Squaring the Chinese Circle
on November 5, 1992
“China,” according to Lucien Pye, “is a civilization pretending to be a state.”1 This is an elegant formulation of an idea which eventually occurs to most people who have studied, read about, or traveled and lived in China. In the late sixteenth century the Jesuits adopted Chinese dress, and shelved some of their basic beliefs; so did some missionaries in 1900. When Owen Lattimore was married in 1926 in Peking he and his wife posed for a photograph in Chinese costume; so did William Empson when he taught there in the 1930s.