China and the West

Starr, G.A. Defoe and China [ID D26790].
Defoe finds China's social order tyrannical, its religion idolatrous, and the entire Asian trade beneficial to China, India and the East India Company but harmful to England and Europe. He ridicules tea, porcelain, lightweight fabrics and their Chinese producers less than his own countrymen: the East India Company for pursuing its own profit rather than national prosperity, and consumers for choosing insubstantial imports over superior domestic products. He prefers England's unruly mobs over China's "submissive Slaves," and Protestant Christianity over devilish idolatry, yet his satire is aimed chiefly at those in the West who defend absolutism in the political sphere, or freethinking in the religious sphere, under the guise of honoring antiquity, stability, "natural reason" and the like. Perceiving China as monitory example, not as threat, Defoe regards European fondness for Chinese goods, beliefs and practices as not merely foolish but pernicious, in commercial, political, and religious terms alike.
Long before Montesquieu argued that China's vaunted stability was based not on justice but on fear, Defoe contended that its social order was a tyranny to which only pusillanimous slaves would submit, and that its religion was idolatrous devil worship. As for products such as tea and porcelain, Defoe thought they were needless, and that trading for them with China drained Europe of silver. Even more pernicious were Indian and Chinese cottons and silks, because their importation imperiled the woolen trade on which English prosperity depended. There has been considerable discussion of Defoe's animosity toward China in the second and third parts of Robinson Crusoe, concerning the sources he may have drawn upon as well as the possible motives for his highly critical assessment of Chinese culture. Thanks to such studies, we know where Defoe probably found many of his facts about China, and we know that he culled negative details from various accounts, such as those by Jesuit missionaries, that were on the whole much more positive. But on the question of why his view of China was so hostile, most existing criticism relies on psychological speculation. Robert Markley imputes to Defoe and his hero lurid "obsessions," "fantasies," and "nightmares"; according to him, Defoe feels threatened by China, so that "Lashing out at the Chinese enacts rhetorically a compensatory fantasy of European pride and supposed superiority, " and reflects "the hero's—and the novelist's—obsession with . . . dangerous 'others'."
Defoe refers frequently to China throughout his career, however, grappling with issues of trade, governance, and religion that provide the context and rationale for Crusoe's harsh remarks. Defoe's image of China is based on his selective and tendentious use of comments by Western observers, who had written to serve ulterior purposes of their own and were often biased. My concern here is not to defend the accuracy of his representations of China, or the soundness of his thoroughly Eurocentric evaluations of it, but rather to suggest that Defoe's long-held convictions about religion, government, and trade explain why China was anathema to him, and that we need not imagine him compensating for covert fears and phobias in order to account for his hostility.
When Defoe generalizes about national characteristics, he usually treats them as symptoms of underlying political, economic, or religious causes. He is less interested in China for its own sake than in using it as a stalking horse for his critiques of the East India Company and British trade policy, "divine right" autocracy, idolatry and deism, and so on. Thus he tries to show that the Jesuit missionaries and their uncritical English readers are wrong to hold up China as a political or religious ideal, and that it should be seen instead as a place where all the malign tendencies of Bourbon and Stuart absolutism have been fully realized. From the Jesuits' admiring accounts of the Chinese system of government, Defoe infers that China is at best another France, and should arouse horror rather than envy in English readers, because its stable order is a mere tyranny, sustained only by keeping a docile populace in fear of swift, violent punishment for the least misstep.
