March 5, 2019
Dear Friends and Family,
This is Segment 18 of the series on Socialism and the last of four segments on China. Previously we covered “Under Strict Communist Rule (1948 -1976)”, “China Today – Economy”, “China Today – Governance”. This segment is entitled “China Today: Culture”. All of the excerpts for this segment are from China in Ten Words published in 2011. The ten words include (1). People, (2). Leader, (3). Reading, (4). Writing, (5). Lu Xun – a novelist, (6). Revolution, (7). Disparity, (8). Grassroots, (9). Copycat, and (10). Bamboozle. For the most part it compares China during the Cultural Revolution to China today in each category. I found the book to be most interesting and enlightening.
My Takeaways:
Most of us born before 1950 think we have seen and experienced a great of change in our lifetime. We probably would also contend that such change required us to adapt both often and significantly. Much of this comes from high-tech, travel, communication, multicultural, security, and political correctness impacts.
But in researching China’s cultural changes since 1954, the changes I have incurred pale by comparison. I grew up in a small farming community. So, I think about the 63+ rural Chinese person and the changes they endured.
Next:
Two of the many consequences we might suffer if the U.S. moves further towards Socialism would be further limitations or erosion of the individualism and the liberties we now possess. Segment 19 will analyze the trend line on college campuses in these two areas with a particular focus on free speech and due process.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
This is Segment 18 of the series on Socialism and the last of four segments on China. Previously we covered “Under Strict Communist Rule (1948 -1976)”, “China Today – Economy”, “China Today – Governance”. This segment is entitled “China Today: Culture”. All of the excerpts for this segment are from China in Ten Words published in 2011. The ten words include (1). People, (2). Leader, (3). Reading, (4). Writing, (5). Lu Xun – a novelist, (6). Revolution, (7). Disparity, (8). Grassroots, (9). Copycat, and (10). Bamboozle. For the most part it compares China during the Cultural Revolution to China today in each category. I found the book to be most interesting and enlightening.
My Takeaways:
Most of us born before 1950 think we have seen and experienced a great of change in our lifetime. We probably would also contend that such change required us to adapt both often and significantly. Much of this comes from high-tech, travel, communication, multicultural, security, and political correctness impacts.
But in researching China’s cultural changes since 1954, the changes I have incurred pale by comparison. I grew up in a small farming community. So, I think about the 63+ rural Chinese person and the changes they endured.
- As a child, Chairman Mao confiscated the author’s family farm and moved the child and family to a large commune, where undoubtedly the child was in part separated from his/her parents (as Mao didn’t believe in a family unit). The commune didn’t have enough food and many of the people around him/her died of starvation. The child may very well have suffered from malnutrition.
- Much of the author’s school years were during the Cultural Revolution, where there were no books, where older students were terrorizing the country particularly the teachers, where the country was in chaos, and younger students were strictly supervised and disciplined. The author’s s parents may have been humiliated and subjected to public ridicule – or at the very least lived in fear of it.
- After completing high school, he/she was assigned a job and irrespective of the job or their performance, everyone was paid the same wage. Further they were told who to marry. Everyone had to dress the same.
- When in their mid-20s to early 30s he/she was forced to move to the city and required to work in a steel mill, with long hours and in poor working conditions. He/she wanted to start a family but were only permitted to have one child. Everything started to change dramatically around the family. Large skyscrapers were appearing, roads were built everywhere, supermarkets were formed, trains were available on which to travel. They lived in a small house and saved every penny they could so their child could get an education – go to college.
- Then they were told their house was going to be torn down and they would have to move. They resisted and then came home one day to find their home had been bulldozed and nothing was left but a pile of rubble. They submitted to the governments wishes (they had little choice but to do so) and were required to move to the 27th floor of a newly built high-rise.
- They saved and saved and then they spent everything they had to put their child through college. The child completed college getting a degree, but then couldn’t find a job and had to put a “bedroll on his/her back” and headed south to become a migrant laborer. That is the downside (and probably the norm for the lower-income population) of the economic miracle.
