The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (State and Society in East Asia)

The Party

and the Arty in China

State and Society in East Asia Series Elizabeth J. Perry, Series Editor

Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern By Prasenjit Duara The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture By Richard Curt Kraus Webs of Smoke: Smugglers, Warlords, Spies, and the History of the International Drug Trade By Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen Of Camel Kings and Other Things: Rural Rebels Against Modernity in Late Im­ perial China By Roxann Prazniak Underground: The Shanghai Communist Party and the Politics of Survival, 1927–1937 By Patricia Stranahan

The Party

and the Arty in China

The New Politics of Culture Richard Curt Kraus

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

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Published in the United States of America

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kraus, Richard Curt. The party and the arty in China : the new politics of culture / Richard Kraus. p. cm. — (State and society in East Asia)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7425-2719-0 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7425-2720-4 (pbk. : alk.

paper)

1. Art and state—China. I. Title. II. Series.

N8846.C6K73 2004

700’.1’030951—dc22

2003021873 Printed in the United States of America

∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Preface

vii

1 Cultural Reform as an Afterthought

1

2 The Waning Authority of the Chinese State as

Patron of the Arts

37

3 Normalizing Nudity

73

4 The Chinese Censorship Game: New Rules

for the Prevention of Art

107

5 Artists as Professionals

143

6 The Price of Beauty

183

7 The Hands That Feed Them

213

Index

239

About the Author

249

v

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Preface

T

his book examines the impact of the market on the once comprehen­ sive system of state patronage of the arts in the People’s Republic of China. The focus of the study is not aesthetic, but political. I use arts ma­ terials to explore the changing nature of politics as seen through such phe­ nomena as ideology, propaganda, censorship, and the relationship of artists to the state. Three themes predominate. First, the commercializa­ tion of China’s cultural life has been intellectually liberating, but also poses serious challenges that artists are sometimes slow to master. Sec­ ond, the shift from state patronage to a mixed system of private and pub­ lic sponsorship is a fundamental political change; those who argue that China has had only economic reform, but no accompanying political re­ form, have too limited a conception of politics. Third, Western recognition of the reformation of China’s cultural life has been obscured by ignorance, ideological barriers, and foreign-policy rivalry. China’s arts have long existed in greater intimacy with the state than is typical in the West. Imperial grandeur and Maoist revolution both pre­ sumed that art would serve the state; while few artists attained positions of power, emperors, ministers, and Communist officials took care to pres­ ent themselves as serious poets, calligraphers, and connoisseurs of paint­ ing. Art was twinned with power in a political culture in which claims to authority could be validated by association with beauty or undermined by poor aesthetic achievement. Morality was understood to be revealed through beauty, and Chinese politicos accordingly enfolded themselves in the habiliments of culture. In imperial times, politics and society were loosely enough ordered that this tradition allowed a great deal of slack for vii

viii

Preface

much cultural life to thrive at some remove from the state. The Chinese revolution’s modernizing project reorganized society more tightly, so that the traditional linkage of art and morality became an intense politiciza­ tion of the arts. After 1949 it became increasingly difficult for artists to stand back from the Party’s cultural policies. The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) was the climax of this trend. China’s public life changed radically after Deng Xiaoping rose to power in 1978. Since that time, through a series of dramatic reforms, China’s economy has become more open and prosperous and better integrated with the rest of the world through trade and investment. Political reforms have also been extensive, but have been both slower and more difficult to implement. Public frustration with the pace of political reform was one of several factors in the 1989 popular movement against the government that was suppressed violently on June 4. Despite popular discouragement and elite controversy about the pace of reform, changes in cultural life continued at a pace generally slower than the economy, but faster than change in political institutions. Over the course of a quarter century, a new politics of culture has taken shape, with greater openness, vastly diminished state supervision, and in­ creased professionalism by artists. China has moved toward a new cul­ tural order in fits and starts, interspersed with occasional retreats. The most obvious retreat followed the Beijing Massacre, which was reversed equally abruptly by a nationwide rush toward the market after Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 inspection of South China. The conventional Western frame of reference for contemporary China juxtaposes economic and political reform. The cliché is that successful economic reforms have not been accompanied by necessary political re­ form, that a dynamic marketized economy is at odds with an ossified Communist state. A common reading, favored both by human rights ac­ tivists and nostalgic cold warriors, holds that lack of political liberaliza­ tion will eventually block economic progress. An alternative version of this approach, quietly popular with multinational corporations, holds that by restraining political reform, China has provided stability with growth, in contrast to the inept reforms of Russia. This framework is inadequate. Economic reforms have brought political reform in their wake, stealthily, surely, not through openly reconstituting the institutions of state, but by altering the meaning of rule. Market re­ forms have eroded Party controls over culture; this is a major political re­ form because it has meant the quiet surrender of Communist Party hege­ mony over intellectual life. Those in search of an event to mark this surrender might point to the shocking appearance in 1983 of nude dancing in Yan’an, cradle of the Communist revolution, but more generally, the rise of commercial art-as-entertainment has overwhelmed the political practice

Preface

ix

of art-as-ideology. The often unsettling impact of rapid economic growth has not been cushioned by shared ideological commitment, but rather ex­ amined coolly with an increasing cynicism toward public affairs. Social scientists should be suspicious of a purported world of only market and state, of carrots and sticks. In different ways, conservative, Weberian, and neo-Marxist scholars have recognized that there is also a realm of symbolic meaning, of value, of culture, that is often excluded from supposedly hard-minded analysis. Stalin’s famous cynical query— “How many divisions has the pope?”—does not show that beliefs are ir­ relevant, merely that they can be trumped by tanks. Well-run states do not need to turn to tanks, but make use of shared belief systems to smooth their rule. Those who see the Chinese state simply as a tyranny foolishly seeking to hold back the forces of democratic progress point above all to the 1989 Beijing Massacre, when the People’s Liberation Army fired on unarmed civilians. But this is less evidence of a strong state, than of a frightened one. The economic reforms undermined the system’s mechanisms for hegemony; China’s now chronic crisis of belief often seems to leave au­ thorities with little to rely upon but economic growth and inconsistent vi­ olence, reinforced from time to time by nationalist appeals. In this book I argue that China has experienced sweeping, if inadver­ tent, political reform as the Communist Party’s economic policies have led to greater concern for profit than preaching in the arts. Of course, the Communist Party remains an authoritarian political force, but an exclu­ sive focus on this fact obscures other, equally important developments in the politics of culture over the past quarter century. One is the commer­ cialization of the arts; another is the withdrawal of the state from cultural supervision; a third is the halting and incomplete trend toward profes­ sionalization among workers in the arts, as they seek to gain greater con­ trol over their livelihoods in a period of political uncertainty and rapid economic change. The state, which was the sole patron of the arts during Mao’s later years, has now been joined by individual consumers who pur­ chase cultural goods and by a new class of arts angels who provide fund­ ing for cash-starved arts organizations. However, the state’s role in giving rise to a new cultural politics is not simply a passive act of withdrawal; as the state has actively pressed for economic reform, it has inevitably sub­ verted its own monopoly over culture. In the process, China has become much less of a political exotic and resembles more closely other countries. U.S. hostility toward China discourages recognition of these changes, as it is politically advantageous to imagine a China frozen in a relentlessly Maoist past. The seven chapters that follow explore the extension of economic re­ forms to the arts in three broad sections. First, an introductory chapter

x

Preface

shows how the ongoing reorganization of culture was never clearly de­ signed, but was secondary to other economic and political purposes. Chapter 2 makes this analysis more specific, examining changing rela­ tionships among major state arts bureaucracies, showing the declining salience of art in modern Chinese politics, even without the impact of the cultural marketplace. Second, three chapters take up the question of political restrictions over art. In chapter 3, I review the history of discord over nude art to illumi­ nate the intersection of aesthetic and political controversy. Chapter 4 re­ views changing trends in censorship, showing the obstacles the Chinese state encounters in controlling the arts, instead of the more customary ex­ clusive focus on the frustrations of artists seeking free expression. As an alternative to our customary model of oppressive state versus freedomseeking individual artist, in chapter 5 I propose that trends toward the professionalization of artistic work provide a useful perspective for un­ derstanding the long-term trajectory of China’s cultural politics. Third, the final pair of chapters focuses on money and art. Chapter 6 explores the reactions of artists to the expanding commodity economy in culture, showing them to be free of nostalgia for Maoism, but happy enough to use remnants of the state plan to cushion them against the un­ familiar tempests of the market. A concluding chapter looks at the emer­ gence of alternative sources of arts support and argues that the reforms have changed the basis of the Chinese state’s claims to political legitimacy. Few studies include all of the arts of modern China. There is an under­ standable division of labor in which musicologists study music, art histo­ rians analyze paintings, and literary critics follow developments in the worlds of fiction and poetry. I have no particular expertise in any of these, and therefore, I have relied with gratitude upon the writings of my spe­ cialist colleagues. I caution the reader that this is a study of politics and does not pretend to be a survey of contemporary China’s complex artistic evolution. I am aware of how impertinent it may seem for me to treat so many distinctive genres together in one study and that factual errors no doubt remain in the pages below. I am equally aware of some of the costs of attempting to capture the broad pattern of change in China’s cultural politics: genres are equal in neither political treatment nor economic un­ derpinnings. Policies fashioned for regulating the stage may not be easily applied to photography, and market opportunities available to musicians may be closed to poets. Nor does this book dwell on the arts of ethnic mi­ norities, a program of great political importance to the regime that intro­ duces different pressures than those faced by Han cultural institutions. For this study I have drawn upon a long-term reading of the Chinese press and on interviews and conversations with well over a hundred Chi­ nese artists, intellectuals, and cultural administrators in the People’s Re­

Preface

xi

public of China, Hong Kong, and the United States. To this is added the lore accumulated in uncounted social encounters. Whenever I am in China, I have learned simply by watching television and movies and ob­ serving the changing availability of cultural goods in bookstores, music shops, department stores, and theaters; conversations with Chinese intel­ lectuals and artists have helped me make sense of what I have seen and read. Their views are quite diverse, and my interpretations are probably sometimes at odds with each of them. Some of these individuals will be acknowledged individually; others will remain unnamed in order to shield them from possible embarrassment. I thank them all with great re­ spect. This study remains, of course, very much an outsider’s view: it is limited by my not being a participant in the system I analyze, yet perhaps contains some observations that might not immediately occur to Chinese intellectuals within this distinctive arts world. I forewarn readers that my tone is sometimes irreverent and has been known to strike more dignified scholars as glib. I hope that my underlying esteem for the courage, tenac­ ity, and ingenuity of China’s artists shines through my occasionally un­ ceremonious manner. Four Chinese institutions provided invaluable assistance. I lived in Fu­ jian Province in 1989; Fuzhou’s Fujian Teachers University and Xiamen University were admirable hosts during an eventful and stress-filled year. In Jiangsu Province, the Center for Chinese and American Cultural Stud­ ies of the Johns Hopkins University and Nanjing University was a fine base from which to observe changes in China from 1995 to 1997, aided by the perceptive comments of my students and colleagues. The Universities Service Centre of the Chinese University of Hong Kong was a generous host on several occasions. In the United States, my University of Oregon colleagues in political science and Asian studies have been as supportive as anyone could expect. Many individuals have generously commented on sections of the manuscript, including Geremie Barmé, Ralph Croizier, Ellen Laing, Wendy Larson, Jerome Silbergeld, Richard P. Suttmeier, and especially Mary S. Erbaugh, who has cleared up more messes than I can recall.

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1

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Cultural Reform

as an Afterthought

B

ambi Meets Godzilla, an animated film, was popular in the United States in the 1970s. The terse little movie is just long enough to develop its simple plot effectively. A cute little deer grazes among the flowers to the accompaniment of the pastoral interlude from Rossini’s overture to William Tell. Suddenly, a horrible monster’s foot descends from the top of the screen, flattening Bambi with abrupt indifference. From happy open­ ing to shocking conclusion, Godzilla’s stomping of Bambi takes only two minutes, usually setting off delighted murmurs of unexpectedly rewarded cynicism from the audience. Bambi Meets Godzilla offers a metaphor for the way the West regards the politics of culture in China. Sweet and innocent artists merely seek joyful self-expression through the creation of beauty, when they encounter the heavy, clumsy, and dangerous foot of the mon­ ster, labeled in this version “Chinese Communist Party.” Yet, all but the youngest and most naive of the artists know the narrative all too well, so most of them cower in the corner, hoping that Godzilla will not notice them if they are very quiet and very well-behaved. Versions of this narrative have long provided the standard frame through which the West has viewed the relationship between China’s state and its intellectuals. As narrative, the Bambi-Godzilla story offers an agreeably clear assessment of good and evil—how could anyone not sym­ pathize with a censored painter or a jailed poet? Are not the illiberalism of the Chinese Communist Party and its determination to maintain itself in power perfectly obvious? But as a representation of reality, the Godzilla narrative can also lead us astray. For instance, China’s artists are some­ times not very Bambi-like, and while Godzilla has been known to stomp 1

2

Chapter 1

really hard, it turns out that he can also tread rather lightly, and some­ times there are others dressed up in the monster suit besides the Com­ munist Party. The central argument of this chapter is that reform has come to China’s cultural politics not because it was any politician’s goal, but because it was the unintended by-product of other policies designed to secure Deng Xiaoping’s power. By way of introduction, I will first consider the inti­ macy between China’s art and politics, then contrast China at Mao’s and Deng Xiaoping’s deaths, before analyzing the circuitous route to arts re­ form.

CHINA’S POLITICIZED ARTS One purpose of this book is to sketch a more complex image of the rela­ tionship between state and artist in China at the end of the century. To say that arts are politicized is not in itself very illuminating. The ways the po­ litical element has remained constant and how it has changed, however, are interesting. Some idealist myths about culture may obscure our understanding. For instance, the charismatic view of the artist as a heroic figure, locked in constant struggle against repressed and repressive authority, is a product of nineteenth-century Western romantic ideology.1 But Chinese artists are not so completely innocent; nor is the Chinese state so consistently malev­ olent. We need a more nuanced view of artists and of the Chinese state and should understand that our principal paradigm may have more to do with the West’s political needs than comprehending China. Marilyn Rueschemeyer makes a similar point about our difficulty in understand­ ing art’s complex role in the former East Germany, our subtlety impeded by a simple stereotype, that Stalinist policies overwhelmed and deformed an art that otherwise—if granted its own integrity—would take on the forms and social functions of the arts in the West. While this simplistic view arises out of moral outrage, one can share the outrage and still reject the stereotype. Im­ plicit in this stereotype is a conception of art that sees its historical develop­ ment as ultimately determined from within, provided that art is given the so­ cial and political autonomy that it ought to have. This is naive reductionism, whether it is applied in the West or in the East.2

Similarly, we in the West take it as an item of faith that art needs free­ dom if it is to flourish. “No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition,” argued George Orwell, who went on to say, “the imagina­ tion, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.”3 Is this won­

Cultural Reform as an Afterthought

3

derfully ringing phrase actually true? The inquisition may not have elicited much great fiction, but the inquisitors could easily comfort them­ selves with sumptuous painting and music that their church so richly sponsored. And what about all those Renaissance artists who had to en­ dure petty tyrants as their patrons? Or how does one explain the majesty of the pyramids, the splendors of Byzantine mosaics, or several thousand years of Chinese art produced before the birth of Amnesty International and with the chill of despotism so routinely in the air? We are unavoidably fascinated by the horror of individual stories of oppression as told by Chinese intellectuals who have run afoul of the regime. The details are often appalling, and as fellow intellectuals, we can perhaps easily imagine alternative lives in which we might be victims, rather than observers. Yet, however important individual tragedies (and successes) might be, a constant focus on Bambi and Godzilla distracts our gaze from changing institutional arrangements in Chinese society that are more important to understanding systemic relationships. China’s distinctively illiberal intimacy of art and state is by no means a product of the Communist revolution, but has antecedents far back in the imperial past.4 In more recent times, China’s state cultural establishment is impressive in its scale. The Chinese state employed over 1.4 million personnel in arts-related institutions in 1994.5 This establishment includes 835 television stations, 95,000 film projection units, 2,690 professional performing-arts troupes, and 2,890 county-level cultural centers. Writers pro­ duce 100,000 books each year, and readers can select from 7,543 magazines.6 China’s army has its own staff of poets and opera singers, Beijing’s largest steel company hires the most talented dancers, and the railway employs conductors for its orchestras as well as its trains. After Deng Xiaoping rose to power in 1978 with a program of dramatic economic reforms in agriculture, commerce, and industry, there was a similar movement in the cultural world from state planning to reliance upon the market in operating arts ensembles, paying artists and perform­ ers, and determining what art should be produced. Debates continue about the extent and speed of continued reform in state patronage of the arts. There are different conceptions of why the state should patronize arts, but few in China want the state to abandon its financial support com­ pletely or even to surrender all claims to moral leadership shown through art. We miss the importance of culture in China’s politics primarily because we do not take culture very seriously in our own. This is a mistake for un­ derstanding U.S. politics, but it is a fatal error in approaching China. We look at the commingling of art and politics in China and declare it to be a defect of the system, a temporary manifestation of Communism that will surely go away one day. By refusing to recognize that China’s politics

4

Chapter 1

have an important dimension that is essentially aesthetic, we cannot quite understand what is going on. We also fail to take culture seriously because of the limits of political science studies of China. Intellectually, political scientists are inclined to regard the arts as trivial and “superstructural,” a perhaps pleasant diver­ sion from the real business of power. Professionally, many political scien­ tists trained in China studies are primarily interested in government ser­ vice, which has its own dictates—above all prizing the ability to talk like a pundit and relegating culture to one of the secondary obligations of elite status. Michael Schoenhals bravely commented on the poor Chineselanguage abilities that are too common in political science as a further im­ pediment to our understanding of the cultural dimension of China’s po­ litical life.7 Scholars who are unable to read novels are unlikely to be very patient with analyses that draw upon the literary world. Indeed, many political scientists seem also not to notice the English-language publica­ tions of their humanist colleagues, from whom they might learn of the fundamental change in China’s cultural politics. Those who recognize that there is more going on than Godzilla stomp­ ing on the artists sometimes juxtapose older political pressures against newer commercial ones: “Chinese culture, which for decades was the tar­ get of Mao Zedong’s revolutionary attacks, is now falling victim to the ar­ rows of unbridled commercialization.”8 This view is a vast improvement, but it makes the Chinese arts world out to be static and unresponsive. In the real world, artists rarely accept their fate so passively—they do spe­ cialize in the creation and manipulation of images, after all. I will show artists as a complex group, including the full range of humanity, from he­ roes to knaves. Like others in China today, artists are understandably con­ fused by the rapid pace of social change and are adjusting their personal lives and careers to new circumstances as best they can, sometimes with excited pleasure, sometimes with profound disappointment, and often with a mixture of both. As an alternative to the narrative of the struggle for freedom, I argue that China’s artists are struggling not only for free­ dom, but also for professional status. Professionalism includes autonomy to make decisions about one’s work; the image of the artists as would-be professional is less romantic and heroic than the artist as rebel, but per­ haps more realistic. In this book, the words “art” and “arts” refer not just to fine arts, but also include literature, music, dance, drama, and the whole range of aes­ thetically creative endeavors. Chinese speakers will note that I use “arts” to translate wenyi, usually rendered into English as “literature and art”; this is an accurate, but unnatural-sounding mouthful.9 I discuss both pop­ ular and elite arts, as well as amateur and professional, commercial and noncommercial, official and unofficial. I will also refer frequently to “cul­

Cultural Reform as an Afterthought

5

ture,” that frustratingly imprecise term that we cannot do without. Cul­ ture often refers to the arts, frequently elite high art, such as oil painting or opera. But one also speaks of “popular culture,” referring either to modern commercial entertainments or older folk arts, or of “mass cul­ ture,” referring to such industrial and commercial arts products as movies, television, and commercialized fiction. China has its equivalents to all of these cultures; it is the evolving interaction of these contrasting subcategories that makes the realm of arts interesting for a social scientist. There is still another use of the word “culture” to refer to a people’s un­ derstanding of the world, including their arts, but also embracing their re­ ligions, their family systems, their laws, and so forth. This is the culture of anthropology and cultural studies, and the reform of China’s arts dis­ closes aspects of Chinese culture in the broadest sense. The arts are tied to this larger conception of culture most obviously through such political questions of legitimacy and hegemony. This remains a poorly delimited, yet especially critical, realm in an authoritarian regime, where there are often few ways of assessing the depth of collective loyalties. Herein lies the importance of patronage, the institutional forms by which artists are employed to produce their work. Patronage offers a way to examine power relations between artists and the state with greater sub­ tlety than simply focusing on the control of artists. Patronage is not a very complicated idea, but does point to some real ambiguities about who has the power in the bond between employer and artist.10 When Samuel John­ son came to the entry for “patron” in his dictionary, he drew upon his bit­ ter memories of miserly support from Lord Chesterfield to define the word as “a wretch who supports with indolence, and is paid with flattery.”11 Artists seem often to resent the authority of their patrons, which they may subvert by the power of their art. Benvenuto Cellini, the sixteenth-century goldsmith and sculptor, is famous for his statue of Perseus holding the head of Medusa, but is also noted for his autobiography, where he describes with pride the grand patrons who hired his talent: Francois I of France, Pope Clement VII, and the Duke of Florence. Cellini boasted of his patrons, yet also feared them. He stooped to kiss Pope Clement’s foot, yet Clement still had him thrown into prison. To some extent, Cellini embodies romantic myths of the artist that I wish to discourage (Goethe translated his book into German, and Berlioz turned it into an opera). Yet, his story illustrates that artistic skill can empower its possessors, bestowing an authority to defy, or at least talk back to, powerful patrons.12 The arts are a world of feeling and sensation, concerned with the cre­ ation of myths and their destruction. This world is simultaneously per­ sonal and public, fashioning an arena where individuals share in percep­ tions and images made familiar from the textures of their lives. Although the arts are ostensibly far removed from administration, state leaders

6

Chapter 1

have often sought to utilize them precisely for their capacity to link the perceptual solitude of personal life to the shared experiences of rituals and routines. Unsurprisingly, many artists have resented this politiciza­ tion. Novelist Zhang Xianliang has a character observe that “the new cul­ ture of China had sucked all emotions into the orbit of politics. He had no idea how this phenomenon had been accomplished, how human relations had been ground into mere flavorings for political use.”13 Yet, art is never completely absorbed by the utilitarianism of politics, and many artists have found in their work a form of individual refuge. Even propaganda art poses technical problems only an artist can solve. In other social set­ tings, artists have hidden in their work from the unwelcome demands of commerce. However dense the interpenetration of culture and politics, one must not imagine the manipulative hand of the state at every artistic turn. Chi­ nese movies, for instance, can turn out badly because of political interfer­ ence, but they can also fail because of indifferent direction, tasteless artists, or technically inferior equipment. In half a century, China’s artists have experienced two patronage revo­ lutions. In the first, the new revolutionary state provided steady profes­ sional work. In the second, the state, having given up revolution under the slogan of reform, shares patronage with the more diffuse commercial market.

TWO DEATHS, TWO CHINAS: 1976 AND 1997 One way to characterize the magnitude of change over the past gener­ ation is to contrast China’s situation at two moments, the death of Mao Zedong in September 1976 and the death of Deng Xiaoping in February 1997. The two revolutionary patriarchs shared much, including epic struggle against both the Guomindang and imperialism in its several guises. Both were strong willed, visionary, and intolerant men, al­ though Deng’s style was less imperious than Mao’s. Each leader died after a long illness that left him removed from direct power toward the end of his rule. While they were often allies during Mao’s lifetime, the policies of the aging Mao and the elderly Deng resulted in sharply dif­ ferent Chinas. Population In 1976 China had nearly one billion people. Despite rigorous population control, by 1996 there were around 30 percent more Chinese. This popu­ lation was healthier, older, and better educated. Life expectancy ap­

Cultural Reform as an Afterthought

7

proached Western standards. This population was also vastly more mo­ bile. Mao’s China enforced a system of residence permits that kept most citizens in their native villages, with the notable exception of urban young people, who moved through both voluntary and forced campaigns of temporary resettlement to the countryside. Deng’s China released the re­ strictions on population movement in order to mobilize rural labor for new investment projects in the coastal provinces. Well over one hundred million people migrated from interior provinces to coastal cities in search of higher wages. Economy After the 1958–1960 disaster of the Great Leap Forward, Mao presided over a long period of economic growth. China enjoyed great success at eliminating the worst poverty, as seen in improvements in infant mortal­ ity, although much investment was wastefully applied, and by Mao’s death his state-directed policies seem to have reached a point of dimin­ ishing returns. This growth developed economic infrastructure, but not personal income. Chinese citizens were kept on low wages to build up China’s industrialization through an isolationist policy of “selfreliance.”14 Deng Xiaoping reversed course in several fundamental direc­ tions: encouraging private and community-level enterprise, actively seek­ ing foreign investment, and developing an export-based economy. Per­ sonal incomes rose threefold, as did expectations that such growth would continue.15 Inflation, no problem under Mao, was a continuous worry during the reform period. Regional disparities increased, as the exportoriented growth strategy privileged prosperous coastal China over the in­ terior provinces. Personal Consumption The sought-after consumer goods of the mid-1970s were modest: watches, bicycles, sewing machines, and radios, along with larger apart­ ments. By the mid-1990s the list had changed drastically to include color televisions and refrigerators, then rapidly moving to embrace air condi­ tioners and cellular telephones. People still wanted larger apartments, one area where the reforms lagged behind consumer demand. Yet, new housing stock increased dramatically; by 1995, over half of urban resi­ dences were less than sixteen years old.16 Television, introduced to China in the early 1960s, was never developed as a national institution under Mao. China under Deng was much quicker to adapt technical innova­ tions, so that video recorders and disc players are now popular. And karaoke is ubiquitous.17

8

Chapter 1

Commercial Activity Mao’s China persecuted small businesses as remnant “tails of capitalism,” reinforcing the mood of austerity, but leaving citizens with few ways of spending their money—there were few restaurants and other urban serv­ ices. Public celebration of weddings, funerals, and other life rituals was typically subdued by the Party’s revolutionary puritanism. Deng left a China in which florist shops were one of the fastest growing businesses; no one assumes anymore that enjoying fresh flowers turns one into a member of the bourgeoisie. Clothing is vastly more colorful, as well, partly the result of letting up political pressure, but also reflecting gener­ ational change and the fact that China now manufactures a large propor­ tion of the world’s clothing for export, with an inevitable spillover in styles and colors. Political Persecution Mao’s China hounded real and imagined dissidents severely, an issue of special importance to intellectuals and artists. Ordinary citizens, however, often remember the Mao years as poor but simple, with greater egalitari­ anism, a climate of honesty, and honorable, if sometimes zealous, officials. Under Deng, the focus of repression narrowed from whole groups to in­ dividual political nonconformists. State harassment became more selec­ tive, less ferocious, and far less intimidating to most intellectuals. China remained an authoritarian regime, but the realm of personal freedom ex­ panded rapidly. Quality of Life Many felt that improvements in personal life were attained at the cost of the coarsening of interpersonal relations in a cash-crazy society. Many seemed unsettled by the pace of change, which introduced new personal anxieties over employment security. This was felt most strongly among the middle-aged, while young women faced a diminution of Party efforts against sexism. Growth in personal incomes was accompanied by routine corruption by ordinary officials and truly world-class greed by high offi­ cials, notoriously among Deng’s own family members. While China seemed a very safe nation in comparison with most others, its citizens compared public safety to a harsher, but more orderly, past and believed that they lived in an era of uncontrolled criminal activity. Assessing change in China is difficult and depends upon what aspect of the nation one examines: there are higher individual incomes and more political freedom, but also more child labor and environmental degradation.

Cultural Reform as an Afterthought

9

China’s Place in the World Under both Mao and Deng, China went its own way in international af­ fairs. Mao’s China voiced a revolutionary rhetoric while pursuing autar­ kic policies; Deng’s China leapt into the global economy, replacing revo­ lutionary slogans with nationalist fervor. In each case, China was a proud, if prickly, nation. Deng accumulated a large international debt, making China more resemble other third world nations, although China remained distinctive for the size of its economy. While non-Han areas such as Tibet and Xinjiang were more restive under Deng, Hong Kong was returned successfully to China soon after his death, and relations with Taiwan, while often stormy, are incomparably better than in 1976. Political Stability The Communist Party has ruled China without serious challenge for half a century, but political stability has been elusive. From his post as chair­ man of the Party, Mao organized consciously disruptive mass campaigns in order to reorganize Chinese society, and political tensions frequently divided the country’s political elite in bitter conflict. Deng abandoned mass campaigns, and he never assumed formal leadership of the Com­ munist Party, but he forced three heads of the Party from office as he sought to control the stresses of rapid change. Deng’s final choice was Jiang Zemin, a Shanghai Party chief who assumed nominal leadership during the 1989 crisis, held on to his post through Deng’s dotage, and es­ tablished his own claim to power from the death of his patron to his re­ tirement in 2002.18 Jiang handed power over to Hu Jintao in 2002–2003 in a transition that was by no means democratic, but was orderly, peaceful, and above all, stable.

FROM ARTISTIC HOMOGENEITY TO DIVERSITY The end of the Cultural Revolution was a monochrome moment in China’s modern cultural history. Artists and administrators were anx­ ious about stepping from a purely revolutionary path; this, plus the purge of older cultural leaders and the forced inactivity of others, lim­ ited the arts to an absurdly small repertory of movies, songs, novels, and paintings for a nation of China’s size and sophistication.19 Yet, in some measure the Cultural Revolution only carried to a grotesque ex­ treme certain tendencies toward homogenization that had been present since the Communist victory (or even since the Party’s Yan’an Arts Fo­ rum of 1942).

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From the early 1950s the Party set a high priority on controlling the cul­ tural market, however weak it may have been. It regarded commercial­ ized culture as a source of decadent values, soft on imperialism and often ignoring class virtue. Private opera companies, for instance, were criti­ cized for seeking customers by turning to smutty or pornographic art.20 These companies were brought under state control much like any other enterprise, as state-private joint management preceded the socialization of the enterprises by 1956.21 The revolutionary elimination of landlords and capitalists further nar­ rowed China’s aesthetic range. Producers of elite arts, already battered by a century of war and economic change, were suddenly deprived of their customers as wealthy urban Chinese either lost their fortunes or fled abroad. The same applied to producers of luxury handicrafts, including jewelry, porcelain, and lacquer ware. The state tried to raise the low sta­ tus of craft workers, but was hard-pressed to figure out what to do with them. Some were employed for state purposes, such as decorating the new Great Hall of the People in 1958, but this was not sufficient to prevent the decay of crafts born in the service of the wealthy. Political leaders often came to regard the arts from the state’s view­ point, as objects of administration, rather than things of beauty. For in­ stance, traditional ink painting was to be valued because it represented the essence of Chinese culture to outsiders, rather than because of any aesthetic imperative and certainly not because China still had a leisured class of gentlemen painters and collectors who cherished this ancient art. Indeed, the state’s interest helped sustain traditional painting against an onslaught of oil painting, which many saw as more modern and which was reinforced by a wave of Eastern European experts.22 The new administrative conception of art raised the status of formerly lowly performers in opera companies, even as it lowered the once proud elite arts of poetry and painting. The arts stood with superficial equality within a new bureaucratic order. In reality literature remained in com­ mand as the leading art, as it had during all past Chinese regimes, but for­ merly despised cultural occupations, even acrobats, could now bask in its reflected glory. In place of the messy notion of a popular audience for ur­ ban culture, whether for motion pictures or old-fashioned storytelling, the Party substituted the blander ideal of a mass audience, undifferentiated in its tastes, but always demanding ever-greater heights of revolutionary fervor. Here the Party implemented Mao Zedong’s ideas about culture. How­ ever deeply felt the chairman’s personal tastes in calligraphy, opera, and fiction, his concern for public culture was instrumental. The arts typically bear social content, and as the bearer of ideology, they could not be left without guidance. The state’s goal was to regulate the arts in order to se­

Cultural Reform as an Afterthought

11

cure a well-ordered citizenry. Put in these terms, this ideal was not new for China; what was new were the vastly expanded powers that political leaders could apply to the task of shaping artistic expression. Unfortunately, from the very beginning the new state found it easier to use its powers to prevent unwanted art than to encourage new visions. As early as 1951, Party fine arts official (and noted cartoonist) Hua Junwu complained of a “tendency towards indiscriminate production” by some “arts workers.”23 Hua feared that artists addressed the tastes of the petty bourgeoisie, rather than the working class. Reflecting a similarly dog­ matic idea that shopkeepers favored one kind of art and proletarians an­ other, Zhou Yang (the Party’s arts “czar” before the Cultural Revolution) complained that the problem lay “in the decision whether to lower the level of the working class to meet the interests, ideology, and loves of the urban petty bourgeoisie, or to raise the interests, ideology, and loves of the urban petty bourgeoisie to the level of the working class.” “It is ab­ solutely correct for our state-operated cinema enterprises to refuse to stoop down to the level of the urban petty bourgeoisie.”24 The Party viewed cities as centers of consumption; its goal was to trans­ form them into centers of production. The fate of culture became em­ blematic of a broader problem with shortages of restaurants, shoe repair, and other urban services. Cultural production was easy to regulate, and cultural consumption suffered. Fear of producing incorrect art afflicted the new cultural system. A trend toward professionalization only exacerbated the situation. The new government quickly offered permanent employment to vast numbers of artists. The relatively secure economic status of artists enabled many to wait out political campaigns by doing little, rather than responding to pressure to produce. One esteemed writer, Shen Congwen, simply stopped practicing his art altogether in a silent escape from politics. Yet, others were quick enough to pick up the pen in service of the new state. The fierce antirightist campaign of 1957 purged large numbers of intel­ lectuals from leadership roles, intensifying anxieties about politically con­ troversial art. Artists were relieved that the ensuing Great Leap Forward did not target intellectuals. But the Great Leap in art celebrated mass cul­ ture through the quota-driven production of poetry and songs, hardly a reassuring trend for professionals. The enduring contributions of the Leap to Chinese culture came not in art works, but in support services such as the creation of a national film archive and the manufacture of China’s first piano wire.25 The new state created a set of institutions that hired more artists in more organizations, but produced less art with less variety. Yet, the situa­ tion was complex. Foreclosing the development of urban commercial cul­ ture was well received by some intellectuals, many of whom disdained it

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as vulgar. The Stalinist ideal of becoming “engineers of the human soul” resonated with Confucian values shared by non-Party artists and their ad­ ministrators: attaining this ideal promised to eliminate the vulgarity of unfettered cultural markets. I do not mean to blame intellectuals for the homogenization of urban culture, but it does seem fair to observe than in the 1950s, as now, many urban sophisticates were decidedly unenthusias­ tic about the vulgarity they saw in commercial culture. Under the post-Mao regime, the greatest force for change has been the introduction of a market for culture, operating alongside the older state system for producing and distributing art. China’s long-established semisecret system of “internal” art—by which controversial or high-demand novels, movies, and painting exhibitions are viewed only by select groups—was also loosened considerably. The market was felt first in pop­ ular culture: video games, tape players and audiocassettes, and video­ tapes, as well as popular music. The immediate consequence of the new cultural market dramatically increased the range of arts available. Cultural reforms were tied closely to rapid growth in urban consumer income. In some cities family expenses for culture increased by up to four times. New technology raised the im­ portance of television, while demographic change gave rise to the singlechild family, whose pride and joy became the object of cultural indul­ gences through purchases of educational toys and musical instruments.26 Arts markets face skepticism in Chinese culture. The belief in a bond between art and morality is strong, as is the traditional ideology that arts are for amateur gentlemen whose work would be tainted if they took money for their efforts.27 The new cultural market challenges such traditions through daily confrontations. For instance, many calligra­ phers were unhappy to see their art turned into a commodity. Tradi­ tionally, calligraphy was an expression of a writer’s inner personality, as well as an emblem of elite status. By the 1980s some calligraphers were earning several hundred yuan per character, equivalent to the an­ nual income of a peasant in a poor region. Some artists responded to the new market by trying to startle audiences with sensationalism. Po­ ets and serious novelists especially resented their inability to compete with translations of Sidney Sheldon and home-grown novels of sex and violence. From the long view, the most dramatic impact of the economic reforms was an increase in the number and range of art works available. As Cul­ tural Revolutionary paranoia toward China’s great arts traditions disap­ peared, novels, paintings, films, and music, which had not been available for a decade, suddenly reappeared. The ultraleftist idea that painting goldfish was inherently self-indulgent and reactionary may have been silly, but it certainly discouraged people from painting goldfish.

Cultural Reform as an Afterthought

13

Equally important were the increasing international contacts that grew out of the diplomatic initiatives of the late Mao period and were extended by Deng Xiaoping. Long cut-off from the currents of modern international culture, Chinese artists and arts lovers experimented busily as they tried to fulfill their curiosity about what they had missed. Freud, Picasso, sex, liberalism, Schoenberg, Milton Friedman, and racy Hungarian television shows all competed for attention as China tasted decades of foreign cul­ tural development at one sitting. Some officials denounced many of these trends as tainted or dangerous, which only enhanced their appeal. Hel­ mut Martin described literature of the period 1976 to 1996 as in “a state of constant flux. There is sometimes even volatility, a rapid succession of short-lived literary fashions and writers leaving the literary stage as sud­ denly as they have appeared.”28 Similar assessments could be made of all genres in the reform period. Not only was the content of culture stimulated by these new contacts, but artists gained exposure to new techniques as well. Foreign study for Chinese artists and access to foreign performers in China influenced styles of performance or painting. Before 1978, reproductions of music or visual art from outside China were difficult to obtain; conservatories and arts academies subsequently improved their collections. New contacts be­ yond the mainland also improved the quality of musical instruments and paints and introduced inexpensive technology for cassette recording. China also became a major exporter of compact disks, many of which ended up for sale as low-cost pirated versions within China. Many of the new cultural stimuli are ultimately Western. But they are often felt through the immediate impact of nonmainland Chinese culture. Mainland intellectuals have understandably been fascinated by the suc­ cessful Western careers of such artists as I. M. Pei, Yo-yo Ma, or Chou Wen-chung. In addition, Chinese artists in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singa­ pore, and elsewhere have had several decades of experience at integrating Western and Chinese culture. Hong Kong and Taiwan played an impor­ tant role in channeling nonmainland Chinese culture to the People’s Re­ public, a process that accelerated in the run-up to the 1997 return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty. Massive tourism and investment from Tai­ wan into nearby Fujian Province created a second southeastern beach­ head for filtering outside culture into the People’s Republic. As early as the 1980s, Fujian television often rebroadcast shows from Taiwan. NonChinese observers sometimes search so obsessively for the forbidden fruits of Western culture that they are insensitive to this important en­ counter between varieties of Chinese culture. After 1949, Cold War diplomacy and the international political econ­ omy had pulled Chinese culture in different directions, creating and in­ tensifying artistic and linguistic differences. Hong Kong’s boom economy

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spawned a commercial culture that sometimes seemed from a different planet than the austere celebration of revolution encouraged in the main­ land arts. The official culture of the Republic of China in Taiwan devel­ oped clear political dimensions, which celebrated a version of traditional elite values, but rejected the populist developments of the mainland. The growing cultural chasm was underscored when the mainland adopted simplified Chinese characters, but Taiwan and Hong Kong refused to do so as well. Now that diplomacy and economics encourage reintegration, linguistic and cultural differences are declining. Hong Kong culture has become a model for young mainlanders, and in Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong private tutoring in Mandarin rivals English lessons in popu­ larity. While the mainland courts Taiwanese investment and political goodwill, characters are actually being desimplified, both in the complex forms of the overseas edition of People’s Daily and in the signs posted in coastal provinces such as Fujian for the convenience of Taiwanese visitors. As the mainland has given up the revolutionary edge to its art, it has pressed the exchange of ideas, performers, and art works to increase the sense that all Chinese share a greater culture. This review must not ignore popular culture, which changed even more rapidly. Popular entertainment became ever more sensational, beginning with cheap thrills of a rather innocent sort. A 1986 television show in Fuzhou featured the lives and loves of three women who rode motorcycles around the inside of a giant wooden tub.29 The city of Xiamen even had such a tub temporarily placed in a waterfront park. Later, in August of 1989, I attended a motorcycle show in a giant wooden tub in Guangzhou. The crowds cheered as a colorfully dressed rider raced around, standing on his cycle in apparent defiance of gravity. I saw the show with my father, who recalled seeing similar shows in small-town Missouri in the 1920s. After a generation of economic reform, China became a place where one could find an enormous number of cultural goods at a variety of prices and in a bewildering array of styles. China’s population is better educated, more sophisticated, and, in contrast to 1976, far less willing to let political authori­ ties judge what its tastes should be. China is now more prosperous, more open, and freer. But because it is less isolated, it is held to a higher standard than ever before. The arts may be less fettered by political manipulation than at any time since the 1930s in Shanghai, Wuhan, and Beiping, but their social content and implications assure that they will continue to be controversial.

THE ROUNDABOUT ROAD TO CULTURAL REFORM

No one seems to have planned cultural reform, which followed from the political logic of other changes in China’s economy.30 A quarter of a cen­

Cultural Reform as an Afterthought

15

tury after the beginning of Deng’s reform program, however, the cumula­ tive impact of the changes in China’s arts was massive. Below is a sketch of the stages along the road to cultural reform. Mao’s Death When Mao died in September 1976, his closest political allies were well anchored in the cultural system. Enver Hoxha, the leader of Albania, China’s only European friend, commented in August 1976: It seems that the opposing currents have captured the leading posts and one side has control of the microphones and the press, while the other side has the economy and the rifle. The former seems nervous, the latter calm, of course, because it has the rifle.31

Mao’s health had been in decline for years, with the political elite anxious about the succession. Within a month of the chairman’s death, those who had the rifles (an alliance of the People’s Liberation Army, the Ministry of Public Security, and the security force for top leaders at Beijing’s Zhong­ nanhai) organized a coup against those who controlled the microphones and the press. Hua Guofeng, former minister of public security, was the temporary winner over the Cultural Revolutionary propagandists, who with Mao’s widow, Jiang Qing, were vilified as the Gang of Four. Accord­ ing to Zhang Pinghua, who was promoted to national propaganda chief by Hua, the new Party chairman, the recapture of the Ministry of Culture took higher priority than did taking control over Tianjin, China’s third leading city.32 Hua and his colleagues had no program for cultural reform beyond seizing control of the mass media from their adversaries, whom they promptly purged. Arrests followed, as did the suicide of the minister of culture and, eventually, the kangaroo court conviction of the Gang of Four in 1980. Artists who had been associated with the Cultural Revolutionary left often found their careers put on hold, but they received little sympa­ thy from the majority of intellectuals and artists whose lives had been dis­ rupted during the preceding ten years. The Return of Deng Xiaoping Hua Guofeng’s hold on power proved to be fleeting. An ambitious Deng Xiaoping, bruised and resentful from being purged twice during the Cul­ tural Revolution, undercut him at every opportunity. Three parts of Deng’s strategy are of special interest for cultural policy. First, Deng repudiated the Cultural Revolution by restoring the cultural officials and the arts establishment of the early 1960s. Deng’s chief deputy

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in this project was Hu Yaobang, first as head of the Party’s Organization Department, then as head of the Propaganda Department. Hu had been head of the Youth League in the 1950s, developing an elaborate web of personal relationships among the rising generations of the elite. If there was any program of reform beyond changing the leading personalities, it was to restore the imagined golden age of wise Party leadership of the 1950s, before the deformations of the Mao cult and the Cultural Revolu­ tion. The 1950s were held to be a time when state and Party leaders were thoughtful patrons of culture, rarely aiming harsh personal attacks at in­ dividual artists, who had happily worked in harmony to show China a vision of its future as a proud and modern society. The 1979 Arts Congress—a meeting of representatives from the professional associa­ tions of writers, musicians, and the like—was the short-lived culmination of this mood of joyful restoration. Second, Deng severely restricted the Party’s propaganda apparatus. As Hua Guofeng attempted to stabilize his power, his propagandists organ­ ized a campaign to substitute Hua as a charismatic figure for the missing Mao. Such a cult of personality was unlikely to succeed for the obvious reason that Hua was no Mao—he had neither led a revolutionary army nor established a new regime. Hua changed his haircut to resemble Mao’s, promoted his handwriting as Mao did, and generally looked fool­ ish. As a consequence, Deng determined to dislodge the propaganda offi­ cials supporting his rival. As Deng increased his own powers, he targeted the propaganda apparatus for serious retooling. With Deng’s crony, Hu Yaobang, as head of the Propaganda Department, the Party abandoned its past technique of mass-mobilizing political campaigns.33 While this was intended to weaken the political base of Deng’s opponents, it had a sec­ ondary impact on the arts. Artists had tired of having to produce for mass campaigns and were in general quite pleased with the new look of Party propaganda. The Party still beat the drums for its policies, but gradually came to look more and more like a giant advertising agency for socialism. Closely related was a new retirement scheme, whereby all officials had to retire at age sixty, except for those with ministerial rank, who were al­ lowed to work until age sixty-five. The justification was to increase the level of education among officials by pensioning off unschooled, but tough, old former peasants. The immediate consequence, however, was to hurry the departure of all officials who had begun their careers with the revolution. By the mid-1980s, most of the surviving members of the revo­ lutionary generation were gone from the bureaucracy.34 With them disap­ peared exactly the constituency that was most likely to resist the spread of cultural markets. Third, the economic reforms for which Deng is best known reshaped China’s cultural environment, although the impact was felt only gradu­

Cultural Reform as an Afterthought

17

ally. Deng struck out against the “iron rice bowl” of guaranteed state jobs in industry. A similar logic was extended to state cultural organizations, which for the first time faced the goal of becoming self-financing. Simul­ taneously, a previously closed bureaucratic arts world began the longterm process of commercialization. As the marketplace presented an al­ ternative way of financing and organizing the arts, the authority of Communist culture and propaganda officials steadily eroded, severely di­ minishing the Party’s ability to shape culture. Deng marked his victory over Hua Guofeng in December 1978 at the Third Plenum of the Communist Party’s Eleventh Central Committee. Hua had lingered for a surprisingly long time, undergoing ever-greater humiliations before he was allowed to resign as Party chairman, to be re­ placed by Hu Yaobang as general secretary of the now chairmanless party.35 Deng signaled that he would exercise his power not through any formal rank as head of a key institution, but personally, as the leader of a winning faction. In practice, he played a role much as Mao had done, if with different goals: by balancing Party factions, Deng was a grand ref­ eree who would favor one side and then another in a series of shifting al­ liances. Deng’s coalition, however, excluded the Party’s now disgraced left. Deng quickly abandoned several Maoist tenets, beginning with the theory that class struggle persists in socialist society and the corollary idea that most intellectuals must struggle against their bourgeois educations. Indeed, the Party resolved several decades of ambiguity about the status of intellectuals by declaring them to be members of the working class, at one stroke denying the possibility of class contradictions between mental and manual laborers. The old Maoist slogan of art for the workers, peas­ ants, and soldiers, dating from the Party’s revolutionary days in Yan’an, gave way to the less militant and more inclusive line of a 1982 slogan: “Arts should serve the people and socialism.” The new status of intellec­ tuals was symbolized by a new fifty-yuan banknote, featuring a middleaged intellectual man, along with a male worker and a female peasant. Missing was the soldier, reflecting the army’s reduced political weight. While entrepreneurs had not yet been portrayed on currency, they were no longer excoriated as bourgeois, but included within the ranks of the people. Democracy Wall Some young Chinese democrats, mostly veterans of the Red Guard strug­ gles, mistook Deng’s victory over Hua Guofeng as the signal for a broader liberalization of intellectual life. The focal point of this movement was the Democracy Wall of 1979, a spot in the capital where, in the tradition of the

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Cultural Revolution, protestors posted big character posters. Deng rather cynically used the movement at first, as the posters attacked the so-called little Gang of Four of Political Bureau members who backed Hua Guofeng. But Deng turned on the protestors when they demanded more open politics, demonstrating that a gentler rule did not extend to nonParty democrats and economic markets did not signal cultural liberaliza­ tion. As the older cultural establishment celebrated its restoration at the 1979 Arts Congress, Deng’s courts prosecuted Wei Jingsheng, who was jailed for fourteen years for speaking his mind. Other dissidents met a similar fate in Beijing and the provinces. Back and Forth through the 1980s Party claims that commercialization of the economy would not lead to cultural liberalization were overly optimistic. Cultural life in the 1980s moved toward greater openness, but not without some short-term reversals.36 During the Cultural Revolution the Party simply stopped all for­ eign cultural influences, except for the occasional North Korean dance troupe. During the reform era, the Party welcomed foreign investment and trade, but tried to distinguish harmful from positive foreign influ­ ences. Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 formula for handling this problem was to is­ sue the four cardinal principles: anything was tolerated, just so it did not weaken socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership of the Communist Party, or Marxist-Leninist ideology. The most powerful veteran revolutionaries, although often long retired, continued to press their influence informally, often acting through per­ sonal ties to former subordinates. Deng Xiaoping could not easily silence such members of his own political cohort as Peng Zhen, mayor of Beijing before the Cultural Revolution, or Wang Zhen, a former military leader with responsibility for state farms. These and other ostensibly retired of­ ficials were shunted off to a newly established (and later closed) Central Advisory Committee, where Deng hoped to employ honor to persuade them to abandon their habits of rule. They often supported efforts to clean up harmful culture, perhaps finding encouragement in Deng’s words: “when you open the door some flies will get in.”37 Campaigns in 1983 against “spiritual pollution” and in 1986 against “bourgeois liberalization” made a lot of noise, caused many people per­ sonal inconvenience, and damaged some careers. Yet, they were not very successful, as few could agree on how to limit bad influences while cher­ ishing good ones or even on how to distinguish the two categories. The Party was divided throughout much of the decade over which was more critical: rectifying the continuing influence of the Cultural Revolution or combating the new perils of spiritual pollution.38 Alternating periods of

Cultural Reform as an Afterthought

19

openness and restriction have long characterized politics in the People’s Republic.39 For most artists, the preference for openness was simple. Moreover, the uneven decline of the Communist Party’s propaganda sys­ tem made it difficult to reimpose controls, so that these campaigns had di­ minishing effectiveness and credibility. Deng Xiaoping continued to rule from behind the scenes. When Hu Yaobang failed to clamp down on student demonstrators in several East China cities in 1986, he was dismissed as Party leader, to be replaced by Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang, a noted reformer even before the Cultural Revolution. The vocal critics of cultural pollution were not simply old Maoists, although some press accounts represented them as seeking a re­ turn to the Cultural Revolution. Deng Liqun, for instance, vilified in the Hong Kong press as an unrepentant Maoist, was once secretary to Mao’s rival, Liu Shaoqi. Some critics of liberalization had been restored to the top of the cultural establishment with Deng Xiaoping’s return to power, but were dismayed to see changes flowing out of their control. Real left­ ists received continued punishment, which was popular with all other groupings within the Party.40 Reforming Cultural Institutions As state controls over the economy loosened, political officials began to lose control over the arts. Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang included this theme in his 1983 report to the National People’s Congress: Most intellectual and artistic products circulate in the form of commodities, but in no case must we allow the decadent ideology of “putting money above everything else” to spread unchecked in our society. All honest, patriotic and revolutionary writers and artists must not treat their works and perform­ ances as a means of grabbing fame and fortune. The tendency towards bour­ geois liberalism in ideological and cultural work and disregard for social consequences are incompatible with the policy of serving the people and so­ cialism, and we must continue to criticize such trends. All ideological, cul­ tural, and art workers must cultivate a deep sense of responsibility to the people and live up to their expectation.41

Yet, while artists were urged not to “grab fame and fortune,” they learned that the organizations in which they had worked since the early 1950s were undergoing major renovation. A typical example is a 1987 report on state drama troupes.42 Chinese opera was (and is) in a prolonged crisis. This reflected the loss of urban audiences, although opera administrator Fang Jie also blamed the per­ sistence of old administrative habits. Opera troupes had gone three decades with little movement of personnel, eventually employing whole

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families: “like a snowball, the more it rolls, the bigger it gets.” Troupes that only had tens of members in the 1950s now had five or six hundred members, even though at least one-third was redundant. The solution was to “reduce the swelling” by cutting state subsidies and introducing a new concern for profit. Such discussions routinely attacked the “big pot” (relatively egalitarian pay systems that did not differentiate artists by tal­ ent or effort) and the “iron rice bowl” (permanent employment, now held to be inferior to short-term contracts). Dreams of Professional Autonomy Political leaders may have believed that reform, when applied to culture, meant balancing the books. Artists, however, imagined that reform would raise their professional status, recognize their autonomy from political su­ pervision, and extend their freedom of expression. After 1978 intellectuals made a bid for increased power and status, first to reclaim what they had lost during the Cultural Revolution and, subsequently, to assert a leader­ ship that intellectuals have not enjoyed in China since the Qing Dynasty. Artists were less often at the forefront of this trend than such activist intellectuals as astronomer Fang Lizhi, reporter Liu Binyan, and editor/essayist Wang Ruowang—each of whom was dismissed from the Communist Party for his efforts. But artists could not help getting caught up in the heady sense that the times were changing. Films such as Yellow Earth criticized the central Maoist myth of the politically engaged artists of revolutionary Yan’an.43 Younger and middle-aged artists especially moved away from assigned political themes to explore personal, often in­ terior, visions that had been neglected for decades. In so doing, they re­ sponded to the lightened hand of the state, and they often justified their experiments in terms of the “laws of art,” which were held to be au­ tonomous from politics and economy. But while the growing commodifi­ cation of culture increased autonomy from politics, autonomy from eco­ nomic crisis was more difficult to achieve. The Beijing Massacre By the spring of 1989 China’s arts and media were as open as they had been at any time in the People’s Republic. Social strains fueled by economic re­ forms broke out in a national student-led protest, sparked by a sometimesinstrumental commemoration of the death of Hu Yaobang, who was viewed by students and older intellectuals as a positive force whom Deng Xiaoping had unfairly forced to resign as head of the Communist Party. The ensuing struggle was not over culture, but power, and only ended with the riot and massacre in Beijing. When the movement began, Party head Zhao

Cultural Reform as an Afterthought

21

Ziyang was among its targets, mocked by students for his love of golf. But before it ended, he was forced to resign for being too tolerant of student demonstrators, echoing the 1987 dismissal of Hu Yaobang.44 Many believe that a thousand and more people died in Beijing and else­ where on June 4; certainly, even more people were jailed, driven into ex­ ile, or punished for their participation in the failed movement. After Zhao, among higher-ranking political casualties was Minister of Culture Wang Meng, a noted novelist who resigned after declining to praise the army following the bloodshed in Beijing. Yet, for all the violence, the Party again proved unable to reassert full control over cultural life. Widespread, if quiet, resistance to the late 1989 purge managed to limit its scope, re­ flecting the deep divisions within China’s political establishment. The massacre and subsequent political campaign demonstrated the implicit collapse of the Party’s effective hegemony. For artists, the purge demon­ strated that they were far from free of political control, yet the inability of the Party to reassert its authority showed that artists as a group were far stronger than a decade earlier.45 Taking a Plunge After an initial wave of fear and revulsion, the 1989 massacre evoked a mood of political caution across China. To counter the pessimism, Deng Xiaoping, in his last major political act, made a much-publicized inspec­ tion of South China in 1992. There he visited communities and institutions on the forefront of the open economy; the accompanying propaganda was used to push aside caution concerning intensifying reform of the economy. From this point the reforms snowballed, with hundreds of thousands of in­ dividuals choosing to give up their state positions to “take a plunge” into the commercial economy. With the smell of money in the air, economic suc­ cess became an even greater basis for the Party’s claims to legitimacy. The state thus tried to continue its earlier policies of economic, though not cul­ tural, liberalization. Again, these proved difficult to separate. The officially sanctioned intensification of the commodity economy en­ couraged many artists and cultural organizations to look even harder for sources of profit. It also helped overcome the resistance of some artists to giving up the security of state employment, which was losing its appeal in any event. Deng’s Death When Deng died in February 1997, he had not been politically active for at least two years. Jiang Zemin, his third choice as Party leader, had time to secure his position as successor, although many initially doubted his

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staying power. Jiang was not associated with any innovations in cultural policy, which remained rather staid. Nor is Hu Jintao, the apparently cau­ tious new Party head, associated with an explicit program of cultural lib­ eralization. The changes that Deng Xiaoping unleashed in China swept over the arts world, but not because Deng had any special interest in the arts. In­ deed, in contrast to such members of the founding generation of Com­ munist revolutionaries as Mao Zedong or Foreign Minister Chen Yi, Deng left few indications of aesthetic ambitions. Deng once remarked to his physician, “If you don’t see Sichuan opera, you don’t understand civi­ lization.” But this seems to have been the chauvinistic comment of a na­ tive son, rather than a commitment to art. Near the end of his life, Deng purchased a $16,000 set of stereo speakers from an Oregon firm for use in his home, but this was likely for the amusement of his relatives, rather than to meet any aesthetic demands of the patriarch.

THE UNEVEN PACE OF ARTS REFORMS The arts reforms were peripheral to Deng’s political and economic pro­ gram; indeed, the regime sent mixed signals about the need to bring change to the arts world. Some portents seem clear enough in retrospect. Shanghai Television marked off the turf for market-oriented culture when it broad­ cast China’s first television commercial on January 18, 1979.46 By 1986, some Fuzhou factories were hiring low-wage temporary workers to meet their re­ quirement to supply “voluntary” labor for community service, heralding the end of one of the more idealistic strands of Party ideology. Yet, Party leaders were also reluctant to abandon the notion that culture is a source of political power. The Party’s steady accompaniment to eco­ nomic reform has been years of talk about “socialist spiritual civilization.” With this phrase the Party signals to artists and intellectuals that their work has value in a changing society and suggests that cultural “work” can help restrain the market’s most damaging impact on society. In his re­ port to the Twelfth Party Congress in September 1982, Hu Yaobang de­ clared, “Socialist spiritual civilization not only gives a tremendous impe­ tus to the building of material civilization, but also guarantees that it will develop according to a correct orientation.”47 The conviction that culture, properly organized under state leadership, can shape the world was wor­ thy of Mao‘s heirs. Thus, it is not surprising that the restructuring of the arts world has been sluggish and erratic. It is similar to the huge and politically contro­ versial task of introducing economic reform to state-owned industry, where the prospect of putting workers out of jobs daunts both those who

Cultural Reform as an Afterthought

23

oppose unemployment and those who fear social instability. A 1988 na­ tional conference on cultural work disclosed that China had 3,068 spe­ cialized performing-arts troupes. Two thousand of these were state-run (the rest were collectively owned), employing 169,000 people on fixed state salaries, in addition to being responsible for pensions, subsidized housing, medical benefits, and pensions and funeral benefits for the fam­ ily members of deceased employees.48 Only ninety-three of the state troupes were self-supporting.49 Much as the Chinese state worries about unemployed workers, it fears unemployed intellectuals even more, so arts subsidies have in fact not been cut, but allowed to rise more slowly than inflation, so that they form a declining percentage of arts budgets. At the same time, the rapid growth of commercial culture means that state-sponsored arts have a declining public significance. The China National Symphony Orchestra One of the most closely watched instances of restructuring was Beijing’s Central Philharmonic Orchestra, the premier national symphonic ensem­ ble. Like many state arts ensembles, the Central Philharmonic had become bloated with five hundred members, plus their dependents, and was ill equipped to adjust to market conditions. Salaries were not obviously re­ lated to musical ability, for instance, and few in the ensemble had any idea about business. Nonetheless, it became the first arts unit under the Ministry of Culture to earn money on its own by recording movie soundtracks.50 The orchestra tried to implement the Party’s policy of “using commerce to nurture art” by setting up a company and a restaurant. But Deputy Di­ rectory Xie Ming complained in 1986, “Not only have we not made any money, but we have built up a big pile of problems by doing things slop­ pily. This is no solution.” Foreign examples are quite clear, claimed Xie: serious music requires subsidies. While popular music can make money and be taxed by the government, orchestras, ballet companies, and choirs cannot make money anywhere in the world. “Look at experience and at least recognize that the method of using commerce to nurture art will not work; the problems of the arts must be resolved by following the laws of art.”51 Musicians were in fact well-informed about Western trends; in 1983 the leading journal for professional musicians reported on the cancella­ tion of the Baltimore Symphony season the previous year, analyzing the problem quite accurately as one of failure either to turn a profit or find sufficient private or public subsidy.52 The orchestra’s situation deteriorated further by the end of the decade. After a post–Cultural Revolution boom in Western classical music, atten­ dance declined sharply; sometimes there were fewer in the audience than

24

Chapter 1

in the orchestra. Of the orchestra’s 1989 1.2-million-yuan (approximately U.S. $150,000) government allocation, salaries consumed 70 percent, leav­ ing little for administrative expenses and nothing for new instruments. A recording company failed to earn money, both from lack of business ex­ perience and from competition with more expensive, but higher prestige and often better quality performances by European orchestras. The or­ chestra canceled both rehearsals and performances for the first three months of 1989. Some companies offered private donations to the orches­ tra, but only if the musicians would rename their ensemble after the benefactor.53 The slogan “use commerce to nurture art” (yishang yangwen) was soft­ ened to “use art to supplement art” (yiwen puwen), meaning that arts or­ ganizations should try to earn money through their arts production, rather than engaging in distracting and unrelated commercial ventures. In practice this meant performing Strauss waltzes instead of peddling illprepared food. By 1993 the orchestra had increased its performances of popular music as it sought new members for its audience, but this pro­ voked controversy among the capital’s classical music aficionados. It also failed to raise enough money, with only two hundred members actually performing music to support the rest. A second discussion of renaming the orchestra, this time after a private company in Hainan, was rejected, allegedly by Jiang Zemin.54 In 1996 the orchestra disbanded, to be reconstituted as the China Na­ tional Symphony Orchestra. Members were required to reaudition for their jobs against other Beijing musicians. Only 94 of 210 old orchestra members who auditioned were rehired, this time on contracts with salaries graded to match their skills. Earnings for a top violinist were five thousand yuan (U.S. $600), twice the rate for a back-desk fiddler. One hundred apartments were set aside for the musicians, who were also pro­ vided instruments by the state. But the state contributed only 30 percent of a twenty-million-yuan budget. The new orchestra emulates Western models in seeking private financial support, especially from the Shanghai Stock Exchange, but also from foreign companies such as Nortel and Boe­ ing. Like most Chinese organizations, the new orchestra does not consider Western-style labor unions as part of the deal.55 The orchestra’s reorgani­ zation eventually led to the 2002 death of one its founders, choral con­ ductor Li Ling. The last surviving performer in the 1938 premier of Xian Xinghai’s Yellow River Cantata, the 90-year-old Li long nursed resentment that the reorganization had excluded the eighty members of the Central Philharmonic Choir. When a member of the China Choral Society asked him to write an inscription for a program, he was reminded that the singers were still without state subsidy. In a rage, he shouted “Why can’t the chorus enjoy the same treatment from the state like the orchestra?” He

Cultural Reform as an Afterthought

25

also screamed at his wife when she tried to calm him. The next day he col­ lapsed, and died in hospital.56 The completion of this long-heralded reorganization of a major arts body presses others to follow, such as the China Song and Dance Troupe, a top ensemble of the Ministry of Culture, with 240 members. Like a state industry, it is deep in debt (U.S. $2 million or 16.6 million yuan), so that performers and workers can only draw 60 percent of basic wages. Its cos­ tumes, stage props, and musical instruments are all aging, and it has no financial reserves to handle emergencies such as lost lawsuits or the theft of its vehicles. Perhaps a planned deal to provide entertainment for a Bei­ jing department store will help, but more radical measures will likely be necessary.57 In addition to the magnitude of the task and the Party’s ambiguity, there are some other reasons why reform has not come quickly to the arts world. Breaking the Habit of the Planned Arts Economy “Reform” became the legitimizing buzzword of the 1980s, much like “revolution” had been in the 1960s. In the 1960s, many policies that had little to do with revolution were wrapped in its red banner; again in the 1980s, reform was sometimes claimed as the rubric for very old-fashioned approaches to culture. For instance, between 1984 and 1988 an armybased acrobat troupe in Guangzhou increased performances to 250 each year, more than twice the number demanded by superiors. This bit of quota busting could have been a tale from the Great Leap Forward, yet it was hailed as a triumph of reform.58 State and Party officials were sometimes not very responsive. The old Central Philharmonic submitted three draft proposals on reforming the orchestra over three years, but neither the Ministry of Culture nor the Party Propaganda Department had responded to any of them. Represen­ tatives of other state musical ensembles sounded pretty bitter when they held a forum on structural reform. The Chinese Opera Academy com­ plained that the state had failed to spread information about arts-related business experiences that had not worked. The Chinese Broadcast Arts ensemble was upset at the lack of planning over long-term budgets, with last-minute bargaining over supplementary allocations at the end of each year, which did nothing to resolve the fundamental issue of how to cal­ culate the labor of musicians.59 Even after artists and managers had begun to understand the impera­ tive of market reforms, their audiences were sometimes slower to learn. Early in the reform period, touring opera companies and acrobats would arrive in a village and encounter unreasonable demands for complimen­ tary tickets to their performances. Often they found their food, lodging,

26

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and transportation cut off when they did not surrender to the extortion of free tickets by villagers unaccustomed to the market, but habituated to the bureaucratic distribution of tickets.60 Adjusting to the market meant that performing troupes had to reward their star performers, even though they might be young and lack the sen­ iority rewarded in the old system. When two young acrobats in Shenyang were unconventionally promoted ten grades in rank at one time, the dis­ regard for the seniority system sparked a national controversy. Both in their mid-twenties, one became star of the show by juggling plates; the other “made new breakthroughs flying through the air.”61 Political Interference There were two kinds of interference. One was simple opposition to the re­ forms from a principled critique. Chen Yun, Deng’s most prestigious rival, put a temporary halt to the application of a contract system for performing artists in 1983.62 Old-line propaganda officials tended not to speak of their grievances in open, but continued to raise questions about the pernicious aspects of market influence. Conservative cultural administrators, long un­ der attack, had been organizing against the reformers. More than a hundred held a conference at Zhouzhou, in Henan, in April 1987, where such figures as He Jingzhi, Lin Mohan, Liu Baiyu, Yao Xueyin, and Chen Tong met to ex­ press their unhappiness at the Party’s abandonment of its former arts poli­ cies. Wang Renzhi, head of the Party Propaganda Department, supported them. When Zhao Ziyang’s secretary, Bao Tong, sent someone to inspect the tapes and materials of conference, their anger at the reformers increased. A second interference was not especially concerned with broad principles, but with protecting the status of favorite or well-connected performers and ensembles under the purview of a bureaucracy or city. The Ministry of Cul­ ture denounced those who used administrative means to protect the rank­ ing of artists, rather than using competition to determine merit.63 A great deal of negotiation and compromise determined which arts bodies received state subsidies and what portion of their expenses would be underwritten. There was some sense that the leading ensembles, which best embodied Chinese culture, deserved state support. There was also some sense in the late 1980s that state support might even have to increase in areas too poor to support a thriving cultural marketplace, such as old revolutionary base ar­ eas, minority regions, border areas, and the most impoverished interior provinces, but little has been accomplished to increase such subsidies.64 Inept Reforms and Inappropriate Models Many schemes were well intended, but poorly designed. Thus, arts en­ sembles forced to run restaurants are not necessarily going to run them

Cultural Reform as an Afterthought

27

well. Or, as a salesman describes an abortive reform initiative in one loca­ tion of the massive state-owned New China bookstore chain: We tried the responsibility system for a month, then gave it up for various reasons. For one thing, prizes were given to those who over fulfilled their sales quota. But the prizes were such a small fraction of the gross profit, it wasn’t worth their while. Instead they took good books, best-selling books home to sell in their spare time—and pocketed all the profit.65

Similarly, arts education took little account of market needs and the job prospects of their students until the 1990s, insisting instead on producing “pure” artists and musicians: sign of a higher status operation, no doubt, but no help in graduating artists who could fit easily into China’s rapidly changing cultural world. The national press praised the prosperous coastal areas as new models for Chinese culture. The Ministry of Culture’s house newspaper printed countless detailed reports on various Cantonese arts ventures. But often these approaches were not very helpful to the arts managers facing real problems in interior provinces that lacked rapid growth in personal in­ come and a tradition of cultural openness to the outside world. “The old three-part tune of ‘eat, earn a living, and sleep’ has given way to a new concerto of work, rest, entertainment, and the quest for knowledge” rhap­ sodized one article, but how does one apply this to hard-scrabble regions where people have no money to spend on leisure activities?66 In some re­ spects such articles were a mirror image of the Maoist propaganda of the 1970s that promoted Shaanxi’s Dazhai Production Brigade as the agricul­ tural model for all China, regardless of differences in weather, irrigation, or soil condition. Some official arts institutions often still seem indifferent to market forces. The Jiangsu Provincial Fine Arts Association runs the Nanjing Art Museum, but only opens it during hours it finds convenient. On a fine Saturday afternoon in late March 1997, the museum was closed, despite cheerful crowds of Nanjing citizens at play in front of its doors. In con­ trast, a neighboring commercial bookstore drew customers with its sign­ board: “Happy news! New Dictionary of The Golden Lotus” (China’s Ming Dynasty pornographic classic), while another store offered plastic versions of Western female nude statues. THE EMERGENCE OF A DISCRETE AESTHETIC REALM The most obvious cultural achievement of the reform period has been enor­ mously increased diversity in arts products, especially for urban Chinese. Not only were new works offered, but formerly banned art was revived, and a new wave of foreign culture was introduced. Chinese audiences tried

28

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to cram a whole century of bourgeois Western art into a single decade, with U.S. television serials, abstract expressionism, and psychoanalysis tumbling into each other in a sometimes confusing, but tremendously energetic, way. As the Party yielded its warrant to impose its own cultural standards upon the nation, a lively ferment about aesthetics ensued, as Chinese artists and intellectuals struggled to find new standards for beauty.67 Although still incomplete, these reforms have partially privatized cul­ ture, breaking the old Maoist system of comprehensive state subsidies for the arts. By weakening the formerly inflexible bonds between artists and the state, the reforms also eroded the Communist Party’s domination of propaganda and ideology. Despite the violence of the 1989 Beijing Mas­ sacre, political reform in China has been more profound than is com­ monly recognized: artists (and other intellectuals) have established a new, more autonomous relationship with the state. The price of this growing independence is financial insecurity, commercial vulgarization, and the specter of unemployment. But the benefit is a growing recognition of aes­ thetics as a separate realm from politics. This does not mean art for art’s sake will soon supplant Communist Party leadership; it does mean that artists can entertain a wider range of views on the relationship of their work to society. This shift has been accompanied by a striking public discussion of aes­ thetics. Before the Cultural Revolution, aesthetics was formally recog­ nized in the organization of intellectual life; its enthusiastic return in the 1980s and 1990s is clearly an effort to stake out a mental terrain where the authority of artists might prevail over the views of politicians.68 The ap­ peal to the objective laws of beauty was initially a quest for a safe harbor against the storms of politics, but as the reforms intensified, the laws of beauty were increasingly posed against the laws of the economy. That cultural reform was an afterthought indicates that the arts have become less important to China’s politicians. Unlike many of his fellow revolutionaries, Deng Xiaoping had no great cultural ambitions or pre­ tensions. Here he was unusual among his revolutionary comrades; Mao Zedong’s ardor for calligraphy was echoed by comparable enthusiasms of other senior leaders for poetry, ballad singing, Beijing opera, and paint­ ing. Deng’s great pastime was not writing poetry or collecting art, but playing bridge—intellectual, to be sure, but not aesthetic. Even Deng’s managers were hesitant to present him in the traditional posture of ruleras-aesthete, dispensing moral wisdom through artistic commentary. Deng’s collected writings on the arts were not published until a decade af­ ter his rise to political supremacy. In cultural terms, Deng’s rule was a transition to the more technically educated leaders of the successor generation.69 Men such as Jiang Zemin, Li Peng, and Li Tieying all received technical training as engineers in East­

Cultural Reform as an Afterthought

29

ern Europe and revealed only a superficial interest in traditional culture.70 Vice Premier Li Lanqing, overseeing Chinese agriculture, was passionate about Western classical music, but he seemed a curiosity in a leadership that seemed to have few deep aesthetic convictions. President and Party Chief Jiang Zemin was a published writer beyond his political speeches; yet, he received royalties not for poetry, but for his translation of a guide to the electric capacity of machine-tool factories.71 Jiang was also televised singing Elvis Presley songs with President Fidel Ramos of the Philippines. This was an unprecedented act for a Chinese leader in its use of modern public relations to convey an image of down-home folksiness far from the austere expression of moral imperatives through high-art forms that ap­ pears so often in China’s political tradition. Reforming culture has been a central issue in Chinese politics for more than a hundred years. Episodes as different as the Tongzhi Restoration, the May Fourth and New Life movements, the Communists’ revolution­ ary mobilization at Yan’an, the institution of the Soviet model in the 1950s, and the Cultural Revolution all concerned themselves with how to make China’s culture somehow better fit the needs of modern society. Each, in its own way, affected the thinking and lives of artists as the group that could be led, pressed, intimidated, manipulated, or even inspired to translate new visions of China’s past and future into works of art. In contrast to these diverse movements, the Deng Xiaoping reforms are striking for not concerning themselves with the reform of culture at all, al­ though they inevitably brought such reform in their wake. Cultural re­ form did not come to China as a conscious policy, but the consequences are as profound as if they had been carefully planned. Deng and his ad­ visors wanted to alter China’s cultural policy, but not its culture.72 In or­ der to weaken the power base of his opponents, Deng purged the cultural apparatus, then hobbled it by ending mass-mobilizing political cam­ paigns. In order to appeal to intellectuals humiliated by ten years of Cul­ tural Revolution, Deng restored many of their most trusted figures to po­ sitions of cultural leadership. In order to bring a spurt of rapid growth to the Chinese economy, Deng initiated reform with market mechanisms that eventually spilled over from factory to dance troupe, threatening the subsidies that had sustained state culture since 1949. In order to build bridges to the West and to Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, Deng encouraged cultural exchanges and the importation of cul­ tural products that introduced new arts trends to China’s arts producers and audiences. In order to deepen the market reforms, Deng initiated a wave of commodification that brought to China a cultural marketplace in which art works were not produced with an eye to serving the state, but to earning a profit as commodities. In spite of repeated efforts to hold the baleful effects of cultural diversity at arms length, Deng’s other policies

30

Chapter 1

ultimately forced the Chinese to ask probing questions about the meaning of their national experience and allowed Chinese artists to suggest an­ swers with ever-greater autonomy. I am not arguing that the Chinese state was passive and weak. To the contrary, it pursued economic reform with determination and political vi­ tality. From the beginning, there were state plans to lighten up political controls, but the politicians of the early reform period did not anticipate their full cultural and ideological implications.73 Nor did many foreign students of these trends.74 Yet, the Party was anxious about the nonmate­ rial dimensions of the changes it had unleashed. One response has been a steady discussion of the need to strengthen “socialist spiritual civiliza­ tion” as a “human counterpart” to rapid economic transformation.75 One of the popular interpretations of Chinese politics during the re­ forms is the thesis of political immobility: China’s problem is a lack of po­ litical change to accompany widespread economic transformation. Im­ plicit in this thesis is the idea that political and economic reform must proceed apace, each reinforcing the other. This view does not hold up well when we consider the cultural realm: the decade of the 1980s brought enormous political changes, especially easing restrictions on speech and religion, and a greater toleration of nonstate organizations, but it also brought the progressive weakening of state cultural organs. These changes are cultural, but they are deeply political as well, and it is only by a willful denial of the aesthetic dimension of politics that the politicalimmobility cliché persists. After the 1989 massacre, the winning faction in China’s government ar­ gued that deposed leader Zhao Ziyang had let things get out of hand by encouraging too much openness, that rising political expectations led to the 1989 movement. In an inversion of the Western political-immobility argument, Chinese hard liners insisted that crisis came from too much po­ litical change. Among the many ironies of modern Chinese politics is that Mao’s grand plans to transform Chinese culture during the Cultural Rev­ olution failed, while the market’s unintended impact on the arts has be­ come so pervasive. The tension between artist and the state in China continues to be an im­ portant dynamic in cultural life, although its terms have been redefined in the course to two decades of economic reform. Most Chinese are aware of the extensive change in this perennial relationship.76 Changes in the or­ ganization of the arts system were so great that we must discard the com­ mon observation that China’s economic reforms have come easily, but that little has been achieved in political reform. Two decades of cultural reform eroded the Party’s former easy domination of the ideological sys­ tem, thereby freeing the way for additional reform in both economics and politics. But many Westerners are so enthralled by the new anti-China

Cultural Reform as an Afterthought

31

politics of post–Cold War triumphalism that they miss how much the pol­ itics of culture has changed. The romantic ideal of the Chinese artist may speak more to the West’s own needs for heroes locked in struggle against tyranny than to the actual problems faced by most of China’s artists today. These problems are real and often severe, but it is not helpful to regard the artists simply and universally as victims of a brutal state.

