America against China: Civilization without Culture against Culture without Civilization?

Culture and Dialogue, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2011, pp. 1-30

America against ChinaCivilization without Culture against Culture without

Civilization?

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

Department of Humanities and Social SciencesGulf University for Science and Technology, Kuwait

[email protected]

Abstract

This essay reflects on Chinese and American hyperrealism and its effect on the self-perceptions and cultural identities of both countries. Hyperreality is a condition whereby it is impossible to distinguish reality from fantasy. Such a condition is common in technologically advanced cultures where virtual reality has made possible the endless reproductions of fundamentally empty appearances. It is however also possible to speak of hyperreality in terms of “culture” or “civilization.” As a first example, China produces a hyperrealist version of its culture in ways that are peculiar to the Confucian treatment of history. As a second example, hyperrealism can be seen in American civilization, which has often been described by some as a materialized utopia excelling in simulations such as Disneyland or Las Vegas and that permeates through large parts of American life like an underlying structure.

The mythical and pseudo-historical past upon which many Chinese philosophical discourses are built has arguably led to a quasi-virtual timelessness whose effects remain significant in China’s contemporary political life. At the same time, American civilization consists – viewed from a certain angle – in an aseptic, dishistoricized culture that authors such as Jean Baudrillard have described in terms of “hyperreality.”

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2 Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

I

Introduction

Superficial observers reduce the China vs. US theme to that of a confrontation between a notoriously undemocratic country and a country that is democratic to the core. Linked to this is the appeal that the Chinese should first embrace “modernity” (that is, “democracy”) before Americans can seriously negotiate with them. Any such one-dimensional opposition will lead a baffled outside observer to wonder how much the countries actually know about each other. Is there, in America and in China, something like a realistic appreciation of the respective cultures? The popular American picture of China is that of a totalitarian country sporting mythical development and unstoppable growth, eagerly dumping prices and currencies along with the most common ethical values. Conversely, there is the Chinese picture of an imperialist America trying to overrun the whole world with a mindless consumer culture against which China has to resist. If this is going to be a new Cold War, it will be led by opponents who have much less in common culturally and less mutual understanding than was the case between the US and the Soviet Union.

With the aim of adopting a more nuanced approach, this essay analyzes Chinese and American hyperrealisms and their effects on the self-perceptions and cultural identities of both countries. In hyperreality, it is impossible to distinguish reality from fantasy. Such a state of things is common in technologically advanced cultures where virtual reality has made possible the endless reproductions of fundamentally empty appearances. We can, however, also think of hyperreality in terms of “cultures” or “civilizations.”

This essay provides examples of how China produces a hyperrealist version of its culture in ways that are peculiar to the Confucian treatment of history. The mythical and pseudo-historical past upon which many Chinese philosophical discourses are built has led to a quasi-virtual timelessness whose effects remain significant in China’s contemporary political life. China’s traditional “self-enclosedness” will be examined in terms of a “dark side of Confucianism” that includes some undesirable parts of Chinese history – its social and political oppression for example – and extends into the contemporary world.

Hyperrealism in America, on the other hand, can be seen in its civilization which has often been described as a materialized utopia excelling in simulations like Disneyland and Las Vegas, or as an aseptic, dishistoricized culture – what authors such as Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco have described in terms of “hyperreality” – to the point that it permeates through large parts of American life like an underlying structure.


America against China 3

II

It is first of all important to note that the distinction between culture and civilization is not well embedded in everyday English language, but has proved to be relatively meaningful in other European languages, as well as in non-European ones under the influence of French and German. In the English-speaking world, a century-old confusing play of mutual recuperations, name switching, and revisions has made it difficult to work out what distinguishes culture from civilization. Such a fogginess has even worsened since powerful streams of English-speaking anthropologists suggested that the concepts are identical.

“Culture” (from the Latin cultura) is the older term and corresponds to the Latin etymology both in form and content; “civilization” (from the Latin civis) was coined at a later stage and evolved rapidly, especially during the 18th century in France and subsequently in England. It is however in Germany that the concept of “culture” developed with its variations of meaning. Kant’s distinction between culture and civilization is that between deceptive external “courtesy” and true “virtue.”1 18th century German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, in his Yet another Philosophy of History for the Purpose of Educating Mankind (1774), makes such a distinction as explicit by equating civilization with the most alienating forms of industrialization.2 Roughly put, the distinction between civilization and culture can be clearly established as follows: the former refers more specifically to material, technical, economic and social facts, the latter conceptualizes spiritual, intellectual and artistic phenomena, individual or collective concrete human expressions rather than abstract systems. The German usage of the word Zivilisation has always alluded to some utilitarian, outer aspect of human existence that is subordinated to Kultur, which was itself perceived as the “real” being of humans, society, and their achievements.

The distinction between civilization and culture has evolved, but it has also been under various attacks, so to speak, for more than two hundred and fifty years. Such a conceptual

1 See Immanuel Kant, “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht,” Berlinische Monatsschrift (November 1784): 391. For an English translation, see, for example, “Idea for a Universal His-tory from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” in Kant: On History, trans. and ed. Lewis White Beck (Upper Sad-dle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963).

2 Johann Gottfried von Herder, “Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit” [Yet anoth-er philosophy of history fort the formation of humankind], in Herders Sämtliche Werke [The complete works of Herder], ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1877-1913), 527-28. English transla-tion by Eva Herzfeld, “Yet another Philosophy of History” (thesis, Columbia University, New York, 1969), 217.


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distinction remains, however, particularly timely in a world where cultures (both local and global), tradition and modernity collide. In 1961, Paul Ricœur launched a debate on the cross-fertilization between “rooted” culture and “universal” civilization,3 pointing to ideas of regionalism that would become preeminent. Since then, the culture-civilization debate has become important in the context of postmodern fragmentation. Ibrahim Abu-Rabi for example, in his study on Middle Eastern political culture, points to the “frequently expressed view that there is an Islamic civilization and not just culture or cultures” in the modern Muslim world. According to Abu-Rabi,4

. . . the political and economic elite in the Arab or Muslim worlds, regardless of their culture, are true participants in the civilization of capitalism. True, there is an Arab or Muslim culture, but it is currently dominated by the larger capitalist civilization.5

He claims that, because the Muslim world has failed to develop its capitalist system in the modern period and has become dependent on the world capitalist system, “the Muslim world has culture but lacks civilization.”6 Abu-Rabi perceives civilization as a progressive development of humanity to which he opposes culture as a national form of self-consciousness. There is, of course, no single definition of culture or civilization, but definitions given above are useful tools when it comes to analyzing a complex constellation.

Boyang and Baudrillard

The starting points of the present reflection are Taiwan-based Chinese writer Boyang’s The Ugly Chinaman and the Crisis of Chinese Culture and French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s America.7 Boyang ( 柏楊 ) uses his central concept of the soy paste vat as

3 See Paul Ricœur, “Universal Civilization and National Cultures,” in History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelb-ley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965).

4 Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi, Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post-1967 Arab Intellectual History (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 188.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., 189.

