How much has Chinese culture changed since China went Communist?

[BrainGlutton]

From Bertrand Russell’s The Problem of China (1922).

One of the most remarkable things about the Chinese is their power of securing the affection of foreigners. Almost all Europeans like China, both those who come only as tourists and those who live there for many years. In spite of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, I can recall hardly a single Englishman in the Far East who liked the Japanese as well as the Chinese. Those who have lived long among them tend to acquire their outlook and their standards. New arrivals are struck by obvious evils: the beggars, the terrible poverty, the prevalence of disease, the anarchy and corruption in politics. Every energetic Westerner feels at first a strong desire to reform these evils, and of course they ought to be reformed.

But the Chinese, even those who are the victims of preventable misfortunes, show a vast passive indifference to the excitement of the foreigners; they wait for it to go off, like the effervescence of soda-water. And gradually strange hesitations creep into the mind of the bewildered traveller; after a period of indignation, he begins to doubt all the maxims he has hitherto accepted without question. Is it really wise to be always guarding against future misfortune? Is it prudent to lose all enjoyment of the present through thinking of the disasters that may come at some future date? Should our lives be passed in building a mansion that we shall never have leisure to inhabit?

The Chinese answer these questions in the negative, and therefore have to put up with poverty, disease, and anarchy. But, to compensate for these evils, they have retained, as industrial nations have not, the capacity for civilized enjoyment, for leisure and laughter, for pleasure in sunshine and philosophical discourse. The Chinese, of all classes, are more laughter-loving than any other race with which I am acquainted; they find amusement in everything, and a dispute can always be softened by a joke.

I remember one hot day when a party of us were crossing the hills in chairs—the way was rough and very steep, the work for the coolies very severe. At the highest point of our journey, we stopped for ten minutes to let the men rest. Instantly they all sat in a row, brought out their pipes, and began to laugh among themselves as if they had not a care in the world. In any country that had learned the virtue of forethought, they would have devoted the moments to complaining of the heat, in order to increase their tip. We, being Europeans, spent the time worrying whether the automobile would be waiting for us at the right place. Well-to-do Chinese would have started a discussion as to whether the universe moves in cycles or progresses by a rectilinear motion; or they might have set to work to consider whether the truly virtuous man shows complete self-abnegation, or may, on occasion, consider his own interest.

One comes across white men occasionally who suffer under the delusion that China is not a civilized country. Such men have quite forgotten what constitutes civilization. It is true that there are no trams in Peking, and that the electric light is poor. It is true that there are places full of beauty, which Europeans itch to make hideous by digging up coal. It is true that the educated Chinaman is better at writing poetry than at remembering the sort of facts which can be looked up in Whitaker’s Almanac. A European, in recommending a place of residence, will tell you that it has a good train service; the best quality he can conceive in any place is that it should be easy to get away from. But a Chinaman will tell you nothing about the trains; if you ask, he will tell you wrong. What he tells you is that there is a palace built by an ancient emperor, and a retreat in a lake for scholars weary of the world, founded by a famous poet of the Tang dynasty. It is this outlook that strikes the Westerner as barbaric.

Can all of that still be true, today, in one of the fastest-industrializing countries in the world?

There are, of course, ambitious men in China, but they are less common than among ourselves. And their ambition takes a different form—not a better form, but one produced by the preference of enjoyment to power. It is a natural result of this preference that avarice is a widespread failing of the Chinese. Money brings the means of enjoyment, therefore money is passionately desired. With us, money is desired chiefly as a means to power; politicians, who can acquire power without much money, are often content to remain poor. In China, the tuchuns (military governors), who have the real power, almost always use it for the sole purpose of amassing a fortune. Their object is to escape to Japan at a suitable moment; with sufficient plunder to enable them to enjoy life quietly for the rest of their days. The fact that in escaping they lose power does not trouble them in the least. It is, of course, obvious that such politicians, who spread devastation only in the provinces committed to their care, are far less harmful to the world than our own, who ruin whole continents in order to win an election campaign.

Can that attitude have survived decades of indoctrination by an anti-avarice philosophy like Communism, in an environment where wealth without power is (until recently) impossible?

