Yangshuo

To get to Yangshuo, I had to backtrack from Ping'an back to Longsheng and Guilin, then take a third bus to Yangshuo. On this bus, the bus "stewardess" was a chirpy young woman of 21 who speaks English and sat next to me the entire ride chatting and alternatively encouraging me and laughing at my attempts to speak Chinese.

Yangshuo has a reputation as a backpackers' mecca in China. The main street is even called "Xi Jie" (West Street). The shops and cafes don’t feel very different than many of their counterparts in the west. European cafe, or lounge and nightclub, and most of them do a very good job of it. However, despite the fact that Westerners make up a higher percentage of the people here than in anywhere else I've been in China so far, they are still the minority. In no way to does the place solely cater to Western tourists. For every Western tourist there are two Chinese tourists. I wonder if they come for here to be part of this highly Westernized milieu..

Nearly every restaurant has the same menu - it includes "safe" Chinese food (the kind of dishes found in Chinese restaurants in America), Indian food, Mexican food (sometimes spelled "Mezican"), burgers, steaks, “Chicken Gordon Bleu”, a wide array of martinis and cocktails, and, of course, the ubiquitous (in backpacker enclaves, at least) banana pancakes. The local specialty here is "beer fish" - fish fried in beer.

I rented a bike one day and went out for a ride in the countryside along the Li River. I didn’t have to travel very far outside of Yangshuo before I encountered sleepy little villages surrounded by rice paddies and mountains. It was pouring rain but I was happy in my poncho.

I often find myself inserting an East/West dichotomy into my posts, using the vague concept of "The West" as a reference point against which to compare things I see in China. In a place like Yangshuo, such comparisons come naturally. I find myself making them everywhere I go: "Oh, that building looks Western." "Oh look, the villagers all have TVs. Such is the forward march of globalization. They are being Westernized..." "These Chinese music videos are just like Western music videos but in Chinese."

But you know what? I think all this talk of what is "Western" and what is not is misleading and troublesome. The more I think about it, I'm not at all convinced that the things that "look Western" to me in China (or India, etc...) are, in fact, evidence that the Chinese are "emulating" or "copying" the West. I think the evolution of technological progress sometimes gets mixed up in cultural transmission. Just because the TV was invented in "the West" does not make it an inherently "Western" piece of technology, or medium for communication. Hell, most TVs are made today in China. When young Chinese consume products that look, to me, remarkably similar to the ones young Westerners consume, I don't know if they are consciously thinking "this is a Western activity I am engaged in", nor do I think that statement is true. I don't know where exactly all this leaves me, but I think a good working thesis is this: Rather than Asian youth consuming "Western culture", youth in both Asia and America and Europe (and probably other regions, but I can't speak for them since I haven't been there myself) are instead consuming what is really a "global youth-oriented mass culture". And this global youth-oriented mass culture is not rooted in "the West", or any one particular cultural geography. It was born in the information age and is transnational. It is not unidirectional but involves the exchange of images, ideas, and style around the world and between cultures. This youth-oriented mass culture as manifested in the United States, I think, is influenced by the youth mass cultures of Asia, and Europe, etc., and visa versa.

In other words....it's globalization, dummy!

But of course it's not that simple. Even if things look the same on the surface, there are still myriad differences.

Some of the most apparent differences arise when one looks at "traditional cultures". In China, that term is thrown around a lot, not just by Let's Go and Lonely Planet, but by the Chinese themselves, in reference to the majority of the Chinese population who still live in villages and work as farmers. Minority groups in China are discovering that their culture is marketable to tourists (both Western and Chinese), representing the "traditions" that those moderns have supposedly left behind in the ever-advancing march towards "modernity" and "progress."

"Tradition" is one of those words that is hopelessly mired in ambiguity. Cosmopolitan urbanites in New York or Shanghai, suburban soccer moms, Iowa farmers, and Chinese villagers all have one thing in common: they are all reliant on their own respective traditions. Small towns, villagers, minority groups, and the Christian Right have no monopoly on tradition.

In an old-fashioned model every settlement of people had its own distinctive practices, values, and traditions, all of which add up to make that thing called "culture". In previous eras, communication and contact between populations and settlements was more limited, and so these distinct cultures tended to be more isolated and thus remain more insular. Today, global mass communication has penetrated every continent and country. But some enclaves remain where, due to political, historical, socioeconomic, transportation, or simply geographic reasons, certain peoples are less connected to this global network. And these are the places which are sought out by anthropologists and tourists and travel writers and celebrated for their "rich heritage and culture", which, as soon as the tourism industry catches on, becomes a commercialized product, its people selling their culture for a price.

*Writing now in 2008, I would like to point out that while the above was written on the computer in my guesthouse in Yangshuo in 2006, much of this would eventually find its way into my Master’s Thesis, published earlier this year.