Cashing in on culture turns it into a commodity
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Shanghai Daily, September 15, 2011
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Illustration by Zhou Tao |
In a city that changes at bewildering speed, it seems meaningless to bemoan the disappearance of old things from our life. Still, the recent news that an established art form is losing ground in Shanghai has aroused some nostalgia and reflection.
The Oriental Morning Post reported last week that a shu chang, literally "literary theater," in suburban Shanghai was on the verge of closure, and had long been in dire financial straits.
In an open letter to the city's political leadership, many aged aficionados of Suzhou ping tan, a genre of storytelling featuring ancient legends told in Suzhou dialect and tunes played on a pair of stringed plucked instruments, called on officials to help the struggling theater.
Tai Ri shu chang is the place where old folks while away the hours every day by watching ping tan performance, schmoozing, drinking tea and nibbling sun flower seeds. Admission costs 3 yuan (44 US cents) and one can stay as long as he or she wishes.
For many of the theater's patrons, ping tan, the art they grew up listening to, is sadly fighting a losing battle to survive the times.
It is a financial challenge to run these old-style theaters with paltry gate revenues that can barely cover operational costs. Tai Ri's desperate situation is true of many similar ping tan theaters in Shanghai, a few of which have been knocked out of the business.
Sixty years ago, enjoying ping tan was the second most popular form of entertainment, only after seeing movies. Sixty years on, there are only 60 shu changs left in Shanghai, a tenth of its number at its heyday.
Sharp decline
Ping tan's waning popularity can be blamed on many things, first and foremost on the sharp decline of public interest in traditional operas.
Confronted also by an existential threat are the many time-honored stores that used to define the city's Nanjing Road E., a world-famous shopping avenue.
Yet its worldly fame was recently subjected to scrutiny in a survey by CNNGo, a review site of food, shopping and sightseeing.
The online survey short-listed Nanjing Road E. among the world's 12 tourist spots most undeserving of the kudos lavished on them. The reason is that "quite a few old heritage buildings and stores have vanished from the street."
The survey's findings about Nanjing Road E. are fiercely repudiated by proud locals as "partial" and "subjective." They are, but according to CNNGo's press official, the poll is only intended to foster discussion about the editors' picks, not to spark polemics.
That said, the survey drew attention to a long-ignored problem, that as the street becomes sleeker and post-modern in its appearance, will the loss of Chinese elements from Nanjing Road E. diminish its appeal?
True, a few old stores and restaurants that date back a century or longer remain intact, selling jewelery, medicine, Chinese snacks, and so on. But they are the lucky few - with subsidies received from the government - since a vast segment of such historic shops have been driven out by increasingly higher rents. Deprived of prime spots, their business will suffer and they may gradually fade into memory.
In policy makers' rush to position the pedestrian shopping street as a showcase of the latest fashion in London, Paris and Milan, Nanjing Road E. has been colonized in recent years by dozens of luxury brands, whose oversize billboards dominate an immense area that once experienced the vicissitudes of Shanghai's commercial history.
These two cases of decay of traditional cultural institutions and a landmark into a basket case and a mere cash cow are graphic instances of how worthless culture and history are in the face of a market that emphasizes profits above everything else.
In the case of the many shuttered shu changs, however, it's still shocking that their fortunes could have fallen to such extent despite calls for reviving China's splendid heritage and traditions.
Denying the past
For a nation perennially in constant denial of its own past, our appreciation has grown markedly for historical refinement and cultured ways, yet that is often restricted to a fetish of concrete objects, rather than strong cultural confidence or awareness.
We may no longer act like the thuggish Red Guards that smashed any relics they stumbled upon during the "cultural revolution" (1966-1976); on the contrary, relics looted from China and put under the hammer in Western auction houses are now eagerly purchased by Chinese at exorbitant prices.
But the latest cultural mania has also struck a disturbing note. It is, in many ways, hijacked to serve an all-too-familiar purpose: generation of GDP.
In a recent interview with ifeng.com, a news website, renowned art critic Chen Danqing said that after Chinese exploited almost everything that could be exchanged for a penny, it suddenly dawned on them that they hadn't cashed in on culture.
We are now gripped by a once-in-a-century fever for "advancing the industrialization of cultural enterprise," as it is officially called.
This mercantile approach to culture is not without consequences, which some pundits and officials have conceded. Culture Minister Cai Wu told Xinhua on July 19 that culture has dual social functions. It is as much a commodity as a means of educating the public. Thus it cannot be left totally to the market.
Cai added that for healthy culture to prosper, we cannot afford to act on impulse and whims.
There are already signs that the so-called initiative of cultural industrialization is a disguise for blatant deception in some locales.
Cultural creativity parks are springing up like mushrooms after a rainstorm all over China, but not all are genuinely engaged in their stated mission. Some are actually real estate developments packaged in cultural sloganeering, according to the May issue of Half Monthly Forum, a Xinhua-affiliated publication.
On a visit to Jilin Province in late August, Li Changchun, a member of the CPC Politburo Standing Committee, spoke about the need for cultural confidence and awareness.
Such a vision appears to be elusive, for now, as tricks are pulled in the name of culture, while true culture is languishing in tatters.
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