chinese diaspora essays

• Subject List
• Take a Tour
• For Authors
• Subscriber Services
• Publications
• African American Studies
• African Studies
• American Literature
• Anthropology
• Architecture Planning and Preservation
• Art History
• Atlantic History
• Biblical Studies
• British and Irish Literature
• Childhood Studies

Chinese Studies

• Cinema and Media Studies
• Communication
• Criminology
• Environmental Science
• Evolutionary Biology
• International Law
• International Relations
• Islamic Studies
• Jewish Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Latino Studies
• Linguistics
• Literary and Critical Theory
• Medieval Studies
• Military History
• Political Science
• Public Health
• Renaissance and Reformation
• Social Work
• Urban Studies
• Victorian Literature
• Browse All Subjects

How to Subscribe

• Free Trials

In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section The Chinese Diaspora

Introduction, general overviews.

• Reference Works and Handbooks
• Bibliographies and Collections
• Historical and Geographical Patterns
• Changing Frameworks
• Multifaceted Transnationalism
• Representation and Gender
• Family, Clanship, and Voluntary Associations
• Education, Rituals, and Religions
• Networks and Entrepreneurship
• Qiaoxiang and Beyond
• Overseas Chinese Nationalism and Diasporic Citizenship
• State Policies and Diplomacy
• Chinese New Migrants
• Southeast Asia
• North America
• Australia/New Zealand
• Latin America and Africa
• Smaller Communities Elsewhere

Related Articles Expand or collapse the "related articles" section about

About related articles close popup.

Lorem Ipsum Sit Dolor Amet

Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Aliquam ligula odio, euismod ut aliquam et, vestibulum nec risus. Nulla viverra, arcu et iaculis consequat, justo diam ornare tellus, semper ultrices tellus nunc eu tellus.

• Han Expansion to the South
• Migration Under Economic Reform
• Sociolinguistic Aspects of the Chinese Language
• Transnational Chinese Cinemas

Other Subject Areas

Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

• Taiwan’s Miracle Development: Its Economy over a Century
• The Jesuit Missions in China, from Matteo Ricci to the Restoration (Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries)
• The One-Child Policy
• Find more forthcoming articles...
• Export Citations
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

The Chinese Diaspora by Hong Liu , Els van Dongen LAST REVIEWED: 27 November 2013 LAST MODIFIED: 27 November 2013 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199920082-0070

The Chinese diaspora is an interdisciplinary research topic par excellence . Located at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, it encompasses disciplines as diverse as geography, sociology, history, anthropology, psychology, and political science. In addition, scholarship on the topic is characterized by changing configurations and approaches that are reflected in terminological debates. The term “overseas Chinese” is mostly associated with the first period of migration (the 1850s–1950) after mass migration from China began during the mid-19th century. During this period, the main destination for South Chinese emigrants was Southeast Asia. Up to the end of World War II, the majority of them considered themselves huaqiao (Chinese sojourners or overseas Chinese), who remained politically and culturally loyal to China. During the second period (1950–1980), new migration patterns emerged as Chinese migrated from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia to North America, Australia, and western Europe. Chinese émigrés renounced Chinese citizenship and gradually became huaren (ethnic Chinese or Chinese overseas) who pledged allegiance to their host countries. Finally, during the third phase (1980 onward), new migrants ( xin yimin ) from various locations in the PRC began to make up a greater proportion of overall Chinese emigration. The term “Chinese overseas” is generally employed as a neutral term to refer to the approximately 46 million ethnic Chinese who reside outside of mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau in the early 21st century. As a result of the growing impact of theories of globalization during the 1990s, however, the term “Chinese diaspora” also became widespread. Since then, the study of the Chinese overseas in national contexts and of Chinese migration as an account of departure, arrival, and settlement has been supplemented with an emphasis on mobility, networks, and flexible identities. Since the topic of Chinese diaspora is interdisciplinary in nature, typified by changing approaches, and encompasses all aspects of the life of ethnic Chinese dispersed over more than 150 countries, this bibliography combines a thematic with a geographical organization. Viewing the Chinese overseas in the context of developments both in their places of residence and in China and using a multidimensional perspective, this bibliography pays attention to main themes, such as the importance of different historical phases, patterns of adaptation, and linkages and networks of the Chinese overseas. It gives special consideration to interdisciplinary and geographical aspects, to comparative approaches, to transnational awareness, and to works that combine theoretical discourse and empirical practice. Research for this article was supported by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (grant number M4081020).

For those new to the field, Wang 2000 , written by the foremost historian in the field, offers a brief historical introduction to the Chinese overseas experience and the main patterns and themes involved. Sinn 1998 is one example of a more traditional volume of conference papers that has emerged from an ISSCO (International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas) conference and which the reader may find useful for its treatment of some of the main themes, as well as for its broad coverage. Liu 2006 offers a bird’s-eye view of the field of Chinese overseas studies and how it has evolved over a period of several decades. Kuhn 2008 provides a macro-overview of Chinese emigration since the 17th century in relation to major turning points in both Chinese and world history, thereby paying attention to different migration phases, adaptation patterns, and networks. Ong and Nonini 1997 is an important volume that breaks with the traditional emphasis placed on Chinese culture, ethnicity, and nation in Chinese overseas studies and that employs ethnographic and political economy approaches instead. Ma and Cartier 2003 , edited by two geographers, brings geographical concepts of space, place, transnational mobility, and place-related identity to the foreground in response to the dominance of economic and sociological paradigms in migration research.

Kuhn, Philip A. Chinese among Others: Emigration in Modern Times . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.

In this impressive volume that contains eight chapters, Kuhn discusses Chinese emigration in relation to maritime expansion, early colonial empires, imperialism, revolution, and reform. He pays special attention to the various “human ecologies” of Southeast Asia, the Americas and Australasia, and Europe. Contains glossary and index.

Liu, Hong, ed. The Chinese Overseas . 4 vols. London: Routledge, 2006.

This four-volume anthology, which includes a thirty-page introduction by the editor, presents the changing themes and genealogies of the field, covering seven decades of the more representative works on international Chinese migration published up to 2005. Particularly useful because it highlights the multidimensionality of the field.

Ma, Lawrence J. C., and Carolyn Cartier, eds. The Chinese Diaspora: Space, Place, Mobility, and Identity . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

The five parts of the volume discuss the following themes: historical and contemporary diasporas; Hong Kong and Taiwan as diasporic homelands; ethnicity, identity, and diaspora as home; migration and settlements in North America; and transmigrants in Oceania.

Ong, Aihwa, and Donald M. Nonini, eds. Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism . New York: Routledge, 1997.

The result of a 1994 conference on overseas Chinese capitalism, Chinese transnationalism is conceived of in relation to the structures of late capitalism. Based on ethnographic research in the Asian Pacific, aspects covered include early Chinese transnationalism; family, guanxi , and space; the role of the nation-state; and transnational subjectivities.

Sinn, Elizabeth, ed. The Last Half Century of Chinese Overseas . Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1998.

A sample of essays presented at the 1994 ISSCO conference on the Chinese diaspora since World War II. Apart from traditional themes such as identity, ethnicity, and emigrant hometowns ( qiaoxiang ), the volume also features papers on new destinations such as European countries, Canada, and Australia, as well as comparative approaches.

Wang, Gungwu. The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Originally delivered as three Reischauer lectures at Harvard University, the book offers a long-term overview of the Chinese overseas experience. It treats the basic migration patterns of traders, laborers, and economic and political migrants, and discusses main themes, including identity, self-perception, and policies of the homeland and host societies.

back to top

Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login .

Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here .

