CHINESE mediocrity in soccer is once again perpetuated with the recent elimination of its men's Olympic team from the 2012 London Olympics football finals.

As expected, the defeat was followed by a blame game. The hurt pride of disappointed fans was not much assuaged by the pervasive legend that ancient China was the mythical birthplace of soccer, known then as cu ju.

When even delusions of past grandeur fail to soothe, some sigh and concede that Chinese grow up eating porridge and pickles, therefore we are physically no match on the pitch for Europeans and Americans, who are better nourished with large consumption of beef.

This might sound like nonsense, but the myth that Western dominance in soccer is a result of higher intake of animal protein is significantly changing the Chinese diet, with more household spending on dairy and meat products.

Homogenizing eating habits is one example of how different cultures are becoming more alike after millennia of mutual influence. But the mutual influence we talk so much about now is falsehood, as it's self-evident who is influencing whom in a world dominated by the West.

Genuine mutual influence only existed before the 1800s, when levels of human development in East and West were generally considered on a par, according to Stanford University professor Ian Morris.

Opium war

In his book "Why the West Rules - For Now," Morris argues that "The West has not been locked into global dominance since the distant past; only after 1800CE, on the eve of the Opium War, did the West pull ahead of the East, and even that was largely accidental."

Indeed, if we pore over history books, we'll know the East, and China in particular, were much richer in both material and spiritual terms.

According to Sinologist Kenneth Pomeranz's book "The Great Divergence," parts of China, especially the Yangtze River delta famed for its thriving silk and tea business, were as prosperous in the early 1800s as a Britain basking in the afterglow of its Industrial Revolution.

Moreover, the enlightened court politics in China had drawn admiration from thinkers like Voltaire, who, traumatized by his persecution at the hands of the Catholic Church he was accused of blaspheming, observed that the kind of religious fanaticism plaguing France was never allowed to prevail over morality and moderation in China.

China, according to him, established the closest thing to a kingdom of reason on earth, governed through rational choice and the teachings of Confucius. China was then held up as a mirror by the exiled French philosophe to reflect the miserable state of his homeland. Voltaire's imagined idyll crumbled when Britain's failed request for China to buy more of what it produced culminated in the Opium War (1839-1942).

Morris argues that this dramatic turn of history was accidental. China happened to be suffering from an exodus of silver, its major currency, and thus demanded that Britain pay silver in exchange for Chinese tea. Instead of complying, Britain took to trading in opium that later sapped the Middle Kingdom's finances and ability to respond forcefully.

China's defeat in the war set the stage for a century of foreign pillage and oppression, yet the lesson learned about this dark chapter is often reduced to either realpolitik - You'll suffer if you fall behind - or nihilism, that our splendid past is nothing before the formidable West.

Authoritative foreign voices strengthened the self-doubt of Chinese. German philosopher Hegel once said that "China has no history, but merely the cyclical rise and fall of various monarchs, out of which no progress can emerge."

Western notions of progress, as Morris argues, mainly center around man's linear evolution manifested in the form of scientific advances, military prowess and rising living standards.

By contrast, Chinese civilization is a continuum of values and beliefs that lasts for millennia, with much less emphasis on material comforts and concrete gauges of technological sophistication.

After disruptions to the continuum, however, everything changed. Self-hating Chinese intellectuals vehemently denounced their own culture for their country's backwardness, rejoicing in "smashing the Confucian shop" during the May Fourth Movement in 1919. Resurgent political movements half a century later would lay further waste to our tenuous links to the past.

Spiritual void

The spiritual void created by this wholesale negation of our ancient civilization was then filled with groveling before everything foreign.

Recent years have seen the publication of numerous books that hype the "China threat." While holding forth on the need to watch out for a vengeful China, they invariably fail to take into account the popular ignorance of China's past. Residual essence of Chinese culture can now only be found in old artists and men of letters. A guqin (seven-string zither) buff, my colleague Wang Yong often shares with me stories of great guqin maestros, whom he admires for their demeanor and rectitude.

Nevertheless, I don't think his passionate promotion of guqin music will make much headway with young minds convinced that Western music is more aesthetically pleasing.

A piano ace, my girlfriend would tune out whenever she heard folk music played on the air, as the "cacophonous medley" reminded her of pan si dong, literally a mythological cave full of cobwebs where spiders-turned-sirens play music to hypnotize their prey.

It is utopian to talk of resurrection of "Chineseness" when many people fall willing prey to the campaign to pulverize what is left of our ravaged past. According to Morris, one likely scenario several years from now is the "merger," or "singularity" of Eastern and Western civilizations.

Given the world's complex disparities, he is likely to be proven wrong on all but one point, that is, the Oriental way of living, traditionally coalescing around frugality and modesty, will indeed resemble the Western lifestyle in terms of lavish spending on luxury goods.

The evolution of Western dominance has led a generation of Chinese to be enslaved to conspicuous consumption. In some ways, Chinese today are reliving the nightmare of epidemic addiction leading to the Opium War, with opium replaced by deluxe goods. As things stand, the sometimes much-heralded search of our lost souls will always be futile as the West still rules by making us conform to its "evolution."