LONDON, Jan 15, 2012 (IPS) - President Hu Jintao of China made headlines in the early days of the new year saying China and the West were engaged in an escalating culture war, and calling on Chinese people to strengthen cultural production to defend themselves against the assault.
His call has struck a chord with local government officials eager to jump on the culture bandwagon as a new way to spur economic growth. But liberal intellectuals and culture heavyweights have expressed misgivings about Beijing’s new culture blueprint, warning that state promotion of "cultural industries" will lead to a new property boom under the disguise of developing "cultural experimental zones".
"Culture is perhaps China’s last uncut economic pie," says Zhu Dake, culture researcher at Shanghai Tongji University. "In a year of leadership transition when everything is politically sensitive, promoting culture is easy and uncontroversial. Everyone is eager to get their share of the pie but big state companies are in for the gain from property development only, and the whole thing is doomed."
Beijing-based art critic Carol Lu is equally sceptical: "A government drive to promote culture means we will have more physical features of cultural development. There will be a boom in large-scale galleries and other art spaces but this does not necessarily mean we will have high-quality works."Read the rest at IPS
Building a Cultural Front Against the West
By Antoaneta Becker
This is actually a big deal for several reasons. First, Hu is correct that China is a cultural powerhouse that will make its mark on global cultural advances in this century.
In promoting culture, the leadership has let the genie out of the bottle, literally. For it is genius that drives cultural change, and genius is the enemy of mediocrity, which the Party represents. Moreover, once Pandora's box is open, specific results may be uncertain, but transformation of the status quo is certain.
Can China monetize its culture? Absolutely. This will automatically resolve the intellectual property and piracy problem, when the Chinese see that there is money in culture for them other than through copying the work of others.
4 comments:
Don’t the Chinese realise they are being phenomenally un-PC? The high priests of Political Correctness have dictated that questioning multiculturalism is not allowed. All cultures must be merged, which means the world will eventually end up with a pan-world monoculture: which means the end of multiculturalism. Oops!
One day those sanctimonious, liberal, brainless, sociologists in academia will tumble to this inherent self-contradiction in multiculturalism. As for anyone with a brain (e.g. MMTers) the point is obvious.
How can they say they have ctheir own ulture when the whole system there runs solely to acquire the premiere western financial assets?
Either USDs or Euros they dont care, either one will do.
If you zealously seek to save in the western foreign financial assets you dont have your own culture, you are zombies trying to act western, you are rejecting your own culture.
They will start to have their own culture when they stop exporting.
Matt, I don't think that economics is the biggest problem wrt cultural development. Rather it is political repression that requires all public expression to be PC. Culture doesn't need funding as much as freedom.
To quote the Chairman himself, "Let a hundred flowers bloom."
The Hundred Flowers Campaign, also termed the Hundred Flowers Movement, refers mainly to a brief six weeks in the People's Republic of China in the early summer of 1957 [1] during which the Communist Party of China (CPC) encouraged a variety of views and solutions to national policy issues, launched under the slogan: "Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land." Following a brief period of liberalization, the Communist Party cracked down hard, forcing confessions, sending outspoken students to labor camps, and imprisoning many more. Hundred Flowers Campaign
So they wish to repeat the earlier experiment. Encourage creative expression, then crack down and arrest potential troublemakers.
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