• About Chinese Studies »
• Meet the Editorial Board »
• 1989 People's Movement
• Agricultural Technologies and Soil Sciences
• Agriculture, Origins of
• Ancestor Worship
• Anti-Japanese War
• Architecture, Chinese
• Assertive Nationalism and China's Core Interests
• Astronomy under Mongol Rule
• Book Publishing and Printing Technologies in Premodern Chi...
• Buddhist Monasticism
• Buddhist Poetry of China
• Budgets and Government Revenues
• Calligraphy
• Central-Local Relations
• Chiang Kai-shek
• Children’s Culture and Social Studies
• China and Africa
• China and Peacekeeping
• China and the World, 1900-1949
• China's Agricultural Regions
• China’s Soft Power
• China’s West
• Chinese Alchemy
• Chinese Communist Party Since 1949, The
• Chinese Communist Party to 1949, The
• Chinese Diaspora, The
• Chinese Nationalism
• Chinese Script, The
• Christianity in China
• Classical Confucianism
• Collective Agriculture
• Concepts of Authentication in Premodern China
• Confucius Institutes
• Consumer Society
• Contemporary Chinese Art Since 1976
• Criticism, Traditional
• Cross-Strait Relations
• Cultural Revolution
• Daoist Canon
• Deng Xiaoping
• Dialect Groups of the Chinese Language
• Disability Studies
• Drama (Xiqu 戏曲) Performance Arts, Traditional Chinese
• Dream of the Red Chamber
• Early Imperial China
• Economic Reforms, 1978-Present
• Economy, 1895-1949
• Emergence of Modern Banks
• Energy Economics and Climate Change
• Environmental Issues in Contemporary China
• Environmental Issues in Pre-Modern China
• Establishment Intellectuals
• Ethnicity and Minority Nationalities Since 1949
• Ethnicity and the Han
• Examination System, The
• Fall of the Qing, 1840-1912, The
• Falun Gong, The
• Family Relations in Contemporary China
• Fiction and Prose, Modern Chinese
• Film, Chinese Language
• Film in Taiwan
• Financial Sector, The
• Five Classics
• Folk Religion in Contemporary China
• Folklore and Popular Culture
• Foreign Direct Investment in China
• Gender and Work in Contemporary China
• Gender Issues in Traditional China
• Great Leap Forward and the Famine, The
• Guomindang (1912–1949)
• Health Care System, The
• Heritage Management
• Heterodox Sects in Premodern China
• Historical Archaeology (Qin and Han)
• Hukou (Household Registration) System, The
• Human Origins in China
• Human Resource Management in China
• Human Rights in China
• Imperialism and China, c. 1800-1949
• Industrialism and Innovation in Republican China
• Innovation Policy in China
• Intellectual Trends in Late Imperial China
• Islam in China
• Journalism and the Press
• Judaism in China
• Labor and Labor Relations
• Landscape Painting
• Language, The Ancient Chinese
• Language Variation in China
• Late Imperial Economy, 960–1895
• Late Maoist Economic Policies
• Law in Late Imperial China
• Law, Traditional Chinese
• Li Bai and Du Fu
• Liang Qichao
• Literati Culture
• Literature Post-Mao, Chinese
• Literature, Pre-Ming Narrative
• Liu, Zongzhou
• Local Elites in Ming-Qing China
• Local Elites in Song-Yuan China
• Macroregions
• Management Style in "Chinese Capitalism"
• Marketing System in Pre-Modern China, The
• Marxist Thought in China
• Material Culture
• May Fourth Movement
• Media Representation of Contemporary China, International
• Medicine, Traditional Chinese
• Medieval Economic Revolution
• Middle-Period China
• Ming and Qing Drama
• Ming Dynasty
• Ming Poetry 1368–1521: Era of Archaism
• Ming Poetry 1522–1644: New Literary Traditions
• Ming-Qing Fiction
• Modern Chinese Drama
• Modern Chinese Poetry
• Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literature
• Music in China
• Needham Question, The
• Neo-Confucianism
• Neolithic Cultures in China
• New Social Classes, 1895–1949
• One Country, Two Systems
• Opium Trade
• Orientalism, China and
• Palace Architecture in Premodern China (Ming-Qing)
• Paleography
• People’s Liberation Army (PLA), The
• Philology and Science in Imperial China
• Poetics, Chinese-Western Comparative
• Poetry, Early Medieval
• Poetry, Traditional Chinese
• Political Art and Posters
• Political Dissent
• Political Thought, Modern Chinese
• Polo, Marco
• Popular Music in the Sinophone World
• Population Dynamics in Pre-Modern China
• Population Structure and Dynamics since 1949
• Porcelain Production
• Post-Collective Agriculture
• Poverty and Living Standards since 1949
• Printing and Book Culture
• Prose, Traditional
• Qing Dynasty up to 1840
• Regional and Global Security, China and
• Religion, Ancient Chinese
• Renminbi, The
• Republican China, 1911-1949
• Revolutionary Literature under Mao
• Rural Society in Contemporary China
• School of Names
• Silk Roads, The
• Sino-Hellenic Studies, Comparative Studies of Early China ...
• Sino-Japanese Relations Since 1945
• Social Welfare in China
• Su Shi (Su Dongpo)
• Sun Yat-sen and the 1911 Revolution
• Taiping Civil War
• Taiwanese Democracy
• Technology Transfer in China
• Television, Chinese
• Terracotta Warriors, The
• Tertiary Education in Contemporary China
• Texts in Pre-Modern East and South-East Asia, Chinese
• The Economy, 1949–1978
• The Shijing詩經 (Classic of Poetry; Book of Odes)
• Township and Village Enterprises
• Traditional Historiography
• Tribute System, The
• Unequal Treaties and the Treaty Ports, The
• United States-China Relations, 1949-present
• Urban Change and Modernity
• Vernacular Language Movement
• Village Society in the Early Twentieth Century
• Warlords, The
• Water Management
• Women Poets and Authors in Late Imperial China
• Xi, Jinping
• Yan'an and the Revolutionary Base Areas
• Yuan Dynasty
• Yuan Dynasty Poetry
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility

Powered by:

• [66.249.64.20|185.66.14.236]
• 185.66.14.236

• © 2024

Gifts to the Sad Country

Essays on the Chinese Diaspora

• Souchou Yao 0

Marrickville, Australia

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

• Explores Chinese belongingness
• Analyzes the politics of China's diaspora
• Explores the role of Chinese in SE Asia

58 Accesses

• Table of contents

About this book

Authors and affiliations, about the author, bibliographic information.

• Publish with us

Buying options

• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Durable hardcover edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check for access.

Table of contents (9 chapters)

Front matter, moving story.

Souchou Yao

Diasporic Histories: Cultural Archives of Chinese Transnationalism

2011, Journal of Chinese Overseas

Related Papers

Translocal Chinese: East Asian Perspectives

Sydney Van Morgan

Journal of Social History

Els van Dongen

China Review

Soon Keong Ong

Communal/Plural

Diasporic Literature: The Politics of Identity and Language

Melissa Lee

Only since the 1960s has the Asian Diaspora been studied as a historical movement greatly impacting the United States — affecting not only socio-historical cultural trends and geographic ethnography, but also culturally redefining major areas of Western history and culture. This paper explores the reverse impact of the Asian America Diaspora on Mainland China or the Chinese Motherland. Mainland Chinese writers Ha Jin and Yiyun Li have left China and today teach in major American universities and reside in America. However, the fiction of both authors explores themes and landscapes that remain immersed in Mainland Chinese culture, traditions and environment. Both authors explore the themes of “cultural collisions” between East and West, choosing to write in their adopted English language instead of their mother Putonghua tongue. Central to this paper is the idea that ethnicity and race are socially and historically constructed as well as contested, reclaimed and redefined.

Margaret Chon

Modern Languages Open

Cangbai Wang

Rhacel Parrenas

Contemporary Women's Writing

Deborah Madsen

Mark R Frost

Paper given at the 'Chinese Diaspora Studies in the Age of Global Modernity' workshop, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 19-20 November, 2015.

