China, a year later. I haven't written on life here in a while, because I quickly ran out of interesting/fun things to report. But now, having worked and talked with locals a bit more, I am beginning to form a mental image of China's culture - and one I do not much like, but that is interesting to write about.
My interpretation of the country's history is that the cultural revolution succeeded in its explicitly stated goal of destroying the Four Old - Customs, Culture, Habits and Ideas. The destruction of old artifacts, the suppression of customs, the persecution of intellectuals and the restriction of free speech were all very successful in eradicating anything the people could use as a framework to think about morality, aesthetics, social norms and behaviours. As a result, the Chinese were left with a blank slate, a void that they have been trying to fill with whatever they can - mostly commercialism and consumerism.
You see this attempt to fill the void everywhere: in their adoption of the commercial aspect of religious holidays, like Halloween and Christmas; in the explosive growth of
foreign religions; in their attempts to
Hollywoodify their
films; in their adoption of and preference for Western fashion; in their habit of naming random things after
famous Western people; in their construction of faux-European buildings; in their selective and sort of emotionally empty attempt to revive old customs; and so on. To give just one example of the latter, a couple of weeks ago the Chinese celebrated the
Lantern Festival (which although it has been celebrated since ~200BC was banned after the cultural revolution and revived again later on). My wife and I went to a party, where someone asked the Chinese people there what the festival was about. The only one who knew was my wife, who had read the festival's history on Wikipedia.
(Not that I blame them on this one - there are many stories about the origin of the Festival but one of them goes as follows: one day, the Emperor's favourite counselor witnessed one of the palace's maids about to commit suicide. He asked her why she wanted to kill herself, and the girl replied that she never had a chance to see her family and she was sad. The counselor decided to help her. But did he go to the Emperor and say "hey, there's this little girl and she was literally about to kill herself, maybe we should give her leave to go see her parents"? No, where's the fun in that? He set up a fortune telling booth in town, and started telling everyone God was about to go Sodom and Gomorrah on them. He also told them God would send a red fairy with further instructions. He then had the maid dress as a red fairy and tell everyone the town would burn on the fifteenth lunar day (how exactly this furthers the maid's agenda is unclear). The Emperor asked him (the counselor) for advice, and the counselor suggested that everyone cook his (the counselor's) favourite food, launch fireworks and hang red lanterns outside their houses to trick God into thinking the city was already on fire so that he (God) would leave the city alone. The Emperor followed this advice, had everyone light lanterns and everything was well. Oh, and the maid's family came to the palace to see the lanterns and was reunited with the maid. So yeah...it looks like the counselor's only match in coming up with incredibly convoluted schemes to achieve something exceedingly simple is Wile E. Coyote.
(In general, either there is a much more significant cultural understanding aspect than I thought when it comes to narrative structure, or ancient Chinese story tellers did not deem it necessary to imbue their characters with basic logic - for example, in the ancient epic "
The Three Kingdoms", the "good guy"'s chief general defeats a rebel leader something like 9 times, each time sparing him, letting him go and specifically instructing him to raise a new army to fight a new war. Why? Because reasons. (Also: how good the good guy, Liu Bei, is is debatable: at one point he seeks refuge in a hunter's house. The hunter, not having any game, butchers his wife and feeds her to his guest telling him it's wolf meet. Later, Liu Bei walks past the kitchen, sees the wife's corpse and realises what happen. But instead of feeling sick or guilty or anything like that he is touched, and rewards the hunter with money and praise.)
