When China Rules the World (20 page)

Japan represents perhaps the most extreme form of this embrace of the future, or hyper-modernity.
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Unlike Europe or the United States, you will find few old bangers on the roads, there being little demand for used cars - or anything secondhand for that matter. Instead there is a rapacious appetite for the new. Until the post-bubble crisis, Japanese car-makers thought nothing of introducing several model changes a year, rather than the Western norm of one, while the electronics firms that Japan is famous for are constantly changing their product lines. Where the Western fashion industry is happy to turn out two collections a year, one in the autumn and one in the spring, Japanese designers seem to believe in perpetual sartorial motion as one collection follows another at bewildering speed several times a year. Japanese youth have become the cognoscenti of fad and fashion, be it a new electronic game, a new look, the latest mobile phone or another Pokemon style craze. Take your chair in a Japanese hair salon and, be you man or woman, you will immediately be handed a very thick catalogue offering a seemingly infinite range of possible hairstyles and colours from which to choose. Japan is the virtuoso of consumer technology. Constant improvement and innovation are a national pastime: the scooter whose lights automatically switch on as it gets dark, the business card-holder whose lid spontaneously flips open, the toilet seat with its dazzling array of dials and controls, the virtual theme park with rides beyond one’s imagination, and the dance machine which renders the need for a partner redundant.

In his book
The Consequences of Modernity
, Anthony Giddens seeks to draw a distinction between the characteristics of modernity and pre-modernity. Speaking of pre-modern society, he argues:

The orientation to the past which is characteristic of tradition does not differ from the outlook of modernity only in being backward-looking rather than forward-looking . . . Rather, neither ‘the past’ nor ‘the future’ is a discrete phenomenon, separated from the ‘continuous present’, as in the case of the modern outlook.
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In East Asian modernity, however, the present and the past are not ‘discrete’, in terms of perceptions, in the way Giddens suggests, nor is the future: on the contrary, the present is layered with
both
the past and the future. In other words, the past and the future are combined in East Asian modernity in a way that is quite distinct from Western modernity. It is, at one and the same time, both very young and very old. This paradox is at its most extreme in China, the oldest continuous civilization in the world and yet now, in cities like Shanghai and Shentzen, also one of the youngest. There is a sense of enormous ambition, a world without limits, symbolized by Pudong, one of the most futuristic cityscapes, with its extraordinary array of breathtaking high-rise buildings.
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According to Gao Rui-qian, professor of philosophy at East China National University in Shanghai, ‘China is like the adolescent who is very keen to become an adult. He can see the goal and wants to reach it as soon as possible. He is always behaving as if he is rather older than he actually is and is constantly forgetting the reality of his situation.’
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East Asian modernity, then, is a unique combination, in terms of social and economic realities, attitudes and consciousness, of the present, the past and the future. These countries might be described as ‘time-compression societies’, where the past and the future are squeezed and condensed into the present. Two hundred years of experience and history elsewhere are seemingly contained within the same place and the same moment of time. Everything is rushed. There is no time to reflect. Generational differences are a gaping chasm, society like a living geological formation.

Giddens also argues that with modernity, ‘Kinship relations, for the majority of the population, remain important, especially within the nuclear family, but they are no longer the carriers of intensively organized social ties across time-space.’
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That may be true of the West but it is certainly not the case in mainland China, or Taiwan, or the Chinese diaspora: in each instance ‘kinship relations’, especially in the form of the extended family, are frequently ‘the carriers of intensively organized social ties across time-space’. The Chinese diaspora, for example, has relied on the extended family as the means by which to organize its globally dispersed business operations, whether large or small. Taiwan, the Chinese diaspora and the more advanced parts of China are, moreover, unambiguously part of the modern world.
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The fact is that kinship has always been far more important in Chinese than Western societies, whatever their level of development. Or take belief-systems. In his second BBC Reith Lecture in 1999, Giddens argued:

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.
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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.
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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. ’
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.’
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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.

This brings us to two critical questions. Firstly, to what extent have East Asian societies been influenced and shaped by Western modernity? Secondly, in the process of modernization are they becoming more Western, or less Western, or even, paradoxically, both at the same time? These questions do not lend themselves to simple answers. They vary from one society to another and from one sphere to another in any given society. History, as one would expect, affects the answers a great deal - in particular, whether or not a country was colonized, and if so when and for how long. At the one extreme lie the Philippines - first colonized by the Spanish in 1542, then by the United States in 1899, achieving independence only in 1946 - and Hong Kong, seized by the British after the First Opium War in 1842 and only returned to China in 1997; at the other lies Japan, which managed to escape colonization altogether.

In order to explore the extent of Western influence, and whether or not it is increasing, let us consider four very different examples - language, the body, food and politics.