I linked to this piece a couple of days ago, but now notice that it has caught the attention of some other big sites.  In coming back to it, I see it in a somewhat different light.

     What I am referring to is Alice Poon’s piece, "China’s Values Vacuum," which starts out like this:

For a nation whose
cultural values were more or less destroyed by the Cultural
Revolution, greed and corruption have become the name of the game in
China. Manipulation of others to achieve one’s goals is not
viewed as morally unacceptable, nor does morality have a place in the
nation’s scramble for economic success.

Look no farther for
proof of this than the Chinese leaders’ relentless, yet
unsuccessful, efforts to stamp out government corruption. Society’s
obsession with money, luxury brands, idols and celebrities reflects
the spiritual and moral desert the society has become.

     This is a fairly common refrain: Chinese economic growth and socio-cultural change are happening so rapidly, the nation is coming undone.  Whatever sense of traditional morality there might have been is being crushed under the rush to the new.  The kids are spoiled and rotten.

    We can hear the same complaints in other places as well.  It has been a standard conservative critique of the decline of the US – or even the decline of the "West" – for decades now.   People still blame "the sixties" for most of what ails the US now.

     I want to push back a bit.  There are at least two dangers in the "good old days were better" argument.  First, let’s not forget about the bad stuff that was happening in the "good old days."  In China today, the fifties are often remembered, or imagined, as the "good old days."  Back when everyone was "comrade" and no one really worried about money – wasn’t it just great?  Sure, tell that to the "counter-revolutionaries" or the victims of the "three anti" and "five anti" campaigns.  A great time was had by all!

    Revolutionary justice, you say?  But the revolution would soon veer off into the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Great Leap Forward, the latter among the worst, most violent, abuses of state power in the twentieth century.

    Yes, there may be a lot of selfishness and greed in China these days, but let’s not pretend life was all that much better in the 1950s.  And we could push this back further historically.  The early twentieth century?  Not so good.  The height of the Qing Dynasty in the 18th century: great if you were on the top of society, rather difficult if you were not.

     Golden ages are never as golden as we want to remember of make them.  So why pretend that some reinvention of "tradition," whether it is Confucianism or Taoism or socialism, can somehow make us better in the present.

     There is a second problem with the "past was better" view.  We tend to ascribe personal qualities and capacities to nations as a whole.  "China is corrupt," "China is selfish," "China is decadent."  But "China," nor any nation for that matter, can never be summarized so simply.  There are a great many good people in China today doing good things, living moral lives.  While poverty and injustice obviously stalk the land, these cannot be taken as the only symbols of such a vast country.  I am reminded of some lines by Wang Meng, a writer who later became a bureaucrat (quoted in John Gittings, The Changing Face of China, p. 5):

You can make any number of statements about China and they are all true: Things are good, things are bad; China is quite developed, and yet also underdeveloped.  China has so many luxury hotels, malls, department stores, and restaurants…And yet at the same time, it is also possible to say that China is one of the poorest countries in the world.

 It is good and bad.  The point is to work to expand and enable the good while limiting the bad.  There are people with "good values" and people with "bad values."  Can we simply count them all up and announce some final score?  China’s good!  No, China’s bad! To what end?

     I say all this because I want to resist the reification of the nation, any nation.  Reducing and summarizing "China" into some string of adjectives that supposedly capture the "essence" of the place is the work of nationalists.  Chinese nationalists will put forth the good adjectives.  American nationalists will likely posit the bad ones.  In both cases the crude descriptions are driven by political agendas.  Better to let go of all that and open ourselves to the multiplicities before us.  If we don’t, we run the risk of repression – either repression of those facets of the country that do not fit the Party’s "good" narrative, or the repression (compression?) of our vision to see only the "bad."  In either case, we are missing much of the story.

     Look for the persons, the individuals.  They are the ones who will have good or bad values.  Nations are imagined, and those imaginings, in the service of one or another political interest, can never show us all we might be able to know.