RELATED PAPERS

Francisco Bustos

Acta Neurochirurgica

roberto spiegelmann

Alexander Sadykov

Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie

Constantin Plaul

Nature Communications

Peter Aasted Paulsen

FOFANA MEMON

Quaternary International

Jean-Luc Locht

Open Journal of Blood Diseases

Cristian Muñoz

PINTOO BANDOPADHYAY

Clinical Chemistry

Peter Timms

British Journal of Applied Science & Technology

PC Agbonome

Open-File Report

Charlie Alpers

Advances in Materials Science and Engineering

Shaik Fairooz

Pierre MAURIZOT

Muhamad Rizki Rizki

Plant, Soil and Environment

Jolanta Kowalska

2014 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium Proceedings

Fernando Santos Osório

Michael Rectenwald

Blaženka Knežević

Salvatore Delli Paoli

Consumption Culture in Europe

Julio Abad González

Alexandre Moura Giarola

麦考瑞大学毕业证文凭办理成绩单修改 办理澳洲MQ文凭学位证书学历认证

Florin Ciolacu

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

Mandarin Expansive Tactics Available

For glocalized chinese bilingual educators.

Diasporic Histories: Cultural Archives of Chinese Transnationalism

The book Diasporic Histories: Cultural Archives of Chinese Transnationalism discusses the important role of the Chinese diaspora in transnational discourses. Edited by Deborah Madsen and Andrea Riemenschnitter, this collection of twelve essays examines historical accounts and cultural representations of the Chinese diaspora, exploring how their identities and cultures have been shaped, preserved, and changed over time.

The book explores various historical accounts of the Chinese diaspora. Ping Kwan Leung’s essay “Writing across Borders: Hong Kong's 1950s and the Present” provides a new perspective and analysis on the cultural and linguistic characteristics of Hong Kong literature, disclosing the history of Chinese diaspora in Hong Kong. In the essay “Diaspora, Sojourn, Migration: The Transnational Dynamics of "Chineseness,” Deborah Madsen discusses how the concept of “Chineseness” can no longer be used to refer to a specific cultural identity since there are various factors including language, economy, and literary production which influence identity. Madsen explores the different meanings of sojourning, migration, and diaspora throughout history. Helen Siu, who has done extensive research on the history and ethnography of southern China and Hong Kong since the 1970s, analyzes several major oppositions against China’s political moves within the last few decades to indicate “how diaspora and centre, groundedness and displacement are mutually constitutive.” Prasenjit Duara’s essay “Between Sovereignty and Capitalism: The Historical Experiences of Migrant Chinese” contrasts the history of Chinese immigrants in Southeast Asia and the United States between the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. He further analyzes the relationships between capitalism with nationalism and colonialism. 

Moreover, several essays review the history of Chinese immigration from as early as the Han Dynasty until the 18th century. Nicolas Zufferey, in his essay “Exile in China during the Han Dynasty,” attempts to present the feelings and conditions of the Chinese diaspora, especially their view towards their home and host countries during the Han Dynasty. Roland Altenburger examines the writings of Ji Yun, a mid-18 th century Chinese scholar. Altenburger analyzes Ji Yun’s detailed documentation, including verses and prose, of his experiences during exile. 

Besides historical narratives, some essays discuss cultural and literary representations. Mary Shuk-han Wong wrote “The Voyage to Hong Kong: Bildungsroman in Hong Kong Literature of the 1950s,” in which through the Bildungsroman perspective, she analyzes refugee literature (难民文学) of the mid-20 th century that shares the experiences and conditions of mainland Chinese who escaped to Hong Kong. The essay “Women and Diaspora: Zhao Shuxia's Novel Sai Jinhua and the Quest for Female Agency” by Kathrin Ensinger explores the way Zhao Shuxia, a diasporic woman, retells the story of Sai Jinhua, a courtesan and a well-known figure who “offers a link between a complex tradition of courtesan culture with its strong ties to the male literati world of imperial China and modernity.” Ensinger further discusses how the life of a courtesan, including being displaced and separated from family, resembles that of the diasporic immigrants.

Furthermore, some essays examine more recent fiction narratives. Sau-Ling Wong explores a rare, yet crucial topic in her essay “The Yellow and the Black: Race and Diasporic Identity in Sinophone Chinese American Literature.” She analyzes how the identities of Chinese diaspora were constructed in some Chinese American fiction and how Black characters have a significant role in this notion of identity construction. The essay “Another Diaspora: Chineseness and the Traffic in Women in Fruit Chan's Durian Durian ” by Pheng Cheah examines the condition of China’s small businesses after the Hong Kong Handover. Cheah also discusses the movie Durian Durian that represents Hong Kong’s unsteady economic condition during that era. Andrea Riemenschnitter’s essay studies Taiwanese and Hong Kong fiction writings within the past few years that are related to transculturalism and diaspora, especially their contribution to the discussion on queer transnationalism. In the last article “Double Diaspora? ‘Re-Presenting’ Singaporeans Abroad,” Tamara Wagner discusses how the current fiction narratives about the Chinese diaspora in Singapore and Asia Pacific countries are combinations of superficial multiculturalism that attracts Westerners and “profoundly ironic, self-reflexive re-plottings of the region's historical triangulations of diaspora, migration, and cultural hybridity.”

These twelve essays profoundly explore, analyze, and highlight the Chinese diaspora’s experiences, expressions, and contributions across different times and places. These essays present readers with possibilities and challenges to conduct further studies and research on transnationalism. 

This website uses cookies to identify users, improve the user experience and requires cookies to work. By continuing to use this website, you consent to Columbia University's use of cookies and similar technologies, in accordance with the Columbia University Website Cookie Notice .

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

The Chinese diaspora : selected essays

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

113 Previews

8 Favorites

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

EPUB and PDF access not available for this item.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by Lotu Tii on May 1, 2012

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

A National Journal of Literature & Discussion

The Sad State of Cultural Life In Moscow (Or Peking) As Viewed From Peking (Or Moscow)

By lowell r. tillett.

During the last decade Cold War rhetoric has taken an unexpected turn. The quantity and intensity of angry exchanges between capitalism and Communism have subsided almost everywhere, while the two major practitioners of Communism have been having it out. Moscow and Peking have blasted each other with charges more scurrilous and personal than the wildest anti-Communist might have ventured in the fifties. In May, 1970, the New York Times, reflecting on the fact that Mao had included in his celebration of Lenin’s centennial a comparison of Brezhnev and Hitler, and Moscow had reciprocated with a charge that Mao was a philanderer who had murdered his own son, observed that “even at the height of the Cold War, it is doubtful that any official American pronouncement matched, much less exceeded, the bitterness” of such exchanges.

Lost in the shadoAvs of the more newsworthy arguments about borders, nuclear war, and leadership of world Communism, is another aspect of the unprecedented Sino-Soviet ideological quarrel—a no-holds-barred and below-the-belt brawl on the nature and function of culture in a Communist society. Each of the Communist giants contends that the other is a traitor to Marxism and has done irreparable harm to the cause of proletarian culture.

This enormous, orchestrated propaganda campaign is carried on not only in the press, but especially by round-the-clock broadcasts over the back fence from Radio Moscow and Radio Peking. The Soviet Party journal Kommunist complained in 1969 that two-thirds of some Chinese newspapers were filled with anti-Soviet material and that Radio Peking was broadcasting to the USSR up to fifty hours per day on forty frequencies, including some reserved for distress calls. The Soviet press and radio were answering on the same scale, the latter intensifying its effort beginning in that year through “Radio Peace and Progress,” beaming broadcasts from Tashkent in the languages of the Chinese minority peoples, as well as standard Chinese.