This reveals more, of course, about Defoe than about China. As Robert Batchelor points out, "defining 'China' was itself a contested and political process," competing English interests were at stake, and would influence if not determine an author's view of it. That Defoe's image of China is designed to advance certain theses is clearest in his treatises on commerce and his polemical pamphlets, but is true of his novels as well. As an advocate of the woollen interest, and as a self-appointed defender of liberty against tyranny and of Protestant Christianity against paganism, Roman Catholicism, and deism, Defoe uses China as a monitory example of various principles and practices he deplores. Much of his hostility is directed at those in the West who advance their own selfish, sinister, or merely silly agendas in honoring China. Thus his writing about the country is largely satirical, but the ultimate object of satire is often not China itself so much as English and European folly. Concerns over government and religion tend to crop up even when his topic is economic. In a work no longer regarded as his, but which reflects his views, calicoes are said to be "made the L . . . d knows where, by a Parcel of Heathens and Pagans, that worship the Devil, and work for a Half-penny a Day." Defoe himself calls England "a wilfully-possess'd Nation, dress'd up in the Manufactures of Foreigners, and despising the Workmanship of their own People : Madly sending their Money to India and China, to feed and support Heathens and Savages." Economically, it would be significant—if true—that Asian laborers "work for a Half-penny a Day," but not that they are "Heathens and Savages" or "worship the Devil." Although questionable logically as well as factually, such linkages between economic, religious, and political factors can be effective polemically.
Economics
Defoe does not represent China's might or its treatment of Westerners as a threat to England, or to fictional Englishmen like Crusoe. Rather, he portrays England's own infatuation with East Indian goods as jeopardizing the manufactures and trade on which its continuing prosperity depends. He is opposed to importing cotton and silk fabrics, porcelain, and tea ; his objections are based on mercantilist principles that are borne out, in his opinion, by his lifelong involvement in trade and study of the British economy. The least serious of his charges is that China is the source of mere superfluities, not of anything vital to the English consumer : "What necessity have we of all our East-India Trade ? of the Callicoes, wrought Silks, raw-Silk; the Tea of China, the Coffee of Arabia, the Diamonds of Golconda and of Borneo, the Oriental Pearl of Ormus and Gamberoon . . . I say what is our necessity of them all ?" He calls these "the exorbitances of Life," "not necessary to the being of Mankind, no, nor for their well being neither." Eastern luxuries are not only dispensable, but trifling : "we are no sooner Prohibited the Use of one foreign Bauble, but we fly to another . . . we turn’d our Backs upon our own wrought Silks, and run to India and China for all the slightest and foolishest Trash in the World, such as their Chintz, slight Silks, painted Cottons, Herba, Silk and no Silks as if any thing but our own was to be thought beautiful, and any thing but what was best for us, was to be encouraged by us." Chinese goods gratify an appetite for "foreign and destructive Gewgaws" that is frivolous, foolish, and unhealthy. Others shared Defoe's view: an indignant contemporary exclaims, "after this year of 1700 let us never more Laugh at, and Ridicule the poor Negroe Indians, that give us their Gold dust . . . for Beads, Shells, Knives and Sizars, and such like, which are to them for Use and Ornament, when we part with our Bullion to invest our Kingdom with China Toyes, or obscene Statues and Images, and other Trifles."
Crusoe's dim view of most Chinese achievements in art and architecture is probably owing to Defoe's Calvinist distrust of religious art as idolatrous, his inability to understand an alien Chinese aesthetic, and his incredulity about the Jesuits' adulation of Chinese science, technology, and applied arts. For instance, if the Chinese did invent gunpowder (which he doubts), he thinks their failure to "improve" it for use rather than mere show marks them as "unaccountable Blockheads." But the superiority of Chinese porcelain and lacquer-ware could not be dismissed as mere Jesuit propaganda; abundant evidence was available to European consumers in the form of imported goods that domestic ceramics and cabinetwork could not match. As to porcelain, Defoe does not deprecate it, as he does gunpowder, by questioning its place of origin or state of development. Crusoe acknowledges that "As this is one of the singularities of China, so they may be allow'd to excel in it, " but he typically takes back with one hand what he gives with the other. Thus he continues, "but I am very sure they excel in their Accounts of it; for they told me such incredible Things of their Performance in Crockery Ware . . . that I care not to relate, as knowing it could not be true." As the former owner of a brick and tile works, Defoe could respect the manufacture of porcelain as a technical accomplishment not yet mastered in Europe. When Crusoe is shown "the greatest Rarity in all the Country," "a Gentleman's House built all with China Ware," the awe with which most earlier travelers had regarded China finds its way briefly into the Farther Adventures. For the space of two paragraphs, Crusoe's habitual skepticism gives way to close, admiring observation. In the Serious Reflections, however, Defoe more characteristically grants the merit of the product but denies credit to the producers :
The Height of their Ingenuity, and for which we admire them with more Colour of Cause than in other things, is their Porcellain or Earthen-ware Work, which, in a Word, is more due to the excellent Composition of the Earth they make them of, and which is their Peculiar, than to the Workmanship; in which, if we had the same Clay, we should soon outdo them, as much as we do in other things.
