China, the country, contains any number of ethnic minorities, some of them suffering from serious oppression, and encompasses great linguistic diversity. But the Chinese themselves overwhelmingly conceive their civilization as having a clear line of continuity back to ancient times, and both the question of foreign influence and the question of adaptation to modernity have been very live questions for China within living memory, and are still. It is for the Chinese themselves to decide what their civilization is and how it will change over time — but whether it exists really isn’t a question.
The West, though, has a far more indefinite character. It has no definite geographic definition, nor linguistic continuity; its native religion has already been supplanted once by an import from the Middle East (Christianity); and its most central pillar in the 20th century — the United States of America — is one of the most ethnically polyglot societies in history. One might define Western civilization as that part of the world that draws its inspiration from Greco-Roman antiquity — but the medieval Muslim world drew heavily on the legacy of Greece for its science and philosophy, and Russia long conceived of itself as the new Byzantium, which in turn saw itself as in continuity with Rome. Yet Russia has rarely been considered part of the West. And yet, the West is something, even if we can’t readily define it. It is not a myth, but a blur.
But this very blurriness is precisely what the West shares with Africa.
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