BEIJING - In recent weeks on Chinese movie screens there has been a confrontation: Oscar-winning Avatar from the United States pitched against the home-grown Confucius. Both have single-word titles and huge productions in common but - independent of their artistic evaluation - the films are entirely different and offer telling projections of different societies.
The American film looks at the future, showing a world beyond our imagination in which blue giants ride flying lizards and six-legged horses. Confucius takes its audience on a journey into the remote past, a golden era when everything we see - the philosophers and the volleys of arrows - has a familiar ring. Chinese are crowding to see Avatar and shunning the state-sponsored historical epic.
Seen through the prism of Avatar, the US seems brimming with revolutionary spirit, although it is an idea rooted in the past. America has lived without massive social upheavals for 200 years and hasn't had a war in its territory in some 150 years. Conversely, Confucius sees China, having lived until what seems like just yesterday through a century of blood-soaked wars and revolutions, wishing for peace and stability amid a phase of epic transformation.
America has had its fair share of historical movies, connecting New York's Italians with their cultural roots in ancient Rome or tracing the lineage between plastic-armored football champions and gladiators, their iron-clad ancestors. It is intriguing that at the time of the deepest economic and structural crisis in the past 80 years, the US, at the center of the storm, gazes at the future; while China, so far shielded from the worst of the economic problems, harks to the past.
This certainly betrays a deep difference in attitude toward change and crisis.
Despite America's many domestic issues - unemployment, difficulties in passing health-care reform, waning international popularity - and the many open-ended dilemmas abroad in Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea, President Barack Obama is still considering intervening in Iran, wants to draw Pakistan more to the forefront, and muses about putting his hands on Yemen.
There are clear signs of overstretching. The US does not have the economic, military and political focus to solve all these issues together, but just like in a science fiction movie, the bold captain of our Star Trek super vessel deems it is his duty to zap all these meteorites as they come. Meanwhile, American society keeps an even, conservative keel.
In a few decades in China, almost one billion people will have moved from the countryside to the cities and 1.5 billion people will have partly shed their traditional Oriental upbringing to embrace an urban, modern mentality.
The Chinese saw their lives dramatically change in less than two decades, from one of humble, dark, flat abodes, where toilets were public, hot water a rare luxury, food scarce, clothes drab and transportation was by bicycle or overcrowded bus to a life of neon-lit streets in a concrete jungle of modern furnished skyscrapers; food can be extravagant and clothes or cars come from any corner of the world. In other words, Chinese are living in a science fiction movie in an age of total yet bloodless revolution.
In the middle of these hearth-shaking transformations, government-sponsored cultural productions try to anchor this modernity to the past and slow the turbo-charged pace of change. As the boat is already rocking quite wildly at home and abroad, Beijing tries to stabilize it. This is not stopping the boat, but making sure it doesn't capsize.
As Chinese economic and political expansion and its new appetite for trade, raw materials and energy are already creating massive changes in all interested countries, Beijing wishes to minimize other changes, such as direct political interventions.
Take Iran for instance. Beijing's purchase of Iran's gas and oil is financing the physical transformation of Tehran's network of subway systems, and it is bringing new ports, factories and technology. To Beijing, this is more than enough structural change.
It is a Chinese perception that too many changes are occurring in Iran, so China does not want to add the Western rallying cry of "bring in democracy" to the burden. This fits the old imperial ideal of the preservation of stability.
In flocking to Avatar, Chinese filmgoers perhaps see more clearly than their government that tempestuous changes are something that cannot be managed but can only be endured. This subtle difference is in a nutshell the one described by economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883-1950) as creative destruction in the capitalism system.
After over a century of capitalism's evolution, Schumpeter, born in what is now the Czech Republic and a devoted student of Marxist literature, argued that modern crises were not crises of the capitalism system, but integral parts of the system. The sudden ups and downs of the capitalist cycles were not a warning of impending total revolution, but the nuts and bolts of the system in which people lived, and from those crises capitalism would be reinforced, not weakened.
In a way, science fiction - almost a literary version of Schumpeter's creative destruction - is part of the present, as Avatar and daily experience in China prove. (2010-03-11 Asia Times)
