also a theory that the central Chinese government intentionally spread Buddhism in both Tibet and Mongolia, as a way of pacifying what had been fierce tribesman. It is definite that it arrived in Tibet with a Chinese princess: Princess Wencheng who married the Tibetan king. Supporters of Tibet independence mostly ignore this awkward little detail, one of the best-recorded facts of Tibetan history, even though the lady is still celebrated by a major shrine in Lhasa.)

但儒家思想只是在一定程度上是理性的。我不认为它声称它的传统有任何潜在的逻辑。它成功地边缘化了佛教——教育仍然是儒家的事，不像大多数佛教传播的国家。佛教僧侣无法控制大多数受过教育的人或他们被教导的内容。……

For government of the Chinese core, Confucianism rested mostly on customs that went back many thousands of years and were regarded as unchanging. These authentically went back at least twenty-five centuries, to the teachings of Confucius that any educated Chinese could read in the original ideograms. Confucius in turn regarded himself as re-stating a vastly older creed, going back another fifteen or twenty-five centuries. The truth of the matter is hard to settle, but the ‘oracle bones’ from 650 or more years before Confucius use recognisable ideograms and have some common sentiments.[E]

作为中国朝廷的核心，儒家思想主要基于几千年前的习俗，被认为是不变的。这些文字可以追溯到至少2500年以前的孔子学说，任何受过教育的中国人都能读懂原始的表意文字。孔子则认为自己是在重复一个更古老的信条，可以在孔子之前进一步追溯1500-2500年之前。事情的真相很难确定，但孔子之前650年或更早的“甲骨文”使用了可识别的表意文字，并有一些共同的情感。

The Chinese tradition had been rule by a scholar-gentry chosen mostly by merit, serving a dynasty but standing in place of the hereditary nobles of most civilisations. Exams were used to some extent by the Han Dynasty, which existed at the same time as the Roman Empire. Exams became the norm under the Tang Dynasty, which shone brightly during Europe’s Dark Ages. The system meant that the rich or well-born couldn’t automatically claim a place among the scholar-gentry: they had to educate their children in Confucian virtues and these children also had to be clever. Very clever children from ordinary backgrounds might also get in and be fully accepted.

中国的传统是由文人士绅统治，他们大多是根据自己的能力选择的，为一个王朝服务，这取代了大多数文明的世袭贵族。考试在一定程度上被汉朝所采用，汉朝与罗马帝国同时期存在。考试成为了欧洲黑暗时代同时期的唐朝的标准。这种制度意味着富人或出身良好的人不能自动在士绅中占有一席之地: 他们必须教育他们的孩子以儒家的美德，这些孩子也必须聪明。来自普通背景的非常聪明的孩子也可能被录取，并被完全接纳。

This structure had huge conservative power. Crisis only threatened legal authority, rarely the social order. The permeation of governmental practice by the agreed ideals of Confucian society was rendered almost complete by the examination system. Moreover, though it was very hard for anyone not assured of some wealth to support himself during the long studies necessary for the examination – writing in the traditional literary forms itself took years to master – the principle of competition ensured that a continuing search for talent was not quite confined to the wealthier and established gentry families; China was a meritocracy in which learning always provided some social mobility. From time to time there were corruption and examples of the buying of places, but such signs of decline usually appear towards the end of a dynastic period. For the most part, the imperial officials showed remarkable independence of their background. They were not supposed to act on such assumptions of obligation to family and connexion as characterized the public servants drawn from the eighteenth-century English gentry. The civil servants were the emperor’s men; they were not allowed to own land in the province where they served, serve in their own provinces, or have relatives in the same branch of government. They were not the representatives of a class, but a sextion from it, an independently recruited elite, renewed and promoted by competition. They made the state a reality.

