—(Continued from Our Own Arrows)
Just over 100 years after the Treaty of Nanking, Mao Tse Tung climbed atop Beijing’s Gate of Heavenly Peace to proclaim an end to the horrid Century. In its earliest days, the new Republic leaned heavily on support from its benefactor, the USSR. But Sino-Soviet alliance turned out to be an unreliable partnership for both sides. The aid packages sent by the USSR, when examined in economic hindsight, look to some scholars more like exploitation than assistance. Military allies disagreed over strategic priorities and short-term tactics. Mistrust of motives proliferated, and it broke into rancorous public disputes about the meanings of Marxist doctrinal minutiae. Each accused the other of cozying up to the West. In 1960, 70% of China’s trade was with the USSR. One decade later, its trading partners were 80% noncommunist.
But, until the early 1970s, trade with the US was legally nonexistent. Washington officially recognized the government of the Republic of China (which was fighting for its survival from its island outpost on Taiwan) as the legitimate government of the whole mainland, and had barred trade with People’s Republic as an enemy combatant after the outbreak of the Korean war. Important shifts occurred during the presidency of Richard Nixon. Most famously, Nixon’s secretary of state Henry Kissinger had worked in secret to establish the outlines of new diplomatic relations between Washington and the People’s Republic. Nixon’s resulting visit to Beijing drove what we would turn out to be a final wedge between the Chinese and Russian Communist parties. The year after the détente, but still locked in the teeth of the Cultural Revolution, China still managed to export more than half billion dollars of goods to the US.
Nixon’s other fateful decision shifted the parameters of monetary rather than diplomatic policy. In the wake of World War II, the US had seized the opportunity to make the dollar into the de facto international currency by agreeing to back every foreign-held dollar by a specified amount of gold on deposit in the US. Instantly, a wildly fluctuating postwar currency, the Deutsche Mark for example, could be fixed at a certain value on the dollar, which, by extension, was backed by the international standard of gold. But, by the 1970s, the financial rationale of the Bretton Woods agreement began to disintegrate. It’s aims had been achieved, but its costs persisted. While domestically, a strong dollar exacerbated the labor market suffering created by the waning of the postwar recovery, Bretton Woods made the U.S. vulnerable to extortion by foreign governments, who could easily threaten a run on American gold reserves. Seeing the writing on the wall, in 1973, Nixon severed the last remaining connection between the supplies of US Dollars and gold bullion, and thereby accelerated changes already underway in the new economic and political order. Importantly for our story, a floating exchange rate had the potential to widen monetary gaps between economies in different developmental stages—gaps that made it increasingly cost effective to manufacture things overseas and then import them into domestic consumer markets.
With these macroeconomic trends playing out in the deep background, change was sweeping China. In 1978, an ascendant reformer named Deng Xiaopeng was emerging victorious from an interparty struggle to control the future of China after Mao’s death. He used his annual address to the Central Committee to offer a rebuke of the orthodoxies that had blinded Party government. Borrowing a Han-dynasty aphorism that had also been a favorite of Mao’s, he encouraged his fellow Committee members to “seek truth from facts.” Not, by extension, from Marxist doctrinal encrustation. And new facts were rapidly inbound to the Middle Kingdom. In 1979, Jimmy Carter’s administration officially “normalized” trade with China. Later that same year, Deng made a historic state visit to the U.S., where he toured cutting-edge manufacturing and scientific facilities in Atlanta and Houston. The high-level exchange of ideas accelerated into the early 1980s. The Chinese Communist Party made the eyebrow-raising move of inviting Milton Friedman, perhaps the world’s most iconic free market thinker, to consult on the planned experiments in market-based economies. The ideas of American futurist Alvin Toffler became a hot topic among Party leaders. Coca Cola was granted favorable access to the Beijing market.
Wang Guangyi, Coca Cola: Great Criticism Series (1994)
With characteristic pragmatism, outside ideas were broken into components parts and reassembled into tactics befitting China’s unique situation. No more than Marx, or in the future, Bezos, Friedman et al could be adapted. These adaptations were often the result of an internal tug of war between reformers like Deng, who envisioned a radically transformed economy, and conservative forces who saw market-based ideas as dangerous experiments to be harnessed and effectively cordoned off. The result was that the country began to divide itself economically—the planned Maoist economy was to continue with minimal interruption, while the Party simultaneously began to sanction experiments in capitalism. Manufacturers were still required to meet government production quotas, but they became free to sell any excess they produced. As China began to regain control over former treaty ports like Portuguese Macau, it used the status of territorial limbo as a means to administer self-contained free market zones. Among the first of these pre-planned zones encompassed a small market town named Shenzen, which was nestled directly across the bay from the British administered financial powerhouse of Hong Kong. From 1980 to 1990, the city’s gross domestic product exploded from effectively nothing to over well over $1B USD annually. Throughout this mindboggling expansion, Chinese partners in joint venture companies absorbed and gradually mastered foreign production principles. And following the logic of the government quota, they were free to manufacture excess and sell the surplus. It was a system designed to encourage local entrepreneurs to copy and adapt Western advances with an eye towards repurposing outside ideas for internal ends.
