CODA: THE CONTEXT OF CHINESE CONTEMPORARY ART
From 2008 onwards, China became embroiled in the global economic crisis, as the inevitable endpoint in a process initiated by a political decision made at the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Party Central Committee some 30 years previously. At that momentous gathering, the Communist Party of China (CPC) shifted its political line from one in which ‘class struggle’ served as the ‘key link’ to a policy stressing economic construction. This led to the gradual introduction into socialist China of the laws and regulations needed to sustain a capitalist market economy. By the first decade of the 21st century, the status of the Chinese market might not yet have been fully acknowledged by the international community, but China’s accelerating participation in the process of globalization was patently obvious.
The economic crisis made Chinese artists and critics fully realize the nature of globalization’s impact. Indeed, according to the usual view and experience, globalization stemmed from economic strength. Economists such as Alan Rugman define globalization as multinational firms crossing national boundaries, engaging in foreign direct investment, and setting up commercial networks to create activities of value. Other scholars think globalization should be interpreted as a process of complex change in many diverse fields including the economy, politics, culture, and technology. But it is the combined strength of politics and culture generated by economic forces that actually impacts on all other human activities in a comprehensive way. Against such a background, Chinese artists faced two difficult choices: On the one hand, they clearly realized that local criteria of value cannot provide the authority and legitimacy for artistic value judgments; on the other hand, the construction of a Chinese national culture is also subject to global pressures but China, unlike Western countries, has not gone through the process of systematically constructing a national culture, and so, in the absence of Western choices and opportunities, Chinese artists can sense a loss of the basis of their values, and when Westerners make choices it is hard to avoid the suspicion that these choices are ‘cultural colonialism’.
In the art world, discussions in the 1990s on several artistic questions may have extended into the new century in different forms, and those artists who were important players in modernist and contemporary art in the 1980s and 1990s were now already middle aged. Artistic sensitivity and differences about artistic issues are now the concerns of a younger generation of artists. However, investigating the work of these young Chinese artists is already different from analyzing the art of artists born in the 1950s and 1960s. Most artists born in the 1970s, especially those born after the mid-seventies have no direct experience of history before 1978. They were born when China had begun to restore the national economy and to use Western thought – especially Western liberal thought – to undertake a critical summary and analysis of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ period from 1966 to the end of 1976. The young directly benefited from the opening to Western knowledge and thought and the relatively relaxed freedom of speech of that time, but could read nothing in their textbooks about the thirty years of Chinese history from 1949 to 1978. Thus, although they had acquired some new Western knowledge, they lacked the experience to make any historical comparisons. Indeed, Western thought already permeated intellectual discourse and every corner of society, but in the field of education which officialdom controlled, the political and moral education which students from primary school to university received was mainly confined to Party ideology and government propaganda. No basic knowledge about human civilization or any traditional ethical teaching was wholly or systematically imparted, and as for universal values and concepts – these were fuzzy notions from the West which China had never fully discussed, and officialdom has continued to the present day to remind the population how hostile Western forces will use these as a pretext to subvert socialist China, and if necessary, statements about universal values are often subjected to critique. [1] It is true that the Party and the media increasingly propagated concepts of democracy, fairness and justice, but the political system of this country remains one-party rule, and ‘socialism’ continues to exist both as an ideological concept and as a social system. Among the many ironies is that even though the intellectual emancipation of the 1980s provided the possibility for individualism of different forms and modes, this did not mean that everybody has acquired a systematic understanding of democratic systems and free thought; some young people interpret individual freedom to mean that one can do whatever one wants, and so they lack any situational or historical consciousness for discussing related concrete issues. Most of them are unaware that whatever freedom or individualism they have today is related to the adoption in July 1977 by the 10th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China at its 3rd plenary session of the ‘Resolution on Comrade Deng Xiaoping resuming his post’; they do not realize that the current situation is also related to the publication on 10 May, 1978 in Theoretical trends (Lilun dongtai), the internal organ of the CPC’s Party School, of an article authorized by Hu Yaobang (1915- 1989) and titled ‘Practice is the sole criterion for testing truth’; they are also unaware of the connection with the 25 November, 1978 decision made at the working conference of the CPC Central Committee’s plenary session reversing the original verdict that those involved in the Tiananmen Incident of April 5, 1976 were ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Few people have concerned with later questions: What was ultimately the great historical significance of the decision of the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Party Central Committee on 18 December, 1978 to make the focus of all Party work from 1979 onwards ‘the switch to the socialist modernization drive’? The young could only enjoy the benefits of these events, and even regarded the freedoms of today and the legitimacy of the individual’s private world as natural things, not knowing the underlying background and political reasons for this ‘natural’ situation.
