XINHUA

Oct. 15, Chinese President Xi Jinping made a landmark speech at Great Hall of the People in Beijing, urging Chinese artists to carry on Chinese traditions and create products serving the people. 

 

 

President Xi Jinping presided over a symposium that gathered some of the country’s most renowned authors, actors, scriptwriters and dancers in Beijing on Oct. 15. Xi made a land­mark speech urging Chinese artists to carry on Chinese traditions and create products that serve the people.

 

 Xi said that artists should be inno­vative and consider the social benefit of their work before everything else. Good art should have intellectual and artistic merit while remaining capable of capturing the attention of the public. Art should not be subju­gated to the market and should not bear “the stench of money,” he said.  

Xi’s speech signaled the direction for the future development of the coun­try’s cultural and artistic sectors. It received a tremendous response from literary and art scholars in China. 

 

Negative effect of marketization

The process of marketization be­gan accelerating in the 1990s, usher­ing in an era of unprecedented pros­perity for art and culture, and in the past few decades, a number of excel­lent works emerged that enriched people’s cultural lives. However, this time also saw the arrival of vulgar art done in poor taste. How should writers and artists behave in the tide of market economy? Should they go with the flow or stand against the current?

 

“The overall situation of China’s cultural and artistic sectors is good, but there are a few factors that jeop­ardize its healthy development,” said Dang Shengyuan, deputy director of the Institute of Foreign Literature at the Chinese Academy of Social Sci­ences (CASS).

 

Dang said consumerism has a negative effect on art by stripping of meaningful content and overempha­sizing its entertainment function. In the end, it undermines art as a tool of moral inspiration while encouraging a decline in aesthetic standards.“Full marketization of art and culture will lead to serious negative effects, so we cannot leave it all to the ‘invisible hand’,” said Zhu Liyuan, professor of Chinese language and literature at Fudan University.

 

“It is inevitable that cultural products will go to the market, but they cannot be fully market ori­ented because cultural production is to fulfill the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment and values, which is significantly different from material production,” Zhu continued.

 

Art to embody the times

Xi pointed out at the symposium that the key to the prosperity of literature and art is the produc­tion of works of art that serve the nation and capture the essence of the times. At a discussion of Xi’s speech held at CASS on Oct. 20, CASS Vice President Zhang Jiang said that Xi’s words mark a new historical point for the develop­ment of China’s literature and art studies, and literary and art creation.

 

“What good is literature if a nation lacks its own epic—literature that fosters a sense of pride in being Chi­nese?” Zhang emotionally said.

 

Since the beginning of 2014, Zhang has hosted a column titled “Literature Observation” launched by CASS and People’s Daily that has been warmly received by scholars and readers. They commented that the articles published in the column have given clear interpretations on relations between literature and history and the role of literature as an instrument to promote ethic and “positive energy.”

 

Lu Jiande, director of the Institute of Literature, CASS, said that Xi’s speech came 72 years after the famous speech by Mao Zedong on literature and art in 1942. Though in Chinese society since then, the basic principle never changes: art and culture should serve the people, Lu said.

 

Liu Wenfei, a researcher at the Institute of Foreign Literature of CASS, criticized some writers who forget national pride: “Few works carry forward our national spirit nowadays, let alone build the national image. And some writers are very reluctant to say good words about China, thinking it’s cheap.”

 

Chao Gejin, director of the Institute of Ethnic Literature at CASS, emphasized great works have traditionally originated in ordinary life and preserved in folk society.

 

Paper cuts are an example, Chao said. They are simple but with amazing mean­ing and abstraction.

 

“We need to put ourselves in people’s shoes, become rooted in the popular cul­ture, to explore deep ethnic characteristics and fine cultural legacies, making it part of our consumption market,” Chao continued.

 

Unfortunately, Chao said, current Chi­nese literary circle pays less attention to the rich folk cultural heritages. Chinese culture is the foundation for the nation’s ability to compete in the world. Without it, we would not be able to stand a chance.

 

Criticism is encouraged

At the symposium, Xi urged artists to cultivate a good atmosphere for criticism by following the criteria that synthesizes “historical, people-oriented, artistic and aesthetic” factors.

 

Zhang Jiang said, in recent years, liter­ary critics in China have adopted Western literary theories to judge Chinese literary works, interpret Chinese cultural practices and even try to shape China’s cultural aes­thetics. However, contemporary Western literary theories are derived from Western practice, so they are not universal.

 

“Chinese literary works abide by the Chinese nation’s aesthetic standards, so its evaluation and interpretation must follow our aesthetic habits and principles. Artists will not accept the one-size-fits-all approach and the rigid application of Western theories, and neither will the people. Such criticism is invalid without any doubts,” Zhang elaborated.

 

“Quantity over quality,” “a plateau with­out summits,”“copy and plagiarism,” and “cookie-cutter approach” now commonly seen in art creation are due to the void of literacy criticism standards, said Ding Guoqi, a researcher from the Institute of Literature under CASS.

 

Xi’s speech pinpointing the criteria for literature criticism will be of great en­couragement for excellent art and cultural works, scholars said.

 

The Chinese version appeared in Chinese Social Sciences Today, No. 659, Oct.22, 2014      

The Chinese link is: http://www.cssn.cn/wx/wx_wtjj/201410/t20141022_1371672.shtml

 

 

 

Translated by Yang Xue