Chinese cultural appropriation
As Chinese ‘crepe’ catches on abroad, a fight to preserve its soul ensues, write Mike Ives and Tiffany May
WHEN is a pancake not a pancake? The unassuming jianbing, an eggy street food snack from China that resembles a French crepe, is increasingly trendy abroad — a symbol of Beijing’s growing soft power. It even inspired the creation of a superhero character in a hit Chinese comedy, Pancake Man.
But in the Chinese city of Tianjin, a local trade association sees the snack’s soaring popularity — and variety — as a threat. Over the weekend, it imposed rules that attempt to standardise the jianbing, apparently as a way of saving the soul of northern China’s quintessential street food.
The rules have prompted headscratching among Chinese eaters, and even some metaphysical speculation about what makes a jianbing in the first place.
The rules say that Tianjin’s jianbing vendors should hew to a fixed recipe and a precise pancake-diameter range of 38cm to 45cm, according to photographs of the rules that were posted online by Chinese state media outlets. The rules also say that a jianbing should be served in packaging that lists its expiration date and the name, address and phone number of its creator.
Song Guanming, chairman of the Tianjin Catering Industry Association’s jianbing branch, told local news outlets that the rules would not be strictly enforced. But he also said the association would establish model jianbing stands to help raise industry standards and boost the city’s pancakeslinging reputation.
“As we make the ingredients and cooking method public, we guarantee that the costs of jianbing will not increase, the flavours will be authentically delicious and business will definitely improve, if practitioners follow the standard,” Song was quoted as saying.
But on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like social media platform, some said that part of the fun of eating jianbing was that its flavour varies by vendor.
“The nonstandard pancakes are the ones I like eating,” one user wrote.
“Everyone’s tastes are different,” another wrote. “Is there even a need to standardise?”
Several vendors in Tianjin told a local newspaper that they were unsure whether to follow the new rules. One said that he viewed them as an affront to his art.”We’ve always used other ingredients,” the vendor said, referring to a rule that declares mung bean batter the city’s official jianbing base.
The jianbing rules were first reported on in English by The South China Morning Post.
Xinhua, a state-run Chinese news agency, says that the jianbing’s origins lie in Tianjin, Beijing and Shandong province. Song of the catering industry association has said that one of the snack’s two primary strains, the jianbing guozi, has a 600-year history in Tianjin.
People.cn, another state-run news outlet, reported that brick murals and pottery remains show that the Chinese could have been rolling thin pancakes on flat, heated griddles for about 5,000 years.
According to Bing, a jianbing business in New York, legend has it that the snack was invented by a third-century official in Shandong province who needed to feed an army of wok-less soldiers. The company says that the official’s bright idea — cooking on a copper griddle — drove his army to victory “on a tummy full of bings”.
While the original jianbing is hugely popular as a street snack, gentrified versions can be found from Beijing to Brooklyn. It comes with a quirky range of toppings, complementing the standard ingredients of eggs, scallions, cilantro, chilli and sweet sauce and a deep-fried dough wafer.
In New York, for example, Bing serves bings a la kimchi. And in Hong Kong, the semiautonomous southern Chinese city, the bubble-tea shop ThirsTea offers them with condensed milk and peanut butter. Fuchsia Dunlop, a London-based cook and food writer who specialises in Chinese cuisine, said that as people in China become more interested in food as a marker of cultural heritage, culinary associations see an opportunity to lure tourists and are moving in some cases to enforce allegiance to traditional recipes.
China, long a haven for piracy and counterfeiters, has worked hard to strengthen its intellectual property laws in recent years. Chinese leaders want its companies to invest in new technologies and new brands — investments that could be easily undermined by copycats.
China has also moved to open more courts to hear intellectual property cases and has increased penalties. Foreign brands, such as New Balance sneakers and Michael Jordan, the basketball star, have won high-profile infringement cases in recent years.
But Dunlop said there was now a debate in China about whether efforts to strictly preserve culinary heritage were going a bit too far. “It’s a living form of culture that is always changing and being influenced,” she said by telephone from the western province of Sichuan.
Dunlop pointed, as examples of evolving culinary heritage, to pizza, which came from Italy and is now beloved by Americans, and to Sichuan’s regional cuisine, which is world-famous for an ingredient — the chilli pepper — that hails from the Americas.
NYT