7 See Bo Yang, The Ugly Chinaman and the Crisis of Chinese Culture, trans. Don J. Cohn and Jing Qing (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991). Boyang ( 柏楊 , 1920-2008). Boyang was his pen name, which should be spelled in one single Romanized word to avoid confusion with what could be interpreted as his first name and surname.


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a metaphor for Chinese culture to try to come to terms with the Chinese past and present. According to him, Chinese culture develops through fermentation and an infinite process of indiscriminately added cultural components, which resembles the production of soy paste in a vat. His point is that the cultural elements within the 5000 year-old vat of Chinese culture have never been churned, and as a result the thick paste of its culture has prevented the development of Chinese civilization.

Boyang’s soy paste vat metaphor for Chinese culture can be contrasted with a vision of America built by many authors, most famously Baudrillard and Umberto Eco.8 Hyperreal America is best encountered in simulated places like Disneyland and Las Vegas, but is also perceptible on many different levels within American civilization. In America, Baudrillard experiences the New World through an exotic-making lens of estrangement that has proved to be shocking for many Americans. Hyperreal America is the “Desert America” most present in California and in the Midwest. It is the America of cleanliness, politeness, and happiness settled in a utopian future, which is unquestionably civilized, but which foreign visitors most often find “culturally empty.” Baudrillard’s picture of American civilization is indeed relevant to our present concern: America is portrayed as a straightforward and predominantly utopian affair, indefatigably preoccupied with turning things into material realities and largely unable to ironize upon the future because American civilization is supposed to be the future.

Both China and America engage in cultural/civilizational simulations of the highest degree. China’s Confucian simulation of culture and America’s utopian simulation of civilization suggest identical copies of either culture (China) or civilization (America), for which no original has ever existed. Baudrillard’s “concrete mythology” of an America made entirely of civilization finds its counterpart in the Confucian myth of Chinese culture produced by the soy paste vat. What both America and China lack is the organic interplay between culture and civilization. The idea of civilization as the spoon that churns the soy paste of culture in order to keep it alive remains alien to both countries.

His birth name was Guo Dingsheng ( 郭定生 ). Jean Baudrillard trans. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (London: Vintage, 1998). First published in Italian as Il costume di casa [Faith in fakes] (Milano: Bompiani, 1973), Amérique (Paris: Grasset, 1986). For the English translation see Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1989).

8 See Baudrillard’s America and Umberto Eco’s Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality, trans. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (London: Vintage, 1998). First published in Italian as Il costume di casa [Faith in fakes] (Milano: Bompiani, 1973).



Boyang’s The Ugly Chinaman

An obvious attempt at unfolding Chinese culture in the light of American civilization is Boyang’s The Ugly Chinaman and the Crisis of Chinese Culture, which was published in Chinese in 1985.9 Though a prolific writer of novels and popular history, The Ugly Chinaman is by far his most famous work. It is a relatively aggressive book, but in spite of the scathing criticism of Chinese culture/civilization and the apparent glorification of America, The Ugly Chinaman does not propagate a view of the wholesale Westernization of China. The book contains a great deal of irony, impressionistic flashes of the mind, and descriptions of the comical content of everyday Chinese life. In no way can it be understood as a systematic continuation of mid-19th century Chinese debates between traditionalists and reformers. As a matter of fact, Boyang does not explicitly talk about modernization or Westernization, nor does he delve into classical modernization projects, such as liberal democracy, capitalist free enterprise and rational technologies. Instead, his aim is to provide sketches of Chinese situations in which a lack of “civilization” is obvious, and to proceed to theorizations only tentatively. His work follows the tradition of satirical essays, called zawen ( 雜文 ), much used by writer Lu Xun ( 魯迅 ) and brought to a revival in the 1950s and 1960s in both the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan.10

Boyang’s monolithic use of the concept of “Chinese culture” as well as his vague presentation of “Confucianism” show that this book was never intended for an academic audience. Still, as a piece of literature, The Ugly Chinaman provides intuitive insights that more formal studies might not. Boyang’s metaphor of the soy paste vat evokes something that is common in Northern China. This soy paste is somehow similar to the Japanese miso and visitors most often discover it while eating Beijing duck. The content of the vat – soybeans and wheat flour – is never stirred, and its fluidity turns into a sticky thickness until the ingredients begin to ferment. In Boyang’s words,

It’s as viscous as mud, and doesn’t flow. Because the paste remains in the vat untouched and unstirred, and because the water content is constantly evaporating, the

9 Boyang moved from Mainland China to Taiwan in 1949 when the communists defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang. From 1967 to 1976, Boyang was imprisoned in Taiwan because of his ten-dentious translation of a Popeye comic strip that the Kuomintang interpreted as a disguised mockery of Presi-dent Chiang Kai-shek ( 蔣介石 , 1887-1975).

10 Lu Xun (1881-1936) is considered by many to be the founder of modern Chinese literature. From 1926 to his death he devoted himself to the writing of satirical essays.



paste grows thicker and thicker as time goes by. Chinese culture undergoes a similar process.11

In a lighthearted fashion, Boyang attributes all the ills of Chinese society to the soy paste vat culture (jianggang wenhua 酱缸文化 ), loudness, filthiness, impoliteness, uncouthness, insincerity, narrow-mindedness, prejudice, infighting, pettiness, ignorance, the inability to admit errors, the tendency to brag and to exaggerate, self-indulgence and self-pity. In particular, Boyang finds that any capacity to develop a set of straightforward values within Chinese culture is thwarted by an egoistically motivated relativism holding that “being good to others is stupid.”12 Boyang believes that in China “cleverness deteriorates into selfishness,”13 and anyone who goes out of their way to help others is dubbed a “busybody.”14 As he puts it, “[a]nyone who does something or even thinks something that is not entirely selfish is considered a simpleton.”15

Western Soy Paste Vats

The idea of a fermenting vat of culture is not entirely unknown in the West. Did not Herder call the Middle Ages the age of fermentation? Admittedly, Herder’s idea was inspired by the process of wine making, whereby the seemingly unhealthiest fermentation will produce a culture of a higher order – which he equated with the form of the Renaissance or protestant culture. He puts it as follows:

Observe how the church had to produce so much horror, error, insipidity, and blasphemy; how so many ages had to struggle, scream and strive for progress, before your Reformation, or your light and brilliant deism could come about.16

For Herder, fermentation is necessary to produce the “pure, divine elixir.” Another Western metaphor reminiscent of the soy paste vat is the philosophical “brain

in a vat” according to which the brain is suspended in a vat full of liquid and wired to

11 Bo Yang, The Ugly Chinaman and the Crisis of Chinese Culture, 40.

12 Ibid., 32.

13 Ibid., 130.

14 Ibid., 72.

15 Ibid., 56.

16 Herder, Yet another Philosophy of History, 217.


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a computer that is feeding our current experiences under the control of a scientist. This Matrix-like vision can be traced back to philosophers such as René Descartes for whom the reality we perceive is a dream produced by an evil demon in order to delude us, or to Plato and his allegory of the cave.17 These conceptions suggest that our reason might be flawed because we rely on flawed perceptions, but they also suggest that we can escape the vat and perceive reality the way it is through intellectual means. In whatever case, the metaphor of the vat evokes a limitation of our cognitive/perceptual horizons, as we find in Yang’s image of the soy paste vat.

