Opinion A hard line on soft power
Chinas leaders still fail to understand you cannot impose a good image by diktat
HONG KONG Almost a full house! Zhao Dayong said,his eyes glinting as we gazed over rows of filmgoers shuffling into their seats. It was a moment neither of us could have imagined two years earlier,as we filmed the Lisu tribespeople through a chilly Christmas in mountainous Fugong,in southwest China,not far from the border with Myanmar.
Zhaos unapproved independent documentary,Ghost Town,an unflinching look at a remote community on Chinas margins one of those left behind by the countrys breakneck development was having its moment at last. But the ovation that followed the films world premiere in 2009 at Lincoln Center in New York could not shake the bittersweet recognition that this moment would never have been possible in Zhaos own China.
My thoughts drifted back to that screening last month,as I watched the nine members of Chinas Politburo Standing Committee preside over a stiffly choreographed meeting of the countrys most senior leaders in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Against a phalanx of red flags and an enormous golden hammer-and-sickle,President Hu Jintao delivered the Chinese Communist Partys document on promoting the great development and prosperity of socialist culture.
The gist of the Decision was that Chinas ruling party,recognising that culture is soft power,would lead a renaissance of cultural creation. The message behind the turgid ideological phrasings and the rodomontade about how the party was leading the great reawakening of the Chinese people was that Chinas leaders would encourage culture so long as it served their narrow political ends. The Decision states emphatically that Chinas rank-and-file cultural workers must uphold the partys main theme and keep to the correct orientation in cultural creation.
Controlling culture is nothing new to the Peoples Republic of China. The Chinese Communist Party has twisted culture to its own ends ever since Mao Zedong dogmatised on the role of literature and art at Yanan in 1942. During the Cultural Revolution,Chinas traditions were ravaged or subverted to persecute millions. What was new last month was the CCPs urgent sense that Chinas power and place in the world should be reflected in its cultural strength. The party has long sought to manufacture legitimacy by guiding public opinion domestically through aggressive controls on media and culture. Now it also hopes to influence global public opinion in its favour.
Behind the bravado lies deep anxiety about what some in China have called the third affliction, its negative image in the world. With its economy now the envy of the world,China has symbolically thrown off the affliction of poverty. With its powerful and modernising military,it is no longer afflicted by the threat of foreign aggression,as it was during its century of shame. Yet the countrys international prestige remains constrained by the cultural dominance of the West. Each time China is castigated by the international human rights community,or criticised by the Western media,the countrys leaders feel more and more that global public opinion is stacked against them. Western culture and values have gone global in a way that Chinese culture and values have not,and Beijing wants to do something about this.
Chinas leaders hope to close this soft-power deficit the only way they know how: by diktat. But commercialising state-controlled culture built on repression only turns the spotlight on the injustices of Chinas political system. Chinas third affliction is a self-inflicted malady. As the popular Chinese blogger Han Han said amid the official drivel in state-run media: Governments in countries with cultural censorship may no longer fear criticism at the hands of their own countrys cultural work,but they must endure the ridicule of the whole world.
While the government backs slick propaganda epics with blockbuster budgets like this years Founding of the Party real creativity will continue to struggle to survive in the gaps. Independent artists,writers and filmmakers like Zhao Dayong,those who refuse to submit to government censorship,will continue to endure marginalisation to protect their creative freedom and work in a state of perpetual exile from their Chinese audiences.
No sooner had the curtain closed on the CCP meeting in Beijing than media outlets in Hong Kong and Taiwan reported with unmistakable schadenfreude that an October 17 showing at Lincoln Center of the 2009 Chinese propaganda epic The Founding of a Republic had drawn not a single filmgoer. The screening was an opener for the series Eastern Promise: Popular Cinema from China, a soft power ploy plain and simple. But not even the organisers from Chinas ministry of culture bothered to show up.
DAVID BANDURSKI is a producer of Chinese independent films
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