By Carlin Romano

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat.

 —Kipling, "The Ballad of East and West"

We like to think about conflict in simple terms. Good vs. evil. Right vs. Left. Big vs. small. Boxers vs. briefs.

Graduate school and academic life interfere with that bent for some, saving them from ever thinking simply (and sometimes clearly) again. Once one learns that modern Eskimos possess 30 different words for briefs and boxers, or some such ethnographic truth, easy distinctions disappear down the rabbit hole. For the rest, the old, handy binaries remain tools for framing social clashes.

"East vs. West" certainly feels hard to avoid in the aftermath of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo's winning of the Nobel Peace Prize. The fury with which the Chinese government greeted the award to the 54-year-old literary critic became a story in itself.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee cited Liu, now serving an 11-year sentence on subversion charges in a prison hundreds of miles from Beijing, for "his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China." The committee noted that such rights have been "distinctly curtailed" as Chinese economic might has risen, the opposite of what many in the West hoped would happen after engagement with China's Communist government.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry denounced the choice of Liu, whom it deemed "a criminal," as a "desecration" of the prize, an "obscenity," a "blasphemy." The government blacked out CNN reports of the prize, blocked text messages with Liu's name, barred media access to his wife (then arrested her), and broke up a private celebration of Liu's selection. The Global Times, a government newspaper, declared in an editorial that the Norwegian committee sought to impose "Western" values on China. Later the paper added that the prize signaled "an extraordinary terror of China's rise and the Chinese model."

The committee, anticipating the Chinese government's attempt to blunt the rights issue by stirring nationalism, stated in its citation that the award was going not to the West, but to Liu, who represented "many Chinese, both in China itself and abroad," struggling for human rights in declarations such as Charter 08, the document signed by thousands of Liu's countrymen before the government banned access to it on the Internet.

East vs. West?

Sources on "East" and "West" abound for the bookish, from Herodotus, Spengler, and classic tomes of a nearer yesteryear (Edward Said's Orientalism and the debate it spurred with Bernard Lewis) to the endless slew of political-science tomes about "China Rising" or "India Without Limits." New books also offer insights. Gurcharan Das's The Difficulty of Being Good (Oxford University Press), in which the Indian author and student of John Rawls recounts how he sought the "subtle art of Dharma" through years of studying the Mahabharata, ably explores the wisdom of India's "foundational text" from a modern liberal viewpoint. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, by Guy Deutscher (Metropolitan Books), brilliantly surveys the differences that words and grammar make between cultures. Ian Morris's Why the West Rules—For Now (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), marshals enormous historical evidence for how geography influences imbalances between West and East.

But for reflecting most broadly on the East-West tension generated by Liu's Nobel, the best aid of the moment is Patrick Smith's Somebody Else's Century: East and West in a Post-Western World (Pantheon, 2010). An American journalist and author (Japan: A Reinterpretation, The Nippon Challenge) long based in Asia, Smith broadens his scope here to include China and India as he scrutinizes "East" and "West." Unburdened by the academic's need to qualify every statement and then qualify it again, Smith, who admires Nietzsche's calls for stepping outside one's frozen clichés, writes like a bureau chief transitioned into freedom, liberated to say what he really thinks.

Occasionally, he misfires, as when he declares, "We will not survive the Western notion of the individual much longer." On the whole, though, his observations sprinkle wisdom from decades of reporting. The parts of the book directly about China shine light on all the old sub-binaries: spirituality vs. materialism, community vs. individualism, hierarchy vs. egalitarianism.

Smith's contemporary China retains its ressentiment. When the author asks a longtime resident of the mainland what Westerners brought to the world of Chinese village life, one Joe Poon answers, "Opium. Pollution. Consumption." Chinese, Smith argues, still think about the 1842 treaty that ended the Opium Wars and humiliated Emperor Daoguang of the Qing dynasty. That palpable sense of sudden inferiority and victimization, Smith writes, "lies just below the surface of Chinese life and erupts through it routinely."

