It is important to remember that Culture of Mainland China today is a product of communism cleansing especially during the cultural revolution. The rich cultural fabric of traditional Chinese history, philosophy and practices are not as evident in most part of China today as it is in say, Taiwan. I would like to emphasize the one good thing brought about by the revolution - Chinese women gained equal status as Chinese men. Other than that, most of the way of life have been torn down by Marxism and Maosim. Most overseas Chinese hold on to the traditional Chinese Cultural practices and reject communism. Even the Chinese Communist Party realizes that. They opened up China thinking they could manipulate Capitalism to their own advantage. It is successful to some extent, today China is a financial and military superpower as well as the biggest creditor of the USA. But most of us believe that left on its own (subscribing to the ancient chinese Lao tze's philosophy of Wuwei - doing nothing and nothing will be undone), the communist ideology will self destruct because it simply cannot sustain itself over time.
via The American interest (http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/01/03/china-feeling-)hemmed-in/
via The American interest (http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/01/03/china-feeling-)hemmed-in/
China Feeling Hemmed In
An
interesting piece in the NYT this morning looks at what Chinese leaders
see as a dangerous problem of cultural encirclement. From the lead:
There are a lot of obvious ‘freedom is better than censorship’ arguments to be made here, and the Times piece hammers them home. That is all very well, and I agree that Mr. Hu and his party are among the reasons why Chinese culture isn’t taking the world by storm. (Totalitarian culture doesn’t have to be boring, by the way. Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini cut major swathes through the art and culture world in their day. But the status-quo seeking, money-centered ‘communism’ of contemporary China is going to have a hard time supporting cultural products that the rest of the world cares about.)
But geopoliticians as well as students of culture and democracy should pay attention to Hu’s essay. It’s a window into the psychology of China’s leadership at a critical time. The sense of threat, encirclement and danger is real — along with the sense that America is trying to divide, crush and destroy China.
He is not, of course, totally wrong. Americans generally do believe that a house divided cannot stand, and that the world cannot long endure half slave and half free. Communism and dictatorship will, we tend to believe, someday fall in China just as they have done in so many other places.
More, our strategy for dealing with communism in China is more or less the same as our strategy for dealing with it in the Soviet Union. It’s what Lincoln and the Republicans wanted to do to slavery in 1860: keep it from expanding, and wait while the forces of history destroy it from within.
Lincoln then and Americans today don’t think of this as an aggressive strategy. Changing the political structure of China is not on anybody’s to-do list in Washington today. The CIA isn’t hatching plots to overthrow the Chinese leadership. Lincoln swore up and down that he wouldn’t abolish slavery where it stood, and would have accepted a constitutional amendment making that position clear.
But Jefferson Davis and his fellow southerners weren’t fooled. They knew that Lincoln’s program to contain slavery was a plan to destroy slavery and, worse, they were sure it would work. Cotton exhausted the soil; sooner or later, if slavery couldn’t expand into new territory, plantations wouldn’t pay and when that happened the whole system would fail. Moreover, the North was growing faster than the South; increasingly the South would be outvoted and turned defensively in on itself.
Hu and some of his fellows seem to be thinking like Jefferson Davis. They believe that America’s project (it isn’t as definite as a plan) to undermine communism in China will work in due course. They fear the historical forces Francis Fukuyama identified in The End of History, and they fear that those forces march to the tune of the Star Spangled Banner.
Further, they connect (psychologically if not explicitly) America’s geopolitical strategy of balancing power in Asia with the containment policy we practiced against the Soviets. They see us in India, Japan, Australia, Vietnam and many other places in the region and they see the same kind of geopolitical and geoeconomic web-weaving that hemmed in and ultimately brought down the Soviets.
Americans, contemplating our policies in Asia and our ideological approach to Chinese communism, see us as promoting a stable status quo that ought to appeal to the Chinese. President Hu and many Chinese leaders see things very differently: the status quo is a dagger aimed at China’s heart. Our very moderation is a sophisticated form of aggression.
This perception gap is something both sides will have to live with, and the ensuing climate of suspicion and hostility is something we will both have to manage. Jefferson Davis, Kaiser Bill and Adolf all decided to fight what they saw as encirclement and containment by hostile powers. It didn’t work out well for them, but a lot of others were badly hurt in the process as well.
