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A Cultural History
Forward and Introduction
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its unique characteristics as it continuously transformed
and reinvented itself.
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expression that a native Chinese rarely displays. She seemed
very happy, and why not? She possessed everything that her
imagination could conceive. Yes, this was America. With her
father's money she could have everything including the dream
that she was someone else.
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were planning our first China trip together, I searched for
a book of cultural history of China to prepare him for the
journey.
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I was born in Beijing and spent my formative years (during
the nineteen fifties, sixties and a part of seventies) in
China. I am part of a multi-generational family of
intellectuals who have held prominent positions in Chinese
politics, military, law, media and education. My great
grandparents, grandparents and parents were members of the
high societies of the Manchu Imperial, Nationalist and
Communist regimes. Chinese history, especially, that of the
modern period, is also the history of my family.
I left China in the 1970s and since then have traveled the
world extensively and been away long enough to acquire a
non-Chinese perspective of the world. It took me almost ten
years to learn how to think (not just speak) in English, and
about twenty years to feel and express emotions in the
English sense. During the past thirty years, I have been to
four continents, thirty countries, and learned many non-
Chinese languages. I have written several books on legal
philosophy, and global cultural history. Each time that I
read and write in a different language, I compared it with
my native tongue and my Chinese frame of mind, seeking
similarities and differences. I find a slice of Chinese in
each and every language, English, Latin, Greek, German,
French, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, and Arabic. But, there are
always some things missing.
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Long and uninterrupted literary tradition sets Chinese
culture apart from the rest of the world. Like English today
(the youngest international language) the written language
of China, however pronounced regionally, has been one of the
great unifying and stabilizing factors in Chinese
civilization.
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Chinese literature absorbed and assimilated expression of
music, visual imagery, and dramatic gestures. This
historical accumulation of idioms substantially expanded the
horizon of Chinese imagination and elevated its reasoning.
Chinese mind became able to see and hear; it could imagine
and suggest sound and imageries that other languages were
unable to do in words alone until the twentieth century.
Chinese evolved into a language that as abstract and
analytic as German, as fluid as Arabic, and as suggestive
and flexible as English and Spanish. Most important of all,
Chinese had become a language of all of these capacities at
the same time.
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truth and emotion. These theories ignore or deny the
restrictions of their own language. To play God in the field
of cultural studies is an attempt to counteract gravity by
pulling ones hair or fly as a bird soaring, swooping, and
changing direction instinctively. Contemporary cultural
theories have produced less a penetrating or valid worldview
than the bold claim of a teenager who announces that he
knows everything about life before he has lived it. The
only way to fly beyond the limitation of ones own language
is to study the history of other (preferably older)
cultures.
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Chapter I: Music, Dance, and Words is a history of formative
Chinese poetry. Like ancient Greek, Ancient Chinese was
born and grew up intact with its music and dance. The
oldest musical instrument dated back to 8000 BC and the
earliest depiction of dance is dated about 3500 BC.
The legends about the pre-history life of music and
dance were handed down by word of mouth, recorded on
oracle bones and isolated pictographs, and accompanied
by musical instruments that have been unearthed by
archaeologists.
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as the predominant poetic form until the Tang dynasty (618
907). Ci (literally meant lyrics of a song) in the Song
dynasty (9601279) inspired new forms of poetry. This broke
the monopoly of quantitative poetic structure and led to the
emergence of poetry of uneven lines. This innovation allowed
poets more creative freedom while maintaining a highly
complex form.
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Chapter VI: Rhythm and Imagery of Feelings Chinese lyric
poetry could be called romantic, but only in the sense
of the English poetry of the twentieth century. The
natural images in Chinese poetry were much more
enriched compared to those in English Romantic poetry
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Chinese
poetry never had to make a general choice between
nature and man. Chinese believed that nature was
neither divine in origin nor universal in its
structure. Mountains, rivers, trees, and flowers, as
isolated objects described a specific vision of a
single literary mind and portrayed the pulse of his
emotion.
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