Andy Warhol, Mao Tse Tung (1972)
Yu Youhan, Mao Marilyn (1994)
“From having been an assurance of immortality, [the Double] becomes the ghastly harbinger of death.”
–Sigmund Freud, 1919
When it first started appearing in international Biennales and in dedicated survey exhibitions in New York, it was difficult to know what to make of something like “Political Pop.” On the one hand, critics recorded that Western audiences were gratified to witness the flourishing of work they read as direct, anti-government provocation. A thumb in the eye of tyranny, delivered with a Warholian flourish. There seemed no way that artists could be so willful with the cherished image of Chairman Mao, which as of this writing still dominates every denomination of RMB, without intending to strike a blow against the hegemony of the Party. Indeed, Americans in particular were primed for such sympathies. They had recoiled in horror at the brutal Tiananmen crackdown, and were in the midst of a very public grappling with their own complicity, through the neoliberal expansion of trade and a wash of stories about appalling “sweat shop” labor, in such exploitation. What a relief to see an endogenous assertion of individual rights—of anti-government speech, of artistic abstraction—In the face of contemporary Despotism.
The critics themselves were typically quick to impute this uncomplicated attitude into the mouths of others. They, they assured their readers, knew better than to take things at face-value. They had, after all, become properly schooled in the constructed-ness of the postmodern. And they were keen to emphasize, as Holland Carter did, that stylized portraits of the Great Leader were not necessarily seditious. Rather, they bore out “the general popular attitude toward Mao in China: critical but…also deeply nostalgic.” Perhaps. Or perhaps all these Maos had more to do with confirmation bias on the part of Western observers. As numerous historians have since observed, the ascendance of Political Pop was in large part authored by its enthusiastic reception amongst international audiences and collectors. Brightly colored, figural canvases steeped in explicit homage to a Western icon like Warhol are beloved by introductory textbook compilers and emergent collectors alike. And Pop Politicos had the double benefit of implicitly appealing to a pernicious Orientalist mindset on the part of their viewers, one that would limit Chinese artistic exploration to a clumsy reprise of American innovations. An MTV-era expression of Hegel’s dictum that “China [is] characterized by a thoroughly unimaginative Understanding.”
But perhaps a whole other game was afoot. Indeed, some of the earliest critical reception of Chinese contemporary art focused on its inherent incommensurability with outside histories. “The acts of defiance of the Chinese avant-garde” wrote critic Andrew Solomon in 1993, “function very legitimately within their system, but are not designed to be interpreted within ours.” Fair enough. But the moves seemed so easily recognizable. A scoop of Warhol-Lichtenstein-Rauschenberg style citation of mass mediated imagery. A helping of Neo Expressionist idiomatic painting. A dollop of Duchamp. Combine with relevant Chinese content: the oppressively ubiquitous portraits of Mao, the faceless masses of the Chinese people, the sacredness and artistry of the written word. Bake. And there you have perfectly done Political Pop, Cynical Realism, Xiamin Dada…
***
The emergence of Chinese art on the world stage in the 1990s was in fact a localized shadow cast by much larger developments. In the late 1970s, with the traumas of the Cultural Revolution still open wounds, the Communist Party of China struggled to point their country in a different direction. Key to this reorientation, which came to be known as “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” was a program of far-reaching economic liberalization. Progress was steady, and then stunning. Over the 1980s GDP doubled, and it was in these heady days that contemporary art first emerged as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon within China. In the following two decades, roughly encompassing the interlude between the first dotcom bubble and the Great Recession, Chinese GDP grew by an astonishing factor of more than 1,000%. It was during this latter period that Chinese art broke out onto the world scene. A moment in which the post-Tiananmen crackdown had made political reform impossible to pursue but staggering economic change had made cultural stasis impossible to imagine. As it was described by Li Xianting, the critic who coined the term, the citation-heavy art of Political Pop, “portrays the reality of dissolved meanings.” A world with feet on opposite sides of a chasm growing wider every day.