NOTES 1. See Catherine Soussloff, The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Janet Wolff, The Social Produc­ tion of Art (London: Macmillan, 1981). 2. Marilyn Rueschemeyer, “State Patronage in the German Democratic Re­ public: Artistic and Political Change in a State Socialist Society,” in Judith Huggins Balfe, ed., Paying the Piper: Causes and Consequences of Art Patronage (Urbana: Uni­ versity of Illinois Press, 1993), 209. 3. George Orwell, “Prevention of Literature,” in John McCormick and Mairi MacInnes, eds., Versions of Censorship (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1962), 296, 299. 4. I have written about this heritage in Brushes with Power: Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of Calligraphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 5. This estimate is based on numbers provided in Zhongguo tongji nianjian 1995 [“China statistical yearbook 1995”] (Beijing: Zhongguo Tongji Chubanshe, 1995), 642–644, to which I have added estimates based on earlier years for the film and broadcast industry. The figure includes both artists and support personnel (ad­ ministrators, bookkeepers, etc.), but excludes artists employed outside obviously arts-related units. That is, it includes performers for the Ministry of Culture’s song-and-dance troupes, but not those of the Ministry of Railways, the Capital Iron and Steel Company, or, most significantly, the People’s Liberation Army. 6. Zhongguo nianjian 1996 [“China yearbook 1996”] (Beijing: Zhongguo Nian­ jian She, 1996). 7. See Michael Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics (Berke­ ley: University of California Center for Chinese Studies, 1992), 6. 8. Philippe Massonnet, “Culture of Gold Replacing the Gold of Culture in China,” Agence France Presse English Wire, 10/31/94, in China News Digest— Global, November 3–4, 1994. 9. Wenyi is a contraction for wenxue (“literature”) and yishu (“fine arts”). 10. See the essays in Balfe, ed., Paying the Piper. 11. Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 97. 12. See The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, George Bull, trans. (Har­ mondsworth: Penguin, 1956). 13. Zhang Xianliang, Getting Used to Dying (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 66. 14. For a critique of the China field’s understatement of the contribution of Maoist industrialization toward subsequent economic growth, see Chris Bramall,

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In Praise of Maoist Economic Planning. Living Standards and Economic Development in Sichuan since 1931 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). See also Peter Nolan, China’s Rise, Russia’s Fall: Economics and Planning in the Transition from Stalinism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), and Maurice Meisner, The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978–1994 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), 188–205. 15. See Deborah Davis, “The Consumer Revolution in Urban China,” in Debo­ rah Davis, ed., The Consumer Revolution in Urban China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 16. Deborah S. Davis, “When a House Becomes His Home,” in Perry Link, Richard P. Madsen, and Paul G. Pickowicz, eds., Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 244. 17. Personal incomes continued to rise rapidly after Deng Xiaoping’s death, at least in cities, where per capita disposable income grew from 5,160 yuan (U.S. $620) in 1997 to 8,000 yuan (U.S. $964) in 2002. “Major Improvements in Living Standard in Past 5 Years,” People’s Daily Online, at http://english.peopledaily. com.cn (February 28, 2003). 18. Willy Wo-lap Lam, The Era of Jiang Zemin (Singapore: Simon & Schuster, 1999). 19. For the politics of this arts famine, see my “Arts Policies of the Cultural Rev­ olution: The Rise and Fall of Culture Minister Yu Huiyong,” in William Joseph, Christine Wong, and David Zweig, eds., New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1991), 219–241. 20. For example, “Ba yishu dangzuo shangpin shi kechi de xingwei” [“It is shameful to treat art as a commodity”], Jiangxi ribao (December 11, 1954). 21. But some companies remained private for several years after 1966. See Colin Mackerras, The Chinese Theatre in Modern Times (London: Thames and Hud­ son, 1975), 163–170. 22. Julia F. Andrews, “Traditional Painting in New China: Guohua and the Anti-Rightist Campaign,” Journal of Asian Studies 49(3) (August 1990), 555–585. 23. “Remolding and Study Movement Unfolded among Literary and Arts Cir­ cles,” NCNA (December 1, 1951), Current Background 156 (February 5, 1952), 38. 24. Zhou Yang, “Reform the Ideology of Literature and Art, Improve the Work of Leadership,” Current Background 156 (February 5, 1952), 28. 25. Paul Pickowicz told me about the history of the film archive in Eugene (Feb­ ruary 26, 1987). 26. For example, see the survey reported in “Jinzhoushi jumin wenhua xiaofei fasheng sida bianhua” [“Jinzhou residents have four big changes in cultural con­ sumption”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (January 3, 1988). 27. James Cahill shows that this was not the reality of much artistic practice. Yet, the Confucian elite pretended that gentlemen did not receive payment for art. See James Cahill, The Painter’s Practice: How Artists Lived and Worked in Traditional China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 28. Helmut Martin, “‘Cultural China’: Irritation and Expectations at the End of an Era,” in Maurice Brosseau, Kuan Hsin-chi, and Y. Y. Kueh, eds., China Review 1997 (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1997), 278. 29. Fuzhou Television (February 8, 1986).

Cultural Reform as an Afterthought

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30. For an overview, see Maurice Meisner, The Deng Xiaoping Era; Richard Baum, Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping (Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 1994); Lowell Dittmer, China’s Continuous Revolution: The Post-Liberation Epoch, 1949–1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Gordon White, Riding the Tiger: The Politics of Economic Reform in Post-Mao China (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1993). The literature on the reform period is enormous and often of transient value. Diverse, yet thoughtful, interpretations include the following books: John P. Burns, Political Participation in Rural China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Cheng Li, Rediscovering China: Dynamics and Dilemmas of Reform (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997); Merle Goldman, Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Harry Harding, China’s Second Revolution: Reform after Mao (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings In­ stitution, 1987); Ruth Hayhoe, China’s Universities and the Open Door (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1989); William Hinton, The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978–1989 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990); Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter, Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s (Palo Alto: Stanford Uni­ versity Press, 1988); Barrett L. McCormick, Political Reform in Post-Mao China: De­ mocracy and Bureaucracy in a Leninist State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Peter Moody Jr., Chinese Politics after Mao (New York: Praeger, 1983); Barry Naughton, Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978–1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Peter Nolan, China’s Rise, Russia’s Fall; Elizabeth J. Perry and Christine Wong, eds., The Political Economy of Re­ form in Post-Mao China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); Suzanne Pepper, China’s Education Reform in the 1980s: Policies, Issues, and Historical Per­ spectives (Berkeley: University of California Institute of East Asian Studies, 1990); Vivienne Shue, The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1988). 31. Quoted in John Halliday, ed., The Artful Albanian: The Memoirs of Enver Hoxha (London: Chatto & Windus, 1986), 367, n. 6. 32. Tianjin was one of three cities (with Beijing and Shanghai) given status equivalent to a province in 1949; Chongqing was added in 1997. “Chang P’inghua’s Speech to Cadres on the Cultural Front” (July 23, 1978), Issues & Studies, 14(12) (December 1978), 92–93. 33. Hu Yaobang’s sycophancy of Deng was profound. In the 1950s, Hu joined one of Deng’s fabled bridge games in Sichuan, where the penalty for losing was to crawl around the table. When Deng was losing to Sichuan boss Li Jingquan, Hu declared, “Comrade Xiaoping has a noble character and high prestige. It is not ap­ propriate for him to crawl. It will tarnish his image if others hear of it. . . . I will be his substitute. I am shorter. It is easier for me to crawl.” In fact, Hu was a half cen­ timeter taller than Deng, which did not keep him from crawling in bridge, as in politics. See Pang Pang, The Death of Hu Yaobang, Si Ren, trans. (Honolulu: Uni­ versity of Hawaii Center for Chinese Studies, 1989), 38. 34. Ezra Vogel, One Step Ahead in China: Guangdong under Reform (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 116. See Melanie Manion, Retirement of Revolu­ tionaries in China: Public Policies, Social Norms, Private Interests (Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 1993).

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35. In contrast to the severity of Mao’s purges, Deng permitted Hua Guofeng to retain some dignity. He remained a member of the Party’s Central Committee un­ til October 1997. 36. Merle Goldman, “The Zigs and Zags in the Treatment of Intellectuals,” China Quarterly 104 (December 1985), 709–715. 37. Ezra Vogel, One Step Ahead in China, 129. See especially Lawrence R. Sul­ livan, “Assault on the Reforms: Conservative Criticism of Political and Eco­ nomic Liberalization in China, 1985–86,” China Quarterly 114 (June 1988), 198–222. 38. See Bruce J. Dickson, “Conflict and Non-Compliance in Chinese Politics: Party Rectification, 1983–87,” Pacific Affairs 63(2) (summer 1990), 170–190. 39. See Lowell Dittmer’s periodization of fang (“openness”) and shou (“restric­ tion”) in “Patterns of Elite Strife and Succession in Chinese Politics,” China Quar­ terly 123 (September 1990), 422, n. 30. 40. In 1983 Qi Benyu, who had been under arrest since falling from his modest Cultural Revolution power fifteen years earlier, was sentenced to eighteen years for “persecuting state leaders and inciting ‘beating, smashing and looting.’” Four others, including former deputy minister of culture Liu Qingtang received com­ parable sentences. “5 ‘Gang of Four’ Supporters Get 15- to 18-Year Jail Terms,” New York Times (November 3, 1983). 41. Zhao Ziyang, “Report on the Work of the Government (June 7, 1983),” in The First Session of the Sixth National People’s Congress (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1983), 50–51 42. Fang Jie, “Jutuan gaige, shizai bixing” [“We truly must carry out reform of drama companies”], in 1987 Zhongguo wenyi nianjian (Beijing: Wenhua Yishu Chubanshe, 1988), 465–466. 43. Directed by Chen Kaige in 1985. 44. Deng here followed the example of Mao Zedong, a leader who also dis­ missed successors such as Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao, whom he found wanting. 45. Geremie R. Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 281–315; see also John Clark, “Official Reactions to Modern Art in China since the Beijing Massacre,” Pacific Affairs 65(3) (fall 1992), 334–352. 46. Shanghai Television Advertisement in South China Morning Post (March 3, 1997). 47. Quoted in Stuart R. Schram, “‘Economics in Command?’ Ideology and Pol­ icy since the Third Plenum, 1978–1984,” China Quarterly 99 (September 1984), 433. 48. Ling Yang, “Reform Booms Non-Government Art Troupes,”Beijing Review 31(27) (July 4–10, 1988), 27–28. 49. An excellent review of the course of reform in one of the arts is Elizabeth Wichmann, “Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Beijing Opera Perfor­ mance,” The Drama Review 34 (spring 1990), 146–180. 50. Bi Xizhou, “‘Xiang qian kan’ gei dalu yinyuejie dailai weiji” [“‘Looking to­ ward cash’ brings a crisis in the mainland musical world”] Guanchajia 38 (Decem­ ber 1980), 46, 69. 51. “Yinyue biaoyan tuanti tizhi gaige zuotanhui” [“Forum on structural re­ form of musical performing groups”], Renmin yinyue (May 1986), 7–11.

Cultural Reform as an Afterthought

35

52. Cai Furu, “Meiguo jiaoxiang yuetuan pubian mianlin jingji kunnan” [“American symphony orchestras routinely face economic difficulties”], Renmin yinyue 218 (1983), 63–64. 53. Wang Qianhai, “Philharmonic Flounders with Dwindling Audience,” China Daily (May 23, 1989); Wang Qianhai, “Symphony Society Facing Difficul­ ties,” China Daily (July 21, 1989). Changing the name for money became an issue again in 1993. See Zha Xiduo, “Zhongyang yuetuan di kunjing: ‘zhao budao bei’ jiu shi bei” [“The predicament of the Central Philharmonic: ‘Can’t find north’ is north”], Jiushi niandai 281 (June 1993), 16–17. On the rage for symphonic music in the early 1980s, see my Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-Class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 175–186. 54. Zha Xiduo, “Zhongyang yuetuan di kunjing,” 16–17. 55. See Ge Xin, “Zhongguo jiaoxiang yue zhouchu xin yinfu” [“Chinese sym­ phonic music plays new notes”], Yazhou zhoukan (September 16–22, 1996), 64–65; Angelica Cheung, “All Together Now,” Asia Magazine (June 20–22, 1997), 36–37. 56. Li Ling’s inscription: “Professional choral bodies have met with unprece­ dented hardship. I hope the Choral Society will pull itself together for a revival and lead the nation’s choral art to a new development and a new height.” See Oliver Chou, “Bitter End for China’s Western Music Pioneer,” Straits Times (November 21, 2003). 57. Zhou Youwen, “Wenhua duanxun” [“Culture notes”], Zhengming 147 (November 1997), 76–77. 58. “Zhiyi gaochao guoji saichang luhuo guanjun, shenru jiceng quanxin quanyi weibing yanchu” [“Superb skill, repeatedly winning international compe­ titions; penetrate to the basic level, wholeheartedly performing for the troops”], Guangming ribao (September 23, 1987). 59. “Yinyue biaoyan tuanti tizhi gaige zuotanhui” [“Forum on structural reform of musical performing groups”], Renmin yinyue (May 1986), 7–11. 60. Zhong Wen, “Cong ‘kan baixi’ shuoqi” [“On ‘seeing free opera’”], Nanfang ribao (May 1, 1979). 61. “Yiji yanyuan gongzi liansheng shiji” [“Wages of grade one performers increase ten grades”], Fuzhou wanbao (March 9, 1989) (reprinted from Zhongguo qingnian bao). 62. Judith Shapiro and Liang Heng, Cold Winds, Warm Winds: Intellectual Life in China Today (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986), 84–86. 63. Gao Zhanxiang, “Wenhua liangdao gongzuo yao shiying gaige kaifang de xin xingshi” [“The work of cultural leadership must respond to the new circum­ stances of reform and openness”], in 1987 Zhongguo wenyi nianjian (Beijing: Wen­ hua Yishu Chubanshe, 1988), 462–464. 64. See “1989 Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu jinyibu fanrong wenyi de ruogan yijian” [“Some opinions of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee on advancing toward a flourishing literature and art”] (February 17, 1989), in Fujian ribao (March 12, 1989). 65. Zhang Xinxin and Sang Ye, “Chinese Profiles,” Chinese Literature (winter 1985), 26.

36

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66. The quotation is from Gu Zuoyi and Tian Feng, “Shangpin jingji tiaojianxia xiangzhen shehui wenhua jianshe de tansuo—Guangdongsheng Dongguangshi Humenzhen diaocha” [“An exploration of village social and cultural construction under the conditions of the commodity economy—an investigation of Humen Township, Dongguan County, Guangdong”], Renmin ribao (February 13, 1989). See also “Yongbao gaige kaifang de nanguo dachao” [“Embrace South China’s great wave of reform and openness”], Wenyi bao (January 16, 1988). 67. Three excellent, if very different, overviews of the new culture are Geremie R. Barmé, In the Red; Claire Huot, China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); and Jianying Zha, China Pop (New York: The New Press, 1994). 68. For an analysis of China’s aesthetics field, see Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997). Key documents are found in Deng Fuxing, ed., Yishu meixue wenxuan 1919–1989 [“Anthology of writings on fine arts and aesthetics”] (Chongqing: Chongqing Chubanshe, 1996). 69. See Cheng Li, China’s Leaders: The New Generation (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). 70. See Richard P. Suttmeier and Richard Kraus, “Reconstituting Culture: Chi­ nese Arts and Sciences and the Transition from Leninism,” in Edwin Winckler, ed., Leninist Transitions (Boulder: Lynn Rienner, 1998). 71. Jiang donated the royalty payment to the Shanghai children’s welfare fund. See “Cankao xiaoxi” [“Reference news”], Zhengming 150 (April 1990), 15. 72. Perry Link, “The Limits of Cultural Reform in Deng Xiaoping’s China,” Modern China 13(2) (April 1987), 118–119. 73. Daniel C. Lynch, After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics, and “Thought Work” in Reformed China (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999), 13–14. Barmé contrasts the activism of China’s state to the Soviet dinosaur in In the Red, 325. 74. Some of my own earlier misperceptions may be found in “China’s Cultural ‘Liberalization’ and Conflict over the Social Organization of the Arts,” Modern China 9(2) (April 1983), 212–227. 75. For one application of spiritual civilization, see Carolyn Cartier, “Transna­ tional Urbanism in the Reform-Era Chinese City: Landscapes from Shenzhen,” Urban Studies 39(9) (2002), 1513–1532. 76. The Chinese literary world has been writing about these changes for some time, including some fine works by Chinese writers abroad. For example, see Jing Wang, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).

2

�

The Waning Authority

of the Chinese State

as Patron of the Arts

T

he Communist Party reorganized the arts, not in a single act, but in a se­ ries of only partially coordinated economic and administrative mea­ sures implemented between 1949 and 1957. The resulting cultural system held three important consequences for the long-term relations between artists and the state. First, the state became the major patron, making artis­ tic work both more professional and more bureaucratic than ever before in Chinese history. The modal artist became an employee in an urban-centered state network of cultural institutions. Second, the Party built a huge, if un­ steady, foundation for political control of the arts, as new cultural bureau­ cracies competed for authority to supervise the work of artists. Third, the Party destroyed the popular commercial culture of the cities. As the Party extended political control over the arts, once obvious distinctions among elite, popular, and folk culture became blurred as officials treated all art forms as administratively equivalent. The extension of political control was the central issue for scholarship on the politics of Chinese culture undertaken before the reform period. While there are many details we do not know, the broad means by which the Party strengthened its controls over artists and audiences are now clear.1 After an initial restriction of its ideological adversaries, the Party in­ troduced to the arts world a new combination of rewards and punish­ ments. A series of political campaigns began in 1951 with criticism of the movie The Life of Wu Xun, continued through a national discussion of the classic eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber, and escalated into the 1955 campaign against writer Hu Feng, accused of resisting the new cultural regime. Initial Maoist optimism that intellectuals could 37

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strengthen the Party by offering their constructive criticisms gave way to a ferocious antirightist campaign that shocked most of China’s artists into political and aesthetic caution.2 Party control became clear by the end of the first decade of rule, sponsoring a rather dull and limited range of art works. Less attention has been given to the institutions that the Party estab­ lished to administer the arts.3 These institutions, borrowed directly from Soviet experience and reproduced throughout China, ultimately fell short of securing Party hegemony. Their failure was double. First, the institu­ tions themselves collapsed under political attack during the Cultural Rev­ olution. Second, when these institutions were restored in the late 1970s, they were unable to prevent a remarkable decline of Communist author­ ity as market reforms eroded their administrative powers. Implicit in my approach is a treatment of China’s Party-state not as a single, totalizing entity, but as a body of constituent parts. Scholars have shown how the state enhanced its powers over the course of the 1950s. But we are now in a position to look critically at developments attributed to the state as a whole. The Communists built a state that presented a re­ markably unitary appearance. But closer inspection complicates the im­ age of purposeful solidity. This story is usually told in terms of individual repression or as the cowing of a great mass of intellectuals. The creation of institutions for culture has received less attention. This chapter will describe the chief political bodies that patronized the arts and their interactions under the regimes of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Under Mao, the state had enormous power over artists and au­ dience, yet the cultural bureaucracies were prevented from building upon this power to create strong institutions. Under Deng, cultural organiza­ tions had fewer resources and less power, but two of them are perhaps somewhat more firmly institutionalized. As the reform program has ex­ tended to arts institutions, one of its major consequences has been to di­ minish the ability of powerful political patrons to control China’s culture.

CHINA’S FIRST PATRONAGE REVOLUTION: ARTISTS BECOME STATE EMPLOYEES From the perspective of the reform era, when the smashing of the iron rice bowl of permanent employment extends to state-employed artists and performers, the 1950s stand out sharply as a time when the state dramat­ ically enlarged employment opportunities for artists. Twentieth-century China has had two revolutions in artistic patronage; we cannot compre­ hend the one that is now underway without understanding its predeces­ sor.

The Waning Authority of the Chinese State

39

The first half of the twentieth century was a hard time to be a profes­ sional artist. The arts were ill organized, and the social status of most artists was extremely low. Singers were commonly regarded as prostitutes, and practitioners of elite arts such as painting or literature were often scorned for working for money. The traditional elite valued an inspired amateurism in the arts: art should not be created for the base motive of profit. Nor should it be sold. Instead, it should be exchanged as gifts among cultivated gentlemen. The power of the amateur ideal was so great that genuine professional artists often had to pretend that they also fol­ lowed the genteel ways of the leisured elite.4 At mid-century, many Chi­ nese artists would have been happy to abandon this outmoded mandarin model, but found that the economy did not provide opportunities to do so. Opera singer Xin Fengxia recounted the bad old days in her memoir.5 Employment was irregular and ill paid, and even excellent singers had to endure the humiliation of begging for donations from the wealthy. Singers were often illiterate, and young ones had to bribe the famous ones for indifferent training.6 Practitioners of nonliterary arts sought to gain some control over their economic destinies by banding together in guilds, premodern forerunners of labor unions.7 The arts world tried to adapt to China’s changing and unsettled econ­ omy. For instance, storytellers at Shanghai’s celebrated Great World Amusement Center began to commodify their art: [I]n the past storytelling had been a more leisurely entertainment, in which a performer would continue his narrative over a period of several days in the interests of keeping his audience with him. In the pressured life of the mod­ ern city, however, it became the custom to break down the much-loved ram­ bling tales from the traditional epics and romantic novels into single episodes that could be narrated separately or in sequence to make an inte­ grated story.8

Ted Huters describes how the ruinous economy of postwar China so preoccupied writers that professional demands remained barely articulated.9 Chinese writers were (and continue to be) paid royalties according to the number of characters they wrote, rather than how many copies are sold, as in the West. Despite rapid inflation, these payments actually de­ clined, so that by 1946 typesetters earned more for setting characters than the authors earned for writing them. Shen Congwen claimed in 1946 that Ba Jin was the only writer able to live off his work. Lao She did earn enough to avoid moonlighting, but only because of payments for the American translation of his popular novel Camel xiangzi. Shen may have exaggerated, but only slightly: a more recent estimate lists only five writ­ ers who supported themselves by their literary activities: Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, Hu Shi, Lin Yutang, and Shen Congwen himself.10

40

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China’s pre-1949 cultural market was too weak for most artists to sup­ port themselves through their art.11 Most elite artists turned to teaching, editorial work, or other employment. The Communist revolution did not so much destroy the arts market as stabilize and expand opportunities for steady employment. While some artists left the Chinese mainland rather than accept the Party and its new state as their employers, the vast ma­ jority either regarded the new regime as an improvement or were in no position to leave. Marxism, as China’s new official ideology, did not easily justify privi­ leging cultural workers. Raymond Williams cites Marx on the place of the artist: There is a difficult passage in the Grundrisse in which he argues that while the man who makes a piano is a productive worker, there is a real question whether the man who distributes the piano is also a productive worker; but he probably is, since he contributes to the realization of surplus value. Yet, when it comes to the man who plays the piano, whether to himself or to oth­ ers, there is no question: he is not a productive worker at all. So piano-maker is base, but pianist is superstructure.12

“Superstructural” artists might well wonder how important they were to be in the new regime as compared with workers defined by more clearly “material” criteria. Nonetheless, the Party elevated artists rather quickly. Many artists had joined the revolution at the Party’s revolution­ ary base in Yan’an, where they turned their talents to propaganda or worked as instructors in the Lu Xun Arts Academy.13 After the revolution, these artists became China’s cultural leaders, mingling Marxist theories with inherited memories of literati practice. Soviet examples also rein­ forced China’s trend to echo Confucian tradition’s giving priority to in­ tellectual work. Government employment of artists increased dramatically through the 1950s as the state created new cultural organizations. Some sense of the scale of growth in the culture industry is suggested by the following fig­ ures: between 1949 and 1962 performing-arts groups increased from 1,000 to 3,320, county and municipal cultural centers from 896 to 2,514, public libraries from 55 to 541, museums from 21 to 230, and film projection units from 646 to 18,583.14 By 1956, there were two hundred thousand profes­ sional folk singers and dancers, a type of performer favored more by the Party than by elite artists.15 Many prominent artists were favored with posts in the new cultural bureaucracy, accompanied by housing, cars, en­ tertainment, and opportunities for travel. By 1960, for instance, there were eighty literary magazines, all of which required editorial staff. Of the 3,719 members of the Writers Association, some could earn a good living as employees of its provincial and municipal branches.16

The Waning Authority of the Chinese State

41

Yet, despite the creation of administrative jobs for artists, most artists found employment as writers, musicians, painters, or dancers in schools, performing ensembles, and other ordinary work units. This was an im­ portant departure from the Soviet model that China’s Communists were busy applying; in Eastern Europe artists’ associations provided jobs to all of their members.17 And while China’s counterpart associations had ben­ efits to distribute, they never provided a steady source of largess that could be used to control artists in the Soviet manner. Perhaps as a result, the Chinese associations seem never to have been held in such wide­ spread contempt as those of the Soviet Union.18 The expansion of em­ ployment made the extension of Communist Party influence relatively painless for most, at least until the 1957 trauma of the antirightist cam­ paign. As new units were created or old ones reorganized and expanded, artists with Communist sympathies could be put into positions of influ­ ence. Even the literati of the old society were absorbed. By 1953, each province had established a Hall of Culture and History, where aging in­ tellectuals were provided small salaries, access to a library, and space and materials for painting.19 Artists became a privileged group before the Cul­ tural Revolution. They were comforted, salaried, and educated, and in many cases committed to a cosmopolitan May Fourth ideology at odds with the nativist populism propounded by Party leaders.20 They enjoyed travel and work in desirable urban locations, such as the assignment of a West Lake site for the Hangzhou’s China Academy of Fine Arts. When times were hard in the nationwide famine of the early 1960s, top artists joined athletes in the privilege of extra rations. Yet, artists in any nation respond less willingly to social discipline than other professionals. The Party’s tasks for artists became less attractive pre­ cisely as conditions of employment improved. The revolution had de­ manded artists skilled at exposure, satire, and inspiring people to join the revolution. Consolidating the new regime required artists to celebrate endless victories, a different skill altogether. Tensions between artists and their new employers were perhaps inevitable, although their scale was not. The Hundred Flowers and antirightist campaigns were cultural coun­ terparts to the 1956 socialization of industry, agriculture, and commerce, a series of campaigns by which private ownership in the economy was brought under political control. The Party viewed its new state domina­ tion of the economy as a tool for bringing a new order to China. State em­ ployment of artists and intellectuals implied the possibility of state disci­ pline: of five million intellectuals in 1957, five hundred thousand were classified as rightists.21 As individuals, artists remained highly vulnerable to shifts in policy, yet the corporate weight of artists increased until the Cultural Revolution.

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The disjuncture between individual disaster and collective good fortune was sometimes unnerving, although it never reached the lunatic situation of the Soviet Union in 1937, where the Writers Union distributed such privileges as good apartments and imported clothing at the height of Stalin’s terror.22

MULTIPLE ARTS BUREAUCRACIES How were artists organized by the new state? The model established in the 1950s under strong Soviet influence persists today in broad outline. No one institution controls cultural policy. Several institutions share re­ sponsibility for the arts in what Chinese call the cultural system. This set of bureaucracies is comparable to other loose groupings, such as the for­ eign affairs system or the finance and trade system. In the foreign affairs system, policy is determined by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Min­ istry of Foreign Trade and Economic Relations, the Defense Ministry, and the Party’s United Front and International Liaison Departments. It also involves the supposedly popular organizations for friendship with foreign countries. Other bodies with specific foreign interests, such as the Ministry of Education, are also involved. A comparable system en­ compasses the major cultural institutions, with four major bureaucra­ cies, a larger number of agencies with peripheral interests in the arts, and the informal, but often momentous, participation of senior Party leaders.23 The Ministry of Culture The most obvious, although not always the most important arts bu­ reaucracy is the Ministry of Culture, which operates a vast network of arts organizations, including opera companies, symphony orchestras, conservatories and arts academies, and many publications. The ministry’s hierarchy descends to include a department of culture in each province. Each of China’s more than two thousand counties also has a cultural bureau. At the local level, these operate neighborhood cultural centers. In prosperous urban areas these centers are often multistory recreation centers with libraries and meeting rooms, which offer les­ sons in painting, support amateur musicians, hire storytellers, and pro­ vide a place to play bridge, pool, and video games. The network of cul­ tural centers is spread more thinly in the countryside. The Ministry of Culture does not serve many villages, and others often have a “cultural station,” consisting of a simple reading room with outdated books and magazines.

The Waning Authority of the Chinese State

43

The Communist Party Propaganda Department The Central Committee’s Propaganda Department is charged with over­ seeing ideology, culture, and education.24 Within the Propaganda Depart­ ment is the Arts Bureau, whose staff works closely with the Ministry of Culture. The propaganda bureaucracy is replicated in each of China’s provinces, cities, and counties. Appointment as Party secretary for propa­ ganda is an important post at any level. Until 1984, appointment of lead­ ing officials throughout the cultural system required vetting by the Pro­ paganda Department, although this approval was typically a formality.25 Initially, many propaganda workers were revolutionary veterans with lit­ tle training or interest in the arts, which they often came to view prima­ rily as a realm of possible political incident. This potential strain with other arts units intensified over time, earning propaganda personnel rep­ utations as political hacks. This has often been true, though there are no­ table exceptions. The People’s Liberation Army The army is another major employer of artists, both for entertaining and encouraging its troops, and is an important sponsor of performances for civilians. The key institution here is the General Political Department of the People’s Liberation Army. The head of this department is usually one of the nation’s chief politicians (including such well-known political per­ sonalities as Li Desheng, Zhang Chunqiao, Wei Guoqing, Yu Qiuli, and Yang Baibing). A cultural department within this office oversees the army’s bands, opera companies, dance troupes, novelists, and poets. The army has operated a major arts school in Beijing since 1960. Each of China’s seven military regions operates major cultural institutions, many of which develop their own specialties. If it seems odd that the army should have a prominent arts role, bear in mind that the United States routinely spends more money for the military bands of the Department of Defense than for the entire budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. The Federation of Artists The Federation of Artists is an umbrella organization for a network of pro­ fessional organizations representing writers, painters and sculptors, dancers, filmmakers, calligraphers, musicians, acrobats, and ballad singers and comedians (quyi). Each professional organization has a na­ tional hierarchy, parallel to the Propaganda Department and the Ministry of Culture. Neither at the central nor at the local level is the federation as important as its constituent organizations. In Fujian there were twelve units in the provincial Arts Federation in the 1980s, but the federation had

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neither budget nor staff of its own. Its meetings were said to resemble those of the United Nations, with painters, writers, and musicians each pushing their own special interests. Among these organizations, the Writ­ ers Association has been more influential than the others, reflecting the historical prestige of writing in Chinese culture.26 Many artists are em­ ployed as administrators for these organizations, or as editors for their publications. The various arts associations publish influential profes­ sional journals (such as People’s Literature, Poetry, Fine Arts, and People’s Music). They also honor prominent artists with posts, award prizes to new work of merit, and signal policy changes through their publications and congresses. These organizations are an important link between Party pol­ icy and the majority of artists who are not Party members. Other Institutions Still other organizations are important arts patrons. The Ministry of For­ eign Affairs is deeply involved in cultural diplomacy through the ex­ change of art exhibitions and musical performances as signs of amity with other nations. The ministry has its own musical ensemble, the “Oriental Song and Dance Troupe,” which specializes in performing music of na­ tions with whom China seeks warm relations. The Foreign Ministry may work closely with the Writers Association or the Fine Arts Association in cultural exchanges, as well as with the state Commission for Cultural Re­ lations with Foreign Countries. Party departments such as the United Front Work Department, charged with relations with Taiwan and over­ seas Chinese, are also active in arranging visits to China by painters and poets of Chinese ethnicity from other lands. The Party’s minority affairs units also become patrons of the arts when they sponsor song-and-dance ensembles for Xinjiang or Inner Mongolia. Similarly, the railroads have a well-known song-and-dance troupe, as do important mines and Beijing’s Capital Steel works. More predictably, both central and provincial educa­ tion departments employ artists as teachers in high schools and universi­ ties. The public security agencies also maintain an interest in the arts. Like any other large Chinese organization, they have their own amateur drama troupes, singers, and painters. The 1944 Yan’an Spring Festival included a yangge performance by a Public Security Office troupe.27 In Fuzhou I saw the annual fine arts exhibit of the Fujian’s police and fire departments. Some of the subjects were a bit more martial than usual, but otherwise a visitor would never have imagined that these often highly skilled exam­ ples of calligraphy, painting, and photography were the work of off-duty cops. But these same officers supervise many professional artists. For two decades, they were charged with keeping check on the “rightist ele­

The Waning Authority of the Chinese State

45

ments,” who included many artists in their number. After the Beijing Mas­ sacre, they were charged with uprooting bourgeois elements who had ag­ itated the students, again including many artists. They must approve the exit permits for all Chinese seeking to travel abroad, including artists, al­ though permission to travel was granted with much greater ease by the end of the 1990s. The General Federation of Trade Unions operates a network of workers cultural palaces throughout China’s cities. Separate from the cultural cen­ ters of the Ministry of Culture, these are typically large-scale entertain­ ment emporia, with dancing in the evenings for young people, opera in the afternoon for retired workers, and movie theaters open to all. On May 1, the union organizes evening concerts. This is a steady, but not a partic­ ularly vital, part of the cultural system. Similarly, the Youth League over­ sees the cultivation of talented young artists. In his long tenure as head of the Youth League, Hu Yaobang developed close ties to many Chinese artists, such as pianist Fou Ts’ong.28 The Youth League also regularly em­ ploys artists as propaganda workers. Culture is thus administered by a series of parallel bureaucracies, four of which are especially prominent. The four major bureaucracies operate at the central, provincial, and local levels, and artists will certainly be aware of each. For instance, in the Fujian city of Xiamen, there are painters who work for the military units stationed there; the more prominent of them are members of the Xiamen Association of Fine Arts, and they par­ ticipate in activities arranged by the Xiamen Cultural Bureau. As military artists, they are especially attuned to shifting emphases coming from the Propaganda Department. Artists are also keenly attuned to the hierarchies that these organiza­ tions represent. According to Guo Feng, head of the Fujian Writers Asso­ ciation, there is a clear ranking of literary publications according to na­ tional, provincial, or local level. While such rankings are often obnoxious to writers and editors, it reflects a long-standing national desire for clar­ ity in the political system. Not only do wages and other benefits follow these ranks, but criticism from higher-rank publications is seen as definitive.29 Some institutions belong to the state (the Ministry of Culture, the Army’s General Political Department), while the Propaganda Depart­ ment is a branch of the Communist Party. Others are people’s organi­ zations (the Arts Federation, the Unions), that is, they are theoretically mass associations, representing the people directly, rather than the state or Party. These distinctions are important in terms of status and power, but are often obscured in practice. Communist Party leadership unifies the cultural system. For instance, when He Jingzhi was appointed act­ ing minister of culture in 1989, he was concurrently head of the Arts

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Department of the Party Propaganda Department and deputy director of the Propaganda Department. All of the state and popular organiza­ tions have Communists among their members and in some leading po­ sitions. However, many officials, especially of the professional associa­ tions, are not Party members. These bureaucracies compete with one another for influence. Each has its own meetings and can identify favorite models to press for its own vision of the arts in China. For instance, the Ministry of Culture held a famous meeting in Guangzhou in 1962 to make arts administra­ tion less heavy-handed. Chen Yi, the arts-loving minister of foreign af­ fairs, called for experimenting with some market-style reforms in the arts. We do not handle the practical management of drama and film as well as the bourgeoisie! We must reduce our capital. We give you the blood of the state and the blood and sweat of the people. If you will learn to calculate costs like the bourgeoisie, earn a little money for us, and lighten our load, we will kow­ tow three times before you and say to you, “long life.”30

In stark contrast, the army’s arts organization held a rival meeting in 1966, where Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, pushed for more politicized arts on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. In 1979 the Federation of Arts held its third national conference in a mood of ebullience as artists purged and humiliated during the Cultural Revolution were restored to positions of honor and influence. However, the minister of culture, Huang Zhen, did not attend this meeting, signaling a disapproval that also marked the end of his influence. Geography also makes important divisions. The competing claims of Beijing and Shanghai for national cultural leadership are notorious. In the 1960s both cities were headed by opera-loving mayors, who sponsored ri­ val conferences on how opera should be reformed. The influence of these two cities over culture in the rest of China is difficult to exaggerate. Trends begin in these cities, receive validation, and then become acceptable in provincial centers, much the way New York and Los Angeles function in the United States’s cultural system, or Paris in France’s. In addition, other areas are important centers in specific arts—Hangzhou in Zhejiang and Chengdu in Sichuan are centers for traditional Chinese painting, for in­ stance. Other cities, such as Xi’an or Guangzhou, exercise cultural influ­ ence that often extends beyond their regions, Xi’an because of its history as an ancient capital and Guangzhou because of its history of contact with Hong Kong and the West. Guangzhou has benefited from recent eco­ nomic policies, while Shenyang, once a base for leftist arts programs dur­ ing the Maoist era, has receded in importance as the power of Manchuria has declined.

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Patrons from the Political Elite The purported unity of shared Communist leadership sometimes ob­ scures, but never eliminates, rivalry among arts organization. Adminis­ trative ambiguity invites organizational conflict. In culture, as in other policy areas, interagency disputes tend to push issues ever higher in the political system before they can be resolved. One of the members of the Standing Committee of the Party’s Political Bureau assumes general re­ sponsibility for questions of ideology and culture, although in controver­ sial cases nearly any member of the top political elite can intervene.31 In some cases, members of the political elite favor pet projects. Eco­ nomics official Chen Yun used his political position to help protect an im­ portant regional art form, the ballad singing of the lower Yangzi known as pingtan.32 While Chen was politically out of favor in the late 1950s, he enthusiastically pursued his hobby by traveling around with equipment from the Central Broadcasting System to record local ballad artists, requi­ sitioning a pipa tutor and arranging for the establishment of a balladsinging school in Suzhou.33 After Chen rose to new eminence after Mao’s death, he published his extensive writings on ballad singing, which in­ cluded forty articles written between 1958 and 1983. In addition to com­ menting on specific pieces, Chen exhorted the Chinese to study the his­ tory of Yangzi ballads, publish more old texts, and train a new generation of artists.34 Chen may have found this music a balm for his political wounds; he also helped protect his art against critics who dismissed it as feudal and also preserved an endangered artistic tradition. The influnce of a powerful patron can persist even after his death. In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, as the arts establishment pressed to make European painting and sculpture respectable once again, Fine Arts magazine published three postcards of French art mailed from Europe by Zhou Enlai in 1921.35 What is impressive is that someone (in this case the Tianjin Municipal History Museum) had kept these relics and was able to pull them out for display when it was useful to show the late premier’s appreciation for bourgeois culture. These basic elements of the cultural system in Chinese politics have formed the parameters for state patronage of the arts since the early 1950s, but the dynamics of their interrelationship have varied considerably over time. I will contrast the way they operated during Mao’s rule with a new pattern that emerged in the reform period. THE CULTURAL BUREAUCRACIES UNDER MAO The strength and focus of Beijing’s early control over culture is striking from the perspective of the reform era, when the state seems to be ever

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weaker and more internally divided. Yet, when reading the 1950s anew, one can discern the fine fractures in the cultural system that became ma­ jor crevices on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Relations among the four chief cultural bureaucracies were volatile during Mao’s rule. Most fa­ vored was the Party Propaganda Department. The Propaganda Department In the 1950s, China’s leaders recognized how vital propaganda had been to their revolution. Many regarded the arts primarily as media for propa­ ganda; even the core of senior leaders who took high culture seriously saw propaganda as an important secondary role for the cultural system. The conviction that propaganda was an important function of culture not only reflected the Party’s revolutionary victory, it also echoed a traditional elite concern that culture should provide moral tutelage for the common people. Confucian predecessors of the Chinese Communist Party had shared a belief in the political centrality of art. The combination of poetry and administration has ancient roots in China. Song Dynasty poet Su Dongpo believed that “What a ruler has to rely upon is only the hearts of men.”36 Such a view encourages a moralism in administration that in the past led Imperial magistrates to become “father-mother officials,” treating the citizens under their rule as children. For ordinary Chinese people as well as the political elite, the word “propaganda” (xuanchuan) has a much more matter-of-fact connotation than its sinister implications in English. Perhaps its emotional punch is close to that of the English word “advertising”—people may dismiss it as unserious or annoying, but do not cower before it. In contrast, the word “propaganda” typically elicits shivers of discomfort in the West. Ameri­ can writer Ward Just captures this sense: “‘What’s propaganda?’ the boy asked. ‘A Rhapsody,’ Axel said. ‘A bully’s love song.’”37 The practical consequence of this elite attitude was a nearly ceaseless drive to organize the arts and apply them in the business of rule.38 The propaganda apparatus attained priority because of its experience at or­ ganizing political campaigns, which provided administrative unity to the cultural system. At Yan’an in the 1940s the Party learned how to har­ ness the power of the arts to arouse ordinary citizens to participate in the revolutionary cause. The orderly bureaucrats of the Ministry of Culture were simply not so experienced or enthusiastic at organizing vast politi­ cal campaigns as their Propaganda Department colleagues. Campaigns were ad hoc, organized outside the regular bureaucratic channels, and offered Mao an important tool in keeping officials on guard against the routine he feared would bring the revolution to a premature conclusion.39

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As a political resource in a poor nation, propaganda has the great merit of being inexpensive. Propagandistic arts could inspire action, justify sac­ rifice, and offer instructions for behavior with little cost at a time when China could not accomplish these things with capital. Nor were China’s leaders eager to use force, although they certainly were not embarrassed to resort to coercion. China’s economic strategy was to substitute abun­ dant labor for scarce capital; propaganda’s role was to squeeze more ef­ fort from this labor. Lynn White has described how the campaign style helped achieve goals, at least in the short run, with relatively few re­ sources. The Party, as it tried to transform important cities such as Shang­ hai with surprisingly few members, turned to campaigns to extend their influence over nonmembers. In addition, campaigns kept subordinates and adversaries off balance, although the system ultimately encouraged compliance through fear of repression.40 The determination of Party leaders to put propaganda specialists in charge of culture was also a result of suspicion and hostility toward bour­ geois intellectuals who otherwise would have exercised arts leadership. At Yan’an, Mao Zedong instituted a systematic thought reform of the bourgeois artists who had fled from Shanghai and Beijing, lecturing them on how to use their art for propaganda. At first, propaganda campaigns were seen as a way of guiding the patriotic contributions offered by these intellectuals. But after the antirightist campaign of 1957, propaganda spe­ cialists viewed the bourgeois cultural specialists with hostility and treated them punitively. The Ministry of Culture Despite the scale of its activities and the prestige of the Soviet model that it emulated, China’s ministry failed to exercise cultural leadership during the 1950s. The great novelist Mao Dun served as a figurehead minister, dominated by Zhou Yang, head of the ministry’s Arts Bureau and deputy head of the Party Propaganda Department. As a sign of the ministry’s weakness in 1965, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, Lu Dingyi, head of the Party’s Propaganda Department, took over as minister of culture from Mao Dun. Mao believed that the revolution was being eroded by loss of firm val­ ues and that greater doses of revolutionary culture could help to raise up a successor generation among young Chinese. The most distinctive fea­ ture of Maoism in the 1960s was its insistence that revolution was not sim­ ply a material process, but also a matter of ideological commitment. Ad­ vocating a voluntarism fiercer than Lenin’s, yet partly resonating with Confucian traditions of art and statecraft, the Maoists insisted that pen and sword were both critical weapons for the revolution.

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Mao believed that the Ministry of Culture was too focused on elite and foreign art to further the revolution. In 1963 Mao mockingly said, “If noth­ ing else is done, the Ministry of Culture should be changed into the Min­ istry of Emperors, Kings, Generals, Ministers, Scholars and Beauties, or the Ministry of Foreign Things and the Dead.”41 The ministry was in fact closed during the Cultural Revolution, reopening as a cultural group in 1971. Not until 1975 was it distinguished again with the title of ministry. Mao’s impatience with the Propaganda Department was also well known, if not so bitterly expressed. The Professional Associations Parallel to the Ministry of Culture, these non-Party organizations mostly transmitted Propaganda Department instructions and guidelines to their members.42 They were weak before the Cultural Revolution, during which they closed their doors because of their bourgeois taint. The one pe­ riod of exception was the Hundred Flowers movement of 1956–1957, when many association members spoke up to criticize Party policy. But this boldness was quickly suppressed by the 1957 antirightist campaign, which intimidated most artists and intellectuals. The nominal head of the umbrella body for professional arts organizations was non-Communist playwright and poet Guo Moruo, with the ubiquitous Zhou Yang as vice chairman. Zhou Yang, a multipurpose political heavy, was more than an ignorant Party hack—his translation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is still available in Chinese bookstores. The voices of artists and other intellectuals during the Hundred Flow­ ers showed that the Propaganda Department was not immune to criti­ cism. By the 1960s, the leadership had divided on the question of culture and propaganda. Some, such as Foreign Minister Chen Yi, encouraged more artistic autonomy, even endorsing mild experiments with cultural markets. Others, led by Mao, extended a general suspicion of bureaucrats to the entire cultural establishment that had grown up since 1949. Mao be­ lieved that few cultural leaders were willing to follow him in a turn to the left. When the Soviet Union in 1960 sharply limited China’s cultural ex­ changes, arts isolation strengthened the hand of populist reformers. The People’s Liberation Army The army was the state patron that rose most dramatically in power dur­ ing Mao’s rule, especially after the ascension of Lin Biao as minister of de­ fense in 1960. Military suspicion of liberalizing tendencies among intel­ lectuals had surfaced in 1957, when the initial public opposition to the Hundred Flowers came from army cultural officials.43 Nine years later,

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when the Ministry of Culture was torn by conflict leading up to the Cul­ tural Revolution, Xiao Wangdong, of the army’s General Political Depart­ ment, was installed as minister to restore order and invigorate the left. Xiao Wangdong brought a band of military associates to assist in bringing revolution to the Ministry of Culture, but his efforts were too late; he lost his post with the collapse of the ministry in 1966.44 The army began at the same time to intervene more directly in cultural af­ fairs. In early 1966, Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, organized an arts forum with the army in direct emulation of the famous 1944 Yan’an Arts Forum.45 As the Cultural Revolution raged, artists sought affiliation with the army. Some, es­ pecially younger artists, wanted to display their radicalism. Others coveted the security of the army’s protective embrace, as the Cultural Revolution was fought less intensely there than in such “bourgeois” arts institutions as the Ministry of Culture, the Central Fine Arts Academy, the Writers Associ­ ation, or the Shanghai Conservatory. Still others desired the greater material benefits that became available at this time to military artists, who enjoyed better food and housing than their civilian counterparts.46 Even groups that did not formally join the army, such as the Central Philharmonic, shared in the army’s reflected glory by performing in uniform.47 The Political Elite The political elite headed by Mao comprised arts enthusiasts, which in­ tensified the politicization of culture. Organizational confusion would have invited intervention by top leaders to resolve arts controversies, even if the elite had been disinterested in the arts. I have described else­ where the passion of this elite for calligraphy and its consequences.48 Here, let me illustrate this fervor for art with the case of China’s tradi­ tional opera theater. When the Shanxi Opera Troupe toured east China in 1959, its failure to im­ press the sophisticated audience of Shanghai angered and shamed two im­ portant old Shanxi natives and opera fans, Beijing mayor Peng Zhen and State Economic Commission head Bo Yibo, who threatened to dismiss the Shanxi Party committee and its first secretary. As a result, the opera under­ took major expenses to improve itself, even though China was entering the economic depression that followed the Great Leap Forward. These included a 5,000 yuan payment to another ensemble for the right to transfer one young performer to the provincial opera company, and the purchase of 66 taels49 of gold and 120 of silver for use in thread for sumptuous costumes.50 Peng and Bo echoed the enthusiasm of Mao Zedong, an opera fan who of­ ten played recordings for relaxation, singing along with his favorite pas­ sages. Mao’s enthusiasm for Beijing opera is revealed in an episode related by his bodyguard, who accompanied the Chairman to a 1958 performance

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of The Legend of the White Snake in Shanghai.51 Mao and other leaders sat in stuffed chairs in the front row. According the bodyguard, Mao’s belt cut into his big belly, “so as he sat down, I loosened his belt as usual.” Once com­ fortable, Mao sat quite still, following the drama intensely; only his facial ex­ pression changed as he entered into the characters of the ill-fated couple, Xu Xian and Bai Langzi. “He applauded moments when the singing was good. When he applauded, the whole house quickly applauded with him.” When Fahai, the old monk from the Famen Temple, came on stage, Mao Zedong’s face suddenly darkened, as if there had suddenly appeared before his eyes a scene of intense panic. His mouth opened slightly, his lower lip trem­ bling. His teeth made a gnawing sound, as if he wanted to take a couple of bites out of the old monk. At the end, Xu Xian and Bai Langzi began their tortuous and bitter depar­ ture from life. I would often make a small noise to remind Mao Zedong that these were only opera performers, but this time the reminder had no impact. The present had ceased to exist; Mao Zedong had completely entered the world of ancient and moving myth. His nostrils started to twitch, and tears welled up in his eyes, becoming enormous drops that rolled down his face and fell on his chest. Nuts. That day there were a lot of people in the audience. I looked about anxiously, but did not dare make any big movement for fear of attracting at­ tention. It was still all right, the audience seemed to be absorbed by the opera, and no one had noticed the “drama” taking place below the stage. But Mao Zedong’s stirring intensified, his tears no longer fell drop by drop but had become two streams pouring down his face. His nose was stopped up and making a neighing noise. This was only a little bit out of the view of the neighboring leaders from the Municipal Committee; this gave me worry enough, as my responsibility was to protect the Chairman’s “leadership im­ age.” I coughed lightly, making matters even worse. The noise did not rouse Mao Zedong, but it attracted the stares of others. I dared not make another sound. Mao Zedong, not realizing where he was, finally began to cry, sobbing convulsively; he then wept uncontrollably and blew his nose. At this point there was nothing I could do but pretend that all was normal. I only hoped that the opera would soon end. In fact it was nearly over, the monk Fahai was condemning Bai Lanzi to the Leifeng Pagoda. . . . Just at that moment a startling event took place! In a sudden burst of anger, Mao Zedong rose to his feet. Supporting him­ self with his hands on the arms of his upholstered chair, he stood up: “Will it do not to make revolution? Will it do not to rebel?” Heavens, I was taken by surprise! I had loosened his belt when he sat down—when he stood up, his pants fell down to his feet. As if struck, I bolted forward and grabbed his pants to push them up. My mind went blank; in a complete panic I used my trembling hands to tighten his belt, quickly, if clumsily. I had not protected the leader’s image. For this I felt bad for a very long time.

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Mao Zedong did not have the least thought of blaming me, but seemed un­ aware that he had dropped his trousers. He strode with big steps to the stage, as if he were still in the opera. At last the sound of the applause brought him back to consciousness. He stared for a moment as if in a daze, then ap­ plauded along with the rest of the audience. I breathed a sigh of relief: the Chairman had returned to reality.

The combination of aesthetic passion and a drive for political control produced an illiberal and often repressive atmosphere. Usually the mo­ tives for interventions in the arts were clear enough; witness the cam­ paign against writer Hu Feng (a disciple of Hu Shi, perhaps the most prominent intellectual associated with the Guomindang in Taiwan) or the criticism of the movie The Life of Wu Xun (which celebrated private phi­ lanthropy as a solution to social problems). But sometimes the motives were obscure, which was even more dispiriting to artists and their public. Jiang Qing once demanded that the Party leader of Hebei Province sing a selection from one of the Cultural Revolution’s model operas. Unable to do so, when he returned to the capital, Shijiazhuang, he led other mem­ bers of the Hebei Standing Committee in singing practice.52 One of the more puzzling episodes in the arts was the 1975 Water Mar­ gin campaign. Mao Zedong is supposed to have said that this classic novel of peasant outlaws reveals a negative example of “capitulationists.” Mao’s words were quoted in editorials, and the nation’s intellectuals, reel­ ing from years of Cultural Revolution, began to make tortured analyses of the novel, looking for clues as to which peasant rebel character repre­ sented which politician. Nearly two decades later, we learned that the ail­ ing Mao suffered from cataracts and had a Beijing University instructor named Lu Di read to him. On August 14, 1975, when Lu Di took advan­ tage of his unusual assignment to ask Mao about Water Margin, the chairman’s impromptu response was that “this book’s strength is in describing surrender. It makes a negative teaching example, to show everyone the ca­ pitulationists.” This was apparently only the passing remark of an ailing old man, noted and used by Cultural Revolution radicals. Later that month Mao had a successful cataract operation.53 How much tortured analysis could have been avoided if the operation had taken place a month earlier and Mao had been able to read the book himself? Elite interest in the arts helped unify policy on occasion, but did little to build coherent institutions with distinct missions. Sometimes one of the cultural bureaucracies was told to perform functions associated with its rivals to the confusion of all. For instance, in 1956 Liu Shaoqi instructed an army propaganda troupe to stage shows for the public. “You may also sell tickets and run your troupe as an enterprise.”54 This unexpected ad­ vice to turn to the market surely befuddled the military, much as the Min­ istry of Culture felt disadvantaged by the use of propaganda campaigns to unify cultural policies.

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The state’s hand in the arts was strongest during the Cultural Revolu­ tion, but this was not a successful period of state patronage as relatively little art was in fact produced.55 Mao and his allies firmly believed that culture could arouse the masses, raising their political consciousness to mobilize millions of Chinese to demand further transformations of soci­ ety. The victorious Cultural Revolutionaries sincerely wanted a thriving, enthusiastic, and revolutionary culture to supplant all that had gone be­ fore. But while radical cultural leaders dreamed of an era of arts plenty, they presided instead over a cultural famine.56 There is ample evidence that radical leaders recognized their failure to sponsor more art and tried to increase productivity. But they failed, largely for political, rather than aesthetic, reasons. Although the Cultural Revolution’s rhetoric stressed the mass participation of amateur arts, in practice, regulation of amateurs was tight, as leaders sought to avoid the political errors that might arise from genuine spontaneity. They were ulti­ mately fearful of what mass participation in the creation of a new culture might unleash. In 1971 Zhang Chunqiao urged a modest decentralization in the supervision of the arts, instructing that new songs need not be ap­ proved by central authorities. But five years later, the Ministry of Culture still had an office for evaluating new songs, including six hundred new tunes attacking Deng Xiaoping and “right deviationism.”57 The refusal to utilize a more decentralized cultural program assured eventual shortages of output. Many artists responded to Cultural Revolutionary harassment by de­ clining to work. Novelists did not write, painters did not paint, composers did not compose. When they tried, they were often hit again, as they were in the “black art” scandal of 1974, in which painters were asked to help decorate hotels for housing the first waves of new tourists to China, only to be criticized for the lack of revolutionary content in their art.58 The movement was also so relentlessly harsh on works from abroad and from China’s past that these forms of art could not easily be revived. Especially toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, as Mao weakened, the revived Ministry of Culture and the army’s General Political Department feuded about arts leadership. Each fearful of giving advantage to its rival, they both operated with an increasingly narrow conception of art. Little ap­ peared beyond the songs and dances of the Mao cult and the small num­ ber of officially sanctioned “model” stage works and films.

THE CULTURAL BUREAUCRACIES IN THE REFORM ERA Although Deng Xiaoping dealt with the arts as an afterthought, his con­ solidation of his power after 1978 nonetheless shook up China’s cultural

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establishment. Deng assembled an anti–Cultural Revolution coalition, mobilizing into his constituency intellectuals, high officials, technical ex­ perts, and people with foreign ties—all of whom had been ill treated dur­ ing the last decade of Mao’s rule.59 An early wave of rehabilitations re­ stored to prominence cultural figures and works of art that had suffered during the Cultural Revolution and purged those that had flourished un­ der radical rule. Rapid personnel and policy shifts placed a great deal of stress on cultural agencies, like most Chinese organizations. People who had been enemies during the Cultural Revolution now found themselves working side by side, wondering how and whether to put their bitter past behind them. As under Mao, rival bureaucracies competed over resources and policy, but now without the unifying force of a charismatic leader.60 Restructuring the Arts New plans to restructure the organization of cultural life diminished the enchantment of former battles rather quickly as fresh conflicts and anxi­ eties appeared. The reforms in culture were broadly analogous to reforms in agriculture, commerce, or industry, loosening political controls and in­ troducing market relationships.61 At the simplest level, this meant intro­ ducing a basic understanding of profit and loss. For instance, performing ensembles often distributed free tickets to shows to groups of workers or the youth league, “papering the house” for the sake of propaganda and entertainment; state subsidies had assured that ticket sales were not an important budget component. Now they began to sell tickets directly to consumers. Or they might follow model units in thinking of ways of in­ troducing economies into their no longer richly subsidized operations. For example, the movie theater in Jiangsu Province’s Haimen County Workers Cultural Palace had one thousand seats, but was rarely full in the daytime, leaving hundreds of unused tickets. Haimen’s simple but effec­ tive solution was to print two kinds of tickets (four-hundred-seat shows and one-thousand-seat shows), with annual savings of one thousand yuan in printing costs.62 At least four themes ran through discussions of cultural reform in the 1980s. First was the attack upon the iron rice bowl, or permanent em­ ployment. Once regarded as one of the great accomplishments of the rev­ olution, in the Deng era permanent employment was no longer discussed as a mark of working-class victory, but as an impediment to managerial flexibility. Here the arts were simply treated as other sectors of Chinese society, with the special twist that the iron rice bowl was blamed for poor artistic standards. A second and related target was the “big pot,” which referred to egali­ tarian pay schemes. Again, in the arts this was held to be a disincentive to

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creative effort, although this view was based on little evidence or under­ standing of artistic motivation. A third reform theme was a call to professionalize management of the of arts organizations. This meant introducing contract systems for em­ ployment, not only for arts workers, but also for the heads of dance com­ panies and orchestras. The new administrators would be empowered to make personnel and artistic decisions with far greater flexibility than their predecessors; a model was the Xi’an Spoken Drama Academy, which hired a young director by open competition, offering a four-year contract with the local cultural bureau.63 The fourth theme was the diminution of state subsidies. The reforms certainly did not end sponsorship of arts organizations, but declared economic self-sufficiency to be a goal of cultural policy. Prior to the re­ forms, state subsidies of the arts were routine. A Guilin official disclosed in 1979 that his municipal cultural bureau spent ten thousand yuan more than it earned each year, and this was a unit whose four profes­ sional performing companies could count on guaranteed ticket sales to tourists visiting this celebrated beauty spot.64 Eventually, the state ad­ vocated a two-track system—a few key organizations would continue under state ownership with state underwriting, although they would be expected to show a greater profit. All other organizations were destined for the nonstate track: they would have to reorganize themselves and become self-supporting. Overall, because of these changes, culture became less important to the state with the consequent benefits and losses for artists. This was not a stable system, although it may seem so when compared with the Maoist years. And tensions continue among institutions of the cultural system. In the Deng Xiaoping version, the Ministry of Culture and the professional associations generally took the lead over the less vigorous and tradition­ ally leftist propaganda department and army. However, in the West we more often hear of the reactions from the weakened Propaganda Depart­ ment than of the initiative of the Ministry of Culture. The Ministry of Culture The ministry’s star rose throughout the reform period, not because the state gave it great new resources, but because the authority of its chief bu­ reaucratic rivals diminished. Moreover, the generally conservative mood of the times favored an organization that specialized in routine adminis­ tration. The beginning, however, was not especially easy. The purge of radical influence from the Ministry of Culture was especially fierce. Although more than a thousand people associated with the ministry had suffered

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official sanctions (ranging from labeling to imprisonment) during the Cul­ tural Revolution, many others resisted the loss of their own influence af­ ter the fall of the Gang of Four. The former radical minister, Yu Huiyong, had been arrested in 1976 and committed suicide. Yet, leftist influence was still so great that a March 1977 rally at the ministry would not permit the slogan “Down with Yu Huiyong.”65 A new Party group was not estab­ lished until December 1977, with the appointment of a new minister, Huang Zhen, a former army commander and diplomat who was also an amateur painter. Huang brought some order to his new assignment, but only after naming a former vice minister of public security, Liu Fuzhi, as a vice minister of culture in 1978. After this appointment, “some turned over material evidence which they had refused to surrender for more than a year.”66 Huang also reallocated personnel, equipment, theaters, and even housing to undo changes made by the radicals, especially to break up their favored arts units.67 Huang was eased out at the end of 1980, re­ placed by Zhou Weichi, one of the team that composed the Yan’an opera The White-Haired Girl and a veteran arts official who had been purged un­ til 1978. Once the ministry was operating normally again, one of its great con­ cerns was how to implement the proposals for economic reform in its vast arts network. The appointment of novelist Wang Meng as minister in 1986 marked an intensification of the reform. Wang was a much-respected lit­ erary figure, a realist writer who turned to experimental techniques in his fiction; more significantly, Wang was labeled a rightist in 1957 for pub­ lishing a novella that satirized bureaucratism. Before his rehabilitation in 1979, he spent thirteen years in internal exile in Xinjiang. Mao Dun, min­ ister until the eve of the Cultural Revolution, had also been a celebrated novelist. But Mao Dun was a figurehead, a man who had also given up creative life for a genteel old age of bureaucratic ritual. Wang Meng con­ tinues to write and remains a vital presence in China’s literary scene. Wang recognized that many of his constituents were not persuaded that the restructuring of cultural organizations was good for them. So he em­ phasized the broader link between economic growth and improving cul­ tural life. “‘It is as simple as this,’ Wang said. ‘if China’s economy fails, the people will suffer from hunger as they did before, and developing culture will be out of the question.’”68 Wang argued that artists should not be seeking riches, but that they should forsake the security of automatic sup­ port from the state and seek out audiences through the market.69 Some understanding of the approach of the ministry under Wang Meng’s administration can be gleaned from a book by Li Jun, Perplexities and Resolutions—An Exploration of Culture and Arts Management published with a preface by Vice Minister Gao Zhanxiang.70 According to Li, the dis­ appointing results of thirty years of Communist arts policies all came

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from poor management. The arts are not, as the leftists maintained, forms of consciousness, but a part of “tertiary production”—that is, the service sector—and, thus, can respond to good management, just like any other form of production. Li admits that the production of cultural commodi­ ties brings new challenges, such as losses for such serious endeavors as literary magazines, academic books, and performances by national mi­ nority ensembles. And lots of bad art will be produced by profiteers. But, he insists, the cultural marketplace is going to expand; the only serious al­ ternative to watching passively is to minimize the problems through modern, scientific management. Other appointments in the ministry emphasized new respect for artists, or at least for arts bureaucrats. Vice Minister Ying Ruocheng translated Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and acted the part of Willy Loman in 1983.71 Ying also acted the part of a prison official in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 film The Last Emperor and in 1994 played a Tibetan monk in Hollywood’s Little Buddha. Wang and Ying both left office after the Beijing Massacre. Wang was the only member of the State Council who refused to demonstrate his loyalty to Deng Xiaoping by visiting army units after the bloodshed. Wang Meng’s record as a rehabilitated rightist had long irritated moreconservative officials. He perhaps also enjoyed publicizing the introduc­ tion of reforms into former Maoist models, including Mao’s hometown of Shaoxing, Hunan.72 The pace of restructuring slowed, only to intensify after Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 “southern inspection.” The Party Propaganda Department When Deng Xiaoping came to power, the Propaganda Department was still demoralized from the Cultural Revolution. It had been the scene of harsh purges early in that movement, then subject to additional turmoil at its conclusion through a hunt for confederates of the Gang of Four. The re­ habilitation of artists and cultural bureaucrats who had been disgraced in earlier movements constituted a blow to the Propaganda Department. China saw a broad decline in mobilizing art in general, due both to the Party’s decision to lighten its voice and to the new availability of alterna­ tive, nondidactic entertainments in the rapidly growing cultural market­ place. Propaganda workers were demoralized by the new public criticism of their efforts as silly, boring, and aesthetically dull.73 An administrative reform of 1984 drastically reduced the capacity of the Propaganda Department to control effectively appointments below the central level.74 The effective loss of its authority to vet appointments throughout the cultural realm seems to have been a critical blow. With the decline of the Party’s propaganda apparatus, some professional ideolo­

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gists hustled careers for themselves in the growing new businesses of public relations and advertising. Three faculty members of the Guang­ dong Provincial Party School wrote one popular public-relations handbook.75 Other propaganda officials sulked, not easily accepting their dimin­ ished power. They pressed hard against the cultural impact of the reforms through campaigns in 1981 (against Bai Hua), 1983 (the Spiritual Pollution campaign), and 1987 (the campaign against bourgeois liberalization). These very unspontaneous movements were ineffectual and quickly abandoned. They simply did not compare to an old-fashioned Maoist campaign; although they did intimidate, far fewer lives were disrupted.76 According to one account, “the hardliners found it was no longer possible to launch an ideological movement . . . the people would no longer par­ ticipate in a government propaganda effort.”77 According to Liu Binyan, the 1983 Spiritual Pollution campaign was an effort by Chen Yun and his allies Wang Zhen (then in charge of the Party School) and Deng Liqun (then head of the Propaganda Department) to seize control over all prop­ aganda by striking indirectly at Zhou Yang of the Arts Federation and Hu Jiwei and Wang Ruoshui of People’s Daily, the two major reformist bases.78 But it is only with the backing of armed force after the June 4, 1989, mas­ sacre that the Propaganda Department regained influence, however su­ perficially and temporarily. The rivalry between the Propaganda Department and the Ministry of Culture was fought out through personnel appointments and interper­ sonal animosities. A noted reformer, Zhu Houze, was imposed upon the Propaganda Department from 1985 to 1987, when he replaced Deng Liqun, an official truly unpopular with artists. Zhu had been expelled from the Communist Party between 1964 and 1978, which was a creden­ tial for the reformers, but surely not for many in the department that he headed.79 Zhu was forced out in early 1987. When Deng Liqun addressed a Ministry of Culture meeting in late January 1987, most officials departed before his speech, and three ministry leaders on the podium pretended not to notice Deng when he approached to shake their hands.80 One likely victory of the Propaganda Department was the creation of a new Ministry of Broadcasting, Film, and Television in 1986 by cutting away a former bureau of the Ministry of Culture. It is likely that these modern media were given separate status in order to maximize Party con­ trol by reducing the influence of persons such as Wang Meng over critical telecommunications policy. This ministry is a major employer of actors, writers, directors, and given the mass character of its entertainment, it is an object of close scrutiny by the Propaganda Department. But even here, in weakening the authority of the Ministry of Culture, the alternative was to give more power to another regular, bureaucratic power center.81

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The Propaganda Department worked through the Party organization. Thus, when Zhao Ziyang began a program to dismantle Party cells in state agencies except those dealing with education, propaganda, legal and security affairs, minority nationalities, and the economy, he weakened the capacity of propaganda workers by cutting off their traditional networks. In the wake of the Beijing Massacre, the Party’s Organization Department decided to terminate this reform, but a quarter of Party cells had already been dismantled by the spring of 1989. The weakening of the propaganda apparatus led to the privatization of public-service information. For instance, venereal disease, formerly infre­ quent, spread rapidly through the rapid social changes of the reform pe­ riod. Yet, much of the campaign against venereal disease was turned over to entrepreneurs. In Fuzhou, hawkers sold tickets on the street to exhibi­ tions against sexually transmitted diseases. I visited one in the back room of a musical instrument store, where I watched a videotape, narrated by a nasty little voice: “Hi, I’m the syphilis germ.” Mr. Syphilis Germ took his viewers through a cavalcade of diseased organs, some just about to fall off, with a clear, if inaccurate message: syphilis comes from sex with for­ eign women with big breasts and too much pubic hair. This “public edu­ cation,” of course, functioned as a peep show, with an audience of young men more interested in the dirty pictures than the fearsome message.82 This lurid example illustrates a broader point. The market economy siphons off those aspects of former propaganda work that can be turned to profit. The consequences for public health are harmful. The People’s Liberation Army Like the Party Propaganda Department, the army’s cultural influence steadily eroded throughout the 1980s, only to be temporarily revived in the wake of the 1989 massacre with increased visibility though a tarnished reputation. The People’s Liberation Army, still a major employer of actors, musicians, filmmakers, and novelists, now often follows the lead of other groups, unlike its glory days as artistic tastemaker during the Cultural Revolution. Early in the reform program, the army’s General Political De­ partment explicitly repudiated Jiang Qing’s 1966 Arts Forum.83 Some from the army were active in the abortive ideological campaigns of 1983 and 1987, but with no more effect than their comrades in the Propaganda Department.84 The army’s reduced leadership in cultural affairs mirrored its lower profile in society. Perhaps a million soldiers (a quarter of the total) were retired or transferred to other units in quest of a more professional mili­ tary. The new lean look for the army coincided with Deng’s desire to end its role as a political base for Maoist ideas.85 China had been divided into

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eleven big military regions, named for the major cities that serve as their centers. When the number of military regions was reduced to seven in 1985, the cultural impact on the cities that lost out was immediate. The Fuzhou military region was absorbed into the Nanjing region, partly to demonstrate peaceful intentions toward Taiwan, which lies a hundred miles across the water from Fuzhou. Fuzhou lost musical groups, opera companies, drama troupes, and dance ensembles that had played a prominent role in local cultural life for thirty-five years. Yet, despite cuts in the army, military bands grew rapidly, apparently beyond control as they leapt from five hundred early in the reforms to over a thousand by 1989.86 Military art suggests patriotism and endless celebration of the revolu­ tion, but the army’s arts establishment has not always been predictable, especially in the 1980s. Its vast size has assured perhaps more diversity than outsiders might anticipate. Novelist Bai Hua was an employee of the Wuhan Military Region when he wrote his controversial screenplay Bitter Love. The suppression of this film for its criticism of Maoism sparked a great controversy in 1981. Bai Hua left the army to become a local cadre in Shanghai in 1985, the year the army was downsizing most decisively.87 Poet Ye Wenfu was also employed by the army he enraged with his 1980 satirical poem “General, You Mustn’t Do That.” Ye left the army in 1985 after experiencing worsening working conditions.88 But not all artists col­ lide with military patrons. When Sichuan painter Li Huasheng challenged conservative critics in the civilian arts establishment in 1984, top brass in the Chengdu Military Regions who enjoyed his paintings protected him by providing housing and other support.89 Mo Yan, widely considered to be among China’s most outstanding novelists, has spent his entire career as a professional writer for the People’s Liberation Army. Another writer, Han Yingshan, after studying the example of Lamb’s Shakespeare, published a bowdlerized Golden Lotus, China’s classic erotic novel, in a military magazine.90 In a comparable move to get with the times, one could also point to the near naked army dancers who partici­ pated in the 1987 national arts festival or to the sudden appearance of rock music on the soundtracks of army films in mid-1980s. And a military opera troupe mounted the first Beijing performance of Tosca early in 1989.91 When the military was riding high in Chinese politics, it inevitably in­ fluenced nonmilitary arts. Now that the army has a lower political profile, its vast cultural apparatus is more likely to focus on entertaining the troops, rather than propagandizing to society. In the mid-1990s, Jiang Zemin instructed the army to provide each platoon with “a karaoke facil­ ity where soldiers could enjoy themselves and sing patriotic songs.”92 This seems a much more modest ambition than Jiang Qing’s uses of the army as an aesthetic force during the Cultural Revolution.