Since 1949, Chinese art has been inextricably linked with politics. At the beginning of the eighties, critics called on people to pay greater attention to the aesthetic function of art, and to abandon the position that art is the tool of doctrine. Because of history – especially the ten year history of the Cultural Revolution, to the present day artists and critics have tended to avoid the vocabulary of ‘politics’. Unlike economists, who regard politics as a mechanism that accompanies the distribution of public goods, artists and critics mainly interpret politics as thought, concepts, and ideology, and in this way, for reasons of inertia and ideology, contemporary artists often either intentionally or unintentionally combine art with political matters, but invariably never elaborate on the relationship between art and politics. Artistic and critical circles still strenuously avoided sensitive political issues, even though political issues are constantly at the forefront of questions related to journalism, the internet media, exhibition inspections, and the allocation of resources. At the same time, the complexity of social affairs has also led to complexity in the expression of politics - for example, political sensitivity stemming from ecological problems, from the process of appropriating and demolishing people’s houses and then relocating them as an aspect of urbanization, and even from rescue efforts during natural disasters.
Just as the works of many young artists proclaim, the high-speed development of the market economy and material ‘progress’ - mainly in the urban context - have satisfied people’s basic demands, and at a time when ‘made in China’ is also becoming a fashionable concept globally, many people - including of course those young artists - very naturally seemed to readily regard today’s world as one very different from that perceived by artists born in the 1950s and 1960s. In academia and art circles, the two decades since the beginning of the 1990s brimming with ‘post-modern’ theory, the streets and lanes brimful of goods that circulate in world markets, and the global links established by the Internet even delude people into thinking that national boundaries are illusory. In artistic circles, it had become routine for artists to fly to New York, Paris, Venice, London and numerous other cities in Western countries to participate in exhibitions or attend activities; the net effect of this also blurred the notion of borders - between nations, histories, politics, economies, cultures, ideologies and even habits and customs, and these feelings also blurred people’s judgmental lines of vision.
Changes in the material world generally led people to think that the reform and market economy had basic legitimacy, based on the indirect and latent characteristics of the impact of politics on daily life and on the basis of society’s lack of any new guiding values. As a result, with the development of the economy, background interests, experience and personal knowledge begin to influence people’s judgments. The 2000 Shanghai Biennale gave some people the feeling that ideology had been dispelled and the atmosphere was filled with globalization, because the different concepts of art, taste, and interest, as well as profit demands of the Biennale’s policy makers, operators and participants, as well as their varying degrees of political sensitivity, dispelled any unified ideological criteria. Many critics still doubted that the reality of such ‘globalization’ could enjoy any assurances from the political system in China, but the political regulation of the early 1990s that the demarcation lines between ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ could not be crossed sustained and perpetuated this non-debatable reality, by not allowing it to surface as ideological conflict. In 1999, Harald Szeeman selected nineteen Chinese artists to take part in the theme exhibition of the 48th Venice Biennale, but few in Chinese art circles noticed this was Chinese contemporary art’s ‘grand moment’ in a globalized context. Regardless, the Shanghai Biennale of 2000 was regarded as a sign that Chinese contemporary art had acquired international status and legitimacy. Later, in 2002, the Guangdong Art Museum, one of China’s three major official art museums, staged the First Guangzhou Triennial of Contemporary Art titled ‘Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990-2000)’. The works bizarrely described as ‘experimental art’ were regarded as representing another step towards China’s legitimization of the ‘avant-garde’, ‘modern art’, ‘the new wave’ and ‘contemporary art’. At the same time, the question of the curator came to the fore with the constant stream of exhibitions and the core of the question hinged upon who determined the themes of exhibitions and who determined the direction in which exhibitions were moving. People knew that in earlier years the official artists associations had determined the themes of exhibitions and exercised control over them. At the same, inspired by Beijing’s 798 art district, the art districts in a number of cities (such as Shanghai’s Moganshan M50, Kunming’s Loft and Chengdu’s Blue Roof Art District) supported curatorial work, and regardless of whether the finance for these spaces came from the market or from funding, they all became active forces in the construction of a new art system. The market also encouraged the emergence of private art galleries, and even though many of the galleries (such as the Upriver Art Museum and the Dongyu Art Museum) of the 1990s had a short-lived history, the strong market led to the appearance of the Today Art Museum in Beijing (June 2002), Zendai Art Museum in Shanghai (Jul 2005), Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing (August 2005), and most recently Chengdu MOMA (2011). All these developments are the result of changes in the new art environment.
