China’s ‘war’ over the human body rages on
- By Andrew Lam
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, July 31, 2014
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Girls in bikinis wash a car at a car washing station in Taiyuan, capital city of north China's Shanxi province on July 27, 2014. [Photo: China News Service] |
Shame is gone
The end of the Cold War however came along with the forces of globalization that surged through the culture and began to wash away hundreds of years of social mores — all variants of a single unifying characteristic: shame.
“Lead the people with excellence and put them in their place through roles and ritual practices, and in addition to developing a sense of shame, they will order themselves harmoniously,” Confucius said in his Analects.
Shame, in other words, binds the tongue and inhibits behavior. Those who seek to change the old world order, on the other hand, learn to be shameless.
Consider the controversial body art showcased in Shanghai in 2005, in which traditional brush paintings were drawn on naked models.
Images of mountains and rivers, of peonies and songbirds, suddenly migrated from the familiar old canvas onto a moving one made of human skin. Most compelling was the female model who had a blue cheongsam with a white crested wave motif painted on her body. She is both beautifully clothed and astonishingly naked — and a literal transfiguration of the past.
Indeed, that old sea of blue and gray Mao jackets has been rapidly transformed into a field of a 100,000 flowers blooming.
Now protestors in China sometimes do so with being naked. And sexuality has become the vehicle to promote individualism. Many women bloggers have become famous for discussing their sex lives online since the early 2000s.
Last year in Beijing, two men stripped down to their g-strings and ran around at Peking University in protest of music piracy. And in Shanghai last year a woman was seen posing nude at popular tourist spots at night and was arrested for bathing in a fountain naked.
Nudity in the US became a popular cultural event — streakers protested the Vietnam war, and the sexual revolution that began in San Francisco became a counterbalance to rigid social mores that eventually changed the cultural life of the United States.
China is in breakneck transition toward modernity, and the fight over the body — how much it should be clothed and unclothed becomes a conversation about something more than issues of morality but social change, and boundaries of freedom.
And the way things go, the borders are definitely shifting.
Andrew Lam is New America editor and the author of “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres” and “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora.” His book of short stories, “Birds of Paradise Lost,” was published in 2013.
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