Mark Elvin Quotes

[There is a] gulf that can exist between different emotional and perceptual worlds - all 'Chinese' - in recent times [post-Deng Xiaoping].

I have taken a different approach. One that I hope is more easily accessible to the reader's emotional imagination, though less analytically systematic. I have summoned back into life again - through my own translations from a selection of popular Chinese novel sand poems - some of the imagined worlds in which Chinese have passed their daily reality during the last two hundred years. I have tried to convey something of what it felt like to be a Chinese, living in Chinese society, in different settings of status, age, and gender, and how this has changed over time. For reasons of method, I have looked at a small number of organically coherent emotional spaces, contained in individual works or parts of works, and considered them in detail. ... It would be pretending to more wisdom than I have to claim that the selection I have made is the result of a rigorous intellectual winnowing process from a harvest of widespread reading in late-imperial and modern Chinese literature. Honesty compels the admission that it is more the outcome of chance, serendipity, and whatever happened to catch my imagination, for reasons that I am probably in no position to do more than guess at. ... In so far as there has been a guiding principle behind my choices it has been the desire to show as much as the constraints of space allow of the contrasts among those in different social position, different periods, and different ideologies.

Perhaps the most overpowering contrast [with the West] is the virtual absence in premodern China of the idea of a transcendent creator God who is distinct from Nature in a fundamental qualitative sense. The Chinese had notions of a supreme god in various guises (that is, 'hypatotheism'), and also, as we have seen, of a somewhat demiurge-like 'transformer' constantly reshaping the cosmos.