Popular Culture in China

As imperial power disintegrated at the end of the 19th century in China, the popular culture was thrown into great turbulence. One important difference with respect to the two crises which marked the end of the imperial era (the Boxer Rebellion) and the beginning of the 1990s in China (the Tiananmen massacre) is that the end of the imperial era and the Boxer Rebellion involved intense foreign forces, while the Tiananmen Massacre involved primarily Chinese-against-Chinese forces. This difference in the origins of the two periods is important because of the impact of that difference on the nature of the popular culture of those two periods. The post-imperial era saw remarkable changes in the popular culture, because of the influx of foreign influences and because of the basic changes in the government of China after the Boxer Rebellion. In the 1990s, on the other hand, after the Tiananmen Massacre, the government remained basically unchanged (at least in short-term consideration) and the culture similarly underwent only minor changes, mostly in terms of increased sociopolitical repression.

As Duiker writes, with respect to the general chaos of the popular culture in China at the end of the imperial era, "The rapid disintegration of power in China had not only whetted the appetites of the great powers, but also had increase

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of tremendous uncertainty, turbulence and change. The so-called Boxer Rebellion (referring to armed Chinese resistance to foreign forces and imperial failure to deal with those forces), says Duiker, "stands in Chinese history as a bridge between traditional anti-foreignism and the emergence of modern nationalism, between a belief in the efficacy of Confucian solutions and a conviction that a new China must emerge" (Duiker, 1978, p. 206). China's popular culture in the subsequent decades was most influenced by Westernization under Chiang Kai-shek, and then by the takeover by Communist leader Mao-Tse-tung. Under Mao, traditional culture blended with Communist ideology, leading to primarily repressive measures exercised by the government whenever popular culture seems, in the eyes of the rulers, to threaten that government in any way. The so-called Cultural Revolution of the 1960s was intended to eliminate Western and progressive elements in the Chinese culture. It was not until over two decades later, in 1989, that the people of China, emboldened by pro-democratic moves by peoples in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, began to express themselves in ways which, once again, threatened the repressive Communist status quo of the post
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Approximate Word count = 1299
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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