Chinese Painting as Integrated Humanities

The Chinese arts I study—calligraphy, painting, and seal carving—are, when pursued together, what I think of as “integrated humanities”: a body of learning capable of resisting divide-and-conquer tactics. The argument runs along the lines of the Japanese proverb “when the wind blows, the bucket-makers prosper”—a chain of seemingly remote causes and effects—so the logic takes some unpacking, but if you stay with me to the end, I think the depth of Chinese art will come through. What follows is an introduction to what I am aiming to become: a jinshi shuhua artist, a Chinese artist who has mastered calligraphy, painting, and seal carving all at a high level. Because it runs long, I’ll break it into several installments. Since most readers, I imagine, won’t immediately grasp what is so remarkable about Chinese art, I’ll begin with a preface designed to reach Western readers.

1. The Difference in How Chinese and Western Painting Interpret Space

What I want to examine first is the difference between Western and Chinese painting in their treatment of “space.”

In Western painting, the artist deploys perspective, anatomy, and light sources to conjure three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. These techniques have long served to make religious scenes—which may never actually have occurred—feel as though they were historical events, by lending them what we might call “persuasive force.” People routinely conflate persuasiveness with truth, but a lie, like a piece of fake news, is by design built to seem persuasive precisely so as to deceive; persuasiveness and truth are not the same thing. Western painting is a mode of expression that has skillfully exploited this very tendency in human perception.

Chinese painting, by contrast—and East Asian painting more broadly—has officially been understood as a tradition in which space emerges within the picture because everything inessential is omitted in order to capture the essence of a thing. Layered on top of this are the elusive, abstract hypotheses characteristic of the East Asian sages who gave us Daoism and Confucianism, all of which lend Chinese painting an additional air of mystery. As a result, there are aspects of Chinese painting that young Western artists find hard to grasp—but since I myself began my career in the Western tradition of observational figure painting, I’m in a position to discuss Chinese painting in terms accessible to such outsiders.

After ten years of practicing daxieyi (great freehand style) flower-and-bird painting and landscape painting, I’ve come to see Chinese painting as profoundly paradoxical, both technically and conceptually. To put the conclusion first: Chinese painting is painting about what isn’t the painting itself—about what is most absent from the picture. In Chinese painting, what is not depicted disguises itself as what is. This may sound deliberately obscure, but for reasons I’ll explain, I think you’ll come to see it as the most accurate description of Chinese painting. The masterworks of the great Chinese painters appear to have been produced quickly, lightly, almost casually—which leads viewers to assume that Chinese painting must be easier than Western oil painting. Before I crossed over from Western to Chinese painting, I made the same assumption. I have some confidence in my own observational, wet-on-wet, alla prima oil portrait technique, and alla prima portraiture is among the most difficult techniques in the entire Western tradition. So, weighing what I took to be Western painting’s cultural and historical advantages over Chinese painting, I assumed it would naturally follow that Chinese technique should be easier to master than alla prima oil.

I was in for a struggle. At the very beginning, I couldn’t even reproduce the beginner exercises my teacher had painted for me—and my teacher went so far as to say that becoming a real Chinese painter takes forty years. At first I thought he was exaggerating. But slowly I began to realize that Chinese painting is not what it looks like. After some time I came to recognize the technical depth of the form, but then I started to feel that the conceptual side was strangely simple—an imbalance, as if the symbolism, messaging, and conceptual weight one finds in Western painting were missing relative to the technical demands the form makes of the artist.

Technically, Chinese painting is clearly not a discipline for dull minds. So why are so many of the masterworks devoted to floral, ornithological, or landscape subjects—motifs that read as purely decorative and apolitical? Given how political the average Chinese person actually is, this is hard to explain. So I started traveling between Japan and Shanghai on a bimonthly basis, trying to crack the secret of Chinese painting.

I began by imagining what form the most intelligent people in China would actually take. Politicians? Entrepreneurs? Perhaps artists? I tried reading Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and the line that struck me hardest at the time was this: that the truly strong win so naturally that no one even notices a contest took place, and so they go unrecorded by posterity. This is a remarkable angle. If you think about it, the ancient war stories beloved by the Chinese are almost always tales of vast upsets in which a small elite force routs a much larger army, with the cleverness and cunning of the victorious general celebrated. Almost nothing is said about the more refined, more cunning conflicts—those that proceed so smoothly and one-sidedly that they never even erupt into physical clashes.