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The Arts Federation Formerly the weakest of the major cultural institutions, the dynamics of reform strengthened the Arts Federation and its constituent organiza­ tions, even though their lack of financial resources prevented them from acting as important patrons. In contrast to their former role as institutions for control, the associations increasingly pressed to represent the corpo­ rate and professional interests of full-time artists in China, albeit with mixed success. I will discuss these groups more thoroughly in chapter 5 on professionalism. With the decline of the army and Propaganda De­ partment, the professional associations had less competition for leader­ ship. They increasingly organized exhibitions and concerts without su­ pervision by the propagandists and found an ally in the newly influential Ministry of Culture. The Arts Federation convened a forum in 1988 to push for greater struc­ tural reform. Vice Minister of Culture Ying Ruocheng joined an appeal to the leaders of the professional associations to help by providing expertise on how to fashion alternatives to capitalist modes of organizing the arts amid rising anxieties that profit might become the dominant criterion for artistic success. Participants agreed that there must be a sharp distinction between structural reform of the arts and structural reform of the economy—the goal of the former was to spur production of spiritual products, not increase profits.93 Although these bureaucratic rivalries are real enough, they are not cut in stone, as each of the agencies has had members who have shared views and backgrounds with its ostensible rivals. Beyond the army’s unexpect­ edly liberal artists, one found in early 1989 that the Propaganda Depart­ ment had a strong supporter of Zhao Ziyang as deputy head (Long Yuzhi), even though hardliners tended to prevail.94 More typically, Liu Zhongde, appointed minister of culture in 1993, came from the Propa­ ganda Department. Other Institutions Arts policy continues to attract the interest of other organizations. In the reform-minded 1980s, this included the Ministry of Light Industry, which oversaw China’s handicrafts, a source of foreign exchange that grew enor­ mously. Such staid bodies as the State Planning Commission and the Min­ istry of Finance began to send representatives to cultural work confer­ ences, presumably another indication of the new role of the arts in the economy.95 The Youth League took the lead in restoring respectability to social dancing in the early 1980s and continues to hire a number of professional artists in its political work. The name “propaganda worker” does little to

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suggest aesthetic excellence. But the professional dancer I know who was hired for a Youth League post at a Fujian University was certainly a dancer, not a political hack. Here, as in most other aspects of the system, a broad range between the political and the aesthetic emerges; when the times are politically tight, the professional associations have a hard time representing nonpolitical concerns. When the times are loose, even the Youth League’s propaganda workers may turn out to be artists first. The role of public security agencies continues, governing access to travel abroad for many artists and overseeing the most serious conflicts with the state for an unfortunate few. Many artists fear public security be­ cause their art can be pulled out of context into a hostile environment, where the police neither understand it nor feel any need to do so. The Political Elite Important politicians continue to intervene in artistic issues, but their par­ ticipation has changed in character, becoming more pragmatic and cyni­ cal. In contrast to the often damaging cultural enthusiasms of Mao and his colleagues in the first generation of Communist Party leadership, little suggests that Deng Xiaoping and his successors care much about the arts.96 There is no record of Deng’s ever doing anything to promote, re­ form, or meddle with any art form out of aesthetic feeling. Except for Hu Yaobang, who had a notorious passion for calligraphy, most of the other central leaders to rise (and sometimes fall) under Deng seem equally un­ moved by beauty. Jiang Zemin played the piano and other instruments, in addition to singing Elvis Presley songs in Manila and Beijing opera tunes on his 1997 visit to the United States.97 But, like Li Peng and many others of his generation, he had a technical background and did not attempt to play the role of Communist literatus. Wuer Kaixi, a leader of the 1989 stu­ dent protest in Tiananmen Square, commented, “The shame of it is that most people in politics don’t have any artistic sense at all.” Wuer is no arts expert, but his disappointment is common among educated Chinese: To be a really successful politician, one must have, in my view, some artistic side. The only Chinese leader who qualifies in this sense is Mao. Even though he was an autocrat, he did have an artistic sense. So while we may dislike him, we must also respect him. . . . What strikes me as very strange, even twisted, is that with a billion people, China now can only throw up a leader like (Premier) Li Peng.98

This is not to say that Deng and his fellow reformers were indifferent to cultural policy, which they manipulated as a political weapon. They often intervened on behalf of works that would win the support of intellectuals by indicating a broad loosening of cultural restrictions. Hu Yaobang, then

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head of the Propaganda Department, stilled a controversy over the play “What If I Were Real?” by approving a private performance in October 1979 for the Arts Congress, signaling to all propaganda officials that this satire on official corruption was legitimate.99 Deng Xiaoping decreed in 1980 that Taiwan popular music was not harmful. There is no indication that Deng liked pop music, but many young Chinese do, and Deng sought to increase contacts with Taiwan. Many officials of the Party’s Propaganda Department regarded this sac­ charine and romantic music as corrosive to revolutionary values, a feeling shared by army cultural leaders. The rumor was put out that Deng had heard a radio broadcast from Taiwan while visiting Anhui’s famous beauty spot, Yellow Mountain, and remarked to his wife that the warbling of the late Taiwan songstress Deng Lijun could not hurt anyone.

CHINA’S SECOND PATRONAGE REVOLUTION:

CULTURAL MARKETS SUPPLEMENT STATE EMPLOYMENT

The history of changing interrelations among the major state arts bureau­ cracies and the political elite indicates the declining salience of art in mod­ ern Chinese politics, even without the additional impact of a rapidly de­ veloping cultural marketplace. To anticipate points that will be elaborated in later chapters, the arts world felt the force of newly developing arts markets in three major ways. First, a rush of new approaches and com­ modities enlivened China’s cultural scene, enormously expanding the range of arts experiences available and challenging artists and audiences alike to experiment with new experiences. Pushing the aesthetic bound­ aries often challenged political conventions as well. Second, the state arts bureaucracies soon encountered political demands that they learn to ap­ ply simple market considerations to their own operations by raising more of their own funds and by trimming expenses. Third, the arts bureaucra­ cies found themselves responsible for producing and supervising a smaller proportion of China’s art as the market for commercial culture ex­ panded. Art-as-propaganda gave way to art-as-commodity. China’s first patronage revolution provided employment to artists, rais­ ing their economic well-being, while placing them under enormous polit­ ical influence. Maoist cultural policies relied upon state-subsidized artists to fashion a mass-mobilizing propaganda art intended to teach political virtue and occasionally to entertain. The ongoing second patronage revolution has had a very different impact. State-sponsored culture, when no longer a monopoly, must contend for au­ diences, rather than take them for granted, and runs the risk of becoming ir­ relevant. Politics has hardly vanished from China’s arts, but in contrast with

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the Mao period, there is now much art that is not self-consciously politi­ cized. A great deal of this apolitical art is produced by the state. Ministry of Culture officials have deliberately sought to limit their reach. Minister Zhu Muzhi commented in 1986, “The scope of work handled by the Ministry of Culture is rather narrow. In fact, the Ministry of Culture cannot shoulder the task of studying the strategy for cultural development.”100 The retreat of the state from supervision of the arts parallels its withdrawal from its once fearsome overseeing of local popular culture. In Fujian, for instance, thirty thousand temples were restored or newly cre­ ated in the decade after the Cultural Revolution.101 At one time China’s arts world complained, if privately, about interference from political leaders; more recently, some have felt that being ignored is not always beneficial. The Bureau of Cultural Relics was so low on the totem pole that only a deputy secretary general had responsibility for it. Some in the bureau be­ moaned the lack of deep personal interest that current vice premiers dis­ played in the preservation of China’s historical sites. While the situation had improved from the Cultural Revolution days, the bureau looked back with nostalgia at the 1950s and 1960s, when Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi took a close and personal interest in its activities.102 The chief patron of China’s arts remains the state, but its dominance has eroded seriously. The reforms may seem at times to have had a stately pace, yet they have steadily redefined the relationship among state, artist, and cultural consumer. The consequent reordering of power among ele­ ments of the cultural system has most clearly raised the relative authority of the Ministry of Culture, which in the late 1990s was beginning to re­ semble the arts ministries of other countries. Its tasks include supporting worthy arts groups, raising standards of appreciation and performance, preserving the arts and monuments of China’s past, and managing cul­ tural exchange programs—typical responsibilities in today’s world, but a long way from the Maoist challenge to use culture to mobilize the masses in the cause of revolution. NOTES 1. My debt to earlier research on the politics of Chinese culture will be appar­ ent to any who know this body of scholarship. I single out four titles as especially helpful for understanding the initial years of cultural politics: D. W. Fokkema, Lit­ erary Doctrine in China and Soviet Influence 1956–1960 (The Hague: Mouton, 1965); Merle Goldman, Literary Dissent in Communist China (Cambridge: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 1967); Colin Mackerras, The Chinese Theatre in Modern Times (Lon­ don: Thames and Hudson, 1975); and Bonnie McDougall, ed., Popular Chinese Lit­ erature and Performing Arts in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

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2. Useful chronologies for arts developments in the 1950s include Liushinian wenyi dashiji 1919–1979 [“Record of major events in the arts for sixty years 1919–1979”] (Macao: Zhongguo Xiandai Wenxue Yanjiu Zhongxin, 1979); “Meishujie liang tiao luxian douzheng dashiji (1949–1966)” [“Record of major events in the struggle between two lines in fine arts (1949–1966)”], in Meishu fen­ glei [“Fine arts tempest”] 3 (August 1967), 2–30. 3. On the need to consider bureaucratic structure, see Kenneth Lieberthal and Michel Oksenberg, Policy Making in China: Leaders, Structures, and Processes (Prince­ ton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 4. See James Cahill, The Painter’s Practice: How Artists Lived and Worked in Tra­ ditional China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 5. Xin Fengxia, Reminiscences (Beijing: Panda Books, 1981). 6. Similar details of wretched working conditions for North China drum singers are richly described in “The Autobiography of the Drum Singer, Jang Tsueyfenq (as told to Liou Fang),” Rulan Chao Pian, trans., Chinoperl Papers 13 (1984–1985), 7–106; See also Lao She’s novel, published as Lau Shaw, The Drum Singers, Helena Kuo, trans. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1952), and A. C. Scott’s memoir, Actors Are Madmen: Notebook of a Theatregoer in China (Madi­ son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). 7. Beijing in the 1920s included guilds for actors, storytellers, cloisenné de­ signers, paper hangers, leather-box makers, dyers, table and chair makers, silk thread makers, tailors, cooks, and carpenters, alongside more conventionally working-class occupations. See John Stewart Burgess, The Guilds of Beijing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928). For a broader view of these guilds and their role in China’s postimperial politics, see David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 8. Scott, Actors Are Madmen, 78. 9. T. D. Huters, “Critical Ground: The Transformation of the May Fourth Era,” in McDougall, Popular Chinese Literature, 50–80. 10. Paul Bady, “The Modern Chinese Writer: Literary Incomes and Best Sell­ ers,” China Quarterly 88 (December 1981), 646–648. 11. For an overview of the arts economy in the republican period, see Li Xiangmin, Zhongguo yishu jingji shi [“An economic history of Chinese arts”] (Nanjing: Jiangsu Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 1995), 674–717. 12. Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” New Left Review 82 (1973), 6. Quoted in Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (London: Macmillan, 1981), 78. 13. See David Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 14. Zhu Zongyu, Yang Yuanhua, Zhen Junyan, Zhonghua renmin gongheguo zhuyao shijian renwu [“Important events and persons of the People’s Republic of China”] (Fuzhou: Fujian Renmin Chubanshe: 1989), 474. 15. “Show Concern for Folk Artists, Help Folk Artists,” Guangming ribao (No­ vember 11, 1956). 16. Bady, “Modern Chinese Writer,” 650–651. 17. See John Garrard and Carol Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union (New York: The Free Press, 1990); Marilyn Rueschemeyer, “State Patronage in the Ger­

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man Democratic Republic: Artistic and Political Change in a State Socialist Soci­ ety,” in Judith Huggins Balfe, ed., Paying the Piper: Causes and Consequences of Art Patronage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 209–233. 18. See Andrew Solomon, The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). 19. See Jerome Silbergeld, Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 59–60; and Jerome Silbergeld, “Art Censorship in Socialist China: A Do-it Yourself Sys­ tem,” in Elizabeth C. Childes, ed., Suspended: Censorship and the Visual Arts (Seat­ tle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 299–332. 20. See Bonnie S. McDougall,”Writers and Performers, Their Works, and Their Audiences in the First Three Decades,” in McDougall, Popular Chinese Literature, 279–280. 21. Hong Yung Lee, From Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrats in Socialist China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 61 22. Garrard and Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union, 60. 23. The cultural system overlaps other systems. For instance, universities fall within the educational system, and the New China News Agency is part of the propaganda system, despite its frequent cultural interests. 24. See Stefan Landsberger, Chinese Propaganda Posters: From Revolution to Mod­ ernization (Amsterdam: The Pepin Press, 1995), 29–31. 25. See John P. Burns, ed., The Chinese Communist Party’s NOMENKLATURA System (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1989), xiii, xxvii, xxxiii. 26. The National Writers Association is a constituent of the Arts Federation, but is equal to the parent in enjoying ministerial-level status, putting it ahead of mu­ sic, fine arts, dance, drama, and the like. Su Yong, “Zhongguo zuoxie ‘wuda’ neiqing” [“The inside story of the Fifth Congress of the Chinese Writers Associa­ tion”], Jing bao 227 (June 1996), 41. 27. David Holm, “Folk Art as Propaganda: The Yangge Movement in Yan’an,” in Bonnie S. McDougall, ed., Popular Chinese Literature, 22, 29. 28. See my Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-Class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 80, 83, 98, 29. Guo Feng, “Guanyu ban kanwu (er)” [“On managing magazines (2)”], Fuzhou wanbao (June 13, 1989). 30. “Zai quanguo huaju, geju, ertong zuangzuo zuotanhuishang de jianghua” [“Speech at the national conference on spoken drama, opera, and children’s liter­ ature”], in Zhang Xizeng and Li Shuliang, eds., Yishu jingjixue cankao ziliao huiben [“Anthology of reference materials in the economics of the arts”] (Shenyang: Liaoning Shehuikexueyuan Wenxue Yanjiusuo, 1982), 12. 31. “Approximately 25 to 35 people constitute China’s top leadership. . . . The group is partly defined by the positions its members hold: most of the Politburo and Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party and of the Standing Committee of the State Council, the top commanders of the military, and the leaders of the wealthiest and largest cities and provinces.” Lieberthal and Oksenberg, Policy Making in China, 36. 32. On Chen, see David M. Bachman, Chen Yun and the Chinese Political System (Berkeley: University of California Center for Chinese Studies, 1984).

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33. “Chen Yun shi wenyijie niugui sheshen de heizhushuai” [“Chen Yun is the black commander of the literary and art world’s ghosts and monsters”], Beijing dongfanghong [“The East is red”] (February 25, 1967), reprinted from Caimao hongqi [“Finance and trade red flag”]. 34. Chen Yun tongzhi guanyu pingtan de tanhua he tongxun [“Comrade Chen Yun’s conversations and instructions about ballad singing”] (Beijing: Zhongguo Quyi Chubanshe, 1983). I am indebted to David Bachman for my copy of this book. 35. Zhang Shuyong, “Zhou Enlai tongzhi jieshao Faguo meishu” [“Comrade Zhou Enlai introduces the fine arts of France”], Meishu 142 (September 1979), 3–5. The postcards were of Rodin’s “The Age of Bronze,” Millet’s “Gleaners,” and a sentimental gem by Trioson Griodet (1767–1824) called “The Burial.” 36. Jerome Grieder, Intellectuals and the State in Modern China: A Narrative His­ tory (New York: Free Press, 1981), 26. 37. Ward Just, Echo House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Just, a writer of po­ litical fiction, once worked for Time magazine, and surely knows about propa­ ganda. 38. See the excellent study by Timothy Cheek, Propaganda and Culture in Mao’s China: Deng Tuo and the Intelligentsia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 39. See Gordon Bennett, Yundong: Mass Campaigns in Chinese Communist Leader­ ship (Berkeley: University of California Center for Chinese Studies, 1976); and Lynn T. White III, Policies of Chaos: The Organizational Causes of Violence in China’s Cultural Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 40. White, Policies of Chaos, 17–18. 41. Quoted in Byung-joon Ahn, Chinese Politics and the Cultural Revolution: Dy­ namics of Policy Processes (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976), 166. 42. On the Writers Association, see Perry Link, The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 118–122. 43. See Chen Qitong et al., “Some of Our Views on Current Literary and Art Work,” Renmin ribao (January 7, 1957), in Survey of the China Mainland Press 1507 (April 9, 1957), 17–19. 44. Xiao was not helped by the fact that his patrons were the moderate Chen Yi and Ye Jianying, rather than radical Lin Biao. See Xiao Wangdong, “Gandan zhaoren xian yingcai—huai Chen Yi tongzhi duiwo de bangju jiaoyu” [“His heroic spirit shows us a man of great ability—Recalling how Comrade Chen Yi helped and educated me”], in Zhonggong Zhuzhou Shiwei Xuanchuanbu, ed., Huainian Chen Yi tongzhi [“Cherish the memory of Comrade Chen Yi”] (Changsha: Hunan Renmin Chubanshe, 1979), 221–223; and “Yeh Chien-ying’s Criminal Activities in the World of Literature and Art,” Beijing hung-teng pao [“Red lantern news”] 3 (May 20, 1967), in Joint Publications Research Service 41,884 (July 18, 1967), 53–56. 45. Summary of the Forum on the Work in Literature and Art in the Armed Forces with Which Comrade Lin Piao Entrusted Comrade Chiang Ching (Peking: Foreign Lan­ guages Press, 1968). A slightly different (earlier) version is in Survey of the China Mainland Press 3956 (June 9, 1967), 1–15. 46. Artists often asked Jiang Qing for aid in joining the army. See “Jiang Qing tongzhi he Shanghai Wudao Xuexiao ‘Baimaonu’ Juzu quanti gongzhi zuotanshi

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de jianghua”[“Comrade Jiang Qing’s talk with the comrades of the ‘WhiteHaired Girl’ troupe of the Shanghai Ballet School”] (April 25, 1967), and “Chen Boda, Jiang Qing deng shouzhang jiejian sige yangbanxi danwei de zuotan jiyao” [“Summary of the conversation of Chen Boda, Jiang Qing, and other lead­ ers in receiving four model opera units”] (November 9, 1967), in Jiang Qing tongzhi lun wenyi [“Comrade Jiang Qing Discusses Literature and Art”] (May 1968), 167–168, 171; Talks of November 9 and 12, 1967, in CCP Documents of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 1966–1967 (Hong Kong: Union Research In­ stitute, 1968), 601. 47. Interview with pianist Yin Chengzong (May 13, 1987), in New York City. 48. See my Brushes with Power: Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of Calligraphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 49. 1 tael = 50g or 1.33 oz. 50. “Exposing the Towering Crimes of Counter-revolutionary Revisionist Li Ch’i against the Party, Socialism and Mao Tse-tung’s Thought” (April 1, 1967), in Survey of China Mainland Magazines 23(Supplement) (April 16, 1968), 16. 51. Quan Yanchi, Zouxia shentan de Mao Zedong [“Mao Zedong off the alter”] (Beijing: Zhongguo Wenhua Chubanshe, 1989), 47–49. I have modified my trans­ lation based on Quan Yanchi, Mao Zedong: Man, Not God (Beijing: Foreign Lan­ guages Press, 1992), 45–47. 52. Li Honglin, “‘Right’ and ‘Left’ in Communist China: A Self-Account by a Theoretician in the Chinese Communist Party,” Journal of Contemporary China 6 (summer 1994), 11. 53. Feng Shufan, ed., Zuotian de zhongguo [“Yesterday’s China”] (Xian: Shaanxi Renmin Chubanshe, 1988), 59, 97. On the Water Margin campaign, see Lowell Dittmer, China’s Continuous Revolution: The Post-Liberation Epoch 1949–1981 (Berke­ ley: University of California Press, 1987), 155–156. 54. “Violently Bombard China’s Khrushchev—Chief Backer of the Black Line in Literature and Art,” Chieh-fang-chun wen-i 12 (August 10, 1967), in Survey of China Mainland Magazines 605 (December 11, 1967), 18. 55. The following paragraphs encapsulate an argument I develop at greater length in “Arts Policies of the Cultural Revolution: The Rise and Fall of Culture Minister Yu Huiyong,” in William Joseph, Christine Wong, and David Zweig, eds., New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). 56. An excellent analysis of political infighting of the late Cultural Revolution is in Dittmer, China’s Continuous Revolution, 108–209. 57. Criticism Group of the Central Broadcasting Affairs Bureau, “The ‘Gang of Four’ Cannot Shirk Responsibility for Their Crimes in Brutally Encircling and Suppressing the Broadcast of Literature and Art,” Renmin ribao 2 (February 1977), in Survey of the People’s Republic of China Press, 6300:87(16) (March 1977); “Song Recitals Popular in China’s Cities and Countryside,” NCNA-English, (May 23, 1976), in Survey of the People’s Republic of China Press, 6107:72(3) (June 1976). 58. See Ellen Johnston Laing, The Winking Owl. Art in the People’s Republic of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 85–87, and Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979 (Berkeley: Univer­ sity of California Press, 1994), 368–376.

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59. As early as 1975, Deng asked Hu Qiaomu to gather materials on the imple­ mentation of the Hundred Flowers policy in culture, education, science, and pub­ lishing. Deng assigned He Long’s daughter, He Jiesheng, to recruit informants in arts. The plan to rehabilitate old arts cadres was premature when Deng lost power in January 1976. See Dittmer, China’s Continuous Revolution, 204–205. 60. See Kenneth G. Lieberthal, “Introduction: The ‘Fragmented Authoritarian­ ism’ Model and Its Limitations,” and Carol Lee Hamrin, “The Party Leadership System,” in Kenneth G. Lieberthal and David M. Lampton, eds., Bureaucracy, Pol­ itics, and Decision Making in Post-Mao China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 1–30 and 95–124. 61. In addition to works cited in chapter 1, see Connie Squires Meaney, “Mar­ ket Reform in a Leninist System: Some Trends in the Distribution of Power, Status, and Money in Urban China,” Studies in Comparative Communism 22(2–3) (summer/autumn 1989), 203–220; and Benedict Stavis, China’s Political Reforms: An In­ terim Report (New York: Praeger, 1988). The early phase of cultural reform is dis­ cussed in John Fitzgerald, “A New Cultural Revolution: The Commercialization of Culture in China,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 11 (January 1984), 105–120; Perry Link, “The Limits of Cultural Reform in Deng Xiaoping’s China,” Modern China 13(2) (April 1987), 115–176; and Richard Kraus, “China’s Cultural ‘Liberalization’ and Conflict over the Social Organization of the Arts,” Modern China 9(2) (April 1983), 212–227. 62. Qi Laiping and Tao Jialun, “Gong xiao lu kuan wencai liangwu” [“A small palace with a broad road, art and finance flourish together”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (January 18, 1989). 63. Zhong Ming, “Xi’an huajuyuan gongkai zhaoping yuanzhang” [“Xi’an spo­ ken drama academy hires head through open competition”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (April 12, 1989). 64. Interview with Comrade Jiang of the Guilin Cultural Bureau (November 8, 1979). 65. Written and shouted slogans are typically negotiated in advance in Chinese culture. This was demonstrated anew at the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sov­ ereignty. In the early hours of the morning of July 1, 1997, in Hong Kong, Martin Lee, leader of the Democratic Party, led followers in chanting “long live democ­ racy” (in English) from the balcony of the Legislative Council from which his party had just been excluded. The precise manner of this demonstration, includ­ ing the slogans to be used, had been negotiated in advance with the police. 66. “People’s Daily on Gang‘s Crimes in Ministry of Culture,” Peking NCNA Domestic Service (May 14, 1978), in FBIS (May 15, 1978), E14–20. 67. “Wenhuabu dui ‘sirenbang’ zhankai dajiepi daqingcha” [“Ministry of Cul­ ture opens big exposure and big inspection of ‘gang of four’”], Renmin ribao (May 15, 1978). 68. Wei Liming, “Criticism: Key to Flourishing Culture,” Beijing Review 29(27) (July 7, 1986), 14. 69. “Wang Meng renwei: yishu bushi shengcai zhi dao” [“Wang Meng: Art is not the road to riches”], Fuzhou wanbao (May 25, 1989); “Wenyijia buyinggai beiyangqilai” [“Artists should not be carried as a burden”], Fuzhou wanbao (June 1, 1989).

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70. Li Jun, Kunrao yu zhuanji—Wenhua yishu guanlixue chutan [“Perplexities and resolutions—An exploration of culture and arts management”] (Wuhan: Hubei Renmin Chubanshe, 1987). 71. See Geremie Barmé, “Chinese Drama: To Be or Not,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 10 (July 1983), 143. 72. Guan Xin, “Shaoxingshi wenhuaju teyao Jilinsheng Huamianshi wen­ huaguanzhang jieshao gaige jingyan” [“Shaoxing municipal cultural bureau in­ vites the head of the cultural center of Huamin city in Jilin to introduce his expe­ rience with reform”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (January 8, 1989). 73. On the post-Mao demoralization of propaganda cadres, see Lucian Pye, The Dynamics of Chinese Politics (Cambridge: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain, 1981), 32. 74. John P. Burns, ed, The Chinese Communist Party’s NOMENKLATURA System, xviii–xix, xxxiii–xxxiv. 75. See Luo Weinian, Zhan Songsheng, and Tian Naiqi, Shiyong gonggong guanxi 88 li [“Eighty-eight rules of practical public relations”] (Guangzhou: Kexue Puji Chubanshe Guangzhou Fenshe, 1988). 76. A Chinese-born professor at Occidental College found that in the campaign against spiritual pollution, “One of my colleagues in Nanjing was sent to the countryside to receive ‘re-education’ for his ‘unhealthy soul.’ He was accused of looking closely at the breasts of a woman student while he talked excitedly about graphic sexual portrayals in the fiction of Saul Bellow.” Xiao-huang Yin, “China’s Gilded Age,” The Atlantic Monthly 273 (April 1994), 42–43. 77. Shen Tong, Almost a Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 127. 78. Liu Binyan, “Tell the World”: What Happened in China and Why (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 92. 79. “Some Important Leadership Cadres in Charge of Cultural and Propaganda Work,” Issues & Studies 5 (1986), 150–152. 80. Lynn T. White III, “The End of the Chinese Revolution: A Leadership Di­ versifies,” in Victor Falkenheim, ed., Chinese Politics from Mao to Deng (New York: Paragon, 1989), 99. 81. As part of a major government restructuring in March 1998, the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television was reorganized into the State Bureau of Radio, Film, and Television under the direct supervision of the State Council, which presum­ ably keeps close tabs on policy. Its governmental functions were given over to a new Ministry of the Information Industry, which also absorbed the former min­ istries of Posts and Telecommunications and Electronics Industry. 82. Personal visit, Fuzhou, January 1989. See also the account in Zhongguo wen­ hua bao (August 13, 1989). 83. “The General Political Department’s Request for Instructions Concerning the Proposal to Revoke the Summary of the February 1966 Forum on the Work in Literature and Art in the Armed Forces” (March 26, 1979), Issues & Studies 20(9) (September 1984), 87–92. 84. Ellis Joffee, The Chinese Army after Mao (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 173–176. 85. June Teufel Dreyer, “The Demobilization of PLA Servicemen and the Rein­ tegration into Civilian Life,” in June Teufel Dreyer and Ilpyong J. Kim, eds., Chi­ nese Defense and Foreign Policy (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 297–330.

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86. “Woguo yiyou qianyu zhijun yuedui” [“Our country now has over a thou­ sand military bands”], Fuzhou wanbao (April 21, 1989). 87. See Richard Kraus, “Bai Hua: The Political Authority of a Writer,” in Tim­ othy Cheek and Carol Hamrin, eds., China’s Establishment Intellectuals (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1986), 185–211; Dong Kangding, “Jiejia guitian hou di Bai Hua” [“Bai Hua after coming out of his shell and returning to the field”], Jing bao 1 (Jan­ uary 1986), 30–31. 88. Liu Binyan, Tell the World, 133. 89. Silbergeld, Contradictions, 162. See also 165–166, 191–192. 90. Lu Zhong, “Chubanshu ‘saohuang’ Jingpingmei zaoyang” [“Publishing officials fail to ‘sweep the pornography’ of The Golden Lotus”], Jingbao 133 (August 1988), 98–99. 91. Jian Feng, “Jiefangjun zongzheng gejutuan gewutuan tuichu Yidali minggeju ‘Tuosika’” [“The opera and dance troupes of the general political de­ partment of the people’s liberation army stage the famous Italian opera Tosca”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (March 12, 1989). 92. Willy Wo-lap Lam, “Grip tightens on army funds,”South China Morning Post (December 7, 1996). 93. “Zhongguo wenlian zhaokai tizhi gaige zuotanhui” [“Chinese Arts Feder­ ation convenes forum on structural reform”], Wenyi bao (January 30, 1988). 94. See Hu Hao, “Mao Zedong youling zai zhaohuan” [“Calling up Mao Zedong’s ghost”], Zhengming 136 (February 1989), 10. 95. “Quanguo wenhua gongzuo huiyi zai Jing zhaokai” [“National cultural work conference opens in Beijing”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (May 15, 1988). 96. On the decline of the traditonally cultured official, see Cheek, Propaganda and Culture. 97. Willy Wo-Lap Lam, “Beijing Banks on April,” South China Morning Post (November 5, 1997). 98. Orville Schell, “Children of Tiananmen,” San Francisco Chronicle (February 25, 1989). On the decline of the traditional intelligentsia, see Cheek, Propaganda and Culture. 99. Qi Xin, “Cong Deng Xiaoping guanyu tequan wenti de jianghua tanqi” [“Talking of Deng Xiaoping’s speech on bureaucratic privilege”], Qishiniandai 120 (January 1980), 74–75. 100. Zhu Muzhi, “Several Questions to Be Taken into Consideration in Formu­ lating Strategies for Cultural Development,” Guangming ribao (January 13, 1986), in FBIS (January 24, 1986), K22. 101. Kenneth Dean, “Funerals in Fujian,” Cahiers d’Extreme Asie 4 (1988), 19–78. 102. Michel Oksenberg, “Economic Policy Making in China: Summer 1981,” China Quarterly 90 (June 1982), 193.

3

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Normalizing Nudity

T

he representation of the naked body is an arena of persistent contro­ versy in China’s cultural politics. As in many nations, the distinction between art and pornography is contested. An obscurely shifting zone of separation between the two reminds us that the difference is political as well as aesthetic. The late 1980s brought a sudden rage for nude paintings. Unprecedented exhibitions of paintings and photographs of nude models attracted thousands of visitors in Beijing, Shanghai, and several provincial capitals. Even more Chinese skimmed books of nude photographs and paintings, as the state relaxed its formerly close supervision of the sexual content of art. The 1989 Beijing Massacre halted this episode; a campaign against pornography dampened public interest in nude painting, but hardly eradicated it. Sex remains a continuing battle line at the conver­ gence of art and politics, although naked images in oils have lost their power to startle the public and unnerve the politicians.1 Nude painting is foreign to China’s cultural tradition, and the political re­ actions to this phenomenon provide a useful perspective for viewing changes in the meaning of culture and who is empowered to determine what consti­ tutes art. What do nude paintings mean to the Chinese and why did they be­ come popular at the end of a decade of reform? The rage for nude painting brings into focus several issues: the erosion of Communist authority, artistic dissent against state-directed cultural policy, underpaid art professors hus­ tling to cope with runaway inflation, rampant sexism, and curiously earnest claims that nude painting is “scientific.” On one level, nude paintings simply exist to titillate; on another, the noisy insistence that they are art challenges the state’s right to classify troublesome culture as pornography. 73

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Nude art seems a lightweight artistic phenomenon to bear the load of such diverse connotations, yet it offers a helpful position from which to explore the emergence of new uncertainties about the formerly pre­ dictable relationship of art to the Chinese state. First, the state ceased de­ manding that artists only apply their skills to immediate political tasks. Second, artists increasingly regarded themselves as professionals with the right work according to their own standards. Some used nude painting to assert their own politics of autonomy, others as a welcome form of apolit­ ical painting. Third, the sensationalism of nude painting joined other pop­ ular culture phenomena in eliciting a limited private arts marketplace as an alternative to state patronage. It is difficult to find an appropriate tone in writing about a subject that affords such easy opportunities to offend both men and women, Chinese and Westerners alike. The category of nude art is China’s social construc­ tion, not mine. Much about the nude art rage may seem absurd to West­ erners, but I do not intend to make light of the seriousness of those who have created the art or participated in the public discussion of its mean­ ing. Art that draws attention to sex poses messy problems for any nation as tolerance clashes with modesty and morality with license. The West has by no means handled these questions more smoothly than China.

NUDITY AS A FORBIDDEN ZONE Imperial China was a harshly prudish place, at least in public. Mark Elvin has commented, “The human body in traditional China was not seen as having its own intrinsic physical glory.” There was no Chinese counter­ part to the “complex interfusion of sexuality, maternity and spirituality that one glimpses in the face of a Bellini Madonna.”2 Nude painting ex­ isted only in pornography for the wealthy, a furtive tradition that under­ scored the scandal with which most people regarded representations of the uncovered body. A number of Chinese painters learned figure-painting techniques in Eu­ rope as students of oil painting early in the twentieth century. On return­ ing to China, they often outraged the established authority by including the nude as a painting subject, along with the still life and other staples of the Western oil tradition.3 Liu Haisu returned from France to become di­ rector of the Shanghai Fine Arts School, where he taught figure painting. Liu defended a student who included nudes in a 1924 exhibition in Nan­ chang, although the military governor immediately banned the paintings. When the minister of education sided with Liu, other schools began using female nude models. Battles over nude art continued in 1926, when Shanghai officials investigated Liu’s school, reporting that female models

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“take off all their clothing and assume positions of sleeping, sitting, stand­ ing, and all kinds of strange postures.”4 Even the Chinese word for model is foreign, unusual in modern Chinese because the English sound has been borrowed (mote’er), rather than the meaning. Warlord Sun Quanfang banned nude models and threatened to arrest Liu Haisu and close his school. The overthrow of Sun by Chiang Kaishek the following year ended the crisis, but not before Liu Haisu fled to Japan. Christian missionaries joined Chinese warlords in opposing nudity in art. When the new Beijing Hotel was opened with murals that included naked mermaids, Western preachers successfully demanded the addition of bathing suits.5 Even politically progressive Chinese painters criticized painting the naked body, not out of prudishness, but because Western subjects for paintings seemed irrelevant to Chinese social needs. One rad­ ical painter of the 1930s said that students at the Hangzhou Academy painted “nothing but apples, bananas, and women’s thighs.”6 Communists and the Body The appearance of figure painting was a consequence of the introduction of realist painting, which eventually became the basis for the political art that once dominated China. The celebrated Xu Beihong returned from Eu­ ropean training to lead the Central Academy of Fine Arts, training a cadre of painters who took figure studies as a central part of their training.7 Many went on to teach realist techniques that helped propagandize the revolution. Although paintings of nudes shared a realist curricular heritage with paintings of model soldiers, the Communist Revolution discouraged nude art, which especially offended the peasants among the new lead­ ership. In the 1950s the Soviet painter Maksimov included nudes in a short course in oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and the Romanian artist Baba offered a similar six-month course in Hangzhou; both exerted considerable influence over the art world.8 But after the split with Moscow in 1960, these “revisionist” nudes were con­ tested, as many sought to ban nude models from figure-painting classes, bringing arts academies in line with traditional Chinese moral­ ity, which on this point seemed to share the austere spirit of the revo­ lution. A group of propaganda officials, unhappy that art students were drawing nude models instead of working in the countryside, pressed the Ministry of Culture to ban nude modeling in August 1964. At the Guangzhou Fine Arts Academy, a campaign to “rectify the bourgeois education system with modeling at its core” was soon underway.9 But when three Central Academy of Fine Arts professors petitioned Mao to overturn the ministry’s decision, Mao used a letter to five top leaders

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(Lu Dingyi, Kang Sheng, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, and Peng Zhen) to do so on July 18, 1965:10 Fundamental training in drawing and sculpture requires models—male, fe­ male, old, and young; they are indispensable. The prohibitions of feudal ide­ ology are inappropriate. It is unimportant if a few bad things emerge. For the sake of art and science, we must put up with some small sacrifices.11

Mao’s directive on nude models was out of phase with the Cultural Revolution that soon followed. Red Guards did not quote the chairman’s encouragement of this “small sacrifice”; instead, they regarded nude painting as bourgeois smut. And the deputy head of the Propaganda De­ partment, who opposed the use of nude models most forcefully, was crit­ icized for his anti-Maoist standpoint. Nude painting reemerged when the academies reopened in the early 1970s. Models reappeared in the classroom in 1973, but were withdrawn again in 1975. When the Lu Xun Fine Arts Academy resumed figurepainting classes in 1978, Mao’s instruction was dusted off in justification.12 The nude tradition was further justified when Fine Arts Research reprinted Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” alongside a prerevolutionary nude sketch by Wu Zuoren, who had returned from studies in Brussels and Paris to become one of China’s fine arts leaders.13 By 1979, a Hunan mu­ seum held a show titled “Exploration of Nude Painting,” explaining that the Gang of Four had blocked the development of this tradition. How­ ever, accompanying signs warned that the nudes were for academic re­ search and the use of arts students only. While foreign visitors could tour the show (which also included landscapes and other less controversial paintings), Chinese needed official credentials for admission.14 Yet, nudes began to make their way into popular culture as well. A 1980 television show included a scene of art students painting “Venus de Milo.”15 Shortly after this Venus was unearthed in 1820, it became an em­ blem of the European bourgeoisie’s amalgam of daring and propriety, qualities that the image carried along with it to China in the twentieth century. Some bold entrepreneurs took advantage of the nascent tolerance for nude art to peddle plaster reproductions of “Venus de Milo” at Hangzhou’s West Lake in 1980, along with other foreign high-culture im­ ages such as busts of Goethe and Beethoven. Nudes of Rebellion Old controversies were rekindled as nude art began to appear in public places. Some artists used nude images to test the limits of what cultural officials would tolerate. One bold sculptor used nude art to subvert a

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massive propaganda campaign about Zhang Zhixin (1930–1975), a Liao­ ning propaganda official who was jailed during the Cultural Revolution for her stubborn loyalty to Liu Shaoqi. Zhang was executed in 1975 in a particularly grisly manner (her throat was cut in order to prevent her from shouting slogans before her death). The propaganda drive sought to purge Maoists from power in Liaoning and accompanied the posthumous rehabilitation of Liu Shaoqi.16 Amidst thousands of songs, stories, and paintings of Zhang Zhixin, Tang Daxi offered a nude statue of Zhang as a fierce archer astride a rear­ ing horse, entitled “Brave Warrior—To Those Who Struggle for Truth.” The Guangdong literary magazine Zuopin reproduced this statue on its November 1979 cover.17 The ploy was clever: who could criticize a work celebrating an official martyr? A Western counterpart might be a nude Joan of Arc or, perhaps, Susan B. Anthony. Zhang was typically repre­ sented playing her violin, but a nude rider was perhaps more striking than a naked fiddler.18 Some Chinese viewers took the nudity quite seri­ ously as part of a political message in which the martyr proclaims, “even if my body is exposed, I will still oppose you.”19 Others saw the statue as a taunt to Party propaganda officials. A complex dispute arose over nude art at the new Beijing airport in 1979. Intended to show off China’s new openness after the Cultural Revolution, the airport was well appointed with new art. Amidst the fifty-eight spe­ cially commissioned works of art was a mural by Yuan Yunsheng, “WaterSplashing Festival, Song of Life,” a massive painting of the springtime cel­ ebration of the Dai minority people of China’s Yunnan Province. Among more than a hundred painted figures are the unclothed forms of two bathing women, which became the focus for a double-barreled controversy.20 The first clash was within the arts world. Speeches given to celebrate the unveiling of the airport art make it clear that the two nude figures were supported enthusiastically by part of the Chinese political and cul­ tural establishment in a drive against “feudal” barriers.21 Many speakers praised Shen Tu, head of China’s aviation system, for his tasteful patron­ age, the head of the Central Party School even likening the airport to the Sistine Chapel. Ai Qing, the most celebrated poet of the senior generation, applauded Shen Tu especially for backing the nudes: If Comrade Shen Tu had no courage, they could not appear. Now that they have been hung, will people denounce them? I dare not say, but I see that the comrade from the Party School has come to support them. The Party School represents the authority of the highest leadership, so I am happy. Just now [an­ other participant] said: “Do you dare to have your photograph taken in front of the nude paintings?” What should I fear? I’ve seen lots of nude paintings.22

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Supervising the airport construction project was Li Ruihuan, a former model worker who had just built Mao Zedong’s mausoleum. Li, a rising star in Chinese politics, would soon become mayor of Tianjin and, in 1989, join the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau as overseer of culture and ideology. Li spoke with surprising vigor: People called me on the phone and wrote me letters; even responsible com­ rades said “You tell them, you think of a way to put underpants on those nudes on the Western wall of the Water-splashing Festival, all right?” (laugh­ ter) I said: what are you doing sounding off before you understand art? Sup­ pose you wait and listen to other views, then speak, ok? If you stick your nose in now as an oppositionist, when the time comes in a few days to criti­ cize that point of view, you’ll really be in it (applause and great laughter). There are a great many people who are not enlightened about this kind of thing; I think that when a new and good thing emerges, a correct sort of thing, its protectors are not necessarily in the majority.

Li remarkably deferred to the professional expertise of artists, in con­ trast with those who did not “understand art.” In 1979 the Party encour­ aged better treatment for intellectuals, a policy intended to reverse the im­ pact of the Cultural Revolution. Li’s verbal respect for the expert autonomy of artists came as China held its Fourth National Arts Con­ gress, which did much to lift the spirits of arts professionals. Those in the leadership who wanted to open China more quickly used the nude figures in Yuan’s painting to challenge conservatives. The new airport artworks were an important symbol of openness to the outside world, and the project received massive publicity. Those who doubt a co­ ordinated campaign should note publication in People’s Daily of a poem in praise of the airport murals that included the line “who says we turn fear­ ful at the sight of the human figure’s beauty?”23 But after the ceremony, Yuan’s mural became embroiled in a second (yet related) conflict between Deng Xiaoping and Hua Guofeng; both used arts issues to advance their causes, and Yuan’s painting came under attack for more expressly political reasons. A group of Dai living in Beijing had “confirmed that they did indeed bathe nude.” But a few months later, some Yunnan officials—apparently not Dai themselves—complained that the mural embarrassed the Dai. It is likely that these critics were prompted by Hua Guofeng’s supporters, eager to take advantage of the fact that Deng Xiaoping had personally visited and approved Yuan Yunsheng’s mural. Hua appealed to traditional Chinese modesty and propri­ ety, while Deng backed intellectuals tired of prudery and official restric­ tions. Yuan Yunsheng had been labeled a rightist in 1957; Deng had backed the rehabilitation of such rightists in 1979 (even though he had been a major leader of the 1957 antirightist campaign), while Hua had

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been unenthusiastic about removing the rightist labels. Many also criti­ cized Yuan for the “distortions” caused by painting the bodies of the Dai people in an elongated style. The offending section of the wall was covered with a curtain while of­ ficials debated its fate. The curtain merely tempted people to peek. In 1981, the nudes were covered by a permanent wall, despite petitions from the arts world to protect the mural’s integrity. Yuan declined an invitation to “revise” his painting. By this time Deng Xiaoping had prevailed over Hua Guofeng and probably reasoned that he no longer needed to curry the favor of intellectuals so much as to win over Hua’s former supporters. In subsequent years, Yuan Yunsheng’s Beijing airport mural was sealed or opened according to the political climate, and Yuan emigrated to the United States. Despite Deng’s betrayal over the mural, his victory over Hua Guofeng brought about a systematic reduction in the role of the Central Committee’s Propaganda Department, which gradually withdrew from day-today supervision of the work of artists, trying instead to set broad policies. At several points in the 1980s, the propagandists erupted in frustration, especially in the 1983 campaign against spiritual pollution and the 1987 campaign against bourgeois liberalization. In the 1983 investigation of Sichuan painter Li Huasheng, authorities seized his books containing re­ productions of nudes by Picasso and Gauguin as pornography, while other artists in Sichuan were imprisoned for their use of nude models.24 Yet, these were ultimately rearguard protestations, incapable of matching the force of three trends: the assertion of self-governance by artists, the emergence of a commercial economy, and the disrepair of the Party’s or­ gans for policing ideology. At the beginning of the reform decade, nude art was a forbidden zone. Ten years later, it had achieved respectability. The 1980s brought more and more public nudes, especially in the movement to build statues to decorate China’s cities. Hundreds of sylphs and nymphs of modernization dance in these stat­ ues, sometimes wearing diaphanous drapes, but often publicly baring breasts and limbs in ways that had not been tolerated in China for thousands of years. New commercial advertising contained so many fleshy images that there was no longer much controversy over the exhibition of academic painters‘ figure paintings. In 1983, Yan’an, the cradle of the revolution, was the scene of nude dancing; what could be so terrible about genteel painters and sculptors using nude figures in their art? When two Liaoning painters won prizes for their nudes in the 1987 “Chinese Oil Painting Exhibition,” the Ministry of Culture’s newspaper commented that “this the first time that paintings of nudes have won prizes in a Chinese exhibition. This reflects changes and progress in popular viewpoint.”25 With this signal of approval, a group of Beijing painters began to plan China’s first all-nude art exhibition.

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THE 1988–1989 NUDE ART SHOWS

The nude art show, which began on December 18, 1988, at Beijing’s China Art Gallery created a sensation even before it opened. As early as June, forty-seven Chinese papers and magazines and seven foreign news serv­ ices carried reports on the coming show. Art schools and work units em­ ploying painters began requesting tickets half a year in advance,26 and 28 faculty from the Central Fine Arts Academy presented 135 nude paint­ ings. Most were realistic, but the show included a few expressionist works; one artist had two abstract canvases that he mischievously or op­ portunistically labeled nudes and included in the show. Almost all of the subjects were women; all but one of the painters were male. The unprece­ dented exhibit attracted about a quarter of a million visitors in eighteen days.27 This record attendance comprised mostly male viewers (perhaps two-thirds) who were primarily officials, intellectuals, or students. Few workers, peasants, or merchants attended.28 The Beijing show was backed publicly by the Ministry of Culture. Vice Minister Ying Ruocheng admit­ ted that the nudes were “no doubt a shock to people still harbouring feu­ dal concepts,” but said that the exhibition was a positive experience from the points of view of art, science, and education.29 Artists of other cities took this endorsement as a green light for their own nude art shows. Early in 1989 such shows opened in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Fuzhou. Members of the fine arts faculty of Fu­ jian Teachers University put on the Fuzhou exhibit from March 19–28, 1989.30 The show was arranged in one week, during which there was fevered construction of frames for paintings pulled from the closets of the artists. This copycat exhibition illustrates a basic principle of Chinese pol­ itics: innovations spread throughout the nation after the publicized suc­ cess of a single prototype. Fuzhou is a city of 1.5 million people on the coast of Fujian Province across from Taiwan. It has been an important re­ gional capital for over a thousand years; in the past decade, it has been a showcase for policies of economic reform, partly to attract investors from Taiwan. But Fuzhou also has a moralistic heritage, partly from a strong military presence; during three decades of armed tension with Taiwan and the United States, Fuzhou was the capital of a frontline military region. The Fuzhou exhibition was staged in a hall directly behind a giant statue of Mao Zedong in the city’s May First Square. It featured some eighty nude paintings by twenty-seven professors. Only four showed males; of these only one included a penis. The styles were varied, includ­ ing some expressionist canvases and a nude in the manner of Modigliani, but most were in the realist tradition. Some portrayed fleshy women with coy smiles and could easily be imagined hanging in old-fashioned saloons

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in the United States. Perhaps the most striking work showed a sturdy young woman painted in the meticulous watercolor style favored in the late Cultural Revolution; wearing only a steel wristwatch, she, a model worker who had just stepped back from her machinery and out of her clothes, stared rather defiantly at the viewer.31 The Fuzhou paintings were quite skillfully done, reflecting more than a generation’s experience of painting clothed figures in propaganda art. Nearly a thousand persons per day visited the show, a remarkable number for Fuzhou. The crowd was curious and included some soldiers in uniform, although most viewers were male intellectuals. Visitors showed high spirits tempered by anxiety, not altogether different from the crowd that attended the inauguration of Fuzhou’s first escalator in Feb­ ruary 1986—people had dared one another to go first, but were not com­ pletely sure that this new thing would work. What did this nude fever sig­ nify? This minor social movement bore several distinct meanings, some of which were contradictory. Nudes of Science and Democracy The artists said they were proudly destroying feudal barriers, and were advancing the cause of science and democracy. Many felt that they were struggling against the restrictions of the old society in much the way the May Fourth figures did earlier in this century. Just as Liu Haisu was at­ tacked by a reactionary warlord for daring to bring nude painting to China, so contemporary artists resented puritanical restrictions from out­ side their ranks. At this simple level, the painting of naked women was a blow for artistic freedom. Many Chinese intellectuals believed that nude paintings were a specific weapon against feudalism. When Mao Zedong used science to justify nude modeling in 1965, he was expressing the common belief among modernizing male intellectuals that the Chinese arts were unscientific and that Western figure painting reflected an admirable tradition of the scien­ tific study of anatomy. Yet, the linkage of science and sex is more complex.32 Nude painting permitted the artists to replace feudal kinship and gender with a “modern” form of erotic sexism that still manages to keep women in their place and denies them a subject position from which they can be viewers. Nudes as symbols of science and progress encourage many Chinese in­ tellectuals to speak of them in rather pretentious terms, explicitly denying their sexual aspect. For instance, an architect commented on the Beijing show that “the greatest potential contribution of nude art is to remind us: humanity is the center of art and science.”33 Two of the painters who par­ ticipated in the Beijing exhibition had similar grandiose formulas. Xie

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Dongming claimed, “one is not painting an external surface with the nude, rather describing certain aspects of the human condition. It’s about life.” Another artist, Chaoge, insisted that “the message we have to get across is that the nude is not essentially concerned with physical beauty but with the beauty of life.”34 Out of context, such words seem to have little to do with pictures of naked women. A staff member at the China Art Gallery insisted that it is feudal to look at nude art with sexual consciousness, while the ability to detach nudity from sexuality is a test of sophistication.35 Others argued that in the West the classical Greek heritage demonstrated the accord be­ tween high ideals and beautiful bodies. Flesh may be the immediate ob­ ject of nude painting, but not of the artistic feelings that it elicits.36 Yet, despite the brave rhetoric, no special courage was required to paint and exhibit nude art in China in 1989, in contrast with 1979. No longer a forbidden zone, nude painting had become a growth industry, despite the sanctimonious talk that accompanied it. Indeed, Chen Zui, author of a 1988 history of nude art, claims that he encountered no major problems after he began his research in 1981, even during the campaigns against spiritual pollution and bourgeois liberalization.37 The appeal to science reflects demands for greater professional auton­ omy in the arts. One commentator demanded the resumption of a project initiated by Chinese art sixty years before, recognizing that figure art has its own laws.38 The common reference to the “laws” of nude painting places this controversial art in the comforting cloak of other arts that have been alleged to have their own laws in the reform era. The content of such laws is unspecified; rather, they are professional arcana, by which artists stake their claim to diminish outside interference by bureaucrats who do not share their expertise. Similarly, the appeal to artistic laws distances professionals from amateur enthusiasts, whom Maoist cultural policy imagined to be morally superior to professionals.39 At times the association of nude painting with the struggle for truth seemed frivolous. In the spring of 1989, an eight-part television series was based on the career of Pan Yuliang, a noted woman painter.40 In the fourth episode, young Pan flees captivity in a brothel to become an art student in Shanghai in 1920. As students assemble for the academy’s new class in figure art, the professor complains that “it is difficult for art to progress in China.” The earnest students, eager to bring Chinese art into modern times, are ready to paint their first nudes. However, the model finds it dif­ ficult to face so many eyes upon her unclothed body. She begins to disrobe behind a curtain, but breaks into tears, finally refusing to work. What can be done? Must China do without nude painting? At the last minute, Pan Yuliang, the only woman in the class, boldly stands and announces that she will be the model. The soundtrack swells with lush music as Pan

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bravely takes off her clothes; her face glows with radiant and joyous courage as China’s viewers are treated to a brief, but full glimpse of her naked body, leaning back in profile.41 The juxtaposition of “progressive” nude painting against “backward” social conservatism, mixed with a bit of lechery, is not unique to China. Theodore Dreiser in The “Genius” described the initiation of a provincial American student into the sophisticated world of Chicago’s Art Institute in 1880s. Like the Chinese television show, Dreiser combined the morally comforting stance of indignation against ignorance and repression with sniggering promises of naked models! Mistresses! French pictures of naked women! Dreiser’s painter, Eugene Witla, eventually fails because of his sexuality, enabling the reader to enjoy the simultaneous pleasures of titillation and moral superiority.42 This same unbeatable combination was at work in China in the 1980s. Eroticism The potential for controversy frightened some artists. As the Beijing nude show opened, one writer appealed for everyone to “take it slowly and there will be no calamity.” Ke Wenhui argued for a sharp distinction be­ tween nude paintings and the issue of sexual liberation. Insisting that the most beautiful nude paintings are of mothers, not wives and certainly not whores, Ke deplored the fact that the rage surrounding the exhibition was over the nudity, not the art: “I hope that everyone will welcome the nude painting exhibition, and that people will appreciate it not in a mad fever, but with proper feelings.”43 In response to this caution, Zhai Mo insisted that “the furor is good!” Separating nude art from sexuality is not possible, argued Zhai, who jeered at Ke’s claim that Western nudes mostly represented good girls. Zhai maintained that China’s artists must affirm the sexual worth of women and that progress is bound up with the cause of nude painting.44 The 1980s was the decade when many Chinese intellectuals discovered Freud, whose works had previously been banned. Yet, despite the rage for Freud, few writers were willing to affirm the sexuality of nude painting publicly. Far more common was the concealment of sensuality behind sci­ ence or the elevating banner of high art. A calendar, for instance, justified appreciation for the “fully developed breasts, her moderate waist, her well-rounded hips” of the “Venus de Milo” by referring to the findings of “aestheticians,” who “recognize that an important standard for the hu­ man body’s beauty is the symmetry and proportion of the body’s parts.”45 Another way of denying the erotic aspect of nude art was to misrepresent Western tradition. One book on Western nude paintings discussed the often-painted myth of Leda and the swan. But the bird was described as

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Leda’s little friend, rather than the animate form the god Jupiter assumed in order to rape Leda.46 Other accounts tended to ignore the content of Western nude paintings, concentrating upon their formal aspects. A third safety mechanism was to paint nudes that were not Han Chi­ nese. Han Chinese, who constitute 93 percent of the population, often re­ gard members of China’s national minorities with condescension, some­ times as exotic primitives. This attitude gives license to paint minority women without any clothes.47 In the Han popular imagination, the mi­ norities of Southern China are often reckoned to be morally loose, fond of casually removing their clothes. Han males have a special fascination with the Lisu and other southern peoples who share a spring watersplashing festival.48 Yuan Yunsheng’s controversial 1979 mural WaterSplashing Festival, Song of Life was of naked minority women. Many Chi­ nese artists felt that painting “primitive” women with no clothes was less likely to arouse controversy. Even when the models were Han, painters often added respectability and distance to their nudes by placing them in minority settings or by adorning their Han models with central Asian headdresses or jewelry characteristic of non-Han peoples.49 Nude pho­ tography is more risqué than painting, both because the images are po­ tentially more lifelike and because few Chinese count photography as high art. Unsurprisingly, the first nude photograph in a mainland publi­ cation was of a group of smiling young Tibetan women bathing in lake.50 The other popular exotics are Western women, who are perhaps even more openly regarded as wanton, but lack the appealing status of naive natives of paradise. Images of naked foreign women are plentiful in China, where reproductions of the West’s own tradition of nude art are widely available. Many popular posters have featured cavorting Caucasian nymphs. Especially popular is Bouguereau’s “Maiden and Love,” with cu­ pid kissing a buxom white woman. One could argue that Han Chinese men are especially titillated by exotic women, but it is more likely that im­ ages of Han Chinese women are simply more controversial. The Victorians reconciled sexuality with prudery, making nude painting legitimate by displacing eroticism to exotic scenes. “In high Victorian painting the nude which would have shocked in contemporary scenes is somehow accept­ able when set in Ancient Greece or Rome.”51 Han Chinese have discovered a similar safety by shifting the naked body either to the West or to China’s own minority regions. Nonetheless, as Harriet Evans points out: The official objection to representations of the sexualized body depends on a simple categorization of the images of the naked, invariably female, body as a source of moral corruption and shame, regardless of the place or narrative context within which it appears, and regardless of the different meanings that the viewer might read into it.52

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SEXISM

Embarrassed by the Fuzhou exhibition, one thirty-year-old Chinese woman intellectual commented that she had never in her life seen so many images of naked bodies, but noted that the pictures were almost all of women, mostly young women, at that. Even a supposedly more worldly American woman college student remarked that she felt as if the male visitors were viewing her as well as the paintings. This feeling was no doubt strengthened by the fact that there was only one woman specta­ tor for every twenty-five or thirty men. The few women who braved the sea of mostly young men either came in groups or with male escorts.53 Yet, the public-relations hype accompanying the show insisted that it was not only daring and pioneering, but even uplifting. Newspaper art critics reassured their readers that naked ladies constitute the very essence of high art.54 One Chinese authority on nude painting, Zuo Zhangwei, quoted at length a passage from Rodin to show that “only an artist with an eye for beauty can discover what is splendid about the hu­ man body.” “Ah! This woman’s shoulder is so enchanting! Her lines are true perfection.” “Look at this woman’s chest: full breasts, incomparably splendid and love­ able. This kind of beauty is simply not human, but of the spirits.” “Look at another woman’s buttocks: what a miraculous undulation! As fair as jade, with such marvelous muscles! She truly makes me want to fall on my knees before her!”55

Because Rodin was an internationally celebrated artist whose works are worth a lot of money, Chinese critics cannot imagine that he was also a dirty old man, albeit a brilliant and talented one.56 In the West, the woman’s movement forced a reconsideration of the West’s tradition of nude painting. According to Rosemary Betterton: It has exposed the nude as a particular construction of female sexuality that signifies male desire. At the same time the privileged position assigned to the fine-art nude in European culture has come under attack, by situating the nude in relation to a whole range of representations—which exploit female sexuality in pinups, pornography and advertising. Male artists and critics have consistently justified their enjoyment of the nude by appealing to ab­ stract conceptions of ideal form, beauty and aesthetic value. Such a view ren­ ders invisible the relationships of power and subordination involved when a male artist depicts the female body. It ignores or denies the difference be­ tween looking at the body of a woman and looking at a pile of fruit. There­ fore a feminist critique of the nude has focused upon analysis of the ways in which the act of viewing itself reinstates male power.57

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John Berger described the classical nude as celebrating male possession: In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear to be the result of his being there. It is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity. But he, by definition, is a stranger—with his clothes still on.58

Yet, when American anthropologist Carolyn Bloomer described such ideas to Zuo Zhangwei, the man who quoted Rodin so effusively, Zuo was unable make sense of her comments.59 Western feminism’s reevalua­ tion of our own tradition of nude art has had little or no impact on Chi­ nese artists and critics. I asked Xie Xingbiao, the painter who organized the Fuzhou exhibition, why the show contained so many more paintings of women than of men. Xie responded with complete sincerity that women have fine white skin, which requires greater skill to paint: female skin reflects the play of light so that painters may better understand the theory of color. Xie added that women’s figures are also more challenging than men’s. “[Male] artists already understand the principles of the male body, so their talent is better developed by painting women.”60 One writer, Chen Zui, unusually admitted that nude art appeals to sex­ ual feelings and that it reflects male domination: “figure culture in class society always reveals the ideology of male strength.” Yet, Chen also of­ fered a banal aesthetic “division of labor: male is power, female is beauty; male is brilliant, female is soft; male is wisdom, female is feeling; male is philosophy, female is poetry!”61 It should be noted that artists and art stu­ dents are far more likely to be male in China than in the West, reflecting Chinese notions of art’s social importance. There are as yet no Chinese Guerrilla Girls, although there is now greater awareness of Western fem­ inist critiques of the fine arts world. The first feminist criticism of the Beijing art show published in China was by an American, Jeanne Moore, a foreign expert working for a Chi­ nese publisher, whose comments were printed in China Women’s News.62 Moore complained that it was false to profess that nude art combated feu­ dal thinking when the paintings were all of women. This continued feudalism’s male domination more subtly and buttressed it by misleading claims about the Western art tradition. When Moore suggested an exhibi­ tion of nude men painted by female artists, her Chinese friends only laughed.63 Somehow naked female bodies combat feudalism, while nude men violate common decency. Some Chinese women commented on the absence of male forms in nude art books and in the pinup posters and calendars that even stateowned firms distribute.64 Yet, the view that China was marching on the

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road to modernization beneath a banner of nude females was far more widespread. When I visited the Fuzhou show, several Chinese art stu­ dents naively asked me how it compared to nude art exhibits in the United States. Sophisticates, such as Xie Xingbiao, however, know that the West does not have such exhibits. They argue that Asia needs specialized figure-painting shows because this art is so new. Xie did not believe that all-nude exhibitions would last long, however. He hoped that in the long run nude art would, as in the West, be integrated with other art as it be­ came less controversial. In the short run, Xie and his colleagues were plan­ ning a new stage. They would no longer paint single naked women, but whole batches of them, linking their figures with stories from Chinese his­ tory and legend. Xie illustrated the coming wave of nude art by pulling out a book printed in Guangzhou; it was full of Western orientalist harem scenes, nineteenth-century French nudes in Roman settings, and Septem­ ber Morn, rounded off with some photorealist American women in bathtubs.65 Nude art’s course in the West followed the opposite direction. Accord­ ing to Kenneth Clark, the painting of the isolated female body “with no pretext of fable or setting, was in fact extremely rare before the nineteenth century.”66 The Fuzhou plan echoes more common European nineteenthcentury practice, where harems and classical backgrounds served to dig­ nify otherwise questionable pictures of naked women. In China censorship and other distorted access to contemporary Western culture means that young Chinese women are being exposed not to recent Western female im­ ages but to those of the gender-typed 1940s and 1950s, if not of much earlier periods: from the literature of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to television and film productions such as Anna Karenina and the wholesome Sound of Music.67

For nude painting, Europe’s nineteenth century was China’s main point of reference. It was then that the “Venus de Milo” was established as a popular symbol of classical beauty in Europe, as it became in China.68 It was also in the nineteenth century that “the nude came to mean, almost exclusively, the female nude.”69 The Women Art-Workers: Models Except for a handful of women artists, men paint the nudes. Art students are far more likely to be men than women, so the pool of female profes­ sional painters is small. Women typically work as models. Controversies about models clarify the sexism of the nude art fad. Even the mere word “model” is worth a snigger in many quarters.

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China abounds with trashy books and stories with titles such as A Peep­ ing Tom Artist Paints a Nude Model. One of these books, My Wife Is Not a Model, tells the story of painter Ouyang Mu, whose wife refuses to pose for him. Even when he cites the precedent of Xu Beihong (China’s pioneer oil painter) and his wife, Ouyang’s wife refuses to undress except in the dark. Ouyang finds a model, a student in his oil class. Proving the disrep­ utable nature of models, the young woman plies Ouyang with liquor un­ til he is dead drunk. She puts him in her bed, then calls his virtuous wife to come fetch him, tricking her into discovering them in bed together. The wife divorces Ouyang, who endures twenty years of miserable marriage to his model, before the city commissions him to paint the portrait of a successful woman entrepreneur. She turns out to be his former wife, who at last becomes his model.70 The image of models presented in such works is harshly unforgiving toward the bad girls who take off their clothes. China’s models became increasingly unhappy with their treatment.71 In a notorious 1986 case, Chen Shuhua, a nineteen-year-old woman from the Nanjing countryside, suffered a nervous breakdown after her relatives shunned her for working as a model at the Nanjing Arts College. When Chen returned home to recover from an illness, villagers crowded her home to stare at her. Her family threw her out; Chen was reported to be “weeping inconsolably: ‘I offered my body for art!’”72 Male models are also subject to harassment. Ding Yi, who modeled for statues of Sun Yat­ sen, Cai Yuanpei, and Li Dazhao, reported that after a dispute with a neighborhood child over a bow and arrow, the young archer’s father scolded him in the Fine Arts Academy dining hall: “You worthless old goat, you lose face for all China when you stand bare-assed and let peo­ ple paint you.”73 The grievances of the models came into the open through a wellpublicized strike during the Beijing show. Spectators cursed two mod­ els when they went to view their own pictures in the gallery. A by­ stander remarked to one model that her head resembled the woman in the painting, but he didn’t know about the part below. Two married models were angry that the show violated their privacy. They had not been told that the paintings might ever be shown in public; after the show opened, their husbands threatened to divorce them. Other mod­ els had concealed their work from their families.74 Watching a televi­ sion news report on the controversy with her husband, one model asked for his reaction. He said that if she were to pose nude he would divorce her and take their child. “How could you let a child go with a woman who strips naked and poses for painters?” Models also wanted a share of the profits from the sale of their portraits in catalogs, slides, postcards, books, and porcelain figurines. The models claimed that they had never consented to the exhibition or reproduction of their images.

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The Central Academy of Fine Arts responded by claiming the precedent of Western art, where they claimed (erroneously) that no artist ever had to seek a model’s permission. Amidst threats of lawsuits and countersuits, Chinese Women’s News sought a legal opinion; the court replied that the question of models and the value of the images of their bodies remained unclear. Academy officials ultimately removed five paintings from the ex­ hibition in response to the models’ demands.75 A questionnaire distributed at the Beijing exhibition included queries about models. Four-fifths responded that models do “respected work,” which ought to be treated with the same dignity as an artist’s. But nearly 30 percent of these presumably sophisticated viewers sympathized with the husbands who threatened to divorce their model wives.76 Chinese Women’s News appealed for a rise in public understanding of figure paint­ ing through education, including proclamations of the artists’ respect for their models.77 As the controversy over models raged, Chinese women were being re­ moved from the workplace. Nude art flourished amidst a massive, but lit­ tle publicized, purge of women from the workforce, comparable to the dismissal of female workers in the United States after World War II. Many women avoided unemployment only by leaving state firms for private and collective enterprises, which have lower wages, few benefits, and no security.78 The Beijing models drew parallels between their own “eleva­ tion” (in this case to the walls of art galleries) and the tenuous position of all women in China. The nude painting rage helped reinforce the status quo of male domi­ nation as it enabled professional artists to supplement their incomes. The reform decade enlarged the sphere of personal freedom for China’s pro­ fessional artists; but in the case of nude art, this was achieved by drama­ tizing the powerlessness of women.

NUDES FOR PROFIT Nude art created opportunities for big profits, unless you were a model. A quarter of a million viewers in Beijing meant nearly U.S. $135,000 in ticket sales. The Beijing models earned less than three yuan per hour, while their Fuzhou counterparts earned five. The Beijing models also complained that their average monthly income was less than two hun­ dred yuan and that they were excluded from other routine benefits at the Central Fine Arts Academy, such as access to the dining hall and free movie tickets.79 Tickets to the Beijing show cost two yuan, ten times the usual entrance fee. Books and pamphlets on nudes, ranging in price from 4.50 to 50 yuan,

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sold briskly.80 Fuzhou saw a similar leap in ticket prices and the busy sale of expensive art books. Fuzhou organizers justified charging two yuan (the highest ticket prices ever charged in the city) with the need to prevent children from seeing the exhibit and to keep the gallery from being crowded with the “wrong kind of people.” The real motive was financial: after deducting overhead for the hall, the painters and Fine Arts Depart­ ment split the profits, according to the number of works exhibited. I do not mean to imply that the painters of Beijing and Fuzhou were driven by simple greed. On the contrary, China’s rapid inflation in the 1980s hit salaried state employees, including fine arts professors, especially hard.81 China’s increasingly relaxed cultural climate also coincided with the de­ cay of both state supervision and financial support for the arts. A decade of economic reform and rising personal incomes had created a nascent art market. If hawkers could sell the “Venus de Milo” at West Lake in 1980, why couldn’t real artists supplement their incomes by painting nude women in 1989? Nude painting, like other unorthodox cultural phenomena (such as Hong Kong and Taiwan pop music or the fascination with qigong) reached out for support from the small, but rapidly expanding, marketplace. In both the Beijing and Fuzhou exhibitions, male artists used their base in state educational institutions to link up with the market by organizing de­ liberately provocative and highly profitable exhibitions. China lacked a class of individual patrons that could afford to purchase oil paintings, so the artists did not sell their paintings, but in effect rented them to ticket holders. When the shows ended, the painters took their works home. The publishing industry responded quickly to opportunity. By mid-February, postcards of the Beijing show were for sale in Hangzhou. Within three months of the Beijing exhibition, some twenty publishers issued new volumes of nude paintings or photographs. During the Beijing show, a book stall in front of the China gallery charged forty-two yuan (one-third of the average monthly income) for World Nude Art Photos.82 The Fujian Fine Arts Press added to the allure of its twenty-three yuan book by mark­ ing it “restricted” (neibu), even though the official New China Bookstore sold it openly.83 These prices were beyond the means of most Chinese, but proprietors of private book stalls could rent them out ten times in a single day at two yuan a peek to be examined on the premises.84 Many of these publications were of poor quality. The survey of nude art by Zuo Zhangwei, the Rodin enthusiast, was an opportunistic effort to make money, with sloppy accounts cribbed from Western art history texts. It min­ gled undiscussed illustrations with unillustrated discussions. The sixteen color plates are unusually garish, and the sixty-four black-and-white illus­ trations are a model of blurred printing. But his publisher printed sixty-one thousand copies in 1988 and presumably turned out even more for 1989.85

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Other organizations were quick to take financial advantage, while selfrighteously combating “feudalism.” The Shanghai Library dug through its files to mount an exhibition of nude photographs: tickets cost 2.5 yuan. After an opening at the Shanghai Population Planning Center, the exhibi­ tion toured in neighboring provinces “to let more people see nude art,” according to a library official.86 Some grumbled that the Shanghai Library was more interested in money than in art, and others criticized the “Great Exhibition of Chinese and Foreign Figure Painting” put on by the Fuzhou Municipal Workers Cultural Palace and the Nanchang Municipal Mass Arts Center: many viewers felt cheated by the cheap arrangement of il­ lustrations from books, rather than original art.87 The quest for money was most blatant when nude art spread to the countryside. An exhibition arranged by a Sichuan County Cultural Cen­ ter consisted solely of photographs of foreign women.88 Residents of this remote area were quite excited about the “pictures of bare-assed foreign women.” One journalist wondered if the exhibit could have been held if it had been of “bare-assed Chinese women.” Partly to pacify the local Party Propaganda Department head, the Cultural Bureau invited officials to a private showing prior to the public exhibition. In total silence, more than 100 middle-aged males inspected 130 colored photographs of naked foreign women, finally proclaiming that the pictures, apparently mostly cheesecake, were healthy art, in the traditions of the Dunhuang Buddhist murals. But they added that the tickets should be priced at 1.5 yuan and obtainable only upon presentation of a work permit and a letter of intro­ duction from one’s work unit, because the art was a bit advanced for a ru­ ral community. No children were allowed into the show. Some young men, expecting to see real foreign women instead of photographs, com­ plained that they had been cheated. Three thousand people visited the ex­ hibition in the four days before the country government canceled it.89 It is important that stories of the opportunistic hustlers who came for­ ward during this movement not eclipse the seriousness of purpose with which many academic painters began to expand the limits of the permis­ sible by experimenting with nude subjects. The honest classicism pro­ duced by such serious painters as Wang Yuqi and Yang Feiyun was far from cheesecake; their work was carefully rendered and quite unsensa­ tional, qualities that did not characterize the rage for nude art as a whole.

