China: Transformation Or Mutation?

China is truly going through a major transformation and I am starting to believe most Chinese people are having a hard time keeping up with the quick change. Beijing is full of contrasts: new, decrepit; rich, poor; knowledge, ignorance; traditional, and modern. Most people here over the age of forty are still scarred by the hard times of the Cultural Revolution and seem to still carry a heavy burden from those times. Half of Beijing seems to be filled with people still living in the past and not accepting the future. The younger generations are now adapting to the modern China though, but most young Chinese still grew up in a very different time and place. Through my friends and host family I’ve been able to see part of this transformation from old to new Chinese lifestyle.

The father of the household, where I live, is a thirty year old, college educated IT specialist, who grew up in Hebei province near Beijing. I think he’s a good example of how Chinese people are adapting to the new China. When he returns from his work, he can often be seen coming in the door with his laptop and hanging up his coat and pants before setting down for dinner. My friend says I live with a “real” Chinese family because the father will just take off his pants in the living room because he says it’s a bit warm in the house. His apartment has a personal computer in one corner, a nice, large flat screen TV in the center, and a little statue of Mao Zedong to top it all off. It seems like the flat screen TV is becoming an important asset to the modern Chinese family. I don’t think they’ve given much thought to their interior design either, and things are usually left messy for the maid to clean up later. Sometimes it’s like they’re still living on the farm. To some foreigners here they just can’t quite understand why Chinese people still act this way and it maybe doesn’t fit their definition of “civilized.” Chinese people use the things they have in a different way from most Western people. They usually just don’t know how to take advantage of the “modern” lifestyle the way most foreigners do, and just live the same way they have always known.

Most of my Chinese friends have had college education yet they still know very little about the rest of the world. I was having dinner with the family this week and the grandmother asked if all foreigners ate with chopsticks. The father didn’t really know either and we started naming every country we knew where people used chopsticks. He seemed surprised when I told him Europeans did not use them, and Japanese people did. If you ask most Chinese people about a foreign country you’ll probably just get a very textbook answer. If somebody talks about Americans, they will almost certainly mention Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Nixon, Clinton, Bush, and Bill Gates. This week, my Chinese friend said he really admired Clinton because he thought he was really tall like Yao Ming. He said he really liked Nixon too because he met with Mao Zedong to mend relations between the US and China. He said he really didn’t like Bush because he attacked Iraq. He said he admired Mao the most of all, and admired Chou Enlei the second most even though he probably didn’t know Chou Enlei was marked as a traitor to Mao and killed by Mao’s Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. Fabricated history is just annoying because it makes everyone sound like a hypocrite or just dumb.