Similar metaphors used in the fields of science rather refer to the content of the vat, that is, the paste. Cognitive science uses concepts such as the “soup of human culture” or the “ideosphere” to represent a shared mental landscape.18 The idea of “the soup of human culture” comes from evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins who suggested that gene-like cultural elements called “memes” (including, for example, tunes and ideas) are brought together to ferment in a sort of cultural vat.19 However, the envisioned idea is that the soup of culture is not self-enclosed, as total confinement would prevent its evolution. An eventual opening to the outside world is essential.

Normally, reality should be the product of an interaction between matter and time, which is not the case in Boyang’s soy paste vat. Instead of evolving through the progressive passage of civilization, here culture remains enclosed until it produces a self-sufficient reality. For Boyang, this is the reason why both the Chinese economy and political culture have remained static, and why a culture of secrecy has evolved in which a mystifying examination system and bureaucracy set the standards. What is interesting in Boyang’s view is that the deplorable state of China does not come from a lack of culture, but, on the contrary, from a surplus of culture that the country has been unable to handle through an appropriate civilizing process and which has subsequently prevented it from becoming civilized. Boyang’s view of civilization is in line with Oswald Spengler’s, whereby “pure civilization, as a historical process, consists in a progressive taking-down of forms that have become inorganic or dead.”20 Culture must go through civilization in order to reject

17 The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction film written and directed by Larry Wachowski and Andy Wachowski, in which most humans perceive reality as a simulation created by machines.

18 See Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (New York: Bantam, 1986).

19 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 194.

20 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles F. Atkinson (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1934), 32.



antiquated elements and to get updated in time. Without this dialectics of culture and civilization – or, to stay close to Gaston Bachelard’s system, without the dialectics of a cultural dream and real time21 – culture will become a paste and be like a ballast that holds the country back. Even worse, culture will begin to represent a reality of its own.

Boyang’s America

Boyang invokes America because its civilization made a deep impression on him during his visits. At the obvious risk of being accused of America-philia, he affirms that America has everything the Chinese do not have, such as the ability to act civilly to others;22 the ability to take logical steps to solve problems, to gradually reduce racial prejudices and promote tolerance (Yang refers to the racial prejudice in China);23 politeness (persistent thanking and apologizing);24 and an absence of provincial prejudice, compelling him to ask, “have you ever heard of people from Virginia trying to exclude people from Arizona from their state?”25 Being asked who, in his opinion, had made the greatest contribution to humankind, Boyang pointed to the “Anglo-Saxons” (and not the English) because they are the ones who invented the parliamentary system of government, as well as a relatively equitable system of justice. His vision of America might appear as naïve to Westerners – not least his enthusiastic interpretation of the American ambition to reduce racial prejudices – but his spontaneous judgments reflect his idea of China, where he evidently believes racial prejudice to be worse.

Reading the Ugly Chinaman Today

The Ugly Chinaman would certainly be classified as slanderous and racist had its author not be Chinese. What saves him is not only his nationality, but also a good portion of humor. Unfortunately, these attributes were not found convincing enough by the Taiwanese authorities, who imprisoned him in 1967. After Boyang’s arrest, his defender, the well known nuclear physicist Sun Guanhan ( 孫觀漢 , 1914-) said that “what imprisoned or

21 See Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves [Water and dreams] (Paris: Corti, 1942).


23 Ibid., 95.

24 Ibid., 70.

25 Ibid., 93.



destroyed Mr. Bo Yang was that discovery of his – the soy paste mentality of the Chinese people.”26

Boyang’s humor is one of the main reasons why his book is enjoyable to read. He contends that “Chinese people’s voices must be the loudest on earth, with the Cantonese taking the gold medal,”27 and that their lack of discipline in public life leads them to “lining up in an orderly fashion at a bus stop, but at the moment the bus appears, all chaos breaks out,” even when all the seats are reserved.28 Commenting on the practical nature of the Chinese mind, Boyang observes,

. . . so shrewd are they, in fact, that once they’ve been sold off for the kill, they continue haggling over the price of their own flesh all the way to the slaughterhouse. If they can earn five extra bucks before the knife passes through their necks, they will die in ecstasy, knowing they had not lived in vain.29

Further, Boyang mentions that in China, unlike in Western countries, when passing through non-automatic doors, few people master the technique

. . . to release the door gently so the next person coming in could get a hold of it before it closed, something akin to passing the baton in a relay race. Instead, Chinese people let the door swing wildly, unconcerned with whether the idiot it smacked in the face lived or died.30

Indeed,

. . . even in the confines of the bedroom, where Western couples habitually address each other as ‘honey’ and ‘darling’, Chinese people refer to such endearments as ‘you deserve death by a thousand cuts!’31

26 Edel Lancashire, “Popeye and the Case of Guo Yidong, Alias Bo Yang,” The China Quarterly 92 (1982): 685.


28 Ibid., 74.

29 Ibid., 56.

30 Ibid., 71.

31 Ibid., 15.



Enlightenment and Self-Criticism

For Boyang the problem of China is not the deficiency of some system of civilization, but rather the complete absence of such a system. So far, all attempts at introducing civilization have been foiled by traditional culture. According to Boyang, what is needed is not the destruction of culture through cultural revolution, which as shown below represents just one more episode in the process of soy paste fermentation. It is rather the creation of a window in the vat that gives Chinese people the opportunity to see what civilization looks like.

For Boyang the Opium War was one such rare window: “. . . without the Opium Wars, Chinese people would still be rotting away in that vat.”32 This war showed people items of civilization such as “airplanes, artillery, automobiles and subway trains.”33 Boyang’s vision very clearly maintains a Spenglerian distinction between culture and civilization, though for him the purifying power of the latter, as it cleans the former of its dead elements is an absolute variable. He must have been aware that his didactic characterization of at least five hundred years of Chinese culture as a mere procession of dictatorships, corporeal punishments, internecine squabbles, and slave mentality can only be a caricature. Still, Boyang’s criticism of the Chinese cultural situation has some academic ground that is not limited to the modernists of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Many 20th century authors have focused on the lack of critical distance between Chinese subjects and their culture. These authors see civilization as a purifying force able to cleanse culture of its dead elements, maintaining thus a distinction between culture and civilization. Bao Zunxin ( 包遵信 ), for example, held that “traditional Chinese culture was a closed and self-sufficient system which could not achieve renewal through criticism”34 and according to Herrlee G. Creel, the main problem for Chinese culture is the fact that through the longest part of its history, Confucianism had to be accepted as a package, labeled “the ways of antiquity.” In his own words, “[s]uch a philosophy tends to discourage criticism and initiative on the part of the individual and to be inflexible and very difficult to adapt to new situations.”35 Amongst other examples, Huang Renyu ( 黃仁宇 ) defined China as an organism where

32 Ibid., 42.

33 Ibid.

34 Ruzhuang Xu and Yanping Shi, “Developments in Chinese Philosophy over the Last Ten Years,” Philosophy East & West 43, no. 1 (1993): 118.

35 Herrlee Creel, Chinese Thought from Confucius to Mao Tse-tung (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 85.



