The Ministers of Cultural Resentment

 January 9, 2022

The Ministers of Cultural Resentment

Something has to be said about this widening window onto China and the Far East in Western media. In short, nothing can be done about it unless we introduce the concept of differing language. Language comes with history, and history comes with popular memory. Part of that popular memory is traumatic, especially when it comes to the events surrounding the overthrow of the last imperial Chinese dynasty. It will never not color the memory of Chinese people toward history. Some say that the current government of China is naught but another new dynasty. And dynasties in China have never not ruled with fear, coercion and violence. There have been bright spots in the past, but only for the literate population. 

With such a language and a history, the consolations of philosophy are great, but they act at a certain remove from the population and create enclaves of literate ministration. There is an immense tendency toward entropy. Part of the reason Chinese people downplay the extraordinariness of their suffering is because their government needs to centralize their needs into one holistic policy. Some of this is because of language but some of it is just plain bad sense by the Communists.

It's complicated to speak of minority rights in China because some of the most notable minorities are full-on co-opted as the undergirding for Chinese philosophy, putting their fate out of the hands of contestations about rights and into the hands of statecraft. The government may make some rare concessions over the Days of Bridge Man and the White Paper Movement, and then the philosophy apparatus will make some, on a scale so slow that it will be tough to track. What this all adds up to is a system where protests and most movements of the people don't coordinate to public policy, in a way that may make Western observers uncomfortable. But this is the cost of making a system that has a cultural element to it as well as a political one. People in the West may know about yin and yang. This is the consequence of it. In a space of contestation bounded by a language that allows for the position of a cultural minister, sometimes you have to make your case to these ministers of cultural resentment. --Now, this is China and not just Chinese so the problem is finally openly stated here with Bridge Man, that, since the Cultural Revolution, there has been no one else to make the case to... so we shall see how history changes.