Pledges to raise tractor output have been replaced by policies to boost the cultural sector, writes CLIFFORD COONANin Beijing
AT THE end of its four-day annual policy meeting, China’s ruling Communist Party approved a programme to make its ideology more popular at home and boost China’s soft power abroad.
The central committee, effectively the 365 most powerful people in China, issued a jargon-laden communique on boosting the country’s cultural influence overseas while reinforcing socialist principles.
All of this is aimed at wooing an internet-savvy population that is increasingly looking beyond the party for ideas and inspiration.
Welcome to what you could call the New Cultural Revolution, although no one in Beijing would dare to compare this policy with the 10-year period of politically charged chaos that began in 1966 and only ended with chairman Mao Zedong’s death in 1976.
The statement is a sign that China is keen to expand its culture industry and open up more, although it is low on details.
Chinese minister of culture Cai Wu expects the value-added output of the cultural industry to account for 5 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product in 2016.
“The goal of reform is to cultivate qualified market entities from the government-run commercial cultural organisations and establish a modern and influential cultural industry system, so as to guard the role of state-run cultural enterprises as market leader and improve their international competitiveness,” Cai said in an interview with official news agency Xinhua.
The emphasis would be on developing markets for films, performance, entertainment, TV series and cartoons, as well as books, newspapers and magazines, he said.
Where once the plenum produced pledges to grow tractor output from state factories, the focus in new China is on boosting the cultural sector as a “pillar industry”. The language is profoundly old-school Marxist-Leninist, discussing a landmark resolution on “boosting cultural system reform and cultural industry development”, but there is a modernising undercurrent beneath the rhetoric.
What is fascinating about the way these reforms are outlined is the way the “culture” industry – traditionally an intangible kind of industry based on ideas and ephemera like poetry, films and performance – is described in the exact same way as the car industry or agribusiness.
Cai urged efforts to promote Chinese culture worldwide by launching “major external-oriented cultural promotion projects and cultivating cultural enterprises and intermediary organs with global influence”.
China has been busy trying to extend its soft power abroad with organisations such as the Confucius Institute, which teaches Chinese language and culture at institutions overseas, including UCD and UCC, and also by extending the reach of state-owned media companies such as Xinhua and CCTV.
“China should also actively absorb and learn the excellent achievements of foreign cultures,” Cai said, describing the decision to step up the introduction of external talents, technology and capital in cultural fields as “a key step in China’s opening up drive”.
The rhetoric either betrays a naivety about how culture works or it is a fudge aimed at distracting people from the real aim of the plenum: to work out the details of who will form the core leadership when Chinese president Hu Jintao passes over the reins of power next year, probably to Xi Jinping.
If this is a cultural call to arms, the challenge will be how China expands its cultural industries without the government relinquishing its firm grip on the media and censorship of books and films.
The film business is doing well in China, with box-office takings zipping past the €1 billion threshold last year for the first time.
James Cameron’s 3D science-fiction epic Avatar took €140 million in China last year, the second-biggest take in the world and despite a quota system of 20 imported films a year.
But culture czars such as Feng Xiaogang, the most popular film director in China, complain that China’s film business cannot advance as long as censorship restricts the kind of films that can be made.
Most films are fairly basic historical martial-arts epics, while TV dramas are restricted to either propaganda or costume dramas. However, there are signs that Chinese audiences, the consumers of cultural products, as it were, are looking for meatier fare that better reflects a changing China.
Mao’s Cultural Revolution was “a single spark” that started “a prairie fire”, but there is little detail in the plenum document to suggest that we can expect “great disorder under heaven” followed by “great order under heaven” in the world of culture.