On Samuel Wells Williams' View Of China

Samuel Wells Williams is an American missionary who came to China in 1833, and had been in China for 43 years. During the years, he had been the American ambassador to China. He became a professor of Yale University after went back, and was the first American Sinologist.It is obvious that Samuel had been affected by the American modern civilization. Prompted by the pious belief, and withheld the strong will to spread the Gospel, he came to China,which was a strange country full of mistery in the eyes of the Westerners. According to Samuel's analyze, China can remain in a closed state for a long period is not only due to the closing country policy implemented by the government. But besides, there are some deeper reasons. First, China is isolated and limited the vision of Chinese. Second, the resources of China are abundant enough to raise itself and there is no need to communicate with the outside world. Third, the Chinese language is an old caligraphy differs greatly from the Western alphabetic languages, so it could not become the affective inter-media of the Sino-Western civilization communication and impeded it. Samuel thought that under the general background of the global expand of the Christianity, and encounted by the strong guns and warships of the Western powers, China had no choice but to open the country gate. This was also the God's will. He felt the corruption in China's monarch politics. However, due to the combined effect of the vertical control by the emporer and the horizonal supervision regime, china's political state was stable at the time being. If china wanted to be stable in a long period, it had no choice but to learn from the West and reform according to the Western democratic politics. Although Samuel was appreciated with China's forus on the moral training in its traditional education, he still argued that compared to that of the West, Chinese education was far from the perfecrt one and it also needed to learn from the West for absorbing new information and essence. In Samuel's view, Chinese still lived in a stagnized world and had few similarities with the fast growing modern society, and only converting to Christiality could Chinese get rid of the ignorant and backward state.In Samuel's view, China the old decayed country only had to learn from the Western countries to seek for its way out. The view on China of Samual is the tri-demands of missionary, ambassador and sinologist, which is in accordance with his social role.We should discuss Samuel's view of China objectively. On one hand, his view did not get rid of the affect of the"western centered argument", and still viewed China with from the Salvior's prospective. It is worth criticizing. On the other hand, the problems raised by his view need our thinking, and we can learn from it during our modernization. We also should learn from it how to treat different civilizations. We shall treat them in a tolerable attitude, and thus we can understand each other.