【外交家 20150305】中美文化之异

满仓

【中文标题】中美文化之异
【原文标题】How Chinese and Americans Understand Culture
【登载媒体】外交家
【原文作者】Brent Crane
【原文链接】http://thediplomat.com/2015/03/how-chinese-and-americans-understand-culture/


谈到文化，这两个国家的观点千差万别。



去年12月的一个晚上，在中国昆明，我与一位中国中年女性教授共进晚餐。她刚刚从华盛顿回到中国，我们谈到了美国和中国在一系列问题上的对比：基础设施、地理、天气、时装。当我提到中美文化差异的时候，她打断我：“什么美国文化？”她认为美国太年轻了，没有自己的文化。在她看来，只有持续几千年的文明才有资格被称为文化。而且，他认为美国文化只不过是其它文化碎片的拼凑，并不是真正的文化。我不是第一次从中国朋友那里听到这样的文化标准，这种观点是否说明中国人逐渐把文化当作一种概念，以及这与美国人的观点有多大的差异？

美国人对于文化的理解包括一系列的因素——食物、语言、音乐、习俗——作为基本条件，而中国人似乎更偏向于时间。

人们往往会说中国拥有最古老的文明，从很多方面来看的确如此——从公元前1000年开始就维系着政治的连贯性，但这样的说法多少有些误导。人类在这片被称为中国的土地上居住了5000年，其地理范围在逐渐扩大，这里其实是不同国家、朝代和种族的一个大杂烩。我们日常所说的中国人主要指的是汉族人，他们占人口总数的90％。其它少数民族——藏族、彝族、壮族、傣族和其它数十个民族——都有他们自己的文化、传统和历史。当然，毕竟有一些“中国人特性”历经千年传承了下来，自然值得骄傲和庆祝。

但是，声称中国文化比其它文化优越是因为其具有更长的生命力的说法，是所谓“汉民族沙文主义”的基础之一。这种社会学意义上的概念更倾向于汉族，而且对北京处理自身问题的方式上有潜在的影响。例如，在西藏和新疆的领土归属问题上，中国人引用历史和文化宣称汉族人对这些地区拥有主权。在与日本争论群岛上的原住民问题时，中国往往显得态度倨傲。

这种思想具有明显的政治意图。中国的历史充满了战争、混乱和派系纷争，因此说所有汉族人具有相同的历史，汉族文化更优越——如果民族文化有优劣之分的话，那么这是可以把人民团结在一个帝王，或者一面旗帜下的一股强大的力量。

美国当然也存在这样的现象。美国例外论——认为美国人的价值观优于其它国家的人民——在我们的电影、书籍、历史解读，当然还有外交政策上表露无遗。与中国一样，我们的文化例外论受到一个强大文明的发展历程，以及与周边国家互动过程的影响。中国人和美国人在进行疆域扩张时，都遭到了原住民的激烈抵抗，他们的对手都被认为是劣等民族。中国和美国把疆域成功地扩张到周边国家，让他们有理由认为自身的文化更优越。而且，就中国来看，来自外族的入侵——最主要的是满族人和蒙古人——最终都导致外族人被中国文化所同化。这也提升了汉族文化更优越的的观点。

与其它文化一样，中国的文化底蕴深厚、内涵丰富、不断变化，很难用简要、具体的方式来描述如此多样化的问题。但是也有一些固定的因素对文化造成了影响：推崇稳定、服从和社会等级制度的儒家学说；集体主义高于个人主义的概念；认为世间事物相互连通并寻求平衡的道家学说。中国的艺术、厨艺、文学和发明都是建立在这些社会基础理念之上。所有这一切缓慢发展了5000多年，对于一个文明来说已经足够久远了。难怪中国人对此津津乐道、引以为荣。但这份荣誉并非中国独享。

如果我们想要了解美国人如何解构他们自己国家文化，我们或许会看到美国民主制度、美式英语、美国哲学，以及流行文化元素，比如美国音乐、食物、文学和电影。但是我们还会看到莎士比亚、霍布斯、柏拉图、雅典民主和罗马帝国之类来自古代世界的东西。严格来说，这些东西不能算作是纯粹的美国文化，不像中国所自称的那样，但是美国人对它们怀有同样的崇敬和自豪感。美国文化的这些古老的因素也同样存在于欧洲国家的文化中，所以我们倾向于推崇纯粹意义上的美国发明——艺术、音乐、创新和想法，也就是新事物，不是旧事物，至少当我们讨论文化优劣的问题时。