“这个结构拥有庞大的保守力量。危机只威胁到法律权威，很少威胁到社会秩序。儒家社会的共识理念对朝廷实践的渗透，在科举制度下基本完成。此外，尽管对于没有足够财富的人来说，为考试而进行的长期学习是非常困难的——传统文学写作本身就需要数年的时间才能掌握，但竞争的原则确保了对人才的持续寻找并不完全局限于较富裕和有地位的贵族家庭；中国是一个任人唯贤的国家，学习总是能提供一定的社会流动性。腐败和购买土地的例子时有发生，但这种衰落的迹象通常出现在王朝末期。在很大程度上，朝廷官员表现出了其背景的显著独立性。他们不应该以这种对家庭和关系的义务为前提而行动，而这种义务是十八世纪英国贵族公务员的特点。公务员是皇帝的仆人，他们不允许在自己工作的省份拥有土地，不允许在自己（出生）的省份工作，也不允许在同一朝廷部门有亲属。他们不是某个阶级的代表，而是从中挑选出来的，一个独立招募的精英，通过竞争获得轮替和晋升。他们使这个国家成为现实。”
原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

Imperial China was thus not an aristocratic polity; political power did not pass by descent within a group of noble families, though noble birth was socially important. Only in the small closed circle of the court was hereditary access to office possible, and there it was a matter of prestige, titles and standing, rather than of power. To the imperial counsellors who had risen through the official hierarchy to its highest levels and had become more than officials, the only rivals of importance were the court eunuchs. These creatures were often trusted with great authority by the emperors because, by definition, they could not found families. They were thus the only political force escaping the restraints of the official world.

“因此，中华帝国不是一个贵族政体。尽管贵族的出身在社会上很重要，但政治权力并不是通过贵族的家族血统来传递的。只有在宫廷的小圈子里才有可能世袭获得职位，这只涉及威望、头衔和地位，而不涉及权力。对于那些从官阶上升到最高层级的朝臣们来说，唯一重要的竞争对手是宫廷宦官。这些人通常被皇帝赋予极大的权威，因为根据定义，它们无法拥有家族。因此，他们是唯一摆脱官方束缚的政治力量。

Clearly, in the Chinese state there was little sense of the European distinction between government and society. Official, scholar and gentleman were usually the same man, combining many roles which in Europe were increasingly to be divided between governmental specialists and the informal authorities of society. He combined them, too, within the frxwork of an ideology which was much more obviously central to society than any to be found elsewhere than perhaps in Islam. The preservation of Confucian values was not a light matter, nor satisfiable by lip-service. The bureaucracy maintained those values by exercising a moral supremacy somewhat like that long exercised by the clergy in the West – and in China there was no Church to rival the state. The ideas which inspired it were profoundly conservative; the predominant administrative task was seen to be the maintenance of the established order; the aim of Chinese government was to oversee, conserve and consolidate, and occasionally to innovate in practical matters by carrying out large public works. Its overriding goals were regularity and the maintenance of common standards in a huge and diverse empire, where many district magistrates were divided from the people in their charge even by language. In achieving its conservative aims, the bureaucracy was spectacularly successful and its ethos survived intact across all the crises of the dynasties.

显然，在中国，政府和社会之间几乎没有欧洲式区别。官员、学者和绅士通常是同一个人，结合了许多角色，在欧洲，这些角色日益被划分为政府专家和社会里的非正式权威。在意识形态的框架内，也可以将它们结合起来，但这种意识形态本身对社会的重要性明显超过了其他任何一方，也许伊斯兰教除外。儒家价值观的维护不是一件轻松的事情，也不能满足于口头上的服务。官僚机构通过道德至上来维持这些价值观，这种道德至上有点像西方长期以来的神职人员。激发中国的这一思想是非常保守的，主要的行政任务被认为是维持既定的秩序；中国朝廷的目的是监督、保护和巩固，偶尔也通过开展大型公共工程在实际问题上进行创新。它最重要的目标是在一个庞大而多样的帝国中维持共同的标准，许多地方长官甚至以语言来区分他们所管理的人民。在实现其保守目标的过程中，官僚机构取得了惊人的成功，其精神在历次朝代危机中都完好无损。”

Though traditional China was imperfect by modern standards, those standards did not exist at the time. Traditional China noticed the outside world but saw nothing it liked better than its own norms. It had few aspirations beyond more of the same. There were some surprising deficiencies, including a failure to notice the famous Oracle Bones, pieces of turtle-shell or bones inscribed with archaic Chinese writing. They were used as a medicine for a long time in traditional China: their real meaning was not noticed by Chinese scholars until 1899, when Western ideas had already changed everything. But traditional China had for long periods been content with what it had, which Western Europe never was after it turned Christian.