(Then again, the undisputed champion for wtfesque narrative is Bram Stoker, who in addition to his well known masterpiece also wrote a lesser known gem called "
The Lair of the White Worm". The story is that two Englishmen believe an impoverished noblewoman is an ancient dragon, because their pet mongoose attacked her and her house is at the site of ancient Mercian legends. So of course the only logical conclusion is that she is the fabled White Worm who has evolved over the millennia to look like a human because that's totally how evolution works. They actually turn out to be right, and the lady/dragon takes turns at trying to brutally murder them and inviting them to tea. They (the Englishmen) politely accept her invites because to refuse a lady's invitation in Victorian England is unthinkable, even if your host is a primordial monster. At the same time there is a nobleman who tries to telepathically murder an innocent girl just so that he can test his psychic powers. The girl also refuses to avoid seeing her aspiring murderer because what would society think is she were rude to him?)))
But anyway, digressions aside, this is a serious matter. Cultures evolve, but at any given point in time, people have their past as a starting point to think about their future. Let's say you are interested in philosophy. Before you even go to university, you have some grasp of the ideas in philosophy - morality, virtues, political systems, the nature of reality &c. Then you go to university where you are taught by people who have been thinking about these topics all their lives.
But now imagine that you are not allowed access to any information; that you are not allowed to even discuss any of these topics. That anyone who does discuss these topics is exiled or worse. That any books on these topics are banned. That from one day to the next, these topics just stop existing. And that this goes on for 10 years, so that at the end of the decade, no-one really knows anything about these matters.
What do you do in this case? All your links to the past have been severed. You have no framework, no references, nothing to go on. Consider art: I am far from an expert on the matter, but when my wife and I visited the National Museum of Art in Beijing, we had the feeling that the paintings, while technically good, were insubstantial attempts to copy Western (or in fewer cases traditional Chinese) art. It was like artists were told "this is what art looks like, go make something like it" - there was no self-expression, no effort to evolve the medium, just an attempt at imitation of what others are doing.
Trying to forge a path without being on one already, without a starting point, must be incredibly difficult. What's especially sad is that, bizarre story-telling aside, what little I've seen of older art is excellent. Older architecture, fashion and furniture are elegant, beautiful and at times awe inspiring. It's a huge shame that the Chinese have been reducing to trying to reproduce their past glories (for example, by creating fake antiques (because most of the real ones were destroyed during the revolution) or putting huge tacky red stickers with classical Chinese writing on their doors).
(At the moment I am trying to establish whether the same can be said of Chinese philosophy (i.e. that it was also good). Amazingly, the big bookshop in the expat area only had one copy of one book on Confucius. It's premature to make judgments based on one book alone, but so far I cannot say I've been overwhelmed - basically it's all about praising virtues like humility and kindness, but without any attempt to explain why these are important virtues. (Also includes aphorisms like "praise a horse for its virtue, not its strength"). In this sense, it looks like Confucianism is much more like a religion (i.e. trying to describe a good way of living without an analysis on
why this way of life is the right one) than philosophy).
In the same way art comes across as soulless, so do revived traditions. In Europe people find meaning in their traditions, even if these are mundane things that are more secular rather than religious any more - like a meal of old family recipes on Christmas day, a walk on boxing day or attending church on Easter Sunday. As
I've written before, I think such traditions are basically a means of communication, of transferring feelings and thoughts from one generation to the next, a means of building a sense of community and belonging. In contrast, traditions here give the impression of people saying "hey, that old custom seems nice, let's do that again", in the same way someone in Europe might attend a moon party in Thailand or an Indian wedding - sure, it may be fun and interesting, but it won't have the same meaning.
That said, there is a small part of ancient culture that has survived. This has to do with belief in certain virtues such as loyalty, a particularly strong sense of duty towards family and belief in superstition (e.g. fortune telling, which is apparently quite popular even with business magnates who will consult psychics before conducting business deals - at least, that's what I was told by a journalist here!). Also food. I suppose it's almost impossible to do away with culinary traditions!
