an essay on chinese culture

Chinese Culture

China is one of the Four Ancient Civilizations (alongside Babylon, India and Egypt), according to Chinese scholar Liang Qichao (1900). It boasts a vast and varied geographic expanse, 3,600 years of written history, as well as a rich and profound culture. Chinese culture is diverse and unique, yet harmoniously blended — an invaluable asset to the world.

Our China culture guide contains information divided into Traditions, Heritage, Arts, Festivals, Language, and Symbols. Topics include Chinese food, World Heritage sites, China's Spring Festival, Kungfu, and Beijing opera.

China's Traditions

China's heritage.

China's national heritage is both tangible and intangible, with natural wonders and historic sites, as well as ethnic songs and festivals included.

As of 2018, 53 noteworthy Chinese sites were inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List: 36 Cultural Heritage, 13 Natural Heritage, and 4 Cultural and Natural Heritage .

China's Performing Arts

Chinese Kungfu
Chinese Folk Dance
Chinese Traditional Music
Chinese Acrobatics
Beijing Opera
Chinese Shadow Plays
Chinese Puppet Plays
Chinese Musical Instruments

Arts and Crafts

Chinese Silk
Chinese Jade Articles
Ancient Chinese Furniture
Chinese Knots
Chinese Embroidery
Chinese Lanterns
Chinese Kites
Chinese Paper Cutting
Chinese Paper Umbrellas
Ancient Porcelain
Chinese Calligraphy
Chinese Painting
Chinese Cloisonné
Four Treasures of the Study
Chinese Seals

China's Festivals

China has several traditional festivals that are celebrated all over the country (in different ways). The most important is Chinese New Year, then Mid-Autumn Festival. China, with its "55 Ethnic Minorities", also has many ethnic festivals. From Tibet to Manchuria to China's tropical south, different tribes celebrate their new year, harvest, and other things, in various ways.

Learning Chinese

Chinese is reckoned to be the most difficult language in the world to learn, but that also must make it the most interesting. It's the world's only remaining pictographic language in common use, with thousands of characters making up the written language. Its pronunciation is generally one syllable per character, in one of five tones. China's rich literary culture includes many pithy sayings and beautiful poems.

Symbols of China

Every nation has its symbols, but what should you think of when it comes to China? You might conjure up images of long coiling dragons, the red flag, pandas, the Great Wall… table tennis, the list goes on…

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Chinese Traditional Festivals and Culture Essay

Introduction.

The Chinese culture is one of the most celebrated cultures over the world. Owing to this culture, there are many festivals associated with it. Through these festivals, the Chinese culture has become overwhelmingly popular in many parts of the world.

The festivals fall in different times of the year and are celebrated in differing styles. All these festivals may be classified under four categories (Gibney, p. 109). This paper will focus on the three Chinese traditional festivals.

These are the Spring Festival, the Mid-Autumn Festival and the Dragon Boat festival. This paper will briefly describe the three festivals and their importance to the Chinese people.

The paper will also explain what the festivals tell the audience about Chinese traditional culture, values and the similarities among these festivals’ values. Chinese have various festivals and Cultures which have different values and similarities. The festivals tell more about the Chinese cultures and values.

The Spring Festival

Of all the Chinese festivals, the Spring Festival has the greatest value to the Chinese people with its value equated to the value of the Westerners attachment to Christmas. It is a time of the year designated for merrymaking when family members come together to celebrate the occasion.

This period is characterized by congestion and overcrowding in all the transport networks. Millions of Chinese fill the airports, bus stations and rail stations in a rush to return home (Kalman, p. 20).

The Spring Festival is celebrated for a period of three days every year though its entire duration is a bit longer. The festival falls on the first day of the first lunar month but starts unceremoniously in the early days of the twelfth lunar month and extends to the mid of the first lunar month of the following year.

During this entire period, the eve of the Spring festival and the following three days have the greatest importance to the Chinese people (Kalman, p. 20).

The history of this festival dates back to the 12th century. The custom has survived through the centuries though the meaning has slightly changed. Today, the festival does not necessarily involve offering sacrifices to gods or ancestors, but simply marks the end of a year and the beginning of another.

The government attaches a lot of importance to the festival and even stipulates that people take the first seven days of the New Year to celebrate. A series of events carried out by the Chinese people mark the Spring Festival (Kalman, p. 21).

The occasion starts on the eighth day of the last lunar month. On this day, families make laba porridge which is made of beans, rice, lotus seeds, millet, jujube berries, longan and gingko. Following this, preparing delicious meals is held on the twenty third day of the same month.

Initially, the meaning of this day was to offer sacrifice to the Chinese kitchen god; however, today, people prepare the meals to enjoy themselves. The day is called the ’Preliminary Eve’ after which people commence the actual preparations for welcoming the New Year. During this period, people go into a shopping spree buying all they will require during the New Year celebrations (Kalman, p. 21).

To mark a new beginning associated with the up coming New Year, all the people carry out a thorough cleaning of their clothes, utensils, houses and compounds. This is followed by colorful decorations to create an atmosphere of joy and festive mood.

At this time, the Chinese mastery in calligraphy is brought to the fore. All houses are decorated with various patterns depending on the tastes of the owners; however, the most common colors are red and black. The most popular decorations involve pasting of the door panels with couplets which have red and black collage patterns.

The Chinese associate different colors and patterns with personal wishes, such as good luck and success in the New Year. Those who still harbor strong traditional attachments decorate their houses with images of the gods of wealth whom they believe will bring them abundant wealth in the New Year (Kalman, p. 22).

The most remarkable symbol that is almost consciously mandatory in the New Year celebrations is the character fu which stands for the happiness and blessings. Other characters and patterns with various meaning associated with the festivities are also commonplace around this period. For example, red lanterns erected on opposite sides of the doors and other brightly decorated images have special meanings of the new beginning or renewed hope to the Chinese populace (Kalman, p. 22).

Another popular custom is the setting of fire crackers and fireworks. The special meaning of this practice is biding farewell to the previous year and welcoming the New Year. The custom of using the fireworks exists in China for a long and is an integral part in many other occasions, such as sports events and wedding ceremonies.

An important event on the New Year day involves visitations. People move around to visit friends and relatives to send their New Year wishes. Culturally, the young visit the elderly to offer the wishes. The elderly in return offer them monetary gifts wrapped in special red wrappings.

It is considered essential to visit one another and pass the New Year regards; however; with influence of technology on the modern generation, nowadays, people use phones and e-mail services to pass their New Year messages (Kalman, p. 23).

A characteristic delicacy during the festival is the Jiaozi , a preparation of flour stuffed with various fillings. The meal is culturally recommended since its shape which resembles an ancient Chinese currency means that the New Year will bring wealth.

To add to that, different ethnic groups attach other symbols to the dumplings associated with good luck. For instance, candy is believed to signify sweet life, and chestnuts represent vigor. To start the year on the right footing, people try to avoid bad behavior or explicit use of some words such as kill, dead or bad because they believe they could be a bad omen for the New Year.

No sweeping of floor is allowed as it signifies pushing away blessings. There are many other taboos associated with this festival that vary from one ethnic group to another. These signify the wealth of the Chinese culture and the value attached to it (Kalman, p. 23).

Mid-Autumn Festival

The Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival also referred to as the Moon Cake Festival is commemorated every fifteenth day of the eighth month. The festival is associated with the connection between the mankind’s spirit and nature. The term Moon Cake Festival is used in reference to a special sweet cake, yueh ping, which is baked during the festival and resembles the moon. The cake is prepared and filled with duck eggs, sesame and ground lotus seeds (Kalman, p. 27).

The history of this festival can be traced back to the 14 th century . Different theories explaining the origin of this festival exist, but this is not withstanding; the Chinese continue to celebrate annually. One myth about the origin of the Moon Cake Festival states that China was under the control of oppressive Mongols in the 14 th century.

A revolutionary named Chu Yuen-Chang and his deputy Liu Po-Wen came up with a strategy to overthrow this leadership. Liu entered a besieged city in the disguise of a Taoist priest and distributed cakes in the shape of a moon to the city inhabitants in readiness for an up coming festival ( Chung Chiu ).

On opening the cakes’ wrappings, people found messages calling on them to help coordinate a rebellion with his army located outside the city. The plan succeeded, and Chu Yuen-Chang became their emperor successfully overthrowing the oppressive rule of the Mongols.

Every following year during the Chung Chiu festival, people in the empire prepared moon shaped cakes, and the custom stuck into all the upcoming generations to signify freedom (Jasmine, p. 38).

Another version argues that a woman lived on the moon during the Hsia dynasty. This woman, Chang-O, was the wife of a great general, Hou-Yi. One day, this general, a skilled archer, shot down eight suns that had mysteriously come out.

These suns, they believed, would have brought disaster to the Earth. The General was thus rewarded by the emperor. People believed that those suns could re-appear and cause more havoc. They, therefore, offered sacrifices to the god of heavens to make the general immortal, so he would forever protect their generations. Their prayer was answered, and Hou received the immortality pill (Jasmine, p. 39).

It is said that the wife, Chang-O, stole the pill and went to live on the moon. Due to the cold weather on the moon, she began coughing until the pill came out. She decided to crash it and scatter it to the earth so all the people would become immortal.

A hare described in many Chinese mythologies as Jade hare helped her and gnawed the pill into dust. Together, they spread the dust all over the earth in the hope it would reach everyone. Owing to this worthy gesture, the Chinese always put images of Chang-O on moon cake boxes and Moon Cake Festival posters as a gesture for good wishes (Jasmine, p. 39).

The third version is based on an ancient belief that marriages are organized on the moon. Yueh Lao Yeh, an old man who was believed to live on the moon, carries out this role. He is said to have a record of all the newborns, their future plans including their matching partners in marriage.

During the Moon Festival, many Chinese including little children climb onto hills and mountains or visit open beaches to have a clear view of the moon and make their wish to the old man. They use symbols with a cultural meaning.

For instance, a butterfly signifies long life, star-like fruits symbolize seasons, a lobster represents mirth, a crap is used to signify strength and wisdom since the symbol was originally a decoration of ancient emperors’ gowns.

The value of this cultural practice among the Chinese indicates that they believe in presence of supernatural beings who determine mortals’ destiny as it is common across almost all the cultures all over the world (Jasmine, p. 40).

The Dragon Boat festival

In China, the Dragon Boat Festival is referred to as Duan Wu Jie. This festival is commemorated every fifth day of the fifth month in the Chinese lunar calendar. The origin of this festival dates many centuries back and is based on activities in remembrance of a great Chinese poet, Qu Yuan.

The Chinese culture has a strong connection to the history of Yuan who is still regarded to be one of the greatest patriots in the Chinese history. It is said that Qu Yuan served as an advisor to the emperor Huai. He opposed corruption fervently which apparently annoyed many of the empire’s officials.

Due to corruption and bad leadership, the empire of the Chu state was easily defeated by the Qin state. This disappointed him so much that he committed suicide by drowning into the Miluo River (Stafford, p. 113).

The Chinese government has tried to emphasize the importance of this holyday for the entire nation apart from being held in remembrance of a great patriot and also offered an appropriate platform to remind everyone the importance of good conduct and loyalty and inculcate the culture of being committed to the national course in the people (Stafford, p. 113).

What the festivals tell the audience about Chinese traditional culture and values

The Spring Festival can be said to be a time for family members to remember one another by coming together and celebrate the success of the past year together and cross over to a new year encouraging each other. Giving money to the young by the elderly is a sign of wishing them good fortune in life.

This creates oneness in the society and shows the caring nature of the populace. It is also a time dedicated to commemoration of the ancestors from whom the current generation emerges. This ensures continuity and inculcates the sense of belonging (Katz, p. 27).

The Mid-Autumn Festival is characterized by worship. People use this festival to offer their thanksgiving to the moon (heavens) and the earth for all the blessings and successes they have had in their lives. It is also a time to pray for good fortunes. The moon shaped cakes consumed during this festival demonstrate family unity. During this festival, the Chinese people also take time to observe serenity (Katz, p. 27).

Nowadays, the Dragon Boat Festival is also called the Poet’s Festival as it commemorates the death of a great patriotic poet. This patriot committed suicide following disillusionment by the failure of the ruling class to fight corruption or uphold integrity in leadership.

Through this festival, the Chinese are reminded about the value of upright nationhood, commitment to the national course and integrity observation in all the deeds of day to day lives (Katz, p. 27).

These festivals are part of the Chinese effort to maintain their culture and values amidst the overwhelming globalization. The involvement of the Chinese government in promoting these festivals goes a long way in creating a national culture for all the Chinese ethnic grouping which in turn would enhance harmony.

Almost all Chinese ethnic groups attach a lot of importance to these festivals and other cultural practices which has resulted in the practices gaining prominence across generations. The Chinese have indicated the importance of their culture on many more occasions and not only the three festivals mentioned above.

For instance, in 2004, during the Athens- based Olympics, the Chinese performed an extravaganza displaying colorful features of their culture. The use of Chinese only attire and symbols at the event and many other events they perform all over the world, in particular during cultural exchange events only acts to demonstrate the actual value they attach t their culture (Katz, p. 89).

Numerous transformations have occurred in the way the Chinese run their politics, education, family structures, language, the military and the judiciary, however; the traditional practices and festivals that demonstrate the Chinese value attachment to their culture have undergone little or no transformation over the their entire 5000-year history.

Social experts claim that the modernized Chinese who have tried to embrace other cultures of the world that are deemed more civilized especially western cultures have found themselves in a ‘lonely world. This has therefore forced majority of the Chinese to tow the cultural line in an effort to remain relevant (Stafford, p. 202).

One of the strategies that the government has employed includes offering sponsorship and an aggressive media awareness campaign to sensitize the populace on the importance of observing and participating in cultural events and festivals.

Aside from the national governments efforts, local authorities have also made it their responsibility to inculcate the essence of observing the festivals and teaching the importance of the same to their children.

Several individuals have also been involved in promoting culture development by sponsoring events or other programs with a cultural orientation. The maintenance of cultural activities in china such as the traditional festivals has also been prominent due to efforts of non-governmental organizations that have kept the government on its toes to protect culture as it was demonstrated in the out cries when the central government started destroying traditional shrines, artifacts and other heritage sites (Stafford, p. 207).

The national media has lately been at the forefront in promoting traditional holidays and events such as the Dragon boat festival, the Mid-Autumn festival, the Moon festival and other cultural events that were earlier deemed contradictory such as the Maoism, globalism and socialism.

These traditional Chinese festivals have gained so much popularity to an extent of being integrated into the curriculum from basic level education to higher education (Katz, p. 28).

All the Chinese festivals described above have many characteristics in common. They all demonstrate a common desire for joy, well-being, and encourage unity among the people to unite the family. They show an element of the vital link between mankind and their creator.

The issue of avoiding misfortunes is also highlighted. The Chinese use all these festivals for relating and merrymaking. It can be also stated that these festivals are an important opportunity for Chinese to take a break from the hectic day to day life chores (Katz, p. 28).

Chinese have various festivals and Cultures which have different values and similarities. The festivals tell more about the Chinese cultures and values. Despite the culture transformations going on in all the parts of the world that have led to erosions of cultures, China is among the few societies that have maintained traditional festivals and customs.

The continued cultural links of the modern Chinese population show the importance of the attachment to the history and culture. There are many other factors that unite the Chinese community, such as language, and ethnic ties, but none of these has a stronger bond than their cultural identity.

Works Cited

Gibney, Matthew J. Immigration and Asylum: From 1900 to the Present. Entries A to I, Volume 1. California: ABC-CLIO, 2005. Print.

Jasmine, Julia. Multicultural Holidays: Share our Celebration . Huntington Beach, CA : Teacher Created Materials, 1994. Print.

Kalman, Bobbie. China, the Culture. New York: Crabtree, 2008. Print.

Katz, Paul R. Demon Hordes and Burning Boats: The Cult of Marshal Wen in Late Imperial Chekiang Albany . New York: State University of New York Press, 1995. Print.

Stafford, Charles. The Roads of Chinese Childhood: Learning and Identification in Angang. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2019, March 29). Chinese Traditional Festivals and Culture. https://ivypanda.com/essays/chinese-traditional-festivals-and-culture/

"Chinese Traditional Festivals and Culture." IvyPanda , 29 Mar. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/chinese-traditional-festivals-and-culture/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Chinese Traditional Festivals and Culture'. 29 March.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Chinese Traditional Festivals and Culture." March 29, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/chinese-traditional-festivals-and-culture/.

1. IvyPanda . "Chinese Traditional Festivals and Culture." March 29, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/chinese-traditional-festivals-and-culture/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Chinese Traditional Festivals and Culture." March 29, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/chinese-traditional-festivals-and-culture/.

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Bringing traditional chinese culture to life.

This issue of Education About Asia addresses the question, “What should we know about Asia?” Based on my experiences teaching courses on China and East Asia, traditional Chinese culture is one of the most important topics in understanding both past and present Asia. China has one of the world’s oldest civilizations. This poses many challenges to teachers who desire to make this rich and complex tradition accessible to their students. On both a temporal and spatial level, traditional China may seem far removed to Western students of the modern world. To bridge these gaps in time and space, and to make it more relevant to my students, I often connect its significance to contemporary society by highlighting the current appeal of learning about traditional Chinese culture in modern China. To demonstrate this process, this article examines examples from three cultural fields: Chinese philosophy, focusing on Confucius and his thought; Chinese history, with an illustration from the Shiji ; and Chinese literature, with a case study on plum blossom poems. Moreover, this article discusses how to develop course questions that are relevant to the students’ needs, as well as how to update teaching styles by incorporating multimedia sources, such as current news and films, in the classroom in order to appeal to students of the digital age. Furthermore, the examples and approaches outlined in this article are applicable to a wide variety of courses, including, but not limited to, Chinese literature, history, philosophy, or world history. It is hoped that this article may therefore encourage teachers across many disciplines to incorporate these techniques, as well as their own innovations, in their classrooms.

Confucius and His Thought

Confucian thought played an important role in shaping Chinese culture and identity. In order to make this complex philosophy more engaging, I utilize the “What Did Confucius Say?” articles from the Asia for Educators website, which is hosted by Columbia University.1 This reading material is concise and contains seven major sections grouped according to various topics, including primary sources and discussion questions. The first two sections cover the life and major ideas of Confucius, and provide the background and main features of the Analects of Confucius . For instance, the reading informs users that the Analects of Confucius is not a single work composed by Confucius (551–479 BCE) during his lifetime, but rather multiple writings compiled by Confucius’s disciples after his death. The Analects are also a useful starting point for students to encounter traditional Chinese culture due to the format of the text itself. Students frequently perceive that in many of these stories, Confucius engages in either a monologue or a conversation with his disciples or a ruler to articulate his ideas. Moreover, Confucius’s words are terse and concise, leaving room for various interpretations, thereby promoting a lively class discussion.