He goes on to treat lacquer-ware in similar terms. Defoe's assessments of Chinese applied arts are thus a mixture of appreciation and belittlement. But he strongly censures the new English eagerness to collect "the Toys and Gaiety of China and Japan," deeming them trifles and gewgaws unworthy of importation; any aesthetic merits they might have are outweighed by economic considerations.
A graver objection to the East India trade, in Defoe's eyes, was that it violated certain fundamental principles of beneficial overseas commerce. One tenet of mercantilism was that an international trade relationship was justifiable only if it resulted in a net inflow of precious metals, a doctrine known as bullionism. Defoe recognized that the soundness of bilateral trade might not always be measurable in such terms, but where the East India trade was concerned, he and other opponents were staunch bullionists. The Indians, the Chinese, and other Asian trading partners had no use for the woolens that were England’s staple export commodity, so that nearly everything the English wished to acquire in the East Indies had to be paid for in silver. The result was an enormous outflow of precious metal, held up with horror as evidence that the East India Company was enriching itself but leading England to ruin.
In various works, Defoe argues that trade is essential to England's strength, but that the kind carried on with the East Indies merely saps the nation’s vitality. In the late 1720s he says that trade had earlier been in a "melancholy and dismal" state: "Nothing but the East India Trade could be said to thrive; their Ships went out full of Money, and came home full of Poison; for it was all Poison to our Trade : The immense Sums of ready Money that went abroad to India impoverish’d our Trade, and indeed bid fair to starve it, and, in a word, to beggar the Nation." Defoe's enthusiasm over thriving commerce is well known, as is his ability to find merit even in kinds of trade that aroused opposition then and since, such as doing business with an enemy during wartime. Less familiar are the points at which he deems "pernicious Trading" contrary to the national interest.
At the time the three volumes of Robinson Crusoe were being written and published, Defoe's objections to the East India trade took on particular topicality and urgency. The chief manufactures being imported were silk and particularly cotton fabrics ; their popularity had caused a crisis throughout the woollen trade, which at the time was crucial to the English economy. Defoe campaigned actively in behalf of the woollen trade in The Manufacturer, a journal he produced between October 1719 and March 1721, and in various polemical pamphlets. He contended that the health of the economy required a complete ban on the Asian cottons known as "callicoes," and his campaign was successful ; in 1720, Parliament passed "An Act to preserve and encourage the Woollen and Silk Manufactures of this Kingdom, and for more effectual employing the Poor, by prohibiting the Use and Wear of all printed, painted, stained or dyed Callicoes in Apparel, Houshold Stuff, Furniture, or otherwise." Despite resistance by the East India Company, Defoe's socioeconomic assessment of the situation prevailed. His opposition to the East India trade was not a phobia peculiar to him, but a principled, persuasively argued position, eventually endorsed by a parliamentary majority.
