China: pop culture and politics

Sam Crane, from the office next door to mine, reprints an August 2003 essay of his looking at the relationship between pop culture and politics in China.  Sam gave an excellent lecture on this at Williams around the time he wrote the piece, complete with some clips of some really atrocious sounding Chinese punk rock bands.  Afterwards, we had a fascinating talk about the differences between pop culture in the Arab and Chinese contexts, which might very well have been the first time  I gave serious thought to what has become known here as the Nancy-Haifa Culture Wars.

Here is part of Sam's essay:

Chinese punk rock. Chinese hip-hop. Chinese NBA stars. Twenty years ago, we could have hardly conceived of such things. What would Chairman Mao have thought of the playful and prosperous possibilities of Chinese cultural expression in the 21st century? What would Emperor Qian Long have thought?

The dignitaries of the imperial past and the commissars of the socialist period would probably reject as "un-Chinese" many of the contemporary cultural currents in Beijing and Shanghai and Guangzhou. Scantily clad models gliding down runways of internationally renowned fashion shows? Immoral, the old men would have intoned. Yet, in spite of derision from traditionalists and communists alike, the remarkable variety of current Chinese cultural practice is historically and politically significant.
....

Chinese, especially young Chinese, have turned to new cultural expressions: conspicuous consumption or pop music or drug- induced raves or whatever is fun and happy and not tied to the tired old China of traditional rectitude or communist asceticism.

Deng knew he was taking a gamble on opening up Chinese society to new forms of economic and cultural behavior. He thought he could let the economy run while he used state power to regulate culture. But what has happened is that culture and wealth have broken free from politics. Communists must now invite capitalists to join their party, an organization founded to overcome capitalism. Only a handful of intellectuals bothers to read Karl Marx anymore, but millions clamor for the latest Hong Kong or Taiwan pop star.

The political liberation of culture and wealth is not unprecedented in Chinese history. In the early decades of the 20th century, the old ways had been discarded and the new was everywhere intoxicating the young. But war destroyed this efflorescence, and communist victory brought back a stricter political regime. Now, however, the openness is even headier. Globalized communications and transportation make virtually any cultural form anywhere available to the Chinese. And they seize the opportunities with passion.

Oddly enough, globalization has also reconstituted a Chinese universalism of sorts. Imperial universalism was founded on the notion that (almost) anyone could become Chinese; now, universalism is a matter of Chinese becoming (almost) anything.

There is an important political aspect of this new universal China: It opens up new avenues of freedom.

The party can no longer control the cultural sphere. It can harass large cultural organizations, like Falun Gong, which have obvious political characteristics. But it no longer has the capacity to chase down the many who are subverting what used to be called "socialist spiritual civilization." There is no effort at all to counter the flood of insipid pop cultural products and productions, none of which uphold socialist values. At the margins of society, in the avant-garde studios and back-alley clubs, much more challenging messages are pouring forth.

Taken all together, the bland and the brash, culture has become a realm of freedom: freedom of expression, freedom of choice, freedom of individual taste and opinion. And this freedom will have political effects over the not-so-long term.

At the time, our conversation was mainly about the differences between Arab and Chinese contexts.  Looking back at it now, I wonder if we should have been talking more about the similarities?

Comments

[hk]

For millenia, the first signs that a ruling dynasty in China was in trouble came in the childrens' songs--strange people would come around teaching children songs and rhymes with subtly (and sometimes not so subdtly) subversive contents. I grant that it's not quite equivalent to what CLounsbury calls "LebSlut" phenomenon--I suppose these may not be calculated efforts by dissidents to spread subversive messages. But, one does have to wonder, though....