When designing class activities, I include some of the discussion questions from the reading material on the website into my own questions in order to unpack both the meaning of his sayings in their own cultural context, as well as their current appeal in contemporary society. These questions are well-designed for high school and undergraduate instructors. The first few questions come from the website and are always based on a primary source in order to ensure the students understand the text. I then follow up these general comprehension questions with my own questions in order to place Confucius’s sayings into a larger intellectual and social context by asking students to apply Confucian thought to modern and contemporary issues. To prepare for class discussion, I may ask students to read some passages together or invite individual students to take turns reading them aloud, followed by their interpretations of the text’s meaning and broader significance. For example, one primary source comes from “On Confucius as Teacher and Person,” which includes Confucius’s sayings on education. I assign students the following discussion questions:

Why is Confucius often called a great teacher? Please note several qualities of Confucius’s teaching philosophy as demonstrated by his sayings.
If Confucius were your teacher today, how would you evaluate his teaching approaches and methods? Would you want to attend his class? Why or why not? Students are then able to discuss these questions based on a close reading of the document itself. For instance, the students learn that Confucius broke away from the traditional education system of his time, which had been limited to teaching the sons of noble families. In contrast, he allegedly would teach anyone who was willing to learn. In addition, he taught students with different approaches according to their own situations and characters. As a teacher, he showed his eagerness to learn from other people and improve his knowledge and skills, stating that “Walking along with three people, my teacher is sure to be among them.”2

Another important Confucian thought is the concept of ren (humanity). In this section, I demonstrate that some of Confucius’s sayings possess universal value, and thus, everyone can relate Confucius’s primary beliefs regardless of their own personal knowledge and backgrounds. The discussion questions below are used to facilitate students’ understanding of this concept and allow them to compare it to other traditions:

Based on the reading section, what qualities does humanity include? Could you use some examples to illustrate Confucius’s ideas on humanity?
Humanity is a universal value in many philosophies and religions. Please discuss the similarities and differences between Confucians’ humanity and other traditions that you are familiar with, such as Christianity or Buddhism. Although Confucius’s beliefs, such as humanity, have many similarities with other philosophical and religious traditions, some of Confucius’s values, such as filial piety, are different from Western cultural traditions. Filial piety is the core of Confucian moral philosophy, but it may be difficult for students outside of the Chinese tradition to understand, thus instructors must explain it and similar concepts in detail. To this end, I provide the following discussion questions:
What are the major ideas of Confucius’s filial piety?
Why do Chinese rulers promote and advocate this concept?
If you were to apply filial piety to your family, what would happen? Do you think that filial piety applies to modern Western society? Why or why not?

To make these abstract concepts more concrete, I also ask students to offer specific examples to explain filial piety and its reciprocity. For instance, Confucius teaches that younger family members should respect their family elders, and in return, the elders have an obligation to take care of their younger family members. When explaining this, instructors should emphasize that this kind of relationship is hierarchical and that it was later advocated by rulers in different dynasties to legitimize their power by equating the ruler to the head of the family. When discussing filial piety, the instructor must also highlight its societal significance and philosophical ramifications. For instance, Confucian scholars maintained that if family members showed filial piety, then they would become peaceful and harmonious. Moreover, because society consists of many small families that make up the state, following this logic, a society that practices filial piety will naturally become well organized. Therefore, these scholars argued, a ruler should not rely on severe laws and regulations to govern his state; instead, a ruler should lead by exemplary deeds and moral values. Thus, students will learn that Confucian values such as filial piety affected all aspects of traditional Chinese culture, from the individual household to the governing state itself.

After students have grappled with the original texts and their historical significance, I then assign them Jeremy Page’s 2015 Wall Street Journal article “Why China Is Turning Back to Confucius”3 in order to further demonstrate the current appeal of Confucian thought on modern Chinese society. Page begins by describing a lecture on Chinese philosophy that many senior Chinese officials attended in order to further understand Confucian values and how to apply them in their daily lives. He then discusses the causes behind this revival of traditional Chinese culture (i.e., Confucianism), such as coping with domestic social problems, legitimating the Communist Party’s rule by arguing that it has inherited the Confucian tradition, and opposing Western influence. In addition, the article briefly traces the reception of Confucianism from the 1840s to the present and discusses many ways that contemporary Chinese society commemorates Confucius, such as establishing monuments, opening Confucian academies and training centers, and holding museum exhibitions and lectures.

In class, I first briefly discuss Confucius’s fluctuating status from the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911) to the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when his thought was largely criticized and condemned. This provides a historical context behind the return that contemporary Chinese society is making toward the study and appreciation of Confucian ideology. It also enables students to understand how the traditional Confucian value of obeying a ruler’s orders is being utilized to keep the present government in power . As students discuss this article, many observe that the top Chinese leaders attend Confucian classics courses and workshops, and even tune in to national television broadcasts and lectures on Confucian thought during primetime. In addition, they discover that school textbooks include more materials that encompass traditional values, and parents send their children to learn Confucian rituals as part of their extracurricular activities. After discussing these newly developing trends in Chinese society today, students often conclude that the Chinese government wants to revive traditional Chinese culture rooted in Confucianism in order to promote the “China Dream” and build a harmonious society. Moreover, Chinese leaders want to gain wisdom from indigenous Chinese culture to help solve contemporary problems, such as government corruption and the decline of moral integrity, while simultaneously opposing strong Western political and cultural influence. However, I make sure that students also know that Confucianism is but one historical tradition that influences China’s political leaders. For example, legalism, which dates back to even before the establishment of China’s first empire, the Qin in 221 BCE, is equally influential on the policies of Chinese leaders in many ways. Historically and in contemporary times, it can sometimes have ominous results for elements of the Chinese population. Instructors interested in making sure their students have an understanding of legalism are advised to access the Columbia University Asia for Educators website.4

Record of the Grand Historian

Another important aspect of Chinese culture is Chinese history. The Shiji ( Record of the Grand Historian ), written from the late second century BCE to 86 BCE, is the foundational text of Chinese history and covers a broad historical spectrum from the mythical Yellow Emperor to Emperor Wu (156–87 BCE) of the Western Han dynasty (202 BCE–8). The class is introduced to the Shiji through a survey of its content, time span, the motivations behind its compilation, and major subdivisions within the work. For instance, students learn that the government did not sponsor the Shiji , and so did not dictate its contents. Rather, it was Sima Tan (ca. 165–110 BCE) who initially conducted the Shiji project, but his son, Sima Qian (ca. 145–86 BCE), actually compiled this monumental masterpiece in order to fulfill his father’s posthumous will. Moreover, Sima Qian fell out of favor with Emperor Wu because he defended Li Ling (134–74 BCE), a Han dynasty general, who defected to the Xiongnu nomadic tribes to the north of China. Sima Qian was ultimately punished for this by undergoing the humiliation of castration. In addition to these family and personal reasons for compiling the Shiji , Sima Qian also sought to establish a lineage of great historical figures who would otherwise have been forgotten in history. These factors strongly influenced what type of historical figures Sima Qian selected for the Shiji , the ways in which he narrated their accounts, and the conclusions he reached about them, as well as the lessons they represented for society as a whole. In general, Sima Qian emphasized the moral value and social impact of historical figures rather than their social or political status.

In my class, I select some biographies to discuss, among which is “The Biographies of the Assassin-Retainers.”5 Here I use the biography of Jing Ke (d. 227 BCE) as an example of how I lead class discussion, integrate the Shiji through film, and highlight its appeal in a contemporary context for students.6 The Jing Ke story took place toward the end of the Warring States Period (475–221 BCE), when the state of Qin had already annexed several rival states and had set its target on the state of Yan in the north. Prince Dan of Yan (d. 226 BCE) consulted his officials about this important issue, and a senior official named Tian Guang (d. 227 BCE) suggested that the prince should hire Jing Ke to assassinate the King of Qin (259–210 BCE). In order to gain an audience with the King of Qin, Jing Ke requested three items: the map of Dukang (part of Yan’s territory), a poisonous dagger, and the head of General Fan (d. 227 BCE), a traitor to the state of Qin. After obtaining these items, Jing Ke was granted an audience with the king in the Qin court. Jing Ke concealed the dagger inside the map scroll and unrolled it to its end. Suddenly, he grabbed the dagger from the scroll and attempted to kidnap the king as a hostage, but was unsuccessful. Eventually, the king and his courtiers killed Jing Ke. After reading this story, students must first summarize the text’s plot, as well as the major characters and their personalities. To engage critically in understanding the historical narrative, students discuss the following questions:

Why is Jing Ke willing to accept Prince Dan of Yan’s order and carry out this assassination?
How do you understand Jing Ke’s complex personality and psychological state? • Jing Ke was a failed assassin, yet he is glorified in Sima Qian’s record. Please consider Sima Qian’s own situation to explain why Jing Ke is immortalized and praised.
In your opinion, is Jing Ke a hero? Why or why not? Students brainstorm different points and piece them together on the whiteboard to understand the history of the Warring States, the knight-errant culture, and the reception of the Jing Ke story. In addition, I explain the possible connection between Sima Qian’s choice of Jing Ke and his own life experiences.

To relate the Jing Ke story with contemporary Chinese society, I then show students parts of two film adaptations of the tale: Chen Kaige’s The Emperor and the Assassin and Zhang Yimou’s Hero , which are available through YouTube for a nominal fee. The former follows the standard historical narration fairly closely, while the latter changes the content substantially; however, students are still able to link the story with the film. In order to make this discussion more lively, students are required to complete a homework assignment on the following questions: How have the two films adapted the Jing Ke lore? What are their major changes? How do you evaluate these changes; are they successful or not? Through this exercise, students learn that the major plot of The Emperor and the Assassin is based on historical narration, with the exception of a new character— Lady Zhao—who is not found in any historical narrative. Students are to explain why this new role might have been created. Several factors shed light on this addition: since this is a three-hour-long, big-budget movie, the director may have been considering the box office results. More importantly, the purpose behind creating this role could have been to create a more complex and romantic plot. Even the director acknowledged in an interview that “Designing such a character like Lady Zhao cannot be said to have been done out of a lack of consideration for the plot. If I produced and shot a purely twoman story, it may not have had such a good effect.”7

Lady Zhao ultimately provides a link between the King of Qin and Jing Ke. When she is young, she admires Yingzheng’s (the King of Qin) courage and political ambition. However, when she later realizes that Yingzheng occupies the state of Zhao by slaughtering many innocent people, she turns to Jing Ke for help to stop such brutality. This additional character provides new possible interpretations of the motivations behind Jing Ke’s assassination attempt, which stems not only from his loyalty to Prince Dan, but also from his righteousness in desiring to remove a brutal ruler. This modern adaptation increases the significance of Jing Ke’s mission. In Zhang’s film Hero , students identify the major change of the assassin abandoning his mission to kill the king, where the assassin instead engages in a direct dialogue with the king in the Qin court. Through their conversation, the assassin comes to understand that the king wants to defeat all other kingdoms and unify China in order to bring peace to all people under heaven. Students then discuss their implications of this change. Often, students are critical towards this adaptation because it glorifies the King of Qin and conveys a problematic and debatable message to the audience that a ruler can adopt any method or make any sacrifice to achieve one’s goal, as long as one’s intention is good or meaningful.

These films demonstrate how contemporary approaches to narrating the story of Jing Ke continue to provide different interpretations of the story and its significance. The discussion about the Jing Ke lore has switched from focusing on the details of his assassination attempt to adapting his story to fit the contemporary needs of strengthening nationalism and Chinese identity. The promotion of a strong “nation-state” ideology by Chinese leaders has played an important role in shaping this reception. Contemporary society portrays him as a national hero, a strong man attempting to remove an evil and despotic ruler, and a knight-errant who embodies the traditional moral values of China in the face of Western influence during China’s rapid economic development, through which intellectuals can further probe China’s recent past and thus bring history to life.

Poems on Things and Objects

Along with Chinese philosophy and history, literature also plays an important role in Chinese culture, particularly poetry, which was the dominant literary subgenre throughout premodern Chinese history. This section provides a creative approach not only on how to teach classical Chinese poems, but also on integrating them within a type of traditional art—blow painting. By exploring this topic, students develop a solid understanding of Chinese poetry, learn the cultural meaning of the plum blossom, and express their own appreciation for Chinese poetry. 8

The plum blossom is famous, along with the orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum, as one of “The Four Gentlemen” in China. Furthermore, it is considered one of “The Three Friends in Winter,” together with pine trees and bamboo. However, plum trees are not common in the US, nor do they carry a significant cultural value, so the topic naturally stimulates student interest. Before we approach the topic of the plum blossom, my students have already studied other Chinese poems, so I briefly review some basic features of Chinese poetry, particularly the Chinese quatrain, which is often made up of four lines with five or seven characters in each line, and regulated verse, which is often made up of eight lines, and each line includes either five or seven characters. These two types of poetry were popular in the Tang dynasty (608–907), known as the golden age of Chinese poetry.9 Next, students gather information on the cultural meaning of the plum blossom and answer the following questions: How and when do Chinese people discuss plum blossoms? What does the plum blossom mean in Chinese society? What interesting facts do you know about the plum blossom? What can you learn from the symbolic meanings of plum blossoms? Students find appropriate information online and in the library about plum blossom culture and outline their primary ideas on the topic. Through class discussion, students also discover that the plum blossom has profound cultural connotations in China. The plum blossom symbolizes courage and strength because the fragrance of plum blossoms comes out of bitterness and coldness. The plum blossom also represents endurance and perseverance because plum blossoms flower in winter while most other plants do not survive. Furthermore, the plum blossom also embodies purity and lofty ideals, possibly because they bloom in winter, often covered with snow. To explore this motif, I incorporate several poems on plum blossoms in the lesson. Here are two examples from Shao Yong (1011–1077) and Wang Anshi (1021–1086):

A Leisure Walk by Shao Yong Once upon a time, we walk leisurely for two or three miles On the way, we see four or five misty villages Six or seven temples and Eight, nine or ten branches of plum blossom10

This poem is easy to understand but demonstrates the major characteristics of Song (960–1279) poetry, which focuses on the details of daily life. The poet’s focus gradually shifts from distant scenery to a closer look at his surroundings. At the beginning, the poet is far away, so he cannot see things clearly. When he moves closer, he sees the pavilions and houses. Looking even closer, he notices plum blossoms. The language in this poem is simple and clear without any descriptive words, but students still identify the poet’s cheerful mood and recognize that this is a pleasant experience. This is typical in Shao’s poems; as modern scholar Xiaoshan Yang states, “Shao Yong was always keen on distinguishing himself as a man of true joy and leisure from those who could only ‘steal leisure’ for a fleeting moment.”11 After discussing the content of the poem, I highlight the word “misty” in the first couplet, which, rather than denoting smoke caused by fire, instead is used to depict the remote villages. Because one cannot see the villages clearly in the distance, it seems like they are surrounded by mist. Another possibility is that many families had been cooking, hence smoke from their chimneys could be obscuring the poet’s vision and creating this phenomenon.

The second poem that I use on this topic is a five-character quatrain:

Plum Blossoms by Wang Anshi In the nook of a wall a few plum sprays, In solitude blossom on the bleak winter days, From the distance, I see they cannot be snow, For a stealthy breath of perfume hither flows.12

In this quatrain, the poet encourages his readers to make use of their senses such as sight and smell. This poem does not focus on the appearance of the plum blossoms, but rather on their character and spirit. Students often note that these plum blossoms appear in the corner of a wall during winter, which is unlikely to draw the attention of many people, revealing the unique character of the poet. In addition, without much nutrients, they still manage to blossom, demonstrating their hardiness. Furthermore, the last couplet forms a reverse causality: the third line tells the reader the result of noticing that the things in the distance are not snow; the fourth line informs the readers why the poet believes this is so: they are fragrant and cannot be snow. Thus, without describing the color of the plum blossoms themselves, the reader knows that they are either a white variety or are covered by snow, so they seem like snow when one looks at them far away. In terms of language, this poem does not employ overly ornate syntax. Yet through this simple and tranquil language, the poet conveys the spirit of plum blossoms: strong endurance and vibrant life. They are not afraid of cold weather, an analogy for people who do not fear power or authority. This allows the class to understand that the subtext of Chinese poetry often has political implications. Based on students’ discussions, I further explain a possible hidden reading: this poem may also allude to the poet’s own frustrated situation, when his political reform efforts faced resistance and gradually lost the Emperor Shenzong’s (1048–1085) support. However, through such adversity, like the plum blossom in winter, he was determined not to yield.

To make this topic even more lively, I integrate blow painting into the section on plum blossom poetry. The instructor should finish a complete blow painting before class so that students can see what the final product looks like. A simple blow painting requires some basic items, such as paper plates, calligraphy brushes, ink, red paint, and water. Ideally, one should use xuan paper made of different fibers, such as blue sandalwood, rice straw, and mulberry, which is specially designed for painting and calligraphy. However, it is difficult to obtain in the US, so I use paper plates instead. The procedure is simple: first, one puts drops of ink in the middle of the paper plate, blowing the drops slowly and patiently in different directions as the first several blows shape the main stem of the tree. Then, blow a little harder, so the stem becomes thicker. Once the main stem is shaped, one can blow the ink quickly in various directions, which become different branches. One may use a straw to do the blowing to expedite the whole process. After the basic painting is completed, one may use a brush to dip into the red ink and put the petals or flowers around the branches and twigs. This combination of poetry appreciation and blow painting demonstration enables students to understand Chinese culture more vividly and concretely.

Many colleges and universities have some type of traditional Chinese culture courses, whether they be premodern Chinese literature, history, philosophy, or other China-related courses. This article offers personal insight and unique methods of diversifying approaches to teaching Chinese culture effectively. It investigates avenues for bringing traditional Chinese culture to life by demonstrating how to integrate multimedia (such as recent news and films), as well as fine arts (such as blow painting of plum blossoms) into a culture class. These examples and approaches, including discussion questions, are used to explore the current appeal of traditional Chinese culture, which continues to shape Chinese identity and character. In addition, these practices include useful materials for designing extracurricular activities in Chinese clubs, film presentations, or guest lectures. A combination of Chinese culture, multimedia, and hands-on experience in the classroom has proven to increase students’ interest and motivation, as well as broaden their horizons with regards to Chinese civilization and society.

Acknowledgements :

This article is made possible by Valparaiso University’s Research Expense Grant and the East Asian Studies Library Travel Grant of the University of Chicago. I also appreciate useful comments from two anonymous reviewers, EAA Editor Dr. Lucien Ellington, Dr. David Chai, Amanda S. Robb, and James Churchill.

Essays on Chinese Culture

Most of us can write a Chinese culture essay without spending hours on research, as the world has been obsessed with Asian culture for years now. The culture of China began to form as early as 3000 BC. Most Chinese traditions have survived and are practiced to this day. Chinese value family and hard work, they celebrate traditional holidays and honor local customs – China has retained its abundant culture like no other country in the world. That is why writing Chinese culture essays is such an enjoyable endeavor! Don’t you agree? Take a look at some great Chinese culture essay samples below and feel free to explore our favorite essay samples for insightful ideas. If you are less enthusiastic about essays on Chinese culture than we are, know that you can always rely on us to complete essays in your stead.

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Even though having a woman rule as emperor during the Tang dynasty's most glorious years would have been highly unnatural in accordance with Confucian beliefs, Wu Zetian, also known as Wu Zhao, was the only woman to do so in Chinese history. (Wills 202). Wu Zetian was Emperor Taizong's concubine,...

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The reading of the Ching highlights aspects of ordering, proportionality, order, and patterns. These components, along with other closely related elements, form the core of proper urban and even rural design, albeit with minor variations due to the variety of environments. Planning and architecture professionals have become interested in the...

Chinese Culture and Health Issues Chinese culture is made up of numerous and diverse groups of people depending on ethnicity and lineage. As a result, providing the optimal treatment for the population will necessitate a thorough understanding of the population from a pharmacological standpoint. As such, the primary goal of the...

Introduction Several literary authors have previously written about family and kinship; many of them have used their own personal experiences to explain the mortal bond that exists between people. Pearl Buck and The Good Earth As the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary, Pearl Buck spent the most of her early years immersed...

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The Study's Goal: Explaining the Suppression of Art during the RevolutionThe study's goal will be to explain how the revolution, in particular, contributed to the suppression of art. The paper will use a variety of sources to accomplish this, based on the evidence of their credibility outlined below.Barmé's Contribution: Studying...

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As its appreciation invites others to marvel at the artist's distinctive point of view, art transcends cultural, political, and social barriers. There are various forms of artistic expression, and each one has characteristics that relate more to its genesis. Asian artworks are particularly valued around the world because they show...

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Mao Zedong was in charge of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which took place between 1966 and 1976. (Cornell University). The introduction, propagation, and installation of socialism as the dominant political ideology in the nation were the main goals of the revolution. To do this, Mao urged the nation's youth to...

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Undoubtedly, the Chinese Civil Service Curriculum is the longest academic assessment system in human history. It was formed around 146 BCE and, in 1905, was eventually abolished. The test, taken only by boys, qualified applicants to work for the imperial government and helped form China's socio-cultural, political, academic and economic spheres....

