What is it about China? Most Jungians perk up if I talk about my background. It's so "other", isn't it? Well, it was when I went there. I'm not at all sure what it is now, for me, who spent a period married to a working class Chinese lad during which I dreamed regularly in Chinese. If I dream about China now, I'm very unsure of what it means, but it's certainly not the totally Other. Edward Said, that consummate commentator on the image of the Orient in Western culture, sums up the fascination in a recent essay. His description appears to be talking about a psychic reality:
"It is difficult to try to understand a region of the world whose principal features seem to be that it is in perpetual flux, and that no one trying to comprehend it can, by an act of pure will or of sovereign understanding, stand at some Archimedian point outside the flux." 1Time and the Other
One of the ways in which the colonial powers got to grips with this (projected?) fluidity was to deny one of its dimensions: time. The way in which colonial texts edited out local time often in favour of Greenwich Mean Time and the self-told histories of peoples and places has been well documented. China's history has never been repressed in the same way by an external, or colonial power; rather, the colonisation is internal. There are many ethnic histories within China which have been usurped and spoken for by an authoritarian leadership. Indeed the mechanism whereby history is constructed by the state is one of the things which holds the national fantasy of China together, and has done for thousands of years, as Bill Jenner has described :
"The historical record that would be written in the future was the only real hope of immortality for the powerful of the day. To leave a name that would be 'handed down through ten thousand antiquities' yet to come was a cliched expression of the wish to be shown in a good light in future histories. Just as the record of the past was an essential guide to how to deal with the problems of today, so the records of one's own time yet to be compiled, and their distribution of praise and blame, were something so worrying that they might even influence present actions. History thus plays a role comparable to that of religious texts in other cultures. It is also the Last Judgment. The religion of the Chinese ruling classes is the Chinese state, and it is through history that the object of devotion is to be understood." 2Writing China
There is always something frozen about a snapshot that's why we take them. The image halted in time, container of reliable meaning, is not quite the same as a symbol in the Jungian sense, at least not in China. Chinese characters fulfill the same function in setting boundaries around cultural discourse. They are snapshots of approved meaning, sanctioned by centuries of authority and tradition. They are to be learned by rote, not used as devices for meditation, except possibly in paintings and poetry. Even there, deep knowledge of the existing associations of a certain Chinese character is more highly praised in most cases than extempore musings. Imagination enters the image slowly, seeping in over millennia, tried and quality tested by generations of dusty scholars. The sheer hard work it takes to memorize the thousands of characters needed for ordinary activities ensures that there is precious little energy left over for originality, and that those who have gained cultural ascendancy through the system are most likely to want to perpetuate it. Indeed, there is very little choice. Mainland China has already simplified its characters once, but a second wave of more radical simplifications was abandoned after causing too much confusion. The written language is not phonetic, and there is too little differentiation in Chinese sounds for it to be possible to communicate Chinese reliably without the writing system. People often need to refer to the graphology of the character in spoken conversation to clear up misunderstandings over exactly which word is intended, especially when it comes to personal names and poetic allusions.
The irony of the imageThe images which are presented to the Western world of China are largely edited by a state-sponsored consensus view of reality. This is clearly visible if you look at the pictures some stunningly beautiful, like those of Don Williams of tourists returned from China. There is something oh-so-familiar about them, not just to people who have also followed the same backpacker trail, but in the very way that they are framed. It is almost as if China, with 20 years of experience in tourism, increasingly offers to Westerners the images which they will find the most inviting. But this way of seeing is not necessarily imposed top-down in a conscious way by the state. It is most evident in the encounter between camera-wielding foreigner and Chinese child. The expression of wonder and sudden awareness of wider possibilities for play around a sense of identity are repeated over and over, so that from my point of view, the image of the boy in the bus takes on an archetypal quality. We see the Other in the act of seeing the Other, possibly for the first time!
People in everyday life will often subscribe to the consensus view of China passionately, and of their own accord, if it is offered to a foreign observer, while maintaining a deeply ironic distance from it in a purely self-referential setting. Similar lines are drawn between the family and the rest of society through the use of more-or-less consciously constructed images. Images in the form of posed photographs are almost a tradeable commodity in China; a gift-giving ritual whereby the process of image construction becomes visible as a collective phenomenon. At a personal level, people pose in formal groups in front of national monuments. It is possible to watch these myriad images being processed: simply stand for 20 minutes outside a one-hour developer's anywhere in China, Taiwan or Hong Kong, and you will soon receive the impression of unchanging forms, whose contents oscillate through the hundred surnames and back again. This is the Li, the Wang, the Zhu family on parade. This is a snapshot of us in our best clothes, enjoying and affirming the continuity of the generations with a trip up the cable car and a seafood dinner. Here are a few meaningful blooms selected from among the mass of "black peonies"; one poet's image for the heads of a Chinese crowd thronging the streets. yi, er, san, click! 3
© Luisetta Mudie, 2002
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Notes- Said, E. (2000) "Orientalism Reconsidered." Reflections on Exile, London: Granta.
- Jenner, WJF. (1992) The Tyranny of History, London, Penguin.
- One, two, three
