How much has Chinese culture/society/family life changed since 1912?

Factual Questions
1

If you read any practically Chinese novel or view any Chinese film set prior to the 1912 Revolution – no matter how long prior – certain common elements seem to run through Chinese culture, in all regions, in all periods from Confucius to the Manchus:

  • The conservative, hierarchical ethics of Confucianism (older than Confucius, he merely codified them) permeate all of society and all social relationships.

  • The Confucian scholar is regarded as a higher and nobler type than the warrior or the merchant. (Most Chinese, of course, are none of these, but peasants.) The best, practically the only, route to social advancement is to study and master the Confucian classics and qualify for the imperial civil service exams. (Only a very small number of examination candidates get into the civil service, but the rest provide a kind of social leadership to their communities, promulgating Confucian values. Imperial examination - Wikipedia)

  • The (extended) family is everything, everyone’s chief identity and first loyalty. (Emperors preferred eunuchs for courtiers on the assumption that intact men would work for the good of their own sons to the detriment of the state.)

  • As in ancient Rome, a father’s authority over his children continues all his life – or, WRT daughters, until they are married off.

  • Every man must have sons, the more the better.

  • Sons – at least elder sons – typically live in the family home for life. (I understand it was Chinese custom, at a father’s death, not to leave all the family land to the eldest son by “primogeniture,” but to divide it among all the sons, preventing the emergence of any class of large landowners; in such event, families and households must have been split up periodically, the eldest son keeping the old home.)

  • Ancestors are worshipped; incense is burned before their images, or characters naming them, at the family altar.

  • The elderly are venerated. “Great old grand-sire” is the politest form of address to a stranger of any age.

  • Life is especially hard for a girl/woman. Her birth represents a burden to her family, which will be expected to provide her dowry. When she reaches marriage age, she leaves her family forever and goes to live with her husband’s family. She immediately becomes junior, subject to the authority of practically everyone in her husband’s family, especially her mother-in-law. With luck, she can improve her status by bearing sons, and living long enough to acquire daughters-in-law of her own.

  • The Chinese of all classes are very superstitious – not religious in the sense of following one of the Three Ways (Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism), but superstitious, believing in folk religion and never doubting the existence of ghosts and demons and luck and luck-charms.

  • Chinese regard themselves as the world’s only truly civilized people – “human beings” – and all non-Chinese, even other Asians, as barbarians.

  • Elaborate courtesy is crucially important.

Sun Yat-Sen wanted to change all this, to supplant the family with the nation as each person’s chief focus of loyalty. There was a republican revolution in 1912 – it didn’t work out to well – and then a civil war ending in Communist victory in 1949. The Communists were committed in principle to wiping out a lot of holdovers from the past. How successful have they been? Do Chinese no longer worship their ancestors? Look to their fathers/husbands as supreme authorities? Are they any less superstitious? Any less family-centered in their thinking? Any more respectful of foreigners? Any less polite?

How do the Chinese of the PRC differ, today, from those of Taiwan, or the “overseas Chinese” of Singapore, etc., who have not been subject to any attempt to change their culture from above?

2

Well, won’t comment on most of that stuff, some of which even to me a neophyte is inexact, but you didn’t mention how ruinous the Cultural Revolution was, which is one of the most disgusting acts by a State in the 20th century, and that’s saying a lot.

3

[QUOTE=Operation Ripper]
Well, won’t comment on most of that stuff, some of which even to me a neophyte is inexact, but you didn’t mention how ruinous the Cultural Revolution was, which is one of the most disgusting acts by a State in the 20th century, and that’s saying a lot.
[/QUOTE]

I know how ruinous it was. The question is, how effective was it?

4

Pretty effective fellow, from the archeological standpoint alone was catastrophic, not counting the millions and millions of Chinese people it killed.

5

[QUOTE=Operation Ripper]
Pretty effective fellow, from the archeological standpoint alone was catastrophic, not counting the millions and millions of Chinese people it killed.
[/QUOTE]

But did it really change the way the (surviving) Chinese think and behave and view the world? A set of traditions and folkways more than 2,000 years old must have deep roots.