In this brave new world, art was far from the only valuable export in a Kingdom that found itself, all of a sudden, back in the Middle. Indeed, China became an international manufacturing powerhouse, with the total value of exports its skyrocketing from $25 billion in 1984 to nearly $400 billion in 2003. Today, it ships out well over $100B worth of goods every month. While geopolitical strategy and local-political chaos each played a part in this incredible growth, China’s rapid ascendance as a manufacturing colossus would not have been possible without the worldwide explosion of high technology consumer goods. The story of the last two decades the world over has been one of unprecedently rapid technological adoption. First, it was a computer in every home and then a laptop for every child. Next came a smartphone (or smart watch) for every pocket, and an E Reader for every nook and a drone for every sky. Soon, IoT apologists promise a smart speaker on every sparkling quartz countertop, a smart fridge refilling the contents of its fruit bowls, and a smart thermostat ensuring we never endure a moment of discomfort from ill-regulated temperature. And every year, more and more of these specialized labor crystals are shipped from the ports of Shenzen.
Back to 1979. In the earliest days of its market reforms, the CCP decided to insist on a negotiating a concession from foreign businesses seeking access to its uniquely massive, and uniquely motivated, labor market. With the legacy of distorted trade agreements forced on the weakened Qing Empire still haunting the political psyche of China, Party leaders knew they needed to protect their market-based experiments from a deluge of foreign interference. Sure, they recognized that massive external investment would be needed in order to modernize the economy. But this investment would come with a catch. Foreigners wishing to conduct business in China were required to do so only through a Chinese-owned partner or intermediary. American companies could manufacture anything they wanted in Chinese factories, but they couldn’t own the factories that did the manufacturing.
These joint-venture arrangements rapidly accelerated the transfer of intellectual capital—from quotidian best managerial practices to extremely valuable, patented technologies—from the West to China. Copycats proliferated, most notoriously in fashion. “Tribute brands” grabbed valuable market share from Paris-based luxury designers, while other “unbranded” labels generated lookalike haute couture out of the same factories. Literally cut from the same cloth. Similar spates of imitation cropped up in every imaginable sector, and many humorous near-misses are preserved in endless online lists. The Sony Polystation, the BlueBerry smartphone, and the iPohone. A group of enterprising entrepreneurs in the Southwestern city of Kunming opened an ersatz Apple store selling either real or fake iPads. It was difficult to tell. This idiom of shanzhai, a Cantonese slang term for such off-the-books imitation, lurks not far below the surface in the reception of Chinese contemporary art. A bit of a borrowing, a twist of Rosenquist. Yu Youhan, an almost Andy.
. 
Andy Warhol, c. 1985 Steve Jobs, c. 2005
The aesthetic and economic halves of this story hang together with striking, if implicit, symmetry. Consider the rhymes between Steve Jobs and Andy Warhol, both thinking differently in their distinctive black turtlenecks. The story of bold artistic experiment becomes the tale of visionary commercial innovation. As Tom Crow reminds us, “the avant-garde serves as a kind of research and development arm of the culture industry.” Or maybe it fills R &D needs for all industry, not just the merely cultural. And seen in the converse, shanzhai is constructed as the negative of avant-garde experimentation, as inimical to research. It is the sterile, simulated soil in which genuine innovation can never flourish. A contemporary, Silicon Valley-centric adaptation of Enlightenment (and even Medieval) ideas about the limited capabilities—linguistic, cultural, genetic—of the Oriental imagination.
Len Jun of Xiaomi, Steve Jobs of Apple. Comparison from Omar Sohail, WCC Tech (June 2018)
And it is here that the intertwined nature of all of this becomes extremely interesting, and extremely important. Recent developments have made clear that the ultimate purpose (which may have even been the original aim) of the Chinese joint venture company model was not simply to nibble away at the edges of foreign competition. Rather, local Chinese partners have been collaborating with outsourcers so as to eventually replace them outright, first in China and then on the world stage. Irritating imitators are fast becoming existential enemies. This process is in fact well underway in the art world. While Warhol and Friends still set high water marks on the well-heeled international auction circuit, it is China that is home to most of the world’s new museums, and most of its new billionaire collectors. And many of them are choosing to shop ever more locally. Back to the technology world, internet companies like TaoBao and Xiaomei, which began their lives as exacting imitations of eBay and Apple, have matured into global threats to their original models. Moreover, this C2C (copy to China) model is obsolescing; the super-app WeChat is currently locked in a struggle for international dominance in both the social media and mobile payment spaces with the same product. And, technologist warn us, the scales are poised to tip, and then freefall, onto the other balance. The unique parameters of the forthcoming AI revolution—which some have likened to the commercialization of electricity—are nearly all arrayed in China’s favor.