There’s a Chinese proverb: “Win, and you are the imperial army; lose, and you are a band of brigands.” Throughout Chinese history, every time a previous dynasty fell to revolution, it was effectively routine for the entire ruling elite of that dynasty—their whole clans—to be executed. Even the Tang, the longest-lasting unified dynasty in Chinese history, ran only 289 years; most unified dynasties failed to last 200; the first, the Qin, collapsed in just 15. So the Chinese have long carried the understanding that any given dynasty is, ultimately, a temporary arrangement. People act politically because they believe political action will lead to prosperity. But consider two people: one maximizes the prosperity of his own generation while accepting the risk of being executed someday as a traitor; the other, given every chance for advancement, chooses an inconspicuous life for the sake of his descendants’ survival. Which of these two is actually more political?

I find this an interesting question. Many lineages of war heroes did not survive into the present, while we ordinary people did. If the lost lineages of past heroes were the most political families, then how political, in real terms, are those of us who actually made it through?

The intensely political always belong to the imperial side. But, in case they should one day find themselves on the losing side, they avoid rising too high in the ranks—lest political turmoil end them. So they don’t stand out. On the surface they look apolitical, feigning ignorance even of political upheavals, and yet, oddly enough, when the decisive moment comes, they are always found on the right side of history.

It is hard to theorize about how the most intelligent people would behave, because their intelligence exceeds our imagination and, by definition, so does their conduct. Still, I have the following hypothesis. The most acute people work hard to appear average. The less acute work hard to appear better than they are. We notice the latter, because their disguise isn’t fine enough. But it is very hard to spot extremely acute people impersonating ordinary ones, because their disguise is precisely designed to be undetectable by ordinary intelligences like ours. And proving the non-existence of “transcendent intelligences disguised as ordinary people” is doubly impossible—there’s a reason the proof of non-existence is called probatio diabolica, the devil’s proof. Doesn’t it actually seem more likely that we are already surrounded by transcendent intelligences disguised as average people? They look ordinary to us not because their intelligence is ordinary, but because we cannot see through their disguise.

So when I evaluate Chinese people and Chinese art, I’ve come to take more interest in the subtle differences among those who look ordinary than in obvious markers of intelligence.

I also began to notice that the subject matter of Chinese painting—aside from generic, inoffensive symbols like dragons and phoenixes (the dragon symbolizing masculinity, the phoenix femininity)—is almost entirely free of specific religious or political signs and symbols. Why does Chinese painting lack the encoded religious or political symbolism one finds in classical Western painting? Here is what I think. When someone hangs a scroll in the reception room of their home, the political leanings of the owner must not be legible to visitors—otherwise, when the decisive moment comes, the owner risks ending up on the wrong side of history. I am sure that paintings containing covert religious or political symbols once did exist; they simply failed to survive the political events—such as the Cultural Revolution—in which “improper” art and literature were censored. If you ask why anyone behaves politically, the answer is: to prosper. But while overtly political works failed to survive political upheavals, the seemingly off-hand, decorative, apolitical bird-and-flower and landscape paintings did. Given that, which type of painting was actually more political? Chinese painting looks apolitical. But looking apolitical is, in fact, one of the symptoms of being highly political. To appreciate the real beauty of a Chinese painting, you have to pay attention not only to what the painting is about, but to what it is not about. Once you have the right context, you can find, inside these seemingly apolitical Chinese paintings, the traces of one political crisis after another.

In this context, the role of “space” in Chinese painting is decisive, because that space is what defines the painting’s contours. Chinese painting is about what is not depicted in it. As the saying goes: speech is silver, silence is gold. This is why, for me, Chinese painting is fundamentally paradoxical. The paintings that survived long periods of political turmoil were the most casually rendered, the most apolitical-looking ones. It doesn’t look that way, but the fact that they survived to the present is precisely what makes them, in reality, the most political. I hope this explanation reaches young Western artists too. Speaking of what is not there is difficult. The absence of something can sometimes be spoken of only paradoxically. It’s a bit like saying that violet is the absence of yellow. Violet can only be described in terms of what it is not; violet is not yellow at all—yet at the same time, it is in some sense a color about yellow.