Next:
Two of the many consequences we might suffer if the U.S. moves further towards Socialism would be further limitations or erosion of the individualism and the liberties we now possess. Segment 19 will analyze the trend line on college campuses in these two areas with a particular focus on free speech and due process.
Happy Learning,
Harley
SOCIALISM – SEGMENT 18
CHINA TODAY: CULTURE – EXCERPTS
NOTE: All the excerpts in this segment come from China in Ten Words by Yu Hua (2011)
PEOPLE: Turning points in history tend to be marked by some emblematic event, and the Tiananmen incident of 1989 was one such moment. College students in Beijing poured out of their campuses to gather in Tiananmen Square, demanding democratic freedoms and denouncing official corruption. The mass movement that had begun to sweep across the country quickly subsided amid the gunfire on the morning of June 4 (Note: when the Chinese Premier Li Pend declared martial law and troops with automatic rifles and tanks fired indiscriminately into the crowds of protesters. The number of civilian deaths has been estimated variously from 180 to 10,454). Since 1990, corruption has grown with the same astounding speed as the economy as a whole. In October of that year, when I visited the University, I found myself in a different world. In the short space of one summer everything had changed so much that it seemed as though nothing at all had happened that spring. Such a huge contrast demonstrated one point: that the political passions that had erupted in Tiananmen – political passions that had accumulated since the Cultural Revolution – had finally expended themselves completely in one fell swoop, to be replaced by a passion for getting rich. When everyone untied in the urge to make money, the economic surge of the 1990s was the natural outcome.
LEADER: I have a sense that in today’s China we no longer have a leader – all we have is a leadership. Many Chinese have begun to pine for the era of Mao Zedong, but I think the majority of them don’t really want to go back in time and probably just feel nostalgic. China today is a completely different story. So intense is the competition and so unbearable the pressure that, for many Chinese, survival is like war itself. In this social environment the strong prey on the weak, people enrich themselves through brute force and deception, and the meek and humble suffer while the gold and unscrupulous flourish. Changes in moral outlook and the reallocation of wealth have created a two-tiered society, and this in turn generates social tensions. So, in China today there have emerged real classes and real class conflict. Perhaps this is precisely why Mao keeps being brought back to life.
READING: I grew up in a time and a place where there were no books. My earliest memory of reading was in the summer following my graduation from elementary school, in 1973. By then we were into the seventh year of the Cultural Revolution, and the bloody street battles and savage house looting were now well behind us. Now, 30 years later, we have moved from an age without books to an age when there is an excess of them – in China today, more than 200,000 books are published each year. In the past there were no books to buy, whereas now there are so many we don’t know which ones to buy. Once Internet outlets began to sell books at a discount, traditional bookstores soon followed suit. Books are now sold in supermarkets and newspaper kiosks, and pirated books are peddled by traveling salesmen on the side of the road.
WRITING: I grew up in the Cultural Revolution. In China then, individuals had no power to choose their own career: all employment was assigned by the state. After my graduation from high school the state made me a dentist. In my five years of dentistry, I must have extracted more than ten thousand teeth. At the age of 22, I went on pulling teeth and also began to write. The tooth pulling was to make a living and the writing was to get out of having to pull teeth. I sent my short stories out to journal after journal. In November 1983, I got a telephone call from the executive editor of Beijing Literature. They planned to publish three stories I had submitted, but one of them needed revision and they wanted me to go to Beijing at once to attend to it. I must have been the first person in the history of our district to have been summoned to Beijing to make revisions to a manuscript. The local officials came to the conclusion that I must be some kind of genius, and they said they could not have me go on extracting teeth but should put me to work in the cultural center. I finally gain entry to the cultural center I had dreamed of for so long. On my first day of work I made a point of showing up two hours late, only to discover I was the first to arrive. I knew then this was just the place for me. That is my most favorite memory of socialism.
