Dr. Alice Evans- Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy

[RINO Tom]

I am generally skeptical of grand narratives about "patriarchy",  particularly the more widely and vaguely it is defined. The world of Mad Men and present day Iranian regime could both be called sexist, but they share little in common in what this sexism consists of and how it fits into larger cultural meanings and structures within those societies.  There is also often the assumption that all women everywhere basically want the same things, and it is far from clear that this is the case. It seems to me that a gendered division of labor is only significantly unsatisfying to women within particular conditions, and that is a big part of the story of why it is contested at some points in history and not others.

It's also worth noting that the world of Mad Men arguably wasn't some "progression 'forward'" as far as sexism goes but indeed represented a far more unfair world to women than the more traditional societies that predated it.  Dr. Jordan Cooper has a great YouTube video criticizing the "Trad Wife" phenomena where he points out that the weird archetype of the 1950s suburban woman staying home and cleaning/cooking while her husband leaves to the office is NOT traditional in a historic sense, and truly "traditional" societies had much more of a cohesive family unit where the father was expected to work as a team with his wife in a much more meaningful way.

[RINO Tom]

Agree mostly. My mistake on the confusion - I didn't mean social conservatism relative to other Americans - I meant social conservatism relative to other Chinese groups. In particular, the well-known divide between North China and South China on collectivism vs. individualism - and secularism vs. religiosity.

For the religion thing, I don't have a good source for that, but I think it's pretty well-known that Buddhism is much stronger in Southern China. Same with ancestor worship. Joss paper is something you see in stores in Southern China/Taiwan, but not in Northern China. Though I do think you're right that Buddhist Chinese don't strongly use their religion as a political identity the way say, many Burmese Buddhists do.

As an aside, the higher historic religiosity of South China is also why I think in the modern era, weird cults like Falun Gong and White Lightning are much more popular in the North than the South - established religious traditions inoculate societies against weirdo cults, lol.

Forum member RI made a map of religion around the world that showed a North-South divide in China. I didn't really know about this growing up, even though I was kind of aware that Taiwanese, Hong Kongers, and the older Chinese immigrant waves from Guangdong were more religious than the post-Mao Mainland China diaspora. It certainly explains things like Taiwan being very Buddhist and more steeped in Chinese folk religion.

That being said, the mercantile/coastal/sorta cosmopolitan nature of Guangdong I think makes it significantly more socially liberal than other rice-agriculture Confucian regions, like inland Southern China - or for that matter, Vietnam or Korea. But North China is honestly just a psychological aberration in Asia.

Yes AFAIK Northern China is the only part of agriculturalist Pacific-facing Asia with a history of a strong indigenous state where the dominant/default staple grain was not rice.

Funny enough in countries where Chinese immigrants disproportionately come from the North, the political reputation is very different. In South Korea for example, Korean-Chinese vote so monolithically left-liberal (probably in %s exceeding US blacks), Korean conservatives have imported American conservative talking points about Korean-Chinese vote-by-mail fraud to "rig" every election a Korean conservative loses.

I had no idea about that. My impression from learning about international elections on here is that Chinese Americans are more politically left-leaning than Chinese Canadians, Chinese Australians, and Chinese New Zealanders despite possibly being less Northern Chinese on average, due to differences in the history of Chinese immigration and in the political status quo (the US is more right-wing overall and has a more complicated history with race).

Kind of OT, but it would be fascinating to see RI's map with the following adjustments:

1. Removal of "Religious Nones" as a category (i.e., literally the "most popular religion" in each area).

2. A map of only the Protestant (blue) areas but divided by most popoular denomination!

I'd tag him if I knew how, lol...