This brings us to two critical questions. Firstly, to what extent have East Asian societies been influenced and shaped by Western modernity? Secondly, in the process of modernization are they becoming more Western, or less Western, or even, paradoxically, both at the same time? These questions do not lend themselves to simple answers. They vary from one society to another and from one sphere to another in any given society. History, as one would expect, affects the answers a great deal – in particular, whether or not a country was colonized, and if so when and for how long. At the one extreme lie the Philippines – first colonized by the Spanish in 1542, then by the United States in 1899, achieving independence only in 1946 – and Hong Kong, seized by the British after the First Opium War in 1842 and only returned to China in 1997; at the other lies Japan, which managed to escape colonization altogether.
In order to explore the extent of Western influence, and whether or not it is increasing, let us consider four very different examples – language, the body, food and politics.
The language that a group shares is precisely the medium in which memories of their joint history can be shared. Languages make possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it… Every language is learnt by the young from the old, so that every living language is the embodiment of a tradition. [337]
Languages are not simply a means of communication, but embody and articulate a culture. To lose one’s language – and thousands of languages are likely to become extinct over the course of this century as they did in the last – is also to lose, in very large measure, one’s culture. As Hung Tze Jan, the successful Taiwanese publisher, puts it:
Language is essential to form an idea – as long as you keep your unique language, you keep your way of creating ideas, your way of thinking. The traditions are kept in the language. Language was an obstacle to us going out, but it also prevented others getting inside. Language was our Great Wall. [338]
East Asia is home to almost half the top twenty most widely spoken languages in the world today. Unlike the European languages, which were essentially spread by overseas conquest (the reason why the number of English, Spanish or Portuguese speakers now greatly exceeds the population of the countries they originated from), East Asian languages have grown organically in their densely populated, rice-growing homelands, as a result of demographic trends and/or land-based territorial expansion. They are spoken overseas overwhelmingly as a result of migration and consequently only on a relatively small scale. Mandarin is the most widely spoken language in the world, far exceeding English, but the vast majority of Mandarin speakers live in China; English, by contrast, has flown the nest.
Figure 9. The world’s top twenty languages.