What we are witnessing is, perhaps, the tectonic shift of historical gravity from the West to China. Perhaps. As Zhou Enlai famously said about the outcome of the French Revolution, it is too early to tell.
***
Like many things China, the history of technology transfer (and cultural interface) is startlingly long. Ambassadors arrived from Ancient Rome, and later, Byzantium, bearing gifts of both local and international origin. Ideas about China percolated back to the West, bearing the imprint of prior paradigms. The imperial splendor of the East was easy to map onto the curious mixture of attitudes the Greeks felt for those paradigmatic Easterners, the Persians. You could marvel at the scale of the imperial achievements while ruing the system that had ground such splendor out of its endless sea of peasants. The particular, millennial old paradigm of a society with a massive, semi-skilled manufacturing workforce. And like the Persians, you could definitely dismiss the Far Easterner as decadent; corrupted by luxury and disinclined to put considered reason before rote instinct. The weather, it was assumed, must play a role.
Contact intensified as European political infrastructure rebuilt itself during in the Middle Ages. Based in part on an apocryphal tale about an Eastern Messiah named Prester John, the 13th century French King Philip the Fair forged a short-lived military alliance with Mongols. Marco Polo famously brought back pasta. The Silk Road continued to shuttle people, goods and ideas between the largely self-contained worlds of Western Europe and East Asia. In the 16th century, the dynamic shifted. The Europeans, and particularly the Portuguese, had been growing bolder in their self-conception as an international trading powerhouse. These new sea powers began adapting inventions with Asian origins, including the magnetic compass and the tanja sail (which improves upwind travel), discovering that they could obviate the slow and dangerous process of shipping goods long distances over land. And “discovering” much else along the way.
Up until this point, the Chinese did not take a significant interest in matters of Occidental origin. Their word for the Roman Empire, dàqín, simply meant “Greater China” and was probably meant to indicate the settlements in and around Syria rather than the Apennine. Not that it made much difference; the Imperial Courts had never given much regard to the grubby business of “barbarian management.” As late as the end of the 18th century, China was officially disinterested in the innovations of the West. The Qianlong Emperor rebuffed King George’s emissary, who had been seeking a direct trade agreement to counter the entrenched Portuguese monopoly, dismissively informing the distant King had no need for British goods, or other “manufactures of outside barbarians” because “Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance.” This was painful news for the Brits, whose consumers already had a voracious appetite for Chinese exports. Given long enough, this commercial asymmetry and military miscalculation was going to correct itself in a paroxysm of violence.
The Qing Emperors were themselves occupied with their own problems, many of which they had inherited from the prior regime. The Qing had swept into power in the mid 17th century, riding a wave of peasant revolts that had been stimulated, indirectly, by the influx of European wealth into treaty ports like Portuguese Macau. The supply of silver, the coin in which peasants were expected to pay taxes to their landlords, briefly spiked and then, for reasons beyond Chinese control (such as Japan’s decision to close its ports to European commerce), quickly disappeared. While court scholars debated the ethical parameters of this new, mercurial effect, there was economic devastation among China’s poorest subjects, particularly the ethnic Manchus living on the inhospitable steppes of Northern China. Combined with a climate-related famine, revolt was not long in coming.
