Chinas Cultural Wrench - Road to the Middle Class

IF YOU ARE willing to read just one thing on China, try China’s Massive Wrench by Francesco Sisci over at Asia Times. It is the best thing I have seen that tells just how massive the change is, day to day, in China.

First of all there is the simple notion that China is changing in 30 years, from rural agricultural to urban industrial, what took 200 years in Europe and the US. But China has been undergoing a parallel cultural change.

But this is just a small part of a larger phenomenon: in the past 150 years, China’s complex cultural values have been under constant attack, forcing revision.

Take the Chinese family.

The change started with the family, the cell and basis for society and the state. The ideal family in the 19th century was unchanged from the times of Confucius, some 2,000 years before: three generations under one roof. The older man had many wives and even more children. Each male heir also had many wives and children, all living together in a large courtyard, resembling a small village of dozens of people.

Now, with the single child policy, Chinese society has been turned upside down. Now there are four grandparents and one grandchild.

In the old system, you could hope for one of the many children to distinguish themselves and enter the mandarinate by passing the state examinations. Today, that hope is focused impossibly into a single child.

Then there’s the end of the emperor system. For over 2,000 years the emperor has embodied the state and its people, down even to Mao, the Communist emperor. Even today parents bring their children to Tienanmen Square for a photo dressed as an emperor. But now the state is run by small men who do not embody the state.

For 2,000 years China had, as a religion, a combination of Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist notions. That was overthrown during the Communist era, to the extent that, in 1979 when Deng took over, China had no religion. Now the Communist Party is discussing the importance of returning China to religion. The Falungong demonstrations taught the party that if religions with sensible ideas were banned then religions with crazy ideas would fill the gap.

Yet, it also revealed that Chinese people wanted religious values, and the government had to be open to them. Buddhism was favored: it was a religion that had been in China for hundreds of years, Chinese people were very familiar with it, and Buddhist monks had been among the first to denounce the dangers of the Falungong in 1998.

Furthermore, the Chinese leaders realized that the much-feared Christian faiths were not so dangerous after all. In 50 years of communist rule, despite ruthless oppression, Christian Protestants and Catholics had never staged demonstrations in Tiananmen, as Falungong followers had...

Religion is no longer an issue of public security that can be handed over to the police - it is a top social and political issue involving all aspects of society, and therefore all politburo members must be aware of it.

China is changing, more rapidly, perhaps, than any great people has changed in history. Right now, about 15 million people are moving to the city every year. The outcome of the wrenching change in China, economic, political, and cultural, will affect the whole world.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.