It's the commercialism, stupid
Down with Christmas! One of Chris's posts was about this article reporting a call by PhD students at several top universities calling on young people to be less excited about Christmas. PhD students from the most authoritative universities including Peking, Tsinghua and Renmin University hope to "wake up the Chinese people to resist the western cultural invasion". Is it really a cultural invasion? Yeah, lots of Western businesses want a piece of the action in China, and the Chinese themselves aren't averse to embracing them or things Wetsern. The statement also implies that foreigners are waging some sort of deliberate campaign to turn China into a Western society. I might be some dumb foreign boy, but this seems to assume that modernisation = Westernisation, and that it comes from without. Modernisation doesn't imply Westernisation for one thing; modernisation has deliberately come from within; it follows cultural trends within society. It's like clothing. ...