chinese art essay

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction
• Art as a reflection of Chinese class structure
• The role of linearity in Chinese art

Characteristic themes and symbols

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• World History Encyclopedia - Ancient Chinese Art
• Art Encyclopedia - Chinese Art
• Table Of Contents

In early times Chinese art often served as a means to submit to the will of heaven through ritual and sacrifice . Archaic bronze vessels were made for sacrifices to heaven and to the spirits of clan ancestors, who were believed to influence the living for good if the rites were properly and regularly performed. (For more information on ritual bronzes, see metalwork ; Chinese bronzes .)

Chinese society, basically agricultural, has always laid great stress on understanding the pattern of nature and living in accordance with it. The world of nature was seen as the visible manifestation of the workings of a higher power through the generative interaction of the yin-yang (female-male) dualism. As it developed, the purpose of Chinese art turned from propitiation and sacrifice to the expression of human understanding of these forces, in the form of painting of landscapes, bamboo , birds , and flowers . This might be called the metaphysical , Daoist aspect of Chinese painting .

Particularly in early times, art also had social and moral functions. The earliest wall paintings referred to in ancient texts depicted benevolent emperors, sages, virtuous ministers, loyal generals, and their evil opposites as examples and warnings to the living. Portrait painting also had this moral function, depicting not the features of the subject so much as his or her character and role in society. Court painters were called upon to depict auspicious and memorable events. This was the ethical , Confucian function of painting. High religious art as such is foreign to China . Popular folk religion was seldom an inspiration to great works of art, and Buddhism , which indeed produced many masterpieces of a special kind, was a foreign import.

Human relationships have always been of supreme importance in China, and a common theme of figure painting is that of gentlemen enjoying scholarly pursuits together or of the poignant partings and infrequent reunions that were the lot of officials whose appointments took them across the country.

Among the typical themes of traditional Chinese art there is no place for war, violence, the nude, death, or martyrdom. Nor is inanimate matter ever painted for art’s sake alone: the very rocks and streams are felt to be alive, visible manifestations of the invisible forces of the universe. For the most part, no theme would be accepted in traditional Chinese art that was not inspiring, noble (either elevating or admonitory), refreshing to the spirit, or at least charming. Nor is there any place in most of the Chinese artistic tradition for an art of pure form divorced from content: it is not enough for the form to be beautiful if the subject matter is unedifying. In the broadest sense, therefore, in a culture steeped in the rhetoric of metaphor and allegory and forever turning to nature as a source of reference, all traditional Chinese art is symbolic , for everything that is painted reflects some aspect of a totality of which the painter is intuitively aware. At the same time, Chinese art is full of symbols of a more specific kind, some with various possible meanings. Bamboo suggests the spirit of the scholar, which can be bent by circumstance but never broken, and jade symbolizes purity and indestructibility. The dragon , in remote antiquity perhaps an alligator or rain deity, is the benevolent but potentially dangerous symbol of the emperor; the crane symbolizes long life; and paired mandarin ducks symbolize wedded fidelity . Popular among the many symbols drawn from the plant world are the orchid , a Confucian symbol of purity and loyalty; the winter plum , which blossoms even in the late winter’s snow and stands for irrepressible purity, in either a revolutionary political or a spiritual sense; and the gnarled pine tree , which may represent either survival in a harsh political environment or the unconquerable spirit of old age .

Critical to all artistic considerations was the belief that the energy and rhythm generated in artistic practice allied the practitioner with the ultimate source of that energy, drawn forth from earthly and heavenly sources and from the sacred Dao itself. Calligraphy and painting, especially, had the capacity to rejuvenate the artist or to damage him spiritually, according to the rightness of his practice and the character of the man. As such, art was viewed in these terms (and so, too, was the viewing of art), taking the artist as much into account as the artistic subject, with regard to erudition, moral character, and harmonic alignment with (or alienation from) the forces of nature.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

The Translation of Art: Essays on Chinese Painting and Poetry

1978, The Journal of Asian Studies

Related Papers

petra power

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE, ART AND MULTIMEDIA (IJHAM)

