Upon the arrival of the new year in the lunar calendar, the annual debate over the official name of the holiday reignites across eastern Asia. Many from China’s neighboring countries want to retain their unique cultural identities while China seeks to adopt them under the notion of “Chinese culture.” Thus, a culture war ensues between China and its neighboring countries in a way that has historically never happened.
At the dawn of Chinese civilization, approximately 1000 B.C., the central Chinese reinforced a line of cultural distinction between the Chinese and the “barbarians” on their borders to preserve the novelty of Chinese culture. Kings from neighboring countries like Korea and Vietnam, however, often displayed pride as a member of the Sinocentric East Asian system. They not only adopted many Chinese political, social, cultural, and linguistic practices, but undertook the responsibility to spread their interpretation of Chinese culture to other Asian peoples. Despite evolving political borders because of military conflicts, vague cultural borders blurred territorial differences. Few cultural conflicts erupted, unlike today, because there was an overarching shared sense of belonging to the larger Sinocentric East Asian system.
As the Sinocentric East Asian system broke down, however, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cultural borders between nations emboldened and grew contingent upon political borders. Whereas China used to have a strong influence over its neighbors like Vietnam and Korea, the country’s declining economic and political power in this era prevented it from mobilizing against Western invaders. No longer able to rely on China’s protection, the other members of the collapsing Sinocentric system based their resistance against imperial forces on a newfound meaning of nationalism. Following the demise of the Nguyễn dynasty in 1946, for instance, emerging leader Ho Chi Minh rallied the Vietnamese people under a new national identity that sought to separate itself from “a thousand years of Chinese rule.” Thus, as China’s neighbors developed independently, their cultural distinctions were part of each emerging nation’s identity. After the People’s Republic of China was founded, China repudiated any efforts to save the traditional East Asian order that was considered backward, feudalist, and reactionary. This catalyzed the formation of the modern nation-state system for East Asian countries.
After the 1970s, however, China began to recognize the benefit of becoming the political and cultural leader of East Asia. As the nation was rebuilding according to Deng Xiaoping’s creative Open and Reform Policy, the need for a continental leader of East Asia was felt by the Chinese, who had already served as a global power for centuries in the past. China’s pursuits, however, have not been positively received by its neighbors.
In recent years, South Korea and China clashed over the latter nation’s cultural appropriation of traditional clothing in the ancient Korean kingdom of Goguryeo. While China insisted that this kingdom is part of Chinese history, Koreans believed China’s interest to be “inclusive” was not in good faith because it wants to assert “the view that the Republic of Korea is not a fully legitimate country deserving respect or sovereignty.” China refuted this claim of cultural appropriation, as well as others, with the argument that a nation cannot own a cultural identity, especially if it is part of a shared history. The Chinese essentially ask: why is it the case that peripheral Chinese cultures cannot be part of China’s cultural fabric as well?
Ultimately, China seeks to be a rich cultural hub that would complement its economic strides and technological innovations, and essentially fortify the country’s membership in the league of dominant global powers. But can China rectify the past and become the cultural oasis it intends to be in the future? The presence of various ethnic cultures, albeit minorities in Chinese society, try to justify the country’s push for cultural inclusivity. However, many of China’s neighboring countries have argued in favor of reclaiming, first culturally and then politically, their “lost siblings” in Chinese society that retain their unique cultural identities. These neighboring countries, and former dominions of Chinese rule, no longer feel impressed to be adopted by Chinese culture as they already have their unique traditions and cultural identities. China hopes to recreate a Sino-centric East Asia from the shared history of the past. The pressing question for the Chinese is how they might achieve this kind of grand cultural revival. Only time and the future generations of East Asians will determine the winner of this tug of war.