“attempts to change the ideology to cope with the new situation must necessarily fail, for a closed system does not have the ability to adapt.”36 The socialist and utilitarian May Fourth Movement intellectual Chen Duxiu ( 陳獨秀 ) described in 1922 the Chinese soy paste vat in terms of a feudal clan system which

. . . has four defects: the destruction of the individual’s independence and dignity, the repression of the individual’s will, the denial of legal equality, and the nurturing of a ependent character which destroys the individual’s productive force. All the mean, illegitimate, brutal and decadent phenomena in Eastern society are created by these four basic defects. In order to remedy this situation, we have to replace familism with individualism.37

The reformer Liang Qichao ( 梁啟超 ) complained that “China, so proud of its ancient civilization and long history, had failed to use them to its advantage. The past had become a dead weight that held society back.”38 Boyang’s claim that in Chinese culture “cleverness deteriorates into selfishness” has been analyzed as a continuous phenomenon by Hua Shiping ( 華世平 ) who wrote:39

The best way to survive in the political arena was never to risk trouble by tackling important issues. Such considerations partly explain the failures of three m a j o r political and economic reforms in the post-Han period. And it certainly was no accident that China during the Manchu Dynasty proved totally incapable of coping with the external forces of western imperialism.40

The nature of soy paste vat culture was equally highlighted by Lin Yusheng ( 林育生 ) who wrote,

36 Renyu Huang, “China: A Macrohistory,” in Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry, ed. Gloria Davis (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 193.

37 From Yokip Hung, “The Origins of Chinese Communism: A New Interpretation,” Modern China 20, no. 1 (1994): 41.

38 Luke S. K. Kwong, “Chinese Politics at the Crossroads: Reflections on the Hundred Days Reform of 1898,” Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 3 (2000): 664.


40 Shiping Hua, ed., Chinese Political Culture 1989-2000 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), 47.


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. . . the continuity of universal kingship [which] implies that the integrated structure of Chinese culture and society had existed through time and without a change, [meant] that traditionally, Chinese civilization had few resources for breaking free of it.41

These critics of China argued that in the Middle Kingdom, “culture” had not been conceived through its reflection against (outside) civilization, but had rather been produced through a mystification of China’s position as an accident of history. Because of its particular geographical and historical position, China would always remain what it is, and any crisis would best be faced with mere patience. One simply had to wait for China’s “natural” position to be reestablished. Rupert Hodder explains that

merely with the passage of time, cycles would change, and China could expect to rise again to its position of acknowledged historical greatness. The idea would be reinforced through cosmic pretensions of China’s rulers who would make the “astronomy” department an essential component of the central government.42

Because the emperor is the son of Heaven and rules from the strength of a mandate of Heaven “China is not a nation among others; it is civilization.”43 Whenever it came to “reforms” it would not be about programs to modernize culture, but rather “about the need for ‘revitalizing’ life and about the arrival of a ‘Chinese renaissance’.”44 In other words, in China culture is civilization.

Boyang criticizes the absence of a self-reflecting Chinese enlightenment tradition able to produce a critical method of approaching the country’s history, culture, and national identity. Historically, the Chinese enlightenment process (qimeng 启蒙 ) came to a premature end in the 19th century. The philosopher and reformer Hu Shih ( 胡適 , 1891-1962) stated that

. . . when, in 1917, I began my course on the History of Chinese Philosophy with the age of the poets and ignored all the previous periods of sage-rulers, the treatment was

41 Yu-Sheng Lin, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era (Mad-ison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 17.

42 Rupert Hodder, In China’s Image: Chinese Self-Perception in Western Thought (Houndmills, UK: Macmillian, 2000), 21.

43 Ibid.

44 Lucian W. Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 127.


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considered by the conservative students as so outrageous that it almost created a revolt in my class.45

Hu Shih formulated these thoughts in 1933 when critical reflections on modernization and Westernization were widespread. When he addressed the subject again in 1961 in Taipei at the East Asian Science Education Conference, his lecture triggered an East-West debate which was bound to have affected Boyang – eventually leading him to the elaborate the metaphor of the soy paste vat culture. However, Boyang never embraced the pro-Western, anti-Chinese positions of other Taiwanese followers of Hu Shih – indeed, the most active of these, Li Ao ( 李敖 ), would years later call Boyang “the ugliest of all Chinamen.”46

Confucianism and the Soy Paste Vat

Boyang had the “feeling” that all the deficiencies he described “grew out of Confucian thought” and he provided a rough sketch of China’s historical over-culturalization:

Chinese civilization attained the zenith of its glory during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (720-221 BC), after which it began its decline under the influence of Confucian philosophy. By the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD), a law had come into effect stipulating that no educated person could talk about, debate or write anything that trespassed the limits set by his teacher.47

In the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 CE) Confucianism in China became, as Boyang put it, “dogmatic and was plagued by formulas”48 – and “China’s literati have [since] done little more than tack on footnotes to the theories propounded by Confucius and his disciples.”49 Their minds have stuck to the bottom of the soy paste vat and they have done nothing but “ape other people’s way of thinking.”50 As a result, Chinese people lost the ability to “think straight”, and they decided to react to the world only through emotions and intuition. Most importantly, they did not develop such habits as self-criticism, introspection and self-

45 Shih Hu, The Chinese Renaissance: The Haskell Lectures 1933 (New York: Paragon, 1963), 76.

46 Lancashire, “Popeye and the Case of Guo Yidong, Alias Bo Yang,” 673.


48 Ibid., 27.

49 Ibid., 21.

50 Ibid.



improvement.51 Finally, moral relativism and fatalism were the only options left for the Chinese people. Thus Boyang observed that “in soy paste vat culture, only seeking fame and fortune is considered proper behavior.”52

In spite of the abstract character of their doctrines, Confucians always remain in the realm of human existence – something that had already been the main target of the Mohists’ criticism. Michael Puett summarizes it as follows:

Insofar as the Confucians overemphasize the greatness of tradition, they wrongfully denigrate the notion of innovation, and insofar as they wrongfully see culture as simply ritualized behavior imitated from Heaven, they neglect the importance of the artifice of invention.53

Confucians are “concrete”, not in an empirico-scientific or sociological sense of the term, but rather through a refusal of transcendence that leads them to the uncritical acceptance of what is given. While ancient Greece attempted to erect a new, systematic, and rational foundation of morality, the aim of Confucianism has always been to synthesize and to “make effective the heritage of the past.”54

Even contemporary scholar Zi Zhongun ( 资中筠 ), who sees Confucianism as a philosophy firmly convinced “that a state of supreme happiness sans souci can be reached in this world,”55 admits that “the lofty moral values and humanistic spirit . . . existed in the ideals pursued by a few philosophers and intellectual elites and not in the sustained practice of the Chinese people at large.”56 Westerners, as well as some critical Chinese people, frequently perceive Confucianism as an “unsystematic expression of intuitive knowledge,” to borrow an expression from Japanese philosopher Tsuchida Kyôson ( 土田杏村 , 1891-1934).57

51 Ibid., 54.

52 Ibid., 80.

53 Michael J. Puett, The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 50.

54 Kwan-chue Hsin, “Confucian and Western Aesthetics: A Brief Comparative Study,” in The Pursuit of Compar-ative Aesthetics: An Interface Between the East & West, eds. Mazhar Hussain and Robert Wilkinson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 148.

