Adopting Western tastes

Press, 24 May 1988, Page 12

Adopting Western tastes

From a correspondent for the

“Economist”

in China

IN THE days of Chairman Mao, all a fashionable Chinese teenager had to do was wave the little red book, shout xenophobic slogans and humiliate his teachers. Now street credibility is more demanding: blue jeans, sun glasses, hair styled with gel rather than blunt scissors. Beijing has been hosting China’s first break-dancing competition. If this goes on, the trendy will have to moonwalk like Michael Jackson. They will have to practise hard. One Western journalist at the competition, his judgment possibly soured by having to listen 34 times to the same Michael Jackson track, reported that the 50 competitors offered passable robot dances but «oor

backspins. Still, even Harlem’s break-dancers, who have since moved on to other fads, were beginners once. Not everyone approves. When break-dancing came to China in an American film last year, so many children stayed away from school to try out the new craze that the authorities in the northern city of Harbin banned the dance. Parents are offended: The copying of occidental inanities offends their belief that Chinese culture is superior. Teenagers who crave Western things, from American cigarettes to the fast food at Beijing’s new Kentucky Fried Chicken, are deriding their heritage and mocking their elders.

It can hardly be otherwise. The China run by Mr Deng Xiaoping and Mr Zhao Ziyang accepts that only economic liberalism can rescue China from its poverty. Reform means opening the door to Western investment and capitalist influence and, inevitably, to what China’s older generation terms western decadence. Traditionalists, alarmed by the unemployed youths drifting around China’s cities, call for a return to the old virtues. This month they applauded the party chief in Shanghai for cancelling a beauty contest. But breakdancing decadents and simpering beauty queens are better than marauding Red Guards. Copyright — The Economist.