6

IMHO, Christ, I hope so.

7

Well, for starters, you might want to revise your dates a bit. The 1912 revolution succeeded in forcing the abdication of the emperor, but Sun Yat Sen was a pretty ineffective revolutionary and the revolt (one of several that failed) immediately plunged the country into chaos that would not subside until the final victory of the Nationalists, trained and advised by the USSR, in 1927.

Most Chinese historians refer to May 4th movement of 1919 as the beginning of “Modern China” and modern Chinese culture.

8

Jesus H Christ, Operation Ripper, take a chill pill or something. Brain Glutton isn’t trying to downplay or spin the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, he’s just asking a reasonable question about whether or not modern Chinese societal values are significantly different from what they were. You guys don’t need to jump on him about not giving detailed analysis of one or two events which are only part of a complex series that led to the divide between Imperial China and modern China. This is GQ after all, and his question wasn’t really about those events at all, it’s about the differences between today and the past, which he is simply using 1912 as a marker for.

9

Anywho, the problem here is that it is going to be really, really hard to pin down an answer. China is a really, really big country, and the regional variation is really an impediment to giving an accurate answer.

There are vestages of old China in shiny new Beijing that are roughly similar to, say, the Puritannical streak that you find in lots of modern-day New England. In other words, the values in each shapes the society and people, but not that the society and people still adhere to the rigid teachings of Confucianism or Puritanism. On the other hand, rural areas are still way “behind the times,” and many of the traditional Chinese values are more present in everyday life, but I would say that even in those places, too, the observances are much less a part of society than are the values.

From what I can tell, from reading and travel, the Cultural Revolution was really the main thing that stamped out a lot of the old system of values. I found it remarkable that it was easier for me to find Chinese who would admit to traveling to family graves and burn money in cosmopolitan Hong Kong than in most other places in China.

10

Operation Ripper, I’m afraid, doesn’t have anywhere close to a real understanding of the GPCR, and who can blame him? It isn’t exactly something that can be explained in a few CNN soundbites. It’s sort of an easy simplification to “blame Mao”, which is what most westerners do, but I doubt that even Mao had any idea where the GPCR was going to go at the onset.

The GPCR didn’t radically change the way modern Chinese think or view the world. Just ask them, my parents lived through it, I lost a grandparent and a number of relatives to its’ throes, most of the current Chinese leadership did as well, and most of them did not fair well during its upheaval. If you asked them for a summary, it would be “Yeah, Mao went a bit off his head, it was a bad time.” The death toll wasn’t particularly large - You have to remember that millions of Chinese had been basically starving to death every year for the last 100 or so years, on top of all the internal and external wars, but it’s effect on the Chinese psyche is still deeply felt because may of its’ survivors (or perpertrators, depending on your POV) are still alive and could publish their memories and experiences. There’s a whole genre of “Cultural Revolution Literature” composed of these works.

If I have to give an answer to your question, I’d agree with conventional historiography and say that the May 4th movement and the Treaty of Versailles marked a radical shift in the way Chinese thought of themselves and the outside world, and the ultimate culmulation of that shift came in 1949 and the communist victory. I’m not going to bother explaining all the details, you can read it yourself but that is where I would start. I would also venture to say that we are in the throes of another change right now, but I won’t venture to guess what the final effect will be.

11

First, a lot of the stereotypes you listed of 1912 are for those of the wealthy urban classes or large land owning families. I don’t think of lot of it is the same for the vast majority of Chinese peasantry at the time. Just strongly suspect that skews the view quite a bit. A crude analogy of the British nobel class versus the rest of British society.

My off the cuff replies below

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
If you read any practically Chinese novel or view any Chinese film set prior to the 1912 Revolution – no matter how long prior – certain common elements seem to run through Chinese culture, in all regions, in all periods from Confucius to the Manchus:
[/QUOTE]
for the elite class

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]

  • The conservative, hierarchical ethics of Confucianism (older than Confucius, he merely codified them) permeate all of society and all social relationships.
    [/QUOTE]
    yes and no. Again, much more so for the elites rather than the 98% peasant population.

