Chinese Culture

The following sections are included:

• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface

Currently, there are 7.5 billion people inhabiting the earth. China, Europe, and the United States each occupy similar geographical areas — about 10 million square kilometers. however China has a population of 1.4 billion, Europe half of that (0.7 billion), and the United States a further half (0.35 billion). In other words, if we take a family photo of the world, we will see approximately one Chinese person every five individuals. This leads to the question: what are these Chinese like? What are the cultural features that constitute them as a people and distinguish them from other members? Let us first approach the question from two essential perspectives: history and language.

For a period of 2,000 years from the Qin Dynasty to the late Qing Dynasty, dozens of dynasties had come into succession, but almost all of them had adopted a Confucian model of government. Governmental institutions would change and expand in successive dynasties as social and economic situations developed, but the basic structures and principles would remain consistent over the two-millennia-period despite the cyclical change of dynasties. This was not a continuous period of peace and stability, but rather a cycle of peace and turmoil. Major dynasties (the Han, Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing) would last about 300 years each, followed by shorter periods of bloody violence, usually marked by a sharp decrease in population when dynasties fell, as rebellions devastate the whole country, and then “heroes” would emerge to establish a new dynasty. But overall, when dynasties stood, the Chinese people enjoyed peace and stability, and even prosperity, sometimes called Pax Sinica…

Chinese immigrants are sometimes asked, or even requested to fill in a form, with the question: what is your religion? This is a rather embarrassing question; surely, there are many Muslims and Christians in China today, but majority of the Chinese hardly identify themselves with any religious sect as commonly recognized in the world today. So to answer that question, you have to tick “none” or “other,” which, however, may carry the connotation that you are a “pagan,” or not religious, or do not have spirituality, none of which is appealing at all…

Chinese culture is a poetic culture. Though the Chinese don’t seem to take religion very seriously, they adore poets, both in their long traditional period and in modern times. As late as the 1980s when China began to open up again after the Cultural Revolution, the hero and icon for the youth was definitely the poet. Nowadays, the poet no longer enjoys such prestige and the Chinese youth today probably crave to become the next IT tycoon or something. But one can’t be certain that the poet would never come back to be the hero again. After all, poetic impulse is very much integrated into the cultural vein. Even when economy holds sway in Chinese life today, children are still very much encouraged to recite famous poems of Tang and Song. It would really be a sin for any “educated” Chinese if they fail to familiarize themselves with some famous poems — if not “three hundred poems of Tang and Song” (as the title of the most popular primer collection of Chinese poems goes), perhaps at least a few dozens…

When we talk about “Chinese culture” today, although we are well into the twenty-first century, it still quite often invokes the images of Confucius or calligraphy, the Great Wall or the terracotta warriors, Tai-chi or martial arts movies. These are certainly a part of the Chinese culture even today, and they remain as a part of the legacies of tradition. But if one’s idea of “Chinese culture” still remains in the time-frozen zone of “ancient Cathay,” as if “culture” and “China” are incongruent entities, it will certainly be detrimental to our understanding of Chinese culture. To understand Chinese culture is to understand Chinese culture as it is today. A Chinese today, in terms of his (and her!) modus vivendi, lifestyles, ideas and demeanors, is very different from someone who lived a hundred-fifty or a hundred years ago. Chinese culture has gone through a gigantic modern transformation, which is still witnessing ongoing change. Chinese culture today is a mixture of tradition and modernity, and for that matter, the effects of its modernity, even though only for a very short time period compared to its millennia-old tradition, outshine those of tradition. While culture may take ages to consolidate and take shape, it is also true that it can change dramatically in a short period of time, as evidenced by the modern Chinese experience…

When we say that Chinese culture today has a strong sense of nationalism, it does not mean that it is self-absorbing and self-defensive, obsessed with its own tradition and “fundamentals.” On the contrary, Chinese modernity has been very much an open and cosmopolitan process about engaging and even embracing the “Other” — the very notion of nationalism was indeed a foreign adaptation. It is not so much that the Chinese did not have self-awareness before Western gunboats opened up the Chinese shores, but that the notion of being Chinese had been a cultural and civilizational one. The Chinese thought, whether Confucian, Taoist, or Buddhist for that matter, is by nature universal and cosmopolitan. At the heart of the Chinese worldview is the notion of “tianxia” — “All under Heaven,” so to speak. The Chinese did differentiate between “Chinese” and “barbarians,” but that was based on universal morals rather than racial or ethnic divides. In other words, “Chinese” and “barbarians” were interchangeable depending on whether or not you follow a set of moral standards that would define you as “human” or “humane” rather than a crude beast. Confucius was explicit in his view that he would rather stay among the “barbarians” if the Chinese had lost all their “rites” and “music”…

A super-state is what the Chinese are living under today, a Communist state empowered by global capitalism. This has tremendous implications on the Chinese culture. The Confucian tradition, for instance, went through the most spectacular destruction under the Communist super-state until quite recently when it was again recuperated into a mainstream ideological discourse. In that respect, one could argue that the Confucian teachings are in a sense skin-deep in Chinese culture today. What is perhaps more relevant is what constitutes and what has made the super-state possible. For that, we need to trace a darker, more destructive revolutionary side of Chinese culture. In many ways, “a powerful nation” was a shared dream of generations of modern Chinese intellectuals, but the final outcome of a Communist super-state was very much the consequence of the radicalization of the Chinese mind under the global influence of Communism—otherwise also called “revolutionary cosmopolitanism.” This chapter discusses how the modern Chinese were overwhelmed in “becoming lost as serially numbered units in the masses of disciplined, obedient, regimented and uniformed coolies,” and the intellectual struggle still facing Chinese today.

When the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution came to an end in 1976, China was on the verge of collapse. Behind the Iron Curtain were a people exhausted of political campaigns in the name of class struggle while barely making a living at all. I was at Year One in middle school and I remember I was wearing my father’s used work clothes to school. Everything was rationed — peanuts were something I cherished only once a year during the Chinese New Year. That was the reality of the Communist utopia. Then, peasants began to defy the party doctrine by growing vegetables and raising chicken in their own backyard out of sheer necessity, ignoring the risk of being labeled as a “capitalist” with dire consequences. Thousands and thousands of people were risking their lives against the cold waters and military barricades to illegally cross the border to Hong Kong. This time, however, the potential mass unrest played a favorable impact upon the power struggle in the party elite in which the “reformers,” many of whom had been persecuted during Mao’s rule and had recently been readmitted to the party leadership, took the opportunity and resolutely turned away from Mao’s orthodox principles. Deng Xiaoping, who emerged as the leader of the new party elite, would lead China into the Reform Era. Instead of blocking illegal migrants by force against the barbwire along the Shenzhen River, what the reformers did was to “open up” part of Shenzhen as a “special economic zone” and invited those capitalists in Hong Kong and abroad to set up their factories there, so that hungry Chinese workers could have jobs and feed themselves. That was how “gaikai” — “gaige” (reform) and “kaifang” (opening up) — started…

The following sections are included:

• Works Cited
• Suggested Further Readings
• Chinese Character List
• Index