May 04 2008
what is chinese culture becoming in a global village?
Okay, I know this is controversial… My blog says that I comment on law, business, society, and of course, anything else interesting. Anyone following these blogs can quickly tell I normally talk law and business, and rarely about anything else. (maybe some American politics once or twice) But Chinese society is something I rarely talk about. Frankly, it is hard to do in an objective way. I was a sociologist in college, and I disliked a lot of the biased sociologists back then as well.
Well, California Magazine (the alumni magazine of UC Berkeley) recently did a cover on China with the Olympics coming up. There is an interesting article called “The Great Leap Nowhere” (credit to my Chinese lawyer friend at Boalt), which argues that Chinese “culture” is becoming more and more amorphous. I am not terribly surprised because globalism, with international media, pop culture, music, movies, etc., seems to bring more conformity in terms of culture. Here are some excerpts from the article:
The Chinese are not polled about feelings of national identity; such questions, much less their answers, would too dangerously approach the political nerve of China’s ruling mandarins. Polling on other issues, however—tastes in carbonated drinks, preferences for shampoos, ratings of certain sports celebrities, the appeal of mobile phone designs—is commonplace and, in a real way, reflects a changing social landscape. Despite the lack of significant data, after many years in China I am most acutely struck by China’s confusion over what, in the end, it means to be Chinese.
The rapidly shifting cultural footing is nowhere more apparent than for China’s urban 20-somethings. Take, for example, Yang Ling, as I will call her. Born in Xian to a military family—her father retired before reaching the rank of general—she chose, perhaps as a dutiful Chinese daughter, to attend a local university rather than a more prestigious institution in Beijing or Shanghai, so that she could be close to her recently divorced mother. “Now I realize I probably made a mistake,” says Yang, a petite woman of 27 who sports radically fashioned bobbed hair and, she confides, a splendid polychromatic butterfly tattoo on her shoulder. “Chinese children are supposed to take care of their parents and I thought it was the thing to do. But now I think I should have gone to Beijing.”
For her fealty, or perhaps because of her family background, she was invited to join the Communist Party but never did. “I just forgot to fill out the paperwork,” she recounts. “It wasn’t important to me. There were other things in my life that mattered more.” For hundreds of thousands of young people like Yang who have migrated to Beijing for professional reasons, the Party is no longer meaningful. “I’m not even sure I know anybody in the Party,” she says. “What’s the point? How does it help you? It’s just ancient history.”
Yet it is true that for up-and-coming 20- and 30-somethings in a cosseted and increasingly international metropolis such as Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou, all history is ancient, and largely irrelevant. Yang Ling sped from provincial Xian after college to Beijing, where she worked as a marketing consultant before founding her own consultancy targeting medium-sized Chinese companies. For her, there is little about China’s history or culture that is either particularly appealing or necessary except, perhaps, the multiplicities of Chinese cuisine. She and other young Chinese live their lives in a world that would fit as easily in Europe or America, a world that is ultimately more recognizable as Western than Chinese.
For most Beijingers, the rhythms of daily life have been inexorably recast by the modern, largely Western economy that undergirds China’s astonishing growth. Consider “Tang Wenhai,” a 40ish director of corporate communications for one of the capital’s largest commercial and residential developers. Because her husband travels extensively for work, as does she, their son boards during the week at an elite primary school. Every morning Tang leaves her utterly modern 22nd floor apartment just off the Fourth Ring Road and drives her gleaming white Honda to an office in a gray, crystalline trapezoidal tower in the CBD. With an MBA from Tsinghua University (“China’s MIT”), she worked on her company’s recent $1.5 billion initial public offering, jetting around the globe with other senior company officers and their investment banking consultants. She’s taken her staff on whirlwind tours of Europe, and most recently vacationed in Egypt with friends.
“Of course this isn’t how my parents live,” she laughs, “or frankly how I thought I would live when I was growing up. My parents”—working-class people from China’s far northeast—”could never have imagined a China like this. The funny thing is, now we live like everyone else in the world.” Or at least like other First World corporate executives. “It’s globalization,” she says.
The article notes, to its credit, that much of the analysis does not apply in the rural areas of China. But is this really all that different from what has happened in places like Tokyo or Seoul? Those are metropolitan areas that are reminiscent of western cities as well. Tall buildings, flashing lights–very New York-ish.
This is not a critique necessarily on Chinese culture. It is, however, a warning that the global economy–and its attendant culture–does threaten any country’s native culture. China is not exempted from this either. Not exactly rocket science, but still makes for an interesting read.