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]

  • The Confucian scholar is regarded as a higher and nobler type than the warrior or the merchant. (Most Chinese, of course, are none of these, but peasants.) The best, practically the only, route to social advancement is to study and master the Confucian classics and qualify for the imperial civil service exams. (Only a very small number of examination candidates get into the civil service, but the rest provide a kind of social leadership to their communities, promulgating Confucian values. Imperial examination - Wikipedia)
    [/QUOTE]
    the successful civil servants were the cream of the crop that got the money and power. Of course better than a warrior or merchant. Also, confucian education was the only education, so to become educated and have way to wealth accumulation when everyone else is a subsistance peasant you were either an imperial civil servant, merchant or top general. Everyone else was dirt poor.

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]

  • The (extended) family is everything, everyone’s chief identity and first loyalty. (Emperors preferred eunuchs for courtiers on the assumption that intact men would work for the good of their own sons to the detriment of the state.)
    [/QUOTE]
    Also combined with group responsibility. Someone in the clan does a bad thing, the individual and the clan is responsible.

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]

  • As in ancient Rome, a father’s authority over his children continues all his life – or, WRT daughters, until they are married off.
    [/QUOTE]
    Yes and no. The one with the money and power held the authority. If the son is a civil servant and the father failed the exams, who do you think holds the power in the family? The stereotype might be true to a certain extent but reality of the one bringing home the bacon can change that.

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]

  • Every man must have sons, the more the better.
    [/QUOTE]

peasants still believe this although I meet tons of city people that prefer girls.

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]

  • Sons – at least elder sons – typically live in the family home for life. (I understand it was Chinese custom, at a father’s death, not to leave all the family land to the eldest son by “primogeniture,” but to divide it among all the sons, preventing the emergence of any class of large landowners; in such event, families and households must have been split up periodically, the eldest son keeping the old home.)
    [/QUOTE]
    There was a lot of primogeniture in my understanding. There was little wealth, so it’s concentrated in the patriarch. That’s the basis of the confucian economy.

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]

  • Ancestors are worshipped; incense is burned before their images, or characters naming them, at the family altar.
    [/QUOTE]
    yep, still done. Less so in my experience in China cities than countryside, and less so in China than in Taiwan or Hong Kong. Before my chinese wife agreed to marry me, I had to go “meet” her grandparents - both of whom had passed away several years before. So, off to the grave for incense, bowing, etc.

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]

  • The elderly are venerated. “Great old grand-sire” is the politest form of address to a stranger of any age.
    [/QUOTE]
    Much more than in the west. However, much less so during the current industrialization and “to get rich is glorious” phase than previously. I think it’s economics. Younger people have a lot more money and economic freedom, and don’t have as much time for the elderly as before. Also, given the massive modernization in China, you wouldn’t go to the elderly for advice about a lot of things that are future shock for that generation.

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]

  • Life is especially hard for a girl/woman. Her birth represents a burden to her family, which will be expected to provide her dowry. When she reaches marriage age, she leaves her family forever and goes to live with her husband’s family. She immediately becomes junior, subject to the authority of practically everyone in her husband’s family, especially her mother-in-law. With luck, she can improve her status by bearing sons, and living long enough to acquire daughters-in-law of her own.
    [/QUOTE]
    duaghter in law thing is much more of a japanese stereotype, and not a chinese one. Certainly some truth there but at least these days daughter in laws are not slaves. Also have to distinguish between the countryside and the city. Also effect of one child policy and more boys that girls is starting to change the “worth” in the countryside.

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]

  • The Chinese of all classes are very superstitious – not religious in the sense of following one of the Three Ways (Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism), but superstitious, believing in folk religion and never doubting the existence of ghosts and demons and luck and luck-charms.
    [/QUOTE]
    a lot of folk beliefs these days. Confucianism and Taoism aren’t really religions, and you’ll certainly never find anyone that says their religion is confuscianism anywhere in the chinese diaspora. Most Buddhists are generally uneducated on Buddhism and not very religious (as opposed to say Tibetan buddhists where buddhism permeates virtually every aspect of life). This took a great hit in the cultural revolution.

