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 at times invoke 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, 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’splenary 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 time, 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 (July 2005), Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing (August 2005), and most recently Chengdu MOMA (2011), Shanghai Long Museum (2012), and the Yu Deyao Museum (2014). All these developments are the result of changes in the new art environment.
In China, people have for a long time been forced to accept the view that economics and politics were quite separate: thus, capitalist markets and technology serve the socialist economy, and a market economy and socialism are not contradictory. However, this kind of explanation provided no corresponding foundation in the political system, nor was there 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 did not mean that there were no demarcation lines around the political system. Since the beginning of the 1990s, two realities – the reality of the system and the 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’ 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 were 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 the question was 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 were 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.
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’.
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, 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. Previously, the amazing prices contemporary art was fetching in the art market starting in 2005 were attracting attention, and until the outbreak of the financial economic crisis in 2008, sharp fluctuations in the market prices of contemporary art also provides the opportunity for skeptical critics to question the Chinese art market, which led to a fog of judgment shrouding some contemporary art and artists.
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 2010, 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 more rational historical 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, questions of fragmented reality and artistic questions can all be understood.
In 2010 when I completed Chinese Art History in the 21st Century: 2000-2010, in analyzing China’s contemporary art context since 2000 in the “preamble” of that book, I cited commonplace phenomena in politics, the economy, culture, and society in that decade. In addition, in 2009, in the preface to the English edition of A History of Art in 20th-Century China, I cited an April 23 Financial Times report and analysis of China’s economic development, after which I commented:
My mention of the above news report does not mean that I embrace an offensive, narrow nationalism. What is more, I do not feel that the positive news about China that we see in the daily media in any way justifies a sense of complacency. As a Chinese born in the 1950s, I am well aware that our so-called “upsurge” has come at a great cost, to the point that it would be no exaggeration to say that our current reality faces disastrous problems, such as grave damage to the environment, increased social inequity, and huge disparity in the distribution of wealth.
In fact, people often hear that in different cities and areas problems have reached a level of being completely rotten: the problem of further deterioration of the environment, total corruption (even the claim that there is “universal corruption”), the constant increase in social malignancy, increasingly frequent conflicts between the government and the public, terrorism highlighting ethnic problems, general abuse of power, and a total lack of constraints in the system; in every corner of the Internet there are anxious rumors about dire events. Everything suggests that an “epochal crisis” hangs like a haze over China, a context that conceptual artists interested in intellectual games and artists obsessed with style and taste – the two basic categories of conceptual and narrative art – cannot escape.
Of course, there is always art practice that has differing degrees of relationship with politics and history; what most typically attracts Western attention to the mainland Chinese art scene is the increasingly alienated Ai Weiwei - at least this was the situation prior to Ai Weiwei’s August 2015 German media interviews and his exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in October that attracted large audiences. Because China’s political system has not fundamentally changed in the almost four decades of reform and opening since 1978, for most of the time people remain sensitive to art games - whether that involves political engagement or avoidance. In short, artists and critics remain involved with politics.
Artists and critics frequently emphasize that art is art and that it should distance itself from social and political issues. Interestingly, on the one hand, China’s centralized system of power generally reminds intellectuals that the space accorded democracy and freedom is very small, and calls for constitutional democracy and universal values constantly appear on Internet media (and in print media if there is ever the opportunity); on the other hand, people in art circles, especially young artists and critics rarely talk about or discuss such questions. Artists focus internally on extremely individual experiences or even personal sensitivities and vulnerabilities, while critics are keen to pepper their writings with quotations from Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, or Jacques Rancière (read in Chinese translation) used in writing articles that avoid describing China’s reality, even in a roundabout way. What is complex is that most people realize that simply shouting out slogans about “universal values” has lost any real significance, given that officialdom obviously and tenaciously reminds people to remain on high alert for Western universal values because these concepts from the West have always been considered by officialdom to be a subversion of socialist China. In fact, as Western observers also note: the fragmentation of Iraq, the dark inside stories of the Afghan presidential election, delays in the Iran nuclear negotiations, the dismemberment of the Ukraine, and so on, expose the failure of Western countries, especially the United States, to promote democratic systems and liberalism – these are after all just one set of theories among many. People question why, if free and democratic political theories and moral truths have basic legitimacy, do we not see effective practices and policies, not to mention actual results? Several years after the Arab color revolutions seem to have failed, or are only paid lip service, in producing democracies like those of the United States as a representative of Western democracy, the actual situation is, in short, a mess. These outcomes of course serve China’s rulers well: China should build socialism with its own characteristics, rather than simply copy the Western doctrine of democracy and freedom.
