I think there is still a sense of uplifting society, at least on a broad level. And at the moment the officially sanctioned way of uplifting society is to generate economic growth.
From a distance, the changes within China seem huge. But from the inside, they are almost incomprehensable. I met a 100 year old woman in China once. She was born under an emperor. Her area was ravaged in WWII. She saw Sichuan at a time when 1 in 6 in the province starved to death and people at the bark off of trees. She witnessed the chaos of the cultural revolution, when society seemed to be splitting at the seams in incomprehensible violence, and the drabness and fear of the 80s. Along with her were assorted great grandkids, toting gameboys and digital cameras. Imagine what it means to her to know that those kids will never know a day of hunger in their lives, and will live comfortably enmeshed in modern international consumer culture, with worries like “Shall we vacation on the beach or in the mountains?” It’s mind boggling.
The force of that change, and the immediacy of the hardship of the recent past, is absolutely crushing. China has achieved the single greatest alleviation of human poverty the world has ever seen, in a way that is not at all abstract to the people living it. It’s enough to make a lot of people believe that they’ve cracked one of the hardest nuts in humanity- how to end the suffering of poverty. And that makes a lot of people think “Hey, whatever happening is flawed and ugly, but it sure seems to work.”
My students were all over the board. Some were party hacks, happily playing the game. Some were angry, and would find ways in class to talk about what bullshit they thought it all was. Some were dreamers. Many were anxious and uncertain about how to navigate a quickly changing world. Some were searchers, trolling foreign and dissident message boards and asking me difficult questions in low voices. Many didn’t try to think too much at all, and focused on daily life and concerns. Like college students anywhere, they were hopeful, eager to learn, idealistic, but grounded in the reality that they were probably going to join the rat race sooner than later.
We in the West get that impression because our contact with China has mainly been through its commercial townspeople. Yet the vast majority of Chinese have always been peasants, to whom the marketplace is only a place to sell their limited surplus produce, and money only a thing necessary to pay their landlords and their taxes. Mao’s peasant-oriented version of Communism appealed to them.
It is also a curious fact that despite the remarkably mercantile inclinations of many ordinary Chinese, practically every ideology influential in Chinese history has been contemptuous of merchants. Confucians and Communists alike regard them as exploiters who produce nothing of value, and both reserve their respect for scholars and warriors (to which the Commies would add peasants and proles, but not merchants/capitalists). No thought-system analogous to Objectivism or economic libertarianism or anything else that would please the Kochs and Scaifes has ever gained a toehold in China in all its very long history. The closest would be Taoism, which is generally libertarian in the minimal-state sense, but merchants and commerce play little role in Taoist thought.
The nearest American analogue, I suppose, would be the sense of change that produced The Beverly Hillbillies, which I have seen explained as an expression of the general sense of dislocation and future shock of a society still largely agrarian and impoverished and ignorant on the eve of WWII suddenly, within the space of a generation, catapulted into an age of historically unprecedented industrialization, mass education, wealth and shared general prosperity. But that’s nothing compared to the Chinese experience described above.
BTW, when I was in law school at the University of Maryland at Baltimore I had, for a school year, a Chinese roommate who was attending the pharmacology school (a political refugee, in fact, who had been involved in pro-democracy protests at the Hunan Medical University in Changsha). On that purely anectodal basis, I can tentatively affirm that decades of Communist rule have not erased the Chinese people’s fundamental cultural politeness. Very polite, he was.
I would say that your disgust at Chinese callousness to strangers is quite ethnocentric. In my personal experience, Chinese do feel a very strong obligation to their family, immediate and extended, and much less for strangers. If you, like many Chinese in the past, grew up in a country wracked with poverty, while immersed in a culture that emphasized filial piety, you would quickly learn that your family is the first priority, and everyone else can go screw themselves (they very likely think the same of you!). Charity was effectively a betrayal of your family, who had a stronger claim to your attention than any strangers.
From our perspective, the way many westerners treat their ancestors, relegating them to old folks’ homes, is absolutely repugnant, but in the end we have to accept that differing cultures have different moral/ethical standards. Those standards, as bizarre as they may seem to outsiders, are often logical to the insider and are derived from historical experience.
I totally agree with you-- but that still doesn’t mean people can’t be impolite. Chinese people were generally polite to me on a one-on-one basis, but in public…well, polite isn’t a word I would use.
What’s that even mean? Can you give an example of a nation of “truly evil and malicious people?” outside of, I dunno, Mordor? Even in some of the most horrible countries out there: Nazi Germany, the Stalinist USSR, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Afghanistan under the Taliban, etc., most people were just average people trying to stay alive and protect themselves and their families.
I’m ethnically Chinese - and I have to agree with Simple Homer’s assessment - the callousness of many Chinese people in China to strangers is indeed rather upsetting.
The percentage of retirees in “old folks’ homes” is actually pretty small at any given time. Also, plenty of elderly people don’t want to live with their offspring, either, and many have no offspring (which will soon be a very common reality in China and its neighbors, by the way). On top of all of that, lots of people have difficult (or worse) relationships with their family members. I resent the idea that there’s something wrong with me or my peers for not living up to some bargain nobody asked me to make; I never asked to be born.
There have been many famous cases of Chinese people refusing to help severely injured children and the elderly that are lying in the streets. Chinese will stop to watch and take pictures of the injured and dying, but it seems almost weekly or monthly that there are new cases of the public refusal to help.
What kind of people watch a young child get run over by cars several times and then refuse to help ?
All of the cities that I have lived in in China have been fairly wealthy, but the people still do not stop to help the injured and dying.
Money ! Almost all Chinese, until very recently, could not afford to take their very sick elders to hospitals or nursing homes.
Every elderly person in my family has lived in my family’s homes until dying, but I do believe that many Chinese would not be any different from Western people if they could afford it.
China may have raised a few hundred million Chinese out of poverty, but there is still about a Billion Chinese that cannot afford care for their elders even if they want to do so. Most elderly Chinese today still do not have enough savings or a pension for retirement.
Western people used to be exactly as the Chinese are today, until Western country’s incomes raised enough so that the people had options.
One reason for this is the relative lack of Good Samaritan laws in China. Someone who helps an injured or dying person could be in for a great deal of liability. There are also scammers on the roadside who will fake being injured, then accuse you of having hit them with your car, etc. if you try to help them (to extort you for money).
That is one big difference between Asians and Western people.
Asian children are born in debt to their parents for giving them life, and are expected to live their lives making their parents happy.
Western children are born as a gift to their parents, and then the parents are expected to take care of the children until they are old enough to be independent.
So, from before they are even born, the culture and ways of thinking of Asians and Westerners are totally different.
Well, except for Jewish culture, where parents are expected to take care of their children forever. And the only thing they ask for in return is for you maybe give them a call every once and a while, I mean, would it kill you to talk to your mother? She’s just sitting here in the dark, worrying about you.
I imagine it varies by region, but it was definitely the norm in middle class Sichuan. From what I saw, parents would usually move in when a couple had a baby, and they would provide childcare and do most of the cooking while the couple worked, and then enjoy leisure time in the evening. Apparently 90% of children in Shanghai are looked after by grandparents.