Notes on 'Civilization'

Apologies for the delayed post. Living out of a suitcase for 4 weeks deadens the creative impulse somewhat.

It is, as usual, the absence of something that hammers home its importance. Perhaps the Cambodian government has more important targets for its limited funds. Perhaps its political parties are more concerned with squaring off against each other than telling their electorate how they ought to be behaving. Perhaps I should learn Khmer before I start making pronouncements upon far away countries about which I know little. Whichever the case, stepping out of customs and back into Shanghai was a bit like being struck in the head with a propaganda-soaked flannel.

Not that this is an altogether unpleasant experience. While red banners sporting large, aggressive looking yellow characters still abound (though these days they’re as likely to be welcoming in the New Year as anything else), the majority of state propaganda is these days disseminated through much subtler means. Inconspicuous among advertisements for expensive private hospitals and a ‘Harry Potter Magic Academy’ is a picture of an improbably verdant urban scene. “The Civilized City of Nanjing Welcomes You.”

Wenming: Civilized. Civilization. The two are tricky enough terms to get to grips with in English, but a lack of distinction between them in Chinese blurs the issue further. As a consequence, resonance of the word can (and does) extend from the courtyards of the Forbidden City to standing on the correct side of an escalator. Originally a Japanese neologism, it began life closely married to the enlightenment idea of ‘progress.’ Highly-charged, it stood for an outlook that was modernist, pro-western, and largely dismissive of a backward, ‘traditional’ China.

This began to change in the late 70’s as Deng Xiaoping began to realize the necessity of finding at least a token replacement for the ideological structures that had underpinned the régime’s legitimacy during the Mao era in order to help drive his reforms forward. Thirty years on, a revised and rather hazy form of wenming bundles together a whole mass of notions concerned moral conduct, material progress, and critically, a sense of innate Chineseness. With such a diverse range of heavyweight associations, it has the dual advantage of carrying enough importance as to render it almost sacred terminology, while being flexible enough to be pressed into use by pretty much anyone for any purpose.

Despite this vagueness, it now forms the heart of an elegant, almost beautiful architecture of propaganda. In contrast to the ‘thought work’ of the Mao era, through which individuals were exclusively defined through their ties to the state, the modern use of wenming encourages people to make an active claim to their citizenship by a voluntary acting out of certain standards of behaviour.

A perfect illustration of how this works greets the male population of China every time it unzips in public urinals across the country; a small placard placed at eye-level above the porcelain reads thus: “One small step forward to pee, one giant leap for civilization.” Trite as they may appear, such soundbytes forge a direct link between personal actions and the progress of the nation as a whole. In doing so, it ascribes a high level of importance to the voluntary behaviour of each individual, while entirely negating any trace of individualism.

The surprising part is that, perhaps shuddering at the memory of progressive negative campaigns that culminated in the nihilistic black hole of the Cultural Revolution, China’s leaders have chosen to mobilize this set-up in an almost entirely positive manner. Emphasis is placed on the results of contribution, not the consequences of a lack thereof. Though the results of this kind of propaganda are always hard to measure, there has been at the very least been a visible change in public behaviour, even over the past three or four years; queuing is now at least a recognisable phenomenon; metro interchanges are no longer the chaotic, jostling scrums they once were; a growing and almost tangible sense of pride and self-respect hangs in the air like incense.

There is, inevitably, an unpleasant side. The concept of ‘civilisation’ can easily be used as a means to exclude or ostracise groups that somehow fail to conform to the standards it prescribes. A parallel and altogether more distasteful line of propaganda surrounds the notion of suzhi, another ‘keyword’ which roughly translates as ‘quality.’ A person’s quality is dependent on a number of things. These can include innate factors such as breeding or cultural background, as well as acquired elements like education or even nutrition. On this basis, people are said to be of ‘high’ or ‘low’ quality. Though whoever concocted the term may have been able to fantasize about its being no more than a straightforward technical description, in reality it has about as much neutrality as calling someone an ‘uneducated peasant.’ As such, it is frequently used pejoratively in describing groups perceived as inferior, such as migrants, rural inhabitants, ethnic minorities and so on. By implication, a person of high suzhi is much more likely to be a ‘civilized’ one.

Despite this, China’s civilizing programme makes the British government’s attempts at propaganda (if they can even be graced with the term) look thuggish and downright sinister by comparison. Rather than emphasising what kinds of nice things might happen if you do do something, we in the UK prefer an approach that might perhaps be termed ‘old school.’ You think you’ve done nothing wrong, don’t you? Are you sure? Are you positive? You’d better be. You think you can hide, but we know where you are, and we will find you, and then… A quick look at recent campaigns run by the Department for Work and Pensions, the TV Licensing Agency, and the DVLA, to name but a few, suggests that a more ‘civilised’ approach may, perhaps, be in order.