Flooded with an embarrassing amount of much sub-par, derivative work, the state of China's creative industries and art scene is a telling sign that economic growth is little influence with pushing forward cultural growth.
Influential satirical blogger and China's pet dissonant du jour Han Han recently gave a speech at the Xiamen University on how the current political system in China and its censorship policies are crippling to the development of culture. My favorite excerpt from his speech:
"Whether China is a economic strong player or not I don’t really know. No conclusions can be drawn until the our real estates crashes; however, if a country grows big in culture, then it is a powerful country in real sense, and I see no risk of crashing ever for a country like this. Let me come back to the censored words database -the more entries it has, the weaker the country’s culture becomes. But our government justify their actions. They tell you it is to protect our teenagers, to maintain a stable society.
Culture has no boundaries, so they have the right to block any information and culture that "harm" our teens and "sabotage" society's stability. If you nod to this, then someday sooner or later when you are complaining about your own mistreatment, you will find yourself blocked with the charge of sabotaging society stableness. In the end, whoever poses threats to the administrating party or their benefits will be condemned with the charges of harming teenagers and sabotaging society stableness."
Man makes a good point. For full speech and translation go
here.