IS IT ART OR IS IT PORNOGRAPHY? The nude paintings were merely the most refined manifestation of a decade’s movement toward greater sexual explicitness, whether in calen­ dars, books, advertising, film, or television. As in the United States, few

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were certain where to draw the line between pornography and art; many were unclear about nude painting, but most Chinese agreed that some im­ ported videotapes were pornographic. Pornography was said to lead to sex crimes or at least to keep young students from studying. On a more general level, pornography was associated with crime, prostitution, gam­ bling, and a widely perceived breakdown of decency and the public order.90 Artists were often afraid of crossing obscure social boundaries in their work. The Photography News reassured its readers that they could protect themselves in court if officials condemned their harmless work as pornographic.91 By 1985, concerns about pornography led to regulations that tried to distinguish lewd materials from works of art and science that showed the human body.92 China’s most detailed administrative regulations on pornography were issued in January 1989 at the time of the Beijing exhi­ bition. The State Press and Publication Administration distinguished be­ tween obscene and sensual items. According to the standards, obscene publications contain pornography throughout and are capable of leading physically and mentally normal adults to degenerate morally while possessing no artistic or scientific value. The complex regulations specifically banned detailed descriptions of sexual intercourse, rape, incest, as well as sex involving minors, sadism, or homoeroticism.93 The growing concern for pornography also resulted at this time in a system for rating movies, designed to bar children from adult entertainment. China’s tardiness in making formal rules about pornography is initially puzzling, until we compare it with the European experience. In the West, despite a lengthy history of sexually explicit writings and pictures, the is­ sue of pornography did not emerge as an issue until the nineteenth cen­ tury when cheap printing and looser cultural restrictions enabled the masses to look at dirty pictures. As long as obscene materials were ex­ pensive and available only to the European elite, no controversy erupted. It was only after ordinary people could obtain the same images that the imagined capacity of pornography to inspire criminal and degraded be­ havior was invented as a social problem. While gentlemen “knew how to handle it,” men of the lower orders could not be trusted.94 According to Lynn Hunt, in the West inclusion of women in public life created a crisis in pornography. The prospect of the promiscuity of representations of the obscene—”when it began to seem possible that anything at all might be shown to anybody”— engendered the desire for barriers, for catalogues, for new classifications and hygienic censoring. In this sense, it might be said that pornography as a cat­

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egory was invented in response to the perceived menace of the democratiza­ tion of culture, which prominently included the participation of women in the consumption of culture.95

THE POLITICAL USES OF PORNOGRAPHY The Beijing Massacre of June 4, 1989, put a break on the craze for nude art, which political violence had rendered trivial and irrelevant. By autumn, images of nude women came under fire as pornography as the decade’s relaxation toward sex was brought into the complex world of postmas­ sacre Chinese politics. Ostensibly, the campaign to “sweep away pornography” was intended to protect the Chinese people from contamination by the dreaded “bour­ geois liberalization” that Beijing claimed sparked the spring’s antigov­ ernment protests.96 Beijing’s war on porn masked political censorship. Most of the purged materials were sexual, even if their content was tame by American standards. But a source close to Fujian’s biggest bookstore reported that works removed from the shelves also included many by po­ litical critics of Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng, such as Yan Jiaqi, the exiled political scientist and Zhao Ziyang backer. A July directive from the Press and Publications Administration ordered withdrawal of publications with bourgeois tendencies, including collections of writings by Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang; ironically, the order set off a speculative rush for works by Liu Binyan, Yan Jiaqi, Fang Lizhi, and Su Shaozhi.97 A drive against sexually titillating materials offered a useful cover for purging bookstores of politically exciting books. Many saw the antipornography campaign as an adroit political maneu­ ver by Li Ruihuan, who was put in charge of propaganda and ideology af­ ter the dismissal of Zhao Ziyang and his ally, Hu Qili. Li, the former car­ penter and mayor of Tianjin, perhaps recalled his patronage of Yuan Yunsheng’s Beijing airport mural in 1979. Only the horror of the Beijing Massacre could make book burning seem a step toward moderation. Even some notoriously “liberal” professors viewed the porn purge as a helpful development; for the first time since the massacre, the Party came up with an issue beyond a mindless defense of Deng Xiaoping, Li Peng, and their murderous associates.98 I will argue in the following chapter that it is not just the Communist Party that keeps China from developing an equiva­ lent to the American Civil Liberties Union. Most Chinese intellectuals be­ lieve that their works should not be destroyed, but almost no one believes in an absolute right to distribute controversial or even disgusting materi­ als. While lewd materials find a market, efforts to stamp out pornogra­ phers are popular among mainstream artists.

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The antiporn campaign provided nervous local officials with an oppor­ tunity to give the appearance of acting firmly without damaging the in­ terests of any of their constituents. If reform-style politics were to make a comeback, local officials might more likely be forgiven for burning some Hong Kong videotapes than for arresting dozens of intellectuals. In Fujian, a main target of the drive against porn was the town of Shishi (“Stone Lion”), once a favorite of local reformers.99 This rocky hamlet is known as Little Hong Kong for its ambitious entrepreneurs and open con­ tempt for socialist planning. Many Shishi entrepreneurs pirated foreign videos, then sold them throughout China. The Fuzhou airport seized ten thousand allegedly pornographic tapes from Shishi, and three quarters of the pornographic videotapes seized in Shanghai were manufactured there as well.100 A drive against Shishi porn in the spring of 1989 netted a bun­ dle of risqué videotapes, but quickly fizzled out.101 But in the fall, after the massacre and the dismissal of Zhao Ziyang, a brace of Stone Lion mer­ chants had their heads shaven and were paraded on television in an open outdoor trial; their jail sentences sent a warning to entrepreneurs through­ out the province.102 Many Chinese, especially urban bureaucrats and pro­ fessionals on fixed incomes, blamed this class and its rapid prosperity for China’s inflation and were quick to condemn newly successful merchants. The campaign against Beijing demonstrators had a clear class dimen­ sion. The state arrested far more workers and entrepreneurs than stu­ dents. Moreover, those executed seem all to have been young male work­ ers, as the government sought to pacify its critics among the intelligentsia by punishing those accused of “infiltrating” the ranks of allegedly patri­ otic, but misguided students.

PROTECTING “ART” The antipornography campaign showed a parallel class dimension as the government sought to attack pornography, while protecting the high art of nude painting. In Shanghai detailed regulations for the antipornogra­ phy drive specified that neither nude art nor sex-education materials were to be treated as pornographic.103 Managers of the campaign at­ tempted to reassure intellectuals that their interests would not be harmed. The crusade against pornography was eventually repackaged so that sex­ ual materials became only one of six evils: prostitution, pornography, sell­ ing women and children, drug pushing, gambling, and feudal supersti­ tion. Nonetheless, the Office of News and Publications complained that 69 percent of the questionable materials submitted from four coastal provinces were not pornographic. Overzealous (or perhaps lazy) local of­

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ficials simply seized publications whose titles included the words “sex,” “love,” or even “woman,” regardless of their content. They also judged books by their covers and illustrations, condemning dull books with spicy jackets.104 Some communities in Jiangxi Province were said to require each family to turn in two pornographic magazines, driving up the black mar­ ket prices as families scurried about to find them.105 As in the United States, “the antipornography movement is not always consistent, but there is a tendency to extend the concept of pornography in such a way that it could cover almost all representations of women.”106 But in more sophisticated cities, officials sought to maintain a distinc­ tion between elite art and common pornography. The Xiamen Daily sent a reporter to accompany a porn raid on a hapless sailor. They discovered playing cards with pictures of naked women and some imported video­ tapes that the sailor had shown to his friends (one of whom informed on him). The fact that this sailor had been detained in 1983 on a similar charge suggested that officials were not expanding their campaign very vigorously.107 Similarly, Xiamen Television News reported that the local Xinhua bookstore was returning unsuitable materials to their publishers.108 When I checked the store two days later, most of the earlier stock on sex education and figure painting was still in place, indicating that the sweep was perfunctory. No store clerks or managers were under investi­ gation. Yet, the campaign was serious enough that graduate students in literature at Fujian Teachers University were blocked from obtaining copies of The Golden Lotus, a four-hundred-year-old classic and porno­ graphic novel. During the spring of 1989, Chinese television showed nudity relatively frequently, certainly more frequently than American broadcasters. In No­ vember 1989, right in the midst of the antiporn campaign, a Jiangxi tele­ vision production opened with some fifteen preadolescent boys cavorting in a river with bare butts and penises. Admittedly, Chinese audiences are less easily panicked by preadult nudity than Americans, yet the close-ups of rear ends was not relevant to the show’s subject, the needs of disabled veterans.109 In a more narrowly targeted signal, the Ministry of Culture newspaper for arts officials printed an illustrated account about Chang Shuhong, who taught painting classes in the countryside outside Kunming during the war against Japan. Using a dilapidated Buddhist temple for his class­ room, this Paris-trained artist had nude models posing for his students even while Japanese planes made their daily bombing raids.110 The Min­ istry of Culture did not ban nude paintings, although it restricted their public exhibition. Only 10 percent of the art in any show might be nudes, and most of these should be painted from the side, a vantage apparently deemed to be less arousing than front or back.111

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Renewed calls for increasing sex education and appreciating the art of nude painting appeared by April 1990.112 Yu Yanfeng, a cultural market in­ spector, reported noticing a band of young men hunkered down in front of a village bookstall, leering as they examined a book of nude photo­ graphs. Yu discovered that the book was an official state publication of “artistic quality.” Yet, in the eyes of these rural youth a healthy book had become a “yellow” publication. Yu praised the antipornography cam­ paign for getting rid of cultural garbage, but demanded greater efforts to educate young people about sex and about figure art. Painter Pan Yuliang again helped mark the respectability of nude paint­ ing. In 1993 China released A Soul Haunted by Painting (Hua hun) (directed by Huang Shuqin), a movie biography of the pioneering woman artist. In this version Pan, played by Gong Li, does not model except in a mirror for herself, producing paintings that even her supportive husband balks at displaying. The film dwells on the petty-minded intolerance of Nanjing intellectuals of the 1930s and treats Pan, who spent most of her career in Paris, as an artist China was too feudal to appreciate during her lifetime. By 2002 a Beijing art exhibition featured nudes that Pan created in Paris, suggesting how normal nude painting had become.113

THE TRIUMPH OF SEX China is by no means alone in lacking widely acceptable standards to sep­ arate pornography from other erotic materials. Debating this problematic boundary has split the women’s community in the United States. An­ tipornography activists, appalled by our nation’s unwillingness to pro­ hibit violence against women, argue that “pornography is the theory, rape is the practice,” while civil libertarians are dismayed that restrictions against free expression may rebound to restrict lesbian art.114 For China, the distinction between art and pornography became less contentious in the 1990s, especially after Deng Xiaoping’s “southern in­ spection.” In 1992 Deng sought to jump-start an additional wave of mar­ ket reforms by a much-publicized visit to Shenzhen (Hong Kong’s crossborder partner) and other leading centers of market economics in South China. Deng simultaneously urged the Chinese to “combat leftism” as a way of reassuring them that they would not be criticized if they looked for profits. With the rage for the market came a new tolerance for sensational im­ ages of naked bodies in fine art, illustrating the covers of popular fiction, and found in pornographic books and videos. The decade of the 1990s brought sex talk radio and, at least in urban China, public attitudes to­ ward sexual matters that would have seemed brazen two decades ear­

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lier.115 In the summer of 1992, in Xiamen, teenage women sold porno­ graphic videos at midday from boxes alongside the main thoroughfare, Sun Yatsen Road. China’s press took advantage of the newly permitted mix of commerce and sexual titillation; editors printed images of naked women as they hunted new readers to ward off declining circulation. The most notorious instance involved the China Culture News, a rather dull paper of the Min­ istry of Culture. On January 1, 1993, this paper’s weekend edition, Cul­ tural Weekend, appeared chock full of nude pictures, mostly of Western women. The Ministry of Culture’s publications, like any others, were fac­ ing a financial crisis. Zha Jianying interviewed its editor, Zhang Zuomin, who knew what lines he could not cross: “I will not run anything an­ tiparty in my paper,” he said emphatically, “ and I will not run pornogra­ phy.” He went into an absurdly meticulous explanation of how the degree of bod­ ily exposure in the nude photos he prints falls well within the prescribed rules of decorum. This seems to be a particularly Chinese technique among the professional orders: the art of creatively interpreting Party policies to pro­ tect and advance yourself as engaged in a nobly subversive cause.116

The following year, Golden Sands, Running Waters, a film commemorat­ ing the sixtieth anniversary of the Long March, included a nude scene in which a naked young woman is sent by the Yi minority to embarrass the Red Army out of crossing Yi territory. Mao Zedong’s brother-in-law is sent to cover the woman with a cloth.117 In this example, the Party made its peace with public sexuality, compelled not by tolerance, but by money. The prediction that the next phase of Chinese nude painting would be illustrations of Chinese legend was born out in the work of the Nanjing artist Fu Xiaoshi, who painted a series that included imperial concubines and a scene from the classic novel Journey to the West.118 Yet, although high-art painters had broken the ban on nude images, they were less in­ terested in the issue after their victory. The growth of a serious pornography industry in the 1990s made ear­ lier suspicions of sex in fine arts seem absurd and effectively weakened the purported link between painting and porn. Chinese authorities fought a losing struggle against materials that most Westerners would count as obscene, even as they executed the organizers of distribution rings. Yet, pornography found another great political use. Railing against pornography helped ameliorate the harshness of the political campaign against government critics in 1989. By the middle of the 1990s, China cynically repeated this ploy for foreign-policy purposes. The United States pressed China steadily to tighten up enforcement of intellectualproperty rights, especially the manufacture of unlicensed, pirated videos

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and compact discs. Enforcement of intellectual-property rights had very little popular appeal as an issue in China, whereas most people could easily become indignant about pornography. The government’s solution was to wage a long-term campaign “against pornography and piracy of intellectual-property rights,” as if all unauthorized Microsoft software and Polygram compact discs were really pornographic. They were not, of course, but linkage to the crusade against porn gave legitimacy to the ef­ fort to broaden intellectual-property rights, a cause that in China still had few believers. It was much more difficult to shock China after the Beijing Massacre than at the beginning of the reform period; risqué images no longer star­ tled in a world hardened by bullets and blood. The movement for nude painting, which represented a naughty kind of cultural dissent in 1979, had won state protection by its end. By 1989, instead of real protest, nude painting had become a mere posture of rebellion. By the century’s turn, it no longer had even this pretense. China has become more sophisticated about nude art, especially in the elite world of professional artists. Painter Liu Xiaodong has even special­ ized in representations of male nudes, and male nudity has been incorpo­ rated into the art of the new avant-garde. For instance, Ma Liuming’s per­ formance art shocks by challenging gender through such juxtapositions as female makeup and the artist’s naked male body. And Zhang Huan star­ tles by using his own body in photos and videos.119 In popular culture, however, naked bodies continue to spark contro­ versy, perhaps now more for their profit potential than because they shock the censors. In 2001 a “first nude photographic exhibition” was staged in Guangzhou (selected for its open-mindedness). It was some­ thing of a sensation, although organizers had learned to be careful about securing permissions for the use of images.120 Accounts of the show sug­ gest, however, that the models remain likely to be women.121 Nor has a re­ cent rage for young women to hire photographers to take their nude por­ traits extended to men.122 The normalization of nudity in the 1990s resolved the previous decade’s discussion by protecting the rights of intellectuals to portray women, especially non-Han women, without clothing. Neither artists nor the Party addressed the power arrangements underlying nude images, thereby reaffirming (if not strengthening) existing gender relationships. Men remained the viewers, and women remained the viewed. Sex be­ came a part of a bread and circus public culture in which nudity was al­ lowed to compensate for a still-limited political speech. Hedonism had priority over political rights. Yet, the loosening of strictures against nudity was politically significant, as it reflected a broader relaxation of the ca­ pacity and desire of the Chinese state to censor art.

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NOTES

1. For a recent overview of a complex topic, see Harriet Evans, Women and Sex­ uality in China (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997). 2. Mark Elvin, “Tales of Shen and Xin: Body-Person and Heart-Mind in China during the Last 150 Years,” in Michel Feher, ed., “Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part II,” Zone 4 (New York: Urzone, 1989), 267. 3. Jerome Chen, China and the West: Society and Culture, 1815–1937 (Blooming­ ton: Indiana University Press, 1979), 201; Mayching Margaret Kao, China’s Re­ sponse to the West in Art: 1898–1937, Ph. D dissertation, Stanford University Fine Arts, 1972, 110–111; Lin Tong, “Liu Haisu yu Mote’er fengbo” [“Liu Haisu and the controversy over models”], Chuanji wenxue [“Biographical literature”] 334 (March 1990), 13–20; Michael Sullivan, Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: Uni­ versity of California Press, 1959), 49; Shi Nan, Liu Haisu zhuan [“Life of Liu Haisu”] (Shanghai: Shanghai Wenyi Chubanshe, 1995), 49–122. 4. Lin Tong, “Liu Haisu,” 18. 5. Denis L. Noble, The Eagle and the Dragon: The United Military in China, 1901–1937 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 202. 6. Julia F. Andrews, “Traditional Painting in New China: Guohua and the Anti-Rightist Campaign,” Journal of Asian Studies 49(3) (August 1990), 561. 7. Ralph Croizier has developed this point in “‘Opening the Mind’: Nudity and Eroticism in Chinese Art of the 1980s,” paper for the Annual Meeting of the College Art Association of America (February 16–18, 1989). 8. Interview with painter Xie Xingbiao, head of the Fine Arts Department at Fujian Teachers University in Fuzhou (March 30, 1989). The arts academies were critical in strengthening the role of figure studies. See Julia F. Andrews, “Tradi­ tional Painting in New China,” 555–585. 9. Tan Yuanheng, Diaosu bainian meng: Pan He zhuan [“Dreaming of a century of statues: a biography of Pan He”] (Beijing: Huawen Chubanshe, 2000), 165–166. 10. The episode is described in Chen Pu, Wenren Mao Zedong [“Mao Zedong, the literary man”] (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Chubanshe, 1997), 555–558. 11. “Important Directives on Literature and Art,” Peking chingkangshan (May 26, 1967), in Survey of the China Mainland Press (Supplement) (July 14, 1967), 191. Translation modified after comparison with original in “Lu Xun Meishu Xueyuan huifu yong ‘mote’er’ jinxing renti xiesheng jiaoxue” [“Lu Xun Fine Arts Academy resumes use of ‘models’ for classes in life drawing”], Meishu 16 (May 1978), 46. 12. “Lu Xun Meishu Xueyuan huifu yong ‘mote’er,’” 46. 13. In the same issue Wu wrote about figure drawing, models, the Venus de Milo, and his patron, Xu Beihong. Wu Zuoren, “Sumiao yu huihua mantan” [“A talk about sketching and drawing”], Meishu yanjiu 3 (1979), 8–15. On Wu Zuoren, see Mayching Kao, “The Quest for New Art,” in Mayching Kao, ed., TwentiethCentury Chinese Painting (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1988), 140–142. 14. Personal visit (November 1979). 15. Beijing Television (June 28, 1980). 16. Zhu Zongyu, Yang Yuanhua, and Zhen Junyan, Zhonghua renmin gongheguo zhuyao shijian renwu [“Important events and persons of the People’s Republic of China”] (Fuzhou: Fujian Renmin Chubanshe, 1989), 356–357; Ouyang Mei,

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“Zhongguo dangdai di ‘shengnu zhende’” [“Contemporary China’s ‘Saint Joan’”], Zhengming 21 (July 1979), 26–28; “Why Was an Outstanding Woman Com­ munist Killed?” Beijing Review 22(26) (July 27, 1979), 19–21; Zhang Zhixin, “Shei de Zui” [“Whose crime?”], Gequ (July 1979), 2; Zhang Zhixin, “Yao ba qin dang qiang shi” [“Use your violin as a gun”], Renmin yinyue (August 1979), 3–4. See the discussion of the campaign for Zhang’s memory in Colin Mackerras, The Perform­ ing Arts in Contemporary China (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 173–174. I have discussed Zhang Zhixin in Pianos and Politics in China: Middle Class Ambi­ tions and the Struggle over Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 179. 17. Zuopin 11 (November 1979). 18. See Wang Kai, “Renti zaoxing de yishu yuyan” [“The artistic language of figure sculpture”], Zuopin 11 (November 1979), 72. Hong Kong controversy over the statue may be seen in Jiang Nanyu, “Wo kan lounu yingxiong suxiang” [“I look at the statue of the naked heroine”], Zhengming 27 (January 1980), 32; and Chang Xin, “‘Lounu,’ yingxiong, yishu” [“‘Nudes,’ heroes, art”], Zhengming 29 (March 1980), 64–65. 19. Interview with Bi Meishu, an emigree artist in Hong Kong (October 27, 28, 30, 31, November 1, 5, 1979). 20. The Dai are ethnic Thais. For accounts of the airport mural fiasco, see Joan Lebold Cohen, The New Chinese Painting, 1949–1986 (New York: Harry N. Abrahms, Inc., 1987), 39–44; Chang Er, “Beijing jichang bihua de fengbo” [“Winds and waves of the Beijing Airport murals”], Guanchajia 31 (May 16, 1980), 30; Barry Wain, “Peking Airport’s Controversial New Murals,” Wall Street Journal (August 29, 1980); Fox Butterfield, “In China, Nudes Touch Off a Debate on Art,” New York Times (July 6, 1980); Du Feng, “Zhonggong wentan de jige fengbo” [“Several dis­ turbances in the Chinese Communist arts scene”], Zhengming 33 (July 1980), 56–57; Zhang Yuli, “Beijing jichang luotihua de chuangzuo” [“The making of the nude painting at Beijing Airport”], Dongxiang 29 (February 1981), 20–21; and Dru C. Gladney, “Representing Nationality in China: Oppositional Aspects of Minority/Majority Identities,” Journal of Asian Studies 53(1) (February 1994), 103–104. 21. “Beijing guoji jichang bihua jungong jiemu dianli zhaiyao” [“Extracts from the ceremony to unveil the Beijing International Airport murals”], Guanchajia 34 (August 20, 1980), 31–34. 22. Ai Qing had studied in France in the 1930s. 23. Zhai Mo, “Feiba! Meili di bihua” [“Fly! beautiful murals”], Renmin ribao (November 14, 1979). 24. Jerome Silbergeld, Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chi­ nese Painter Li Huasheng (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 157, 166. 25. “Shouju Zhongguo youhua dazhan zaihu zhanchu” [“First Chinese exhibi­ tion of oil paintings opens in Shanghai”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (January 6, 1988). 26. Zhen Cheng, “Luoti yishu huazhan xiaoxi fabu zhihou” [“After the an­ nouncement of the exhibition of nude art”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (June 19, 1988). 27. Guan Yecheng, “Sannao luoti huazhan” [“Three disturbances at the nude art exhibition”], Zhengming 136 (February 1989), 16–17. The catalog of the show was published as You hua renti yishu dazhan zuopin [“Works of the Chinese nude oils exhibition”] (Nanning: Guangxi Renmin Meishu Chubanshe, 1988).

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28. Xu Jinsheng, “‘Youhua renti yishu dazhan’ minyi diaocha” [“Survey of pub­ lic opinion at the ‘oil figure painting exhibition’”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (January 18, 1989). 29. “Nude Shock Due to Old Feudal Ideas, Says Ying,” China Daily (January 9, 1989). 30. I visited the show twice and interviewed Xie Xingbiao, head of the Fine Arts Department at Fujian Teachers University and organizer of the Fuzhou Figure Painting Exhibition (March 30, 1989). 31. For an example of this style, see Liang Yan’s 1973 painting “Applying to Join the Party,” in Ellen Johnston Laing, The Winking Owl: Art in the People’s Re­ public of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), figure 92. 32. See Gail Hershatter, “Sexing Modern China,” in Gail Hershatter et al., eds., Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1996), 90. 33. Bu Mengchao, “Renti yishu yu jianzhu fangsheng” [“Nude art and architecture’s imitation of life”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (January 25, 1989). 34. Simon Johnstone, “The Naked and the True,” Chinese Literature (autumn 1989), 102–104. 35. Zhen Cheng, “Luoti yishu huazhan xiaoxi fabu zhihou.” 36. Shao Yanxiang, “Ren yu mei: renti yishu suotan” [“Humans and beauty: a few remarks about the art of figure painting”], Guangming ribao (January 6, 1989). 37. Chen Zui, “Luoti jingshen de zhuisu” [“Tracing the spirit of nude art”], Meishu yanjiu (April, 1988), 44–48, reprinted in Zhongguo Renmin Daxue Shubao Ziliao Zhongxin, ed., Fuyin baokan ziliao: Zaoxing yishu yanjiu (January 1989), 13–17. Chen’s book is Luoti yishu lun [“The theory of nude art”] (Beijing: Zhong­ guo Wenlian Chuban Gongsi, 1988). 38. Shao Yanxiang, “Ren yu mei: renti yishu suotan.” 39. An anonymous reader of an early draft for this chapter argued that the nude exhibitions were motivated by the desires of realist painters to regain influ­ ence being lost to the influx of new styles from Europe and America. This may have also been a factor, although the haste with which the Fuzhou exhibition was assembled makes it less likely. Morevoer, nude paintings seem a risky medium upon which to make a claim for artistic influence. 40. Pan Yuliang, a student of Liu Haisu, spent most of her career in France. See Michael Sullivan, Chinese Art, 48, 58–59. 41. This episode was broadcast on Fujian Television (May 6, 1989). 42. Theodore Dreiser, The “Genius” (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1915), esp. 50–56. 43. Ke Wenhui, “Renti yishu: xishui changliu mo chengzhai” [“Nude art: Take it slowly and there will be no calamity”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (December 4, 1988). 44. Zhai Mo, “Lun renti yishu de hongdong xiaoying” [“On the furor over nude art”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (January 18, 1989). 45. “Weineisa mei zai nali” [“Where is the beauty of Venus de Milo?”], Wenhua shenghuo liu 1989 [“Cultural life No. 6 1989”] (Shanghai: Shanghai Rili Yin­ shuachang). This desk calendar was in the Communist Party’s guesthouse for vis­ iting officials in Xiapu, Fujian.

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46. Zuo Zhangwei, Xifang luoti yishu xinshang [“Appreciating Western nude art”] (Changsha: Hunan Meishu Chubanshe, 1988), 61. 47. Dru C. Gladney discusses erotic aspects of Han treatment of minorities in “Representing Nationality in China.” See also Louisa Schein, “Gender and Inter­ nal Orientalism in China,” Modern China 23(1) (January 1997), 69–98. 48. For instance, see the smirking report by Shi Zhiyi, “Bathing Festival of the Lisu People,” China Reconstructs 37(10) (October 1988), 66–68. Or consider Kuo Kuo-fu’s 1959 novel, Among the Omnians, Shang Huai-yuan, trans. (Beijing: For­ eign Languages Press, 1961). Here a Han soldier’s civilizing gift to the primitives is a safety pin with which the buxom Noni can close her buttonless jacket and keep her chest properly covered. 49. For example, see the paintings by Liu Bingjiang (p. 46), Zhao Yixiong (p. 61), Qin Yuanyue (p. 75), He Neng (p. 76), Tang Muli (p. 101) in Cohen, The New Chi­ nese Painting. 50. In Zhongguo huabao (January 1988). See the back cover of Dongxiang 46 (Jan­ uary 1988). 51. Janet Wolff, “The Culture of Separate Spheres: The Role of Culture in Nineteenth-Century Public and Private Life,” in Janet Wolff and John Seed, eds., The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth-Century Middle Class (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 130. See Jeremy Maas, Victorian Painters (Lon­ don: Barrie & Jenkins, 1978), 164–187. 52. Evans, Women and Sexuality in China, 181. 53. Huang Cunle and Xu Xu, “Rentimei shi meizhong zhi zhimei” [“The beauty of figure art is beauty’s extreme”], Fuzhou wanbao (March 21, 1989). 54. For example, Zheng Gong, “Manhua renti yishu” [“Chat about the art of the human body”], Fuzhou wanbao (March 22, 1989). 55. Zuo Zhangwei, Xifang luoti, 2. 56. For a more sympathetic reading that finds feminist liberation in Rodin’s carnal concerns, see Anne M. Wagner, “Rodin’s Reputation,” in Lynn Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 191–242. 57. Rosemary Betterton, “How Do Women Look? The Female Nude in the Work of Suzanne Valadon,” in Hilary Robinson, Visibly Female. Feminism and Art Today (London: Camden Press, 1987), 252. See also Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin, eds., Woman as Sex Object: Studies in Erotic Art, 1730–1970. Art News An­ nual 28 (1972); Lynda Nead, “The Female Nude: Pornography, Art, and Sexuality,” Signs 15(2) (winter 1990), 323–335; Norma Bourde and Mary D. Garrard, eds., The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); Rosemary Betterton, ed., Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Me­ dia (London and New York: Pandora, 1987); and Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Pa­ tricia Mathews, “The Feminist Critique of Art History,” The Art Bulletin 69(3) (Sep­ tember 1987), 326–357. 58. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), 54. 59. Conversation with Carolyn Bloomer, Xiamen (October 4, 1989). 60. Interview with Xie Xingbiao (March 30, 1989). 61. Chen Zui, “Luoti jingshen de zhuisu.” 62. Mao Zhenni [Jeanne Moore], “Huangdi de xifu” [“The emperor’s Western clothing”], Zhongguo funu bao [“China women’s news”] (February 20, 1990).

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63. For a selection of Western feminist paintings of male nudes, see “The Male Nude: The Gaze Returned,” Heresies 24 (1989), 46–48. 64. Mao Qi, “‘Meiren’ shengyiyan de kunhuo” [“The puzzle of the business in ‘pin-ups’”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (January 27, 1989); Shen Yuan, “Beijing luolu guali zhengduozhan” [“Beijing’s battle over pinup calendars”], Dongxiang 46 (January 1, 1988), 24–25; “Albums Profit on a Fine Line Over Nude Art,” China Daily (April 10, 1989). 65. Interview with Xie Xingbiao (March 30, 1989). 66. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), 127. 67. Beverly Hooper, “China’s Modernization: Are Young Women Going to Lose Out?” Modern China 10(3) (January 1984), 330–331. 68. Maas, Victorian Painters, 202. 69. Clark, The Nude, 219. 70. Shao Liu, Qizi bushi mote’er [“My wife is not a model”] (Nanchang: Jiangxi Renmin Chubanshe, 1988). 71. Situ Ying, “Dalu luoti mote’er lueying” [“Mainland nude models remain in the shadows”], Jing bao 57 (April 1988), 48–49. 72. “Yige mote’er de beiju” [“A model’s tragedy”], Guangming ribao (February 2, 1988); Wei Liming, “Stripping Back Tradition,” Beijing Review 32(3) (January 16–22, 1989), 31–34. 73. Guo Zhong, “Mote’er de meng” [“A model’s dream”], Baogao wenxue [“Re­ portage”] 2 (1987), 53. 74. One of the Beijing models demanded that her husband go out for a walk so that he would miss her image on the evening television news broadcast. But his parents saw and recognized her and accused her of disgracing the family. Lai Ren­ qiong, “Thought-Provoking Nude Paintings Exhibition,” Renmin ribao (January 7, 1989), in FBIS-CHI-89-010 (January 17, 1989), 35–36. 75. See Wang An, et al., “Zhongyang meiyuan mote’er tingke jishi” [“Account of the strike of the models at the Central Fine Arts Academy”], Zhongguo qingnian bao (December 28, 1988); Jiang Li, “Mote’er fengbo liangmianguan” [“Two sides of the storm over models”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (January 11, 1989); Wang Rong, “‘Upset’ Models Hire Attorneys, Seek Royalties,” China Daily (January 7, 1989); Wang Xin, “Models Clamour about Nude Art,” Beijing Review 32(3) (January 16–22, 1989), 11–12. 76. Xu Jinsheng, “‘Youhua renti yishu dazhan’ minyi diaocha.” 77. Zhong Guoxiang, “Cong renti mote’er shuokaiqu” [“Starting from the nude models”], Zhongguo funu bao (January 23, 1989). 78. See, for instance, Tamara Jacka, “Back to the Wok: Women and Employment in Chinese Industry in the 1980s,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 24 (July 1990), 1–23. 79. Jiang Li, “Mote’er fengbo. 80. Zhai Mo, “Lun renti yishu de hongdong xiaoying”; Johnstone, “The Naked and the True,” 102. 81. See Benedict Stavis, “The Political Economy of Inflation in China,” Studies in Comparative Communism 22(2–3) (summer/autumn 1989), 235–250. 82. “Albums Profit.”

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83. Liu Changhua and Sun Zhichun, eds., Zhongguo xiandai gudianzhuiyi renti youhua [“Modern Chinese classical oil figure painting”] (Fuzhou: Fujian Meishu Chubanshe, 1988). 84. Yu Yanfeng, “Buguang ‘qingsao’ hai ying yindao” [“‘Purification’ is not enough, we must also lead”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (April 11, 1990). 85. Zuo Zhangwei, Xifang luoti. 86. Chen Weihua, “Art Exhibit Challenges Feudal Ideas,” China Daily (April 8, 1989). 87. Guo Hui, “Yishu hu? Liyu hu?” [“Art or greed?”], Fuzhou wanbao (April 8, 1989). 88. Su Hang, “Luoti yingzhan fengbo” [“Storm over an exhibition of nude pho­ tographs”], Jizhe wenxue (June 1989), 17–20. 89. A show of foreign magazine pictures in a nearby county had sparked con­ troversy. The most offensive showed a male musician fondling a naked female singer with one hand as he played the drum with his other. Galleries in the United States also exploit controversial art for money. The Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center hoped to profit by hosting the exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photo­ graphs. The center raised ticket prices from two to five dollars, claiming a need to need to keep the crowd small, the same rationalization as used in China. Isabel Wilkerson, “Furor in Cincinnati as the Cutting Edge of Art Scrapes Deeply Held Beliefs,” New York Times (April 14, 1990). 90. For earlier critiques of pornography, see Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter, Personal Voices. Chinese Women in the 1980s (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1988), 59–67. 91. Xieying bao (March 24, 1988), cited in Wang An et al., “Zhongyang Meiyuan mote’er tingke jishi.” 92. Honig and Hershatter, Personal Voices, 62. The April 17, 1985 “State Council Regulation Strictly Banning Obscene Material,” targeted items “that specifically portray sexual behavior or consp[i]cuously publicize pornographic and lascivious images; toys and articles bearing drawing or pictures of this category; and aphro­ disiacs and sex aids.” “Literary and art works of artistic value having obscene con­ tent and fine art works showing the beauty of the human body as well as works on physiological and medical knowledge about the human body and other natu­ ral sciences are not considered obscene and will not be included in the ban.” See John L. Scherer, ed., China Facts and Figures Annual 9 (Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International Press: 1986), 21. 93. Chang Hong, “Obscenity Standards Now Defined,” China Daily (January 6, 1989); Su Hang, “Luoti yingzhan fengbo,” 17–20. But see Yi Chen, “Publishing in China in the Post-Mao Era: The Case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Asian Survey 32(6) (June 1992), 577–581, on the fate of shifting obsenity standards. 94. Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (New York: Viking. 1987). 95. Lynn Hunt, “Introduction,” in Hunt, ed., Eroticism, 3–4. 96. The antipornography drive began in the four provinces of China’s southeast coast: Fujian, Guangdong, Zhejiang, and Hainan. With hundreds of thousands of overseas Chinese visitors each year, foreign businessmen operat­ ing factories, and a lively smuggling trade with Taiwan and Hong Kong, this

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region does have more adventurous popular publications and more prostitu­ tion than most of China. Yet, during the demonstrations that preceded the June massacre, these provinces were among the nation’s quietest, making it very difficult to blame the counterrevolutionary disturbances on dirty pictures in Fujian. 97. “Clampdown Sparks Rush to Beat Censors,” South China Morning Post (July 8, 1989). 98. Two of Li Ruihuan’s August and September speeches on combating pornography may be found in Zhao Yao, Hu Qinsheng, and Xu Kojun, eds., Zhongguo gaige quanshu (1978–1991) [“Complete book of chinese reform (1978–1991)”] (Dalian: Dalian Chubanshe, 1992), 222–225. See also Jianying Zha, China Pop (New York: The New Press, 1994), 28–30, 145–146. 99. For praise of Shishi’s private sponsorship of culture, see Chen Ning and Lu Yida, “Yuhuanzhong de fenqi” [“Struggling through hardship”], Fujian ribao (May 6, 1989). 100. Cheng Gang, “China Declares War on Pornography,” Beijing Review 33(12) (March 19–25, 1990), 26–29. 101. “Yindao qunzhong kaizhan jiankang wenti huodong yikao shehui liliang xingban wule sheshi” [“Leading the masses to develop healthy cultural and sports activities depends upon the strength of society setting up entertainment fa­ cilities”], Fujian ribao (June 9, 1989). 102. “Dangzheng lingdao qinzi guashuai ‘saohuang’ liewei zhuanxiang douzheng” [“Party and state leaders personally assume command of ‘sweeping away pornography’ as the main item of struggle”], Fujian ribao (October 18, 1989). 103. Voice of America (December 6, 1989). 104. “Jiaqing dui chafeng tushu de shendu” [“Make a closer reading in closing down books”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (February 21, 1990). 105. Zhang Wuchang, “Baicai yu huangse shukan” [“Cabbages and pornogra­ phy”], Shibao zhoukan 253 (December 30, 1989–January 5, 1990), 49. 106. Kate Ellis, “I’m Black and Blue from the Rolling Stones and I’m Not Sure How I Feel About It: Pornography and the Feminist Imagination,” in Karen V. Hansen and Ilene J. Philipson, eds., Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 433. 107. Jin Fu, “Wohei huidao” [“A black nest is destroyed”], Xiamen ribao (No­ vember 7, 1989). 108. Xiamen Television (October 16, 1989). 109. Xiamen Television (November 4, 1989). 110. Wu Guanzhong, “Wengu qixin” [“Reviewing the old, beginning the new”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (September 28, 1989). 111. Alice Bishop, “Chinese Journalism, Literature, and Art: Return to the Yan’an Way?” China Exchange News 18(2) (June 1990), 9. 112. Yu Yanfeng, “Buguang ‘qingsao’ hai ying yindao.” 113. Yang Yingshi, “From Red Lights to Painting the Town Red,” China Daily (May 31, 2002). 114. See Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Put­ nam, 1981); Catherine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).

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115. See Kathleen Erwin, “Heart-to-Heart, Phone-to-Phone: Family Values, Sex­ uality and the Politics of Shanghai Advice Hotlines,” in Deborah S. Davis, ed., China’s Consumer Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 116. Jianying Zha, China Pop, 106–107. 117. AFP (November 24, 1994), reported in China News Digest—Global (Novem­ ber 26–27 1994). 118. Fu Xiaoshi menghuan shinu tu [“Fu Xiaoshi’s paintings of fantastic beau­ ties”], a portfolio of twelve works by the eldest son of painter Fu Baoshi (Nanjing: Nanjing Chubanshe, 1991). In turning to Chinese legend, Fu painted Han, instead of minority, women. In contrast to these pieces of mock-ancient cheesecake, it is said that Chinese scholars must petition the premier in order to examine genuine ancient pornographic paintings, which show sexual acts. 119. On Ma Liuming, see Huang Du, “Special Focus—Ma Liuming,” Chineseart.com 3(2), at www.chinese-art.com/Contemporary/volume3issue2/ special_maliuming.htm (2000). Both Ma and Zhang are illusrated in Gao Minglu, ed. Inside Out: New Chinese Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 120. “First Nude Photo Show Breaks Another Taboo,” South China Morning Post (January 29, 2001); and “First Nude Photo Show Calmly Welcomed in Guangzhou” Xinhua on China Internet Information Center (January 28, 2001). 121. “First Nude Photo Show.” 122. “Nude Photos Controversial in China,”China Daily (July 30, 2000).

4

�

The Chinese Censorship

Game: New Rules for

the Prevention of Art

T

he proliferation of public images of nudity and sexuality shocked many Chinese, stirred controversy about public decency, and height­ ened consciousness of the changing role of censorship. Censorship, the external prohibition or self-limiting of expression, has a bad name in the United States, but is quite common in most of world and more normal in the United States than many realize. Censorship’s reputation is so dis­ honorable that censors usually claim to be engaged in something else al­ together, such as protecting the nation against sedition or defending the innocent against sex (“that’s not art, that’s pornography”).1 One great change in the politics of Chinese culture has been a dimin­ ished role for the state as supervisor of art, including a dramatic reduction of Party censorship over Chinese artists. As the reforms proceeded, artists and editors grew increasingly independent, paying less heed to central Party guidance and more attention to market pressures for commercial success. The censor’s heavy hand still emerged several times, but awk­ wardly, revealing a lack of elite consensus. The hesitation of the censor’s hand belied no new commitment to free expression. Deng Xiaoping restrained the Propaganda Department be­ cause it was a major bastion of Maoists, who tended to support Hua Guofeng in resisting Deng’s rise to power. Deng’s need to rein in these critics appealed to urban intellectuals, many of them ill used by Maoist propagandists and most tired of hyped up enthusiasm instead of honest art. However, Deng demonstrated that he was not acting out of new lib­ eral values when he arrested Wei Jingsheng and the activists of Democ­ racy Wall. 107

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Conventional coverage of China often treats censorship as a weapon of ter­ rible clarity, with the state calmly and regularly smacking artists who dis­ please it. Even a more sophisticated understanding is perhaps too simple: China under Mao had tight political control over the arts, and since his death, these controls have become considerably looser. But little about China’s cen­ sorship is uncomplicated. The odd history of nude art reveals diminishing state intervention, but in a halting, irresolute, and unpredictable fashion. Three factors explain this lack of resolve. One is indecision by the politi­ cal elite about what to allow. A second is the rapid commercialization of Chinese culture, which both increases the number of cultural products as it sensationalizes them. A third is that censorship is poorly institutionalized— it lacks regular organization and widely accepted norms, which enhances the latitude available to artists during rapid social change. Given the centrality of censorship to public life, the scholarly literature on contemporary China offers surprisingly little analysis or even detailed description.2 This is partly because information about censorship is itself censored, leaving us more dependent than usual even in the study of Chi­ nese politics upon rumors and partial accounts. Yi Chuan observes in his study of the publication history of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that “no pub­ lished Chinese source acknowledges the existence of censorship after 1949.”3 This chapter is not a review of all or even the most notorious cases of censorship, but rather an examination of the range and limits of cen­ sorship in China’s new cultural politics.4 Censorship may be seen as a kind of game, in which state officials and artists contest the extent of free public expression. Status and power are important factors in this game, but so are ideals such as beauty and moral­ ity. Few state officials want to review all art. Few artists want to challenge state definitions of public morality in every work. Most censors would be happiest if artists produced only acceptable work, and most artists would be happiest if they were never challenged. Like many bitterly contested games, disputes frequently break out over the rules, which change fre­ quently, confusing artists and censors alike. Unlike in most games, it is not always clear how one wins or loses. The prizes in this game are significant. At the grandest level, if one be­ lieves that a nation is defined by its shared culture, the future of China is at stake. At an individual level, participants risk their careers. Artists whose work is blocked may not only feel frustrated, but may be avoided by others, and in more extreme cases find themselves harassed or exiled. Officials may find their careers harmed if others deem them too lenient (poor custodians of public morality) or too harsh (having a poor under­ standing of the needs of intellectuals). For all its seriousness, the censor­ ship game also reveals a playful aspect. Artists impishly circumvent re­ strictions, even as officials concoct new techniques to thwart them.

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This chapter will first review the players and the rules, then consider how economic change is altering the game. I conclude with some obser­ vations about U.S. assessments of China’s censorship.

THE PLAYERS The censorship game has four types of players: censors, editors-cumcensors, artists, and audience members. The Censors China’s censorship system is not what most Westerners assume, a Stalin­ ist apparatus of professional censors equipped with manuals of taboo words and ideas, who carefully read each article prior to publication, lis­ ten to each piece of music before public performance, and inspect each painting before it may be placed in an exhibition. Unlike the former Com­ munist regimes of Eastern Europe, China never created a special bureau­ cracy of professional censors.5 Why did Mao and his colleagues not emu­ late Soviet censorship? One reason is that the Guomindang had assigned censors to newspaper offices, earning Communist scorn.6 Another is that Party leaders simply felt that Soviet practice was irrelevant. Soviet Com­ munism got off to a shaky start in its relationship to the experts, and the army’s commissar system set a pattern later applied to other areas of so­ cial and cultural life: Party monitoring of the work of non-Party special­ ists. According to one account, seventy thousand Soviet censors super­ vised seven thousand Soviet writers.7 The Chinese Communist Party came to power with greater initial popularity and may well have thought that external checks were not necessary.8 Although there is no nationwide censorship corps, the Party assigns people to review artistic work in a few key organizations. One is the Party Propaganda Department, the heart of the Party’s ambitions for ideologi­ cal influence. But this agency does not have the capacity to review all art produced in China and works mostly by reviewing cases that have al­ ready sparked controversy. The Propaganda Department issues bulletins that specify topics the leading newspapers are to avoid (in 1993 these in­ cluded Guangdong horse racing, Russian prostitutes in China, and claims for damages from Japan for wartime offenses), but artists are not brought into this net.9 More traditional censors work in the film and television in­ dustries, subjecting scripts to more rigorous scrutiny than is given any other artistic genre. There is also the State Press and Publication Admin­ istration, which supervises the publishing industry, but review usually only takes place after publication (periods of political campaigns are

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sometimes an exception for publications under special scrutiny).10 In ad­ dition to these permanent censors, there are various short-term arrange­ ments, such as when the Party sends a work team to rectify a troublesome publication or dispatches “resident inspectors” to all firms making audio and video products for 1996 as part of the dual campaign against piracy and pornography.11 There may well be some other organizations that em­ ploy professional censors, but the striking fact about China’s censorship is that there are few whose job is merely to censor. The Editors-cum-Censors Lacking a centralized censorship office in Beijing, the Party early dis­ persed responsibilities for censorship among cultural and propaganda in­ stitutions throughout the nation. This administrative heritage of the 1950s has never been changed. In contrast with the small number of profes­ sional censors, many people held jobs with vague responsibility for main­ taining political and moral standards—they were ambiguously defined, nonprofessional censors occupying leadership positions in arts organiza­ tions. What do we call a censor who is not a censor? Michael Schoenhals of­ fers the formulation “editor-cum-censor,” an oddity in normal English, but one that captures the ambivalence of the role. Most of these individu­ als are themselves veteran arts workers, promoted to manage a drama company, edit a magazine, or lead a neighborhood cultural center. They supervise arts colleagues and are often artists themselves. Is their super­ vision a form of censorship? Sometimes, but in many instances China’s artists regard it as something more benign. Just as there was no specialized bureaucracy, there is no Chinese coun­ terpart to the notorious Polish handbook on how to censor.12 Individual writers, editors, and local officials are expected “to read the major pro­ nouncements on cultural policy and divine the direction of the wind for themselves.” Propaganda officials especially are expected to drum up art­ works that adhered to the Party line, and to discourage or censor those that appeared to question it. Such a loose system suppressed heterodox ideas effectively when officials throughout the nation believed in (or at least followed) a common cause. Then there were censors aplenty: men and women in leading positions throughout the cultural system who took it to be among their responsibilities to check articles, books, paintings, po­ ems, and song-and-dance extravaganzas. Their motivation was often po­ litical in the sense of guarding beliefs that they treasured. But it was per­ haps more often a question of determining how to avoid approving works that would subsequently cause “trouble” and thus damage their careers. In the Maoist years, especially during periods of special political tension,

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the inclination of editors to show their mettle as censors could sometimes overload the system. The Gang of Four ran a very tight cultural ship, yet both Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan complained in 1973 that central authorities need not bother to approve each new song.13 In the initial enthusiasm for the reforms, many Chinese artists were thrilled to find that prior restraints had been lifted. A Youth League–sponsored painting show in Guangzhou in 1979 included such previously provocative themes as figures in bathing suits and romantic representations of prerevolutionary mansions built by overseas Chinese merchants. When I questioned one of the painters about the exhibition, he vigorously denied that there had been any censorship. He meant that there had been no prior process of approval by officials of either the lo­ cal cultural bureau or the Propaganda Department as had been the nor­ mal practice in the late Mao years.14 But how had these paintings gotten there, I persisted? The selection had been by the fine arts association, the professional organization of painters and sculptors.15 In this young painter’s optimistic view, “we have no censors” excluded the leaders of his professional organization, functioning in this instance as editors. Certainly, the very informality of China’s censorship made it eas­ ier for cultural officials simply to let up their vigilance at a task many had never much enjoyed. The editors often liked assuming greater responsibility. In 1980 a spokesperson for the Liaoning literary magazine Yalu River (Yalujiang) re­ joiced that the propaganda department had ceased inspecting manu­ scripts, relinquishing this responsibility to the editors: “It used to be that we could edit the magazine passively, or not even use our brains at all, and just follow the instructions from the upper levels.”16 In Changsha, Peng Ming, a musician who had been jailed for five years for his “ultraleft” activities during the Cultural Revolution, found himself head of the drama department of Hunan Television. Peng recognized that his new post meant less time for composing music: “‘I’m willing to give up my chances to write,’ he said, ‘if it means that with me as their leader, ten composers will have their freedom.’ He smiled broadly. ‘I’m not afraid of the censors anymore. The censors are me!’”17 When is an editor a censor? We confuse the issue when we describe every frustration encountered by a Chinese intellectual as censorship. The job of editors in all nations is in large measure to say no. Many Americans write letters to editors of newspapers, often to complain about coverage of a particular story. Because of its national status, the New York Times receives far more letters than it can ever print. Are unprinted letters censored let­ ters? An American can usually find an alternative outlet for his or her opin­ ion, but that outlet is likely to be less widely distributed, thereby margin­ alizing the opinion. Citizens on the left are especially inclined to suspect

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that the editors of the Times apply an ideological filter in the course of se­ lecting which letters to print. Is this censorship? Not quite, but letters sent to The Nation or Mother Jones will only be read by those who already un­ derstand the point being made.18 Do not misunderstand: I am not suggesting that Chinese censorship is just the same as that in the United States. The United States has a broader range of media, under less unified control, plus it has a deeply embedded tradition of speaking out. Yet, the processes by which opinion is selected, approved, and publicized are similar enough in kind, if not in result, that China’s world of censorship should be less exotic to us than it often seems. China’s censors are thus multiple. They include editors-cum-censors, the successful colleagues of the artists who have jobs as editors of maga­ zines, managers of performing-arts groups, and administrators of arts schools and conservatories.19 They include any high-level official who gets agitated about a piece of art that threatens to carry controversy into his or her bailiwick. And they include a small number of full-time profes­ sional censors, especially in broadcasting and film. The Artists From the preceding analysis, it is obvious that artists vary considerably in their relationship to censorship. Is the artist also an official? Does he or she work in a closely supervised field such as television? Artists also dif­ fer in personal inclination to push the limits; some artists enjoy the for­ bidden excitement of the rebel’s role, while others may be cautious by na­ ture. Geremie Barmé reminds us that the demarcation between censor and censored is not a simple one.20 One should not presume that Chinese artists have as clear an abhorrence of censorship as their modern Western counterparts (for whom there is usually little hazard in attacking the idea of censorship). First, some in China’s arts world are in some sense “hardliners,” either from personal preference, or from career associations that make liberalism unattractive. China’s artistic cliques and factions often overlap with political factions, such as the connec­ tion between those who became revolutionary artists at Yan’an and the politicians who were most reluctant to see Chinese socialism in retreat. Sec­ ond, a large number of artists may take a “moderate” position when attack­ ing censorship. In 1980, Zhao Dan, perhaps China’s biggest movie star, wrote the following thoughts on his deathbed, which have been much quoted by those pressing for cultural openness: “The arts are the business of writers and artists. If the party controls the arts too tightly, they will have no hope. They will be finished.”21

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Note that in Zhao’s “moderate” view, there is no question that the Party should control the arts, but only an issue of whether it should do so tightly or loosely. Of course Chinese artists believe that their own works should certainly not be censored, and some have been bravely eloquent on the need to abolish the practice of censorship for all.22 But even among relatively wild and free-spirited intellectuals, few have that streak of an­ archism that many Americans share. Dissidents often come to the United States and conclude that Americans have “too much freedom,” a senti­ ment far more common among the politically conventional and cautious. Much discussion of China’s censorship concerns journalists rather than artists, or the relatively small number of high-profile dissidents who have captured Western attention (in contrast to the larger number who have not). There are some obvious distinctions between artists and the other two groups. Artists are less likely to be politically savvy; dissidents and jour­ nalists who defy authority have probably thought through the possible con­ sequences. Artists are perhaps more likely to get into trouble simply by mis­ reading the times. While a similar dynamic governs censorship for artists and others, few artists are likely to be under close public-security scrutiny, and by the mid-1990s, most artists were given considerable leeway, as their work rarely seemed seriously to challenge Party authority.23 The World As­ sociation of Newspapers estimated that twenty-six Chinese “journalists and dissidents” had been imprisoned in 1997.24 In contrast, relatively few artists have been jailed in recent years. Exceptions include Ethnomusicolo­ gist Ngawang Choephel, who was sentenced to eighteen years for espi­ onage after his 1995 arrest while filming Tibetan music and dance.25 Four Guizhou poets were arrested in 1998 and charged with plotting to over­ throw the government as they prepared to start an unofficial publication, China Cultural Renaissance. Ma Zhe, who had spent more than three years in prison after the 1986 student protests, was given a seven-year term in this case.26 Boston-based poet and editor Bei Ling was arrested in 2002 when visiting Beijing. The Audience for Art: Readers, Viewers, Listeners The cumbersome controls on the audience for art decreased with the ex­ pansion of the cultural marketplace. The Party understands that it is eas­ ier to control writers and musicians than readers and listeners. This un­ derstanding has deepened as the Party has learned how difficult it is to get a grip on the cultural market. But one must be on guard against es­ sentializing the Party, forgetting how many figures sympathetic to the avant-garde are now working as officials in the media or other cultural departments.

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There is vast differentiation within the audience for cultural goods in China, which complicates the contest between artists and censors still fur­ ther. Even when artists and officials both agree that it is good to lessen pressure on the arts, some in the audience may disagree. For instance, the filmmaker who shot the first on-screen kiss after the Cultural Revolution received thousands of angry letters and complained that “audiences have become more puritanically leftist than the censors.”27 Yet, a seemingly lim­ itless market for erotic art and entertainment offsets the prudery of a few. No one should mistake the public as merely passive. China has not yet fully become a nation of docile couch potatoes (one plausible variant of the Party’s vision for China), and the public can sometimes enforce rules that the Party forgets. A 1985 circular of the Party Propaganda Depart­ ment specified, “For the sake of caution, all movies, television dramas, and plays in which leaders of our Party are portrayed must, without ex­ ception, be submitted for censorship to the leading Comrades at the Cen­ ter prior to being performed in public.”28 Ten years later actors who spe­ cialized in representing Party greats of the past on the screen were earning money by making commercial appearances at department store openings in a kind of rent-a-revolutionary program. But in 1996 it was not the state that censored two professionals acting the parts of Mao and Zhou Enlai, but an indignant crowd of customers who chased them from the opening of a Zhejiang clothing store, apparently feeling that revolutionary icons should not be used to peddle pants.29

THE RULES OF THE GAME There are rules that govern censorship in China. They are not written, but constitute a shifting set of largely unspoken common assumptions. How­ ever, the rules are widely, if vaguely, understood by participants, and a foreign observer can make some generalizations. Uncertainty about Censorship’s Reach The very lack of clarity about censorship’s rules is the first rule. This has been true throughout the history of the People’s Republic. For instance, consider a March 5, 1962, dialog between Foreign Minister Chen Yi and propagandist Hu Qiaomu, neither of whom was naive about the politics of art.30 Hu: I’ve been on sick-leave for more than a year, and I don’t understand why works of art must be censored. Is it because the Center recently decided to institute censorship?

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Chen: No! It has never been stated that works have to be censored. Neither has it been said that works can be performed only after they have been cen­ sored. Hu: Why has such a thing happened? Chen: The Center has never ruled that books must be censored before pub­ lication. This is all the work of some people below. From now on, no book should be censored before publication. . . . If someone spends several years writing a book, and you reject it out of hand after looking at it for half an hour, then who would be able to write books? Hu: Nor must our political articles undergo censorship. All we have to do is discuss the matter and come to a decision. If you don’t agree with an arti­ cle, then send the author an additional paragraph or some opinions. The au­ thor can accept them or not, and if they are not incorporated, the article will still be published all the same. Chen: Right!

If even this pair of high rollers from the political elite was puzzled by the terms of censorship, so were lesser souls. The erratic, unpredictable quality of suppression enhances effective control. Few need to be pun­ ished in order for many to be intimidated—or kill a chicken to scare the monkeys, as the Chinese cliché goes. Censorship arrangements are constantly altered, keeping artists guess­ ing about what limits they face. For instance, in 1993 the government in­ troduced a requirement that fine arts dealers register with the Ministry of Culture, allegedly because of “disorder” in the painting market, which had quickly emerged from nowhere with too many “shoddy and fake paintings.”31 In contrast, in 1996, the Film Bureau of the Ministry of Ra­ dio, Film, and Television was said to offer greater accountability in the form of written reports of reasons for vetoing film projects, for demand­ ing changes, or for banning already completed movies.32 Was this hon­ ored? The zigs and zags of Chinese politics do not impact all arts institu­ tions at the same time; levels of tolerance and willingness to experiment vary by genre, geography, bureaucratic unit, generational experience, and, sometimes, simple good or bad luck. Censorship conventions may also vary by region, adding to confusion about the rules. Link tells how Shanghai editors sent galleys to the prop­ aganda department, which then made cuts. But in most places, the prop­ aganda department did not make cuts, but only approved or disapproved of complete works. In Anhui, editors skipped the propaganda department altogether, sending galleys directly to the printers.33 The broad trend, however, is clear. The Chinese state has come to rely less on censorship as a tool for disciplining artists, and artists understandably feel that they can anticipate greater laxness. Yet, everyone realizes that in indi­ vidual instances, some unlucky artists will get caught in a political back draft.

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This growing relaxation accompanies a deterioration of older institu­ tions of censorship. Lynn T. White III describes the fate of News Front (Xin­ wen zhanxian), a secret, internal publication initiated during the 1957 an­ tirightist campaign as a guide for journalists to tell them “what kinds of stories to write” (and by implication what kinds to avoid). After the Cul­ tural Revolution the magazine became public, changing “from being a po­ litical guide for journalists to being just a professional publication.”34 Sim­ ilarly, Party members within cultural work units could once be counted on to spread the word of shifts in Party line for writers and artists to note. But the Party no longer commands the loyalty and discipline that pro­ vided cohesion to central policy—indeed, in many work units, Party cells meet infrequently, or no longer exist. Formalized Language Instead of Restricted Content Michael Schoenhals argues that China’s political discourse, if you con­ sider all fora (including private conversations) “is probably no more re­ stricted with respect to content than political discourse in the United States or the former Soviet Union.” The real control comes not from con­ straints on content, but on form. The Party often specifies the terms in which issues may be publicly discussed. “Only by replicating or mimick­ ing the formal qualities of the discourse of the state can critics of the state make their voices heard.”35 As Perry Link suggests, “the surface meanings of words should make sense at a level of pretense whereas actual mean­ ings lie deeper.”36 Rather than tell you what you are forbidden to say, the Party establishes standards for how you say what you say. China is certainly not unique in formalizing language, but it plays an es­ pecially large role in public life, with an elaborate set of directives and man­ uals specifying what terms shall be used to discuss political issues, certain nations, and the like. Note that these are positive recommendations, not lists of banned expressions. Schoenhals likens these to the stylesheets that Western media use to let journalists know which forms to follow: Is the Irish Republican Army to be identified as terrorist or not? Shall Israeli-Arab (or should that be Arab-Israeli) violence be called a peace process? A differ­ ence is that reporters who don’t like the forms favored by the Washington Post can look for jobs at the Washington Times. For China’s artists and other intellectuals, these forms provide cues by which all can make their personal “kremlinological” analyses about what is possible. Postpublication Censorship Censorship takes place after, not before, the appearance of a work. A corps of professional censors would be able to review art before its exhibition,

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performance, or publication, but the effective decentralization of censor­ ship makes it all ex post facto. Even in countries with professional cen­ sors, postpublication review seems to be common, and it causes maxi­ mum inconvenience for the censored.37 For instance, one of China’s most celebrated writers in the 1980s was Liu Binyan, a rehabilitated victim of the 1957 antirightist campaign whose investigations of corruption among old Maoists helped Deng Xiaoping consolidate his power. But Liu was not content to write what Deng wanted, which led to his dismissal from the Party in January 1987. A magazine that had thought it safe to publish Liu’s work had to rip his article from its pages prior to distribution.38 Postproduction censorship effectively turns political risks into eco­ nomic risks. A publisher may well be stuck with thousands of books that can no longer be sold, or a troupe may have to cancel a drama production before it can recover its investment. As China’s economy becomes more market dependent, these risks increase. Producers and publishers may want to avoid the financial risk of politically controversial material.39 The State Press and Publication Administration does not have to pro­ vide any specific reason for its displeasure. Beijing’s Dongfang magazine was required, like other magazines, to file an annual report. After print­ ing some articles deemed too controversial in 1996, its last report was re­ turned with the annotation “insufficient.” The magazine was never for­ mally closed, but merely “suspended,” until it could somehow accomplish the impossible task of guessing what aspect of its report needed fixing.40 Yet, even seemingly banned publications may survive. Fujian’s Explo­ rations in Contemporary Arts (Dangdai wenyi tansuo) was shut down during the 1987 campaign against bourgeois liberalism. But, because its staff en­ joyed support from influential intellectuals in the province, editors con­ tinued to draw salaries, and the journal eventually reemerged under a new name, Cultural Annals (Wenhua chunqiu). The new title avoided loss of face for the propagandists who had ordered the failed closure. Variations among Genres The censor’s reach is uneven. Music is widely regarded as the least con­ trolled art, because it is abstract and typically has little political content. Visual arts have considerable latitude, but have also drawn fire in several incidents, including those discussed in the preceding chapter.41 Literature occupies a middle ground. It is often problematic from the censor’s per­ spective, but there are just too many books and journals to control very ef­ fectively. Still, the state persists in efforts to regulate the printed word more efficiently; early in the reform period, for instance, printers required a special letter of introduction for works of literature or public affairs, but

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not for technical titles.42 Television and the movies are the most difficult to manage. The state watches over them more carefully because of their mass audience. Because technology centralizes their production, it is rela­ tively simple to review a final cut before it is broadcast or distributed. Nor is it very difficult to scrutinize one hundred fifty or so new movies in a year. Stage plays (including both Chinese opera and modern spoken drama) also are carefully scrutinized, perhaps because of a pre-Communist tradition of supervising the morality of the stage.43 Differences among genres change over time, however. In the early 1980s, music was more controversial, as old songs from the 1930s and 1940s were revived and sometimes criticized for their Guomindang or Japanese associations. Foreign songs were sometimes problematic; an army commander in Fuzhou banned the song, “Never on Sunday,” when he learned that it referred to the work schedule of a Greek prostitute in a movie. These days, restrictions on music are lessened because of the vast expansion of recording, broadcasting, and importation of song. And as poetry has become ever more abstruse, it no longer has much of an audi­ ence beyond other poets and, thus, poses little political threat. Book Licenses In its efforts to keep a handle on publications, the Party devised a curious system. The State Press and Publishing Administration licenses the publica­ tion of books by allocating book numbers to China’s nearly six hundred publishing houses. Publishers then assign these numbers to their books. The system was an attempt to cope with the explosion of new publications dur­ ing the reform era, without subjecting each title to prepublication review. This cumbersome mechanism has not worked well. Legitimate publishers are often tempted to sell some of their book numbers to unlicensed and ef­ fectively underground companies eager to bring disreputable and porno­ graphic titles to market.44 The result has been a continuing series of scandals in which presses are censured, fined, or even closed. In the fall of 1988, the State Press and Publication Administration was reported to have closed the China Braille Publishing House for selling thirteen book licenses to illegal publishers who published obscene books. Hebei’s “TV Literature” also lost its license for selling book numbers to an obscene magazine.45 Often, no one can figure out who has actually produced the book that is for sale. Covert companies flourish in the publication of sexual materials and books telling the secrets of China’s political stars; the profits are too low to risk serious books exploring risky political topics. Here the book num­ ber system may work more effectively, enabling the state to discipline publishers who have made political “errors,” such the Hainan Photo­ graphic Arts Publishing Company and the Inner Mongolia Audiovisual Publishing Company, both of which were closed in 1997.46

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The Moral Purpose of Art Chinese artists, their audiences, and their censors share the belief that art must be suffused with morality, that high art has an ethical content. While to Western ears this may echo the stuffy presumptions of our own nineteenthcentury high bourgeoisie, its source in China lies deep in Confucian civiliza­ tion, which also holds that an artist is a kind of public figure—not a celebrity, but a moral guide to the nation. The reverse of this is, of course, that Chinese politicians often present themselves as artists. This rule complicates the lives of artists. They cannot become too isolated from Chinese values. Artists are almost obligated to take up moral demands, making the Party anxious that without controls, artists will make moral demands for dissident art. One of China’s more controversial writers, Wang Shuo, the creator of best-selling novels of tough working-class life in Beijing, be­ came rich by writing sensational narratives that avoid, even disdain, pol­ itics. Wang cockily remarked: There’s a very famous dissident named Liu Xiaobo, who tried to persuade me to protest and make petitions and collect signatures. I refused. Now Liu is in a labor camp, and I am here [in a Beijing disco]. I was proved right. A writer is a writer. He should stay away from politics.47

Yet, Liu Xiaobo, a noted literary critic, is closer to Chinese intellectual tra­ dition, which is exactly what makes him menacing to the Party. And many intellectuals regard Wang Shuo with contempt, not for his failure to sign petitions, but for rejecting the moral obligations of the artist. Censorship for the Many/Access for the Elite So-called internal or restricted (neibu) materials ease the need for censor­ ship. Arts and information are available throughout China in a variety of nonpublic formats. Elites may be trusted with images and knowledge that might corrupt ordinary people. Such internal materials include newspapers that print extensive translations from the foreign press (but that are distrib­ uted only to officials of a certain rank), art exhibitions only open to “quali­ fied” viewers, and films shown for free to invited audiences. Many state agencies publish their own newspapers and magazines, not routinely avail­ able, which may contain sensitive information—or they may be the Chinese equivalents of American company newsletters. Large numbers of people have access to such in-house materials, including the greater portion of the urban intelligentsia. These restricted arts thus occupy a shadowy world of quasi-censorship, where words and images are unavailable to the general public, but accessible to those people who are most likely to be upset at ex­ clusion. Indeed, some political criticism initially appears in internal sources as a kind of test run, before it makes its way into the public media.

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This dual system of arts access does not always work as intended. For instance, in 1967 and 1968 during the Cultural Revolution, screenings of some movies, such as The Life of Wu Xun and The Secret History of the Qing Court, were held to provide examples of “bourgeois”art. The practice was discontinued when officials realized the invited audiences were enjoying the films too much. In 1980 Party elder Wang Renzhong tried to halt in­ ternal film screenings, not out of a sense that elite privilege was wrong, but because he believed that the Foreign Ministry was showing French pornography.48 And one must wonder why the innocuous Shanghai Phi­ lately was a restricted publication in 1986. More recently, the entire dualaccess system has repeatedly been criticized as going against the spirit of reform.49 But dual access lingers on, in part because it allows the editors of Chinese culture to avoid having to censor. And it is also an exclusive perquisite that flatters intellectuals as it contributes to cultural control. Political Patrons for Artists In a system with obscure, but significantly changing, rules, controversies often cannot be resolved without superseding the cultural system and bringing in the firmer hand of a member of the political elite. The system generates a steady demand for referees. Political leaders are no longer so deeply involved in the approval of individual works that members of the Political Bureau routinely arbitrate disputes about specific paintings or films. But awareness of a powerful backer can inspire potential critics of an artist to fade away. Thus, the mighty are frequently called upon to show their support for arts projects by providing prefaces or calligraphic inscriptions for books, exhibits, or even the titles of controversial televi­ sion shows. And direct intervention by political patrons remains a factor. Director Zhang Yimou’s films Ju Dou (1989) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991) were banned from distribution in China until 1992, when Ju Dou was viewed by Li Ruihuan of the Political Bureau’s Standing Committee. Li reversed the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television’s ban and also ap­ proved joint ventures between state cultural organizations and foreign companies, allowing open Taiwanese and Hong Kong coproduction of Chinese movies.50 Self-Censorship Most censorship in China, as elsewhere, is self-censorship. In his classic essay “The Prevention of Literature,” George Orwell pointed to the utter normality of censorship, even in a Britain that prided itself on being “free.” The greatest inhibitors of literature, he argued, are writers them­ selves, who restrain themselves in deference to authority.51 China’s

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loosely structured cultural controls result in a shadowy mechanism of hints, rumors, and speculation that is more effective, and certainly much cheaper, than formal government review. Western journalists blocked from the corridors of power in Beijing did not invent the arcane arts of “China watching.” Instead, they were per­ fected by Chinese intellectuals, officials, and artists alike, eager to divine their futures from meager, but tantalizing, public hints of change. The public placement of an article written by a formerly disgraced author sig­ nals that others who shared in that particular category of disrepute will be coming back. Public criticism of a play for bourgeois liberalism warns all writers to be careful of replicating the offense. The harshest criticism is that by name; indirect reference saves face and permits plausible denia­ bility. But just how far is going too far? Every song or painting is a kind of miner’s canary in the caves of China’s cultural politics. Watch. See. You can’t go that far, at least not yet. For most artists, the question of artistic freedom is important, but indirect. For most, artistic freedom is a bell­ wether issue, influencing the climate of professional work. Few show much eagerness to be at the barricades themselves. An analogy might be the dispute over academic freedom in U.S. universities. A professor need not feel an immediate personal need to challenge the system’s limits to be pleased that someone else has done so successfully. Chinese intellectuals learn a tight set of internal controls. Let me pro­ vide an example. Three images were displayed in the living room of my 1995–1997 Nanjing apartment. One was a perfectly conventional photo­ graph of my wife and son, posed with me in Oregon. Second was a piece of traditional Chinese art, a large white-on-black rubbing of a Buddhist figure, one of the eighteen Arhats. More unusual was the third, a brightly colored poster for a Hong Kong exhibition of 1930s and 1940s cartoons from Shanghai. This poster contained images of eight cartoons, some satirical (Chiang Kaishek and a Christian missionary before a Guomin­ dang flag), some unsettling (a monstrous Japanese butcher slicing Manchuria from a China-shaped chopping block), and others simply odd (a modern young couple apparently in blackface). In the course of teach­ ing in Nanjing, I invited at least eighty students to dinner in my apart­ ment, always in groups of three or four. Many commented politely on the small family portrait, many remarked on the more obvious rubbing. But not one ever did more than glance furtively at the flamboyant poster. What was going on? It was all right to talk about family and although Buddhist rubbings are not likely to be found in a Chinese intellectual’s apartment, they are easily classified as objects of interest to foreigners. The poster’s art remained as dangerous and subversive as the cartoonists intended half a century ago; better not to mention it, for fear of saying or

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hearing something one should not.52 The incident is trivial, but suggestive of how tightly China’s educated class can control its tongue. The Chinese, of course, have excellent reasons to censor themselves. The older generation remembers past political campaigns. In 1955 twenty-one hundred people were involved in the Hu Feng case. No one was helped by connection to this famous literary critic, even though “only” ninety-three were arrested, seventy-eight labeled as Hu Feng elements, and twentythree were labeled as hardcore elements. They were not rehabilitated until 1980, when their original work units were ordered to take them back twenty-five years after the Party made its “mistake.”53 Political sanctions against artists and others continued, including the vast purges during the Cultural Revolution and subsequent purges of the left. In the 1980s a group of former Red Guard leaders was paraded around the nation as negative example for offenses committed twenty years earlier. Many were arrested or otherwise punished for their involvement in the 1989 protests.54 There were politically inspired purges at the Academy of Social Sciences in 1995.55 Persistent dissidents encounter difficulties with the police and other au­ thorities. After police pressed his employer in 1998, poet Liao Yiwu lost his job running a supplement for the Chengdu Commercial Newspaper. Liao, who had been jailed for four years for a 1990 film on the Beijing Massacre, watched a bookstore venture fail when commercial inspectors ransacked his shop.56 The harsh punishment (multiple imprisonments and exile) given Wei Jingsheng seems effective; many Chinese intellectuals blame Wei and other dissidents for bringing trouble to themselves and for rock­ ing the boat in which all intellectuals must sail.

