A Tale of Two Cultures

The other culture was frightening, unknown. But we could make it less so by mashing up its differences and spitting them out into coherent paragraphs of our own language. Writing is a means of appropriation, and the amount of material on the rising economic power of China is an indication of both how frightening and incomprehensible this "other" is to Western society. On a bookshelf spanning from One Billion Customers to China, the Gathering Threat, I picked out three books that grapple with the Middle Kingdom from different angles. The Politics of Piracy: Intellectual Property in Contemporary China zooms in on the solution to the paradise of 50-cent DVDs. The Changing Face of China from Mao to Market plows through the country's post-1949 laborious transition to capitalism. Foreign Babes in Beijing, like its title suggests, is a sassy, personal take on Beijing in the 1990s.

Generally speaking, the three books successfully deal with the representation of Chinese culture. This representation is slightly lacking, though, because it presupposes a distance. None of the three pieces completely slips into and renders comprehensible the Chinese culture or mind-set.

I very quickly regretted picking The Politics of Piracy for my reduced reading list. The book is a dry, albeit complete, 200 pages of academic hammering. Its topic is presented with perfect essay decorum in the introductory chapter: "The question that guides this book is: What has been the impact of external pressure on China's policymaking and implementation processes?" Or more simply put, can the U.S. stop Chinese street vendors from selling pirated DVDs of Hollywood films? If I had opened the book before buying it, I would have realized that it answered none of my ideal "why?" questions: why has the pirated DVD market flourished in China? Why are most of these pirated DVDs Western films? Why is the Chinese population so thirsty for this Western entertainment?

Less academic but still heavy on the convoluted sentence construction is The Changing Face of China. It addresses the history of coexistence between the secretly chosen socialist government and the capitalist economy, complete with its millionaire Chinese businessmen rolling around in chauffered limousines. In chronological order, it details, with 10 pages of small print after every point made, the transition from a planned economy to capitalism and the reinterpretations of the socialist doctrines that accommodated this transition. At the end of the 1950s, during the establishment of communes, Mao Zedong announced that a school textbook "cannot emphasize personal material interests, and lead people into the private pursuit of 'a wife, a dacha, a car, a piano, and a TV set.'" After the privatization of most businesses and the eradication of fixed prices, Chinese politician Zhang Zemin stated in 2001, "On the basis of economic growth, efforts should be made to increase income for urban and rural residents, constantly improve their living conditions, including food, clothing, housing, transport and daily necessities. ... When some people and some regions Get Rich First, others will be brought along." To demonstrate this economic transition, author John Gittings goes heavy on the statistics and first-hand accounts in every level of society after 1949. A delightful abundance of contemporary literature and poetry excerpts punctuate an equal-sized portion on the government's failure to liberalize despite repeatedly crushed demonstrations of the student population.

John Gittings is adept at going into details and digging up the hidden side of the main Chinese disasters, including the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Square massacre. But beforehand, he does not describe the publicly documented side of these events. In the section on the Cultural Revolution, Gittings zooms in on the ideological and political skirmishes between Mao Zedong and his surrounding politicians, but he fails to describe the actual events of the Revolution, particularly its devastating effect on culture and on the Chinese population. The Changing Face of China is an incomplete historical account of modern China, better suited for scholars of the subject then newcomers.

Foreign Babes in Beijing pulls the curtain up on its author, Columbia University graduate Rachel DeWoskin, as she takes off her clothes and poorly enacts inter-cultural sex for a Chinese soap opera. It's somewhat relieving that for the rest of the humorous work describing her immersion in Bejing from 1995 to 2000, DeWoskin often plunges past superficial differences of etiquette and language to scout out their historical origin. She describes that her soap opera character, Jiexi, refuses to bow in front of ancestral tablets in the soap script. DeWoskin says, "She follows the ugly ways of her predecessor, Lord Macartney, a British diplomat who famously did not get the kowtow idea and refused to bow to the Chinese emperor, stalling the advance of Sino-British trade for five decades and bringing on the Opium wars." After a while though, the repeated pattern of show-not-tell examples, analysis, and use of descriptive verbs reminds of a Columbia writing graduate who follows her courses' curricula too closely.

In addition to descriptions of ridiculous debates at her PR office and embarrassing dinners, DeWoskin gives us four "Biographies of Model Babes" (as the chapter headings run), emphasizing the variety and psychological complexity of the individuals she meets in China. Her Chinese office-mate, Anna, engages in an illicit love affair with an Arab exchange student and cheers for China's first woman rock band, the Cobras. Kate is an American journalist in love with Chinese men. The author's long-term Chinese boyfriend Zhao Jun grapples with his violent past, and the two artists, Zhou Wen and Zhen Yi, believe China should reject the influence of the United States. It is only DeWoskin's sometimes suffocating omnipresence that prevents us from understanding more fully the individuals that she describes.

Out of the three books, Foreign Babes in Beijing is the most successful at grasping Chinese culture. It attempts to understand the individuals that compose it. Of course, this raises questions about the best way to understand a foreign culture. Does culture reside in its individual's mind-sets? Can we understand another individual? Or does culture reside in the art and the history of a country? In that case, The Changing Face of China is a more satisfying read. That said, understanding Chinese culture is necessary to avoid conflict as the economic dragon increasingly challenges the Western world's hegemony. The two latter works can be commended for their efforts, although many more need to be made before the Asian "other" becomes as comfortable a notion as the Western "self."