In the end, I think what really bothered me the most in Beijing and its surrounding area was the crushing weight of 3000 years of tradition. Coming from such a young country as the U.S., it’s a stifling feeling being around a culture where everything important about life has been decided long ago.
Chinese people are born with the weight of over 100 generations of ancestors bearing down on them, telling them how to think about authority, marriage, work, play, love and war. America, on the other hand, was born out of the restless spirit of a people refusing to obey their colonial “parents.” It’s hard to overemphasize what a difference this makes between our two cultures.
The result in China is a culture of sameness. When I toured the various Ming Dynasty tombs, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven and other historical sites in and around Beijing, at first it was fascinating to hear the lore of what everything represented.
Oh, I see, cool: Red is a color everyone can use, and its stands for happiness. Green stands for prosperity. Yellow is a color only the Imperial family can use.
See these two lions guarding the gate? Which is the male and which is the female? Oh, there it is: the male lion has a large ball (representing power) under his paw; the female has a lion cub under hers. See these three bridges to the temple sanctuary? Middle bridge is for emperor, left bridge is for common folks.
All perfectly interesting. Until you realize EVERY temple and traditional building has the EXACT same color scheme, the EXACT same lions, the EXACT same bridges. You even begin seeing exact motifs represented in art. See the pretty jade horses representing good luck? Now see the same exact set of horses in a hundred different sizes, carved out of a hundred different colors of jade, in a hundred different flea markets. Mind you, I’m not referring to similar designs, but IDENTICAL designs.
It’s as if the entire country is based on a set of immutable templates.
Compare this to old churches in Europe. Even though you’ll see the flow of certain architectural traditions, like Romanesque, Rococo, Gothic, etc., within those traditions you’ll see a wild proliferations of variations on the traditional themes.
Not in Beijing. Red, green, yellow. Three bridges. Two lions.
In stark contrast, the skyline of modern Beijing is a forest of fascinating and innovative new high-rises and skyscrapers. Daring shapes, colors and designs abound. The architects? German. Dutch. Italian. Not a single major construction project in the city has a Chinese architect. What a shock. I guess it’s a sign of progress that the Chinese can at least recognize their limitations and are willing to take the step of hiring foreigners to be innovative, since innovation has been bred out of their own national chromosomes.
Harsh? Maybe. But when you watch the Olympics on TV next year and marvel at the wild-looking Birds Nest Stadium and other cool buildings in the Olympic Village, just remember – ALL of them were designed by non-Chinese people who are capable of thinking out of the box.
This extends to all personal matters as well. When I spoke to Chinese people and they learned I wasn’t married, they were honestly shocked. Shocked, and seemingly almost unable to imagine such a state for a 47-year old man.
It reminded me of how rich and valuable my heritage as an American is. As an ornery citizen of the U.S., I actually get to decide for MYSELF what colors I’d like to put on my house. Or how to build a family, or IF to build a family. There are a thousand choices I can make a day that I can easily take for granted. Well, shame on me – I’ll try not to take them for granted any more.
Will it stay this way forever in China? Maybe not. It’s very possible that, with the aggressiveness of their outreach to the West to build their economy that an influx of new ideas could flood into the country and be embraced by the younger generations. I certainly hope so.
Remember, just because something is old, doesn’t make it good. Just because we’ve done something a certain way forever doesn’t mean we’re doing it the right way. You want me to list some of the institutions with a long and respectable history which are an abomination to modern man? Don’t get me started. That rant is for another piece.
I absolutely agree with you comment on tradition. It strikes me that tradition, like religion, was basically created to explain and maintain a specific social order and that adherence to it keeps the peace but it also breeds its own kind of inability to allow any challenge or change to it. While our society has long valued individualism and initiative, I feel that these traits are being attacked by the very people who espouse to promote them bec/ they don’t fall within their own very limited parameters of what is allowed under American “tradition”. It also strikes me that the very strict structures that you descirbe in China are probably why the rigid social order imposed by the communists worked so well. Other than the rhetoric it wasn’t really more than another centrally imposed system that had better means to enforce its power. I really wonder how well China will embrace or adapt to real creative change.
Your blog IS truly enlightening and extremely entertaining. Carry on with the deep thinking.