The history of the world's oldest Chinese statehood, despite the thousands-year tradition of its study, discussion and application by sages, philosophers, scientists and politicians, is still full of mysteries and contradictions. The editorial board of the magazine "Oriens" offers readers a series of articles covering various aspects of the history of ancient Chinese civilization and statehood. The series of articles was prepared under the editorship of S. V. Dmitriev.

The oldest and at the same time most developed cultures of the modern world form a global alternative, similar to psychosomatic, sexual and all other binary opposites of the human body, species and society. The mutual polarity of Western (European-American, Indo-Iranian, Arab-Muslim) and Eastern (Chinese, or Sinist) cultures has the deepest anthropological, and not only social and historical-cultural roots, expressed in the cardinal difference between languages, types of writing, linguistic worldviews, psychotypes, socio-cultural norms, religious and philosophical systems, etc. perhaps even reflecting the variable features of sapientation in two different and remote parts of the earth. Like the Globe, the world is bipolar, and China has been one of its poles for almost the entire history of mankind and will continue to be in the 21st century. His book of books, The Canon of Change ("I Ching") is the forerunner of the binary code of all computer programs, and hieroglyphics is a contender for the language of international communication on the Internet. In today's visual world, images are winning over words and the ancient culture of hieroglyphic images is gaining a second youth. A scientific understanding of this is necessary for an adequate correlation of the real "clash of civilizations" with the ideal "dialogue of cultures".

Keywords: China, West, Russia, Sinology, Sinology, sinology, cultural studies, anthropology, global studies, culture, civilization, binary, binary.

Artem I. KOBZEV-Doctor of Philosophy, Professor, Head of the China Department of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director of the Educational and Scientific Center for Humanities and Social Sciences and Head of the Department of Cultural Studies of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Head of the Educational and Scientific Center "Philosophy of the East" of RSUH, arkobzev@gmail.ru.

Artem KOBZEV - Prof., Dr. Hab., Head of the China department of the Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow; Director of Educational and scientific center of humanities and social sciences and Head of the Department of cultural studies, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology; Head of the educational and scientific center "The philosophy of the East", Russian State University for the Humanities; arkobzev@gmail.ru.

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CHINESE WAY OF HUMANITY

In modern world the most ancient and at the same time the most advanced cultures form a global alternative, like psycho-somatic, sexual and all other binary opposites of the human body, human species and human society. Mutual polarity of Western (Euro-American, Indo-Iranian, Arab-Muslim) and Eastern (Chinese) cultures has profound anthropological, not only the social, historical and cultural roots, to put it in fundamental differences of languages, writing types, the language pictures of the world, psychological types, socio-cultural norms, religious and philosophical systems, and possibly reflecting various features of emergence of Homo sapiens in two different and widely separated regions of the globe. Like the globe, the human world has two poles and one of its poles almost all of human history was and in the twenty first century will be China. Chinese book of books "The Canon of Changes" ("I Ching") is the predecessor of the binary code of computer programs, and Chinese characters are a contender for the role of the language of international communication in the Internet. The modern world is visualized, pictures triumph over the words and ancient culture of hieroglyphic images finds a second youth. Scientific understanding of it is necessary to adequately correlate the real "clash of civilizations" with the perfect "dialogue of cultures".

Keywords: China, West, Russia, Chinese studies, sinology, cultural studies, anthropology, globalistics, culture, civilization, duality, binary.

Humanity as a species has survived and evolved through a binary polarization of developmental paths and corresponding abilities. In the course of sapientation, it regularly encountered bifurcation situations. Thus, Neanderthals represented an alternative to the synchronously existing Cro-Magnons, and, apparently, similar ramifications of the proto-human family tree have occurred before.

Not only is human evolution binary, but its morphology is also binary. It is binary at all somatic levels-from the intracellular double helix of DNA, on which all genetic information is recorded, to the pairing of major organs and sexual differentiation. The main biological factor of culture, the human brain, is also bi - hemispheric.

The emergence of binary social structures on this basis seems quite natural: from the simple division of primitive communities into two halves - male and female, and the power in them into royal and priestly, to complex paired combinations of the state with the ruling church or party. Since ancient times, the special significance of the binary opposition has been reflected in the language as a dual number, and in the worldview as the myth of duality. This universal principle cannot but be embodied in culture as a whole.

It has always been followed by the Chinese worldview, whose most famous symbol in the world is the polar forces of yin and yang ( dark and light, female and male, passive and active), and it corresponds to the global opposite of civilizations - Western and eastern. It is based on fundamental anthropological, linguistic, psychophysiological, cultural and other differences related to the very origin of man and the process of his sapientation.

One pole of this global alternative is the Western culture, which includes not only the Mediterranean European-American origin, but also the Arab-Muslim and Indo-Iranian cultures. Another alternative is Chinese, or Sinistic in a broader sense (it could even be called "sino-hieroglyphic"). It is associated with the cultural area of China and neighboring countries. The Western culture was initially created by native speakers of Indo - European languages, while the eastern culture was created by speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages, which, first of all, are characterized by Chinese.-

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changeability of words, minimal grammar, no parts of speech, and grammatical categories of gender and number. The same opposition corresponds to two different types of writing: alphabetic and hieroglyphic.