55 Zhongyun Zi, “The Relationship of Chinese Traditional Culture to the Modernization of China: An Introduc-tion to the Current Discussion,” Asian Survey 27, no. 4 (1987): 447.

56 Ibid., 450.

57 Kyoson Tsuchida, Contemporary Thought of Japan and China (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1927), 190.


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The synthesizing power of Confucianism leads to its paradoxical evaluation as simultaneously “hierarchical” and “relativistic.” On the one hand, Confucianism may lead to rigidity because the absence of critical reflection might engender attempts to interpret things literally. On the other hand, the same absence of critical reflection can lead to a high degree of relativism, especially in the absence of any systematization. The metaphor of the paste is indeed suitable for this constellation.

The absurdity of an inherent relativism was noted very early. Chinese social critic Tai Chen ( 戴震 , 1724-1777) wrote about the Confucian li ( 禮 ), the rule or underlying principle:

The high and mighty use li to blame the lowly. The old use li to blame the young.The exalted use li to blame the downtrodden. Even if they are mistaken, [the ruling groups] call [what they have done] proper. If the lowly, the young, and the downtrodden use li to struggle, even if they have the right, they are called rebellious. As a result, the people on the bottom cannot make their shared emotions and desires in the world understood by those on top. Those on top use li to blame them for their lowly positions. For these uncountable throngs of people, their only crime is their lowly position.58

Critique of Confucianism becomes particularly severe amongst people directly or indirectly linked to the May Fourth Movement. Hu Shih held that Confucianism is nothing other than “a big factory for the manufacturing of obedient subjects and that Confucian moral teachings are man eating mores.”59 As he describes it, the Confucian way of recording random facts about the history of Chinese philosophy is indeed reminiscent of a soy paste vat where the “history of philosophy had been given vague and confused accounts of, including poetry, religious beliefs, and irrelevant legendary philosophy, forming an elaborate catalogue of names and quotations with neither coherence nor outline.”60 In the Han period, a great variety of pseudo-scientific and even magical practices was grafted onto Confucianism. Names and quotations were thus mixed with more concrete items with the effect of an impenetrable paste, leading Hu Shih to suggest that

58 Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Impe-rial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 18.

59 Wing-Tsit Chan, “Hu Shih and Chinese Philosophy,” Philosophy East & West 6, no. 1 (1956): 4.

60 Ibid., 5.



. . . what has characterized Chinese tradition are China’s unique treasures: eight-legged essays, bound feet, eunuchs, concubinage, five-generation households, memorial arches for honoring chastity, hellish prisons, and law courts filled with instruments of torture.61

Confucianism thus became

. . . a great synthetic religion into which were fused all the elements of popular superstition and state worship, rationalized somewhat in order to eliminate a few of the most untenable elements, and thinly covered up under the disguise of Confucian and pre-Confucian Classics.62

And for scholar Liu Dong ( 劉東 ), Confucian intellectual activity remained limited to two sorts of movements: “I interpret the six classics (wo zhu liu jing) and I use the Six Classics to interpret my thoughts (liu jing zhu wo).”63

Mao and the Soy Paste Vat

According to Boyang, a particular style of bureaucracy and authoritarianism amongst other elements of an antiquated culture, have made Chinese public life repetitive and unimaginative. Since the “virus of traditional Chinese culture” penetrates everything, the best thing China can do is to “throw away their 5000-year-old cultural baggage.”64 Of course, the question is whether Mao’s wholesale rejection of traditional culture overlaps exactly with this project. Did not communist activities destroy Chinese culture, making the “culture vs. civilization” problem forever redundant? Not in Boyang’s opinion. For him, the particularly non-civilized Chinese “revolution,” with all its sequels, is an idea that can only be conceived within the sticky atmosphere of a soy paste vat. In the end, China fell apart not because Mao or Chiang Kai-shek committed major mistakes, but because the soy paste vat culture had been omnivorous and spoiled everything that went into it.65

61 Hu Shih quoted in Lin, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness, 97.

62 Hu Shi quoted in Creel, Chinese Thought from Confucius to Mao Tse-tung, 178.

63 Dong Liu, “Revisiting the Perils of ‘Designer Pidgin Scholarship’,” in Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chi-nese Critical Inquiry, trans. and ed. Gloria Davis (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 111.

64 Bo Yang, The Ugly Chinaman and the Crisis of Chinese Culture, 14 and 70.

65 See ibid., 26-27.


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Boyang is not the only intellectual who has established such connections between Maoism and ancient Chinese culture. Woei Lien Chong ( 莊愛蓮 ), for instance, is convinced that the Cultural Revolution was an “egalitarian utopia as described in ancient Chinese sources.”66 This theory explains why the Chinese “enlightenment” (in the form of the May Fourth Movement) came after the revolution instead of bringing about the revolution. The vat needed first to be cracked – enlightenment would come later.67 The same theory also explains why, in the periods that followed the Cultural Revolution, the state had been so eager to define the nature of Chinese identity through the archiving of historical knowledge (or at least those parts that were found to be compatible with socialist ideology). Indeed, this looked very much like a hasty fixing of the cracks. Chong’s interpretation in fact explains the paradox of China that sinologist Lucian Pye saw as “a culture that easily becomes artificially traditionalistic whenever a self-conscious effort is made to preserve it.”68 Had the soy paste vat really been destroyed, one would have been able to use other approaches to develop a sustained national identity. Furthermore, the theory explains why, as Belgian sinologist Simon Leys puts it, “the Maoist regime purposefully and provocatively chose to reclaim an ancient tyranny, declaring to be the political inheritors of the first imperial unifier, Qin Shihung ( 秦始皇 , 259-210 BCE).”69

The Phantom Pains of Chinese Culture

The existence or non-existence of Chinese culture is a tricky question. Some argue that such a culture simply does not exist, which would contradict the previously mentioned thesis of an all-embracing Chinese culture. A closer look can however show that the problem rather comes from the confusion between culture and civilization. The popular writer Wang Shuo ( 王朔 ) has criticized, perhaps like no one else, the new, post-communist Chinese culture. He is amongst those who argue that Chinese culture does not exist. The problem he sees is that Mao did away with culture as a set of values.70 And the

66 Woei Lien Chong, “Combining Marx with Kant: The Philosophical Anthropology of Li Zehou,” Philosophy East & West 49, no. 2 (1999): 141.

67 Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: California University Press, 1986), 297.

68 Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics, 55.

69 Simon Leys, Essais sur la Chine [Essays on China] (Paris: Laffont, 1998), 556. (The translation is mine).

70 See Shuo Wang, “Chinese Culture Sounds Like It’s Vibrant and Refined. One Problem: It Doesn’t Exist,” Originally published on the Time Asia website. Now available on http://www.forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=6956. Last accessed August 16, 2011.