The business of “saving face,” which often strikes foreigners in China as ludicrous, is only the carrying-out of respect for personal dignity in the sphere of social manners. Everybody has “face,” even the humblest beggar; there are humiliations that you must not inflict upon him, if you are not to outrage the Chinese ethical code. If you speak to a Chinaman in a way that transgresses the code, he will laugh, because your words must be taken as spoken in jest if they are not to constitute an offence.

Once I thought that the students to whom I was lecturing were not as industrious as they might be, and I told them so in just the same words that I should have used to English students in the same circumstances. But I soon found I was making a mistake. They all laughed uneasily, which surprised me until I saw the reason. Chinese life, even among the most modernized, is far more polite than anything to which we are accustomed. This, of course, interferes with efficiency, and also (what is more serious) with sincerity and truth in personal relations. If I were Chinese, I should wish to see it mitigated. But to those who suffer from the brutalities of the West, Chinese urbanity is very restful. Whether on the balance it is better or worse than our frankness, I shall not venture to decide.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s still the same; it sounds like the kind of thing that is very deeply rooted in a culture.

So far, I have spoken chiefly of the good sides of the Chinese character; but of course China, like every other nation, has its bad sides also. It is disagreeable to me to speak of these, as I experienced so much courtesy and real kindness from the Chinese, that I should prefer to say only nice things about them. But for the sake of China, as well as for the sake of truth, it would be a mistake to conceal what is less admirable. I will only ask the reader to remember that, on the balance, I think the Chinese one of the best nations I have come across, and am prepared to draw up a graver indictment against every one of the Great Powers. Shortly before I left China, an eminent Chinese writer pressed me to say what I considered the chief defects of the Chinese. With some reluctance, I mentioned three: avarice, cowardice and callousness. Strange to say, my interlocutor, instead of getting angry, admitted the justice of my criticism, and proceeded to discuss possible remedies. This is a sample of the intellectual integrity which is one of China’s greatest virtues.

The callousness of the Chinese is bound to strike every Anglo-Saxon. They have none of that humanitarian impulse which leads us to devote one per cent. of our energy to mitigating the evils wrought by the other ninety-nine per cent. For instance, we have been forbidding the Austrians to join with Germany, to emigrate, or to obtain the raw materials of industry. Therefore the Viennese have starved, except those whom it has pleased us to keep alive from philanthropy. The Chinese would not have had the energy to starve the Viennese, or the philanthropy to keep some of them alive. While I was in China, millions were dying of famine; men sold their children into slavery for a few dollars, and killed them if this sum was unobtainable. Much was done by white men to relieve the famine, but very little by the Chinese, and that little vitiated by corruption. It must be said, however, that the efforts of the white men were more effective in soothing their own consciences than in helping the Chinese. So long as the present birth-rate and the present methods of agriculture persist, famines are bound to occur periodically; and those whom philanthropy keeps alive through one famine are only too likely to perish in the next.

(Say what you will about the emperors, at least they had a somewhat effective famine-relief program – they bought grain when it was cheap, stored it in silos, and doled it out during famines. But China in 1922 was too disrupted and disorganized and corrupt for that. And Mao’s government during the Great Leap Forward was too, well, crazy.)

Famines in China can be permanently cured only by better methods of agriculture combined with emigration or birth-control on a large scale. Educated Chinese realize this, and it makes them indifferent to efforts to keep the present victims alive. A great deal of Chinese callousness has a similar explanation, and is due to perception of the vastness of the problems involved. But there remains a residue which cannot be so explained. If a dog is run over by an automobile and seriously hurt, nine out of ten passers-by will stop to laugh at the poor brute’s howls. The spectacle of suffering does not of itself rouse any sympathetic pain in the average Chinaman; in fact, he seems to find it mildly agreeable. Their history, and their penal code before the revolution of 1911, show that they are by no means destitute of the impulse of active cruelty; but of this I did not myself come across any instances. And it must be said that active cruelty is practised by all the great nations, to an extent concealed from us only by our hypocrisy.

