Is China Inevitable?

Inevitable…yet moral and complying with the will of God

Last week, in Venice, we went past the home of Marco Polo.

Marco Polo, for those who went to public school in the US in the past 30 years and never heard of him, was a Venetian explorer who first went to China in 1269 and introduced Europeans to China and Chinese culture.

What Marco Polo found in China was a civilization far in advance of anything in Europe. The Chinese had already invented gunpowder, astronomy, the basics of chemistry, metallurgy, advanced architecture, not to mention silk, spaghetti (yes, it’s true) and whole lot more.

Compared to the Chinese, the Europeans were living in the Dark Ages. In fact, they were living in the Dark Ages.

China was already sailing great ships all over the world.  

Yet in a few hundred years, China would be driven in to eclipse and Europe would stand supreme for nearly 700 years – that is, until now.

The end of Chinese culture and power would not come from the end of a gun (as Mao might have said), but rather from a European invention created just a few hundred miles north of Polo’s Venice – the Printing Press.

In 1452, when Johannes Gutenberg first put paper to movable type, he also cast the death sentence on Chinese civilization.

Chinese culture, literature, science, government was all based upon a written language that has nearly 40,000 characters (though you can get by with a few thousand).  The language is ideographic, that is, it is driven by symbols as opposed to letters.

Beautiful though it is, the Chinese language left China in a kind of cultural cul-de-sac as the Gutenberg Revolution swept the world.

Western languages such as English are constructed of 26 letters.  That’s simple when it comes to the printing press. You need only cast (and find and arrange) 26 letters to take your entire culture from verbal to print.  You can do it an an afternoon.

But with Chinese and its thousands of ideograms, the notion of a composer sitting before a tray of 10,000 or so individual ‘letters’ and arranging them to create a newspaper to be printed was just… well, impossible.

Thus, as civilization moved into the world of the printed word, China and the Chinese were left behind.

It was not their fault. It was inherent in the DNA of their alphabet, and to a larger extent, to a culture that ‘thought’ in images instead of linear words.

Now we are rapidly moving into screen world. A world in which the average person spends 8.5 hours a day staring at screens.

And those screens carry images. In fact, they carry images far more easily than they carry letters and words.

The world of screenworld – computers, iPhones, Blackberrys, televisions, is far more friendly to images than it is to text.

Try typing on your iPhone if you don’t believe me. 

As chinese ideograms were to the printing press, text-based information is to the screen.

A non-starter.

So as we start to live more and more in screen world, we are also going to start to live more and more in the world of images. We will begin to create our own ideograms, (and latterly, what I might call videograms), to convey complex ideas as briefly and simply and powerfully as possible.

Don’t believe me?  :((

Just take a look at the dock on your Mac (if you’ve got one).  Safari, Mail, Twitter, Skype, iPhoto.  All ideograms.

And we are only at the beginning.

Inevitably, as video becomes better and better, vMail is going to replace eMail.  Simply turn on the camera, say what you want and hit send.

As the technology of the 15th Century inevitably pushed the Medieval world toward literacy, (and very often against their will or even their very belief that this could happen), so too will the world of images slowly erode the world of text.  

And it is not just about how we write. It is the kind of culture that we are.  

We are a linear culture.  We have been nurtured on the written word and the notion of linear explanations.  But China… ah China. Here is a culture that spent 3,000 years steeped in images.

They think images.

Linear writing for them is a relative novelty. But nonlinear image based thinking?  Comes naturally.

So as the Chinese found themselves in a technological cul de sac for the past 600 years or so, we may now find ourselves in the same situation for the future.

å­¸ learn.