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]

  • Chinese regard themselves as the world’s only truly civilized people – “human beings” – and all non-Chinese, even other Asians, as barbarians.
    [/QUOTE]
    Still stereotypically believe superior to other asians. Much less so to westerners.

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]

  • Elaborate courtesy is crucially important.
    [/QUOTE]
    bwahahahahaha. Those days are long gone if ever existed. They probably did exist for the ruling elite but that’s about it. Sure, there are a lot of courtesies, but IMHO nothing more elaborate than say in the US, just different and to untrained eyes maybe seems a lot more elaborate.

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Sun Yat-Sen wanted to change all this, to supplant the family with the nation as each person’s chief focus of loyalty. There was a republican revolution in 1912 – it didn’t work out to well – and then a civil war ending in Communist victory in 1949. The Communists were committed in principle to wiping out a lot of holdovers from the past. How successful have they been? Do Chinese no longer worship their ancestors? Look to their fathers/husbands as supreme authorities? Are they any less superstitious? Any less family-centered in their thinking? Any more respectful of foreigners? Any less polite?
[/QUOTE]
Sun Yat-Sen was basically a figurehead that stood for nothing that Chiang Kai-shek and other power hungry warlords could use as a rallying point. Read the 3 people’s principals - it’s no Gettysburg address.

Chinese have modernized. Most families have a cemetary plot that they visit once a year. Fathers are respected as fathers just like anywhere else and not supreme authorities. Women have had equality since the revolution, and husbands are not supreme authorities. Supersticians like catching cold’s from drafts are still around, but as science and education take hold the older beliefs just wither away. Much less clan centric than before, but the extended family still very important. In cities, most people no longer live with the extended family although pretty common to have 3 generations under one roof. Also very common to have grandparents close but not in the same place. Westerners are generally not thought to be inferior these days. Politness is no where near old levels - combination of the economic changes, rural to city migrations, and the past history such as cultural revolution.

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
How do the Chinese of the PRC differ, today, from those of Taiwan, or the “overseas Chinese” of Singapore, etc., who have not been subject to any attempt to change their culture from above?
[/QUOTE]
Two major differences: one there are a LOT more people in China and that affects everything. Cutting in line is not rude - it’s a survival skill :slight_smile: Also, the Taiwan, HK, Singaporeans did not live through the revolution, the 50’s political movements, the cultural revolution, and then the massive dislocation that came from unbridled capitalism and breaking the iron rice bowl.

Virtually all families in the cultural revolution were affected one way or another. This experience is not shared in Taiwan, HK and Singapore.

Anyhoo, just IMHO

12

Ok, I suppose I should elaborate on the May 4th Movement even though I said I wouldn’t, since China Guy has taken the time to answer each individual question. I cannot emphasize enough its’ importance Many of the supposedly “Chinese” customs you mention, and that are no longer relevent, were basically swept away during the period that started with May 4th and ended in 1949. Mao and the Communists were certainly a part of the movement, just as the Nationalists were. It was a period where the intellegencia and the educated class, who had been educated on the Confucian model and values, realized en mass that everything they had learned in their lives had become irrelevent in the age of steam and machine guns.

Just to name one example: Prior to 1949, written Chinese basically sounded nothing like spoken Chinese. You can’t really appreciate this without being able to read Confucius in its’ original form, I certainly cannot read it without a translation. Imagine speaking English as you would normally, but having every written correspondence be in Pre-shakespearian Middle English, and you’d have a close approximation of what it was like during the turn of the century. Learning to write meant learning an entirely new language and it was no simple task, that’s one of the things that made studying the Confucian classics and succeeding in a system that revolves around its’ understanding so difficult and out of reach of the common peasant. After 1919, the entire Chinese nation basically shifted away from this form of writing and began writing things in colloquial (Bai Hua) Chinese. (for you nitpickers, I realize that colloquial literature existed before 1919, most famously The Dream of the Red Chamber).

