We’ve all been there. You’re out in the city, enjoying a delicious bowl of hand-pulled noodles, when you get the urge to text an old friend about how Chinese your life has become since meeting them. You take a swig of Tsingtao and send them an image you saw of a phone styled to look like a carton of Chunghwa cigarettes.

“I call Chinese food, food. Just a glimpse into how Chinese my mind is becoming.”

In retrospect, this all strikes me as quite funny. Because despite being framed as a normalisation of Chinese culture, here the opposite is happening. Rather than treating Chinese cultural exports as
unremarkable, people are clearly ascribing significance and novelty to them for the only reason that they are Chinese.

CREDIT: CFOTO / GETTY
Do you actually like these cigarettes that much more, or are you mostly excited by how novel they seem?

To me, it is difficult to interpret this as an authentic embrace of Chinese culture. The process of cultural exchange between China and Australia has been ongoing since long before Federation, and multiple distinct waves of Chinese migration to Australia have meant that our cultures have interacted more than many European cultures have with us.

Chinese-Australian culture is significantly more robust, widespread, and entrenched than any idea of French-Australian or Spanish-Australian or, say, Bulgarian- Australian culture. You won’t find a “Spaintown” in any of our major cities.

So, what makes these cultural items and ideas so special all of a sudden? Calling attention to it in this manner is not only performative, but also reeks of mockery.

Importantly, this trend is not contained to Australia, but has appeared in the US, UK, and rest of the English speaking world, as well as in a number of European countries. So, why look past our rich cultural
relationship with China? It seems some Aussies would find it preferable to engage with Chinese culture based on a shared “understanding” of it with other Western nations. An agreed-upon set of ideas and aesthetics that oversimplify the cultures and societies of the world outside of Europe — that’s right, we’re looking at Orientalism.

Wait! You cry. These memes are implying Chinese culture and society are superior to that of the West. “Abandon US imperialism, embrace the Chinese Century,” et cetera. Isn’t Orientalism centered around ideas of European superiority?

Well — have you ever observed people try to make fun of a disabled person by pretending to flatter them? Like, they will facetiously praise or hype up, say, a man with cerebral palsy, calling him a “chick magnet” or whatever, and hoping you’ll get the sarcasm implicit in their “compliment”? Even if the comment was not intended to insult, going out of your way like that reinforces the idea that the other person is deficient, and that deficiency must be compensated for in the way you describe them.

As someone who has grown up autistic and had my fair share of “friends” who found amusement in my confusion and odd behaviours, this dynamic is familiar. And, all these China memes make me suspicious.

I’m not alone in this suspicion. As I was writing this article, the ABC’s Asia News Week ran a story about the “Chinamaxxing” trend in which (mostly) white people participate in traditional Chinese cultural
practices on camera, often captioning their posts with “you met me at a very Chinese time of my life.” Online content creator Maggie Zhou is quoted in the article as saying she has “trust issues” around the phenomenon given how Chinese culture has been perceived historically in the West.

The story, written by Madeline Lo-Booth and Amelia Costigan, also notes how cultural trends originating in China are frequently misattributed to Japan or Korea. To some, it’s all the same. It’s all Oriental. Indeed, you also see Western interest in Japanese and Korean cultural exports appear in a way that is distinct to how we often contextualise the same things from European countries. Don’t even get me started on the obscene fetishisation of Japanese culture in the West.

Whether people claim “Eastern” culture is inferior or superior to “Western” culture, they necessarily create a distinction. One culture is ours (Occidental), another theirs (Oriental). It could be argued that this cuts both ways, but only if you ignore history and the fact this distinction was created by Europeans in an act of cultural dominance. Edward Said, who coined the term “Orientalism” in his book of the same name, argues the following:

“The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony. The Orient was Orientalised not only because it was discovered to be ‘Oriental’ in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be — that is, submitted to being — made Oriental.”

Said continues, referencing French novelist Gustave Flaubert’s accounts of the East:

“There is very little consent to be found, for example, in the fact that Flaubert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for her and represented her.

“He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts that allowed him to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was ‘typically Oriental.’ My argument is that Flaubert’s situation of strength in relation to Kuchuk Hanem was not an isolated instance. It fairly stands for the pattern of relative strength between East and West, and the discourse about the Orient that it enabled.”

CREDIT: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Kuchuk Hanem was a 19th century Ghawazi dancer referenced by a number of European writers travelling through Egypt. “Kuchuk Hanem” was not her real name, and is a generic Turkish phrase meaning “little lady”.

Much of this discourse revolves around the prevailing myth of the Orient as a mysterious and exotic place, with strange languages, cuisine, fashion, rituals, architecture, and et cetera. That there is something alien, mystical, even supernatural about these places in direct contrast with “the West”.

Indeed, a lot of the memes I see online are in this vein, mentioning temples and scrolls and monks and the like, and portraying Chinese people as obsessed with magical pursuits of fortune. Often I also see these ideas and aesthetics merged with the Western conception of China as an authoritarian dystopia, with “affirmations” for good luck and “social credit score” inexplicably mentioned in tandem; a crude and utterly incoherent caricature.

CREDIT: TENOR
Barely comprehensible AI slop.

For many it is difficult to imagine life in China as just doing a day’s work and indulging in life’s simple pleasures in the time left over, because this does not match the romantic Western imagination of the Orient as a land that exists for Westerners to “explore” and “discover”. In reality, there is only people trying to get by as they do in every corner of the world. Yes, culture can vary wildly among groups of humans — but in the end, there are far more points of similarity between us than difference.

I’m not trying to chastise anyone here. I am just as guilty of this as anyone. Orientalism is so very, very very very deeply entrenched in
society and culture that we often don’t notice it’s there. The invisible line between East and West feels natural not because of any clear rules, but because of inertia. We continue to create new cultural artefacts and engage in discussions which assume the line must exist, and this allows it to perpetuate. Much like capitalism, Orientalism is a self-reinforcing idea, though is perhaps even more insidious because of the messy and fluid nature of culture as opposed to hard economics.

Orientalism is not a mirage that we can each will out of existence. However, being aware of it allows us to navigate the cultural exchange in good faith. Really, in this context, Orientalism is just a heavily institutionalised form of prejudice. As long as you bear all this in mind, the next time you want to knock back a Tsingtao or two just for the sake of it, I’ll grab the bottle opener.

Although, there are better Chinese lagers…

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This article was originally published in Keep Left #1.