The Useless Tree

Cultural Distinctiveness and Historical Continuity

I had a great day yesterday.  A very engaging and productive time at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.  Some good responses to my presentation on Confucianism and soft power, and even better, broad-ranging conversation afterward.  Much to think about and absorb and, eventually, blog.  In the evening I had a fun time with a diverse gathering of journalists and others at the Foreign Correspondent's Club here.  My talk to them was a bit different that the more academic presentation that morning, and I was able to float a variety of ideas to an informed audience.  And the martinis later with a couple of former students in a bar in the mansion that had been the home of a Shanghai gangster was a great way to cap the last night in Shanghai.

Throughout my short time here, one of the ideas I have been raising is that China is not now a Confucian society.  This notion has been met with mixed responses here.  Some Chinese, scholars and students alike, agree that modernization has transformed China to such an extent that it is very difficult to say that consistent Confucian behavior is common here (and by "Confucianism" I mean a rigorous moral practice).  Materialist instrumentalism (or instrumental materialism) is just too powerful an economic and social dynamic to maintain the humanist sociality of Confucianism.  That's not to say there are no traces or expressions of Confucian-like intentions and actions, there are.  But they do not sufficiently add up at the level of society and economy to justify calling this place a "Confucian society."

I obviously need to refine and hone this argument.  And I will be aided in that endeavor by the points made by those here who have disagreed with me.  Negative responses came from students and scholars and they were offered with varying degrees of fervency.  One Chinese student at Beijing Foreign Studies University was quite direct and comprehensive in her rejection of my suggestion that China is not a Confucian society.  I believe that I can rebut most of her points, and I will be thinking through them in the next few days, but here I want to step back and think about a larger issue.

Why do some Chinese very much want to believe that China is a Confucian society?  What's at stake in that conception?

Various people here mentioned the familiar point that China is facing a crisis of faith or a vacuum of principles.  The very rapid and extensive economic and social and cultural change is destabalizing.  Personal and collective identites are called into question.  And in that context, reaching for some grounding in cultural distinctiveness and historical continuity can provide some comfort and confidence. 

I think this is generally true.  But I don't think this is a particularly Chinese phenomenon.  All countries and cultures that face globalized modernity face the same problem.  In the US, the "culture wars" are essentially the same thing: people debating what it means to be "American" in the face of continual and fundamental social and cultural change.  It is generally the more conservative resopnse to change that reaches for cultural distsinctiveness (which in the US takes the form of American excetionalism) and historical continuity.  That what conservatism means: to conserve something essential about social organization and cultural identity. 

What is unique about China now is the speed and extent of change.  Everything is moving faster here, faster than the US, faster than many people feel comfortable with.  And perhaps that is why the conservative response, which here includes the neo-traditionalist re-invention of Confucianism, is so prominent in certain quarters.  But, however dizzying the pace of change here, I don't think that the yearning for cultral distinctiveness and historical continuity is all that different from the cultural dynamics of the US.

Paradoxically, the two countries may be more alike than either might realize, and their similarity lies in their efforts to define and conserve cultural difference in a world of inescapable change.... We all look to assert what is culturally distinctive about our place in that world, and the historical continuities that link us to the past of our place in the world...

Something to think about as I face a twelve hour flight back to the US, and then another short flight and car ride home. 

In the meantime, here's a funny post card from Tai Kung lu; the caption reads something like: "today's recommendation" or, maybe "recommended daily."

Shanghai and the Cultural Implications of Emulative Spending

Tomorrow I will give two talks here: one to the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and the other to the Foreign Correspondent's Club of Shanghai.  In both cases, one point that I will raise is the notion that China is not now a Confucian society.  I realize that this could cause a bit of a stir - there are many who will reject the idea - but, hey, I may as well shake things up, after coming half way around the world...

