Between cultural confidence and ideological insecurity: China’s soft power strategy for the cultural industries

Abstract

There is a clear gap between the expectations of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that the country’s rich and deep cultural tradition should be a source of cultural influence for China and the reality of an international marketplace in which contemporary Chinese cultural products, particularly books, music and television shows, often struggle to attract a global audience. As O’Connor and Gu (2006: 279) have pointed out, China’s global cultural profile ‘lacks real weight’. The CCP has attempted to remedy this discrepancy between China’s rich cultural heritage and its weak international cultural presence by investing in a strategy to promote Chinese culture internationally. Heavily influenced by the concept of ‘soft power’ (Nye 2004), the Party has encouraged Chinese cultural industries to ‘go out’ (zou chu qu) and compete to win over international audiences (Zhang 2010). Despite this growing emphasis on an international orientation, the cultural industriesremain embedded in a domestic policy environment in which the propaganda system plays a strong role in promoting and restricting certain cultural expression. While the Chinese cultural industries have shifted away from politically driven cultural production and towards more market-oriented cultural industries (Tong and Hung 2012), and culture is no longer the focal point of open ideological struggle to the extent it was during either the Cultural Revolution or the ‘culture fever’ period of the 1980s, ideology still plays a key part in shaping official cultural policies. To understand the CCP’s soft power strategy for the cultural industries therefore requires consideration of the complex and often subtle relationship between culture and ideology in contemporary China. This chapter will investigate the CCP’s push to develop China’s cultural industriesfor international audiences by examining the official and semi-official discourse ofculture in China. I draw on the statements of senior officials, CCP policy documents and written regulations and I also examine the semi-official discourse that can be found in the editorials and opinion pieces in state-run media outlets. The intention here is to use this official and semi-official discourse to gain insight into the CCP’s strategy for the cultural industries, not to provide an overview of the various contested approaches to culture that find expression in the range of popular discourses within China, so I do not look at the ways in which individual artists or others who are outside or on the fringes of the formal power structure talk about culture. Despite the complexity generated by the wide range of policy pronouncements, by the variations in local implementation and by the proliferation of ideological jargon in the cultural sector, through looking at the official and semi-official discourses it is possible to begin to tease out some of the challenges facing the CCP in its attempts to develop a soft power strategy for the cultural industries. Looking at how the official and semi-official discourse links culture with soft power,nationalism and the market reveals the heavy and sometimes contradictory ideological burden that the Party places on the cultural industries in contemporary China. An unusual combination of cultural confidence and ideological insecurity emerges from these discourses. The CCP expects the cultural industries simultaneously to generate domestic cohesion (ningju li), remain within the politically correct boundaries of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ and attract international audiences. The propaganda authorities aim to protect China from ideological challenges that arrive in the guise of foreign cultural imports and at the same time promote Chinese culture internationally as part of an ongoing struggle to increase China’s global power. During the more than 35 years of the reform era the cultural policy landscape inChina has continued to evolve. Prior to the beginning of reform in 1978 the CCP did not need to develop cultural policies because there was not enough civil autonomy to require them (Tong and Hung 2012: 265); it instead exercised specific and prescriptive control over all aspects of cultural activity. From 1978 onward, however, the Party developed a broad strategic plan for the cultural sphere. This plan was still issued from the top but was more of an indication of a general direction than a tool for prescriptive control (Tong and Hung 2012). Further cultural reform policies were introduced in the late 1990s to make cultural units profitable in order to enhance the authorities’ position vis-a-vis private actors in the cultural sphere, to build China’s knowledge economy as a step to greater international economic competitiveness, and so that cultural units would not drain the financial resources of the state but instead generate revenue for local governments and propaganda organs (Volland 2012: 108-9). A Culture Industry Bureau was established within the Ministry of Culture in 1998 and a Cultural Reform Office was set up within the CCP’s Propaganda Department in 2004 (Volland 2012: 109-10). The international discourse of the cultural industries arrived in China in the early2000s (Ren and Sun 2012: 507) and the CCP has clearly recognized that the sector requires further state intervention and support. Local authorities have pursued policies designed to promote the cultural industries in their areas, often in the form of ‘creative clusters’ or art districts, although these initiatives may be motivated more by factors related to economic competitiveness or property development than the actual cultural output of such endeavours (Keane 2009; Ren and Sun 2012). Atthe national level the official media has published commentaries on China’s ‘cultural trade imbalance’ with the rest of the world (e.g. Jin and Zhang 2007) and in 2006 the National Bureau of Statistics released information on the cultural industries for the first time (Xinhua 2006). The CCP’s contemporary reform agenda, which is represented as the building of‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, includes culture as one of its key components alongside the economy, politics and society. Over time, the Party’s policies to modernize the cultural sphere have become known collectively as ‘cultural systems reform’ (wenhua tizhi gaige). This official focus on cultural systems reform reached a high point in late 2011, when the Sixth Plenum of the Seventeenth Central Committee took the issue of cultural system reform as its major theme. The plenum referred to the need to ‘protect national cultural security’ and claimed that this important task is becoming more difficult. The plenum also noted that the need to increase the influence of Chinese culture overseas was becoming more pressing. The Party’s statement linked reform of the cultural system with achieving the goal of ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’, which has since become one of Chinese President and CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s key ideological phrases. The CCP also linked cultural reform with the socialist system and national cohesion when it discussed the need to build a ‘strong nation of socialist culture’ (shehui zhuyi wenhua qiangguo) and to make use of the shared ideals of socialism with Chinese characteristics in order to ‘coalesce power’ (ningju liliang) (Zhongguo Fayuan Wang 2011).