In the decades preceding the Crusoe volumes, traders who write about their experience tend to harp on the difficulties of doing business in China ; several find more shrewdness than uprightness in their Chinese counterparts. This is a recurrent complaint, even in accounts that are generally positive, as those of the Jesuits tend to be. Ferdinand de los Rios is unusually vehement : "this is the true Kingdom of the Devil, and where he may be said to govern with absolute Power. Every . . . Chinese, seems to be possess'd by him ; for there is no piece of Malice, or Fraud, but what they attempt. The Government, tho' outwardly it appears good, as to Order and Method, for its Security ; yet when you once have Experience of its Practice, you will find it is all a Contrivance of the Devil. Tho' they do not here publickly rob, or plunder Strangers, they do it another worse Way. "
When he denies that Chinese order is evidence of good government, and finds everything "a Contrivance of the Devil," whose "true Kingdom" it is, this missionary anticipates Defoe, who also refuses to believe that there is much substance to whatever "outwardly . . . appears good," and thinks the devil "may be said to govern with absolute Power." But Defoe goes a step farther than Father Ferdinand and other Jesuits who include occasional criticisms in their generally admiring reports. As we shall see, he holds up the Jesuits' own way of seeking to establish Christianity in China as proof of the devil's total sway there.
Writings by actual traders, however, had little influence on Defoe's treatment of China in his novels; nor is this surprising, since he represents Crusoe and his other peripatetic heroes not as merchants but adventurers, who from time to time happen to buy and sell. In their later careers, Colonel Jack and Captain Singleton are persistently anxious and vulnerable because of their own guilt, past or present. Crusoe is anxious and vulnerable in the East Indies only briefly, until he can get rid of a ship that he has purchased innocently but unwarily from some pirates who had stolen it. He experiences momentary "Anxieties and Perplexities," but these are based on a real danger of being seized and summarily executed as a pirate by an English or Dutch ship, not on any "Apprehensions" involving the Chinese.
In any case, I see no grounds for supposing that Defoe's criticism of China is provoked by frustration, either his own or Crusoe's, over doing business there. Crusoe trades quite profitably with the Chinese, without encountering any intransigence or dishonesty on their part. Nor do I find any evidence in the Crusoe volumes or elsewhere that Defoe wishes the Chinese were more accessible or accommodating, so that trade with them could be easier and more profitable. Agents of the East India Company do express annoyance at Chinese bureaucracy and dishonesty. But Defoe, far from seeking to facilitate or enlarge a trade that he judges inimical to English interests, writes caustically against it, and tries to turn his countrymen’s attention elsewhere. Both Africa and South America seem to him more promising, either for beneficial commerce or colonization. Nor is China a commercial rival striving to export its fabrics, tea, or porcelain to markets in which they would compete against English goods. The chief threat to English welfare is posed by the English themselves :
We see our trade sick and languishing, and our poor starving before our eyes; and know that we our selves are the only cause of it, are yet so obstinately and unalterably averse to our own manufacture, and fond of novelties and trifles, that we will not wear our own goods, but will at any hazard make use of things foreign to us, the labour and advantage of strangers, pagans, negroes, or any kind of people rather than our own.
Indifferent or blind to their own interests, the English perversely insist on using Chinese tea, cotton, silk, and porcelain, even though domestic beverages, fabrics, and housewares are available, and in Defoe's judgment, superior. The East India Company is as culpable as the fickle and foolish English buyer: it profits at the expense of national prosperity, by sending silver out of the country to fetch back needless trumpery and gewgaws. For importing, purchasing, and consuming such products, Defoe holds his countrymen responsible, but cannot and does not blame the Chinese.
Governance
Western admirers of China focused on the mandarins, whose power and prestige were based not on inheritance but on ability and learning, as tested through examinations. Defoe concentrates instead on the populace at large, insisting that a country cannot be a utopia if most of its people live in misery. He gives the Chinese credit for industriousness, referring to their "indefatigable Application," but thinks the benefits of this virtue are negated by a social and economic system that reduces most of the population to misery. Crusoe finds the country "infinitely populous, but miserably cultivated; the Husbandry, the Oeconomy, and the Way of living, miserable . . . I say, miserable, and so it is, if we who understand how to live were to endure it, or to compare it with our own, but not so to these poor Wretches who know no other." In later writings Defoe similarly emphasizes the wretchedness of the Chinese people, less to elicit pity for them than to suggest that their degradation is the natural result of tyranny—unless the folk respond to despotic abuse by becoming a rebellious mob, and forcibly reconstitute the social bonds that a tyrant has in effect dissolved.