It was as part of this larger sweep of cultural and economic changes that “contemporary art” emerged onto, and within, China. In the wake of the Cultural Revolution, legions of artists who had been purged for their heterodoxies, as Deng himself had been, were officially rehabilitated and welcomed back into positions of authority. New publications disseminated reproductions of both classical Chinese and recent Western art, with a particularly warm reception for the realist painter Andrew Wyeth. The art academies, objects of deep suspicion under the Maoist regime, were eager to regain their pre-Revolutionary position and to distinguish their output from regime propaganda. And in losing a battle over the spontaneous public mourning for revolutionary hero Zhou Enlai, Party hardliners inadvertently set the precedent that unofficial gatherings, such as at short-term art exhibitions, could go forward without explicit sanction.
View of the Stars exhibition (1979)
One of the most important such gathering occurred in 1979, the same year that Carter and Deng were calling on each other in their respective capitals. A group of mostly self-trained artists commandeered a park next to the National Art Museum in Beijing, mounted an exhibition making use of recently banned painting styles, including 19th century Post-Impressionism. When the show was closed by the authorities, the artists staged what would become an historic protest, establishing an unstable, but very real, right of assembly for emerging cultural producers. Much has been already been written about the first Stars exhibition in the paradigm of the “first” endogenous contemporary art exhibition. Art historians are always keenly interested in firsts: the “first” use of linear perspective, the first photograph, the first totally abstract picture. The first stage of an implicit teleological progression towards a predetermined goal. Scientific naturalism. Mechanical reproduction. European Modernism.
Or something else entirely. With the focus on the Stars’ groundbreaking originality, less historical attention has been paid to the importance of imitation in the exhibition’s self-conception. The year following the show, curator Li Xianting (who would later coin “Political Pop”) emphasized that Chinese artists needed to imitate outside techniques in order to broaden their expressive vocabularies. “It is critical,” he argued, “for us to be able to express the thoughts and feelings of the Chinese people.” Maintaining such expression as an explicit goal was all the more essential given that “the form we use is indiscriminately borrowed.” Copy, adapt, repackage.
***
Those agitating for change remained locked in a perpetual struggle with those attempting to maintain their vision of national integrity. In 1982, Andy Warhol, the world’s most famous contemporary artist and one of its most profligate copyists, came for an extended tour. His visit coincided with an attempt by reactionary party members to launch a campaign against “spiritual pollution,” which included, among other things, new prohibitions on existentialist philosophy and abstract painting. The Sartre ban was short-lived and its demise was greeted by a florescence of activity in experimental literature, dance, music and the visual arts that is now historicized under the rubric of ’85 New Wave. Capping off that momentous year, the same National Art Museum that had seen the Stars censored from its extended campus welcomed a monographic exhibition of the artist Robert Rauschenberg, the first such touring retrospective of a contemporary artist to take place within China. Sometimes the “firsts” really do tell a story.
The struggle over the vector of the nation’s identity continued in the terrain of economics as well as culture. The rapid success of market reforms was generating vast new wealth, but as critics of China’s government were often quick to point out, this wealth was often concentrated in the extended families of well-connected Party members rather than won on the ostensibly neutral playing field of the free market. Moreover, the dual economic system was introducing new kinds of strains. When manufacturers were expected to turn over the entirety of their production to the state, the state was able to set uniform prices for basic goods. But when producers became free to sell their excess, they could easily undercut the state’s own prices (the fixed manufacturing costs, after all, had been born by the production of the government quota). Middlemen with connections to wealthy manufacturers could add their own layers of profit by buying low and reselling high, transactions that served to reinforce the yawning economic disparity in the ostensibly communist republic. With these pressures mounting, in late 1988 Deng ordered a widespread liberalization of price controls, which set off waves of inflation, hoarding and shortages. More consultations with Milton Friedman followed, who predictably recommended more liberalization.
