(no subject)
Much has been written already on the subject of conformity in Asian cultures - with a particular focus on Japanese culture. Numerous papers have been written about how enforced conformity in Japanese highschools (vìs-à-vìs dress codes, hair color and length standards, etc.) has lead to an incredible outpouring of creativity in areas where such behavior is allowed (in one particular piece, the customization of cellphones was the center point of this discussion). For the most part, these areas of individuality seem odd to Westerners, who are generally allowed to dress as they like, wear their hair how they like, and behave as they wish. Westerners thus often can not understand why anyone would care so much about their phone, their hair clip, or their book covers. It is namely because they are not permitted to express who they are in other circumstances where Westerners have considerably more freedom that they take expression where it is allowed.
All societies demand conformity to a certain extent, and all people demand individuality to a certain extent. The West, it seems, finds itself much further along the conformity-individuality continuum than most East-Asian cultures.
China demands an extreme amount of conformity. This conformity is reflected in the still present Confucian system of societal management, and has been a part of Chinese society since long before even Confucius left his mark on Chinese thought. I intend to provide examples of this conformity in hopes of providing a picture for the reader of the extent of this conformity. At the outset, though, the reader must understand what this piece is and what it is not. It is a description of certain phenomena in Chinese culture, not an attempt at tracing the origins of these phenomena. The reader must also keep in mind that correlation is in no way indicative of causation. These examples are merely areas in which the author himself, viewing inevitably from an American point of view, sees a great deal more conformity than in his own culture; they are not to be taken as characteristics of conformist cultures, nor should they be seen as events which cause, reinforce, or propagate conformity in a culture.
An area I have already discussed is the area of education - the Chinese educational system is one which demands almost no thought of the students, only the ability to memorize. This is clearly a conformist system: it does not encourage in any way individual thought. Individual thought is the opposite of conformity - how can a person do anything but conform if they are unable to think in any way but the way they are taught? Students are taught that fact A is the answer to question B, and that after question C, the blank ought to be filled with response D. There is almost no teaching of critical thinking methods. As I have previously mentioned, students are uncomfortable when asked to partake in any activity which is not of a “fill-in-the-blanks” nature (for example, students will violently flip through their English book looking for the answer to a question such as “what would you like to order,” despite having the menu in front of their face, having seen sample dialogues modeled several times in several varying ways, and the fact that the topic of discussion [western fast food restaurants and their menus] not being one present in their book).
An area I have not mentioned before is something that could be called conformity in the area of music. This is much less objectively verifiable or quantifiable, and is much more speculative and impressionistic in nature. As such this of all things, though it may feel the most indicative and important to the author, should be taken with the largest grain of salt.
Most westerners can not hear the difference between what the Chinese call “pop,” “R&B,” and “rock.” These, aside from classical music, are the only three genres ever mentioned by the majority of Chinese when asked about music. To the author, and several other westerners asked about this, it all sounds like what we in the west would call “pop.” The variation between different styles of music is astonishingly small compared to western popular music. An over-simplification of this situation can, despite its inherently inaccurate nature, lead to a greater understanding of this point. Imagine music as a giant sphere. In your mind place Rap at 90 degrees, R&B at 45, Pop at 0, Rock perhaps at 270, and so on. There are rock songs that are closer to pop (Blink 182), and rock songs that are closer to rap (Linkin Park). There is a considerable amount of distance between the song farthest in the ‘rap’ category, and the song farthest in the ‘rock’ category. Now imagine a smaller oval there within, pulled along the 0 degree axis so its center is not at the origin. This sphere will conceptually represent Chinese music. In this sphere, the distance between any two extremes is much smaller. There are songs closer to what we would call R&B, songs we would call pop, etc. Yet the degree of variation between any two songs is much smaller in potential than any two randomized songs in music from the west. Yet people in China insist that they only like R&B, or they only like Rock. To the author, the R&B song that person A may play sounds no different stylistically than the rock song which person B played. Yet, if what westerners consider to be real R&B, real Rock, etc. is played for a Chinese person, in general it is viewed with distaste and is unappreciated. One may speculate that it is too far from the norm, the standard, though again it must be stated that this is the most speculative and unverifiable of any example.
A third example may be clothing. If one were to walk into any women’s clothing store in Yibin, one would find in every case: a plaid jacket (of varying color schemes) with fake unnaturally colored fur around the collar and big buttons, jeans with white lined exterior cargo pockets and oddly placed straps, etc. There is an incredible amount of conformity to particular archetypes (down to certain pieces of clothing, more than just stylistically) by fashionable Chinese, and this conformity is much more article-specific than conformity in the West (which tends to be brand- or style-based).
