This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Honestly, if China wasn't run by Godless Communists, I'd have far fewer issues with them competing against America economically (or otherwise). Not to say there would be zero concern about those things, for example I don't like US manufacturing being hollowed out by Chinese competition, but the overwhelming weight of my concerns about China are the ends they are using their economy and political and military and cultural influence towards.
I think most people in senior positions in the party, including Xi himself, are true believer communists in a ideological sense. Nothing the CCP has done since Deng really contradicts Marx and Engels, who were clear that a long capitalist phase was necessary (implicitly to drive down widget costs by competition) before socialism could be achieved. Amusingly this may be the best way of justifying the highly destructive involution / neijuan process going on now.
Even Lenin agreed with this, hence the NEP - only Stalin and those inspired by him (Mao, Castro) didn’t (and that ideological turn was largely self-serving in his battle to consolidate state power, eliminate Trotskyism, and prevent the emergence of anyone with influence or wealth who could challenge him domestically). The turn to capitalism was an about-face, sure, but it isn’t inherently a rejection of communism because communism is a process that in theory involves capitalism (and feudalism and so on).
In my understanding the idea that the communists are being ideologically sidelined in the party elite is more of a fantasy of very online Chinese nationalists who are more ambivalent on Marxism and the CCP (even if they’re often very careful to only imply this rather than say it outright) and who care more about a grander trajectory of Chinese civilization to which the ideology of 1947-present isn’t central. But to the actual rulers of China, the children and grandchildren, by and large, of the revolutionaries themselves, it is central.
I agree that modern China barely qualifies as communist, and mainlanders care way more about the Chinese nation-building project than they do communism as an end-goal. However, I do want to touch on a tangential comment here as an excuse to talk about something that annoys me:
I always hear this stated, but in spite of its popularity as an idea I've never actually heard anyone base this off any proper quantification of the mentioned losses in Chinese culture, and this sentiment is often expressed by people with a clear China Bad agenda to illustrate the illegitimacy of the modern Chinese state and to distance it from the history its people seem to derive a huge amount of national identity from. It's not incorrect that Mao's actions were often destructive, it's also not incorrect that criticism of Chinese tradition was a huge trend in early 20th-century Chinese thought (and not just communist ones), but in general I actually think Chinese culture has proven surprisingly resilient in the turmoil of the 20th century. In the Deng era there was a huge resurgence of many religions and ideas that had been thoroughly criticised throughout the Cultural Revolution, Confucianism being a big one. This article makes a pretty good argument that it never "died out", and its resurgence was less revival and more an example of ancient tradition experiencing organic evolution through the stressors of the 20th century. I also remember reading a book about Cultural Revolution culture that basically argued that it was often based off aspects of traditional culture (such as the yangbanxi model plays being based off Beijing Opera), which often had the ironic effect of indirectly inducing more interest in traditional Chinese culture in many of those who were exposed to it. That book also contained a large number of anecdotes from people suggesting that in practice they maintained a lot of traditional customs in the countryside outside of the purview of authorities during the CR, that in spite of the official party line they continued to practice what they knew. Chinese culture survives reasonably well in my opinion, and there are many visible manifestations of that in the rural celebrations and religious festivities that still continue within the country.
It's also helpful to consider how China fits into larger East Asian context in this regard. Pretty much no East Asian country survived its modernisation period intact; even Japan, a country which is (IMO incorrectly) perceived as uniquely preservationist, was no stranger to iconoclastic campaigns that criticised Japanese culture and in general had its culture hugely altered in virtually every way during modernisation. I would say that many aspects of Japanese culture that exist today and are thought to be ancient practice date back 20th/late 19th century at earliest, given the immense change the Meiji period wrought. It's known that Meiji destroyed a large amount of feudal castles, but he also issued a shinbutsu bunri doctrine forcibly separating Shintoism and Buddhism, pretty much ending the centuries-long syncretism that had characterised Japanese religion; this separation continues into the modern day. Due to the Buddhists' deep association with the Tokugawa shogunate, there was a period of violent iconoclasm against Buddhists and their relics known as haibutsu kishaku, which saw approx 40,000 temples and their relics destroyed; there are some Japanese prefectures completely lacking extant pre-Meiji Buddhist temples for that reason. Shintoism was reformed and repurposed into a cult of the emperor (State Shinto), an alliance which Buddhists also tried to emulate for survival, and this period also saw Buddhist priests brought down to the level of the laity once the Meiji state abolished the dictums that priests should avoid meat and remain celibate. To this day, Shinto as a distinct and unitary religion is actually a modern concept whose organisation derives from Meiji-era State Shinto. Japanese Buddhism is still characterised by the lack of its Vinaya Pitaka disciplinary code for practitioners, and they often eat meat, which is very not in line with Mahayana tradition. Many other related aspects of Japanese culture that are seen as traditional are actually modern - for example the association of torii gates and shimenawa ropes with Shinto shrines or the custom that Shintoists wear white while Buddhists wear black are actually distinctions that really only stem from Meiji period separation policy. There's also other things I could talk about, such as the forced closures and decline of food-cart yatai culture, or the adoption of Gregorian dates for the Japanese new year and heavy westernisation of the celebration.