With the help of writing in the" axial time " of the middle of the 1st millennium BC, humanity made a qualitative leap from an archaic religious and mythological worldview to a philosophical and scientific one, which determined the main parameters of modern civilization. It occurred almost simultaneously in two ancient cultural centers of Eurasia - Indo-European and Chinese. Thus, the two ends of the Eurasian ecumene formed a fundamental civilizational opposition for all mankind, which, in turn, has deep biosocial roots associated with differences in the structure and functions of the brain obtained on different paths of sapientation.

In the European-African area, human development continued for more than two million years, and the alternative process took place in the area of the Yellow River and Yangtze basins for a comparable time. Apparently, human sapientation took place here and there along with the formation of language and the corresponding psychotype, i.e., civilizational differences were based on this basic, psychosomatic discrepancy. Consequently, the Proto - Chinese evolutionary path is fundamentally different from the main one-the Afro-Caucasian one.

The first level of differentiation is a different human structure, a different type of person with a different interaction of the asymmetric hemispheres of the brain, and this is directly related to the use of alphabetic (phonetic) or hieroglyphic (logographic) writing, which is shown by half a century of empirical research. In speakers of sino-hieroglyphic languages, the brain perceives the hieroglyph differently from the perception of letters, and a violation of the activity of the left hemisphere leads to the inability to use alphabetic writing, while maintaining the ability to reproduce the hieroglyph. As historically older and more basic, the synthetic and holistic right hemisphere is more stable, and in this sense, the right-left hemisphere opposition has not only a synchronistic, but also a diachronic alternative (like the opposition of women and men: the former is the guardian of basic human qualities, the latter is an "experimental" being who acquires and tests for human qualities). new and therefore potentially dangerous qualities).

The right hemisphere works with hieroglyphs, but the left hemisphere also works with them. Therefore, the bearers of hieroglyphic culture, who are able to implement both principles, have more different opportunities. The biomechanics of writing texts also apply here: usually hieroglyphics are associated with left-handedness and writing from right to left, not from left to right. For the Chinese, both models are typical: they can easily write from top to bottom, from left to right, and from right to left, and hexagrams of the "Canon of Changes" ( "I Ching") - even from bottom to top. Writing a hieroglyph and a hieroglyphic text, even in a traditional standard, gives both vectors in general, since the hieroglyph is written from left to right and top to bottom, and the entire text is written from right to left and top to bottom. This means that Chinese people are more adaptable to different ways of writing and reading written signs, which actually creates a new quality - their non-linear perception, which is already so significant in computer technologies. And in modern (electronic) systems for reproducing hieroglyphic texts, they are even more adaptive, because they use both the alphabetic principle and the hieroglyphic one, since the input of hieroglyphics occurs through phonetic transcription in Latin letters.

The second level of differentiation is linguistic. The Chinese cultural area is characterized by "Eastern languages", which are 1) syllabic (syllabemic) with a basic unit - syllable morpheme and a weak difference between the word and the phrase, 2) tonal and 3) characterized by optional grammatical indicators. Chinese hieroglyphics organically correspond to this linguistic specificity.

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At first glance, the main advantage of alphabetic writing is the direct transmission of sounding speech, but in fact, in all developed hieroglyphic systems, there are also ways to transmit phonetics. Moreover, the history of Chinese characters knows a number of dramatic periods when the prerequisites were created and there was a temptation to switch to alphabetic writing. Recently, China has discovered written monuments comparable to the oldest writings of mankind. Prior to this, Mantic inscriptions on turtle shells and cattle scapulae of the second half of the 2nd millennium BC (jia-gu-wen ) were considered to be original, although inexplicably highly developed. Even in them, there is a noticeable tendency to phonetize, namely, the use of so - called borrowed hieroglyphs-based on the same sound of different words used for recording (mainly due to the limited sign resource). Even then, in the first centuries of the 1st millennium BC, a similar and even synchronous Western transition to alphabetic writing could have been made. But this did not happen, and the number of hieroglyphs began to increase significantly, and their spelling began to standardize.

Half a millennium later, a similar situation developed. The writing reform carried out by the first Chinese emperor Qin Shi-huang in 213 BC also entailed a significant change in the characters and marked a fork, a bifurcation point: either introduce additional phonetic determinants into the composition of the characters themselves, or switch to alphabetic writing. As a result, we followed the first path, preserving the hieroglyphic tradition.

After almost half a millennium, after the penetration of Buddhism and acquaintance with Indian linguistics in the first centuries of the new era, a special fan-tse system was created to convey the sound of hieroglyphs. According to this method, the syllable associated with the hieroglyph was divided into an initial and a final, which in turn were indicated by two other hieroglyphs. Here it is clearly possible to select a limited set of simple characters for recording the sound of hieroglyphs, i.e. a direct step to alphabetic writing, especially since the corresponding example was given by massively translated Buddhist literature. But again, nothing like this happened, and it all came down to the mutual recoding of some hieroglyphs by others.

