The "cancer" of all things Western
In China’s state-run press of late, there seems to be a renewed (though certainly not new) animus against things Western. The ideas, language and culture of the West — even the foodstuffs of the West — pose a threat, we are told, to Chinese identities, paradigms and physical well-being. Back in February, the Beijing Daily, drawing on the remarks of Taiwanese writer and critic Yu Guangzhong (余光中), warned of a “language cancer” (语言癌) ravaging Chinese literacy, owing to a sustained pattern of “malignant Westernisation” (恶性西化).
Earlier this month, the official Xinhua News Agency cautioned about the dangerous things Westerners stuff into their mouths — which now, as Chinese grow wealthier and more adventurous in their tastes, apparently also pose a threat to more salubrious Chinese diets. “Westernisation of Diets Must Be Moderated: Bad Life Habits Cause 3 Major Cancers,” the Xinhua headline warned.
Most dangerous of all, however, are Western ideas. This has been a consistent theme in the mainstream Party press since the People’s Daily and others emerged from the October 2014 Plenum on “ruling the nation in accord with the law” with their ideological fists swinging, anxious to brawl out the differences between China’s “rule by law” (as some have chosen to call it) and Western rule of law.
On February 25, four days after the Beijing Daily piece on “language cancer,” officials from China’s Supreme People’s Court stressed again that a clear line must be drawn between “the legal system under socialism with Chinese characteristics” and “Western ‘judicial independence'” and “separation of powers.” Not mincing words, the officials said: “[We must] resolutely oppose the influence of erroneous trends of thought and mistaken ideas from the West.”
This year, the Westernisation of higher education has become a particular focus of strategic concern for Party officials. The warning flare was sent up in November last year, when an ostensible investigative feature in the Liaoning Daily decried insufficient “political recognition” among college instructors: “Some teachers are wont to share their superficial ‘impressions from overseas study,’ praising Western ‘separation of powers’ and believing that China should take the Western path. Openly, they question the major policy decisions of the CCP’s Central Committee, or even speak directly against them.”
On January 19, the Central Office of the Chinese Communist Party and China’s State Council jointly issued an “Opinion” on the country’s system of higher education, which it called “the front line of ideological work.” Universities, said the document, “bear the important task of studying, researching and propagating Marxism, fostering and praising socialist core values, and providing intellectual talent and support for the realization of the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.”
The “Opinion” was followed with an announcement earlier this month by education minister Yuan Guiren that the government would conduct an investigation into the use of foreign textbooks at Chinese universities.
The call for ideological retrenchment in China’s universities has led to a deluge of pieces like this one, about the need to uphold socialist core values. Universities across the country are now reportedly following up with ham-fisted measures, including bans on the celebration by students of “Western festivals” (过洋节). “These debates,” said the People’s Daily of new measures like these and the controversy they engendered, “concern the question of how to understand and deal with Western values.” The paper continued:
There are elements within Western values that comport with human civilisational progress, and these deserve to be adopted. But fundamentally, [these values] are determined by Western capitalist modes of production, and at their core is the imperative of maximising the interests of the bourgeoisie. In an era of economic globalisation and social information, it is not at all strange that Western values have appeared in our universities. However, our universities are about fostering the builders and successors of the socialist project, and we cannot allow challenges from Western values to continue unchecked . . .
The debate over modernisation and national identity is of course as old as the hills in China. And it’s no surprise to see old terms being dusted off — terms like “wholesale Westernisation” (全盘西化) and “take-ism” (拿来主义).
The former term was introduced in the 1920s, advocated by prominent cultural figures such as the philosopher and essayist Hu Shi (胡适), who equated the process of adopting Western ideas with what he also called “wholehearted modernisation” (全力的现代化) or “complete modernisation” (充分的现代化), the idea being that China was hampered by its “feudal culture” (封建文化). The latter term, “take-ism,” introduced by the writer Lu Xun (鲁迅) in a 1934 essay of the same name, is in fact a more selective approach than the wholesale or wholehearted borrowing advocated by Hu Shi, the sociologist Chen Xujing (陈序经) and others in the period before and after the 1919 May Fourth Movement.
On February 28, in what seems to me to be a serious misreading of Lu Xun’s essay on “take-ism,” the Party’s flagship journal of theory, Qiushi (求是), warned against both “take-ism” and “wholesale Westernisation” as it discussed the unique path of rule of law under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party:
The path of rule of law under socialism with Chinese characteristics does not indiscriminately imitate or model itself on Western things, but adopts beneficial elements of traditional Chinese culture, and references the excellent fruits of human civilisation, creating a path that endogenously evolves, principally through the self-exploration and self-innovation of the Chinese Communist Party . . . The Chinese Communist Party does not spurn the fruits of all human civilisations and institutions. But study and referencing does not mean “take-ism”, and we must prioritise our own [needs], and usefulness for ourselves, carefully identifying [ideas and trends] and being reasonable in their absorption, and we certainly must not just copy them. Even less can we pursue a ‘wholesale Westernisation.’
