SINOGRAPH Different takes on coping with change
By Francesco Sisci
BEIJING - In recent weeks on Chinese movie screens there has been a
confrontation: Oscar-winning Avatar from the United States pitched
against the home-grown Confucius. Both have single-word titles and huge
productions in common but - independent of their artistic evaluation - the
films are entirely different and offer telling projections of different
societies.
The American film looks at the future, showing a world beyond our imagination
in which blue giants ride flying lizards and six-legged horses. Confucius
takes its audience on a journey into the remote past, a golden era when
everything we see - the philosophers and the volleys of arrows - has a familiar
ring. Chinese are crowding to
see Avatar and shunning the state-sponsored historical epic.
Seen through the prism of Avatar, the US seems brimming with
revolutionary spirit, although it is an idea rooted in the past. America has
lived without massive social upheavals for 200 years and hasn't had a war in
its territory in some 150 years. Conversely, Confucius sees China,
having lived until what seems like just yesterday through a century of
blood-soaked wars and revolutions, wishing for peace and stability amid a phase
of epic transformation.
America has had its fair share of historical movies, connecting New York's
Italians with their cultural roots in ancient Rome or tracing the lineage
between plastic-armored football champions and gladiators, their iron-clad
ancestors. It is intriguing that at the time of the deepest economic and
structural crisis in the past 80 years, the US, at the center of the storm,
gazes at the future; while China, so far shielded from the worst of the
economic problems, harks to the past.
This certainly betrays a deep difference in attitude toward change and crisis.
Despite America's many domestic issues - unemployment, difficulties in passing
health-care reform, waning international popularity - and the many open-ended
dilemmas abroad in Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea, President Barack Obama is
still considering intervening in Iran, wants to draw Pakistan more to the
forefront, and muses about putting his hands on Yemen.
There are clear signs of overstretching. The US does not have the economic,
military and political focus to solve all these issues together, but just like
in a science fiction movie, the bold captain of our Star Trek super
vessel deems it is his duty to zap all these meteorites as they come.
Meanwhile, American society keeps an even, conservative keel.
In a few decades in China, almost one billion people will have moved from the
countryside to the cities and 1.5 billion people will have partly shed their
traditional Oriental upbringing to embrace an urban, modern mentality.
The Chinese saw their lives dramatically change in less than two decades, from
one of humble, dark, flat abodes, where toilets were public, hot water a rare
luxury, food scarce, clothes drab and transportation was by bicycle or
overcrowded bus to a life of neon-lit streets in a concrete jungle of modern
furnished skyscrapers; food can be extravagant and clothes or cars come from
any corner of the world. In other words, Chinese are living in a science
fiction movie in an age of total yet bloodless revolution.
In the middle of these hearth-shaking transformations, government-sponsored
cultural productions try to anchor this modernity to the past and slow the
turbo-charged pace of change. As the boat is already rocking quite wildly at
home and abroad, Beijing tries to stabilize it. This is not stopping the boat,
but making sure it doesn't capsize.
As Chinese economic and political expansion and its new appetite for trade, raw
materials and energy are already creating massive changes in all interested
countries, Beijing wishes to minimize other changes, such as direct political
interventions.
Take Iran for instance. Beijing's purchase of Iran's gas and oil is financing
the physical transformation of Tehran's network of subway systems, and it is
bringing new ports, factories and technology. To Beijing, this is more than
enough structural change.
It is a Chinese perception that too many changes are occurring in Iran, so
China does not want to add the Western rallying cry of "bring in democracy" to
the burden. This fits the old imperial ideal of the preservation of stability.
In flocking to Avatar, Chinese filmgoers perhaps see more clearly than
their government that tempestuous changes are something that cannot be managed
but can only be endured. This subtle difference is in a nutshell the one
described by economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883-1950) as creative
destruction in the capitalism system.
After over a century of capitalism's evolution, Schumpeter, born in what is now
the Czech Republic and a devoted student of Marxist literature, argued that
modern crises were not crises of the capitalism system, but integral parts of
the system. The sudden ups and downs of the capitalist cycles were not a
warning of impending total revolution, but the nuts and bolts of the system in
which people lived, and from those crises capitalism would be reinforced, not
weakened.
In a way, science fiction - almost a literary version of Schumpeter's creative
destruction - is part of the present, as Avatar and daily experience in
China prove.
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