Cowardice is prima facie a fault of the Chinese; but I am not sure that they are really lacking in courage. It is true that, in battles between rival tuchuns, both sides run away, and victory rests with the side that first discovers the flight of the other. But this proves only that the Chinese soldier is a rational man. No cause of any importance is involved, and the armies consist of mere mercenaries. When there is a serious issue, as, for instance, in the Tai-Ping rebellion, the Chinese are said to fight well, particularly if they have good officers. Nevertheless, I do not think that, in comparison with the Anglo-Saxons, the French, or the Germans, the Chinese can be considered a courageous people, except in the matter of passive endurance. They will endure torture, and even death, for motives which men of more pugnacious races would find insufficient—for example, to conceal the hiding-place of stolen plunder. In spite of their comparative lack of active courage, they have less fear of death than we have, as is shown by their readiness to commit suicide.

Avarice is, I should say, the gravest defect of the Chinese. Life is hard, and money is not easily obtained. For the sake of money, all except a very few foreign-educated Chinese will be guilty of corruption. For the sake of a few pence, almost any coolie will run an imminent risk of death. The difficulty of combating Japan has arisen mainly from the fact that hardly any Chinese politician can resist Japanese bribes. I think this defect is probably due to the fact that, for many ages, an honest living has been hard to get; in which case it will be lessened as economic conditions improve. I doubt if it is any worse now in China than it was in Europe in the eighteenth century. I have not heard of any Chinese general more corrupt than Marlborough, or of any politician more corrupt than Cardinal Dubois. It is, therefore, quite likely that changed industrial conditions will make the Chinese as honest as we are—which is not saying much.

And most tellingly, when we consider Mao Zedong’s victory in the Civil War, and subsequent episodes like the Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Cultural Revolution:

I have been speaking of the Chinese as they are in ordinary life, when they appear as men of active and sceptical intelligence, but of somewhat sluggish passions. There is, however, another side to them: they are capable of wild excitement, often of a collective kind. I saw little of this myself, but there can be no doubt of the fact. The Boxer rising was a case in point, and one which particularly affected Europeans. But their history is full of more or less analogous disturbances. It is this element in their character that makes them incalculable, and makes it impossible even to guess at their future. One can imagine a section of them becoming fanatically Bolshevist, or anti-Japanese, or Christian, or devoted to some leader who would ultimately declare himself Emperor. I suppose it is this element in their character that makes them, in spite of their habitual caution, the most reckless gamblers in the world. And many emperors have lost their thrones through the force of romantic love, although romantic love is far more despised than it is in the West.

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

Mr. Russell’s comment about a large proportion of “Chinamen” becoming Christian was rather prophetic considering the growth of Christianity there although quite a few of the sects are heretical cults.

[BrainGlutton]

@Qin_Shi_Huangdi

Mr. Russell’s comment about a large proportion of “Chinamen” becoming Christian was rather prophetic considering the growth of Christianity there although quite a few of the sects are heretical cults.

Are they fanatical?

[simple_homer]

I have been living and working in China for the past 7 years.
I would say that the Chinese character, in general, today is the same as observed by Russell.

Everyday I enjoy the Chinese people’s sense of humor, and I have laughed with them many times.
Chinese can be very kind to their friends and family, but the callousness towards strangers that I have observed in Chinese on a regular basis is both disgusting and disappointing.

[nani]

I’m in China again for the 5th time. This was extremely interesting to read.

I was actually talking about something like this with a guy at a wedding the other day. When he asked me how I thought Westerners and Chinese were different, I answered that Chinese often care much more about their friends than Americans do, and Americans will often treat strangers better than Chinese will.

Avarice and corruption are certainly problems. Mao took a really hard line against corruption but it came back under Deng.

Christianity (and Buddhism/Chinese Religions) is growing remarkably, and there are groups that could be characterized as fanatical.

[even_sven]

I’m not sure that Russell is the authority on pre-Communist China, and I’m not sure it really makes sense to talk of a “Chinese character” in all but the broadest terms.

I can say this.

Ask any foreigner in China what the hardest part of living in China is, and they are likely to say it is difficult to make true friends. It is easy to make friendly acquaintances, but it takes years to develop even a single “share your hopes and fears” kind of friendships, and it can be difficult to feel like a part of social circles, rather than a guest of them.

Ask any Chinese person what the hardest part of the US is, and they are likely to say it is difficult to make true friends. I’ve been told that our friendships seem shallow and superficial, and it’s hard for them to feel a real emotional connection with their American friends.

When observing another culture, you are also observing your own.

