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You have a more balanced take on China than most here, I think. Probably because you have actually been to the country. Looks like you've had a good time.
I don't think we're actually in disagreement here at all. I agree with this completely. Different emphasis of course.
First of all, I am Chinese. Not just ethnically Chinese, but Chinese Chinese. Of course that does not mean that I’m always right about China, but I'm not your average "China bad" westerner who barely knows anything about the country but still has the chutzpah to comment on it profusely, nor am I someone who left the country with hatred and is desperate to prove they didn't make the wrong choice by refusing to acknowledge China's progress. You can check my post history if you like.
When I say Mao destroyed a huge fraction of meaningful Chinese culture, I mean exactly that, no more, no less. I never said he completely destroyed Chinese culture, which as you correctly note is resilient, shared by hundreds of millions of people (at his time around 400 million), and rooted not only in tangible things like architecture, art, and clothing, but also in customs, mannerisms, and ways of thinking. It's hard to imagine how anyone could destroy it completely, even someone wielding Mao's level of power, which again is like the First Emperor who changed the trajectory of Chinese history but did not “destroy” the culture despite his effort. The Mongols, the Manchus, the Communists all changed Chinese culture meaningfully, but none of them managed to destroy it, and hopefully none in the future will either.
And as I said in the original post, and as you've acknowledged, this destruction was part of a broader reformist project stretching from the Opium Wars (or the Xinhai Revolution, depending on how you frame it) through the founding (and I’d say the subsequent ~60 years) of the PRC. There is a long history of Chinese scholars and politicians who considered Chinese culture itself inferior and in need of total reimagination, so that our people could survive in the modern world. (And to be honest, that impulse is itself very Chinese. The ruthless utilitarianism aimed at maximizing our people's survival).
Do you speak Chinese? Next time you visit, if you find someone willing, you can ask them. The people who answer this question will certainly have their biases, but those who decline to answer probably have nothing interesting to say anyway, so you're not missing out. I hope translation tools these days can help you communicate better with the locals.
The early Chinese communists had little respect for their own culture. I wish someone had told them about Chesterton’s fence. They tore down things they didn’t fully understand. The rituals, the mannerisms, the syncretic folk religions, the Confucian virtues, the family structures; these existed for reasons. Like their counterparts in Russia, Cambodia, and Vietnam, they demolished before they had anything to put in their place. I’m speaking abstractly for now, but I’ll try to quantify what I mean.
For tangible losses, I'll spare us both the time. I believe Wikipedia has a page on artifacts destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. But that's not actually the main point.
What we lost in direction: The most important loss, to my mind, is that we lost the ability to modernize in a way that was Chinese rather than Western (or Russian, which is of course Western but with its own flavor). At the critical turning point of the 20th century, it was not Chinese culture and its traditions guiding the reform movement. It was Western models of industrialization and modernization that shaped Chinese society. The result still has a distinctly Chinese flavor, I won't deny that, but it is not a natural extension of Chinese culture; it is precisely the outcome of a rejection of Chinese culture. The breakdown of the Confucian value system had profound effects as well, but I won’t elaborate here. It may be true that given time, the Chinese state will revert toward its roots, and I think we're moving in that direction (in other words, the kids are alright), but I'm not entirely sure.
What we lost in aesthetics: We also lost a significant part of the aesthetic sensibility unique to Chinese civilization. The Chinese aesthetics I love deeply are not what the median Chinese person understands or prefers today. Take any Chinese city you've visited. Almost all of them, except a select few in the Yangtze Delta, are ugly by my standards: a strange amalgamation of cargo-cult Western style, remnants of Communist-era aesthetics, and some uninformed, almost orientalist imagination of what "Chinese" culture should look like, eg those replica “old towns”. People wear clothing littered with nonsensical English. People listen to trashy music in English (and Korean and Japanese, from cultures that are themselves culturally colonized to varying degrees depending on how you see it). Mention traditional Chinese aesthetics to random dude on the street and and you get a blank look or a vague appraisal without specifics; at worst they tell you it's 土, "crude" "hillbilly”. I know that kids these days are getting better, but it’s difficukt for me to know how widespread this newly found appreciation for traditional culture is, given how isolated everyone is in their respective social circles.
What we lost in transmission. There is a generational loss of Chinese culture spanning the period from the Opium Wars, through the Sino-Japanese Wars, the Eight-Nation Alliance and the Boxer Rebellion, and all the devastation and famine these brought, up through the end of the Cultural Revolution when revolutionary fervor died off and people began to live "normally." Many ways of thinking, traditions, and techniques were lost because more than one generation fits inside that window of absolute chaos, and cultural knowledge, tangible or intangible, needs living people to carry it forward. If generations grow up without that cultural exposure, they come to see their own culture as foreign. We can recover a lot of the aesthetics and tangible artifacts, but the intangible things lost are not so easily restored. Even for myself, someone who has read far more history and is far more aware of the tradition than most, feel distant (not exactly the right word but I hope you understand what I mean) from traditional Chinese culture. How many of us have read the entire Dialects? The 四书五经, which every scholar in the old days could recite? I can tell you confidently that even among the most educated Chinese, the graduates of Tsinghua and Peking, the number is surprisingly low for the former and almost unheard of outside of people who study Chinese and history for the latter. I'm trying my best to regain it. Maybe it's because I hold a higher standard than most, but I find it disturbing how much Western literature and culture I've absorbed while my knowledge of Chinese literature remains comparatively sparse compared to Chinese back in the days that are in the same social stratum. Also I suspect I am simply more sensitive to what has been lost than you might be, if you're not Chinese yourself.
Precisely, and you can actually see the damage by looking at the regional variation. Compare the more clannish, "traditional" provinces of Fujian and Guangdong with the less clannish, more turbulent north. Northern China is surprisingly culturally barren. It contains some of the most important symbols of Chinese civilization, in Shanxi, Shaanxi, Henan. But the people who live there today are nothing like that heritage would suggest. What traditions do they preserve? I'm a northerner myself, and my honest assessment is: surprisingly little. Of course we still live a Chinese way of life, celebrating the things that matter. But look at the Cantonese and compare how much tradition survives there, precisely because their clannish nature insulated them from the worst effects of the Cultural Revolution. The difference is pretty clear. Again, I'm not saying the culture is destroyed. I'm saying it's more damaged than I would prefer.
I don't perceive Japan as uniquely preservationist either. Their culture, especially after WWII, is meaningfully different from their traditional culture. And as you note, much of their current "traditional culture" dates to the 19th and 20th centuries, when the modern nation-state of Japan formed and began constructing its founding mythos around nationalism. My rough gauge based on my lack of knowledge in Japanese history: I think we fared a bit better than post-WWII Japan, but worse than post-Black Ship Japan. You can use that to calibrate where I stand.
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