One night in Kunming, China last December I was out to dinner with a former professor, a middle-aged Chinese woman. She had just returned from a trip to Washington D.C. and at one point during the meal we began contrasting America and China on a number of different fronts: infrastructure, geography, weather, fashion. When I brought up the differences between Chinese and American culture she interjected, “What American culture?”
The U.S. is too young a country to have a culture, she began arguing. In her mind, real culture was something that could only exist after thousands of years of civilization. Besides, she argued, American culture is merely a collection of snippets from other cultures. It is not a true culture. This was not the first time I’d heard such criteria for culture from a Chinese friend. What does this perspective, if anything, say about how the Chinese generally view culture as a concept and how that might differ from the American viewpoint?
Whereas American ideas of culture acknowledge a certain package of shared traits – food, language, music, customs – as a base requirement, the Chinese alternative, it seems, ascribes a much heftier weight to time.
China, it is often said, has the oldest continuous civilization. While true in many respects – it has remained largely politically coherent since the first millennium BC – this is also slightly misleading. The five thousand or so years of human habitation in the land we now call China, today a territory larger then it’s ever been, has been a changing hodgepodge of kingdoms and dynasties with often diverse ethnic make-ups. And what we think of as Chinese usually is limited to the Han ethnicity, which makes up around 90 percent of the population. The remaining minority groups – Tibetans, Yi, Zhuang, Dai, among a few dozen others – have their own sets of cultures, traditions and histories. Still, there are forms of Chineseness that have persisted through millennia and it’s certainly something to be proud of and celebrate.
Read Full Article HERE