China and the West

Joseph Conrad und China.
Heliéna M. Krenn : The image of the Chinese which Conrad draws in individual works roughly corresponds with the stereotypes found in other writing of the time. His interest in China had various origins. In addition to his childhood reading, which whetted his appetite for the distant and the unknown, there was his father's literary activity, which acquainted him with Victor Hugo, an enthusiastic admirer of the Chinese. Later, his life as a sailor offered chances for personal contact with Chinese individuals. Conrad never reached China. His acquaintance with the Far East was limited to the brief periods he spent in eastern seaports. An important stimulus were England's imperialist policies and increased trade relations with Asia, especially China, in the nineteenth century.
A less obvious but more basic and therefore more important explanation for Conrad's sentiment about China can be found in his approach to his creative activity which may well have been affected by Schopenhauer's philosophy and Oriental concepts.
If Conrad's creative genius experiences an affinity with China because of the aura of mysteriousness that surrounded that country, her people's self-understanding as constituting the center of civilized humanity, and the potential for good and evil which that vast country then held for Western minds, it also explains the great variety of images of the country and her people in his writings. To be sure, contemporary stereotypes of the Chinese occur in Conrad's work : among the most frequently mentioned occupations are those related to trade and business, food culture, and the earning of money as coolies and 'boys' by any kind of labor, and Conrad's 'Chinaman' wear pigtails, have 'almost' eyes, are 'yellow', speak pidgin English, and several of them smoke opium. Despite this compliance with stereotypes, Conrad presents individualities, traits, and situations that reflect the changing Western opinions of China which, as the reader discovers, resulted from the change of attitudes toward that country and her people at different periods of Western history.
The discovery that for Conrad the way of speaking and thinking about the Chinese is a subtle device to reveal character is confirmed when those personalities are considered who hold outspokenly positive views of them.
The Chinese are obscure, mysterious, and of a doubtful nature to Westerners, they are in danger of being wrongly seen and misunderstood. The oral mode of presentation of narrative details enables the author to forestall misinterpretations of what is shadowy and enigmatic in his tales by allowing for rival versions to what any one speaker puts forward at any one time.
The Chinese are seen through different eyes and from different angles. The reader experiences one utterance as standing against another, recognizes misinterpretations and misrepresentations of the Chinese as welcome means for revealing the characters of those who incur them, and is warned against jumping to rash conclusions. To the degree to which the informative value of whatever is being said about China and the Chinese is recognized as relative to the character of the speaker the likelihood of Conrad's self-identification with those utterances decreases.
The mere fact of allowing for alternatives proves Conrad's divergence from the prevailing negative opinions of his time. Likewise, the frequent coupling of disagreeable characters with negative opinions about China and the Chinese can be taken as suggestive of the author's sympathetic attitude toward them.