I focus on economic and social changes here and how they seem to render Confucianism, which I take to be a rigorous moral practice that generally eschews instrumentalist materialism, untenable.  Jing Wang's book, Brand New China, which describes the rise of consumerist thinking and behavior here, has been helpful in this regard.  She discusses "emulative spending," whereby the fashions and tastes of the rich shape the preferences and outlook of those further down the socio-economic scale.  Veblen talked of the phenomenon as "emulative consumption" when he analyzed early twentieth century American capitalism:

The competitive requirements of capitalism resulted in predatory and exploitationary tactics where values of prowess supplanted older instincts of workmanship. In fact, the concept of "emulative consumption" or the struggle to possess and outdo your neighbor became an inseparable and undesirable effect of the institution of private property.

Early twenty-first century China is not exactly the same as early twentieth century America, but I think something rather like emulative consumption is happening here.  Especially right here in Shanghai.

This is one of the most vibrant and open and rich economic centers in the country (I haven't been to Guangzhou lately but it, too, is a commercial wonder).  Wealth and high end commodities are very much in evidence.  Shanghai People have a sophisticated, globally inflected, sense of style. 

But what I noticed most today were the immense crowds of ordinary people from many other parts of China here on vacation.  They come because Shanghai has long been the bright lights and big city that many want to see.  And they are here in even greater numbers just now because The Bund, the famous riverside promenade, has been refurbished and reopened to the public yesterday.

So, today there I was on the Bund, amidst a sea of people from all over China.  Some took pictures of me, because foreigners are one of the strange things you see in Shanghai.  But as I wandered about I thought of them and Shanghai, and what Shanghai might mean to them.  Does it symbolize some strange distortion of Chinese culture, a unrecognizable hybrid of East and West?  Or does it stand for the new China and all that is possible, materially and culturally, through the new prosperity?  My sense is that the latter impression is the stronger.  Shanghai is long past its imperialist history.  It is a Chinese city.  It is an expression of Chinese culture.  And, indeed, it could be the Chinese culture that many of these ordinary people from all around the country want to emulate. Perhaps not all the older people, but probably the younger ones.  Shanghai is what China is now, and it is what China will be even more in the future.

In this way, Shanghai is rather like California (which is hard for a New Yorker like myself to say...): it sets the standard for what the rest of the country will be doing in the next decade.  And if that is true, then the socio-economic trends that Jing Wang analyzes, especially the emulative and conspicuous consumption that drive this place, will make it harder and harder to assert that China is a Confucian society.

The Bund today (and more pictures below the jump):

Tian Zi Fang, off Tai Kung Lu

Tian Zi Fang is a warren of alleyways that run off of Taikung Road in the old French Concession of Shanghai.  It is similar to Nanluoguxiang in Beijing in that commerce is used as a basis for architectural preservation.  But the vibe is a bit different.  The alleyways of Tian Zi Fang are narrower and higher; the surrounding buildings are at least two to three stories high. The construction of a Beijing hutong is generally lower.  And in Tian Zi Fang there are more artists, especially painters, doing their thing.  Thus, it has an element of Beijing's 798, with an active creative-artistic energy, but not nearly as expansive and industrial as that famous Beijing art space. 

Anyway, it made for a nice walk today.  This section of Shanghai is fairly well preserved, given the explosion of property development and building that has happened in the past twenty years.  Here are some Tian Zi Fang photos:

Recommendation

Try to avoid the Jianguomen subway station during a weekday evening rush hour:

That is all.

Talks and Walks in Beijing

A quick update from Beijing...

I gave two talks in the last two days. It was essentially the same presentation in both spots, my paper, "Confucianism as Soft Power," in which I argue that Confucianism will likely not serve as a significant source of soft power for the PRC.  The first talk was to a group of American students studying here with IES.  A good point came up in that exchange: a student asked if it might be possible that the image of Confucius himself could become a kind of brand symbol detached from the texts and ideas of Confucianism.  A floating signifier of sorts, holding various meanings and open to several interpretations depending on the individual interpreter and his or her context.  In that case, Confucius could become an element in the repertoire of Chinese soft power but Confucianism, which actually requires something of us, a conscientious effort to live a certain kind of moral life, would fade into the background.  An interesting idea that I will have to come back to at some point.

