“You must come to Chengdu!”, urged my new Chinese friend. “It’s very tolerant and liberal. Men can be openly gay. Women in my family are assertive - that’s the local culture. Beijing - where I went to university - is very different. Chinese people joke that Chengdu husbands are ‘henpecked’, controlled by their wives”.
My eyes lit up, with great excitement!
East Asia scores as culturally tight; norm deviation is strictly punished. Yasheng Huang blames China’s imperial examinations, instilling rote-learning. Southern (versus Northern) Chinese score higher for collectivism; Thomas Talhelm suggests this is because they grew rice, which requires far greater cooperation and interdependence.
But Chengdu was a major imperial city, heavily reliant on rice! How then did Chengdu become so queer-friendly - hosting China’s first gay wedding?
Obviously, I eagerly arranged to visit, then nose-dived into the empirical literature. This post harness insights from big data to understand China’s subnational heterogeneity, then uses qualitative history to trace cultural evolution and possible causes.