Destruction of the Opium at Humen, 1839
Though the Manchurian Qing toppled the Imperial capital at Beijing in 1645, Ming loyalism, spurred in part by ethnic resentment from the Han majority, was stubbornly difficult to extinguish. One loyalist general even ran a splinter state on the island of Taiwan for over twenty years; he had been bent on eventually wresting control of the Mainland away from the usurpers. It was internal threats like these that worried Imperial policymakers. The ignorant boorishness of the barbarians, who were continually stretching their treaty port arrangements and peddling their unwanted vices, did not rate as a national emergency. It was a matter of law enforcement, not territorial sovereignty, that lead viceroy Lin Zexu, an Eliot Ness or Wyatt Earp type figure, to raid suspected British traders in the treaty port of Canton. He came back trailed by endless chests of illegal opium. His haul, 2.5 million pounds of contraband, was more than 100 times larger than any bust ever suffered by the narcotraficantes.
But what began as a matter of border police and trade agreements escalated into full blown, albeit lopsided, military conflict. The resulting Treaty of Nanking was considered a national humiliation; it conceded chunks of sovereign territory to a foreign power and entailed the loss of China’s control over its own trade policy. It turned out to be the first in what became known as the “unequal treaties.” But the associated phrase, the “century of humiliation” captures the national sentiment better. It is these treaties that lurk in the long durée backdrop of the weaponized joint-venture arrangements from which China has recently reaped huge value. It must be with a certain ironic satisfaction that Chinese officials view the earnest sense of injury latent in Western rhetoric about the “unfair” nature of the JV system. As Von Clausewitz would have put it, “trade war is politics by other means.”
***
(Continue on Our Own Arrows II)
1. Andrew Solomon, “Their Irony, Humor (and Art) Can Save China” New York Times December 19, 1993. Accessible online at https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/19/magazine/their-irony-humor-and-art-can-save-china.html (Last accessed 5/22/2019).
2. Holland Cotter, “Art That’s a Dragon With Two Heads” New York Times December 13, 1998. Accessible online at https://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/13/arts/art-that-s-a-dragon-with-two-heads.html (Last accessed 5/22/2019).
3. Ibid.
4..See discussion of international reception of Political Pop in Hsiao-peng Lu, Sheldon H. Lu, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 144-6.
5. Peggy Wang, “New Audiences, New Energy: Producing and Exhibiting Contemporary Chinese Art in 1993” MoMA Posts August 19, 2015. Accessible online at https://post.at.moma.org/content_items/612-new-audiences-new-energy-producing-and-exhibiting-contemporary-chinese-art-in-1993 (Last accessed 5/22/2019).
6. GFW Hegel, “Part I: The Oriental World” Philosophy of History. Translator unknown. Accessible online https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/lectures1.htm (Last accessed 5/22/2019).
7. Solomon, “Their Irony…”
8. For a thorough history of this loaded term, see Immanuel Chung-yueh Hsü, China without Mao (Oxford University Press, 1998), 168-205. For an overview of this term in contemporary debates over international trade, see Chris Buckley, “Xi Jinping Thought Explained: A New Ideology for a New Era” New York Times Feb. 26, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/world/asia/xi-jinping-thought-explained-a-new-ideology-for-a-new-era.html (Last accessed 5/22/2019).
9. The Guardian, “China GDP: How it Has Changed Since 1980” Datablog March 23, 2012. Accessible online at https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/mar/23/china-gdp-since-1980 (Last accessed 5/22/2019).
10. Li Xianting, “Apathy and Deconstruction in Post -89 Art” in Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents ed. Wu Hung (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 164.
11. Javier Silva-Ruete, “The Development of China’s Export Performance” Speech given to Central Reserve Bank of Peru. Accessible on IMF website at https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sp030706 (Last accessed 5/22/2019).
12. “ China: monthly value of exports from March 2018 to March 2019 (in billion U.S. dollars” Statista https://www.statista.com/statistics/271616/monthly-value-of-exports-from-china/ (Last accessed 5/22/2019).
13. For an excellent overview of the topic from the period under consideration, see Ann Fenwick, “Equity Joint Ventures in the People’s Republic of China: An Assessment of the First Five Years” The Business Lawyer 40. 3 (May 1985), pp. 839-878.