In the spring of 1989, these cultural and economic vectors came to a head in Tiananmen Square, the site on which, almost exactly 50 years before, Mao had declared founding of the People’s Republic. Coming on the heels of the China/Avant Garde exhibition, a Party-approved presentation of recent experimentation at the National Museum of Beijing, young agitators began to gather in the Square in April. The immediate cause of the mass migration was the death of Hu Yaobang, a reformist Party member who had been removed from power of taking what his reactionary colleagues believed to be an overly soft line on the burgeoning liberalization movements of the mid 1980s. When he died three years later in political exile, close to 100,000 students took to the area surrounding the Gate of Heavenly Peace. The parallels with the funeral of Zhou Enlai were striking. Over the ensuing weeks, people streamed into the square—possibly up to a million at a time. They issued striking new demands, including an objective news media free of government interference and financial disclosure laws aimed at ending Party nepotism. A hunger strike began, timed to embarrass the Party during a state visit by Russian Premier Mikhail Gorbachov. Sister protests began mushrooming in cities and towns around China. Sanitation problems began emerging the Square. Something was going to have to give.
Under mounting pressure from the conservative wing of the Party, Deng reluctantly agreed to use the military to end the protests. He declared martial law in late May, ordering a quarter million troops into the capital. A brief standoff between a sea of effectively unarmed protestors and legions of heavily armed infantry ended with bloodshed. On June 4th, the military forcibly cleared Tiananmen square, killing hundreds or possibly thousands in the process. Deng’s liberalizing emissary Zhao Ziyang, who had been sent out to learn from Friedman and to reason with the protestors, was placed under house arrest where he eventually died. Reactionary forces effectively ended the possibility of meaningful political reform to attend the drastic economic and cultural shifts that were only just beginning.
The international fallout from June 4th was surprisingly short lived. At first, it appeared that China had potentially ostracized itself on the world stage. European heads of state issued denouncement after denouncement and the US House of Representatives unanimously passed punitive sanctions against China, suspending high level diplomatic contact and embargoing arm sales. But Beijing had a friend in the White House. George Bush the Elder had cut his political teeth with Nixon and Kissinger, and he endeavored mightily to ensure that Sino-US economic relations would not be endangered by a little civilian bloodshed. By July, Bush was finagling loopholes into the arms embargo and finding non-traditional means of continuing diplomatic contact. And in what had evolved into an annual legislative ritual, he again vetoed Congress’ request to repeal China’s status as a “most favored” trading partner. This was a charade that only had a few years left anyway. Bush’s successor Bill Clinton, who had made political hay out of Bush’s supposed preference for corporate profits over human rights in China, signed PRC’s permanent status as most favored nation into law as in 2000. Shortly thereafter China joined the WTO.
It was during the 1990s, as China solidified its position as the world’s leading exporter (a rise powered by joint venture partnerships and the explosion of consumer spending on computer products), that Chinese artists entered into the global circuit of the contemporary art world. In the years immediately following Tiananmen, exhibitions began sprouting up in the capitals of the Western art world and the academy: Paris, Los Angeles, the University of Chicago. In 1993, Chinese artists were represented at a dedicated presentation (though not yet an official national pavilion) at the Venice Biennale. The survey was curated by the Italian critic Achille Bonito Oliva, who had risen to prominence in the 1980s as an advocate for what the he termed the trans-avantgarde, an artistic ethos that bears out striking similarities to the motivations of Political Pop and Cynical Realism as articulated by Ly Xianting.
The former’s “The Italian Trans-Avantgarde” (1979) presages the latter’s “Apathy and Deconstruction in Post- ‘89 Art (1992)” in a number of significant ways. Central to Bonito Oliva’s ideas was a refusal of the teleological character of European modernism. Differing from the dictate of earlier forward-guard movements that had born out “a moral character,” derived from some of goal artistic or social reform enacted through the work, the transavantgardiste would assume “a nomad position which respects no definitive engagement.” Achilo Bonita made a fitting ally for work that had, as Li put it, “lost the meanings previously assigned to it by former cultural models and values.” Both argued that, in the ashes of ideology, artists were forced to turn inward for new possibilities. Achilo Bonita welcomed the “landslides of the individual’s imagery” as an antidote to “depersonalization in the name of the supremacy of politics.” Li heralded the artistic insight that “salvation can only be achieved through rescuing the self.” Trauma haunts the worlds surveyed by both writers. The recent failure of student uprisings (1968 in Europe, 1989 in China) ache most acutely. The grievous societal injuries of fascism and forced labor lurk only slightly further back. It is all the more significant then, that it was this moment in the early 1990s that Li cited as “the starting point of modern Chinese art [moving] in a direction of its own choosing.” No longer simply imitating the West, China was now playing its own art historical hand.
