We spent a couple of days in Haerbin while we waited for the Beijing bureaucrats to process our visa extensions. It was -9 during the day and -20 at night, but the centre of town, with its refreshingly different looking old Russian buildings, was packed with people enjoying the winter festival.

 

The festival is famous for the snow and ice sculptures so we forked out the small fortune to see them (our out of date Young Persons Railcards failed to convince the lady at the gate that she should charge us student rates). The ice sculptures were colourfully lit and the scale of the snow sculptures was definitely impressive but we still felt a bit short changed. China’s museums are full of stunning bronze and stone sculptures. Dragons, tigers, battle scenes, giant Buddhas... the list goes on. In Haerbin 2008 however, the sculptures were of cartoon mice,  smiling disney characters holding olympic rings and recurring works on the  theme of ancient greek thinkers and gods. There was a giant snow Plato standing in his robes and another that was supposed to be Aristotle. The colossal centre piece sculpture featured a busty, wine drinking, greek goddess - Confucius would have cried.

 

Coincidentally, later that night the book I was reading offered some explanation. A historian by the name of David Knieghtly described how the disasters China faced in the 19th and 20th century helped lead to some Chinese starting to turn to foreign concepts and values. He describes it as a clumsy process that clutched at some of the worst Western ideas (he gives Marxism as an example). He also refers to the China’s bid to host the Asian Games (obviously the 2008 olympics is now an even stronger example): “The games can be seen as the decendents of the games Achilles held for Patriochius’ funeral.  They serve as one example of China’s attempt to appropriate part of the West’s Classical and now International Heritage into China’s modern culture.”

 

I’m all for China making a big deal of the Olympics. I just wish they’d do it with more dragons and fewer cartoon mice.

 

JL

 

 

 

 

PS

Here’s a few other excerpts from the David Knieghtly bit of Peter Hessler’s 'Oracle Bones':

 

Many of the philosophical foundations of Chinese Culture, including some of the most important works of early literature were established during the Zhou dynasty. Confucius who was born around 451 BC, 2 centuries after the fall of the last Zhou ruler. He idealised the dynasty as a model of appropriate culture and customs...

 

...In contrast to the literature of Ancient Greece, the moral world of the Chinese (Zhou) Classics is remarkably orderly. In ancient China the good are rewarded and the bad punished. Gods do not come down to earth and behave badly, there is no tragedy in ancient Chinese Literature. The dead function in essentially the same way as the living, except with greater power. Its all about order, regularity and organisation...

 

In Classical Chinese literature the Hero is essentially a bureaucrat.  He organises, he’s better known for making plans than fighting.

 

Knieghtley - “You don’t get that attention to dirty detail that you have in the Iliad and Odyssey. It’s all about what a person does, what his talents are. It’s very pragmatic, very existential. The trouble with the dead in Homer, is that they don’t know beans. In the Odyssey, Odysseus visits the underworld and talks with Achilles who doesn’t know what’s going on back in Greece, or even if his son and father are alive. It quite unike the Chinese dead who assume power as they become older. What the Greeks do is develop a Hero cult, which is opposed to the ancestor cult. The Greeks are trying to built a city state as opposed to a lineage state, where you have a polity that is run by and for a group of powerful families. The Greeks did not encourage that.”

 

Knieghtley remarks that the Chinese produce bureaucracy as instinctively as the West create heroes, but he emphasises that this is not a value judgement; in fact the need for western-style heroism – decision, action – might naturally produce war. He points to the idea that Europeans educated in the Greek Classics may have been particularly willing to rush headlong into the First World War. As William Blake wrote - “The Classics, it’s the Classics! That desolate Europe with wars”

 

Knieghtley - “I believe that the climate of Ancient China was very benevolent. And this encouraged the kind of optimism which we see in the culture. There is a flood myth, but the ancestor Yu solves the problem. And in Ancient China there is no evil act, there is no sense of original sin. There is no interest in theodicy, in explaining evil in the world. When you look at the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Sumeria where you have these sandstorms, these disasters – it’s a very different world.  Read the Gilgamesh; it’s remarkable. The guy is going to die and he’s angry about it.  He wants and explanation about death.  There is nothing like that in China. You die and you become and ancestor. You have the same relationship: once a King always a King; once a serf always a serf. I  believe that cultures that engage in ancestor worship are going to be conservative cultures, you’re not going to find new things attractive, because that would be a challenge to the ancestors.