The second talk today, at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, went smoothly.  I spoke in English and the simultaneous translation into Chinese was efficient.  I had expected some criticism of my basic point that China is not now a Confucian society or economy or polity, but no one rose to defend its practical relevance in contemporary Chinese life.  It may have been that everyone was being polite (I was a guest of the vice-director). Or, it could have been that those in the room all generally believed that the tumultuous modernization of China in the past century has left little of what we might call "actually existing Confucianism." 

One fellow pressed back against me when I suggested that an aversion to profit was central to just about any reading of Confucianism.  And my response was to ask how a modern Confucian would understand how much profit is enough?  My sense is that the modern tendency to make profit an end in itself, as opposed to simply a means to allow people to fulfill the ends of Humanity and Duty and Ritual, would be seen as excessive to a contemporary Confucian.

I had a very nice lunch afterward with two former students, who I taught over twenty years ago at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center.  Here we are together after the talk:

Last night I wandered up to Houhai and had a good meal, a spicy beef stew, at a nice Yunnan restaurant there.   Afterward as I wandered about the alleys, fending off the touts trying to lure me to the "lady bars," I realized that the music blasting out of one boutiques was familiar.  Could it be?  Yes: "oh, oh, oh, oh caught in a bad romance...."  Lady Gaga is here.  I emailed to inform my sixteen year old daughter, and she rejoiced in Lady Gaga's global reach. I am less thrilled at the prospect.  In any event, a Houhai alley:

And, finally, yesterday I walked through  the Imperial Palace (Gugong), which is right next to my hotel.  Here are a couple of obligatory pictures (notice the blue sky! The sand storms are gone...):

First Day in Beijing

I arrived yesterday afternoon to a brown Beijing.  A massive sand/dust storm has turned the city into a murky mess.  Everything is covered in a fine brown powdering of air-borne dirt from Mongolia.  Many locals have broken out the surgical masks...

I didn't let the lousy air stop me.  Last evening I walked up to Nanluoguxiang and had a pleasant meal at the Pass By Bar.   It's a famous expatriate hang out, perhaps past its prime.  But it made for a comfortable spot to get over the first wave of jet-lag.  As I walked back down Nanluoguxiang afterwards, a poster caught my eye:

The man to the right of Mao is Liu Shaoqi, one of the main targets of the Cultural  Revolution.  Essentially, Mao killed him.  Forty years ago, putting up a post of Liu would certainly have brought serious repercussions.  Now, I suspect it's an ironic reminder of the changing nature of politics and Chinese society.  On my walk back to my hotel - the Jade Garden Hotel, which which was used for high level Communist Party meetings in the 1940s (maybe Liu walked these same halls...) - I saw a rather unsuccessful advertisement, at least for native readers of English:

Well thank goodness it's palatable, though that seems to set the bar a bit low.  Maybe the competition is unpalatable...

Today  I went out to the Museum of Military  History but it was closed.  So, I made my  way back on the subway to Xidan  and went into  a  gigantic book store.  I picked up  some copies of China is not Happy, to  read with some Chinese students back at  Williams.  I also bought the Confucius movie, so now I will actually be able to  come to my own conclusions about it.

After a long walk, and a quick plate of jiaozi, I found my way back to the hotel to rest. The combination of jet lag and warnings from the weather men to stay indoors to escape the bad air has convinced me to sit tight for the rest of the afternoon.  I have to tune up my presentation for Wednesday at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences anyway.  Later, I'll meet up with Jeremiah, of Granite Studio fame, and wander toward Wangfujing for dinner.

I'll leave you with a  shot of the back wall of  Gugong.  I took this at about noon with no prospect of any blue in the sky:

Daoist Thoughts on Travel

Whenever I set out on a trip, passage 47 of the Daodejing always comes to mind.  I don't really agree with it, as is obvious from the fact of my travel, but it keeps things in perspective:

You can know all beneath heaven though you never step out the door, and you can see the Way of heaven though you never look out the window.

The further you explore, the less you know.

So it is that a sage knows by going nowhere, names by seeing nothing, perfects by doing nothing.

