I’m here to talk about something I know very little about: The Great Ten.
Just in case you don’t know anything about me, I read comic books. I buy comic books. I also read lots of other things, but if there’s one thing I grok, it’s comics.
So, when the publisher of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman announced to the world it would be introducing a team of super-powered Chinese heroes, with powers reflective of their home country, I began to hope that they would also reflect moral and ethical values that could be uniquely Chinese.
Of course, this led me to wonder: what the heck are Chinese values, anyway?
In Superman, for example, we see the values and behaviors of the quintessential American insider and outsider melded into one person. Smart, confused, handsome, bespectacled, strong, weak – it’s pretty easy to figure out which traits go to which aspect of the Superman/Clark Kent mix. In Batman, we see a far more personal dichotomy. The struggle to improve one’s self and help others at the same time hints at a psychology far deeper than mere “vengeance.”
China, though, is a different question. With a history not nearly as clean-cut as the United States’, with origins sometimes drastically at odds with current regulations, it’s hard to discern what’s important to whom. Confucianism would dictate familial fealty and piety to be near the top of the list. From what I’ve read, many Chinese still consider blood ties to be extremely strong. Wandering around as a backpacker, though, it’s a bit hard to see. It’s not as if people wear their genealogies around their necks.
Monetary concerns are also a big part of Chinese culture. Gifts are most often money, when in the west we would consider a desired object or one with sentimental value to be worth more. The current government has placed a high value on controlling thought and expression – would a Chinese hero display a rebellion against that, or a patriarchical deference to it? Many of the people my Financial and Menu Adviser and I have run into have been helpful, but we’ve encountered a few rude SOBs as well. Is one the face and the other the reality? Both? Neither?
Without living in a place for an extended period of time, it’s extremely difficult to gain a sense of what’s important and what’s not ethically. It’s equally as hard to gauge the value placed on things in America we take for granted, like the assimilating immigrant or Horatio Alger-style hard work.
While nobody can predict how the lives of the Chinese will change as their country moves towards the center of the world’s stage, it seems there’s even less mention of how their values will change, as well.
The following comments originally came to me as email, and I thought the discussion was interesting (if not resume relevent) so I got permission from Renee to post them as comments. Do as you will.
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I just wanted to write you about the most recent installment- the one about
the Big Ten. It was so interesting, the idea that culture is reflected in
superheroes in comic books. But I tend to look at it the other way- that
comics send out the message, that minimally the relationship goes both ways.
You should be asking, if there is some sort of freedom of speech or plan
that includes writers (whatever that may be, and I am not suggesting that in
this country it came from the government) what Chinese values are most
likely to be put forth in order to create some sort of national identity. I
think writers tend to create superheroes that they WANT people to believe
embody national values, so because we have superman, we believe that
Americans believe in right and justice, not to mention vengeance and the
justification for violence if necessary. Because we have wonder woman and
batman, spiderman etc, we can believe that there is such a thing as “the
American Way” instead of dealing with the reality that is at least as
complicated, conflicted and paradoxical as any other society in the world.
Do you understand what I mean?
R
I do understand. It’s a bit chicken-and-egg, but I think much of the reason that such characters have lasted for more than 60 years has a lot to do with their ability to represent values that people aspire to. Whether or not they’re successful in their emulation of them is another story. And the governments, of course, rarely succeed in inspiring anybody except the megalomaniacs and those with delusions of grandeur.
The interesting thing about these Chinese characters is that the Chinese government is supposed to have created them. So in a story, they’d have to reflect the purported values and not actual values of said government. Whether or not they should reflect its faults as well as its ostensible aspirations is another wrinkle.
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The other part of it that I find so fascinating is the response that Google got when it went to China. There wasn’t the response that wasn’t it so fantastic that Google was opening up China so much as what a sellout they are in that they were willing to kowtow to the chinese gov’t and self-censor in order to get in at all.
So, do you think that if something smacks of government intervention it would automatically be suspect even if it is something so attractive as a comic?
R
The two interesting things about Google admitting it screwed up in China were that it addmitted it screwed up in China, for one, and that as a company, people held it to the higher standards it espoused. Because in its dealings with the Chinese government, I recall reading that Google’s contracts weren’t drastically different from Microsoft’s or Yahoo’s.
I think in America, it’s impossible to do anything that has even the faintest noxious whiff of government intervention without arousing the ire of some people. But at the same time, Americans have proved themselves time and time again in the modern era as just not giving two shits how badly the government is lying to them.
I can speculate that in china, the people here are at least equally wary, if not more so – hello, cultural revolution! But in terms of writing superheroes, I think that people under any regime love icons, and love to “worship” them. Given the walls of official secrecy here – did you know that a dam that burst in the 70′s was revealed only recently to have killed something like 250,000 people? – I doubt that the average person would think of their superheroes as anything other than glorified Yao Ming’s.
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