(Let me also note that while I am using the West as a comparison, I do think the West also suffers from a similar problem to an extent. Fewer and fewer people believe in God or follow a religion in earnest, but they have not found something to replace it. For this I blame academic philosophers: having done away with a religious moral framework, they have not thought it appropriate to try and talk with the average person about potential alternatives, preferring to debate pedantic details among themselves in their ivory towers. But regardless of whose fault it is, the fact of the matter is that in the West too we have people who are somewhat lost - they have some notions of what is "good" and what is "bad", but nothing to base these ideas on. I think this uncertainty, this lack of a convincing moral framework, is partly to blame for things like polarisation, increases in divorce rates, weakening sense of community and belonging, existential crises &c - in other words, people in the West have become too smart to blindly believe in God-issued tenets but not smart enough/secure enough to cope with the resulting lack of meaning in their lives. Hence people trying to combat existential angst with ideas imported from the East (Buddhism &c), pilates, spinning and so on. That's right - I trace the emergence of spinning to the decline of religion).
What I am now wondering is whether this is linked to the other notable aspect of culture here - a lack of innovative drive (one request I make when interviewing candidates is that they provide an example of innovative thinking; sadly I cannot produce their responses publicly, but trust me, some are hilarious and beggar belief). Is this lack of innovation linked to the fact that coming up with new ideas was dangerous and discouraged during the revolution? Or is this a more historical trait? (After all, even older Chinese culture seems to favour stability over progress). Either way, it looks like the educational system here trains people that there is a box whose boundaries are very clearly defined, and thinking ought to be contained within that box. Amazingly, at the same time as the Chinese are trying to emulate Western education to
teach their children creativity, Western schools are trying to go the other way and emulate China!
(In my view both approaches are wrong and the truth lies in the middle. It's wrong to teach children to solve problems algorithmically/through brute force without real understanding; but it's equally wrong to teach children that there is no such thing as a wrong answer and that memorising information is useless. It's quite embarrassing that British children have no idea of history or grammar for example - apparently memorising facts or understanding
the rules that govern language are too restrictive (for what it's worth, my view on the importance of grammar isn't just a result of my being a stuck-up, pedantic conservative (not that this isn't at all a factor): it has to do with the appreciation of language's beauty. When you start understanding grammar you begin to see that a communication tool that arose naturally is nevertheless ruled by a very consistent logic; furthermore, as you learn different languages, you begin to see that there are some elements that are remarkably similar among them - which has led some people to postulate the existence of a hard-wired
Universal Grammar in humans. I mean, isn't this all wonderful? Don't you think people who use language without really thinking about it are missing out? It's like having your living room furnished with Picassos and Dalis and never even realising they are there, much less stopping to admire them.))
Anyway - this refusal to think out of the box has unfortunate repercussions on things like customer service or productivity. For example, you go to a hotel with a large group of people, and though there are 3 receptionists at the check in desk, they insist all three of them are needed to check in one person, regardless of the fact that there are 20 people waiting in a queue. Or you go to the underground, which has a checkpoint staffed with 8 (!!) security guards - one to scan your bags, one to scan you and 6 to just stand there. Plus another 2 guards and 5 attendants on the platform. No-one seems to question why this many people are needed in a little station far from downtown Beijing. Or you go to the Tianjin rail station, and you have to undergo a security check to buy tickets, then exit the ticket office, go to the main terminal and undergo a second security check before you can go to your platform.
Given all this, it may seem shocking the Chinese are so advanced when it comes to things like mobile payments. But thinking about it, it seems to me that the areas in which the Chinese are more advanced than the west are those that are a matter of execution and resources rather than design (e.g. bullet trains), lack of regulation or fortunate coincidences (e.g. the Chinese never developed a big credit card culture, so they moved straight from cash to mobile payments). The question is, are these sustainable? Are the Chinese destined to beat the West only as far as they can import and improve foreign ideas? Or will they adapt and do away with cultural barriers to innovation? This remains to be seen.
One final note: none of the above is to say that the Chinese aren't smart or good people. I have met many people here who are driven and excellent at their jobs and almost everyone is kind and welcoming. I am only commenting on the astonishing cultural destruction the country underwent.
