China's new cultural
revolution By Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING - While the world is getting used
to China's ballooning global trade surplus,
Chinese mandarins are fretting over the one area
in which the country has been posting a continuous
deficit - culture.
China now may be the
world's fourth-largest economy, wielding
increasing influence in everything from global
trade talks to currency rates, but it lacks the
success stories of Harry Potter and The
Da Vinci Code, which would transform it into a
cultural heavyweight producing works of universal
appeal.
"We still have a very bad deficit
to resolve," Zhao Qizheng, former minister for the
State Council information office, said in May. "It
runs
counter to China's fast-growing economy, which has
been expanding by an average of 10% since 1979."
Redressing the country's cultural deficit
is not a problem Chinese officials are intent on
leaving on the back burner while laboring to
appease global fears of China's increasing trade
might. On the contrary, the rise of what are
domestically described as "cultural industries" is
seen by Beijing as the next step along a path
marking the country's transformation from
developing nation to world power.
With
Beijing due to host the 2008 Summer Olympic Games,
the next few years are being perceived as an
opportunity for the country to show that it is
more than just the world's largest manufacturing
workshop.
"It is high time to make
ourselves better understood by the world's
people," said Du Ruiqing, a scholar from Xian
International Studies University.
Attempts
to use cultural pursuits in boosting China's image
overseas are part of Beijing's overall diplomatic
strategy to portray itself as a "soft power".
In diplomatic corridors from Africa to
Latin America and Asia, Chinese politicians have
tried to advance the image of a harmonious and
peace-loving country, guided ethically by its
Confucian values of universal acceptance and
peaceful co-existence. Culture has come to play an
important part in the persuasion process.
"To go global, China must perfect its
cultural policy and rebuild the image of Chinese
culture," an editorial in the People's Daily, the
Communist Party's flagship, stated last autumn. It
went on to call for the creation of "China-made"
cultural products. "While China continues to
welcome foreign cultural products, a 'China wind'
has still not stirred up much dust."
Foreigners in China are frequently
reminded that as a civilization with more than
4,000 years of history, the country boasts a long
and impressive cultural heritage. But Chinese
people and cultural officials, in particular, also
complain that observers overseas get a very
slanted view of China from existing art, culture
and news.
Now, Chinese cultural gurus are
keen to reverse that. To help spread Chinese
culture worldwide, they have embarked on a massive
drive to popularize Chinese language. Beijing has
announced plans to set up 100 Confucius Institutes
around the world to help foreigners learn China's
official language, Mandarin.
The Education
Ministry reports that some 40 million people are
learning Chinese around the world, but predicts
the figure will hit 100 million by 2010. In China,
the number of foreigners studying Mandarin has
grown from 36,000 about 10 years ago to 110,000
this year.
As the language is popularized,
books and publishing are also being made a focus
of China's cultural offensive. Officials are
looking for a success story that would firmly
re-establish China on the literary map of the
world and make foreign publishers engage in
bidding wars for the translation rights.
Last year provided a glimpse of what the
future could hold for one of the world's
fastest-growing book markets. Penguin Books set a
Chinese record when it purchased for US$100,000
the worldwide English rights to the literary
bestseller, The Wolf Totem, by Jiang Rong.
"The new cultural drive is not unlike the
'Think UK' campaign the British government
embarked on a couple of years ago to persuade the
Chinese people that we [British] are not just
fog-bound Dickensians," said Jo Lusby, who
represents Penguin Books in China.
"The
difference here, though, is that they are viewing
this as being in response to perceived 'cultural
deficit', as though these things can be
quantitatively measured."
Beijing,
however, knows that cultural expressions such as
films, music and art can be lucrative export items
just as any other product and wants to see China
rivaling Japan and South Korea as pop-culture
trend setters and major cultural players in Asia.
Currently, the cultural industries of
Japan and South Korea account for 13% of the
international culture market while China and all
the other countries in Asia make up some 6%, the
Culture Ministry reports.
"China is unable
to bring out cultural products that can compete or
compare with the [South] Korean drama series
Dae Jang-geum, or the Japanese cartoon
Chibi Maruko Chan, or any of Disney's
animation efforts," the People's Daily editorial
said.
Still, cultural officials hope that
following a worldwide scramble to invest in
China's manufacturing industry, the country's
cultural market is the next golden opportunity for
foreign investors.
The cultural industry's
total added value in 2004 was $42 billion,
accounting for 2% of China's gross domestic
product. In a remarkable contrast with the years
before the 1979 economic reforms when cultural
undertakings were neither considered nor operated
as a business, now about 10 million people work in
domestic cultural industries.
In the long
years of political campaigns during Mao Zedong's
reign (1949-76), the Chinese Communist Party
rallied people to destroy the "four olds" -
everything from old customs and festivals to old
beliefs and traditions. But nowadays the market
potential of Chinese culture and its appeal to the
millions of tourists visiting the country have led
to an officially sanctioned cultural renaissance
at home as well.
This year the State
Council, or China's cabinet, established a new
Cultural Heritage Day, devoted to promoting and
preserving China's intangible cultural heritage. A
protected list of "endangered" cultural
traditions, including old craftsmanship and
festival rituals, has been drawn up, as well as a
new law on the preservation of China's cultural
heritage. A series of new museums and cultural
venues are being planned for unveiling in Beijing
before the Olympic Games.
But as the
government has fervently embraced the hot cultural
industries, some intellectuals have urged caution.
"I'm all for China-made cultural
products," writer Hong Ying said. "However, I
don't want to see them being manipulated in some
new political campaign. If Chinese leaders are
really intent on promoting culture, they should
abolish censorship so that free ideas can flourish
and a hundred thoughts contend."