Ernesto Pujazon , Jose Domingo Elias Arcelles

Along with its multiple levels of importance, characterising a Chinese traditional painting in terms of its aesthetic arrangement-composition and visual meaning may be a challenging undertaking; yet, it also presents evolving features and constantly expanded connotations. A 'landscape painting' is cultural (cultivated) rather than natural (innate); it is a cultural interpretation that renews the physical environmental reality. In the visual arts, 'landscape' representation has acted as an emblem, playing a key role in the construction of China's and Europe's identities. Landscape ink-painting on Chinese paper or silk has a long history in China, stretching back over a thousand years, in contrast to Europe, where it evolved and developed considerably later. What is vital in this study is to determine how Chinese ink-painting has remained traditional in comparison to the evolution of western arts. Every civilization has its own aesthetic limits and standards for evaluating the manifestation of beauty through its arts, which impact its pursuit and creation. Chinese philosophers have a fundamentally conceptual understanding of nature that supports their belief in the cosmos' order and harmony. Shānshuǐ-huà (山水画 ), akin to knowledge of the Western 'landscape,' has been a continuous practise and vital feature of Chinese culture since the Song dynasty (960AD-1290AD), one of China's finest creative epochs. This ink-painting tradition is linked to calligraphy methods known as painted poetry. As a result, in Chinese traditional painting, empty space is balanced against the painted area, the artwork keeps the beauty and balance the results; in Western art, figure-ground plays a visual equilibrium. This study analyses fundamental visual knowledge that embraces holistic aesthetic judgement for none-Chinese audiences; the concerns covered provide a flexible way for leading audiences in evaluating many aspects of Chinese ink-painting using their own understanding and imagination.

Medieval Encounters

Jennifer Purtle（裴珍妮）

Karel Vereycken

In the thousand years from A.D. 700 to 1700, and in particular during the Chinese Renaissance under the Sung Dynasty (960-1279), the greatest contribution of China to universal culture in the domain of painting was the invention of several different types of non-linear perspective, such as one can admire as far back as the Eighth century A.D.

James Elkins

The idea here is to provide a clear, arguable definition, in order to clarify some of the ongoing discussions about what counts as ink painting. These debates are especially important given the claim that Chinese ink painting should be considered as the central Chinese contemporary art. It has a 3,000 year history, and it is not centrally or necessarily influenced by the West like so much Chinese art of the last few generations. One of the things standing in the way of a general acceptance of ink painting is that there is no general agreement about what counts as ink painting: is it the use of ink? Rice paper? Traditional techniques? Can photographs influenced by ink painting count? Can Gu Wenda's paintings count? Xu Bing's calligraphy? Ai Weiwei's architecture, furniture, or painted vases? The definition proposed here is non-visual: I suggest that it is helpful to think of ink painting as not dependent on any particular materials, but rather on the quality and nature of its references to the past. In that sense, much of Chinese contemporary art is neither ink painting nor especially Chinese; and much contemporary Chinese ink painting does not use ink, paper, or traditional brush marks. The essay is unpublished. It was commissioned, fully edited, paid, and then rejected, for an exhibition of contemporary ink painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012-13. (It was rejected because it is more art criticism than art history. Exhibition catalog essays for larger museums need to appear as art history and scholarship, and not as criticism or theory, even if the exhibition they accompany is itself a critical or theoretical contribution.)

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics

Chutong Wang

I n this essay, I will compare different translations of ancient Chinese poetry by Stephen Owen and Xu Yuanchong. I will refer to Book of Poetry and poems from Tang and Song dynasties as examples. I argue, different translation versions represent different comprehensions of themes or aesthetics; and understanding artistic techniques of ancient Chinese poetry should be one of translation strategies.

Seminar presentation 'Introduction to Chinese Culture'

