The Middle Kingdom

The Myth of the West: Part 1 - Kaifang

Orientalism is a powerful idea in Western culture. It has associations with being strange, foreign, or representing the Other. It conjures up images of an ancient society, filled with narrow-eyed, inscrutable men; willowy women with painted faces and silk dresses; and benign septuagenarians with fists of steel and a mouth full of riddles. It is a compelling image, one most Westerners treat as phantasmagoria; a myth with little substance in today’s reality. In China, there is an equally compelling myth called xifang, or Western. But unlike Orientalism in the West, this myth is still very much alive and relevant to today’s Chinese.

Xifang is a potpourri of ideas and concepts, constantly shifting and changing. Every person you ask will give you a slightly different answer.  It’s a personalized concept but there are some commonalities of thought—xifang stands for kaifang (open, especially in regards to new ideas), xianjin (advanced, modern), qiangda (strong), and wenming (civilized). Xifang represents a new way of looking at things and doing things: new management styles, business plans, and social etiquette. It is a view of the West amalgamated from fragmentary news stories, gossip, and too much Hollywood. It paints a picture that lacks subtlety and nuance.

This uniform view of the West may be one of the leading causes of tensions that erupt when young Chinese bloggers meet unfiltered Western culture—they lack a well-grounded context to understand what they see and hear.

For some people, kaifang is a pejorative, conjuring up images of epicurean playboys with too much money and debauched women with too few clothes. It has the connotation of dubious moral and sexual practices, people who have abandoned familial obligation in the pursuit of self-gratification, people who have traded in morality for a decadent, Western lifestyle, whatever that means. For many, it is the reason behind the skyrocketing divorce rate and the perceived increase in teenage pregnancies in China. Certainly, in my time in Beijing, I’ve seen many hotels that make good money renting out rooms by the hour, something that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.

For others, kaifang is a point of pride, a deliberate casting-off of traditional (read: backwards and outdated) attitudes. Chinese culture is traditionally “superstitious”—offerings for luck, burning money for the deceased, homophones for other words (the character for fortune, fu, displayed upside down as a pun for “fortune has arrived”). A kaifang person doesn’t believe in any of that. It also means being more open toward strangers—Chinese families are traditionally distrusting of strangers and nepotism is considered a virtue. People who pass over talentless relatives for talented strangers are considered more kaifang. It is the transcendence of local, parochial ties for an identification with China as a whole, rather than with your town or province or family. It means someone who is not offended by the violation of traditional etiquette.  Splitting the bill, (in Chinese, “going A-A”) is kaifang.

For women, especially, kaifang is the equivalent of feminist liberation in the West. A kaifang woman is one who eschews the traditional, subservient role of women as the keepers of the household.  While the old Mao quotation, “Women hold up half the sky,” is often quoted, the reality has always been that women hold a more subservient or dependent position within Chinese society. A kaifang woman has her own job and doesn’t need a husband or a man to complete her identity. She may live on her own if she chooses. The rising number of single mothers and women who raise children out of wedlock is associated with new, kaifang morals.

China is a country in the middle of profound social change, to go along with its economic revolution. It is struggling to maintain its own cultural identity in the face of what is perhaps the largest generation gap in history—parents who toiled in the fields and children who surf the Internet. The cultural clash between China and the West is not just in ways of doing business, but between generations as well. It is therefore important to remember that the way we perceive ourselves is different from the way others perceive us, which is still different from the way we perceive others perceive us.

The Myth of the West is a four-part series by Yulin Zhuang.

© 2008 The Hypermodern.