China

[Jimmy/ Chun]

The so-called "Chinese culture" has a strong bias against cultural 
and linguistic diversity. This preference to singularity may have 
made it easy to see China-PRC as other European colonizers, and 
hence we bring up western theories that perceive modern 
nationalism and other -isms.

But I think Chinese singularity has a different, and probably 
historically longer, root. I'd like to think that it is in the 
language and the culture, but really I am not sure what 
"culture"-singular, that may be. What's "Chinese" anyway? Now 
people think of Mandarin as "the Chinese language," but Mandarin 
was only made into the National Language in the 1920's by the 
Chinese Nationalist Party KMT that formed Republic of China on the 
Mainland and then retreated to and occupied Taiwan in 1949 after 
losing their "original homeland" to the communists. ROC govt in 
Taiwan has reduced the indigenous Austronesian languages from 30 
to somewhere around 15.  PRC, or the communists, inherited 
Mandarin as its NL and then designed similar policies that have 
committed linguistic and cultural genocide in the Mainland, and 
that's why we are talking about Tibet right now (Please, don't 
forget the Uyghur - or East Turkestan. Compared to the Tibetan, 
the Uyghur is much ignored by the international media). Meanwhile, 
the Singabore govt has made Mandarin the "only" Chinese language 
the Chinese Singaporeans "should" all speak. Ironically, NONE of 
the so-labeled "Chinese groups" in Singapore spoke Mandarin as 
their first language before the LP was implemented. NONE!!!

So...China-PRC, Taiwan-ROC, Singapore... The problem of the 
observed racist imperialism in these regions is probably not 
communism or Marxism, but something else that has made "Chinese"; 
something that's quite obscure by now.

Oh, I think Confucianism has a lot to do with it. Instead of 
"benevolent teacher," many studies have now revealed a sexist and 
racist Confucius through examining his words, many of which are 
now commonsense idioms in Mandarin. Examples: (1) said to a woman 
- "If you are married to a chiken-man, obey the chicken; if you 
are married to a dog-man, obey the dog"; (2) "supposedly," a 
savage thanked the Chinese Confucian teacher Guanzhong by saving 
them from their vulgar native culture - "Without Guanzhong, we 
would never learn to tie our hair and we would still wear our 
clothes in the wrong way"

Since these thoughts, stories, and words are encoded into the 
language, it should not matter whether PRC govt really did abolish 
Confucian symbols during the Cultural Revolution...


On Tue May 06 01:26:21 EDT 2008, William J Poser 
<wjposer at LDC.UPENN.EDU> wrote:

>> Marxist idealism- it still boils down to racist imperialism.
> 
> Ironically, China is no longer actually a Communist country.
> 
>