The meanings of red envelopes: Promises and lies at a Singaporean Chinese funeral The article The meanings of red envelopes: Promises and lies at a Singaporean Chinese funeral written by Ruth E. Toulson, revolves around a large question: Why do red envelopes appear at Singaporean Chinese funerals? The creator...

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Empress Wu s colonial influence on the Chinese Patriarchal Culture In the history of China, the majority of empires were governed and ruled by men. In the situation, however, where women came to power, such as Empress Wu, major impacts were felt, especially if the former leadership stressed the patriarchy system....

In studying the Chinese faith, the principle of Yang and Yin is essential (Wang 215). The Yang and Yin religion idea reflects a circle form sign that helps decipher how things function in the Chinese religion. While the inner black and white circle symbolizes the relationships of this dynamism known as...

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Nature in chinese culture.

Wine pouring vessel (Gong)

Night-Shining White

Attributed to Dong Yuan

Finches and bamboo

Emperor Huizong

Scholar viewing a waterfall

Service with Decoration of Flowers and Birds

Landscapes after old masters

Dong Qichang

Windblown bamboo

Brush holder with “Ode to the Pavilion of the Inebriated Old Man”

Zhang Xihuang

Grazing Horse

Stately Pines on Mount Hua

Department of Asian Art , The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

In no other cultural tradition has nature played a more important role in the arts than in that of China. Since China’s earliest dynastic period, real and imagined creatures of the earth—serpents, bovines, cicadas, and dragons —were endowed with special attributes, as revealed by their depiction on ritual bronze vessels . In the Chinese imagination, mountains were also imbued since ancient times with sacred power as manifestations of nature’s vital energy ( qi ). They not only attracted the rain clouds that watered the farmer’s crops, they also concealed medicinal herbs, magical fruits, and alchemical minerals that held the promise of longevity . Mountains pierced by caves and grottoes were viewed as gateways to other realms—”cave heavens” ( dongtian ) leading to Daoist paradises where aging is arrested and inhabitants live in harmony.

From the early centuries of the Common Era, men wandered in the mountains not only in quest of immortality but to purify the spirit and find renewal. Daoist and Buddhist holy men gravitated to sacred mountains to build meditation huts and establish temples. They were followed by pilgrims, travelers, and sightseers: poets who celebrated nature’s beauty , city dwellers who built country estates to escape the dust and pestilence of crowded urban centers, and, during periods of political turmoil, officials and courtiers who retreated to the mountains as places of refuge.

Early Chinese philosophical and historical texts contain sophisticated conceptions of the nature of the cosmos. These ideas predate the formal development of the native belief systems of Daoism and Confucianism, and, as part of the foundation of Chinese culture, they were incorporated into the fundamental tenets of these two philosophies. Similarly, these ideas strongly influenced Buddhism when it arrived in China around the first century A.D. Therefore, the ideas about nature described below, as well as their manifestation in Chinese gardens , are consistent with all three belief systems.

The natural world has long been conceived in Chinese thought as a self-generating, complex arrangement of elements that are continuously changing and interacting. Uniting these disparate elements is the Dao, or the Way. Dao is the dominant principle by which all things exist, but it is not understood as a causal or governing force. Chinese philosophy tends to focus on the relationships between the various elements in nature rather than on what makes or controls them. According to Daoist beliefs, man is a crucial component of the natural world and is advised to follow the flow of nature’s rhythms. Daoism also teaches that people should maintain a close relationship with nature for optimal moral and physical health.

Within this structure, each part of the universe is made up of complementary aspects known as yin and yang. Yin, which can be described as passive, dark, secretive, negative, weak, feminine, and cool, and yang, which is active, bright, revealed, positive, masculine, and hot, constantly interact and shift from one extreme to the other, giving rise to the rhythm of nature and unending change.

As early as the Han dynasty , mountains figured prominently in the arts. Han incense burners typically resemble mountain peaks, with perforations concealed amid the clefts to emit incense, like grottoes disgorging magical vapors. Han mirrors are often decorated with either a diagram of the cosmos featuring a large central boss that recalls Mount Kunlun, the mythical abode of the Queen Mother of the West and the axis of the cosmos, or an image of the Queen Mother of the West enthroned on a mountain. While they never lost their cosmic symbolism or association with paradises inhabited by numinous beings, mountains gradually became a more familiar part of the scenery in depictions of hunting parks, ritual processions, temples, palaces, and gardens. By the late Tang dynasty , landscape painting had evolved into an independent genre that embodied the universal longing of cultivated men to escape their quotidian world to commune with nature. The prominence of landscape imagery in Chinese art has continued for more than a millennium and still inspires contemporary artists .

Department of Asian Art. “Nature in Chinese Culture.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cnat/hd_cnat.htm (October 2004)

Additional Essays by Department of Asian Art

Department of Asian Art. “ Mauryan Empire (ca. 323–185 B.C.) .” (October 2000)
Department of Asian Art. “ Zen Buddhism .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ Chinese Cloisonné .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Chinese Gardens and Collectors’ Rocks .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Landscape Painting in Chinese Art .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–220 A.D.) .” (October 2000)
Department of Asian Art. “ Kushan Empire (ca. Second Century B.C.–Third Century A.D.) .” (October 2000)
Department of Asian Art. “ Qin Dynasty (221–206 B.C.) .” (October 2000)
Department of Asian Art. “ Rinpa Painting Style .” (October 2003)
Department of Asian Art. “ Jōmon Culture (ca. 10,500–ca. 300 B.C.) .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ The Kano School of Painting .” (October 2003)
Department of Asian Art. “ Woodblock Prints in the Ukiyo-e Style .” (October 2003)
Department of Asian Art. “ Traditional Chinese Painting in the Twentieth Century .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127) .” (October 2001)
Department of Asian Art. “ Period of the Northern and Southern Dynasties (386–581) .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279) .” (October 2001)
Department of Asian Art. “ Tang Dynasty (618–907) .” (October 2001)
Department of Asian Art. “ Yayoi Culture (ca. 300 B.C.–300 A.D.) .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) .” (October 2001)
Department of Asian Art. “ Art of the Pleasure Quarters and the Ukiyo-e Style .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Scholar-Officials of China .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Kofun Period (ca. 300–710) .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ Shunga Dynasty (ca. Second–First Century B.C.) .” (October 2000)
Department of Asian Art. “ Lacquerware of East Asia .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Painting Formats in East Asian Art .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Asuka and Nara Periods (538–794) .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ Heian Period (794–1185) .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ Kamakura and Nanbokucho Periods (1185–1392) .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ Momoyama Period (1573–1615) .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ Neolithic Period in China .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Muromachi Period (1392–1573) .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ Samurai .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ Shinto .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ Seasonal Imagery in Japanese Art .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Shang and Zhou Dynasties: The Bronze Age of China .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Shōguns and Art .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Art of the Edo Period (1615–1868) .” (October 2003)

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Why learn more about traditional Chinese culture?

Wherever you are in the world, modern China is increasingly influencing daily life (even though you may not have noticed). So learning more about China, its language and culture, is important. The more you know about the China of the past, the more you can understand and appreciate the China of the present.

But how exactly can you personally benefit by learning about China's history and traditional culture? Read on to find out our take!

When we tell people that we, two British expats, opened a company that teaches people about traditional Chinese culture, and allows them to experience things like calligraphy, painting and martial arts, the reaction we often get is "Why?" and "You are British! You should teach British culture! It's easier! You'll earn more money!" Fair points, certainly.

For me personally, I would always say simply that I love traditional Chinese culture, and want to share that with others. At first, I hoped that answer would suffice, but as time has passed, I've come to realise that perhaps a more comprehensive answer is required. Of course, I don't need to explain myself, but as a business owner and proponent of something as vague as traditional Chinese culture, I thought now was a good time to put words to something that had previously been something I just knew.

In this article, I cover three main points:

- What we mean when we say traditional Chinese culture

- The main benefits of learning about traditional Chinese culture

- Whether China still has traditional Chinese culture

It's my hope that by sharing my thoughts on this topic, it might encourage people to take a greater interest in studying traditional Chinese culture, or at least have a better appreciation of the value that can be found in it and in the people who take the time to study, experience and promote it.

What do we mean when we say traditional Chinese culture?

Before discussing the benefits of experiencing traditional Chinese culture, we should first clarify what we mean by the phrase 'traditional Chinese culture', as it covers a huge range of topics and the phrase itself is open to widely varying interpretations.

At its most simple (and widely recognised) definition, culture can be broken down into five main categories (though of course, so many aspects could be included); language, religion or philosophy, food, the arts and the people. These are the general areas of influence that make up a society. Tradition, for the purposes of this discourse, is defined by the Merriam Webster dictionary as:

a: an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior (such as a religious practice or a social custom)

b: the handing down of information, beliefs, and customs by word of mouth or by example from one generation to another without written instruction

c: cultural continuity in social attitudes, customs, and institutions

Therefore, when talking about traditional Chinese culture, specifically as presented by companies such as ours, we are referring to the language, philosophies, food, arts and crafts and customs from thousands of years ago up to the turn of the 20th century, that have been passed down through the generations.

And as anyone who has heard anything about China knows, with a history of an estimated 5000 years (and increasing evidence that it may be even longer), that covers a lot of culture! In order to present information in an easily digestible way, we do need to choose a focus for what we as a company offer, so we have chosen Han culture. That doesn't mean we don't value or respect the other cultures China has to offer, but this is the one we have most access to, and therefore can best offer a clear understanding of. In the future we may consider offering access to the intangible Chinese cultural heritage of China's numerous minority ethnic groups.

Benefits of Learning About and Experiencing Traditional Chinese Culture

In August 2017, Jean-Pierre Lehmann, emeritus professor at IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland, wrote in an opinion piece for the South China Morning Post “it is dispiriting and indeed alarming to see how ignorant the West is about China and, from what I can see, intends to remain so.” While perhaps a little harsh (and while Professor Lehmann was focusing specifically on Hong Kong's role on the world stage), there is surely some truth to the statement. Whether through choice or lack of exposure, much of the world only knows China from what they see on TV or read in newspapers, which often has a negative slant, dictated by political or business tensions.

As Professor Lehmann noted, “Learning about Chinese philosophy, history, music, painting, calligraphy and literature will bring culturally enriching rewards.”

Chinese culture, both modern and traditional, can seem very ‘alien’ to many westerners. But even with a world of resources available to you to learn more about China, why exactly should you do so? While most articles and opinion pieces focus on the business and career benefits of learning more about China's culture and history, what about for everyday people, both those who live in China and those observing around the world? How can learning about China benefit them and you?

It's fun and interesting!

Putting aside any deeper reasoning behind learning more about traditional Chinese culture, and the history and philosophies behind it, the simplest reason to experience the various activities that come under the Chinese culture banner is that it can be a lot of fun!

Activities that can be classified as 'traditional culture' cover such a huge range that you are bound to find something you'll enjoy doing. Whether it's painting and calligraphy, dough figurine sculpting or knot making, taichi or fan dancing, there is something for every taste. With a good teacher and environment, all of them can be very enjoyable. And as with any fun activity, it can lead to a whole range of benefits, such as it becoming a new hobby or making new friends. Plus it's interesting to find out about customs that are different from your own!

Because knowledge negates fear, misunderstanding and distrust

While various media outlets bombard us daily with their take on the current situation in China, often ignoring the historical and culture context of such situations, if you take the time to learn about something for yourself, you will see issues often have more than one side, and can in fact be multi-layered. The culture of China, both modern and traditional, can appear quite different and at times even mysterious to those who have never experienced it before. When we don't understand something, it is human nature for that to lead to fear. And as we all know, fear can lead to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate always leads to dark places. And the best counter to fear is knowledge.

That's not to say that you personally have fear or misconceptions about China. But perhaps the more you personally learn and understand, the more you can share your insight with others who don't know China so well. Of course, that means more than taking one calligraphy class or trying out taichi one afternoon, but each experience you have brings you closer to answering any questions you have and closing the gap between your perception and reality.

To facilitate understanding and interaction

Whether you are a business person with ties to China, someone travelling here short-term for work or leisure or an expat with plans to stay for a while, the more you know about a place, the better you understand it. And the better you understand something, the more you can benefit from and enjoy it. But what does that mean, in real terms? An example is dealing with culture shock: getting to know more about a country's culture is the best way to negate it. Not everyone suffers from this in the same way, but if you are worried about what to expect in China, or are finding it hard to adapt to life after arriving, taking a few cultural workshops can help with your understanding and with the way you perceive the country and its people, and the way they perceive you, especially in China. Chinese people are generally very pleased when they meet foreigners who know something of the culture or language, so this can be a great way to get closer to neighbors, colleagues or people you meet in your daily life. People are, and the culture in general is, very accepting of visitors, even if they make errors in their daily dealings. Knowing more about the culture can generally help avoid awkward situations and business faux pas, and can even save you time and money! What's not to like about that?

Traditional culture is prevalent in the lives of modern people in China. The philosophies of thousands of years ago are still visible and influencing the culture today, even if not recognised by name. In the same way that understanding the ideas of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers or the Renaissance might give you better insight into the way of life in modern western society, so the study of traditional Chinese culture and philosophies can aid in our understanding of life, culture and society in modern China.

To help with language learning

If you are serious about knowing more about China, the best way to do that is by learning the language - after all, language is culture. Numerous concepts, everything from amount of eye contact to the name of an item used for worship, can be unique to a culture, and therefore unique to the language used to describe them. Language also tells us about how people think and interact with the world. Of course, while Mandarin is the lingua franca, when dealing with a country the size of China, it's important to remember that both culture and local language vary widely in different areas.

Whereas learning the English language can really help with cultural understanding, and vice versa (to pick a random word: knowing the etymology of the word avocado can really help you understand the history of the fruit and the culture in which it originated!) the same is possibly even more true with the Chinese language. As written Chinese is logographic, knowing the origin of the characters can help in not just learning the language and how to use it, but further deepening your immersion in the culture itself.

Take the word 武 (wǔ) for example. A simple translation of the character is 'martial' or 'of war'. But what about the deeper meaning? Well, if you break down the character wu, it actually contains three parts, 'one 一', 'weapon 戈' and 'stop 止'. So we can see that 武 actually means to stop war or to stop fighting, to bring about peace, thus martial arts can be seen as a way to bring about peace. But in fact, that's the comparatively modern understanding. Originally, the component 止 meant feet, or movement, so wu did indeed refer to martial or war like activities. Through the study of culture, we can see how language and understanding of characters have changed and adapted to meet the needs and wants of modern users.

Traditional Chinese culture gives us insight into leading a happier and more balanced life

Traditional Chinese culture, and by extension modern Chinese society, is built upon China's three main philosophies; Confucianism, Daoism and Chan Buddhism. While different in their approaches, all three of those schools of thought promote mindfulness (though not named as such) as a means to achieve peace and harmony with yourself and everything around you.

But how do the three philosophies relate to the kind of Chinese cultural activities that can be experienced and enjoyed in daily life? Many of the most renowned Chinese masters from throughout history have been greatly influenced by them, incorporating ideas such as mindfulness, emptiness, and dynamic balance into their work. Painting and calligraphy, for example, require you to be simultaneously relaxed yet focused and were seen as a way to cultivate mindfulness.

And it's not just the classical arts (painting, poetry, calligraphy) which contain those philosophies at their heart. Nearly all forms of Chinese art, food and traditional customs have aspects that were influenced and informed by philosophy.

We see Confucian influence in Chinese papercutting, for example, which was a way for common people to make representations of 'luxurious' offerings to their ancestors, and a way to observe and be mindful of the natural world and their place in it.

We see Buddhist influence in the act of using art as a way to observe the world from a neutral point of view, and simply 'be in the moment' when conveying your observations through the medium of your chosen art form. We see Daoist practices in the idea that the art you are creating is not something new, or separate from yourself, but is in fact an extension of you, the artist, and in creating the art (or food, or poetry etc.) you let qi (life spirit/essence) flow through you on its way out into the world, as a positive force.

Though it is true to say that the connections with and understanding of traditional philosophies, as originally presented through traditional culture, are less prevalent today than in the past, those principles are still carried forward by traditionally trained modern day artists who seek to emulate the work done by the masters of the past, and for the same reasons, to spread the philosophical teachings, and to give people a way to both observe those concepts through their art, and to inspire others to cultivate their own mindfulness, balance, harmony and respect in their own lives.

It should be noted that none of these ideas are connected with formalised religion or indeed require 'faith' of any kind. While certain groups do treat the ideas presented by teachers such as Buddha, Confucius and Laozi as a religion, together with associated rules, rituals and doctrine, none of those teachers ever presented their ideas as religious. As such, everyone, regardless of their own belief system, or lack thereof, can partake in and benefit from ideas like mindfulness and qi. As a result, whether it is through painting, knotting, martial arts, cooking, or whatever repeated practice takes your interest, by using these concepts to help focus and calm the mind, you can bring balance to the unbalanced and create a positive life habit that will only benefit you more and more as time goes by.

Has China lost its 'true' traditional roots?

There are some who might argue that the traditional Chinese culture we have access to today in China has been adapted simply with 'showiness' or 'commercial viability' in mind, and 'drained' of anything resembling traditional values or philosophies. Is that true?

As someone who has lived in China for more than two decades, indulged myself in the study and discussion of traditional Chinese culture, and of course set up a company to help others experience it for themselves, I feel fairly qualified to say that yes, perhaps it doesn't embrace its traditional roots the same way as other regions, like Hong Kong, do. Or maybe it's not that the traditions aren't embraced, but that simply their origins, and original intentions, are not so widely understood.

Take taichi, as an easy example. Wandering around an average park on any morning of the week, you may see countless people practicing taichi, usually in bright clothing, moving softly to music or waving colourful fans. Asked why they are practising, the majority will answer 'for health reasons'. Asked about the martial arts aspects of taichi, it would be quite common to hear practitioners tell you that taichi isn't a martial art, and is only for health.

While taichi is most definitely good for overall health and well-being, to suggest that it has no martial aspects, and could not be used for self-defence (regardless of how complicated or how long you would need to train taichi to be able to actually use it in a combat situation) is simply being ignorant of the roots of taichi. Of course, that is more the error of the teacher, who themselves may not have learnt anything beyond the most shallow aspects of the art, but the fact still remains that a traditional aspect of the culture is being lost, because teachers aren't teaching it, and students aren't taking the time to enquire further.

And that doesn't just apply to something like martial arts. From the Buddhist inspiration for some of the most spectacular paintings, to Daoist influence in Chinese arts and crafts as discussed above, many people simply aren't aware of how essential traditional culture was to their history, nor how it is still very much present in their daily lives now. That doesn't mean those roots are lost, just that people simply aren't aware of them.

It's also true that traditional Chinese culture has never seen as much promotion as it does now. The world is interested in learning more about China, its history and culture, and so, the powers that be have often taken steps to make that knowledge more appealing or accessible, to better suit their perceptions of what the audience wants and how they want it.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Everything evolves and adapts to keep it relevant. And just because it's being made easier to access and understand, it doesn't mean it's losing its value or 'roots'. Sure, maybe 10 people will go to a calligraphy class, and get to hear about a little history, try a few strokes, maybe take a nice piece of art home with them. Nothing too deep or profound. But maybe one or two of those people really enjoy the experience, feel they want to know more about it, and so take the time and effort to look further into the art, its origins, philosophies and connections with TCM and mindfulness. Yes, they should have access to more in-depth information if they want it, but they might not have developed that interest in the first place if they hadn't had such easy access to begin with!

As long as we understand that what we are teaching or experiencing is simply the tip of the iceberg, with thousands of years of history and culture behind it, which interested parties have the ability to explore and experience for themselves if they wish, those 'roots' are not lost, and this method in fact gives us a way to help preserve and promote traditional Chinese culture further.

For an easy to understand example, beginning as early as the start of the 20th century but really coming into practical force in the early 1950's, the simplification of Chinese characters was seen as a way to rapidly improve education and literacy for the general populace in China, and to help China's development into a modern world power. Could it be argued that the true meaning or 'roots' of the language were lost in the transition to simplified characters? Possibly. But it's hard to argue against an adaptation that allowed easier access to knowledge and education, and the benefits thereof. And traditional characters weren't 'lost' - they are still used today on the Chinese mainland by those in cultural fields, in formal contexts, and even by young people seeking to be different.