[Velocity]

@simple_homer

the callousness towards strangers that I have observed in Chinese on a regular basis is both disgusting and disappointing.

I wonder if the huge size of China’s population - 1.3 billion - makes people feel callous towards strangers, a drop-of-water-in-the-ocean syndrome.
But Americans, as **nani **pointed out, treat strangers better than many people in other countries - countries with much less than America’s population of 300 million. So culture may be much more of a factor than population size.

[BrainGlutton]

@even_sven

I’m not sure that Russell is the authority on pre-Communist China . . .

“The authority” would be some historian specializing in it; Russell was just an academic who taught philosophy there and wrote about his impressions and experiences of the country. (Not that he shied away from political commentary and prescriptions, that’s what the book is mainly about.)

[even_sven]

@Velocity

I wonder if the huge size of China’s population - 1.3 billion - makes people feel callous towards strangers, a drop-of-water-in-the-ocean syndrome.

But Americans, as **nani **pointed out, treat strangers better than many people in other countries - countries with much less than America’s population of 300 million. So culture may be much more of a factor than population size.

Cultures have different ways of conceptualizing in-groups and out-groups. In the U.S., we have a wide, shallow in-group. We feel a small obligation to basically everyone, but we have some pretty hard limits on how deep that obligation goes. We don’t, for example, consider it an absolute obligation to financially support adult family members.

In China, the in-group is more distinctly defined. People have very clear social networks (family, members of the same work unit, classmates) that you have a very deep obligation to. It’s actually illegal not to provide support for your elderly parents. In high school, you’ll probably stay with a single class all four years, and most of your social activities will be within that class-- you may not have any friends from other classes, but your relationship with your classmates will be extremely close. On the flip side, this means you have relatively little obligation to strangers.

When I first arrived in China, people were taken aback that I was a volunteer. Some asked if I was sent there as punishment or if it gave me special status with the government when i returned. Ar first, I thought it was a sign that they did not care about others. But I slowly realized that volunteering, in that mindset, is seen as wildly irresponsible. To my student, I had a very real obligation to help my family and my immediate community, and to work without pay for two years was basically stealing from my family. They were sitting there thinking I was the one that didn’t care about others.

FWIW, I think this is changing, and volunteering has entered local consciousness thanks to well-publicized disaster response efforts.

[BrainGlutton]

@even_sven

Cultures have different ways of conceptualizing in-groups and out-groups. In the U.S., we have a wide, shallow in-group. We feel a small obligation to basically everyone, but we have some pretty hard limits on how deep that obligation goes. We don’t, for example, consider it an absolute obligation to financially support adult family members.

In China, the in-group is more distinctly defined. People have very clear social networks (family, members of the same work unit, classmates) that you have a very deep obligation to. It’s actually illegal not to provide support for your elderly parents. In high school, you’ll probably stay with a single class all four years, and most of your social activities will be within that class-- you may not have any friends from other classes, but your relationship with your classmates will be extremely close. On the flip side, this means you have relatively little obligation to strangers.

When I first arrived in China, people were taken aback that I was a volunteer. Some asked if I was sent there as punishment or if it gave me special status with the government when i returned. Ar first, I thought it was a sign that they did not care about others. But I slowly realized that volunteering, in that mindset, is seen as wildly irresponsible. To my student, I had a very real obligation to help my family and my immediate community, and to work without pay for two years was basically stealing from my family. They were sitting there thinking I was the one that didn’t care about others.

FWIW, I think this is changing, and volunteering has entered local consciousness thanks to well-publicized disaster response efforts.

“The Chinese people have only family and clan solidarity; they do not have national spirit…they are just a heap of loose sand…Other men are the carving knife and serving dish; we are the fish and the meat.”

– Sun Yat-sen

[BrainGlutton]

How, in all of these regards, if at all, does the culture of today’s China differ from that of Taiwan, which has not been through Communism? Anyone know?

[PhillyGuy]

@BrainGlutton

"The Chinese people have only family and clan solidarity; they do not have national spirit…

Maybe Sun Yat-sen said that because they weren’t all that loyal to him

I’m now finishing up River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, which was written by a Peace Corps English teacher. Asked to name the happiest day of their lives, a goodly portion of the author’s students named the Hong Kong sovereignty transfer. Of course, not everyone sees the unequal treaties as deep continuing injuries, but I think there are at least as many jingoist there as where I live, the US. And the US does have a lot of super-patriots!