2014 was Xi Jinping’s first year in office. He and his team faced a mountain of accumulated problems. His anti-corruption campaign led to fierce resistance from interest groups within the Party that reached the proportions of a Hollywood epic, with the result that people can barely summon up the energy and interest to look at what reform measures have been carried out. At the same time, the issues of the military buildup, cyber-espionage, intellectual property rights, and human rights, as well as territorial disputes with Washington’s allies have resulted in increased degrees of tension between China on the one hand and the United States and neighboring countries on the other, so that at the China-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue in July 2016, Secretary of State John Kerry simply reminded China: building a new strategic relationship between the two countries does not simply rely on language; we need action. In fact, the Dialogue quickly slid from strategic discussions to economic problems, revealing that in Sino-US relations (including China’s relations with Western countries), some fundamental issues have not been resolved. Ideological differences remain fundamental, although they are often concealed by language about “national interest”. This context goes well beyond the news, but unless a political event is an enjoyable story, Chinese artists and critics pay little attention to this type of news. Most of my circle of friends on WeChat (technological progress, the control of opinion, and people’s demands have meant that people in China have moved from blogs to direct WeChat) are in the art scene, but when I sent them this statement by Kerry, their comments were few compared to the number of comments they make on gossip from within the art scene.
Excited by jihadists in the Middle East, Xinjiang separatist groups are committing increasingly violent acts in different cities, so that now there are obvious changes in China’s original ideological position in international affairs. Whereas the Chinese Government once supported Arab liberation movements, she now faces threats from ISIS, because this Islamist terrorist organization has announced it will set up Islamist states throughout the world, including China. For China, the fight against terrorism can obviously become an increasingly regular political and social problem, at the same time as it signifies that the complexity of China’s social reality is more global. [3]
In fact, in global politics the consecutive “color revolutions” of the twenty-first century following the 2003 “rose revolution” in Georgia and the 2010 “jasmine revolution” in Tunisia, and coming in the wake of the revolutions in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Eastern Europe, have seen the rapid spread of a new international political and economic pattern of change to Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Iran, fundamentally changing the face of the Middle East, and this has given rise to the fear that the “color revolutions” will spread to Asia, especially China. Indeed, as early as 2011, there were rallies in some cities on the Chinese mainland calling for a “jasmine revolution in China”, and there has been “a sunflower student movement” in Taiwan, and an “occupy” movement in 2014 in Hong Kong; these were seen by official analysts in China as “color revolutions” in the Far East that had “mainland China as their ultimate target”. [4] The problem is how to understand or interpret these changes in reality, and it is difficult to explain these issues in terms of big power strategy. When Taiwan students desperately demanded of the authorities that government decisions must be open and procedurally just, the real cause of the outbreak of the “sunflower student movement” becomes apparent.
In any case, the globalization of economies and markets has led to profound changes in different countries in the region, and so-called cultural particularities are an amalgam of particular knowledge within different civilizations. An article in the November 2014 issue of Die Welt reported that in 2015, China will have more than 500,000 students studying abroad, which is an amazing figure when compared with previous data. [5] In the author’s opinion, even though China has more than seven million college graduates a year, “their knowledge and skills do not meet the needs of modern social and economic development. Studying abroad, one can cultivate the ability to solve problems independently”. This means that each generation of Chinese will be more deeply involved in the exchanges and collisions between different civilizations and increasingly more people will be acquiring knowledge that will be increasingly complex and remote from earlier knowledge structures. For China, this will of course mean that Western civilization will be more universal in its influence on young Chinese, and the old political systems of ideological control and political education will also become increasingly ineffective.