所以我们看到，尽管存在着诸多现代政治因素，中国和美国把文明和古代因素深植于现代国家文化的概念中。但是在现实世界中如何表述呢？加利福尼亚州大学尔湾分校的中国历史教授杰夫瑞•瓦瑟斯特洛姆说：“在中文里，‘culture’是‘文化’、‘civilization’是‘文明’，这两者结合起来形成了历史传承下来的发明创造和文献。你可以看到它们之间的关系。同样，我们有时也会用这种方式阐述，我们用这些词来描述某个人有文化，具备文明意识。”如果说美国也像中国一样，文化的传统可以追溯到古代文明，为什么那么多中国朋友不假思索地说美国文化欠发展、处于婴儿期呢？或许部分原因在于它不被世人所了解。

纽约大学皇后学院政治科学教授和民族问题学者孙彦说：“我想这是无知所导致的，因为他们没有真正了解美国。他们或许在报纸上了解到美国的文化，但记者其实也不大懂。美国出口的文化并不是百老汇，而是NBA。”

中国人对美国文化的印象通常是扁平的，而且是崭新的。我举一个例子：几年前，我在昆明一所大学任英语代课教师。我没有教学经验，于是临时想到了一个活动。我在黑板上写下“中国”和“美国”，让每个学生走上来用英语写下分别与这两个国家有关的单词。结果颇耐人寻味。中国下面的单词有“历史久远”、“传统食物”、“长城”等，美国下面的单词更多，而且各种各样，包括“性感”、“快餐”、“iPhone”、“迪斯尼”、“联合国”、“经济危机”和“同性恋”等。很明显，他们对自己的国家所联想到的大部分事物都是古代的，而美国让他们联想到现代。当然，这种不大正规的调查结果没有足够的权威性，但我可以冒险地说，其他中国年轻人肯定也会表达类似的观点。

外人其实有理由把美国与新生事物联系在一起，美国就是一个建立在新思想基础上的国家，“历史清白”是深植于美国人头脑中的概念。实际上，这也是这个国家的国际声望所在。美国革命家托马斯•潘恩说：“我们凭一己之力再一次重新建立一个世界。”美国人对历史不但没有敬畏之情，而且持怀疑态度。19世纪的作家赫尔曼•梅尔维尔写到：“历史一去不复返。”在中国，除了毛时代和文化大革命的疯狂，这样的说法不但罕见，而且是离经叛道的。孔子说：“温故知新。”仅仅在上个世纪末期，中国文化的历史跨度才出现了微小的调整。

美国和中国社会的文化多元性也差异巨大。美国社会从整体上来说，种族多样化趋势明显。梅尔维尔说：“美国人的每一滴血都带有全世界的基因。”如果说中国为人所知的是古老、不间断的文明，那么美国为人所知的就是一个大熔炉。种族多样性不容置疑地为国家的文化做出贡献，就像中国人骄傲地说起他们漫长的历史一样，美国人为大熔炉的地位感到自豪。但是这个熔炉社会，以及由此派生出来的美国国家文化，恰恰是我的很多中国朋友所认为不值一哂的所在。我看到的是文化融合，他们看到的是文化盗窃；我看到的是把美国文化凝聚在一起的力量，他们看到的是胡拼乱凑。我们怎样才能弥合这两种相反的观点？

归根到底，其中的区别在于句法。在美国，人们提到的“文化”主要指的是流行文化：电影、音乐、食物、可触摸到的文化元素和近代或者现代。在中国，文化似乎指的是久远的过去。瓦瑟斯特洛姆说：“[中国是古老文化所在地]的这个观点已经成为人们谈论中国的常用方式，也是政府推崇自己国家的主要方面。”

自从习执政以来，他收紧了对文化领域的管控，扩大了中国的电影市场，在海外积极推广中国文化。在2010年文艺座谈会上的讲话中，习强调两个文化领域必须“坚持以服务人民、服务社会为导向”。贯穿其中的中国梦是一项全国性的宣传运动，运动中包括了很多公开展示的海报，用浪漫的中国未来与历史作对比。经典的刺绣工艺和古代绘画手法，加上一些口号——“诚实守信代代传，儒家思想永放光”、“祖国前头尽是春”——是常见的主题。与以往过分夸大社会主义制度优越性的宣传海报不同，中国梦的海报臆造出一个久远的历史形象。为了达到这个目的，党所使用的手段——用《纽约时报》记者伊恩•约翰逊的话来说——“以前被用来把党说成是中国落后、非共产主义的历史的代表。现在，这些传统美学元素变成了让党成为这个国家的希望和未来的守护神和缔造者的基础。”在这种环境下，文化在某种程度上变成了一个政治话题。

尽管存在这些差异，美国和中国的社会依然存在着很多共性。他们都居住在一个疆域广阔的国家，他们都极为自豪、爱国，都对外部世界缺乏了解。当然，任何一个国家的文化都不可能用几千字的文章讲述清楚，更不可能完全汇总两个国家将近20亿人口的复杂思想。但是，我们可以信心十足地确定一个问题，那就是这两个国家都有自己的文化。只不过他们都从不同的角度来看待。





原文：

The two countries seem to have very different perspectives when it comes to their culture.