The next stage is the introduction of the Latin alphabet after one and a half thousand years thanks to Christian missionaries, but even this temptation of alphabetic writing was completely overcome, although, for example, Naklaas Trigo (Jin Ni-ge , 1577-1628) published in Hangzhou in 1626 a guide for reading Chinese characters "Si-zhu er-mu tzu" ("A manual of Western scholars for the ears and eyes"), which influenced the scholar-encyclopedist Fang Yi-zhi (, 1611-1671), who for the first time in the Middle Empire realized the advantages of the Latin alphabet for transcribing Chinese words.

In the twentieth century, at least three times in China and even beyond its borders, in the USSR, very serious attempts were made to romanize or romanize the Chinese script, but even these projects failed. Despite the seemingly obvious advantages and influential external patronage of alphabetic writing, it has been regularly rejected by Chinese culture for thousands of years, because it is simply alien to its organic nature. The powerful factor of globalization that is currently acting against hieroglyphics is more than compensated by overcoming its main drawback - the increased complexity of reproduction-with the help of modern computer technologies. Moreover, being independent of the phonetics of a particular language, thanks to the cunning of the world mind, it has suddenly turned from a well-deserved but outdated veteran into a competitive contender for the role of a universal means of international communication on the Internet. The avalanche-like visualization of information flows growing before our eyes gives a second youth to the oldest culture of hieroglyphic images, which is fundamentally different from the younger, originally Western and phonetically devisualized alphabetic writing.

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In the global alternative of cultures, the hieroglyphic and alphabetic principles are not represented in strict disjunction. Their relationship can be described in the biological categories of dominant and recessive: both principles are present here and there, but one is dominant, and the other is in a recessive state, thus preserving the possibility of changing a secondary role to the main one under favorable conditions. This position also resembles the yin-yang model, in which one opposite element is embedded in the other and they cyclically change their positions.

The reproduction of individual sounds by Chinese speakers of a syllabic language clearly demonstrates their psycholinguistic features. They find it physically difficult to pronounce consonants separately and pronounce them only in combination with vowels, i.e. as syllables. A Russian-speaking person can easily pronounce combinations of several consonants, and in Chinese transcription they will turn into combinations of as many syllables expressed by the appropriate number of hieroglyphs. Identifying these intricate sound combinations with their foreign-language originals is very difficult, and sometimes almost impossible. Of course, this does not mean that the Chinese cannot understand the sound composition of the syllables they pronounce. True, this awareness came to them thanks to Buddhist pilgrims who introduced them to the non-syllabic language-Sanskrit and the achievements of Indian phonetists. As a result, from the second half of the 1st millennium AD, Chinese scientists began to create phonological tables (yun-tu ), in which they classified syllables using phonemes. But even here, after a thorough acquaintance with a different language practice and theory, the division of a syllable did not reach a separate sound, but was limited to its dichotomy into an initial and final. This extremely complex scientific activity, based on an unexplicated and largely mysterious theory, was aimed not at identifying the primary elements of syllables, but at their convenient classification. And in general terms: it is one thing to see a part of the whole as such, and another to distinguish it as an independent element. It is one thing to passively perceive, another to actively use. These are completely different things. In one case - something like therapy, in the other-surgery (which, by the way, in traditional Chinese medicine also did not exist). Therefore, in particular, there is a paradoxical historical and scientific situation: In Europe, phonology began to separate from traditional phonetics only at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and in China, on the contrary, at about the same time, phonetics began to emerge under Western influence, different from traditional phonology.

The next level of differentiation between the two polar cultures after natural language and writing covers basic rituals and worldviews. Here the main opposition is created by settled farmers and nomadic pastoralists, for the former the main thing is space, for the latter-time. The central ritual - burial in the hieroglyphic cultures of farmers - assumed burial (ideally with mummification), i.e. the longest possible preservation of the body of the deceased in the space of the same world, and in the alphabetic cultures of nomads - burning, i.e. the most radical removal from the space of this world for the transition to the ideal time - eternity. The meaning of the funeral pyre is complete dematerialization and the acquisition of a fundamentally different state. Here arose the idea of otherness as a better world, which is not immanent, but transcendent to the earth's space. And from this sprang Western, i.e. Indo-European, idealism, which did not arise either in Egypt or in China, where in similar hieroglyphic cultures the bodies of the dead were preserved with equal care and skillfully mummified. If Egyptian naturalism can be explained as a rudimentary state of philosophical thought, then this argument is not suitable for China. His developed philosophy, as in the case of Sanskrit and Indian linguistics, despite his familiarity with Buddhism and other variants of Indian idealism, stubbornly adhered to the original naturalism.

Another level is the general opposition of hieroglyphic Chinese naturalism and alphabetic Western idealism. In a culture where idealism has developed-

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There are three important features that are analogous to the alphabetic principle.

