Alastair Kwan

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About Work

Appropriation or Appreciation of Chinese Culture: making an educated choice

The boundary between cultural appropriation and appreciation is hard to define. However, what is clear, is that we need more transparency in our educational system about the effects of colonisation and how colonial attitudes remain entrenched in our society. Only once this has been achieved can people develop an informed opinion on the United Kingdom’s position in relation to other cultures and what falls into the categories of cultural appreciation and appropriation.

Our perceptions of China in this country seem to switch between two ideas; an extreme, oppressive and untrustworthy state or an ‘oriental’ land full of mystique and ancient traditions. Our ‘modern’ attitudes in the UK have been shaped over the past two centuries, starting with the two Opium wars that were fought between China and the UK. It was victory for the British that led to the occupation of Hong Kong by the British Empire. Public opinion of China has since been shaped by tensions between our two countries; tensions that are still ongoing today.

With the Opium Wars came a body of Victorian anti-Chinese literature, which aimed to shape public opinion on the Chinese immigrants that had started settling in the London Docklands. Writers including Charles Dickens and Charles Dickens (Jr.) wrote about ‘sordid’ opium dens in Limehouse that were run by Chinese immigrants, infecting Londoners, ready to lose their souls in this powerful drug. The irony was that the British were actually the ones selling opium in China, grown in Bangladesh, which was then smuggled through to the Canton region of China to be sold on to Chinese addicts (much against the will of the Chinese Emperor).

Much of this literature was fictional, a Western projection of its own exotic fantasies of the

‘orient’. Later, writers like Sax Rohmer took up the baton and invented the character of the evil genius ‘Fu Manchu’, a Chinese mastermind criminal who lived in the depths of Limehouse. As a demonstration of how infectious this literature was, in the mid 20th century ‘Fu Manchu’ became a series of horrifically culturally inaccurate films, lent its name to a certain type of moustache, and the name was even later was adopted by a Californian rock band in the 1980’s.

It is upon foundations such as these, that many of our stereotypes of Chinese culture rest up. Recently a discussion around how Chinese culture is presented in the West has slowly started to gain traction. Films such as Crazy Rich Asians (2018) have tried to improve ‘Asian’ representation in the cinema, along with a general movement towards the decolonisation of British curriculum. We have historically fetishized Chinese characters and language, reducing it to an alien language, made up of four-word idioms.

However, schools have actually started to recognise it as a useful foreign language with more and more allowing students the option to study it. Generally the subject of decolonising our education is being brought to the table and recent student movements such as those at Oxford and Cambridge to remove statutes of Cecil Rhodes and to return a Benin Bronze show that we are starting to challenge our own status as ‘coloniser’. However the lacuna in the British education system on its complex history with China needs to be addressed.

Once we start questioning our preconceptions and stereotypes of Chinese culture in the UK, we can begin to make a more informed judgement when faced with the dilemma of deciding whether something is or is not cultural appreciation or appropriation.