Columbia Spectator (Columbia University, New York): Reclaiming Chinese Culture
By Matt Kutolowski
February 16, 2007 You can learn a lot about a man from who his enemies are. This also applies
to a nation-state, or party-state, such as mainland China, which has been ruled
by the unelected Chinese Communist Party since 1949. One need look no further
than the bizarre efforts of Chinese officialdom over the past couple of weeks
for confirmation of this. Around the world, embassy officials and consuls of the
Chinese state have been putting the Chinese people's hard-earned tax dollars to
work trying, oddly enough, to bring down a Chinese cultural show--New Tang
Dynasty Television's Chinese New Year Spectacular. What would prompt attempts to crash the show's phone system, send threatening
letters to its sponsors, and pressure venues into canceling the event? Communist
rulers sometimes find enemies in strange places. But isn't NTD's show itself
Chinese culture--a shared, collective good that everyone, especially officials,
should be proud of? Besides, what could be threatening to a powerful regime
about petite ladies prancing about doing fan dances? The answer, I would
suggest, cuts to the heart of a fascinating range of issues, not the least of
which is whether it's possible for a Chinese cultural space, one that is not
managed and orchestrated by Beijing, to exist. Since the ascendancy of the Chine Communist Party (CCP),
"culture"--defined locally as performing arts, shared stories,
traditions, etc.--has been seen as a means of disseminating ideology among the
more- and less-literate. In the past, performing troupes would thus bring the
message of the Party to the masses through various theatrical shows. Values such
as "struggle" and the demonizing of new social pariahs such as
"landlords" were standard fare. Traditional culture became unlikely fodder and was refashioned in barbarous,
if unlikely, ways. This gave way to an all-out hostility towards China's
traditional past by the nation's Marxist rulers during the Cultural Revolution
(1966-76), which was more akin to cultural insanity--imagine Red Guard troops
attacking Buddha statues with baseball bats. With the death of Mao in 1976, things normalized, somewhat. While artists
were no longer jailed or beaten publicly, the arts, or Chinese culture proper,
remained quite firmly in the Party's hands. New contortions of the past have
marked the post-Mao era, with most instantiations contrived if not for ideology,
then to cater to the imaginations of tourists from afar--something like
Confucius meets Colonel Sanders. The CCP has wed itself to Chinese culture, and as its sole, self-proclaimed
proprietor, the CCP feels a sense of possessiveness. So with the arrival of
NTD's first Chinese New Year production in 2003, the party-state's monopoly on
culture was faced with, in its own words, a "crisis." The formation of NTD marked one of the first Chinese-language media ventures
truly independent of the CCP. Confirmation of this is found in the extent of the
efforts by Chinese authorities to thwart the station. Many of its New Year
performers, like the station's founders, could be called Chinese communism's
discontents--people who have seen and gone through a lot. Several I have
interviewed were shunned for being artists and thus "bourgeoisie"
under communist rule. Since much of the Chinese media has been bought off or
bought out, these folks are dogged. The NTD New Year show is also very much Chinese, and that makes it
fundamentally different from the Party's brand of communist culture--as to the
latter, one almost has to see for oneself the uniformed Chinese People's
Liberation Army soldiers dancing ballet to believe it. By contrast, the NTD show
draws inspiration from China's golden age--the Tang Dynasty (617-907). The Tang
was a time of tremendous cultural diversity, tolerance, and religious
devotion--a contrast to China's contemporary autocratic state. The show seeks,
like NTD itself, to empower its viewer insofar as it reaches back to a shared
past, unmediated by party or state, for common values, ideals, and inspiration.
And given that it was NTD that broke the SARS story three weeks before China's
state media admitted to a top-down cover-up, you might call it "the
people's station." The NTD is, after all, more concerned with the Chinese
people's welfare than the CCP's image. The show amounts to nothing less than a refashioning--or recovery--of Chinese
self. It suggests, tacitly, that there are other interpretations and visions of
Chinese culture available, and that venturing in such directions need not be
feared. When we hear communist officials frequently denounce the show as being
"anti-China," it is the highest form of flattery, since in that ironic
accusation is confirmation that NTD has ruptured a five-decade long conflation
of communist culture with Chinese culture, and of being patriotic with being
Chinese. Nobody can say for sure how this will play out, but, for the historically
minded, it is a fascinating, hopeful moment. I'll be enjoying the show. The author is a Ph.D. candidate in East Asian Languages and Cultures in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Chinese version available at
http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2007/2/18/149253.html
Yearly Archive
Printer Version
feedback@clearwisdom.net