Why everything you know about China is wrong.

Destroying villages and their culture also reveals deeper biases. A common insult in China is to call someone a farmer, a word equated with backwardness and ignorance, while the most valued cultural traditions are elite practices like landscape painting, calligraphy and court music.

But in recent years, Chinese scholars have begun to recognize the countryside's vast cultural heritage. A mammoth government project has cataloged roughly 9,700 examples nationwide of "intangible cultural heritage," fragile traditions like songs, dances, rituals, martial arts, cuisines and theater. About 80 percent of them are rural.

-- from Chinese culture fades with empty villages


Everything we know about China, personal experience aside, is from and about, and the trying to be of, elites.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that the rural people feel more and more excluded from the 'economic miracle' that they are slaving for

I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that the rural people feel more and more excluded from the 'economic miracle' that they are slaving for

I think it depends on how 'rural' these farmers are.  Those farmers located near urban areas have done very well out of economic development.

Ten years ago most of the landowners on the outskirts of Guangzhou rented out their plots to immigrants from other provinces; a lot of the money was invested in apartments, and these were rented out to immigrants from other provinces. Those landowners have done ok; their tenants are the ones slaving their guts out to make a living.

Destroying villages and their culture also reveals deeper biases.

The movement from village  to 'gated' apartment blocks is changing more than the tangible culture of Chinese people. It is changing the fabric of Chinese society in a way that really concerns me.

For example, many the old people who used to sit out in the street interacting with young and old are now entombed in an apartment 40 stories above street level.         

Yeah, real culture is whatever you build in daily functioning. Or anyway, one kind of culture is that. And it would seem that for a helluva long time, real functioning in China was in villages.

I originally thought the article was interesting for pointing out how what gets touted as "Chinese culture" is all that elite stuff that wasn't part of daily functioning for (presumably) the majority for (presumably) all of those 5000 years. And coincidentally, all that village stuff is going by the boards presently.

This emphasis on "elite" is still real though. It's not much of a stretch to see high culture now as being money and status and the artform of how people display both. And if that's so, then yet again, real culture is being ignored for this elite stuff. (Or not - that doesn't really make sense.)


Anyway, reading the article seemed to crystalise a weirdness about China - how there's daily life and then there's some magical "culture" - and those two are NOT the same.

I have this great idea. We should close down all the schools and send students into the countryside to learn from farmers.

 

Yeah what's so wrong about money,living in a nice apartment and having things?

It's one of my bugbears about the whole 'European imperialism' thing that they have here to be honest. As if it mattered to most chinese people that the Tang Dynasty were humiliated by capitalism because they were medieval, it wasn't some racial thing

All of the stuff 'stolen' from china' was stolen by Chinese people and sold to westerners at prices they couldn't refuse and that was because they had mofuckin emperor who read bones