Identity and hybridity

Chinese culture and aesthetics in the age of globalization

Karl-Heinz Pohl

pp. 87-103

in: Antoon van den Braembussche, Heinz Kimmerle, Nicole Note (eds), Intercultural aesthetics, Berlin, Springer, 2009

Abstract

Thirty years ago (1977), Thomas Metzger published a book that became well known in Sinological circles: Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China's Evolving Political Culture. In this book, Metzger discusses a serious problem Chinese scholars were confronted with at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century: the modernization of China without giving up 2000 years of culturally valuable Confucian teachings. From the 1920s on, Confucian thought was replaced by Marxist ideology and, with the beginning of the Peoples' Republic in 1949, the latter was firmly established as the new order of discourse. Metzger argues persuasively, however, in spite of the new leftist ideology that poured into China after the May Fourth Movement of 1919, that Confucianism was not relegated to the museum of History of Philosophy in China as Joseph Levenson (in his Confucian China and its Modern Fate, 1958) had predicted. Instead, Confucian thought — as an integral part of the Chinese cultural psyche — survived and remained influential, though not visible, in shaping modern China. Even radicals of that time, such as Mao Tse-tung, although they attempted to give China a completely new ideological order, were formed by their cultural tradition in such a way that it also influenced their political action.1The aforementioned historical example is significant for our theme. It concerns the question of persistence of culture in the face of cultural encounters — both of the hostile kind, such as the first clash of civilizations between China and the West in the nineteenth century (after the Opium Wars), as well as of the latest and somewhat more amicable sort, the process of mingling and interpenetration of cultures called globalization.2 Hence, the significance of culture and cultural identity in the age of globalization remains an issue to be addressed.

Cited authors

Marx Karl