First, the letter is a component of a quantitatively limited set: alphabets range mainly in the numerical range from 20 to 40 characters (with exotic variants - from 12 to 72), and hieroglyphic systems contain orders of magnitude more characters and are fundamentally open, having the ability to constantly replenish to unimaginable sizes. Thus, Chinese characters in the Shang-Yin era (XVII/XV-XI centuries BC) were approximately 5000, about 100 AD-10,000, at the beginning of the XVIII century-50,000, and by the end of the XX century - almost 90,000. And there are no fundamental limits to this growth.

Secondly, letters have a significantly different relationship to words - they mark a qualitative leap. The letter is desemantized in contrast to the word that is always endowed with meaning. Only the combination of letters into a word gives rise to meaning (logos), which literally resembles the divine act of creation from nothing. On the contrary, in any hieroglyph, in particular in Chinese, all signs are equally meaningful and do not give any reason for such an idealistic idea.

When the first European missionaries encountered the Chinese language, they managed to see it as a grammar similar to Latin, although nothing is more distant from each other, and the next generation of Western linguists even began to refuse him any grammar at all. Similarly, when trying to classify Chinese characters, Western scholars sought to isolate or construct a hieroglyphic alphabet. In this connection, it is necessary to mention an important world achievement of Russian science: the outstanding sinologist Academician V. P. Vasiliev (1818-1900) in the middle of the XIX century invented such an alphabetic "graphic system of Chinese characters" based on 24 features and their 60 combinations, which prevailed in domestic Chinese-Russian dictionaries as a convenient search engine. By the way, there is an assumption that through the Japanese writer O. O. Rosenberg (1888-1919), who had a hand in its improvement, who was in Tokyo at the beginning of the XX century, the famous publisher and author of the famous explanatory dictionary named after him, Wang Yun-wu (1888-1979), who developed the popular dictionary system for searching for hieroglyphs " by the four corners." It is based on an alphabet of 10 features and their combinations, and now it is used for computer input of hieroglyphs.

This approach, based on hieroglyphic graphics, is the opposite of phonetic, but it may also have been stimulated in its origins by familiarity with the foreign alphabet. For the first time, such a system of 540 "key" characters was presented by Xu Shen (c. 58 - c. 147) in the first complete explanatory etymological dictionary in China, Sho-wen tse-tzu ("Explanation of signs and analysis of hieroglyphs") in 100 AD, that is, after the penetration of Buddhism into the country. When Catholic missionaries arrived in China, Mei Ying-tso in the dictionary "Zi Hui" ( "Code of hieroglyphs") in 1615 proposed a much more reminiscent alphabet and became a classic set of 214 "keys". In modern upgrades, it sometimes narrows to 189 and expands to 250 characters. Despite the possible initiating influence of foreign alphabets, these classification systems follow the original Chinese principle of semantic one-level classification and classifying characters, highlighting as" keys " easier to write and more general in meaning characters, rather than their desemantized elements. In other words, the Chinese analogs of letters are still the same hieroglyphs.

Third, letters, as elements of a different level and a completely different quality from words, form them and become for them what atoms are for things. There is nothing like this in the hieroglyphics. Similarly, Western theoretical models that reflect transcendental reality have required special, not verbal, but numerical and alphabetic symbolization, i.e., the use of peculiar symbolic atoms. In China, on the contrary, all the same hieroglyphs played a similar role.

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The transition from hieroglyphics to the idea of letters and alphabetic writing is associated with a change in cultural dominance and foreign cultural influence. The logic of this transformation is clear. In contact with a complex culture that has developed over the centuries (Sumero-Akkadian or Egyptian) came nomadic peoples, simpler, but also more passionate, who had the need to master the achievements accumulated by their neighbors, encrypted with sacred hieroglyphics. The sacred writings of the priests are too complex for merchants and travelers, and they have simplified their simplest forms as much as possible, thus gaining a new quality. By taking over the cultural initiative, they also made simplified alphabetic writing dominant. If the culture dominates in its area, which has always been observed in China, then these alphabetic temptations do not cause rejection of their own main path of development.

In turn, alphabetic writing, at least as a heuristic principle, stimulated the birth of atomism as the most important scientific and philosophical theory of the West.

So, the oldest and at the same time most developed cultures of the modern world form an obvious global alternative, similar to psychosomatic, sexual and all other binary opposites of the human body, species and society. The mutual polarity of Western (European-American, Indo-Iranian, Arab-Muslim) and Eastern (Chinese, or Sinist) cultures has the deepest anthropological, not only social and historical-cultural roots, expressed in the fundamental difference between languages, types of writing, linguistic worldviews, psychotypes, socio-cultural norms, religious and philosophical systems, etc. perhaps even reflecting the variable features of sapientation in two different and remote parts of the earth. A scientific understanding of this is necessary for an adequate correlation of the real "clash of civilizations" with the ideal "dialogue of cultures".