At work here is the principle that even a dangerous, unruly mob is better than a weak-spirited, slavish populace. In polemical contexts, Defoe sometimes impugns the actions or language of adversaries by associating them with the intemperateness and violence of the mob. But at other times he treats the mob as a valid representative of the will of the people, driven to desperation by tyranny. Under such provocation, when the normal political order has been violated by a despot, Defoe deems it natural for the populace to assert itself as the fundamental source and beneficiary of all government. Even in their excesses, the English people, willing and able to defend themselves, have demonstrated a superiority to their counterparts elsewhere. Defoe contrasts the irrepressible English most frequently and favorably with the supine peasants of France, whose misery does not lessen their deference to royal, aristocratic, and clerical masters. The people of Prussia, also exploited by despotic rulers, are similarly acquiescent. The English alone realize, and have historically insisted upon, their collective rights. However arguable they may be, these assumptions are central to his critique of China.
"What Policy," Defoe demands, "is required in governing a People, of whom 'tis said, that if you command them to hang themselves, they will only cry a little, and submit immediately ?" Besides being a specimen of his mordant humor, this is part of his indictment of the vaunted Chinese system of government : "an absolute Tyranny," in his opinion, is "the easiest Way of Ruling in the World, where the People are dispos'd to obey, as blindly as the Mandarin commands or governs imperiously." Refusing to join the chorus of China's Western admirers, Defoe denies that the maintenance of order in such a vast and populous nation is owing to great political acumen. A major objective of his long poem Jure Divino (1706) is to discredit the Tory and High Church doctrine of passive obedience; he argues that the apologists for Stuart absolutism and "divine right" seek to justify tyranny, and that the submission to royal and clerical authority they demand is tantamount to slavery. Defoe's theories of government include a conviction that blind obedience shows people to be fools, not good citizens: "Nations who to Tyranny submit / Can ne’er be scandaliz'd for too much Wit". Such obedience is unnatural : when beaten, even "Balaam's Beast durst in Resistance bray," and "Nature abhors the vile submissive Slave".
The Chinese polity is deplorable not only for being a tyranny—Europe and the Near East have had their share of those, as the historical pageant of books 7–10 makes clear—but for its victims yielding to tyranny so abjectly. Defoe is aware of the anarchic potential of the English mob, but when its liberty is in jeopardy, its recourse to violence seems to him legitimate, and preferable to the cowed compliance of the common people in France or China, who meekly bow under their yokes. To him, such docility signals a demoralized and spiritless populace, not a well-governed society. Crusoe calls the Chinese "a contemptible Hoord or Crowd of ignorant sordid Slaves ; subjected to a Government qualified only to rule such a People." Their submissiveness to superiors shows the dire consequences of divine-right theories of government. That the Chinese social order rests on such principles had long been asserted by its critics : "The Government of this Kingdome is meerly tyrannicall; there being no other Lord but the King . . . The King alone is the generall Landlord, and him the subjects do not onely reverence as a Prince, but adore like a God. For in the chief City of every Province, they have the Kings portraiture made of gold, which is always covered with a veil: and at every New-moon, the Magistrates and other inferiour Officers use to kneel before it, as if it were the King himself. By these and other artifices of the like contrivement the Common-people are kept in such awe and fear, that they are rather slaves than subjects."
Defoe himself suggests, through the careers of his fictional heroes and heroines, that spirited unruliness is better than acquiescent resignation ; the novels display sympathy with those who respond aggressively to adversity, and contempt for those who cringe, truckle, and grovel.
