Sharing: Reflections on Looking at a Mirror

Reflections on Looking at a Mirror | Lu Xun’s Collected Works · Essays · The Grave

This essay is a sharp satire of xenophobes, and its argument still holds up today.

The Chinese state’s “cultural confidence” policy is, in essence, a lack of cultural confidence. A truly confident civilization should not feel panic toward foreign civilizations.

Think back to how expansive and open-minded the Han people once were: newly arrived plants and animals were used without hesitation as decorative motifs. The Tang people were not weak either; for instance, the stone animals in front of Han-dynasty tombs were mostly sheep, tigers, celestial deer, and guardian beasts, yet the Zhaoling Mausoleum in Chang’an bears carvings of a horse pierced by an arrow, and even an ostrich, an approach unprecedented in earlier ages. Not to mention tombs today: even in ordinary paintings, does anyone dare to use a foreign flower or a foreign bird? Even on personal seals, does anyone dare to use cursive script or an unrefined character? Many refined people insist on recording the year using the sexagenary cycle, afraid to use the Republican calendar. I do not know whether there simply are no artists bold enough, or whether such artists exist but are persecuted by the public until they can only wither and die.

And some civilizations, weakened and lacking confidence, the kind that issue policies “banning the celebration of foreign holidays,” guard against foreign civilizations with every means possible, yet still cannot hide their own insecurity.

The literature and art of the Song dynasty already reeked of the same “national essence” odour as today. Yet the Liao, Jin, and Yuan came in one after another, and this fact is worth pondering. The Han and Tang also had troubles at their borders, but their spirit was truly vigorous and grand; the people had the confidence that they would never be enslaved by other peoples, or perhaps it never even occurred to them to worry, so that whenever they adopted things from abroad, they used them freely, as though they had captured them, without giving it a second thought. But once a dynasty reached decline and decay, its nerves grew weak and oversensitive: whenever it encountered something foreign, it felt as though it were being captured by that foreign thing, and so it pushed back, panicked, retreated, fled, and trembled all over, and then had to invent some line of reasoning to cover it up, so that “national essence” became the treasured comfort of feeble rulers and feeble subjects alike.

I do not know how the Southern Song compares with today, but toward its foreign enemies it had clearly already declared itself a vassal, while at home it was especially full of elaborate rituals and endless nagging trivia. Just as an unlucky person is especially full of taboos, its spirit of openness and grandeur was entirely extinguished. Nothing much changed after that either. I once saw, on an old painting displayed in the Hall of Antiquities, a seal inscription made up of several Roman letters. But that was the seal of the so-called “Our Sacred Ancestor, the Benevolent Emperor,” the ruler who had conquered the Han people, so he dared to use it; a Han subject would not have dared. Even now, even among artists, does anyone dare to use a seal with foreign script?