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Part I ORIGINSSample essay: "Cultural origins"
Chinese In a sequence like this, we see how a person's origin can proceed from the general to the particular. We begin with China as a whole, then move to a particular region and onward to a particular speech area within that region. The final steps take us into the domain of local and sub-local identity. For many Chinese pondering their origins, 'China' is too great a generality. Staggering in the length of its recorded history, it is also mammoth in size and population. Something on a lower scale of inclusiveness is necessary. For the bulk of the world's overseas Chinese, that something boils down to coastal South China. In this section we consider Fujian, Guangdong, Hainan and Zhejiang as places of overseas Chinese origin. For each of the first three, themselves large enough areas to warrant subdivision, we select certain component localities for closer focus... Sample essay: Cultural origins An overseas Chinese who thinks of himself as Chinese may do so with a sense of his origin in China and of his having inherited bits of tradition handed down from the Chinese past. Tradition lives on in every society, and many areas of past Chinese experience have an ongoing existence in the present, not only in China itself but in overseas Chinese communities. What these areas are might stand a better chance of elucidation if Chinese tradition itself were one thing rather than several. Similarly, if Chinese tradition were one thing rather than several, we would better understand how these areas are transformed by modern challenges, by exposure and adaptation to non-Chinese experience and by their having been selectively and unevenly inherited in the first place, or selectively conserved or restored for economic or political ends. As it is, the cloth out of which today's shapes were cut makes available many, even conflicting, options. Confucians, for example, may want to keep the supernatural at a distance, but anyone who looks into the world of popular 'Chinese culture' will discover an obsession with gods and goddesses, ghosts and spirits. Those invoking 'Chinese culture' as an explanation for present behaviour may pick any one of a whole range of traditions which that culture flexibly makes available. They may pick something out of the Confucian world of thought and action, or alternatively choose some strain of Daoism or Buddhism or of various superstitious cults and practices that might claim connection to either of these two traditions, both, or neither. The imperial Chinese state, with its penchant for control and order, did not preclude its alternatives, such as violent and subversive popular organizations like the network of 'secret societies' that called themselves Triads, Heaven and Earth Society (Tiandi Hui) and many other names. Hoary roots in the Chinese past have been cited to account for a particular habit or turn of mind today but also for their exact opposites. China's slowness to modernize has been attributed to the Confucian heritage; but so has the alacrity with which Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore have used capitalist methods to develop modernized industrial economies. Is it the case, as some argue, that different strains of Confucianism are involved, one predisposing its carriers to capitalism, the other against it? Yet to argue in this way is still to leave unanswered the question of why one strain should emerge and not the other. So the act of locating an overseas Chinese's cultural antecedents in the traditions of China contains at least three question marks: Which tradition? Which strain of tradition? Why that tradition instead of all the others? Chinese culture is richly varied, contradictory and protean. Selected fragments may be used to build a new identity, but the new identity is not the old one, and to claim that it is would be a pretence. Lynn Pan, Editor, Founding Director, Chinese Heritage Centre, Singapore
Excerpt copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.
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Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.