Or, given the scale of everything China, many hands at once. As it matured, Chinese contemporary art began to develop the internal tensions of any major cultural undertaking. Tensions arose between artists who had made a name for themselves abroad and those who had braved a more difficult climate at home. And as the money started flowing—from both speculative collectors and well-endowed nonprofit institutions— the question of who had access to the networks of exposure became increasingly high stakes. And as it grew, the edifice of Chinese contemporary was developed an uneasy, and involuntarily, alliance with the Party. Ten years after Bonita Oliva’s Survey, the People’s Republic of China sponsored its first official pavilion at the Biennale. Among the selected artists was Stars alum and noted provocateur Ai Wei Wei, whose notorious Fuck Off series had included a middle finger seemingly directed straight at Mao. By 2008, his selection as the lead artist for the Olympic Stadium in Beijing made him into an international icon. His ensuing troubles with Party leadership—including a beating by the police that left him hospitalized—point to very uneasiness of this larger alliance. Much like the free market layer of the dual track economy engineered by Deng in the 1980s, the world of contemporary art in China derives its power from its position both outside of, and in service to, the larger apparatus of Party power.
Once borrowed, the pieces can be constantly reassembled.
***
With the drumbeat of trade war growing louder every day, Dr. Michael Pillsbury has recently become a fixture in the right wing American news media. President Trump calls him “the leading authority on China.” And he has been growing increasingly dire in his warning about China’s malign geopolitical intentions. His book Hundred Year Marathon has become a frequent touchpoint for American trade hawks, both on conservative television (and as I can attest personally) among finance professionals in bars. It only makes sense that the Fox and Friends set would respond enthusiastically when a former senior foreign relations official promised to reveal “China’s secret strategy to replace America as the global superpower.” A message, he is not shy to point out, that was ignored by the prior administration.
Hundred Year Marathon opens with an argument for the global contemporary art world as a kind of scale model for the larger civilizational conflict. In 2012, the Smithsonian-Sackler gallery invited the artist Cai Guo Qiang to perform one of his signature fireworks-events at the Museum’s 25th anniversary celebration. Cai chose to revisit a work he had first carried out in the closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics: making a massive pine tree appear as behind a shroud of thick black smoke. The commission was heralded in the American media—a gesture of “a revolt against an oppressive artistic culture” said the Smithsonian’s own press release—but as an actual event it was fairly difficult to grasp. I remember huddling against the cold as I waited in a throng of onlookers for whatever was about to happen. When each round of fireworks exploded, it sent a tenebrous tree of smoke into the grey November sky. When it was over after three trees, I wasn’t quite sure I had witnessed.
But, pace Pillsbury, a dirty trick had been pulled on all of us. While he was also in the audience that day, “clap[ping] along with the rest” as he put it, he would soon discover the intercultural duplicity underneath the pyrotechnics. Through a secret meeting with an unnamed defector, Pillsbury learned of Cai’s favor among Party hardliners, who reportedly cheer the ironic symbolism of Cai receiving rapturous praise from Western institutions for detonating the cherished symbols of their power. According to an unnamed Mandarin language website that Pillsbury chooses to leave uncited, blowing up a Christmas tree on the National Mall was a particularly delicious victory.
Maybe.
Cai Guo Qiang, Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows (1998)
But what is certain is that if he was looking for evidence of meta-strategic geopolitical maneuvering in the art of Cai Guo Qiang, Pillsbury chose the wrong piece. In 1998, Cai contributed a now iconic work to Inside Out, one of the most significant touring retrospectives of Chinese art to take place in the decade after Tiananmen. Borrowing Your Enemies Arrows, a ceiling-mounted sculpture featuring a fishing vessel studded by hundreds of arrows, alludes to an ancient bit of military folklore. According to legend, the ancient general Zhuge Liang faced down a two-front problem—an ammunition shortage and an internal challenge to his command—with a stroke of tactical brilliance. He sent an “attack” against a fortified enemy position, sailing an unmanned fleet onto a lake filled with fog. After the empty armada had been deluged under a shower of arrows, Zhuge managed to surreptitiously retrieve his navy, which was now replete with a cache of missiles. Borrow, adapt, repurpose. A technology transfer tactic millennia in the making.
