Peter Hessler has a nice piece, "Hutong Karma," in the February 13 issue of the New Yorker, which, unfortunately, is not posted on their website.  He describes the little lane, or hutong, where he lives in Beijing and how its old structures and folkways are being destroyed under the crush of rapid economic, and architectural, transformation.

    Hessler observes how Beijingers seem resigned to the changes swirling around them:

…Over the years, there had been a number of protests and lawsuits about the destruction, but such disputes tended to be localized: people complained that government corruption reduced their compensation,and they didn’t like being relocated to suburbs that were too distant.  But it was unusual to hear an average Beijinger express concern for what was happening to the city as a whole.  Few spoke in terms of architectural preservation, perhaps because the Chinese concept of the past isn’t closely linked to buildings, as it is in the West.  The Chinese rarely built with stone, instead replacing perishable materials periodically over the decades.

    Now, I’m not sure I buy his architectural "Chinese concept of the past."  The choice of building materials may have had as much to do with aesthetics and cost as with the desire to leave memorials for the future (although the ruling class was good at memorialization: see Qin Shihuangdi). And all the good stones had to be used for military fortifications.  But there is a bigger question here, which does not necessarily contradict Hessler’s analysis: is there something about Chinese society and culture (admittedly large concepts) that engenders a certain fatalism or resignation in the face of large-scale historical change?

 Hessler himself points to contemporary social and political practices:

The hutong essence had more to do with spirit than structure, and this spirit often showed strongest when the neighborhood encountered some modern element: an Olympic [i.e. new public] toilet, a McDonald’s franchise.  Pragmatism and resourcefulness were deeply ingrained in residents like Good Old Wang, whose environment had always been fluid.  The fundamental character of hutong life helped prepare for its destruction.

     What he means in that last, vaguely Hegelian, line is that a certain social dynamism – whose fortunes were up and whose were down – has long shaped the expectations of average city dwellers.  Much of this is due to the wild instability of the PRC political situation: going from optimistic progress of the early fifties, to the devastating economic failures of the late fifties, to the return to pragmatism in the early sixties, to the craziness of the Cultural Revolution in the late sixties, to the suspended political animation of most of the seventies, to the move to economic reform in 1979, and, then, to the inexorable changes in material culture and social life that have swept across the country in the past twenty five years.  Yes, the "environment had always been fluid."

    There may also be something deeper, culturally.  I want to be careful here and not leave the impression that ancient Chinese thought might somehow have a direct and unmediated effect on the present.  It doesn’t.  Whatever Taoism and Confucianism are in China today, or anywhere today for that manner, will obviously be different than the meaning or social expression they had at various times in the distant past.  So, I am not saying that Taoism and the Book of Changes are directly responsible for the acceptance of change that Hessler observes.  But they are part of the story.

    Indeed, as soon as I finished the article, this line from the Ta Chuan, Great Treatise, of the I Ching popped into my head:

As begetter of all begetting, it is called change.

   The "it" here is Tao, the notion of all things existing simultaneously together, without distinction of being and nonbeing.  Wilhelm’s (299) commentary continues:

The dark begets the light and the light begets the dark in ceaseless alternation, but that which begets this alternation, that to which all life owes its existence, is tao with its laws of change.

 That naturalistic invocation of inevitable cycles of day/night, summer/winter, life/death, youth/age, etc. are deeply ingrained in many strands of Chinese thought, save, perhaps, Mohist utilitarianism and Legalist political realism.  The I Ching, the Taoist classics, Confucius and Mencius all, to varying degrees, are infused with an acceptance of natural forces beyond human control.  Taoists revel in them; Confucius simply does not speak about them; recognizing their significance and resistance to human intervention.

    This acceptance or resignation has filtered into the culture at large throughout the centuries.  Lu Xun, of course, saw such fatalism as a fundamental flaw of traditional Chinese culture.  Modernizers of all sorts hoped to overcome it in their struggles against imperialism and the old order.  Yet, while too much resignation might be a bad thing, some level of it might be quite healthy, especially for a society undergoing rapid and extensive change.  It might allow us to step back and see the larger context of any particular encounter with change.  Is it change for the better or change for the worse?  If we are free from our attachment to what is changing, we can gain a broader perspective on the change itself. 

    One of Hessler’s former neighbors, who has come back for a visit after having moved away from his hutong home, captures the liberating effects of acceptance:

Outside, I asked him if it had been hard to leave the hutong after nearly half a century.  He thought for a moment.  "You know, lots of events happened while I lived here," he said.  "And maybe there were more sad events than happy events."

   Whatever the balance of sad and happy, the change had come, he had accepted it in some ways, and was able to see himself outside of his former life and move on with his new life.  No regrets, no recriminations.  There’s something refreshing in that.