Polina Lemenkova

Current presentation discusses question of the Chinese culture and among others, painting, calligraphy and opera. Painting and calligraphy are of the same origin and are regarded as two treasured arts in China. They are both liked with free movement and distribution of lines in expression. Together with music and chess, they formed the four skills for a learned scholar to pursue in ancient China. They have also been held as a good exercise to temper one’s character and cultivate one’s personality. Chinese painting has a long history and excellent tradition. Through thousands of years, it has developed its own style, its own techniques, and a complete system of art which expresses the aesthetics of the nation. Through its unique style and features, it has established supremacy in the world of art, Chinese painting emphasizes the point that “Inspiration comes from close observation and understanding of Nature.” Traditional Chinese painting is the art of painting on a piece of Xuan paper or silk with a Chinese brush that was soaked with black ink or colored pigments. It is regarded as one of the three “quintessence of Chinese culture”. Chinese paintings are usually in the form of hanging pictures or of horizontal scrolls, in both cases they are normally kept rolled up. The latter paintings, often of great length, are unrolled bit by bit and enjoyed as a reader enjoys reading a manuscript.There is no fixed or standard viewpoint or perspective. Chinese painting is far less concerned with notions of symmetry, balance and proportion than its European counterpart. Because it lacks a single focal point, Chinese artists are free to paint on long strips of paper (or silk) and can compose pieces of amazing complexity in a rather comic book-like manner.Artists could paint a whole chain of pictures to depict continuous scenery. Many pictures include objects that are both far away and near, but they are depicted as being of the same size. It is more likely that the artists were trying to paint life exactly as they saw it. The presentation was held at OUC, 2017.

Ars Orientalis

Juliane Noth

Many Chinese painters working in the medium of ink painting, or guohua, in the 1930s saw their medium at a historical turning point. They perceived a necessity to strengthen ink painting conceptually and formally in order for it to persist in a globalizing modern world. This essay studies how modern ink painters positioned their works through both an analysis of their texts and a study of reproductions in publications related to the Chinese Painting Association (Zhongguo Huahui). Many painters worked as editors for book companies, journals, or pictorials, and they were highly conscious of the possibilities and limitations of particular reproduction techniques. An analysis of the editorial arrangements, choices of printing techniques, and textual framings of the reproduced works sheds light on the social structures of the Chinese art world of the 1920s and 30s, and on the role that the editors envisioned for themselves, their associations, and modern ink painting in general. According to its mission statement, the Chinese Painting Association (Zhongguo Huahui 中國畫會), founded in 1932 by several prominent guohua 國畫 (" national painting ") artists working in Shanghai, had three main goals: " (1) to develop the age-old art of our nation; (2) to publicize it abroad and raise our international artistic stature; (3) with a spirit of mutual assistance on the part of the artists, to plan for a [financially] secure system. " 1 One of the activities by which the association aimed to fulfill the first two of these goals was the publication of a journal, Guohua yuekan 國畫月刊, or National Painting Monthly, and of a catalogue of works by its members across the country, titled Zhongguo xiandai minghua huikan 中國現代名畫彙刊 (Collection of Famous Modern Chinese Paintings). 2 The texts as well as the illustrations in the journal and the catalogue reflected the programmatic impulse that led to the foundation of the Chinese Painting Association. Because it became the largest art organization in Republican China and the only one officially registered with the government, its key publications are of crucial importance for a differentiated understanding of how artists working in the medium of guohua defined their practice visually and theoretically. Moreover, these artists positioned their artistic practice with regard to other media or other historical moments, most notably in relation to " Western " (i.e., European) painting and its global transformations. This aspect is

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

RELATED PAPERS

Current Issues in Contemporary Chinese and Oriental Studies. Papers from the International Conference, Dedicated to the 25th Anniversary of the Establishment of the Chinese Studies Program at Sofia University "St. Climent Ohridski"

Victoria Bogushevskaya

Shenghan Huang

The China Journal

Carolyn M Bloomer, PhD

Kate Tyrwhitt

The Journal of Asian Studies

Michael Fuller

The International Journal of New Media, Technology and the Arts

Jean M Ippolito

Charles Haxthausen

Shao-Lan Hertel (何小蘭)

lucien van valen

Telling Images of China

Cedric LAURENT

Gulzhan Bedelova

Routledge Handbook of Early Chinese History

Haicheng Wang

Xingming Wu

Proceedings of European Society For Aesthetics. Volumn 8 /2016 p. 247-268

Lucas Klein

Daniela C . Zhang

Neoland School of Chinese Culture

Muhammad Khizar Shafique

Eugene Y Wang

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

• The Renaissance Society
• Exhibitions

Chinese Painting at Mid-Century

CHINESE PAINTING: THE TRADITION In the early 12th century A.D. the critic Han Cho wrote: “Painting is brush lines, these lines in turn reveal the emotions of the heart… It stands in subtle accord with the creative process of nature, and has the same driving force as the Tao… Hence with the aid of the brush one fixes the shape of things, and with the aid of ink one distinguishes between light and dark.”