A few years ago, a Western reporter asked me why I abandoned the profitable world of dentistry for a writer’s paltry income. What he didn’t realize is that China at the time had just started to initiate reforms, and it was still the era of socialist egalitarianism – everyone eating from the same big pot. All employees in cities and towns got paid exactly the same amount no matter what kind of work they were engaged in. I was a pauper in the cultural center, but I had been a pauper as a dentist, too. The difference was that a dentist was a pauper mired in drudgery, whereas now I was a pauper who enjoyed freedom and fulfillment.
LU XUN: The Cultural Revolution was an era without literature, and it was only in our Chinese textbooks that one could catch a faint whiff of literary art. But the assigned texts were confined to works of just two authors: Lu Xun’s stories and essays and Mao Zedong’s poetry. In my first year of primary school I believed innocently that there was only one prose author in the world, Lu Xun, and only one poet, Mao Zedong.
REVOLUTION: Within China’s success story one can see both revolutionary movements reminiscent of the Great Leap Forward and revolutionary violence of the Cultural Revolution.
Steel: During the Great Leap Forward in 1958, under the slogan “Surpass the UK, catch up to the USA,” the Chinese people were mobilized to smelt steel. Backyard furnaces filled courtyards in Chinese cities and towns and dotted the Chinese countryside. Peasants abandoned agriculture for ore extraction and steel production. In that era people were anxious not to be labeled “passive resisters of the Great Leap Forward”; participation in the steel drive was the only route to glory. Let me start with some statistics showing the rapid growth of steel output in China. In 1978, the 1st year of the reforms, it was just 30 million tons. Two years later it reached 37.12 million tons, the 5th largest steel output in the world. By 1996 it jumped to #1 in the world, where it has stayed ever since. In 2008 it exceeded 500 million tons – 32% of the worlds total output, more than that of the next seven nations in the world combined.
Education: During the Cultural Revolution, we primary school pupils were afraid of our teachers. It we talked or distracted others in class or if we got into a fight, they would often force to write self-criticisms. Our teachers would then paste them up on the classroom walls, making us lose a lot of face. We wouldn’t have to write any more self-criticisms once we got into middle school, for there it was not the pupils who were afraid of the teachers but the other way around. Once we got into middle school, we thought, misbehavior had a chance of gaining legitimacy as revolutionary action.
In 1999 the Ministry of Education decided to greatly expand enrollments in higher education, and China’s educational great leap forward began. In 2006 institutions of higher education recruited 5.4 million new students, five times as many as in 1998; the total number of those enrolled was 25 million. The great leap forward type of enrollment growth has created immense difficulties in the job market; every year was are adding more than 1 million college graduates who cannot find work. Many low-income parents are prepared to bankrupt themselves and take on enormous debt to put their children through college; but after graduation those children join the army of unemployed, and their parents can only sink deeper into financial hardship. Given this harsh reality, some children are forced to abandon their dreams: as soon as they graduate from high school, they put a bedroll on their backs and become migrant laborers instead. In 2009, after 32 years of increases there was actually a drop in the numbers of high school students taking university entrance examinations.
Relocation: As China’s economy has raced forward, violence reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution has taken place with official backing. Consider how urbanization has been pursued with huge swathes of old houses razed in no time at all and replaced in short order by high-rise buildings. To suppress popular discontent and resistance, some local governments send in large numbers of police to haul away any residents who refuse to budge. Then a dozen or more giant bulldozers will advance in formation, knocking down a block full of old houses in no time at all. When the residents are released, they find only rubble where their homes once stood. Vagrants now, they have no option but to bow to reality and accept the housing offered. Our economic miracle relies to a significant extent on the absolute authority of local governments.