CENSORSHIP IN RETREAT, USUALLY The hand of censorship is visible, but it moves erratically. Nonetheless, it retains some power, and all artists and intellectuals must play the censor­ ship game, however unwillingly. The censorship has lightened, not mainly due to the Party’s goodwill, but because many intellectuals have pressed successfully for fewer restrictions and because the emerging cul­ tural marketplace has complicated the censor’s job. Censorship will not soon vanish in China, but the long trend of reform toward greater auton­ omy for artists will continue, despite intermittent and painful counter­ currents. Several factors will shape censorship’s future. Breaking the Rules Rules fall into disuse when people flout them. In 1979 I visited the Hunan capital of Changsha; out of curiosity, I asked for a copy of the local televi­

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sion program guide, only to be refused by the vendor, who told me with embarrassment that this publication was not allowed to foreigners. A kind stranger overheard the conversation and beat the censorship simply by buying the magazine, which he then presented as a gift. This violation seemed low risk, but similar violations across the nation brought about the demise of a disregarded rule. In the arts as in other areas, the mere promulgation of a law, rule, or pol­ icy is no indication that the measures will be followed or even acknowl­ edged. For instance, China has repeatedly issued rules to restrict the use of satellite dishes in order to control television. None of these has been ef­ fective, following the pattern established in the early 1980s, when Guang­ dong officials failed to ban television antennae that could pick up broad­ casts from neighboring Hong Kong. Fear of defying censorship has vastly diminished. In the wake of the Beijing Massacre, the Press and Publications Administration ordered the withdrawal of publications with “bourgeois tendencies,” including the writings of overthrown Party heads Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang. Many rushed to purchase such books, plus the works of such targets as Yan Jiaqi, Fang Lizhi, Su Shaozhi, not necessarily for a bracing reformist read, but for speculative investment.57 Censors were scandalized in 1991 to discover that a poem published in the overseas edition of People’s Daily contained a coded demand for Prime Minister Li Peng’s resignation. The poem was a qi lü (a seven-word, eightsentence rhyme) by Zhu Haihong, a student in the United States. Its content is superficially quite conventional: “A wandering son atop the steps misses his motherland, never abandoning his life-long urge to serve China.” Yet, when read diagonally, one line of characters says: “Li Peng must step down in order to assuage the people’s anger.” Public security agents arrested one editor and combed through old faxes in the effort to discover how the poem had reached the Shenzhen office responsible for the overseas edition. Any­ one in China with access to this edition was required to turn his or her copy into the authorities or provide written justification for not doing so.58 Media Expansion Commercial pressure often works directly against censorship. Newly le­ gitimate commercial ambitions rapidly expanded cultural products, from television to novels to magazines and newspapers, overloading the Party’s already weakened control mechanisms.59 In 1978, China had 186 newspapers and 930 magazines. By 1996 these numbers had grown to 1,053 newspapers and 7,543 magazines.60 New publications, new styles of art, and new foreign contacts all appeared precisely as the control appa­ ratus was on the defensive. Alternative distribution channels also

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appeared, making state supervision more difficult. The New China Book­ store lost exclusive control over book distribution in late 1985, when com­ peting private (as well as collective and state) book vendors spread quickly. Some of that control was restored, albeit ineffectually, in 1989. Widespread piracy in books, recordings, and films has also made control difficult.61 The cultural market simply generates new stuff faster than the state can regulate it. From 1992 into the new millennium, new media out­ lets have not been seeking to subvert the state, but all are looking for ed­ itorial content to put between the advertisements.62 The 1989 political repression was followed by Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 sig­ nal to strengthen the commercial economy. Chinese artists recently branded as subversive went back into print, as publishers feared offending the state less than missing out on profits. In 1989, influential aesthetician Li Zehou was a critic of the government’s policies. His works were not for­ mally banned, but the Press and Publishing Administration instructed that his works that contained serious political errors could not be reprinted; of course, no press would take up his works at all.63 By 1994, although Li Ze­ hou lived in exile in the United States, his most celebrated studies were reprinted in a single volume under the title Li Zehou Ten-Year Collection, with a color photo of the author inside.64 In this spirit, the closely super­ vised movie industry reconsidered previously banned movies as it searched for new titles to win back its audience from television.65 The small number of “real” censors can only be effective under a regime in which most of the editors-cum-censors show enthusiasm for imposing central controls. In the absence of such enthusiasm, the Propaganda Department has sought to limit its losses by focusing its attention on a mere eight institutions: the New China News Agency, People’s Daily, Seek Truth from Facts (Qiushi, a Party journal), Economic Daily, Guangming Daily, Central Television, Central People’s Radio, and China International Radio.66 Dispirited propagandists are apparently willing to settle for firm control over what they perhaps cyni­ cally designate to be key media, rather than over the entire system. In 1993, the Press and Publications Administration relinquished many of its controls over the book industry. In a decentralization intended to help publishers adjust to the commercial marketplace, the state declared that they were freed from the need to limit titles to their nominal special­ ization. This change followed several controversies over the administration’s efforts to limit the scope of publication. The state essentially sur­ rendered, perhaps partly motivated by the desire to share in new profits, knowing that it was abandoning an important censorship tool.67 Technological Change The cultural marketplace and especially China’s integration into the world economy has sped the introduction of new communications tech­

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nology that works against censorship. The enormous inconvenience of producing unofficial periodicals impeded the 1979 Democracy Wall movement, spread by mimeographing stencils using broken and second­ hand mimeograph machines. Beijing Spring managed to print up to ten thousand copies at Foreign Languages Press, but this was exceptional.68 Even then, Deng Xiaoping menacingly remarked, “Some secret maga­ zines are printed so prettily. Where do they find their paper? What press prints them?”69 Over two decades later, the technical environment is different. Com­ puters have become common, fax machines abound, cellular phones are a hot commodity. There are over eighty million cable television subscribers. New technical ways to beat the censors continue to appear. In the summer of 1997, an e-mail magazine was prepared inside China, sent electroni­ cally to the United States, and then redistributed via e-mail to Chinese subscribers. Topics included the 1989 Beijing Massacre and the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union.70 State efforts to control or even comprehend these changes are often pa­ thetic or erratically fierce. Although the state promotes Internet expan­ sion, one hapless Internet entrepreneur was jailed in 1998 to halt the crit­ ical electronic magazine. Internet use has expanded to over fifty million users, amid much discussion of the Party’s efforts to regulate it. Ironies abound: Western firms sell the Chinese state the software with which it seeks to regulate the information explosion, even as the Central Intelli­ gence Agency invests in a firm that tries to break through the Great Fire­ wall of China. As in recent censorship politics in general, the Party’s primary goal is to restrain online information and political discussion, which typically means that the arts are not a special target. But some technologies are more arts centered, such as cable television and DVD. The latter especially frustrates the censor; propaganda officials may order cuts in a film for the­ atrical distribution, but cannot prevent the sale of fuller DVD versions of the same movies. Rapid technological change is accompanied by a relentless drive to make the media more commercial. Even publications once owned by the state now operate in a thoroughly marketized manner. Daniel Lynch re­ minds us, however, that the inevitable collapse of tight political control over the media does not by itself constitute political liberalization.71 The Professionalization of Cultural Criticism Early in the reform era, there was much angry discussion by artists who had been criticized on political grounds during the Cultural Revolution. Artists and officials alike agreed that the Maoist practice of “wielding sticks” against artists in political campaigns had been a serious mistake.

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But what is a stick? When screenwriter Bai Hua came under attack in 1981, his supporters believed that any Party criticism of an artist was a stick. Party leaders responded, “We should not flagrantly interfere with creativity in literature and art, but we must not misinterpret it as casting aside the party’s leadership.”72 Reforming intellectuals wished to render illegitimate political criticism of their work, a goal crystallized in the widespread (among artists) belief in the autonomy of the laws of art, not understandable by untrained outsiders. This effort has not met with com­ plete success, but when the results are compared to the practices of the Cultural Revolution or even the early 1980s, the change is remarkable. Illustrative of the trend is Zhang Xianliang, author of several novels (such as Half of Man Is Woman, Mimosa, and Getting Used to Dying) that of­ fend some people doubly, with their highly sexualized accounts of life in labor reform camps. Despite harsh criticism (“Moral degeneration is bound to lead to political depravity”), Zhang retained his post as chair­ man of the Ningxia Arts Federation.73 Yet, many questions remain unre­ solved: Where is the line between literary criticism and political attack? Are politically based criticisms a form of censorship? What of the right of conservative critics to publish, if they are not demanding the political de­ struction of their targets? Censored, but Available The lack of formal institutions to block publication means that banned works must be recalled from distribution, a cumbersome and often inef­ fective process. Golden Years, Wang Xiaobo’s 1994 novel of the Cultural Revolution was withdrawn amidst controversy about some sexual pas­ sages, but not before it sold forty thousand copies.74 Technically, the book was censored, and I could not purchase a copy at a Nanjing bookstore. But with so many copies in circulation, I could certainly borrow one, making the censorship issue a bit cloudier than the incisive word “censor” would suggest. Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby similarly taunted the censors with its tale of drugs and sex between Chinese women and foreign men.75 One ex­ pects subsequent works by authors censored with such ample publicity to sell briskly, whether they deliver steamy sex or not. The censored-but-notcensored phenomenon is now a routine aspect of China’s cultural life. Baiting the State: The Advantages of Being Censored Artists also use the censorship of their work to enhance their reputations as warriors for freedom. Novelist Jia Pingwa published The Abandoned Capital (Feidu) in 1993. The book chronicles literary life in a thinly veiled Xi’an (Jia’s home and capital of China in the Tang Dynasty), with more sex

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scenes than Chinese readers expect, especially from a well-established au­ thor. The book was banned, but not before it had become a best-seller. Bei­ jing Publishing House was compelled to relinquish all profits, plus pay double that amount as a fine.76 This seems like a harsh blow against a writer, but in China’s newly commercial cultural world, there is no such thing as bad publicity. Some think that Jia’s novel is brilliant, but even many of these believe that The Abandoned Capital was a cynical produc­ tion. Jia even included blank spots in place of characters in some steamy passages as if he had been censored, just for effect. While I had to go to Hong Kong for my copy of The Abandoned Capital, China’s bookstores were filled with copies of Jia’s other works, released in new editions to meet rising demand.77 By 1997, a major Chinese encyclopedia listed The Abandoned Capital as one of Jia Pingwa’s important works. Stylish film directors such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou have some­ times simplified their admittedly complex relations with the Chinese state. Both of these accomplished artists have had serious conflicts with Chinese film authorities, including demands for changes in final cuts and authorities have temporarily refused to screen some of their movies in China. Yet, they have also enjoyed cooperation from the state, which, af­ ter all, earns foreign exchange from their popularity abroad. Western re­ porters would rather hear tales of artistic suppression than of coopera­ tion. So Zhang Yimou does not call attention to the fact that hundreds of People’s Liberation Army soldiers took part in Living (Huozhe) or that the plot of Qiu Ju Goes to Court (in which a virtuous official intervenes to re­ solve the political harassment of a feisty peasant woman) likely pleased the Propaganda Department.78 Aesopian Discussion The indirect language of parable or metaphor is a classic means of cir­ cumventing censorship. This tactic has a long history in China and has continued in the People’s Republic.79 Examples are often only slightly roundabout. In Guangzhou the host of a late night radio talk show that drew large audiences for its daring talk about sex reported that the topic of homosexuality was banned, but talking about movies was not, so he discussed movies with homosexual characters, like Philadelphia or The Wedding Banquet.80 More complex are literary uses of allegory and symbolism. In “Hard Porridge,” a story by former minister of culture Wang Meng, an old man tries to persuade his four-generation family to try some Western breakfast instead of rice porridge. Conflict arises when a weak and indecisive elder son, a rash youth, wants to switch at once to eating nothing but Western food at once. Wang Meng’s enemies read the story as a criticism of Deng

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Xiaoping, the old man who tried to introduce a little of the West. A letter to the Wenyi bao criticized Wang for an oblique attack on Deng. The letter turned out to have been written by the editor under a pseudonym. Wang filed a lawsuit, denying any political intent.81 One thinks here of the 1970s example of Huang Yongyu, who was fond of annoying Maoists by paint­ ing winking owls, which elicited charges that these birds (evil in Chinese lore) were closing one eye to indicate doubts about the political system. No one could prove it, and Huang steadfastly denied it—until the fall of the Gang of Four, after which he freely admitted that his owls were a po­ litical protest. The problem with such symbolic responses to censorship is that they do not make one’s point very clearly, effectively conceding ground to the censors from the outset.82 Once cynical readings of cultural symbols are required, it seems that the established powers have won the game. Artists are effectively hostage to the formalized terms of discourse set by the Party, even if their words and images are subject to subversive readings. New Forms of Censorship The cultural market has contributed to a general loosening of controls over art, but it has also evoked some new forms of censorship. For in­ stance, China did not have a system for rating motion pictures according to their alleged suitability for children until 1989. Movies that might titil­ late were simply not shown, at least not in public and rarely in private. But greater diversity on the screen, fueled in part by new competition from television, led to some controversial films. Teng Jinxian, head of the Chinese Film Bureau, said in the summer of 1988 that the nation needed to protect children against sex and violence that may be vital to the story, but harmful to young viewers, offering Red Sorghum as an example. A rat­ ing system, he argued, would enable the Film Bureau to label movies as unsuitable for children, rather than to cut scenes.83 Nearly a year later, on May 1, 1989, the new system was introduced. Children could not buy tick­ ets to four kinds of movies: (1) those portraying rape, robbery, drug tak­ ing, drug selling, or prostitution; (2) films that can easily terrify children with fighting or violence; (3) movies with sex; and (4) films with “social abnormalities.” “Not suitable for children” signs were posted at ticket booths and on the screen before the film.84 Is this censorship? Of course. Did Chinese people object? No. Parents were pleased for the same reason that anxious parents in other nations want to shield their children from alarming images. Filmmakers were pleased to imagine that the Film Bureau might lighten up on cuts before releasing new products. And theater operators could earn more money by screening more risqué fare. Even before the new restrictions, the words “no

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children allowed” enabled scalpers to charge twenty-seven yuan in Guangzhou and ten yuan in Beijing for tickets to Village of Widows (Guafu­ cun), a rather arty movie about old sexual mores along the Fujian coast.85 Controversy over this film stemmed from two things: Young women of Hui’an county dress in an especially colorful way that features elaborate headgear and exposed midriffs and leads many to doubt that they are re­ ally Han Chinese. (They are. In Fujian, the constantly repeated local joke about the dress of Hui’an women is “feudal heads, democratic bellies.”) The story included a nocturnal and barely visible act of lovemaking in which neither partner turns out to be sure of the other’s identity.86 Censorship for Profit New forms of censorship seek to assure profits through control of intellectual-property rights. Deng Xiaoping jailed his cultural critics; his daughter takes her adversaries to court. In a property-rights battle, Deng Rong sued a Liaoning publisher over unauthorized printing of her biog­ raphy of her father, lest the Deng family money machine be impaired. When China announced early in 1996 that Chinese organizations would only be able to subscribe to foreign economic news services (DowJones, Reuters, Bloomberg) through the New China News Agency (Xin­ hua), there was a sharp outcry in the Western media against censorship of information about China’s and the world’s economy. China beat a hasty retreat, announcing that the New China News Agency would not be in­ specting the news prior to distribution. The incident seems best explained by Xinhua’s desire to control not the information, but the revenue. The agency can charge each subscriber a fee in its self-appointed role as un­ wanted and monopolizing agent.87 What initially appeared to be censor­ ship turned out to be something rather different, although state-granted monopolies may be no less obnoxious. Libel Laws Intellectuals have long called for the strengthening of China’s legal system, but may be disappointed with some of the outcomes. There was a dramatic increase in the number of lawsuits among the intelligentsia, as private in­ dividuals attempted to suppress criticism. One notorious case pitted two linguists against each other, with one demanding damages for attacks on his academic work. This kind of lawsuit, common in Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, seems likely to spread in the mainland as an unantici­ pated consequence of the rule of law. Wang Meng’s suit over his short story shows that reformers can use the legal mechanism against their crit­ ics, but often the results may well be less favorable to the arts world.

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Censorship by Price As China continues to prosper, a new twist is being introduced into the censorship system. While the old official system of internal distribution is in decay, a new system of price distribution is flourishing. In the 1989 nude art rage, books of reproductions of oil paintings were kept out of the hands of the masses not by state edict, but by their expense. The market’s logic can be as effective as the state’s in keeping “dangerous” materials away from the masses, while making them accessible to privileged mem­ bers of society. “BANNED IN CHINA” Who wins the censorship game? One’s answer depends on his or her per­ sonal political values. Those who oppose any form of censorship will con­ clude that there are no winners. Artists lose because they must waste their time dealing with silliness. The game is exhausting and distracting, even when artists are successful. The state loses because it wastes resources in an oppressive and dehumanizing activity. And the citizens of China lose access to the ideas that have been closed off, silenced, or disguised, as well as to some fun. But, of course, many Chinese will not agree with my American Civil Liberties Union perspective. China’s censorship is complex, the product of a weakening regime taking aim at a moving target. The marketization of culture has both complicated the job of the censors and generated new tasks. The end re­ sult has been a loosening of censorship, although it is too simple to say that markets bring freedom. There are certainly many artists who feel the bite of censorship, but China’s censorship, like other aspects of its politics, resembles that of other countries far more than it did at Mao’s death. There is some irony in the fact that China’s censorship has been so rou­ tinely condemned by the Western press just as it has lost much of its bite. Some of the pressure applied to China is tactical; pressure on a regime in the process of change may discourage backsliding and further limit cen­ sorship. But most Western commentary seems more ignorant than tactical.88 Several factors account for this discrepancy between a loosening Chinese censorship and ever-fiercer Western condemnation. Lack of Information One problem in assessing censorship is the dearth of reliable information. There is no consistently reliable source for censorship news in any coun­ try. After a group of intellectuals petitioned for the release of Wei Jing­

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sheng in early 1989, a Hong Kong report asserted the Propaganda De­ partment had barred mention of Su Shaozhi and the other thirty-three sig­ natories in the press or on television.89 But Su’s ideas were in fact reported at the time in the Fuzhou Evening News.90 Was the report of censorship mis­ taken? Did the Propaganda Department lack the authority to make local newspapers follow its directive? Or did someone in Fuzhou simply mis­ place or ignore the instructions? In October 1995, a group of avant-garde artists were arrested in Yuanming Park Village in Northwest Beijing for ignoring police orders to va­ cate the houses that they had rented from peasants. This was reported widely in the Western press. It was not reported, however, that the artists successfully returned to their unofficial arts community despite police ha­ rassment and that they were still there in the summer of 1997, although they remained skittish of contact with the police. How does one interpret such inconsistent reports? There is a tendency in the Western press to highlight censorship stories, which may exagger­ ate the frequency of incidents. Many other bad moments for artists never become news, which can delude observers into believing that no one is having any problems.91 At the same time, rarely do we read follow-up sto­ ries about artists who have become uncensored. For example, there was much notice when Taiwanese pop star A Mei was banned from perform­ ing on the mainland after singing the Republic of China’s national anthem at the 2000 inauguration of Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian. But lit­ tle notice was paid of her return to Shanghai two years later. “Banned in China” as Sales Appeal A major impediment to understanding censorship in China is the way Western media hype the “banned in China” theme, exaggerating censor­ ship. Virtuous outrage at human rights abuses, simple anti-Communism, and efforts to make cultural products seem more significant, and therefore more attractive to purchasers, all play a role in assessments that are often extreme or ludicrous. For instance, the normally staid Chronicle of Higher Education, a trade paper for deans of U.S. universities, asserted that pho­ tography had been “banned by Communist decree.”92 In a more complicated example, Penguin books published Howard Goldblatt’s fine translation of Mo Yan’s novel The Garlic Ballads. On the back cover, where publishers have their last chance to make a sale to the reader who is contemplating the volume in hand, Penguin says, “The Garlic Ballads, banned in China, is a powerful and apocalyptic vision of life for the innu­ merable people of China who exist at the mercy of an uncaring state.”93 In fact, by time of the 1995 Viking-Penguin publication, Mo Yan’s novel was readily available in Chinese bookstores.

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Penguin was technically correct. The Garlic Ballads had been withdrawn from sale shortly after its 1989 publication. The reality of the censoring of Mo Yan, however, is subtler than Penguin publicists can handle. The rea­ son the novel was banned in 1989 is almost certainly its sympathetic rep­ resentation of an antigovernment riot by peasants furious that the state will not purchase the garlic that it has encouraged them to plant. Such ri­ ots happen in China, and the state does not want to publicize them. By 1993, however, the Party’s panic over the 1989 political crisis had sub­ sided, and The Garlic Ballads joined Mo Yan’s other popular novels on the bookseller’s shelves. Yet, it appeared in a “revised” edition. The novel was originally written in the fall of 1987 and published by the People’s Liberation Army Publishing House. Mo Yan was unhappy with some cuts, which he restored in a 1988 Taiwan edition.94 When Mo Yan revised the book, he added a preface declaring that his book is not to be taken as a model, but as a warning (“The ultimate goal in writing this kind of novel is to hope that the phenomena it describes do not become a model for real life”). He also removed a prefatory quotation from Stalin, whose irony had probably not been enjoyed by the Propa­ ganda Department.95 Most significantly, he substituted a new concluding chapter (one of twenty). The Penguin final chapter is grim: a blind ballad singer is tortured with an electric cattle prod, then murdered by the po­ lice. There is also a suicide, a posthumous marriage with a corpse, and a suicidal escape from prison. The 1993 final chapter uses the device of a newspaper account to sum things up at the end of the novel. The official and familiarly hypocritical language of the Masses Daily newspaper make an effective ending, but one not so shocking or depressing as the censored version. At the same time, the alternate ending is hardly a kiss blown to the Chinese state. From the Penguin blurb, however, the reader might well imagine Mo Yan is a nonperson, a dissident artist who writes underground and at great peril. In fact, as Penguin explains inside the book, Mo Yan, who was born in Shandong in 1956, “has won virtually every Chinese literary prize and is the most critically acclaimed Chinese writer of his generation, in both China and the West.” Among other works, he is the author of Red Sorghum, the basis for the popular Zhang Yimou film. Is Mo Yan a “banned” writer? Hardly. Any decent bookstore stocks many of his nov­ els. His place in China’s literary life is central, not peripheral. So we have a banned (but only for a few years) book, but not a banned writer or even a writer who was punished for writing a questionable book. To add yet another layer of ambiguity: Mo Yan is a professional writer for the People’s Liberation Army, his employer since 1976.96 I do not blame Penguin for trying to sell more copies of Mo Yan, a fine writer who should be bet­ ter known in the West. But how can a back-cover blurb capture this com­

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plex history of editing, withdrawal from sales, republication in Taiwan, and rewriting of the concluding chapter? Another example comes from the world of fine arts. “New Art in China Post 1989” was a traveling exhibition of Chinese painting, including many works of oblique political and social commentary. It showed at the Uni­ versity of Oregon Museum of Art, December 17, 1995, to February 18, 1996.97 While I missed the exhibit, I read the press clippings with fascina­ tion. Most Western publicists and art critics are driven to try to character­ ize all of the paintings as banned, even misrepresenting the facts to pre­ sent each painter as a tormented rebel. Even House & Garden described the show as “underground art (officially banned in China).” The New York Times agreed: “This exhibition has been banned in China for its provoca­ tive avant-garde content.” Yet, the exhibition was never assembled or pre­ sented in China. It would likely not have found a sponsoring organiza­ tion, but this is a different question. “Come and see art that the Chinese government has denounced as dangerous” seems to capture the odd mix of hype and outraged liberalism that Americans so often adopt when speaking of contemporary Chinese culture.98 Some reporters connected the New Art show to Beijing’s 1989 avant­ garde exhibition, where “artist Xiao Lu pulled out a pistol and fired a shot into her own work, declaring it dead. The government quickly agreed and closed the exhibition down.” Reporters did not mention that the Beijing show reopened successfully after the flamboyant performance; nor did they wonder what might happen if an American artist were to fire a round or two into her installation at the Whitney or the Museum of Modern Art. One doubts if it would be business as usual, and it is likely that the police would temporarily close the exhibition while they investigated the crime.99 A second account of the New Art show in the New York Times got it right: “In this new era, ‘unofficial’ artists—while not persecuted for their work—are not allowed to exhibit and are viewed as dissidents, the more provocative among them going underground.” A Double Standard for China and the West Surprisingly, none of the press clippings mentioned that one of the pieces, Gu Wenda’s “Oedipus Refound No. 1 The Enigma of Blood,” made of used sanitary tampons attached to pillows, was banned from an earlier exhibition in Columbus, Ohio. Any American who cares about human rights should know that Ohio can be a dangerous place for art: the direc­ tor of a Cincinnati museum was prosecuted for obscenity in the notorious Mapplethorpe trial.100 But, of course, the good people of Ohio did not imagine that they had censored Gu’s art so much as dismissed it for being indecent, surely a different matter altogether.

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Our understanding of Chinese censorship would be advanced by greater honesty about the West’s own censorship. Amidst anxieties in 1997 over freedom of expression in Hong Kong under Chinese rule, few noted that until 1995 British colonial law authorized the police to review and censor drama productions.101 In the United States publishers of com­ modity market newsletters are required to register with a government agency and provide fingerprints of employees and information about subscribers.102 France’s attempts to restrict Hollywood movies are treated as evidence of a romantic, but impractical, cultural nationalism; China’s attempts to do the same are invariably characterized as a fear of new ideas. When Chinese film studio bosses force directors to make changes in their movies, it is censorship, but when Hollywood studios do the same, it is not.103 Nor is there much concern when the U.S. Defense Department’s Film and Television Liaison Office demands changes in screenplays in exchange for cooperation with Hollywood.104 Wal-Mart, the largest U.S. seller of pop music, demands that record companies pro­ vide it with new and sanitized versions of their products, changing both cover art and song lyrics. Wal-Mart claims that this is not censorship, be­ cause music fans can purchase the original product elsewhere. Yet, WalMart often drives competing stores from the small towns that it domi­ nates. Western reporting on Chinese intellectual issues is doggedly negative, in contrast with our treatment of other parts of the world. The Western press made much of the 1996 regulation that all Internet users in China must register with the police. I duly registered in Nanjing in 1996. No jack-booted thug examined my hard drive; I filled in a one-page form, providing my identification (passport) number, address, the name of my network, my e-mail address, and declared that my “purpose for net­ working” was e-mail. Around the same time, there was a false report that China had closed access to China News Digest, an electronic periodical published by Chinese in the West. But China News Digest continued to ap­ pear on my Nanjing computer, unimpaired.105 Many Americans seem to feel much more threatened by limits to free­ dom in China, over which they have little influence, than by government action in their own country, whether it be school boards expurgating clas­ sic art, the Justice Department examining library records, or the National Security Agency eavesdropping on phone conversations.106 One well-meaning businesswoman in Oakland, California, shipped over eight thousand books to China, arguing that “They need books . . . because of the mandatory dark ages that occurred there, and all of the book burning. All of the library shelves—everything—were emptied.” She worked through an organization called Gateway to China. “They’re going to send me pictures back of all the Chinese people holding the books, being so happy.”107

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Some readers may be unhappy with my treatment of censorship. The struggle against tyranny is aided by black-and-white representations, thus the complex nuances of Chinese censorship is frustrating. Censor­ ship of the sort that most Westerners resist certainly exists. But there is also business as usual “editing” that is not so different from our own ex­ perience. My point is not that Western and Chinese styles of censorship are identical, for they are not, but that we cannot understand the complex issues faced by China’s intellectuals as long as we pretend that freedom is without limit in the West. No nation can ever remove all forms of censor­ ship, although all can struggle to undermine its power. If we continue to treat China as if its artists are sullen robots subject to Cultural Revolution conditions, we only use censorship as an ideological whip and contribute little to a more open China or a more intelligent America. NOTES 1. For U.S. examples, see Marjorie Heins, Not in Front of the Children: “Inde­ cency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001). 2. Notable exceptions are Perry Link, The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Geremie R. Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia Univer­ sity Press, 1999); Perry Link, “The Limits of Cultural Reform in Deng Xiaoping’s China,” Modern China 13(2) (April 1987), 115–176; Judy Polumbaum, “The Tribu­ lations of China’s Journalists after a Decade of Reform,” in Chin-Chuan Lee, ed., Voices of China: The Interplay of Politics and Journalism (New York: Guilford Press, 1990), 33–68; Michael Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics (Berkeley: University of California Institute for East Asian Studies, 1992); Jerome Silbergeld, “Art Censorship in Socialist China: A Do-It-Yourself System,” in Eliza­ beth C. Childes, ed., Suspended: Censorship and the Visual Arts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 299–332; Lynn T. White III, “All the News: Structure and Politics in Shanghai’s Reform Media,” in Chin-Chuan Lee, ed., Voices of China, 88–110; and Yi Chen, “Publishing in China in the Post-Mao Era: The Case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Asian Survey 32(6) (June 1992), 568–582. 3. Yi Chen, “Publishing in China,” 569. 4. On the history of censorship, see An Pingqiu and Zhang Peiheng, eds., Zhong­ guo jinshu daguan [“A survey of banned books in China”] (Shanghai: Shanghai Wenhua Chubanshe, 1990). This volume ends with the fall of the Qing Dynasty, but its publication shortly after the 1989 crackdown was itself a statement against cen­ sorship. On censorship in the republican period see Lee-hsia Hsu Ting, Government Control of the Press in Modern China 1900–1949 (Cambridge: Harvard University East Asian Research Center, 1974); and Frederick Wakeman Jr., Policing Shanghai 1927–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press), esp. 171–173, 238–240. 5. On the Soviet censorship system, see Marianna Tax Choldin and Maurice Friedberg, eds., The Red Pencil: Artists, Scholars, and Censors in the USSR (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

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6. White, “All the News,” 103. 7. J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 34. 8. There is a parallel in China’s adoption of Soviet practice in statistics, where China’s statistical bureaucracy was much more decentralized and politically weaker. The Soviet Union had 41,000 personnel in central statistical agencies in 1987, while China had 46 in 1976, and 280 after the beginning of the reforms in 1981. Yasheng Huang, “The Statistical Agency in China’s Bureaucratic System: A Com­ parison with the Former Soviet Union,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 29(1) (March 1996), 59–75. 9. “Some Topics Reportedly Banned in ‘Major’ Papers,” Hong Kong mingbao (February 16, 1993), in FBIS Daily Report China (February 17, 1993), 11–12. 10. The Publishing Bureau preceded the Press and Publishing Administration in having a national body of censors. 11. Chen Zhuli, “Anti-Porn Drive Focuses on Electronic Products,” China Daily (December 29, 1995). 12. Jane Leftwich Currey, ed. and trans. The Black Book of Polish Censorship (New York: Vintage, 1984). This manual came from a Krakow censor who defected to Sweden in 1977. Its excellent introduction contains the depressing information that the typical Polish censor was a recent female university graduate in the hu­ manities, put on the job after a six-week training course. More happily, the job had a high turnover. 13. Criticism Group of the Central Broadcasting Administrative Bureau, “The Gang of Four Cannot Escape from Their Crimes of Encircling and Suppressing Broadcasts on Literature and Art,” Beijing Domestic Radio (February 4, 1977), in FBIS (February 7, 1977), E18. 14. The conventional word for censor is shencha (“to inspect”), which implies prepublication, preperformance, or preexhibition inspection. 15. On the relaxation of exhibition supervision, see Maria Galikowski, Art and Politics in China, 1949–1984 (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1998), 183–187. 16. “Fangxin, fangshou, fangxia jiazi” [“Relax, let go, put down your airs”], Renmin ribao (October 22, 1980). 17. Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro, After the Nightmare (New York: Knopf, 1986), 31. 18. For several years, a lively monthly entitled Lies of Our Times tracked the dis­ tortions of our national newspaper of record for leftist newshounds, but it pre­ dictably died from financial weakness. The propaganda model developed by Chomsky and Herman describes how ideological filters cleanse the mass media in a capitalist society. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988). 19. It may seem odd that artists can also be censors, but there is precedent in nineteenth-century Russia, where several outstanding poets and the novelist Gon­ charov helped the czars block unsavory books from the West. See Marianna Tax Choldin, A Fence around the Empire: Russian Censorship of Western Ideas under the Tsars (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1985). 20. Barmé, In the Red.

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21. Zhao Dan, “Guande tai juti, wenyi mei xiwang” [“If controlled too tightly, the arts have no hope”], Renmin ribao (October 8,1980). 22. See especially Wu Zuguang, “Against Those Who Wield the Scissors: A Plea for an End to Censorship,” in Helmut Martin and Jeffrey Kinkley, eds., Modern Chinese Writers: Self-Portrayals (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1992), 34–40; and “Wu Zuguang: A Disaffected Gentleman,” in Geremie Barmé and John Minford, eds., Seeds of Fire, 2nd ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 368–372. 23. While few artists seem to have been jailed, several publishers have been jailed or sentenced to death for publishing pornographic materials. 24. Tom Korski, “Press Gag Protests Dismissed as ‘Impractical’ by Beijing,” South China Morning Post (April 4, 1997). 25. “UN Cultural Event Riles Tibet Exiles,” South China Morning Post (August 20, 1997). Choephel was released on medical parole in 2002. 26. See “Poets ‘Arrested, Work Seized,’” South China Morning Post (February 2, 1998); “Detained Poets May Face Sedition Trial,” South China Morning Post (Feb­ ruary 3, 1998); Chan Yee Hon, “Poet Ma Given Seven Years’ Jail for Subversion,” South China Morning Post (January 1, 1999). 27. Judith Shapiro and Liang Heng, “Letter from China—Young Writers Test the Limits,” New York Times Book Review (January 11, 1987). 28. Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words, 46. 29. China News Digest—Global (December 9, 1996). 30. “Chen Yi de hei guanxi” [“Chen Yi’s black relationships”], Wenge fengyun [“Cultural Revolution wind and clouds”] 4 (1967), 8–9. This Red Guard maga­ zine, published by the Red Flag Revolutionary Rebel Corp of the Beijing Foreign Language Institute, seemingly drew upon public security taping for this conver­ sation in Guangzhou, which took place the day before Chen Yi gave a famous speech urging more autonomy for artists. The Red Guard journalists observe that Hu Qiaomu had not hesitated in the past to use his power to censor works he did not like. 31. UPI, 11/21/93, Beijing, in China News Digest Books and Journals Review (De­ cember 5, 1993). 32. Tony Rayns, “The Well Dries Up,” Index on Censorship 26(1) (January– February 1997), 91. 33. Link, The Uses of Literature, 81. 34. White, “All the News,” 100. 35. Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words, 20–21. 36. Perry Link, Evening Chats in Beijing: Probing China’s Predicament (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 179 37. V. S. Naipaul wrote about Iran in “After the Revolution,” “There was cen­ sorship, of course; there was no secret about that. There was an especial cruelty about book censorship. Every book had to be submitted to the censors not in type­ script but in its printed and finished form, and after the full print run. It made for a passionate and searching self-censorship. However much you wanted to be in the clear, though, you couldn’t always be sure that you were. Was music all right? There were different opinions. Was chess all right, or was it a form of gambling? Eventually Ayatollah Khomeini had said it was all right, and that had become the law.” (The New Yorker [May 26, 1997], 48)

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38. Liu Binyan, A Higher Kind of Loyalty (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 269–271. 39. Taiwan censorship was also postpublication. Lin Wenyi of the Qianwei [“Vanguard”] Publishing Company reported that four of his company’s books were suppressed by the Guomindang in 1989, causing considerable financial loss to his company. Personal interview (September 1, 1989). 40. On Dongfang, see Willy Wo-lap Lam, The Era of Jiang Zemin (Singapore: Si­ mon & Schuster, 1999), 42–43. 41. According to Jerome Silbergeld, “Art Censorship in Socialist China.” 42. Zhang Xinxin and Sang Ye, Chinese Lives (New York: Pantheon, 1987), 143. 43. Wu Zuguang, a fearless critic of the censors, summarized the genre differ­ ences: “Fiction and poetry, for example, get by much better because one must first carefully read them, word by word, and the hatchetmen are unwilling to work so hard. In general, the fine arts can get by all right, too, and music is so deep and mysterious that it can survive well above the fray. Drama and film, however, are most unfortunate in being easily understood and therefore having no place to hide.” Wu Zuguang, “Against Those Who Wield the Scissors,” 37. 44. For a clear account, see Orville Schell, The Mandate of Heaven: A New Gener­ ation of Entrepreneurs, Dissidents, Bohemians, and Technocrats Lays Claim to China’s Future (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 293–310. See also Daniel C. Lynch, Af­ ter the Propaganda State: Media, Politics, and “Thought Work” in Reformed China (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999), 84–93; and Yang Lian, “Return to Beijing,” New Left Review 4 (July–August 2000), 37–48. 45. “Publishing House Accused and Closed,” China Daily (April 21, 1989). 46. China News Digest—Global (April 18, 1997). 47. Jamie James, “Bad Boy,” The New Yorker (April 21, 1997), 50–53. 48. Fox Butterfield, “China Sending Party Workers to Villages in New Indoctri­ nation Drive,” New York Times (May 15, 1980). Jiang Wen’s 1994 film In the Heat of the Sun, a coming-of-age tale set during the Cultural Revolution, contains a satirical scene of an internal showing of a European costume drama. Teens sneak into the forbidden screening, catching their revolutionary leaders watching naked actresses. 49. Some internal publications were closed in 1996 and 1997. “Beijing dang’an,”Jiushi niandai (April 1997), 93. 50. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, “Of Gender, State Censorship, and Overseas Capital: An Interview with Chinese Director Zhang Yimou,” Public Culture 5 (winter 1993), 297–313. 51. George Orwell, “The Prevention of Literature,” in John McCormick and Mairi MacInnes, eds., Versions of Censorship (Chicago: Aldine, 1962), 285–299. 52. The Guomindang flag might have been problematic around 1985, but not in 1997, especially with the cartoon’s blatant mockery of Chiang and his foreign sup­ porters. 53. Su Tong, “Hu Feng pingfan zhi hou” [“After Hu Feng’s rehabilitation”], Zhengming 37 (November 1, 1980), 20–21. 54. On the dismissal of the editors of Meishu [“Fine arts”], see John Clark, “Of­ ficial Reactions to Modern Art in China since the Beijing Massacre,” Pacific Affairs 65(3) (fall 1992), 334–352. 55. Willy Wo-lap Lam, “Academics Lose Jobs in Purge of Liberals,” South China Morning Post (October 12, 1995).

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56. “Poet Accuses Authorities over Sacking,” South China Morning Post (May 22, 1998). 57. “Clampdown Sparks Rush to Beat Censors,” South China Morning Post (July 8, 1989). 58. Marsha Wagner, talk at Bryn Mawr College (April 19, 1991). The poem is in Renmin ribao (haiwaiban, “overseas edition”) (March 20, 1991). In much the same spirit, Chinese wishing to access a computer for the Asian games had first to re­ spond yes to the question, Is Li Peng a killer? Fang Lizhi, talk at University of Cal­ ifornia, Berkeley (May 9, 1991). 59. Lowell Dittmer, China’s Continuous Revolution. The Post-Liberation Epoch 1949–1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 247. 60. Zhongguo nianjian 1996 [“China yearbook 1996”] (Beijing: Zhongguo Nian­ jian She, 1996). 61. Yi Chen, “Publishing in China,” 568–582. 62. See Anthony Kuhn, “Mass Media—Rushing into Print,” Far Eastern Eco­ nomic Review (September 1, 1994), 52. 63. Li Xiaozhuang, “Zuobiezi dangdao, dalu wentan xianru tongkuqi” [“With the leftists blocking the way, the mainland literary scene descends into a bitter pe­ riod”] Jiushiniandai 256 (May 1991), 38–40. 64. Li Zehou, Mei di licheng [“The course of beauty”] (Hefei: Anhui Wenyi Chubanshe, 1994). 65. Hong Kong Zhongguo tongxun she (June 9, 1992), in FBIS-CHI-92-117 (June 17, 1992), 25. One of the movies released, three years after its production, was Zhang Yuan’s Mama, which explores the problems of retarded children and their families. Zhang Yuan remains controversial for his recent film on a homosexual theme, East Palace, West Palace. Geoffrey Crothall, “‘Controversial’ Film Released after 3 Years,” South China Morning Post (June 3, 1992), in FBIS-CHI-92-108 (June 4, 1992), 14–15. 66. Joseph Man Chan, “Calling the Tune without Paying the Piper: The Re­ assertion of Media Controls in China,” in Lo Chi Kin, Suzanne Pepper, and Tsui Kai Yuen, eds., China Review 1995 (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1995), 5.13–5.14. 67. See Qu Zhihong, “Publishers to Receive ‘Greater Autonomy’ in 1993,” Beijing xinhua (December 24, 1992), in FBIS-CHI-93-002 (January 5, 1994), 18–19. 68. Goran Lijonhufvud, Going against the Tide: On Dissent and Big-Character Posters in China (London: Curzon Press, 1990), 87. 69. “Deng Xiaoping guanyu muqian xingshi he renwu de baogao” [“Deng Xiaoping’s report on the current situation and responsibilities”] (January 6, 1980), Zhengming 29 (March 1, 1980), 17. 70. “Underground E-Mail Magazine in China,” China News Digest—Global (June 23, 1997). 71. Lynch, After the Propaganda State. 72. “Uphold and Safeguard the Four Basic Principles,” Jiefang Ribao 17 (April 1981), in FBIS, April 21, 1981, K3. 73. Hua Li, “Some Critical Notes on the Novel Recurring Death,” Wenyi bao (Oc­ tober 19, 1991), in FBIS-CHI-91-216 (November 7, 1991), 29; “Chairman of Ningxia Artists Federation Reelected,” Beijing xinhua (March 9, 1993), in FBIS-CHI-93-054 (March 23, 1993), 65.

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74. A Taiwan newspaper awarded Wang a literary prize for the novel. See “‘Huangjin shidai’ liang’an dayu butong” [“‘Golden Years’ receives different treat­ ment on the two shores of the Taiwan Strait”], Mingbao yuekan 360 (December 1995). 75. Wei Hui, Shanghai Baby (New York: Pocket Books, 2001). 76. “Best-Selling Novel Banned for Sexual Contents,” China News Digest— Global (February 8, 1994). 77. For background on Jia and his novel, see Zha Jianying, China Pop (New York: The New York Press, 1994), 129–164, and Barmé, In the Red, 181–187. 78. For example, see the interview with Chen Kaige, Patrick E. Tyler, “Who Makes the Rules in Chinese Movies?” New York Times (October 17, 1995), or Agence France Presse English Wire, “Government Denies Banning Zhang Yimou from Making Movies” (September 12, 1994), in China News Digest (September 14, 1994). 79. For example, Rudolf G. Wagner, The Contemporary Chinese Historical Drama: Four Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 80. Maggie Farley, “China’s Late-Night Radio Programmes Tell It Like It Is” Los Angeles Times (November 8, 1994), in China News Digest Books and Journals Review (November 13, 1994). 81. Timothy Tung, “Porridge and the Law,” Human Rights Tribune 3(21) (spring 1992), 9. 82. See Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words, 124. 83. Los Angeles Times (July 7, 1988). 84. “Sizhong yingpian dingwei ‘shaoer buyi’” [“Four kinds of movies desig­ nated ‘not suitable for children’”], Fuzhou wanbao (April 17, 1989). 85. Xie Wenqin, “Wanzhong—Zhongguo tansuo yingpian de ‘wanzhong’?” [“Evening bell—Is it the ‘evening bell’ for Chinese films of exploration?”], Fuzhou wanbao (April 2, 1989). 86. In the spring of 1989 in the North Fujian city of Ningde, police removed a poster for the film, claiming that it was pornographic. Fujian television’s News Half-hour covered the controversy, allowing the theater manager and vice director of the provincial film bureau to defend the poster (April 21, 1989). 87. “State Council Directive to Control Flow of Information in China Sparks In­ ternational Criticism,” China News Digest—Global (January 22, 1996). 88. See the fine essays in Timothy B. Weston and Lionel M. Jensen, China beyond the Headlines (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). 89. Chang Chuan, “Beida dangyuan yunniang jiti tuidang” [“Beijing Univer­ sity Party members ferment to collectively quit the Party”], Zhengming 138 (April 1989), 9; He Shaoming, “Shouge qianming tuanti dansheng zhihou” [“After the birth of the first petition-signing group”], Zhengming 138 (April 1989), 11. 90. “Su Shaozhi lun: ‘shuangguizhi’ yu ‘guandao’” [“Su Shaozhi on ‘the twotrack system’ and ‘official turnover’”], Fuzhou wanbao (April 20, 1989). 91. Human Rights in China and Index on Censorship offer continuing coverage of censorship issues in China. 92. “Prints That Cross Cultures,” Chronicle of Higher Education (February 25, 2000), B112. 93. Mo Yan, The Garlic Ballads, Howard Goldblatt, trans. (London: Penguin Books, 1996). The title might also be rendered “garlic shoots of wrath,” as the Chi­ nese “fennu di xuantai” is a play on Steinbeck’s famous book (“fennu di putao”). 94. See Howard Goldblatt’s translator’s note in the Penguin edition.

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95. The Penguin edition restored Stalin: “Novelists are forever trying to dis­ tance themselves from politics, but the novel itself closes in on politics. Novelists are so concerned with ‘man’s fate’ that they tend to lose sight of their own fate. Therein lies their tragedy.” 96. On Mo Yan [“Guan moye”], see Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie, The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 415–416; Michael S. Duke, “Past, Present, and Future in Mo Yan’s Fiction of the 1980s,” in Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang, eds., From May Fourth to June Fourth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 43–70; and Lu Tonglin, Misogyny, Cultural Nihilism, and Oppositional Politics: Contemporary Chinese Experi­ mental Fiction (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1995), 51–74. Mo Yan dis­ cusses his gratitude to the army for sending him to the People’s Liberation Arts Academy in 1984 in Mo Yan, Hui changge di qiang [“The wall that could sing”] (Taipei: Maitian Chuban Gufen Youxiangongsi, 2000), 45–49. 97. The show, which was sponsored by Hong Kong’s Hanzart TZ Gallery and the American Federation of Arts, was also seen in Vancouver, Fort Wayne, Mil­ waukee, Kansas City, and Chicago. I was in China and unable to see the show, but examined with interest the kit of press clippings provided by Larry Fong of the University of Oregon Museum. 98. “In Art,” Eugene In Town (March 1996). 99. See the account in Ya Lan, “Qiangsheng xianghou: xiandai yishuzhan de fengpo” [“The gunshot’s echo: The storm over the contemporary art exhibition”], Jiushiniandai 231 (April 1989), 50–52. 100. Jayne Merkel, “Art on Trial,” Art in America (December 1990), 41–51. 101. Kevin Kwong, “Dramatic Demands for Freedom of Expression,” South China Morning Post (July 1, 1997). 102. Reuters, “Lawsuit Filed over Rights on Internet,” South China Morning Post (August 5, 1997). 103. For instance, see special China issue of Index on Censorship 26(1) (January–February 1997). 104. David Robb, “To the Shores of Hollywood: Marine Corps Fights to Polish Image in ‘Windtalkers,’” Washington Post (June 15, 2002). 105. On Internet regulation, see Geremie R. Barmé and Sang Ye, “The Great Firewall of China” Wired (June 1997), 138–150, 174–178. See also Helen Johnstone, “Beijing Opts out of Plan for Censors on the Net,” South China Morning Post (De­ cember 11, 1997). 106. Madison Middle School in Eugene, Oregon, banned the image of Michelangelo’s “David” in 1991. The National Security Agency has long moni­ tored international e-mail, fax, and telephone communication from the United States. Civil liberties protections do not apply because the communications are bugged outside of the borders of the United States. See Nicky Hager, “Exposing the Global Surveillance System,” Covert Action Quarterly 59 (winter 1996–1997), 11–17; and James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America’s Most Se­ cret Agency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982); and Duncan Campbell, “Inside Echelon,” Telopolis, at www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/te/6929/1.html (July 25, 2000). 107. Catherine McEver, “West Oakland Serenade,” East Bay Express 12(30) (May 4, 1990), 21.

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Artists as Professionals

T

he Godzilla model of China’s arts sketched in chapter 1 is unsatisfy­ ing because it imagines a Chinese state that is both consistent and om­ nipotent, while the record shows a polity far more internally divided, er­ ratic, and ineffectual. The Godzilla model is not much better when it comes to artists, whom it romanticizes as heroes and rebel-dissidents. If the Chinese state is unreservedly evil, then artists must wage war against their oppressor, either openly daring its terrible punishments or covertly resisting its malign grasp. The alternative is to sell out, to become a moral weakling complicit in sustaining an intolerable system. Such a stark al­ ternative is dramatic, but not very realistic. Here I will sketch an alternative narrative: The story of artists in the People’s Republic of China may also be seen as a protracted struggle for profes­ sional status and security. This is not to deny the history of individual op­ pression and heavy-handed political control or the frustrations met by aesthetic experimenters. These issues have been well documented, and we are unlikely to forget them, especially as their relevance persists in China to­ day. Instead, I focus on the search for personal security, as well as artistic free­ dom, and treat the state not only as an adversary, but also as an occasional ally (however unreliable) or a vehicle for the professional aspiration of artists as a group. Students of the arts have tended to downplay the importance of institutional arrangements as they follow their disciplinary quests to under­ stand individual poets, painters, or genres. Institutions do not reveal much about the fate of individual artists, but understanding them may discourage us from mistaking the stereotyped pairing of the terrorizing state versus the cowering aesthete for the more complex reality of China’s cultural politics. 143

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Many studies of the arts in the West look away from individual artists toward structural and organizational factors. Sometimes fascination with social structure can produce a seeming indifference to art’s quality and con­ tent. But this problem is inherent in the dissident-hero school of interpreta­ tion as well. There the key question about an artist is his or her stance to­ ward the state, a query that sometimes produces odd results. For instance, looking at the existing Western literature, one might think that the brave and irrepressible (but mediocre) writer Bai Hua was a major literary figure. The arts reflect the tension between two trends: after 1949 the arts be­ came more political, but they also became more professional. The highly visible politicization of the arts has received considerable attention in the literature on modern Chinese culture. Art has been closely tied to the po­ litical demands of the moment. Sinologists commonly understand that the arts in China have long been enmeshed in politics, both from the her­ itage of premodern cultural practices and from the introduction of Lenin­ ist political organization into the arts world. The slower process of professionalization has been less flamboyant and examined far less. Patronage of the arts by the new Communist state con­ tributed to the development of professionalism in the arts, if often indi­ rectly and unevenly. Although Maoist practices harshly limited the per­ sonal independence of artists, cultural reforms of the 1950s for the first time assured steady employment and improved working conditions for China’s artists. A second wave of cultural reforms in the 1980s, by loosen­ ing the hand of state patrons, permitted greater authority to devolve onto increasingly autonomous arts institutions. Even though some reforms have worked against professionalism, the group consciousness of artists has been formed in reaction to assaults upon their corporate privileges. This is not a narrative of heroism, although it recognizes the bravery of many individuals. The story has loose ends, although the long-term pattern is clear enough. It is a tale of changing techniques of political control over the arts and of artists’ shared responses. This chapter first takes up the implica­ tions of considering the arts as a profession, then explores the Party’s succes­ sive efforts to prevent professional autonomy, initially by appropriating the arts’external forms as a kind of control mechanism, and then by trying to ex­ tirpate their social basis. Neither of these responses worked very well; in the reform period indications of professionalism emerged once more, along with evidence that the Party now finds this professionalism more palatable.

IS ART A PROFESSION? Professionals in any society share a corporate identity based upon their training and expertise, a sense of social responsibility, and a widely rec­

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ognized right to take part in setting their own standards. Professionals of­ ten enjoy material benefits that flow from their jobs, but their motives are usually not exclusively economic. They also have their own organizations and enjoy considerable autonomy in their work.1 In Work and Integrity William M. Sullivan designates the briefcase as the emblem of profession­ alism because it signifies workplace autonomy, lack of supervision, and work so important that it must be taken home.2 The concept of the pro­ fession has proved valuable in discussing modern, knowledge-based so­ cieties, where it has long been part of popular discourse. Yet, “professional” is not a very tidy category. Western studies disagree in naming the exemplary professional occupation, with American studies focusing on physicians and lawyers, while German scholars are inclined to look first at civil servants. Other occupations commonly regarded as professional include accounting, teaching, and engineering, but there are many examples of occupations where work is only partially professional­ ized, such as journalism, advertising, cooking, and chiropractics. National differences make it “unlikely that we will find one modal pattern of or­ ganizing professional work in all modern societies,” as earlier work on professions suggested.3 Sheldon Rothblatt contrasted profession to class, another indispensable, yet frustrating social category, finding that professional occupations did not easily merge with classes, although they might in certain cases simulate several of the principal features of classes: a style of life similar to upper income levels, but not quite; competitive like en­ trepreneurs, but not quite; or oriented toward the market, but not quite; joined in solidarity like the organized working classes, but not quite; offering their labor or skill like workers, but not quite.4

In the West, professionalism grew alongside industrial capitalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when early professional organ­ izations displayed a deep ambivalence toward the market, which helped inspire their new organizations.5 This early animus toward the market is now often forgotten, but it provided the framework by which profession­ als learned to distinguish their advanced training, credentials, technical expertise, and regular work for income from the superficially similar ac­ tivities of amateurs and “dabblers.” But if professionals were character­ ized by work, they needed to show that this was the opposite of depen­ dent and unskilled proletarian work. The Arts Are Slow to Professionalize The arts are not easily professionalized in any nation. Artists have spe­ cialized technical expertise, but credentialed training is more extensive in some arts (classical music and the fine arts) than in others (jazz, acting,

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poetry, folk music). A collective sense of social responsibility is relatively unformed; there is no readily shared vision, such as creating or spreading beauty, which might be comparable to physicians’ commitment to healing or bureaucrats’ idealized goal of impartial administration. Artistic work varies enormously in its autonomy. Architects may be the most clearly professional, with self-determined codes of conduct and self-regulating organizations (advanced by their work with big-ticket commodities) and their need to deal bureaucratically with public health and building codes. Yet, other arts are less in control of their own destinies.6 Finally, readers, viewers, and listeners who consume art expect to react critically to it; au­ dience engagement with art is fundamental to the aesthetic experience. Artists are not professionals in the same sense as electrical engineers or orthopedic surgeons, whose technical prowess is less commonly judged by amateurs. Material factors may be the greatest impediment to fuller professional­ ization of artistic work. According to Steven C. Dubin, Arts are an enigma; they challenge many of the accepted notions of what it means to be members of a professional group in this society. On the one hand, they tend to undertake an extended period of formal training, main­ tain affiliations with professional organizations, and develop a strong sense of identification with their chosen fields. On the other hand, they are subject to a number of highly contrasting trends. Their rates of unemployment and underemployment are marked, their income and the status they are accorded is low, and the degree of control and predictability they have over career lines is low relative to other professional groups.7

One thinks of poets, few of whom can support themselves through their writing, or the large numbers of aspiring dancers, novelists, actors, and singers who support themselves with “day” jobs in Western coun­ tries. In the United States, even winners of Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards cannot live on their literary earnings alone. Only 5 percent of writers write full-time, while most “shuttle between full-time and parttime writing, depending on the economic situation.”8 “Professional” mu­ sicians have been relatively successful economically. But they have often accomplished this by turning to labor unions—the symbol of proletarian, not professional work—as a way of dealing with the market.9 Ultimately, the material problem of the arts may well be an oversupply of young, tal­ ented, and ambitious workers, which is probably good for a nation’s cul­ ture, but not for professional organizations wishing to control entry into a specialized type of work. But the arts are not immune from professional drives, as the examples of architects and conservatory-trained musicians show. And, of course, other occupations are problematic, as well. Are business executives pro­

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fessionals? The rise of the M.B.A. asserts a professional status that is not yet completely recognized by others.10 Occupations that talk a lot about their professional status reveal that others may not yet accept their claims. American journalists, for instance, give themselves more awards for “pro­ fessional” achievement than members of any other occupation, suggest­ ing the need to reinforce a point not widely accepted. The uneven profes­ sionalism of journalists is partly structural, as they must entrust their careers to the judgment of corporate managers. The man­ agers are often called ‘editors,’ which makes them sound vaguely like fellow professionals, and are often former journalists. But that is no more relevant than the fact that the managers of universities are called ‘deans’ and are of­ ten former scholars. A manager inevitably comes to identify with the organ­ ization, not with a former craft.11

Artists are also often subject to editors, curators, managers, and agents who are outside the profession. Even when artistic work is relatively autonomous, we have a difficult time recognizing artists’ authority to manipulate the raw materials of beauty into new and inspired creations of innovative power. This would require a technical understanding of what it is that artists actually do when they work. Lacking such understanding, we often prefer to believe in the magic of artistic creation. The situation musicologist Susan McClary describes regarding music is perhaps equally true of literature and the fine arts: Thus, on the one hand, we have a priesthood of professionals who learn prin­ ciples of musical order, who come to be able to call musical events by name and even to manipulate them; and, on the other hand, we have a laity of lis­ teners who respond strongly to music but have little conscious critical control over it. Because nonprofessional listeners usually do not know how to ac­ count intellectually for how music does what it does, they respond either by mystifying it (ascribing its power to extra-human sources—natural or implic­ itly supernatural) or by domesticating it, asserting that it does not really bear meaning). . . . Neither priest nor consumer truly wants to break the spell: to reveal the social grounding of that magic. Thus the priesthood prattles in its jargon that adds a metaphysical component to the essence of music and abdi­ cates responsibility for its power, and listeners react as though mystically— not wanting to attribute to mere mortals the power to move them.12

Moreover, this “magic” is strengthened as the cultural marketplace rup­ tures direct bonds between patrons and artists, thereby encouraging an ideology of “autonomous art.” Here the artist is seen “as detached from society, as working in total independence from external pressures, and as expressing his or her own personality in the work of art.”13 The spiritual

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world of art seems to be magical, and the productive world of art seems to be unconnected to the market; neither artist nor audience has a deep in­ terest in breaking the spell of successful art by calling attention to the fact that the work of making art is, in fact, a job. Arts Professionalism and Political Control In China, the Communist Party has shown widely varying attitudes to­ ward professionalism, not just in the arts, but in all fields. The Party is skeptical, not about specialized training or a commitment to public ser­ vice, but about occupational autonomy. In the case of artistic work, the Party has struggled to maintain control over the high ground of aesthet­ ics. For the Party to allow artists to identify their area of autonomous pro­ fessional expertise as beauty would be to abandon its own authority to set China’s ideological course. Party ambivalence toward professionalism arises from the notion that it alters the power between patron and artist. “Put simply, the more ‘pro­ fessional’ an artist, the greater his artistic authority over his clients and the smaller his dependence in artistic matters on the clients’ needs and demands.”14 Professionalism conveys a right to speak. Artists may speak about beauty, which can spill over rather messily to related questions of truth and justice. Political authorities can stop short of granting full professional autonomy over artistic work and use professional forms as a technique for political control. One can see this phenomenon in other Communist polit­ ical systems. When Josef Brodsky received his first jail sentence in the So­ viet Union, the judge demanded to know by what right Brodsky could call himself a poet. Brodsky could not be recognized as a poet simply because he wrote in verse; in the former Soviet Union, writers of verse were only officially designated poets when they joined the Writers Union. The observation that professionalism can function as a kind of political control system is a mainstay of studies of military affairs, where profes­ sionalism of the officer corps is recommended as a technique for avoiding coups d’etat. Professionalization is not so much a depoliticization of the soldiers as a narrowing of their interests so that they will concentrate on developing their expertise instead of overthrowing parliaments and assas­ sinating presidents and union leaders.15 Students of the military have paid attention to professionalism in China, where the People’s Liberation Army has followed a course similar to the one I trace for the artists: strong pro­ fessional roots established in the 1950s were then weakened in the Cultural Revolution, although against the wishes of professional officers, only to be strengthened again in the post-Mao era.16 The Beijing Massacre demon­ strated that the process was incomplete, as fully professional soldiers do

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not intervene in civil political disputes. Yet, the model is etched in our minds: neutral professionals who follow the demands of technical expert­ ise and solve problems in a rational manner will win out in the end, but only after struggles with state leaders who want to politicize their work. Professionalism in culture has much to recommend it: autonomy from political or economic interference, established standards of work-related expertise, formal training to cultivate talent, and a sense of corporate identity that sometimes becomes an exhilarating esprit de corps. Yet, it is not a flawless way to organize culture: professionals are often isolated from society, elitist toward those outside the corporate group, and conde­ scending toward amateurs, however talented. Professionals also place great value on seniority and are typically mistrustful of popular views, which by definition are technically unsophisticated. By becoming professional, artists can buffer themselves against the heady waves of politics, and politicians can reduce the often unwelcome involvement of artists in the political world by acknowledging for them an honored, but specialized, place in the division of labor. The logic of power dictates that the institutions of rule and the roles at the top of these institutions be less specialized than subordinate units if the rela­ tion of domination is to be secure. Specialization makes for good tools. Spe­ cialists and specialized institutions are not only more effective instruments for given purposes (set by decision-makers at the top), they also have (and know) “their place.” “Cobbler, stick to your last” is the demobilizing injunc­ tion par excellence.17

As an example of apolitical professionalism, consider the American composer Milton Babbitt. A pioneer in electronic music in the 1950s and 1960s, Babbitt developed his esoteric skills without the need to pander to a mass audience, as he had regular income as a professor at Princeton University. Babbitt articulated an extreme, but telling, position on the re­ lationship between the professional artist and the audience: [T]he composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute, and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of the private performance and electronic media, with its very real possibility of compete elimination of the public and social aspects of musical composition.18

Another American abstractionist, the painter Adolf Gottlieb, when asked for whom art is created, responded It is for just a few special people who are educated in art and literature. I would like to get rid of the idea that art is for everybody. It isn’t for every­ body. People are always talking about art reaching more people. I don’t see

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why they should want to reach so many people. For the large mass of people there are other things that can appeal to them. The average man can get along without art.19

This inward looking quality of professionalism often results in a fasci­ nation with the technical problems of art and a related detachment from society, hallmarks of Gottlieb’s abstract expressionism. Professionalism does not necessarily mean disinterest in politics, although those politics will often be directed toward artistic, not social, ends. No Chinese artist is likely to echo Milton Babbitt or Adolf Gottlieb, whose clear positions sug­ gest a professional extreme that Chinese artists have not approached.

THE REVOLUTION WRESTLES WITH PROFESSIONALISM Although artists tend to be individuals who lack enthusiasm for toting professionalism’s emblematic briefcase, there has been a long-term trend over the last century in China for Chinese work and social organization to become more, not less, professional.20 The Communist revolution spurred professionalism as it trained propaganda workers; at the same time, the revolution attempted to control signs of professional autonomy among its artists. The Confucian Ideal of the Amateur China’s dominant premodern ideology of Confucianism sternly depre­ cated the exchange of art for money. An important theme in late Qing Confucianism was the cult of the amateur, the gentleman who painted or wrote poetry for personal cultivation rather than for his livelihood. Gen­ tlemen were not supposed to be interested in money. Moreover, their art (most often painting, calligraphy, or poetry) was regarded as a highly per­ sonal expression, demonstrating their ethical superiority to ordinary peo­ ple. Confucian literati claimed to a special moral voice in society, a stance that would be undercut by turning their lofty artistic expressions into mere goods.21 Even at the end of the twentieth century, memories of cen­ turies of Confucian proscription against selling art linger in the memories of educated and refined Chinese. Yet, we know that this tradition coex­ isted with another in which painters depended upon their skills for their living, albeit to the disdain of amateurs at the top of the social hierarchy.22 If even the gentleman’s art of painting could not keep its amateur purity, it is obvious that China has long had full-time arts workers with the pre­ professional status of craft workers: stone carvers, designers and decora­ tors of temples, musicians, storytellers, and others supported themselves

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through their artistic work. As long ago as the Qin Dynasty, the sculptors of the terra cotta army buried with Emperor Qinshi Huangdi signed their names in the armpits of the soldiers they crafted.23 The elite relied upon such artists, yet sometimes punished them for not being gentlemen. Ac­ tors were so lowly that they were not allowed to take the imperial civil service examination.24 The more formal conceptions of modern profes­ sionalism came to China with Western influence. For instance, the first drama school to offer an alternative to master-disciple pedagogy opened in 1903, and in 1930 the Chinese Theatrical Training Academy, a coeduca­ tional school inspired by European models, opened in Beiping.25 Professionalism and Populism at Yan’an Yan’an, the Communist base area during the war against Japan, is in re­ mote and impoverished northern Shaanxi Province. After Mao Zedong led the defeated Red Army in retreat to Yan’an in 1935 from the Guomin­ dang conquest of the Jiangxi Soviet, the Communists used their new base to extend their reach through North China in the course of war against Japan. The Communists recruited thousands of young peasants to their cause in Yan’an, where they were joined by a wave of patriotic young in­ tellectuals from Eastern Chinese cities. Full of enthusiasm, but without much personal experience coping with the harshness of rural life, these intellectuals provided the Party with teachers, technical experts, and, most famously, propagandists. Writers and artists living in the border regions were, in practically every sense, outsiders. They were of a different class from the masses of north­ west China. They brought with them the culture of urban areas or other regions that were vastly different from those of the rural people of the bor­ der regions. And most importantly, even those who had not lived outside China carried within themselves foreign and cosmopolitan beliefs and ideas. This cosmopolitan culture, born in the New Culture and May Fourth movements, had hardly touched the common people of northwest China and, so, contributed to the remarkable alienation of the leftist intellectuals.26 This alienation was problematic in the Party’s Lu Xun Arts Academy, established to train still more revolutionary intellectuals. While the young intellectuals at the academy were certainly not Confucian gentlemen or ladies, they used Marxism, instead of Confucianism, to justify their dis­ dain of commercial arts and their belief that art should be suffused with (revolutionary) morality. The mission of the Lu Xun Arts Academy and other Yan’an cultural or­ ganizations was to heighten fervor for the war against Japan. There were periodic disagreements about how this should best be accomplished. In

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his study of the arts at Yan’an, David Holm shows that the Lu Xun Arts Academy was surprisingly professional in its outlook.27 Artists tended to disregard Party demands for greater populism. Writers aspired to publish their work in nationally influential Chongqing literary journals. Actors staged Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, as well as Chekov, Golgol, and Cao Yu. The drama curriculum included Stanislavsky’s techniques. Singers learned to use Western vocal production, creating sounds that few north Shaanxi peasants had ever heard. Mao Zedong attempted to bind the young intellectuals to the increas­ ingly urgent needs of the Party’s struggle through the 1942 rectification movement. His “Talks at the Yan’an Arts Forum” established a Party arts doctrine.28 Mao gave his 1942 talks in part to reconcile young, enthusias­ tic, urban revolutionaries to the reality of peasant revolution: give up your cosmopolitan sophistication in order to fashion a propagandistic art that will mobilize peasant warriors in the cause of revolution. The formula is familiar from subsequent repetition: art is not for its own sake, but rather must serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers of the revolutionary masses. Artists must abjure cosmopolitanism and international recogni­ tion to develop “national” forms, the better to recruit people to the revo­ lution. Ideological remolding is an important aspect of the Yan’an talks and the broader rectification campaign of which they were a part. Mao ar­ gued that class struggle was the only basis for forging a new popular unity and that artists must contribute to that unity by giving it a voice. The Yan’an rectification was a crisis over ideological control of Party arts policy; the subject of dispute was ultimately whether Party or artists would control the high ground of aesthetics. Mao claimed this terrain for political leaders, thus denying the autonomy of professionalism to China’s revolutionary arts workers. Yet, in many other respects, Mao’s message supported greater profes­ sionalism. The Yan’an artists were to remold themselves by learning from the masses. But the Party still valued them precisely because they possessed expertise, applied in support of the revolution. Mao did not break up these quasi-professional clusters at the Lu Xun Arts Academy and in other Yan’an cultural organizations; he demanded that they ap­ ply their professional skills with greater doses of populism, so that the art would inspire peasants, rather than delight one’s self and impress fellow artists. Professional artwork was not incompatible with populist content. The Party provided Yan’an artists with materials to support their work, facili­ ties, publications, and protection from the fickleness of the market.29 And artists quickly backpedaled from populism, continuing to display rather condescending attitudes toward folk artists with whom they worked, as well as disdain for the artistic products of peasant culture.30

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The Lu Xun Arts Academy came to play an important role in Chinese cultural history. Between 1938 and 1945, the academy had over fifty fac­ ulty, a hundred research and administrative staff members, and nearly seven hundred graduates—new cadres in literature, music, fine arts, drama.31 After the 1949 Communist victory, its faculty and alumni filled leadership roles throughout China’s arts establishment. The influence of Lu Xun Academy graduates continues, long after most have died or re­ tired, through their students and colleagues. The revolution thus created a professional cohort at its core that, with its esprit de corps, carried pro­ fessionalizing values into the new regime. The Yan’an rectification was a moment in which some artists were dis­ ciplined by the Party and forced to give way on fundamental aesthetic is­ sues. Many of these artists were bruised forever, such as the novelist Ding Ling, who was taken to task for her feminist critique of life in the Com­ munist capital. And Wang Shiwei was ultimately executed for his com­ plaints about social inequalities at the heart of the revolution. Viewed not as individuals, however, but as a group, the Yan’an artists were on a road toward greater professionalism. American art critic Harold Rosenberg argued that the New Deal federal arts projects were ultimately less important for the art they generated than for their struggle to make the work of fine arts more professional, overcoming its traditional dependence upon the wealthy. “The effort dur­ ing the Depression to establish art as a profession was the chief interest of art in the thirties.”32 One might make a similar point about the Yan’an ex­ perience.

