Chinese culture does not belong to the Chinese government

My heart sank. Since I moved to Beijing in 2014 as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, I have seen the Xi Jinping regime regularly invoke Chinese culture to strengthen its government, promoting the nation’s “great civilization” and the party’s efforts to preserve and sustain it -there. But it was especially sad to see a beloved childhood icon involved in the effort as well.

What does it mean to love a culture and be proud of it, but not the government that serves as its most prominent driver? For members of the Chinese diaspora, these issues can be complicated, especially in a time of growing global distrust of China and its leaders. A recent survey by Pew in 14 countries, for example, found a record of unfavorable views of China, with an average of 78% of respondents saying they did not trust Xi to do the right thing on world affairs.

As a child in the United States in the 1990s, my identity as someone of Chinese ethnic descent seemed primarily to be a cultural issue: dim sum rooms, Chinese classes, participating in the San Francisco Lunar New Year parade. However, moving forward today, as Beijing takes on a more visible role on the global stage, politics and culture now seem much more mixed.

Celebrities like Jackie Chan have become supporters of the government, with Chan declaring that “we Chinese need to be controlled”. On Twitter, Chinese state media mixes posts that deny the atrocities in Xinjiang – where western governments say authorities have detained a million or more Uighurs in internment camps – with homage to the virtues of tai chi and Chinese cuisine.

“China’s soft power is constantly on the rise, which stems from its attractive traditional culture,” said the Chinese nationalist tabloid The Global Times, referring to YouTube star Li Ziqi, whose cinematic photos of his traditional rural lifestyle Chinese gathered millions of people in the world.

Clarissa Wei, an American food writer who lives in Taipei, says that when she started writing about Chinese food a decade ago, the subject seemed innocuous. Lately, however, her work has faced a negative reaction, with some critics accusing her of being part of Beijing’s soft power movement. “It seems that when you say ‘Chinese culture’ too hard, it almost sounds like a dirty word,” says Wei, adding that his intention was to celebrate part of her heritage and that she does not support the party.

At the time the Monkey King video was released, I recently left Beijing and moved back to the United States. I was pregnant and thinking about my son and how to raise him as an American of proud Chinese ethnic descent, as my parents did raised me.

But even before he was born, questions arose, including something as simple as spelling his Chinese name in English. The Wade-Giles system created during the 19th century – which my parents used to transliterate my name – seemed old-fashioned, and we were not comfortable using the pininin system propagated under the Communist regime in the 1950s, which became a global standard . My grandparents were members of the Kuomintang, the party that lost to the Communists during China’s civil war and later fled to Taiwan – as a child, my father grew up singing “Reclaim the continent!” at home – and I imagined them rolling around in their graves with thought. So, for my son’s name, we ended up using a totally different romanization system, developed in Taiwan.

I want my son to grow up feeling connected to China. In my time as a reporter, and before that too, I lived in China for years – in all, more than I lived anywhere except in my hometown, Oakland, California. In addition to my family roots there, it is a place that I love deeply.

It is also a place that I find difficult to talk about. Since I returned to the United States, people have often asked me about the worst parts of the country and its government, about the Communist Party’s campaign to eradicate dissent and its growing political repression. “What a place to be a reporter,” they will say. “You must be so relieved to be back.”

I mean yes, but also that it is a place full of kind and intelligent people who are constantly finding ways to reinvent their lives, with a propelling mixture of pragmatism and playfulness. I can’t count how many times I was asked to leave the street to go to people’s homes, or describe how much I miss China today. Food and language, yes – but people above all. I can’t speak in a shorthand that captures all of this.

As China becomes increasingly unruly in its authoritarian ambitions, some have found clarity in dismissing the “Chinese” label altogether. Nathan Law, a Hong Kong activist in London, says he once identified himself as a Chinese and rooted for the Beijing Olympic team, but no more. Like many in Hong Kong, as China has increasingly usurped the city’s autonomy – most recently by passing a draconian national security law that froze speech and led to dozens of arrests – mr. Law began to call himself Hong Konger. “The term ‘Chinese’ has been abused,” he says. “The way Xi marks the term forces people to establish a more localized identity.”

For Arlen Tsao, an IT professional in Taiwan, Beijing’s efforts to embrace the mantle of traditional Chinese culture seem ironic, given how the party’s Cultural Revolution led to the widespread destruction of that culture, with destroyed temples and suspected loyalties to the old ones. persecuted traditions. “It’s advertising and it makes me angry,” he says.

I tell him that I also had similar thoughts. I think of how art was used in Nazi Germany and how Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was played in propaganda films, half a century before Chinese protestors interpreted it as a rallying cry during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. For authoritarian regimes , cultural pride is a ready fig leaf.

“The government is always trying to promote Chinese culture to project China as a peaceful and friendly emerging power,” says Sheng Ding, professor of political science at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. Still, he says, the soft culture drive has met with increasing resistance in recent years. Many Confucius Institutes at universities in the United States – Beijing’s main vehicles for promoting the Chinese language and culture – have recently been closed, for example, amid security concerns and a broader reaction. Mr. Ding says he sought to teach his children that it is possible to love a country, but not its government. “What the Chinese government is doing has nothing to do with the Chinese people,” he says, adding that he says the same thing to his students.

The other day, I started to read to my son the Monkey King books that I saved from childhood. It was a joy to sink back. After challenging the skies, the Monkey King defeats an army of celestial soldiers and proves impossible to execute. It was a reminder that the immortal Chinese cheater is first and foremost a rebel – and that every empire, no matter how powerful, can sometimes be overcome.

-In. Chen covers work and work culture for the Journal and is the author of a new collection of short stories, “Land of Big Numbers”, which will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on February 2.