As a final, more abstract example I would present language to be a correlative of conformity. While this is more objectively verifiable and quantifiable than my speculation about music, I have in no way gone about the experiments necessary to do so. This said, I ask the reader again to take my observations as just that - my own personal observations. The Chinese language is a language which requires an enormous degree of precision, precision much greater than that which is required by western languages like Spanish or English. As many alert readers will know, Chinese is tonal, and “ma” with a high tone (mother) is different from “ma” with a falling tone (scold). These sounds are not incredibly different for a western speaker, but sound as different to Chinese as sesquipedalian and menagerie. If a learner of Chinese makes any mistake at all in his sentence, Chinese people will often not understand at all what the student is trying to say. However, should a learner of English walk into a McDonald’s and say “I would are wanting to eating the sandburger,” almost any speaker of English would be able to extrapolate that the person is asking for a hamburger.
However, the real thrust of this discussion of language is a discussion of accents and dialects. People all over China can not understand each other’s accents, which is completely understandable considering the thousands of years of development in disparate places with little communication with each other. Yet often even speaking standard mandarin, people from different places have difficulty understanding each other. To many people in Sichuan, the accent of a Shanghai speaker of standard Mandarin is nigh unintelligible. Also, the differences in dialects seems insurmountable to many Chinese. Some students of the Yibin University from the Xingjiang autonomous prefecture still, after three years, can neither speak nor understand the local dialect and have tremendous difficulty communicating even simple things. Granted, there is enormous variance in pronunciation between distant geographical locations, however, Scott and I have adapted more to the local accent in six months than our friends have in three years. Moreover, many people will make no attempt at all to understand a foreign speaker of Chinese. If Scott were to go to a restaurant with a Chinese friend, the waiters would generally simply ignore him if he speaks, as in their heads the feeling that they can’t understand him is so deep that it won’t even register in their heads that he is speaking Chinese, however perfectly intelligible it may be to other speakers. It is my theory that this is a correlative of the Chinese desire for conformity reflected in their language - small differences to which Scott and I have little trouble adapting are much larger problems for the Chinese. Perhaps we can correlate this with the fact that in the west our environment is saturated with different accents of English, even among native speakers of English (consider the Scotts!), and especially when foreign accents are taken into account.
The conformity of Chinese society is so built into the mindset of its people that anything outside the norm is seen as humorous. One representation of this is certain movies which make intentional use of things outside the Chinese status quo as a humorous device. An easy example is a very popular movie staring Stephen Chow (writer and director of Shaolin Soccer), called “The King of Comedy.” There is often in the shot a naked child, just standing somewhere. Chinese people find this consistently and repeatedly hysterical, most likely because, simply, it is far out of the status quo.
However, this also translates to situations in which events outside the status quo, not used for comic purposes, are seen as humorous. For example, many readers of this essay will have seen the movie “Kill Bill Pt. 2.” Many of these readers may remember a scene in which the character “Budd” calls a friend to bury the character “the Bride” alive. This friend was about a foot to two feet shorter than Budd, but this disparity was most likely not intended as comic relief. However, our Chinese friends have, on every occasion this film has been shown to them, found the shortness of this character extremely funny, some to the extent that they have rewound the film several times to watch and laugh again, for no other reason than that he is short.
Another, more personal example is an experience which I personally had the other day, wherein I was walking down the street when I passed by a crowd of younger elementary school students walking in the opposite direction. All the students began to laugh, and one stated to another in between fits of laughter “He’s not Chinese!” and all the students began to laugh harder.
Another result of this demand for conformity seems to be that people do not tire of things as readily as we do in the west. For example, one of the most popular songs in China, 童话, has been one of the most popular songs in China since its release in 1999. Our friends will often watch a movie at night, and then again the next morning. Many of our friends will play the same song on repeat for hours. It may prove to be an unfounded, rash speculation, however it seems not unreasonable to correlate the demand for conformity and similarity with an increased tolerance of repetition.
As stated above, conformity, strict social norms and status quo have very long and well-rooted histories in Chinese society, to the extent that anything outside this normality is odd, unacceptable or humorous. In the west this is much less true. While it is true that things outside our status quo can be seen as funny or odd, it seems that due to our more varied society, we are much less demanding of conformity, and the conformity we do demand regulates these controlled aspects much less strictly. Perhaps it is also due to our much greater racial diversity that in the west we accept difference much more readily.
