The Ugly Chinaman and the Crisis of Chinese Culture

'Bo Yang' is the pen name of the Taiwanese writer Guo Yidong. Bo Yang is one of the rare polemicists/satirists in modern Chinese lit. In 1967 he published a satirical translation of a Popeye cartoon, which poked fun at the 'democracy' of the KMT rule of Taiwan (at that time, martial law had been in operation since 1949 and Chiang Kai Shek and his son Chiang Jing Guo were establishing a dynasty while flattering their American allies that they were building a democracy). Bo Yang was jailed by the KMT and spent the next 10 years in prison.

In the 1980s he wrote a book called [The Ugly Chinaman] which involved him in controversy in Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and all over the diaspora. In it, Bo Yang unleashes a bitter attack on Confucianism, show more peasant culture, and what he sees to be the weaknesses of Chinese culture. Chinese people are 'ugly' ( choulou), not in an aesthetic sense, but in a moral and behavioural sense. They are untruthful, noisy, stupid, bad mannered, addicted to infighting and petty revenge, paranoid, selfish, slavish, craven, money grasping, obsessed with face and shame and unable to admit their mistakes, cruel, and incapable of following the rule of law or of following any lofty virtues, while at the same time possessed of an unreasonable chip on their shoulders about the value of their own culture.

This translation contains the speech made at Iowa University in September 1984 which launched the controversy, other interviews and speeches in which Bo Yang discusses the 'ugly Chinaman idea', and selections from some of Bo Yang's essays. It also includes reactions to Bo Yang's book from a range of academics, writers and commentators, both in China and abroad, in effect recreating or preserving the controversy.

This is not a thought-through, or even very thoughtful, academic critique of Chinese culture, but a polemic, a satire, in the tradition of Lu Xun. Bo Yang's style is brisk, colloquial, scatalogical and very funny, especially when he inserts fictional monologues from Chinese, mirroring the things they typically say. The text is larded with anecdotes chosen (invented?) to illustrate his points.

Bo Yang hits a lot of nails right on the head: his description of the Chinese is extremely accurate - but also one-sided. However, the reasons he gives for this cultural ugliness are superficial and unfair. His style, while vastly entertaining and provoking, defeats any attempt at a real cultural analysis. It is not organised enough, too much reliance is placed on anecdote, and there are no real ideas as to what aspects of Chinese culture specifically are responsible for Chinese 'ugliness'. There are some brilliant -and timely and correct- rants against Confucianism and its baleful influence, but they are just that: rants, not considered critiques.

The reactions from other writers unwittingly reveal more about the ugly chinaman. Bo Yang has been accused of licking American arses by his enemies (this is the kind of language used), of sniffing their farts (this is one of Mao's favourite phrases), and of insulting 5000 years of glorious Chinese culture. Many of these articles from Bo Yang's detractors are very interesting for what they reveal about Chinese habits of thought, about Chinese information structure (circular, repetitive) and what they call 'logic' (non sequential), about Chinese methods of argumentation (relying on statements such as 'Every one knows'... and the citation of proverbs and old sayings to irrefutably prove your point) as well as day to day life in China and Taipei in the wealth of anecdotes.

Amusing, often accurate, and informative for those seeking to understand the more elusive aspects of China, but ultimately unsatisfying as a serious critique of Chinese culture. show less