Dikotter also emphasizes that new goods didn't only benefit elites. A "copy culture" ensured that foreign goods were quickly imitated in cheaper local versions (something else that has parallels in today's Asia), so that even the poorest could acquire brightly enameled basins, manufactured at a fraction of the price of the old porcelain, and lasting much longer than their earthenware equivalents. This too anticipates the contemporary situation where cheap and attractive goods from China, made following patterns pioneered in the West, are today flooding world markets.
This appears to be the first major survey of the dissemination of modern commodities in China during the period 1842-1949. Once again Frank Dikotter has proved himself a pioneer in his field.
One of the most striking differences between East and West today is that East Asians almost invariably prefer to take vacations in highly-developed countries, whereas large numbers of Westerners opt for older societies, ones they imagine to be pre-modern. What this suggests is that there's a fatigue in the face of modernity that afflicts many Westerners, reflected in an extensive dystopian imaginative literature expressive of world-weariness and disillusion. By contrast, East Asians seize everything new with relish, desperate to be first with the latest cell phone models and the like.
I used to explain this as follows. In declining cultures (the West) people have a nostalgia for the past because things are now stagnating, whereas in rising cultures (East Asia) people have little time for the old because for them the past spells poverty and the new success. They want to travel to affluent countries because they perceive their ways are where their own cultures are heading.
Dikotter, however, offers a different perspective. At the end of his book he suggests the Chinese, for reasons to do with aspects of their traditional culture, may be more attuned to the modern than other people. The implication of this, it seems to me, would be that the pan-Chinese world is moving to inhabit the advance ground, and that what Taiwan and China are now fast becoming is what the rest of the world will one day soon be like. The full implications of such an idea, needless to say, can hardly be dealt with in a book review of this length.
RSS