The two countries seem to
have very different perspectives when it comes to their culture.
One night in Kunming, China last December I was out to dinner with a
former professor, a middle-aged Chinese woman. She had just returned from a
trip to Washington D.C. and at one point during the meal we began contrasting
America and China on a number of different fronts: infrastructure, geography,
weather, fashion. When I brought up the differences between Chinese and
American culture she interjected, “What American culture?” The U.S. is too
young a country to have a culture, she began arguing. In her mind, real culture
was something that could only exist after thousands of years of civilization.
Besides, she argued, American culture is merely a collection of snippets from
other cultures. It is not a true culture. This was not the first time
I’d heard such criteria for culture from a Chinese friend. What does this
perspective, if anything, say about how the Chinese generally view culture as a
concept and how that might differ from the American viewpoint?
Whereas
American ideas of culture acknowledge a certain package of shared traits –
food, language, music, customs – as a base requirement, the Chinese
alternative, it seems, ascribes a much heftier weight to time.
China, it
is often said, has the oldest continuous civilization. While true in many
respects – it has remained largely politically coherent since the first
millennium BC – this is also slightly misleading. The five thousand or so years
of human habitation in the land we now call China, today a territory larger
then it’s ever been, has been a changing hodgepodge of kingdoms and dynasties
with often diverse ethnic make-ups. And what we think of as Chinese usually is
limited to the Han ethnicity, which makes up around 90 percent of the
population. The remaining minority groups – Tibetans, Yi, Zhuang, Dai, among a
few dozen others – have their own sets of cultures, traditions and histories.
Still, there are forms of Chineseness that have persisted through millennia and
it’s certainly something to be proud of and celebrate.
But the
idea that Chinese culture is somehow more advanced then others because of its
long life is one of the bedrocks of what is called “Han chauvinism,” a sociological
disposition that favors the Han ethnicity over others, and it has real
implications for how Beijing conducts its affairs. In both the disputed
territories of Tibet and Xinjiang for instance, the Chinese invoke history and
culture to argue for Han claims on each region. In its ongoing spat with Japan
the fact that the original settlers of the archipelago came from China is often
cited patronizingly.
This
mindset serves a clear political purpose. China has been plagued throughout its
history by war, chaos and factionalism. The idea that all Han come from the
same historical place and that Han culture is superior, if a single culture at
all, is a powerful force in unifying people under an emperor or a flag.
Americans
have this too, of course. American exceptionalism, the belief that American
values are qualitatively superior to others, is evident in our movies, our
books, our understandings of history, and of course our foreign policy. Our own
cultural exceptionalism was shaped, like the Chinese version, by our
development as a powerful civilization and our interaction with surrounding
groups. In both the Chinese and American experiences in territorial expansion
the frontier forces faced violent resistance from native peoples and in both
experiences the natives were regarded as members of an inferior race. The
success of both China and America in expanding its territory over that of
surrounding peoples’ validated each civilization’s notions of itself as
culturally superior. Moreover, in China’s case, aggressors that invaded China
from abroad, the Manchus and the Mongols notably, actually ended up adopting
Chinese culture and becoming Sinicized themselves. This too contributed to the
notion that Han culture was a step above the rest.
Like any
culture, China’s is deep, ever-changing, and multifaceted and it can be hard to
speak concisely or determinately about anything so variable and intangible.
There are however certain reoccurring, generally held attributes: Confucianism
and its general urgings towards stability, obedience, and societal hierarchies;
collectivism over individualism; and a Taoist understanding of the world as
interconnected and seeking equilibrium. China’s deep well of art, cuisine,
literature and innovations are all in part a product of these sociological
underpinnings. All of this developed gradually over more then five thousand
years, a remarkable length of time for cultural traits to survive through. It’s
no wonder the Chinese point to that and are proud of it. Yet China is not
unique in this.
If we
were to look at how Americans might deconstruct their own national culture we
would probably see things like the American democratic system, American
English, American philosophies, as well as elements of popular culture such as
American music, food, literature and film. But we would also see things like
Shakespeare, Hobbs, Plato, Athenian democracy and the Roman empire – elements
of the ancient and old worlds. While these can’t be said to be strictly
American in the same way that the Chinese alternatives maybe can, they are held
with a comparable sense of pride and reverence in the American psyche. Since
the aspects of American culture that are ancient in origin are also shared with
other Western countries, we tend to value strictly American creations – art,
music, innovations and ideas – and thus new world ones, over those of the
ancient and old worlds, at least in the immediate arena of culture-making.
So we see
that, despite modern political arrangements, in both China and America ideas of
civilization and antiquity are deeply entrenched within modern conceptions of
national culture. But how does this play out in the real world? “In the Chinese
language there is wenhua (文化) for culture but also wenming (文明) for civilization or civilized,” says Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a China
scholar and history professor at the University of California Irvine. “They go
together and the root has something to do with creation and texts and things
passed on. You can see they’re connected. Similarly, we can sometimes talk that
way as well. We use the term for someone being cultured to mean sort of
possessing in these kinds of civilized awareness.” If, like China, America also
traces its cultural origins to antiquity and ancient civilization, why then are
so many of my Chinese friends so quick to disqualify American culture as
undeveloped or infantile? Part of it might be a lack of exposure.