APPARITIONS OF AUTONOMY: 1949–1966 With the victory of the Communist Party over the Guomindang, many of the Yan’an artists returned enthusiastically to the sophisticated life of cities, where they staffed new cultural institutions. Many Yan’an-based in­ tellectuals had tired of the difficult work of mobilizing peasants. On the night before the liberation of Beijing, as Communist troops camped out­ side the city, Party fine arts official Jiang Feng remarked excitedly, “Now we can paint oil paintings!”33 At the same time, Mao Zedong warned of “sugar-coated bullets” that would seduce the victorious revolutionaries into letting down their zeal for change. Because many Party leaders viewed the cities as occupied terrain, they constructed there the machin­ ery for a massive program of popular mobilization and cultural engineer­ ing. They hoped to use modern means to extend to the entire population techniques of ideological remolding learned in Yan’an. Throughout the next decade and a half, both practicing artists and senior Party leaders

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had apparitions of greater professional autonomy: the artists saw this as a blissful vision, the bureaucrats as a nightmare. The New State Boosts Professionalism Multiple factors increased the momentum for professionalism among artists. State provision of steady employment was the most fundamental, as the Party’s reorganization of the arts into new institutions created job opportunities. New public schools to train painters, musicians, and opera performers gave important public recognition to artistic work. Academies and conservatories formalized educational processes that had often been left to uncredentialed apprenticeships in the past. The identification of artists as a distinctive community raised the professional consciousness and self-regard of its members. Moreover, the historical association of professionalism with progress and rationalism in the West was repeated in China through the linking of the May Fourth movement’s heritage with the Communist revolution.34 The regime’s new professional associations for artists extended a warm embrace as they offered prestige, career con­ nections with fellow practitioners, and access to artistic facilities. Mem­ bership requirements varied, but typically included demonstration of artistic prowess plus political vetting by recommendation by association members. In the fine arts world, “for most members, the national artists association served as a voluntary professional organization.”35 In the West, professionalism expanded when practitioners of expertisebased occupations sought to mitigate the uncontrolled competition of the marketplace. In China, artists had not been well served by commerce in the first half of the twentieth century. Many agreed with the Party’s casti­ gation of commercialized culture as decadent in values, soft on imperial­ ism, and ignoring class virtue. Before private opera companies were col­ lectivized, for instance, they were criticized for seeking customers by turning to smutty art. Attacks on the commodification of culture echoed older Confucian critiques, but in a new Marxist format.36 In the early years of the People’s Republic, many defended professional standards. For instance, Beijing museums apparently turned town several job applicants recommended by Mao as insufficiently qualified.37 As the Hundred Flowers campaign accelerated in February 1956, the governing council of the Writers Association heard demands for more writers to be given opportunities to support themselves by their art alone.38 At another meeting the following month, Mao Zedong suggested that the Writers As­ sociation set up its own paper mill to help resolve a major shortage that was delaying or preventing the publication of many books.39 Colin Mackerras has described the rise of professionalism in state mu­ sic and drama ensembles, giving special attention to the arts troupes of

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China’s ethnic minorities.40 He shows the improvement of performing standards (spilling over to influence amateur standards, as well), the es­ tablishment of arts schools to replace master-disciple bonds for instruc­ tion, the introduction of full-time troupes of salaried performers, and the creation of permanent theaters for performance in areas where art was formerly itinerant and out of doors (permitting year-long employment and more elaborate productions). Artists throughout the nation were ranked according to a sixteen-grade scale and enjoyed a common welfare scheme. These improvements are “most certainly the result of Han socialism.”41 This conclusion echoes Ted Huters’s assessment of literature: “Pro­ fessional writers as an estate would not have come into existence but for the victory of the Communist Party.”42 The New State Also Extends Political Controls The Communist Party sowed the seeds of artistic professionalism for many reasons. One was certainly the national pride felt by the victorious revolutionaries, who wished to demonstrate their right to inherit the splendor of past dynasties, reminding themselves as well as their new subjects that they were no longer living in caves in Yan’an. Another was a populist urge to spread culture more broadly throughout society. But there was also a widespread expectation that it was important to control the arts as an instrument of rule. This heritage of premodern Chinese po­ litical theory and practice was reinforced by the experience of the Soviet Union, which the young People’s Republic took as a model in so many areas. Rapid cultural expansion made the extension of Communist Party in­ fluence relatively painless, at least until the 1956–1957 trauma of the Hun­ dred Flowers and antirightist campaigns. As new units were created or old ones reorganized and expanded, artists with Communist sympathies could be put in positions of influence. Non-Communist artists could con­ tribute to the greater cause, but safely under Party leadership. But new organizations such as the Fine Arts Association could be used to disci­ pline as well as to reward. Painter Li Kuchan was barred from joining and dismissed from the faculty of the Central Fine Arts Academy after 1949.43 More broadly, the Soviet model of professional organization was a way of influencing non-Party artists by creating an information network that dis­ seminated Party policies throughout arts academies, conservatories, mag­ azines, and performing-arts groups. Chinese Communist use of these associations was learned from Soviet precursors that originated in the 1930s. Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown that these bodies were much more complex than mere Stalinist mechanisms for bullying artists.44 The Union of Soviet Writers and its counterparts

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were born amid the 1932 destruction of the more radical Communist As­ sociation of Proletarian Writers. The Union admitted non-Communists on equal terms with Communists as part of Stalin’s patronage of the old cul­ tural intelligentsia and of such prerevolutionary institutions as the Acad­ emy of Sciences, Moscow University, Bolshoi Theatre, and the Moscow Arts Theatre. Conformity was enforced to “professional norms estab­ lished within each profession through a process of negotiation between professionals, cultural bureaucrats, and party leadership. These norms were often based on emulation of a nonparty cultural figure like Gorky, Stanislavsky, or Makarenko.”45 China’s leaders were initially optimistic that they could also use the self-disciplinary logic of professionalism to extend control over the arts establishment, avoiding Stalinist-style repression. Rudolf Wagner has characterized this professionalism as a metaphor to describe a new role for the writer who was committed to the great general goals of economic and social advance, but op­ erating on his own responsibility. The basic commitment here is not to the Party machinery, but to the “people,” who are as often and as much idealized as the cadres . . . in a time of a well-organized, professional-led economic and social policy guided by a more or less enlightened leadership, supported by the common people, and obstructed by bureaucrats. The writers act as the “trumpet” and spokesman of the “people,” trying to forge a link between high and low through the outside channels of the public sphere, the press and literature.46

“Engineers of the human soul,” a phrase introduced by Stalin’s hench­ man, Zhdanov, was readily adopted by Chinese officials and artists alike. Although most Western intellectuals find the phrase repellant, China’s literati found its suggestion of professionally and scientifically improving culture attractive. Its resonance with both the Confucian tradition of highart moralizing and the May Fourth tradition of using culture as a force for reform assured that even today artists will happily identify themselves on formal occasions as engineers of the human soul. Professionalism Versus Political Control Tensions between artists and their new employers were perhaps in­ evitable, although there was nothing preordained about the magnitude of the conflict. Just as the development of professional organization, corpo­ rate self-interest, and a distinctive worldview in the arts was halting and incomplete, so the evolution of political controls in the arts was erratic. The new arts organizations were too Communist for many non-Party artists (and for some Party members as well), but they also proved to be

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too bourgeois (often a code word for professionally autonomous) for many propaganda officials. From the beginning, Party arts czar Zhou Yang was skeptical that the professional associations were doing their job. In 1951, he complained, “As matters are, these organizations are only working in a highly irregu­ lar manner, leading a sort of haphazard life and existing in name only.”47 In the same year, Hu Qiaomu urged that cultural organizations that did not meet their political obligations should be dissolved and that politi­ cally passive arts workers should be expelled.48 When Mao initiated a campaign against the movie The Life of Wu Xun, Guo Moruo, head of the Arts Federation, was embarrassed to have written an inscription (“Study Wu Xun”) to coincide with the release of the film.49 Yet, for writer Hu Feng, the Writers Association was insufficiently inde­ pendent. He wanted to reduce its authority, to abolish its central publica­ tions, and to found new magazines independent of Party control.50 The 1955 campaign against Hu Feng and others was the first after 1949 to tar­ geted high intellectuals. While relatively few writers were directly af­ fected, it clearly shook the entire cultural world. “Its main effect for high intellectuals was a parallel, in the cultural sphere, to the simultaneous ef­ fect on businessmen of increasing government control of markets. It fright­ ened them into complying with further changes during the Transition.”51 The Hundred Flowers campaign included many attacks on the associa­ tions much in the spirit of Hu Feng’s unsuccessful critique. Rumors cir­ culated that Ai Qing, Chen Qixia, Feng Xuefeng, Xiao Qian, and Ding Ling planned to withdraw from the Writers Association and start new journals beyond the control of the associations and their Party overseers.52 Yet, at the same time, some in the Arts Federation of Zhejiang proposed purging nonprofessionals—including some politicos in the leadership— thereby making the organization a stronger voice for real artists.53 During the Hundred Flowers the associations all heard a diverse range of complaints about the reorganization of culture, and the Party sharply curtailed their influence during the antirightist campaign and afterwards. The associations’ fortunes paralleled the so-called democratic parties.54 Their periods of prosperity and misfortune coincided quite directly. The Shanghai Democratic League increased the artists in its ranks from 52 to 290 in 1956, the year before the end of the Hundred Flowers.55 Resistance to the new organization of culture was not limited to the professional associations. A Hundred Flowers speech by Shi Ximin, direc­ tor of the Shanghai Propaganda Department, called for restoring the cul­ tural market and disbanding many of the professional organizations: The state[-]owned dramatic troupes took over many workers of experience and during the period from 1952 to 1956, 6.11 million yuan of the state funds

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were spent. What the state got in return consisted merely of the cultivation among the theatrical workers, the habit to live under the system of governmentissue, reduced cultural and art activities, the maintenance of huge establish­ ments, redundancy of personnel, and confusion in the professional system. He pointed out that the art activities of the masses are the superstructure and not the economic foundation. Art enterprises cannot be promoted effectively through the system of ownership by the whole people. It is impractical to un­ derwrite the entire theatrical industry. His suggestion was that the art troupes should be changed to collective ownership, freely organized by the actors themselves.56

There was of course an aesthetic background to the issue of organiza­ tion. The Party’s tasks for artists became less attractive precisely as con­ ditions of employment improved. The revolution had demanded artists skilled at exposure, satire, and mobilization. The new regime needed artists who could celebrate its continuing victories and lighten up on so­ cial criticism. For many artists, the web of Party controls that permeated the Ministry of Culture and the professional associations was stifling be­ cause it enforced an external criterion for judging their art, denying their right to be autonomous in their field of expertise. When they demanded either that the new institutions be made more fully professional or that they be allowed to reorganize their activities outside Party domination, Party leaders cut off the discussion. The antirightist campaign of 1957, the Party’s fierce blow against criti­ cal intellectuals, extended far beyond the arts. Of China’s five million in­ tellectuals, 10 percent were labeled as “rightist elements.”57 The long-term impact of such political criticism, which typically (but not always) in­ cluded career setbacks of varying severity, discouraged any open dissent. When this story is only told as a narrative of state suppression of artists, an important outcome is ignored. While the artists as a group were cer­ tainly punished, silenced, and terrified, the quasi-professionalism of their organizations resumed, continuing until they were closed during the Cul­ tural Revolution. Professional except in aesthetic autonomy, artists en­ joyed an economically secure status, which meant that they could wait out political campaigns, rather than succumb to pressure to produce works for the moment. Thus, the professional aspect continued to frustrate political control. Mao complained in 1964: In the past 15 years these associations and most of their publications (a few are said to be good) by and large (this does not apply to every individual) have not carried out the policies of the Party, have acted as high and mighty bu­ reaucrats, have not gone to the workers, peasants and soldiers and have not reflected the socialist revolution and construction. In recent years, they have even slid to the verge of revisionism. Unless they make serious efforts to re­

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mould themselves, they are bound at some future date to become groups like the Hungarian Petofi Club.58

Indeed, the professional associations could often protect their artists against some of the harshness faced by most intellectuals. For instance, artists, like top leaders and athletes, received special food rations during the great famine of 1959–1962. Professional associations had to take part in the wave of going down to the countryside to learn from poor and lower-middle peasants in the early 1960s, but they could often shield their members from anything too unpleasant. Guangdong novelist Ouyang Shan “spent most of the time in his room writing” when sent down to learn from the peasants in 1964.59 Sending artists to the factory and the countryside was justified as either reeducation (learning from the masses) or research (gathering materials for artistic inspiration). The latter was more likely to turn into pleasant trips to famous beauty spots with good accommodations. Marshal Chen Yi, hero of the revolution and China’s foreign minister, actively protected artists, using an old-fashioned paternalism to strengthen aspects of professional organization against external influence. As foreign minister, Chen Yi was responsible for the Oriental Song and Dance Troupe, which specialized in cultural diplomacy. He protected them in 1965, arguing, “Since dancing itself is physical labor, you need not go to the countryside to take part in labor.”60 In a 1962 Guangzhou speech very popular with artists, Chen Yi insisted on maintaining a professional division of labor: Workers should devote themselves to work, peasants to farming, and com­ mercial departments to commerce. I just don’t understand why they should establish contacts with writers. . . . In the past [the writers] looked down upon the masses and sat over them; now they have turned around and wor­ shiped the masses blindly. All this is anti-Marxist.61

THE CELEBRATION OF THE AMATEUR Marshal Chen Yi was more supportive of artistic autonomy than most top Party leaders. Yet, such powerful figures as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaop­ ing were also content with a rather high degree of artistic professionalism, which they saw as a mild and generally effective method of maintaining Party guidance over the arts world. But this was insufficient for the Party’s left, which advocated more egalitarian policies to prevent the emergence of a specialized stratum of experts, whether in the arts, sci­ ence, or medicine. Radical leaders such as Mao Zedong were suspicious of the commitment of the formal cultural bureaucracy to serve ordinary

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citizens. An alternative to professionalism was to encourage the develop­ ment of amateur artists, believing that peasants and workers can best pro­ duce the culture that addresses their own needs.62 There were also practical political considerations. Some propaganda of­ ficials believed that amateur arts were “the only way to reach” ordinary workers, whose low incomes sometimes made it difficult to buy books or attend the theater in China’s pretelevision age.63 Amateurs might also provide a kind of counterweight to the highly professionalized arts estab­ lishment that the Party had fostered. Amateur arts programs were a part of the revolution, and had grown rapidly after 1949. For example, by 1960, 7 million peasants participated in a quarter of a million drama troupes, compared to 3,513 professional drama troupes.64 Radicals promoted ama­ teur arts with special ardor in the early 1960s, reflecting frustration with persistent elitism in cultural organizations. At the same time, the breakup of the Sino-Soviet alliance meant that visiting East European arts experts left China, thereby weakening this external support for professionalism. Mobilizing the Masses through Art Radical cultivation of amateur arts was a prominent feature of China’s cultural politics between the Great Leap Forward (1958–1959) and the end of the Cultural Revolution (1976). The Party’s left sought to revive classbased analyses of the problems China faced, hoping to revive its nowfaded revolutionary spirit. The Party’s more insistent glorification of peasants and workers had as its corollary in the arts the cult of the ama­ teur. The Great Leap slogan, “both red and expert,” denigrated technical skills practiced without revolutionary politics. When this way of thinking about the arts intensified in the early 1960s, the idea of artistic genius was attacked as a bourgeois trick to deny the abilities of ordinary people. Shanghai worker poets increased from 889 in 1957 to 200,000 in 1958, pro­ ducing 5 million poems and songs.65 This renewed priority to the masses coincided with a traditionally Con­ fucian disdain for professionalism, although China no longer had a class of leisured amateurs. Far from being leisured, the masses were to be in­ spired, cheered, agitated, and mobilized, both into greater production and into activism for leftist politics. An enthusiast for the cult of the amateur was Shanghai propaganda chief Zhang Chunqiao, later famous for being one of the Gang of Four. In 1958 Zhang cut payments to writers by one-half for all publications con­ trolled by his department, an initiative later followed by the whole nation. Zhang’s Shanghai collaborator, Yao Wenyuan, believed strongly that the living standards for intellectuals should not climb outrageously above that for ordinary workers.66

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The celebration of the amateur brought along a denial of any language that might sustain professional inclinations. By the end of the Cultural Revolution, intellectuals in general were often identified as the “stinking ninth,” referring to their ranking as number nine in a list of politically dis­ credited categories. One American visitor at the time was struck that writ­ ers said they did not want to be known as professionals, but to have their work published anonymously.67 Professional Amateurs The celebration of the amateur employed passionately antielitist rhetoric, yet accompanied some very professional practice. The best-documented case is the once-famous peasant painting movement of Hu County, Shaanxi.68 According to Ellen Laing, “almost every major Chinese profes­ sional artist spent time in Huxian” in the late Cultural Revolution. “It was really through the guidance, actual or indirect, of the disgraced specialists that peasant painting attained any reasonable degree of artistic competence. Although the professional was in official disfavor, his art was not abolished, but submerged; it resurfaced in the guise of peasant amateur painting.”69 How are we to explain this apparent paradox? Cynicism by cultural bu­ reaucrats is one factor. But another is the Cultural Revolution’s fear of the spontaneity of true amateurs. The celebration of the amateur was aborted—or at least seriously limited—by the Maoist elite’s realization that political control mattered more than mobilization. We can see this by examining the handbooks for amateur productions of the model Beijing operas, such as Shajiabang or The Red Lantern, in which every hand mo­ tion, every costume, every prop is specified with meticulous detail, so that local productions of these centrally designed operas will be replicas of the originals, not adaptations.70 We may also see the quick suppression of lo­ cal arts that were apparently too spontaneous. In 1970 a “black drama troupe” was banned for putting Cantonese opera tunes into the model operas, as well as for using other traditional techniques.71 Ellen Judd studied a Shanghai food factory that was known for its am­ ateur singers and dancers, who were given time off from making choco­ late, dried fruit, and cookies for rehearsal and professional instruction. She characterizes such programs as ultraleft in their intense and extreme demands for social change, but rightist in their “exclusion of many po­ tential participants” and dependence upon party hierarchy.72 Despite itself, the celebration of the amateur ended up encouraging professional trends in the arts. The majority of old professionals were sel­ dom heard from during the Cultural Revolution—it is impossible to gen­ eralize on their fates, which ranged from suicide to beating, imprison­ ment, forced work in the countryside, or just fearful oblivion. Yet, other

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arts professionals were held up as stars, such as the novelist Hao Ran, the poet Zeng Kejia, the pianists Yin Chengzong and Liu Shikun, the dancer Liu Qingtang, or the opera singer Hao Liang. Promising young perform­ ers were sought out and cultivated as the next generation of professionals.73 Factories coddled their “amateur” singers. Former Red Guards prac­ ticed the violin in order to join song-and-dance ensembles, a sure ticket out of the countryside. It was easier to recruit “amateur” artists when there was no commercial economy to offer alternatives and when the arts might be an escape from production. Novelist Wang Anyi conveys the status of those who had managed to join song-and-dance troupes in her story of a provincial bal­ let company performing in a small town late in the Cultural Revolution. Its members were permitted to use the public bathhouse two hours before the villagers. As the actresses leave, wet haired and carrying their dirty clothes, “at the door of the public bathhouse the villagers are queuing, their faces dirty, their eyes gluey and their bodies shivering. They look at the girls in wonder and admiration, trying hard to imagine what a blessed, royal life they lead.”74 But serious amateurs who showed too much independence were un­ popular with most officials. One of the cultural incidents early in the re­ form period was the Stars Fine Arts Exhibition of 1979. The young artists were all workers in lowly factory and office jobs. They had no profes­ sional standing and, thus, had to buy their own materials, plus give up for their art opportunities to earn overtime and bonuses. Their show was deemed too political and closed, despite support from Jiang Feng of the Artists’ Association.75 I have argued elsewhere that the Cultural Revolution, despite its rhetoric of opposing Western music, in fact intensified the modernization of China’s traditional musical arts.76 In a similar process, an interruption of the out­ ward manifestations of professionalism proved to be only superficially red, ultimately damaging the amateur, as much as the professional, arts. The Return of the Professionals The return was, first, quite literally a return as formerly disgraced artists came back to China’s cities from the countryside in the early 1970s. This heralded a return to power, alongside the rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping. Deng infuriated the Maoists and pleased many arts professionals by mocking the pretensions of Xiaojinzhuang, Jiang Qing’s favorite village of amateur poets, singers, and dancers: “You can hop and jump, but can you jump across the Yangtze?”77 I do not want to give the impression that China has somehow sup­ pressed amateur arts. Amateur activities continue to be an important part

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of cultural life. But they are now mostly for the pleasure they provide the participants. The state’s cultural centers continue to organize classes, per­ formances, and exhibitions. China remains a nation where one can find inexpensive musical instruments, low-cost paper and brushes, and mate­ rials for seal carving, although these indirect state subsidies are declining, as prices are gradually raised to market levels. Some amateur arts make a public splash, as in Beijing in 1996 when two thousand yangko groups with ten thousand members performed nearly every night. The noise of the drums provoked a wave of angry calls to the city’s environmental pro­ tection hotline; more people complained about drums than about pol­ luted air.78 And of course one can find newer commercial amateur arts ac­ tivities in karaoke bars across the country. Some amateurs became professionals under the reforms. The increase in disposable income in Fujian Province increased demand for local opera in the countryside, and many troupes have become professional without state support. Xianyou County’s Duni Opera Company was probably the most successful of some two thousand newly private com­ panies in the 1980s. It staged over six hundred performances per year, with a repertory of over sixty operas, including eight to ten new produc­ tions each year. Over a million people saw this company annually, al­ lowing it to operate its own opera school for training new members of the company.79

A RENEWED DRIVE FOR PROFESSIONALISM Deng Xiaoping’s reform program may have included the arts only inad­ vertently, but intellectuals quickly seized the opportunity to improve their battered status. The renewal of a drive toward professionalism was part of a broader push for power, fueled by a sense of unjust treatment during the Cultural Revolution and a feeling of entitlement as China’s natural elite. Radicals had urged professional artists to learn from amateurs, who were imagined to embody a more reliable political purity, untarnished by the elitism of the conservatory and academy of fine arts. However super­ ficial this cult may have been in practice, as a symbol it weighed heavily on arts professionals, who began the 1980s determined to show that they were the real artists and that they should be able to run their own affairs without overseeing worker and peasant amateurs. Counterattack by Artists In film actor Zhao Dan’s dramatic article written on his deathbed in 1980, he railed against political leaders who treat professional artists “as if they

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were only a crowd of dim-sighted, insensitive people.” His words captured the spirit of the new demands for professionalism: The party can lead in formulating national economic plans and implement­ ing agricultural and industrial policy. But why should the party tell us how to farm, how to make a stool, how to cut trousers or how to fry vegetables? Why should they instruct writers how to write, or actors how to act? . . . The arts are the business of writers and artists. If the party controls the arts too tightly, they will have no hope. They will be finished.80

Many artists were encouraged when the regime insisted that it would now do things differently, especially after the 1979 National Arts Con­ gress. Party discourse on the arts shifted from the militant jargon of class struggle to a renewed emphasis upon the 1956 slogan “a Hundred Flow­ ers,” supposedly denoting a new era of openness and tolerance. Yet, the cultural vision of Deng Xiaoping’s entourage rarely moved beyond restoring a supposedly purified pre–Cultural Revolution system of state patronage and propaganda: a vision of a golden age, but without Mao. There was little official encouragement to challenge the fundamental sys­ tem by which the arts had been organized since the early 1950s. But some bolder writers did not wait for the Party to lead. Wang Ruowang wrote in Red Flag magazine that in the arts, the Party should adopt the Daoist pre­ cept of “governing through inaction,” adroitly, but inaccurately, claiming the popular Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi as models.81 Artists applied their talents to subverting the foundational myths of Maoist cultural politics. Film, always the most closely supervised medium, was the most controversial. A 1979 screenplay by Bai Hua, Un­ requited Love, drew powerful reactions from threatened bureaucrats who attacked his portrayal of a patriotic painter whose career had been ruined by political campaigns.82 By 1985 the political balance had shifted so that millions of Chinese watched Yellow Earth, a film about an idealistic young art worker in Yan’an, showing his disillusionment as he discovered the impoverished backwardness of the supposedly revolutionary peasant masses.83 The reactivation of specialist organizations increased the momentum for professionalism. Cultural Revolutionary policies had depressed pro­ fessional consciousness by political command and by minimizing ties among experts. The restoration of these ties was an occasion to share ex­ periences of common pain in the antielitist 1960s and 1970s. It turned out that recollection of such experiences of being sent to the countryside or being criticized in mass rallies actually strengthened communities of in­ tellectuals. Maoist administrators had wanted to mold a militant army of revolutionary artists, but they often achieved something very different. In a 1987 interview, the poet Gu Cheng revealed “how important it was for

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him [in the 1979 Democracy Wall movement] to read poster texts by other poets, which he had not heard about but which seemed to share his own attitude to culture.”84 Such feeling were intensified by the state’s own ac­ tions, as it encouraged artists to create works exposing Cultural Revolu­ tionary mistreatment of intellectuals in the “scar” movement in fiction, film, and painting, a corollary to political campaigns to purge radical officials.85 On a more formal level, the revival of professionalism was but­ tressed by the reopening of arts academies and conservatories that had been closed by the Cultural Revolution, and the following decade brought a renewed emphasis on educational credentials in assessing young artists. Surviving leftists in the leadership sometimes criticized what they saw as an aggressive push by liberal artists who used their literary reputations to defy Party discipline and who treated the new emphasis on the Hun­ dred Flowers as a “new breakthrough” against the Party line.86 Others, shifting with the times, curried favor with artists and other intellectuals whose support was increasingly necessary for leadership in the arts world. Former Party arts czar Zhou Yang (head of the Arts Federation, vice president of the Academy of Social Sciences, and deputy director of the Party Propaganda Department) celebrated the March 1983 centennial of Marx’s death by joining a reinterpretation of Party views on alienation and humanism. This step proved too bold for some comrades, who forced Zhou’s self-criticism by November.87 Political maneuvers such as Zhou Yang’s, even when aborted, showed that artists and bureaucrats had much in common as allies. Many of the political campaigns that had harassed professional artists also swept up arts administrators in their wake. Both shared an interest in purging left­ ists. Moreover, the taming of the Propaganda Department meant that ad­ ministrators were more likely to be artists themselves or drawn from the ranks of those sympathetic to artists. Administrators and artists also shared an interest in keeping money flowing to their units, and they both tended to harbor suspicions of the new arts marketplace. Renewed pressure in the arts for professionalism was of course a broader trend throughout China. Physicians put aside Maoist policies that urged combining Chinese and Western medicine, another effort to de­ press elitism by forcing professionals to integrate themselves with folk wisdom.88 Journalists began to discuss professional ethics and suggest that their journalism had objective laws that must be respected.89 The le­ gal profession was essentially re-created, as, first, contracts with foreign firms and later domestic law reform created a massive demand for attorneys.90 In the army, Maoists had abolished the titles and insignia of mili­ tary rank in 1965; the introduction of new uniforms in 1985 proclaimed the new emphasis upon technical skills and professional values over po­ litical spirit. Chinese scientists and engineers followed a pattern similar to

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that of the artists, although with a clearer professional heritage for their fields.91 Managers of state factories organized into a professional associa­ tion in 1985, although local Party leaders threatened by their autonomy frustrated their success.92 Even diplomats, whose political autonomy is re­ stricted in any society, are now usefully seen as a professional group.93 For artists, as for other professional groups, the 1980s were a decade of steady improvement in salaries, working conditions, and facilities, as the Party attempted to win their support by making up for a decade and a half of low investment. The Language of Professionalism As artists demanded higher status, Deng Xiaoping’s government declared that intellectuals were “a part of the working class.” This was a reaffir­ mation of their political position as equal to proletarians, intended as compensation for Cultural Revolutionary abuse that treated intellectuals as inferior to proletarians. But this was not good enough. Many intellec­ tuals, and probably most artists, did not want to be counted as workers, but as something better. Nor they did not want to have their social iden­ tities defined through categories imposed by the Communist Party. The favor of honorary proletarian status had been extended earlier in the 1950s. Bear in mind that proletarian status would be perceived as a down­ ward move for writers and painters, but as upward mobility for tradi­ tionally despised singers and actors. The Association of Chinese Writers became the Union of Chinese Writers by 1954, indicating that its members were actually members of the working class. During the first five-year plan, artists, along with reporters and athletes, were classified as laborers because they earned income by selling labor. But by the antirightist cam­ paign of 1957, the protection of proletarian dignity was withdrawn and they became bourgeois.94 Party actions carried artistic work further to­ ward professionalization than any earlier Chinese regime. Yet, the Party still withheld the name “professional,” both to deny the reality its policies were evoking and to curb the emergence of a conscious corporate identity among artists. With increased self-confidence, many used the word “intellectual” (zhishifenzi) as an emblem of honor, and it is often translated into English as “professional.”95 With “professional,” it shares a certain genteel, whitecollar connotation, while remaining vague about what an intellectual ac­ tually does for a living.96 But fields less securely recognized as profes­ sional felt left behind. Faculty at the Central Academy of Crafts and Design complained that “the average Chinese climbs up the social ladder by acquiring professional titles one after the other,” yet there is still no such professional ladder for designers, who are still called “design work­

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ers.” This lack of recognition of professional status, they argued, was re­ sponsible for the poor quality of their students and the peripheral posi­ tion of designers in society.97 The doggedness of Party resistance to the proliferation of antiegalitarian titles was seen in its refusal until 1994 to agree to restore the use of the title of “academician” in the Academy of Sciences.98 Nonetheless, the Party conceded a point and adopted the discourse of professionalism in its appeals to artists. By 1997, the Press and Publica­ tions Administration appealed to professional ethics as it urged writers and publishers to assist in stopping book piracy and suppressing pornography.99 The Autonomy of the Aesthetic The Party also conceded on the question of whether art can be an au­ tonomous realm with rules of its own, or whether it is ultimately a reflec­ tion of the economy and, thus, subject to political guidance. Some kind of doctrine of artistic autonomy is essential if artists are to assert profes­ sional status.100 If they are not experts on the laws of beauty, what then is the basis of their claim? Critic Liu Zaifu put the claim strongly: such ideas as science for science’s sake and art for art’s sake are “a kind of ‘return to oneself’ [huifu zishen], that is a return by intellectuals to their professional specialization and the creation of a ‘cultural autonomous region’ [wenhua zizhiqu] through which they can actively contribute to society and the im­ provement of social conditions.”101 Wendy Larson has identified the relationship between a theory of au­ tonomy and the practical need for experts: The autonomous aesthetic—literature as art, with its own rules, generative power, and sphere of detached and profound meaning—was the modern theory of literature. This theory demanded not only respect and awe from the educated or those with pretensions to knowledge, but also its own group of academic specialists to teach and interpret it.102

According to Larson, this modern theory of literature replaces older ideas of literature (and other arts) as the embodiment of morality. The choice of a less politicized conception of art bears the risk to artists of a loss of poten­ tial political influence. Is greater peace and creative autonomy worth this price? Yet, it is difficult to sustain a purely aesthetic discourse, even when all participants want to do so. To some extent, claims to professionalism based upon the special nature of aesthetics are opportunistic. Aggressive and aggrieved intellectuals were quick to carve out their own universal jus­ tification for autonomy when they perceived that the state was entering a period of ideological weakness. But artists have not easily abandoned the

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Confucian heritage that entitles, if not requires, them to comment on pub­ lic affairs. Liu Zaifu illustrates this well, in his 1996 book Farewell to the Rev­ olution, a stimulating dialog with aesthetician Li Zehou on a broad range of cultural and political topics, but written without conveying any sense that either may have strayed beyond his professional license.103 Yet, it would be mistaken to dismiss claims of aesthetic autonomy as merely self-serving. In the early 1980s, as the Party began to loosen un­ evenly its political controls over art, propaganda officials withdrew from the job of refereeing aesthetic questions. Even Deng Xiaoping spoke of the “laws of their development,”as if it were apparent that aesthetics fol­ lowed some inexorable internal process for change.104 Initial claims for a separate sphere of aesthetic judgment emerged along with new discord about such fundamental issues as what is beauty.105 A debate over socalled obscure poetry pushed the discussion of aesthetic autonomy even further. Obscure poetry was highly personal and, thus, an innovative re­ action to the tradition of versified propaganda. When critic Sun Shaozhen argued that the declining dominance of the state gave rise to fuller ex­ pressions of the self, he elicited a hostile assault from propaganda officials.106 A national aesthetics rage fueled growth in journals of art and lit­ erary criticism, all needing more professionals to fill their pages and apply their expertise to artistic judgment. One account of how these thoughts about the high principles of aesthet­ ics were stimulated by the daily work of an artist is provided by Liang Xiaosheng’s memoir of a young litterateur’s introduction to Beijing.107 This young graduate of Shanghai’s Fudan University (in the first class admitted after the restoration of entrance examinations in 1977) was assigned to work at the Beijing Film Studio as a script editor, reading fifty scripts per month. He encountered problems when a leading comrade pressed a bad script on the studio as a favor to a friend. When Liang rejected the script, the big shot denounced him and the studio in a letter, which accused them of slighting the works of amateur writers, operating an “independent kingdom,” and behaving as in the days of the Gang of Four. The studio manager and his colleagues saved Liang from a self-criticism, but got no help from the Party secretary. Liang expressed his anger at frequent inter­ ference in the form of suggestions and recommendations from political leaders about promising scripts. If you are the mayor, and I am a citizen, I should listen to you because citi­ zens ought to fulfill their civic obligations. If I am an editor and you are the mayor, and you write a film script, novel, poem, or play, excuse me, but you should listen to me. This is only as it should be. To do otherwise is not fitting. This is called “a difference in the social division of labor,” and we should re­ spect each other’s place in this division of labor. Moreover this is one of the principles of our ancestor Marx’s Communist society.108

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In the end, the Propaganda Department recognized this “difference in the social division of labor” by retreating to the high-sounding concept of “socialist spiritual civilization.” The Party has bandied this phrase about for nearly two decades; with almost limitless ambiguity, the phrase can re­ fer to the loftiest of ideals (how young people can grow up to be patriotic, scientific, and honest in a rapidly changing world); yet, it can also em­ brace the most mundane of tasks (campaigns against public spitting or swearing). It is easy to smirk at socialist spiritual civilization as a lame product of a now exhausted Propaganda Department. But the concept is also that department’s recognition of a special realm that should be re­ garded as above the world of economics and the confusion of the market. This, of course, echoes, without quite admitting, the professional artists’ claim to the autonomous laws of art.109 Even former propagandists may support greater aesthetic autonomy. In late 1989, as I walked across a park with the head of the Xiamen Munici­ pal Arts Association, this former propaganda official and amateur callig­ rapher stopped before a row of flowers that had been arranged to spell out a current political slogan. There he remarked that things of beauty should not be subordinated to politics in this manner. He waited for two junior officials to catch up with us and repeated his observation, just to be sure that I (and they) got the point. More Organization, Less Supervision The professional associations grew quickly. The Writers Association, for example, with eight hundred members upon its restoration in 1979, nearly doubled to fifteen hundred members in 1981. By 1985 there were 2,525 members, by 1988 there were 3,324 members, and by 1996 there were 5,382 members.110 The reactivation of professional arts associations was followed by the creation of new organizations for groups who had previously lacked their own institutional base, such as associations for calligraphers or for those working in publishing, television, or folk litera­ ture, under the broad umbrella of the Arts Federation.111 At the local level, there are new grassroots organizations for amateurs that copy the more prestigious professional modes of organization. Seal carvers, calligra­ phers, photographers, musicians, and others were not incorporated into a national control system and are pretty much ignored by the Propaganda Department. Over eighty new informal arts groups appeared by 1986.112 Vivienne Shue describes the activity in the small city of Xinji, Hebei, with a population of one hundred fifty thousand. There are new volun­ tary groups of people “to paint, to make papercuts, to collect and edit folk legends, stories, ballads, and songs. They organize performances and exhibitions. There are community drum troupes, dance troupes,

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stilt-walkers, acrobats, kite-makers, embroidery circles, and folk paint­ ing associations.” The state plays a facilitating role, instead of “provid­ ing models and dictating restrictions.” And people are permitted to gather regularly—like the one hundred (out of three hundred or so) amateur (fine arts) painters in Xinji who attend monthly meetings of their association—to talk about their art without being subject to heavy political or other guidance of these activities by the party-state.113

This is not to suggest that there have not been ferocious battles over po­ litical control of the national- and provincial-level professional organiza­ tions. Unhappy leftist artists demonstrated their alienation from perhaps excessively professional associations by setting up their own counteror­ ganizations. The Xian Xinghai–Nie Erh Musicians Association rivaled the Chinese Musicians Association.114 In 1985, the National Writers Asso­ ciation was permitted to elect its own officers. In a secret ballot, reformer Liu Binyan came in second to veteran novelist Ba Jin, even though Liu had not been included on the Party’s list of candidates. Some Party can­ didates who had backed the campaigns against spiritual pollution and bourgeois liberalization lost.115 Burned by the experience, the Propaganda Department did not allow elections when the National Arts Federation convened in 1988.116 Yet, if the autonomy of electing officers was denied, the Party continued to permit the expansion of professionalism by press­ ing for the use of legal contracts when appointing executives for arts or­ ganizations. The Party was unable to reestablish complete control over the associa­ tions even in the aftermath of the Beijing Massacre. The National Arts Federation openly supported the student movement, even proclaiming in Wenyi bao on the initial day of martial law (May 20, 1989), “We represent the whole nation’s arts world in expressing respect for the recent patriotic activities of the students. . . . We truly hope and call upon the major lead­ ers of Party and government in all speed to meet directly with the students.”117 After the massacre, Deng Xiaoping’s victorious supporters threatened a thorough purge, but proved unable to bear its heavy political costs. Many individuals did lose their positions on editorial boards. Association jour­ nals such as Fine Arts (Meishu) were reorganized in order to silence out­ spoken reformers.118 The 1989 crisis caused the Party to avoid calling a meeting of the Writers Association National Congress between December 1984 and December 1996.119 The Party perhaps feared first that many writ­ ers would not attend and, later, that their words might bring embarrass­ ment. The reelection of ninety-two-year-old Ba Jin as head of the Writers Association in 1996 assured that the organization would not have unruly leadership.

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When Wang Meng lost his post as minister of culture, he retained his position as a deputy head of the Writers Association and suffered no loss of prestige.120 The association’s leadership, divided among reformers and their opponents, was apparently seen as an appropriate base for a reformminded novelist and cultural official. While reformers have expressed frustration with the associations, it is striking that the associations never seem to have been held in the kind of open contempt that was often ex­ pressed toward their Soviet counterparts.121 The Soviet Writers Union was typically more hard-line than the Communist Party, dragging its feet on publishing provocative literature and demanding stern discipline for lib­ eral intellectuals.122 In contrast, Chinese artists who were outraged by the 1989 massacre expressed their anger by resigning (or threatening to re­ sign) from the Communist Party, instead of the professional associations. The growth of professional autonomy through the 1980s was tem­ porarily reined in by the 1989 crisis. But, by 1992 the Party had given up trying to purge all dissident voices and opted instead for the strategy of urging all arts organizations to strive to earn more money, an approach that ultimately feeds professional autonomy. Although the Party judged that arts professionalism posed no imminent threat to its authority and its intellectual appeal increased, professionalism remains inhibited organizationally.123 The corporate status of artists may be better respected, yet in­ dividual artists remain vulnerable, with little power to protect them­ selves.

THE UNSETTLED COMFORTS OF PROFESSIONALISM The professionalization of the arts in any country will always encounter limits, and in China there are serious political barriers to autonomy for any social organization.124 Yet, fostered by Party efforts at ideological con­ trol over the nation, arts professionalism has sometimes assumed a life of its own, given new energy by the relaxation of political supervision. Yet, the impact of this development is clouded. Professionalism Can Be Illiberal We would like to believe that professional ethics will make a better world, but professional organizations can participate in the worst kinds of polit­ ical mischief as the example of the highly trained and ostensibly profes­ sional judges of Nazi Germany demonstrate.125 It is important to remem­ ber that professionalism is delimited not by political liberalism, but by shared work-based interests. These interests can be quite narrowly drawn, as in the resistance of U.S. professors to regulations against sexual

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relations with their students or the successful lobbying by the U.S. med­ ical establishment for federal funds to pay medical schools to train fewer physicians. The rhetoric of professionalism asserts benevolent public ser­ vice, but this language can cloak a much more self-seeking reality. We should anticipate comparable phenomena from Chinese professionals. For instance, Judy Polumbaum found that many journalists had no objec­ tion to propaganda work, but felt control of it should rest in their hands as technical experts, rather in the hands of outside officials.126 Professionalism, by building shared structures of experience among coworkers, also works to exclude the claims of others. This is typically ac­ complished through raising technical standards, although the evaluation of such standards often bears biases favoring already established groups. In the course of professionalizing its medical school education, the United States closed down two-thirds of the schools that trained black physi­ cians. The professionalization of science similarly excluded women as new academic societies banned their participation.127 A similar pattern may be seen in China, where professionalism has brought a sharp decline in the numbers of women and ethnic minorities in the Writers Associa­ tion. In 1981 there were 115 women and 130 minority members, but by 1988 there were only 41 women and 39 minorities. Given the overall in­ crease in members, this is a change from one woman for thirteen men (6 percent) to one woman for eighty-one men. The drop in minority mem­ bers was from one for eleven Han members to one for sixty-eight.128 Selling Out? Do the emergence of professional structures in socialist societies lead to a kind of pact with Satan, in which artists receive improved material comfort in exchange for not challenging the political order? This view was developed most forcefully in Miklos Haraszti’s The Velvet Prison, a polemic against the condition of the arts in Hungary before the end of Communist rule.129 Haraszti argues that after the end of the harshest Stalinist oppression, professional artists recognized that capitalism is not especially hospitable to state subsidies for art and managed to find cozy places for themselves as (often passive) supporters of the socialist status quo. The art world became relatively soft, tolerant of limited experimen­ tation, and ever more conscious of its ties to the educated middle class, rather than falsely claiming to serve workers and peasants. The profes­ sional values of the artists became one of their strongest bonds to the state. “Under Stalinism, our plight was like that of the fish whose owner foolishly locked the aquarium in fear of its escape. Since Stalinism, the owner has become wiser and the fish happier. The aquarium remains the same.”130

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Is Haraszti’s prison metaphor applicable to China? Geremie Barmé dis­ cusses the cultural politics of the post-Mao period as an East Asian “vel­ vet prison.”131 Yes, Barmé says, conditions have certainly improved for artists over the harsh days of the Cultural Revolution. Yet, many artists are still content to be captives, never pushing their freedom to the limit. He identifies former minister of culture Wang Meng as an exemplary post-Mao arts official, eager to encourage experimentation, yet equally concerned to define the parameters of acceptable aesthetic novelty. Barmé identifies a political dynamic in which state officials seek to co-opt artists. They typically isolate a small number of maverick and possibly socially marginal artists who decline to covet the privileges accorded members of the official organizations for writers, fine artists, musicians, dramatists, dancers, filmmakers, and the like. But Paul Pickowicz points out a logical flaw in the velvet prison hy­ pothesis: it assumes a perpetual motion machine that can never change, yet the Hungarian Communist state’s hegemony was broken, and it very quickly ceased to exist.132 There is an ideological bias in the velvet prison argument, as well. Al­ though the velvet prison concept points to important, dark sides of pro­ fessionalism, these seem to be problems around the world, wherever pro­ fessional artists are employed. It requires world-class ideological blinders to imagine that professional American intellectuals have never sold their integrity for material reward. An evening of U.S. television quickly shows which questions are not posed, which viewpoints are voluntarily ex­ cluded by highly paid professionals. The issue may not be a special form of entrapment for artists in socialist nations, but the pervasiveness of vel­ vet prisons as gentle forms of control. A far better book than Haraszti’s is the study of professional writers in the former German Democratic Republic by Robert von Hallberg.133 He found that professional structures effectively instituted conformity, as professional structures programmati­ cally do. My point here is not that the relevant conformity was exactly of be­ lief . . . but rather of dissent: intellectuals knew very well where the limits of tolerance would be enforced, first by the relevant professional organization, which might expel any member who crossed the line, and only later by other nonliterary sections of the state apparatus. The constant contact with one’s colleagues at meetings and through memoranda helped to hold these boundaries in sight. One surprising lesson that I quickly absorbed from my conversations is that fear of professional difficulties, not of the Stasi, was what enforced conformity. With elaborate professional organizations in place, it just does not take much to control the ideological activity of literary intellectuals. That is a sad truth that deserves consideration by American intellectuals.134

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Like their counterparts in other nations, Chinese professionals some­ times find it difficult to maintain their ideals against material blandish­ ments from the powerful.135 They must often cautiously keep their heads low, doing little better to act boldly against authority than professionals anywhere.

NOTES 1. Important works on professionalism include Eliot Freidson, Professional Powers. A Study of the Institutionalization of Formal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Thomas L. Haskell, ed., The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Konrad Hugo Jarausch, The Unfree Professions: German Lawyers, Teachers, and Engineers, 1900–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Power and the Division of Labor (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1986); Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982); William M. Sullivan, Work and Integrity: The Crisis and Promise of Professionalism in America (New York: Harper Business, 1995). 2. Sullivan, Work and Integrity, 1–2. 3. Rueschemeyer, Power and the Division of Labor, 119. 4. Sheldon Rothblatt, “How ‘Professional’ Are the Professions? A Review Arti­ cle,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37(1) (January 1995), 196. 5. For instance, see Thomas L. Haskell, “Professionalism versus Capitalism: R. H. Tawney, Emile Durkheim, and C. S. Pierce on the Disinterestedness of Pro­ fessional Communities,” in Haskell, ed., Authority of Experts, 180–225. 6. On professionalism in the arts, see Emanuel Levy, “The Choice of Acting as a Profession,” in Arnold W. Foster and Judith R. Blau, eds., Art and Society: Read­ ings in the Sociology of the Arts (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 111–131; David Earl Sutherland, “Ballet as a Career,” in Foster and Blau, eds., Art and Society, 97–110; and Judith R. Blau, The Shape of Culture: A Study of Contempo­ rary Cultural Patterns in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 81–82. 7. Steven C. Dubin, Bureaucratizing the Muse: Public Funds and the Cultural Worker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 25. 8. Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals. American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 225–226. It is the need for alternate employment that makes Pierre Bourdieu assert, “The ‘profession’ of writer or artist is one of the least professionalized there is, despite all the efforts of ‘writers’ associations,’ ‘Pen Clubs,’ etc.” See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Co­ lumbia University Press, 1993), 43. 9. On the difficulty of professionalizing music in the West, see Walter Salmen, ed., The Social Status of the Professional Musician from the Middle Ages to the 19th Cen­ tury (New York: Pendragon Press, 1983).

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10. An airline flight magazine, Hemispheres (December 1997), carried an ad for Certified Marketing Services, Inc., which offers professional certification for sales personnel. “Sales Professionals . . . It’s Time to Show the World You’re at the Top. GET CERTIFIED!” “Certification means quality, integrity, and continuous im­ provement.” Zig Ziglar, a “business motivation speaker” endorsed the product: “This system furthers the cause of professional selling around the world. Top sales people have high moral character and sound professional training, a requirement of the CMSI program.” 11. Christopher Jencks, “Should the News Be Sold for Profit?” in Paul DiMag­ gio, ed., Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 281–282. 12. Susan McClary, “The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during Bach Year,” in Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, eds., Music and Society: The Politics of Composi­ tion, Performance and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 17. 13. Janet Wolff, “Forward: The Ideology of Autonomous Art,” in Leppert and McClary, eds., Music and Society, 3. 14. Jap van der Tas, “Dilettantism and Academies of Art: The Netherlands Ex­ ample,” in Judith Huggins Balfe, ed., Paying the Piper: Causes and Consequences of Art Patronage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 32. 15. The classic study is Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The The­ ory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957). 16. For example, see Harlan Jencks, From Muskets to Missiles: Politics and Profes­ sionalism in the Chinese Army, 1945–1981 (Boulder: Westview, 1981); Ellis Joffe, Party and Army: Professionalism and Political Control in the Chinese Officer Corps, 1949–1964 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965); Ellis Joffe, The Chinese Army after Mao (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Ellis Joffe, “PartyArmy Relations in China: Retrospect and Prospect,” China Quarterly 146 (June 1996), 299–314. 17. Rueschemeyer, Power and the Division of Labor, 162–163. 18. Quoted in Richard Norton, Tonality in Western Culture. A Critical and Histor­ ical Perspective (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984), 249. 19. Quoted in Diana Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde. The New York Art World, 1940–1985 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 48. 20. Xiaoqun Xu, Chinese Professionals and the Republican State: The Rise of Profes­ sional Associations in Shanghai, 1912–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), analyzes the changes in more conventionally professional occupa­ tions during the republican period. Xu concludes that physicians and attorneys had an ambivalent relationship to the state, which ultimately fostered their pro­ fessionalization. 21. On the moral voice of artists, see Ralph Crozier, “Qu Yuan and the Artists: Ancient Symbols and Modern Politics in the Post-Mao Era,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 24 (July 1990), 25–50. I discuss the disdain for money among callig­ raphers in Brushes with Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 22. See Richard Barnhart, “The ‘Wilde and Heterodox School’ of Ming Painting,” in Theories of the Arts in China, Susan Bush and Christian Murck, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 365–396; the essays in Chu-tsing Li, ed., Artists

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and Patrons: Some Social and Economic Aspects of Chinese Painting (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989); and James Cahill, The Painter’s Practice: How Artists Lived and Worked in Traditional China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 23. China News Digest—Global (July 29, 1994). 24. On the social status of actors, see Colin P. Mackerras, The Rise of the Peking Opera, 1770—1870: Social Aspects of the Theatre in Manchu China (London: Oxford University Press, 1972); Colin Mackerras, The Chinese Theatre in Modern Times (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975); and Barbara E. Ward, “Not Merely Players: Drama, Art, and Ritual in Traditional China,” Man 14(1) (March 1979), 18–39. 25. A. C. Scott, Actors Are Madmen: Notebook of a Theatregoer in China (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 8. 26. Ellen R. Judd, “Prelude to the ‘Yan’an Talks’: Problems in Transforming a Literary Intelligentsia,” Modern China 11(3) (July 1985), 377–408. 27. David Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1991). 28. See Bonnie S. McDougall, Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Lit­ erature and Art”: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary (Ann Arbor: Uni­ versity of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1980). 29. Judd, “Prelude to the ‘Yan’an Talks,’” 398. 30. See Chang-tai Hung, “Reeducating a Blind Storyteller: Han Qixiang and the Chinese Communist Storytelling Campaign,” Modern China 19(4) (October 1993), 395–426. 31. Judd, “Prelude to the ‘Yan’an Talks,’” 394. 32. Harold Rosenberg, “The Profession of Art: The W.P.A. Art Project,” in Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 197. 33. Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China (Berke­ ley: University of California Press, 1994), 44. 34. For professional trends in other occupations, see Gordon White, Party and Professionals: The Political Role of Teachers in Contemporary China (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1981); David M. Lampton, Health, Conflict, and the Chinese Political Sys­ tem (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1974); and Richard P. Suttmeier, Research and Revolution: Science Policy and Societal Change in China (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1974). 35. Andrews, Painters and Politics, 227. See also Maria Galikowski, Art and Poli­ tics in China, 1949–1984 (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1998), 11–16. 36. “Ba yishu dangzuo shangpin shi kechi de xingwei” [“It is shameful to treat art as a commodity”], Jiangxi ribao (December 11, 1954). 37. This was Mao’s excuse in 1955 when he declined to use his influence to find a position for an old friend of his first wife, Yang Kaihui. Michael Y. M. Kau and John K. Leung, eds., The Writings of Mao Zedong, 1949–1976 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1986), 448. 38. Lars Ragvald, “Professionalism and Amateur Tendencies in Post-Revolutionary Chinese Literature,” in Goren Malmqvist, ed., “Modern Chinese Litera­ ture and Its Social Context,” Nobel Symposium 32 (Stockholm 1977), 159. 39. Roderick MacFarquhar, Timothy Cheek, and Eugene Wu, eds., The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao: From the Hundred Flowers to the Great Leap Forward (Cam­ bridge: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1989), 237–238.

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40. Colin Mackerras, “Traditional Mongolian Performing Arts in Inner Mongo­ lia,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 10 (July 1983), 17–38; Colin Mackerras, “Folksongs and Dances of China’s Minority Nationalities: Policy, Tradition, and Professionalism,” Modern China 10(2) (April 1984), 187–226; Colin Mackerras, “Uygur Performing Arts in Contemporary China,” China Quarterly 101 (March 1985), 58–77; Colin Mackerras, “Modernization and Contemporary Chinese The­ atre: Commercialization and Professionalization,” in Constantine Tung and Colin Mackerras, eds., Drama in the People’s Republic of China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 183–212. 41. Mackerras, “Uygur Performing Arts,” 76. 42. T. D. Huters, “Critical Ground: The Transformation of the May Fourth Era,” in Bonnie McDougall, ed., Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 79–80. 43. Roderick MacFarquhar, The Hundred Flowers (London: Stevens & Sons, 1960), 191. 44. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Culture and Politics under Stalin: A Reappraisal,” Slavic Review 35(2) (June 1976), 211–231. 45. Fitzpatrick, “Culture and Politics under Stalin,” 231. 46. Rudolf G. Wagner, “The Chinese Writer in His Own Mirror: Writers, State, and Society—The Literary Evidence,” in Merle Goldman, Timothy Cheek, and Carol Hamrin, eds., China’s Intellectuals and the State: In Search of a New Relationship (Cambridge: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1987), 225. Also see Rudolf G. Wagner, Inside a Service Trade: Studies in Contemporary Chinese Prose (Cambridge: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1992). 47. Chou Yang, “Reform the Ideology of Literature and Art, Improve the Work of Leadership,” Peking NCNA (December 5, 1951), in Current Background 156 (Feb­ ruary 5, 1952), 34. 48. Hu Qiaomu, “Why Must Literary and Arts Workers Carry Out Ideological Reform?” Peking NCNA (December 5, 1951), in Current Background 156 (February 5, 1952), 23. 49. Fang Xing, “Ping Zhou Yang zai wendaihui shang de baogao” [“A critique of Zhou Yang’s speech at the congress of literature and art”], Dongxiang 15 (De­ cember 16, 1979), 20. See the indirect criticism by Hu Qiaomu, “Literary and Arts Workers,” 20. 50. Lars Ragvald, Yao Wenyuan and Literary Critic and Theorist. The Emergence of Chinese Zhdanovism (Stockholm: University of Stockholm, 1978), 6. 51. Lynn T. White III, Policies of Chaos: The Organizational Causes of Violence in China’s Cultural Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 137. 52. Douwe Fokkema, Literary Doctrine in China and Soviet Influence 1956–1960 (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), 140, 156. 53. Fokkema, Literary Doctrine, 172–173. 54. On China’s little-known multiparty system, see James D. Seymour, China’s Satellite Parties (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1987), 72. In fact, one of the mi­ nor parties, the Democratic League, recruited heavily among artists, increasing in Shanghai from 52 to 290 in year before end of the Hundred Flowers. “Large-Scale Anti-Rightist Struggle Launched by Art Circle in Shanghai,” NCNA (August 10, 1957), in Survey of the China Mainland Press 1601 (August 29, 1957), 11.

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55. “Large-Scale Anti-Rightist Struggle,” 11. 56. NCNA, “Propaganda Work Conference of CCP Shanghai Committee Closed” (May 20, 1957), in Survey of the China Mainland Press 1539 (May 28, 1957), 18. 57. Hong Yung Lee, From Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrats in Socialist China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 61. 58. June 1964, quoted in “Comrade Chen Po-ta’s Speech,” Chinese Literature 8 (1967), 92. For Chinese discussion of the Hungarian poet Petofi Sandor (1823–1849) and his eponymous club in 1956, see my “Eastern Europe as an Al­ ternate West for China’s Middle Class,” Studies in Comparative Communism 22(4) (Winter 1989), 323–336. 59. Merle Goldman, China’s Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent (Cambridge: Har­ vard University Press, 1981), 106. 60. “Chen Yi’s Black Words (in respect to literature and art),” Beijing waishi hongqi [“Foreign affairs red flag”] (May 26, 1967), in Survey of the China Mainland Press 4002 (August 16, 1967), 2. 61. “Chen Yi’s Black Words,” 2. 62. See Ragvald, “Professionalism and Amateur Tendencies,” 152–179. 63. Lars Ragvald, “The Emergence of Worker-Writers in Shanghai,” in Christo­ pher Howe, ed., Shanghai: Revolution and Development in an Asian Metropolis (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 315. 64. Colin Mackerras, Amateur Theatre in China 1949–1966 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973), 8–10. 65. S. H. Chen, “Multiplicity in Uniformity: Poetry and the Great Leap For­ ward,” in Roderick MacFarquhar, ed., China under Mao: Politics Takes Command (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), 396. 66. Ragvald, Yao Wenyuan, 127–129. 67. Kai-yu Hsu, The Chinese Literary Scene. A Writer’s Visit to the People’s Repub­ lic (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 6–9. 68. I rely on Ellen Johnston Laing, “Chinese Peasant Painting, 1958–1976: Am­ ateur and Professional,” Art International 27(1) (January–March 1984), 2–12, 40. 69. Laing, “Chinese Peasant Painting,” 2. 70. On control of amateur drama through script, see Hua-yuan Li Mowry, “Yang-pan Hsi—New Theatre in China,” in Studies in Chinese Communist Termi­ nology 15 (Berkeley: University of California Center for Chinese Studies, 1973). 71. “Shunte Hsien Revolutionary Committee Bans the Black Drama Troupe and Protects Model Revolutionary Theatrical Works,” Nan-fang jih-pao (February 16, 1970), in Survey of the China Mainland Press 269(Supplement) (April 9, 1970), 5–7. 72. Ellen Judd, “China’s Amateur Drama: The Movement to Popularize the Revolutionary Model Operas,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 15(1) (January–February 1983), 26–35. 73. See the rather chilling account of cultural officials visiting her rural school by Anchee Min, Red Azalea (New York: Pantheon Book, 1994). 74. Wang Anyi, Love in a Small Town (Hong Kong: Renditions, 1988), 11. A sim­ ilar rise to royalty is conveyed in Anchee Min’s Red Azalea. 75. See Andrews, Painters and Politics, 396–400; “‘Xingxing meizhan’ fangwen ji,” [“Interview with the artists of the ‘Stars fine arts exhibition’”], Guanchajia 37 (November 20, 1980), 39–42.

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76. Richard Curt Kraus, Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-Class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). . 77. Judd, “China’s Amateur Drama,” 34, quoting Guangming ribao (February 27, 1976). 78. Agence France Presse, “Twilight Dancing Hotline Buzzes,” South China Morning Post (May 28, 1996). 79. The school selected only fifty of five hundred applicants. See Chen Weimin, “Minjian jutuan—xiqu wutai de shenglijun” [“Private opera companies—a main force on the opera stage”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (February 11, 1990). See Macker­ ras, “Modernization and Contemporary Chinese Theatre,” 191–194. 80. Zhao Dan, “Guande tai juti, wenyi mei xiwang” [“If controlled too tightly, the arts have no hope”], Renmin ribao (October 8, 1980). 81. Wang Ruowang, “Tan wenyi de ‘wuwei er zhi’” [“On ‘rule through inac­ tion’ for the arts”], Hongqi [“Red flag”] 9 (1979), 47–49. Discussed in Kyna Rubin, “Keeper of the Flame: Wang Ruowang as Moral Critic of the State,” in Goldman, Cheek, and Hamrin, eds., China’s Intellectuals, 233–250. Wang was retired in 1981 after his involvement with screenwriter Bai Hua, although Rubin reports he re­ ceived a higher salary writing at home than working for Shanghai wenxue. 82. I discuss this episode in “Bai Hua: The Political Authority of a Writer,” in Timothy Cheek and Carol Hamrin, eds., China’s Establishment Intellectuals (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1986), 185–211. 83. Chen Kaige, dir., Huang tudi, 1985. 84. Goran Leijonhufvud, Going against the Tide: On Dissent and Big-Character Posters in China (London: Curzon Press, 1990), 89–90. 85. The “scar” art was only critical of the leftist predecessors of Deng Xiaoping, much like artists of the early 1950s were critical only of the Guomindang. 86. “On Party-Member Literature and Art Workers,” Xi’an shaanxi ribao (July 24, 1982), in FBIS (August 11, 1982), T3–4. 87. For background on Zhou Yang and alienation, see Bill Brugger, “Alienation Revisited,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 12 (July 1984), 143–151. 88. On the professionalization of medicine, see Gail Henderson, “Increased In­ equality in Health Care,” in Deborah Davis and Ezra F. Vogel, eds., Chinese Society on the Eve of Tiananmen: The Impact of Reform (Cambridge: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1990), 263–282. 89. Judy Polumbaum, “The Tribulations of China’s Journalists after a Decade of Reform,” in Chin-Chuan Lee, ed. Voices of China: The Interplay of Politics and Jour­ nalism (New York: Guilford Press, 1990), 36, 41; and Judy Polumbaum, “‘Profes­ sionalism’ in China’s Press Corps,” in Roger V. Des Forges, Luo Ning, and Wu Yen-bo, eds., Chinese Democracy and the Crisis of 1989: Chinese and American Reflec­ tions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 295–311. 90. James V. Feinerman, “Law and Legal Professionalism in the People’s Re­ public of China,” in Goldman, Cheek, and Hamrin, eds., China’s Intellectuals, 107–127. 91. See James Reardon-Anderson, The Study of Change: Chemistry in China, 1840–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 92. Yves Chevrier, “Micropolitics and the Factory Responsibility System, 1984–1987,” in Davis and Vogel, eds., Chinese Society on the Eve of Tiananmen, 109–134.

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93. See Xiaohong Liu, Chinese Ambassadors: The Rise of Diplomatic Professional­ ism since 1949 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001). 94. Hong Yung Lee, From Revolutionary Cadres, 54, 61. 95. For example: “Although in China the term intellectual is used casually for anyone with a college diploma, I use it here to refer to a range of educated, urban professionals, including writers, architects, filmmakers, artists, critics, and pub­ lishers.” Jianying Zha, China Pop (New York: The New Press, 1994), 5–6. American sociologist Eliot Freidson argues that “professional” should replace “intelli­ gentsia” and “intellectual” as the term describing “the carriers of formal knowl­ edge.” See Freidson, Professional Powers, 20. 96. In reaction, journalist Dai Qing complained of the “promiscuous use of the word ‘intellectual.’” See Geremie Barmé, “Traveling Heavy: The Intellectual Baggage of the Chinese Diaspora,” Problems of Communism (January–April 1991), 108. 97. She Ji, “Great Designs Reflect the Times,” China Daily (November 14, 1995). 98. Cong Cao and Richard P. Suttmeier, “China’s ‘Brain Bank’?: The Chinese Academician System and Elite Formation in Science and Engineering,” unpub­ lished paper, 1998. 99. “Beijing Tightens Control over Books and Media” China News Digest— Global (February 3, 1997). 100. For a history of the ideology of autonomous aesthetics in the West, see Gene H. Bell-Villada, Art for Art’s Sake & Literary Life (Lincoln: University of Ne­ braska Press, 1996). 101. Liu Zaifu, “Lishi jiaose de bianxing: Zhongguo xiandai zhishifenzi de ziwo mishi” [“Chinese intellectuals’ loss of self and their changing historical role”], Zhishi fenzi [“The Chinese intellectual”], 25:7(1) (autumn 1991), 43. Quoted in Vi­ vian Catharina Harris, The Confluence of Politics and Culture: Intellectuals and Dis­ course on Culture in China, University of Melbourne M.A. Thesis, 1994, 44. 102. Wendy Larson, Women and Writing in Modern China (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8. 103. Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, Gaobie geming [“Farewell to revolution”] (Hong Kong: Tiandi Tushu, 1996). 104. Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (1975–1982) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984), 206. 105. Yi Jun, “Sixiang fenxi buneng daiti yishu fenxi” [“Ideological analysis can­ not replace aesthetic analysis”], Renmin ribao (October 22, 1980). 106. Sun Shaozhen, “Xinshi meishu yuanze zi jueqi” [“New aesthetic principles age are rising”], Shikan (3) (1981), 55–58. The episode is analyzed by William Tay, “‘Obscure Poetry’: A Controversy in Post-Mao China,” in Jeffrey C. Kinkley, ed., After Mao: Chinese Literature and Society 1978–1981 (Cambridge: Harvard Univer­ sity Council on East Asian Studies, 1985), 133–157. 107. Liang Xiaosheng, “Jinghua wenjianlu” [“What I have seen in Beijing”], in Yang Yang, ed., Tianliang [“Conscience”] (Beijing: Dadi Chubanshe, 1988), 164–210. 108. Liang Xiaosheng, “Jinghua wenjianlu,” 189. 109. A quasi-official effort to place the movement for spiritual civilization in a larger historical context is Ni Jianzhong, ed., Wenming zhongguo [“Civilized China”] (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Chubanshe, 1996).

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110. Figures from Beijing Xinhua in English (April 20, 1981), in FBIS (April 23, 1981), K5; Wen Xue, “The Fourth Congress of Chinese Writers,” Chinese Literature (autumn 1985), 178; Bi Sheng, “Zhongguo zuoxie rencai jiji huiyuan zongshu yiyu sanqian” [“Chinese Writers’ Association personnel abundant, membership total passes three thousand”], Renmin ribao (haiwaiban, “overseas edition”) (October 6, 1988); “Zhongguo zuoxie huiyuan yu wuqian” [“Over five thousand members in Chinese Writers’ Association”], Mingbao yuekan 368 (August, 1996), 105. 111. Zhongguo chuban nianjian 1987 [“China publishing yearbook 1987”] (Beijing: Zhongguo Shuji Chubanshe, 1988), 109–115; Xue Dong, “Shi yingshi, xiju, minjian wenxue xiehui fenbie chengli” [“Separate municipal associations for television, opera, and popular literature established”], Fuzhou wanbao (March 15, 1989). 112. Wu Hung, Transcience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, 1999), 19. 113. Vivienne Shue, “State Sprawl: The Regulatory State and Social Life in a Small Chinese City,” in Deborah S. Davis et al., eds., Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 95–96. 114. Mao Yurun, Professor of Composition, Shanghai Conservatory of Music (October 27, 1987), interviewed in Eugene, Oregon. 115. Merle Goldman and Timothy Cheek, “Introduction: Uncertain Change,” in Goldman, Cheek, and Hamrin, eds., China’s Intellectuals, 17. 116. Perry Link, Evening Chats in Beijing: Probing China’s Predicament (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 226. 117. Quoted in Wang Xiyu, “Beijing dang’an” [“Beijing file”], Jiushi niandai 235 (August 1989), 72. 118. See John Clark, “Official Reactions to Modern Art in China since the Bei­ jing Massacre,” Pacific Affairs 65(3) (fall 1992), 334–352. 119. Helmut Martin, “‘Cultural China’: Irritation and Expectations at the End of an Era,” in Maurice Brouseau, Kuan Hsin-chi, and Y. Y. Kueh, eds., China Review 1997 (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1997), 295–297. 120. Su Yong, “Zhongguo zuoxie ‘wuda’ neiqing” [“The inside story of the fifth congress of the chinese writers”], Jing bao 227 (June 1996), 41. 121. See Andrew Solomon, The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). One article for an internal publication of a provincial branch of China’s Writers Association coolly compared the Chinese and Soviet organizations, with envious comments on the higher incomes of Soviet au­ thors. Jin He, “Sulian de zuojia tizhi” [“The organization of Soviet writers”], Fujian zuoxie bao [“Fujian Writers Association news”] (restricted) 12 (May 15, 1987), 4. 122. John and Carol Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union (New York: The Free Press, 1990). 123. Looking beyond the arts toward the broader professionalization of intel­ lectual life in the 1990s, see Ben Xu, Disenchanted Democracy: Chinese Cultural Crit­ icism after 1989 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 57–87; and Xudong Zhang, “The Making of the Post-Tiananmen Intellectual Field: A Critical Overview,” in Xudong Zhang, ed., Whither China? Intellectual Politics in Contempo­ rary China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 19–24. 124. For the view that dependence upon patronage by political leaders restricts

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professional autonomy, see Hans Hendriscke, “Expertocracy and Professional­ ism,” in David S. G. Goodman and Beverly Hooper, eds., China’s Quiet Revolution: New Interactions between State and Society (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1994), 144–161. 125. See Ingo Müller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). 126. Polumbaum, “The Tribulations of China’s Journalists,” 47–48. 127. Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Making Science Masculine,” The Women’s Review of Books 7(7) (April 1990), 13. 128. Calculations are based on figures cited in note 110 above. 129. Miklos Haraszti, The Velvet Prison: Artists under State Socialism (New York: Basic Books, 1987). 130. Haraszti, The Velvet Prison, 101. 131. Geremie Barmé, “The Chinese Velvet Prison: Culture in the ‘New Age,’ 1976–89,” Issues and Studies 25(8) (August 1989), 54–79. 132. Paul Pickowicz, “Velvet Prisons and the Political Economy of Chinese Filmmaking,” in Deborah Davis et al., eds., Urban Spaces: Autonomy and Commu­ nity in Contemporary China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 193–220. 133. Robert von Hallberg, ed., Literary Intellectuals and the Dissolution of the State: Professionalism and Conformity in the G.D.R. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 134. von Hallberg, Literary Intellectuals, 13–14. 135. Consider Gao Xingjian’s remark in his 2000 Nobel prize acceptance speech: “When writing is not a livelihood or when one is so engrossed in writing that one forgets why one is writing and for whom one is writing it becomes a ne­ cessity and one will write compulsively and give birth to literature. It is this nonutilitarian aspect of literature that is fundamental to literature. That the writing of literature has become a profession is an ugly outcome of the division of labour in modern society and a very bitter fruit for the writer.” Gao Xingjian, “The Case for Literature,” at www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2000/gao-lecture.html (De­ cember 7, 2000).

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The Price of Beauty

A

rtists and their audiences often believe that beauty is priceless, but markets set prices on all commodities, including works of art. The sense of entitlement found among many Chinese intellectuals has fueled re­ sentment at the commodification of culture, as their accustomed terrain has been transformed into an aesthetic marketplace. Talk of the laws of art may help reclaim the intellectual autonomy of the arts, but the laws of the econ­ omy have a very different impact, including uncertain rewards for artistic work. China’s artists are often frustrated by the new marketplace, even as they are annoyed with the old state patronage for abandoning them. Few artists would want to abandon the reforms in cultural life. The great majority surely enjoys the lightened hand of the state, with its greater range of self-expression and the vastly increased availability of cultural goods. Yet, the reform period has been an anxious time for artists. Of course, anxiety is one of the main themes running throughout the en­ tire cultural history of the People’s Republic of China; what is different about the reform period is its focus. Artists now work without daily fear that their work might evoke unwanted political controversy. Nor need they worry that their family lives will be disrupted by periods of forced reeducation in the countryside. The new anxieties are about financial se­ curity, the quality of personal life, and the meaning of artistic work. The arts market is now securely established in China. It is likely that the worst of the economic crisis that I describe below has passed. Younger artists are learning to operate effectively within a cultural marketplace, reshaping, although not completely abandoning, the state-oriented as­ sumptions of Chinese intellectuals. The weathering of China’s aesthetic 183

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crisis is of course a more subjective matter. In contrast to writing on Chi­ nese culture, which has centered on the relationship between the arts and the state, writings on Western arts have focused upon the connections be­ tween art and the market. Some of the themes of this Western literature may help make sense of the new politics of culture that is taking shape alongside China’s arts marketplace.

THE ANXIETIES OF ARTISTS The film Strangers in Beijing (Hun zai Beijing) captures the daily problems of artists in the reform period.1 The movie deals with life in a Beijing pub­ lishing house. The film begins not with problems of art, but with the artists’ really bad housing. Like most socialist work units, the publishing house provides low-cost, but unpleasant, housing for its employees and their families. These arty people wear stylish clothes, but have to walk through a hallway overflowing with sewer water. Private life and work life have little separation; the neighbors with whom one quarrels over the use of a communal kitchen are the colleagues with whom one must coop­ erate in producing books. The atmosphere breeds nosiness and gossip even among the most noble minded. Three characters exemplify the personal dilemmas of the market. Zhe Yili is a bad poet whom the market has inexplicably enriched as he turns out vulgar lyrics for popular songs. He spends his money on his cellular phone, nightclubs, and his songstress mistress. His prosperity earns him the contemptuous envy of his fellow workers; family pressures compel one scholarly neighbor to translate Zhe Yili’s absurd verses into English for foreign publication, but he hates himself for swapping his artistic in­ tegrity for money. Fine arts editor Ji Zi is an ambitious, but refined, single woman. Colleagues presume unfairly that she is sleeping with the boss to get ahead; their gossip wounds her deeply. Ji Zi is frustrated profession­ ally; when she includes nude figures in her designs for a new book cover, her old-fashioned and censorious supervisor rejects them as wanton. Fi­ nally, Sha Xin is an idealistic and upright mandarin, a writer disgusted by recent developments in the literary world—he wants to write for art, not for money. When Sha Xin vents his disillusionment on the street by lec­ turing a band of young toughs about the declining standards of civiliza­ tion, they prove his point by beating and kicking him. A literary person in old China would not encounter such treatment, which is eerily reminis­ cent of Red Guard beatings of intellectuals at the outset of the Cultural Revolution. Not only is the housing bad, there is not enough of it. Sha Xin’s preg­ nant wife comes from Sichuan to be with him for the birth of their child.

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Because she lacks a Beijing residence permit, she is not entitled to live in the apartment. When a housing official is tipped off by a jealous neighbor and tries to evict her, Sha Xin explodes in fury. His neighbors hold him back from violence, but openly support his cause. The publishing house is under great pressure to earn profits, but the ten­ sion generated by debating countless marketing schemes sometimes evokes harsh judgments about the book-buying public. One employee mutters darkly, “What does the public know?” This vague public lurks in the back­ ground throughout the film, as the artists constantly struggle to honor an ap­ parently fickle new master who so unexpectedly dominates their lives. At the end, one couple is cooking up plans to get rich with a series of calendars: 365 days of makeup tips for women, a daily guide to blood pressure, and so forth. Zhe Yili’s wife discovers his mistress, but the an­ gry confrontation seems not to dampen his enthusiasms for the market’s new opportunities. Ji Zi, rather than taking advantage of a chance to travel abroad through the publishing house, resigns her job and heads south for new opportunities in far away Hainan, where the market is even more developed. Sha Xin and his wife return to Chengdu in Sichuan, un­ happy to be leaving the nation’s cultural capital, but at least they will be able to live together without challenge. The overall mood of the Strangers in Beijing is pessimistic, but then it is essentially a soap opera propagandizing the cause of professional artists: In the early 1990s, China is not treating its artists well. They are being left behind materially by the reforms, which reward the most dishonest and punish the most pure. This film was not made early in the reform period, but nearly two decades after the death of Mao; the expression of artists’ discontent has become a permanent feature of public life. Artists are ar­ ticulate and have access to the mass media and, thus, are more effective than many groups at expressing their discontent. These views should be taken seriously. In the section that follows, I will explore the material and aesthetic worries raised by Strangers in Beijing.

MATERIAL CONCERNS With the notable exception of members of state-run performing ensem­ bles, only a small number of artists work as full-time professionals for state arts organizations; among writers, for instance, only two hundred fit this category in 1989.2 Most professional artists earned their livings as bu­ reaucrats in cultural organizations, editors for state-supported publica­ tions, teachers, or in other such jobs. Many worked in cultural settings, but only some of their time was given to the actual practice of art.3 With the reforms, salaries for state jobs did not rise rapidly.