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author states: “[T]he first time I heard the word culture was in the ‘Cultural Revolution.’”71 Wang then points out that Confucianism, as “a philosophy that is about telling people to act one way or another,”72 is not a substitute for culture either. He illustrates the antiquated nature of Chinese culture characterized by a lack of civilization: “Flushing toilets, televisions, cars and toothbrushes. Which did the Chinese invent? All we can talk about is the Great Wall.”73

Is it possible that an “inexistent” culture is able to prevent the rise of civilization? Can an inexistent culture be “existent” in the same way that an individual feels imaginary sensations of pain in a limb that is no longer physically part of his/her body? Wang’s idea of “the non-existence of Chinese culture” entails the combination of a virtual culture that is too abstract to have concrete manifestations, but which is still able to absorb elements of civilization in the manner of a soy paste vat. As he puts it, “[i]f by culture you mean a spiritual font or a shared sense of values, then I have to say that this is something I can’t see in China – past or present.”74 Amongst other things, the values that Wang does not see in China are those that would define it as a coherent nation and not simply as a vast group of people united by race, common historical experiences, and nowadays by common consumer attitudes. In other words, the missing values are not really cultural (of which there is plenty of evidence in books) but civilizational. In other words, what is missing is a Chinese culture that would have gone through a process of civilization.

As such, Wang’s argument comes close to that of Chong, according to which Maoism expressed only “norms and values of Chinese village culture” leading to a “stress on egalitarianism and the idealization of the simple life.”75 The problem is that such a “village culture” does not represent a “civilized culture” in the modern sense of the word. Because this Maoist conception of culture is unconnected and even opposed to civilization, it does not discontinue the tradition of the soy paste vat, but rather seeks to reestablish it. In other words, culture is once again thought to be civilization – something highlighted in the following statement by anthropologist Francis Hsu:

If an American were to point with justifiable pride to his country’s many child protective associations, a Chinese would simply counter with an equally proud boast

71 Ibid.

72 Ibid.

73 Ibid.

74 Ibid.

75 Chong, “Combining Marx with Kant,” 125 and 132.



about his nation’s ancient cultural heritage in which Confucian filial piety was the highest ideal.76

Culture, Civilization, and Nationalism

When thinking about a national culture or the cultural prerequisites for defining a nation, we might soon discover the impossibility of doing so for a culture without civilization. The reason is that simple, nationalistic assumptions about “Chineseness” or a fabricated sense of uniqueness and destiny cannot replace the civilizational values that are required to establish a national culture. This is why in China identity appears to be restricted to an obscure idea of “culture.” In Pye’s words, “much of what is usually thought of as Chinese nationalism are really powerful sentiments of racial and cultural identity and not feelings about the nation as a state.”77 Pye criticizes the absence of an “idealistic substance of a modern form of nationalism” able to provide either inspiration for popular mobilization or disciplining constraints on elite behavior.78 What is needed for the Chinese nation to be identified as such are values begotten by a common civilization, and not just an obscure idea of culture.

In spite of the overall pragmatic character of Confucian philosophy that gives priority to function over essence, it appears that China has been unable so far to work out its national culture beyond essentialism. As Chong pointed out, one of the reasons is without doubt that the Chinese enlightenment process “was pushed aside by the nationalistic concern to save the country from foreign aggression.”79 However, the phenomenon is not limited to mainland China and its particular political past. The situation elsewhere is no different, even though “Chinese culture” has been staged differently within other types of political systems. According to Schwarcz, when the Taiwanese thought about their nation, they found that “traditional culture had become rotten from within now it could appeal only to naïve and selfish power holders who understand nothing about true nationalism.”80 Normally, the alternative to rotten culture would be civilization or, at least, a culture that

76 Francis L.K. Hsu, Americans and Chinese: Reflections on Two Cultures and Their People (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Natural History Press, 1970), 77.


78 Ibid., 231.

79 Chong, “Combining Marx with Kant,” 120.

80 Schwarcz, Chinese Enlightenment, 278.



has been stratified by civilization and that can be perceived as a positive value. There was, apparently, no such civilization. Instead, the Chinese nation ended up being designed in terms of race – a project undertaken by the revolutionary nationalists with Sun Yat-Sen ( 孫逸仙 , 1866-1925) as their leader.81 This of course reflected the general tendency to “confuse culture and biology,” to borrow Pye’s expression,82 which proved to be an equally a major problem in European history. And to confuse culture and biology means to derive a sense of identity “less from the content of culture . . . and more from the fact of race, which is biologically unambiguous.”83

Anthropologist Allen Chun mentions how the Taiwanese government adopted a conservative attitude towards the preservation of the Chinese language, thought and civilization by referring to the traditional identity concept of hua-hsia ( 華夏 ).84 Hua means the “Chineseness” whose origin is thought to come from the first mythical dynasty hsia (ca. 2070 - ca. 1600 BCE), a civilization shared by all Chinese. In Taiwan, hua-hsia represents a metaphorical defense of the traditional past against the People’s Republic of China and the extreme radicalism of communist worldview. However, even though Chinese tradition is, in Taiwan, systematically invoked through Confucian values, it does not lead to the definition of what Wang calls “a spiritual font or a shared sense of values” brought about by a civilization,85 yet it remains, in Chun’s words, an “icon of cultural uniqueness and resistance to Western imperialism.”86 The conclusion is that, with or without communist anti-traditionalism, the soy paste vat remains, even if only in the form of a phantom culture.

III

The following section compares Boyang’s soy paste vat image of Chinese culture to a diametrically contrasted vision of American civilization that falls within the same principle of dichotomous oppositions between culture and civilization. Both Chinese culture and

81 John Fitzgerald, “The Nationless State: The Search for a Nation in Modern Chinese Nationalism,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 33 (1995): 87.


83 Ibid., 55.

84 Allen Chun, “Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity,” Boundary 2, 23, no. 2 (1996): 116.

85 See Wang, “Chinese Culture Sounds Like It’s Vibrant and Refined. One Problem: It Doesn’t Exist.”

86 Chun, “Fuck Chineseness,” 116.


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American civilization share the ontological features of hyperreality and simulation. This paradoxical parallel will be brought to light through a comparison between The Ugly Chinaman and Jean Baudrillard’s America.

Baudrillard’s America

As a piece of critical literature on America, Baudrillard’s America is tortuous. Simplistic criticisms of American culture could go in the same direction as those found in The Ugly Chinaman; that is, by pointing to less than enviable aspects of American culture. Such criticisms do exist, whereby the “ugly American” refers to the loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless, and ethnocentric behavior of some American citizens abroad as well as at home. Such critical, or self-critical, writings highlight a particular redneck culture or, to use Joseph Wilbur Cash’s expression, a culture of “the boomer, the shark, [and] the horse-trader,”87 depicting America in a way that is quite similar to Boyang’s portraiture of China.

Here, as elsewhere, the overlapping and confusion between culture and civilization previously mentioned does not contribute to a clear analysis. Criticisms in terms of “redneck culture” are intended to illustrate America’s lack of culture as well as a certain lack of civilization. A simultaneous lack of culture and civilization – this is what Thomas Sowell evokes when describing rednecks and crackers as boasters and threateners, devoted to bombastic self-dramatization and excelling in academic and sexual laxity, showiness and corruption.88

Baudrillard takes a completely different path. His targets are neither the non-cultural America of the rednecks nor American culture. Baudrillard states clearly that a cultural America exists, but that it is not his focus of interest. What fascinates Baudrillard is an abstract concept of what is arguably the most American quality that America has to offer, that is, the America of the desert:

I went in search of astral [sidéral] America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces.89

87 Wilbur Joseph Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1941), 18.

88 Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals (New York: Encounter Books, 2005), 13 and 237.