2. What It Takes to Become a True Chinese Painter

From here, I want to discuss the importance of Chinese painting as humanities. Earlier I mentioned that my teacher told me it takes forty years to become a real Chinese painter; now, ten years in, I have some confidence that I’ve reached a respectable level in daxieyi flower-and-bird and landscape painting. So I’ve been turning over the question of what my teacher really meant by “forty years”—and one day I remembered a phrase he often used: jinshi shuhua. Jinshi shuhua refers to a Chinese artist who has mastered calligraphy, painting, and seal carving all at a high level. Looked at this way, it’s clear my calligraphy and seal carving are still amateur. I don’t know exactly how many years it takes to master Chinese calligraphy and seal carving, but I have a vague sense that it must be a considerable number.

What sort of worldview, then, does jinshi shuhua open onto? To begin with: at what level does one earn the right to call oneself a calligrapher? My teacher’s own teacher, Lai Chusheng, held that you cannot call yourself a calligrapher unless you have mastered all five script styles—standard, semi-cursive, cursive, clerical, and seal—and can write each in a style that bears the imprint of your own character. And at what level for seal carving? My teacher, Weng Zuqing, has never spelled out the conditions for calling oneself a seal carver, but if you look at the range of his learning, he has mastered not only seal-script for stamps, but also dazhuan (greater seal script) and bronze inscriptions, and he creates new characters that didn’t exist historically but exist today—composed by combining radicals he draws from bronze inscriptions. At this stage, the jinshi shuhua artist’s relationship with society becomes pleasantly attenuated. He begins to drift out of the ordinary world and to be steeped in the recluse ideal embodied by the Six Dynasties poet Tao Yuanming. A whole constellation of literati attributes begins to take root in him: a love of multiple arts and hobbies, a kind of cultivated amateurism, a refusal of the vulgar, a fondness for solitude, an interest in nourishing life. And by starting with standard script and moving on through semi-cursive, cursive, clerical, and seal script, then on into seal carving, then into greater seal script and bronze inscriptions, one naturally travels backwards through history, encountering archaeology, the canonical texts of Confucianism and Daoism, and eventually the great classics of China—Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian, Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and the like.

Now, about the literati who have mastered all this—and especially about the Chinese ideal of the “recluse.” As I wrote earlier, the ancients had themselves experienced what I tried to articulate through paradox: “the non-existence of people above a certain level of intelligence.” Through various parables, they too tried to sketch what kind of person such a “recluse” might be. Consider literati exhausted by court intrigue, or intellectuals who had mastered Confucianism—the orthodox state doctrine—but couldn’t ascend to important posts because they lacked blood ties or connections with the powerful, or because the prevailing evaluation criteria didn’t suit them. Such people would, first of all, withdraw into the mountains to avoid conflict. There they would nourish their health and continue their studies, dreaming of the moment when a worthy lord would appear in search of them—as in the story of Liu Bei calling three times upon Zhuge Liang, or of King Wen inviting Jiang Ziya, the fisherman, to become his strategist. If such a lord did appear and ask for help, and if he turned out to be virtuous enough, the recluse would help him take the realm. If the realm was won, the recluse would continue nourishing his health and his learning, and live as a modest retainer—offering counsel and helping sustain the new order. Such men spent their lives bracing for a moment of opportunity that might come tomorrow, or might never come at all. In appearance they were indistinguishable from impoverished students, and from ordinary people. It is as if we were living in a world where transcendent intelligences are hiding in plain sight, disguised as ordinary people—and where, since their intelligence is by definition above ours, if they truly meant to hide, we would have no way of seeing through them. The ancients called such theoretically existing literati of hidden transcendent intelligence yinyi, the “reclusive.” This concept actually dates as far back as China’s Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods—remarkably old. But for us, modern people raised on dumbed-down education and unable to read classical Chinese, it is a worldview that has come back around to feeling almost new. You won’t grasp how sophisticated this worldview is without reading the classics—that’s the thought I carry with me as I touch the Chinese classics and paint, day after day.

3. Chinese Painting as Integrated Humanities

The preface is done; now I want to get to the heart of the matter—how mastering Chinese painting becomes a way of contending for the realm. I’m three-quarters Chinese and one-quarter Japanese, but having been born and raised in Japan, I long thought of myself simply as Japanese. In elementary and middle school I learned the conventional taxonomy—that white Europeans divide broadly into Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Latin, Slavic, and other lineages. In university I attended art school in the United States, surrounded for the first time by people of many races and gender identities. From that environment I came to understand how central identity is to being an artist.