In China, people had for a long time been forced to accept the view that economics and politics were quite separate: capitalist markets and technology served the socialist economy, and a market economy and socialism were not contradictory. However, this kind of explanation provided no corresponding foundation in the political system or any unified system of value judgments for the fields of literature and art. Some contemporary artists and critics (mainly teachers in some institutes) had different degrees of contact with the political system, simply by being for example teachers or professors in institutes, and in different spaces with different degrees of intensity and technology they relied on moving back and forth, inside and outside the system. However, this does not mean that there were no demarcation lines around the political system. Since the beginning of the 1990s, two realities – the system and one outside the system - had gradually taken shape in parallel, and regardless of however fuzzy the artistic criteria of the political system were, the old ideology and the official standards that depended on it for their survival continued to exist; the ‘main tune’ (zhuxuanlü) which officialdom propagated was merely an ambiguous substitute term for what had in the past been called ‘political tasks’. Those artists who needed to rely on galleries and the market are not controlled by such criteria in the slightest. As a result, there were two art worlds in China, even though information about these two art worlds was often presented to the world on the same website, e.g. Artron.
After the year 2000, nobody could convincingly point in which direction art would develop, and at a time when the legal identity of capitalists (who if willing could now also join the ranks of the Communist Party as a proletarian vanguard) occupied the mainstream, the questions of whom art should serve and the direction in which art should develop had further emerged in the mechanism of art. The complicated economic sectors had produced complex social strata, but ultimately which stratum was the main strength in this society, or did the different strata constitute a new historical totality? Within the official art system few people contemplated, or could even articulate, these questions.
Most people could see that the economic reforms seriously challenged the authority of the old system, as well as the right of ‘experts’ and ‘authorities’ to speak out. Wu Guanzhong was an older painter within the system, and he was an interesting special case, because he frankly stated that the Federation of Literary and Art Circles, the ‘artists associations’, and the state academies were necessarily suspect, and this made official ‘authorities’ and ‘experts’ extremely tense and enraged. Basically speaking, they found that Wu’s criticism of them challenged their very legitimacy in this new historical period. In fact, these organizations continued to exist throughout the period in which the market economy rapidly developed, because there had been no change in the political system of China, and the old ideological criteria in the worlds of culture and art still existed. In step with the reforms and seeing things from the positions of tactics and cost accounting, the costs consumed by these organizations was insignificant compared with other areas of the old system; because of the system itself, the propaganda function of art still occupied an important position in the work of ideological administrative departments, and so the continuation of these organizations still had a political raison d’être, since the power of the markets and their institutional improvement had still not impinged on the power of mandatory intervention that these organizations enjoyed. At the same time, because art works had the attribute of being goods that could be immediately exchanged for currency, those people in the system who consumed taxpayers’ money could similarly place their own works in the market through the use of power and skillful language; as a result, they not only had power and capital but also obtained material benefits offered by the market at the same time, and they made use of the twin opportunities presented from within the political system (power) and outside the political system (markets). From this perspective, capital also played a part in maintaining the old system.
During the 30 years of reform, official arts organizations in China never staged an exhibition of modern or contemporary Chinese art, except in 1989 when the China Art Gallery (now the National Art Museum of China) allowed the ’89/China Modern Art Exhibition to be staged. This demonstrates that there was no new art system to support new art and artists, and the system and criteria under which art operated were not at all those that accorded with the historical stage which the reforms in this country had attained. The question of which works of art state galleries should ultimately collect had become seriously pressing, if the actual requirements of an age of the reform and of the historical stage this country had reached were to be met. However, against a background in which the state constitution finally contained guarantees of the protection of private property, and contemporary art products were constantly circulating in society as private property items, it was unavoidable that as private collections grew there was an acute need to be able to convert these important resources of the newly constructed system from private commodities into public holdings.