All this is to say that sure China did not survive the 20th century unscathed, but deep cultural modification is something that occurred in most East Asian countries during their modernisation, I don't think it's at all a given that China has been the most modified by modernity or iconoclasm in the region. It's always very jarring whenever I see the "death of Chinese culture" being brought up; the amount of times it gets mentioned is just disproportionate relative to the degree of cultural loss it experienced, especially when you compare it with the rest of East Asia.
I did have a good time, I’ll probably be back again this year. And having a more balanced take on China than most here is not too difficult; in general much of the 外网 has a tendency to paint China as Great Satan. It happens pretty often with countries that don’t align themselves with the U.S.
To provide some background, I am ethnically Hokkien, though not of Mainland origin (so don't expect me to speak putonghua well). I'm Malaysian Chinese and was born and raised there, which kind of makes me a good control group since we didn't experience the revolution. And my relatively conciliatory attitude towards the mainland is largely consistent with that background - most of us Straits Chinese don't appear to have the same adversarial attitude towards the mainland that Taiwanese or the Western-integrated parts of the diaspora do.
We're mostly not disagreeing, I think. I'll just take this opportunity to elaborate on what has been a large hobbyhorse of mine for the last little bit. As noted I am not a mainlander so I have limited experience on the ground there (apart from my travels), but I do have experience with the region in general which contextualises my view of the mainland.
There’s a good number of things in your list that I think would have happened anyway, Maoism or not.
Tangible losses were definitely a thing during the Cultural Revolution, not disputing that. But I'm primarily looking at this from a comparative perspective derived from travelling extensively through Asia; I'm well acquainted with the region, and it's very common to find that much tangible heritage has completely vanished in all of the Asian countries I've visited, sometimes due to iconoclasm or warfare, sometimes due to modernisation. Travelling the larger East Asia region has been pretty eye-opening, and in spite of everything, I find the mainland probably has the largest concentration of well-preserved extant East Asian architecture.
But as somebody that's specifically invested in Chinese culture, wants to see it flourish and has been dismayed by the scale of loss, I understand why your position is the way it is, and why you would focus in on China specifically.
I assume by the select few in the Yangtze Delta you mean Suzhou, Yangzhou, perhaps Hangzhou’s West Lake and a bunch of the water towns in the surrounds. For my part I would add Pingyao to that list (touristy but the historic quarter there is the most complete in all of Asia), in addition I think Quanzhou and Langzhong belong there too. Southern Anhui, Zhejiang, Fujian and Yunnan provinces have a very large number of rather well-preserved and non-rebuilt villages. Actually quite a lot of them. But yeah most Chinese cities are not designed like that, the vast majority of people live and work in anonymised concrete blocks. I do understand why this is the case though, and I don't think it's a matter of aesthetic preference as much as it is pure necessity. Massive crowds show up anywhere there's even a sliver of traditional architecture in China.
The problem is that Asian architecture, as much as I love it myself, is decidedly a premodern architecture and adapting it to modern standards often presents a serious challenge. Traditional Asian vernacular architecture often sits flat and low to the ground; it's fundamentally a single-story, at best double-story affair made largely of earth and timber, with the exception of some unique architectural typologies that were built primarily for defensive purposes, like the diaolou or tulou. Throughout the modernisation period there has been a large number of attempts to bring Asian aesthetics into the modern era; on the mainland these attempts stretch all the way back to Republican China where Chinese architecture was often adapted to contemporary needs by simply tacking Chinese-styled roofs onto a modern concrete structure (see: Wuhan University), which inevitably end up looking a bit strange. They are largely not suited for extremely high-density urban living, and a major goal of many East Asian governments during their modernisation period was to urbanise and industrialise a very agricultural, rural population.
Traditional Asian architecture is just not a scalable solution when you're quickly trying to urbanise 1/5ths of the world's population. A city like Beijing that houses over double the population of Greece is large and unwieldy enough as it is with these looming high-rises, trying to build in hutong style throughout the city would create serious logistical and infrastructural problems. Even the already-existing hutongs are a challenge to deal with. The standard of living in unrenovated hutongs is noticeably lower than the surrounding areas; many residents are just crammed into one sihueyuan, share one very dirty public toilet and often lack proper plumbing and other amenities. I understand the Chinese government's need to modernise these hutongs, but often the task of renovation is challenging, and in order to comprehensively meet residents' needs you just end up fucking up the space badly anyway. Preserving old houses such that they still can be lived in while still remaining authentic is a difficult tightrope to walk, especially in the Asian context. I do however think the government's policies on hutongs have gotten better as the years have gone on; they appear to be increasingly prioritising renovations over just wholesale tearing down a neighbourhood and rebuilding it.