The campaign has had its ups and clowns. It grew more and more intense from 1967, reaching a peak in the summer of 1969. It was then turned off like a faucet for a few months—neither Moscow nor Peking saying a disparaging word about the other—while border talks were being held. It has had periodic outbursts since. The Soviets have recently made occasional references to the relaxation of Mao’s cultural policies, but have not retreated from their basic charges. The Chinese have not retreated one iota, but have observed long periods of silence on the subject.

Each side holds that the other has strayed from the Marxist path and betrayed the proletariat. The method of betrayal is the same in either case: the Communist Party of China (or the Soviet Union) has been “kidnapped” by a small clique, which is building its power and ruling for selfish goals. Each side assigns a definite date to the betrayal. The Chinese claim that Stalin hewed to the Marxist line, but soon after his death that “buffoon,” Khrushchev, and his “renegade revisionist clique” began a clandestine but systematic program for “the all-round restoration of capitalism.” The Soviets hold that at roughly the same time the Chinese Party lost its battle against Mao, who is not a Marxist at all, but an unprincipled opportunist Avho has built a fearful “personality cult” through purge and intimidation.

The cultural policies of each power, as observed by the other, are an important manifestation of the Marxist heresy and a means of realizing the tyrants’ goals. Each side presents a caricature of the other and in the process reveals something about itself. The Chinese have concentrated on detecting and exposing capitalistic characteristics in Soviet culture; the Soviets have dwelt on the wild, romantic, whimsical experimentation of Maoism, which “has nothing in common with Marxism.”

In support of their proposition that the Soviet “renegades” are restoring capitalism, the Chinese point to what they consider scandalous wage differentials and examples of high living, in the worst tradition of bourgeois capitalists, among Soviet leaders. These cases prove to Chinese satisfaction that a new class division is growing in the USSR and that the class struggle—that hallmark of a capitalist society—is not only present, but is intensifying.

The Chinese find many examples of extravagant living among the “high-salaried privileged stratum.” While among Soviet workers “two or three families share a single room,” the tycoons are concerned about luxurious second houses by the sea. One villa on the Black Sea “has two swimming pools, one for fresh water and another for salt water” and another has a special room for the master’s dog. While Soviet workers suffer from periodic food shortages, their leaders enjoy “beef and mutton from Mongolia, champagne from France, onions from Poland, grapes from Bulgaria.” And while the Avorkers complain of shortages of shoes and underwear, the privileged squander hard currency on imported fashions. As evidence, the Chinese once wryly quoted a compliment from the camp of the enemy: Die Welt’s opinion that the Soviet Union “has never seen a Party chief as fashionable as Brezhnev . . ., with a silvery grey necktie and an impeccable, well-tailored black suit, he is so smartly groomed that he gives no thought at all about Lenin’s style of dress.”

It is little wonder that Soviet leaders, seduced by these capitalist comforts, should be diverted from the causes of the people. “When these fat and comfortable Communists . . .tog themselves up in Italian fashion, sip a glass of martini [sic] and bounce to the rhythm of American jazz, how it is possible for them to think of the liberation fighters in the South Vietnamese jungles, the starving peasants in the Indian countryside, and the Afro-Americans in Harlem?”

The evils of the system are not confined to the “upper strata,” but have seeped down to another group which can only be identified by its capitalist nomenclature, the middle class. The Chinese have denounced such capitalist trappings as pawnshops, classified advertising, and the free markets where agricultural products and handicrafts are sold by individuals. When the Moscow Pawnshops Administration tried in 1967 to promote its operations by offering better guarantees, transactions by telephone, and even house calls by the pawnbroker, the Chinese press rose to the occasion, asking rhetorically, “Just what is a pawnshop?. . . Whatever the color of its signboard, and whatever its sidelines, its main business is usury, in other words, sucking the blood out of the poor. It is rather strange that thriving pawnbrokers should be a sign of the transition to Communism and that the workers will enter Communist society with wads of pawn tickets in their pockets.”

The Chinese were also disturbed by the proliferation of classified advertisements in the Moscow evening newspaper. The mere existence of such ads was regarded as prima facie evidence of a capitalist society, since “advertising in the bourgeois press is a medium by which capitalists push sales, carry out cut-throat competition, and grab profits.” But the Chinese turned the knife in the wound by noting the business being transacted: villas and summer cottages wanted, medals wanted, lottery tickets wanted, jobs wanted, and divorce announcements. “Multiplying like fungi , . . .these ads reek with the stink of bourgeois ideology and way of life.”

The Chinese share with the Russians great fears about the profit motive in the private sector of Soviet agriculture. They regard the free markets, where products from the private plots are sold as “a paradise for kulaks and speculators. . . . In the free markets, people rub shoulders in crowds. They push and jostle each other. It is a sickening scene of noise and confusion, with hawkings to attract customers, angry bargaining, etc.”

The Chinese also detect signs of restored capitalism in the trappings of popular culture in the USSR. What could be more symptomatic of decadent bourgeois society than fashion shows, fashion magazines, beauty shops, nude pictures, fancy wedding ceremonies, dog shows, and comic strips?

According to the Chinese, “the Soviet revisionists have discarded the plain working-class clothing of Lenin for the sophisticated styles of the bourgeoisie.” They publish “fashion and hair style magazines to corrupt the Soviet people, particularly the youth,” and have staged fashion shows at home and abroad. At one “Soviet fashion design show” in Washington, the models wore fashions by “the Soviet Union’s best-known avant garde designer, who copied the cowboy pants and mini-skirts of the West.”

The Chinese claim that even the Communist Youth League, the customary apprenticeship to the Communist Party, has entered the race for fashion and beauty. They were alarmed to find out that “there is a Beauty Parlor for Young Communist League Members and Youths” in Leningrad, where discussions on “new hair fashions” and “hair-do contests” are held every Sunday. And “in Moscow, so-called clubs for girls have been set up in some cultural palaces to attract young women workers to study “the secrets of beauty culture” and “problems of love. ” Is this following the behest of Lenin?”

It is only a short step from the fashion show to the even more decadent dog show. “The Soviet revisionists also put on dog shows in Moscow similar to those in New York and London and went so far as to make this thing fashionable. All this is the height of rottenness.”

In popular Soviet wedding ceremonies, Peking detects a throwback to tsarist days. “In Moscow nowadays, one often sees troikas of the type common in the days of old Russia galloping by. They carry no ordinary passengers, but cater to newlyweds,” carrying them to the wedding palace. The hiring of troikas has become a thriving business, for, according to TASS, “wedding vehicles have been booked up for the whole spring season.”

For the younger set, Soviet authorities have tried to make learning about scientific subjects more palatable by using the form of the comic strip. The Chinese reaction was this:

The Soviet revisionists have resorted to new methods of corrupting the young by churning out “science” fiction and comics modeled after “Alley-Oop,” “Blonclie,” “Batman,” etc. Under the pretext of disseminating scientific knowledge, such garbage from the Soviet press fosters venomous fantasy.

Having set the Soviet Union on such a dangerous course, the leaders have accepted the uglier features of bourgeois society—unsavory night life, increasing crime, alcoholism, and prostitution. When the Soviet press called on recreation officials to “brighten up night life,” the Chinese press wondered what the workers, who “toil from dawn to dusk,” could possibly do with a nightclub. They have no time to loaf, and such “decadent and licentious recreation is completely alien” to them. Nightclubs are “the hallmark of the Western way of life” where “bourgeois ladies and gentlemen and their offspring, who fatten on the sweat and blood of the working people . . .squander their ill-gotten gains.” And “since night clubs are being readied, brothels, gambling houses, and other such foul trades will also make their public appearance before long.”

