CHINA: From Cultural Revolution to Culture Exports

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Jul 27 2006 (IPS) - While the world is getting used to China’s ballooning global trade surplus, Chinese mandarins fret over the one area that the country has been posting a continuous deficit in – culture.

China may be now 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.

As far as culture is concerned, “we still have very bad deficit to resolve,” Zhao Qizheng, former minister of the state council information office said in May this year. “It runs counter to China’s fast growing economy which has been expanding by an average of 10 percent since 1979.”

Redressing the country’s cultural deficit is not a problem that the Chinese government officials are intent on leaving on the backburner while labouring 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 play host to the 2008 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,” says 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”, as opposed to the United States’ profile of a harsh-talking and domineering power, which also does not seek to impose its development values or interfere in other countries’ internal affairs.

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,” noted an editorial in the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s flagship, in the fall last year. 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,” it lamented.

Foreigners in China are frequently reminded that as a civilisation 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 reporting.

Now, Chinese cultural gurus are keen to reverse that. In order to help a worldwide spread of Chinese culture they have embarked on a massive drive to popularise the Chinese language. Beijing has announced plans to set up 100 Confucius institutes around the world to help foreigners learn China’s official language, the Mandarin.

The ministry of education says some 40 million people are learning Chinese the world over but predicts the figure will hit 100 million by 2010. In China alone, the number of foreigners studying Mandarin has grown from 36,000 some ten years ago to 110,000 this year.

As the language is popularised, books and publishing are also being made a focus of China’s cultural offensive. Officials are looking for a success story that would firmly reestablish China on the literary map of the world and make foreign publishers engage in bidding wars for the translation rights.

Last year gave a glimpse of what future could have in store for one of the world’s fastest growing book markets. Penguin Books set a Chinese record when it purchased for 100,000 US dollars the worldwide English rights for the literary bestseller of Jiang Rong, ‘The Wolf Totem’.

“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,” says 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 like any other product and wants to see China rivalling Japan and South Korea as pop-culture trend-setters and major cultural players in Asia.

Currently, Japan and South Korea’s cultural industries account for 13 percent of the international culture market while China and all the other countries in Asia make up some six percent, figures of ministry of culture show.

“China is unable to bring out cultural products that can compete or compare with the 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 expounded.

Still, cultural officials here 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 US dollars, accounting for two percent of China’s GDP. In a remarkable contrast with the years before the 1979 economic reforms when cultural undertakings were neither considered nor operated as a business, now some 10 million people work in the domestic cultural industries.

During the long years of political campaigns of Mao Zedong’s reign (1949-1976) 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 has 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 list of “endangered” cultural traditions, including old craftsmanship and festival rituals, to be protected 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 arrive in 2008.

But as the government has fervently embraced the hot cultural industries some intellectuals have sounded caution. “I’m all for China-made cultural products,” says writer Hong Ying. “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 hundred thoughts contend.”