On the “Rustic” Culture of Chinese Society
As a country with a large population, China naturally has many complex features, and we can analyze it from many different perspectives, like politics, economy, culture, science, folk thought and etc, and as one of these analytical perspectives, if we have a comparative view to compare China with Japan, Korea and United States as a whole, we can get some enlightening discoveries. In the process of comparation with many other societies, we can realize a basic fact: “rustic” culture is one fundamental characteristic of Chinese society.
(I)Broadly speaking, the values, architecture, clothes, everyday language, music and customs of our country all exude strong “rustic”; take everyday language as an example, the language of our workers in nearly all fields has a strong “rustic” feature, from government officials, scholars, ordinary people to journalists, and it doesnot have an elegant and original overall feeling. Take the values as another example, the notions our people admire, like “being an official”, “make money”, also exude a strong “rustic” feeling. In summary, various aspects of humanistic environment in Chinese society all have a deep brand with “rustic” culture.
(II)Correspondingly, the appearance of most Chinese people have an obvious “rustic” character, and workers in various fields of our country, like businessmen, government officials, workers, farmers, are all so; while people of Japan, South Korea, the West, Brazil and many other areas in the world rarely have this “rustic” feeling, and they also have some high-level spiritual quality, and I think we can easily observe this basic fact.
(III)Meanwhile, the impact of “rustic” culture to our scientific community is also deep and broad. As to the research motivations, due to the unconsciously deep influence of “rustic” culture, the research motivations of our scientific students have three major types: funny, cool and interesting, while the motivations of brilliant foreign scholars are mainly: the pursuit of beauty, curiosity, keen interest, creating knowledge by using human’s vast imagination, understanding their own subject, etc, and I think that it is virtually impossible for our students to make really good contributions by these crude words. As a natural effect, I rarely see scientific PhDs who have intense curiosity and passion for their own subjects in my generation, and the reason is naturally a lack of rich and deep thought foundation, in particular: 1 our culture is somewhat superficial, 2 many ideas in our social scope are also somewhat fickle, and the superposition of these 2 reasons leads to a universal lack of mature thought and profound character in scientific PhDs (in Chinese science and engineering PhDs in good universities, like Harvard or Princeton, I hardly see individuals with deep high-level spiritual quality), while the reasons of the above two basic aspects are naturally grounded in the underlying soil of the “rustic” culture.
Scientific research naturally needs high-level mental qualities because it needs rigorous rational thinking, rich intellectual background and certain cultural cultivation, while “rustic” culture has a somewhat serious negative impact on these things, and science and technology in Japan and South Korea is a bit better than our nation, and one of the major reasons is the “rustic” characteristic of Chinese scientific workers.
(IV)The impact of “rustic” culture to our literature and art fields is also enormous. Our modern writers’ impact is mainly at home, therefore they are chiefly famous at home and hardly have international impact, and one of the fundamental reasons is also the “rustic” culture. Some of our famous writers, like Liang Shiqiu, Mao Dun, Ba Jin, Ye Shengtao, etc, all exude strong “rustic” , and lack high-level spiritual quality, while art is the most elegant part in human society, and there naturally exists a wide gap between “rustic” culture and high art, and an artist who have real elegant mastery is unlikely to show a “rustic” feature. To sum up, the deep “rustic” culture in Chinese society is also one important reason for our artists to fail to create really good works.
(V)The “rustic” culture also has far reaching negative impacts to the vocational education in our country. Broadly speaking, vocational education can be divided into two levels: 1education in college, 2education in the entire society, and in these 2 levels, comparing with western countries, we are both a little behind. As to the latter one, since our social atmosphere is somewhat crude, and many ideas and notions all emanate crude “rustic”, therefore, the overall effect of vocational education is naturally not very good, while social atmosphere of the west is somewhat graceful. In the meantime, due to the impact of “rustic” culture, Chinese society also doesnot respect knowledge and intelligentsia, which also has a large negative impact on our vocational education.
(VI)The impact of “rustic” culture on our political ecology is also deep and lasting. To begin with, for the practice of democracy and freedom, I once stayed at abroad for a long time, and in this process, I deeply feel that for foreign societies, some basic political things, like democracy and freedom, are actually all common things, while the functions of them in our country are still not very mature, and the deeper reason is also the somewhat crude “rustic” culture.
