The Cultural Invasion of the Western Culture towards China

The Cultural Invasion of the Western Culture towards China China is an old country with over 5000 years history, boasting its splendid and brilliant spirit, along with the extensive and profound culture. However, with the time going ahead, especially after the curtain-up of the reform and opening up, China is faced with the head-on confrontation of the western culture, replenished with exotic flavor and challenged by the dazzling cultural phenomena at the same time. The western culture serves as an all-inclusive kaleidoscope with the good and the bad intermingled. The western culture is unscrupulously on a big run in such an oriental-featured environment, which sparks a debate among the nationals. As far as I am concerned, the western culture permeating China is more a cultural invasion than a cultural integration.

Firstly, the western culture has been giving rise to the dissipation of our traditional culture. We can still call to mind the joyful occasions when we spent the Spring Festival ten years ago—pasting the couplets on the front door, hanging the red lanterns, setting off firecrackers, and dropping around to pass on our good wishes for the new year and children making a small profit by getting lucky money from the elderly. But there is no such jubilant scene any more during the Spring Festival. Rather people turn their eyes to the Christmas Day on which all the shopping malls place a Christmas tree for publicity and promotion, attracting more customers to involve themselves in the shopping binge, and people indulge themselves in all sorts of celebration parties, not even knowing what Christmas Day was actually celebrated for. However, it seems that Christmas Day is on the track of being the symbol of fashion, while our Spring Festival becomes synonymous with out-dated. On top of that, more and more people tend to enjoy the Valentine’s Day, overlooking our Double Seventh Magpie’s day, a day with profound culture base and rich cultural meaning. From the decay of the traditional festivals into which our Chinese culture is condensed, we can see how long a shadow the western culture has cast on our soil. It spreads like “the rain sneaking into the night with the wind, moistening all the things silently”, not the tender spring shower, but the acid rain with formidable and corrosive power.

Secondly, the western culture has converted our lifestyle with the packaged products. What we eat is packaged---it is not expected to sit around the table at home, waiting eagerly for our parents to finish the cooking; we more often than not go to the western snack bar and leave with the take-away. What we see is packaged---a flood of talent shows which follow in the wake of the western TV programs, have been overflowing from the screen; the group of youngsters rising to their fame overnight have been emerging one after the another, like the canned food of volume production manufactured by the star-forming factory, and although easily made famous, they are easily forgetted about with their shelf life. I would like to assimilate the different lifestyles to the different kinds of medicine---the western lifestyle plays a role as the western medicine with instant result but ensuing side effects; Chinese lifestyle the opposite---taking effect leisurely and unhurriedly with no negative impact. We should

not have been in the blind chase after the western lifestyle which is not fit for us.

After close examination, it is not difficult to draw the conclusion that the western culture has exerted some advert effects on us in some respects. Nevertheless, with the efforts to keep ourselves from the undesirable cultural invasion, we should strive to upgrade the cultural competitiveness of our own.