One night in Kunming, China last December I was out to dinner with a former professor, a middle-aged Chinese woman. She had just returned from a trip to Washington D.C. and at one point during the meal we began contrasting America and China on a number of different fronts: infrastructure, geography, weather, fashion. When I brought up the differences between Chinese and American culture she interjected, “What American culture?” The U.S. is too young a country to have a culture, she began arguing. In her mind, real culture was something that could only exist after thousands of years of civilization. Besides, she argued, American culture is merely a collection of snippets from other cultures. It is not a true culture. This was not the first time I’d heard such criteria for culture from a Chinese friend. What does this perspective, if anything, say about how the Chinese generally view culture as a concept and how that might differ from the American viewpoint?

Whereas American ideas of culture acknowledge a certain package of shared traits – food, language, music, customs – as a base requirement, the Chinese alternative, it seems, ascribes a much heftier weight to time.

China, it is often said, has the oldest continuous civilization. While true in many respects – it has remained largely politically coherent since the first millennium BC – this is also slightly misleading. The five thousand or so years of human habitation in the land we now call China, today a territory larger then it’s ever been, has been a changing hodgepodge of kingdoms and dynasties with often diverse ethnic make-ups. And what we think of as Chinese usually is limited to the Han ethnicity, which makes up around 90 percent of the population. The remaining minority groups – Tibetans, Yi, Zhuang, Dai, among a few dozen others – have their own sets of cultures, traditions and histories. Still, there are forms of Chineseness that have persisted through millennia and it’s certainly something to be proud of and celebrate.

But the idea that Chinese culture is somehow more advanced then others because of its long life is one of the bedrocks of what is called “Han chauvinism,” a sociological disposition that favors the Han ethnicity over others, and it has real implications for how Beijing conducts its affairs. In both the disputed territories of Tibet and Xinjiang for instance, the Chinese invoke history and culture to argue for Han claims on each region. In its ongoing spat with Japan the fact that the original settlers of the archipelago came from China is often cited patronizingly.

This mindset serves a clear political purpose. China has been plagued throughout its history by war, chaos and factionalism. The idea that all Han come from the same historical place and that Han culture is superior, if a single culture at all, is a powerful force in unifying people under an emperor or a flag.

Americans have this too, of course. American exceptionalism, the belief that American values are qualitatively superior to others, is evident in our movies, our books, our understandings of history, and of course our foreign policy. Our own cultural exceptionalism was shaped, like the Chinese version, by our development as a powerful civilization and our interaction with surrounding groups. In both the Chinese and American experiences in territorial expansion the frontier forces faced violent resistance from native peoples and in both experiences the natives were regarded as members of an inferior race. The success of both China and America in expanding its territory over that of surrounding peoples’ validated each civilization’s notions of itself as culturally superior. Moreover, in China’s case, aggressors that invaded China from abroad, the Manchus and the Mongols notably, actually ended up adopting Chinese culture and becoming Sinicized themselves. This too contributed to the notion that Han culture was a step above the rest.

Like any culture, China’s is deep, ever-changing, and multifaceted and it can be hard to speak concisely or determinately about anything so variable and intangible. There are however certain reoccurring, generally held attributes: Confucianism and its general urgings towards stability, obedience, and societal hierarchies; collectivism over individualism; and a Taoist understanding of the world as interconnected and seeking equilibrium. China’s deep well of art, cuisine, literature and innovations are all in part a product of these sociological underpinnings. All of this developed gradually over more then five thousand years, a remarkable length of time for cultural traits to survive through. It’s no wonder the Chinese point to that and are proud of it. Yet China is not unique in this.

If we were to look at how Americans might deconstruct their own national culture we would probably see things like the American democratic system, American English, American philosophies, as well as elements of popular culture such as American music, food, literature and film. But we would also see things like Shakespeare, Hobbs, Plato, Athenian democracy and the Roman empire – elements of the ancient and old worlds. While these can’t be said to be strictly American in the same way that the Chinese alternatives maybe can, they are held with a comparable sense of pride and reverence in the American psyche. Since the aspects of American culture that are ancient in origin are also shared with other Western countries, we tend to value strictly American creations – art, music, innovations and ideas – and thus new world ones, over those of the ancient and old worlds, at least in the immediate arena of culture-making.