One phenomenon which perplexed critics in the first ten years of the new century entailed the startlingly sky-high prices that Cynical Realist and Political Pop art works produced since 1993 were realizing on international markets. Until 2008, critics launched direct attacks on the artists and works who obtained such high prices in auction salesrooms. Meanwhile, also participating in this criticism of high price artists were some critics of the older generation, such as Gao Minglu who had lived for the previous 20 years in the U.S.A., but who clamored to add his voice to those of these critics. On the other hand, Chinese contemporary art since the beginning of the 1990s had never received approval from the official ‘artists associations’, and even in December 2008, the Chinese Artists Association’s ‘Work Report’ still singled out contemporary art for censure. As a consequence the two artistic phenomena - Cynical Realism and Political Pop – found themselves consistently the brunt of two groups of critics – those critics of high price artists mentioned previously who had never made their values and position clear, and the official line spelled out by the ‘artists associations’.
The transitions in the political system and the reforms that had taken place in the economic system over the previous 30 years were incompatible, and the reality was simply described as ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. However, the main embodiment of these ‘Chinese characteristics’ was the material wealth generated by the development of this market economy and the reality of this incomplete market transition, which resulted in a uniquely ‘fractured society’. In any case, the nature of ‘socialism’ – the Communist Party holding power and the incomplete market economy – received its guarantees from the official media, ideological propaganda, the structure of education, and the political system. This was also the reason why the National Artists Association administered by the government under the leadership of the Party could use large amounts of taxpayers’ money to hold an art exhibition extolling the Communist Party, while art which reflected or embodied real problems and new concepts had to continue to survive in an uncertain market environment as it totally lacked any state funding.
Politics still functions as a brake on contemporary art by controlling the mechanisms of public property. One only has to investigate the history of the fine arts since 1979 to realize that whenever there is any discussion on the platform for artistic exchange, or on the environments in which art works are exchanged and artists receive the costs and resources from this trade and exchange with the artist in trade of the work of art, one can see the influence politics exerts on contemporary art: it is the official fine arts organizations that really hold the legal power, the opportunities, and the resources to conduct exchanges, and these official organizations control the right to represent the country and the right to distribute the relevant resources. Those contemporary Chinese artists who already play a significant role in the international community have never become the representatives of China’s contemporary national culture, and it is the enforcers (or messengers) of the national ideology, the National Artists Association, who have no understanding at all of the position in the world of these artists, but suspect instead that there is some ulterior motive behind the forces that have pushed these Chinese artists to prominent status.
However, inexplicably, on 13 November 2009, the ‘China Contemporary Art Academy’, an affiliate of the official China Art Academy, formally opened in Beijing. The first president of the institute was Luo Zhongli, whose painting Father depicted a man who had endured great hardships but Luo had managed to endure censure from those who adhered to the old ideology. Before the event, invitations to attend the inauguration and to express their congratulations had been issued to officials of important departments of the Party and state (Propaganda Department of the CPC Central Committee, Ministry of Culture, China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, and artists’ associations). The president of the National Artists Association also attended and conveyed his congratulations. At the ceremony, people realized that the among the members of the new institution there were many artists, such as Wang Guangyi, Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun and Fang Lijun, who could never have been acknowledged as contemporary artists by the official artists’ associations. Against a background where their value had not been acknowledged, these artists now held the hands of officialdom. This was seen as ‘capitulation’ on their part by younger artists and critics, and as the end of their critical spirit.
In fact, the value of art critique was in a confused and unclear state throughout the art world. In 2008 at a conference on Chinese contemporary art attended by Western and Chinese scholars, [2] one Western participant asked a Chinese critic to explain to him what was unique about Chinese contemporary art and what its significance was for world art history. The background to this question was of course the effects beyond the realm of economics of the ‘rise’ of China. Specifically, Western scholars’ attention had been direct to the constantly growing prices that Chinese art works were fetching at auction. In China, some critics regarded this phenomenon as something that had been only cooked up by businessmen, but they could not explain why it was contemporary art rather than official art or some other type of art which attracted market attention. On many questions what was vexing was perhaps what relationship existed between Chinese contemporary art and Chinese art traditions, and there were no materials available to the Chinese conference participants to provide an informed answer. It can be imagined that given China’s rapidity (this rapidity being apparent in all sectors), Chinese critics were not completely prepared for providing an answer to the question. According to the usual intellectual logic a basic critical framework should have been available, but for some time, Chinese critics had not worked to provide one and it seemed that within a very short time it had become very difficult to provide a clear basis for making judgments.