US-China relations are a complicated mix of hostility and mutual dependence. Understanding that mix and managing the relationship in a sustainable way must be a top priority for leaders in both countries.
President Hu Jintao of China has said that the West is trying to dominate China by spreading its culture and ideology and that China must strengthen its cultural production to defend against the assault, according to an essay in a Communist Party policy magazine published this week.President Hu had a lot on his mind.
“We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration,” Mr. Hu said, according to a translation by Reuters.From Hu’s perspective the news on the culture war is not good.
“We should deeply understand the seriousness and complexity of the ideological struggle, always sound the alarms and remain vigilant and take forceful measures to be on guard and respond,” he added.
“The overall strength of Chinese culture and its international influence is not commensurate with China’s international status,” Mr. Hu said in his essay, according to another translation.
“The international culture of the West is strong while we are weak,” he said.
There are a lot of obvious ‘freedom is better than censorship’ arguments to be made here, and the Times piece hammers them home. That is all very well, and I agree that Mr. Hu and his party are among the reasons why Chinese culture isn’t taking the world by storm. (Totalitarian culture doesn’t have to be boring, by the way. Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini cut major swathes through the art and culture world in their day. But the status-quo seeking, money-centered ‘communism’ of contemporary China is going to have a hard time supporting cultural products that the rest of the world cares about.)
But geopoliticians as well as students of culture and democracy should pay attention to Hu’s essay. It’s a window into the psychology of China’s leadership at a critical time. The sense of threat, encirclement and danger is real — along with the sense that America is trying to divide, crush and destroy China.
He is not, of course, totally wrong. Americans generally do believe that a house divided cannot stand, and that the world cannot long endure half slave and half free. Communism and dictatorship will, we tend to believe, someday fall in China just as they have done in so many other places.
More, our strategy for dealing with communism in China is more or less the same as our strategy for dealing with it in the Soviet Union. It’s what Lincoln and the Republicans wanted to do to slavery in 1860: keep it from expanding, and wait while the forces of history destroy it from within.
Lincoln then and Americans today don’t think of this as an aggressive strategy. Changing the political structure of China is not on anybody’s to-do list in Washington today. The CIA isn’t hatching plots to overthrow the Chinese leadership. Lincoln swore up and down that he wouldn’t abolish slavery where it stood, and would have accepted a constitutional amendment making that position clear.
But Jefferson Davis and his fellow southerners weren’t fooled. They knew that Lincoln’s program to contain slavery was a plan to destroy slavery and, worse, they were sure it would work. Cotton exhausted the soil; sooner or later, if slavery couldn’t expand into new territory, plantations wouldn’t pay and when that happened the whole system would fail. Moreover, the North was growing faster than the South; increasingly the South would be outvoted and turned defensively in on itself.
Hu and some of his fellows seem to be thinking like Jefferson Davis. They believe that America’s project (it isn’t as definite as a plan) to undermine communism in China will work in due course. They fear the historical forces Francis Fukuyama identified in The End of History, and they fear that those forces march to the tune of the Star Spangled Banner.
Further, they connect (psychologically if not explicitly) America’s geopolitical strategy of balancing power in Asia with the containment policy we practiced against the Soviets. They see us in India, Japan, Australia, Vietnam and many other places in the region and they see the same kind of geopolitical and geoeconomic web-weaving that hemmed in and ultimately brought down the Soviets.
Americans, contemplating our policies in Asia and our ideological approach to Chinese communism, see us as promoting a stable status quo that ought to appeal to the Chinese. President Hu and many Chinese leaders see things very differently: the status quo is a dagger aimed at China’s heart. Our very moderation is a sophisticated form of aggression.
This perception gap is something both sides will have to live with, and the ensuing climate of suspicion and hostility is something we will both have to manage. Jefferson Davis, Kaiser Bill and Adolf all decided to fight what they saw as encirclement and containment by hostile powers. It didn’t work out well for them, but a lot of others were badly hurt in the process as well.
US-China relations are a complicated mix of hostility and mutual dependence. Understanding that mix and managing the relationship in a sustainable way must be a top priority for leaders in both countries.