The Ise Shrine in Japan is a holy site of Shintoism. It’s 1,300 years old, and of course the UNESCO put it on its list of World Heritage Sites. But here’s a problem. The shrine isn’t 1,300 years old in any sense that we can understand. It gets purposefully destroyed and rebuilt every 20 years. That’s why the WEF loves the Ise Shrine. It’s very fluid, and they see it as a metaphor of everything they hold dear. UNESCO was horrified by what any Westerner perceives as a fake landmark and yanked the shrine off its list. Then there was a campaign to castigate UNESCO over this un-PC act but that part of the story is boring.
I’m writing this in the depths of the Old City in Spain’s Pontevedra. The old buildings, the ruins, the uneven centuries-old walls are magical because they are old. I can see the passage of time in them. They are cracked, ravaged, blackened, covered in moss. For me, they are original because they don’t look like they did when they were originally created. The changes made by age testify to the originality of the buildings. For the worshippers at Ise, on the other hand, the real way to preserve the original version of the shrine is to keep it looking as it did originally. And the only way to do that is to rebuild.
When I look at the old walls in Pontevedra, I am awed by the hidden essence I perceive in them. The feeling that the true nature of people and things is hidden in impenetrable depths marks me as belonging to the Western civilization. Once a year, the high priest of the Jews entered the Holy of Holies where the spirit of God would be present. Nobody else could go in, and the name of God was hidden from the faithful. Christians continued the tradition of looking for The Truth in enclosed spaces through their practice of cloistered religious orders. Today, the most atheistic of Westerners work hard to figure out their innermost authentic self that is hidden even from them. The Holy of Holies has migrated into the interiority of human beings but everything else about it remained the same.
In his 2011 book Shanzhai: The Art of Falsification and Deconstruction in China, Byung-Chul Han talks about the differences in how the culture of the Far East and the culture of the West perceive such notions as originality, authorship, and essence. It’s a short volume that I read in an hour but it’s very enlightening. We cannot spend too much time thinking about cultural differences and how profound they are.
Byung-Chul Han says, for example, that the notion of a contradiction isn’t an important one in Chinese thought. That’s why the Chinese copied the Western ideology of Communism and then combined it with the Western ideology of free markets that they also copied. Nothing original comes from China because that’s another concept that has no currency. Han is very optimistic for China, thinking that the sheer ebullience if its exercises in fakery will let it jump into democracy. Which will be yet another idea copied from the West.
Thanks to Shanzhai, I can stop wondering why there’s no original thought coming out of China. I now know: producing original thought is simply not a thing in Chinese culture. This is a great relief. If people are simply not into that, I get it.
Clarissa's Blog 
“The Truth in enclosed spaces through their practice of cloistered religious orders”
Slightly off-topic, have you seen the old Spanish tv series (1984) Teresa de Jesus about Teresa de Avila? I watched it around last Easter or so… the first episodes are slow to start but then it gets really good.
One of the things I liked was showing the daily life in the convent and the various rituals they engaged in.
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Oh, that sounds so interesting! I really want to watch.
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“contradiction isn’t an important one in Chinese thought”
“producing original thought is simply not a thing in Chinese culture”
I thought these two things were widely known…. both are also general features of East Asia….
“We cannot spend too much time thinking about cultural differences and how profound they are”
IIRC it was Mark Blyth who said that Germany would never create an innovative product that the world would adopt and the US would never be able to take a finished popular product that was…. okay and over time, make one small improvement after another until it was a really great product.
Life is better for all involved when different cultures can play to their strengths but at present everybody’s supposed to follow the same model….
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This idea that Chinese culture has no notion of invention seems very dubious. The mythical founder of China, the Yellow Emperor, is supposed to have devised all kinds of things. The legendary tactician Zhuge Liang was supposed to devise ingenious battle strategies. Kitschy modern online fantasies from China that I’ve read, contain heroes who devise their own magic spells. Numerous actual inventions came out of China across the centuries, and of course the country these days is eager to brag about its technical achievements…
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“Chinese culture has no notion of invention seems very dubious”
Don’t be one of those people…….. of course there are inventive and innovative Chinese people. But, overall, innovation is not a strong value in Chinese culture which means that, over time, China will produce fewer innovations per capita than places were innovation is positively valued.
And it’s not that innovation is actively discouraged (as in some Arab/Muslim majority cultures) just that it’s not a priority.
There are similar values across what you might call the ‘Confucian Belt’ (which also includes Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Vietnam). All emphasize harmonious hierarchical social order, rote learning, and…. craftsmanship. None of those are particularly fertile ground for innovation (though as Japan has shown, German style incremental improvement on ideas from elsewhere is a regional strength).
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“innovation is not a strong value in Chinese culture”
In Western societies, innovation is underpinned by individualism and the value of standing out from the crowd, of originality of thought. In Confucian-based societies standing out is ferociously reprimanded (there is even a saying in Chinese which goes: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down”). People are supposed to be followers, not leaders or initiators.