While the source I will link to is an example of censored journalism, the headline seems plausible:

85% say Mao’s merits outweigh his faults: poll

One part of me thinks there must be something to the idea that there is a Chinese cultural spirit. But another part thinks any attempt to describe it up will inevitably be full of error.

[PhillyGuy]

@BrainGlutton

How, in all of these regards, if at all, does the culture of today’s China differ from that of Taiwan, which has not been through Communism?

I haven’t been to the PRC. But I think it is safe to say that Taiwanese are more polite and less likely to litter. And it is also safe to say that this predates Chinese communism.

From what I gather, Hong Kongers will sometimes criticize the mainland tourists they see littering – to their face. Taiwanese are too polite to do this, and instead discretely mutter about it to themselves.

The first thing I would say about Taiwanese is – they are friendly. I can’t hardly go through a day without being approached on the street to talk about someone’s child who lives in America. It even happens in Taipei, where seeing a western face is no rarity.

[BrainGlutton]

@PhillyGuy

I haven’t been to the PRC. But I think it is safe to say that Taiwanese are more polite and less likely to litter. And it is also safe to say that this predates Chinese communism.

Hmm. Leaving political systems and ideologies aside, to what extent is Taiwan’s national culture, as a culture, different from China’s? Did Chinese-speaking Taiwanese (I’m not thinking of the non-Chinese aboriginal minority) even think of themselves as Chinese before Chiang showed up with his army and followers and refugees?

[PhillyGuy]

@BrainGlutton

Did Chinese-speaking Taiwanese (I’m not thinking of the non-Chinese aboriginal minority) even think of themselves as Chinese before Chiang showed up with his army and followers and refugees?

To what extent the Taiwanese ever were Chinese is a big question influenced by political considerations.

See:

Why do so many people from Taiwan dislike being called Chinese?

One reason I want to say Taiwan isn’t Chinese is that the Chinese government frequently threatens Taiwan’s soverignty, and backs up the threats with a couple thousands missiles pointed at a country where our youngest son lives.

As to your question, the first point is that, in 1945, there were hardly any Chinese-speaking Taiwanese. In the nineteenth century, I guess there were more, and there certainly were Chinese-reading Taiwanese (arguably more than today, since Taiwan does not use the mainland’s written characters).

See Wikipedia:

Many supporters of independence for Taiwan view the history of Taiwan since the 17th century as a continuous struggle for independence and use it as an inspiration for the current political movement.[3] According to this view, the people indigenous to Taiwan and those who have taken up residence there have been repeatedly occupied by groups including the Dutch, the Spanish, the Ming, Koxinga and the Ming loyalists, the Qing, the Japanese and finally the Chinese Nationalists led by the Kuomintang. From a pro-independence supporter’s point of view, the movement for Taiwan independence began under Qing rule in the 1680s which led to a well known saying those days, “Every three years an uprising, every five years a rebellion”.

Taiwan today has de facto independence. But the Peoples Liberation Army vows to invade if that independence is ever clearly declared. This greatly distorts Taiwanese politics, which is filled with arcane-to-outsiders disputes over how far they dare go in plainly stating what most Taiwanese feel. Call it Chinese New Year? Then there’s a good chance you support the ruling Kuomintang, a party which used to threaten to retake the mainland but now quakes in fear of offending it. Call the same holiday the Lunar New Year, and point out how similar it is to Vietnam’s Tết? Then you probably vote for the almost pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

You could see the DPP as the more nationalist of the two. But in US political terms, the DPP is much more liberal.

[Eiffel]

IMO this answer from the Quora page is one of the best:

"There is a difference between being culturally Chinese and a citizen of China (PRC) which English fails to capture.

Most people who call themselves Chinese mean that they are culturally Han Chinese, but don’t want to be construed as being from the PRC and following the PRC view from Beijing. Many Taiwanese now call themselves Taiwanese simply because they see behavior and policies which they don’t want to be a part of."

Having lived in Taiwan for a great part of my life, I will say that this accurately sums up my personal experiences there. Of course, this is a difficult political issue so I can’t claim to represent any sort of majority.