And in here lies the uncanny strangeness of broadly constructed shanzai. In looking at the double vision of Youhan and Warhol, or of Jun and Jobs, we are confronted with nothing so much as the points of our own arrows.
32. Chang-tai Hung, Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 33.
33. This analysis was synthesized from Liang-Shing Fan, “The Economy and Foreign Trade of China”) Law and Contemporary Problems 38.2 (Summer – Autumn, 1973), pp. 249-259.
34. Fan, 249-251. See also Chris Tudda, A Cold War Turning Point: Nixon and China, 1969-1972 (Shreveport, LA: LSU Press, May 7, 2012).
35. John and Wendy Cornwall, “Globaliation, the Distribution of Power and Full Employment” in What Global Economic Crisis? (New York: Springer, 2001), 112-117.
36. Mei Lee-Wong, Song. (2010). “Discourse as Communicative Action: Validation of China’s New Socio-Cultural Paradigm “Qiye Wenhua”/‘Enterprise Culture’” Pragmatics 19.2 (January 2010), 223.
37. For more on Carter and Deng see, Brian “‘Maximum Flexibility for Peaceful Change:’ Jimmy Carter, Taiwan, and the Recognition of the People’s Republic of China” Diplomatic History 33.4 (September 2009), pp. 595-613
38. Julian Gewirtz, “The Little-Known Story of Milton Friedman in China” The Cato Policy Report (September/October 2017). Accessible online at https://www.cato.org/policy-report/septemberoctober-2017/little-known-story-milton-friedman-china
(Last accessed 5/22/2019).
39. Julian Gewirtz,”The Futurists of Beijing: Alvin Toffler, Zhao Ziyang, and China’s ‘New Technological Revolution,’” 1979–1991. The Journal of Asian Studies, 78.1 (February 2019), 115-140.
40. Scott Cendrowski, “Opening happiness: An oral history of Coca-Cola in China” Fortune September 12, 2014. Accessible online at fortune.com/2014/09/11/opening-happiness-an-oral-history-of-coca-cola-in-china/ (Last accessed 5/22/2019).
41. Gerwitz, “The Little Known…”
42. Bill Chou and Ding Xuejie “A Comparative Analysis of Shenzhen and Kashgar in Development as Special Economic Zones” East Asia. 32.2 (June 2015), 117-136. See reference Table 6.
43. Wu, Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents, 5-10, 29-32.
44. Bo Zheng, The Pursuit of Publicness: A Study of Four Chinese Contemporary Art (PhD Dissertation, University of Rochester, 2012), 114.
45. Quoted in Wu, Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents, 11.
46. For a thorough accounting of this period see Yong Guo, “Corruption in Transitional China: An Empirical Analysis” The China Quarterly 194 (June, 2008), pp. 349-364.
47. Gerwitz, “The Little Known…”
48. For an important, fictionalized account of the connection between the China/Avant Garde 1989 exhibition and the ensuing massacre from the perspective of one of its central participants, see Lu Xiao, Dialogue (Hong Kong University Press, 1, 2010)
49. For an in-depth, behind the scenes accounting of the lead up to the June 4th Massacre, see The Tiananmen Papers Liang Zhang et. Al., (Public Affairs, 2008).
50. For more, David Skidmore and William Gates, “After Tiananmen: The Struggle over U.S. Policy toward China in the Bush Administration” Presidential Studies Quarterly 27. 3, (Summer 1997), pp. 514-539.
51. Ted Osius, “Legacy of the Clinton-Gore Administration’s China Policy” Asian Affairs: An American Review 28.3 (Fall 2001), pp. 125-134.
52. T Julia F. Andrews, Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 201), 257-278.
53. Meiqin Wang, “Officializing the Unofficial: Presenting New Chinese Art to the World” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21.1 (Spring 2009), pp. 102-140.
54. Achille Bonito Oliva, “The Italian Trans-Avantgarde” Flash Art (1979). More easily accessed online at https://flash—art.com/article/the-italian-trans-avantgarde/ (Last accessed 5/22/2019).
55. Quoted in Wu, Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents, 159.
56. Idem., 165.
Sheldon H. Lu, Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 102.
57. For more see Sasha Su-Ling Welland, Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art (Raleigh-Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 1-15.
58.For more see Jane DeBevoise, Between State and Market: Chinese Contemporary Art in the Post-Mao Era (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2014).
59. Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2015), 1-5.
60. Sheldon H. Lu, Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 102.
