The famous Ching-dynasty scholar and general, Tseng Kuo-fan, once wrote that keeping fish and pigs and growing vegetables and bamboo are essential activities for the maintenance of a well-ordered home and indicators of a family's fortunes. The reasoning is simple: In large households fish and pig raising are communal industries; domestic harmony increases production and wealth, while friction upsets the animals and leads to losses.

For the satirist Lin Yutang this exemplified the Chinese ideals of frugality and industriousness. It was an expression of the Chinese knowledge that the benefits of civilization also bring dangers, that the simplest joys last longest and indulging in too many of life's pleasures leads to a decrease of one's overall happiness. As a Chinese scholar once said, "a well-filled stomach is indeed a great thing: all else is luxury in life."

The writer Wendell Berry once described Americans as being the most unhappy people in the world because they are always having face lifts and fretting over their weight, while "the water they drink, the food they eat and the air they breathe are all poisonous." Today this is the common predicament shared by all of us.

"Yet it is not dirt but the fear of dirt which is the sign of man's degeneration," according to Lin Yutang; a statement that adds poignancy to the fact that farmers today keep aside a patch of land for their own "private vegetables," reserving that which has been subjected to chemical saturation for the people of Taipei who want to eat nice looking things!

Lin Yutang's seminal work, My Country My People, was published in 1934. In the introduction by Pearl S. Buck she pointed out how the Chinese had "viewed with interest and sometimes with satisfaction the world war, the depression, the breakdown of prosperity and the failure of scientific men to prevent these disasters." They began to say that China was not so bad. Even contemporary youth, immersed in English and modern Chinese literature as they were, looked back to the simple purity of the traditional ideals of Chinese life.

The China of this time was divided internally and encroached upon by its powerful neighbor, and the "New Life Movement" had just begun. In the eyes of Buck, this great drifting China could have avoided many of its problems if only it "had been earlier less sluggish."

Looking at the spectacle of Europe, Lin Yutang wrote: "She is suffering less from a lack of 'smartness' or intellectual brilliance than from the lack of a little mellow wisdom. It seems at times barely possible that Europe will outgrow its hotheaded youthfulness and its intellectual brilliance.... will be a little less desirous to make progress, and little more anxious to understand life."

Since 1934 there has been another world war, which has only in-creased scepticism about the fruits of scientism and industrialization. But Europe holds to its dream of endless progress and has not only emerged from the rubble but also recreated a prosperous world. Yet right now the Europeans have once again seen a collapse of industry and the family and face a bleak outlook with rising unemployment.

How things do change! During President Bush's last visit to Japan, the press there mercilessly speculated on how the American trade deficit is due to the "laziness" of Americans. And when former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher came to lecture Taiwan, she felt able to opine that "the Chinese are natural-born businessmen."

Yet since the 1980s Americans have been spending more time at work than Europeans. The multitude of work-related maladies to which Americans are now subjected has led to a rethinking of the values of living; people now want to pursue spiritual revival and "family values" has become the banner of both camps in this year's presidential election.

The Europeans are worrying over what has brought them to their current impasse and taking a new look at their systems of education and traditional disregard for business. Signs of contempt for the power of the "economic animals" of Asia with their "busy bee" culture do still occasionally emerge, however.

Is western culture entering a mellow autumn? Has China passed through a harsh winter to now warm to a culture humming with the vitality of great ambitions? Now that Chinese people are admired as nature's businessmen, will we see a return to the values of the garden? How hard will it be to once again enjoy unspoiled fields, clean water, fresh air and unpolluted land?