The Duality of the Chinese Culture

It has always been a fatal mistake to think of "Chinese culture" as singular. It would still be wrong to take it plural. It's dual. Always been, always will be.

As I was watching the Mughal exhibition, I cannot help but compare the two cultures and think of their mutual influences. Obviously the Mughals had a much stronger sense of color than the Chinese, the latter suffering a mental disease even till now called "associationism" (感应论) which tends to connect everything natural with everything human, giving every color a moral value. Red is almost always good, lucky, auspicious, while black is not. Yellow is the royal color, forbidden for common use. Combined with the Yin-yang Five Phase Theory (阴阳五行论), whether each color is good or bad depends on the circumstance, for each is linked with a certain "Phase" (Gold, Wood, Water, Fire and Earth, not to be confused with the western elements). For example, if the dynasty decided that it's virtue is of the Fire Phase (火德), then it should use Wood to enhance Fire and avoid Water which harms fire. Each Phase has its turn in ruling the world, so it's vital to decide which turn is it, and to decide each thing, be it a person, an object or a location, its respective Phase. This kind of thinking still works in the majority of the Chinese minds. 

Yet this does not mean the Mughals have nothing in common with the Chinese. The most striking similarity between the two lies in the fact that the Mughal dynasty is a foreign regime ruling over a native population, much the same as the Mongolian Yuan dynasty in Chinese history. That is to say, both culture are mixtures of the inner and the outer, of the invader and the invaded. The difference in this respect is, while the Yuan dynasty chose a loose control and intervened little in the Chinese society, the Islam-Persian Mughal dynasty accepted the Sufi philosophy and tried, quite successfully, to integrate the foreign and the native, and created a true fusion culture. The Chinese culture never truly fused with anything, except when the culture itself was developing (I would say between the Zhou and the Qin dynasty), it just picked some parts useful or fit for itself and discarded the rest. And so while the Mughals had a more integrated culture, the Chinese always have a dual culture, with its inner tension, only to be mitigated by their all too pragmatic attitude of life. 

Such duality is composed by a northern culture and a southern culture, the former essentially nomadic and the latter agricultural. The swing between the two poles explains a large part of Chinese history: the Xia being agricultural, the Shang nomadic, the Zhou agricultural again, the Qin nomadic again, and so on. By "nomadic" I am not indicating that the rulers themselves ride horses and fight battles and eat flesh and drink blood. The main features of the northern culture are movement, aggressiveness, pragmatism, anti-intellectualism, shamanism; of the southern culture, stability, passivism, intellectualism, respect for civilizations. Take Buddhism for example: the northern type focuses on ritual and supernatural power, while the southern focuses on scriptures, saints and understanding. The northern culture becomes more and more on the surface, while the southern constitutes the core, the inner self of the Chinese spirit.

And so when China finally rejected the Anglo-American way of parliamentary government (the culture from the south and the sea) and embraced the Soviet party-state system (the culture from the north and the land, the nomadic of the modern age), it proves time and again that the Chinese duality hardly dies, that the nomadic soul, the power-hungry, cruel, military, winner-takes-all type, is such a fundamental part of the Chinese spirit, that however the peaceful southern soul protests, the warlike northern soul still finds time to dominate. It is only when things went south that the south comes back and cleans up the mess, only to be spoiled by the north again. This is the true cycle of the Chinese history.