These words suggest some of the fundamental ideas underlying Chinese painting over the centuries. Some ideas and attitudes are constants; others are infinitely variable, depending upon the individual personality of the artist, his personal view of nature, and his era.

“Paintings stand in subtle accord with the creative process of nature.” (Ho Cho, 12 c.) This idea is a first constant which is manifested in infinite variety. Landscape painters saw themselves as the receiver of the forces of nature, which they could transmit to the viewer. The viewer, if he has no access to landscape, in turn, receives the Tao, the forces of nature from a painting, “in order to nourish his nature.” Then, as now, “the din of the dusty world and the locked-in-ness of human habitation human nature habitually abhors; while, on the contrary, haze, mist, and the haunting spirits of the countryside are what human nature seeks and can rarely find.” (Kuo Hsi, 11th c.)

How can a painter be capable of “receiving” from nature? This problem has infinite variables. “Let one who wishes to portray these masterpieces of creation first be captivated by their charm; then let him study with great diligence.” (Kuo Hsi, 11th c.)

“When one is not equal to painting the best thing is to take a stroll alone. Perhaps one will encounter an odd piece of rock or dried up branch. They are pieces of nature, totally unlike what is in a picture. One should give them a cool careful look and try to catch that indefinable quality wherein lies the expression of life.” (Ku Ning-Yuan, 16th c.)

This leads us into a second important constant. The Chinese painter was never satisfied to render only the outward appearance of forms in nature. “To judge a painting by its verisimilitude shows the mental level of a child.” Further, “mountains, rocks, bamboo…clouds have no constant form but have a constant inner nature (law). Anybody can detect inaccuracies of form…but when a mistake is made with regard to form, it is confined to that object; but when a mistake is made in the inner nature of things, the whole is spoiled…The inner nature can be understood only by those with the highest spirits.” (Su Tung-p’o, 12th c.)

“A painting is brush lines” expresses a third constant. The brush stroke is the vehicle by which the artist puts the creative energy in nature on silk or paper. The way the artist uses line is infinitely varied.

Kuo Hsi cautioned: “When using the brush one must never allow oneself to be used by it. When using the ink one must never allow oneself to be used by ink. Brush and ink are the most ordinary everyday implements; how then could a man who does not know hot to control them hope to attain the highest levels?” (Kuo Hsi, 11th c.)

“And I, who have recognized the importance of the line in painting, can thread upon the divine that has taken the form in the shape of mountains and rivers. Fifty years ago my ego had not yet been born in mountains and rivers…now mountains and rivers let me speak for them.” (Shih T’ao, 17th c.)

The Chinese artist is ever aware that he has learned from the old masters, and yet he must break loose. “The goal of painting should be freshness after mastery, but it is difficult to be spontaneous after one has mastery.” (Ku Ning-yuan, 16th c.)

“I find it regrettable that people cling to the past and do not develop it; this simply comes from the fact that the manner of their knowledge constricts them…the educated man borrows from the old in order to begin the new…People of today still do not understand and continually say…one can take so and so’s internal drawing…or so and so’s purity, etc. This means making ourselves the servant of a certain master…such a man knows that the old exists but not that the ego exists. The beard and eyebrow of the ancients cannot grow on our faces, the entrails of the ancients cannot rest in our bellies. We express our own entrails and display our own beard and eyebrows.” (Shih T’ao, 17th c.)

CHINESE PAINTING AT MID-CENTURY If the modern Chinese artist shares with the Western artist the struggle to break through the confines of tradition to discover his own expression, the Far Eastern artist also struggles with problems that he does not share with most Western artists. He has had to contend with Western influence; what to value and assimilate, how to incorporate techniques and viewpoints if one chooses to maintain one’s “Chineseness.” He has also had to respond as an artist to the urgency of the times.

The break with the accepted pattern of learning to paint came as early as 1909 when Western style art academies began to appear in Shanghai, Canton, and later Peking. Only after the stunning blow to Chinese national pride of the Treaty of Versailles, did Chinese youth go directly to Europe instead of Japan to study. For many the technical mastery of oils was an end in itself, but to some students of a second generation who went to France in the 1930s, oils were just another technical resource, which they abandoned in favor of brush and ink upon returning to China.