Clearly the next step in this investigation is to question why these statements are true. What is the basis for this demand for conformity? It is a part of society much older than even the Confucian teachings, and an inseparable part of most East-Asian cultures. The answer to the question of why may in part lie in the Orality/Literacy duality discussed by Walter J. Ohm (1959), who discusses the way in which oral transmission of knowledge creates a society much more demanding of repetition memorization and imitation.
All societies demand conformity to a certain extent, and all people demand individuality to a certain extent. The West, it seems, finds itself much further along the conformity-individuality continuum than most East-Asian cultures.
China demands an extreme amount of conformity. This conformity is reflected in the still present Confucian system of societal management, and has been a part of Chinese society since long before even Confucius left his mark on Chinese thought. I intend to provide examples of this conformity in hopes of providing a picture for the reader of the extent of this conformity. At the outset, though, the reader must understand what this piece is and what it is not. It is a description of certain phenomena in Chinese culture, not an attempt at tracing the origins of these phenomena. The reader must also keep in mind that correlation is in no way indicative of causation. These examples are merely areas in which the author himself, viewing inevitably from an American point of view, sees a great deal more conformity than in his own culture; they are not to be taken as characteristics of conformist cultures, nor should they be seen as events which cause, reinforce, or propagate conformity in a culture.
An area I have already discussed is the area of education - the Chinese educational system is one which demands almost no thought of the students, only the ability to memorize. This is clearly a conformist system: it does not encourage in any way individual thought. Individual thought is the opposite of conformity - how can a person do anything but conform if they are unable to think in any way but the way they are taught? Students are taught that fact A is the answer to question B, and that after question C, the blank ought to be filled with response D. There is almost no teaching of critical thinking methods. As I have previously mentioned, students are uncomfortable when asked to partake in any activity which is not of a “fill-in-the-blanks” nature (for example, students will violently flip through their English book looking for the answer to a question such as “what would you like to order,” despite having the menu in front of their face, having seen sample dialogues modeled several times in several varying ways, and the fact that the topic of discussion [western fast food restaurants and their menus] not being one present in their book).
An area I have not mentioned before is something that could be called conformity in the area of music. This is much less objectively verifiable or quantifiable, and is much more speculative and impressionistic in nature. As such this of all things, though it may feel the most indicative and important to the author, should be taken with the largest grain of salt.
Most westerners can not hear the difference between what the Chinese call “pop,” “R&B,” and “rock.” These, aside from classical music, are the only three genres ever mentioned by the majority of Chinese when asked about music. To the author, and several other westerners asked about this, it all sounds like what we in the west would call “pop.” The variation between different styles of music is astonishingly small compared to western popular music. An over-simplification of this situation can, despite its inherently inaccurate nature, lead to a greater understanding of this point. Imagine music as a giant sphere. In your mind place Rap at 90 degrees, R&B at 45, Pop at 0, Rock perhaps at 270, and so on. There are rock songs that are closer to pop (Blink 182), and rock songs that are closer to rap (Linkin Park). There is a considerable amount of distance between the song farthest in the ‘rap’ category, and the song farthest in the ‘rock’ category. Now imagine a smaller oval there within, pulled along the 0 degree axis so its center is not at the origin. This sphere will conceptually represent Chinese music. In this sphere, the distance between any two extremes is much smaller. There are songs closer to what we would call R&B, songs we would call pop, etc. Yet the degree of variation between any two songs is much smaller in potential than any two randomized songs in music from the west. Yet people in China insist that they only like R&B, or they only like Rock. To the author, the R&B song that person A may play sounds no different stylistically than the rock song which person B played. Yet, if what westerners consider to be real R&B, real Rock, etc. is played for a Chinese person, in general it is viewed with distaste and is unappreciated. One may speculate that it is too far from the norm, the standard, though again it must be stated that this is the most speculative and unverifiable of any example.
A third example may be clothing. If one were to walk into any women’s clothing store in Yibin, one would find in every case: a plaid jacket (of varying color schemes) with fake unnaturally colored fur around the collar and big buttons, jeans with white lined exterior cargo pockets and oddly placed straps, etc. There is an incredible amount of conformity to particular archetypes (down to certain pieces of clothing, more than just stylistically) by fashionable Chinese, and this conformity is much more article-specific than conformity in the West (which tends to be brand- or style-based).
