On the History of Chinese Materialism

Something I wrote in Sydney. I think it’s rather good, so it has to come out.

Epigraph: I added the title later. Seeing the title, I have a bit more to say, if only to pad out the word count and make it look nice. When I had just started middle school and was learning to write argumentative essays, I’ve forgotten what I wrote, but I seem to have opened with a title along the lines of “On Such-and-Such”. The teacher put me in my place at once: titles like that were not allowed. “On” was to be saved for later, when we wrote theses; for now we had to make do with titles like “A Few Remarks on Such-and-Such” or “Let’s Talk About Such-and-Such”. These days I am a free spirit, a lone crane among drifting clouds; at least nobody polices what I write in Chinese any more. So I’m indulging myself first with a title like this, which will make people think it’s some kind of philosophical treatise.

Let me state at the outset that I don’t actually like writing at all. I write purely because I have nothing better to do.

I started writing 500-character narrative essays in the third year of primary school. I remember writing a travel piece back then called “A Visit to the Humble Administrator’s Garden” and somehow, without quite knowing how, getting the highest mark in the class. In theory, a good start is equal or approximately equal to half the success; but after that I could only manage fewer than or equal to one good essay a year. I hated those narrative essays. When I have lived through something exciting, I will naturally write about it, to remember it years later. School narrative essays, though, made me write about “an unforgettable event”, “a thrilling event” or “the happiest event” precisely when life felt perfectly uneventful. Not only that: the essay also had to be original, ideologically healthy and so on. Once we had attained a certain mastery in the art of talking nonsense, I began learning argumentative essays. Taken literally, an argumentative essay means voicing your own opinion on some phenomenon. But the education I received taught me to “second-guess” the setter: to work out what kind of essay he or she wanted me to write.

This reminds me of how cases are handled in China. The fundamental difference between a Chinese police station and a police station in a developed Western country lies in their principles. In Western countries, by convention, a suspect who has been caught is first presumed innocent, and then a chain of evidence has to be found to prove his or her guilt; if no evidence to charge him or her turns up within 48 or 72 hours, there is nothing for it but to let the person go. In China, it seems, once you are taken in they are not very polite: first a good beating, which is to say guilt is presumed first. Then you are handcuffed to something, the officer settles into his seat above, cradles his teacup, clears his throat and asks: “Do you know our policy?”

“I do. Leniency for those who confess, severity for those who resist.”

“Good. Do you know what bad thing you’ve done?”

Then the one in handcuffs, just as we second-guessed what the examiner wanted us to write, studies every movement, every expression and every word of the officer, trying to work out what on earth the officer wants him or her to confess.

I seem to have wandered off a long way. Anyway, all I wanted to say is that our country’s academic style of composition is absurd to a certain degree, so I have a certain degree of aversion to it.

Now I should get to the point. I don’t know which wire got crossed in my head today, but I feel like discussing the question of materialism. The other day I was walking down the street when a light bulb suddenly lit up above my head. Thinking as I walked, I realised that the Chinese people have a solid ideological foundation for materialism. Materialism means holding that the basis of the world is matter (I know my high-school politics was bad, don’t nitpick this sentence). My understanding is that materialists just want to prove that people, like many things in the world, developed out of things. My grandmother often scolded me with this line: “You truly are not a thing.” (真真不是个东西: a common Chinese insult, roughly “you good-for-nothing”; literally, “you are not a thing”.) Thinking about it now, this is about the same as medieval Europeans calling someone a “heretic”. Let me explain in detail. Materialists believe that everything in the world originates in matter, and that human thought, culture and so on are by-products that came along after people developed out of things; the essence of a human being is a thing. So people who believe in materialism become more and more like things. I, for example, am a staunch materialist; I believe the essence of a human being is a heap of protoplasm hung on bones. I once asked my grandmother about that line she scolded me with. She said that calling you “not a thing” means calling you “not a person”. Of course, cursing like this sounds very refined, about as refined as swearing “your mother’s” (a genteel version of the most common Chinese curse). In other words, in my grandmother’s worldview, people are things, and to deny that you are a thing is to deny that you are a person. And when I asked her when people started cursing like this, she told me it began with my ancestors’ ancestors. So I can say with great pride that China has had materialists since my ancestors’ ancestors. That is who knows how much earlier than Mr Marx’s Das Kapital. And, as luck would have it, that unknown materialist happened to be my ancestors’ ancestor. Yeah! ~~ What’s more, who knows how many years ago, plenty of people were already cursing like that; it seems the whole city of Nanjing cursed that way. In other words, the first community to believe in materialism was born in great red China who knows how many years before the Russian Communist Party.

At this point I’ve run out of things to write. Looking over this essay, the structure is a mess, the genre is nothing in particular, the idioms I used can be counted on one hand, and what I actually wrote about, even I don’t know.

Anyway, I haven’t written anything in Chinese for a year. Just some practice, so I don’t forget how.