Does China lack positive role models
This may sound weird but in the West growing up you've got comic books, right
You've got spider-man Superman, you know Batman people fighting for justice
you know people you can look up to as a kid and be like I want to be like that or if you're lucky you've
Got a strong father figure to follow someone who teaches you how to do right
And I think it's an incredibly important thing. I did however notice that in China
We don't have superheroes
We've got the monkey Kings probably the closest thing to a superhero that China has so Kong
You know the good old monkey and to bhajiya the guy who turned into a pig
If you know the Journey to the West these are the main characters from that
Failing that you do have some dynasty warrior type people, you know Tata, you know for Tata hustle gildo all that kind of stuff
But this is kind of old and outdated
It's nothing for the modern world when it comes to modern entertainment like comic books and things in China
At least from what I've seen, it's usually kind of very bottom of the barrel toilet humor stuff things like funny school
And the most famous of long-running cartoon series is son mal
Which is about a poor peasant boy and his little adventures which of course are very entertaining
But it's nothing to look up to I don't want to look up to being a poor peasant boy with three
Hairs of my head, you know what I mean?
So the thing is how does this actually change Chinese society and how has this changed the children and my current generation?
So, you know, I've always wondered why
Society especially people of my age and generation in China have this same sort of attitude
I can explain it away using this whole role model thing. You see when I was growing up
I had a lot of choice when it came to role models and you know things to see we had of course he-man and
Ninja Turtles and Thundercats and you name it but there was always something interesting
for us to consume
however in China there was no homegrown media because don't forget China was still recuperating from a sort of
Terrible years that happened, you know during the the past and they didn't have any of their homegrown stuff
In fact, the only cartoons and and consumables for children were from Japan
mainly things like Doraemon
strangely enough transformers is one of the cartoons that made it into China and that's why these days those Michael Bay movies do
Incredibly well in China. It's because of the nostalgia
People that you know can recognize the characters and things like that because let's face it. Those movies are pretty awful
So think about it this way imagine you're growing up in China and the only character
You know cartoon character as a child that you can really identify with is son ma
You know son ma is the longest one of the longest-running
Cartoon characters in the world something like 80 something years old started in the 30s
but
If you look at it, it comes from a time of great turmoil in China and it's reflected in the comics themselves
They're all silent comics. In other words. There's no writing in it
It's just you know
There's no speech so character son ma doesn't speak but you see all these like terrible situations and they are they're awful
It shows, you know, there's him getting beaten up starving to death getting poisoned, you know
Being his friends being shot
His you know horse that he's looking after being eaten by, you know, starving soldiers things like this
It's not good stuff. And you know, you're identifying with the character who's basically a poor peasant who's downtrodden and
You seeing a situation where rich people are the enemy and you see through the son Malcolm X that rich people are bad
you know opulent terrible people and so the character that you're identifying with is a poor peasant and the rich people are the
awful people who sort of kick him and treat him badly and you know take advantage of him and he's just a poor little
Honest boy trying to make his way in the world. So that's who you are. You're identifying with so you've got that
Then you've got the Monkey King
Which is by far the best role model for young Chinese children because this is in fact, very interesting
I like the Monkey King Legend a lot and it traces its way all the way back to the Song Dynasty, which is I
don't know nine hundred and something ad and
That's where the the main legend comes from
but in fact
it's been traced even earlier then that to a sort of a white monkey legend from and I'm not talking about white monkeys like
Like yours truly I'm talking about white monkey as in a an actual monkey
But there's a legend from something like 700 BC. So, you know, this is incredibly old
so it's kind of like
Bible times it's like us looking at the the Old Testament or something like that and using that as our role model
which I suppose a lot of Christians do but
what I love about the Monkey King is
It's a set of stories about
This kind of god-like
monkey and
He's protecting a monk and he's got his travelling companions as they travel to the West in order to get these sort of Buddhist scrolls
but along the way they are beset by
Temptation and evil and all sorts of things and they have to overcome all these obstacles
Placed in their path and it does teach a lot of very positive
ideas
you know as in don't give in to temptation and be careful of evil people things like that, so
Even to this day. I will see young Chinese children running around on the streets pretending to be
Some will come. You know, The Monkey King they do this kind of let me try to balance and do you think
anyway, sorry, I'm not the most supple person in the world at the moment, but you
Know it's to me. It's quite endearing to see this and you know, he's a cool character
He runs around with the staff and he confides and he can fly and he can jump really high and do all sorts of things
so I personally think that this is the most positive role model that
Chinese children now for decades and decades have had then you get
Unfortunately the worst kind of role model which is the lay Fung
Role model I'm using him as an example because there are plenty of other ones and let me explain this
You know
It was in this to the sort of early 60s
The Communist Party had made a huge screw up with the great leap backwards and they'd lost a lot of faith in the people
Because they pretty much
Destroyed the country. So what they did was they?
Manufactured this role model. It's a manufactured role model
His name is layfon and they you know after he died they found his diary
and
In his diary, he wrote how much he loves the people and he loves the party and he loves Mao Zedong
Which is the equivalent to finding a diary where somebody writes how much they love Stalin and Hitler combined?
It's not exactly something to look up to but anyway
the fact of the matter is then this whole
series of photographs
Emerge of this brave young man who?
helps the people teaches children how to read selflessly
You know gives his money that he earned really hard to improving sort of
Local towns things like that
So you've got this very selfless character
But the main sort of points of this layfon characters that he loves the party
He loves mao zedong this tyrant and he you know loves the people, which is a good thing
It's good to love the people of your country. But what he is is he is like a nationalist propagandist hero
so what you're seeing here is a
Glorification of being a nationalist and loving your country and we see many of these characters especially today through films like wolf warrior
Wolf warrior - you have these sort of macho
Soldiers who can beat up everyone in the world and kill foreigners without thinking twice and all in the name of the great and glorious
Communist Party and of course China, so these are the role models. We're dealing with you guys. We're dealing with
basically a
poor peasant
mentality a downtrodden peasant mentality then we're dealing with something fantastic like The Monkey King or these sort of
dynasty Warriors from the son war sure, you know the sort of Three Kingdoms era which are historical figures and you know,
Sort of old generals, but this is ancient history stuff
You know, it's kind of like us looking at Shakespeare for you know, if I'm going around trying to be Macbeth or something
It's it's not quite the same or you know, Shylock or something along those lines
And then on top of that you've got the worst one
Which is the nationalist propaganda hero and if you combine all of these role models together?
You can get a very clear insight into the current state of the mentality of Chinese society
Get a lot of very nationalist
proud
Chinese citizens who at the same time very insecure and see
foreigners and rich people as the enemy
All kind of based somewhere in the middle with the good stuff that you get from The Monkey King, etc
coming to this realization has helped me understand why you have these people to go out of their way to
attack anyone who they see as either being
bourgeois or rich or
foreigners who say bad things about China say bad things or criticize China because you know,
You're going against everything that they were brought up to believe
Anyway, guys, I hope you found this as interesting as I did. I can't wait to see in the next one
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