This is a redefinition of the state’s vision from a Marxist utopia to a Confucian, family-centric nation, defined by a quiet life of respecting the elderly and saving for the future....You can see all the "China Dream" posters here, and there are plenty of examples at the first link, with translated slogans, stuff like: "Ah China/My dream/A truly fragrant dream," "Young people are strong; China is strong," "The China Dream is ahead/What do you see?/I see my dream!," and "Honesty and consideration handed down generation by generation; poems and books (or alternately The Book of Poems and The Book of History) last forever."
Almost all the art used in the posters, with its depictions of traditional dress and poses, used to be derided by the Party as belonging to China’s backward, pre-Communist past; now, these aesthetic traditions are a bulwark used to legitimize the Party as a guardian and creator of the country’s hopes and aspirations.
Mostly, there's no mention of Communism, but one — which you can see here — says "Communists on the road to fulfilling the dream," and it has a poem that's translated as:
Feet shackled, hands cuffed
sturdy grass withstands strong winds
the Communist Party members on the road
the mountains can shake, their will is unshakeable
hot blood and spring flowers will write today's history.
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Break the imperialists. Break the communists. Break the socialists. Then find a reasonable compromise which respects individual dignity and human life, and constrains progressive corruption.
Honesty and consideration handed down generation by generation
Oy veh, talk about yer revisionist history! I guess that there are fewer & fewer Chinese who lived through the time when Mao & the Party tried their best to destroy traditional Chinese culture & its virtues. What happens in the mind of the inquiring young person who seeks to understand even the history of the Party, not to mention the history of post-war China, and finds that the very same Party that now preaches traditional Confucian virtues once exterminated millions of Chinese who tried desperately to hold onto those virtues as their world tumbled into genocide around them?
No doubt anyone who knows the depths of the Party's deception either lives in silent desperation or tries his best to depart for other climes.
It' too late. China has a pending demographic disaster coming.
My Chinese medical student did her education here so she could care for her parents when they were too old to work.
Incidentally, she married a Caucasian, a real change from traditional Chinese practice that is becoming much more common. Another couple, friends of my daughter, are a Chinese girl and her husband, a white American who met her in Shanghai while teaching English. They came back to the US for him to do an MBA.
Chinese women, at least the educated ones, have had it with the status of women in China and sex selection abortions, etc. The population will crash by the end of this century. Before that happens, they will have worse problems than Japan with an aged population and not enough workers.
@Michael K,
My Chinese medical student did her education here....
If every Chinese person disappeared overnight from NIH, they'd have to shut it down. Many stay here for freedom to have a family as large as they choose, and for freedom of religion (including the freedom to hold square dances at the church, with fiddles, calls, cowboy hats & boots, and ladies in petticoats).
The upside for me & the Mrs: Rockville, MD now has some incredibly funky Chinese restaurants.
This is a redefinition of the state’s vision from a Marxist utopia to a Confucian, family-centric nation, defined by a quiet life of respecting the elderly and saving for the future....
...and binding girls' feet.
Meh. Modern American politicians -- who would, almost to a man, be run out of town on a rail in 1787 -- routinely pay gaudy lip service to the founding of the Republic.
The Chinese are trying to return to their traditional values because they have lived through the hell which results when the left/liberals/Marxists define the culture (including what passes for morality.
As I recall from a few years ago, it was Burke who described the state of France after the French revolution as similar to a country which had been defeated by a hostile foreign power which destroyed their culture, their arts, and their institutions. Since then the leftists
(donning the mantle of enlightenment)have moved from one country to another destroying their culture and institutions while murdering everyone who have stood in their way.
The Chinese are victims of this destruction just like the Russians before them. Both countries are trying to dig out of the rubble by reestablishing their connection with the remnants of their own culture. Whether either country can survive the demographic and cultural collapse is still an open question. Both of them will probably suffer immensely before they have purged the demons of the left. Our country is in the early stages of the same descent into leftist hell.