So we see that, despite modern political arrangements, in both China and America ideas of civilization and antiquity are deeply entrenched within modern conceptions of national culture. But how does this play out in the real world? “In the Chinese language there is wenhua (文化) for culture but also wenming (文明) for civilization or civilized,” says Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a China scholar and history professor at the University of California Irvine. “They go together and the root has something to do with creation and texts and things passed on. You can see they’re connected. Similarly, we can sometimes talk that way as well. We use the term for someone being cultured to mean sort of possessing in these kinds of civilized awareness.” If, like China, America also traces its cultural origins to antiquity and ancient civilization, why then are so many of my Chinese friends so quick to disqualify American culture as undeveloped or infantile? Part of it might be a lack of exposure.

“I think it’s maybe ignorance because they don’t really know what America is,” says Yan Sun, a professor of political science at Queens College in New York and scholar of ethnic relations in China. “They may have read about it in the paper but the reporters don’t know of it either. The kind of American culture that gets exported isn’t Broadway but NBA.”

Chinese impressions of American culture generally are limited to the one-dimensional and very new. Consider this anecdotal example: A few years ago in Kunming I was teaching English to a class of college students as a substitute teacher. Having no experience in teaching, I improvised an activity for the students. I wrote China and America on the whiteboard and had each student come up and write an English word they associated with each country. The results were intriguing. Under China were things like, “long history,” “traditional food,” “Great Wall.” Under America, a much longer and varied list, was “sexy,” “fast food,” “iPhone,” “Disney” “UN,” “economy crisis” and “homosexual.” It was clear that most of the things they associated with their own country were of the past, while associations with America were mostly of the very recent. Of course, such an informal polling cannot be seen as authoritative, but I would venture to say that other young Chinese would respond similarly.

It makes sense that outsiders might associate America with newness. America was founded on novel ideas and a fresh start. The notion of a clean slate is ingrained in its national psyche. Indeed, it is a part of the country’s global reputation. “We have it in our power,” said the American revolutionary Thomas Paine, “to begin the world all over again.” Instead of revering antiquity, Americans regarded it with suspicion. “The Past is dead, and has no resurrection,” wrote 19th century novelist Herman Melville. In China, excepting the frantic years of Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, such notions have long been not only uncommon but heretical. “Study the past if you would divine the future,” wrote Confucius. Only in the last century or so, microscopic in the span of Chinese civilization, has this begun to change.

Where American and Chinese societies differ markedly as well is in multiculturalism. American society has for most of its existence been an ethnically diverse one. “You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world,” wrote Melville. If China is known around the world as the oldest continuous civilization, America is known as the melting pot. Its ethnic diversity has undeniably contributed to its national culture and in the same way that many Chinese speak proudly of their long history, Americans tend to speak proudly of the melting pot. Yet the melting pot society, and the American national culture that has sprung out of it, is exactly what has been targeted as somehow illegitimate by my Chinese friends. What I saw as cultural integration, they saw as cultural theft. What I saw as something that binds together American culture, they saw as disqualifying it. How do we reconcile these opposing views?

In the end the difference may be in the syntax. In America, the word “culture” when spoken in conversation increasingly refers to aspects of popular culture: film, music, food; tangible cultural elements and often those of the recent past or present. In China, it seems more often to refer to things of the far past. “[That China is a place of ancient culture] has become an increasingly common way of talking about China. It’s become one of the things that the government sort of celebrates most,” says Wasserstrom.

Since coming to power, president Xi Jinping has tightened the Party’s control over the cultural playing field. He has expanded the Chinese film industry, and increased promotion of Chinese culture abroad. In a 2010speech on art and literature Xi stressed that the two cultural realms must “persist in the fundamental orientation of serving the people and serving Socialism.” Throughout all of this there has been the China Dream campaign. The national propaganda campaign, mostly consisting of publicly displayed posters, has contrasted messages of hope for China’s future with romantic allusions to its past.Depictions of classical embroidery designs and ancient painting motifs partnered with slogans like, “Honesty and sincerity passed down from generation to generation; Confucian classics last forever” and “Spring is always ahead for our motherland” are common examples of the posters. Unlike propaganda posters of the past that advertised overtly socialist imagery, the China Dream posters conjure up images of a faraway past. In doing this the Party is utilizing material that, as New York Times writer Ian Johnsonpointed out, “used to be derided by the Party as belonging to China’s backward, pre-Communist past; now, these aesthetic traditions are a bulwark used to legitimize the Party as a guardian and creator of the country’s hopes and aspirations.” Within this atmosphere, culture has, in some ways, become a politically charged topic.

Despite obvious differences, American and Chinese societies share several characteristics. They both live in physically large countries. They both are fiercely proud, patriotic, and pay scant attention to the outside world. Admittedly, neither country’s culture can be summed up in a couple thousand words nor can the myriad opinions on this topic of the nearly two billion people between them. What one can say with confidence however is that both countries certainly do have a culture. They just might be looking at them from different angles.

每天的晨吟

人贵有自知之明，国家也是。