Put briefly, the importance of identity to the artist is this: identity is a barrier to entry that effort alone cannot overcome. Unlike today’s artists, classical artists rarely deployed identity as an active concept. Instead, they spent ten or more years in obscurity, watched fellow artists abandon their careers, and through that process refined their pure painterly technique into a sufficiently high barrier to entry against the other art-school graduates who hoped to make a living as painters. That is how they protected their work.

Many young artists today, after graduating from art school, begin participating in group shows hoping one day to be famous enough to mount a solo exhibition, or move to a big city where dating is easier. Many of them aim, eventually, to settle in the suburbs and support a family—but first they need to achieve some level of success in the city, and to find a partner along the way. The reality is brutal.

Imagine trying to make it as a painter in New York. You start by renting a studio apartment for two thousand dollars a month (The price back in 2013). To make rent, the art-school graduate—who has no marketable skills beyond making art—takes a grueling, low-wage job, working long hours. The stress mounts, so he goes out drinking with fellow aspiring artists under the banner of “discussing art” and burns through what little money he has. He grows more frustrated, because he isn’t finding nearly as much time to paint as he had imagined. And when he does manage to carve out time, he’s too exhausted to paint, or simply not in the mood. After two or three years of this cycle, his parents back home—who have been supporting him financially—call to tell him it’s time to come back and find a real job. The remittances stop, he gives up his career, returns home, and has no choice but to take an ordinary job.

People who didn’t have quite enough talent to become solid mid-career artists but who were cunning, or who came from families wealthy enough that they never really had to work but who wanted the appearance of “working for love”—these people give up on being artists early and move into management roles like producer or director. Despite the fact that they themselves couldn’t even make it as middling artists, the moment they cross over into management they begin to think they have better taste than most of the artists they oversee.

Well-funded projects often come with a political agenda attached. From personal experience: when I went looking for non-repayable grants after graduating from art school, nearly every grant I found was restricted to LGBT applicants. Even then, I had the strong sense that this was a divide-and-conquer operation funded from outside. Briefly put, divide-and-conquer works like this: when several factions are competing within some arena, external capital backs the weakest of those factions financially, wearing down the resources of the strongest. The contest grows protracted and exhausting for everyone involved. At precisely the right moment, the same external capital that has been backing the weakest faction reappears, disguised as a conscientious third party, and offers mediation—imposing the rules that benefit itself most. Look back at history and you’ll find this pattern repeated again and again.

For today’s artists, there is a more efficient path to becoming a professional than the classical artist’s decade of laboring without any guarantee of return: using identity—race, gender, nationality—as your lever. While the vast majority of aspiring artists quietly give up, those belonging to sexual or racial minorities can rise smoothly to mid-career status by drawing on non-repayable grants made available, by foreign capital, only to them. Their parents, too, sense that their children’s identity is being supported by the powers that be, and so they have greater patience for their children’s career than the parents of artists with more “ordinary” identities. And as the influence of artists who lead with such identities grows, divide-and-conquer operations become correspondingly easier to execute.

Here I realized something important. My Chinese father has ten younger siblings. All of them, both his brothers and sisters, married partners with roots in different parts of China, and had children my age. I therefore have a great many cousins who don’t resemble each other much in face or build. Comparing the appearances of these Chinese relatives, I had long thought, from childhood, that there must surely be subgroups among the Chinese—Anglo-Saxons and Germanics and so on, as among white Europeans. And yet they all, inexplicably, identify with absolute conviction as a single unified Han people—a Han people who make up 94 percent of China’s population. Isn’t that strange, and at the same time deeply telling? It tells us that China, unlike the societies of Western Europe, is immune to divide-and-conquer operations mounted by malicious foreign capital.