On at least one of these subjects, alcoholism, the Chinese get plenty of ammunition from the Soviet press. But characteristically they accentuate the negative, citing the most glaring cases from Soviet articles, without acknowledging that the whole purpose of the Soviet discussion is remedial. They suggest that Ivan drinks a lot to cover his disillusionment with the régime, his sorrow for a revolution betrayed.

The Soviet counterpart of the Chinese charges of restored capitalism in the USSR is the contention that Mao’s erratic ideas and adventurism have wrecked traditional Chinese culture and have not put anything worthwhile in its place. Maoist thoughts not only drive out the harder currency of creative ideas; they serve as a religious opiate: “Mao Tse-tung’s thoughts do not differ from the religious intoxicants which develop the minds of the people and promise them a better lot—in another world.” Furthermore, Mao has a deep anti-intellectual streak (“the more books you read, the more stupid you become”) and Chinese intellectuals have been the scapegoats for the failure of his many experiments. As a result of all this, the Soviets see China as a cultural wasteland.

According to Marxism cultural life, like almost everything else, is based on economic underpinnings and the Soviets contend that Mao has failed the Chinese people at this basic point. The standard of living in China remains at a very low level, and there is no plan to improve it substantially in the foreseeable future. According to Mao’s doctrine of “primitive asceticism” all incentiA r es to material gain are denounced, and poverty is a virtue. While the Chinese rail against wage differentials in the USSR, the Russians deplore the grinding poverty of the whole Chinese population, a condition which is accepted and lauded by the leadership. One Soviet spokesman cited the chorus from a popular Chinese play:

First you walked barefoot. Then you put on rag slippers, and then—rubber shoes. This time you may wish to sport leather shoes, or even high boots. What will become of you in this process of bourgeois degradation?

Another Soviet position in this quarrel rings strange in the Western ear, for vis-à-vis the Chinese, they are champions of the rights of the individual against the demands of the state. They charge that Mao has so completely subdued, “brainwashed,” and regimented the Chinese people that there are no areas of individual freedom left, and this includes all cultural life at a personal level. The demands for group activity are so great that a Chinese can no longer enjoy the simplest pleasures—taking a walk, going fishing, playing cards, or taking a nap on his day off. Such activities have been condemned as bourgeois. One Soviet broadcast lamented Mao’s purge of billions of goldfish. “The Peking press, . . .calling for greater revolutionary vigilance, urged the people to destroy the fishbowls and to carry out the revolution, because goldfish breeding was an assault by the bourgeoisie on the proletariat.”

The goal of Maoist cultural policy, in the Soviet view, is to reduce the individual to the rôle of an ant in the giant anthill. Several phrases on this theme, which were upheld as ideals in China during the Cultural Revolution, have been quoted in contempt in Soviet propaganda. Workers are asked to become “little stainless screws” in Mao’s machine. According to the diary of a Chinese soldier, “although a cog is small, its rôle is inestimable. I want to be a cog always, . . .cleaned and protected so that it does not rust.” The peasant’s variant has him aspiring to be “an obedient buffalo of the great helmsman,” and children pledge themselves as “red seedlings.”

Chinese culture has been submerged in the morass of Mao worship. Instead of reading traditional Chinese literature (much of which has perished in the flames of the Cultural Revolution) Chinese children memorize twenty quotations per day from Mao’s thought. Mao quotations are chanted at meals and at public rallies. “From the very early morning Peking’s streets are filled with a roar which comes from loudspeakers. . . . It is impossible to collect one’s thoughts and think about what is happening.” There is no escape in visiting the theater or the music hall, in listening to the radio, or reading the popular press, which are all saturated with Mao themes.

The Soviets are also, rather surprisingly, the champions of traditional cultural values and have given much attention to the cultural nihilism of the Cultural Revolution. While the Chinese were citing Marx and Lenin passages calling for the destruction of bourgeois culture and the remolding of intellectuals, the Soviets have cited other passages emphasizing the need for continuity and critical assimilation of the culture of the past.

In the fine arts the Chinese are somewhere to the right of Stalin; they advocate socialist realism with a vengeance. Every work of art is judged strictly on its utility in furthering the revolution, and any work that does not do so in a straightforward way is a “poisonous weed” which must be eradicated. One of the earliest criticisms of Khrushchev’s cultural policy was that he had permitted the rehabilitation of “revisionist royalist writers” who had quite properly been suppressed by Stalin. Among these were Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova, who shared the heresy of ideological neutrality in some of their works. Like Stalin, the Chinese regard non-conforming literature to be extremely detrimental: “a single bullet can only kill a single person, but the influence of a single reactionary novel can harm ten thousand people.”

The Chinese have attacked more than a dozen Soviet writers, but their main efforts have been made against three. Mikhail Sholokhov has drawn more fire from Chinese critics than all other Soviet writers combined. They regard him as the most dangerous kind of cultural figure, a counter-revolutionary who manages to hoodwink his countrymen, a “termite that sneaked into the revolutionary camp.”

In the Chinese view, Sholokhov’s works are full of counter-revolutionary messages, and his characters are not properly oriented. In “And Quiet Flows the Don” Grigory is an out-and-out white guard, whose tragic experiences are treated sympathetically. Sholokhov weighs the personal sufferings of his characters against the Revolution and questions whether the sacrifice was worth it. Furthermore, the author “exaggerated the counter-revolutionary rebellion,” stated openly that “there were too many bad elements” in the Bolshevik Party, and pointed out the “excessive actions” of the Red Army against the enemy-—all “impermissible” according to Maoist literary standards. In “Virgin Soil Upturned” Sholokhov “maliciously distorted the features of the poor and lower-middle peasants and vilified them as opponents of collectivization.” He “prettifies the class enemy” and “describes collectivization as a series of endless disasters.”

Sholokhov’s Nobel prize confirms Chinese suspicions. “Sholokhov, in a state of awed excitement, accepted the Nobel prize for literature, which even the French bourgeois writer Jean-Paul Sartre would not accept. In Sartre’s words, to accept the prize would be to receive “a distinction reserved for the writers of the West or for the traitors of the East. “”

Konstantin Simonov’s popular war novels, “The Living and the Dead” and “Days and Nights,” have been attacked for their strong condemnation of war. In Mao’s view the violence and destructiveness of wars should not be emphasized to the exclusion of the positive results of just wars, which are the means by which the working class will destroy imperialism. In Mao’s words, “war is politics with bloodshed.” But Simonov’s novels, concerning the German invasion of Russia in 1941 and the battle of Stalingrad, view war in a totally negative way. There is too much gore, not enough glory. The main characters only want to survive—to survive for such selfish reasons as to return to a lover or to school. Simonov would “stamp out the flames of peoples’ revolutionary wars.” Besides, he emphasizes the might of the German army and the weakness of the Red Army. He had the Red Army falling back to Stalingrad because of weakness and not to launch a counter-attack, as the Chinese prefer to have it.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who is always referred to as a “playboy poet,” has committed all the cardinal sins: he has condemned Stalin, China, and written anti-war poetry. Furthermore, he is a writer “who sold his soul” to United States imperialism. He first came to fame for “brutally defaming Stalin after the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. This clown described himself as “weeping like all others when Stalin died. ” Yet before his tears were dry, he had trod upon Khrushchev’s heels in attacking Stalin.” Yevtushenko’s “mud-slinging” poems against the Cultural Revolution have drawn heavy fire from the Chinese, as have his popular recital trips to the West.

Soviet criticism of the current Chinese literary scene seldom involves specific writers or works, since the main Soviet complaint is that the Cultural Revolution and the Maoist cult have destroyed old literary works and prevented new ones from being written. “In effect, sentence of death has been pronounced on China’s centuries-old culture.” A 1969 broadcast charged that not a single novel had been published in China during the last four years and that the author of the last one was soon in trouble. The fate of foreign literature in China was equally bad. According to Sovetskaya Kultura, “between 1949 and 1956, 2683 works of classical Russian and Soviet literature had been published in the Chinese language in a total of 66,500,000.” But these have all been swept away in “the prairie fire of the Cultural Revolution.” Soviet accounts are full of descriptions of book burning, the destruction of bookshops and libraries, and of trash heaps which serve as collection points for condemned literature. Meanwhile three billion copies of Mao’s works have been turned out in China.

