It is very different from the western view which, on the eve of the Beijing Olympics, seems to have become obligatory for publishers and their marketing departments. Here be dragons, eight of them in the current bunch - only one short of the auspicious nine - a fearsome brood with claws outstretched and mostly coloured red.
Generalisations about China, the great historian John King Fairbank once wrote, are "the sort of thing we should learn in the eighth grade" and then spend a lifetime breaking down into reality. By this standard the persistence of the dragon cliché means we still have a lot of work to do.
The most frightening dragon is offered by Erik Durschmied, who urges us, simply, to beware: while China was regarded for centuries as "an ancient dragon enfolded in a sleep of ages", it was really writing "pages in blood in the world's chronicle". This 1,000 years of bloodshed - the subtitle of his book - dates from the Mongol invasion of Europe to the "Chinese hordes" in the Korean war. Durschmied acknowledges (a) that this is a period of only seven, not 10, centuries, and (b) that the Mongols were not Chinese at all - but we should still beware. Long before the Kaiser spoke of the "yellow peril", China gave us what Durschmied calls the yellow scourge - the black death which, contrary to the accepted view, originated in the putrefaction of unburied corpses after a Chinese earthquake. Western civilisation then had a narrow escape when the Ming dynasty naval explorer Zheng He was ordered to turn back by a poorly advised young emperor. If Zheng had continued sailing westwards, he would have annihilated the merchant fleets of Venice, Genoa and the Sultan of Istanbul.
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