Another example of this is the iconic Shaolin Temple, under the leadership of venerable Abbot Shi Yongxin. Since taking over the running of temple, Abbot Shi Yongxin instituted numerous changes, such as speeding up the opening up multiple branches overseas, starting a dedicated media company to sell books and videos, and working to promote the Temple across many media and entertainment outlets.

As a result of these efforts, the Abbott is often accused online of only being interested in money, of turning the temple into a 'money making machine' and abandoning all the important traditions of the temple, and in fact of Buddhism itself! However, from the extensive time we have spent at the temple, talking with the monks there and being involved in aspects of the temple's daily work, we can say the truth is in fact very different. Aside from the fact that Buddhism has no problem with people making money (nor even being rich!), what people don't seem to realise is that the Abbot simply understands the necessity of adapting and providing access in new ways to meet the needs of new audiences and channels. By making it easier to learn about Shaolin history and culture, he is helping to create a whole new generation of potential students (both of Buddhism and martial arts). Sure, not all of them train or meditate 8 hours a day, read every scripture or practice every technique and dedicate their lives to the temple, but those who do (as a result of the initial exposure they might not have gotten otherwise) will be the ones who carry on the traditions to the next generation, and in doing so safeguard the lineage of the Shaolin Temple.

As you can see, we don't believe that modern China is giving up on the essence or roots of its traditional culture, but is finding new ways to present it. Yes, in the march to modernisation and accessibility, we do risk losing something along the way, and steps must be taken to preserve those treasures for future generations. Whether people take the time to go deeper and 'peel back the onion', will be a matter of personal choice. But as teachers, facilitators, fans and proponents, it's our job, our duty, to make people interested enough to want to do so, and help them find that information if they choose to look for it.

What started out as a short look at some of the reasons why learning about traditional Chinese culture is so useful turned into a much longer discussion on a much wider topic. However, despite its length, this was still just a very brief look at our answers to three of the most common questions we get asked, as owners and operators of a Chinese culture company. Of course, it could be argued that we are biased, having been here so long and running the company that we do. And that might be true. But hopefully from what we've written you can get an idea of some of the reasons why we have stayed here so long.

While not intended to be in any way academic, and simply presented as our opinion on a topic we obviously hold very close, we hope something written here will spur an interest so that you find out more for yourself. The study of traditional Chinese culture offers so many benefits, no matter your reason for being interested or whether you decide to find out more in your home country or in China itself. In either case, the benefits you reap will be a question of how much time you choose to dedicate to finding out more and how deep you want to go.

We're not here to suggest any culture, or the teachings and experiences therein, are any better than any other. Everyone has their own path and will learn their life lessons in whichever way is best and most accessible for them. For us, we found those lessons clearest in traditional Chinese culture, which is what lead to our love of China and our passion for sharing the culture with others. If by doing so, we can help people understand China better, or indeed gain any of the benefits we have listed above, then we would definitely consider it work well done.

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Home > The Governance of China > The Governance of China II > Cultural Confidence

Confidence in Chinese Culture

Xi Jinping: The Governance of China II Updated: 2021-12-27

Confidence in Chinese Culture*

November 30, 2016

I hope we all have full confidence in our culture and work to lift our national spirit with literary and art works. The realization of national rejuvenation requires us to have confidence in the path, theories, system and culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics. A good understanding of and strong confidence in China's profound culture are the prerequisites for the creation of excellent works with distinct national features and unique personal style. Writers and artists should excel in learning from the best of the country's cultural heritage, and siphon energy from it. They should have full confidence in the aspirations, values, vitality and creativity of their own culture, and produce works of art that give strength to the Chinese people on their march towards the future.

Culture is the soul of both a country and a nation. History and reality have proven that a nation which abandons or betrays its own history and culture cannot prosper, and is likely to end in tragedy. Confidence in culture is basic, deep-rooted, and reaches far and wide; it is a force that is more fundamental, stable and persistent. Increasing confidence in our own culture is critical to the prospects of our country, to our cultural security, and to the independence of our national character. Without confidence in culture, there is no way to create works that are hard-hitting, unique and charming.

Human history tells us that all nations across the globe, without exception, are deeply influenced by excellent art and literature as well as by gifted writers and artists in each and every phase of their historical development. The spirit of the Chinese nation is embodied in the striving of the Chinese people and their achievements, in the cultural life of the Chinese people, in all the marvelous works created by the Chinese nation over thousands of years, and also in the fantastic creative activities of all Chinese writers and artists.

The Chinese nation has created numerous brilliant works at every step of its historical course, such as Book of Songs, Songs of Chu , fu poetry of the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220), poems of the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties, operas of the Yuan Dynasty (1206-1368), and novels of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1616- 1911) dynasties, that give birth to the splendid history of Chinese art and literature. It is the prolific literary and artistic creativity of the Chinese nation, our marvelous achievements, and confidence in culture that make us so proud.

Each era has its unique art and literature as well as its unique spirit. Classical art and literature in any era epitomize the social life and spirit of that era with coincident traces and features. Only when the arts of an era are closely related to the nation and share weal and woe with its people, can they air resonant voices. Writers and artists should follow the pulse of the times, respond to the call of the times, listen to the voice of the times, and brave the challenges of the times.

There is a universally applicable law across the whole world throughout history: Art and literature rise and prosper at the beginning of a new era; they change as the momentum changes, march along with their time, and synchronize with their time in rhythm and wavelength. At every critical juncture of human development, art and literature are the harbinger of social progress, heralding periodic change and social transformation. Aloof from booming life and the zeitgeist, those writers and artists who indulge in self-admiration are bound to be marginalized by society.

The significance of any work of art and literature lies in the ideas and values contained in it. All forms of expression are but a means to transmit the ideas and values. A work devoid of ideas and values is worthless no matter what dazzling forms of expression are adopted. Our core socialist values fully represent the spirit of contemporary China and serve as the cultural and ethical cornerstone that coalesces China's strength. Our writers and artists should undertake the principal task of developing and promoting the core socialist values and create excellent works carrying the distinct brand and style of China by following Chinese ways of thinking, expression of emotions and aesthetical preferences.

Since our motherland gives us the strongest support while our heroes best represent our nation, singing the praises of our motherland and our heroes is the eternal theme and the most touching chapter of our literary and artistic creations. To ignite the sense of national pride and honor of all Chinese people, we should follow this patriotic theme, describe a beautiful China, and tell the best stories of our nation through striking language and vivid images. We must hold our heroes in great respect, present them and their stories in a respectful way, promote them in our art and literature, and help our people develop positive viewpoints on history, nation, state, and culture. Our art and literature should exhibit energetic efforts on behalf of reform and opening up, socialist modernization, and a fruitful, progressive and united China, to encourage all our people to march towards a promising future.

Strengthening cultural confidence is nothing but empty talk without perceiving and applying the history of the Chinese nation. History is a mirror, through which we can better see the world and life and understand ourselves; history is also a sage whose admonition can help us better understand the past, grasp the present, and face the future. There is a Chinese verse: "Our imagination expressed in literary and artistic creation can reach any point in time throughout history and every corner of the whole world in the blink of an eye." 1 Writers and artists struggling in search of inspiration and profound ideas should seek them in historical materials.

Our cultural legacy has provided writers and artists with abundant nourishment and sent their imagination flying. But writers and artists must not portray past events or persons merely through their unbridled imagination or by resorting to historical nihilism. No writers or artists can accurately reconstruct what has happened in the past, but they have the duty to tell the truth about our history and let the people know what are the most valuable in our tradition. Literary and artistic works that make travesty of history indicate that the author is not serious about history, that he is not serious about his own creations. Such works will not have a place in the literary and artistic pantheon. Only if we develop a sound outlook on history, show respect for our tradition and present the past through proper artistic means can our works stand the test of time, find their proper place in our time and pass on to posterity.

The Chinese culture is both historical and contemporary, belonging both to the Chinese nation and the whole world. Art and literature must take root in the land where they were born and grew up to reflect reality, strengthen confidence, and absorb energy, if they are to hold against the impact of other cultures. This echoes with a Chinese poem which goes, "When we eat the fruit, we think of the tree that bore it; when we drink water, we think of its source." 2

We have to bear in mind the essence of Chinese culture, learn from foreign cultures, and look to the future. We need to complete a creative transformation in cultural inheritance, and try to surpass those from whom we learn. We hope to create excellent works that embody the essence of the Chinese culture, reflect the Chinese people's aesthetic pursuits, spread the values of contemporary China, and are in line with the world's progressive trends. We have to present our literature and art in the international arena with distinct Chinese features, in a distinctive Chinese style and Chinese ethos.

* Part of the speech at the opening ceremony of the 10th National Congress of China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and the Ninth National Congress of China Writers Association.

Notes

1 Lu Ji: The Art of Writing (Wen Fu) . Lu Ji (261-303) was a writer and calligrapher of the Western Jin Dynasty.

2 Yu Xin: "Poems to the Tune of Zhi" (Zhi Diao Qu). Yu Xin (513-581) was a writer during the Northern and Southern Dynasties.

(Not to be republished for any commercial or other purposes.)

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Journey into the World of Chinese Tea

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Join CLI and learn Chinese with your personal team of Mandarin teachers online or in person at the CLI Center in Guilin , China.

China is synonymous with tea, and tea with China. In fact, the history of tea in China is almost as long as the history of China itself. Despite the recent rise of coffee, Chinese tea culture continues to enjoy great popularity. Read on to learn about the past, present and future of tea in China.

Table of Contents

Shennong: The Mythical Father of Chinese Medicine

Early archeological and historical evidence, the classic of tea by lu yu, tea during the ming and qing dynasties, the east india company and robert fortune, we really mean tea, camellia sinensis tea, types of chinese teas, honorable mentions, we must not forget herbal "teas", last but not least, nǎichá, top 5 recommended chinese teas, chinese tea ceremonies gain in popularity, how to conduct a chinese tea ceremony, everything tea, how much coffee do people drink in china, the chinese tea industry marches on, chinese vocabulary related to chinese tea culture.

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The History of Tea in China

The history of Chinese tea (茶 chá ) begins with Shennong (神农 S hénnóng ), a mythical personage said to be the father of Chinese agriculture and Traditional Chinese Medicine .

Legend has it that Shennong accidentally discovered tea as he was boiling water to drink while sitting under a Camellia sinensis tree. Some leaves from the tree fell into the water, infusing it with a refreshing aroma. Shennong took a sip, found it enjoyable, and thus, tea was born.

Shennong is considered the father of Chinese agriculture.

Chinese mythology aside, archeological evidence has been found indicating that tea was used as a medicine by the elite as early as the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE).

Tea didn’t achieve widespread popularity as an everyday beverage in China until the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE), however. Chinese Buddhist monks were some of the first to develop the habit of drinking tea. Its caffeine content helped them concentrate during long hours of prayer and meditation.

Much of the information we have about early Chinese tea culture comes from The Classic of Tea (茶经 C hájīng ), written around 760 CE by Lu Yu (陆羽 L ù Yǔ ), an orphan who grew up cultivating and drinking tea in a Buddhist monastery.

The Classic of Tea describes early Tang dynasty tea culture and explains how to grow and prepare tea.

In Lu Yu’s day, tea leaves were compressed into tea bricks , which were sometimes used as currency . When it was time to drink the tea, it was ground into a powder and mixed with water using a whisk to create a frothy beverage.

Although this type of powdered tea is no longer common in China, it was brought from China to Japan during the Tang dynasty and lives on today in Japanese matcha .

During the Ming dynasty (1368–1644 CE), tea bricks were replaced with loose leaf tea by imperial decree. This change was meant to make life easier for farmers since the traditional method of creating tea bricks was quite labor intensive.

Loose leaf tea is still the most common form of tea found in China today.

Tea was introduced in Britain in the mid-1600’s and British demand for tea soon created a trade imbalance with China. To correct it, Britain began exporting opium to China.

After China tried to ban opium, Britain launched the mid-19th century Opium Wars to force the trade to continue.

Although the wars achieved their stated goal, British merchants began to worry about the viability of continuing to rely on tea from the Chinese market. Soon, the East India Company sent Robert Fortune , a Scottish botanist and adventurer, to steal the secrets of tea-making from China.

Fortune’s stolen information, plants and seeds were then used to start large-scale tea production in India.

Indian tea production quickly outstripped that of China, and China lost its long-standing monopoly on the international tea trade.

The Chinese tea industry went into decline, and China has only recently regained its status as the world’s leading tea exporter.

Robert Fortune

Popular Types of Tea in China

Today, most Chinese tea is loose leaf tea that’s steeped in boiling water, either in a teapot (茶壶 cháhú ) or directly in a thermos or glass, depending on the type of tea being consumed.

Drinking tea made from tea bags is uncommon in China.

“Tea” is used as a catch-all term for many different herbal brews in the West. In the strictest sense, however, the word “tea” only applies to beverages made from the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant.

Contrary to popular belief, the differences in taste and color seen in different types of Chinese tea are not due to the use of different kinds of tea leaves. Rather, they are due to differences in the production and manufacturing process.

The type of tea produced is determined by the level of oxidation the tea leaves are allowed to undergo before the process is stopped by heating the leaves. In China, tea merchants usually refer to this oxidation process as fermentation (发酵 fājiào ).

Chinese teas are classified according to their level of fermentation. The more fermented the tea, the stronger its taste. White teas (白茶 báichá) are essentially unfermented (不发酵 bù fājiào).

They are followed by lightly fermented (微发酵 wēi fājiào) green teas (绿茶 lǜchá), half fermented (半发酵 bàn fājiào) oolong teas (乌龙茶 wūlóng chá), and fully fermented (全发酵 quán fājiào) black teas (红茶 hóngchá).

Pu’er (also called pu-erh) teas (普洱茶 pǔ'ěrchá), which are generally quite dark and strong, are said to be post-fermented (后发酵 hòu fājiào).

Certain regions of China are known for producing and consuming special types of tea. For example, Wuyi Mountain, in Fujian Province, is particularly famous for production and consumption of fine oolong teas such as dahongpao (大红袍 dàhóngpáo ).

Green teas such as biluochun (碧螺春 bìluóchūn ), grown in Jiangsu Province, are popular in the region around Shanghai.

Biluochun tea

Other beverages referred to as “tea” also exist in China, although some of them don’t actually contain any Camellia sinensis leaves.

One popular tea is jasmine tea (茉莉花茶 mòlìhuāchá ), made from a mixture of green tea and jasmine flowers.

Barley tea (大麦茶 dàmàichá ), made from roasted barley grains, doesn’t actually contain any tea leaves at all.

Jasmine tea

Other types of “tea” that enjoy immense popularity among the younger generations are milk tea (奶茶 nǎichá ) and bubble tea (珍珠奶茶 zhēnzhū nǎichá ).

These sugary drinks, which don’t contain much (if any) actual tea, come in a variety of different flavors.

CLI is in the business of China, and in China business means drinking tea. After over 12 years working day in and day out on behalf of our students and community (which means staying well caffeinated!), we've come know tea well.

Here are our top 5 recommended Chinese teas:

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Modern Chinese Tea Culture

Tea culture in China is most intact in the south, where the bulk of China’s tea is produced.

Tea can be consumed at home or in teahouses (茶馆 cháguǎn ), many of which offer private rooms for drinking tea with friends or business partners. Although tea is consumed by people from every sector of society, most tea connoisseurs tend to be middle-aged business people, intellectuals or artists.

Much of modern Chinese tea culture revolves around the gongfu tea ceremony (功夫茶 or gōngfūchá ). Thought to have originated in Fujian or Guangdong Province, it usually features black, oolong or pu’er tea.

At its most basic, the ceremony makes use of tiny tea cups (茶杯 chábēi ), a tea-brewing vessel such as a gaiwan (盖碗 gàiwǎn ) or an Yixing purple clay teapot (紫砂壶 zǐshāhú ), a tea strainer, a tea pitcher and a tea table or tray. Other utensils such as tea tongs are optional.

The more complicated the ceremony, the more utensils are likely to be involved. Tea tables are often quite large and can be decorated with whimsical tea pets (茶宠 cháchǒng ).

Normally, tea ceremonies are run by a host who begins by steeping loose leaf tea in water in a gaiwan or teapot, and then pouring it through a tea strainer into a tea pitcher to filter out bits of tea leaf.

Next, the host pours tea from the pitcher onto teacups. Instead of serving this first batch of tea to guests, the host generally pours it out onto the tea table, allowing it to drain into a bucket underneath.

This is done to wash the tea cups and also because tea from the first pour is thought to be too strong to drink. This process is then repeated, except that the tea is served to those present instead of being discarded.

After being served, guests should either thank the host verbally or express thanks by tapping their bent index and middle fingers on the tea table. This custom is most common in southern China and is said to have originated during the Qing dynasty (1636–1912 CE), when the Qianlong Emperor , who was traveling in disguise, poured tea for a servant.

The servant wanted to show his gratitude by kneeling, but couldn’t do so for fear of revealing the emperor’s identity. Therefore, he tapped the table with two bent fingers instead.

For a full transcript of the above video that includes Chinese characters , pinyin , and English translations, click here .

It is possible to spend a great deal of money collecting expensive tea leaves and fine tea accessories, especially Yixing teapots .

In some affluent circles, engagement with tea culture is used as a way to “ flaunt wealth and invest savings ,” a bit like wine culture in the United States. Certain wealthy individuals use their knowledge of tea culture to impress friends and gain prestige.

It’s also not uncommon for expensive teas to be given as gifts on important occasions.

That said, not everyone you encounter in China is going to be a tea connoisseur. Many won’t even be familiar with the gongfu tea ceremony.

Some families don’t have the habit of drinking tea, and some people simply drink it without fanfare in a thermos that they carry with them throughout the day.

The Rise of Coffee

China has been a nation of tea drinkers for a long time, and coffee (咖啡 kā fēi ) was rare in China until recently. Over the past 20 years, coffee’s popularity has steadily increased, especially among urban millennials.

Although per capita Chinese coffee consumption is still only 5 cups per year compared to 400 cups in the United States, the demand for coffee in China has grown exponentially since the first Starbucks opened in Beijing in 1999.

Coffee shops (咖啡馆 kāfēiguǎn ) are now ubiquitous in China’s first, second, and even third-tier cities.

Coffee is especially popular with students and young white-collar workers, who associate it with the aspirational Western lifestyle that comes with newfound economic mobility.

The prices at Starbucks in China are quite high compared to those in the U.S., but this only helps to add to its allure and cements Starbucks coffee as a status symbol for the new middle class.

The Future of Tea

For now, tea drinking is firmly entrenched in Chinese culture. Coffee’s increasing popularity poses a challenge to the Chinese tea industry, however.

Today, traditional teahouses are nowhere near as popular with members of the younger generation as coffee shops are. This is perhaps related to the fact that traditional Chinese tea suffers from a branding problem.

While large coffee chains like Starbucks have sophisticated brand images that attract young consumers, no traditional Chinese tea brands with such widespread appeal have emerged.

Recently, some traditional tea companies have responded to changes in the market by opening trendy cafes or offering new products designed to appeal to more modern tastes such as fruit-flavored teas, tea bags, and instant tea. Such changes may be necessary if China’s tea industry wants to compete with coffee in the long-run.

Considering its strong historical record of successfully adapting to the changes brought about by wars, intellectual property theft and imperial decrees, the Chinese tea industry seems likely to overcome its current challenges and continue to exist for many years to come.

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Chinese Culture

Revisiting Chinese Political Culture: The Historical Politics Approach

Original Article
Published: 05 February 2022
Volume 7 , pages 160–180, ( 2022 )

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Chunlong Lu 1 na1 &
Ting Yan 1 na1

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Western Political science cannot adequately address China’s development in the twenty-first century. The inadequacy is due to a general neglect of historical methods and an obsession with progressive views in the discipline. As a result, the study of China’s political culture is torn away from Chinese history and loses itself to become another version of modernization thesis. This article calls for the application of a historical politics approach and a poly-chronic view of history to the study of China’s political culture. The article examines four potential core value components of China’s political culture, namely the quest for great unification, the preference for political order, the orientation towards substance, and the deference to authority and hierarchy. Results show that those values have historical continuity and China-specificity thereby demonstrating the value of the historical politics perspective.

