The Chinese, I feel, have an interesting take on everything.
This is what they have taken from James Cameron's 1998 blockbuster, Titanic: That the film is not just a love story, but a celebration of the noblest aspects of human nature.
Thus for 1 billion renminbi the Chinese will clone the Titanic and name it Titanic II. Titanic II will be permanently berthed as the main attraction in a Chinese theme park in the Province of Sichuan. Theme park visitors can experience not only the pleasure of being inside a fabulous luxury liner, but also the pleasure of being part of history.
The goal is to teach people a lesson of responsibility in the face of a monumental catastrophe.
Thus for 1 billion renminbi the Chinese will clone the Titanic and name it Titanic II. Titanic II will be permanently berthed as the main attraction in a Chinese theme park in the Province of Sichuan. Theme park visitors can experience not only the pleasure of being inside a fabulous luxury liner, but also the pleasure of being part of history.
The goal is to teach people a lesson of responsibility in the face of a monumental catastrophe.
A spokesperson for Seven Star, a shipbuilding corporation in China, claims that the Titanic represents the "pinnacle of the spirit of human responsibility" and could teach Easterners the value of "responsibility". There is a implied nationalistic message in this.
In the parlance of Chinese nationalism, being "responsible" could mean putting the larger interest of the nation before the selfish interests of the a individual.
The one Western thought that stands out in my mind about the sinking of the Titanic is that of memory and death. Western intellectuals, in love more often than not with the aesthetics of an experience over the moral lessons of it, have said that we remember the Titanic precisely because it died at the moment, as it were, of its inception. Had the Titanic lived on to become one of the many luxury liners that have sailed the seas, we would simply have regarded it as yet another engineering marvel.
But to the Chinese the lesson of the titanic is not in aesthetics; it's another occasion to call upon the people to develop their nationalistic muscles.
In the parlance of Chinese nationalism, being "responsible" could mean putting the larger interest of the nation before the selfish interests of the a individual.
The one Western thought that stands out in my mind about the sinking of the Titanic is that of memory and death. Western intellectuals, in love more often than not with the aesthetics of an experience over the moral lessons of it, have said that we remember the Titanic precisely because it died at the moment, as it were, of its inception. Had the Titanic lived on to become one of the many luxury liners that have sailed the seas, we would simply have regarded it as yet another engineering marvel.
But to the Chinese the lesson of the titanic is not in aesthetics; it's another occasion to call upon the people to develop their nationalistic muscles.
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