If ambiton is often deemed as something evil in the Christian world, it has, in Chinese, two opposite sides. And I wonder if the ambiguous nature of Chinese philosophy, the Chinese way to see the world, a lack of accurary and absoluteness—the qualities that science and technology requires—one of the reasons that made this at one time the wealthiest countries in the world lagged so pitifully behind in the run since the age of Industrial Revolution.

Ambition for the Chinese could be 雄心, heroic heart, or 野心, savage heart. Much as the Chinese and the West would disagree over the character of Mao, to say that Mao is an ambitious man certainly would win both sides’ confirmation.

It’s said China now is at The Age of Ambition, the whole country is dashing forward, sometimes with the madness of a full-speed train gone off the track, and everyone in the country, under the influence of this energy, rushes on themselves. One hesitates to commend this. Certainly New York itself is a city charged full of a similar energy.

A hero’s heart, a hero aspires to something that’s out of the common run of life. 雄心壮志, is a word stirs the blood and brings in the images of the epics of Homer. No Chinese could hear this word without at once popping up in their minds various characters in the swordsmen novels.

A savage’s heart, a savage (though the word “savage” now, even compared to two decades ago, takes on a different meaning that’s quite different from the long period that the west had, undoubtly still now, in the complacency of their “civilized society”.) a savage with much rage and discontent, wants land, wants power, wants money. 野心勃勃, is a word comes with the image of war and destruction under a tyrannical will.

As no one could sum up French Revolution with one word, and there will be forever dispute as to what a man Napoleon really is, the complex of the world and human nature is thus that it’s no longer easy for us to say “this person is a good guy and that person bad” once we grew out of childhood.

And it might be in a man to be both 雄心壮志 and 野心勃勃, as French Revolution started with heroic ideas for human race and soon turned into horror and blood shed.

If the Chinese is paying heavily for its ambiguousness, for its reluctance to go to absoluteness and extremities and cut off the innate connections in everything—“there is no beauty without ugliness to contrast it; we know goodness because there is evil to contrast it”—there is hope that this way of seeing the world, this philosophy, will finally pay off: For everything by nature is connected, and when science and technology play out, it ultimately is us, human, our mind to grasp the world thoroughly and comprehensively as a whole that wins us the game in the long run.