The Russians do single out one Chinese writer for biting criticism, and it cuts to the quick: they have a very low opinion of the literary efforts of Mao Tse-tung. His poems are always vague and sometimes incomprehensible. One of the Russian translators of Mao’s poetry stated in an interview that “these verses are incomprehensible, not merely on first reading; even readers with philological education cannot explain the meaning of some phrases exactly.” Red Guards sing Mao’s words “frequently without understanding their meaning.”

Furthermore, Mao’s poetry is ideologically suspect. The Soviet verdict on one of his poems was that “it is merely an imitation of decadent court poetry, full of embellishing phrases.” Other Soviet critics have noted that “Mao’s imagination has always been captivated by the imagery and personalities of the rulers of old imperial China. Moreover, Mao’s personality has clear traces of the characteristics of the Chinese Emperors.” Radio Moscow has broadcast detailed analyses of “Yellow Stork Flying,” one of Mao’s most popular poems, detecting almost precise figures found in the verse of one of the Tang emperors, “an aesthete, whose life . . .was given over to meditations concerning the apparition of the yellow stork.”

“Counter-revolutionary plays dominate the Soviet stage”—so reads a typical Chinese critique. Popular Soviet plays are condemned for sowing “the virus of pacifism,” “distorting facts about the anti-fascist war” with Hitler, “repudiating the Stalin cult, vilifying the dictatorship of the proletariat,” and for advocating “a life of eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die.”

Chinese objections to the Soviet theater center about their attacks on Konstantin Stanislavsky, whose method acting has drawn frequent fire from Peking. The core of the method, as the Chinese see it, is the “self,” the “innermost I.” Such “stinking egoism” is a betrayal of class consciousness. According to the method, the actor who plays a landlord or capitalist must delve into his sub-consciousness and evoke all those hated traits of the class enemy. He “becomes” the landlord or capitalist and presents his new “self” in the best possible light. This is intolerable for current Chinese critics, who argue that all characters, including the darkest villains, must be played from a proletarian viewpoint. There must never be the slightest doubt about the true colors of the actors; the theater must occupy itself with showing the class struggle in action. “If the proletariat does not turn the theater into a red revolutionary crucible, then the bourgeoisie will change it into a black and stinking dyeing vat, disseminating the ideological poison of the bourgeoisie and contaminating the ideology of the masses.”

Soviet films come in for the same treatment. Blunderbuss attacks on Soviet films strongly suggest that the Chinese critics have not had an opportunity to see what they are condemning, the giveaway coming in some variation of the clause: “such titles alone suffice to show what these movies peddle and what sort of creatures their producers are.”

One favorite theme of Chinese critics is the growing popularity of United States films in the USSR. Peking regarded the Moscow Film Festival of 1969 as “a sickening spectacle of dewy-eyed admirers standing spellbound before the altar of Western imperialist films, . . .a disgusting exhibition of the clique’s maneuver to use the junk cranked out by the bourgeois scum . . .to promote the full-scale capitalist restoration.”

Among Soviet film figures the director Grigory Chukrai shares the villainous rôle of Sholokhov among the Chinese, and for some of the same reasons. His pictures are soft on war, and besides he made the tactical error of commenting unfavorably on Chinese films in an article for the British magazine, Films and Filming, observing that “with dogmatism and logic alone the Chinese artist cannot make good films.” Taking on his best known films one by one, a Chinese critic condemned “The Forty-First” as a flimsy love story, in which “human nature overcomes class nature, and the enemies become lovers”; “Ballad of a Soldier” is really a “condemnation of war, [showing] how the anti-fascist patriotic War wrecked people’s happiness”; “The Clear Sky” is an anti-Stalin diatribe: “when Stalin dies, “the ice melts” and “the sky clears. ” ” Chukhari’s films are all revisionist, reeking of the “odor of bourgeois humanism and pacifism.”

The Soviet view of Chinese theater and film is similar to that on literature, emphasizing cultural nihilism and political subservience. By one Soviet account, “of 3,000 theatrical companies which existed until quite recently, less than ten are alive. The silence of the Chinese theater is proof of the crisis in its art, until recently extremely popular and widespread in China.” The “spectacular revolutionary plays” which have replaced the classics are artistically worthless, and are mere propaganda pieces. “The theater in China has become a primitive means of frontal propaganda for the political lines of the present leadership.”

The Soviets also react sharply to the repudiation of Stanislavsky and to the Chinese practice of casting all characters from the proletarian viewpoint. One Soviet visitor reported a shocking experience on a visit backstage in Peking: “I was looking for the actor whom we liked very much and who appeared in the rôle of a Japanese intelligence officer. Finally I discovered him at the end of the line; it turned out that he had no right to stand next to the actors appearing in positive rôles.”

Soviet critics also regret the demise of the popular theater in China.

In the old days Chinese rural areas were blessed with popular forms of art; Chinese theatrical performers would tell stories and give performances and magic shows. . . . Thousands upon thousands of native theatrical groups used to roam from village to village giving performances, but the Maoists today have wiped out the native arts the same way they have wiped out the professional arts.

The Russians have complained about the arid film fare as well. They have from time to time reeled off the titles of films showing in Peking; all feature Chairman Mao in the titles, and most are produced by his wife, Chiang Ching. Chinese documentaries are especially deplored for their anti-Soviet bias.

Impugning the merits of “Swan Lake” is for the Russians as low a blow as discrediting Mao’s poetry for the Chinese. A Red Guard penned the following reaction:

Treasured as a masterpiece by people like you and your kind, the ballet “Swan Lake” has been going on and on for decades but the performances remain the same. What can “Swan Lake” arouse in a revolutionary of this era . . .except disgust for its corrosive rôle in leading people astray into a world far removed from real life?

A presumably more mature critic in Red Flag found it to be “a cacophony of primitive dance melodies [which] can in no way compare with the elevated music being written today in China to the words of Mao Tse-tung.” The plot is as bad as the music: “Evil genius romps about the stage, suppressing everything, while devils have become the main characters! This is indeed a sinister picture of the restoration of capitalism on the stage.”

Soviet music critics weep for the fate of the Peking opera, whose rich repertory of hundreds of masterpieces has been eliminated and replaced by a handful of worthless “revolutionary model operas.” One reason the Peking opera had to go was that Mao’s henchmen felt implied threats from its Aesopian language: “in every character, in every situation, the Maoists’ sick imagination felt an allusion.” The same fate has befallen the ballet, whose ballerinas now carry rifles to attack imaginary bourgeois fortresses.

The Chinese critics are most indignant of all when it comes to popular music—specifically the Soviet surrender to the wishes of young people to hear jazz and other mod music from the West.

Disguised as “cultural co-operation,” degenerate Western music, commercialized jazz, has become the rage in the Soviet revisionist musical, dancing, and theatrical world. . . . As a result, various weird-named American and British jazz bands have performed in the Soviet Union.

The Russians could hardly be expected to defend jazz festivals, but they do counter such charges with their own broadsides against the politicization of popular music. In one commentary they noted that the stirring old songs of the Chinese revolutionary movement had been abandoned, and new words had been set to the tunes. The new lyrics “praise Mao, his current policies, and the threat of war from the Soviet Union” and are “published in all newspapers and endlessly broadcast by the radio.”