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Exactly. The European culture also didn’t arrive at the concept of “I, the author” easily. It was a process. And it was an absolutely revolutionary moment in world history where literary texts started appearing during the Renaissance that started with “I”.
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Being original isn’t much use for a poor country trying to develop. You’re much better off copying what has been observed to work elsewhere rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, let alone wallowing in what an oppressed victim you are.
https://dailyfriend.co.za/2025/01/07/remaining-an-under-developed-country-is-a-choice/
An industrialized, urbanized China is fundamentaly different from the old rural, agrarian China, so it’s anyone’s guess how they will develop in the future.
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It’s more than that… China has people in Earth orbit right now, they have their own parallel Internet, they are a technologically hypermodern society. They have pretty much everything we have, except for democracy. All we can say now is “we had it first”.
The whole world outside of Europe went through terrible paroxysms in order to deal with the novelties of modernity (just as Europe did!), and China is no exception. But from a standpoint of national power, China has been by far the most successful at assimilating modernity, while remaining apart from the West.
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I agree that it’s impossible to explain why not being enslaved to somebody else’s ideas is better than being enslaved. 🙂
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Everyone is enslaved by other people’s ideas unless you were raised by wolves. Pretty much the definition of civilization is that we can build on what has been discovered already rather than starting from scratch with each generation.
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Building your own is different from slavishly imitating somebody else’s. Look at my book reviews, for example. If I simply retold what the book is about, nobody would read them. The only reason why the reviews are so fun is because I give my very own perspective which is like nobody else’s. I use the books to inspire me to express myself in a way that is often completely at cross purposes with those of the author.
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I’m not sure we are even arguing about. Where’s the Chinese Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Sartre, Freud, Bauman? Where’s the Chinese invention equivalent to a PC, an iPhone, a Starlink, Elon Musk’s reusable rocket, AI? What’s one idea originating from China since tea was invented that we all use daily? Look at Ukrainians who last year rewrote the entire concept of warfare and invented drone warfare. In the worst imaginable circumstances a nation of 40 million is coming up with the invention that’s reshaping the future. The Chinese in peacetime, on the other hand, are coming up with ways to misspell Adidas to sell Adidas fakes. Where’s their own Adidas? I was just in Spain, and there are phenomenal local designers. Stuff I want to wear and that the Chinese will imitate (or probably already do). Where’s the Chinese fashion relevant to anybody outside of China?
I can go on. In every industry, every area of achievement, China shines brightly by its complete absence.
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“China shines brightly by its complete absence”
I’m thinking this is at least partly a dictator thing…. until Xi came along China was developing at light speed. But dictators hate, hate HATE innovation (which by definition challenges the status quo).
I’m not saying China would be a beacon of innovation (not what it’s about) but it would be ten times better off had it been continuing its path in 2010.
What’s also interesting is the lack of cultural capital of modern China…. Japan (manga, anime) and SKorea (music, tv series, films last years literature nobel) are the cultural powerhouses of the region and China hasn’t produced an international hit for 20 years… (unless I’ve missed something).
When I had a group of Chinese students a couple of years ago I asked for film/series recommendations and they had nothing. I asked about a series I had found and they just rolled their eyes…
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Ukraine has been inventing drone warfare; China invented the world’s most efficient, flexible, and powerful manufacturing system. Speaking of drones, Chinese DJI drones are the main civilian drones in use throughout the world. And as for something Chinese that people use every day, I believe there’s an app called TikTok? And in the world of AI, the biggest sensation at the moment is DeepSeek-r1 (r for “reasoning” I think, it shows you its “thought process”), which overnight came out to rival OpenAI’s flagship model GPT-o1. It’s the most downloaded app in China and in America right now.
Now I take your point about famous Chinese intellectuals; from a scientific perspective, I could add Newton and Darwin to the list of big western names, along with many 20th-century celebrity scientists. Of course China has an intelligentsia, but they are mostly known just within China, even when they are heavily engaged with western thought.
There’s no question that Europe around 1500 achieved a potent cultural synthesis which led both to world conquest and to new horizons for humanity in every sense. Counterfactually it could have happened in China, India, or Islam, but in reality it happened in Europe and it’s now headquartered in North America, and precisely because technological civilization is a civilization of progress, it presents a moving target for any rival trying to catch up. I think that’s a major reason why it’s hard to find major new inventions coming from outside the US alliance system, on top of whatever “maladaptive” cultural characteristics these other civilizations may possess (maladaptive from the perspective of fostering innovation).
It would be interesting if you studied modern Chinese literature at some point – I don’t know anything about it, the only Chinese literature I know about is kitschy online time travel fantasies and so forth (this is kind of China’s answer to Japanese manga and American SF of the pulp fiction era). I’m sure better writing exists. But I can understand if you don’t have time to investigate!
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Talking about literature, every writer from every country would be overjoyed to get the Nobel Prize. Why has China never tried to award its own Nobel? Surely, the money can be found. If you can’t produce culture that people around the world want to consume, then you could ar least could enter the culture game as an arbiter and mecenas. It would still be imitation but at least it would be some form of agency.