To be sure, he often satirizes English fractiousness and restiveness, yet English insubordination has served historically as a check on tyranny. The only alternative, in Defoe's view, is the acquiescence exemplified by the French and the Chinese. In such societies,
If the exalted Tyrant Claims his Right,
The Passive Slave must patiently submit ;
His Wife, Life, Land, his Sword and Gun resign,
And neither must Resist, nor may Repine ;
If to be murther'd, must to Fate give way,
And if to Hang his Passive Self : Obey.
Such, he suggests, are the consequences of patiently submitting, whether in France or in China. Defoe regards France, however, as a great nation and a genuine threat to England. He repeatedly argues that the English tendency to "Undervalue and Contemn" the power of France is foolish and dangerous : "Tis an allow'd Maxim in War, never to Contemn the meanest Adversary; and it must pass with me for a Maxim in Politicks, Not to Contemn the Power that is so far from Mean, that 'tis a Match for half the World." If Defoe had perceived China as a menace to England or its interests, he probably would have tried to alert his countrymen to the danger by emphasizing, not by "Undervalu[ing] and Contemn[ing]," its accomplishments and its strengths. France worried him, and to galvanize his complacent countrymen, he played Cassandra. If China had worried him, it seems unlikely that he would resort to "compensatory fantasies" to avoid acknowledging that threat.
Religion
In the Serious Reflections, Defoe has Crusoe declare, "As to their Religion, 'tis all summ'd up in Confucius his Maxims, whose Theology, I take to be a Rhapsody of Moral Conclusions; a Foundation, or what we may call Elements of Polity, Morality and Superstition, huddl'd together in a Rhapsody of Words, without Consistency, and indeed with very little Reasoning in it." Various writers of the time share this view; some are even more critical of the Confucian texts, and see no point in debating the merits of a moral code which (in their view) has so little bearing on actual behavior.
Defoe attacks China even more sweepingly in the Serious Reflections of August 1720 than he had in the Farther Adventures a year earlier. One provocation may have been Charles Gildon’s assertion in September 1719 that Sir William Temple's favorable account of China was more trustworthy than Robinson Crusoe's slurs in the Farther Adventures. The context for Temple's praise of Confucius and traditional Chinese philosophy was the "Ancients versus Moderns" controversy. Temple's essays made him the leading English advocate of the merits of the Ancients ; William Wotton's slighting account of Chinese learning, particularly in natural science and medicine, was one aspect of his defense of the Moderns. Defoe's denigration of Confucius aligns him with the Moderns, as does his insistence on the cultural importance of printing and gunpowder.
Furthermore, Temple praises the very elements in Confucianism which were becoming shibboleths of the English deists, regarding the strength of "natural reason" and its sufficiency for the attainment of human happiness. Temple acknowledges that the reputation of the Chinese for "wisdom and knowledge" is "apt to be lessened by their gross and sottish idolatry," but he thinks such religious beliefs and practices are confined to "the vulgar or illiterate," "the common people and the women. " The learned, in contrast, "adore the spirit of the world, which they hold to be eternal; and this without temples, idols, or priests." The accuracy of Temple's conception of Confucianism scarcely matters: like Defoe's writing on China, it reveals more about the English author than his Chinese subject. Implicit in Temple's admiration for Confucian thought is his own skeptical or deistic preference for reason over revelation, and for a religion of nature cultivated by literati over one requiring temples or priests and catering to common people and women.
In adopting Wotton's low rather than Temple's high opinion of Confucianism, Defoe challenges an English attitude he sees as absurd and insidious. Besides overrating Confucian thought, Temple and other freethinkers hold up as meritorious those features of it most baneful to Protestant Christianity. Prizing only the "natural" and the "rational," they associate organized religion with priestcraft, and the supernatural (including revelation) with superstition. In The Consolidator, Defoe parodies the uncritical adulation of Chinese wisdom and knowledge. Temple is not attacked by name, but he was the most influential English spokesman for the view that China epitomized Ancient superiority, and his claims would probably have been identified by readers as those being mocked.