89 Baudrillard, America, 5.


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Baudrillard’s book is clearly not a criticism of American culture (or even the possible lack of it), but a critical description of American civilization. This is why his work can be conceived of as the mirror image of Boyang’s critical view of China. Jean-Philippe Mathy comments that Baudrillard “distinguishes, in Spenglerian terms, a mere civilization from a genuine culture.”90 “Desert America” is more than its concrete manifestations; it is a concept that permeates, like an abstract structure, all of American civilization. There is, in Baudrillard’s opinion, a sort of absolute American civilization that

. . . no [American] is capable of analyzing, least of all the American intellectuals shut away on their campuses, dramatically cut off from the fabulous concrete mythology all around them.91

Nobody should doubt that America has plenty of culture. However, wherever we encounter this culture we find that it makes America less “American.” In the country itself we might equally come across pockets of “non-civilization” such as the “redneck culture” or the culture of ghettos, but even this does not affect the idea of “American Civilization” as a concept. On the contrary, it can be argued that the existence of such uncivilized parts within a civilized culture is possible only because the overall civilizational tissue of America is extremely strong.

“American-ness” is a matter of civilization by definition, and this latter has no better place to find its expression other than in America. For Baudrillard,

. . . the distinctions that are made elsewhere have little meaning. It would be misguided to focus on aspects of an American civility that is often in fact far superior to our own (in our land of ‘high culture’) and then to point out that in other respects the Americans are barbarians.92

Politeness, sincerity, soft-spokenness and all the rest that Boyang found to be missing in Chinese culture, we find to be plentiful in America as long as we are not amongst rednecks.

There is no lack of civilization in America. There might be a lack of culture, but any discussion of a non-cultural or anti-cultural America is bound to get entangled in an

90 Jean-Philippe Mathy, “Out of History: French Readings of Postmodern America,” American Literary History 2, no. 2 (1990): 275.


92 Ibid., 67.



intellectually unsteerable relativism. In a way, redneck culture or even American ghetto culture are cultures, and their existence makes America more cultural – but also less American. In principle, America is the land of civilization, a civilization that is pure and abstract not because it is opposed to culture, but simply because it is not concerned with culture.

Dick Meyer, in his critique of contemporary American culture entitled Why We Hate Us, goes in the same direction. First, he notes that

. . . we perceive other Americans as belligerent in arguments, boorish in manners, vulgar and violent in entertainment, greedy in business, ostentatious in style, and phony in a big way.93

However, his main criticism is not aimed at these “cultural” components that clearly denote a lack of civilization. On the contrary, Meyer puts at the center of his cultural criticism an America suffering from over-civilization that concurs with Baudrillard’s idea of “desert civilization” – an America of faux chateaus and sensitive therapy; of plastic surgery advertisements on billboards next to the busiest roads; and the America of It’s a great day at ServePro, this is Emily, how can I help you. It is the America that many foreigners experience as a friendly, enhanced world, safely programmed, market tested and always ready for an Oprah Winfrey quick-fix.94 It is the America of middle-class suburbs and their emptiness; of the sprawling, repetitive and forgettable landscape that has supplanted the original promise of suburban life with a hollow imitation.95 And it is the America where the only people still allowed to be offended are straight white men with a full head of hair.96 This is not cultural but civilized America offering the foreigner’s gaze a perfectly polished civilizational surface with a fascinating cultural void behind it.

“Desert” implies the absence of “desire.” The very notion of “desert” symbolizes an accomplished civilization for which the word utopia seems to be the most appropriate. Desire, just like charm and eroticism, are “heavy” components that could prevent civilization from adopting the accomplished lightness so typical of American civilization.

93 Dick Meyer, Why we Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium (New York: Crown Publishers, 2008), 15.

94 Oprah Winfrey (1954-) is an American television host known for promoting controversial self-help ideas.

95 See ibid., 130.

96 See ibid., 188.



Desire is always the desire of something that has not yet been reached, and a perfect utopia is not supposed to contain such a desire. Indeed, as Baudrillard puts it,

. . . desire is still something deeply natural, we are living off its vestiges in Europe . . . [In America] the cities are mobile deserts. No monuments and no history: the exaltation of mobile deserts and simulation.97

“Eros is not American,”98 declared another French traveler, Claude Roy, about a country that he found clean and antiseptic, pointing out that

. . . American love remains unsophisticated and frustrated, clumsy and anxious, frenzied and hypocrite, committed to a contradictory and lively civilization whose terrible ripping and magnificent gushing it reflects.99

American civilization is just as un-erotic as a soy paste vat, albeit for completely opposite reasons. Nobody who lives in a soy paste vat can have any desire – except that of escaping – because in it life becomes saturated by culture to the point that there is no culture left to desire. “Civilization as desert” is the conceptual counterpart of culture as a soy paste vat. Both come into being when either culture or civilization exists in isolation and do not “desire” each other as in a dialectical movement. In Baudrillard’s words,

American culture is heir to the deserts, but the deserts here are not part of a Nature defined by contrast with the town. Rather they denote the emptiness, the radical nudity that is the background to every human institution. At the same time, they designate human institutions as a metaphor of that emptiness and the work of man as the continuity of the desert, culture as a mirage and as the perpetuity of the simulacrum.100

The clean desert civilization is one of puritanism and asceticism. Baudrillard goes on:


98 Claude Roy, Clefs pour L’Amérique [Keys to America] (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 84. (The translation is mine).

99 Ibid. (The translation is mine).




America always gives me a feeling of real asceticism. Culture, politics – and sexuality too – are seen exclusively in terms of the desert, which here assumes the status of a primal scene.101

American politeness, for example, is pure civilization manifesting itself as the “eternal smile of communication.”102 Finally, the brutal naïveté, alien to all sense of speculation or irony through which this absolute civilization is implemented, does not make it less primitive or savage than the soy paste culture. To this particular point, Baudrillard adds that

. . . deep down in the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.103

When Boyang declares that the Chinese are primitive because of their over-abundance of culture, Baudrillard does not hesitate to describe the Americans as primitive because of their over-abundance of civilization. For him, “everything [in America] still bears the mark of primitive society: technology, the media, total simulation.”104

Any criticism of America must be addressed in the light of this particular concept of civilization. American civilization can only be criticized because its autonomous nature makes any dialectical movement with regard to culture impossible. America is not “bad” because its “evil” culture ends up killing another culture that we (i.e. the Europeans) believe to be superior. The “problem” with much of American culture is on the contrary that it can be thought of as precisely mere civilization. Once again, Baudrillard’s words are quite revealing:

In this sense, [civilizational America] is naïve and primitive; it knows nothing of the irony of concepts, nor the irony of seduction. It does not ironize upon the future or destiny. It gets on with turning things into material realities. Santa Barbara is a paradise, Disneyland is a paradise, America is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise, mournful, monotonous and superficial though it may be, it is paradise.105

101 Ibid., 28.

102 Ibid., 33.

103 Ibid., 7.

104 Ibid., 63.

105 Ibid., 97-98.



The mirroring effect between America and China thus becomes clear. While the Chinese hold that their culture is civilization through the emperor’s Mandate of heaven, the Americans are made to see their civilization as “American culture.”

