When I said ‘nations’, I was thinking more of the people than the government. I recognise the importance of the distinction; but in China, people very often don’t! The identification between country, state, government, and people is so thoroughgoing here that any criticism of the government seems to be taken as an outrageous insult to the whole of China’s history and culture and to every individual Chinese person. I imagine this identification goes far back in Chinese history, but the CCP has certainly bolstered it for its own ends.

Of course, I exaggerated out of exasperation in my earlier comment; but I was thinking of the contemporary situation, not the earlier 20th Century. And can you really say that the movements you mention were fairly representative of Chinese culture and the Chinese people overall? There’s always going to be a minority of ‘intellectuals’ who are more forward-thinking, and, in revolutionary times, perhaps a very large and vocal and influential minority. I would imagine, however, that most Chinese people in those days – across the whole spectrum of income and education – tended to be more like “But China has always been ruled by the Imperial family!” or “How can you diss Confucius like that?” or “But vernacular Chinese is too ugly for writing” or “Why do we need a way of writing our language in the Western alphabet?” or “What’s the big deal about democracy anyway?” and so on and so on.

In my earlier comment, I was particularly lamenting the extremely limited capacity for debate or self-analysis in today’s educated Chinese (as a result, I believe, of the propaganda stranglehold of the CCP, and also probably of the poor state of the education system here, and the rather limited contact with the outside world that is available to most people even now). I was particularly sore about this at the time because I had just suffered the experience of spending most of last weekend interviewing employees of Xinhua News for their annual English level test, and only 2 or 3 out of the 60 I spoke to were capable of saying anything that didn’t make them sound like a robot (and I’m talking content here, not fluency or pronunciation). One girl said, with a completely straight face, “In China, we ALL agree with our government.”

Other comment threads I’ve read in recent years (perhaps here in the Studio, although I can’t quite recall now) have made the probably valid point that this problem may seem worse to foreigners because the Chinese are hyper-sensitive to our notoriously critical attitudes and tend to become almost paralysed by their defensiveness when they speak with us; in conversing with each other in private, they may perhaps address a greater plurality of views…… but with us laowai, 9 times out of 10, they’ll just parrot the party line.

I think you raise an excellent point about the New Culture Movement, certainly there was a flourishing culture of debate, criticism, and intellectual curiosity. I also agree that we should make the important distinction between the state (CCP/PRC government) and the nation (the Chinese people).

Sadly however, when I see examples of “The May Fourth Spirit” in China today, too often it is in the form of a knee-jerk nationalism which does not admit of the sort of critiques and open inquiry that characterized the best of the New Culture thinkers.

Equally distressing, this does not only manifest itself in terms of state repression, but also an anti-intellectual culture of jingoism that seems to becoming increasingly vocal and aggressive.

How many times have we seen somebody in recent years post a thoughtful critique on a BBS only to be attacked by other netizens as a ‘hanjian’ or in other ways have their sincerity, loyalty, and character impugned?

Good comments, thanks for stopping by and I look forward to Froog’s response.

Jeremiah-
One can certainly argue that.

I’ve always liked the story about Gandhi (though I fear it is probably apocryphal) that, when quizzed once by a journalist as to what he thought of “Western Civilization”, responded simply: “I think it would be a very good idea.”