Some thoughts on how to write about Chinese culture well. First of all, it's not fixed, immutable, eternal, or singular. There's just as much historical, geographical, and linguistic variety in Chinese cultural history as European history.
Even mainline PRC culture has gone through massive generational changes *in our lifetimes.* 八零后 and 九零后 culture differs dramatically - their work and study habits, their beliefs, their attitudes toward the world, even their folkways.
The PRC's version of cultural history can no more be trusted than any other high-nationalist history, especially with the doubling down on racial-national elements.
Many, many words in China - like everywhere else - have shifted in meaning or emphasis over time. When a Chinese official uses a term in 2018, just because somebody used the same term in 1600 doesn't mean they're thinking of remotely the same thing.
Material factors are critical in culture. The mainland understanding of 'guanxi' today, for instance, is shaped by the intersection of the planned and market economies in the 1980s.
And when you're talking about China in the past, the comparison points should be its historical contemporaries. Take the idea that Chinese culture is particularly clannish or family-based, for instance, and then think of European nobility or mountain feuds.
When Chinese wrote about their own culture historically, remember who was writing and why, and try not to give a vision filtered purely through a scholarly class. Remember that propaganda is as old as empire, too.
To take a prominent example, 'Confucian' can be a slippery a term as 'Christian,' and the history of Confucianism and Confucian values is messy, complex, factional, and intersects with the values of ordinary Chinese in weird and wonderful ways.
When you write a big, sweeping sentence, think about whether it would make sense for, say, Italy. 'Christian values have dominated in Italy for 2000 years.' What does that mean? What does it overlook, or elide?
China's system of governance, work culture, and institution are full of direct or very-close copies of the Soviet Union. But almost nobody talks about the influence of Soviet culture or Communist thinking, despite it being a very clear and direct influence.
In general, prefer the immediate explanation to the distant, remember that culture shifts and is learnt in very different ways with different generations, and remember that tons of stuff, from Buddhism to Marx, came from outside.
And remember that there's *so much* of it. I've read widely in Chinese history and culture. I grew up with Chinese myth and legend. I write about it as part of my living. And I discover aspects and stories and histories I didn't know *all the time.*
