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monopoly on power, of the divine monarch and his courtiers. So the nineteenth-century Chinese establishment scholars found an ingenious formula: Western knowledge for practical matters, such as weaponry, and Chinese learning for spiritual and moral affairs. This formula was later adopted by the Japanese as well.
    It was a hopeless undertaking. You cannot separate one kind of knowledge from another, cannot import what is merely utilitarian while keeping out the potentially subversive ideas that go with it. But the effort persists to this day: the Chinese government wants the benefits of information technology without the ideas it makes available to all. Misguided or not, the classification of Western knowledge as purely practical confirmed the notion of a cold and mechanical Occident. The other thing that has remained a constant factor in Chinese and many other non-European societies, ever since their confrontation with modern Western ideas, is the split between nativists and Westernizers. The former dream of going back to the purity of an imaginary past: Japan under the divine emperor, the Caliphate united under Islam, China as a community of peasants. The latter are iconoclasts, who see local tradition as an impediment to radical modernization.
    The problem of radical modernizers was how to modernize without becoming a mere clone of the West. Was there a way to build a modern nation without letting in Christianity and other forms of “spiritual pollution”? b This problem was sharpest in the Muslim countries, where the modern successes of Christian empires were felt as an intolerable humiliation. Given these circumstances, the appeal of socialism, whether in an Arab or Chinese guise, is not at all surprising. Marxism is egalitarian, and indisputably modern. It came from the West, and like Christianity it has universal claims. But its promise to liberate mankind is “scientific,” not cultural or religious. State socialism was a way for non-Western countries to become part of the modern, industrial world without appearing to mimic the metropoles of capitalist imperialism. This alternative route to modernity was tried in Egypt, Iraq, North Korea, Ethiopia, Cuba, China, Vietnam, and many other places. And it failed. The most violent forms of Occidentalism, of nativist yearnings for purity and destructive loathing of the West, were born from this failure, or, as was the case in China, were part of it.
    Of all Third World revolutions, Chairman Mao’s was the most inspiring model of Occidentalist dreams. Chairman Mao was at war with Western imperialism, of course, and a great wrecker of Chinese traditions. But what made him original, compared with Stalin, was his war against the City. Against the advice of Comintern agents and fellow Chinese Communists, who championed the urban proletariat, Mao decided to mobilize rural China and reverse the victory of town over country. Shanghai, in particular, was seen as the symbol of Western imperialism, capitalist corruption, degenerate urban luxury, cultural artificiality, and moral decadence. Shanghai, with its teeming slums, coffeehouses, French restaurants, Hollywood movies, Russian teahouses, and merchants and prostitutes of all races and creeds, was the most venal, most soulless, most Westernized urban whore of all. The fact that one of the most ferocious apostles of Maoism, Mao’s own wife Jiang Qing, was once a Shanghai movie starlet and good-time girl only goes to show that violent hatred and deep longing can be closely related.
    The horizon of Mao’s rural revolution went far beyond Shanghai. His idea of a rural revolt was not limited to China. Mao saw himself as the champion of the entire Third World. And so did his sympathizers in the West. For all those who hated the bourgeois West, Maoism promised a way out of capitalist alienation, urban decadence, Western imperialism, selfish individualism, cold reason, and modern anomie. Under Mao, warm human bonds would be restored,