14. Yiling Pan, “China’s Luxury Copycats Say They’re Fans” Jing Daily March 6, 2018. https://jingdaily.com/fake-manufacturers-luxury/ (Last accessed 5/22/2019). Marc Bain, “‘Unbranded’ Luxury Items in China Are Like Knockoffs, with One Vital Difference” Quartz May 15, 2018. https://qz.com/1278501/unbranded-luxury-items-in-china-are-like-knockoffs-with-one-vital-difference/ (Last accessed 5/22/2019).
15. Uri Freedman, “Welcome to China’s Fake Apple Store” The Atlantic July 2011.
16. For a thorough theoretical history of shanzai in relation to the Western intellectual tradition see Byung-Chul Han, Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese trans Philippa Hurd (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). An enormous missed opportunity to analyze the idiom of “fakeness” and appropriation in Chinese contemporary art can be found in Caroline Jones “Fake | Factory” in which she jointly analyzes the studio practices of Ai Wei Wei and Andy Warhol, noting the irony of Wei’s appropriation of Warholian tropes of delegated labor while privileging traditional handcraft.
17. Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 35.
18. One oft-quoted report from McKinsey referred to China as an “innovation sponge,” simply absorbing ideas from elsewhere, while the Harvard Business Review pointedly wondered, as its article headline put it, “Why China Can’t Innovate.” See McKinsey and Company “The China Effect on Global Innovation.” McKinsey Global Institute 2015, page 4; Regina M. Abrami et. al,”Why China Can’t Innovate” Harvrd Business Review March 2014.
19. The Economist, “China: Mad About Museums.” August 2018. https://www.economist.com/special-report/2018/08/14/mad-about-museums
(Last accesed 5/22/2019). Oliver Giles, “The New Generation of Chinese Collectors Shaking up the Art World,” CNN October 6, 2017. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/chinas-young-art-collectors/index.html (Last accessed 5/22/2019).
20. For an excellent overview of the tactic of imitation as a rehearsal for competition in the Chinese technology sector see Kai-Fu Lee. AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). The present article was inspired by, and written in response to, Lee’s book.
21. This oft-repeated quote is the potential subject of a mis-translation. Zhou may have been speaking about the 1968 protests rather than the 1789 Revolution. See Richard McGregor, “Zhou’s Cryptic Caution Lost in Translation,” Financial Times, June 10, 2011.
22. For more, see, Warwick Ball, Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire (New York: Routledge, 2001).
23. Margaret Miller, “Persians in the Greek Imagination” Mediterranean Archaeology 19/20 (October 2005), pp. 109-123. Irina Metzler, “Perceptions of Hot Climate in Medieval Cosmography and Travel Literature” Reading Medieval Studies Vol.23 (1997), 69-105. For a broader overview of the topic see Kim M. Phillips, Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245-1510 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
24. Phillips, 181.
25. For an overview of Portguese exploration of Asia, see Ronald S. Love. Maritime Exploration in the Age of Discovery, 1415-1800 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing), 9-32.
26. Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), 64–68.
27. Bruce A. Elleman, S. C. M. Paine, Modern China: Continuity and Change (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), 9.
28. “Emperor Qian Long’s Letter to King George III,” (1793). Reprinted in E. Backhouse and J. O. P. Bland, Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), pp. 322-331. More easily accessed online at http://academics.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/China/208/READINGS/qianlong.html (Last accessed 5/22/2019).
29. For an excellent overview of trade an monetary policy in the Ming era, see Richard von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700 (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1996), 113-145, 187-206.
30. Aditya Das, Defending British India Against Napoleon (Suffolk, United Kingdom: Boydell & Brewer, 2016) 243; for an authoritative overview of the larger conflict, see Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, May 15, 2018). The widely reported largest bust of Colombian cocaine was 13.8 metric tons, or just over 22,000lbs, seized from Pablo Escobar in 1984.
31. For more on the “Century of Humiliation” as a backdrop for modern Chinese political consciousness, see David Scott, China and the International System, 1840-1949: Power, Presence, and Perceptions in a Century of Humiliation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008)