不出戶知天下；不闚牖見天道。其出彌遠，其知彌少。是以聖人不行而知，不見而名，不為而成。

Blogging Slow Down and Heading Out to Beijing and Shanghai

Yes, I have been remiss this week.  One silly post on old disco music and nothing more.  But this is the last week before our Spring Break here and I have been consumed with grading one set of papers (finished yesterday; hooray!) and fielding questions and drafts of another set of papers due today at  5PM.

I have also been getting ready for a trip to China, which will commence tomorrow.  My main purpose is to present a paper I have been working on (though it is still rough and in need of greater analytic depth), "Confucianism as Soft Power."  It needs a better title, too.  The central argument is that Confucianism is unlikely to serve as a significant source of soft power for the PRC in the near future.  Yes, the idea first emerged here (with some further ideas here) but I have expanded on it, and continue to expand on it, considerably.

I will present the paper at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences next week, and at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences the week after.  Perhaps the best way to describes these organizations is government-sponsored think tanks.  "Soft Power" has been something of a hot topic in China of late.  So I am sure that the people in both Academies will have ideas to share with me.  It will be interesting to see what kind of arguments will emerge both for and against the possibilities of Confucian Soft Power. 

I will also pop into a couple of classes at Beijing Foreign Studies University, one with Chinese students and one with American students.  And, in Shanghai, I will give a talk at the Foreign Correspondent's Club.  

In between there will be meet ups with former and current students and friends new and old, walks and bike rides through Beijing hutongs, visits to new art galleries in Shanghai, perhaps a look at the Chinese People's Revolutionary Military Museum (which I have never seen), and, of course, my continuing search for the perfect dumpling.

I will try to post from China, as I was able to do during my trip last year.  But blogging could slack off a bit while I am on the road.  

Any suggestions for other spots in Beijing and Shanghai that I should check out (places other than the standard historical/tourist sites)?

Shake Your Groove Thing

I was at a party last night and some disco came on.  My wife and I started to dance, just like we did all those years ago in college, back in the seventies when disco was ubiquitous.

It made me think about disco as an art form.  At first, I hated it.  This was 1975 when it was just coming out in a big way.  I thought then that it was too simplistic, just percussion, most notably the high-hat cymbal, and bass and whatever lyrics that could be scrambled together.  But as it caught on I found it infectious.  Disco was taken seriously at my college, Purchase College.  The dancers liked it because it was, after all, all about dancing.   Purchase was very gay, and, as this analysis suggests, disco had a distinctively gay aspect to it:

...Gays took the same idea of the black dance parties and used the same music for their parties that shared the same private clubs, soon to be known as "discos". Discos became so successful that they transformed rapidly from marginalized, discriminated and underground phenomenon to a chic craze for the yuppies. Far from being agents of the Establishment, gays adopted several trademarks of the hippy culture (free-form dancing, psychedelic lights, colorful costumes, hallucinogens). New York's gay community rediscovered a new facet of human psychology that had been well known to ancient cultures: "depersonalization" due to collective ecstasy enabled and fostered freedom of expression. The cathartic and regenerative function of disco-music accounted for the lightning speed with which it spread around the world

This was before it became mainstreamed, as all popular cultural products are destined to be, when it was still somewhat transgressive.  At base, it was just fun.  There were songs that integrated love themes (I always liked Sending you forget me nots - which I take as a late disco (1982) love song) but most did away with any pretension of lyrical significance.  They reveled in silly lines that were simply accompaniment for the main purpose, which was dancing.  How else can one explain titles such as, Shake Your Booty, Boogie, Oogie, Oogie, Get Down Tonight, and Shake Your Groove Thing.  All that mattered was giving yourself over to the sound and moving to the music.    We all got out on the dance floor and boogied: gay, straight, black, white, Latino, together, dancing, forgetting the rest, just letting go and flying, collective ecstasy....

But it is that last line of above quote I want to focus on: the freedom of expression, the cathartic and regenerative function.  Makes me think of Zhuangzi....