Indeed, China’s economic development had led to a lot of conjecture. In 2009 when the Hollywood film 2012 was shown in China, it did well at the box office, because the film addressed many of the problems mankind would have to face together in the future. Even though the film’s director (who was not of course an engineer concerned for life’s realities) points out the importance of ‘China’s rapidity” for saving mankind, the complex and distorted background to ‘China’s rapidity’ is not discussed in the film. Whether or not the crisis can be resolved by mankind is a question that cannot be answered, but for real people the question before them can clearly be judged: the intrusion and intensification of social inequalities, the massive degradation of the environment, and large-scale ecological destruction are all the result of ‘China’s rapidity’. On the afternoon of 19 December 2009 the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change concluded in an atmosphere of wrangling and disappointment. The various participating countries in the battle to reduce their goals and responsibilities revealed the imbalance in profits and power that exists. Even though the Chinese delegates explained that there needed to be a historical view of development, China is nevertheless one of the world’s major greenhouse gas emitting nations, and the questions of reducing carbon emissions and environmental pollution are major problems for China’s development. In other words, as China globalizes it needs to bravely shoulder the responsibilities of a world power and necessarily reform its original system and management system. However, daily events and existing problems show how serious and difficult their resolution is, and mass violent incidents come close to spinning out of control. At the same time, ethnic problems in Tibet and Xinjiang have never been as thorny as they are today. The daily details and information about problems arising from economic development, political reform and ethnic conflict enter the spiritual world of the artist in all their complexity, and he or she can respond consciously or unconsciously on the basis of his or her own unique knowledge, background and experience.
On 10 December 2012, when at a session of Hanhai Autumn Auctions devoted to pre-modern and modern paintings from the Qingyun Tang Collection, a work painted by Xu Beihong in 1938 and titled Baren Jishui Tu fetched RMB 153 million (more than RMB 171 million when the commission was added), the question of the art market again became a hot topic in the media. The art market had not ground to a halt because of the earlier economic crisis or because of its criticism by the art world. On the contrary, even more capital was flowing into it, and when people heard that many private funds were entering the art auction market, this meant that capital investments had replaced the earlier private collectors based on family inheritance, interest and knowledge. People were concerned that the large-scale influx of capital might have a detrimental effect on art production, because by this time the concept that money corrupted the soul was still widespread. Those with an ethical sense of values were unable to have sufficient faith in neutral money being rationally used. At the same time, 2010 was also regarded as the first year in which funds were injected into art exchanges within China, and the investment in artworks had already evolved into an accompaniment of capital and not only an interest or passion. However, regardless, in that year Chinese auction houses exceeded RMB 50 billion in sales (the sales in the previous year were less than half of this) and people were hopeful: the value of civilization and art had rapidly commanded attention and great respect. People could see that the Chinese art market of today had expressed the respect for art through prices, an art work being able to represent spiritual wealth and material value at one and the same time, and this was a rational historical turn. However much critics might clamor about those markets, if people compared today’s situation to that at the beginning of the Republic when treasures from Dunhuang were looted and sent abroad or to the days of the Cultural Revolution when the Red Guards had destroyed antiquities, then it was easy to come to this happy conclusion.