Now, regarding attitudes before the arrival of the KMT, I think that this is still quite complicated. After all, the Japanese spent a good deal of time trying to make these ethnically-Chinese Taiwanese into Japanese subjects. However, we do gain a good deal of insight from the KMT, which posited that Taiwanese would have to be “Sinicized.”

[Lemmytheseal2]

@even_sven

Cultures have different ways of conceptualizing in-groups and out-groups. In the U.S., we have a wide, shallow in-group. We feel a small obligation to basically everyone, but we have some pretty hard limits on how deep that obligation goes. We don’t, for example, consider it an absolute obligation to financially support adult family members.

In China, the in-group is more distinctly defined. People have very clear social networks (family, members of the same work unit, classmates) that you have a very deep obligation to. It’s actually illegal not to provide support for your elderly parents. In high school, you’ll probably stay with a single class all four years, and most of your social activities will be within that class-- you may not have any friends from other classes, but your relationship with your classmates will be extremely close. On the flip side, this means you have relatively little obligation to strangers.

When I first arrived in China, people were taken aback that I was a volunteer. Some asked if I was sent there as punishment or if it gave me special status with the government when i returned. Ar first, I thought it was a sign that they did not care about others. But I slowly realized that volunteering, in that mindset, is seen as wildly irresponsible. To my student, I had a very real obligation to help my family and my immediate community, and to work without pay for two years was basically stealing from my family. They were sitting there thinking I was the one that didn’t care about others.

FWIW, I think this is changing, and volunteering has entered local consciousness thanks to well-publicized disaster response efforts.

This makes it seem like Communism as such never really stuck to the masses. There’s no sense of solidarity in the scenario you describe.

[even_sven]

@Lemmytheseal2

This makes it seem like Communism as such never really stuck to the masses. There’s no sense of solidarity in the scenario you describe.

That’s the thing, though. There IS solidarity, as meaningful and deep as anywhere else, it’s just differently focused.

A metaphor I use is that when I lived in Cameroon, I had a small yard in front of my house that was filled in with gravel and dirt. Ringing the yard were trees with fine, narrow leaves and gorgeous yellow flowers. Naturally, these leaves and flowers would fall in the yard, but never in large quantities, just what you’d expect to find in a yard. I ignored the local custom of laboriously sweeping the yard several times a day with a small broom, because why would I sweep the dirt?

Well, Cameroonians hated it. Pretty much everyone who visited would say “Your yard is so dirty!” People would send their kids over at dawn to sweep it before I woke up. People gave me gifts of brooms. It really just did not go over welll. Eventually, I gave in and hired someone to do the sweeping, as obnoxious and uneccesaary as it seemed to keep a pristine patch of dirt.

In my mind, that space was “yard space” and not expected to be particularly clean. In Cameroon, that space was considered living space, and having leaves all over it was pretty much the same as having leaves all over your living room.

Later, I went to China, where in most places it’s customary at all but the finest restaurants to throw bones, gristle, sunflower seed shells, orange peels and used napkins (and even spit) right on the floor. The lunch place I used to go to would develop a two foot-deep pile of trash on the floor during the lunch rush. This was cleaned upr egularly, and nobody seemed to mind.

A lot of people walk away thinking “My God, Chinese people are just dirty.” But that’s not really it. The floors in private homes, for example, are typically pristine. Shoes are always removed at the door, in part because they’ve been traversing all kinds of gross things like restauarnt floors. Just like my yard in Cameroon was “dirty” space to me and “clean” space to Cameroonians, a restaurant floor is a “dirty” space in China, while it is a “clean” space to Americans. It’s not that one group of people is just cleaner or dirtier than the other group (despite the Cameroonians thinking I was clearly a slob), but it’s that these values are expressed in ways that may be unrecognizable to outsiders. Generally, though, things tend to balance out into a coherent system.

I think the same thinking applies to any number of cultural observations.

[Alessan]

@Lemmytheseal2

This makes it seem like Communism as such never really stuck to the masses.

Considering how easily they shrugged it off, I’m guessing that’s the case.

[Velocity]

I don’t think communism (in its economic sense) could ever have lasted for long in China. Chinese people, in general, have been and are a shrewd, business-minded, profit-minded people. They are capitalist to the core. I’m not saying that in an attacking way, but simply a matter-of-fact way.