Western Perspectives on the People's Republic of China

Socio-cultural Perspectives on the People's Republic of ChinaThe topic of Western socio-cultural perspectives on the PRC is so vast that it is necessary to limit the scope of discussion.In this chapter the focus is on just a few aspects of perennial interest, especially the family, women and religion.For the most recent period a couple of socio-cultural issues are considered that are not relevant to the earlier years of the PRC, including such important matters as the Internet and 'soft power'.The Chinese state classifies all Muslims as among ten ethnic minorities, and one particular form of Buddhism as characteristic of the Tibetans.For these reasons, religion will come back to the discussion in the chapter on perspectives on ethnic minorities.The sources of images are similar to those in earlier chapters, but with more appeal to film, itself a cultural form.Western socio-cultural perspectives on the PRC are very mixed.They depend on time, the Kissinger-Nixon visits and the reform period being dividing points.And they vary according to type, with perspectives on religion being much harsher than those of women.A major general factor in the formulation of socio-cultural images is the culture of the West itself, and especially that of the dominant country, the UnitedStates.An example illustrating the point is religion.The United States was to a large extent built on aspirations towards religious freedom, which remains extremely important in its self-imagination and in its culture.So judgements and perspectives on religion in other countries show the imprint of American attitudes on this issue.Of course there are variations among denominations and ideological points of view, countries and eras, but it is a valid generalization that Western perspectives on religion in the PRC show the heavy influence of the Western desire for universal freedom of religion.In Chapter 3, I noted the influence of the trade unions in many of the Western countries.Of course independent trade unions exist also in the United States, but they exert considerably less impact on social thinking in general than in Britain, France or Australia.On the other hand, there were progressive social movements in the United 151 States from the 1960s on that influenced all Western countries or at least went handin-hand with similar movements elsewhere.The Civil Rights Movement was initially a specifically American phenomenon, while protest against the Vietnam War spawned progressive thinking and images in many realms, including attitudes to spirituality, family and women. Socio-cultural Perspectives to the Late 1970s Family and women, including personal impressionsThe mainstream Western image of Chinese family life to the 1970s was related to the lack of individualism discussed in Chapter 3, summed up in the insulting and unfair phrase 'blue ants'.It meant that families were totally dependent on the state and forced to live apart, children were encouraged to report on their parents to the authorities, students to criticize their teachers.Small children were compelled to live in kindergartens in order to be under state and not parental control.The Chinese may once have been as family-centred as any people, but with the loss of individuality imposed by Mao and his CCP, it was an important Western image that family life had been more or less destroyed.As for women, the dominant pattern in the United States and most other Western countries in the 1950s and into later decades was that consumption was what mattered.A family should own.Men were the primary bread-winners, but women were the main buyers, the ones who upheld the status of the family as better and bigger consumers than their neighbours.Measured against this pattern, the image of China, where women laboured and were strongly discouraged from being merely consumers, was a negative one indeed.There were more positive images as well.Most Westerners supported the criticism of arranged marriages, which was enshrined in the Marriage Law of 1950.A senior Christian cleric was an early admirer of the deep-seated moral regeneration that 'lay at the root of all China's great successes', 1 such as the liberation of women and elimination of prostitution.Left-wing writers put much more focus than conservative counterparts on matters like the striving for gender equality and Mao Zedong's slogan

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