The Party has swapped out vital myths - from the Marxist(Maoist-primitivist strain) set to a more traditionally fascist Old Tyme Cathay set - and this is just an artistic recognition of that rather trite observation. Sorelian totalitarian governance and ideology is rather like a Disneyland-style theme park - just shut a section, put up temporary walls while you tear out the old rides and theme-dressing, and slap in a fresh new set of theme-dressing and slightly re-engineered rides. Looks like a completely different park! Except the infrastructure underlying it hasn't changed at all.
So they are moving from an authoritarian oligarchy to... an authoritarian oligarchy.
Wake me when individual rights and dignity are respected.
You can take the Communist out of China, but you can't take China out of a Communist.
Old China is reasserting itself. But human rights as we understand them was never part of Old China. Old China was an oligarchy of credentials and corruption. Society was collectivist, including criminal punishment. It will not be a utopia, but it will reflect Chinese ideals rather than foreign ideals that never really took.
" Our country is in the early stages of the same descent into leftist hell."
Yes, and like Cassandra, some of us are cursed with the knowledge and the failure to convince our peers.
A Radio Taiwan cooking show started by saying that Chinese and Western ideas of edibility differ a great deal.
It's probably the same in politics.
A truly fragrant dream
Until they control their pollution, it will remain a dream.
The new propaganda is nationalist; the old was (at least nominally) internationalist communism.
Which is more dangerous? I'd guess the old propaganda was more dangerous within China but the new may be more dangerous for the rest of the world.
@Peter,
I'd guess the old propaganda was more dangerous within China but the new may be more dangerous for the rest of the world.
I'm not sure. The Chinese like to make noise about how they're gonna push X or Y around, but, historically speaking, unless it's Tibet or Outer Mongolia, they really suck at actually doing it. They just seem to be so busy with internal fractures that projection of imperialistic force just seems to be out of the question. Maybe the future holds something different, but I doubt it. Very few countries seem to be as culturally determined as China.
During WWII ("the Great Patriotic War"), Stalin downplayed Communist slogans and played up Russian nationalist ones, and it worked. Then the USSR took over half of the Nazi Empire in the name of Communism.
As China modernizes, I wonder whether old Chinese traditions or Communist ideology will prove more effective in keeping the people quiescent. Or will freedom rear its scary head?
History lesson for leftists: Walter Lippmann felt that the Chiang regime on Taiwan was fascist. He recommended that America withdraw its military support and economic aid to Taiwan. Lippmann was the official liberal pundit of that era--even more revered and honored than Krugman today......Jump cut to sixty years later: Taiwan is a democracy, the first that Chinese people have had in their four thousand year history. And not coincidentally their standard of living is higher than most Western European countries. China, after a number of purges and famines, seems poised for another catastrophe......Can any leftist find the appropriate moral in this history lesson?
History lesson for leftists: Walter Lippmann felt that the Chiang regime on Taiwan was fascist.
History lesson for *you*, the Kuomintang *was* fascist, insofar as it was a militarized party of the left which emphasized nationalism & corporatist (no, that doesn't mean what your hippy OWS cousin thinks it does) economics over internationalism and straight-up Marxist cant. They had a very close relationship with the Soviets in the Twenties, to the point that Chiang's army was largely trained by Soviet advisors. This allowed the CP to riddle the Kuomintang with sleeper agents and compromised, blackmailable officers who might as well have been sleeper agents. The Long March was triggered by the collapse of the Kuomintang/Soviet entente.
I don't know that Lippmann and his peers were to blame for "losing China", btw. The Kuomintang was perfectly capable of doing that all on their own. And yes, Taiwan eventually went democratic the same way that Spain and Portugal and South Korea did. Fascists, kept from going on expansive, futile foreign adventures, can eventually turn free. But then, so did Communist Eastern Europe.
My point is that Taiwan under Chiang did better, far better, than mainland China did under Mao. I think the Dominican Republic under Trujillo eventually did better than Cuba did under Castro. Batista would have died or been deposed, and Cuba would have moved on......The historical record indicates that a right wing government is a better fate than a Communist one. That was not the belief of Lippmann and his successors.
China's 'pivot' toward old traditions from steel-clad Communist slogans when facing uncertainty is a mirror of good old Uncle Joe Stalin when his German buddies betrayed and attacked him. Suddenly he rediscovered the Motherland and religion, after spending a decade murderously purging those concepts from public approval.
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