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

264 Pages·2004·0.68 MB·English

by  Richard Curt Kraus

The Party

and the Arty in China
State and Society in East Asia Series
Elizabeth J. Perry, Series Editor
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By Prasenjit Duara
The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture
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By Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen
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By Roxann Prazniak
Underground: The Shanghai Communist Party and the Politics of Survival,
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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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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
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™
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

This 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 Xi-
aoping’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