In the post-Mao era, as in the brief era between the end of the Qing dynasty and the coming of Communist rule in 1949, the Chinese have responded with wisdom, Smith writes, that suffuses Lampedusa's classic novel of evolving Sicily, The Leopard: "If things are going to stay the same, things will have to change." The Chinese, Smith suggests, took on the simple strategy: "Let us adopt foreign things, and so keep the core of ourselves intact." In Chinese terms, Smith contends, ti (essence, substance, spirit) would be preserved, while yong (material things) would be co-opted.

Unfortunately, Smith asserts, yong in post-Mao China has become "the new ti." At the same time, China, so to speak, has missed "the ti of the West," which is rooted in the universal rights of the individual. What China cannot admit now, he writes, is that "when yong became ti, there was no longer any ti; life is all method and things." As a result, we get China's "prevalent preoccupation" with "material prosperity alone," the "emptiness of Chinese affluence" today, and, Smith submits, its "nihilism."

Smith's overview clarifies a powerful reason for the Chinese government's fury. It knows it has no authentic ideology left to offer people battling for their own vision of individual freedom. As Smith portrays matters, China's "communism" is phony, its socialism fading, its relation to its own history significantly dishonest. In two of his most powerful pieces of reportage, Smith takes us first to enormous Nanjing Memorial Hall, where China remembers the massacre of some 300,000 of its people by Japanese troops in 1937, and then to a tiny museum on the outskirts of Shantou, "hidden within a country park"—the only museum in China dedicated to the horrors of Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Beijing, it turns out, learned of the Shantou museum only when it opened, in 2005. Its sole founder, Peng Qi'an, told Smith that a city official informed him: "Don't wait for any response from the central government, because no one from the party or any party committee will have anything to say about your museum, good or bad." That is, so long as Peng Qi'an doesn't take his agenda any further.

"Deng gave us the era of lost memory," explains Xie Tao, a former vice president of prestigious Renmin University whom Smith consults because of Xie's courage. At the age of 85, Xie published a critique of rule by the Communist Party he joined at 25.

Xie laments his old colleagues' suppression of free expression: "Nothing can be mentioned. Nothing of history can be discussed. This is China's greatest struggle now—or one of them: to speak, to put history back in our newspapers and our media."

If the Chinese Communist Party screamed so loudly over Liu's prize, Smith indicates, it is because it "no longer knows what to think or say about the past," and has no argument to justify its rule in the present. Below the surface, he advises, China's "harmonious society" is not. Says a former Tiananmen activist, "One of the weaknesses of the Chinese nation is that we cannot admit our weaknesses."

For many sympathetic onlookers, the key question before December's Nobel Prize ceremonies is whether Chinese government officials will relent in any way. Will they allow Mrs. Liu to go to Oslo to accept the prize? Will they release Liu himself under some deal with his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama? For big-picture sorts, the question is whether public-relations pressure can make any difference to the Chinese government's unbending resistance to political change. Optimists cite the statement, posted on the Internet right after the announcement of Liu's prize, in which 23 retired Chinese Communist Party officials sharply criticized the present government's oppressive acts against human rights. Pessimists note that the Burmese Nobel Peace laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, remains under house arrest nearly two decades after her 1991 prize.

Smith offers some insight here, too. The great irony of the Chinese government's anger over Liu is that "China is Westernizing beyond anything the most Western of Westernizers might have imagined." Almost all of it, as noted, is that Westernization of things rather than values. Given such contradictions, Smith finds the terms "East" and "West" too "confining, uncomfortable," too likely to cause "misunderstandings." They are "losing what usefulness they may have had."

In that light, the best support Western intellectuals can give to brave Chinese fighting for their rights may be to adopt toward "East" and "West" the slogan that Bo Xilai, mayor of the gritty northern city of Dalian, made famous as he demolished much of it in the 1990s: Chai chai kan, or "Tear it down and see what happens."

Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle, is a professor of philosophy and humanities at Ursinus College.