Back in January, Amy Hawkins and Jeffrey Wasserstrom published a fascinating, nuanced look why Chinese state censors had banned the mention of Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” on social media, but not the book itself.
Now, the pair are back with a wider look at the way that Chinese authorities and the Chinese people adapt western culture for both a local audience and local politics. Some of this is just funny twists of syncretism, like Santa Claus invariably being depicted with a saxophone (!), but there’s a much more interesting and meaty political story.
Hawkins and Wasserstrom begin their story with the adoption of Marx’s ideas by the Chinese Communist Party, producing “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and banishing Confucionism to the scrapheap of history – and how that turned into today’s “capitalism with Chinese characteristics,” overseen by Xi Jinping, who describes himself as being a fan of both Marx and Confucious.
Another deeply contested western idea is International Women’s Day, which has taken on many meanings at different times in Chinese history – being celebrated as a tribute to women who stayed home to care for family, then as a holiday celebrating the revolutionary cause of women’s equality, finally turning into a shopping holiday where companies offer discounts on spa treatments (one Beijing pizza chain offered 50% off to women – but only for salads).
This fluxuating nature of political meaning for western symbols is neatly described in the rise, fall, and rise again of Peppa Pig, who entered China as a counterculture icon for millennials, with a fad for Peppa tattoos leading the state to denounce Peppa as “an unexpected cultural icon of gangster subculture in China.” But Peppa was rehabilitated by the state, who drafted Alibaba Pictures to produce a Peppa movie embodying Confucian values, wiht a story about “a rural grandfather who makes a Peppa Pig toy to bring to his grandson in the city at Chinese New Year.”
Likewise with rap music: first it was banned as “tasteless, vulgar and obscene,” then it was rehabilitated with a state-sanctioned TV reality show called The Show of Rap, and now China exports made-in-China hiphop around the world.
This back-and-forth is kind of dance between Microsoft’s old tactic of “embrace and extend” and counterculture’s Gibsonian rallying cry that “the street finds its own use for things.” The Tiananmen protesters sang The Internationale and a rock anthem called “Nothing to My Name,” and carried banners reading “We Shall Overcome” and “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death.”
