It must have been about a year ago that the German daily papers began to carry reports on China regularly. The subjects explored in these texts were the economic upturn, the rapid growth of cities, indeed the emergence of entire new cities and suburbs, censorship of critical intellectuals who expressed their opinion, particularly in the public media arena of the Internet. Since October 2005 the editor of the FAZ culture supplement, Mark Siemons, has been writing every week from Beijing about significant steps in China’s capitalist transformation, spurred on perhaps by the grant programme »Beijing Case«1, initiated by the Culture Foundation of the German government. For on that front there are always new developments to observe, things that at first we do not understand with our Western perspective, which however should be comprehensible, for some forecasts indicate after all that by 2040 at the latest China will be the most important global economic power. However, there are still a few hitches with Chinese attempts to adopt an international air, as this advert from a mobile phone manufacturer reveals, conveying no clear statement: »I will chocolate you«. Will incoming message be sweet enough to eat? Is the mobile phone as addictive as chocolate?
The Internet does at least seem to be addictive for city dwellers that have access to it. According to international press and TV reports, blogging is so popular in China that an influential democratisation movement could arise as a result of these online activities – at least, that’s what the West hopes, believing that the promising potential of digital technologies such as web logs, podcasts and Skype has not yet been fully exploited. The role played by the West is however mostly limited to technical support, such as hosting blogs2 if access to them is blocked in China, for the language barrier acts as an obstacle to connecting with a large international community as occurred in 1999 during the Yugoslavia crisis. Parallel to this, in the universe driven by economic interests, American firms such as Microsoft and Cisco cooperate with the Chinese government to combat the »discourse of dissent« 3 and offer their technologies to provide an effective firewall and control public opinion. Google has adapted to Chinese censorship provisions and launched a version with limited search results (with for example expressions like »Tiananmen Square massacre 1989«, »Falun Gong« and »Tibet« black-listed).
China has already made a name for itself as the copy-cat country – in all commercial spheres. There are Chinese pendants to ebay4 and Google5, duplicates of Western cars, imitations of department store chains etc. – Chinese twins of all commercially successful business models are set up in the twinkling of an eye. The Wikipedia encyclopaedia, blocked inside China by the Great Firewall, has been copied too: baidu.com offers an extended and reworked version of the Chinese texts from Wikipedia.6 Addresses of mirror sites are circulated in the active blogger scene, but this information does not filter through to standard users, for whom the Internet primarily fulfils a social function in communication forums.
An hour in an Internet cafe costs three Yuan (thirty cents), and the premises do not always look like generic large-scale offices, but may be in a dimly lit area fitted out with round tables and plastic chairs. Many of the customers are engrossed in chat-rooms or FPS (first-person shooter) games. There’s an unpleasant odour as the door to the toilet is open, paper plates with left-over food are lying around, and the staff probably spend most of their waking hours at work. Hotel staff whose nights are spent sleeping curled up on a couple of office chairs behind the reception also reveal the close ties between work and life.
»Take a break« is the surprising motto of Len Ling, who runs and curates the »Beijing Commune«7, gallery and spent some time in Berlin. Working together with other artists, he has drawn up a manifesto that talks of a new socialism, in which the political form is cited and its vacuity highlighted: »Today, socialism – a new socialism – should be a space for the imagination. This space keeps distant from social practices that have developed by means of capitalist forces. The ghost of the once reverberating communism has flown away, leaving behind a form that can be never wiped away. And behind us, there is only one wall. « Yet this idea of time off, which is communicated in artistic form, is not reflected in the gallery-owner’s working life: he had only scheduled three days between taking down one exhibition and setting up the next.
Media historian Feng Mengbo is also slaving away on the historical heritage, the aesthetic of the Cultural Revolution and its symbolism; his computer game adaptations and Internet works are situated somewhere between nostalgia and pop. »Game Over: The Long March« and »The War of Resistance against Japan« pick up on central events in Chinese history and deal humorously with historical documents to generate a new narrative structure, which reflects the former system’s visual style of representation in its affirmative execution. Whilst I was writing this text, Mengbo’s homepage was taken offline, for some incomprehensible reason, and the following message appeared on the site: »This domain name expired on 05/14/2006 and is pending renewal or deletion.«8 In the wake of the many cases of censorship one would tend to assume there is a political background to this, but it is equally possible that Mengbo had forgotten to pay the bills from his provider.
Addressing the media art and/or culture of China seems to have become something of a must in our modern times. The »China Connection« panel at this year’s transmediale programme in February dealt with the role of European media art and technology organisations 9 in the development of a Chinese agenda for media culture. This on the one hand involves (co-) conception of media (art) courses, as well as institutional support of active blogger circles. However, in the course of the event, reflection on the Western perspective ended up hogging the limelight, with Chinese participant, Lu Jie, deriding the relevance of the new media for domestic art production.10 However, participants in the panel did emphasise that they were just taking the first faltering steps in developing a perspective on the outside world.
If one were feeling pessimistic, one might say that the West, with its paradigms and criteria, is thinking in terms that entirely miss the point when it comes to cultural production in China, which is guided primarily by commercial considerations – with the exception of critical works produced specially for the Western market (because it is common knowledge that this sells better there). At the same time, blogs associated with the individuals who initiated them (in contrast to mailing lists) correspond precisely to the popular urge to be a fan felt by many Chinese. This becomes especially apparent in the context of the programme »Supergirl«, modelled on »American Idols«, in which millions of Chinese took part in the decision by sending text messages, which was interpreted as the first sign of a democratic decision-making process (here one would rather tend to read this appraisal as perverted form of democracy).
However, the Internet has not really entered the mainstream yet. Instead it is a phenomenon of the new middle class, a »third location between work and family» 11 and above all a »domestic medium«, for 85 per cent of the websites visited are Chinese. However, active users invest a lot of energy in the medium. Activist and blogger Isaac Mao12 talks of a »pro-am« culture in the Chinese »glass box«. He is referring to professional amateurs, equipped with the latest technologies, who constantly produce video and audio content for blogs and bulletin boards and whom he hopes will in the future give rise to a »social fabric«.
Whether however, given the local circumstances of capitalism and state control, the future of the Internet will be characterised by production that goes against the grain of society or whether this projection turns out to be merely utopian will be determined to no small extent by the question of whether its integration into public space succeeds. The way in which the Internet is handled can certainly be taken as a seismograph to indicate the evolution of Chinese society. And if the dissatisfaction of the various online activist groups could be articulated visibly in public space, the new technologies would certainly prove to be an important instrument for political transformation – although it is possible that this notion stems from an overly Western mindset and that a certain degree of pragmatism is just as much part of the behaviour of the idiosyncratic but certainly not self-serving online activists.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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