Western influences have persisted in various ways since the 1930s: in the use of contemporary subjects, a broader color spectrum and westernized perspective, in a less traditional feel for brush line, and eventually in an interest in non-objective painting. (The Chinese have always enjoyed calligraphy as a continuous tradition equivalent to an abstract art, whereas in the West non-objective painting is a recent phenomenon which some Chinese artists now also practice.

The modern Chinese painter has been concerned not only with the old problem of individual expression and the new one of Western material and visual conventions, but also with the problems of a nation in turmoil and distress. Others have been concerned with reasserting their “Chineseness” as painters.

Chinese art, just as Chinese literature, had been the exclusive province of the scholarly elite. As early as 1917 Hu Shih and other scholars were advocating the adoption of the vernacular for writers “to destroy…the powdered and obsequious literature of the aristocratic few…to destroy the stereotyped…literature of classicism…” in order to create “an expressive literature of the people.” In 1929 when Wang Shih-chieh was Minister of Education for the Kuomintang and addressed the exhibiting artists on the occasion of the First National Art Exhibition in Shanghai, he exhorted them to cease their ‘aimless’ painting and to identify themselves with the people. The traditional repertoire of bird and flower, landscapes with genteel scholars and servants and so on, failed to relate to the times.

In the 1920s a group of Canton artists, later known as the Ling Nan-p’ai, were revolutionaries in politics as well as in art, where they sought to revitalize the scholarly tradition by blending Chinese and Western traditions. Led by Kao Chien-fu (1879-1951), they retained traditional brush technique, but added perspective, shading and atmosphere as well as contemporary motifs such as plane, railroads, telephone poles and people in modern dress.

In the 1920s a group of Shanghai artists inspired by Lu Hsun, a leader of the proletarian literature movement, tired to express spiritual turmoil and revolutionary aims as proletarian social realists. They chose the woodcut as their medium as it was suited to mass dissemination of ideas, not dependent on machines and easily portable. Many joined the Communists in Yenan whose 1937 ideology stated, “the test of modern art is its value to the progress of China.” The best of art tradition could be used, as well as the best of world culture, but unless art was based upon a realism understandable to the Chinese people, it was considered useless. The Communist leaders, before the ultimate victory over Kuomintang in 1949, believed that art should no longer be the special preserve of the educated elite, but should be used to instruct the people.

World War II provided yet another impetus to artists to paint contemporary subjects. By 1939 the Japanese occupied the important coastal cities. The Kuomintang government removed itself to southwestern China at Chungking. The universities also re-established themselves in the Southwest as did the art schools. The far western provinces were regarded for centuries as the ends of the earth, “a place of banishment for unruly official.” But in 1942 the National Art Research Institute, formed at Chungking, sponsored research and for the first time the western tribal peoples received the serious attention of cultural anthropologists who commissioned artists to record those tribes. Other artists were sent to copy and supervise the preservation of Buddhist cave paintings.

After the war, art schools returned to the eastern coastal cities. These were years of struggle for the Chinese in every sphere. Many artists turned away from extreme forms of propaganda and some developed personal styles. The Communist victory encouraged for a time a new vitality in writers and artists alike: “Let the hundred flowers bloom, let the hundred schools contend” was the bold party line of 1956. A harsh party reaction curtailed the policy of raising educational standards for the able student, which would produce the technical and scientific elite needed after the departure of Russian advisors. The policy gradually relaxed until 1968 when Chairman Mao, seeking to reassert egalitarian ideals once again, let loose the Red Guard Movement.

Many artists whose families moved to Taiwan are active there now. A large group continues as traditional landscape, bamboo and bird painters. A few have tried to create a new vitality within the ink brush tradition, of which the Fifth Moon Group is best known outside Taiwan. The Fifth Moon Group was founded in 1959 and takes its name from habitually exhibiting during the fifth lunar month. The artists in this loosely knit group follow individual directions.

The mid-twentieth century painters assembled here demonstrate many varieties of personal style and many varieties of response to this turbulent period. In selecting the paintings for this exhibition, we have, in general, used three criteria. Aside from their mid-century contemporaneity, we have limited our selection to Chinese painters who use traditional materials (brush, ink, watercolor) designed for traditional formats. We have looked for artists whose use of the brush may still be broadly understood as traditional, that is, where a brush stroke has an individual structure and ‘life’ of its own. We have not been able to include even all of the interesting ink painters of this time, both because of insufficient contact with them and because of limited gallery space. The small sampling is offered as an introduction to the contemporary expression of a very ancient tradition.

