From: joe@astro.as.utexas.edu (Joe Wang)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.taiwan,soc.culture.china
Subject: Re: The Future of Chinese Culture (reply to wavelet)
Date: 23 Jul 92 10:27:56 GMT
Followup-To: soc.culture.taiwan,soc.culture.china
Organization: McDonald Observatory, University of Texas @ Austin

In article <22JUL199212433369@vtcc1.cc.vt.edu> laiichung@vtcc1.cc.vt.edu (L. D. ROPER) writes:
>In article <76343@ut-emx.uucp>, joe@astro.as.utexas.edu (Joe Wang) writes...
>>1. The "blue ocean" group
>>2. The roots or "xungen" group
>>3. The "modern Confucian" group
>>4. The "experimental" group

> In 60-70' There were the root-searching movement in Africian Americans, 
> they want the root of black culture . Do you think they are in the same 
> culture with Chinese? 

But the cultural debate in the United States is and has always been
different from the cultural debate on Taiwan and the Mainland.  The
cultural debate in the United States now centers around "politically
correct versus anti-politically correct."  There's nothing like the
"p.c." movement in Taiwan or Mainland, and there's nothing like the
"blue ocean" group in the United States.

In particular, few in the United States has suggested that the key to
the domainant "white" identity is bankrupt and replaced by a new
identity composed of the traditions of the American Indian.  That's
analogous to both the "xungen" and some culture TI are suggesting.

> Taiwanese culture searching is to find
> Taiwan's culture root in Taiwan . Why this is comming up is because Chinese
> claimed there is no culture in Taiwan , just like you.

Did I claim this?  My claim is that Taiwanese culture is and should be
part of the "big Chinese culture."  Right now, the "xungen" movement
is trying to find a new Chinese culture in the lives and traditions of
the minority peoples.  I'm sure they would appreciate contributions
from Taiwanese, especially the mountain people.

> People use the same
> method and classified their culture into some categary doesn't mean they 
> are in the same culture as other culture which belongs to the same categary!

Your Chinese chauvinism is showing.... :-) :-) :-)

People don't use the same methods!!!!!!  The methods of classifying
and thinking about culture which exist in Taiwan and the Mainland do
not exist elsewhere.

The theory of "blue ocean cultures" is something that's popular only
in the Mainland and Taiwan.  While the idea has Western origins
(Hegel's notion of a hydralic society), the idea has been discredited
in the West.  In fact, the idea of "culture" in the West is completely
different from the idea of "culture" in China.    

Most Westerners for example, think that the question "What should our
culture be like?" is a completely meaningless one.  Most Westerners
think that it is useless to try to build a better culture, and that
culture is just is what it is.  In fact, many (perhaps most) Americans
are "cultural relativists" who deny that any one culture is
inherentally better than another.  Most Chinese disagree.  

If you tell a Chinese person, that "Chinese culture is bad" then
usually that person will try to argue otherwise.

If you tell a Western person, that "Western culture is bad" then
usually that person will deny that the idea of "bad culture" has any
objective meaning.

My point is that Chinese people think about culture, politics, and the
world in a way that is fundamentally different from the way most
Westerners think about these topics.  In fact, the assumptions that
Chinese people make about the world seem so obvious to us, that it is
difficult for us to sometimes imagine that other non-Chinese have
fundamentally different assumptions about how the world works.

Furthermore, I argue that Mainlanders and Taiwanese share the same set
of based assumptions, and therefore can be considered to be part of
one "culture".

(I'll type in what these shared assumptions are later, but you can
find them in Thomas A. Metzger's article "The Chinese Reconciliation
of Moral-Sacred Values with Modern Pluralism.  Political Discourse in
the ROC, 1949-1989" which is published in the book "Two Societies in
Opposition, The Republic of China and the People's Republic of China,
After Forty Years" edited by Ramon H. Myers. and also in "The Spirit
of Chinese Politics" by Lucian W. Pye)