Hunan Cross Cultural Education

Why Chinese culture is not as alluring as it ought to be

I once heard an American musician who was friendly toward China say, “Every westerner who comes to China for the first time will be shocked at how many misconceptions they had before they came. Perhaps your propaganda methods have created a kind of cultural isolation.”

To call it “cultural isolation” is obviously going too far, since there are few people in the world who deny the grand history of Chinese culture, and few people reject Chinese material or food culture. At present, a “China fever” is gradually rising. However, it cannot be denied that in the case of the Chinese cultural mainstream being understood abroad, despite a certain improvement over the past few years in rejecting habits like “leftist” extremes and arrogant, one-way indoctrination, there nonetheless still exist serious problems. Internationally, our cultural dialogue overall is still stuck in a situation that is hard to accept.

Is this because of political bias? It actually is not – take the two World Expos that China has attended for example: at Hanover, Germany, in 2001, in a public opinion survey taken before the opening ceremony, China’s exhibit ranked second on the list of “exhibits you most want to visit.” So where then is the problem?

I visited the China exhibit at the Hanover Expo. What struck me most were the photographs of the Great Wall and Peking Opera masks, as well as some backlit photos of famous Chinese vistas. After that it was a smallish model of the Three Gorges, a conceptual model of a Chinese person on the moon, and finally a model of the human body labeled with acupuncture points next to some Chinese medicine. Out of all of the foreign audience who lined up to come in, few lingered at any one spot; most of them walked quickly through in a few minutes and then left.

The China exhibit at the 2005 World Expo in Aichi, Japan, obviously took a lot of work, but conceptually there was little change. At that time, there was a computer screen at the main entrance that displayed how long you would have to wait at particular moment to enter any country’s exhibit. That screen essentially became a competition board for the attractiveness of each country’s culture; for example, France was three hours, Korea three-and-a-half hours, Japan four hours. But at the entrance to China’s exhibit you hardly had to wait at all.  (more…)