Political Culture and the Study of Chinese Politics

Agenda of Historical Political Science in China

Zhongqiu Yao

Knowledge Subjectivity and Functions of Historical Political Science

Guangbin Yang

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Western political theories have not adequately explained the China phenomena, namely that it sustains economic growth but does not copy the Washington consensus, that it maintains one-party rule, but studies show over 90% popular support for government (see Fig. 3 in the Appendix), and that it embraces modernity but preserves much of its own culture. The dominant development framework in the West has predicted that China will become like a Western democracy in a gradual (Inglehart 1997 ) or abrupt way (Shirk 2008 ; Pei 2008 ), but the China phenomena have endured for the past four decades and still show signs of great vitality. China’s successful campaign against COVID-19 appears to be such a sign. So why cannot the dominant political science paradigm in the West explain China? How can we amend the paradigm to solve the China puzzle? In this paper, we argue that the neglect of history and context in the dominant framework of the West is the underlying reason and that only by bringing the historical politics approach back in can we get on the right track to explaining China.

The paper is divided into four sections. The next section reviews theory development in the West and exposes its defects. The second section discusses different views on history and change and introduces the concept of a poly-chronic view as the best fitting historical politics approach. The third section applies the historical politics approach and poly-chronic view to examine some core components of China’s political culture. Findings and comments are included in the conclusion.

1 Why a Historical Politics Approach Matters?

Guba and Lincoln ( 1994 : 107) define a paradigm as “basic belief systems based on ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions.” Ontology, epistemology, and methodology are so interrelated that answering one question shapes how others can be answered (Killam 2013 : 9). Epistemology and methodology are hard to distinguish except that the former is more philosophical in nature than methodology (Killam 2013 : 8). That is to say, to locate and evaluate a dominant paradigm, we need to look at the ontological dimension as well as the methodological dimension. Defect in one dimension leads to problems in the other.

The inadequacy to explain the China phenomena suggests that the dominant paradigm in political science discipline has an ontological defect, namely not studying China as a concept (Wang 2021 ). Along the ontological dimension, there are two competing approaches—the modernization approach and the contextual approach. In the 1980s and 1990s, the contextual approach led by historical sociological studies declined and the modernization approach represented by democratization studies became the dominant paradigm (Yang 2021c : 494).

The modernization approach posits a positive linear relationship between economic development and democratization, believing that economic development is a panacea, bringing all good things together such as the rise of middle class, democratic culture, and democracy. Modernization advocates assume that the rising middle class is a pro-democratic force in developing societies. In addition, this linear model between economic development and democratization posits a universal path for all developing countries; thus, developing countries should follow the Western model and obey the advice from Western scholarship.

However, the modernization approach fails to consider the different social and historical contexts of developing societies. The contextual approach, however, recognizes such contexts as the middle class in the developing societies and takes into account two country-specific contexts of the middle class.

The first context concerns the role of the state in the formation and development of the middle class in the developing societies. For example, quite a few empirical observations of Pacific Asian societies suggest that the rise of the middle class in these countries is a direct consequence of rapid state-led economic development over the past several decades (e.g., Brown and Jones 1995 ; Koo 1991 ; Bell 1998 ; Jones 2005 ; Torii 2003 ). A large sector of the newly emerged middle class in Pacific Asian societies is “dependent upon the state for their employment, either as public servants, or as employees of state-supported companies” (Brown and Jones 1995 : 92). This unique relationship between the state and the newly emerged middle class in Pacific Asian societies makes this class quite different from its counterparts in the industrialized Western societies. Therefore, when analyzing the political culture of the middle class in the developing world, researchers have to bear this difference in mind.

The second context concerns the variations within the middle class, especially along the line of their relationship to the state. Many empirical studies have found that since the state often plays a very active role in creating and shaping the formation of the middle class in the developing world, the emergence of a unified and distinctive middle class identity is nearly impossible. As a result, these studies suggest that the political culture of the middle classes in the developing world is not unified but divided along the lines of their respective relations with the state. Sundhaussen ( 1991 : 112) concludes that inquiry in the political culture of the middle classes in the developing world “would have to begin with distinguishing between the different kinds of Middle Classes.”

In brief, the above comparison between the modernization approach and the contextual approach reveals that the neglect of history and context is the biggest defect in the dominant modernization framework. Because of this neglect, the modernization approach has intrinsic difficulties in recognizing the varied origins and development of middle classes in Pacific Asian societies. With ethnic history and country-specific context out of its picture, the modernization approach tends to assume that all middle classes and all democratizations will follow the Western model, because the latter invents, defines, and exports these things to the rest of the world. In other words, this defect is also ideological in nature. The same could be said about its efforts to explain the China phenomena. To correct this ontological/ideological defect, we need to bring political history back into the center of political science research.

The ontological/ideological defect in the dominant paradigm of political science discipline is also reflected in developments in the methodological dimension.

In the 1950s, the rise of behavioral revolution in combination with rational choice theory had a strong push on political science research towards the hard sciences, which focused on causality, emphasized on discovering regularities in political life, and aimed to make generalizations through laws. This scientific movement has popularized the study of politics outside of its historical and cultural setting, made quantitative methods the core of political science education, and degraded the importance of political philosophy and culture. To hasten this scientific progress in political research, this group of hard science advocates, including rational choice theorists, formal modelers, and quantitative researchers, has imposed a consensus—the so-called positivist paradigm—on epistemology and methodology in the discipline. This positivist paradigm has several tenets (e.g., King et.al 1994 ; Babbie 2015 ) as follows:

Political science theory shall have as its basis natural laws or empirical regularities;

political science theory must be falsifiable;

political science theory shall make predictions, that is, theory offers an explanation for observed facts and predicts new facts;

fact and values are separate; fact is fact and is objective.

Reviewing this methodological history of Western political science, we can conclude that political science methods can be divided into three different levels—tools, approaches, and the paradigm level. The tool level is not only the lowest level of methodology, but also the most scientific and objective one, comprising methods such as interviewing techniques and statistical methods. The paradigm level is the highest level of methodology, which has ideological connotations behind it. At the approach level, there are quantitative research methods, big data analysis, and experimental methods among others. All these methods belong to the hard science side and have positivist attributes. However, we should be vigilant about the positivist paradigm pursued by Western political science, because it is grounded upon empirical regularities of the highly stable, post-industrial and pluralist society in the West and its ambition is to generalize these regularities to the rest of the world. Therefore, the positivist paradigm has a strong tendency to be Western-centric and embodies the central tenets of Western ideology.

Putting together both ontological/ideological and methodological dimensions, we have a better picture of Western political science research. As Table 1 demonstrates, it can be separated into four camps along two dimensions—hard left, hard right, soft left, and soft right. The hard right is where the dominant paradigm of modernization theory is located. It mainly includes modernization theory and its variants, with the support of quantitative research, rational choice theory and formal theory, which are guided by the positivist paradigm. Obviously, this camp has ideological implications—it tends to generalize the developmental path based on the industrialized, plural Western society to the rest of the world, and regards Western liberal democracy as the end of human history (Inglehart 1997 ; Inglehart and Welzel 2005 ). The soft right includes political liberalism and classical political philosophy. It also has a clear ideological implication—it tends to treat the liberal, plural Western society as the superior model of all human society. As we could see, this camp has declined gradually since the 1950s in the discipline.

The soft left camp mainly includes new Marxist theory, critical theory, and world systems theory. Due to its ideological left nature, it has had a marginalized position in Western political research. It has also been attacked as not scientific by the dominant positivist paradigm. However, the soft left camp has more relevance to the study of contemporary Chinese politics, because the soft left camp uses historical analysis to criticize the Western capitalist system for causing never-ending backwardness in the developing world (Wallerstein 1983 ). Faced with being criticized as unscientific, the soft left camp endeavors to combine the positivist paradigm and new Marxist theory, using empirical data to test the validity of new Marxist theory. This attempt marks the transition from the soft left to the hard left. Comparative historical analysis is the oft-used approach in the hard left camp and had dominated social sciences for centuries before the twentieth century. However, after some period of neglect, recent decades have witnessed a strong reemergence of the comparative historical tradition. These works of historical comparison are united by a methodological commitment to offering historically grounded analysis.

Therefore, following the hard left camp, we propose the new approach of historical politics. The historical politics approach not only has epistemological/methodological significance, but also has its ontological value, which answers the question of how the political systems and political cultures of various countries take place and provides a better explanation for us to understand the historical relevance of contemporary world politics. On the one hand, we have to respect the unique historical context and cultural tradition of each country, because history and culture denotes meaning to political life and offers a framework for political action. On the other hand, we need to use empirical data to test the validity of historical politics.

The historical politics approach is the right direction to understand the China phenomenon and Chinese political culture, which go against expectations of the dominant Western political science paradigm. To do this, we need to put more emphasis on historical analysis at the paradigm level while still following the positivist inquiry of scientific research. Only from the historical perspective can we understand the special historical context of China's political development. China has unique historical and cultural traditions and hence forms its own political culture which ultimately affects potential choices and political outcomes at the national level. As Professor Yang Guangbin ( 2021a ) argues, the unique political history of China means that history is not only a historical research method but also a subject of political research. This unified research path is historical politics. It values the unique history and culture of all countries of interest along both ontological and methodological dimensions. Furthermore, historical politics aims at neither monolithic nor idiosyncratic inference. Rather, it seeks theory and explaindum in between. It will explain the China phenomena as a combined result from both modernizing forces and China’s unique historical/cultural background.

2 Two Different Views of Historical Change in the Study of Political Culture

Following the framework of historical politics, we believe that political cultural traditions—the product of history passed down from generation to generation—play a very important role in determining political results in different societies.

There is general consensus among political culture theorists that a set of political values held at the individual level are conducive to consolidation of a well-functioning political system in a society. Political culture theorists identify distinctive clusters of political attitudes that are widely held across individuals, including political cognition, affection, and judgment towards the political system (Almond and Verba 1963 ). These clusters of political attitudes are durable and form subjective world orientations that are highly resistant to change and are considered to be the driving force for political development.

With regard to history and political culture, there are two different general views. One is the progressive view that advocates that the trajectory of culture(s) in human history is upward linear (in progression) and that different cultures will converge to one end at some point in history. The other is a poly-chronic view that argues the trajectory of major cultures, despite their historical encounters and interactions, moves like parallel lines over the centuries to diverse ends. German philosopher Karl Jaspers ( 2003 : 98) argues that during the axial age (800 b.c.–200 b.c.), the “spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently in China, India, Persia, Judea, and Greece…and these are the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today.” His view of traditions in historical parallelism provides an example of the poly-chronic view.

Modernization theory has a typical progressive view of history and culture. The civic culture emphasized by Almond and Verba ( 1963 ) and self-expression values advocated by Inglehart and Welzel ( 2005 ), among others, are regarded as the ends for all political cultures. Those modernization theorists basically propose that driven by forces of modernization, political cultures of all human societies will slowly change from their traditional forms to the civic culture of self-expression values. With modernization theory as the dominant paradigm of Western political science, progressive ideology is governing the study of political culture.

Inglehart is a faithful supporter of modernization theory. According to his revised version of modernization, Inglehart divides the progress of all human societal values into two stages. The first stage is the transition from traditional authority to secular-rational authority, which is accompanied by the process of industrialization. Traditional societies emphasize the importance of religion and respect for authority. With modernity brought about by industrialization, human societies start to spread more secular and rational orientations toward political authority. The second stage is the transition from survival values to self-expression values, which is closely related to the ongoing industrialization. Survival values give priority to economic and material security, while self-expression values emphasize free expression, participation in the decision-making process, quality of life, and gender equality. Inglehart and Welzel ( 2005 ) stress that this is the empirical law of modernization and the evolutions of cultural values are universal to all human societies.

From poly-chronic view, however, we can deduce that there is a super-stable structure in a society’s political culture and that structure keeps key factors of political culture durable over time. Again, we use Karl Jaspers and his followers’ axial age thesis as an example (Jaspers 1977 , 2003 ; Eisenstadt 1982 ; Armstrong 2006 ). They all identify China, India, and the Occident as three cultures that originate in the axial age, develop in parallel, and co-exist independently today. Furthermore, the key factors of culture for China, India and the Occident are, respectively, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Platonism.

Fukuyama’s ( 2011 , 2014 ) work on political order can be regarded as adopting a poly-chronic view of history. Basically, major political entities today show different traditions in terms of state-building, rule-of-law, and accountability and those different traditions can be traced back to the axial age.

Following the introduction to the two views of history, we propose to use the poly-chronic view of history to recalibrate the study of China’s political culture. The progressive view is bundled to the dominant modernization paradigm, which tends to be Western-centric and cannot adequately explain China phenomena, while the poly-chronic view fits well with the historical politics approach. Generally speaking, most mainstream studies of China’s political culture are dominated by the modernization approach (e.g., Almond and Verba 1963 ; Gibson et al. 1992 ; Putnam 1993 ; Inglehart 1997 ). Here, we are going to review several representative studies by those Western scholars to determine what is mistaken with the study of Chinese political culture.

Ogden ( 2002 ) lists nine elements of a democratic political culture—individualism and independence, tolerance of different opinions and behaviors, pluralistic perspectives, a concern for the public good and community, equality of opportunity, equality before the law, voluntary participation by the people in governance, interpersonal trust, and cooperative decision-making based on bargaining and compromise. After examination of these nine elements, Ogden ( 2002 :114) suggests “China has inklings of a democratic political culture in certain respects and not in others.” Ogden warns against simple calculation of China’s “scores” on these nine characteristics to define China’s political culture as either democratic or authoritarian.

Nathan and Shi ( 1993 ) focus on three dimensions of political culture that they believe are fundamental to democracy—the perceived impact of government, political efficacy, and political tolerance. They find that few Chinese citizens perceive their government as having an impact on their daily lives, even though Chinese government is more intrusive in its citizens’ lives. The underestimation of the impact of government may blunt Chinese demands for democracy. Nathan and Shi conclude that educated Chinese are substantially less likely to hold democratic orientations than people of the same educational levels elsewhere.

Dowd and his associates ( 2000 ) use an open question—which of the following values is most important—and put political democracy and individual freedom together with public order, fair administration of justice, social equality, and national peace and prosperity. They conclude that political democracy and individual freedom are not as cherished as others, notably national peace and prosperity.

The above review exposes some severe problems with the modernization approach to the study of China’s political culture. First, as we have argued earlier, the modernization approach tends to use Western-based democratic culture as a template for China’s political culture. The selected literature all uses notions from the Western template to evaluate aspects of China’s political culture. The conclusions surround the gap in democratic values between China and its Western counterparts. Their views are arrogant and biased, because they imply that China needs to fill the gaps to become something of higher order like Western democracy. That is why we need a historical politics approach to correct the ideological/ontological bias. Second, the above authors have locked their sights on a short span of contemporary China instead of the entire 5,000-year history. They fail to see that some crucial factors in China’s political culture have strong inertia and often re-emerge in Chinese society with different new forms, such as the Chinese public's preference for paternalistic authority, social order, and social stability. These factors might be the key to understand why China’s political culture consistently differs from the West and why the China model functions well in contradiction to modernization propositions. A poly-chronic view allows us to treat China’s political culture at the same order as the Western one.

3 Bringing Historical Politics and the Poly-chronic View to the Study of China’s Political Culture

The historical politics approach and the poly-chronic view suggest that China or Chinese civilization is distinct from its Western counterparts and this distinctness has been transmitted from generation to generation, all the way from ancient times to the contemporary era. Yang ( 2021b :609) calls the distinctness the unique “genes” of Chinese civilization and concludes that “the political development of contemporary China is a natural continuation of the genetic community of Chinese civilization”. The same idea echoes in many studies of China that use the historical approach (e.g., Huntington 1993 ; Toynbee 2001 ; Mizoguchi 2011 ; Pines 2012 ). However, scholars have not reached agreement on the list of China genes. For instance, Zhao ( 2015 ) lists at least seven aspects that make imperial China different from other civilizations. Pines ( 2012 ) argues that pillars of traditional China and of relevance today include the hegemonic position of the political center, the concept of political unity, and political elitism. Yang ( 2021a :560) proposes that China genes include “a unification of the whole country and the people-oriented philosophy of governance; a bureaucracy at the government level (including the system of prefectures and counties, and the imperial examination system); cultural tolerance and the doctrine of the mean; freedom and autonomy of social life; and the priority of family ethics, among other things”. Many more scholars simply locate the genes as Confucianism-related aspects literally interpreted from the Confucian classics (e.g., Yu 2000 ). The lack of agreement on that list is mainly due to the fact that there is no criterion of inclusion and exclusion in the Chinese political science discipline. However, the historical politics approach and the poly-chronic view provide some insights on selection criteria. The historical politics approach stresses patterns of historical continuity (regularity). China genes should assert their existence and leave their traces uninterrupted along the course of China’s civilizational history to qualify. Historical continuity serves as an internal validity check on could-be China genes. The poly-chronic view stipulates that the distinction between China and other civilizations has been maintained at different time points throughout history (Jaspers 1977 ; Armstrong 2006 ; Fukuyama 2011 ), so China genes are valid only in comparison with Western peers, which can serve as an external validity check. With those two checks in mind, the rest of the article will explore the issue of locating China genes in history and in the present time. The authors believe that the findings will improve our understanding about the ontological and methodological issue of “what is China,” amplify the voices for studying China as a concept (Wang 2021 ) and as a method (Yang 2021a ), and demonstrate the power of historical politics and the poly-chronic view in political science studies.

The China genes under our purview are the quest for great unification ( dayitong ), the preference over political order, the orientation towards substance, and the deference to authority and hierarchy. They are more or less mentioned in or connected to the afore-mentioned China aspects (Yu 2000 ; Pines 2012 ; Zhao 2015 ; Yang 2021a ). For each item, we will track its trajectory to check its historical continuity and examine its current contours in comparison to the West, using evidence from the latest survey data.

3.1 The Quest for Great Unification

Toynbee ( 2001 :235–317) characterizes China as a case of great unification. Pines ( 2012 :165) regards the quest for great unification as “the most fundamental idea behind the empire’s formation, and it remained the least affected by the advent of modernity.” Among others, Zhao ( 2015 :8) and Wang ( 2021 :578) both list this concept in the first place when they make the distinction between Chinese civilization and its Western counterparts. Therefore, we choose this concept as one potential candidate of China genes or essential components of Chinese political culture.

The quest for great unification is a complex notion still shrouded in controversy. For example, Yu ( 1995 :51) postulates that this notion has five dimensions, namely the sense of unity in geography, political unity, longevity under oneness, the continuity of orthodoxy rule, and a union of ethnic minorities into the nation. He ( 2011 ) regards it as the cultural and psychological structure of Chinese society that clings to unity in geography, politics, thought, and ethnicities. Duan and Hu ( 2012 ) define it broadly as the identification with a unified Chinese state, nation, culture, and civilization. After careful survey, we find that commonalities between various definitions converge at people’s support for a unified state (whether political or geographic) and a shared identity with one Chinese nation.

The concept for great unification is historically constructed. There are four unification periods in China’s dynastic history of over 4,000 years, namely the Xia-Shang-Zhou dynasties, the Qin-Han dynasties, the Sui-Tang dynasties, and the Yuan-Ming-Qing dynasties. In aggregate, the unification time is proximately 2,700 years, while the time of division is about 1,200 years. Such a long history of state unification has created, nurtured, and disseminated the ideal of great unification from generation to generation, turning it into something integral to Chinese people’s beliefs.

