ContentsPrologueFirst impression arrivalThe way the pendulum swingsBeijing, on the eve of a new yearThe first of October National DayLets get to know each other firstMianziHello, have you eaten yet?Gaokao： the university entrance examYesterdays China, todays ChinaReform in 1979Freshness is everythingFrom black to green?Contemporary Chinese literatureChange, does everything change?Spanish literature in Chinese translation These days it is not just Don Quixote which is read in MandarinMo Yan Chinas front door key to the contemporary canon of world literature
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PrologueIn his biography of Marco Polo, Maurice Collis relates how, back then, the city of Hangzhou, quite apart from being a delightful place to live, with good shops and roads, effective policing and plenty of entertaining things to do, was the leading artistic and intellectual hub of the entire world, far superior to any city before it including Ancient Rome or after it including London and Paris because its culture was rooted in a far lengthier and more robust evolution of the mind.Collis points out that if Marco Polo, instead of travelling in the company of a rich merchant, possibly a foreigner like himself, had struck up friendship, on equal terms, with the cultured intelligentsia of Hangzhou also known for being scholars of Confucianism, he might have come to understand the depth of the spirituality which prevailed in that city. Collis then pictures how, once that ideal of friendship had been established, the Chinese might have shown the Venetian, in the privacy of their libraries, the uninterrupted development of their culture over thousands of years, and the accumulation of thinking which that brought in its wake. He concludes by saying that, with a greater degree of understanding, sensitivity and imagination, Marco Polo could have learned far more from the Chinese which, ideally, would have transformed him from a medieval merchant into a man of culture, but neither his sensibility nor his imagination were sufficient to allow this transformation. Nevertheless, his personality did develop, as a result of his travels and experiences, to a point where it was only with some difficulty that his western contemporaries came to fully comprehend what he wrote, although he did not sever the mental ties of his European education as much as he might have done had the Chinese succeeded in raising him to their own level.Fortunately, the Impressions of China presented here have been written not by a merchant but, quite the reverse, by a man who has dedicated his life to developing understanding, sensitivity and imagination. Albino Chacn graduated in Comparative Literature in Canada and has since worked as a university academic, in Costa Rica as well as in China and other countries. He observes, but from the viewpoint of someone appropriately prepared and with the refined culture of the radical humanist and advocate of pluriversity, as he himself expresses it in his lecture El asedio de las diversidades： de la universidad a la pluriversidad Diversities under siege： from university to pluriversity, where he reminds us that： not only are we diverse from each other, but also each one of us is in himself an agglomeration of diversities.Therefore, in view of this meeting of cultures put forward by the author, it seems to me to be important to point out the difference between universalism and pluriversalism, as proposed by the philosopher and legal expert Danilo Zolo, who explains in an interview：Two philosophies exist concerning international order, indeed a world order in general. One which aims towards the unification, homologation and simplification of symbolic universes and of values, and which clings to the hope that world unity could eo ipso bring about peace, justice, progress and happiness. It is a vision which is elementary, simplistic, dare I say childlike in its theology and rigidly monotheistic in a Weberian sense. Then there is the other world vision which takes into account pluralism, difference, confrontation within diversity and complexity as part of the cherished evolutionary heritage of the human experience. The ideal upheld by adherents of world unificationis universalism. The idea supported by defenders of complexity is what I suggest should be called pluriversalism.Zolo adds that those who are advocates of complexity aspire towards achieving peaceful interaction between different cultures and civilizations, defending the right to teach about pluralism and relativism of values and about their historic, dynamic and evolutionary characteristics. In my opinion, these Impressions of China champion that cultural pluriversity and are written with the intention of achieving rapprochements, understanding and better relations between East and West.George Orwell, in 1984, explains that, if the governments depicted in this novel were to allow the average citizen to have contact with foreigners, the closed world in which they live would break open, and this might dispel the fear, hatred and fanatical inflexibility which form the basis of their morality. Unfortunately, not all of us are able to live the Chinese experience by travelling all the way to that country and living there for long enough to fully understand the true scope of its culture. However, to paraphrase Lin Yutang, reading empowers us to escape from our physical prison, our limited contact with just a handful of people who live close by, and break free of our immediate world, in time no less than in space, to find ourselves in a totally different world...
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