Disneyland and the Soy Paste Vat

Baudrillard echoes Boyang when he criticizes the European soy bean vat as a “primitive accumulation of time” that Americans are luckily lacking.106 The issue in America is of another kind. The spontaneous tendency to transcend reality towards a purely civilizational ideal lets Americans lose the same sense of reality for the opposite reason. Hsu observed that

. . . Chinese have always moved within the limitations of the familiar and what can be perceived by the senses [and] have never overly interested themselves in high abstraction.107 [Americans, on the other hand,] express their feelings about either the present or the past in terms of an imagined future.108

This imagined future is a utopian expression of an ideal civilization. Philosopher Cornel West finds that the American “indigenous mode of thought subordinates . . . immediate problems to utopian possibilities.”109

The result is the production of a perpetual presence of signs leading to perpetual simulation making Americans fail to keep sight of reality in a similar way to the Chinese in a soy bean vat. This is the reason Baudrillard equates the exaltation of “mobile deserts” with simulation, and why desert and simulation are for him one and the same concept. The problem occurs when the immediacy of cultural perception is not constrained by thinking civilization through culture, nor by transcending culture towards civilization, precisely because such culture is pure civilization, in spite of taking the shape of culture. Utopia is reached when there is only civilization without history or culture, that is, when such a civilization has established itself in an immediate fashion. American civilization does not

106 Ibid., 76.

107 Hsu, Americans and Chinese, 372.

108 Ibid., 363.

109 Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 5.



feel the need to transcend anything because it is transcendence. Americans lose the sense of reality to simulation through an overabundance of civilizational transcendence, just like the Chinese disconnect from reality through a lack of civilizational transcendence by shutting themselves into a windowless soy bean vat.

These are the reasons why Americans are the representatives of the most extreme form of utopian civilizational values, while Confucians are the representatives of the most extreme form of historicism and culturalism. The Chinese soy paste contains too many concrete items that seem all too rarely to be linked through any abstract structure. American civilization, on the other hand, is only made of codes. In other words, “America as a Concept” is a logical structure that is reproduced ad infinitum. The result, according to Baudrillard, is that any gas station, Burger King, or Midwestern American street represents the whole of American civilization. When the present is utopia, when culture is civilization, when the dream is reality, everything flows into a baffling arrangement “just as it is,” which is for Baudrillard the most typical paradigm of American civilization. This can also be described with the paradoxical concept of “pragmatic dream,”110 which gives Americans the right to be “simply what they are,” and which is finally the reason why, for Baudrillard,

. . . Americans have no sense of simulation. They are themselves simulation in its most developed state, but they have no language in which to describe it, since they themselves are the model.111

When Baudrillard establishes a causal link between “desert civilization” and the loss of reality (or the transformation of reality into simulation), this is the exact reverse of Boyang’s soy paste vision of a culture where people lack windows that would enable them to perceive the reality outside the vat. The soy paste vat culture is achieved when there is no immediacy, and when everything is traced back to history. This is absolute culture. Absolute civilization, on the other hand, does not form an organic body made of present and past, but exists outside the aspirations of cultural duration. Still, the process leads to the same result: a vision of a world that is “just as it is”, no matter if it is called culture or civilization. The driving forces of absolute civilization are not those of what Baudrillard calls “an ‘objective’ conception of historical transformation,” but are instead “utopia and morality [and] the concrete idea of happiness and mores.”112 While in Europe, politics and


111 Ibid., 28-29.

112 Ibid., 90.



culture remain a primitive backdrop against which any civilization must take shape,113 in America, the utopian sphere itself is the backdrop, which makes its civilization absolute and desert-like.

When it comes to the perception of reality, the parallel between Baudrillard’s interpretation and the scenario of the brain in the vat becomes most obvious. The hallucinating goo of the cultural soy paste in which reality gets entangled has found its counterpart in a civilization that creates culture in the form of a mirage or a simulacrum. Thus, as Baudrillard puts it,

… everything is destined to appear as simulation. Landscapes as photography, women as the sexual scenario, thoughts as writing, terrorism as fashion and the media, events as television. Things seem to exist only by virtue of this strange destiny. You wonder whether the world itself isn’t just here to serve as an advertizing copy in some other world.114

The endless copying that supposedly gives rise to civilization in the case of America finds a clear parallel in Chinese culture. Indeed, China produces culture in the form of a writing equally akin to hyperreality. Chinese culture produces itself out of nothing.

IV

Conclusion

The main similarities between American simulation as manifestation of a utopia of civilization and Chinese simulation produced by a cultural soy paste vat are that both give priority to reproduction over production; both designate references before designating the referent; and both are self-referential – that is, both produce identical copies of either culture (China) or civilization (America) for which no original has ever existed. Baudrillard’s “concrete mythology of America” made entirely of civilization finds its counterpart in the myth of Chinese culture produced by the soy paste vat. Both concepts are symmetrical opposites, albeit producing identical attributes. American civilization is indestructible because its abstract and general values are not linked to geographical,

113 See ibid., 75.

114 Ibid., 32.



historical, or cultural positions. Chinese culture is indestructible because it is only identified with a particular historical and geographical position. Concrete cultural values cannot arise in either constellation. The Chinese soy paste vat suffers from the inability to produce values capable of defining China as a coherent nation and not simply as a vast group of people united by race and common historical experiences. American civilization is based on self-sufficient ideas such as liberty and democracy, and has neither the need nor the capacity to derive values from history and concrete culture.

In China, the concrete alchemy of the soy bean vat has been unable to withdraw from itself in order to project a more civilized vision of Chinese culture. American absolute civilization, on the other hand, ends up as an “achieved” utopia with regard to which anything beyond is as impossible to conceive as it is unlikely in the soy paste vat. In Baudrillard’s words, “the principle of achieved utopia explains the absence and, moreover, the lack of need for metaphysics and the imaginary in American life.”115 For the French philosopher, it is the excess of civilization, and not the lack of culture, that leads to what he describes in the same annihilating terms as Boyang and his image of the Chinese soy paste vat. American life is, for Baudrillard, a universe “completely rotten with wealth, power senility, indifference, Puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence.”116 This account of America concerns neither redneck culture nor any other kind of American culture, but only the particular state of American civilization.

BIOGRAPHY

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein was born in Germany, studied philosophy in France (University of Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne), and received his Ph.D. in 1993 from the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. He worked as a researcher in various institutions, including the University of Helsinki, Finland, and the Center of Cognition of Hangzhou University, China. He also undertook research in Japan on the Kyôto School. Between 2007 and 2009 he taught at Tuskegee University, Alabama, USA. He is now Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Gulf University for Science and Technology, Kuwait.

115 Ibid., 84.

116 Ibid., 23.


America against China: Civilization without Culture against Culture without Civilization?

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