Dynasties rose and fell, but the ideology of seeking great unification has left its footprints along the path of Chinese history since its origin. Its wording was first explicitly put forward by Gongyang ( 1980 ) during the Warring States Period (453-221 BC). During the Han dynasty, Dong Zhongshu proposed the thesis of great unification and Emperor Wudi of the Han dynasty adopted his proposal. From then on, the idea of great unification was incorporated into the governing philosophy of all dynasties following the Han. Even during the dynasties ruled by ethnic minorities such as the Yuan and Qing dynasty, the concept of great unification was proclaimed as justification for governing or being governed. The quest for great unification was neither abated by the intervals between dynasties, nor repelled by ethnic rule or political division. The ruling powers in Chinese history all had belief in and commitment to the ideal of great unification (Wang and Zhu 2019 :27).

When the Qing dynasty came to an end in 1912 and China’s integrity was at jeopardy, evocation of the ideal of great unification reached an unprecedented height. Modern-era scholars including Liang Qichao, Gu Jiegang, Fu Sinian, and Qian Mu all wrote a lot about great unification and used it to advocate the cause of national unity.

The People's Republic of China is the fifth great unification period in Chinese history. The ideal of great unification continues to play a great role in today’s political ecology. We can observe its vitality in the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) latest discourse on rejuvenating the Chinese nation (Li 2017 ) and in mainland attitudes towards unifying Taiwan. According to a survey conducted in 2016 by the Global Times , 96.4% of mainland respondents agree that Taiwan is an indivisible part of China; 70.7% agree that Taiwan unification will greatly boost China’s rise; and 86.2% support the option of unification by force. Footnote 1

In sum, the quest for great unification exhibits continuity from the perspective of the historical politics approach. However, is this value distinct from its Western counterparts? We choose two survey items from the “World Values Survey” (WVS) Footnote 2 to measure attitudes towards great unification: (1) To which of these geographical groups would you say you belong first of all? (2) We all hope that there will not be another war; if it were to come to that, would you be willing to fight for your country? The first question mainly taps a subjective priority for national identity, while the second question is about support for state integrity. Table 2 show the results and a comparison between China, the US, and OECD countries. 43% of Chinese respondents chosed to first identify with the nation compared to only 30% of US respondents and 34% of OECD citizens. 89% of Chinese respondents expressed their willingness to fight for their country, while less than 70% of US respondents and OECD respondents did the same. The gaps are substantial enough to conclude that Chinese people are keener on great unification than their Western counterparts.

3.2 Mentality over Political Order

Fukuyama’s ( 2011 , 2014 ) works have triggered wide academic interest in the topic of political order. China is a persistent example in his analysis.

There is no uniform definition of political order, but all definitions emphasize a state of orderliness in politics (Liu 2014 :38). The Spring and Autumn Period (770 bc –476 bc ) and the Warring States Period (475 bc –221 bc ) witnessed the origin of major schools of China’s traditional thought. Political order is the core and dominant subject in all those schools, because they all aspire after the ultimate goal of achieving order in politics. Other goals such as justice and etiquette are of secondary importance compared to the emphasis placed on political order. Confucianism was no exception. Confucianism has been the official governing philosophy since Emperor Wudi of the Han dynasty and this preference over political order has carried on and constantly occupied a central place in China’s governing mentality. The doctrine of the mean ( zhongyong ), a core Confucian value, can be regarded as the manifestation of this preference for political order (Hu 2012 : 20–21), because its tenet is to avoid extremes or contradictions and stay balanced and harmonious. The doctrine of the mean was originally a chapter in the Classic of Rites ( lijing ) and it became an important part of education and ritual life throughout the history between the Han dynasty and the Song dynasty. From the Song to the Qing dynasty, the doctrine of the mean was singled out as a key text and it became one of the Four Classics ( sishu ), which were prerequisites for employment in the imperial government and for the education of emperors. Though its official status was lost with the end of dynastic rule, the doctrine is already deeply rooted in Chinese culture. We find its mark in the CPC’s policy statements such as “grasping material and spiritual civilization with both hands” ( wuzhiwenming he jinshenwenming liangshouzhua ) and “building a harmonious society” ( goujian hexieshehui ).

The wide acceptance of this doctrine led to interesting phenomenon throughout China’s dynastic politics—a widespread propensity to avoid extremes and to prioritize political stability. Radical reforms are something extreme that the Doctrine of the Mean advises against. Not surprisingly, the great reforms along the path of Chinese history very often failed due to their radical nature. For example, in the Northern Song dynasty, Wang An-shi, with the emperor’s support, launched a political reform (1069–1085) aimed to overhaul the political, economic, and education system, but nearly all reform measures were rescinded after he stepped down. Similar failures include Emperor Wang Mang’s reform (9–23) between the two Han dynasties, Zhang Juzheng’s reform (1573–1582) in the Ming dynasty and the Hundred Days’ Reform (1898) in the Qing dynasty.

The doctrine of the mean encourages the China state to emphasize political stability and to emulate previously tested institutions. Fukuyama ( 2011 :19) observes that “many of the elements of what we now understand to be a modern state were already in place in China in the third century b.c.” Take the household registration ( hukou ) for instance. As early as in Zhou dynasty, a minister for population management was appointed to record birth, deaths, emigration, and immigration. This institution proved to be effective in facilitating governmental control over the population, hence establishing conditions for social stability. Later, Chinese dynasties all followed suit and installed similar household registration institutions. In contemporary China, the household registration system is still a very important institution of social governance and helps explain the CPC’s efficient and successful mobilization to fight against the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

The above historical politics analysis shows us that the maintenance of political order has been a prominent preoccupation along the course of Chinese history, hence qualifying itself as a historic continuity. If the zest for political order really constitutes a China gene, we should also see a large gap in emphasis on this concept between China and its Western counterparts. We use three WVS questions to measure this as follows: (1) If you had to choose which one of the things on this card would you say is most important (a. maintaining order in this country; b. giving people more say; c. fighting rising prices; d. protecting freedom of expression)? (2) Please choose the one which best describes your own opinion (a. society must be radically changed; b. society must be gradually improved by reform; c. society must be valiantly defended). (3) Most people consider both freedom and security to be important, but if you had to choose between them, which one would you consider more important?

Question (1) uses literal meaning to measure attitudes to political order. As Fig. 1 shows, the percentage choosing “maintain order” as the most important goal is higher in China than in the US or OECD countries across all six WVS waves (1989–2020). Furthermore, the results for China are always above the 50% level, while the US or OECD line struggles to break the 50% threshold. Therefore, in a literal sense, political order is more important in Chinese people’s minds.

Preference over political order (question (1)). Source: Calculated from World Value Survey data (1989–2020)

Question 2 measures attitudes towards radical change and question 3 taps one’s inclination toward security (stability). The doctrine of the mean suggests that people with a preference for political order will avoid radical things and prioritize security over other goals. Therefore, if an emphasis on political order is something unique to China, then the Chinese population and their Western peers are expected to differentiate along attitudes towards these two questions. Table 3 show that only 11% of Chinese respondents welcome radical change, which is lower than 14% in US and 15% in OECD; 93% in China believe that security is more important, while the number is only 29% in the US and 55% in OECD countries. The value gap is obvious and lends support to our proposition of treating political order preference as something unique to China’s political culture.

3.3 Orientation Towards Substance

People-oriented thought ( minben sixiang ) is an oft-studied traditional Chinese philosophy related to politics and governance (e.g., Zhu 2012 ; Liu 2020 ). Confucius calls for “benevolent rule ( renzheng )”, Mencius argues that “the people are of supreme importance… last comes the ruler ( mingui junqing )”, and Xunzi emphasizes the people’s role ( zhongminlun ). Together, these lay a solid foundation for people-oriented thought to occupy the central stage of traditional Chinese governance culture. Generally, all dynastic rulers accept this thought and try to realize it, which leads to a collateral but vital question of seeking what people want. Xunzi’s answer is that people want substantial things such as wealth and material interests. He argues that “he who can profit the people and not profiteer from them, show the people care and not work them, will win over all under Heaven” (Xunzi 2014 :93). That is to say, an orientation towards substance and people-oriented thought are actually one thing. The former adopts a people’s angle, and the latter uses a rulers’ sight. Since we are interested in China’s political culture and the Chinese nation, we would like to examine popular orientation towards substance instead of people-oriented thought. We also define this orientation as a popular propensity of preferring real, material goals to non-material ones. This orientation has a reputation overseas, because the world is amazed by the disproportional economic success of the Chinese population almost as if wealth accumulation is an instinct of the Chinese people (Chua 2004 ). For example, as Fig. 2 shows, the Chinese people’s saving rate far exceeds that of people in the US and OECD. Their attitude towards saving money has not appeared to wither over the past 40 years. Lee Kuan Yew (Zakaria and Lee 1994) regards the propensity of accumulating material profits as cultural.

Savings (% of GDP). Source: the World Bank data. https://data.worldbank.org

This orientation bears the check of historical politics. Xunzi’s policy proposals accompanying his people-oriented thought include substantive measures such as to “lighten taxes on the fields, make fair the tariffs at markets and passes, lower the numbers of merchants, rarely raise corvée labor parties, and do not drag people away during the times of agricultural work” (Xunzi 2014 : 85). In China’s dynastic history, there are several well-known periods of prosperity and peace, which include the rule of emperors Wendi and Jingdi in the Han dynasty (206 BC–8), the rule of Emperor Taizong (626–649) and the Kaiyuan reign of Emperor Xuanzong (713–741) in the Tang dynasty, and the rule of Emperor Kangxi and Emperor Qianlong (1661–1796) in the Qing dynasty. Their reputation for good governance can be attributed to their policy measures corresponding to Xunzi’s proposals. On the reverse, the decay and demise of dynasties are mostly coupled with policies that ignore or even repress people’s needs. The link between people’s needs and good governance runs throughout the course of Chinese history. It still functions today and will continue to have effect. To illustrate, the 2017 report of CPC’s 19th National Congress claims that the principal contradiction in Chinese society is between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life.

Now, let us move on to examine whether the orientation towards substance is distinct in China. To measure it, we choose a set of eight WVS questions asking respondents whether some given items constitute basic elements of democracy. The items are all about people’s substantive needs for government except the one emphasizing elections.

Respondents are asked to rate each item on a scale from 1 (being not a basic element of democracy) to 10 (being an essential element of democracy). Shi and Ma (2009) conclude that Chinese traditional culture stresses substance and Chinese people want a type of democracy consistent with Confucius and Mencius’ people-oriented thought. Zhang (2013) further points out that Chinese people need substantive democracy instead of procedural democracy. If orientation towards substance is a China-specific character, we expect Chinese respondents to rate highest on substance items and lowest on the election item. The results testify to our expectations: the China sample has the lowest average of 7.85 on the election item compared with the US (8.48) and OECD (8.49) counterparts; and Chinese respondents rate highest on all other seven substance items. Therefore, the results lend support to the conclusion that orientation towards substance is a distinct China character (Table 4 ).

3.4 Deference to Authority and Hierarchy

The last candidate for core Chinese cultural values in our article is Chinese people’s deference to authority and hierarchy. In Confucianism, political authority and hierarchy are a means-end relationship, and together, they are central to Confucian political philosophy. Xunzi puts great emphasis on the role of political authority in good governance, arguing that the subjects should respect rulers and be awed by them. Xunzi further postulates that the only way to maintain political authority is to define and obey social hierarchies (Peng and Tang 2019 : 60). Interestingly, contemporary studies of Chinese political culture continue to find evidence about the prevalence of authoritarian orientations among the Chinese public (e.g., Neher 1994 ; Ackerly 2005 ; Park and Shin 2006; Dalton and Ong 2006 ; Chu 2013 ; Zhai 2017 ). For example, Nathan and Shi ( 1993 ) analyze cultural values in China and find that the majority of Chinese respondents have strong orientations towards authority and hierarchy. Huntington ( 1991 :24) explicitly names respect for authority and hierarchy as a central value for Chinese civilization, so we are interested to test whether this is the case.

Authority and hierarchy correspond to one of the five Confucian basics—ritual or li . Xunzi writes, “in ritual, noble and lowly have their proper ranking, elder and youth have their proper distance, poor and rich, humble and eminent, each have their proper weights” (Xunzi 2014 : 84–85). That is to say, ritual arrangements should reflect the primacy of authority and hierarchy. In China’s dynastic history, ritual has been heavily institutionalized to become an integral component of China’s bureaucratic system. The underlying primacy over authority and hierarchy makes centralization of power a representative feature of China’s bureaucracy. The Sui dynasty (581–618) first set up the ministry of ritual ( libu ) to take charge of official rituals, ceremonies, banquets, schools, royal examinations, and foreign affairs. Since then, this institution has appeared in every Chinese dynasty after the Sui and enjoyed the same executive prominence in centralized political systems. In addition, ritual was also made into state laws and ritual-breakers received severe punishment. For example, the legal code of the Qing dynasty had a separate chapter about ritual standards and stipulated that any violation of those standards was subject to banishment or even capital punishment. Similar clauses could be found in the legal documents of every Chinese dynasty.

With Confucianism and centralized bureaucracy as its vehicles, deference to authority and hierarchy demonstrates historic continuity and has been ingrained into Chinese people’s minds and soul. In today’s People’s Republic of China, a centralized bureaucracy still functions (Fukuyama 2011 ) and Confucianism remains popular as shown in China’s promotion of the Confucius Institute program. Chinese people’s orientation towards authority and hierarchy can be felt even by seating arrangements for formal meals (Bell et.al, 2020). A comparison of this orientation between China and its counterparts demonstrated its “Chineseness” (Yang 2017 ).

First, we use a WVS question to measure deference towards authority and hierarchy. The question asks the respondents whether people-obey-their-rulers is an essential characteristic of democracy. Respondents are asked to rate this item on a scale from 1 (being not a basic element of democracy) to 10 (being an essential element of democracy).The higher the respondent rates this item, the deeper deference to authority and hierarchy he or she shows. As Table 5 show, the mean score of Chinese respondents’ on this question is 6.69 and 6.35, respectively, in wave 6 (2010–2014) and wave 7 (2017–2020); the US’ mean scores are 5.18 and 5.37; and the OECD’s mean scores are 4.67 and 4.80. China scores much higher than the US and OECD. The percentage figures tell the same story. Over 61% of Chinese respondents clearly show strong deference to authority and hierarchy, while less than 46% of US and OECD respondents do. The results provide support for treating deference towards authority and hierarchy as something distinct of Chinese culture.

We also choose an East Asian Barometer (EAB) question to measure this. The survey question presents the statement: “government leaders are like the head of a family; we should all follow their decisions.” Respondents are asked whether they strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree with the above statement (assigned scores of 1–4, respectively). The higher the score on this question, the stronger orientation towards authority they exhibit. The reasons for using this EAB measure are twofold. First, a question with nearly the same wording was used by Nathan and Shi ( 1993 ) to measure orientations to authority and our results using nearly the same measure can provide more validity and reliability. Furthermore, the nearly 30-year span between the two analyses can provide some evidence of historical continuity. Second, the statement compares leaders to the head of a family, which broadens the concept of authority and comes closer to the Confucian definition of authority. However, one defect with this measure is that the EAB does not have the US or OECD data. To compensate, we use Japan and South Korea in comparison, because they are OECD countries and Japan is labeled as a distinct culture (Huntington 1993 ). Table 6 show the results. China’s mean scores and percentages far exceed the numbers in Japan and South Korea. The findings are robust in 2005, 2010, and 2016. Nathan and Shi ( 1993 : 550) recorded a percentage of 73.3% in 1993, demonstrating that the Chinese people’s strong attachment to authority has endured for the past 30 years.

4 Conclusion

The study of China’s political culture is at a crossroad. Modernization thesis, the dominant paradigm in the American political science discipline, has not adequately addressed the China puzzle in the twenty-first century. “[T]he country not only has thus far carved out a unique … path to economic modernization under the rubric of market socialism but also is poised to carve out an alternative path to political modernization…[this model] can acquire its legitimacy without the standard institutional fixtures of a representative democracy (such as regular election, multiparty competition, and free media), as it will be buttressed by a set of shared symbolisms and values that are embedded in the country's own revolutionary legacy and cultural heritage and are significantly different from Western norms and values” (Chu 2013 :2). Our article attributes this inadequacy to the neglect of historical methods and an obsession with progressive views in the mainstream political science discipline of the West. Modernization thesis ignores the importance of historical context, so that its research is unhealthily Western-centric (in ideology and methodology). As a result, the field of China’s political culture research is dominated by Western discourse such as political efficacy, social trust, social capital, and consensual democracy. Furthermore, the modernization thesis is necessarily accompanied by a progressive view of history. As a result, study on China’s political culture has been reduced to another Western version of “the end of history” proposition. However, even Fukuyama ( 2006 , 2011 ) who initiated this proposition finds it problematic and resorts to Chinese tradition for answers. Therefore, our article calls for applying the historical politics approach with a poly-chronic view of time to the study of China’s political culture. We go a step further by demonstrating the power of this application. We use the historical politics approach with a poly-chronic view to examine four potential core components of China’s political culture, namely, the quest for great unification, the preference for political order, the orientation towards substance, and the deference to authority and hierarchy. We show that those values are of historical continuity and demonstrate China-specificity from a historical politics perspective. Therefore, they can be considered the genes of Chinese politics. The findings suggest that those values may be the key to understanding the contours of contemporary Chinese political culture and help explain the dynamics of the China puzzle, including but not limited to China’s high regime support, determination to unify Taiwan, effective mobilization against COVID-19, and the notion of a community of shared destiny.

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Source: Calculated from WVS data (1999–2020)

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Lu, C., Yan, T. Revisiting Chinese Political Culture: The Historical Politics Approach. Chin. Polit. Sci. Rev. 7 , 160–180 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-021-00208-y

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In my composition class at Sichuan University, in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu, the first assignment was a personal essay. I gave some prompts in case students had trouble coming up with topics. One suggestion was to describe an incident in which the writer had felt excluded from a group. Another was to tell how he or she had responded when some endeavor went unexpectedly wrong. For the third prompt, I wrote:

Have you ever been involved in a situation that was extremely threatening, or dangerous, or somehow dramatic? Tell the story, along with what you learned.

It was September, 2019, and the class consisted of engineering majors who were in their first month at university. Like virtually all Chinese undergraduates, they had been admitted solely on the basis of scores on the gaokao , the national college-entrance examination. The gaokao is notorious for pressure, and most of my students chose to write about some aspect of their high-school experience. One girl described a cruel math instructor: “He is the person whose office you enter happily and exit with pain and inferiority.” Edith, a student from northern Sichuan Province, wrote about feeling excluded from her graduation banquet, because her father and his male work colleagues hijacked the event by giving long-winded speeches that praised one another. “That’s what I hate, being hypocritical as some adults,” she wrote.

Few students chose the third prompt. Some remarked that nothing dangerous or dramatic had ever happened, because they had spent so much of their short lives studying. But one boy, whom I’ll call Vincent, submitted an essay titled “A Day Trip to the Police Station.”

The story began with a policeman calling Vincent’s mother. The officer said that the police needed to see her son, but he wouldn’t explain why. After the call, Vincent tried to figure out if he had committed some crime. He was the only student who wrote his essay in the third person, as if this distance made it easier to describe his mind-set:

He was tracing the memory from birth to now, including but not limited to [the time] he broke a kid’s head in kindergarten, he used V.P.N. to browse YouTube to see some videos, and talked with his friends abroad in Facebook and so on. Suddenly he thought of the most possible thing that happened two years ago. In the summer vacation in 2017, he bought an airsoft gun in the Internet, which is illegal in mainland China but legal in most countries or regions. Although it had been two years since then, he left his private information such as the address and his phone number. In modern society, it is possible to trace every information in the Internet and [especially] easy for police.

Vincent’s parents both worked tizhinei , within the government system. The boy approached his father for advice, and the older man didn’t lecture his son about following the rules. Vincent described their exchange:

“If you are asked about this matter,” dad said, “you just tell him that the seller mailed a toy gun and you were cheated. And then you felt unhappy and threw it away.” Sure enough, two policemen came to his home the next day.

Vincent stood about six feet tall, a handsome boy with close-cropped hair. He always sat in the front of the class, and he enjoyed speaking up, unlike many of the other engineers, who tended to be shy. On the first day of the term, I asked students to list their favorite authors, and Vincent chose Wang Xiaobo, a Beijing novelist who wrote irreverent, sexually explicit fiction.