DISPARITY: Thirty years ago, boys and girls in high school did not talk to one another. They would have loved to, of course, but did not dare. Even if they had a crush on a member of the opposite sex, the most they could do would be to cast furtive glances at them. These days pregnancies among high school girls have become so common they are no longer controversial, but it is still startling to find that some teenage girls actually show up for abortions in their school uniforms. What has made us move from one extreme to the other? China’s high-speed growth seems to have changed everything in the blink of an eye, rather like a long jump that let us leap from an era of material shortages into an era of extravagance and waste, from an era when instincts are repressed into an era of impulsive self-indulgence. A quick jump seems to be all it took to cross a span of thirty years. Just look at China today: the urban high-rises shooting up like forests under a gray and murky sky; the thick mesh of expressways, far out numbering our rivers; the dazzling array of merchandise in shopping centers and supermarkets; the endless lines of traffic and pedestrians in the streets; the nightclubs and massage parlors, beauty salons and foot-washing joints, lining every block; the luxury restaurants three or four floors high.
China today is a land of huge disparities. In the past thirty years, China has developed at a remarkable pace, maintaining an average annual growth rate of 9% and in 2009 becoming the second-largest economy in the world and we are on the verge of becoming the second-richest, trailing only the United States. But behind these dazzling statistics is another unsettling one; in terms of per capita income China is still languishing at a low rank, one hundredth in the world. These two economic indicators, which should be similar or in balance, are miles apart in China today, a society where the state is rich, but the people are poor.
GRASSROOTS: With all the changes since 1978, there’s no end to such stories. China’s economic miracle of the past thirty years, it’s fair to say, is an agglomeration of countless individual miracles created at the grassroots level. China’s grassroots dare to think and dare to act; in the tide of economic development they will adopt any method that suits their purposes and they are bold enough to try things that are illegal or even criminal. At the same time China’s legal system has developed only slowly, leaving plenty of loopholes for the grassroots to exploit and putting all kinds of profits within their reach. Add to that their dauntless courage, which comes from their having nothing to lose, since they began with nothing at all.
COPYCAT: In the past few years, with the increasing popularity of copycat cellphones that offer multiple functions as a low price, the word “copycat” has given the word “imitation” a new meaning, allowing room for it to acquire additional shades of meaning: counterfeiting, infringement, deviations from the standard, mischief, and caricature. Once copycat cell phones had taken China by storm, copycat digital cameras, copycat MP3 players, copycat game consoles, and other such pirated and knockoff products came pouring forth. Copycat brands have rapidly expanded to include instant noodles, sodas, milk, medications, laundry detergent, and sport shoes, and so the word “copycat” has penetrated deep into every aspect of Chinese people’s lives. Copycat pop songs and copycat TV programs are even more varied, combining imitation with parody. Copycat TV programs, released as videos on the Internet, tend to be send-ups of official TV programs.
As a product of China’s uneven development, the copycat phenomenon has as many negative implications as it has positive aspects. The moral bankruptcy and confusion of right and wrong in China today, for example, find vivid expression in copycatting. As the copycat concept has gained acceptance, plagiarism, piracy, burlesque, parody, slander, and other actions originally seen as vulgar or illegal have been given a reason to exist; and in social psychology and public opinion they have gradually acquired respectability. No wonder that “copycat” has become one of the words most commonly used in China today.
BAMBOOZLE: In China today, “bamboozle” is a new star in the lexical firmament, fully the equal of “copycat” in its charlatan status. The word “bamboozle” has rapidly gained acceptance in China. Just as “copycat” gives imitation and piracy a new range of connotations, “bamboozle” throws a cloak of respectability over deception and manufactured rumor.
The media in China today are full of fake stories because there are seldom any legal repercussions. To circulate a fake story is a kind of fraud, but in China people just shrug it off as bamboozle. Many imply deception and hype, but they also contain a certain element of entertainment. That being so, nobody is inclined to regard it as a serious issue. But now we clever Chinese have found a place for leverage in common and everyday bamboozling. Bamboozling is everywhere, and so leverage is everywhere, too. If you’re going to bamboozle at all, then clearly the bigger the better.
