From: joe@astro.as.utexas.edu (Joe Wang)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.taiwan,soc.culture.china
Subject: The Future of Chinese Culture (reply to wavelet)
Date: 22 Jul 92 04:19:23 GMT
Followup-To: soc.culture.taiwan,soc.culture.china
Organization: McDonald Observatory, University of Texas @ Austin

In article <1992Jul20.031514.41736@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> wavelet@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>          Ha! I have learnt something from you. Please give people
>      your definition of "culture" first.

Ha! I've learned something from you too.  :-) :-) :-)
Go look in a dictionary for the definition.  :-) :-) :-)

me> There is no way that the evolving Taiwanese culture can be much
me> different from the Mainland culture assuming that no one is isolating
me> themselves.

wavelet>          Ha! How about "TI"?

Chinese culture will absorb even TI.  There are currently four
cultural schools of thought among Mainland intellectuals.  These are:

1. The "blue ocean" group, including Su Xiaokang.  These people say
that China's problems have been because China is a river culture while
the Western societies have been ocean cultures and to survive China
must transform itself into an ocean culture.

2. The roots or "xungen" group, including Li Tuo.  These people
believe that the ideological campaigns of the CCP have cut them from
their cultural past and a true sense of self.  To reclaim this
cultural past, they wish to debunk the domainant Han culture and probe
the collective unconscious of the Chinese people by writing about
border regions and pre-Han or non-Han peoples.

3. The "modern Confucian" group, include Tu Weiming.  These people
believe that the "Confucian ethic" is one of the major factors
responsisble for the prosperity of the four dragons and call of a
rebirth of Confucian thought to cope with the problems of the Western
world.

4. The "experimental" group, including Can Xue wish to experiment with
unconventional use of language as well as probing a personal and
objection vision.

Notice that I didn't mention anything to do with Communism or Marxism.
Among older intellectuals, there are those who still believe in
Communist principles but who feel that Chinese leaders have betrayed
those principles.  Some call for more democracy in order to bring the
party closing to the people (Liu Binyan is an example of this group).

Younger Chinese intellectuals seem now to doubt even the principles of
the Communist framework.  The few people who I've seen that support
Communist/Maoist principles all seem to be Westerners.  While the
Communist Party may last a long time, Communism (and particularly
Maoism) as a cultural force is dead.

For now, the Communist Party is surpressing any real development of
these four schools of thought and any real debate between them.
Ultimately, the power of the Communist Party will be reduced and you
will begin to see a debate between these four schools about "What does
Chinese culture mean?"  The ultimate answer to this question is likely
going to involve a little from each of the four schools of thought.

Now about how this relates to Taiwan and TI.  If you take away the
experimentalist school, you will see exactly the cultural debate on
Taiwan.  The ruling KMT ideology is supposedly "modern Confucian,"
while TIers advocate "blue ocean", "roots", or sometimes even "modern
Confucian" ideas. 

Just as the economic rhythms of the Mainland and Taiwan are already
interlinked.  So are the cultural rhythms.  TIers don't seem to
realize that even as they demand "independence" the fact that the
whole framework of debate is identical to the cultural debate on the
Mainland shows that Taiwan indeed is not culturally independent in any
meaningful sense of the word.

Right now, cultural development on the Mainland is frozen because the
government there is afraid of even the smallest challenge to its
political power.  This freezing of cultural development began in 1987
with the firing of Hu Yaobang and the campaign against "bouroigeise
liberalism."  Because this freezing of the cultural debate on the
Mainland began at the same time that major contacts between Mainland
and Taiwan, the cultural debate in the two places have not had time to
merge.

My prediction is that once the cultural climate on the Mainland
improves that this will happen.  Some ex-TI intellectuals will find
themselves arguing on behalf of the "blue ocean" group.  Others will
find themselves as part of the "roots" group and will write about how
the Taiwanese experience provides a unique element in the collective
unconsicous of Chinese.  Still others will find themselves cooperating
with "modern Confucians" in the Mainland, trying to piece together a
Confucian renaissance.

The debates between people in the 21st century are not going to be
"Chinese versus Taiwanese" but rather they are likely to be between
the four schools of thought that I mentioned with advocates of each
on both the Mainland and Taiwan.  

And I don't see any way for TI to avoid this.  The more you talk about
the "oceanic" culture of Taiwan, the more you will help the "blue
ocean" group.  The more you try to develop HoLo and investigate the
aboriginal peoples, the more you will help the "roots" group.  The more
you try to create a separate Taiwanese identity, the more you will 
deepen the Chinese one.  

So in culture as with economics, you can't "go away."

So yes, Mr. Wavelet.  Chinese culture will absorb even TI.