One of my Chinese history teachers once remarked that the era of intellecutal freedom and creativity during the May 4th movement will never be replicated, because the generation of literati that were completely fluent in both the classical texts and also educated in Western thought(most famously Lu Xun) will never be re-created, since most of them were dead by the time the Communists came to power. No later generation was ever educated in the same manner that they were. “Classical” Chinese civilization basically died with them.

13

Forgot to mention, Wikipedia hs a pretty good basic explanation of the Chinese writing system

14

[QUOTE=China Guy]
yep, still done. Less so in my experience in China cities than countryside, and less so in China than in Taiwan or Hong Kong. Before my chinese wife agreed to marry me, I had to go “meet” her grandparents - both of whom had passed away several years before. So, off to the grave for incense, bowing, etc.
[/QUOTE]

I recall two anecdotes about Chinese reverence for their dead:

  1. From Durant’s Our Oriental Heritage: A fisherman recovered the body of a drowned man and offered to return it to the man’s family for a very steep price. The family consulted a famous lawyer, who advised, “Wait. No one else will pay for the body.” The fisherman grew anxious and consulted the same lawyer (apparently Chinese legal ethics allowed a lawyer to counsel opposing parties in the same matter), and he advised, “Wait. Nowhere else can they obtain the body.”

  2. From one of Bertrand Russell’s books: During the 19th or early 20th Century, a Western physician set up a medical school in China to train physicians in Western medicine. He asked the government if he could get some cadavers for the students to dissect, for instructional purposes. The official he spoke with was utterly horrified; desecrating corpses was barbaric. However, he assured the doctor the state would provide him with an unlimited supply of live criminals.

I guess that’s all pretty much in the past. There’s now a traveling exhibition of preserved, partially dissected human bodies going around in the U.S., called simply “Bodies” – http://www.mosi.org/ – which are Chinese cadavers (paupers unclaimed by families, presumably), and some Americans have been protesting the exhibit as exploitative, or in bad taste.

15

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
I recall two anecdotes about Chinese reverence for their dead:

  1. From Durant’s Our Oriental Heritage: A fisherman recovered the body of a drowned man and offered to return it to the man’s family for a very steep price. The family consulted a famous lawyer, who advised, “Wait. No one else will pay for the body.” The fisherman grew anxious and consulted the same lawyer (apparently Chinese legal ethics allowed a lawyer to counsel opposing parties in the same matter), and he advised, “Wait. Nowhere else can they obtain the body.”

  2. From one of Bertrand Russell’s books: During the 19th or early 20th Century, a Western physician set up a medical school in China to train physicians in Western medicine. He asked the government if he could get some cadavers for the students to dissect, for instructional purposes. The official he spoke with was utterly horrified; desecrating corpses was barbaric. However, he assured the doctor the state would provide him with an unlimited supply of live criminals.

I guess that’s all pretty much in the past.
[/QUOTE]
Interesting and quaint, and very far in the past.

Keaitentaclebeast has given a good view of the importance of the May 4th movement. At that first wave of modernization/collision with the advanced West, generation gaps were measured in just a few years. Not uncommon for a confucian type older brother having an internal civil war with a brother just a few years younger. Ba Jin’s novel Family (Jia) captures this nicely. So, a big language deliniation occured then when written and spoken Chinese were more or less unified.

One can not underestimate the importance of literature in the Communists coming to power. In Yen’an, after the long march, one of the watershed events decided was the role of literature. And the role was to serve the party. Pretty much from 1949 until the 1990’s there was nothing written that wasn’t propaganda for all intents and purposes.

The second big language occurance was after the revolution. The government simplified the characters (in two waves) and dumbed down the language to raise literacy from IIRC less than 10% to nowadays more like 90%.

I would put forth that the other seminal event was the second collision between the hermetically sealed Chinese borders and advanced western economies that started with a trickle in 1979 and has become a flood in the past decade.