The Chinese version is an extremely developed cultural position of a sane and maximally socialized "normal" person, an "infinitely developed Neolithic" (P. Teilhard de Chardin, 1881-1955), and the Western one is a paradoxical deviation from the "natural norm", a kind of "perversion of the mind" that aspires beyond reality. The formation of European civilization was determined by a number of unique phenomena (alphabetic writing, the "Greek miracle", Christianity, the Renaissance, the Reformation, capitalism, the scientific and technological revolution) and, accordingly, was interpreted using a linear concept of time and recognition of the absolute uniqueness of such acts of historical drama as the Incarnation of God, the Second Coming or the End of the World. On the contrary, Chinese civilization developed cyclically and was conceptualized in terms of the theory of "eternal return to normal" in accordance with cosmic and dynastic cycles.

In the European worldview, whether Platonic philosophy, Christian theology, or scientific theory, there is a doubling of the world in its ideal construction (as a prototype or model). For Chinese naturalism, the world is one and indivisible, everything is immanent, and nothing, including the most subtle spiritual and divine entities, is transcendent. In the ideal world of the Western man, abstract logical laws operate, in the naturalistic world of the Chinese - classification structures, and the place of logic here is occupied by numerology (similar to Pythagoreanism and Kabbalah "the doctrine of symbols and numbers" - xiang-shu-zhi-xue ). The social consequence of this" sanity " is that in China, philosophy has always been the queen of the sciences and has never become the servant of theology.

The fundamental discovery of irrational numbers in ancient Greece, based on the incommensurability of the diagonal and side of a square (or the hypotenuse and leg of an isosceles right triangle), dealt a crushing blow to the number theory of the Pythagoreans and stimulated the geometrization of ancient Greek mathematics. Chinese mathematicians did not seem to notice the qualitative specifics of irrational numbers, which could be due to their use of decimals and general philosophical conti-

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nualism. In solving problems related to the Pythagorean theorem, they were limited to obtaining approximate numerical values and selecting triples of Pythagorean numbers, i.e. integer values. The fundamental difference in the attitude to irrational numbers probably reflects the fundamental difference between Ancient Greek somatism and Chinese processualism, i.e. understanding the world in terms of discrete bodies, on the one hand, and continuous processes (events, deeds), on the other. Within the framework of Chinese naturalism, which was not familiar with the individuality (literally: indivisibility) of atoms, nor with the individuality of ideas/eidos, which processualized reality and represented it in the form of many continuous masses, the infinite decimal fraction did not seem to be something extraordinary and could well be understood as a reflection of the infinite divisibility of any material object or phenomenon, for example, even a short stick is infinitely divisible, according to the well-known aphorism of the patriarchs of the "school of names" (ming-jia ) Hui Shi and Gongsun Long (IV-III centuries BC).

One of the prerogative instances demonstrating the fundamental difference between Chinese and Western scientific and philosophical traditions and cultures in general is the atomistic theory. As J. R. R. Tolkien has shown. Needham (1900-1995), a Chinese physicist who remained faithful to the philosophical prototype of wave theory, stubbornly rejected atomistics. Chinese thinkers, apparently, did not independently create any version of the atomistic theory. All the substratum states of both material and spiritual phenomena were usually thought of as continuously homogeneous ("pneuma" - chi , "seed-spirit" - ching ), since the continuum-wave concepts of matter dominated. If in the 19th century such a worldview position did not seem to speak in favor of China, then in the 21st century. it looks quite consistent with the latest ideas about the structure of the universe.

Similarly, before the spiritual revolution of the early twentieth century, which was marked by the reinterpretation of time in the philosophy of A. Bergson and the physics of A. Einstein, the whole Western culture was dominated by the idea of its secondary nature in comparison with space, while in China they were always considered in indissoluble unity, as two attributes of a single Universe (cosmos, world, universe). the terms that convey this concept (yu-zhou - "space-time", tien-di - "heaven-earth", shih-tse - "age-limits") testify.

Contrary to the understandable desire of countries and peoples for multipolarity, the world of geopolitics, like the Globe, always strives for bipolarity, and it has been one of its poles for almost the entire history of mankind-and in the XXI century. once again it becomes-China. Always, unless it was subject to external aggression or internal turmoil, it was the most economically dominant, the richest and strongest state in the world, and until the 15th century, the most advanced in science and technology. According to the calculations of J. R. R. Tolkien, According to Needham, China generated 32 world-historical discoveries, receiving only 4 of them from the medieval West, and according to S. Huntington, around 1800 it produced a third of the world's total manufacturing output, more than any other civilization.

The main difference between a person and any other living being is the possession and active operation of non-hereditary information, i.e., culture, which in its historical development, like Hegel's absolute spirit, becomes less and less dependent on the material forms that embody it. The progress of humanity consists precisely in the growing change in the balance between material and spiritual culture in favor of the latter, which, in the end, led it to self-realization in the idea of the noosphere. This idea was put forward by two outstanding scientists and thinkers of the 20th century - the French Jesuit P. Teilhard de Chardin, who lived in China for more than 20 years and was one of the discoverers of synanthropus, and the Russian cosmist academician V. I. Vernadsky, who inspired it. Such scientific and technological foundations of the noosphere as N. Wiener's cybernetics, A. M. Turing's theory of algorithmic "machines" and other components of computer technology were created synchronously and independently.

