{"id":17696,"date":"2018-06-14T06:00:58","date_gmt":"2018-06-14T13:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=17696"},"modified":"2018-06-14T07:41:54","modified_gmt":"2018-06-14T14:41:54","slug":"engineering-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/engineering-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Engineering culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The twentieth century in China was, to put it mildly, tumultuous. War, famine, revolution, and totalitarianism deeply impacted the Chinese in their daily lives for most of the century. Bringing social order was the Communist Party, and yet in bringing order and egalitarianism, many other orders were disrupted and tossed out.<\/p>\n

Jung Chang, in her beautiful memoir, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China<\/em>, traces the troubling arc of modern Chinese history through stories from her own family lineage as she tracks three generations of women who evolved with each dramatic cultural shift. Susan Brownmiller provides the context for this book: \u201cThe sprawling canvas is held together schematically by narrative accounts of her maternal grandmother, who was a concubine to a warlord in the 1920’s; her mother, who chose a radically different life for herself in the 1940’s as a Communist organizer married to a zealous functionary higher up on the party ladder; and Jung Chang’s own peripatetic adventures, before her departure, as a Red Guard, peasant and factory worker.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

This work must be read through the lens that understands Mao Zedong as the architect of a new China, building communist ideals onto the blank slate of the peasantry. Millennia of tradition and Confucian cultural mores were cast aside in exchange for the materialist philosophy of Communism. William Rosenberg and Marilyn Young in their book, Transforming Russia and China: Revolutionary Struggle in the Twentieth Century, <\/em>recount how this new culture would begin as a tabula rasa<\/em>. \u201cAs always in Mao\u2019s vision, China\u2019s backwardness did not seem to be an obstacle to socialist transformation but an advantage. \u2026[Mao] insisted that \u2018poor people want change, want to do things, want revolution. A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.\u2019 China, \u2018poor and blank,\u2019 was capable of painting its own revolutionary epic.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

Chang explains how these draconian policies for engineered culture affected her own life. Rather than culture being created through the spark of creativity in individuals created in the imago dei<\/em>, social engineering was imposed from the top down. \u201cAccording to Mao\u2019s rhetoric, we were sent to the countryside \u2018to be reformed\u2019. Mao advocated \u2018thought reform through labor\u2019 for everyone, but never explained the relationship between the two. Of course, no one asked for clarification. Merely to contemplate such a question was tantamount to treason.\u201d[3]<\/a> Birthing culture without linking it to deeply held personal values is totalitarian evil in action \u2013 it creates a veneer of uniformity on the surface that does not touch or transform the soul.<\/p>\n

In the mid-eighties, China briefly thawed to foreign influences, allowing for the first time a wave of English language teachers to arrive and teach. My wife, Karen, was among them \u2013 a young Canadian sent to a coal mining institute in Jilin Province, very near where Jung Chang\u2019s grandmother was raised in Jinzhou. Her agency instructed her team of three women to teach English well, gain respect, and not to proselytize. Much like the advice from James Davison Hunter\u2019s book, they were urged to be a \u201cfaithful presence\u201d as English teachers. As Hunter states, \u201cGod was calling them to something different \u2013 not to be defensive against, isolated from, or absorbed into the dominant culture, but to be faithfully present within it.\u201d[4]<\/a> They served there together for two years and over that period were the first non-Chinese most of their students ever met. Cultural change, through vulnerability, trust and friendship, began to be birthed in the hearts of their students.<\/p>\n

When I married Karen, China was all she talked about. But we ended up moving to Latin America. It wasn\u2019t until 2006 when she would return, this time with myself and our two adolescent sons, as representatives of a foundation. Her teammate had married and raised her family in China, and the couple had been instrumental in leading operations for Shanxi Evergreen Service, whose purpose is described as: \u201cChristian professionals from many countries who work alongside local Chinese partners toward the enhancement and sustainability of regional economic and spiritual development.\u201d[5]<\/a>\u00a0As people of faith, they work in the areas of health care, education, economic development, mental health, family services, and agriculture. This was faithful presence writ large, and it has taken a few generations of people faithfully investing their lives into the specific region of Shanxi. The Norwegian founder Peter Torjeson\u2019s biography, in fact, is entitled We Signed Away Our Lives<\/em>.[6]<\/a> \u00a0The local government authorities have been so moved by their sacrifice, that they honour and facilitate this work rather than impose roadblocks which are experienced by most foreign efforts.<\/p>\n

For my philanthropic clients, I encourage this long-range, deeply-invested, approach to cultural change that begins with the heart but impacts body and soul as well. Leaving one\u2019s comfort zone to discover the vitality of a life of faith lived on the edge like these folks disrupts the status quo and comfort that we are frequently lulled into in our capitalistic, Western contexts.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Susan Brownmiller, \u201cWhen Nuances Meant Life or Death,\u201d New York Times, <\/em>October 13, 1991, accessed May 21, 2018, https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1991\/10\/13\/books\/when-nuances-meant-life-or-death.html.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> William G. Rosenberg and Marilyn B. Young, Transforming Russia and China: Revolutionary Struggle in the Twentieth Century <\/em>(New York: Oxford, 1982), 246-247.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China<\/em> (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 504.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> James Davison Hunter, To Change the World <\/em>(New York: Oxford, 2010), 277.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Shanxi Evergreen Service website, \u201cAbout Us\u201d, accessed May 21, 2018, https:\/\/www.evergreenchina.net\/press\/about-us\/.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Shanxi Evergreen Service website, \u201cHistory\u201d, accessed May 21, 2018, https:\/\/www.evergreenchina.net\/press\/history\/.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The twentieth century in China was, to put it mildly, tumultuous. War, famine, revolution, and totalitarianism deeply impacted the Chinese in their daily lives for most of the century. Bringing social order was the Communist Party, and yet in bringing order and egalitarianism, many other orders were disrupted and tossed out. Jung Chang, in her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1259],"class_list":["post-17696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-chang","cohort-lgp8"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17696"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17701,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17696\/revisions\/17701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}