Old school could suggest being part of the old guard or old style, or also a pioneer in China’s blogsphere. You know 北风 and 令狐补充? Good friends of mine here in Guangzhou. I talked to them later and it seems old school isn’t a very fitting description for you. What do you think?

Translation by John Kennedy:

“I really don’t think there’s much need to see Chinese observe Christmas.”

This is getting close to the essence of the issue. I am living in Canada and I’ll tell you that we’re having the same problem over here. You can blame cultural globalisation but I think it’s something deeper. I think it’s due to a global shift in priorities and ways of thinking.

If you take the example of China (which I always like to do because China has an extreme example for everything) You can see that the beauty of the culture is not in it’s forms necessarily. Whether or not you have firecrackers on New Years is not what Chinese culture is all about, the braids and the slippers, the robes and the temples are just forms. Christmas trees, Santa Claus those are just pretty pictures but the real culture is in the essence.

Chinese culture is about wisdom, compa ssion, high mor al character, dignity, searching for the Tao, respect for man, nature and the heavens so on. If these are the essences of Chinese culture then havn’t you already lost the meaning of you festival forms?

The way the country is going, does anyone dare stand up for what’s right anymore under such government terrorism? Who dares to beleive in the true culture after the Cultural revolution? Hasn’;t the c o mmuinst prop panda education raised you all to be absolute materialists who beleive in money and struggling for earthly gains? So arent people who think according to the essence of the culture labelled as superstitious and foolish according the prevalent ideology?

I live in Canada and when I went Christmas shopping I couldn’t find anything with pictures of the deities and saints. Cultural globalisation has ruinned any strong traditional forms but that’s not the issue. I think the issue is that people in general are overly materialistic, ignoring things they can’t see with their eyes such as virtues, God, kindness, wisdom…

absolute materialism turns us into beasts who just want presents and pleasure, not like the old ways at all.

In China, there’s no shortage of blogs covering what’s happening around the world, in the news and on the street, and I think it’s fair to say that much more attention is being paid to what’s happening outside China than the other way around, it’s a safe way for issues revelant to be explored via another country without touching too close to home. But it’s not the only option. Take Canada for example: when recent immigrants are killed or involved in serious incidents of crime, mainstream English media will often spend a lot of time covering those. Compare that with Guangzhou, home to thousands of Africans, earlier this month when a black man’s body was found chopped up in pieces and dumped into a river in a plastic bag. Aside from the brief mention that a corpse was found and had belonged to a black man, three weeks later neither his name or country of origin have been reported.

Back to pop music, hip-hop and R&B are hot now in Taiwan and China and Hong Kong like they were with white guys twenty years ago. Most North Americans I’ve talked to are excited about the idea of Chinese hip-hop, but disappointed at what’s out there to find. You could say the social context is different, or that the languages are incompatible, invoke Madonna, Elvis or Eminem, or you could say that new genres of music are being created, and popularly enjoyed, regardless of whether people outside the age 14-27 Chinese demographic think they’re any good. Ask anyone who the biggest pop star in mainland China is and has been for the past 4-5 years and they’ll say the Taiwanese Jay Chou. He’s chosen R&B as his main style, but at the same time he incorporates quite a lot of traditional elements into his songs. It’s not the best example, but I’d like to hear what you think of the song 千里之外 he released last year with Fei Yuqing.

Or have heard of Li Jie (李杰)? He had this one song out about three years ago that was just him on one traditional Chinese instrument, with some slow dance-y beats in the background and just him on vocals. It sounded like a song he would have written himself, and sounded pretty good if you ask me. He even had a white girl dancing in the music video!

First off, China is already the world’s largest democracy. Anyone can run for elections, and anyone can be President as long as they get enough votes at the NPC. So you shouldn’t say China cannot become a democracy because it already is a democracy.

Secondly, the people who call for a boycott of Christmas are not ultraconservative. Rather they are philosophers who are posting a very important question for people to think about. Their call can never succeed but it can make people think.

To rephrase the question, “If you celebrate Christmas, why aren’t you celebrating Eid? (Eid is the Moslem holiday of Prophet Mohammed)”

People often ask me about why I do not give my son a Christian name like Peter Lee or Vincent Tan (I am a Chinese Christian by the way). I told them, I wanted to name my son “Mohammed Ali” after the great boxing champ, but my wife objected. A big shock or confusion would show on their faces by what I just said. No doubt, in their head, they are asking themselves, “did i just hear that this Chinese guy wanted to name his son with a Moslem name?”

The big question that is being asked is why this adoration for Western culture but not other cultures like Islamic culture? I have come across so many Chinese people with Christian names who are not Christians, but I have yet to come across a Chinese with a Moslem name who is not Moslem. Are Chinese people inheritly biased and have a fetish love for Western cultures? If the answer is yes, then this is culturally dangerous because it would hinder cultural developments. Take for example pop culture from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Look at the popular songs there. The popular songs from Taiwan and Hong Kong are not original. They are merely Western music sung with Chinese lyrics. Development of Chinese music on the other hand has stopped. No more Er Hu or Gu Zheng. You may think this is not a big deal. But for an artist, it is a big deal. For it is only by understanding oneself can an artist progress. Quincy Jones once tried to play music like a white man and it wasn’t until his music coach lectured him that he should stop trying to imitate white people but to go back to his African roots that he can develop real music.

In the same way, soceity as a whole would not progress unless we first dig into our own self, but if society merely copies other culture, you get a shallow superficial representation, like pop songs from taiwan and hong kong, western music with chinese lyrics and singers only. This is the concern of the people who are calling for this boycott of Christmas. It is a legitimate concern.

http://www.hi-on.org.tw/bulletins.jsp?b_ID=65986

here on Taiwan Matters:

http://taiwanmatters.blogspot.com/2006/12/enemies-of-press-freedom.html

You’ll need to scroll down to the section “Who Said ‘Chinese Pigs’?” to find the beginning of the actual translation.

Please let me know what the correct way to submit my translations is.

TIA

I’m not comfortable with the notion that Taiwan has “preserved Chinese culture” the way that Chinese bloggers often casually assume. Yes Taiwanese society is overwhelmingly Han Chinese but I think it is fully morphed into a modern society that is no longer particularly concerned with being Chinese (or Taiwanese for that matter).

I recently traveled to China after having not been there for more than a decade. One of the things I noticed was how the issue of Chineseness is constantly raised with a sort of cultural nationalism that has very much died out in Taiwan. If you read magazines from the 1970s and 1980s in Taiwan, you will find constant anxiety over whether something was Chinese or Western. I believe there was even a dispute over the Chinese word for Christmas–Shengdanjie– because Jesus was not a Chinese Shengren and the term properly applied to Confucius.

I think your bloggers also sense (correctly) that ultraconservative cultural nationalists like the graduate students who signed the petition are in fact apologists for authoritarianism and the idea that since China is a Confucian country and Confucian values are supposedly incompatible with democratic values, China cannot become a democracy.

What do you think about some of the points those bloggers made? I haven’t been to Taiwan or Japan and only once spent a few days in Korea, but what they said seemed to make sense to me.