Such views, of course, don’t disappear completely with modernization. Magical notions, concepts of fate and cosmology still have a hold but mostly they continue on as superstitions, in which people only half-believe and follow in a somewhat embarrassed way. [328]
This certainly does not apply to modern Chinese societies: superstition and traditional beliefs — as we saw earlier with the worship of ancestral spirits and the prayers offered to various deities in the hope of good fortune — remain an integral part of the thinking and behaviour of most Chinese. [329]
The arrival of modernization in different parts of the world and in diverse cultures obliges us, therefore, to rethink what is meant by modernity and to recognize its diversity and plurality. We can no longer base our concept of modernity simply on the experience of North America and Europe. Our understanding of modernity is changed and expanded by the emergence of new modernities. The Chinese scholar Huang Ping argues that Chinese civilization has been so different from Western societies in so many ways that it is impossible to comprehend it, and its modernity, simply by the use of Western concepts. ‘Is it not a question of whether the concepts/theories are far away from Chinese reality? China ’s own practice,’ he concludes, ‘is capable of generating alternative concepts, theories, and more convincing frameworks. ’ [330]
THE PRIMACY OF CULTURE
In his book East and West, Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, writes: ‘I find myself driven to the conclusion that what we see when we compare West and East is a consequence more of time lags than of profound cultural differences.’ [331] The implication of his argument is that timing is a relatively transient question and that culture matters little. As we have seen, however, the timing and speed of industrialization and urbanization, far from being merely transient phenomena, have real and lasting effects. More fundamentally, it is a mistake to believe that cultural difference does not have a far-reaching impact on the nature of modernity. When countries are much less developed than the West — before or in the early stages of economic take-off — then it is plausible to argue that the disparities are primarily a function of their backwardness rather than any cultural difference. But the transformation of the Asian tigers, with countries like Taiwan and South Korea now at least as developed as many European nations, means that the proposition that cultural difference counts for little can now be tested in practice. The classic exemplar is post-war Japan. As we saw in Chapter 3, Japan remains, notwithstanding the fact that it is at least as advanced as the West, very different from its Western counterparts in a myriad of the most basic ways, including the nature of social relations, the modus operandi of institutions, the character of the family, the role of the state and the manner in which power is exercised. By no stretch of the imagination can Japanese modernity be described as similar to, let alone synonymous with, that of the United States or Europe. [332]
The same can be said of China. Its path towards and through modernity has been entirely different from the route followed by the West. The state is constructed in a different way and plays a different kind of role. The relationship between the present and the past is distinct, not simply because of the way in which the past bears on the process of modernization but also because, more than any other society, China is deeply aware of and influenced by its history. [333]
The long-term persistence of cultural difference is deeply rooted. In April 1998, I interviewed two Chinese-Americans in Beijing for a television programme: they had decided to go and work in China for a year, where they had never been before, to find out what it was like and to discover more about themselves. One of them, Katherine Gin, who was in her mid twenties and had spent all her life in San Francisco, made the following observation:
I think one of the biggest differences between the Americans and the Chinese is that Americans are always trying to re-create themselves, always feel it is important to be the first person to do this or do that. Even America as a nation is always trying to re-create itself. The Chinese rarely even ask these questions, and as a nation seem to have more of a sense of where they come from. Of course, they are changing fast, but they don’t ask who they are, or constantly compare themselves with others. [334]
The irresistible conclusion is that the reason why the Chinese have a deep sense of their own identity is to be found in their long, continuous and rich history; in contrast, as products of a relatively new and young nation, Americans are in constant search of their identity.
The recognition that the Chinese exhibit certain cultural traits which can be explained by their history does not imply cultural essentialism, the idea that all nations and ethnic groups have a bundle of characteristics which remain fixed and unchanged over time. On the contrary, identities are constantly changing and being renegotiated. But that does not mean that cultural characteristics stemming from profound and very long-run influences — like climate, patterns of agriculture, language, the environment, family structure, cosmological beliefs or the longevity of history — don’t persist from the past and leave their mark on the present. According to Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, who have extensively researched the relationship between cultural and genetic evolution, ‘an enormous amount of circumstantial evidence suggests that culturally transmitted traits are stable over time and in the face of changing environments.’ [335]
THE EXTENT OF WESTERNIZATION
Walk around Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, and virtually every street name is printed in English as well as Chinese. Switch on Taiwanese television and the most popular sports are basketball and baseball. Go to a movie on Saturday night and most of them, in a country internationally renowned for its film directors, are products of Hollywood. Go window-shopping in the underground mall below People’s Square in Shanghai, and many of the models used in the fashion photographs are Caucasian. Wander round the huge Ba Bai Ban department store in Pudong, and you’ll probably see many banners written in English. The top students at Shanghai ’s Fudan University want to do postgraduate studies at American universities or work for American multinationals in Shanghai. Middle-class Malaysians in their thirties are far more likely to have visited Europe or Australia than Japan and China. Go on a shopping spree in Tokyo ’s fashionable Harajuka or Shibuya districts and it won’t be long before you find yourself singing along to a Western pop song blaring out from a boutique or coffee shop.
I vividly recall a softly-spoken Malaysian lawyer telling me: ‘I am wearing your clothes, I speak your language, I watch your films, and today is whatever date it is because you say so.’ [336] Even the term ‘ Asia ’ was a European invention. Everywhere you go in the region, you feel the presence of the West. The sheer power and dynamism of Western modernity has set, and reset, the agenda for East Asia for almost two centuries. From colonialism to Hollywood, from the English language to basketball, from the solar calendar to Microsoft, from the Vietnam War to the IMF, the West has been, and is, present in the East in a way that the East has never been present in the West. Only in the form of Japan has Asian modernity, until the recent rise of China, exercised a significant impact on the West. Otherwise, the presence of the East in the West is largely confined to the mainly post-colonial migration of large numbers of Chinese, Indians, Koreans and others to North America and Europe and their consequent impact on the West in terms, first and foremost, of food, but also language, religion and culture. The constant imperative, both past and present, for Asian nations to negotiate with Western power, influence and presence — first in the era of colonialism (with every East Asian country colonized apart from Japan and Thailand) and then in the post-war era of American hegemony — constitutes a fundamental difference between East Asian and Western modernity.
[328] ‘Risk’, available at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith1999/lecture2.shtml.
[329] Mark Elvin, ‘Secular Karma: The Communist Revolution Understood in Traditional Chinese Terms’, in Mabel Lee and A.D. Syrokomia-Stefanowski, eds,
[330] Huang Ping, ‘“Beijing Consensus”, or “Chinese Experiences”, or What?’, unpublished paper, 2005, p. 8.
[331] Chris Patten,
[332] For an interesting discussion of Japan ’s specificity, see Alan Macfarlane,
[333] Howard Gardner,