More clues to locating China in America's past
■"Workers In China Shed Passivity: Spate of Walkouts Shakes Factories," by Edward Cody, Washington Post, 27 November 2004, p. A1.■"Glamour's New Orientation: The era of lustrous screen sirens lives on, thousands of miles from Hollywood," by Manohla Dargis, New York Times, 5 December 2004, p. AR1.
I've written many times that China of today can be thought of as being spread across a number of U.S. decades. Some of it looks like turn-of-the-20th-century America in terms of land use and industrialization. Other parts, like it's military and space program, come right out of the 1960s. Then there are super-computer projects that are luring back to China the same brains that Silicon Valley sucked off the mainland years earlier. So China really seems like it's all over the last U.S. century.
And yet I still maintain that China's center of gravity is similar to our own coming-of-age point, which was in the first two decades of the 1900s, culminating in our entry into World War I. So it's no great surprise that when you look at labor in China, you see the same sort of pissed-off factory-level activism that you saw in the U.S. at that time period. Makes you kind of wobbly all over, if you catch my historical drift.
But culturally speaking, that sort of unrest extends as far as America's 1930s. China is a rough-and-tumble society where some are very rich, many are moving up, but still many more are being left behind. China is just one huge swirl of economic and social aspirations right now, so much so that there's little room for much purely political activism—it's instead all about jobs, the environment, urban planning, etc. I mean, who's got time for anything less practical than that in China right now? These people work as long as they can stay awake!
So when they go to the movies, it's not unlike Depression-era America. They want glamour. They want fantasy. They want to get away from it all.
Americans may want to constantly explore their fears—especially of terrorism right now—but China is looking for escape. And that's why the real glamour in movies today is found in Chinese films. You want gorgeous women, grand fights between heroes, and visuals designed to stir the heart more than tax the brain synapses? Then go watch Chinese films.
I tell you, between Bollywood and Hong Kong, Asia is going to start chiseling away at Hollywood's alleged domination of global cultural film values—production and otherwise—far faster than anyone anticipates.
As I have said before: in tens years no one with a brain and two good eyes will be able to pretend that globalization equals Americanization. India and China will inevitably join America's "global" war on terrorism because they will become inevitably aligned so profoundly with the global culture being resisted by some violent elements that they too will become targets.
And when that connectivity redefines security, we will have new rule sets in this war.