A New Age of Enlightenment
It is an accident of history and geography that China has been culturally isolated from most of the rest of the world during the greater part of her long and distinguished career as one of the most brilliant civilizations ever created by the human species—a civilization noted for both its brilliance and its individuality for three or possibly four millenia. This isolation was intentionally aggravated by imperialism during the 19th and early 20th centuries as the imperialist powers hoped to deny China the technology of that period so that she would be defenseless to deny the imperialists the plunder of her rich civilization. At any rate the cultural self-sufficiency and self-completeness of China is a historically well-established fact. China is a culture-universe by herself.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.