In Time Magazine, Kate Merkel-Hess and Jeffrey Wasserstrom of China Beat write that China’s cultural legacy is more complex and diverse than government campaigns would lead us to believe:
…Visions of imperial China as hermetically sealed off from the world are a myth. Foreign belief systems often made their way in and, once reaching Chinese soil, merged with some form of Confucianism (there have been many versions of that creed) or Taoism (ditto) to create hybrid schools of thought. Long before Deng Xiaoping’s Marxist-inflected reboot of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singaporean capitalist-meets-Confucian soft authoritarianism, there were equally complex homegrown fusion creations. A famous one was Chan Buddhism (known in Japanese as Zen), a mash-up of native Taoist and imported Indian elements.
Current efforts to treat Confucius as Chinese culture personified — whether via state-funded Confucius Institutes or the not-quite-official Confucius Peace Prize just ginned up to compete with the Nobel — also run into trouble when we get to texts. Yes, generations of Chinese have valued the great sage’s Analects. But they have also loved Journey to the West, a popular novel in which the central figure, the Monkey King, is a rebellious trickster. Even Liu’s essays that present “Chinese culture” as an obstacle to progress are hardly “un-Chinese.” Lu Xun, an iconoclastic figure whose stories were once praised by Mao Zedong and still show up in textbooks, made a similar argument in the 1920s. (See pictures of today’s young Chinese.)
In its response to Liu’s Nobel win, Beijing is trying to claim the center of Chinese culture. Yet Chinese cultural tradition features regional and ethnic variations of sufficient breadth to support dozens of doctoral theses. We need to think about China, with its mutually unintelligible languages — not merely dialects — as more equivalent to a continent than a country.
