Topic: The Contemporary “Onlooker Mentality” (“看客心理”) in China
The “onlooker mentality” is a term that is translated from one of the most critical topics in Lu Xun (鲁迅), one of the most famous writers and thinkers in modern China. It is used to describe a phenomenon in modern China where people are very numb and indifferent about what the people around them are suffering from and how badly the country has been invaded. Because of some recent incidents where people act as onlookers, I feel like this phenomenon that was issued nearly a century is still happening now. Thus, I would like to look into this question further.
Reading 1: Is Contemporary Chinese Society Inhumane? What Mencius and Empirical Psychology Have to Say
This article is derived from an incident in 2014 where a toddler was hit by a car, and no one came to help the kid, and eventually, she died. The author Wenqing Zhao analyzed contemporary Chinese society by referring to Mencius’s ethical philosophy and modern moral psychology studies. Zhao landed on the conclusion that, like what Mencius says, people can be and might genuinely be altruistic, but “empathic concern for others is a fragile feeling that can be easily crushed by environmental factors (Zhao 359)”. Zhao also thinks that this kind of incident where people indifferently look at as passers-by constantly happen in contemporary China indicates that the cold, indifferent “onlooker mentality” is deeply rooted in Chinese society. And the continuation of this phenomenon “is a sign of failed moral education over past decades, and a result of current Chinese juridical monstrosities (Zhao 359)”.
I think this article convincingly outlined the fact that the “onlooker mentality” is an actual issue in contemporary China. More importantly, Zhao graphed the philosophical origin of empirical psychology in China (too ideal to work) and how the PRC has tried to forward social ethics and failed.
This path of the history of morality Zhao drew, as well as the contrast between the ideal society where everyone is pro-social in their very essence and their act of indifference in real-world scenarios gives my research more specific yet various aspects to think about.
Reading 2: Onlooker: Metaphor with Tragic Life (看客：生命悲剧的隐喻)
This essay gives a comprehensive interpretation of what “onlookers” really mean in Lu Xun’s literature and how Lu Xun developed such an analysis of Chinese society. The author Wang Xueqian mentioned the influences that foreign philosophers such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard had on Lu Xun in developing this analysis on Chinese society. The fact that Lu Xun developed this concept by having influences from western philosophers, we can say that this is actually a universal problem.
From this essay, I developed a deeper understanding of the concept of the “onlooker”: the people who lack faith and view others’ pain and sufferings as pleasure. And there are a few quotes that inspired me a lot.
When speaking of what Lu Xun said about the pioneers who fought wars and sacrificed, Wang quoted Lu Xun
“It’s just that the comfort of this sacrifice belongs to oneself, and it has nothing to do with the so-called socialism of the lofty ideals (Lu Xun 416)”.
只是这牺牲的适意是属于自己的，与志士们之所谓为社会这无涉。
It’s very sad that the pioneers are sacrificing for those “onlookers” who take all this blood and lives for granted. When viewing all this numbness and indifference, how extremely altruistic does a person has to be to put him/herself out and make this world a better place? How big of power and motivation does a social movement have to have in order to push such a society filled with onlookers forward?
Here’s another quote from Lu Xun about education:
The current so-called education, no matter which country in the world, is actually nothing more than a method of making many machines adapted to the environment (Lu 19).
现在的所谓教育，世界上无论哪一国，其实都不过是制造许多适应环境的机器的方法罢了。
This quote makes me wonder if the education is considered as more “advanced”, why then people are not getting better morally and might even be getting worse with such education? How is education in China now different then what it used to be in feudal times?
Conclusion
Based on both Zhao and Wang’s essays, I’ve made my research topic more specific: given the concept brought up by Lu Xun about a century ago, how much of the society has changed?
Or more specifically, there seems to have been a dramatic shift in society from the feudal society to a modern communist country. No matter it’s in technology or politics, economic, various aspects of people’s lives, everything is much more modernized, not to say that China has become now one of the most powerful countries in the world. However, in terms of the dark side of society, the “onlooker mentality” in this case, how much have we evolved? With so much praising and bragging about how powerful our country is, how many problems in society have we solved? Do people dare to look straight into these issues?
Overall, the contrast and relationship between the superficially shown “changed” and the underlying “unchanged” are what I would like to explore for this research.
Work Cited
Zhao, Wenqing. “Is Contemporary Chinese Society Inhumane? What Mencius and Empirical Psychology Have to Say.”Springer Science + Business Media Dordrecht. 2014.
Wang, Xueqian. “Kanke: Shengming Beiju De Yinyu–Dui Lu Xun ‘Kanke’ De Shengming Jiedu [Onlookr: Metaphor with Tragic Life–‘Onlooker’s’ Life Understands to Lu Xun].” Journal of Inner Mongolia University for Nationalities (Social Sciences). 2004.
Lu, Xun. Lu Xun Quanji [Lu Xun Collected Works]. The People’s Literature Publishing House. 1991.