Zhuangzi would, I think, be repelled by what disco became: a conspicuous fashion, the movement from a freely expressed human quality, if that is what dancing with abandon is, to an institutionalized and routinized commodity.   As in this passage, from chapter 4:

...Drinking at ceremonies begins orderly enough, but it always ends up wild and chaotic.  And if things go far enough, it's nothing but debauchery.  All our human affairs seem to work like this.  However sincerely they begin, they end in vile deceit.  And however simply they begin, they grow enormously complex before they're. (55)

This would suggest that Zhuangzi would frown upon the whole ethos of disco.  Debauchery, after all, was not unknown in and around the dance floor at Purchase in the 1970s....  Zhuangzi was not a party guy.  But I do not take this as a blanket rejection of the early core of disco, the freedom, the abandon, the letting go.  Think of this passage, from chapter 2, when he is discussing the music the natural world creates:

Sounding the ten thousand things differently, so each becomes itself according to itself alone - who could make such music? (18)

Each becoming itself, according to itself alone: that is the spirit of early disco.  That was its motivation among gays; they could find on the dance floor a space for their personal expression.  And their joy and abandon radiated out to us all.  And all of us jumped into it and found something of ourselves there, something essential and vital, something we might not have connected to had we not followed the advice of Peaches and Herb: Shake Your Groove Thing...

So, I think there is something compatible between disco and Daoism.  They each embrace an ethic of letting go.  Confucians...not so much (though I think a case could be made for the Confucian themes of We Are Family...).  We'll end with Zhuangzi:

Just let your mind wander along the drift of things.  Trust yourself to what is beyond you - let it be the nurturing center.  Then you've made it.  It the midst of all this, is there really any response?  Nothing can compare to simply living out your inevitable nature.  And there's nothing more difficult (56)

In other words, Get Up and Do Your Thing...

Confucian Sovereignty

A quick shout out to Stephen Angle, over at Warp, Weft and Way, who has a post on his evolving thoughts on the relationship of sovereignty and democracy in Mencius.  The post is short but the comments go on a bit (over 30 of them) and dig down into some interesting points on Mencius.  When I read this line of Angle's it resonated with some of my own, unarticulated, impressions of Mencius:

In other words, the argument that I end up making for what we can loosely call Confucian democracy is not a claim that democracy is compatible with Confucianism, but rather than it is required by Confucian commitments themselves.

Although I'm not sure if the initial distinction he draws is really necessary to make this ultimate argument, I think this is a fruitful line to pursue.  When I read those passages in Mencius (can't be precise; I'm at home and the text is in the office) where he speaks of the people being the eyes and ears of Heaven, and that the people must confirm the Mandate of Heaven, it raises the question: how can we know what the people's understanding and preferences are?  Of course if the peasants are revolting, we can take that as a sign of their displeasure, but, short of that, wouldn't some sort or regular expression of popular opinion seem to be required to know what the eyes and ears of Heaven are seeing and hearing?  And wouldn't a routinized system of elections serve that purpose?  If the current leadership was acting in accordance with the Mandate of Heaven they should have a significant electoral advantage.  And if they were losing the Mandate, they the people could be the channel of Heaven's preferences.

Yes, yes, I know, electoral systems and democratic politics can get messy.  But so can authoritarian politics.  And I know that the standard, knee-jerk first reaction to this idea might be: an American system is not appropriate for China.  I agree!  There are a wide variety of electoral systems and democratic structures.  The only point here is that a democratic process could be the best way to live up to Mencian moral and political commitments.

After all, there is a fundamental way in which Confucianism failed in China historically: it never, in and of itself, was able to constitute an exclusive role for ordering the political system.  In their times, both Confucius and Mencius were not all that influential politically.  And when Confucianism was revived after the Qin disaster, it was fused with Legalism to produce a ruling ideology.  And Legalism was obviously uninterested in consulting popular opinion.  That historical failure of Confucianism points to Angle's main point: what would seem to be required for Confucianism to truly live up to its political commitments, it might require some sort of democratic practice.

Angle's argument is more sophisticated and textually informed than my initial reaction here.  I look forward to his future publications on the topic...