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A Widening Range of Economic Inequalities Artists have felt the growing differentiation of wealth and income that the reforms have encouraged throughout Chinese society. Before the reforms there was only a narrow income differential among artists, who as state employees earned similarly low wages whether they were poets or popu­ lar singers. Moreover there were relatively few ways of supplementing state salaries. Writers could earn royalties on their works, but Chinese manuscript payments are set according to the number of words printed, instead of the numbers of copies sold. Initial state efforts to increase salaries for artists could not keep pace with the top set by the more rapidly developing market for artistic work. For instance a professional tenor for a state troupe had earned 52.5 yuan per month until 1978, when his pay went up to over 90 yuan, plus a small supplement for each performance.4 Yet, the famous painter, Huang Zhou, could circumvent the limits of the state salary system by trading his paint­ ings for “gifts” of imported electronic goods.5 A decade later, the cele­ brated Guangzhou painter Guan Shanyue could sell a painting in Hong Kong for U.S. $40,000.6 Rumors of market riches discouraged the great majority of artists who saw their lives improving, but who were not becoming rich. As anxieties increased, practitioners of different genres were quick to tell me how other artists were enriching themselves under the reforms. Oil painters presumed that calligraphers were doing better because they could pro­ duce a work more quickly; calligraphers imagined that oil painters were prospering because their individual works bore higher prices; both were certain that musicians were the ones really raking it in. Their tone was not bitter, but their anxieties were real. In fact, some celebrity artists within each genre had opportunities to earn high incomes, but their lesserknown colleagues continued to worry about how to keep up with infla­ tion. For writers, publication in Hong Kong could produce extraordinary income, but again, this was only open to well-known figures. Other writ­ ers in Guangdong and Fujian sometimes fought inflation by writing scripts for Hong Kong television, typically working under pseudonyms. The market privileges stars in all genres, but ordinary artists in none. Association with a well-established institution bore indirect, but im­ portant, material benefits. By 1994 the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou had three studios in Paris for the use of its staff.7 Painters at­ tached to less glorious institutions were unlikely to get to Paris, much less paint there. Arts organizations in the booming coastal provinces enjoyed opportu­ nities for sponsorship by overseas Chinese, by private business, and by vigorous state enterprises. The Fujian Writers Association was able to set

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up a small foundation to finance activities outside state support. These in­ cluded twenty scholarships for young writers, an annual two-week re­ treat for ten writers, subventions to publishers for Fujian writers, and subsidies to employers to free writers to devote more time to their art. Through such measures, the foundation helped the association compen­ sate for the erosions of inflation in the state budget. It also enabled Fujian to host a delegation of Italian writers, whose trip was otherwise restricted by a national budget that allocated an unrealistic twenty-five yuan per night for lodging. This income was in addition to relatively generous al­ lotments to state-run cultural institutions. In contrast, the drive toward self-sufficiency meant greater poverty for cultural organizations in inte­ rior provinces. Twelve county libraries in Hunan in 1988 could not afford to purchase any books; one canceled all periodical subscriptions except Hunan Radio and Television News.8 The climate is one in which all artists feel they must hustle in ways that are often demeaning and corrosive of their artistic integrity. The bad poet satirized in the movie as a buffoon is one example, but on a deeper level, no one wants to face the stark choice of playing the clown or being left behind.

Inflation Inflation has varied during the reform period, but has several times reached 20 percent in the coastal cities where most artists work.9 Before the reforms, when state patronage and state controls were both much clearer, there was at least the consolation of low inflation, so that state jobs were good ones. Salary increases have usually been slower than increases in the cost of living, and income from state pay has lagged considerably behind the incomes for the most successful of those artists who have turned to the market. Artists and urban intellectuals feel strong peer and family pressure to join China’s emerging consumer society, acquiring such commodities as cellular phones, automobiles, and air conditioning, thus putting considerable strain on their wages.10 The impact of inflation is insidious, going beyond eroding once-adequate salaries to menacing whole categories of livelihood. Writers were especially hit by inflation, which raised prices for newsprint and, thus, raised the costs of all publications. This in turn intensified pressure on publication sub­ scriptions, which increased in price, but often losing many readers as a result—especially as state work units canceled subscriptions to official magazines and newspapers to trim their own expenses. The state tried to help by raising royalty rates, always welcome by writers, but with the risk that it might make it more difficult to get one’s work published.11

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As the state chipped away at cultural subsidies, artists found their livelihoods threatened. Cultural officials argued that they could save money by cutting back on the massive number of “internal” publications. These magazines and newspapers are published by bureaucratic units (see chapter 4). At their best, they contain information, fiction, and art. At their worst they are internal propaganda organs, similar to the in-house newsletters familiar to workers in the West. What they have in common is that they cannot be purchased, but are distributed to qualified members of an organization. In 1993, there were five thousand internally published newspapers and ten thousand magazines.12 The Ministry of Culture pointed with horror to the negative example of Nanxian in Hunan, which had seventy-one internal publications. By cutting this number to twentyfive, local officials reduced their printing budget by one-half to ten thou­ sand yuan.13 The years 1996 and 1997 brought a campaign to close more internal publications. Yet, these publications provided artists an easy way of supplementing their incomes. In fact, their semisecret nature meant that a clever writer could publish variants of the same article or story in multiple organs, without anyone being the wiser.14 Housing The old system of state employment assured steady, but low, wages; it also guaranteed housing, usually of rather low quality. When the range of housing quality was narrow, housing was less of an issue; during the re­ form period, however, China’s housing stock is being improved unevenly and not rapidly enough to satisfy artists and other intellectuals. The nicest apartment I visited in two years in Nanjing belonged to a sculptor. He had torn out several walls of a flat located within an anonymous-looking block of faculty apartments at the Nanjing Arts College, so that the apartment seemed spacious, even though it was not large by American standards. Wood paneled walls and a spare, modern display of a very few works of art distinguished this place from the cramped and not-too-pleasant quarters of his neighbors. A musician in the same complex enjoyed the same amount of space in his rented apart­ ment, but it was cut up into smaller and less well-appointed rooms. Nanjing is a leader in implementing housing reform, a program by which the state is trying to persuade residents of unit-provided housing to purchase their apartments as condos. The sculptor’s apartment is quite literally his, and the walls he ripped out are his own walls. But most Nan­ jing intellectuals cannot afford to buy their apartments, and they are not too sure that it is a good deal. But the state will eliminate the system of highly subsidized rents to press people into buying their housing. The anxieties on individuals are much like those pressing Americans who are

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not quite able to come up with a down payment big enough to buy their first house and fear that they will never be able to afford one. Artists need space to work, which increases housing envy. Novelists may lack suitable writing space, and painters may not have access to ad­ equate studios. One well-established older painter assured me that he had abandoned oils for watercolors not out of aesthetic preference, but be­ cause the oils required too much space. Administrators make housing as­ signments and often use them to reward supporters or punish those who have been recalcitrant.15 Housing has another feature unfamiliar to most Westerners: because apartments are controlled by work units, artists, like other urban workers, end up spending their nonwork time surrounded by the same people with whom they deal at the office. Thus, the strangers in Beijing fought out their job-related disputes in their shared kitchens at home. Corruption Corruption has been one of the hallmarks of the reform period. Pent-up desires, the shortages of a rapidly growing economy, and old-fashioned greed have combined in a long-running festival of scheming dishonesty that has touched the art world as it has all others. Young artists have had to bribe officials in order to find jobs and housing or gain permission to study and travel abroad. A common form of corruption has been for state employees to use their positions to obtain goods at fixed prices, then sell them at market prices. Artists are not often in a position to do this, but have been exposed using their positions for petty acts of corruption. When a Chaozhou opera troupe returned from performing in Hong Kong in 1980, two-thirds of its sixty members were caught by customs agents as they attempted to smuggle in 2 televisions, 3 boom boxes, 16 watches, 7 tape recorders, 3 electric fans, 418 calculators, 1 sewing machine, 315 au­ dio cassettes, 8 antelope horns, more than 3,000 units of ginseng, 300 yards of cloth, more than 600 items of clothing, plus cameras, mahjong tiles, liquor, candy, cigarettes, umbrellas, rice cookers, books, and pornog­ raphy. Watches were concealed in the folds of opera costumes, smutty magazines among the scores.16 On a grander level, valuable art has long been used as a discrete and tasteful medium for bribery; laundering bribes through gifts of paintings has increased with the reforms, tarnishing the self-image of purity enter­ tained by many artists. The corruption of Deng Xiaoping’s family is well known. His sons, Deng Pufang and Deng Zhifang, led the way in estab­ lishing dishonest bonds between trading companies and China’s senior leaders. Less notorious is Deng Xiaoping’s daughter, Deng Lin, a perfectly respectable painter, who attracted much criticism when she sold a painting

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in Hong Kong for more than U.S. $10,000 in 1987. Even People’s Daily men­ tioned this extravagant price, revealing that her works were in the collec­ tions of such people as shipping magnate Y. K. Bao, and Jacques Chirac, as well as in the Great Hall of the People. The presumption that Deng Lin was selling influence along with her art was strengthened by her 1988 exhibi­ tion at New York’s Hefner Gallery, the toy of Oklahoma natural-gas baron and China trader Robert Hefner III, who claimed merely to be interested in Chinese painting, not purchasing influence with China’s boss.17 AESTHETIC CONCERNS Vulgarity Some artists used sensationalism to attract consumers in the new cultural market. Poets and serious novelists especially resented the difficulty of competing with translations of Sidney Sheldon and homegrown novels of sex and violence. In wealthy rural Fujian, funeral musicians escalated their competition by adding dancing girls to their ensembles. A teacher was shocked at his aunt’s 1989 funeral to discover that the band included two dancing girls. The band’s leader initially refused to exclude them, arguing that if they did not dance in the funeral procession, his reputation would be ruined when word spread that his band had no dancing girls. The teacher ulti­ mately prevailed by threatening to have no musicians at all.18 The Fujian musicians were emulating some Taiwanese funerals that include strip­ pers. Sensationalism also appeared in urban culture, sometimes unpleas­ antly. The hot nightspot in Fuzhou in 1989 was a bar staffed by singing dwarves, launching a debate over whether the owner was helping the dis­ abled or appealing to the cruelest instincts of his audience. The singing and dancing waiters were well paid, at three hundred yuan per day, and for three months the place was packed with people attracted by the novelty.19 But signs of vulgarity were not limited to peasant musicians and urban bars. One of the oldest and most respected forms of Chinese opera is kunqu. Its audiences have never matched its reputation, which led the Shanghai Kunqu Company to hire a stage director from the film indus­ try early in the reform period and to introduce acrobatics and dance spectacles that had no traditional role in this staid operatic form.20 Tradi­ tionalist fans were not pleased to see their art go Hollywood. Similar trends can be seen in many arts, as Chinese have begun to reconsider aes­ thetic departures that the cultural elite would formerly have disdained as coarse.

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Most intellectuals share the sense of market-driven coarseness spread­ ing over the nation. Chinese who return home after years abroad are of­ ten shocked by the new mood: We went back to Sichuan in the summer of 1996. Things changed so much that I could barely recognize anything or anybody. In terms of material life it’s for the better. But otherwise it’s a mess and there lacked a sense of clarity and groundedness. I didn’t feel like at home. Even the food wasn’t as good as I remembered. And the pollution was at a dangerous level (tho nobody seemed to pay attention to that). People were energetic, excited about mak­ ing money, karaoke bars, cosmetics, etc. It felt rather primitive and cultureless. We also spent two weeks in Beijing where my brother works. There the same kind of wild, primitive passions dominate. On the once-stately Tianan­ men Square walked ugly-looking nouveaux riches and their vulgar women. I nearly fainted at the sight. People were crazy about McDonalds, the Hard Rock Café, etc., all the garbage stuff. Somehow it seemed that people sud­ denly lost all their taste for the healthy and the beautiful. I could hardly imagine this was the country that produced such people like Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi, and poetry like those from the Tang dynasty. I wish this first stage of capitalism would be over soon and people would recover their finer senses and build a life that is more worth living.21

The Destruction of Cultural Infrastructure Although China made impressive progress against illiteracy in the first three decades after 1949, the reform era eroded many of these gains. Many became alarmed at the closing of rural schools. Rural women have been the hardest hit; 70 percent of the 220 million Chinese adults who cannot read are female, as is the case in most developing nations.22 In some cases their parents refuse to spend the money on the heavy fees now required by public schools; in others local schools have been closed. The rapid spread of child labor has further exacerbated the educational gap among the classes. Many rural families want their children to drop out and work after graduating from elementary school, leaving them with insufficient education to comprehend China’s increasingly sophisticated culture. Of China’s 2,500 public libraries, nearly 1,000 purchased fewer than 100 new books in 1993, while 342 purchased none at all.23 In Henan, Xinyang city proudly installed karaoke in the public library as part of the cam­ paign to break through the traditional concept of “literature does not re­ spect commerce.”24 Some rural state stores in Hunan Province closed their book departments, turning the books over to their hardware departments.25 The state celebrated occasional oddments, such as the Hubei mountain village that had eighty households and thirty-one thousand books, yet the impact of these stories was perhaps less to inspire than to remind everyone how exceptional they were.26

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The Ministry of Culture’s massive network of cultural centers was forced to find ways to support itself; most of these units introduced pool halls and video games as a way of earning money. When managed well, these entertainments can subsidize libraries and painting classes. When managed badly, the cultural centers are left with nothing except pool and video games. Even worse, many poor localities have closed their cultural facilities or (more commonly) only support them in a minimal way, some­ times not even paying wages to the single person on the staff. This has elicited appeals for several villages to combine their forces into one cen­ tral cultural station.27 But there are still other aesthetic issues beyond loss of support for the arts and a sense of encroaching vulgarity. Harder to pin down is a gnaw­ ing sense that aesthetic standards are all up for reconsideration, that judg­ ing beauty is no longer as simple a matter as it may once have seemed, when artists could only dream of the state lightening its supervision of their work.28

LEARNING THE MARKET Most Chinese artists had little experience with markets; people with strong business instincts are no doubt underrepresented among the artist population in any country. But as early as 1979, the state provided clues to young artists about the future.29 An early endorsement of capitalist ad­ vertising defended billboards in aesthetic terms: “advertising is an art in­ volving a wide section of the people. Good advertising can make our cities beautiful, lift our spirits and make us feel proud of a thriving so­ cialist economy or culture in a cheerful artistic atmosphere.”30 By 1982 there were academic collections of articles on the problems of commer­ cializing the arts.31 Yet, it is one thing to be curious about the market, an­ other to work it successfully. Some arts, such as film, novels, and drama, have been sold to con­ sumers for so long that nothing seems odd about their distribution as commodities, although few artists were prepared for the changes that took place, as these goods were increasingly outside the planned econ­ omy. For instance, painters were shocked to find their works could be priced by size.32 Yet, the rapid spread of the market transformed into com­ modities some art products that had not previously been sold at all. Many calligraphers were unhappy to see their artwork turned into price-bearing products. Traditionally, calligraphy is an expression of a writer’s inner personality, as well as an emblem of elite status, but at the end of the 1980s some calligraphers were earning several hundred yuan (that is, as much as U.S. $100) per character. The commodification of art could disconcert

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consumers as well. In one incident, Tibetan patrons of a Sichuan dance hall refused to pay the manager for the right to dance. They agreed to pur­ chase food and beer, but believed that no one could turn their dancing into a thing to be sold.33 Neither popular dance nor calligraphy had pre­ viously been part of the commercial economy, and their transformation into commodities was a profound challenge to conventional assumptions about the relationship of art to society. The effort to master the market was filled with sometimes unhappy sur­ prises. A lack of financial experience hurt some artists, and their sometimes tragic stories spread concern throughout the arts community. Cao Hua, a Jiangxi student of art theory with no business experience, borrowed money from Taiwanese investors to set up a Jiangxi folk music troupe of thirty members in 1988. Cao killed himself when he was unable to repay his back­ ers. Another suicide was Li Pei, a thirty-three-year-old graduate student at Beijing’s Central Conservatory; Li was despondent after being swindled out of money she was going to trade on the black market for hard currency to help Chinese orchestra members on a tour of Eastern Europe.34 Many efforts by young artists to take advantage of the market initially aroused controversy. Violinists played salon music in the lobbies of fine hotels, and performers of traditional Chinese instruments entertained shoppers in department stores. Writers and painters applied their skills to advertising, as art schools eventually incorporated design into their cur­ ricula. Established artists scorned each of these developments as exam­ ples of going commercial, leaving younger experimenters with the mar­ ket doubly confused. It is difficult to convey how clueless many young artists were about markets, especially in the first decade of the reforms. One of the most awkward and painful conversations I have had with a Chinese artist took place in Fujian shortly after the Beijing Massacre, when political anxieties about China’s future were at their highest. Many artists were fearful that the door between China and the West was about to shut, before they could taste the opportunities imagined to lie on the other side. An oil painter visited me with photos of his work; we had met only casually on a bus two months earlier. This was more than an ordinary painter’s hus­ tle, as he was obviously fearful. Accompanied to my apartment by his wife, he forcefully asked me to take the photos to the United States and “show them to millionaires you know.” My repeated protests that I knew no millionaires struck him as deceitful. One of his art academy classmates had in fact struck it rich in the United States by selling oil paintings to mil­ lionaires, and nothing I could say would disabuse the painter of his dream of somehow making the right connection.35 The painter was merely attempting a strategy followed by many Chi­ nese to cope with the uncertainties of the market, that of applying

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whatever social capital one can command to master the market. Despite our superficial relationship, he sought to use me, as the only Chinesespeaking American he knew, to expand his market contacts. In this in­ stance, the strategy failed, but for others it was successful. China lacked the commercial infrastructure that manages interactions between artists and consumers in long-established capitalist societies. These include agents to negotiate favorable terms for artist clients, unions to represent groups of performers, gallery owners to show paintings, im­ presarios to arrange concert tours, and attorneys to protect the legal in­ terests of artists.36 Their absence left artists to discover for themselves how to operate in the new commercial environment. More sophisticated artists realized that they were being exploited, for instance, when a foreign citi­ zen would buy a batch of paintings at low prices for resale abroad. Al­ though agents and private galleries became more prominent in the 1990s, the immaturity of the cultural market prompted officials to encourage the development of a fuller set of market-oriented bodies to bring art to cus­ tomers. In Shanghai, the Cultural Administration Bureau initiated a pro­ gram to train professional promoters to be sufficiently market savvy to keep the city’s forty theaters busy, and a Shanghai Propaganda Depart­ ment official published a collection of essays on art galleries.37 As in the economy at large, some artists got rich first. The interface be­ tween private and public arts was the site of many enterprising deals. Singers of popular music had better opportunities than most other artists, because they were able to take advantage of their status as em­ ployees of state song-and-dance troupes; some moonlighted for enor­ mous fees, going underground without authorization from their work units.38 In 1988 at least seventeen singers earned over six hundred yuan for a single performance. Yet, they could have the state subsidize their market ventures by relying upon housing, insurance, and other benefits provided by their official work units.39 Of course, artists are not alone in relying upon state employment as a buffer against the market; stock speculators and other entrepreneurial types also use government offices as bases for market activities.40 Resentment against commercially suc­ cessful artists who take advantage of their state work units is mitigated by the realization that they cannot simply quit and move to new jobs easily.41 Sometimes whole private companies have built their fortunes on state property. An opera company begun in Sanming, Fujian, included some of the performers from a state-run company and used the state’s costumes and equipment. This made entry into the entertainment market easier, but gave unfair advantage to those with good connections.42 The situation was no different from that of a local official who enriched his family by using publicly owned vehicles to start a private trucking com­ pany.

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Fans and rival artists were less forgiving on the subject of tax evasion. With new tax regulations in 1987, the state sought to raise revenues, while diminishing the gap between commercially successful stars and less glam­ orous artists still heavily dependent upon government employment. Tax evasion has been a chronic issue ever since. Mao Amin, who earned two thousand yuan for a single performance as China’s biggest pop star in the late 1980s, was fined thirty-four thousand yuan for tax evasion, after lying to the Beijing Evening News about under-the-table payments from a luxury hotel.43 Tax evasion by stars continued through the 1990s, with an increas­ ingly frustrated state threatening to ban performances for six months by those convicted of tax evasion for a third time.44 Some successful elite artists also evaded tax payments; a Henan Daily reporter was arrested for blackmailing the noted calligrapher Pang Zhonghua, threatening to pub­ lish his tax records unless he paid twenty thousand yuan in hush money.45 By the late 1990s, the younger generation of artists no longer expected state support as the norm. Especially after Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 southern inspection inspired millions to take a plunge into the market, artists have joined other Chinese in becoming more market savvy. Zhang Xianliang, author of several popular novels based on his prison-camp experiences, was something of a model to younger writers, setting up two companies as an entrepreneur, swearing that the “market is merely a temporary lover,” while literature is his “partner to accompany him forever.”46 And Wang Shuo, Beijing’s bad boy novelist, was almost as well known for his business deals as he was for his writing. Some abandoned art altogether, seeking their fortunes in other fields. How does one calculate the benefit or loss to China and to art that a talented Nanjing painter has made a fortune manufacturing machines to read credit cards? The artist seems not to have many regrets about his career change, but the cumulative impact of such cases on the nation as a whole is per­ ceptible. After the first decade of reform, for instance, the Fujian Writers Association’s annual intake of new members declined from fifteen to only one or two new members. Fujian’s booming commercial economy leads many young people to turn to business instead of culture, although contributions to literary magazines have not declined so drastically in most provinces as they have along the coast. The irony is that Fujian’s prosperity leaves its arts associations in better shape to help young artists than ever before. Julian Yu Jing-jun is a successful Australian composer who emigrated from China in 1985. Returning to Beijing, he found his friends were unin­ terested in his expatriate musical career. I told them what I am doing in Australia, but everybody is talking about money and how to make money in China now. One of my friends said: “You seem like you come from another planet, you are talking so purely about the arts. If you were like that in China you would starve.”47

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Despite growling from many artists about the market’s perils, the fact is that China’s market for culture has been transformed over the past two decades. As the nation has prospered, the amount of disposable income spent on culture by urban Chinese increased from 10 percent in 1993 to 18.5 percent in 1995.48 While intellectuals often disdain the entrepreneurs who profit most dramatically from economic growth, even these suppos­ edly crude people seek the refinements of culture as they enjoy upward mobility in good bourgeois fashion. Deborah Davis found a sharply rising trend among Shanghai urban household income devoted to pleasure, which grew from 4 percent in 1982 to 8 percent in 1994 and 10 percent in 1995.49 On May 1, 1995, China shortened the workweek to five days, primarily to fight unemployment, traffic congestion, and energy shortages. However, a secondary conse­ quence has been to stimulate demand for culture and entertainment as urban citizens have more leisure.50 Family cultural expenditures quadrupled in the mid-1980s in prosper­ ous Jinzhou, where by 1988 97 percent of homes had television.51 Onethird of these Jinzhou families consisted of two parents and a single child, who became the cultural target for the new marketplace eager to sell magazines and educational toys, as well as musical instruments. The parents also put pressure on local authorities to improve such public cul­ tural amenities as libraries and parks. These demographic changes in­ tensified the greater cultural shift away from now old-fashioned tastes for Chinese opera, storytelling in the parks, realist fiction, and Western classical music. The rage for classical music that opened the reform period declined by the late 1980s, as the high-culture boom failed to sustain itself. In 1985 the Association of Shanghai Symphony Lovers attracted one thousand sup­ porters, only to lose half its members by 1989. Similar trends hit other elite forms of music, with many blaming video games and pop music for the decline, in addition to tired programming of indifferent quality.52 Novelist Liu Heng suggested an alternative explanation in his novel of alienated Beijing life, Black Snow. The novel describes Li Huiquan, an exconvict who sells clothing from a market stall. Li tries to participate in the fad for classical music by attending a program at the Beijing Concert Hall: “When the music began he thought he was the only one who pretended to enjoy it, until he realized that practically everyone else was doing the same thing. It was unendurable. He never went again.” Visits to an art museum did not fare much better; Li became depressed and spent more time smoking cigarettes than looking at paintings.53 The market for high art turned out to be more limited than intellectuals had hoped. As prosperity spread to people without education or West­ ernized tastes, demand for more popular forms of culture predictably ex­

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panded more rapidly than for the supposedly more ennobling high art. For artists who had grown to maturity without considering the market a legitimate way of distributing cultural products, such changes were diffi­ cult to accept. One critic describes how the sudden boom in popular liter­ ature shocked many writers who were accustomed to writing by assign­ ment: “All of a sudden, the reading public was to be entertained rather than educated; it took on the role of a choosy customer rather than a faith­ ful, only less cultivated fellow comrade.”54 Still, others adapted, as is shown in the rise of the new genre of theatri­ cal “little pieces (xiaopin).”55 One way spoken drama troupes coped with competition from the commercial economy was to develop satirical sketches as a kind of artistic fast food. These sketches typically criticize the commercialism that is enriching their creators. The popularity of these sketches on television has made stars of some actors and solved the fi­ nancial worries of some writers. An actor can earn ten thousand yuan per performance on television, in contrast to a few yuan for an opera per­ formance. The sketches especially mock the way in which social rankings have been turned upside-down by the new economy, where money out­ weighs bureaucratic rank. Television is the medium by which China has produced a group of millionaire writers; more will follow, it was said at the 2002 Congress of the Writers Association. 56 Professionals Negotiating the Cultural Marketplace Just as artists were realizing some progress in asserting their autonomous realm of expertise from state authority, along came the market, which of course recognizes no such claim. It is no small accomplishment to per­ suade propaganda officials to acquiesce in talk of the laws of art, but the new cultural market only cares about economics, and is not subject to per­ suasion. Nonetheless, professionalism helped artists to cope with the in­ securities and anxieties introduced by the erosion of state sinecures. As early as 1980, Gu Yuan, vice president of the Central Fine Arts Acad­ emy, argued that application of economic laws would distort art.57 He complained that the search for foreign exchange led to a focus on ex­ portable works, so that their value in trade became, in effect, a measure of their aesthetic worth. Lack of private customers for oil portraits meant that these could only be warehoused. But the newly marketized cost of storage hurt large-scale oils and sculptures especially hard. The profit mo­ tive in fine arts publishing stalled publication of a periodical for wood­ block prints, which would not earn much money as compared with some other commercial junk. The China Art Gallery had to rent out its space to nonart functions. Such problems, Gu said, could only be addressed by re­ specting the laws of art.

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Assertions of professional standards aided state-employed artists when the state imposed licensing procedures that effectively discouraged pri­ vate competition. Private actors and singers in Anhui were forced to pass an examination on politics and culture before receiving licenses to per­ form during the 1983 spiritual pollution campaign.58 Similar trends emerged as the purge following the Beijing Massacre was accompanied by a more general crackdown on lawlessness and disorder. A Ministry of Culture newspaper publicized a letter from Hunan demanding that pri­ vate sellers of arts lessons (music, dance, photography, painting, writing, acting, acrobatics) be licensed by local cultural departments.59 A similar spirit of professionalism allowed Xiamen physicians to rid themselves of competition from fifty quacks who had flourished in the market economy.60 Similarly, a 1996 regulation by the Ministry of Culture reinforced the clannish aspect of professionalism by requiring that local cultural of­ ficials license actors. Ostensibly a way to assure payment of taxes, it sounded like a device to limit entry to new performers, who must first pass an examination in their art. The subsequent announcement of new fines for unlicensed commercial stage performers was justified as a re­ striction against sex and superstition, but it also placed obstacles in the path of private rivals to state-run ensembles.61 Chinese artists support state reinforcement of their professionalism when it helps regulate the market in their interests, as in the prohibition of fraudulent works or the enforcement of their copyrights.62 The fact that the associations themselves have rarely initiated such regulation shows the limits of arts professionalism. It was a notable departure for the AllChina Association of Journalists to establish a committee to help journal­ ists protect their rights against a rash of lawsuits by unhappy subjects of their reporting.63 Yet, the more the market grows, the less the professional associations are able to aid in negotiating its mysterious ways. Early in the reform pe­ riod, membership in the associations was the obvious course for any am­ bitious young artist. The hopeful, yet depressed, poet Gu Cheng included the following in an “Autobiographical Montage:” “1982. I showed my prize and the catalogue of my published works to a comrade at the Bei­ jing Writers Union. ‘More than three hundred pieces—nearly enough’ I opened the membership card and wrote three words in the space marked Occupation: ‘Waiting for Work.’”64 Yet, already in 1979 the notorious “Stars” fine arts exhibition was or­ ganized by amateurs, painters, and sculptors who were not members of the Artists Association. Although they received some encouragement from association officials, one of the messages of the event was that one could make art outside the professional establishment. With the expan­ sion of the market, this became much easier to accomplish. At the same

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time, the professional associations no longer have as much money to mount exhibitions, help with publications, or otherwise ease the careers of their members.65 Many still seek membership, but as a badge of status, often achieved after commercial success. One must put artists’ complaints in perspective. Most professional artists would be happiest if the reform era had ended all political super­ vision while increasing state subsidies. Yet, their lives have eased enor­ mously. The material conditions under which artists work seem inade­ quate by Western standards, but it is quite clear within China that artists continue to be privileged over ordinary workers and peasants in their bu­ reaucratic benefits, their urban apartments, and now their access to mar­ ket opportunities. The Party has not simply tossed artists back into the chaos of the pre-1949 market. Instead, decades of education and rising in­ comes have created the conditions for commercial market activity. More­ over, where some rail against the coarseness of commercial culture, others find in it vitality and inspiration. Nor should one lose sight of the extent to which the state has subsi­ dized culture, even of a critical sort. For instance, Reading (Dushu) is re­ spected as a leading liberal free-thinking journal, but it is also a state publication.66 One of the great works of the reform era was Xu Bing’s Book of the Sky (Tianshu). This vast series of pages present Chinese characters that resemble the real thing, but are in fact nonsense, invented, carved, and printed while the artist worked for the state. Xu Bing playfully, yet seri­ ously (given the scale of the work), suggests a subversive vision of Chi­ nese literary culture, all form and devoid of content.

ART AGAINST COMMERCE: THE TAINT OF MONEY It is of course absurd to imagine that artists who grumble about the mar­ ket are all somehow nostalgic for Maoism. China’s artists are certainly not alone in decrying the impact of commerce upon their work. Artists in the capitalist West have long made their own long march between two con­ tradictory values: the practical necessity of making money from the masses as customers and a sophisticated disdain for popular aesthetic standards. With the rapid commodification of China’s culture, artists are encountering a similar dynamic, with all of its nervous mixture of cyni­ cism and anxiety. Pierre Bourdieu’s writings on the cultural field offer a helpful perspec­ tive on the often discussed tension between art and economics.67 We com­ monly treat this relationship as a regrettable contradiction between lofty ideals and vulgar greed, between dreamy visions and hardheaded practi­ cality, between timeless civilization and fickle market trends. From this

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romantic perspective, the problem for the artist is how to maintain artis­ tic integrity while earning a livelihood. But Bourdieu does not treat the tension between art and commerce as a problem to be solved in order to make the arts world right. Instead, he sees the interplay of art and com­ merce as a defining characteristic of cultural work.68 Bourdieu’s approach has three basic features. First, Bourdieu sees society as a series of fields (education, culture, sci­ ence, the military, sports, medicine, farming, etc.), each hierarchically or­ ganized and “each defined as a structured space with its own laws of functioning and its own relations of force independent of those of politics and the economy, except, obviously, in the cases of the economic and po­ litical fields.”69 The structure of a field is rather simply constituted by the relations among positions occupied by its participants, at any given mo­ ment. A field is thus dynamic because its structure shifts as participants change their positions through professional successes and frustrations, as well as the inevitable mobility of age and death. Second, the cultural field is uniquely driven by a logic that values artis­ tic above commercial success. While high income is well regarded in most areas of modern life, cultural work reverses the conventional economic world so that prosperity can easily be taken as proof that one has pan­ dered to the unsophisticated. Among artists, notable financial reward can become a measure of aesthetic failure, of a lack of taste. Bourdieu identi­ fies the “winner loses” logic by which true artists disdain their fellow workers who make lots of money or aspire too obviously to do so. “The literary and artistic world is so ordered that those who enter it have an in­ terest in disinterestedness.”70 Or rather, they have an interest in the ap­ pearance of disinterest in money. Nonmonetary rewards such as recogni­ tion by one’s peers have enormous influence in the cultural field. The taint of money was nortoriously powerful in China’s Artistic Tra­ dition: Chinese writers, old and modern, with very few exceptions, scrupulously avoid discussing such matters, feeling that even to acknowledge them as se­ rious concerns of the artist would demean that artist. Economic factors are thus excluded from accounts of artists, like sex was excluded from Victorian novels by people who were familiar enough with it in their everyday lives but felt it improper to allude to it in their books.71

Illustrations of the tension between artistic reputation and commercial success are commonplace in recent American culture. Novelist Paul Auster devoted a memoir to rueful descriptions of his youthful pursuit of money at the expense of his art.72 Gore Vidal recalled that after commer­ cial success as a writer for television, he “was also being written off as any sort of novelist. There might have been a certain sad prestige had I failed

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in television, but to have been successful was a sign of fundamental flaw.”73 Or at the height of painter Jackson Pollack’s success, he is said to have needed the validation of the less famous, but professionally re­ spected Earl Kerkam, who thrilled Pollack by judging his recent work as “not bad.” “Pollack, despite his public fame, hungered for a kind of ap­ proval that only the artists’ art world could give him.”74 Bourdieu’s third feature is that the key participants in the cultural field are those whose reputations and institutional positions authorize them to say who should be rewarded with the sacred name of artist, thus defining the field’s limits. Such a leader has “the power to consecrate and to win assent when he or she consecrates an author or a work—with a preface, a favourable review, a prize, etc.”75 Other artists may deal with these fig­ ures either by honoring them (demonstrating their allegiance) or by con­ testing their authority (often thereby challenging their definition of the cultural field and its established aesthetics). Bourdieu develops these concepts through a discussion of French liter­ ary and dramatic controversies of the nineteenth and early-twentieth cen­ turies, including an elaborate discussion of Flaubert’s A Sentimental Edu­ cation. This may seem to be rather distant from contemporary Chinese politics, but in fact suggests ways to understand how China’s artists are responding to the changes in their political economy. Conflict within the cultural field assumes two major forms. In the first axis, the consecrated elite sneer at their commercially successful comrades for sell­ ing out to the vulgar marketplace. For instance, when critics remark cattily that novelist Su Tong was enriched when his story was made into the film Raise the Red Lantern by director Zhang Yimou, they suggest that he should be valued less highly because he committed the offense of making money.76 Going commercial means forgoing the most prestigious form of profit—being able to earn money while appearing to be indifferent. It is not that the consecrated figures who dominate the field are impoverished. In fact, they are not only the most expensive or the most profitable but also the most readable and the most acceptable because they have become part of “general culture” through a process of familiarization which may or may not have been accompanied by specific teaching. What distinguishes them from com­ mercial writers and artists is that they do not appear to aim at profit. They possess “symbolic capital,” a kind of “credit” which, under certain condi­ tions, and always in the long run, guarantees “economic” profits.77

The case of novelist Wang Shuo illustrates this principle in contempo­ rary China. Although in the late 1980s and early 1990s Wang Shuo was enormously popular with younger urban readers for his tough and cyni­ cal tales of Beijing lowlife, old-fashioned writers and readers rejected him

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as a literary version of the hooligans he depicted and complained that anyone who sold so many books couldn’t possibly be good. A consecrated figure was Wang Meng, a reform-minded modernist whose social-realist fiction criticized social trends, but not so bitterly that he could not serve as minister of culture in the late 1980s. In contrast, Wang Shuo rejected such politics and aspired to a career of influence in such overtly commer­ cial institutions as television and film.78 Wang Shuo recognized that artists were upset as economic change threatened their formerly reliable liveli­ hoods. “I think their sense of crisis following the great wave of commod­ ification is more intense than any other social stratum.” Yet, Wang, who has flourished with the market, spoke of the cleansing impact of com­ modification, which allowed the character of the Chinese people to emerge.79 In the second major axis of conflict, the cultural elite tries to protect its orthodoxy against heretical challenges from (often marginally) younger generations for new standards of aesthetic evaluation. Changes in estab­ lished taste reconfigure hierarchies within the cultural field by abandon­ ing standards that privileged former elites. Specifically, aesthetic conflicts about the legitimate vision of the world—in the last resort, about what deserves to be represented and the right way to represent it—are political conflicts (appearing in their most euphemized form) for the power to impose the dominant definition of re­ ality in general, and social reality in particular.80 In this conflict, artists often turn to tests of technique. A “dialectic of cul­ tural distinction” values form more highly than content, respecting the mode of representation over the object of representation. Technical issues predominate in a quest for purity and abstraction.81 In battles between old and new avant-gardes, the former tries to conserve its cultural capital through routinization, while the latter seeks to subvert it, often by ap­ pealing to a lost original purity.82 For instance, the rebels of nineteenthcentury French painting refused to give their paintings a narrative con­ tent; the impressionists opened up a road that led to painting being about painting itself. Judith Huggins Balfe argues that even commercially suc­ cessful artists often turn to the development of the “formal aesthetic qual­ ities in their work” precisely to allow “them to disassociate themselves from their original sponsors.”83 Here the Chinese counterpart is the threatened place of the old-line so­ cial realists—not such Maoist writers of the Cultural Revolution as Hao Ran, but the generation that includes Wang Meng, Liu Xinwu, or Lu Wenfu. Members of this cohort first made their mark during the 1950s, were disgraced as rightists, then restored to prominence soon after Mao’s death. They presumed that their moment to set China’s aesthetic mood had come, that China would benefit from their progressive, yet socially

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critical, art. In many respects this group looked back before the revolution to the traditions of May Fourth art. Yet, by the latter part of the 1980s, younger writers (and readers) were no longer interested in social realism and challenged the elite through their highly individualistic, asocial, and bleakly alienated fiction. One anthology of new fiction includes Lu Rui’s “The Brake-Stone” (the protagonist shares a wife with a cart driver), Wen Yuhong’s “The Mad City” (dog butchers lead a town into a frenzy of self destruction), Yu Hua’s “One Kind of Reality” (family loyalties and mur­ der are topped off by a postexecution harvesting of organs).84 These bitter, nihilistic stories contrast with the politically reforming impulse of the older generation’s realism. Costs of entry are relatively low in literature and fine arts (in contrast to the much more expensive film or television); thus, it is difficult for arts elites to bar challengers from entering into the cultural field. There is no other criterion for membership in a field than the objective fact of producing effects within it. One of the difficulties of orthodox de­ fense against heretical transformation of the field by a redefinition of the tacit or explicit terms of entry is the fact that polemics imply a form of recognition; adversaries whom one would prefer to destroy by ignoring them cannot be combated without consecrating them.85 When Chinese critics discussed Wang Xiaobo, author of the racily contro­ versial novel Golden Years, he was often identified as a “talent from outside the world of letters,” as they sought to distance him from the literary estab­ lishment. But a Guangzhou critic observed that as soon as people identified him as a talent, “in practice he has already entered the world of letters.”86 Professionalism offers artists a way of negotiating the confusion of mar­ ket reform, sometimes by claiming that their work is so advanced that the masses cannot grasp its significance. This is the course followed by po­ etry, which has shrunk from a once proud pastime for China’s educated elite into an ever more refined and technical activity among a tiny group of professional poets.87 According to Henry Y. H. Zhao, popular writing in the early 1980s severely reduced the readership of [serious] Chinese fiction. This caused a fi­ nancial crisis but it also enabled Chinese fiction to eschew all the non-literary functions it had previously been forced to take on, and to free itself from so­ cial and ideological pressures. The shrunken readership also became more elitist, consisting mainly of students. By distancing itself from the immediate social need of entertainment and edification, Chinese fiction had won the right to develop in its own direction.88

Longing for a reputation for creative refinement among fellow artists is so great that even those working in so commercial a medium as film seek it. Members of the post-Mao fifth generation of moviemakers were alleged

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to say, in the years before they accepted commercial moviemaking, “My films belong to the next century. The audience who can understand my film haven’t [sic] yet been born.”89 Bourdieu would treat such a claim as one of the myths of romanticism: The representation of culture as a kind of superior reality, irreducible to the vulgar demands of economics, and the ideology of free, disinterested “cre­ ation” founded on the spontaneity of innate inspiration—appear to be just so many reactions to the pressures of an anonymous market.90

ART AGAINST POWER: THE BITTERSWEET LOSS OF POLITICS Bourdieu reminds us that communities of artists will often be torn be­ tween evaluation criteria determined by the artists themselves and their aesthetic technique and standards from outside the arts world, typically financial success. We should recall, however, that China’s artists have also long had an additional external criterion for evaluation: the measure of politics. In its most immediate and simplest form, political standards were used by the Communist Party to reward and punish artists, especially during the Maoist period, though the practice continues in attenuated form. As artists differ on the weight they attach to the polarity of purely aesthetic standards versus monetary success, so do they vary in their assessments of pure aesthetic versus political success. For instance, novelist Hao Ran, the only writer paid royalties during the Cultural Revolution, probably regrets the shift from political judgment.91 Similarly, artists of propaganda paintings, recognized as a distinct genre during the Maoist period, may also regret the reform era’s disinterest in their work. Most artists are happy to be rid of political surveillance and to have careers somewhat re­ moved from the state.92 Yet, there is a second way in which political and purely aesthetic stan­ dards have coexisted. In contrast to the Maoists’ often clumsy use of art as a weapon for waging political conflict, most educated people have shared a commitment to the subtler mandarin tradition. Here intellectuals, in­ cluding artists, have an obligation to become teachers to society, to use their skills to rectify social and political ills. This tradition never died in twentieth-century China. Artists who emerged in the early reform period eagerly anticipated a renewal of the May Fourth agenda, with pride of place given to the artist who could articulate progressive visions for the nation’s future. Artists who might scorn art created to meet political de­ mands of the moment might well still esteem work that bears a high moral tone. The mission of moral tutelage thus offers a commercial-political po­ larity parallel to the commercial-aesthetic dualism described by Bourdieu.

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Through the reforms, artists gained the right to produce depoliticized art, addressing their personal visions, be they imbued with a moral con­ tent or empty of social concern. What they have begun to lose is the priv­ ileged status of the literati tradition and its moralizing art. Few antici­ pated the need to compete with video games, imported pornography, Walt Disney, or canto-pop singers, all of which came headlong into China along with the lightening of political controls over the arts. Art for art’s sake has limited appeal in China, where it seems to lack the moral commitment of China’s humanist tradition. Even in the United States, this battle cry of the pure aesthete is most commonly encountered at the movies, when the Metro Goldwyn Mayer lion disingenuously roars ars gratia artis from beneath its enclosing Latin banner. In China, “art for the Party’s sake” is an unappealing slogan these days, but “art for the nation’s sake” would still sound right to many intellectuals. The growing commercial economy sent the message that art should en­ tertain instead of uplift. Some state leaders appealed to professional artists to counter the market’s ideological confusion and antisocial values with the high-minded purity of socialist spiritual civilization. Mixed sig­ nals confused many artists. By the end of the 1980s, however, one promi­ nent reformist writer observed that fewer and fewer Chinese writers think they should use their writing to help the Chinese people to reorganize society. One common view is that it would destroy the artistic purity of their work and cause it to lose the value of time­ lessness. Some writers were also growing indifferent to popular sentiments and to the country’s fate.93

Chinese intellectuals were of course not alone in these sentiments, which echo the deepening crisis of the cultural market in Latin America, another region with a tradition of politically engaged intellectuals.94 The more routine the professionalization of art, the more artists will re­ semble other professionals. China’s artists have a long tradition in which their art endows them with a special moral position. The Maoist ideal of the politically engaged artist struggling for revolution was a close cousin to this mandarin ideal. In reality most artists are not engaged in struggles over public ethics; as the arts profession comes to look more and more like accounting, civil engineering, or dentistry, the less all artists will feel that they are somehow, if indirectly, participating in something that is more heroic than the prosaic routine of their day-to-day lives.95 But the historical domination of the humanist literati has ended, and the new model for artists is the technical expert of science and engineering.96 Few at the top of the political system care passionately about the arts any­ more. The state is willing to provide important new arts facilities (the Shanghai Museum, the Beijing Opera House), but pays much less attention

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to art’s content. Probably this is good for the arts, and it certainly makes life easy for the artists who generally find being marginalized preferable to being suppressed. Today their political interest is likely to focus on skillful maneuvering for larger budgets for their fine arts academies or song-anddance troupes. The fact that art mixes with politics is not a major issue for most Chi­ nese. Instead, the question is how to combine the two adroitly and pow­ erfully and in a more humane manner than in the recent past. Failure to grasp this point and instead blaming bad officials who oppress freedomseeking artists assures a minimum of understanding of what the Chinese are trying to attain. NOTES 1. Directed by He Cun, Fujian film studio, 1996. Other ethnographically inter­ esting films exploring rapid change in the arts world are “Bei kao bai, mian dui mian” [“Back to back, face to face”], directed by Huang Jianxin (1994), and “Zhan­ tai” [“Platform”], directed by Jia Zhangke (2000). 2. Wang Meng in “Wenyijia buyinggai beiyangqilai” [“Artists should not be supported”], Fuzhou wanbao (June 1, 1989). 3. On the material problems of intellectuals see Perry Link, Evening Chats in Beijing: Probing China’s Predicament (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), especially chapter 2; Lynn T. White III and Li Cheng, “Diversification among Mainland Chi­ nese Intellectuals,” Issues & Studies 24(9) (September 1988), 50–77; Chen Yong­ sheng, “The Income of Intellectuals in Mainland China,” Issues & Studies 28(3) (March 1992), 76–91. For information on the incomes of Beijing painters in 1984, see Joan Lebold Cohen, The New Chinese Painting: 1949–1986 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 27. 4. Xian Jie, “Zaqi Wuhan fan nangaoyin Wu Yanze” [“An interview with Tenor Wu Yanze in Wuhan”], Guanchajia 38 (December 20, 1980), 47–49. 5. See “State Monopoly of Chinese Art Impairs Market,” New York Times (July 6, 1980). 6. Picture caption, Renmin ribao (haiwaiban, “overseas editon”) (July 31, 1991), 4. In this instance the money was donated to aid flood victims. 7. Interview with painter Wang Gongyi (December 10, 1994). 8. “Ren chi shu” [“People eat books”], Fuzhou wanbao (April 13, 1989); see also Luo Rujia, “Gongchandangren de ‘renge fenlie’” [“The ‘split in the moral quality’ of Communist Party members”], Dongxiang 56 (September 1989), 36. 9. For a review of inflation issues, see Benedict Stavis, “The Political Economy of Inflation in China,” Studies in Comparative Communism 22(2–3) (summer/ autumn 1989), 235–250. 10. See Deborah Davis, ed., The Consumer Revolution in Urban China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 11. “Gaochou biaojun digao wucheng” [“Standards for manuscript fees in­ creased fifty percent”], Fuzhou wanbao (April 13, 1989).

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12. Daniel C. Lynch, After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics, and “Thought Work” in Reformed China (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999), 137. 13. “Wa ‘wenshan’ shengkaixiao” [“Dig away the ‘mountain of documents’ and save expenses”], Zhongguo baokan bao (June 3, 1987). 14. The drive against internal publications continued into 2000, when four hundred local publications were closed. “China Consolidates State Publications,” China News Digest (September 8, 2000). 15. See Jerome Silbergeld, Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 134, 227, n. 54. 16. Huang Gongzhi, “Chaojutuan zousi’an di yubo” [“Implications of the Chaozhou Opera Company Smuggling Case”], Zhengming 41 (March 1981), 17. 17. See Luo Bing, “Dao Hu jihua daweiji” [“The big crisis of overthrowing Hu going to extremes”], Zhengming 113 (March 1987), 7; Wang Lihong, “Huayuan congzhong shi Deng Lin” (“Recognizing Deng Lin in painting’s dense garden”), Renmin ribao (haiwaiban, “overseas edition”) (October 6, 1988); Ling Yuan, “Chi­ nese Artists’ New York Debut,” Beijing Review 31(45) (November 7–13, 1988), 33–37; Grace Glueck, “Artists Bring Their Vision from China to SoHo,” New York Times (October 10, 1988); Irene So, “Agency Portrait of Deng Lin Omits Pedigree,” South China Morning Post (October 6, 1995). Jiang Zemin’s nephew, Xu Jiang, heads the oil painting department at the China Art Academy in Hangzhou, where he en­ joys a flourishing career, but without the taint of scandal that dogs his colleague Deng Lin. 18. Yu Zhongli, “Songzang qiyao nulang tiaowu” [“Why should a funeral in­ clude dancing girls?”], Fuzhou wanbao (May 20, 1989). 19. Huang Yihua, “Youren xiang ban ‘zhuru jiuba’” [“Someone plans to open a ‘dwarf bar’”], Fuzhou wanbao (March 10, 1989); Chen Cao, “Lin Dachun he tade qige xiaoairen” [“Lin Dachun and his seven little people”], Fuzhou wanbao (June 23, 1989). 20. Isabel K. F. Wong, “The Second Spring for the Hundred Flowers: Diversity and Change in Traditional Chinese Music Drama, 1980s,” paper for the Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Los Angeles, California, 1984. 21. Personal communication from a Chinese social scientist who had been away from China for over a dozen years (November 17, 1998). 22. Wu Mei, “Women’s Education Urged,” China Daily (March 8, 1989). 23. Yi Ming, “Shenzhou baijinchao xia de qiwen” [“Strange news from China in the money-worshiping tide”], Dongxiang 106 (June 1994), 40–41. 24. See “Xinyangshi wenhuaju ‘yi wen pu wen’ xiaoguo xianzhu” [“The results of the Xinyang city culture bureau’s policy of ‘subsidizing art through art’ shine through clearly”], in 1995 Henan wenhua yishu nianjian [“1995 Henan arts year­ book”] (Zhengzhou, Henansheng Wenhuating, 1966), 263–264. 25. “Xinhuaxian gongxiaoshe yu xian xinhua shudian lianying” [“Xinhua County supply and marketing cooperatives join up with New China Bookstores”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (February 11, 1990). 26. “Hubeisheng Xingshanxian chuxian ‘cangshucun’” [“Hubei’s Xiangshan county produces a ‘book-collecting village’”], Renmin ribao (haiwaiban, “overseas edition”)(March 9, 1988).

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27. Zhao Xiangdong, “Gonggu wenhuazhan xiaoyi” [“An opinion on consoli­ dating cultural stations”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (June 13, 1990). 28. For a sensitive discussion, see Jing Wang, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aes­ thetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 29. On the beginning of arts markets, see John Fitzgerald, “A New Cultural Revolution: The Commercialization of Culture in China,” Australian Journal of Chi­ nese Affairs 11 (January 1984), 105–120. 30. Ding Yunpeng, “Put Advertising in Its Proper Perspective,” Shanghai Wen­ huibao (January 14, 1979), in FBIS (January 24, 1979), E18. See also Randall Stross, “The Return of Advertising in China: A Survey of the Ideological Reversal,” China Quarterly 123 (September 1990), 499–500. 31. Zhang Xizeng and Li Shuliang, eds., Yishu jingjixue cankao ziliao huiben [“An­ thology of reference materials in the economics of the arts”] (Shenyang: Liaoning Shehuikexueyuan Wenxue Yanjiusuo, 1982). 32. Silbergeld, Contradictions, 189. 33. Personal communication with Hill Gates (1989). 34. See “Studying the Causes of Increasing Suicide,” China Daily (March 16, 1989). 35. The painter would be frustrated to know of his fellow artist Ting Shaoguang, who bought the biggest house built in Beverly Hills, outbidding Michael Jackson. Angelica Cheung, “Mainland Artist Who Made a Mint,” South China Morning Post (January 4, 1996). 36. See Howard Becker, Artworlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), for an analysis of such intermediaries. 37. Agence France Press, “Curtain up on Drive to Aid Struggling Theaters,” South China Morning Post (April 7, 1997); Fang Quanlin, ed., Zou xiang shichang di yishu [“Fine arts on the road to the market”] (Shanghai: Xuelin Chubanshe, 1997). 38. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, Gifts, Favors, & Banquets: The Art of Social Relation­ ships in China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 303–304. See also Lu Shi, “‘Zouxue’ taoshui de wenyi chongjipo” [“The arts shockwave of ‘going under­ ground’ and evading taxes”], Dongxiang 48 (March 1988), 39–41. 39. “Mao Amin touloushui beifakuan sanwanduo yuan” [“Mao Amin fined over thirty thousand yuan for tax evasion”], Fujian ribao (May 31, 1989); Lu Shi, “‘Zouxue’ taoshui de wenyi chongjipo”; “Qunian gexing ‘zouxue’ de chuchangfei” [“Underground performance fees earned last year by singing stars”], Fuzhou wanbao (March 16, 1989). 40. Jocelyn E. Gamble, “Stir-Fried Stocks: Share Dealers, Trading Places, and New Options in Contemporary Shanghai,” Modern China 23(2) (April 1997), 199–200. 41. For discussion of complex loans and deals among work units over their artists, see Silbergeld, Contradictions, 134, 170. 42. Xiang Feng, “Sanmingshi mingyiren Lin Keqing zuban minjian jutuan” [“Famous Sanming City artist Li Keqing organizes private opera company”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (October 5, 1988). 43. “Mao Amin touloushui beifakuan sanwanduo yuan” [“Mao Amin fined over thirty thousand yuan for tax evasion”], Fujian ribao (May 31, 1989).

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44. China News Digest (February 14, 1996). 45. “Reporter Arrested for Blackmail,” China Daily (November 6, 1989). 46. Beijing Xinhua in English (March 9, 1993), in FBIS-CHI-93-054 (March 23, 1993), 65. 47. Sue Green, “Hunt for Political Harmony,” South China Morning Post (Janu­ ary 3, 1998). 48. Food was steady in these years at 52 percent. “Search Is on for All Beijing Book-Lovers,”China Daily (June 10, 1997). 49. Deborah Davis, personal communication (1997). 50. On leisure, see Shaoguang Wang, “The Politics of Private Time: Changing Leisure Patterns in Urban China,” in Deborah Davis et al., eds., Urban Spaces: Au­ tonomy and Community in Contemporary China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 149–172. 51. “Jinzhoushi jumin wenhua xiaofei fasheng sida bianhua” [“Jinzhou resi­ dents have four big changes in cultural consumption”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (Jan­ uary 3, 1988). 52. Ou Rongchang, “Qingyinyue yanchushang zuolu weihe xijiang” [“Why is the attendance at light music performances in decline?”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (February 12, 1989); “Music Fans Lose Love for Symphony,” China Daily (April 29, 1989). 53. Liu Heng, Black Snow (Beijing: Panda Books, 1991), 71. Black Snow was made into a movie under the title Benmingnian [“Fateful year”], Xie Fei, dir., 1990. 54. Xiaobing Tang, “The Function of New Theory: What Does It Mean to Talk about Postmodernism in China?” Working Papers in Asian/Pacific Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University, N.D.), 12. 55. Wenwi Du, “Xiaopin: Chinese Theatrical Skits as Both Creatures and Critics of Commercialism,” China Quarterly 154 (June 1998), 382–399. 56. “Writers Bank a Million for Novel Lives,” China Daily (January7, 2002). 57. Gu Yuan, “Zhi qiangdiao jingji guilu lai lingdao wenyi xingma?” [“Will it do to advocate only using economic laws for leading the arts?”], Renmin ribao (Oc­ tober 4, 1980). 58. Colin Mackerras, “Modernization and Contemporary Chinese Theatre: Commercialization and Professionalization,” in Constantine Tung and Colin Mackerras, eds., Drama in the People’s Republic of China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 183. 59. Wang Xun’an, “Shoufei wenyi peixun ying naru shichang guanli” [“Com­ mercial arts training should be subject to market management”], Zhonguo wenhua bao (November 1, 1990). 60. “Woshi qudi jianghu youyi weifa xingyi jigou” [“Our city suppresses itin­ erant physicians and illegal medical organizations”], Xiamen ribao (November 8, 1989). The crackdown seems to have responded to previously expressed demands for higher standards. For example, see the indignant letter from a staff member at a rural hospital in Fujian, Chu Yan, “Ying dui geti xingyizhe jinxing kaoge” [“We must check the qualifications of independent travelling doctors”], Fujian ribao (February 13, 1989). Chu was unhappy about an itinerant physician who charged one hundred fifty yuan (U.S. $40) for three worthless injections for a sixty-threeyear-old woman with rectal cancer.

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61. Liu Yinglang, “Ministry of Culture to Licence Performers,” China Daily (June 15, 1996); Vivien Pic-Kwan Chan, “Clamps on Performers Broadened,” South China Morning Post (August 22, 1997). 62. Here the sociological model of professionalism predicts such behavior to re­ sist market pressures for competition with their peers, or pursue profits against their better judgment. William M. Sullivan, Work and Integrity: The Crisis and Promise of Professionalism in America (New York: Harper Business, 1995), 6. 63. China News Digest—Global (August 21, 1998). 64. Gu Cheng, Selected Poems (Hong Kong: Renditions, 1990), xxii. 65. Other nonstate “mass organizations,” such as the Women’s Federation, en­ countered similar financial difficulties. See Stanley Rosen, “Women and Political Participation in China,” Pacific Affairs 68(3) (fall 1995), 324–325. 66. Suzanne Ogden, Inklings of Democracy in China (Cambridge: Harvard Uni­ versity Asia Center, 2002), 327. 67. Bourdieu’s essays on the field of culture are reprinted in Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, Randal Johnson, ed. (New York: Columbia Uni­ versity Press, 1993), with a useful introduction by the editor, Randal Johnson. See also Helmut K. Anheier, Jürgen Gerhards, and Frank P. Romo, “Forms of Capital and Social Structure in Cultural Fields: Examining Bourdieu’s Social Topogra­ phy,” American Journal of Sociology 100(4) (January 1995), 859–903; and Michel Hockx, “The Literary Association (Wenxue yanjiu hui, 1920–1947) and the Liter­ ary Field of Early Republican China,” China Quarterly 153 (March 1998), 49–81. 68. Michel Hockx applies Bourdieu to Chinese literary politics in “The Literary Association,” 49–81. See also Michel Hockx, ed., The Literary Field of Twentieth-Century China (Richmond, U.K.: Curzon, 1999). 69. Johnson, ed., Field, 6. 70. Bourdieu, Field, 40. 71. James Cahill, The Painter’s Practice: How Artists Lived and Worked in Tradi­ tional China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 5. 72. Paul Auster, Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997). 73. Gore Vidal, Palimpsest: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 1996), 276. 74. Jed Perl, “The Art Nobody Knows,” The New Republic (October 19, 1992), 35–36. 75. Bourdieu, Field, 42. 76. Su Tong is a professional writer for the Jiangsu Writers Association. See Lu Min, “Su Tong di ‘Mi’ hui bu hui langfei?” [“Will Su Tong’s ‘rice’ be wasted?”], Dongxiang 125 (January 1996), 74–76. Ying Wen, “Wenhua duanxun” [“Cultural notes”], Dongxiang 125 (January 1996), 72. 77. Bourdieu, Field, 75, 108. 78. For a recent translation of Wang’s fiction into English, see Wang Shuo, Playing for Thrills, Howard Goldblatt, trans. (London: No Exit Press, 1997), containing light mockery of Wang Meng on p. 162. See Geremie Barmé, “Wang Shuo and Liumang (‘Hooligan’) Culture,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 28 (July 1992), 23–66. 79. Liu Xiaobo, “Wang Shuo fangtan lu” [“Transcript of interview with Wang Shuo”], Zhengming 183 (January 1993), 72–74. 80. Bourdieu, Field, 101–102.

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81. Bourdieu, Field, 117. 82. Bourdieu, Field, 17. 83. Judith Huggins Balfe, “Art Patronage: Perennial Problems, Current Impli­ cations,” in Judith Huggins Balfe, ed., Paying the Piper: Causes and Consequences of Art Patronage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 306. 84. Henry Y. H. Zhao, ed., The Lost Boat: Avant-Garde Fiction from China (London: Wellsweep, 1993). See also Howard Goldblatt, ed., Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused: Fiction from Today’s China (New York: Grove Press, 1995), and Jing Wang, ed., China’s Avant-Garde Fiction: An Anthology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998). 85. Bourdieu, Field, 42. 86. Chen Wenchao, “Wentan wai gaoshou faxian dute wenben” [“The discov­ ery of a special text by a talent from beyond the world of letters”], Mingbao yuekan 360 (December, 1995), 103. 87. See Su Wei and Wendy Larson, “The Disintegration of the Poetic ‘Berlin Wall,’” in Davis et al., eds., Urban Spaces, 279–293. 88. Henry Y. H. Zhao, “The New Waves in Recent Chinese Fiction,” in Zhao, ed., The Lost Boat, 9–10. 89. Xiao Gong, “Lights, Action, Camera! Filmmaking Discussed,” China Daily (October 11, 1995). Director Tian Zhuangzhuang says, “I shot Horse Thief for audi­ ences of the next century to watch.” Interview with Yang Ping, “A Director Who is Trying to Change the Audience,” originally published in Popular Cinema, 9 (1986), translated in Chris Berry, ed., Perspectives on Chinese Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1991), 127. According to Chris Berry the disinterest of film’s avant-garde in making money frustrates studio heads. Chris Berry, “Market Forces: China’s ‘Fifth Generation’ Faces the Bottom Line,” in Berry, ed., Perspectives, 114–140. 90. Bourdieu, Field, 114. 91. Hao Ran’s The Broad Road in Golden Light sold four million copies in 1972, its year of publication. Kai-yu Hsu, The Chinese Literary Scene. A Writer’s Visit to the People’s Republic (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 86–99. 92. Yet it is still regarded as noteworthy if a writer is without official ties. See Shi Pin, “Wanquan tuoli guanfang di duli zuojia Wang Lixiong” [“Wang Lixiong, a writer completely independent of officialdom”], in Liu Dawen, ed., Dalu yijian zuojia zhun [“Exceptional writers of the mainland”] (Hong Kong: Xiafeier Guoji Chubanshe, 2001), 230–240. 93. Liu Binyan, “Tell the World”: What Happened in China and Why (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 27. 94. “Everywhere in contemporary Latin America, there is a sense of the literary intelligentsia’s diminishing importance and displacement from public discourse. This displacement is exacerbated by the growing privatization of culture. Increas­ ingly, cultural institutions—galleries, music, and television channels—are man­ aged by private enterprise. Even national universities, traditionally the focus of political activism, now compete with thousands of private universities, many of which are geared to business rather than culture. The shift in patronage is partic­ ularly striking in Mexico because of a tradition of cultural nationalism that dates back to the revolution.” Jean Franco, “What’s Left of the Intelligentsia?” NACLA Report on the Americas 27(2) (September–October 1994), 17.

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95. For a more optimistic view, see Richard Madsen, “The Spiritual Crisis of China’s Intellectuals,” in Deborah Davis and Ezra F. Vogel, eds., Chinese Society on the Eve of Tiananmen: The Impact of Reform (Cambridge: Harvard University Coun­ cil on East Asian Studies, 1990), 257; for a more melancholy treatment of the loss of the generalist intellectual, see Timothy Cheek, Propaganda and Culture in Mao’s China: Deng Tuo and the Intelligentsia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), esp. 306–318. 96. On the increase of higher education and technical skills among the political elite, see White and Cheng, “Diversification,” 54. See also Hong Yung Lee, From Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrats in Socialist China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

7

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The Hands That Feed Them

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ho makes up the shortfall in public support for the arts and with what political consequences? In this concluding chapter I will ex­ amine the issue of arts sponsorship and ideological control. Much public discussion in China focuses on artists’ need to master the market, to find new audiences, and to earn money from the sale of their products. Many have in fact learned to do so. But contributions from both private and state firms have assumed a new place in China’s cultural politics. Arts an­ gels have mixed motives, ranging from a generous desire to support cul­ ture to vulgar self-promotion. Artists respond to this new opportunity for support with both relief and resentment. The artists may not actually bite the hands that feed them, but they certainly do snap at them from time to time. If paying the piper entitles one to call the tune, what do these new pa­ tronage relationships imply for the continued rule of the Communist Party? For more than three decades, the Party’s claim to rule rested in part upon wide acceptance of a revolutionary ideology, continuously rein­ forced by the output of the arts establishment. In the new century, the Party can no longer enforce its increasingly empty claims to ideological hegemony. Will the new hands that help feed the nation’s artists use their patronage to challenge Party hegemony?

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BUDGET SHORTFALLS AND ARTS ANGELS Declining State Support For all the public discussion of cutting subsidies and requiring selfsufficiency, the actual pace of the reforms in state cultural organs has been rather deliberate, much like the tempo of economic reform at large. Incomplete national data is available for state-subsidized performing-arts troupes, which receive a disproportionate amount of press attention.1 These troupes include a broad range of arts genres: Chinese opera companies, symphony orchestras, spoken drama companies, song-and-dance troupes, and companies of ballad singers, puppeteers, and acrobats. Prior to the mid-1980s, statistical reports indicated annual increases in the numbers of such companies, reflecting the still widely held presumption that more subsidized art was a good thing. This atti­ tude changed mid-decade, when the numbers began to decline. In 1985 there were 3,175 subsidized arts troupes; by 1994, 20 percent had been cut. For the remaining 2,561 troupes, state subsidies constituted 56 per­ cent of total expenditures, a reduction from 65 percent in 1985. The top-ranked troupes, under direct state management, were more likely to be sheltered, while local collective troupes were hit harder. Only 12 percent of state units lost state subsidies, but 34 percent of collective units did. Collective units were also required to earn a much larger pro­ portion of their own budgets in 1994 (55 percent instead of 36 percent). Variations emerge among genres. A quarter of the 253 companies spe­ cializing in ballad singing, acrobatics, puppetry, and shadow puppetry were cut. A quarter of 2,101 local opera companies were cut. More than one-third of 181 Beijing opera companies (mostly local companies that stage Beijing opera around the nation) were cut, leaving only a slight im­ provement in the ratio of revenues to expenses. In contrast, the number of subsidized symphonies and choruses, a form favored by the Westernlooking intelligentsia, increased from fifteen to nineteen. And the 200 state-subsidized song-and-dance troupes, which perform pop music, ac­ tually grew by 31 percent to 293. State subsidies, far from being cut in absolute terms, actually increased by 2.5 times in this decade to 756 million yuan (U.S. $91 million). They de­ clined of course as a relative proportion of arts budgets, as companies learned to raise more of their own funds. Pressures to increase the nonstate income of all of these ensembles were successful, including a dou­ bling of revenues from performances (mostly ticket sales). The decline was not so precipitous as one might imagine from conver­ sations with frustrated artists and intellectuals. Cuts have been severe, but surviving companies have enjoyed substantial budget increases. Wellplaced units have been able to raise more of their own funds, to pare ex­

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penses, and to survive. Yet, the fact that 20 percent of units disappeared explains why so many artists have been anxious about the reforms. The situation for local cultural centers under the Ministry of Culture is simi­ lar; in 1994 they spent 462 million yuan (U.S. $56 million), but the state budget only covered two-thirds, with the shortfall to be made up by video games, movie tickets, and discos.2 Thus, arts budgets increased, but not enough to keep pace with inflation and new expenses, forcing official companies to find alternative financing or be cut completely. Even more important than the pattern within the budget was the rapid growth of the market in the economy at large. State firms produced 77 percent of China’s industrial goods in 1978, but only 53 percent in 1991. Collective producers (locally owned, often a state-private mix) increased from 23 percent in 1978 to 36 percent in 1991; private and foreign-related producers increased from 0 percent to 11 percent in the same period. The state controlled a smaller percentage of a much larger economy, in which industrial output increased sevenfold.3 By 2002, twothirds of China’s gross domestic product was in the private sector.

Long-Term Demand for External Support The wave of reform in arts financing will certainly wring some new effi­ ciencies out of bloated aesthetic institutions, even as it forces arts groups to turn to other patrons to compensate for lost state subsidies. Yet, there are also longer-term pressures at work that may not be felt in the short term, but that may well strengthen the need for alternative patrons in the new cultural politics. Arts markets face distinctive limits to capital-intensive ef­ ficiencies available to other types of production.4 The arts are typically labor intensive, and their history, like the history of any capitalist production, can be read as a process of substituting new technologies in order to reduce rising labor costs. For example, as middleclass markets for music emerged in the nineteenth-century West, per­ formers and their managers sought to increase the sizes of audiences by strengthening their instruments so that they might be heard in larger con­ cert halls or even by altering vocal techniques so that singers could pro­ ject their voices more forcefully.5 More recently, the mechanical reproduc­ tion of visual art and music intensified the quest for productive efficiency, as corporations built sales through broadcasting and recording, reducing labor costs with massive capital investment. Yet, the labor intensity that makes the arts unique renders efficiencies difficult to attain without destroying the art. For instance, one cannot produce more art by reducing a string quartet to three musicians or in­ struct them to perform more music by playing faster. This dilemma has confronted Western performing-arts institutions for decades, as they lag

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behind other producers in applying technological efficiencies.6 In the United States this dynamic has led to disputes over the use of synthesiz­ ers to replace studio orchestras in Hollywood, “colorization” of classic films to earn greater profits for their owners, or the introduction of drum machines to replace human percussionists in bands. In general, live art, which must be consumed immediately at the point of production, gives way (amidst controversy about standards) to reproduced art as cultural entrepreneurs deal with the arts’ productivity lag in a market economy. Many Chinese arts units are so amply staffed that short-run savings are easy, but long-term economies will be more difficult to achieve. If China follows Western experience, rising wage levels in society will create social pressures to keep artists from falling too far behind, especially as the arts assume a more professional aspect (underscoring common social origins with other, better-paid elites). For China, the situations faced by overstaffed steel mills and bloated performing-arts ensembles are similar, at least for the moment. But the imme­ diate economic benefits to managers of trimming personnel will give way eventually to Western-style demands for new subsidies in the name of pre­ serving whole artistic genres whose labor costs cannot be met by ticket sales. Chinese opera already makes this appeal, but it seems likely to spread. Given the persistence of the Chinese state in pressing for market re­ forms in the arts, it seems unlikely that the policies of the past two decades will be reversed in favor of reestablishing sole state patronage. Even so poor a province as Hebei found by 1988 that cultural departments on their own raised amounts equal to one quarter of their state allocations.7 But marginal policy adjustments might ease the demands on se­ lected institutions. For instance, in 1996, karaoke bars, dance halls, adver­ tising agencies, bowling alleys, and golf courses were assessed a 3 percent culture tax. The tax only applied to licensed businesses, and individuals donating 3 percent of their income to cultural organizations could take this amount off their taxes.8 The Communist regime in Hungary used a similar tax to transfer resources from popular to high culture. Looking for Arts Angels How do artists find new patrons to make up for rising costs and a declin­ ing percentage of state support? Chen Guokai was the chairman of the Guangdong Writers Association in 1995, when he published a short story about the frustrations of artists in search of financial support.9 The hero, a writer named Xiao, is pained to realize that “Prices are always going up, but royalties aren’t. Half a day’s work won’t buy a pack of cigarettes. You bury yourself in work for years, then find it’s tough getting your book published, and even then 20 percent tax doesn’t leave very much.”

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Xiao decides to change careers. Uninterested in business, he finds a government post through family connections. This is no ordinary state job; Xiao is made vice mayor with no responsibilities beyond eating and drinking—which is what many citizens believe officials do anyway. Xiao finds the job pleasant, especially because his office is equipped with an imported massage chair to ease the hangovers from all his ban­ quets. One day the secretary general of the local Writers Association calls. Being a dinner-eating official had kept me so busy that not only had I for­ gotten that I was a writer, I had also forgotten that the writers’ association ex­ isted. It seemed that if you occupied such a post for very long you might very well even forget the Ministry of Culture.

Because the Writers Association lacks medical funds for its members, Secretary General Ah Qiang has come to seek help for a respected elderly writer who cannot afford some urgently needed, but expensive, medicine. The Party Propaganda Department, overburdened with requests, has al­ ready said no. The business world has refused to contribute—it hasn’t been a good year. Companies need to earn money to give money, and lit­ erature doesn’t help business: “Literature is neither a roadside billboard, nor land for a building, nor karaoke, much less a mistress.” Xiao turns in desperation to a prosperous peasant, Iron Nail Li, head of a nearby village. Li only had three years of schooling and is famous for his ability to drink. I have noticed an odd phenomenon in recent years: the ones who are truly concerned for culture are poorly educated. Some cultured people, as soon as they get rich, become even more devoted to making money than the greedi­ est of merchants.

Iron Nail Li listens to Xiao’s appeal, then closes off the conversation by saying that he would rather drink than talk about disease. But he offers a bargain: counting from glass number eight, he will give Xiao ten thou­ sand yuan for each additional glass of liquor consumed. Xiao valiantly drinks eighteen glasses until he collapses. An ambulance rushes him to a hospital, where he endures three enemas and two stomach pumpings. When the municipal Party chief comes to visit in the hospital, Xiao re­ signs his official post, despite the Party secretary’s protest: “Weary from head to foot, I only had one thing to say: ‘with literature so impoverished, I’m afraid of more enemas.’” The moral of the story is grim. Unable to rely on state support and with­ out assets of its own, the Writers Association must shop the private world even for so vital a mission as medicine for its elderly members. Aid usu­ ally comes with strings attached, even if they are only humoring an angel

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with a big heart, but rough manners. Private patrons are appreciated, but rarely with the fulsome gratitude that they may imagine or desire.