Today mainstream ideology is hollowed out as it is increasingly challenged by the ever-developing Internet media. On June 1, 2015, 50 provincial police organizations went online as uniformly identified “police inspections of law enforcement” to focus on Weibo, WeChat and Baidu accounts, which was explained as a measure to prevent “cyber crime” as well as to deter “bad words and deeds online”. Global Times, addressing those who suspected that this was designed to counter “electronic democracy”, provided a vague explanation: “Police have no obligation or responsibility to make moral or political evaluation of any statements on the Internet that do not conflict with the law, and will not pursue those who make legal statements. They are only concerned with those who break the law, particularly serious violators”. (Global Times, No. 3621, June 1, 2015, p.14) Reference News (June 1 issue, p.16) also quoted a BBC online report of May 31: “On May 29, China’s Politburo announced that it would set up Communist Party groups in all organizations, including economic, cultural, and social organizations”. Anyone with a basic knowledge of Chinese history and society will realize that this is a further measure intended to strengthen, not weaken, the Communist Party’s grip on society as a whole, and it is in stark contrast to the reform of the 1980s whereby the Party withdrew from government organizations. Shortly thereafter, Global Times ran a story on June 29, 2015 headed “Xiaomi Should Be Applauded by Society for Setting up a Communist Party Committee”. The story reported how the Xiaomi Corporation that produces mobile phones held a meeting on June 19 to celebrate the establishment of its Communist Party branch. The company which has more than 8,000 employees has 104 Communist Party members. How the company will handle the different values of the Communist Party and the company and to what extent the Communist Party will be able to intervene in the business management process and influence company decisions is unknown to outsiders. But what is certain is that the Party Committee will no doubt have an impact on the operations and management of the company; in addition to the existing Board of Directors, there will be a Communist Party Committee, and in addition to the President and General Manager, there will be a Communist Party Secretary. Regardless of who is to assume the role of Secretary, this clearly recalls the period of the planned economy and it seems similar to the State-owned enterprise management model, unless these new positions are all just empty titles. The newspaper report also explained: “Many private business leaders and executives believe that the average performance of Party members among employees is better than that of non-Party members”. The report also demonstrates a skewed logic when it states: “All over the world, large enterprises want to maintain good relations with the ruling party and those who will potentially form a ruling party, and so this is not seen to be a political issue”. These baseless analogies and situations are quite staggering, and the report even goes on to say: “China’s rapid development in the non-public economy show that private enterprises perform better when combined with the political system of the country; this is a constructive direction in the long-term development of non-public enterprises”. (p.15)
2015 was an impressive year of market volatility; the “stock market crash”, combined with the simultaneous obviously slowing economy and the massive explosion in Tianjin on 12 August, raised serious doubts about China and many people simply said that an era had come to an end. Indeed, the possible ensuing rise in unemployment may have prompted national political strategy to direct people’s anxiety and attention towards foreign conflicts which would affect world trade. These were all problems that concerned people. The media seemed to be saying increasingly that the “Chinese economic miracle was coming to an end”. This background affected the art market, and of course, regardless of where the funds entering the art market came from, from at least the second half of 2008, starting with the financial economic crisis, the buoyant contemporary art market had been in decline.
Even though slogans proclaiming traditional culture were continually advanced by the Communist Party, by 2015, the Party School of the CPC Central Committee began to systematically introduce central government and local officials to ancient culture, especially Confucianism. When people attempt to interpret the meaning of the “China dream” proposeda few years ago by the party’s leader, Xi Jinping, thousands of years of traditional culture are understood to be the cultural gene that will ensure the restoration of Chinese civilization, which will help heal problems caused by the economic slowdown and the stock market collapse. In earlier decades, Party cadres at all levels were primarily required to study and understand Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought; this requirement has not yet been formally changed, but what is in fact studied is the traditional ideology and moral standards that were criticized from 1949 until 1976, while the Ministry of Education has begun to increase the space devoted to classical literary theory in textbooks. This phenomenon shows that the Communist Party is looking for a reliable and secure system of values, although the present choice does cater to those interested in, or even fascinated by, traditional art. Since the late 1980s “new literati painting” has sailed along smoothly. Around 2014 a “new school of gongbi painting” became influential and it met with no official criticism. Some art critics and artists believe that the phenomenon is an ideological and conceptual compromise or a static product. However, even though critics often question the continued use of traditional Chinese painting materials and tools in the face of the use of new materials and ideas, the discussion of “Chinese-style painting” is regarded as something that can only be clarified in the context of the broader issue of Chinese civilization.
