Outsiders with views of China are often talking about themselves
is a surprisingly dodgy role model for writers on China. Seven centuries have passed since the Venetian merchant published his account of travels in Asia, including 17 years in the service of Kublai Khan, China’s Mongol overlord. Polo’s China is a ruthless but efficient dictatorship, a market of staggering promise, a land of great cities and tireless workers.
Long before foreigners commonly travelled or worked in China—an actual country linked to the world by trade and by two-way flows of emigration and return—outsiders have held strong opinions about “China”, an Otherland that is as much an idea as a place on the map. “The Chan’s Great Continent”, a classic history of Western thought about China by Jonathan Spence, catalogues the many influential writers on China who never set foot there.
On the face of it, imaginary notions of China should not matter much during the covid-19 pandemic, which has left governments wrestling with hard questions about life and death. There is, for instance, nothing very abstract about a propaganda campaign under way inside China to stress that most new infections involve cases imported from abroad. Though almost all of these involve Chinese nationals, curbs on foreigners are tightening. The border has been shut to most of them.
Pushing back against headlines about China delivering medical supplies to Italy and other European countries, President Emmanuel Macron of France warned against becoming “intoxicated” with the boasts of rival powers . He noted that France and Germany had also sent substantial aid to Italy. Then Mr Macron let slip what really troubles him about thiscontest with China: that it reveals the limits of European solidarity. “I do not want this selfish and divided Europe,” he lamented.
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