ALTERNATIVE PATRONS IN THE CULTURAL MARKETPLACE The phrase “cultural market” evokes an image of millions of citizens, each championing his or her sovereign consumer preferences. Rapidly rising personal income allows consumers more cultural choices. For some arts, such as writing, individual consumer choices are obviously critical. In others, the market’s impact is less direct; purchases of televisions, for in­ stance, drastically reduced demand for movies. Chinese artists work hard to attract purchasers for their paintings, novels, and performances. Yet, in the eyes of most novelists, the real patron is likely to be a publishing house or a magazine editor. The new patrons are less likely to be anony­ mous participants in a mass cultural marketplace than individuals or or­ ganizations with concentrated economic power. Private investment in culture has been easiest not in the labor-intensive arts of fiction or painting, but in the already capital-intensive (and prof­ itable) television and film industry. One-third of Chinese films and 80 per­ cent of television dramas were made with private investment by 2003.10 Wealthy Individuals A new class of wealthy individuals is beginning to play the role of arts an­ gel. The revolution’s destruction of private fortunes is being reversed by the growth of new wealth with the reforms. Yet, the new rich include few big fortunes; entrepreneurs have more often flourished in retail trade than in industry. They are weak and dependent upon the state. “Members usu­ ally lack their own means of production, independent capital, material supplies, and modes of operation.”11 Some entrepreneurs support the arts, both for personal enjoyment and prestige as the new bourgeoisie relearns old forms of connoisseurship. A 1989 report from Fujian’s Zhangzhou re­ ported that a third of the homes that hired tutors for their children were business families. Liu Tangtang, who operated a general store, studied English on her own. Many laughed at her, but she learned to read The Mer­ chant of Venice and recite Portia’s soliloquy. “You see that I am an entrepre­ neur and am also a woman. I will not allow anyone to look down at me.”12 But for many entrepreneurs, other forms of conspicuous consumption are more attractive, such as banqueting, limousines, and female compan­ ionship. Still others seem too naive to be sophisticated patrons. I attended the 1989 New Year’s party given by the Fujian Entrepreneurs Association, held at one of the better Fuzhou hotels. After short speeches referring to

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the struggles of entrepreneurs who fight their way to respectability, the evening featured very simple entertainment: tycoons competed for prizes of shampoo and toothpaste by bouncing a balloon over a net with their heads; a young woman acrobat dressed in a Tang Dynasty costume danced (to Liebestraum), ending up with her feet on her shoulders; the fast crowd of Fuzhou sipped orange drink and ate White Rabbit candy.13 Nonetheless, the sophistication and wealth of the business community is growing rapidly; by 1996 an entrepreneurial acquaintance in Nanjing en­ tertained at his private horse farm and track.14 This growing consumer society will lead to a Chinese class of million­ aire collectors; Western auction houses believe that the yuan will become a convertible currency, and that Chinese collectors will bid for Western oils. “We aren’t going to be selling impressionists in China in the near fu­ ture,” said a Sotheby’s executive in 1996. “In 10 years time maybe but not now.”15 The prediction may have been on target. By the turn of the cen­ tury, China had three thousand art galleries and shops; two years later, Shanghai alone claimed to have a thousand. While many of these sell tourist art to foreigners, domestic collectors are beginning to become a market force in the fine arts.16 Further illustrating the new world of nonstate culture, China’s first private art museum, the Guanfu Classic Art Museum, opened in Beijing in 1997, built around a thousand items col­ lected by a former editor, who says that the museum is “a symbol of so­ cial advancement and stability.”17 Corporate Angels More visible than individual patrons are corporate arts sponsors. China’s new political economy is not capitalism as Westerners know it, but is built upon vaguely delineated and highly fluid new corporate entities. Some are renovated state firms or new enterprises set up as subsidiaries of older state companies. Others belong to the vast number of township and vil­ lage industries, rural firms that are nominally part of the collective econ­ omy, but in practice operate with often surprising autonomy under the control of powerful executives (such as Iron Nail Li).18 Corporate contributors began to play a role early in the reforms. When the Shandong Song and Dance Theatre underwent a painful rectification in 1986, it dismissed more than a hundred members.19 Reforms included professionalizing the staff through annual examinations, while trying to raise morale by improvements to the cafeteria and providing cakes for members’ birthdays. Provincial officials arranged a deal by which the lo­ cal power company agreed to provide an annual subsidy and to repair the company’s electrical equipment in exchange for eight to twelve perform­ ances at the company each year.

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Why should businesses give money to artists? Sometimes an executive is simply a fan. In 1998 the Assets News Industrial Company donated five million yuan (approximately U.S. $60,000) to the Association of Chinese Writers to support a new Lu Xun literary prize. The company had earlier promoted modern literature by posting portraits of writers Lu Xun and Mao Dun in downtown Beijing.20 In other cases there are strings attached, often a demand for high-toned publicity. One Chengde wine company sponsored a local spoken drama troupe when it made a television play glorifying the history of its wine. An engineering-supplies company in Zhejiang provided travel expenses to enable an amateur playwright to accept a prize, then publicized its philanthropy.21 The Yangzi River Power Company funds tours by the Beijing Opera Company of Hubei, which considered changing its name to the China Yangzi River Power Company Beijing Opera Troupe.22 In Guang­ dong, the popular Jianlibao health tonic sponsored a Jianlibao Cantonese Opera Troupe and a Jianlibao Light Orchestra, providing a fairly lighthanded bit of advertising, somewhat like the old Texaco sponsorship of the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts.23 The Kunming Cigarette Factory, China’s largest, donated fifteen million yuan in 1993 and 1994 for cultural affairs in poor regions, much as the U.S. Philip Morris Company cloaks its sales of cigarettes and beer with uplifting arts philanthropy.24 Many of China’s new class of entrepreneurs are able to purchase both public attention and praise. Selections from Fiction (Xiaoshuo xuankan), a major journal that reprints new fiction from China’s legion of literary magazines, includes advertising of a most flattering sort. Its May 1987 back cover featured the Liaodong County Paper Factory. Manager Wang Qingfu appears in four of the five color photos. On the inside back cover are still more photos of Wang Qingfu under the caption, “The Labor and Life of an Entrepreneur.” The photos show Wang talk­ ing to a reporter, offering a toast to the president of Liaoning Univer­ sity, watching a former provincial governor write a poem while visiting his paper factory, and making a speech to the mayor of Shenyang. The photos are accompanied by a lickspittle text: “He has tread roads never walked by others.” A few months later, the same spot featured photos showing the manager of a refrigerator factory on his travels to Venice and Japan, accompanied by a suitably inspirational quotation from Balzac.25 More formal commercial links have developed between companies and cultural organizations. In 1987 the Xiamen Arts Association gave partial control of Xiamen Literature (Xiamen wenxue) magazine to the Xiamen Chi­ nese Medicine Factory. In exchange for financial support, the factory ap­ pointed two members to the editorial board, including a deputy editor to take charge of the magazine’s finances. The magazine promised to pub­ lish articles that

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penetrate deeply the life of the Xiamen Chinese Medicine Factory; through their poetry, essays, and reportage they will reflect this factory’s new people, new things, and new style. Moreover, the back cover of each issue will print an advertisement of the factory’s outstanding products.26

Foundations Foundations to support cultural activities work even better than corpo­ rate contributors for arts organizations as they set fewer preconditions. Many of the first foundations were set up in Guangdong and Fujian, which prospered early in the reforms and have strong commercial tradi­ tions. Foshan, a prosperous old city near Guangzhou, established its own Cultural Enterprises Foundation early in 1989. Both overseas Chinese and local enterprises have contributed to Foshan’s cultural activities through arts prizes, training courses, and new facilities.27 Guan Shanyue, an enor­ mously successful Cantonese painter, donates funds to the Fine Arts As­ sociation to set up a fund to aid talented artists.28 A Fujian Literature Foundation exploited connections with the celebrated veteran writer, Bing Xin, herself a Fujian native long resident in Beijing, who graced the foundation’s bulletin with its title in her calligraphy. Hong Kong busi­ nessmen, mostly of Fujian origin, also support the foundation and pre­ sumably enjoy the reflected glory of literary association.29 Foreigners Several forms of support from outside China offer a new and growing source of patronage. Early in the reform period, the state recognized that foreign tourists would attend exhibitions and performances; several arts or­ ganizations successfully aim a part of their work at Western or Japanese tourists.30 More complex is the distinctive role of foreign (including overseas Chinese) collectors in supporting China’s avant-garde. Many painters sup­ port themselves by “complex commercial relationships with the outside, whether it be in the form of foreign buyers or Hong Kong and Taiwan in­ terests (including publishers, record companies, galleries and film critics).”31 These include painters whose work makes officials squirm, but who have found financial success among collectors in Hong Kong or outside the People’s Republic. Internally, however, the Chinese government makes it diffi­ cult for foreign firms or individuals to own arts or communications compa­ nies, which discourages foreign participation in corporate patronage.32 Self-Support Arts organizations first look for ways to increase revenues from their regu­ lar activities. Ticket prices have increased steadily in order to increase box­

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office receipts. After cuts in state support, Hangzhou’s China Art Academy increased its tuition from six hundred to six thousand yuan in 1994.33 Some arts groups go into business for themselves, sometimes in fields far from their expertise. The Hangzhou Fine Arts Academy runs a com­ mercial gallery, but also has real estate investments. A deputy director was brought in especially to manage income-producing ventures, which are run on a business-like basis.34 In Fuzhou, Fujian Television, like many other stations, has built a local empire, including a restaurant and real es­ tate, supervised by a manager imported from the construction business. The Fujian Writers Association operates several enterprises, including an advertizing company and a hotel. The ad agency can hire writers, while the hotel also houses literary visitors, but both earn profits that support association activities. The Fujian Minju Experimental Opera Company gave over the ground floor of its headquarters to its jewelry factory, em­ ploying dependents of its performers and staff. Such enterprises are in­ tended to make profits in the market, but they are also set up paternalis­ tically to employ relatives of workers for the parent organizations. Similar is the experience of Xinhua (“New China”) Bookstore, the mas­ sive state-owned chain. Xinhua worried about profits as its retail monop­ oly crumbled in the 1980s, when the book business was also hit by infla­ tion in paper prices. Xinhua managers began to enter other businesses, some related, such as sales of popular audio and video equipment. They also began to rent floor space to other merchants and even set up facto­ ries, partly with a paternalistic eye for placing surplus workers in a mod­ ernizing book industry.35 The city of Guangzhou even figured out how to turn a profit from old statues. Gathering statues from many eras that had been scattered around the city, Guangzhou established a Sculpture Park. By placing them in a park with a steep admission fee, public art has been commodified, the earnings presumably applied to support parks and culture.36 Some of these enterprises will surely fail, but the more profitable busi­ nesses may become important as corporations in their own right, rather than as sources of supplementary revenue for arts activities. They might end up dominating the artists who initiated them. The Snobbery Factor Novelist Ba Jin criticized the “mutual co-operation of artists and entrepre­ neurs”: “I am still of the old view that it is readers who sustain me as a writer, not entrepreneurs.”37 But only a celebrated and well-supported writer, long past the end of his career, can comfortably cast a cold eye upon new patrons whom he does not need.38 Few practicing artists resist an alternative source of funding, separate from both the Party and the cash register.

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Yet, as the preceding chapter suggests, artists who court the new patrons of the market most assiduously often earn aesthetic cold shoulders from their colleagues. Millionaire painter Chen Yifei, for instance, initially made a fortune by painting decorative and sentimental oils for Westerners; he now produces them for newly rich Chinese, but is quite defensive about his many highbrow critics (“People say I am commercial, but I say there are artists who want to use politics to get attention, and I don’t think this is good”).39

DOES PRIVATE PATRONAGE THREATEN THE COMMUNIST PARTY? On the face of it, the growth of private or at least alternative patronage would seem potentially to give voice to possible rivals to the Communist Party for ideological influence. This can be seen in both some reformist hopes and Party fears, which may view the impact of nonstate patronage too simply. The Stone Corporation, China’s computer success of the 1980s, was typ­ ical of new business ventures, established with state loans and well con­ nected to the political elite.40 Founder Wan Runnan was connected to the political elite by two marriages, one to the daughter of former president Liu Shaoqi. Less typical was Wan’s political activism, which drove him into exile after the 1989 Beijing Massacre. Wan later commented that his company’s autonomy permitted a great deal of influence. Interestingly, several of his examples are from the arts world: For example, because we developed this private entrepreneurship, many of the work units in China, the danwei, came to us for help. They would ask us to sponsor dance troupes, singing contests, go tournaments, or even swim­ ming races. We were able to influence a large part of Chinese society.41

We cannot really measure the influence of the glamorous Stone Corpo­ ration, but dissident editor Wang Ruoshui echoed Wan’s possibly boastful assessment when he told a reporter early in the 1989 protest movement that his hopes for strengthening the independent role of intellectuals in China were pinned in part on the willingness of private enterprises like the Stone Cor­ poration, a Beijing computer company, to fund cultural activities. He argued that although these private enterprises “had a relationship with the state,” they would at last supply intellectuals with “a definite [independent] space.”42

Anxiety about the use of art as a source of funding seems to have played a role in the 1994 rearrest of Beijing dissident Wei Jingsheng. The charges accused Wei of planning to raise funds through a painting exhibition for his allegedly “illegal” activities. The court claimed that

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Wei, in attempting to overthrow the government, developed a plan of action, which included establishing an organization to “raise funds to support dem­ ocratic movement activities,” purchasing several newspapers, setting up a company in charge of organizing cultural activities, and organizing non­ governmental painting exhibitions, performances, and publications with the aim of setting up a propaganda and liaison base, attempting to “raise a storm powerful enough to shake up the present government.”43

But, private arts patronage poses no immediate threat to Communist rule; however weakened the Propaganda Department, it is still suffi­ ciently powerful to block private propaganda that challenges Party doc­ trine or legitimacy. For instance, the Party seems unlikely to allow there to be powerful and completely autonomous cultural institutions, such as a privately or collectively owned television network. Alternative patrons are not especially threatening to the Party in part because they are mostly drawn from elites with conservative views. The new business class is not independent, but deeply rooted in the state. Its new entrepreneurs have complex relations with state production units, and the princelings—children of the Communist elite—are entrenched in leading positions in the new market economy. Economic corruption is at the heart of China’s reform. The Communist Party has pressed reform by buying off the opposition, which was itself.44 Thus, the new economic elites constitute no independent bourgeoisie and offer no social basis for liberal politics.45 Indeed, so confident was the Communist Party that at its Sixteenth Congress in 2002, it revoked the ban on capitalists becoming members. Liberalism may one day be important in China, but artists are looking for arts angels to help pay the bills, not sponsor their ideologies. The private messages carried by China’s mass media are productfocused advertising, without even vaguely civic-minded public-service messages. When Fuzhou hosted a conference of authors and entrepre­ neurs in March 1989, celebrated writers such as Zhang Xianliang and (Chinese-American) Chen Ruoxi visited factories, where they chatted with the managers. The program received much praise for bringing artists into contact with life, but no one publicly recollected how Mao had sent writers to hang out with the workers, rather than their bosses.46 Away from the commanding heights of ideology, organizations use al­ ternative sources of patronage to create the conditions for greater artistic autonomy. The Fujian town of Shishi was a hot spot for market activities in the 1980s. Shishi was also touted as a cultural model, with new associ­ ations for traditional music (nanyin), bonsai, calligraphy, and photogra­ phy. “All are begun and aided by entrepreneurs. They raise their own money and manage their own affairs, which is much better than having the government come and tell them how to run things.”47 Alternative funding allows a degree of leverage, not clear-cut institutional autonomy, but a much murkier space for negotiation.

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Jeffrey C. Goldfarb contrasted Polish and American artists before the collapse of the Eastern European Communist regimes. The game for West­ ern artists was to subvert the market for the sake of art, avoiding mass-market demands by creating specialized markets or non-market supports through state, foundation, corporate, or individual patronage. The politics of culture in the East was about using or avoiding the party-state for artistic purposes. . . . Gaming with the censor became part of the cultural world. As Western artists are forced to work or subvert the market, the artists of the so­ cialist bloc worked or subverted the administered art world. They pretended to do what they never intended, to build a socialist culture. They found zones in which censorship was lax, for example in student cultural institutions, and they used elliptical language and other techniques of formal disguise. In this way, as in the case of artists in the West who must play with and against the market to get on with their work, the artists in the socialist world got on with their work by playing with and against the party-state.48

Arts foundations and corporate donations diminish reliance upon both state and popular audience, permitting artists some autonomy. This does not assure ideological independence, but it provides room for maneuver. Is autonomy freedom? It certainly permits artists to escape the imposition of political structures on their work, but few push such autonomy to in­ clude systematic critiques of the state within their work. Private patronage thus introduces a helpful margin of security for many artists. In a period when the chief alternative to dependence upon unreliable state funding is to go into business, arts-minded entrepreneurs and managers of state firms sometimes help cushion artists from the un­ familiar perils of trade. The unpleasant job of fawning after rich patrons and flourishing enterprises is often worth a little humiliation precisely be­ cause it can permit artists to avoid even greater dependence upon the box office. Arts groups in the United States are familiar with this strategy.

RECASTING HEGEMONY AS BREAD AND CIRCUS A more important reason private patronage is no immediate threat is that the basis for ideological hegemony has changed. The expansion of the cul­ tural market and the emergence of arts angels certainly diminish the abil­ ity of the Party to control the content of each work of art. But this is a dif­ ferent thing from the loss of political control over the nation. The nature of the Party’s rule has changed, not vanished.49 The Chinese state at the beginning of the twenty-first century has largely abandoned the approach for legitimacy and hegemony pursued in the Maoist era. When Mao died in 1976, an intellectual and emotional bond between the Party’s rule and its revolutionary origins still remained.

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The Cultural Revolution was in part a systematic effort to recreate that bond for a generation too young to remember prerevolutionary society. The Maoist approach was twofold. First, it sought to remove from the public realm any voices that supported either the old order or alternative visions of socialism. The suppression of cultural markets weakened the ability of the old bourgeoisie to mount any imaginable alternative to Party rule. Second, the Party used the media and the arts to mobilize key sec­ tors of the population (workers, peasants, and soldiers), not just in sup­ port of the new state, but into an emotional bond with it. Maoist arts also mobilized state bureaucrats through idealized representations of the good cadre. The glue for this project was a relatively coherent doctrine, drawn in part from classic Marxist texts, but above all from Mao’s speeches. Sev­ eral institutions busied themselves with developing, revising, and elabo­ rating this doctrine. As specialists in the manipulation of symbols, artists were recruited to support the Party line in their work, scrutinized to make certain that they did not go astray. In the old system, any alternative voice to the Party’s, however innocent, posed a challenge. This is no longer true. The significant change in the political economy of China’s arts is not state-funding levels, but the general explosion in commercial culture, which renders much of the Party’s past program for cultural hegemony ir­ relevant. Ideological hegemony is the friendly, nonviolent sidekick of blunt coercion; it achieves domination through the participation of the population it subordinates. Regimes ease the difficulties of rule when they foster a popular sense that the existing political order is the only one imaginable.50 The Party has retreated to another level of control. It does not tolerate serious political rivalry (even though it waffled a bit before suppressing organizers of the China Democratic Party in 1998), yet an apparent abun­ dance of arts products fills the nation to entertain, perhaps to dull the senses of, the population. Artists no longer need to seem relentlessly mil­ itant or cheerful, and the regime has sought a more human visage by en­ couraging artists to take part in the systematic unmasking of such Maoist myths as class purity. Criticizing Mao and his policies is now common­ place, but such criticism provides an illusion of greater liberalism than is warranted; attempts to criticize Deng Xiaoping or Jiang Zemin often evoke tough suppression and ratchet up anyone’s level of cynicism.51 Altering the Meaning of Rule Decades of cultural reform have altered the meaning of Party rule. The Party now reasons that the regime survives best by depoliticizing everlarger hunks of Chinese culture. Earlier enforcement of a narrowly drawn hegemony alienated intellectuals; now the regime banks on economic

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growth and private pleasures, underscored by an implicit threat of inter­ mittent violence. The Party certainly continues to use the arts for selfpromotion, as all regimes do. What is striking is how the Party no longer works very hard to enforce a monopolizing hegemony. By Deng’s death in 1997, Party ideology had atrophied, leaving little Marxist content. Kalpana Misra shows how official ideology lost its priv­ ileged position in public discourse, largely as intellectual consensus among serious Marxists broke down in the face of new economic and so­ cial conditions.52 Doctrine increasingly became a rationalization fash­ ioned to avoid elite conflict, leaving few serious intellectual efforts to an­ alyze changes sweeping across the nation, except outside the Party’s institutions. It became unclear what socialism meant in any theoretical terms, although as a practical matter, it seemed to include proceeding with deliberation in subjecting state enterprises to market discipline, per­ haps shrewdly postponing an inevitable shakedown in employment. Ide­ ology meant, Listen to the Party, try to become rich, and be patriotic, as nationalism supplanted revolution as the emotional component of China’s official belief system. The Party had earlier experienced major changes in its ideological work, such as the movement from the liberalism of the Hundred Flowers to the fierceness of the antirightist campaign, or from the energizing mass mobilization of the Great Leap Forward to the economic retrenchment of the early 1960s to the surrogate class warfare of the Cultural Revolution. This change is different, as it is not a substitution of one belief for another, but a reduction in the capacity and centrality of the belief machine itself. The commodity economy’s embrace of culture diminishes art’s utility as symbol of (potentially) political consciousness, turning attention in­ stead to art’s role in the marketplace, whether as decoration, speculative investment, or status symbol. Indeed, the rapid development of commer­ cial advertising sets up an apparent counterideology that does not di­ rectly challenge the state, but that subtly advances an ideology of material acquisition, and of self-identification with glamorous products. There have been inevitable clashes, as when Party leaders angered the advertiz­ ing industry by demanding that the center of Beijing be cleansed of com­ mercial billboards for the fiftieth anniversary of the People’s Republic. Yet, as Geremie Barmé has shown, Party propaganda and corporate ad­ vertizing have developed a bizarre symbiosis of shared imagery.53 The circle of controversy in Chinese art is shrinking. The new sensa­ tionalism of the popular media demonstrates that the Chinese state is now willing to tolerate images and ideas that it once would have consid­ ered vile. Yet, the limits on explicitly political discussion are far harder to crack. Chen Xitong, the spectacularly corrupt Beijing mayor, was purged in 1995. A roman à clef about his fall, The Wrath of Heaven, was published

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openly in 1997, but as the Party delayed his trial, the novel was banned and driven into an underground life of pirated and Hong Kong editions.54 Sex and celebrity biographies become a surrogate for politics, enabling Chinese to tell themselves how much more open their country is without seriously questioning what limits remain in effect. James Scott argues that culture is harder for elites to patrol than pro­ duction sites.55 Even if they wished, Party officials are no longer able to police all the sites of popular commercial culture. Orville Schell describes official confusion about how to handle rock music or whether the Party should handle it at all, since it may be politically harmless for all its ap­ parent fury.56 Some scholars now find that even state television program­ ming reveals evidence of a popular culture that challenges, or at least complicates, the Party control over ideology. The rise of entertainment culture has effectively demobilized the audi­ ence, for the left could only use mass mobilizing art when it enjoyed a me­ dia monopoly. Emblematic of this shift is the decline of the propaganda poster, which once was the characteristic genre linking art and politics. At the end of the 1980s, propaganda posters were readily available in book­ stores in major cities, but by the middle of the next decade, they were only easily found in smaller places.57 What replaced the propaganda poster? More propaganda posters, this time pressing the merits of commercial products instead of socialist political campaigns. More broadly, television supplanted the cultural world of the propaganda poster. Television en­ courages more distanced, uninvolved audiences, and its linkage of arts to politics is essentially passive; by century’s turn, China had the world’s largest television audience.58 Cynicism and Nationalism One of the most noted ideological harvests of the reform period has been widespread cynicism, intensified by the suppression of the 1989 popular movement. In Jiwei Ci’s analysis, revolutionary utopianism once provided many with a sense of purpose. But the regime’s failure to realize utopia led first to Cultural Revolutionary nihilism and finally to hedonism and its po­ litical ideology, liberalism. The government’s suppression of liberalism left a crude, but politically passive, hedonism as the shaky philosophical founda­ tion for contemporary society. “In proportion as people’s sensual needs were satisfied, their political demands weakened and lost their relevance.”59 Cynicism is joined by its boastful cousin, nationalism, as the emotional core of the new ideology. Maoism was certainly nationalistic, but clothed itself in the language of international revolution. Today nationalism has become patriotism, fueled by an understandable pride in China’s eco­ nomic growth and popular aspirations to great power status. Like com­

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modity culture, patriotism is promoted by a regime that knows that it needs something for the population to believe in, but worries that it will get out of control, which it of course does.60 Jiang Zemin included boost­ ing nationalism in the tasks for the arts he enumerated at the Sixteenth Party Congress in 2002: “Without an inspiring spirit and lofty character, it is impossible for a nation to stand proudly in the family of nations.”61 Will a cultural politics of bread and circuses work to preserve the Party’s power? Probably not for the long haul, but it buys time. Many in the Party who want tougher standards believe that with more effective censorship, the Party will prolong its rule and that, otherwise, it may bleed slowly to death as its authority is eroded away around the edges. But the ruling faction would rather bleed slowly than fall suddenly; the current policies permit elite families to amass fortunes from personal cor­ ruption in the meantime. China Becomes More Ordinary China remains extraordinary in the scale of its politics, but not in their cul­ tural dimension. China’s cultural politics entered the twenty-first century looking less exotic and sharing more features than ever with other na­ tions. China’s cultural life has begun to seem “normal”; not so normal as Denmark, perhaps, but comparable to other large industrializing nations, such as Brazil, Mexico, or India.62 Charismatic rule has long given way to bureaucratic administration. It is no longer reasonable to characterize the extent of free expression as the preeminent arts issue, although it certainly continues to be contested, as it is in many other nations. The question of China’s revolutionary heritage is now primarily rhetorical. Other arts is­ sues have become more salient, such as protecting the national artistic heritage against economic development, understanding the aesthetic and social implications of new technologies, reducing cultural and educa­ tional gaps between rich and poor regions, nurturing young artistic talent, finding a meaningful place for the arts of ethnic minorities within a Hanbased national cultural identity, and winning international respect for China’s cultural achievements. No longer does power simply treat art as its prettified voice, and no longer does the ruling Party embrace the arts at the center of a grand scheme for rebuilding national identity and power. The privileged place of the arts is no longer unquestioned. The sometimes elusive quality of these cultural changes is suggested by the experience of Brian Chao Tak­ hay, a Hong Kong official who assumed responsibility for culture and recreation after holding the top position in trade policy. When he met his former Beijing counterpart, Minister of Foreign Trade Wu Yi, she congrat­ ulated Chao, commenting that “in Beijing, officials who are in charge of

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ideology are more important than officials like me who are in charge of these mundane matters.” Chao protested that in Hong Kong he had noth­ ing to control, but later could not decide if Wu had been serious or had made a self-deprecating joke.63 The Chinese are increasingly thinking of the arts in ways similar to cap­ italist planners. For instance, culture is increasingly viewed as a growth area for the economy. The culture industry has been incorporated into the tenth Five-Year Plan (2001–2005), and some identify culture as a future pillar industry upon which the economy will rest.64 The Chinese real es­ tate industry has even followed New York and Paris in learning that hav­ ing artists in the neighborhood helps boost property values.65 Although China’s arts scene increasingly resembles those of other countries, one would not know it from public discourse in the United States, where the demonization of China continues. As the Chinese state loosens its grip on cultural life, we seem to like it even less than when it was vastly more oppressive. Some readers will be annoyed by my argu­ ments that China’s authoritarianism has diminished. Attempts to analyze unpleasant institutions are often mistaken for rationalization, so this is probably the appropriate place to comment that as a member of the Amer­ ican Civil Liberties Union, I do not find China’s cultural climate to my personal taste. But responsibility for changing this climate rests with Chi­ nese citizens, not foreigners. We have problems of our own to handle and can most influence other nations, if that is our goal, by the power of our own example.

ART AND DEMOCRATIC REFORM The Communist Party’s recipe for reform is most often understood to be economic liberalization plus tight political control. Many believe that eco­ nomic change must be balanced by political reform, or economic growth will be thwarted. This book argues that political reform has already begun and that it has proceeded first in the realm of culture. The simple opposi­ tion of reformed market to an unreconstructed state is simplistic and dis­ regards complex changes in the symbolic realm. A reactive loosening of political controls over culture and the transfer of arts and entertainment from state to market is no less profound in impact than a carefully planned reform. Cultural loosening is likely to be fol­ lowed by the kind of explicit alterations of other institutions that will be more broadly recognized as political reform. A weakening of state cultural institutions is not prima facie evidence of a frail Chinese state. The Maoist state relied upon a radical ideology to muster support for a broad package of revolutionary changes.

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Some China watchers argue that the ideological decline from Mao’s days weakens the central capacity to rule. They are confusing governance with the Maoist regime’s need to implement ambitious economic and po­ litical changes. The Chinese Communist Party came to power not just to govern, but to transform Chinese society radically in a short period of time. Its goals included communizing land, launching satellites, and de­ veloping nuclear weapons—amid famines and deprivation—and financ­ ing history’s largest industrial program, despite a predominantly agrarian economy. An exacting ideology was needed to impose unspeakable sacri­ fices on the Chinese population.66 The post-Mao Chinese state cherishes few visions of transforming soci­ ety that would be aided by state-dominated arts institutions deploying a demanding ideology. One should not infer a fragile state from a weak­ ened Party. Nor should one presume that a collapse of the Communist Party would produce a democratic regime. If the Communist Party were to collapse or to share power with others, how different would China’s cultural policies be? Cultural freedom would probably not flower in the ways the international human rights community hopes. There would probably be fewer political prisoners, probably more explicit political discussion. But in the absence of demo­ cratic reforms—not just removing the Communist Party—China would remain an authoritarian land that gives grief to Amnesty International. China may well change without Westerners liking the change very much. Any serious democratic reform must be a long-term project and is un­ likely to proceed smoothly.67 Do the arts have any contribution to make? If democratic institutions must rest atop a civil society in which ever more vigorous civic organizations confound the state with newly discov­ ered autonomy, then the professionalization of the arts may be seen as part of a broader trend.68 In the republican period, the weakness of the central state made civil society an important component of the polity, in which self-governing, nonstate associations provided services to their members: guilds, native place associations, clans, surname associations, temple societies, monasteries, secret societies, unions, student organiza­ tions, chambers of commerce, and bankers and lawyers associations. The Communist Party destroyed autonomous groups as it reorganized society, creating the ambiguous category of people’s (minjian) organiza­ tions. In the arts, these nonprivate, but not fully state, groups include the associations of artists and performers that dominate professional culture. The Party effectively blocked interaction among these groups except through Party members, thereby strengthening its own rule. Evidence for a growing role in civil society for the arts can be found in the 1986 and 1989 demonstrations against the Party, in which the leaders of many arts organizations were subject to conflicting pressures from their

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members to participate and from Party leaders to calm participants down. Many collaborated with demonstrators in Beijing and elsewhere by pro­ viding buses or by agreeing to look benignly upon participating mem­ bers. One may also point to the slowly increasing autonomy of artists, both within established cultural organizations and in new, privatized re­ lationships to the marketplace. Yet, sometimes, the proponents of civil so­ ciety may search too desperately for autonomous civic organizations in a society in which power relationships are rarely clear-cut. And while groups such as writers’ or dance associations are not mere tentacles of the Communist Party, regarding them as constituents of civil society under­ states their own complex history as nonstate, nonprivate organizations. Bryna Goodman cautions that the public sphere–civil society discussion often introduces too passive a view of Chinese society during the Repub­ lican era. Goodman calls for a focus on “interpenetration and shifting strategic boundaries,” instead of “oppositional forces and absolute no­ tions of autonomy.” A similar complexity is useful for understanding con­ temporary China.69 Professional artists may be seen as participants in an embryonic or par­ tial civil society.70 The increase in civic organizations is impressive, with estimates ranging from the 186,000 registered in the late 1990s to perhaps a million citizen-run organizations of all sorts.71 The magnitude of in­ crease poses huge problems for Party desires for control, even over or­ ganizations that it ostensibly leads, and even after trimming the number of registered organizations by a fifth. But civil society may well follow corporatist, rather than democratic directions.72 Future problems in rela­ tions between artists and the state will assume new forms alongside the old ones. The cozy links between the state and increasingly powerful en­ terprises may well lead to collusion at the expense of artists and other less powerful agents. Recent hints of this include the State Bureau of Cultural Relics’s curtailing of rapid growth in auction firms by limiting auctions to six companies.73 Similarly, fifteen television stations and production cen­ ters have joined to set wages for actors to prevent their salaries from rising.74 The idealized traditional social roles for Chinese artists, whether as tu­ tors to the people or remonstrators against tyranny, bestow on artists a spe­ cial status that is ultimately not very democratic. As long as artists regard themselves as properly above ordinary citizens, their relationship to de­ mocratization must be ambiguous. The slow process of depoliticization through which artists abandoned state propaganda for the exploration of increasingly personal themes may turn out to be an important contribution of the reform period to the democratic reconstitution of Chinese culture. The arts might also offer another potential contribution to democracy: an increased toleration for rival points of view. This does not come easily.

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Many artists initially supported the reforms by creating works denounc­ ing the radicals who had fallen from power. But now, the need to propa­ gandize against Maoism seems remote, and China’s aesthetic palette is more diverse than ever. Much of this tolerance is still passive, ignoring what one doesn’t like. Few in China will yet defend the rights of adver­ saries to make speeches, much less paint ugly canvases or compose un­ appealing symphonies. Yet, this aesthetic balance is one way in which de­ mocracy can be learned. Artists may discover how to become tolerant as the authority of the state becomes ever less appealing as a final arbiter of taste. Increased tolerance among artists themselves would permit a greater competition of ideas, which often remain nakedly bound to polit­ ical supporters. Moreover, artists might well have a slow, but politically helpful, demonstration effect upon other citizens. Even without reforms that Westerners would identify as democratic, China is likely to enjoy a period in which the arts contribute to a pub­ lic discourse that has been muted since the revolution. In a period of looser cultural restrictions, artists are no longer compelled to perform politically. Herbert Marcuse argued that intensely politicized art alien­ ates. The political potential of art lies only in its own aesthetic dimension. Its rela­ tion to praxis is inexorably indirect, mediated, and frustrating. The more im­ mediately political the work of art, the more it reduces the power of es­ trangement and the radical, transcendent goals of change. In this sense, there may be more subversive potential in the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud than in the didactic plays of Brecht.75

Mao voiced a similar understanding of art’s bond to power, when he claimed that the art of the bourgeoisie becomes more dangerous as it in­ creases in beauty.76 David Strand argued that in the Chinese version of civil society, movements, however transitory, are stronger than institu­ tions. Thus, aesthetic currents for new styles of poetry or painting or the introduction of new techniques in music or film might carry greater op­ positional weight beyond what the present disorder in artists’ organiza­ tions suggests.77 Perhaps artists’ gifts for nuance, shadow, and obscurity will be an asset in the new politics of culture.

NOTES 1. The following is based on Zhongguo tongji nianjian 1995 [“China statistical yearbook 1995”] (Beijing: Zhongguo Tongji Chubanshe, 1995), and also the vol­ umes for 1985 to 1994. 2. Zhongguo tongji nianjian 1995, 648.

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3. Based on Barry Naughton, Growing out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978–1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 331. 4. The classic study is William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1966). For a more recent review, see James Heilbrun and Charles M. Gray, The Economics of Art and Culture: An American Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 5. I have traced a similar trajectory in postrevolutionary China in Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-Class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 100–127. 6. For a skeptical view of the gap theory, see Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Com­ mercial Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 7. “Ruizheng fangxiang wanshan guizhang jiankang fazhan” [“Adjust the di­ rection, improve the regulations, develop in good health”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (February 25, 1990). 8. “Karaoke Bar Tax to Finance Arts,” South China Morning Post (November 15, 1996). 9. Chen Guokai, “Becoming an Official” [Dangguan], Zhongpian xiaoshuo xu­ ankan [“Novella selections”] 5 (1995), 24–32, originally in Zuopin [“Works”] 7 (1995). 10. “Private Capital Major Money Source for China’s Film Industry,” People’s Daily Online, at http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200305/24/ eng20030524_117167.shtml (May 24, 2003). 11. Dorothy J. Solinger, “Urban Entrepreneurs and the State: The Merger of State and Society,” in Arthur Lewis Rosenbaum, ed., State and Society in China: The Consequences of Reform (Boulder: Westview, 1992), 6–7. 12. Huang Rufei, “Xue wenhua—Zhangzhoushi getihu de xin zhuiqiu” [“Study culture—The new pursuit of the independent business people of Changzhou”], Fujian ribao (March 18, 1989). 13. This image of commercial wholesomeness is reinforced by a page of photos of entrepreneurs at play in Fujian ribao: a stamp collector, a jogger, a pianist play­ ing duets with his daughter, a coin collector, a chess player, a calligrapher and painter, a dancer, and a pigeon fancier. Fang Youde, “Shenghuo she xuanli duo­ caide” [“Life is resplendent and multicolored”], Fujian ribao (June 23, 1989). 14. On the complexities of the changing business elite, see Margaret Pearson, China’s New Business Elite: The Political Consequences of Economic Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 15. Alice Cairns, “Hammer and Tongs,” Sunday Morning Post Magazine (May 26, 1996), 12. 16. Yang Yingshi, “Fledgling Art Market,” China Daily (March 27, 2000); and “Private Galleries in Shanghai: A World of Free Art,” Xinhua (April 20 2002). 17. China News Digest—Global (January 22, 1996). 18. According to one observer, “it was precisely the rural collective enterprises— owned by townships and villages, yet operating in a marketized environment—that were among the most dynamic of all sectors of the rural economy. At the end of the decade, they still overshadowed private enterprises in total output value by a ratio of two to one.” Philip C. C. Huang, “The Paradigmatic Crisis in Chinese Studies,” Modern China 17(3) (July 1991), 332.

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19. Jiang Li, “Shandong gewujuyuan tizhi gaige diaocha baogao” [“Report on an investigation of the structural reform of the Shandong Song and Dance The­ atre”], Renmin yinyue (May 1986), 12–13. 20. China News Digest—Global (March 2, 1998). 21. Zhang Zuomin, “Women weishenma zhichi huaji shiye?” [“Why do we support the activities of spoken drama troupes?”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (January 29, 1989). 22. “Gongtong jianli ‘jingji wenhua lianheti’” [“Joint establishment of ‘eco­ nomic and cultural cooperative body’”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (April 8, 1990). Jing Wang also discusses changing names for financial support in “‘Culture’ as Leisure and ‘Culture’ as Capital,” positions 9(1) (spring 2000), 69–104. 23. Luo Weinian, Zhan Songsheng, and Tian Naiqi, Shiyong gonggong guanxi 88 li [“Eighty-eight rules of practical public relations”] (Guangzhou: Kexue Puji Chubanshe Guangzhou Fenshe, 1988), 124. 24. Yali Peng, “The Politics of Tobacco in China’s Southwest,” unpublished pa­ per, February 1995. 25. “The strength of humankind is patience added to time; the strong are those with both willpower and the capacity to wait for opportunity,” Xiaoshuo xuankan (May and November 1987). 26. “Xiamen Wenxue gaiwei lianhe chuban” [“Xiamen Literature becomes a joint publication”], Fujian zuoxie bao [“Fujian Writers Association news”] 12 (May 15, 1987), 3. 27. “Guangdongsheng diyige wenhua shiye jijinghui zai Foshanshi chengli” [“Guangdong’s first cultural enterprise foundation established in Foshan”], Zhongguo wenhua bao (March 20, 1989). 28. “Guan Shanyue fenbei xiang meixie he zaiqu juankuan” [“Guan Shanyue makes separate contributions to the artists association and the areas hit by disas­ ter”], Renmin ribao (haiwaiban, “overseas edition”) (August 20, 1991). 29. Haineiwai wenxuejia qiyejia bao [“The domestic and overseas writers’ and en­ trepreneurs’ news”] (May 22, 1989). 30. In her short story, “The Other World,” Zhang Jie describes a hotel for for­ eign tourists as patron of the arts. A hapless literary man is given free room and board in exchange for writing calligraphy for Japanese tourists and advertizing copy for the hotel. Zhang Jie, As Long as Nothing Happens, Nothing Will (London: Virago, 1988), 68–108. 31. Geremie Barmé, “Official Bad Boys or True Rebels,” Human Rights in China 3(4) (winter 1992), 19. 32. “Foreign Theatre Managers Barred in Arts Crackdown,” South China Morn­ ing Post (August 29, 1997). 33. Morgan Perkins, unpublished paper (1997) on fine arts. 34. Wang Gongyi, interviewed in Eugene, Oregon, December 10, 1994. 35. Li Zhuoyan, “Bookstores Try Other Ventures,” China Daily (February 21, 1989). 36. For more on the politics of statuary in the commodity economy, see my “Public Monuments and Private Pleasures in the Parks of Nanjing: A Tango in the Ruins of the Ming Emperor’s Palace,” in Deborah Davis, ed., The Consumer Revo­ lution in Urban China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

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37. “Zuojia buneng kao qiyejia yanghuo” [“Writers cannot depend upon entre­ preneurs for their livelihood”], Fuzhou wanbao (March 30, 1989). 38. Ba Jin sang a different tune in 1957, when he commented that “the readers will read whatever books are offered to them.” Union Research Service (June 4, 1957), 272. 39. Isabel Hilton, “Chinese Artist Leads Great Leap Forward,” South China Morning Post (August 31, 1997). 40. See Scott Kennedy, “The Stone Group: State Client or Market Pathbreaker,” China Quarterly 152 (December 1997), 746–777; and Yu Tu, “Wan Runnan yu sitong gongsi” [“Wan Runnan and the Stone Company”], Zhengming 142 (August 1989), 40–41. 41. Wan Runnan, “Capitalism and Democracy in China (I),” China Forum Newsletter, 1992, 2, quoted in Frederic Wakeman Jr. “The Civil Society and Public Sphere Debate: Western Reflections on Chinese Political Culture,” Modern China 19(2) (April 1993), 110. 42. David Strand, “Protest in Beijing: Civil Society and Public Sphere in China,” Problems of Communism (May–June 1990), 14, quoting Nan Fangshuo, “A Look at the Mainland Democracy Movement on a Visit to Beijing,” Jiushi niandai (April 1989), 37. 43. “Wei Sentenced for Political Conspiracy,” China Daily (December 14, 1994). 44. See Maurice Meisner, The Deng Xiaoping Era; Richard Baum, Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 300–345. 45. See my “China’s Cultural ‘Liberalization’ and Conflict over the Social Or­ ganization of the Arts,” Modern China 9(2) (April 1983), 212–227. 46. Fuzhou Television documentary (April 4, 1989). 47. Chen Ning and Lu Yida, “Yuhuanzhong de fenqi” [“Struggling through hardship”], Fujian ribao (May 6, 1989). 48. Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 231–232. 49. See Daniel C. Lynch, After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics, and “Thought Work” in Reformed China (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999). 50. The concept derives from Gramsci, among others. See T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” American His­ torical Review 90(3) (1985), 567–593; for a more complex view, see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale Univer­ sity Press, 1990). 51. For example, see Geremie Barmé, Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996). 52. Kalpana Misra, From Post-Maoism to Post-Marxism: The Erosion of Official Ide­ ology in Deng’s China (New York: Routledge, 1998). 53. Geremie Barmé, “CCPTM & ADCULT PRC,” The China Journal 41 (January 1999), 1–24. 54. Chen Fang, Tianyuan [“The wrath of heaven”] (Hong Kong: Taipingyang Shiji Chubanshe, 1998). Two years later, a television mini-series based the Chen Xitong case was also blocked by the Party. Fong Tak-ho, “TV Series on Capital Graft Scandal Banned,” Hong Kong Standard (May 6, 2000).

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55. Scott, Domination, 157. 56. Orville Schell, The Mandate of Heaven: A New Generation of Entrepreneurs, Dis­ sidents, Bohemians, and Technocrats Lays Claim to China’s Future (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 311–320. 57. Stefan Landsberger, Chinese Propaganda Posters: From Revolution to Modern­ ization (Amsterdam: The Pepin Press, 1995), 205–211. 58. More than a billion viewers watched 317 million sets. Wenhui bao (Septem­ ber 24, 1998), in South China Morning Post (September 25, 1998). 59. Jiwei Ci, Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994). 60. The starting point for the new nationalism is Song Qiang, Zhang Cangcang, and Qiao Bian. Zhongguo keyi shuo bu [“China can say no”] (Beijing: Zhonghua Gongshang Lianhe Chubanshe, 1996), followed by numerous imitators. See Su­ isheng Zhao, “Chinese Intellectuals’ Quest for National Greatness and National­ istic Writing in the 1990s,” China Quarterly 152 (December 1997), 725–745; and Jonathan Unger, ed., Chinese Nationalism (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996). 61. Jiang Zeming, “Report to the 16th Party Congress,” China Daily (November 18, 2002). 62. Compare Brazil, another large, multiethnic, frequently authoritarian devel­ oping nation in Randal Johnson, “Regarding the Philanthropic Ogre: Cultural Pol­ icy in Brazil, 1930–45/1964–90,” in Daniel H. Levine, ed., Constructing Culture and Power in Latin America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 311–356. 63. Glenn Schloss, “Staunch Advocate of Free Speech,” South China Morning Post (April 15, 1996). 64. “Research Base for Cultural Industry Opens in China,” Xinhua (August 19, 2002). See also Dan Shilian, Xiandaixing yu wenhua gongye [“Modernity and the cultural industry”] (Guangzhou: Guangdong Renmin Chubanshe, 2001); and Chen Fang and Xie Hong, Wenhua cehuaxue [“Cultural planning”] (Beijing: Shishi Chubanshe, 2000). 65. Erik Eckholm, “A Factory Is Transformed by the Art of Real Estate,” New York Times (February 6, 2003). 66. Yasheng Huang, “Why China Will Not Collapse,” Foreign Policy 99 (summer 1995), 59. 67. For one culturally sensitive analysis, see Suzanne Ogden, Inklings of Democ­ racy in China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). 68. For examples of the civil society discussion of Western and Eastern Europe, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence, trans. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989); Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil So­ ciety and Its Rivals (London: Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 1994); Giuseppe Di Palma, “Legitimation from the Top to Civil Society: Politico-Cultural Change in Eastern Europe,” World Politics 44(1) (October 1991), 49–80; and Charles Taylor, “Modes of Civil Society,” Public Culture 3(1) (fall 1990), 95–118, and the response by Partha Chatterjee, 119–132. For civil society arguments about China, see Strand, “Protest,” 1–19; Elizabeth J. Perry and Ellen J. Fuller, “China’s Long March to De­ mocracy,” World Policy Journal (fall 1991), 663–685; Barrett L. McCormick, Su Shaozhi, and Xiao Xiaoming, “The 1989 Democracy Movement: A Review of the

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Prospects for Civil Society in China,” Pacific Affairs 65(2) (summer 1992), 182–202; Wang Hui, Leo Ou-fan Lee, with Michael M. J. Fischer, “Is the Public Sphere Un­ speakable in Chinese? Can Public Spaces (gonggong kongjian) Lead to Public Spheres?” Public Culture 6 (1994), 597–605; Bryna Goodman, “Creating Civic Ground: Public Maneuverings and the State in the Nanjing Decade,” in Gail Hershatter et al., eds., Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain (Palo Alto: Stan­ ford University Press, 1996), 164–177; Wakeman, “The Civil Society,” 108–138; William Rowe, “The Problem of ‘Civil Society’ in Late Imperial China,” Modern China 19(2) (1993), 139–157; Rudolf Wagner, “The Role of the Foreign Community in the Chinese Public Sphere,” China Quarterly 142 (1995), 423–443; Gordon White, Jude Howell, and Shang Shaoyuan, In Search of Civil Society: Market Reform and So­ cial Change in Contemporary China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966); Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Liu Xinyong, “Student Associations and Mass Movements,” in Deborah Davis et al., eds., Urban Spaces: Autonomy and Community in Contempo­ rary China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 375–393; Kraus, “Pub­ lic Monuments.” 69. Goodman, “Creating Civic Ground,”165. 70. Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (New York: Times Books, 1994), 279; Andrew J. Nathan and Tianjin Shi, “Left and Right with Chinese Characteristics: Issues and Alignments in Deng Xiaoping’s China,” World Politics 48(4) (July 1996), 529. 71. See Tony Saich, “Negotiating the State: The Development of Social Organi­ zations in China,” China Quarterly 161 (March 2000), 124–141; Jonathan Unger, “‘Bridges’: Private Business, the Chinese Government and the Rise of New Asso­ ciations,” China Quarterly 147 (September 1996), 795–819; Human Rights in China, “China: Social Groups Seek Independence in a Regulatory Cage,” April 1998, www.igc.org/hric/reports/freedom.html. 72. Unger, “Bridges,” 795–819. 73. Liao Wang and Bei Bao, “Hammer Falls on Auctioneers,” China Daily (March 26, 1996). 74. Wang Xizuo, “Beijing dang’an,” Jiushi niandai 330 (July 1997), 93. 75. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension. Toward a Critique of Marxist Aes­ thetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), xii–xiii. 76. Mao: “The more reactionary a work is in content, the more artistic it is, the more it can harm the people, and the greater is the need to reject it.” Quoted in the “Cultural Revolution for Exchange of Revolutionary Experience” of the Vanguard Song and Dance Ensemble of the Tsinan Armed Forces Units, “Lo Jui-ch’ing’s Three Poisoned Knives for Slaying Literature and Art in the Armed Forces,” Chiehfang-chun Wen-I 13–14 (September 10, 1967), in Survey of China Mainland Magazines 605 (December 11, 1967), 12. 77. Strand, “Protest.”

Index

A Mei, 131 Academy of Sciences, 156, 167 Academy of Social Sciences, 122 acrobats, 10, 25–26 advertising, 216, 227 aesthetics, 28, 148, 167–68 Ai Qing, 77, 157 amateur arts, 39, 54, 160–63 Anhui, 115, 198 Anna Karenina, 50 Anthony, Susan B., 77 antirightist campaign, 11, 38, 41, 49, 50, 155, 158, 227 army. See People’s Liberation Army art for art’s sake, 205 Arts Federation, 43, 62, 165, 169, 170 Association of Chinese Writers, 166, 220 Association of Journalists, 198 Association of Shanghai Symphony Lovers, 196 autonomy of artists, 78, 82 avant-garde, 221 Ba Jin, 39, 170, 222 Baba, 75 Babbitt, Milton, 149 Bai Hua, 59, 61, 126, 144, 164

Balfe, Judith Huggins, 202 Baltimore Symphony, 23 Balzac, Honoré de, 220 Bao Tong, 26 Bao, Y. K., 190 Barmé, Geremie, 173, 227 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 76 Bei Ling, 113 Beijing, 18, 46, 47, 153, 163 Beijing airport, 77 Beijing Film Studio, 168 Beijing Hotel, 75 Beijing Massacre, 20, 93, 123, 148, 193, 198, 223 Beijing Opera House, 205 Beijing Spring, 125 Beiping, 14 Berger, John, 86 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 58 Betterton, Rosemary, 85 big pot, 20, 50 Bing Xin, 221 Bitter Love, 61 “black art” scandal, 54 Black Snow, 196 Bloomer, Carolyn, 86 Bo Yibo, 51 239

240 Boeing, 24 Bolshoi Theatre, 156 Botticelli, Sandro, 76 Bouguereau, William-Adolphe, 84 Bourdieu, Pierre, 199–204 Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Le, 152 Brazil, 229 Brodsky, Josef, 148 Bureau of Cultural Relics, 65, 232 Cai Yuanpei, 88 calligraphy, 10, 12, 28, 51, 63, 120, 169, 186, 192–93, 196, 221, 235n30 Camel xiangzi, 39 Cao Hua, 193 Cao Yu, 152 Capital Steel works, 44 Cellini, Benvenuto, 5 censorship, 109, 107–41 Central Academy of Crafts and Design, 166 Central Academy of Fine Arts, 75, 89 Central Conservatory, 193 Central Fine Arts Academy, 88, 155, 197 Central Intelligence Agency, 125 Central Party School, 77 Central People’s Radio, 124 Central Philharmonic Orchestra, 23, 25, 51. See also China National Symphony Orchestra Central Television, 124 Chang Shuhong, 95 Changsha, 111, 122 Chao, Brian, 229 Chaoge, 82 Chaozhou, 189 Chekov, Anton, 152 Chen Guokai, 216 Chen Kaige, 127 Chen Qixia, 157 Chen Ruoxi, 224 Chen Shuhua, 88 Chen Shui-Bian, 131 Chen Tong, 26 Chen Xitong, 227 Chen Yi, 22, 46, 50, 114, 159, 164

Index Chen Yifei, 223 Chen Yun, 26, 47, 59 Chen Zui, 82, 86 Chengde, 220 Chengdu, 46, 61 Chiang Kaishek, 75, 121 Chicago Art Institute, 83 China Academy of Fine Arts, 41, 75, 186 China Art Academy, 222 China Art Gallery, 80, 82, 197 China Braille Publishing House, 118 China Culture News, 97 China International Radio, 124 China National Symphony Orchestra, 23–25. See also Central Philharmonic Orchestra China News Digest, 134 China Song and Dance Troupe, 25 China Women’s News, 86 Chinese Broadcast Arts ensemble, 25 Chinese Musicians Association, 170 Chinese Opera Academy, 25 Chinese Women’s News, 89 Chirac, Jacques, 190 Choephel, Ngawang, 113 Chongqing, 152 Chou Wen-Chung, 13 Chronicle of Higher Education, 131 Ci, Jiwei, 228 Clark, Kenneth, 87 Commission for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, 44 Communist Association of Proletarian Writers, 156 Communist Party Eleventh Central Committee, 17 Confucianism, 48, 150 corruption, 189–90, 195 Cultural Annals, 117 cultural markets, x, 10, 12, 16, 26, 29, 40, 50, 58, 64–65, 96, 113, 122, 124, 128, 147, 157, 183, 190, 197–99, 205, 218–23 Cultural Revolution, 15, 16, 29, 46, 51, 53, 54, 65, 76, 81, 111, 114, 120, 122, 125, 158, 160, 202, 204, 226, 227

Index Culture, Ministry of, 15, 27, 42, 46, 49–50, 56–58, 62, 65, 80, 95, 97, 115, 158, 188, 192, 198 Dai minority, 77–79 dance, 61, 63, 190, 193 Davis, Deborah, 196 Dazhai Production Brigade, 27 Death of a Salesman, 58 democracy, 17, 81–83, 230–33 Democracy Wall, 17–18, 107, 125, 165 Democratic League, 177n54 Deng Lijun, 64 Deng Lin, 189, 190 Deng Liqun, 19, 59 Deng Pufang, 189 Deng Rong, 129 Deng Xiaoping, 6, 13, 19, 54–64, 78, 93, 107, 117, 124–25, 128, 129, 159, 162, 163, 189; contrast to Mao Zedong, 6–9; disinterest in arts, 22, 28, 64; return to power, 15–17; “southern inspection,” 21, 58, 96 Deng Zhifang, 189 Denmark, 229 Ding Ling, 153, 157 Ding Yi, 88 Disney, Walt, 205 Dongfang, 117 Dream of the Red Chamber, 37 Dreiser, Theodore, 83 Dubin, Steven C., 146 Dunhuang, 91 Duni Opera Company, 163 East Germany, 2 Eastern Europe, 10, 29, 41, 109, 173–74 Economic Daily, 124 Elvin, Mark, 74 “engineers of the human soul,” 12 Evans, Harriet, 84 Exploration of Contemporary Arts, 117 Fang Jie, 19 Fang Lizhi, 20, 93, 123 Feidu, 126 Feng Xuefeng, 157

241

feudalism, 81, 86 Film Bureau, 128 Fine Arts, 170 Fine Arts Academy, 88 Fine Arts Association, 155 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 155 Foreign Affairs, Ministry of, 42, 44 Foshan, 221 Fou Ts’ong, 45 four cardinal principles, 18 Fourth National Arts Congress, 78 Freud, 13, 83 Friedman, Milton, 13 Fu Xiaoshi, 97 Fudan University, 168 Fujian, 13, 43, 65, 94, 129, 163, 186, 187, 190, 193, 221 Fujian Entrepreneurs Association, 218 Fujian Literature Foundation, 221 Fujian Minju Experimental Opera Company, 222 Fujian Teachers University, 80, 95 Fujian Television, 222 Fujian Writer’s Association, 45, 186–87, 195, 222 Fuzhou, 22, 60, 61, 80, 90, 118, 224 Fuzhou Evening News, 131 Fuzhou Municipal Workers Cultural Palace, 91 Gang of Four, 15, 76, 111, 160 Garlic Ballads, The, 131–34 Gateway to China, 134 Gauguin, Paul, 79 General Federation of Trade Unions, 45 Getting Used to Dying, 126 Godzilla, 1, 143 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 76 Goldblatt, Howard, 131 Golden Lotus, 61, 95 Golden Sands, Running Waters, 97 Golden Years, 126 Goldfarb, Jeffrey C., 225 Golgol, Nicolai, 152 Gong Li, 96 Goodman, Bryna, 232

242

Index

Gorky, Maxim, 156 Gottlieb, Adolf, 149–50 Great Hall of the People, 10 Great Leap Forward, 7, 11, 25, 51, 160, 227 Great World Amusement Center, 39 Gu Cheng, 164, 198 Gu Wenda, 133 Gu Yuan, 197 Guan Shanyue, 186, 221 Guanfu Classic Art Museum, 219 Guangdong, 27, 186, 221 Guangdong Writers Association, 216 Guangming Daily, 124 Guangzhou, 14, 25, 46, 98, 111, 127, 222 Guangzhou Fine Arts Academy, 75 Guerrilla Girls, 86 Guilin, 56 Guizhou, 113 Guo Moruo, 50, 157 Guomindang, 118, 121 Haimen County, Jiangsu, 55 Hainan, 24 Hainan Photographic Arts Publishing Company, 118 Half of Man Is Woman, 126 Hall of Culture and History, 41 handicrafts, 10, 62 Hangzhou, 46, 80, 186 Hao Liang, 162 Hao Ran, 162, 202, 204 Haraszti, Miklos, 172–73 “Hard Porridge,” 127 He Jingzhi, 26, 45 Hebei, 53, 118, 169, 216 Hefner III, Robert, 190 hegemony, ideological, viii–ix, 5, 21, 38, 173, 213, 225–30 Henan, 191 Hi Feng, 53 Hollywood, 134 Holm, David, 152 Hong Kong, 13, 134, 186, 189 Hoxha, Enver, 15 Hu County, Shaanxi, 161 Hu Feng, 37, 122, 157 Hu Jintao, 9, 22

Hu Jiwei, 59 Hu Qiaomu, 114, 157 Hu Qili, 93 Hu Shi, 39, 53 Hu Yaobang, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 33n33, 45, 63, 93, 123 Hua Guofeng, 15, 16, 17, 78, 107 Hua Junwu, 11 Huang Shuqin, 96 Huang Yongyu, 128 Huang Zhen, 46, 57 Huang Zhou, 186 Hubei, 191 Hui’an county, Fujian, 129 Hunan, 58, 198 Hunan Television, 111 Hundred Flowers, 41, 154, 155, 165, 227 Hundred Flowers movement, 50, 157 Hungary, 172, 216 Hunt, Lynn, 92 Huters, Ted, 39, 155 In the Heat of the Sun, 138n48 India, 229 inflation, 90, 187 Inner Mongolia, 44 Inner Mongolia Audiovisual Publishing Company, 118 intellectual property rights, 97, 98, 129 internally restricted art, 12, 90, 119, 188 Irish Republican Army, 116 iron rice bowl, 17, 55 Jia Pingwa, 126–27 Jiang Feng, 153, 162 Jiang Qing, 15, 46, 51, 53, 60, 61, 162 Jiang Wen, 138n48 Jiang Zemin, 9, 21, 24, 28, 29, 61, 63, 229 Jiangxi, 95 Jiangxi Soviet, 151 Jianlibao Cantonese Opera Troupe, 220 Jianlibao Light Orchestra, 220 Jinzhou, 196 Joan of Arc, 77 Johnson, Samuel, 5 Journey to the West, 97

Index Ju Dou, 120 Judd, Ellen, 161 Kang Sheng, 76 Ke Wenhui, 83 Kunming, 95 Kunming Cigarette Factory, 220 kunqu, 190 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 108 Laing, Ellen, 161 Lao She, 39 Larson, Wendy, 167 Last Emperor, 58 laws of art, 20, 23, 82, 126, 167–69, 183, 197. See also professionalism Leda and the swan, 83 Legend of the White Snake, 52 Li Dazhao, 88 Li Desheng, 43 Li Huasheng, 61, 79 Li Jingquan, 33n3 Li Jun, 57 Li Kuchan, 155 Li Lanqing, 29 Li Ling, 24 Li Pei, 193 Li Peng, 28, 63, 93, 123 Li Ruihaun, 78, 93, 120 Li Tieying, 28 Li Zehou, 124 Liang Qichao, 39 Liang Xiaosheng, 168 Liao Yiwu, 122 Liaodong County Paper Factory, 220 Liaoning, 77, 79, 111 libel, 129 liberalization: bourgeois, 18, 59, 79, 82, 93, 117, 170; cultural and political, viii–ix, 18–19, 21–22, 125, 210 licensing, 198 Life of Wu Xun, 37, 53, 120, 157 Lin Biao, 50–51 Lin Mohan, 26 Lin Yutang, 39 Link, Perry, 115–16

243

literature, 6, 10–12, 21, 37, 39, 49, 57, 61, 112–13, 119, 126–27, 131–33, 144, 146, 159, 162, 170, 185–88, 190, 196, 200, 201, 203, 207, 216–18, 220–22, 228 Liu Baiyu, 26 Liu Binyan, 20, 59, 93, 117, 170 Liu Fuzhi, 57 Liu Haisu, 74, 75, 81 Liu Heng, 196 Liu Qingtang, 34n40, 162 Liu Shaoqi, 19, 53, 76, 77, 159, 223 Liu Shikun, 162 Liu Xinwu, 202 Liu Xiobo, 119 Liu Zaifu, 167 Liu Zhongde, 62 Living, 127 Long Yuzhi, 62 Lu Di, 53 Lu Dingy, 76 Lu Dingyi, 49 Lu Rui, 203 Lu Wenfu, 202 Lu Xun, 39, 220 Lu Xun Arts Academy, 40, 151, 152, 153 Lu Xun Fine Arts Academy, 76 Lynch, Daniel, 125 Ma Liuming, 98 Ma, Yo-yo, 13 Ma Zhe, 113 Mackerras, Colin, 154–55 Makarenko, Anton, 156 Maksimov, 75 Mama, 139n65 management, 56, 58 Mao Amin, 195 Mao Dun, 49, 57, 220 Mao Zedong, 6, 10, 15, 47–54, 63, 80–81, 114, 151, 153, 154, 158–59; arts enthusiasms, 10–11, 22, 28, 51–53; contrast to Deng Xiaoping, 6–9; Maoist approach to culture, 226, 233; “Talks at Yan’an Arts Forum,” 152 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 133 Marcuse, Herbert, 233 Martin, Helmut, 13

244

Index

May Fourth movement, 29, 41, 151, 203–4 McClary, Susan, 147 Metro Goldwyn Mayer, 205 Mexico, 229 Miller, Arthur, 58 Mimosa, 126 Misra, Kalpana, 227 missionaries, 75 Mo Yan, 61, 131–33 models, 74–76, 79, 87–89 Modigliani, Amedeo, 80 Moliere, 152 Moore, Jeanne, 86 Morris, Philip, 220 Moscow Arts Theatre, 156 Moscow University, 156 Museum of Modern Art, 133 music, ix, 3, 23–24, 29, 44, 47, 109, 111, 117–18, 146–47, 149 155, 162, 170, 166, 190, 193, 195; popular, 12, 64, 90, 194, 196, 214, 228 Nanchang, 74 Nanchang Municipal Mass Arts Center, 91 Nanjing, 61, 80, 88, 121, 134 Nanjing Art Museum, 27, 88, 188 National Arts Congress, 164 National Endowment of the Arts, 43 nationalism, 134, 217–19, 228–29 “New Art in China Post 1989,” 133 New China Bookstore, 27, 90, 124, 222 New China News Agency, 124, 129 New Life movement, 29 News Front, 116 Ningxia Arts Federation, 126 Nortel, 24 North Korea, 18 nudes, 73–106 Office of News and Publications, 94 Ohio, 133 opera, 10, 19–20, 22, 25, 39, 46, 51–53, 57, 61, 118, 154, 161, 163, 189, 194, 214, 216, 220 Organization Department, Communist Party, 16

Oriental Song and Dance Troupe, 44, 159 Orwell, George, 2, 120 Ouyang Shan, 159 painting, 10, 12, 47, 54, 57, 61, 73–105, 111, 115, 128, 130, 133, 149, 150, 153, 155, 161, 170, 186, 189, 192–95, 198, 201, 204, 221, 223 Pan Yuliang, 2, 96 Pang Zhonghua, 195 Paris, 186 patronage, 3–6, 37–72, 77, 93, 144, 164, 213–38 Pei, I.M., 13 Peng Ming, 111 Peng Zhen, 18, 51, 76 Penguin books, 131 People’s Daily, 14, 59, 78, 123, 124 People’s Liberation Army, 15, 21, 43, 46, 50, 58, 60–61, 127, 132, 148 Petofi, Sandor, 159 Photography News, 92 Picasso, 13, 79 Pickowicz, Paul, 173 pingtan, 47 poetry, 10, 48, 50, 61, 75, 113, 118, 122, 148, 160, 164–65, 168, 190, 198, 208 Political Bureau, 120 political elite, 51–54, 63–64 pollution, spiritual, 18, 59, 79, 170 population, 6,7 pornography, 10, 91–95 posters, propaganda, 228 Presley, Elvis, 29 professionalism, viii–x, 3–6, 11, 20, 39–41, 50, 74, 78, 82, 125–26, 143–82, 197–99, 203–5, 231–32. See also laws of art Propaganda Department, Communist Party, 16, 43, 48–49, 58–60, 109, 114, 124, 127, 132, 165, 169–70, 224 Public Security, Ministry of, 15, 44 Qi Benyu, 34n40 qigong, 90 Qinshi Huangdi, 151

Index Qiu Ju Goes to Court, 127 Qiushi, 124 Radio, Film, and Television, Ministry of, 59, 115, 120 Raise the Red Lantern, 120, 201 Ramos, Fidel, 29 Reading, 199 Red Flag, 164 Red Guard, 122 The Red Lantern, 161 Red Sorghum, 128, 132 reform, political, vii–x, 26, 30, 230–33 retirement, 16 Rodin, August, 85, 86 Rosenberg, Harold, 153 Rueschemeyer, Marilyn, 2 Sanming, Fujian, 194 Schell, Orville, 228 Schoenberg, Arnold,13 Schoenhals, Michael, 110, 116 science, 76, 81–83, 167, 172 Scott, James C., 228 Sculpture Park, 222 The Secret History of the Qing Court, 120 Seek Truth from Facts, 124 Selections from Fiction, 220 self-reliance, 7 September Morn, 87 Shaanxi, 151, 152, 161 Shajiabang, 161 Shangdong Song and Dance Theatre, 219 Shanghai, 14, 46, 51, 80, 94, 115, 194 Shanghai Baby, 126 Shanghai Democratic League, 157 Shanghai Fine Arts School, 74 Shanghai Kunqu Company, 190 Shanghai Library, 91 Shanghai Museum, 205 Shanghai Philately, 120 Shanghai Population Planning Center, 91 Shanghai Propaganda Department, 157 Shanghai Stock Exchange, 24 Shanghai Television, 22

245

Shanxi Opera Troupe, 51 Sheldon, Sidney, 12, 190 Shen Congwen, 11, 39 Shen Tu, 77 Shenyang, 26, 46 Shenzhen, 123 Shi Ximin, 157 Shishi, 94, 224 Sichuan, 91 Sistine Chapel, 77 slogans, 70n65 socialist spiritual civilization, 22, 169, 205 Soviet experience, 38, 41 Soviet Union, 42, 75, 148, 155 Soviet Writers Union, 155, 171 Stalin, 132 Stanislavsky, Constantin, 152, 156 Stars Fine Arts Exhibition, 162, 198 State Planning Commission, 62 State Press and Publication Administration, 92–93, 109, 117, 118, 123, 124, 167 Stone Corporation, 223 storytellers, 39, 42 Strand, David, 233 Strangers in Beijing, 184 Su Dongpo, 48 Su Shaozhi, 93, 123, 131 Su Tong, 201 subsidies for art, 23, 56, 214–16 Sullivan, William M., 145 Sun Quanfang, 75 Sun Shaozhen, 168 Sun Yatsen, 88 Suzhou, 47 Taiwan, 13, 14, 61, 64, 132, 133 Tang Daxi, 77 television, 3, 5, 7, 12–13, 22, 59, 76, 82, 88, 96, 109, 115, 118, 120, 123, 125, 186, 196, 197, 200, 203, 218, 222, 228, 232 Teng Jinxian, 128 Texaco, 220 Tianjin, 15, 78 Tibetan, 84

246

Index

Ting Shaoguang, 208n35 Tongzhi Restoration, 29 Tosca, 61 tourism, 219–21 U.S. Defense Department Film and Television Liaison Office, 134 United Front Work Department, Communist Party, 44 University of Oregon Museum of Art, 133 Unrequited Love, 164 Venus de Milo, 76, 83, 87 Village of Widows, 129 von Hallberg, Robert, 173 Wagner, Rudolf, 156 Wal-Mart, 134 Wan Runnan, 223 Wang Anyi, 162 Wang Meng, 21, 127–28, 57, 171, 173, 202 Wang Renzhi, 26 Wang Renzhong, 120 Wang Roushui, 59, 223 Wang Ruowang, 20, 164 Wang Shiwei, 153 Wang Shuo, 119, 195, 201 Wang Xiaobo, 126, 203 Wang Yuqi, 91 Wang Zhen, 18, 59 Washington Post, 116 Washington Times, 116 Water Margin, 53 Wei Guoqing, 43 Wei Hui, 126 Wei Jingsheng, 18, 107, 122, 131, 223 Wen Yuhong, 203 Wenyi bao, 170 “What if I Were Real,” 64 White III, Lynn T., 49, 116 The White-Haired Girl, 57 Whitney Museum of American Art, 133 Williams, Raymond, 40, 44, 154, 157, 169, 170, 171, 172, 197 Wu Yi, 229

Wu Zuoren, 76 Wuer Kaixi, 63 Wuhan, 14, 61 Xi’an, 46, 126 Xi’an Spoken Drama Academy, 56 Xiamen, 14, 95, 97, 198 Xiamen Arts Association, 169, 220 Xiamen Daily, 95 Xiamen Literature, 220 Xian Xinghai, 24 Xian Xinghai-Nie Erh Musicians Association, 170 Xianyou County, 163 Xiao Lu, 133 Xiao Qian, 157 Xiao Wangdong, 51 Xiaojinzhuang, 162 Xie Dongming, 82 Xie Ming, 23 Xie Xingbiao, 86, 87 Xin Fengxia, 39 Xinji, 169, 170 Xinjiang, 44, 57 Xu Beihong, 75, 88 Xu Bing, 199 Yalu River, 111 Yan Jiaqi, 93, 123 Yan’an, 4, 17, 20, 40, 48, 79, 151, 152, 153, 155, 164 Yan’an Arts Forum, 9, 51, 152 Yang Baibing, 43 Yang Feiyun, 91 yangge, 44 Yangzi River Power Company, 220 Yao Wenyuan, 111, 160 Yao Xueyin, 26 Ye Wenfu, 61 Yellow Earth, 20, 164 Yellow Mountain, 64 Yellow River Cantata, 24 Yi Chuan, 108 Yin Chengzong, 162 Ying Ruocheng, 58, 62, 80 Youth League, Communist, 16, 45, 62, 111

Index Yu Hua, 203 Yu Huiyong, 57 Yu, Julian, 195 Yu Qiuli, 43 Yu Yanfeng, 96 Yuan Yunsheng, 77–79, 84, 93 Yuanming Park Village, 131 Zeng Kejia, 162 Zha Jianying, 97 Zhai Mo, 83 Zhang Chunqiao, 43, 54, 111, 160 Zhang Huan, 98 Zhang Jie, 235n30 Zhang Pinghua, 15 Zhang Xianliang, 6, 126, 195, 224 Zhang Yimou, 120, 127, 132, 201 Zhang Yuan, 139n65 Zhang Zhixin, 77

247

Zhang Zuomin, 97 Zhangzhou, 218 Zhao Dan, 112–13, 163 Zhao, Henry Y. H., 203 Zhao Ziyang, 19, 20, 26, 30, 60, 62, 93, 123 Zhdanov, Andrei, 156 Zhejiang, 114, 220 Zhongnanhai, 15 Zhou Enlai, 47, 76, 114, 164 Zhou Weichi, 57 Zhou Yang, 11, 49, 50, 59, 157, 165 Zhouzhou Conference, 26 Zhu Haihong, 123 Zhu Houze, 59 Zhu Muzhi, 65 Zuo Zhangwei, 85, 86, 90 Zuopin, 77

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About the Author

Richard Curt Kraus is director of the Robert D. Clark Honors College and professor of political science at the University of Oregon. His other books in­ clude Class Conflict in Chinese Socialism; Pianos and Politics in China: MiddleClass Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music; Brushes with Power: Mod­ ern Politics and the Chinese Art of Calligraphy; and Urban Spaces: Autonomy and Community in Contemporary China (coedited with Deborah Davis, Barry Naughton, and Elizabeth Perry).

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