The non-Communist bystander can only react to these arguments with a certain amount of amusement, and it is not unlikely that the people on the receiving end regard them the same way. The great majority of the charges go unanswered. Aside from an occasional angry riposte resulting from wounded national pride, there is little evidence that the charges are taken very seriously. Neither government is concerned enough to put up funds for systematic jamming of the broadcasts, and while the USSR tries to prevent Chinese printed matter from coming into the country (as it does for all unfriendly materials), the Chinese have from time to time reprinted the Soviet charges with a brief editorial note asking readers to see how ridiculous they are. While each side claims a large, sympathetic audience in the other country, there is no evidence of a large number of converts.

This propaganda is to some extent intended to persuade the rest of the world (the broadcasts are usually aimed directly at the adversary in his language, but elaborate translation services turn out news releases and magazines in all major languages). Its influence cannot be measured, but the total effect must be negative, judging from the singular lack of success of each side in converting the third world. If there are impressionable Marxist-leaning leaders of the future looking to Moscow and Peking for guidance, their frustration must be equal to that of Christendom five centuries ago when two rival popes demanded allegiance.

Each country reveals something about its view of the world in this propaganda, even through the thick layers of self-righteousness and hypocrisy. The Chinese revolutionists are still in the fiery, youthful, idealistic stage, while the Russians have reached middle age and want its comforts. In some respects the Chinese are where the USSR was a quarter-century ago: many of these charges are similar to those Stalin hurled at the West. And unquestionably the USSR has softened somewhat in the last two decades; its lecturing of the Chinese on human rights and tyranny could hardly have been made in Stalin’s day. The big question is whether the Chinese have also begun to move in this direction, and there are indications of such motion in the new diplomacy and the dampening of the fires of the Cultural Revolution.

Above all, these cultural polemics add a new dimension to the proposition that the Sino-Soviet conflict is deep and fundamental. These charges are somehow more drastic and irrevocable than border disputes, which can be settled on a legal basis. The good old days of a mere twenty years ago, when cultural agreements were signed with great fanfare, when cultural troupes of every description traveled between Moscow and Peking, and the press was full of congratulations of the cultural achievements of the other, seem far removed, and not likely to return.

• Print Article

Most Popular

The male glance, prince of peace, fear factors, omnipresence.

You have read 1 of 10 free articles in the past 30 days

Get unlimited access

Recommended Reading

Democracy, Debates, and Daughters

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

Night Moves

By Amanda Petrusich

Mysterious American Cat

By Ryan Bradley

Once Bitten

By Laura Kolbe

But I’ve Got Ovid

By Jane Alison

中文 | English | عربي | Español | Français | Deutsch

• Special Report
• Around China
• Business Information
• Language Corner
• Cooking Class

Jointly Building a Community of Shared Future for All Humankind

By staff reporter AN XINZHU

THE world is facing serious dilemmas in its push for further growth, such as insufficient impetus to drive economic growth, the gap between rich and poor, prevalence of protectionism, and global governance that needs to be improved. The questions remains: How to work together to promote common prosperity and inject new impetus to boost sustained economic growth?

“In promoting mutually beneficial cooperation, we should raise awareness on building a community of shared future for all humankind. A country should accommodate the legitimate concerns of others when pursuing its own interests; and it should promote common development of all countries when advancing its own. Countries should establish a new type of global development partnership that is more equitable and balanced, stick together in times of difficulty, share all rights as well as shoulder all obligations, and boost the common interests of humankind.” This is quoted from the report adopted by the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in November 2012, which attracted the world’s attention.

An Increasingly Clear Notion

“It is a world where countries are linked with and dependent on one another at a level never seen before. Humankind, by living in the same global village within the same time and space where history and reality meet, has increasingly emerged as an intimate community of shared future,” said Chinese President Xi Jinping. He first made the remarks about sharing with the world China’s perspective on the future development of human civilization in his speech delivered at Moscow State Institute of International Relations during his first overseas trip after becoming China’s president in March 2013.

The response from international society showed that Xi’s understanding of the future development of the whole world and human society is “far-sighted.” The concept of building a community of shared future for all humankind has struck a chord with the rest of the world.

In a series of conferences and major events in the ensuing years, Xi Jinping has expounded on the notion repeatedly. All the remarks he has made and what he has called for over the past five years, including “an intimate community where everyone is interlinked,” “there is only one Earth in the universe and we, humankind, have only one homeland,” “foster a keen sense of a global community of shared future,” “let the awareness of a community of common destiny take root in the neighboring countries,” “create and fulfill an Asia-Pacific dream,” and “move towards a community of common destiny and a new future for Asia,” have made the concept of “building a community of shared future for all humankind” a global notion that has surpassed national boundaries and the constraints of nationality and ideology. China’s influence on regional cooperation and global governance has been expanded from merely an institutional aspect to a spiritual level.

On May 18, 2015, People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the CPC, published an article by Guo Jiping, to elaborate on the concept of “a community of shared future for all humankind.” The article pointed out that China has expressed its wish for peaceful development through this global notion that has surpassed the constraints of nationality and ideology.

The article, entitled “Promise of a Better Future for the World,” noted that there are divergences and conflicts when pursuing different state interests, religious beliefs, ideologies, and social systems. However, we are all humans, and people are the subject of any historical activity. Countries with different beliefs, systems, and ethnic groups could coexist peacefully and compete with each other equally and in an orderly fashion, so that the common interests outweigh divergences and confrontations and the people can rationally decide the future of the world.

A New Model of International Relations Based on Win-win Cooperation

The famous British historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee said: “If the CPC can blaze a new path in its social and economic strategies, then it can prove its capacity to endow a gift on China and the world. The gift will be a combination of the vitality of modern Western society and the stability of traditional Chinese culture.”

The notion of “building a community of shared future for all humankind” is probably part of this gift.

In September 2015, Xi Jinping gave a comprehensive elaboration on the notion when he attended summits marking the 70th anniversary of the United Nations’ founding in New York. He pointed out that efforts should be made to establish a partnership in which countries treat each other as equals with mutual consultations and mutual understanding, build a security pattern featuring fairness and justice that is contributed and shared jointly by all nations, strive for open, innovative, and inclusive development that benefits all, advance inter-civilization exchanges featuring inclusiveness and harmony amid diversity, and build an ecosystem that puts nature and green development first.

His elaboration has made the overall plan for building a community of shared future for all humankind clear, depicted the bright prospects of international relations, and also represented the innovation of major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics.

Following the traditional Chinese doctrine of “the unity of knowing and acting,” China has become a pioneer and contributor in realizing this notion through its actions. Over the past 30-odd years since the implementation of the reform and opening-up policy, China has climbed from the 10th to second largest economy in the world, with its contribution to world economic growth remaining at around 30 percent annually, proving its commitment to development. Meanwhile, China has lifted more than 700 million people out of poverty in the past three decades — which amounts to more than 70 percent of global poverty reduction over that period.

From a political aspect, China insists on a new approach to state-to-state relations that features dialogue rather than confrontation and partnerships instead of alliances. Efforts should be made to seek common ground while shelving differences. Countries need to respect other countries’ unique social systems and development paths, as well as respect each other’s core interests and major concerns. Countries may differ in size, strength, or level of development, but we should discuss and look for solutions together on matters that involve us all. China takes the lead among major countries to make “establishing a partnership” a guiding principle of building international relations. So far, it has established partnerships with over 80 countries, regions, and regional organizations. A partnership network between China and the rest of the world has begun to take shape.

On security issues, China calls for abandoning the outdated Cold War mentality in all forms, and fostering a new vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative, and sustainable security. As people of all countries become increasingly interdependent, no country could ensure its own security without also ensuring the security of other countries or of the wider world. Therefore, all countries should play a constructive role in safeguarding global and regional stability. Guided by the new vision of security, China is working hard to provide solutions to regional hotspot issues. It has actively participated in the UN’s peacekeeping operations by sending the highest number of peacekeepers among all five permanent members of the Security Council and contributing the greatest amount of funds to the UN peacekeeping budget as a developing country.