Most intellectuals agreed. Capital was not a simple economic concept but a manifestation of a sense of values. China found itself in a transitional period of very rapid change, and this transformation was not simply confined to China’s degree of industrialization, urbanization or GDP per capita, but more importantly to the direction in which China would move: the core question was into what type of state and society with what sense of values China would evolve. To the present day China has not acknowledged the basic rationale of any sense of ‘universal values’, even though China has signed the International Treaty on Human Rights, and this is because they are an expression of Western civilization and are regarded as containing elements that will subvert socialism. In the first half of the twentieth century, science and democracy advocated by the May Fourth New Culture Movement overthrew the ideology and concepts of the Confucian order that had ruled China for a long time, but the bitter anti-Japanese struggle abruptly terminated the development of this intellectual conflict. In the 1980s people continued to draw on Western thought in the ‘intellectual emancipation movement’ of that time that once again promoted science and democracy and delivered a critique of Stalinist and Mao Zedong authoritarianism. Yet modernization based on ‘economic construction’ did not lead to a rejection of the old ideology (dogmatic Marxist historical materialism) and the construction of a new system (constitutional democracy). There was no civil society that could provide a basis for these ideas and system. As a result, following the growth of the economy, problems of social justice and truth became increasingly more obvious, and the gap between rich and poor rapidly widened. In the last few years, people have debated whether China needs to adopt ‘universal values’ or can it create a ‘Chinese model’? Can China continue to develop the economy using nationalism while maintaining a one-party autocracy, without there being any abrupt change in the structure of state power and social management? These questions are all related to art, because they impinge on the allocation of state resources for artistic development and the legitimization of the value systems of art, as well as on whether the art world needs guarantees of its new values and system. Moreover, the true basis and content of the nation’s art strategy depends on the resolution of these questions. In today’s China, there has been no change in a system in which ideology is based on politics and provides the only authority for legality. In the wake of massive changes in material life this has led to correspondingly severe losses in spirituality, morality and values. Over the past thirty years, the guiding ideology of ‘class struggle’ has been replaced by concepts of ‘developing the forces of production’, ‘advanced culture’, ‘the outlook of scientific development’, and ‘harmonious society’, but because the latter were all determined by politics and were not part of a philosophy or system of values they lacked the systematic qualities that characterize Western universal values, and this meant that the old political system was always distorted and undermined ‘ideologically’ by the reform of the economic system. As a result when values float like bubbles that disperse in the air, the questions of fragmented reality and artistic questions can all be understood.
The earliest influences on the Chinese people were Confucianism and Taoism, and Buddhism was later introduced. The spiritual world of the Chinese people constructed from Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism continued until the Late Ming period when China was also ‘baptized’ into Christianity. The concepts of science and democracy rapidly became part of the Chinese people’s spiritual world. Through the suffering of war and political movements, and especially through the thirty years of intellectual emancipation and reform and opening in the economic sphere, the spiritual world of the Chinese people absorbed elements of the new culture, and compared with those nations and peoples that only have Islamic or Christian civilization, the structure of Chinese civilization is more complex and richer. According to the historical experience of mankind’s existence and development, the level of people’s consciousness is always related to their richness of knowledge and complexity of experience, because the overall completeness of knowledge and experience forms the basis of understanding and judgment.
The twentieth century was a century of suffering and dramatic change for Chinese society and, even though its issues have been different at different times, art has its uniqueness. However, today, the Chinese world has still not been able to extricate itself from a number of basic problems that relate to the past. Today, Beijingers can see exhibitions of Hiroshi Sugimoto at Pace Gallery, while students and teachers at the Central Academy of Fine Arts can see works by Jean Baudrillard in the academy art gallery and discuss his philosophy, but the problems that Chinese artists and critics face go back to an earlier time. This is not necessarily a bad thing and the phenomenon touches on a unique characteristic of the civilization: the possibilities of creation can be sought in its continuity. In fact, Chinese art from the Late Qing to today has developed and changed through understanding and reflecting on this sequential flow.
20 May 2012
NOTES:
[1] [2] In February 2007, as one of the Party’s leaders Wen Jiabao made the following statement in an article entitled ‘On the historical tasks in the primary stage of socialism and several problems I have encountered in foreign policy’ (Guanyu shehui-zhuyi chuji jieduan de lishi renw he wo guo duiwai zhengce de jige wenti): ‘Science, democracy, a legal system, freedom, and human rights are not the exclusive preserve of capitalism, but are values which mankind has pursued in common in the course of a long historical process and they are the fruits of civilization created together’. However, this statement has had no bearing on the critique of ‘universal values’. In 2008, Chen Kuiyuan, Head of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, made the following criticism: ‘In the past Christianity advocated its religious doctrines as universal values, and today the West authoritatively pronounces its ‘democratic views’, ‘views on human rights’ and its free market economic theory to be universal values; China is like a shadow following a person when we too talk volubly about wanting to integrate with “universal values’’’. (See: Panorama [Guangjiaojing], September-October issue 2010, no. 456)