"Chinestern" Culture, or A Lack Thereof

This Saturday, our CET excursion was to the old synagogue in Harbin and St. Sophia's Cathedral. This cathedral is now a history and architecture museum but remains one of the greatest examples of Russian architecture in Harbin. In fact, when I told my one-on-one professor that I was going there this weekend, he said he was planning on taking me there himself, as my one-on-one study topic is the architecture of Harbin and how it reflects the city's history and culture (in case I didn't mention that in an earlier post).

I'm sure many people would call St. Sophia's the most interesting thing in Harbin, but what we did after visiting Harbin's historic places of worship was actually more interesting to me because it gave me a true insight into Chinese present day culture. Cortne, Laura, Dane, and I went back to Zhongyang Dajie where we had gone on our scavenger hunt to check out the Europlaza mall that we had read about in the small Harbin guidebook CET had given us. I have to say I think it was nicer than most malls I've seen in the United States. It seemed so out of place in this city.

While it was really surprising to see Versace and Burberry in Harbin, what was even more strange were the Chinese high-end brands (I used to think that was an oxymoron). "Prich" seems to be the Chinese version of Ralph Lauren, and it's seriously not a knock-off.  The clothes are in the same price range, and they appear to be of the same quality. Unfortunately for the Chinese though, they don't have the same international recognition as American and European designers. Chinese Lacoste is called "Crocodile," once again the same prices; a polo was 800RMB (about $115USD). On the second floor, I thought I was walking into a Holister until I saw the sign "Who.a.u," but the clothes in the store could easily have been in an American store.

This was such a cool find not because I needed new clothes (I discovered soon after arriving in Harbin that I had already brought too many) but because of the way the Chinese were so eager to embrace Western fashion. At first, it was really quite funny to see brands like Crocodile, Prich, and Who.a.u, but as I really thought about it, it wasn't funny at all. It's actually kind of sad. These are Chinese brands, but they have English names. In fact, there weren't hardly any Chinese signs in Europlaza, and the few that were there all had an English translation. Even more evident than the language difference, was that all of the models on the walls were white. I didn't see one Asian model.

The Chinese are so infatuated with the West that they are rejecting their own identity and culture, a product of thousands of years of Chinese history. What's kind of ironic is that they don't really fully understand Western culture. They see Western clothes and buildings and attempt to mimic them, but they don't understand the values of the many cultures that make up the Western world or the fundamentals upon which "our" society is built. This isn't for a lack of mental capacity; it's simply because if you don't grow up in a given society or culture, you can very rarely ever come to fully understand it. I fear that Chinese society is becoming more and more superficial, not only as it becomes more materialistic (because Americans are about as materialistic as people get) but also as the Chinese lose a huge part of their heritage and replace it with the little more than the shiny exterior of the West.