CHINA TRIES TO ADD CULTURAL CLOUT TO ECONOMIC MUSCLE

[There is an alternative view in the party’s report last month on culture, one that hints at a less rigorous official stance. That view points to other snippets of the report — led, ironically, by a famous statement by Mao Zedong, the leader whose Cultural Revolution plunged China into years of repression and torment.]

By Michael Wines

Shiho Fukada for The New York Times

An art exhibition this month at the Sunshine International Art 

Museum  in Songzhuang, an artists' colony 

in suburban Beijing.

BEIJING — Last month, the cream of the Communist Party leadership gathered here to proclaim a national effort to make China a cultural tastemaker, one whose global creative influence matches its economic clout. “A nation cannot stand among great powers,” the official party newspaper People’s Daily said on its front page, “without its people’s spiritual affluence and the nation’s full expression of its creativity.”

The question is how to square that goal with what just happened to Yue Luping.

Mr. Yue, a professional artist for more than 10 years, was preparing his works for an exhibition in the Shunyi District of north Beijing last month when government officials and police officers abruptly canceled the show.

The next day, he said, agents of the local Public Security Bureau interrogated him about one work, a collection of peppercorns arranged to form numbers. Security officers had already photographed the piece, studied it for an entire night and consulted cryptography experts to divine its message.

As they eventually discovered, the numbers were in a computer language, Unicode, spelling out five phrases that Chinese censors have banned from the results of Internet search engines. And the pungent peppercorns were a metaphor for what Mr. Yue called people’s undue sensitivity to ordinary words.

“It’s very ironic,” Mr. Yue, 36, said in an interview last week. “On the one hand, they want to boost cultural development. And on the other, they call off our exhibition.”

Ironic is one way to describe it. But viewed against the language of the party’s declaration on culture — the Oct. 25 report on the annual Central Committee plenum, held last month — there is not much inconsistency at all, some analysts say.

Rather, they suggest, the leaders’ approach to building a world-class culture is not all that different from the one that powered China’s economic miracle: set a long-term goal, adopt rigid specifications, pour in copious amounts of public money, monitor closely to ensure the desired result.

In this case, as the report repeatedly stated, the specifications are to adhere to “core socialist values” in cultural activities. The desired result is “to build our country into a socialist culture superpower.”

The monitoring affects artists like Mr. Yue and Yu Jianrong, a painter and photographer whose works — on the petitions prepared annually by thousands of ordinary Chinese whose grievances have been ignored by the government — were banned two weeks ago from being exhibited in Songzhuang, a suburban Beijing artists’ colony.

Mr. Yu declined to be interviewed. But The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong quoted a microblog post, since deleted, in which Mr. Yu wrote that exhibition officials in Songzhuang had told him that “the situation this year is tense, and no sensitive topics are allowed.”

Such tales show that there is nothing ironic about the current censorship, said Zhang Ming, a political science professor at Renmin University of China.

“The government is overconfident about controlling art,” he said. “They think as long as they provide money and they provide a value orientation, there can be good art produced. This is not surprising at all, because they have never experienced the process of free expression.”

In that view, the notion is lost on Chinese leaders that a great culture — whether in painting, science or journalism — rests on people’s abilities to push the boundaries of creativity, no matter whom it offends.

There is much to support that view, including the arrest in April of the internationally famous artist and dissident Ai Weiwei and the banning of literature like “The Fat Years,” Chan Koonchung’s bleak depiction of a China-dominated future.

Not a few officially approved commentaries cast Chinese culture as a sort of zero-sum contest with its rivals. Xinhua, the government news agency, described the challenge last month as an “international cultural competition,” in which controlling the world stage is one more hurdle to surmount in a triathlon toward global greatness.

“Chinese cultural companies have yet to produce a world-famous brand,” that commentary groused, offering a litany of shortcomings: China’s television programs have an “embarrassing” export record; its total published literature does not approach the output of a single German firm, Bertelsmann.

Most embarrassing, the 1998 animated film “Mulan,” based on a Chinese heroine, was produced by the Walt Disney Studios in California. “China has yet to produce an animated film as internationally successful,” the commentary said.

There is an alternative view in the party’s report last month on culture, one that hints at a less rigorous official stance. That view points to other snippets of the report — led, ironically, by a famous statement by Mao Zedong, the leader whose Cultural Revolution plunged China into years of repression and torment.