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The formation of the noosphere in its modern form-a global information civilization-required at least three fundamental inventions: 1) writing, 2) printing, 3) computer.

Chinese writing is the oldest among the living languages and is characterized by such valuable qualities for modern information technologies as formalization (semi-artistic, close to logical grammar, hierarchically standardized and widely terminologized vocabulary), compactness (self-archiving and deployment in the form of hypertext) and visual symbolization.

The Chinese tradition of printing production is also the oldest in the world, as it originated here, and also organically combines the principles of typesetting and print printing, creating a unity of mental analysis and visual synthesis.

Fixed in the archetype of Chinese written culture-a formally (numerically and geometrically) organized set of graphic figures (yao / xiao gua ) of the "Canon of Changes" - the principle of universal binary symbolization anticipated the logical number and binary arithmetic of G. W. Leibniz, the binary algebra of J. R. R. Tolkien. Bul, finally, is a modern computer, the first sample of which in 1937 G. Atanasov designed to work precisely in binary notation, although both ternary and decimal are suitable for this.

Consequently, these inventions of the Chinese, which determined the specifics of the entire sinistic culture of East Asia, can be considered the forerunners of the information technologies that gave rise to the modern post-industrial civilization, which in the world's noosphere are transforming all human knowledge into a hyperencyclopaedia of the Internet.

According to J. R. R. Tolkien: According to Needham, the early (second-century) invention of the seismograph (Zhang Heng, 78-139) and methods for measuring precipitation were probably stimulated by the authorities ' rational desire to anticipate and prevent earthquakes, droughts, and floods. Only Chinese society in the Middle Ages could organize such large scientific enterprises as geodesic measurement under the leadership of the Buddhist monk and scientist Yi-xing (683-727) and the court astronomer Nanyun Yue (VII-VIII centuries) of the meridian arc with a length of at least 2.5 thousand km from Indochina to Mongolia, or an expedition in the same VIII century. East India to observe the starry sky of the southern hemisphere. The Chinese were the first in the world to introduce decimals and an empty position to indicate zero, building decimal metrology, thanks to which even in the first century BC artisans used calipers with decimal calibration. By the beginning of the 14th century, Pascal's triangle (1623-1662) was considered here as an ancient method of solving equations. Such cases of copyright infringement by Chinese discoverers and inventors are not uncommon. The suspension of Cardano (1501-1576) is more correctly called the suspension of Ding Huan (, II century).

Chinese astronomers were the most persistent and accurate observers of the pre-Renaissance period, creating an excellent cosmology that describes the sky using modern coordinates, without a telescope, they recorded solar and lunar eclipses, comets, nebulae, meteors, sunspots and other celestial phenomena that are still relevant today. Thanks to a high level of engineering, they created such brilliant astronomical instruments and devices as the equatorial installation and clock drive. Among the physical disciplines in traditional China, optics, acoustics, and the theory of magnetism were most developed, while in the West, with relatively greater development of mechanics and dynamics, almost nothing was known about magnetic phenomena.

However, the lack of atomistics did not prevent the discovery of the hexagonal structure of the snowflake, which in Europe was found out many centuries later (And. Kepler), and lay the foundations for the knowledge of chemical affinity in the treatises of the Tang, Song, and Yuan eras (VII-XIV centuries). In the invention of iron casting, the Chinese were 15% ahead of the Europeans.-

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anniversary. Contrary to popular belief, mechanical watches were most likely invented not in early Renaissance Europe, but in Tang China. The inventions of multi-arched and suspended bridges on iron chains testify to the engineering art in civil construction. The Chinese also excelled in military technology, starting to use gunpowder in the ninth century and developing explosive technology in the eleventh century, three centuries earlier than Europe, where the first cannons were recorded in 1327. In China, already in the middle of the tenth century. as a melee weapon, "fire pikes" were used (ho-qiang bamboo tubes with a powder charge - the prototype of future missiles and cannons.

The priority of the Chinese in silk weaving is widely known. Their mastery of extra-long fiber has led to some fundamental inventions, such as the drive belt and chain drive. In blowers for metallurgy, they were the first to apply the mutual transformation of circular and translational motion, which appeared in Europe in early steam engines. Their invention of the compass was associated with the study of magnetic declination long before Europeans heard about magnetic polarity. China did not lag behind in biology, becoming the birthplace of many agricultural crops. Simultaneously, agricultural treatises were written here, similar to the works of the Romans Varro (116-27 BC) and Columella (I century).

In the Nan-fang cao-mu chuang (Description of grasses and trees of the Southern Region, c. 340), Ji Han (III-IV centuries) reported the world's first case of using some insects (ants) to fight others (ticks and spiders). China still has a strong tradition of biological plant protection. In medicine, the Chinese took the path that is probably the most different from the Western one. Free from the Western bias against mineral medicines, Chinese pharmacopoeias have long contained prescriptions made from plant, animal, and mineral ingredients. Acupuncture (acupuncture) and ignipuncture (moxibustion) make this medical tradition very special.