Temple's exalted notion of Confucianism relied on accounts by the Jesuits, whose writings were a major source of Defoe's information as well. The value of their testimony, and of their actual missionary activity, was called into question by rival orders; these conflicts culminated in 1715 with Pope Clement's bull condemning the Jesuits' position. Opponents accused them of adapting Christianity to Chinese paganism, both to avoid giving offense and to gain proselytes, and of reinforcing rather than purifying a debased religion, by grafting onto it the worship of images—the very feature of Roman Catholicism most repugnant to a Protestant like Defoe. From his perspective, the version of Christianity propagated by the Jesuits and the traditional religion of China were both idolatrous.
In the Farther Adventures, however, the Jesuit fathers are credited with courage, zeal, and unselfishness in their missionary efforts. Catholic as well as Protestant critics accused the order of selfish motives and sinister methods, but Defoe does not. Through this moderation, he brings out the disparity between the worthy intentions and the sorry results of the would-be Christianizers of China ; the Jesuits' efforts have been prolonged, dedicated, but altogether nugatory. Defoe interprets this failure not as evidence of either Jesuit weakness or Chinese strength, but as proof of the subtlety and resourcefulness of the powers of darkness. As he sees it, prior to the Jesuits' arrival, the dominion of the devil over China had been complete. A genuine conversion of the Chinese to Christianity would have deprived Satan of millions of subjects, but the labors of the Jesuits merely confirmed his sway. Thus Defoe says in the Serious Reflections, "The Missionaries in China tolerated the Worshipping the Devil," and that "the Jesuits join'd the Paganism of the Heathen with the High Mass." Elsewhere he says of Satan,
the Jesuits and he form'd a hotch-potch of religion made up of Popery and Paganism . . . blending the faith of Christ and the philosophy or morals of Confucius together . . . by which means the politick interest of the mission was preserved, and yet Satan lost not one inch of ground with the Chineses. . . . Thus the mission has in it self been truly devilish, and the Devil has interested himself in the planting the christian religion in China.
Such charges were reiterated frequently, even by critics who did not go so far as to identify the devil as the object of Chinese idolatry.
In treating the devil, the Jesuits, and the Chinese as so well suited to each other, Defoe collapses the distinction Temple drew between the sophisticated beliefs of the literati and the "gross and sottish idolatry“ of the common people, and lumps all Chinese religion together as idolatrous. He can see th" point in primitive people adoring something as glorious and influential as the sun, but it makes no sense to him to worship something made of base materials, incorporating features drawn from lower animals and disturbed imaginations, and apparently inspiring more anxiety than admiration in its devotees. Such an idol, he thinks, must be the devil : if not an image of him, an object contrived by him to keep his worshipers in slavish, fearful subjection. He sees the idols of China in this light, and judges Chinese religion accordingly.
Crusoe might simply have deplored the depths to which religion had sunk, and gone his way. His indignation reaches its highest pitch, however, not when he himself feels endangered, but when strong revulsion is aroused in him by a conviction that this or that practice is against nature. When Defoe considers something totally unnatural, he makes his fictional characters respond with shock and repugnance. Moll Flanders discovers in Virginia that she is married to her half-brother, and finds incest intolerably "nauseous and surfeiting" ; Crusoe is similarly horrified and physically sickened when, on his island, he encounters Caribbean cannibalism. Contemplating Chinese and Mongolian idols in the Farther Adventures, he experiences similar sensations. Defoe portrays these as natural recoils from unnatural situations : spontaneous, immediate reactions, extreme but understandable. Yet Moll does not act at once on her sense that "coming between the Sheets" with her brother is no better than sleeping with a dog, nor had Crusoe acted on his strong urge to punish the cannibals for their barbarity. But the Mongolian idol arouses in him an abhorrence, and a determination to do away with it, which are not abandoned. He does not reflect (as he had on the earlier occasion) that bad as the objects of his detestation might be, it is no business of his to be punishing them. Instead, he contrives and executes his foolhardy scheme without serious misgivings. He represents this particular idol as utterly unnatural : by destroying it, he thinks he is ridding the world of an affront to nature and the true God.
