China and the West

Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François. Histoire philosophique et politique [ID D20030].
Raynal schreibt : "La Chine est le pays de la terre où il y a le moins de gens oisifs, le seul peut-être où il n'y en ait point."
"L'attente de la disette qui s'avance remplit tous les citoyens d'activité, de mouvement, et d'inquiétude. Il n'ya pas un instant qui n'ait sa valeur. L'intérêt doit être le mobile secret ou public de toutes les actions. Il est impossible que les mensonges, les fraudes, les vols ne se multiplient : les âmes y doivent être basses l'esprit y doit être petit, intéressé, rétréci et esquin."
"Dans cet Empire [la Chine] on distingue les ministres en deux classes, celle des penseurs et celle des signeurs. Tandis que la dernière est occupée du détail et de l'expédition des affaires, la première n'a d'autre travail que de former des projets ou d'examiner ceux qu'on lui présente. C'est la source de tous ces réglements admirables qui font régner à la Chine la législation la plus savante par l'administration la plus sage. Chez les Chinois on croit à l'autorié naturelle de la loi raisonnée."

Basil Guy : The last five chapters are summaries of commercial enterprise in the Middle kingdom, making special mention of the trade in tea, porcelains and silk, including the appropriately impressive figures of prices and quantities imported by the Dutch, British, and French. The first chapter begins in quite anodyne fashion like Salmon's or other brief descriptions of the Empire. Far from indulging in blind speculation over the antiquity of China and the validity of her annals, the author has preferred instead to examine such concrete facts as were then available regarding more practical considerations : government, politics, and especially morality. In its derision of China as en empire "très bien gouverné mais [où] les moeurs particulières sont très vicieuses", we have something more than a faithful reflection of contemporary prejudices regarding that far land, something more than the merely prating adulation to which we have become accustomed in eighteenth-century works treating of China. There is also an effort to consolidate the knowledge of the previous fifty years, knowledge whose practical details were largely derived from merchant contacts in China - no matter how unfavourable - and not from the abstract and treacherous vagaries of ecclesiastical minds in a European study.
Raynal makes a rather moving plea for the reasonable laws that preside over China's destiny. Even as he remarks in the chapter on government that China is a despotism, he seeks to qualify the term not one, but twice, saying that it is 'le despotisme des lois' and again, 'des lois par la raison'. Thus, he takes his stand with those old-fasioned defenders of the China that was and dares go against the practice, common in his day, or denigrating any and every political mode that came from the East. His insistence on the resonableness of Chinese procedure would lead the reader to believe that the following lines were intended as a defense of the Chinese system, eminently rational at a time when this quality seemed to be prized above all others - except in relation to the Orient in general.