The homogenisation of China's cities is one aspect though where I'm pretty certain the lion's share of the blame can be placed on the pressures of modernisation and not on Maoism, especially considering how large the population they were trying to urbanise was. Seoul and Incheon and Hong Kong possess much of the same features as any mainland Chinese city, repeated tall tower blocks dominate the landscape. Tokyo is a hyper-concreted sprawl of a city featuring a globalised turn-of-the-century aesthetic. Singapore never experienced such a revolution, and yet its cityscape and aesthetics are also noticeably globalised, high-rise and rather Western; big cities in Malaysia are much the same way. Apart from a small handful of heritage buildings here and there, Kuala Lumpur is increasingly becoming a modern city built in a modern fashion, and the newer the construction, the less local identity there is. IMO no country in Asia has managed to successfully tackle the task of respectfully adapting Asian architecture to modern life and high-density living thus far. The very weird modern parodies of "Oriental" architecture that receive such backlash in Asia are an attempt at precisely this, and they're not limited to China in the slightest. Malaysia and Singapore's more modern temple constructions often look like the Disneylandified architecture people complain about in China (see: Kek Lok Si, Penang; Thean Hou Temple, Kuala Lumpur; Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, Singapore). We're really not doing any better in that regard, and I honestly think some of the new traditional-style construction in China actually can look better and more authentic.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not the biggest fan of how many Asian cities look, and I often do wish they could have retained more of a traditional character. But the kinds of pressures that Asian countries generally faced weren't trivial; they possessed very large and very rural populations that they needed to quickly bring into the modern day, and in that light their decision-making starts to look a lot more understandable. Ruthless utilitarianism perhaps, but what else could they have done?
The general disinterest in traditional Chinese literature is something that's occurring in a lot of places unfortunately; all I can really say in response is that there’s barely anybody in the Straits who has actually read the bulk of the Four Books and Five Classics either and I would be surprised if you found someone who had ever done that, particularly among the younger generations. I’ve had a gander at the Analects, and I’m pretty certain that makes me more Sinophilic than most of my peers. I’m also not aware of any Malaysian Chinese who are proficient in, say, the 四艺. And unlike the situation in the Mainland, where it seems that levels of interest in traditional culture are higher among the younger generation, if anything in the overseas diaspora the youth are less likely to have read any Chinese classics, and less likely to engage deeply with the culture than their forebears; that’s old person shit. Granted, I can't speak for Taiwan and have no experience with it, but it appears from my limited engagement with their politics that they're slowly deprioritising the classics in education as a part of "de-sinicisation", whereas in contrast it seems the opposite has been occurring on the mainland; guoxue has started to gain some steam, and the number of classics included in the gaokao has grown.
Again, this is not to downplay the losses that have occurred. China has changed a lot in the modern era, and I certainly sympathise with culture revivalists. But in this regard, the mainland really isn't too different from the diaspora. Honestly the replica old towns and Xiaohongshu hanfu-wearing girls is actually a good sign I think, even if it does at times look like a quite distasteful parody of Chinese aesthetics, it's at least a signal that there is some latent interest in engaging with the traditional aspects of Chinese culture again.
It’s not uncommon to hear the sentiment that many practices have been preserved in overseas Chinese communities, but speaking as one myself, frankly I don’t think we’re preserving all that much. It's possible we have some stuff that’s no longer on the mainland, but the reverse is true too and possibly to a greater degree - for example I had never heard of the youshen festival or Yingge dance until doing research into China, as far as I can tell Straits Chinese simply don’t practice these things much at all despite many of them being able to trace back their heritage to Fujian/Chaoshan where they're a very visible aspect of traditional culture. I really don’t know if we’re any more authentically Chinese than the Southern Chinese on the mainland are, coastal Southeastern China has preserved a lot of stuff I’ve barely heard about before.
A great discussion, and keep in mind that this is true in the West as well! Big tower blocks are no more native to my British culture than they are to yours, where beautiful stucco Georgian houses completely fail to scale, as do thatched cottages or the stone of Oxford.
One can draw a lineage from the Swiss to brutalism and from the Americans to skyscrapers, and thus call these things ‘Western’, but I think it would be more accurate to say that Globalism and the pressures of urbanisation swallowed Western cultures first and then Eastern countries very soon after.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link