The rapid rise in popularity of the word “bamboozle,” like that of “copycat,” demonstrates to me a breakdown of social morality and a confusion in the value system in China today: it is an after effect of our uneven development these past thirty years. If anything, bamboozling is even more widespread in social terms than the copycat phenomenon, and when bamboozling gains such wide acceptance, it goes to show that we live in a frivolous society one that doesn’t set much store by matters of principle. My concern is that when bamboozling unabashedly becomes a way of life, then everyone from the individual to the population at large can become its victim.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
CHINA TODAY: CULTURE – EXCERPTS
NOTE: All the excerpts in this segment come from China in Ten Words by Yu Hua (2011)
PEOPLE: Turning points in history tend to be marked by some emblematic event, and the Tiananmen incident of 1989 was one such moment. College students in Beijing poured out of their campuses to gather in Tiananmen Square, demanding democratic freedoms and denouncing official corruption. The mass movement that had begun to sweep across the country quickly subsided amid the gunfire on the morning of June 4 (Note: when the Chinese Premier Li Pend declared martial law and troops with automatic rifles and tanks fired indiscriminately into the crowds of protesters. The number of civilian deaths has been estimated variously from 180 to 10,454). Since 1990, corruption has grown with the same astounding speed as the economy as a whole. In October of that year, when I visited the University, I found myself in a different world. In the short space of one summer everything had changed so much that it seemed as though nothing at all had happened that spring. Such a huge contrast demonstrated one point: that the political passions that had erupted in Tiananmen – political passions that had accumulated since the Cultural Revolution – had finally expended themselves completely in one fell swoop, to be replaced by a passion for getting rich. When everyone untied in the urge to make money, the economic surge of the 1990s was the natural outcome.
LEADER: I have a sense that in today’s China we no longer have a leader – all we have is a leadership. Many Chinese have begun to pine for the era of Mao Zedong, but I think the majority of them don’t really want to go back in time and probably just feel nostalgic. China today is a completely different story. So intense is the competition and so unbearable the pressure that, for many Chinese, survival is like war itself. In this social environment the strong prey on the weak, people enrich themselves through brute force and deception, and the meek and humble suffer while the gold and unscrupulous flourish. Changes in moral outlook and the reallocation of wealth have created a two-tiered society, and this in turn generates social tensions. So, in China today there have emerged real classes and real class conflict. Perhaps this is precisely why Mao keeps being brought back to life.
READING: I grew up in a time and a place where there were no books. My earliest memory of reading was in the summer following my graduation from elementary school, in 1973. By then we were into the seventh year of the Cultural Revolution, and the bloody street battles and savage house looting were now well behind us. Now, 30 years later, we have moved from an age without books to an age when there is an excess of them – in China today, more than 200,000 books are published each year. In the past there were no books to buy, whereas now there are so many we don’t know which ones to buy. Once Internet outlets began to sell books at a discount, traditional bookstores soon followed suit. Books are now sold in supermarkets and newspaper kiosks, and pirated books are peddled by traveling salesmen on the side of the road.
WRITING: I grew up in the Cultural Revolution. In China then, individuals had no power to choose their own career: all employment was assigned by the state. After my graduation from high school the state made me a dentist. In my five years of dentistry, I must have extracted more than ten thousand teeth. At the age of 22, I went on pulling teeth and also began to write. The tooth pulling was to make a living and the writing was to get out of having to pull teeth. I sent my short stories out to journal after journal. In November 1983, I got a telephone call from the executive editor of Beijing Literature. They planned to publish three stories I had submitted, but one of them needed revision and they wanted me to go to Beijing at once to attend to it. I must have been the first person in the history of our district to have been summoned to Beijing to make revisions to a manuscript. The local officials came to the conclusion that I must be some kind of genius, and they said they could not have me go on extracting teeth but should put me to work in the cultural center. I finally gain entry to the cultural center I had dreamed of for so long. On my first day of work I made a point of showing up two hours late, only to discover I was the first to arrive. I knew then this was just the place for me. That is my most favorite memory of socialism.
A few years ago, a Western reporter asked me why I abandoned the profitable world of dentistry for a writer’s paltry income. What he didn’t realize is that China at the time had just started to initiate reforms, and it was still the era of socialist egalitarianism – everyone eating from the same big pot. All employees in cities and towns got paid exactly the same amount no matter what kind of work they were engaged in. I was a pauper in the cultural center, but I had been a pauper as a dentist, too. The difference was that a dentist was a pauper mired in drudgery, whereas now I was a pauper who enjoyed freedom and fulfillment.
