222
thousand years of continuous cultural development: it includes the present but only in the perspective of the past.
To explain the persistence and magnetism of Chinese traditional culture is too great a task for this note (and, I fear, for this writer too), but to find examples of its strength is not so difficult. The first Chinese migrants to the countries of mainland and island Southeast Asia arrived there centuries ago. Some assimilated, but many did not, with the result that there have been recognisable Chinese communities in all these countries up to the present. They have been discriminated against, massacred and evicted over the years, but they have tenaciously stuck to their Chineseness. In Britain the Chinese community has a much shorter history, but there is a great flourishing of special classes in Chinese language and writing which testifies to the eagerness of parents to pass on their cultural influences to the next generation. And the overseas Chinese maintain their links with the homeland in much the same way as the people there maintain their ties with the past.
The Chinese have shared their homes with the ancestors, eaten picnics on their ancestors' graves, lived with continuity of history to an extent that the West cannot match. While it is true that twentieth century international urban values have begun to intrude upon this sense of continuity, it also must be said that contemporary ways of thought and behaviour are still greatly informed by traditional culture. It is through studying these traditions that some kind of baseline for understanding the present can be established.
Oddly enough, it has mostly been the nineteenth and twentieth century foreign interest in China which has documented traditional culture best. Before Western-inspired educational reforms brought literacy within the reach of the majority of the population, China's literate few constituted an elite which not only occupied a separate social position but which also only wrote about itself and its elite activities. The Dream of the Red Chamber (also known as The Story of the Stone) has been hailed as the great Chinese sociological novel, and indeed it is, but it is the sociology of a large elite family and its household of slaves, servants and relatives; it does not deal with the villager, the peasant
222
thousand years of continuous cultural development: it includes the present but only in the perspective of the past.
To explain the persistence and magnetism of Chinese traditional culture is too great a task for this note (and, I fear, for this writer too), but to find examples of its strength is not so difficult. The first Chinese migrants to the countries of mainland and island Southeast Asia arrived there centuries ago. Some assimilated, but many did not, with the result that there have been recognisable Chinese communities in all these countries up to the present. They have been discriminated against, massacred and evicted over the years, but they have tenaciously stuck to their Chineseness. In Britain the Chinese community has a much shorter history, but there is a great flourishing of special classes in Chinese language and writing which testifies to the eagerness of parents to pass on their cultural influences to the next generation. And the overseas Chinese maintain their links with the homeland in much the same way as the people there maintain their ties with the past.
The Chinese have shared their homes with the ancestors, eaten picnics on their ancestors' graves, lived with continuity of history to an extent that the West cannot match. While it is true that twentieth century international urban values have begun to intrude upon this sense of continuity, it also must be said that contemporary ways of thought and behaviour are still greatly informed by traditional culture. It is through studying these traditions that some kind of baseline for understanding the present can be established.
Oddly enough, it has mostly been the nineteenth and twentieth century foreign interest in China which has documented traditional culture best. Before Western-inspired educational reforms brought literacy within the reach of the majority of the population, China's literate few constituted an elite which not only occupied a separate social position but which also only wrote about itself and its elite activities. The Dream of the Red Chamber # (also known as The Story of the Stone Z32) has been hailed as the great Chinese sociological novel, and indeed it is, but it is the sociology of a large elite family and its household of slaves, servants and relatives, it does not deal with the villager, the peasant
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