The Strange Paradox of Marxist China

The Chinese are notorious for being suspicious of anything they consider to be foreign. This is rather strange considering they spent half of the last millennia living under foreign non-Han dynasties and Western colonialism. China's biggest ancient religion, Buddhism, was imported from India. Its dominant modern religion and sociopolitical philosophy, Marxism, was imported from Western Europe and Russia.

The Chinese Communist Party has built its legitimacy on ending China's "century of humiliation" at the hands of foreigners, and it insists that everything from law to Christianity be altered to conform with "Chinese characteristics." The official government approved history is that almost everything great in the world has ancient roots in China, and thus China's current state of underdevelopment and cultural backwardness is the result of foreign abuse. This anti-foreign attitude is present to some extent in most mainland Chinese people (although many individuals privately reject it).

This official history is shockingly incongruent with the fact that modern China's Marxist worldview has no roots in China nor Asia. This fact is never mentioned despite being glaringly obvious to any outside observer. Atheistic dialectical materialism has never before existed in China, and yet most Chinese will repeat the mantra "Chinese have no religion" while claiming with pride in the next sentence that "China has a 5,000-year history." They simply can't see that modern Marxist China has little connection with Chinese history, and that it is essentially a foreign import that suppressed that history.

Tiananmen Square has been the center of Chinese civilization since the Ming Dynasty, and its Forbidden City is strikingly Chinese with its ancient architecture and gardens. However, everything constructed in the square since 1949 looks as though it was designed by Russians. China's most popular sport, basketball, was imported from America. Contemporary Chinese music consists mostly of imitations of American styles from the 1990s. Almost all Chinese people wear sneakers, jeans, and t-shirts copied off American originals. Every major aspect of modern China has been imported. The names "Confucius" and "Laozi" are recognized and praised, but their ideas are now forgotten and irrelevant.

Strangely, none of this is consciously recognized by most Chinese people, and the majority of them appear content to be trapped in the paradox that "foreign is bad" and yet modern China derived from foreigners. However, some feeble resistance is mounting. Many, often socially awkward teenagers, have started wearing traditional Chinese clothing called "hanfu." Many people stare and mock, but I love seeing them resurrect part of their past after the devastating twentieth century.