LU XUN: The Cultural Revolution was an era without literature, and it was only in our Chinese textbooks that one could catch a faint whiff of literary art. But the assigned texts were confined to works of just two authors: Lu Xun’s stories and essays and Mao Zedong’s poetry. In my first year of primary school I believed innocently that there was only one prose author in the world, Lu Xun, and only one poet, Mao Zedong.
REVOLUTION: Within China’s success story one can see both revolutionary movements reminiscent of the Great Leap Forward and revolutionary violence of the Cultural Revolution.
Steel: During the Great Leap Forward in 1958, under the slogan “Surpass the UK, catch up to the USA,” the Chinese people were mobilized to smelt steel. Backyard furnaces filled courtyards in Chinese cities and towns and dotted the Chinese countryside. Peasants abandoned agriculture for ore extraction and steel production. In that era people were anxious not to be labeled “passive resisters of the Great Leap Forward”; participation in the steel drive was the only route to glory. Let me start with some statistics showing the rapid growth of steel output in China. In 1978, the 1st year of the reforms, it was just 30 million tons. Two years later it reached 37.12 million tons, the 5th largest steel output in the world. By 1996 it jumped to #1 in the world, where it has stayed ever since. In 2008 it exceeded 500 million tons – 32% of the worlds total output, more than that of the next seven nations in the world combined.
Education: During the Cultural Revolution, we primary school pupils were afraid of our teachers. It we talked or distracted others in class or if we got into a fight, they would often force to write self-criticisms. Our teachers would then paste them up on the classroom walls, making us lose a lot of face. We wouldn’t have to write any more self-criticisms once we got into middle school, for there it was not the pupils who were afraid of the teachers but the other way around. Once we got into middle school, we thought, misbehavior had a chance of gaining legitimacy as revolutionary action.
In 1999 the Ministry of Education decided to greatly expand enrollments in higher education, and China’s educational great leap forward began. In 2006 institutions of higher education recruited 5.4 million new students, five times as many as in 1998; the total number of those enrolled was 25 million. The great leap forward type of enrollment growth has created immense difficulties in the job market; every year was are adding more than 1 million college graduates who cannot find work. Many low-income parents are prepared to bankrupt themselves and take on enormous debt to put their children through college; but after graduation those children join the army of unemployed, and their parents can only sink deeper into financial hardship. Given this harsh reality, some children are forced to abandon their dreams: as soon as they graduate from high school, they put a bedroll on their backs and become migrant laborers instead. In 2009, after 32 years of increases there was actually a drop in the numbers of high school students taking university entrance examinations.
Relocation: As China’s economy has raced forward, violence reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution has taken place with official backing. Consider how urbanization has been pursued with huge swathes of old houses razed in no time at all and replaced in short order by high-rise buildings. To suppress popular discontent and resistance, some local governments send in large numbers of police to haul away any residents who refuse to budge. Then a dozen or more giant bulldozers will advance in formation, knocking down a block full of old houses in no time at all. When the residents are released, they find only rubble where their homes once stood. Vagrants now, they have no option but to bow to reality and accept the housing offered. Our economic miracle relies to a significant extent on the absolute authority of local governments.
DISPARITY: Thirty years ago, boys and girls in high school did not talk to one another. They would have loved to, of course, but did not dare. Even if they had a crush on a member of the opposite sex, the most they could do would be to cast furtive glances at them. These days pregnancies among high school girls have become so common they are no longer controversial, but it is still startling to find that some teenage girls actually show up for abortions in their school uniforms. What has made us move from one extreme to the other? China’s high-speed growth seems to have changed everything in the blink of an eye, rather like a long jump that let us leap from an era of material shortages into an era of extravagance and waste, from an era when instincts are repressed into an era of impulsive self-indulgence. A quick jump seems to be all it took to cross a span of thirty years. Just look at China today: the urban high-rises shooting up like forests under a gray and murky sky; the thick mesh of expressways, far out numbering our rivers; the dazzling array of merchandise in shopping centers and supermarkets; the endless lines of traffic and pedestrians in the streets; the nightclubs and massage parlors, beauty salons and foot-washing joints, lining every block; the luxury restaurants three or four floors high.