虽然以现代的标准来看，传统的中国是不完善的，但这些现代标准在当时并不存在。传统的中国注意到了外部世界，但没有什么比自己的规范更喜欢的了。除了更多的同化之外，它几乎没有什么抱负。还有一些令人惊讶的不足之处，包括没有注意到闻名于世的甲骨文(甲骨文是刻有古代汉字的甲骨或甲骨，中国近代才被发掘发现)。在传统中国，它们被用作药物的时间很长:直到1899年，中国学者才注意到它们的真正含义，那时西方的思想已经让世界发生了翻天覆地的变化。但是传统的中国很长一段时间都满足于它所拥有的东西，而西欧在变成基督徒后就从来没有这样过。

By the 15th century, Islam had largely pushed Christianity out of Asia. Europe was given a strong incentive to try to bypass the Islamic world and re-establish contact with rich non-Islamic ‘Cathay’. That was Columbus’s aim when he found the New World, the achievement that vastly accelerated Europe’s world-wide seizure of seas and oceans. But the civilised Far East was unimpressed by Europe’s sea-nomads.

到了15世纪，伊斯兰教在很大程度上把基督教赶出了亚洲。欧洲受到了强烈的刺激，试图绕过伊斯兰世界，与富有的非伊斯兰“中国”重新建立联系。这就是哥伦布发现新大陆时的目标，这一成就极大地加速了欧洲在世界范围内占领海洋的进程。但是文明的远东却对欧洲的海上游牧民无动于衷。

When the Pope overturned a compromise reached by Jesuit missionaries that had accepted traditional Chinese reverence for their ancestors, a Chinese Emperor commented:

当教皇推翻了耶稣会传教士达成的接受中国人对祖先的传统尊敬的妥协时，一位中国皇帝评论道:

Every country must have some spirits that it reveres. This is true of our dynasty, as for Mongols and Mohammedans… But in this Catholic faith, the Society of Peter quarrels with the Jesuits… and among the Jesuits the Portuguese want only their own nationals in their church while the French want only French in theirs. This violates the principles of religion. Such dissension cannot be inspired by the Lord of Heaven but by the Devil, who, I have heard Westerners say, leads men to do evil since he can’t do otherwise.[G]

“每个国家都必须有一些它所崇敬的精神。我们的王朝就是这样，伊斯兰教徒也是如此……但在天主教信仰中，彼得会与耶稣会发生争执……在耶稣会中，葡萄牙人只要求自己的国民进入他们的教堂，而法国人只要求法国人进入他们的教堂。这违反了宗教原则。这种纷争不是由上帝引起的，而是由魔鬼引起的。我曾听西方人说过，魔鬼引导人们作恶，因为他没有别的办法。”

It was not only Puritans who found something of the ‘anti-Christ’ in the Papacy. Almost every power that’s had dealings with the Popes has ended up appalled by the pride and greed of the Vatican machine, an imbalance that infects even men of great personal piety and modesty. Protestors included many Catholics loyal to the old Latin-Christian traditions, who were unable to accept innovations like Transubstantiation and Papal Infallibility.

不仅仅是清教徒发现教皇中有“反基督”的成分。几乎所有与教皇打交道的权力机构都被梵蒂冈机器的骄傲和贪婪所震惊，这种不平衡甚至影响了虔诚和谦逊的人。抗议者包括许多忠于古老的拉丁-基督教传统的天主教徒，他们无法接受像变形论和教皇绝对正确这样的革新。

China was different. There were some brutal rulers across the centuries, but the brutality was usually for a clear end, the creation of a peaceful Empire. On the whole, peace and harmony was achieved.

中国是不同的。几个世纪以来，有一些残暴的统治者，但这种残暴通常有一个明确的结局，那就是建立一个和平的帝国，并总体上实现了和平与和谐。
（未完待续）