Devilish idols are the grimmest specimens of monstrosity that Crusoe encounters in China, but their misshapen incongruity is often brought out through droll touches, such as the reference to one of them as "a kind of celestial Hedgehog." Other deviations from what Defoe regards as natural are more comic, such as the episode in which a proud "Country Gentleman" is fed by his servants : he sat lolling back in a great Elbo Chair, being a heavy corpulent Man, and his Meat being brought him by two Women Slaves; he had two more, whose Office, I think, few Gentlemen in Europe would accept of their Service in, (viz.) One fed the Squire with a Spoon, and the other held the Dish with one Hand, and scrap’d off what he let fall upon his Worship's Beard and Taffaty Vest, while the great fat Brute thought it below him to employ his own Hands in any of those familiar Offices, which Kings and Monarchs would rather do, than be troubled with the clumsy Fingers of their Servants.
For a grown man to be fed like a baby by his "Slaves" is unnatural, but this "greasy Don," whose "Mixture of Pomp and Poverty" is likened to Don Quixote's, is made to appear more absurd than sinister. He is described at greater length than anyone else Crusoe encounters in China, and personifies what Defoe sees as China's baseless conceit. At the same time, this vignette is part of a larger pattern, suggesting that passivity is endemic to Chinese character and culture. Otherwise, Defoe implies, the populace would not acquiesce in its misery and submit to its enslavement. An adult male being spoon-fed is regarded by the Chinese as a display of his power and dignity, but by Defoe as a shameful spectacle of weakness and dependence. The implicit contrast is with manly self-reliance, the value of which Crusoe had demonstrated on his island, in the account of his Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures published only four months earlier. In any case, the satiric comedy of the "Country Gentleman" episode recurs at several points during Crusoe's travels in China : for instance, when he deflates China's achievements in porcelain by referring to ludicrous exaggerations ; when he derides its expertise in astronomy by dramatizing its belief that eclipses are caused by dragons ; and, most pointedly, in his "speaking in Colours" about the Great Wall. Such moments may be more sardonic than hilarious, but they help to make the prevailing tone far from one of shrill anxiety. Crusoe and his European traveling companions, a gentlemanly French missionary priest and a worldly-wise Portuguese pilot, find most of China's pretensions laughable, and "us'd to be very merry upon these Occasions" : not the mood of a man burdened with nightmarish fantasies or obsessions.
Conclusion
From the evidence assembled here, it should be clear that Defoe has a low opinion of what he takes to be China's system of governance and its religion. Among goods imported from China, some, such as tea, he thinks should be grown in English territories nearer home, and others, particularly lightweight fabrics, banned altogether. He regards the entire trade as benefitting only China, India, and the East India Company, and as damaging to British and European interests. He opposes it because he is convinced that the woollen trade is vital to English welfare, and that paying for imports with bullion is fatal to commerce. His epithets for the goods themselves range from belittling ("trifles") to scathing ("trash"), yet neither they nor their Chinese producers are as much the objects of his scorn as the English : both the East India Company which pursues its own profit rather than national prosperity, and the consumers who prefer insubstantial imports over superior domestic products. As for Defoe's criticism of other aspects of Chinese culture, I have suggested that even when he prefers something British to its Chinese counterpart—unruly mob over „submissive Slave,“ or Protestant Christianity over devilish idolatry—his satire often is directed less toward the Chinese institution or custom itself than against those in the West who confer legitimacy on absolutism in the political sphere, or freethinking in the religious sphere, under the guise of honoring antiquity, stability, "natural reason," and the like. In short, Defoe perceives China as a monitory example. What poses a threat, in his opinion, is the perverse Western appetite for Chinese goods, beliefs, and practices. For Europeans to indulge this fondness seems to him not merely foolish but pernicious in its commercial, political, and religious consequences.