China’s history of struggle is long. According to Sun Tzu, winning a hundred battles in a hundred engagements is inferior to winning without fighting at all. Peace, then, is probably just another name for a highly sophisticated state of war. The very concept of peace originated when, in an age of constant warfare, rival parties became too worn down by long wars and mutually agreed to share a preparatory interval for the next war. This original definition is startlingly accurate at describing our present situation. Consider: what if the “perpetual peace” after the Second World War were, in fact, the defeated side’s temporary political posture—a stance taken with the provisional victors, in which both sides pretended the arrangement was permanent, so that the defeated could secure the longest possible preparatory interval for the next war? In the post-war era, the great powers have continued to avoid kinetic war among themselves because of the risk of nuclear escalation. As a result, nuclear weapons and other instruments of comparable scale have come to be used only for displays of force. War itself has been displaced into economic warfare and R&D races, and capital and information—now no longer physical—can no longer be seized by physical war.

Once you reach this stage, “war that disguises itself as peace” begins to appear. It becomes unclear whether a revolution is in progress; it becomes unclear whether a given country is upholding what the West calls “human rights.” By “human rights” here I mean the umbrella term for the labor ethics and labor regulations that the developed world has imposed on the developing world so that the former can maintain its lead without exhausting itself. Behind this lies, on the Western side, both a self-image that says “if we compete ethically, we cannot possibly lose,” and a kind of arrogance: a built-in rationalization that, should the West lose anyway, the loss can be reframed as “they violated human rights.”

To put it bluntly: the first people who broke taboos were never punished, because the very concept of “taboo” hadn’t yet been invented. As a result, the most criminally inclined people, leveraging the unfair advantage of murder, rape, torture, and plunder, eventually unified states and even became kings. Only those whose criminal instincts were half-hearted—or who broke taboos after taboo itself had been invented, often by the king—became “criminals” in the literal sense.

War and revolution bring dramatic change. But people fail to notice revolutions and wars that wear the mask of peace. Even so, the accelerating texture of change quietly betrays that such peace-disguised wars and revolutions are indeed in progress. In ordinary peacetime, one doesn’t feel the urgent need to adapt to a rapidly changing environment the way one does in war. And that is precisely why presenting a “real war” to your rival in the guise of “war disguised as peace”—deceiving them into thinking the present is peaceful, and so dulling their capacity to adapt—is a more efficient way to fight than mere war.

The basic sciences have three categories: the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. The natural sciences include physics, chemistry, biology, earth science, and astronomy; the social sciences include political science, policy science, business administration, law, economics, and sociology; the humanities include ethics, philosophy, aesthetics, linguistics, religious studies, and archaeology. When people think about applying the basic sciences to war, they tend to prioritize them in that order—natural, social, humanities. This is a mistake people tend to make when they aren’t familiar with the history of war.

Consider nuclear weapons—an achievement of physics. We have managed to avoid nuclear war so far precisely because access to that technology is granted only to scientists who can be relied upon to behave with political correctness. This in turn implies that, even if technologies with social impact greater than nuclear weapons were invented—quantum mechanics, free energy, and the like—access to them should be limited to those who can behave politically, and ideally ethically, correctly. At this stage of development, it becomes clear that understanding the humanities (ethics, for example) and the social sciences (political science, policy science) matters more than understanding pure natural sciences like physics or mathematics. That is the argument for peaceful technology use. But, as I said earlier, peace—disguised war—is a highly advanced state of war; and the closer humanity moves to the endgame of war, the higher the relative priority of the humanities and the social sciences becomes, compared to the natural sciences. One more point: those who have maximized political and legal correctness by any means available are also the most likely to fail catastrophically on ethics—because ethics, being impossible to codify into law and therefore impossible to enforce by penalty, ultimately depends on individual conscience. So when asked to choose between prioritizing the humanities (ethics) and the social sciences (political science), I hope people will be wise enough to put the humanities first. But the importance of the humanities in war doesn’t end there.

So let me describe the further importance of the humanities through a different lens, which requires a brief detour through Chinese history and through my own personal experience. As for Chinese history: China has been ruled by non-Han peoples on two occasions—by the Mongols and by the Manchus. What happened, in the end? In both cases, from the next generation onward, the rulers themselves voluntarily assimilated into the Han. The Han, then, possess the depth and pliancy to absorb foreign ruling classes into themselves—a kind of strategic capacity to “lose the match and win the contest.” As for my own experience: throughout my growing up, I always identified as Japanese. But after learning at art school in America how central identity is to being an artist, I spent several years after returning to Japan asking myself what I actually was. At that point I was already studying Chinese art under a Chinese teacher, a close friend of my father’s, but I had not yet recognized Chinese painting’s significance as humanities.