People often let issues slide because they are busy or preoccupied and those who run the country and have defined no new spiritual content for the new century were caught off-guard by the announcement of the agreement on October 5, 2015 of the Trans Pacific Partnership, a document writing the rules for the global economic game for the 21st century led by the United States. China who had grown complacent with its huge economic development was reminded: This country splashing its money around had not only lost the power to formulate the rules of the game, but now realizes that it might be too late to try to expedite reforms required by globalization itself as it faces the danger of being abandoned again by the world. Art circles might still see such events as indirect context, but for quite a long time into the future, China’s economic problems and the social, political and cultural problems that will also arise, will inevitably affect the art market. In the mid-1990s, Chinese critics began to discuss “getting on the international track” and the related question of international art “standards”, and for those critics and related persons trying to obtain the right to assess the value of art, this event again reminds us: will the future art evaluation system come from the West or will it come from a nation that has a long tradition and culture of its own?
Fundamentally speaking, the basis for assessing the value of art is a system of values, and when China in an era of globalization has not yet established a value systems that conforms to this era, then it cannot possibly have the power to control or influence art values. On January 8, 2016, the online edition of the New York Times reported that a golden statue of Mao Zedong in China had been removed. The paper said that the boss of a rural business had spent the equivalent of $ 465,000 to build the 36-meter-high statue of Mao Zedong and the demolition was ordered by local officials. People who understand recent Chinese history know that no unified evaluation about Mao Zedong and his period of history has ever been reached and this will of course influence China into the future. Officials back in the early 1980s made an evaluation of Mao’s record that declared he was seven parts good and three parts bad, although the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China’s Resolution on Some Historical Issues since the Founding of the Party (June 27, 1981), unequivocally negated Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” declaring that “practice proved that the ‘cultural revolution’ was not and could not be any kind of revolution or social progress”. Since 1979, the problem of the history and reality of Mao Zedong has emerged as a symbol of different periods. In fact, the thought, political strategy, and system Mao Zedong established, were inextricably linked with the artistic criteria of the past and, whenever required, the fields of culture and art (including their realms of speech and publishing) would invoke those criteria to impose limits and issue political reminders on ideological standards. For example, in 2013 Beijing Daily published an article titled “Leave No Space for Universal Values”, and the article stated: “Dare to struggle, dare to wield a shining sword. This is our imperative choice!” This readily suggests the tenor of the “Cultural Revolution” period. However, with the increasing complexity of social and economic life, forms of values and standards become increasingly complex and difficult to demarcate. Art itself has the characteristic of expressing values that are ambiguous and complex, but this official ideology has remained influential and it can be invoked in times of need.
In fact, in the same way as a political and economic “international order” never existed, even though Kissinger, who had a historical relationship with China, has discussed this issue (at the 2015 “Beijing International Forum”), [6] cultural and artistic standards have never been uniform. There are no artistic criteria, yet art still exists. At a time when more and more Western art exhibition are held in China, this invariably implies, regardless of the reason, that the influence and power of the art world has changed and shifted. China has become very influential globally because of its economic development, and this impact has challenged the universal stance of adherence to an ideology formed in “hungry Europe”. The most typical example is provided by President Xi Jinping’s March 28, 2016 visit to the Czech Republic, when “Prague broke with precedent in receiving President Xi” (Reference News, March 29, 2016, headline) revealing to the world the changes in European countries: the Czech Republic founded by Havel and the ideological position it maintains has been transformed to allow the national interests of the Czech Republic to accommodate the relationship with the Chinese. [7] Although it is not sure whether the change is irreversible, the Czech Republic’s hoped for Chinese investment “dream” seems to contain ideological considerations. [9] The world is adjusting its historically formed nodes, to maintain a balance in accordance with changes in the structural network. China maintains strict limits of ideology, yet in dealing with issues of international relations, it blunts the ideological edge as much as possible, so that sometimes when people watch CCTV’s international channel they might think they have switched to a European channel. However, Global Times (Tuesday, March 29, 2016, p.14) stated unabashedly:
China is breaking down the ideological iron curtain in Europe, not by reason, but it is by relying on her economic development that China is attracting attraction. For European countries, the benefits of cooperation with China greatly exceed the political benefits of ideological confrontation with China, and this led to a lot of strategic thinking about turning to China. [9]
The 20th century was a century of dramatic changes in Chinese society mired in misery and, despite the different problems in different periods, art retained its particularity but, to the present day, Chinese art has still not extricated itself from many fundamental issues associated with the past. Today, visitors to the Pace Gallery in Beijing can see photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto, and students and teachers of the Central Academy of Fine Arts can see works by Jean Baudrillard works in the Academy’s gallery and they can discuss his ideas. Yet Chinese artists and critics still encounter many problems that can be traced back to the early years. This is of course not a bad thing, but this phenomenon reflects the characteristics of Chinese civilization: possibilities for creation exist in endurance over time. In fact, art changed and developed from the late-Qing to the China of today with understanding and reflection correlated with that change and development.