China today is a land of huge disparities. In the past thirty years, China has developed at a remarkable pace, maintaining an average annual growth rate of 9% and in 2009 becoming the second-largest economy in the world and we are on the verge of becoming the second-richest, trailing only the United States. But behind these dazzling statistics is another unsettling one; in terms of per capita income China is still languishing at a low rank, one hundredth in the world. These two economic indicators, which should be similar or in balance, are miles apart in China today, a society where the state is rich, but the people are poor.
GRASSROOTS: With all the changes since 1978, there’s no end to such stories. China’s economic miracle of the past thirty years, it’s fair to say, is an agglomeration of countless individual miracles created at the grassroots level. China’s grassroots dare to think and dare to act; in the tide of economic development they will adopt any method that suits their purposes and they are bold enough to try things that are illegal or even criminal. At the same time China’s legal system has developed only slowly, leaving plenty of loopholes for the grassroots to exploit and putting all kinds of profits within their reach. Add to that their dauntless courage, which comes from their having nothing to lose, since they began with nothing at all.
COPYCAT: In the past few years, with the increasing popularity of copycat cellphones that offer multiple functions as a low price, the word “copycat” has given the word “imitation” a new meaning, allowing room for it to acquire additional shades of meaning: counterfeiting, infringement, deviations from the standard, mischief, and caricature. Once copycat cell phones had taken China by storm, copycat digital cameras, copycat MP3 players, copycat game consoles, and other such pirated and knockoff products came pouring forth. Copycat brands have rapidly expanded to include instant noodles, sodas, milk, medications, laundry detergent, and sport shoes, and so the word “copycat” has penetrated deep into every aspect of Chinese people’s lives. Copycat pop songs and copycat TV programs are even more varied, combining imitation with parody. Copycat TV programs, released as videos on the Internet, tend to be send-ups of official TV programs.
As a product of China’s uneven development, the copycat phenomenon has as many negative implications as it has positive aspects. The moral bankruptcy and confusion of right and wrong in China today, for example, find vivid expression in copycatting. As the copycat concept has gained acceptance, plagiarism, piracy, burlesque, parody, slander, and other actions originally seen as vulgar or illegal have been given a reason to exist; and in social psychology and public opinion they have gradually acquired respectability. No wonder that “copycat” has become one of the words most commonly used in China today.
BAMBOOZLE: In China today, “bamboozle” is a new star in the lexical firmament, fully the equal of “copycat” in its charlatan status. The word “bamboozle” has rapidly gained acceptance in China. Just as “copycat” gives imitation and piracy a new range of connotations, “bamboozle” throws a cloak of respectability over deception and manufactured rumor.
The media in China today are full of fake stories because there are seldom any legal repercussions. To circulate a fake story is a kind of fraud, but in China people just shrug it off as bamboozle. Many imply deception and hype, but they also contain a certain element of entertainment. That being so, nobody is inclined to regard it as a serious issue. But now we clever Chinese have found a place for leverage in common and everyday bamboozling. Bamboozling is everywhere, and so leverage is everywhere, too. If you’re going to bamboozle at all, then clearly the bigger the better.
The rapid rise in popularity of the word “bamboozle,” like that of “copycat,” demonstrates to me a breakdown of social morality and a confusion in the value system in China today: it is an after effect of our uneven development these past thirty years. If anything, bamboozling is even more widespread in social terms than the copycat phenomenon, and when bamboozling gains such wide acceptance, it goes to show that we live in a frivolous society one that doesn’t set much store by matters of principle. My concern is that when bamboozling unabashedly becomes a way of life, then everyone from the individual to the population at large can become its victim.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 18_soc_china_culture.pdf |