But no, nothing. No effort in that direction. The thought simply doesn’t seem to occur.
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China has lots of brands, in cars for example. There are also many chinese phone brands. They might not be available in the US due to import duties, but other people are buying them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/business/china-mexico-ev-electric-vehicles.html
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Holywood pays close attention to the Chinese box office! (The top ten films each year in China are split between Chinese and American.) So that’s one area where they are playing cultural arbiter.
As for literature prizes, they have awards for Chinese writers. And I have seen plenty of online Chinese lamenting that the Chinese culture industry isn’t as big as that of America, India, Japan, or Korea. So people do care. If China isn’t buying influence by having a wealthy international book award, perhaps it’s just that they don’t consider literature as important as the movies.
In the realm of computer games, I’ve seen a game called “Genshin Impact” named as an extremely successful Chinese export.
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You are saying yourself that none of this is relevant or interesting to anybody outside of China. And that’s a fact.
I highly recommend reading Byung-Chul Han’s book. He’s writing from a desire to defend the culture of the Far East but he’s doing that by accepting reality, not denying it.
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Byung-Chul Han sounds like he’s following the deconstructionist playbook of taking something that’s supposed to be bad – in this case, imitation of international brands – and then mounting a defense of it. I dare say he’s also ironically embracing Hegelian ideas about how the West differs from the East, but inverting the usual valuation of that difference, which would again be deconstruction 101. “Critical theory” people love to come up with outrageous-sounding propositions that they can then defend.
Meanwhile, in historical reality, Chinese intellectuals at the start of the 20th century were saying that China had to understand western ideas like science and democracy, or else China would end up divided up among the great powers like Africa did. The struggles of modernizing reform have been a theme in Chinese life for more than a century. Ignoring that in favor of Han’s ironic orientalism is a choice, but it’s like writing about India as an eternally stratified land of caste, ignoring that anti-caste movements have been at the center of Indian politics for a similar length of time. (These days, Hindu nationalists characteristically blame the caste system on the British.)
I think it would be nonsense to say that Chinese intellectuals don’t want to have original ideas, or that Chinese scientists don’t want to discover things, or that Chinese artists don’t want to create works that are their own. If Chinese innovation hasn’t swept the world, it’s not because it doesn’t exist.
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“the notion of a contradiction isn’t an important one in Chinese though”
Years and years ago the Chinese-American ethnographer Francis L. K. Hsu described this in the Chinese (and more widely… East Asian) approach to religion.
In the west the religion is bigger than the individual and an individual belongs within the circle of a religion (and cannot therefore belong to more than one at a time since the circles don’t overlap).
Chinese perceive religion as something outside of themselves and different religions are different… resources that are useful at different times in different contexts.
That’s why Japanese, for example, can simultaneously follow Shinto and Buddhism, using each for different things.
I was once a house guest of the Ambassador to Poland of an East Asian country that is mostly Buddhist. There was indeed a big Buddhist shrine in one part of the house and a second area with what looked a lot like a Buddhist shine but devoted to Mary (whom the the Ambassador told me they frequently dreamed of and they frequently visited Częstochowa the biggest center of the Cult of Mary in Poland).
Lots of other examples…
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Our Buddhist friends in VN like to attend Catholic mass, and since the town is dotted with shrines, they stop in at the Marian shrines just the same as the ones at every little waterfall, at certain trees, and other nature-spirit-associated sites. It is almost impossible to convert them, because Buddhism (and Hinduism from which it came) are sort of open-ended shelving systems, where you slot in whatever local spirits and deities seem appropriate. They all think Jesus is a pretty swell god, and are pretty sure that Quan Am and Ba Maria are actually the same goddess.
Interestingly, while the Catholics are more reserved about this sort of thing, it *is* a two-way street. The good Catholic girls who towed me all around with them… were not averse to lighting a bit of incense in a Buddhist temple, and did chao (curt formal bow with arms crossed) whenever we passed the tree and waterfall shrines. Whether that’s syncretism or just a healthy mutual respect seems entirely a matter of perspective. Both groups have been officially discriminated against since the Communist takeover, so… it’s not a “don’t hurt me” thing. Seems to be a certain foxhole camaraderie.
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“not averse to lighting a bit of incense in a Buddhist temple”
Some years ago my university here arranged an Indonesian film week. Most of the movies…. were not great, sometimes interesting but…. not great. One thing I did notice was the characters who supposedly muslims were reading Hindu epics, had Hindu names and were doing things in temples…
I think in recent years political Islam has been increasing in importance and probably trying to wipe things like that out…
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“I have seen plenty of online Chinese lamenting that the Chinese culture industry isn’t as big as”
And yet the last big international Chinese hit was over 20 years ago…..
China has run up the dictator limit (economies can only develop so far under a dictatorship and the same is true of art, whether popular or elite).
But rather than open up, it’s doubling down on dictatorship….
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