Saturday, 30 July 2016
NOTES:
[1] In February 2007, Wen Jiabao, as one of the leaders of the Communist Party of China, made the following statement in an article titled ‘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 renwu 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 that 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 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”’. Ref: Panorama (Guangjiaojing), September-October issue, 2010, no. 456.
[2] The main participants in this conference at Ditchley Park (October 10-12, 2008) were scholars and professional staff from the British Museum, the Tate, the National Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yale University, and Princeton University, together with scholars from France and the Netherlands. Chinese participants included Gao Minglu, Wu Hung, Wang Huangsheng, Zhou Yan, Fei Dawei, Huang Zhuan, Zhu Qi, Wang Jianwei, Zhang Peili, Sui Jianguo, Sheng Rui, and Wang Zhiliang. This conference was convened with the assistance of Lin Mingzhu’s China Art Foundation and the English collector Susan Hayden.
[3] As a result, at the 2014 APAC meeting in Beijing, China adopted an anti-terror strategy similar to that of other members.
[4] Global Times reported on 25 November 2014 that the Far Eastern color revolutions targeted China. The author of the report was Yang Yucai, a professor at the Crisis Management Center of National Defense University.
[5] The original article states: “Bis zum Jahr 2009 gingen chinesische Akademiker vorwiegend zu Promotions-, Fortbildungs- oder Forschungsstudien ins Ausland, die meisten davon in die USA. Die jährlichen Zahlen neuer chinesischer Studenten in den Vereinigten Staaten lagen bis zum Jahr 2008 unter 100.000. Heute, fünf Jahre später, sind es dreimal so viele, mehr als 90 Prozent von ihnen sind Selbstzahler. …… Nach Angaben des Pekinger Erziehungsministeriums gingen zwischen 1978 und Ende 2013 rund 3,06 Millionen Chinesen zum Auslandsstudium in alle Welt. Darunter waren im Studienjahr 2013 allein 414.000 Schüler und Studenten. Von ihnen entschieden sich mit 236.000 mehr als die Hälfte (beziehungsweise deren Eltern) für US-Eliteschulen und Universitäten. Nach Hochrechnungen für das Kalenderjahr 2014 wird die weltweite Gesamtzahl aller Lernenden aus China auf 460.000 und ab 2015 auf weit mehr als eine halbe Millionen steigen”. Based on this data of growth, this second study described middle school students in China as the "quiet revolution". (See Die Welt, November 24, 2014
[6] Kissinger said at the Forum: “There has never been a so-called world order, but there must be a world order. Otherwise we could face the danger of being destroyed”. (November 2, 2015 the 14th edition of the Global Times).
[7] This was the first visit to the Czech Republic by a Chinese President since bilateral relations were established. The media commented that over the previous twenty years, President Havel and his centre-right cabinet had focused on the human rights issues in their dealings with Beijing, leading to strained relations.
[8] In 2014 the Czech President visiting China told the media that he came to China to “learn how to accelerate economic growth and social stability”, not “as a professor of the market economy or of human rights”.
[9] This official newspaper intentionally obscured the widespread anger and dissatisfaction the attitude of the Czech President aroused in his country; many Czech people (especially intellectuals) believed that the presidential position of avoiding human rights and liberal values and simply discussing economic issues was an embarrassment to the Czech Republic. Moreover, they questioned whether economically it would bring real benefits to the Czech people.