In the grandiose picture of scientific creativity of China, which has made a significant contribution to the creation of modern civilization, along with four great inventions (paper, printing, compass, gunpowder), many lesser - known but no less outstanding achievements are captured: whole new branches of knowledge-macrobiotics and eroticism, acupuncture and pulse diagnostics.

No less significant than the four great inventions of the Chinese, world culture was influenced by the temperament invented by Prince Zhu Tsai-yu (1536-1610), which, after theoretical development in Europe in the XVII century and practical implementation in the "Well-Tempered Clavier" (1722) by J. S. Bach, was followed by the entire musical world. And after getting acquainted with the art of classical Beijing musical drama (Jing-ju ) Mei Lan-fang (1894-1961) S. M. Eisenstein formulated the concept of " cinema hieroglyphic language "as a new figurative system of expressiveness of cinema art within the framework of his theory of"installation of attractions". Some even more ancient traditions-martial arts, tea drinking, and especially cooking , which Sun Yat-sen (Sun Chung - shan, 1866-1925) considered "an indicator of the depth of Chinese culture" - have now become integral elements of Western life.

In the eighteenth century, European enlighteners saw China as the ideal state of philosophers. It was the workshop of the world as much as Britain. The image of poor and hungry China emerged in the 19th century, when the British drugged it with opium and consolidated the change in the trade balance in their favor with the opium wars (1840-1860), after which all the major Western powers, along with Japan and Russia, forcibly turned China into a semi-colony. Twice in the twentieth century, before and after World War II, the country's departure from its traditional values in favor of Western capitalism and Soviet communism was disastrous.

China's globalization is a double-edged problem for both it and the rest of the world, as it is fraught with global confrontation. The Chinese were pioneers of economic development.

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globalization both in ancient times, having paved the Great Silk Road to Rome in the II century BC, and in the run-up to modern times, sailing to Africa in the early XV century. several decades earlier than Europeans, opening the era of Great Geographical Discoveries and technologically preparing it with the invention of the compass. The most important factors of the information globalization that began at that time, Eurocentricly called the Guttenberg era, are also the paper and printing invented by the Chinese.

The Chinese have managed to make a single culture the common heritage of the nation. With the unity of values and goals of the upper and lower classes, the state easily organized the people to solve various tasks, including grandiose ones like the Great Wall or the Great Canal. No economic growth in such a vast, diverse and complex country, comparable to an entire continent and burdened with a great many problems, would be possible without the action of special forces that go far beyond the economy. We are talking about a colossal cultural and historical potential, which no country in the modern world has an analogue of. This spiritual experience, unprecedented in its duration of accumulation and variety of forms, can become a productive force and transform into social matter. Therefore, preserving Chinese cultural identity is tantamount to fighting for national security.

Chinese culture is built on the priority of knowledge. This has been laid down since the time of Confucius in the VI-V centuries BC. e. A Confucian is a scientist, an intellectual who, after passing the system of exams, became an official and statesman. Thanks to such a social elevator, " a simple person from the street could become an emperor." The universal desire of the rich and noble to secure their privileges by inheritance in China was opposed by a well-developed examination mechanism that had been in operation for more than two millennia. The competition, of course, was fierce: for one place, not ten people, but hundreds and even thousands. The real elite reached the very top, which was crowded by the next echelons.

After more than a century of attempts, Chinese reformers managed to effectively implement the formula of a major dignitary and scholar of the end of the empire - Zhang Zhi-tung (1837-1909): "Chinese teachings are for a fundamental basis, Western ones are for applied application." Talented Japanese students were ahead of them on this path. The author of the concept of "clash of civilizations" S. Huntington rightly noted that in the course of such reforms, modernization gradually begins to suppress Westernization and the desire to restore national values increases. The Chinese are great patriots. Easily dispersed all over the planet, they return at the first call of their homeland with the acquired material and spiritual capital. It is believed that capitalism originated in Europe during the Renaissance. But capitalist relations have been developed in China since ancient times. Already at the turn of the new era, there were cities with millions of people with the most complex economic and social structure, and all this multiplied on the scale of a huge empire. Under Mao Zedong, the capitalist spirit was suppressed in every possible way, but the centuries-old experience is ineradicable.

For thousands of years, Chinese culture has been particularly homogeneous and integrated with hieroglyphics, which were identified with it even in terms of terminology - being designated by a single word wen and belonging to it, even the most ignorant peasant always shared the same values as the cultural elite, whose highest aspirations were always of an earthly nature. In the West, spirituality means striving for the otherworldly and eternal, believing in another, better world and renouncing the hereafter as its distorted copy. Therefore, you can sacrifice the earthly as the lowest in the name of the highest-the heavenly. And the Chinese have always put the surrounding reality above all else. And the simplest person cared about his and his descendants ' best existence in it, no different in this from the enlightened Mandarin.

The Chinese have always had to survive in extreme conditions. They changed their natural world by the middle of the 1st millennium BC and could not, like the Russians until the 20th century, develop new expanses and raise virgin lands. And when there are a lot of people around-

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In order to avoid competitors competing for living space and material goods, it remains only to intensify their work and maximize self-discipline.