Here, Taiwan provides a somewhat good example, and the chaos of Taiwan’s election is hard to imagine in all the other areas, and the language is vulgar, mainly comparing the rotten parts, and bribery is also common. Furthermore, politics seems to be the main concern of the entire Taiwan society, and other basic issues, like science, modern economic ideas and elegant culture, are hardly discussed, which is also hard to happen in other areas. As a modern institution, democracy’s practice in Taiwan leads to the crudeness of language and many disordered and crude election behaviours, while the political behaviour in South Korea and Japan is much more civilized, rational and ordered, and the reason of the awful overall condition of Taiwan’s politics is also naturally the deep and broad “rustic” culture-the appearance of various personnell in Taiwan society, from businessmen, workers, government officials to ordinary people, also have a strong “rustic” feeling, which is a somewhat obvious fact, while this “rustic” culture also has many negative impacts to Taiwan society.
Based on this, we can realize that, if our people’s overall quality can greatly improve, some political and economic institutions, like democracy, freedom and rule of law, will be a natural thing, and accrodingly, improving the quality and comprehensive ability of our people has become one of the most important central tasks for us at present.
(VII)The “rustic” culture also influences China’s film industry. People have ardently discussed why our movies cannot get enough recognition and have extensive impact at the international level, and the broad “rustic” culture is naturally one of the most important reasons. Except Ang Lee, the other famous directors in China are mainly “rustic”, and if we compare some of them with western directors, like David Lynch, Woody Allen, Coppola, George Lucas and Bergman, we can easily get some intuitive basic feeling: these famous western directors all have some high-level spiritual qualities, while ours relatively lack, therefore, it is natural that our directors cannot make some good movies, and it is difficult for them to shoot good films even if they want to (we need to say that our directors also want to make good movies), and the new generation also just has little change.
The main defects of our movies probably include:1 they do not have deep thoughtful and philosophical foundation, 2the feelings in them are somewhat superficial and thin, lack of depth of character, 3the dialogues are not deep enough, lack of philosophical sentences, 4 the grammar, photography technology and industrial chain also have some basic weaknesses. The overall conditions of Chinese movies and literature are similar, and they are both mainly popular at home, since they are both covered by the broad “rustic” culture.
(VIII)The “rustic” culture also influences our business and management world. To begin with, our company administrators’ mindset and quality of ideas have a gap with foreign entrepreneurs (like Jack Welch), and we seldom put forward some new management concepts. Take the investment world as an example, there are no good works, like Peter Lynch’s Where Are the Customers’ Yachts, in our nation, and our economic books often do not have creative writings and novel ideas. If we inquire the deeper reasons, “rustic” culture is undoubtedly one of the most important influencing factors.
(IX)We need to point out that the narrow “rustic” character of Chinese people born in 1970s and later has relatively decreased quite a bit (some of them are still quite “rustic”), because they are exposed to many new ideas, and some traditional ideas’ impact on them is somewhat weak, however, they are still in the generalized “rustic” culture and are clearly short of high-level spiritual quality. (meanwhile, there are also many people who have little “rustic” when they are young, but become deeply “rustic” in their middle and old age, which naturally arises from the accumulation of many rustic words and rustic mindset in them) The ideas and values which prevail in our 80s and 90s is naturally the product of Chinese society, therefore, they all carry the imprint of the ideas and notions in our society, and thus, they do not have high-level spiritual quality is a somewhat natural thing. (Some children around us also have “rustic”, and this point can partially illustrate the issues.)
(X)Meanwhile, if we observe the everyday language in Chinese society, we can strongly feel the “rustic” culture’s all-pervasive impact. We can easily find out that, the everyday words of our people have many “rustic” words, and these a great many “rustic” words shape both Chinese people’s mindset and the “rustic” characteristic of Chinese society. We naturally need a long period of thoughtful, cultural, institutional and scientific constructions to gradually change this basic condition.
(XI)We think that Chinese society’s “rustic” culture probably were already very universal at least in the Ming Dynasty, and if we observe many pictures of people at that time, including government officials, businessmen and ordinary people, we can feel that the “rustic” culture was already serious then, and people’s everyday language in that time was likely to have many “rustic” words, and thus, this is a fundamental problem which have existed in our society for over 500 years, and obviously, we need quite a long period to change this deep and vast phenomenon.
From the above complex analysis, we can feel that: the “rustic” culture has a broad and deep impact to Chinese society, and it also creates some negative phenomena in various fields of our society, and we think that the “rustic” culture is the source of many basic issues in China, like backwardness of science and technology, somewhat bad moral ecology and weakness in artistic creation (we just list three important aspects here), etc. The lack of high-level spiritual quality has fundamentally negative impacts on many major aspects of our society, like science, business, entertainment, social atmosphere, art, vocational education, political ecology and etc. Clearly, we need to realize this basic issue and use creative constructions from many aspects to gradually change this basic negative social ecology.
Jul 17, 2018
