CULTURE CONTACT IN CHINA: SOME NATURAL TRENDS AND THEIR CONDITIONING BY THE CULTURAL SETTING.

The article focuses on culture contact in China. The study of contemporary culture contact is concerned with the behavior of individuals and groups in any culture, toward manufactured products, customs, social institutions, ideas, and people that come from an alien culture. In his attempt to understand changes in Oriental society resulting from the impinging of such new features upon it, the investigator of these reactions believes in scrutinizing and analyzing the changes while they are going on, instead of leaving it to posterity to draw inferences on the basis of fragmentary sources and half-hidden trails. Much of the data, seems to relate to futile ventures of all sorts which spring up and die down, with little chance of leaving records for the future historian. Yet the ventures which fail, are as significant for an understanding of the process of culture contact and change as are the ventures that succeed. In general, this field of interest and study, though theoretically preempted by certain anthropologists, is being actually attacked only in the usual more or less routine-statistical, descriptive and historical, anecdotal, and preliminary manner by various practical organizations and students of contemporary history.