As a final, more abstract example I would present language to be a correlative of conformity. While this is more objectively verifiable and quantifiable than my speculation about music, I have in no way gone about the experiments necessary to do so. This said, I ask the reader again to take my observations as just that - my own personal observations. The Chinese language is a language which requires an enormous degree of precision, precision much greater than that which is required by western languages like Spanish or English. As many alert readers will know, Chinese is tonal, and “ma” with a high tone (mother) is different from “ma” with a falling tone (scold). These sounds are not incredibly different for a western speaker, but sound as different to Chinese as sesquipedalian and menagerie. If a learner of Chinese makes any mistake at all in his sentence, Chinese people will often not understand at all what the student is trying to say. However, should a learner of English walk into a McDonald’s and say “I would are wanting to eating the sandburger,” almost any speaker of English would be able to extrapolate that the person is asking for a hamburger.
However, the real thrust of this discussion of language is a discussion of accents and dialects. People all over China can not understand each other’s accents, which is completely understandable considering the thousands of years of development in disparate places with little communication with each other. Yet often even speaking standard mandarin, people from different places have difficulty understanding each other. To many people in Sichuan, the accent of a Shanghai speaker of standard Mandarin is nigh unintelligible. Also, the differences in dialects seems insurmountable to many Chinese. Some students of the Yibin University from the Xingjiang autonomous prefecture still, after three years, can neither speak nor understand the local dialect and have tremendous difficulty communicating even simple things. Granted, there is enormous variance in pronunciation between distant geographical locations, however, Scott and I have adapted more to the local accent in six months than our friends have in three years. Moreover, many people will make no attempt at all to understand a foreign speaker of Chinese. If Scott were to go to a restaurant with a Chinese friend, the waiters would generally simply ignore him if he speaks, as in their heads the feeling that they can’t understand him is so deep that it won’t even register in their heads that he is speaking Chinese, however perfectly intelligible it may be to other speakers. It is my theory that this is a correlative of the Chinese desire for conformity reflected in their language - small differences to which Scott and I have little trouble adapting are much larger problems for the Chinese. Perhaps we can correlate this with the fact that in the west our environment is saturated with different accents of English, even among native speakers of English (consider the Scotts!), and especially when foreign accents are taken into account.
The conformity of Chinese society is so built into the mindset of its people that anything outside the norm is seen as humorous. One representation of this is certain movies which make intentional use of things outside the Chinese status quo as a humorous device. An easy example is a very popular movie staring Stephen Chow (writer and director of Shaolin Soccer), called “The King of Comedy.” There is often in the shot a naked child, just standing somewhere. Chinese people find this consistently and repeatedly hysterical, most likely because, simply, it is far out of the status quo.
However, this also translates to situations in which events outside the status quo, not used for comic purposes, are seen as humorous. For example, many readers of this essay will have seen the movie “Kill Bill Pt. 2.” Many of these readers may remember a scene in which the character “Budd” calls a friend to bury the character “the Bride” alive. This friend was about a foot to two feet shorter than Budd, but this disparity was most likely not intended as comic relief. However, our Chinese friends have, on every occasion this film has been shown to them, found the shortness of this character extremely funny, some to the extent that they have rewound the film several times to watch and laugh again, for no other reason than that he is short.
Another, more personal example is an experience which I personally had the other day, wherein I was walking down the street when I passed by a crowd of younger elementary school students walking in the opposite direction. All the students began to laugh, and one stated to another in between fits of laughter “He’s not Chinese!” and all the students began to laugh harder.
Another result of this demand for conformity seems to be that people do not tire of things as readily as we do in the west. For example, one of the most popular songs in China, 童话, has been one of the most popular songs in China since its release in 1999. Our friends will often watch a movie at night, and then again the next morning. Many of our friends will play the same song on repeat for hours. It may prove to be an unfounded, rash speculation, however it seems not unreasonable to correlate the demand for conformity and similarity with an increased tolerance of repetition.
As stated above, conformity, strict social norms and status quo have very long and well-rooted histories in Chinese society, to the extent that anything outside this normality is odd, unacceptable or humorous. In the west this is much less true. While it is true that things outside our status quo can be seen as funny or odd, it seems that due to our more varied society, we are much less demanding of conformity, and the conformity we do demand regulates these controlled aspects much less strictly. Perhaps it is also due to our much greater racial diversity that in the west we accept difference much more readily.
Clearly the next step in this investigation is to question why these statements are true. What is the basis for this demand for conformity? It is a part of society much older than even the Confucian teachings, and an inseparable part of most East-Asian cultures. The answer to the question of why may in part lie in the Orality/Literacy duality discussed by Walter J. Ohm (1959), who discusses the way in which oral transmission of knowledge creates a society much more demanding of repetition memorization and imitation.