But before that, in 1956, Mao made a famous speech in which he summoned ordinary Chinese to speak out about their needs: “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” he said, “and a hundred schools of thoughts contend.”

The report repeated those words verbatim, citing them as a guiding principle for China’s cultural development. Other passages call for an “opening and reform” in China’s cultural development, echoing the economic approach to the rest of the world that spurred China’s growth over the last two decades.

Liang Xiaosheng, an author and a government-appointed member of China’s legislative advisory body, said last week that Mao’s statement and other clauses in the report are a muted call for more artistic freedom, at least over the long haul.

“In China, the policy won’t be quickly carried out because the executors need a digesting and understanding process,” he said. “Even a small step for China may take as long as 10 years.”

People here pay great attention to history. Mao’s hundred-flowers campaign was a disaster. Freed to say their piece, intellectuals denounced government repression and incompetence, and party leaders quickly reverted to a crackdown on expression.

It may not be lost on the creative community that Mao quickly replaced his hundred-flowers campaign with an anti-rightist movement in which hundreds of thousands of intellectuals were stripped of their jobs, with many of them sent to labor camps. Mao later said he had been seeking to lure the snakes from their dens in order to cut off their heads.

In China, then as now, liberalization and crackdown reliably — and unpredictably — ebb and flow.

Free-thinking students spawned the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, which, in turn, provoked a new crackdown that has lasted to this day.Which may explain one genuine irony: when asked, some of the artists who organized the Shunyi and Songzhuang exhibitions chose to pretend that their colleagues were not censored at all.

Free-speech principles or not, some artists here appear to have no appetite for trouble.

“There is some misunderstanding going on,” Shen Qibing, an organizer of the exhibition that was to have shown Mr. Yue’s peppercorn art, said in a telephone interview. “The exhibition was called off because more and more artists are trying to sign up for the exhibition, and we feel we have a lot of work to do.

“I am the executive organizer,” he said. “I know what is going on. Some of the artists try to exaggerate things.”

Shi Da and Edy Yin contributed research.

@ The New York Times

  

SOUTH KOREA APPROVES SENDING MEDICAL AID TO NORTH

[While South Korea remains frustrated with the North’s persistence in its nuclear program, it has faced growing appeals from international relief agencies calling for aid shipments, arguing that the North’s most vulnerable should not be punished for their government’s deeds. The United Nations humanitarian chief, Valerie Amos, said last month that 6 million North Koreans are in urgent need of food aid.] 

By Choe Sang-Hun

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea on Tuesday authorized the World Health Organization to resume distribution of Seoul-financed medical aid to North Korea, amid growing calls for humanitarian assistance for malnourished North Korean children.

The decision, the latest sign of easing tensions on the Korean Peninsula, “was based upon our belief that purely humanitarian support for the young and vulnerable in North Korea should continue,” a senior Unification Ministry official told reporters Tuesday during a briefing given on condition of anonymity.

In 2009, South Korea donated $13 million for a W.H.O. program to send medicine and medical supplies to the North. But it asked the United Nations agency to suspend distribution of the money after the March 2010 sinking of a South Korean warship, the Cheonan. Seoul says the North torpedoed the ship, killing 46 sailors. North Korea rejects the accusations.

On Tuesday, the Unification Ministry accepted W.H.O.’s request to distribute the remaining South Korean money, totaling about $7 million, the official said.

Unification Minister Yu Woo-ik told the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, in New York on Saturday that his government would consider sending aid to the North through the world body.

Recent months have seen some easing of tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula, with the government in Pyongyang signaling a possible willingness to resume talks on ending its nuclear weapons program and the government in Seoul easing restrictions on nongovernmental aid shipments to the North.

While South Korea remains frustrated with the North’s persistence in its nuclear program, it has faced growing appeals from international relief agencies calling for aid shipments, arguing that the North’s most vulnerable should not be punished for their government’s deeds. The United Nations humanitarian chief, Valerie Amos, said last month that 6 million North Koreans are in urgent need of food aid.

Aid organizations have warned South Korea that the malnutrition that has plagued two generations in the North will have consequences for a united Korea, should reunification one day occur. North Korean children on average are considerably shorter than their South Korean counterparts, and doctors have reported signs of malnutrition hindering North Korean children’s cognitive development.

South Korean officials say they are ready to step in with significant aid shipments in the event of another nationwide food crisis in the North, but they say that with harvest season having just begun, the chronic food shortages there have not reached crisis level.

 @ The New York Times