As with many of his classmates, Vincent hoped to complete his undergraduate degree in the United States. I was teaching at the Sichuan University–Pittsburgh Institute, or SCUPI . All SCUPI classes were in English, and after two or three years at Sichuan University students could transfer to the University of Pittsburgh or another foreign institution. SCUPI was one of many programs and exchanges designed to direct more Chinese students to the U.S. In the 2019-20 academic year, Chinese enrollment at American institutions reached an all-time high of 372,532.

Nobody in Vincent’s section had previously studied in the U.S. Almost all of them were middle class, and they often said that their goal was to complete their bachelor’s degree in America, stay on for a master’s or a Ph.D., and then come back to work in China. A generation earlier, the vast majority of Chinese students at American universities had stayed in the country, but the pattern changed dramatically with China’s new prosperity. In 2022, the Chinese Ministry of Education reported that, in the past decade, more than eighty per cent of Chinese students returned after completing their studies abroad.

Vincent also intended to make a career in China, but he had specific plans for his time in the U.S. Once, during a class discussion, he remarked that someday he would purchase both a car and a real firearm. The illegal airsoft pistol that he had acquired in high school shot only plastic pellets. In 2017, when Vincent ordered the gun, it had been delivered to his home at the bottom of a rice cooker, as camouflage. At the time, such subterfuges were still possible, but the government had since cracked down, as part of a general tightening under Xi Jinping.

In Vincent’s essay, he was surprised that the two policemen who arrived at his home didn’t mention the forbidden gun. Instead, they accused him of a much more shocking crime: spreading terrorist messages.

“That’s ridiculous,” Vincent said. “I have never browsed such videos, not to mention posted them in the Internet. You must be joking.” “Maybe you didn’t post it by yourself,” the policeman said. “But the app may back up the video automatically.”

Vincent admitted that once, in a WeChat group, he had come across a terrorist video. The police instructed him to get his I.D. card and accompany them to the station. After they arrived, they entered a room labelled “Cybersecurity Police,” where Vincent was impressed by the officers’ politeness. (“It’s not scary at all, no handcuffs and no cage.”) The police informed him that they had found a host of sensitive and banned material on his cloud storage:

“But how interesting it is!” the policeman said. “They sent pornographic videos, traffic accident videos, [breaking news] videos, and funny videos.” “Yes,” he said helplessly, “so I am innocent.” “Yes, we believe you,” the policeman said. “But you have to [sign] the record because it is the fact that you posted the terrorism video in the Internet, which is illegal.”

On one level, the essay was terrifying—Chinese can be imprisoned for such crimes. But the calm tone created a strange sense of normalcy. The basic narrative was universal: a teen-ager makes a mistake, finds himself gently corrected, and gains new maturity. Along the way, he connects with the elders who love him. Part of this connection comes from what they share: the parents, rather than representing authority, are also powerless in the face of the larger system. The essay ended with the father giving advice that could be viewed as cynical, or heartwarming, or defeatist, or wise, or all these things at once:

“That’s why I always like to browse news [but] never comment on the Internet,” father said. “Because the Internet police really exist. And we have no private information, we can be easily investigated however you try to disguise yourself. So take care whatever you send on the Internet, my boy!” From this matter, Vincent really gained some experience. First, take care about your account in the Internet, and focus on some basic setting like automatic backup. Besides, don’t send some words, videos, or photos freely. In China, there is Internet police focus on WeChat, QQ, Weibo, and other software. As it is said in 1984 , “Big Brother is watching you.”

More than twenty years earlier, I had taught English at a small teachers’ college in a city called Fuling, less than three hundred miles east of Chengdu. The Fuling college was relatively low in the hierarchy of Chinese universities, but even such a place was highly selective. In 1996, the year that I started, only one out of twelve college-age Chinese was able to enter a tertiary educational institution. Almost all my students had grown up on farms, like the vast majority of citizens at that time.

In two years, I taught more than two hundred people, not one of whom went on to live abroad or attend a foreign graduate school. Most of them accepted government-assigned jobs in public middle schools or high schools, where they taught English, as part of China’s effort to improve education and engage with the outside world. Meanwhile, the government was expanding universities with remarkable speed. In less than ten years, the Fuling college grew from two thousand undergraduates to more than twenty thousand, a rate of increase that wasn’t unusual for Chinese institutions at that time. By 2019, the year that I returned, China’s enrollment rate of college-age citizens had risen, in the span of a single generation, from eight per cent to 51.6 per cent.

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When I had first arrived, in the nineties, I believed that improved education was bound to result in a more open society and political system. But in Fuling I began to understand that college in China might work differently than it did in the West. Students were indoctrinated by mandatory political classes, and Communist Party officials strictly controlled teaching materials. They were also skilled at identifying talent. In “River Town,” a book that I wrote about teaching in Fuling, I described my realization that the kind of young people I once imagined would become dissidents were in fact the most likely to be co-opted by the system: “The ones who were charismatic, intelligent, farsighted, and brave—those were the ones who had been recruited long ago as Party Members.”

This strategy long predated the Communists. China’s imperial examination system, the ancestor of the gaokao , was instituted in the seventh century and lasted for about thirteen hundred years. Through these centuries, education was closely aligned with political authority, because virtually all schooling was intended to prepare men for government service. That emphasis stood in sharp contrast with the West, where higher learning in pre-modern times often came out of religious institutions. Elizabeth J. Perry, a historian at Harvard, has described the ancient Chinese system as being effective at producing “educated acquiescence.” Perry used this phrase as the title for a 2019 paper that explores how today’s Party has built on the ancient tradition. “One might have expected,” she writes, “that opening China’s ivory tower to an infusion of scholars and dollars from around the world would work to liberalize the intellectual climate on Chinese campuses. Yet Chinese universities remain oases of political compliance.”

At Sichuan University, which is among the country’s top forty or so institutions, I recognized some tools of indoctrination that I remembered from the nineties. Political courses now included the ideas of Xi Jinping along with Marxism, and an elaborate system of Party-controlled fudaoyuan , or counsellors, advised and monitored students. But today’s undergraduates were much more skilled at getting their own information, and it seemed that most young people in my classes used V.P.N.s. They also impressed me as less inclined to join the Party. In 2017, a nationwide survey of university students showed decreased interest in Party membership. I noticed that many of my most talented and charismatic students, like Vincent, had no interest in joining.

But they weren’t necessarily progressive. In class, students debated the death penalty after reading George Orwell’s essay “A Hanging,” and Vincent was among the majority, which supported capital punishment. He described it as a human right—in his opinion, if a murderer is not properly punished, other citizens lose their right to a safe society. Another day, when I asked if political leaders should be directly elected, Vincent and most of his classmates said no. Once, I asked two questions: Does the Chinese education system do a good job of preparing people for life? Should the education system be significantly changed? Vincent and several others had the same answer to both: no.

The students rarely exhibited the kind of idealism that a Westerner associates with youth. They seemed to accept that the world is a flawed place, and they were prepared to make compromises. Even when Vincent wrote about his encounter with the Internet police, he never criticized the monitoring; instead, his point was that a Chinese citizen needs to be careful. In another essay, Vincent described learning to control himself after a rebellious phase in middle school and high school. “Now, I seem to know more about the world,” he wrote. “It’s too impractical to change a lot of things like the education system, the government policies.”

Vincent took another class with me the following fall, in 2020. That year, China had a series of vastly different responses to COVID . Early on, Party officials in Wuhan covered up reports of the virus, which spread unchecked in the city, killing thousands. By February, the national leadership had started to implement policies—strict quarantines, extensive testing, and abundant contact tracing—that proved highly effective in the pre-vaccination era. There wasn’t a single reported case at Sichuan University that year, and we conducted our fall classes without masks or social distancing. Our final session was on December 31st, and I asked students to write about how they characterized 2020. Vincent, like more than seventy per cent of his peers, wrote that it had been a good year. He described how his thinking had evolved after observing the initial mistakes in Wuhan:

Most people held negative attitudes to the government’s reaction, including me. Meanwhile, our freedom of expression was not protected and the supervision department did a lot to delete negative news, critical comments, and so on. I felt so sad about the Party and the country at that time. But after things got better and seeing other countries’ worse behaviors, I feel so fortunate now and change my idea [about] China and the Party. Although I know there are still too many existing problems in China, I am convinced that the socialist system is more advanced especially in emergency cases.

In 2021, after suspending visa services for Chinese students during the pandemic, the U.S. resumed them. Throughout the spring, I fielded anxious questions from undergraduates who were thinking about going to America. One engineer itemized his concerns in an e-mail:

1. How to feel or deal with the discrimination when the two countries’ relationship [is] very nervous? 2. What are the root causes [in] America to cause today’s situation (drugs; distrust of the government, unemployment, and the most important, racial problem)?

They generally worried most about COVID , although guns, anti-Asian violence, and U.S.-China tensions were all prominent issues. One student who eventually went to America told me that in his home town, in northeastern China, ideas about the U.S. had changed dramatically since his childhood. “When people in the community went to America, the family was proud of them,” he said. “But this time, before I went, some family members came and they said, ‘You are going to the U.S.—it’s so dangerous!’ ”

Vincent’s mother was on a WeChat group for SCUPI parents, and that spring somebody posted an advisory from the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C.:

Since the COVID pandemic, there have been successive incidents of discrimination and violent crimes against Asians in some cities in the United States. . . . On March 16, three shooting incidents occurred in Atlanta and surrounding areas, killing 8 people, of whom 6 were Asian women, including 1 Chinese and 1 Chinese citizen. . . . When encountering such a situation, you must remain calm, deal with it properly, try to avoid quarrels and physical conflicts, and ensure your own safety.

That month, Vincent told me that he planned to buy a .38 revolver after arriving in Pittsburgh. He had already researched how to acquire a hunting license and a firearm-safety certificate. In July, a month before he was scheduled to leave, I had dinner with his mother. She said that she worried about gun violence and racial prejudice. “Lots of people say that now in America you can’t rise to the highest level if you are Chinese,” she said.

Vincent’s mother was born in 1974, the same year as many of the people I had taught in Fuling. Like them, she had benefitted from a stable government job during the era of China’s economic boom. She and her husband weren’t rich, but they were prepared to direct virtually all their resources toward Vincent’s education, a common pattern. Edith, the girl who wrote about her graduation banquet, told me that her parents were selling their downtown apartment and moving to the suburbs in order to pay her tuition at Pittsburgh—more than forty thousand dollars a year. Like Vincent, and like nearly ninety per cent of the people I taught, Edith was an only child. Her mother had majored in English in the nineties, when it was still hard to go overseas. After reading “Gone with the Wind” in college, she had dreamed of going abroad, and now she wanted her daughter to have the opportunity.

At dinner with Vincent’s mother, I asked how his generation was different from hers.

“They have more thoughts of their own,” she said. “They’re more creative. But they don’t have our experience of chiku , eating bitterness.”

Even so, she described Vincent as hardworking and unafraid of challenges. I saw these qualities in many students, which in some ways seemed counterintuitive. As only children from comfortable backgrounds who had spent high school in a bubble of gaokao preparation, they could have come across as sheltered or spoiled. But the exam is so difficult, and a modern Chinese childhood is so pressured, that even prosperous young people have experienced their own form of chiku .

They often seemed eager for a change of environment. In my classes, I required off-campus reporting projects, which aren’t common at Chinese universities. Some students clearly relished the opportunity to visit places that otherwise may have seemed illicit or inappropriate: Christian churches, gay bars, tattoo parlors. Occasionally, they travelled far afield. One boy in Vincent’s year who called himself Bruce, after Bruce Lee, rode a motorcycle several hundred miles into the Hengduan Mountains, at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, to research a road that had been constructed as part of China’s supply chain during the Second World War.

Vincent liked interacting with people from different backgrounds, and he researched a massage parlor, a seedy pool hall, and an outdoor marriage market in Chengdu’s People’s Park. At the marriage market, singles tried to find partners, often with the help of parents and various middlemen. In Vincent’s opinion, Chinese parents were too controlling, and young people had spent so much time studying that they had no dating experience. He wrote:

Because of one-child policy and traditional ideology, many parents consider their children as their treasure which belongs to the parents instead of the children themselves. . . . I hope the future Chinese children can have genuine liberty.

Vincent’s mother told me that she and her husband had made a point of allowing their son to decide for himself whether to go to America. But many parents were nervous, including Bruce’s father, who didn’t want his son to go to the U.S. because of the political tensions with China. In the end, Bruce decided to take a gap year before leaving. The delay was probably fortunate, because while researching the highway in the mountains he drove his motorcycle around a blind curve and was hit by a thirteen-ton dump truck. Bruce and the motorcycle slid beneath the truck; by some miracle, the vehicle came to a halt before killing the boy. I didn’t hear about the accident from the police, or the hospital, or anybody at the university. It was characteristic of these hardworking students that the news arrived in the form of an e-mailed request for an extension:

Dear Prof. Hessler, I had an accident on my way to the Lexi Highway. I was turning a corner when I was hit by a truck. Now I have a fracture in my left hand and a piece of flesh has been grinded off my left hand. Then the ligaments and nerves were damaged, and the whole left hand was immobile. My left foot was also injured. It was badly bruised. The whole foot was swollen and couldn’t move. I’m in hospital now. I’ll have to stay in the hospital for a while before I can come back. So I may not be able to write the article about the Lexi Highway. I don’t know what to do now. Can I write the article at a later date? Because I can’t do my research right now. And it’s really hard for me to type with one hand. Best wishes, Bruce

The first time I saw Vincent in Pittsburgh, in October, 2021, he had lived in America for only eighty-two days, but already he had acquired a used Lexus sedan, a twelve-gauge Winchester shotgun, a Savage Axis XP 6.5 Creedmoor bolt-action rifle, and a Glock 19 handgun. “It’s the Toyota Camry of guns,” he said, explaining that the Glock was simple and reliable.

Vincent had studied the gun laws in Pennsylvania, learning that an applicant for a concealed-carry permit must be at least twenty-one, so he applied on his birthday. The permit cost twenty dollars and featured a photograph of Vincent standing in front of an American flag. He had also researched issues of jurisdiction. “I can use it in Ohio,” he said. “But not in California. I don’t like California.” One reason he disliked California was that state law follows the Castle Doctrine, which, in Vincent’s opinion, provides inadequate protection for gun owners. “Pennsylvania has Stand Your Ground,” he said, referring to a law that allows people to defend themselves with deadly force in public spaces. “They made some adjustments to the Castle Doctrine.”

Vincent was thriving in his engineering classes, and he said that some of the math was easier than what he had studied in high school in China. His views about his home country were changing, in part because of the pandemic. Vaccines were now widespread, but the Party hadn’t adjusted its “zero COVID ” strategy. “Their policy overreacts,” Vincent told me. “You should not require the government to do too many things and restrict our liberties. We should be responsible for ourselves. We should not require the government to be like our parents.”

Snail looks down at cinnamon role it has just taken a bite out of.

A couple of times, he had attended Sunday services at the Pittsburgh Chinese Church Oakland, an evangelical congregation that offered meals and various forms of support for students. In China, Vincent had never gone to church, but now he was exploring different denominations. He had his own way of classifying faiths. “For example, a church with all white Americans,” he said, referring to his options. “One of my classmates joined that. I think he likes it. He goes every week. He can earn so many profits. Even the Chinese church, they can pick you up from the airport, free. They can help you deliver furniture from some store, no charge. They do all kinds of things!”

In 2021, there were more than fifteen hundred Chinese at the University of Pittsburgh, and around three thousand at Carnegie Mellon, whose campus is less than a mile away. I came to associate the city with Sichuanese food, because I almost never ate anything else while meeting former students. Some of them, like Vincent, were trying to branch out into American activities, but for the most part they found it easy to maintain a Chinese life. Many still ordered from Taobao, which in the U.S. is slower than Amazon but has a much better selection of Chinese products. They also used various Chinese delivery apps: Fantuan, HungryPanda, FreshGoGo. The people I taught still relied heavily on V.P.N.s, although now they used them to hop in the other direction across China’s firewall. They needed the Chinese Internet in order to access various streaming apps and pop-music services, as well as to watch N.B.A. games with cheaper subscription fees and Mandarin commentary.

For students who wanted to play intercollegiate basketball, the Chinese even had their own league. An athletic boy named Ethan, who had been in my composition class at Sichuan University, was now the point guard for the Pittsburgh team. Ethan told me that about forty students had tried out and seventeen had made the cut. I asked if somebody like me could play.

“No white people,” Ethan said, laughing.

“What about hunxue’er ?” The term means a person of mixed race.

“I think that works.”

One weekend in 2022, I watched Pitt play Carnegie Mellon. Or, more accurately, I watched “UPitt,” because that was the name on the jerseys. My father attended Pitt in the late sixties, and I had grown up wearing school paraphernalia, but I had never heard anybody refer to the place as UPitt. The colors were also different. Rather than using Pitt’s royal and gold, the Chinese had made up uniforms in white and navy blue, which, in this corner of Pennsylvania, verged on sacrilege: Penn State colors.

The team received no university funding, so it had found its own sponsors. Moello, a Chinese-owned athletic-clothing company in New York, made the uniforms, and Penguin Auto, a local dealership, paid to have its logo on the back, because Chinese students were reliable car buyers.

The Northeastern Chinese Basketball League, which is not limited to the Northeast, has more than a hundred teams across the U.S. On the day that I watched, the Pitt team played a fast, guard-dominated game, running plays that had been named for local public bus lines. “ Qishiyi B!” the point guard would call out: 71B, a bus that runs to Highland Park. It was the first time I had attended a college basketball game in which the starting forward hit a vape pen in the huddle during time-outs.

The forward was originally from Tianjin, and his girlfriend was the team manager. She told me that she was trying to get him to stop vaping during games. Her name was Ren Yufan, and she was friendly and talkative; she went by the English name Ally. Ally had grown up in Shanghai and Nanjing, but she had attended high school at Christ the King Cathedral, a Catholic school in Lubbock, Texas, where she played tennis. “I was state sixth place in 2A,” she said. She noted that she had also been elected prom queen.

Ally often answered questions with “Yes, sir” or “No, sir,” and her English had a slight Texas twang. Her parents had sent her to Lubbock through a program that pairs Chinese children with American host families. Ally’s host family owned a farm, where she learned to ride a horse; she enjoyed Lubbock so much that she still returned for school holidays. In the past ten or so years, more Chinese have found ways to enroll their kids in U.S. high schools, in part to avoid gaokao agony. In Pittsburgh, my Sichuan University students described these Chinese as a class apart: typically, they come from wealthy families, and their English is better than that of the Chinese who arrive in college or afterward. Their work patterns are also different. Yingyi Ma, a Chinese-born sociologist at Syracuse University, who has conducted extensive surveys of students from the mainland, has observed that the longer the Chinese stay in the U.S. the less they report working harder than their American peers. Like any good Chinese math problem, this distinctly American form of regression toward the mean can be quantified. In Ma’s book “Ambitious and Anxious,” she reports on her survey results: “Specifically, one additional year of time in the United States can reduce the odds of putting in more effort than American peers by 14 percent.”

Ally’s boyfriend had attended a private high school in Pennsylvania that cost almost seventy thousand dollars a year, and he drove a Mercedes GLC. “We are using our parents’ money, but we can’t be as successful as our parents,” Ally said. Neither her father nor her mother had attended university, but they had thrived in construction and private business during the era of China’s rapid growth. Now the country’s economy was struggling, and Ally accepted the fact that her career opportunities would likely be worse than those of the previous generation. Nevertheless, she planned to return to China, because she wanted to be close to her parents. I asked if anything might make it hard to fit in after spending so many formative years in America.

“My personality,” she said. “I’m too outgoing.”

“There are no prom queens in China, right?”

