Posted on 01/08/2002 1:20:50 PM PST by Enemy Of The State
The politics of culture in China
By Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING - Those who believed that globalization and multilateral trade have swept aside the last isolationist barriers of the Middle Kingdom got a strong reminder recently that culture is one bastion China's communist guardians are unwilling to relinquish.
The battle for the hearts and minds of Chinese people is not over, said President and Chinese Communist Party chief Jiang Zemin at a Beijing gathering of more than 2,000 artists and writers last month. On the contrary, with rapid economic globalization, the battle is about to intensify as developed Western countries pursue cultural hegemony in international society, he added.
Jiang urged the country's cultural workers to contribute to the revival of the Chinese nation and ward off the "backward" and "decadent" forces that will dawn on the country with its full integration in the global community.
"The current fierce international competition is not only about economic and scientific strength or national-defense capabilities," Jiang warned. "It is also about competition on the cultural front. As a large developing country, China faces great cultural challenges and we should work hard to preserve our national traditions and carry forward our national spirit." He told authors and artists to act as agents who contribute to expanding China's "advanced productive forces" and toward raising the people's "ideological and moral standards".
The high-profile speech appears to be part of Jiang's efforts to leave his mark on Chinese communist theory as the party prepares for its all-important 16th Congress this autumn. In the weeks before meeting the authors and artists, Jiang attended top-level meetings on religious affairs and military science, promoting his ideological theory of the "Three Representatives", which aims to reinterpret Marxist thinking by fitting it into China's new realities. Jiang's new theory requires party cadres and government officials to serve the nation to advance production forces, embrace advanced culture and to keep the people's interests at the forefront of their work.
Jiang delivered his speech at the concurrent congresses of the Chinese Writers' Association and the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. Both organizations are supervised by the Communist Party's Propaganda Bureau, yet in recent years propaganda mentors have seen their authority dwindle as commercialization engulfs both publishing and art.
An article in the English-language China Daily last month bemoaned the "floundering" state of contemporary Chinese literature and the lack of great masters among its writers. "China's contemporary literature would disappoint Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky," read the article's headline. "Chinese writers appear to be either too childish or too selfish to take the social responsibility a real writer is supposed to shoulder," the article said. The reason for this, the article said, lies in the crumbling state of Confucianism, the "conventional moral system in China" that has been shaken by the powerful trend of commercial business.
Decadence in morals and commercialism are being blamed for the emergence of writers such as Wei Hui and Mian Mian, who depicted the life of China's social underbelly in graphic, grim detail. Wei Hui, who penned Shanghai Baby, was described by critics as "decadent and a debauched slave of foreign culture", but her indulgence in sexual scenes went on to win popularity among China's urban youth. The book was acclaimed as an international best-seller in the West.
Stirring even more anger with China's propaganda officials was the recognition awarded by the West to Gao Xingjian, a dissident writer who left China in 1987 and who renounced his Communist Party membership after the 1989 Tiananmen onslaught on the democratic movement. Gao's plays and novels are banned in China, and his name is omitted from the official history textbooks of Chinese modern literature. While some critics regard his experimental plays as a milestone in the development of China's modern theatre, the new generations of Chinese theater-goers have never heard his name.
When Gao received the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature last year, it presented a painful realization to critics at home about the kind of Chinese literature applauded and well received abroad. Both Mian Mian's and Wei Hui's works are banned these days in mainland China. Gao Xingjian continues to be persona non grata in his own country and his plays are only distributed illegally.
"Chinese leaders don't like these new trends," said one foreign diplomat. "It is quite contrary to the kind of Confucian morality which they are trying to promote."
Addressing writers last month, Jiang said: "Literary and art workers should adhere to the truth, oppose falsehood, glorify beauty and goodness, advocate science and combat foolishness."
His call evoked associations with a famous 1942 speech by late Chairman Mao Zedong, one in which the Chinese communist leader said art must appeal to the "masses" rather to the intellectual elite. After that historic speech on literature and art in the revolutionary bastion of Yanan, in northern Shaanxi province, Mao turned the world of art and writing into an engine for propaganda.
"In a way, Jiang's speech is a step backward," reflected one foreign analyst. "The party is telling you what you have to write again."
Anything less would be 'un-' or 'anti-Chinese'.
Maybe we should start talking about Confucious and feudalism here...
These two things were just what Mao tried to destroy in the cultural revolution. One of the lessons learned from the cultural revolution is that you won't be able to destroy Chinese tradition and culture, no matter how radical you are. Those who try to completely westernize China wil never succeed.
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