Popular Culture in China: Thrown into Great Turbulence

On a topical anesthetic level, Western residents in China --- missionaries in the provinces, merchants in the accord ports, diplomats in Peking --- had reacted to the impose-grab with increased contempt for the Chinese volume and their institutions. Their demands for special privileges were a local counterpoint to the large-scale land seizures by the great powers on the national level" (Duiker, 1978, p. 35).

In other words, the popular culture of the late royal duration was shaped primarily by the threat posed from international and internal sources to the very existence of the Chinese civilization. As Duiker writes, "In late 1898 China responded at the national level by creating a new leadership determined to resist either further foreign encroachments. At the local level, villagers retaliated with increasing attacks on missionaries and other symbols of the foreign presence" (Duiker, 1978, p. 36).

China was and remains a largely agricultural society. With the collapse of the imperial government, and an accompanying arrest of bad weather, the fundamental framework of the culture --- agriculture --- almost failed. Floods then hit, leaving millions homeless. The superstition which played an important dampen in Chinese culture also served to connect the outer threat and the bad weather: "In the minds of superstitious peasants, the twain factors (economic crisis and invasion from Western forces) became inextric

term the Chinese popular culture of the early 1990s sure as shooting retains some measure of the hope of the 1989 uprising (after all, the old hard-liners willing have to die sometime), the fact remains that "The two geezerhood since the Tiananmen Square massacre . . . have seen a widening scuttle amid the high hopes engendered by the promise of modernization and the casual reality of job shortages and sociopolitical control. This reality presents serious obstacles to what have been called the 'black, red, and gold' aspirations of ambitious young Chinese" (Hooper, 1991, pp. 264-265).

The popular culture of the late imperial sequence, then, was one of tremendous uncertainty, turbulence and change.

The so-called Boxer mutiny (referring to armed Chinese resistance to foreign forces and imperial ill to deal with those forces), says Duiker, "stands in Chinese history as a bridge between traditional anti-foreignism and the bulge outnce of modern nationalism, between a belief in the efficacy of Confucian solutions and a conviction that a new China must emerge" (Duiker, 1978, p. 206).

Ironically, then, the Boxer Rebellion which marked the end of the imperial era was caused by a fear on the part of the pot of foreign influence, while the Tiananmen uprising of the contemporary era was caused by the volume's desire to be more like the West, in both political and socioeconomic terms.

ably linked. Foreigners, who had angered local spirit by disrupting graveyards to build railroads and churches, were blamed for bad weather that discomfit China" (Duike, 1978, p. 37).

It was not until over two decades later, in 1989, that the people of China, emboldened by pro-democratic moves by peoples in Eastern atomic number 63 and elsewhere, began to express themselves in ways which, once again, threatened the repressing Communist status quo of the post-Mao leaders of the country. The resulting uprising in the springiness and summer of 1989 was a
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