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How Chinese and Americans Understand Culture

Mar 10 , 2015

One night in Kunming, China last December I was out to dinner with a former professor, a middle-aged Chinese woman. She had just returned from a trip to Washington D.C. and at one point during the meal we began contrasting America and China on a number of different fronts: infrastructure, geography, weather, fashion. When I brought up the differences between Chinese and American culture she interjected, “What American culture?”

The U.S. is too young a country to have a culture, she began arguing. In her mind, real culture was something that could only exist after thousands of years of civilization. Besides, she argued, American culture is merely a collection of snippets from other cultures. It is not a true culture. This was not the first time I’d heard such criteria for culture from a Chinese friend. What does this perspective, if anything, say about how the Chinese generally view culture as a concept and how that might differ from the American viewpoint?

Whereas American ideas of culture acknowledge a certain package of shared traits – food, language, music, customs – as a base requirement, the Chinese alternative, it seems, ascribes a much heftier weight to time.

China, it is often said, has the oldest continuous civilization. While true in many respects – it has remained largely politically coherent since the first millennium BC – this is also slightly misleading. The five thousand or so years of human habitation in the land we now call China, today a territory larger then it’s ever been, has been a changing hodgepodge of kingdoms and dynasties with often diverse ethnic make-ups. And what we think of as Chinese usually is limited to the Han ethnicity, which makes up around 90 percent of the population. The remaining minority groups – Tibetans, Yi, Zhuang, Dai, among a few dozen others – have their own sets of cultures, traditions and histories. Still, there are forms of Chineseness that have persisted through millennia and it’s certainly something to be proud of and celebrate.

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