“I think
it’s maybe ignorance because they don’t really know what America is,” says Yan
Sun, a professor of political science at Queens College in New York and scholar
of ethnic relations in China. “They may have read about it in the paper but the
reporters don’t know of it either. The kind of American culture that gets
exported isn’t Broadway but NBA.”
Chinese
impressions of American culture generally are limited to the one-dimensional
and very new. Consider this anecdotal example: A few years ago in Kunming I was
teaching English to a class of college students as a substitute teacher. Having
no experience in teaching, I improvised an activity for the students. I wrote
China and America on the whiteboard and had each student come up and write an
English word they associated with each country. The results were intriguing.
Under China were things like, “long history,” “traditional food,” “Great Wall.”
Under America, a much longer and varied list, was “sexy,” “fast food,”
“iPhone,” “Disney” “UN,” “economy crisis” and “homosexual.” It was clear that
most of the things they associated with their own country were of the past,
while associations with America were mostly of the very recent. Of course, such
an informal polling cannot be seen as authoritative, but I would venture to say
that other young Chinese would respond similarly.
It makes
sense that outsiders might associate America with newness. America was founded
on novel ideas and a fresh start. The notion of a clean slate is ingrained in
its national psyche. Indeed, it is a part of the country’s global reputation.
“We have it in our power,” said the American revolutionary Thomas Paine, “to begin
the world all over again.” Instead of revering antiquity, Americans regarded it
with suspicion. “The Past is dead, and has no resurrection,” wrote 19th century
novelist Herman Melville. In China, excepting the frantic years of Maoism and
the Cultural Revolution, such notions have long been not only uncommon but
heretical. “Study the past if you would divine the future,” wrote Confucius.
Only in the last century or so, microscopic in the span of Chinese
civilization, has this begun to change.
Where
American and Chinese societies differ markedly as well is in multiculturalism.
American society has for most of its existence been an ethnically diverse one.
“You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the
whole world,” wrote Melville. If China is known around the world as the oldest
continuous civilization, America is known as the melting pot. Its ethnic
diversity has undeniably contributed to its national culture and in the same
way that many Chinese speak proudly of their long history, Americans tend to
speak proudly of the melting pot. Yet the melting pot society, and the American
national culture that has sprung out of it, is exactly what has been targeted
as somehow illegitimate by my Chinese friends. What I saw as cultural integration,
they saw as cultural theft. What I saw as something that binds together
American culture, they saw as disqualifying it. How do we reconcile these
opposing views?
In the
end the difference may be in the syntax. In America, the word “culture” when spoken
in conversation increasingly refers to aspects of popular culture: film, music,
food; tangible cultural elements and often those of the recent past or present.
In China, it seems more often to refer to things of the far past. “[That China
is a place of ancient culture] has become an increasingly common way of talking
about China. It’s become one of the things that the government sort of
celebrates most,” says Wasserstrom.
Since
coming to power, president Xi Jinping has tightened the Party’s control over
the cultural playing field. He has expanded the Chinese film industry, and
increased promotion of Chinese culture abroad. In a 2010speech on art and
literature Xi stressed that the two cultural realms must “persist in the
fundamental orientation of serving the people and serving Socialism.”
Throughout all of this there has been the China Dream campaign. The national
propaganda campaign, mostly consisting of publicly displayed posters, has
contrasted messages of hope for China’s future with romantic allusions to its
past.Depictions of classical embroidery designs and ancient painting motifs partnered with slogans
like, “Honesty and sincerity passed down from generation to generation;
Confucian classics last forever” and “Spring is always ahead for our motherland”
are common examples of the posters. Unlike propaganda posters of the past that
advertised overtly socialist imagery, the China Dream posters conjure up images
of a faraway past. In doing this the Party is utilizing material that, as New
York Times writer Ian Johnsonpointed out, “used to be
derided by the Party as belonging to China’s backward, pre-Communist past; now,
these aesthetic traditions are a bulwark used to legitimize the Party as a
guardian and creator of the country’s hopes and aspirations.” Within this
atmosphere, culture has, in some ways, become a politically charged topic.
Despite
obvious differences, American and Chinese societies share several
characteristics. They both live in physically large countries. They both are
fiercely proud, patriotic, and pay scant attention to the outside world.
Admittedly, neither country’s culture can be summed up in a couple thousand
words nor can the myriad opinions on this topic of the nearly two billion
people between them. What one can say with confidence however is that both
countries certainly do have a culture. They just might be looking at
them from different angles.
Brent
Crane is a Washington D.C.-based writer
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