美国侨报：世界应无恙，当惊中国殊——百度新闻搜索 via kwout

I was looking at this Baidu news page, scanning through some of the headlines. You notice that most of them are about how impressed the world is with the Olympics, with some obligatory fellow-feeling from the overseas Chinese newspapers. You might as well go ahead and call this the “Beijing Consensus”—though that term has been used elsewhere—to wit, the consensus that China is on the way up and has found its place in the world, espouses values of mutual non-interference, peaceful and harmonious dialogue to solve conflicts, etc. It’s enough to make you sick.

One of the headlines at the bottom talks about China’s “soft power”—the term coined by the Harvard scholar Joseph Nye—about non-military forms of power and influence that countries, e.g the American dream, Hollywood, blue jeans, rap music, etc.

I’ll be honest here—I didn’t go and read the articles. I really just can’t stand to anymore, which is unfortunate because there are times when I think I could have something to offer to the English speaking world with regards to what I see and what I think about China—but for the most part, everything that is written in China I tend to find repulsive.

I was re-reading Ernest Becker’s Escape from Evil today and there is a part about words–he argues that without words, actions stop dead. The project of individual immortality, the causa sui project of the individual—finds a cultural continuation in the hero-systems of the culture and society at large. The hero system in China—well there are different types of heroes and different types of meaning-systems that sustain them, but one of the most obvious ones, especially now, is athletics. Li Ning commercials, among others, are quick to use and abuse the word “hero” (英雄) to hawk their wares. Liu Xiang is a hero. Yang Wei is a hero. Yao Ming is a hero. Those who bring back the gold and write themselves into history books are not valuable as individuals, but because the entire Chinese race can vicariously share in their immortality.

In fact, you don’t even need the “vicariously” modifier, because in fact none of us is guaranteed immortality, biologically—the only game in town is the culture game. And that has long since been the way in China, what with its illustrious 5000 years of history of emperors, sages, knight-errants, poets, generals, ballers, and hurdlers. This was the way it always was, the system of manufacture is a bit different now that we have this thing called “professional sports” which lives off the blood infusions given to it by this thing called “the media”, including the internet, which allows it or rather
insists that it become part of our lives, 24/7, omnipresent, forever accessible, exponentially reproducible.

Becker’s thesis is that much of this has to do with self-esteem. Self-esteem in Becker’s sense isn’t about being able to walk up to a girl and ask her to prom, but about the kind of value that we, through the medium of culture, give our own lives. It’s the way that we beat what he calls “animal futility”—the knowledge that once we tear away the fig leaf of culture, nothing but animals. Sure, we rise above most of them and have done some pretty impressive things on this planet, but that doesn’t change the fact that we are animals that eat, sleep, fuck and shit and cannot escape the animal constraints that nature has placed on us–at least not yet, if the sci-fi writers are to be believed.

Becker goes on to talk about culture-types and I think that for me, this is the only real framework I’ve found that makes sense for describing what Chinese people are like. He talks about aggression and social evil with relation to weak, unindividuated types—something that we’ve seen all around the world, from Columbine to Saudi Arabia—and I am not saying that Chinese people are this type. But they are a certain culture-type, to be sure. That kind of wounded, self-embattled, we got beat up yesterday but are coming back to school confidence is, to me, pervasive. The mentality behind excoriating anyone who supports the Dalai Lama, or talks about human rights like they really matter, or suggests that democracy might be good for China, or that France and Germany aren’t all that bad—that mentality is all over the place. You overhear it in cafes and restaurants, you read it on Twitter or BBS’s, you see it in blog comments.

And that’s why I realized that no matter how purely Chinese my blood is, how I will never really be “Chinese”—I am not part of that culture-project.