/lit/ - Literature

>>19395451
Also the stuff about social ordering rituals ("li") merging with the individual in a harmonious way is pretty interesting. The idea is that the most human person is someone who is able to perform social rituals both perfectly and spontaneously. I think a lot of this would've been in various political rituals but also tea ceremonies and things like that. But in today's China, I don't think they practice some old-school Confucianism but the importance of political ritual is obvious if you follow the government's stuff because there are loads of ceremonies where there's a certain way of doing it, a certain way they flick the flag when they unfurl it -- and that all seems very Confucian to me. The individual's spontaneous desire merges with the social ritual so it seems effortless:

https://youtu.be/9wPq0M_T8JQ

Xi is also presented in a "harmonious" and balanced way. He's somewhat expressive, but not too expressive. American politicians waving their arms around or smiling with Cheshire Cat grins would seem really vulgar in comparison I think.

>>18943616
Pretty much. I think people like to selectively pluck things out and then use that as a "win" in their culture war business. So the Chinese internet jannies kick some LGBT groups off Weibo or censor some Western movies with too much manlove, and for /poltards/ that means China is going to slaughter globohomo any second... while they're quietly rolling out anti-discrimination laws and sending Chinese transgender Oprah to the World Economic Forum to be their global LGBT ambassador (and also voting "yes" at the United Nations on pro-LGBT stuff). But for those guys, that doesn't matter, because the appearance that you're winning is all that matters.

The political system there is different, too. The government is run by boomers, and they're conservative in some ways, but I think they're always trying to "balance" different interests or find some kind of "harmony" between different interests, so nobody gets everything they want -- which gives everyone something to grouch about -- but most people get something out of it, too. And that creates a kind of order. It's a single-party state. In the U.S., by contrast, Trump was concentrated boomer rage which contributed to setting off a concentrated youth-rage revolt, which is the last fucking thing the boomers in the Chinese government want to see happen, because they have enough problems to deal with as it is. They have all the same debates and generational differences (with some specific cultural characteristics like anti-Japanese sentiment among the elderly... while the youth are all watching anime), but it doesn't seem as intense because it's not being weaponized so much by the political elites.

You'll also see it in how Xi is depicted. The leaders are always depicted this way. His face is not too expressive, but not unexpressive, either. They're trying to balance his appearance. It's like yin-yang man, dialectics! Or something.

It was also funny, the Uyghur genocide story has broken down, so I read another article in the U.S. press by some dipwad saying that China is actually genociding minorities by "recognizing them into oblivion" by promoting their language rights and identities as a way of creating unity with the Chinese state, because they're guided by Marxism and see these ethnic divisions as temporal phenomena so they'll just be assimilated into the ChiCom borg hive eventually.