China articles - China expat living

Hybrid culture of contemporary China

It’s true that sometimes western commodities do not agree with the traditional Chinese culture. For instance, heated debates occurred about whether a Starbucks should be kept (or even built at first) in the Forbidden City of Beijing. Economic development and a successful Olympic Games in Beijing have made people in China proud of themselves. However, there still lies confusion and uncertainty about the mixture of traditional Chinese national culture with international streams of thoughts brought with the opening up for imported and mass produced western commodities. Behind those commodities are mass culture and ideology from the western countries.

When the modern China firstly opens to the outside world in the late 1970s, everything from abroad seemed fresh and attractive. At that time many Chinese people even worshiped everything foreign. Similar to “the grass is always greener at the other side of the hill”, there was a popular saying “the moon is brighter in the West” in the Chinese language. However with an increasing number of foreigners coming to China and more Chinese going abroad, they gradually see the foreigners through a more objective perspective and the western countries are no longer an idealized world.

But still, as Milan Kundera says “Life is elsewhere”, for those who could only get access to the outside world through media coverage, life in a western country looks like mysterious and idealized dreams. Many Chinese people may heard about the Big Ben, English gentlemen, football clubs and fog in London, and England also sent their stereotypical “tea at five” and David Beckham for the Closing Ceremony of Beijing Olympics. However, for most Chinese people, those are all about England. Before I moved to Denmark, all I knew about this Scandinavian country is it’s a fairytale kingdom. Plus everyone in China knows the Little Mermaid. So it’s not surprising that the Copenhagen City Council have decided to send the sculpture to Shanghai next year for the World Expo. But both David Beckham and the Little Mermaid are definitely not all the story about the culture in England and Denmark. They are so much more than that.

Basically there are two popular trends about the clashes between “local” and “global” culture in contemporary China. For one thing, there has been a growing tendency of the cult of a global, or West-dominated culture. “International look” is something that one would find popular in the requirements of business performances. Middle-class and wealthy Chinese people worship western fashion. Young and indulged teenagers grow up with Barbie, Coca Cola, hip-hop dancing and western junk food…One of the famous scene from the Sichuan earthquake news coverage last year was when a boy being rescued after surviving from the earthquake, the first sentence he told the camera was “I want to drink Coca Cola”.

For the other, nationalism and occasionally reflections from the past history still lingers on for many radical Chinese nationalist. They condemn the commercialized global village, resist foreign products and are strongly against the successful imposition of western culture.

Globalization and Chinese national identity

The hybrid cultural values and confusion of national identity brought by cultural clash between the local and global is not only a problem that one would find challenging only in China. What the “Chinese culture” is actually is something complicated to identify. It’s not easy to describe traditional Chinese culture in a nutshell. It’s even harder to describe the contemporary culture of China in one article. Opening-up has brought China with wealth as well as rather hybrid ideology. With its diversified population and vast geographical area and an unbalanced state of economic development, China has a rather mixed population, with elite and intellectual middle class in cities, who are better educated, and who are more willing to be open to new stream of thoughts. And also there is a large proportion of people working as peasants or living in rural areas. In addition, people who resident in different areas and who are from altogether 56 ethnic groups have distinct regional or ethnic identities. Ethnic origins, regions and religion have created hybrid and diversified culture for China. It is hard to identify what an overall national identity is to the Chinese people. Furthermore, economic and social structural transformation has left the ideology of Chinese people always in a state of flux. Therefore it is usually rather difficult to conclude nation-wide cultural identities of Chinese people.

When the East meets the West

In the mean time, however, globalization is a two-way process. When nationalists are criticizing about the danger of globalization, the process of globalization and localization can also contribute to the Chinese culture disseminating into the other areas of the world. Take the cuisine in China Town of London for example. Even if they are not authentic enough, the localized Chinese cuisine still remains popular in the UK. Similarly, when the Beijing Olympic Games was held, the BBC played short opening credits “Monkey Olympics” for its sports coverage program. Then after the Game was held, I attended a public talk given by Mr Chen Shizheng at SOAS, about the adaptation of "Journey to the West", a classical Chinese folklore into "Monkey", a popular West-end opera in London. Both of the “monkeys” in fact don’t look like the images of the “monkey king” in the folklore that Chinese people are familiar with. However it still helps for the famous Chinese monkey to gain popularity in the West.

It is of no harm to celebrate something from foreign culture if it is applied and understood in an appropriate way. For instance, I could still remember watching a friend of mine performing traditional Chinese fan dancing with her students at the Confucius Institute, LSE, when it was the Spring Festival in London. And it has become a tradition for the mayor of London to deliver a speech at the Chinese New Year celebration at Trafalgar Square each year. The Chinese lion dances can also be found at the parade of Thames Festival, which could be compared, to a certain extent, to the celebration of Christmas and Valentine’s Day in China.

Therefore, the process of globalization – not only during the process of economic development, but also holding international events (such as the Olympics and World Expo) and exchanging with foreign cultures also bring about more profound thinking and discussion for Chinese people and could contribute to the proliferation of a more diversified world culture.