Regarding the economy, China calls for an open, innovative, and inclusive development that benefits all, so to achieve win-win cooperation and common development. China supports the establishment of a more open economy and firmly boosts free trade and investment by promoting the facilitation of trade and investment and opposing protectionism. Against the anti-globalization movement, China calls for eliminating gaps among countries and allowing the people around the world to share development fruits together.

For cultural exchanges, China strives to promote exchanges among different civilizations and different development models, so that we can learn from each other’s best potential for common progress. “Different civilizations represent different wisdoms and are made up of the contributions from different nationalities. They are equal, none of them superior or inferior. We should respect all civilizations, treat each other as equals, learn from each other, and take in each other’s excellent essence so as to promote human civilization towards creative development,” said Xi Jinping in a speech delivered at the Peruvian Congress in November 2016.

To encourage green development, China has made significant efforts to promote the implementation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). China takes the lead among the world’s biggest carbon emitters in starting domestic procedures to ratify the Paris Agreement. Patricia Espinosa Cantellano, executive secretary of the UNFCCC, said during her visit to China at the end of August 2017 that China is one of the most important leaders in tackling global climate change, noting that the country has made positive efforts in line with its green development concept. She added that China plays a leading role, especially in promoting the implementation of the Paris Agreement.

Sincere Partner for Developing Countries

Building a community of shared future for all humankind starts from surrounding countries. The Boao Forum for Asia witnessed the concept of an Asian community of shared future.

During the annual meeting of the Boao Forum for Asia in 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping stressed “firmly establishing the consciousness of a community of shared future.” President Xi then delivered an important speech in the Indonesian parliament, and proposed five major initiatives to build the “China-ASEAN community of shared future.” At the Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs in 2014, President Xi stressed the need to create a “community of shared future in surrounding countries.”

The theme of the Boao Forum for Asia in 2015 was “Asia’s New Future: Towards a Community of Shared Future.” At the opening ceremony, President Xi once again explained the proposition to “march towards the community of shared future, and create a new future in Asia.” The forum is regarded as the symbol of Asian solidarity by foreign media.

The concept also reaches Africa and Latin America across the ocean.

In March 2013, when President Xi gave an address in Tanzania, he said that China and Africa have the same historical experience, development tasks and strategic interests of a community of shared future. And his 30-minute speech won 30 rounds of applause.

In July 2014, Xi Jinping visited Brazil and attended the meeting with leaders of Latin American and Caribbean countries. In his speech entitled “Strive to Build a Community of Shared Future,” he proposed a new pattern between China and Latin America, and called for the creation of the “Sino-Latin American community of shared future.”

As a developing country, China’s diplomatic work has never neglected the common progress of other developing countries, believing that only joint self-improvement can allow developing countries to go to the center of the world stage. During the 2016 G20 Summit in Hangzhou, China extensively invited developing counties to participate in and to enhance the representation and speaking right of the developing countries at the G20. During the BRICS Leaders Meeting in 2017, the Chinese side held a dialogue between emerging market economies and developing countries, with the aim of building a network of partners and building a community of common development and shared future.

The concept of “community of shared future” has extended from the “real world” to “virtual space.”

According to international media, to build a community of shared future has become China’s new diplomatic strategy, even the new blueprint to establish a fair international order.

Contributing Chinese Wisdom

“The community of shared future” is rooted in the inheritance of thousands of years of Chinese culture.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi pointed out that the concept is rooted in the long history of Chinese civilization and China’s magnificent diplomatic practice, in line with various countries’ sincere desire and lofty pursuit of peace, development and cooperation.

The Chinese people have said, “The world is a commonwealth.” The community of shared future is not only the resonance of the Chinese philosophy of life, diplomatic traditions and the contemporary era, but also the pursuit of better life of peoples of various countries.

In the China Hall of the United Nations Headquarters hang two Chinese paintings – the Interactive World and the Home of Us All. According to former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the two paintings reflect the important role of China in the peaceful development of the world. China is not only the advocator of community of shared future, but also the responsible practitioner.

On September 28, 2015, in the UN headquarters, President Xi stated that “we are going to inherit and carry forward the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, build a new type of international relations centered on win-win cooperation, and build a community of shared future for mankind.” This was the first time that Xi Jinping had elaborated the concept at the United Nations.

On January 18, 2017, President Xi delivered an important speech entitled “Jointly Build a Community of Shared Future for Mankind” in the United Nations Office at Geneva, and clearly put forward China’s approach of “building a community of shared future to achieve win-win results.” In February, the concept was first written into the United Nations resolution. One month later, at the 34th meeting of United Nations Human Rights Council, China, on behalf of 140 countries, issued a joint statement entitled “Work Together to Promote and Protect Human Rights and Build a Community of Shared Future for Humankind.”

China has not only provided a unique vision to promote the progress of world civilization, but also put forward the “China approach” to this idea.

Proposed more than three years ago, the Belt and Road Initiative has entered the new stage of action and implementation. The circle of friends along the Belt and Road is expanding. Since establishment, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has gained plentiful and substantial achievements. As a growing number of Chinese initiatives have become international consensus, a series of constructive public goods have benefited the world.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres highly appreciates the idea put forward by President Xi. “China has become an important pillar of multilateralism, and the purpose of multilateralism is to establish a community of shared future for all humankind ,” he said.

• Developing a Green Economy in Response to Climate Change
• The Xiamen BRICS Summit Ushers in an Era of Pragmatic Cooperation
• Infographic: China's Contribution to South-South Cooperation
• Infographic: What is South-South Cooperation
• Tong Ren Tang Sailing into Overseas Markets

Cinco consejos para hacerse millonarios

Panama – Connecting China with Latin America

El reto de la donación de órganos en China

Huang Jiefu, viceministro chino de Sanidad, sugirió la posibilidad de que

• China’s Path: A Great Practice in Human Social Development
• China-U.S. shared interests far outweigh differences in trade ties: Premier Li
• Xi calls for persistently pursuing Chinese dream of national rejuvenation
• Looking into the Chinese “Mirror” – An Interview with Professor Alfons Labisch, a Renowned German Scientist
• A Financer’s Venture into the Cultural Field
• Régis Lansade: Falling in Love with China

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Moscow Charges Chinese Seek ‘Undercover Deal’ With Chiang

By James F. Clarity Special to The New York Times

• March 10, 1975

MOSCOW, March 9—A Soviet commentator said today that Peking hoped to make an “undercover deal” with the Nationalists under which Chiang Kai‐shek would become the provincial chief of Taiwan for life.

The commentator, A. Kantov, writing for the Novosti press agency, an official Soviet propaganda outlet, said that Chairman Mao Tse‐tung had sent a man identified as “the aged Chang Shih‐chao” to Hong Kong to make contact with agents of the Nationalist leader whose government is based on the island of Taiwan. But the Nationalist leader, the commentary said, would not accept the deal.

The commentary came as an unusual ripple in the constant stream of anti‐Peking propaganda that is produced in this country. The Novosti commentary, distributed by Tass, the official press agency, has not yet appeared in any Soviet publication. A. Kantov is not known here as a prominent Soviet writer on Chinese affairs.

The commentary, as quoted Viand paraphrased by Tass, said that “the Maoists still cherish an illusion of an undercover deal with the Taiwan regime as a result of which Chiang Kai‐shek could fill the post of the head of a Taiwan province for life.” The commentary added:

“Attempts to find a compromise solution to the Taiwan problem on a Nationalist basis encounter intransigent opposition on the part of Chiang Kaishek himself. He not only openly rejects the sounding by Mao Tse‐tung's feelers but reaffirms his intention to return to the mainland and assert his power over the whole of China.”