The Great Wall in Ruins: Communication and Cultural Change in China (review)

Reviews 421 Godwin C. Chu and Yanan Ju. The Great Wall in Ruins: Communication and Cultural Change in China. Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1993. xii, 366 pp. Hardcover $59.50. Paperback $19.95. This book deals with recent cultural changes in China. Based on thorough research and analysis of survey data, it contains a most valuable qualitative assessment as well. An important theme in the book is the destruction of the cultural Great Wall by Mao and millions ofhis followers. Looking at culture from a holistic-functional point ofview, the authors see it as a system of collective survival. They believe that culture has two salient features: it must be able to adapt to changing conditions in both the external and internal environments. A culture that fails to adapt to these changes runs the risk ofextinction. Change is considered to be an inherent factor in any culture. At the same time, a culture should have a certain degree ofresistance to change—otherwise there will be a lack ofstability and continuity . It seems that resistance is as necessary as adaptability. The hypothesis proposed by Chu and Ju is expressed as follows: In traditional Chinese culture there were constraining components and incentive components. Some were structural, others ideological. As these constraining and incentive components are altered, Chinese people change their social relations, material relations, values, beliefs, and attitudes to adapt. Thus Chinese culture changes. A number of factors, such as age, sex, education, economic status, and urbanization mediate in the way individuals relate to both the old and new constraining and incentive components, and thus have an impact on the nature of cultural change. In China, communication plays a central role in the processes of cultural change in the two major perspectives. Political communication was used intensively in the days ofMao Zedong to change the ideological foundation oftraditional Chinese culture. In the post-Mao years of economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping, [the] Chinese mass media has become a conduit for Western influence on Chinese culture, (p. 11) The continuing political campaigns during communist rule have left their imprint on the development ofrecent Chinese culture, "culminating in 1966 with the cultural revolution as a traumatic climax" (p. 1 1). The Chinese people do not view Western ideology as a set of clearly articulated principles and standards. Western ideology is perceived in terms of a lifestyle ofaffluence, material comfort, and a high degree ofpersonal freedom,© 1995 by University wnich the Chinese have seen in American films and television programs. Expoof awai ? resssure {o Western gims an¿ television has made the Chinese more aware ofthe large gap between the media portrayal ofreality and the reality oftheir own lives. The socialist utopia has come to seem like nothing more than an unfulfilled 422 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1995 promise after forty years oftoil. The cultural adaptation to these forty years of communist influence on the one hand and to recent Western influences on the other is reflected in social and material relations, values, beliefs, and attitudes. These responses vary among the Chinese according to differences between age groups with their dissimilar socialization experiences, between men and women, in urban and rural areas, in diverse educational and income levels, and in access to official mass media and Western culture (p. 13). In chapter 2, the authors describe the tools that they used for their cultural research, as well as their research aims. They compare the results oftheir own data analysis to what they know about the traditional values of the past. In order to conduct a multivariate statistical analysis, they selected seven independent variables : age, gender, education, income, urbanization, official media information, and Western cultural influence (p. 56). The aim was to give a general picture of the nature and direction of cultural change up to the present. Part 2 deals with the research findings. The various chapters are devoted to family relations, social relations, job preferences and work ethic, organizational relations, community life, and cultural values (i.e., general perspective, family and children, and traditional beliefs). In what follows, I will highlight certain aspects ofthe data and the remarkable results of the data analysis. In chapter 3, which deals with...