By my second visit to Pittsburgh, in November, 2022, Vincent had decided to stay permanently in the U.S., been baptized in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and added an AK-47 and two Sig Sauer handguns to his arsenal. He had also downgraded to a less expensive car, because the Lexus had been damaged in a crash. Rather than getting the Glock 19 of automobiles, Vincent decided on the Camry’s cousin, a used Toyota Prius. He picked me up in the Prius, and we headed out for a traditional Steel City meal of lajiao and prickly ash. Vincent wore a Sig Sauer P365 XL with a laser sight in a holster on his right hip. The car radio was playing “Water Tower Town,” a country song by Scotty McCreery:

In a water tower town, everybody waves Church doors are the only thing that’s open on Sundays Word travels fast, wheels turn slow. . . .

Earlier in the year, some Mormon missionaries had struck up a conversation with Vincent on campus. “Their koucai is really good,” he told me, using a word that means “eloquence.” “It helps me understand how to interact with people. They say things like ‘Those shoes are really nice!’ And they start talking, and then they ask you a question: ‘Are you familiar with the Book of Mormon?’ ” Now Vincent had a Chinese app for the Book of Mormon on his phone, and he attended services every Sunday. He had been baptized on July 23rd, which was also the day that he had quit drinking and smoking cigarettes, a habit he’d had since Sichuan University. He thought that the church might be a good place to meet a girlfriend. He had a notion that someday he’d like to have a big family and live in a place like Texas, whose gun laws appealed to him.

Corn grows high, crime stays low There’s little towns everywhere where everybody knows. . . .

During the winter of Vincent’s first academic year in the U.S., his political transformation had been rapid. “I watched a lot of YouTube videos about things like June 4th,” he told me, referring to the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre, in 1989. He began to question the accommodationist views that he had previously held. “Young people are like this in China,” he said. “They tend to support the system.”

In the spring of 2022, Vincent became dismayed by the excessive COVID lockdown in Shanghai. He posted a series of critical remarks on social media, and in May he sent me an e-mail:

In recent months, I make some negative comments on WeChat on the humanitarian crisis caused by the lockdown in Shanghai and some other issues. My parents got nervous and asked me to delete these contents because their colleagues having me in their contact lists in WeChat read my “Pengyou Quan” [friends’ circle] and reminded my parents of potential risks of “Ju Bao” [political reporting] that would affect my parents’ jobs.

One day, a man who may have been from the Chinese security apparatus phoned Vincent’s parents. Unlike in the call from years before, this man didn’t identify himself as the police. But he said that Vincent’s actions could cause trouble for the family. Such anonymous warnings are occasionally made to the parents of overseas Chinese, and they weigh heavily on students.

Vincent deleted his WeChat comments. But he also decided that he couldn’t imagine returning to China. “I would say something and get arrested,” he told me. “I need to be in a place where I have freedom.” An older Chinese friend in Pittsburgh had made a similar decision, and he advised Vincent on how to eventually apply for a green card.

Vincent told his parents that he planned to stay in America for at least five years, but initially he didn’t say that his decision was permanent, because he worried that they would be upset. In the meantime, he didn’t want to waste their money, so he earned cash on the side by teaching Chinese students how to drive. Professional garages charged at least five hundred dollars to install a passenger brake, but Vincent found one on Taobao for about eighty-five dollars, including shipping from China. “I don’t know if it’s legal,” he told me. With his engineering skills, he was able to install the brake in the Prius.

Man talking to woman in kitchen full of dirty dishes.

The number of Chinese studying in the U.S. had dropped to the lowest level in nearly a decade. But there were still almost three hundred thousand, and many of them arrived in places like Pittsburgh and realized that qishiyi B and other public buses weren’t adequate for their needs. They preferred to hire driving instructors who spoke Mandarin, and Vincent’s rate was eighty dollars an hour. He charged even more for the use of his car during exams. Vincent told me that a Chinese-speaking driving instructor who hustled could earn at least two hundred thousand dollars a year. In my own business, the Chinese political climate had made it almost impossible for American journalists to get resident visas, and specialists of all sorts no longer had access to the country. Sometimes I envisioned a retraining program for old China hands: all of us could buy passenger brakes on Taobao and set up shop as mandarins of parallel parking.

I knew of only a few former students who, like Vincent, had already decided to make a permanent home outside China. It was viewed as an extreme step, and most of them preferred to keep their options open. But virtually all my former students in the U.S. planned to apply to graduate school here.

They were concerned about the economic and political situation in China, but they also often felt out of place in Pittsburgh. American racial attitudes sometimes mystified them. One engineer had taken a Pitt psychology class that frequently touched on race, and he said that it reminded him of the political-indoctrination classes at Sichuan University. In both situations, he felt that students weren’t supposed to ask questions. “They’re just telling you how to play with words,” he said. “Like in China when they say socialism is good. In America you will say, ‘Black lives matter.’ They are actually the same thing. When you are saying socialism is good, you are saying that capitalism is bad. You are hiding something behind your words. When you say, ‘Black lives matter,’ what are you saying? You are basically saying that Asian lives don’t matter, white lives don’t matter.”

It wasn’t uncommon for Chinese students to have been harassed on the streets. They often said, with some discomfort, that those who targeted them tended to be Black. Many of these incidents involved people shouting slurs from passing cars, but occasionally there was something more serious. One group of boys was riding a public bus at night when a passenger insulted them and stole some ice cream that they had just bought. Afterward, one of the students acquired a Beretta air pistol. He was wary of buying an actual gun, but he figured that the Beretta looked real enough to intimidate people.

One evening, I went out for Sichuanese food with four former students, including a couple who had been involved in that incident. They seemed to brush it off, and they were much more concerned about Sino-U.S. tensions. One mentioned that if there were a war over Taiwan he would have only three options. “I can go back to China, or I can go to Canada, or I can go somewhere else,” he said. “I won’t be able to stay here.”

“Look at what happened to the Japanese during World War Two,” another said. “They put them into camps. It would be the same here.”

They all believed that war was unlikely, although Xi Jinping made them nervous. Back in China, my students had generally avoided mentioning the leader by name, and in Pittsburgh they did the same.

“It all depends on one person now,” a student said at the dinner. “In the past, it wasn’t just one person. When you have a group of people, it’s more likely that somebody will think about the cost.”

I asked whether they would serve in the Chinese military if there were a war.

“They wouldn’t ask people like us to fight,” one boy said. He explained that, in a war, he wouldn’t return home if his country was the aggressor. “If China fires the first shot, then I will stay in America,” he said.

I asked why.

“Because I don’t believe that we should attack our tongbao , our compatriots.”

I knew of only one Pitt student who planned to return to China for graduate school. The student, whom I’ll call Jack, was accepted into an aerospace-engineering program at Jiao Tong University, in Shanghai. Jack was one of the top SCUPI students, and in an earlier era he would have had his pick of American grad schools. But Chinese aerospace jobs are generally connected to the military, and American institutions had become wary of training such students. Even if a university makes an offer of admission, it can be extremely difficult to get a student visa approved. “Ten years ago, it would have been fine,” Jack told me. “My future Ph.D. adviser got his Ph.D. at Ohio State in aerospace engineering.” He continued, “Everybody knows you can’t get this kind of degree in the U.S. anymore.”

When I met Jack for lunch, I initially didn’t recognize him. He had lost twenty pounds, because in Pittsburgh he had adopted a daily routine of a four-mile run. “In middle school and high school, my parents and grandparents always said you should eat a lot and study hard,” he said. “I became kind of fat.”

He had assimilated to American life more successfully than most of his peers, and his English had improved dramatically. He told me shyly that he had become good friends with a girl in his department. “Some of my friends from SCUPI are jealous because I have a friend who is a foreign girl, a white girl,” he said. “They make some jokes.”

He said that he would always remember Pittsburgh fondly, but he expected his departure to be final. “I don’t think I’ll come to the U.S. again,” he said. “They will check. If they see that you work with rockets, with the military, they won’t let you in.”

On the afternoon of January 10, 2023, at around three o’clock, in the neighborhood of Homewood, Vincent was stopped behind another vehicle at a traffic light when he heard a popping sound that he thought was fireworks. He was driving the Prius, and a Chinese graduate student from Carnegie Mellon sat in the passenger seat. Vincent wore a Sig Sauer P365 subcompact semi-automatic pistol in a concealed-carry holster on his right hip. The Carnegie Mellon student was preparing to get his driver’s license, and Vincent was taking him to practice at a test course in Penn Hills, an area that was known for occasional crime problems.

At the traffic light, Vincent saw a car approach at high speed and run a red light. Then there were more popping sounds. Vincent realized that they weren’t fireworks when a bullet cracked his windshield.

He ducked below the dashboard. In the process, his foot came off the brake, and the Prius struck the vehicle ahead of him. The shooting continued for a few seconds. After it stopped, the Carnegie Mellon student said, “ Ge , brother, you just hit the car in front!”

“Get your head down!” Vincent shouted. He backed up, swerved around the other vehicle, and tore through a red light. After a block, he saw a crossing guard waiting for children who had just finished the day at Westinghouse Academy, a nearby public school.

“Shots fired, shots fired!” Vincent shouted. “Call 911!”

He parked on the side of the road, and soon he was joined by the driver whose car he had struck. They checked the bumpers; there wasn’t any damage. The driver, an elderly woman, didn’t seem particularly concerned about the shooting. She left before the police arrived.

A woman from a nearby house came out to talk with Vincent. She remarked that shootings actually weren’t so common, and then she walked off to pick up her child from Westinghouse Academy. After a while, a police officer drove up, carrying an AR-15. Vincent explained that he was also armed, and the officer thanked him for the information. He asked Vincent to wait until a detective arrived.

For more than two hours, Vincent sat in his car. The Carnegie Mellon student took an Uber home. When the detective finally showed up, his questions were perfunctory, and he didn’t seem interested in Vincent’s offer to provide dashboard-camera footage. A brief report about the incident appeared on a Twitter account called Real News and Alerts Allegheny County:

Shot Spotter Alert for 20 rounds Vehicles outside of a school shooting at each other. 1 vehicle fled after firing shots.

Later that year, Vincent took me to the site. He recalled that during the incident he had repeatedly said, “Lord, save me!,” like Peter the Apostle on the Sea of Galilee. The lack of police response had surprised Vincent. “I didn’t know they didn’t care about a shooting,” he said. For our visit, he wore a Sig Sauer P320-M17 on his right hip. “Normally, I don’t open-carry,” he said. “But this gun can hold eighteen rounds.”

It had been four years since Vincent arrived in my class at Sichuan University. Have you ever been involved in a situation that was extremely threatening, or dangerous, or somehow dramatic ? Back then, he had written about what happened when the Chinese Internet police came to his home. Now Vincent’s American story was one in which the police effectively didn’t come after twenty rounds had been fired near a school. But there was a similar sense of normalcy: everybody was calm; nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The following month, four students were shot outside Westinghouse Academy.

I asked Vincent if the incident had changed his opinion about gun laws.

“No,” he said. “That’s why we should carry guns. Carrying a gun is more comfortable than wearing body armor.”

At Sichuan University, I also taught journalism to undergraduates from a range of departments. Last June, I sent out a detailed survey to more than a hundred and fifty students. One question asked if they intended to make their permanent home in China. A few weren’t certain, but, of the forty-three who answered, thirty said that they planned to live in China. There was no significant difference in the responses of students who were currently in China versus those abroad.

Since the pandemic, there have been increasing reports of young Chinese engaged in runxue , or “run philosophy,” escaping the country’s various pressures by going abroad permanently. A number of my students pushed back against the idea that runxue had wide appeal. “I think that’s just an expression of emotion, like saying, ‘I want to die,’ ” one student who was studying in Pittsburgh told me. “I don’t take it very seriously.” He planned to go to graduate school in America and then return home. He said that in China it was easy for him to avoid politics, whereas in Pittsburgh he couldn’t avoid the fact that he was a foreigner. During his initial few months in the city, he had experienced three unpleasant anti-Asian incidents. As a result, he had changed the route he walked to his bus stop. “I think I don’t belong here,” he said.

Clothing store called “Big N Tall N Yet Somehow Not Impressive”.

Yingyi Ma, the sociologist at Syracuse who has surveyed Chinese students in the U.S., has observed that almost sixty per cent of her respondents intend to return to their homeland. She told me that young Chinese rarely connect with the political climate in the U.S. “But what makes America appealing is the other aspects,” she said. “The agency. The self-acceptance. Over time, as they stay in the U.S., they figure out that they don’t have to change themselves.”

One former student told me that she might remain in America in part because people were less likely to make comments about her body. She’s not overweight, but she doesn’t have the tiny frame that is common among young Chinese women, and people in China constantly remarked on her size. In Pittsburgh, I met with Edith, the student who had written about her graduation banquet. Now she had dyed some of her hair purple and green, and she avoided video calls with her grandparents, who might judge her. Once, she had gone to a shooting range with Chinese classmates, and she had attended church-group meetings out of curiosity. She told me that recently she had taken up skateboarding as a hobby.

It was typical for students to pursue activities that would have been unlikely or impossible in China, and several boys became gun enthusiasts. Nationwide, rising numbers of Asian Americans have purchased firearms since the start of the pandemic, a trend that scholars attribute to fears of racism. One afternoon, I arranged to meet a former student named Steven at a shooting range outside Wexford, Pennsylvania. I knew that I was in the right parking lot when, amid all the pickup trucks, I saw a car with a bumper sticker that said “E=mc 2 .” On the range, whenever the call came for a halt in shooting—“All clear!”—a bunch of bearded white guys in camo and Carhartt stalked out with staple guns to attach new paper covers to the targets. Steven, a shy, round-faced engineer in glasses, was the only Chinese at the range, and also the only person who used quilting pins for his target. He told me that the quilting pins were reusable and thus cheaper than staples. He had come with a Smith & Wesson M&P 5.7 handgun, a Ruger American Predator 6.5 Creedmoor bolt-action rifle, and a large Benchmade knife that he wore in a leather holster. At the range, he shot his rifle left-handed. When he was small, his father had thought that he was a natural lefty, but he was taught to write with his right hand, like all Chinese students. He told me that shooting was the first significant activity in which he had used his left.

On the same trip, I met Bruce for a classic Allegheny County dinner of mapo tofu and Chongqing chicken. After the accident in the Himalayas, Bruce had sworn off motorcycles. At Pitt, in addition to his engineering classes, he had learned auto repair by watching YouTube videos. He bought an old BMW, fixed it up, and sold it for a fifty-per-cent profit. He used the money to purchase a used Ford F-150 truck, which he customized so he could sleep in the cab for hiking and snowboarding excursions to the mountains. He had decorated the truck with two “thin blue line” American-flag decals and another pro-police insignia around the license plate. “That’s so it looks like I’m a hongbozi ,” Bruce said, using the Mandarin translation of “redneck.” “People won’t honk at me or mess with me.” He opened the door and pointed out a tiny Chinese flag on the back of the driver’s seat. “You can’t see it from the outside,” he said, grinning.

Over time, I’ve also surveyed the people I taught in the nineties, and last year I asked both cohorts of former students the same question: Did the pandemic change anything significant about your personal opinions, beliefs, or values? The older group reported relatively few changes. Most are now around fifty years old, with stable teaching jobs that have not been affected by China’s economic problems. They typically live in third- or fourth-tier provincial cities, which were less likely to suffer brutal lockdowns than places like Shanghai and Beijing.

But members of the younger generation, who are likelier to live in larger cities and generally access more foreign information, responded very differently. “I can’t believe I’m still reading Mao Zedong Thought and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” one graduate student at a Chinese university wrote. “In this collectivist ideology, there is no respect for the dignity and worth of the individual.” Another woman, who was in graduate school in the United Kingdom, wrote, “Now I’ve switched to an anarchist. It reduces the stress when I have to read the news.”

Their generation is unique in Chinese history in the scope of their education and in their degree of contact with the outside world. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that their concerns are broader. In my survey, I asked what they worried about most, and, out of forty-seven responses, three mentioned politics. Another three worried about the possibility of war with Taiwan. Only one cited environmental issues. The vast majority of answers were personal, with more than half mentioning job opportunities or problems with graduate school. This seemed to reflect the tradition of “educated acquiescence”: there’s no point in concerning yourself with big questions and systemic flaws.

Nevertheless, their worldliness makes it harder to predict long-term outcomes, and I sense a new degree of unease. On a recent trip to California, I interviewed a former student who commented that even when she and her Chinese boyfriend were alone they instinctively covered their phones if they talked about politics, as if this would prevent surveillance. I noticed that, like many other former students, she never uttered the name Xi Jinping. Afterward, I asked her about it over e-mail, and she replied:

I do find myself avoiding mentioning Xi’s name directly in [California], even in private conversations and in places where I generally feel “safe.” . . . I guess it’s a thing that has been reinforced millions of times to the point that it just feels uncomfortable and daunting to say his full name, as it has too much association with unrestrained power and punishment.

In the survey of my Sichuan University students, I was most struck by responses to a simple query: Do you want to have children someday? The most common answer was no, and the trend was especially pronounced for women, at seventy-six per cent. Other surveys and studies in China indicate a similar pattern. One former student explained:

I think that Chinese children are more stressed and profoundly confused, which will continue. We are already a confused generation, and children’s upbringing requires long periods of companionship and observation and guidance, which is difficult to ensure in the face of intense social pressure. The future of Chinese society is an adventure and children do not “demand to be born.” I am worried that my children are not warriors and are lost in it.

By my third visit to Pittsburgh, in November, 2023, Vincent had graduated, been baptized again, and embarked on his first real American job. The previous year, I had attended Sunday services with him at a Mormon church, but this time he took me to the Church of the Ascension, an Anglican congregation near campus. When I asked why he had switched, he used a Chinese word, qihou . “Environment,” he said. “They aren’t pushy. The Mormons are too pushy.”

He liked the fact that the Anglicans were conservative but reasonable. He saw politics in similar terms: he disliked Donald Trump, but he considered himself most likely to vote as a traditional Republican if he became a citizen. He had been baptized in the Anglican Church on Easter. “I told them that I had already been baptized,” he explained. “But they said that because it was Mormon it doesn’t count.”

The previous summer, Vincent’s mother had visited Pittsburgh, where, among other places, he took her to church and to the shooting range. During the trip, he told her about his plan to live permanently in the U.S. When I spoke with her recently by phone, she still held out hope that he would someday return to China. “I don’t want him to stay in America,” she said. “But if that’s what he wants I won’t oppose it.” She said that she was impressed by how much her son had matured since going abroad.

After receiving his degree in industrial engineering, Vincent decided not to work in the field. He believed that he was best suited for a career in business, because he liked dealing with all kinds of people. He had started working for his landlord, Nick Kefalos, who managed real-estate properties around Pittsburgh. One morning, I accompanied Vincent when he stopped by Kefalos’s office to drop off a check from a tenant.

Kefalos was a wiry, energetic man of around seventy. He told me that on a couple of occasions a roommate had left an apartment and Vincent was able to find a replacement. At one point, he persuaded a Japanese American, a Serbian, and a Dane to share a unit, and all of them had got along ever since. “We could see that he had a knack,” Kefalos said. “He was able to find unrelated people and make good matches.” Kefalos also liked having a Chinese speaker on staff. “We think a diverse population is ideal,” he said. Vincent was currently studying for his real-estate license, and he hoped to start his own business someday.

Kefalos’s grandfather had come from Greece, and his father had worked as an electrical engineer in the steel industry. Many of his current tenants were immigrants. “My personal experience is that they are relatively hardworking,” he said. “And I think that’s true with most immigrants who come into the country. Whether it’s for education or a better life.” He looked up at Vincent and said, “My sense is that most U.S. citizens born in the United States don’t have any idea how fortunate they are.” ♦

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Revisiting Chinese Political Culture: The Historical Politics Approach

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Political Culture and the Study of Chinese Politics

Agenda of Historical Political Science in China

Knowledge Subjectivity and Functions of Historical Political Science

1 Why a Historical Politics Approach Matters?

2 Two Different Views of Historical Change in the Study of Political Culture

3 Bringing Historical Politics and the Poly-chronic View to the Study of China’s Political Culture

3.1 The Quest for Great Unification

3.2 Mentality over Political Order

3.3 Orientation Towards Substance

3.4 Deference to Authority and Hierarchy

4 Conclusion

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