China and the West

George Bernard Shaw in China : Allgemein.
Wendi Chen : To many Chinese intellectuals, the public face of George Bernard Shaw corresponded to their elevated image of a socially responsible scholar ; they unconsciously transformed him into a culturally more familiar type of scholar and found in him what modern China needed – a public spokesperson with all the necessary attributes : moral conscience, courage, a sense of justice, and great talent. He was regarded first and foremost as a moralist, whose principal purpose in writing was to serve social causes.
Shaw was already widely known in China as an expert in humor by the time of his visit, as is clear from Chinese journalistic and literary writings produced during that time. Shaw's witticisms and jokes were told and retold in print ; essays exploiting the public craze for 'humor' were numerous.
Since the majority of Chinese writers and artists of the time still came from bourgeois families, they were continually pressured to remold their thinking, - that is, to change their political outlooks and adopt proletarian attitudes – in order to serve the proletariat. The Party urged that they adopt two principles : 1) to go among the broad mass of the people in order to understand and learn from them, and 2) to conscientiously study Marxism-Leninism. Shaw was seen as a bourgeois intellectual who had already experiences ideological remolding by actively participating in various revolutionary activities and seriously studying Marx's Das Kapital. In this respect, Shaw was an exemplary figure for Chinese bourgeois intellectuals.
Armed with Mao's thought, critics first of all assessed Shaw's political outlook. In this respect, Shaw passed the Maoist test.
Mao Zedong's theory of the source of literary creation also strongly influenced Chinese critics' discussions of Shaw, whose advocacy of working-class causes was viewed as the determining condition for his dramatic success.

Kay Li : When Shaw's works were first introduced in to China, he was regarded as a mentor showing the Chinese how to modernize Chinese drama and social life, how to enable China to join an imaginary world civilization or global culture, an integrative single entity that encompassed the world and included all nations and cultures. While Shaw's texts were regard4ed as authoritative, the Chinese intellectuals introducing Shaw's works had no intention of debasing China and elevating the West. His translators made use of the cultural gap between East and West less to widen the geographical distance between the two poles than to draw analogies and create assumed similarities between Shaw's Western world and China.
The young Chinese intellectuals hailed Shaw as a naturalist and a realist who presented 'real life'. Shaw did not present real Chinese life, but the intellectuals felt that he presented real life in a general sense, thus showing their assumption of a global homogeneity.
The call for social reforms made Shaw's realism and didacticism especially attractive.
The young Chinese intellectuals were attracted to the idea of exposing unpleasant social facts and to the form of the problem play, but the kind of social facts exposed had to be social facts relevant to Chinese rather than to English society.
The reception of Shaw's plays in China was in part responsible for a reaction against the importation of Western literature generally. Some intellectuals opposed the importation of Western-style-drama, especially the problem plays, because the problems presented in those plays were not completely relevant to the Chinese situation.
Shaw's plays helped to globalize rather than Westernize modern Chinese drama because the underlying concerns surrounding the introduction of Western drama were to centrifugally enable China to join world drama and to centripetally make use of world drama to develop a Chinese theater that could realistically address the country's social problems.
The young Chinese intellectuals were attracted to Shavian methods such as the discussion play and the problem play and to certain concepts Shaw advocated such as individual will and freedom from family control that echoed the ideology promoted in the Chinese Intellectual Revolution. However, the Chinese found some Shavian issues irrelevant or unimportant, the most notable of these being Shaw's intense advocacy of the Life Force and Creative Evolution, and the Chinese responded to these ideas with little att4ention or understanding. So the Chinese were faced with the dilemma of giving Shaw the power of interpretation, of interpreting Shaw themselves, or of rewriting Shaw.