The most famous feature of the Chinese-their record number-was achieved over the past three centuries in conditions that, it would seem, should have led to the opposite result. From 1644 to 1911, the country was under the rule of foreign Manchus, in the 19th and early 20th centuries it was suppressed and plundered by imperialist powers, and until the end of the 1970s it was in a state of internal or external wars and destructive social conflicts. But now, before our very eyes, it is the creative Chinese idea that has taken hold of the masses and is showing itself as a powerful material force. Behind this miraculous rebirth of the Chinese phoenix from the ashes of the" cultural revolution " is its multi-thousand-year history.

Chinese civilization is the oldest existing on Earth, but after a century-long catastrophe half a century ago, it seemed to have lagged behind forever. Now everything has changed radically, and China is once again ready to become not only the factory of the world, but also its cultural center, as it was most often in the history of mankind. In fact, many of the fundamental values of the Middle Kingdom have already quietly penetrated Western usage. The heart of popular culture-Hollywood produces blockbusters based on the patterns of Chinese theatrical and circus performances, superman movie heroes act as masters of martial arts-wushu and even the citadel of the Faustian soul-psychological theater retreats under the onslaught of synthetic shows in the style of Beijing opera. But behind such clear and vivid signs, deeper and more fundamental changes are hidden: the modern post-Christian West, having abandoned the ascetic idealism of the Platonists and the Church fathers, having reoriented itself from otherworldly values to this-worldly ones, automatically took the path of Sinization, since the essence of the Chinese worldview is a naturalistic view of reality, pragmatism and the priority of vital values.

list of literature

Granet M. Kitayskaya mysl ' [Chinese Thought], Moscow, 2004.

Granet M. Kitayskaya tsivilizatsiya [Chinese Civilization], Moscow, 2008.
Spiritual Culture of China: an encyclopedia. Tt. 1-6. Moscow, 2006-2010.

Eliseef V. D. Civilizatsiya klassicheskogo Kitaya [The Civilization of classical China]. Moscow, 2007.

Eremeev V. E. Traditional Science of China. Brief history and Ideas, Moscow, 2011.
Eremeev V. E. Nauka i tekhnika Kitay v drevnosti i srednevekovye [Science and Technology of China in Ancient and Medieval Times]. Moscow, 2014.

Kamenarovich I. Classical China, Moscow, 2006.
Karapetyants A.M. U istokov kitayskoy slovesnosti: sobranie trudov [At the origins of Chinese literature]. Moscow, 2010.

Karapetyants A.M. Rannekitayskaya sistemologiya [Early Chinese Systemology], Moscow, 2015.

Kobzev A. I. The doctrine of symbols and numbers in Chinese classical Philosophy, Moscow, 1994.
Kobzev A. I. Vzaimodeystvie tsivilizatsii: zapadnye prognozatsii i kitayskaya real'nost ' [Interaction of Civilizations: Western forecasts and Chinese reality].

Kobzev A. I. "Clash of civilizations" and "dialogue of cultures" / / In the flow of scientific creativity. To the 80th anniversary of Academician V. S. Myasnikov, Moscow, 2011, pp. 5-15.
Kobzev A. I. Kitay i atomizm [China and Atomism] / / Istoriko-filosofskiy yezhegodnik ' 2010. Moscow, 2011, pp. 367-394.

Kobzev A. I. Sinology as a universal science and Russian China, Ordus or Zheltorosia // In search of the "Chinese Miracle". Collection of articles dedicated to the 80th anniversary of Yu. V. Chudodeev. Moscow, pp. 20-31.

Kobzev A. I. Xinhai fracture in Chinese culture / / Xinhai revolution and Republican China: vek revolyutsii, evolyutsii i modernizatsii [The Age of revolutions, evolution and modernization]. Collection of Articles, Moscow, 2013, pp. 59-75.

Kobzev A. I. Global cultural alternative: Kitay - Zapad [China-the West]. 2015, No. 1, pp. 36-57.

Kobzev A. I., Eremeev V. E. Traditional science in China. T. I. Metodologicheskie nauki: protologika, numerologiya i matematika [Methodological sciences: protology, numerology and mathematics]. Book 1. General sections, Moscow, 2014.
Kravtsova E. M. Istoriya kul'tury Kitay [History of Chinese Culture]. St. Petersburg, 1999.

Needham J. Obshchestvo i nauka na Vostoke i na Zapad [Society and Science in the East and West]. Nauka o nauke, Moscow, 1966, pp. 149-177.

J. Needham Fundamental'nye osnovy traditsionnoi kitayskoy nauki [Fundamental foundations of traditional Chinese Science]. Kitayskaya geomantiya [Chinese Geomancy], St. Petersburg, 1998, pp. 195-263.

Spirin V. S. Postroenie drevnekitayskikh tekstov [Construction of Ancient Chinese texts]. SPb., 2006.

Fitzgerald C. P. China: A brief history of culture. St. Petersburg, 1998.

Huntington S. P. Clash of Civilizations, Moscow, 2003.
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