I began by trying to deepen my Japanese identity, reading The Book of Tea and Representative Men of Japan. I discovered that the tea ceremony originates in Chinese Southern Song-era Zen, and that Saigō Takamori, one of the “representative men,” had studied Yangmingism, a Confucian school. Cultures I had taken to be uniquely Japanese turned out, when traced backward, to have been transmitted from China in far more numerous and varied ways than I had imagined. Even so, at that point I still wanted to pursue Japanese rather than Chinese identity. I decided to take the entrance exam for the graduate program in nihonga (Japanese-style painting) at a Japanese art school. After the figure-drawing practicum, in the interview, one of the professors asked me: “Given that you have access to an ideal environment for studying Chinese painting, what is the point of you studying Japanese painting?” I couldn’t produce an answer on the spot. Whether that was the reason or not, I wasn’t accepted. What struck me most was not the rejection itself but this: the question should have been entirely predictable in advance, and yet I had nothing prepared. I simply had no answer. That moment was when I resolved to commit myself seriously to Chinese art. And as I studied Chinese painting, I began to recognize its significance as humanities.

Why, after all, do those who defeat the Han ultimately, over several generations, assimilate into the Han? It happens when someone traces their ancestry back through history, archaeology, and linguistics. And the chemical reaction occurs when someone realizes that the essential side of communication is—just as much as, or perhaps even more than, the logical exchange of information—the act of socially asserting dominance. Once you grasp this, you can explain why individuals who carry two or more conflicting identities consistently choose one identity over the other, and how the accumulation of those choices generates the numerically dominant peoples and cultures we observe.

A weaker male chimpanzee avoids physical fights by letting a dominant male mount him—by submitting to being dominated. The introverted, intelligent young man, who is not yet involved in the contest to be the alpha male, tends to misunderstand the purpose of communication as the logical sharing of information. The women of his student years can only judge male dominance by who can win an instantaneous dominance display, conducted through everything but the verbal content of conversation—voice, expression, hairstyle, clothing—so introverted men lose, in the contest for women, to extroverted men. For some of these introverted men, this is actually a good thing. By continuing their studies they sharpen their strategy, and from those student-era defeats they gradually pick up, in a more refined form, the tactics of the extroverted men who once outmaneuvered them. They acquire methods that surpass the extroverts both strategically and tactically. In other words, they begin, belatedly, to enter the contest for alpha status—and at that point intelligent women begin paying attention to the actual content of what they say. By then, the gap in conversational substance between the introverted man who originally understood communication as the logical sharing of information and the extrovert who has only ever wielded everything-but-the-content for instantaneous dominance becomes glaringly obvious.

People begin competing before they understand who they are. And those who have achieved some measure of success start searching for the reasons for that success in the question “who am I?” To the introverted young man not yet involved in the alpha-male contest, cultural communication is just an exercise in understanding diversity. But extroverted men have understood from the beginning that cultural communication is, in fact, a social dominance contest grounded in cultural superiority. In other words: cultural struggle. And here’s the part that those who get it will get—in dominance contests, the older and more original a culture is, the stronger it is. Because some genuinely old and original cultures, the ones bound up with the alpha-male contest, arose out of a necessity rooted in the logic of the dominant male in the troop. Chinese characters are the only logographic script that can be traced all the way back to the four great early civilizations; every other logographic script broke down and became undecipherable. And the content of the Chinese classics written in these “characters” was written from necessities rooted in the logic of the troop’s dominant male. As for the origin of Chinese painting itself: it began when literati who had over-studied content directly bound up with the alpha-male contest—Confucianism, for instance—grew bored, and began, for amusement, to paint bamboo. In other words, Chinese painting, composed of calligraphy, painting, and seal carving, is the formal integration of humanities disciplines—ethics, philosophy, aesthetics, religious studies, history, archaeology, linguistics—and may legitimately be called not so much “mixed martial arts” as “mixed humanities.” In the cultural struggle that ultimately determines whose identity is the identity of the war’s victor, it can be an exceptionally powerful tool.

In my own reckoning, Western civilization—which is only now beginning to grapple with political correctness—has already been checkmated in this world we inhabit, a world that is itself the experience of a “war disguised as peace,” contested through the humanities. The Chinese don’t really care who wins the war—so long as the winner is Chinese. I hope my meaning will reach my readers.