It may occur to some that the charming, fresh, original painting of contemporary life, chosen here for artistic merit, are an unimpeachable response to the party demands for ‘socialist realism.’ The landscape paintings, while linked to the past are unmistakably original and individual. In every period, including the last 150 years (in spite of frequent generalizations to the contrary) fresh and original painters have emerged. The ‘avant-garde’ 18th century “individualist and Eccentrics” of Chinese painting have received attention in U.S. exhibitions during the last decade. We hope for more opportunities to view Chinese masters of the 19th and 20th centuries.

This text was originally published in the exhibition brochure.

Chinese Art’s Definition, Influence and History Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Definition and influence of art

Art is composed of various human activities that require specific skills for instance music, literature, sculpture amongst others. Each community is endowed with its unique forms of art and which can be traced back sometimes across many years in history.

Art also offers a glimpse into a people’s way of social life and this gives rise to social criticism. It is important to note that in each social setting, politics in that particular area can have adverse influence in any form of art arising thereby.

This paper discusses the influence of politics in line with both contemporary and modern Chinese art. In addition, the paper discusses the relationship between western ideologies such as social criticism and Chinese art.

Chinese art in 1949 – the Foundation of Peoples republic of China

Chinese art spans over a range of centuries like the Neolithic period and the modern era and has experienced changes as time went by (Fenollosa 5). Chinese art has undergone many changes since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

Many of the changes have mainly been due to the influence of communistic ideologies such as Marxist-Maoist as well as other events that have taken place in China ever since. This fact is evident if one has a glimpse of the chronology of events in mainland China from its inception up to date (Andrews 34).

Political influence in Chinese art – Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping

Chinese art has also had its fair share of influence by politics as in many other arts in other civilizations. As already mentioned, China earlier years were under the leadership of Mao Zedong’s Communist Party of China; and it is worth mentioning that these two aspects (the leader and the party) had immense influence on Chinese art.

According to Michael Sullivan Art in China Since 1949 observations, Mao Zedong leadership exerted a tight control over Chinese cultural life for almost thirty years (Sullivan 334). This in turn made art in that particular period to be a reflection or an expression of the political forces in charge.

In particular, Mao had earlier on made considerable efforts to ensuring that art “served the people” as evidenced in his contribution in “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art” in 1942 (Yang 14).

Thus, he had begun what would become the influence of art in subsequent revolutions and education systems of China in latter days. It is important to note that Mao encouraged people to offer their art skills to the nation to the extent of seeking knowledge from other western nations. Beginning the early 1950s, many Chinese artists sought training in the Soviet Union as well as in eastern bloc countries.

The two important periods in Chinese art – Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution

Historical periods such as the Great Leap Forward era in late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976 had much greater impact on Chinese art (Latham 12). During the Great Leap for instance, the government had encouraged creation of new culture of communication in which goals and ideologies could be imparted on the Chinese people.

Traditional art led to new and realistic ways of expression for instance when ink painting was replaced by oil painting: ink painting had been around for the last one thousand years.

The subjects of art also became changed from traditional concepts of using nature – flowers, landscape etc to themes featuring soldiers, workers and heroes. This aspect continued during the Cultural Revolution albeit with some significant catastrophes especially when traditional artists became subjects of ridicule and even faced persecution.

Following this dreadful period, many upcoming and young artists endeavored to seek new voices and opportunities so that their works conformed to the whims of the ruling class and their ideologies. It is important to note that art and politics became so closely entwined during Cultural Revolution than at any other time in Chinese history.

Despite the many struggles, Chinese art continued to experience changes even after the revolution as other events took place. The death of Mao marked a significant stage whereby China finally “opened up” to the world and so did their artists, which of course led to far much greater influence by western ideologies.

Western influence in Chinese art

The western influence on Chinese art dates back to the late 17 th Century. The impact was however minimal though it peaked in the 19 th and 20 th Centuries; and especially since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 (Mungello 71).

Many traditional artists copied Western styles although they did this without full comprehension and hence such attempts were sometimes unsuccessful. On the other hand, Chinese art made considerable effect on surrounding cultures like in the Muslim and Western Europe worlds.

In China itself, outside influence was discouraged under the Communism rule, which generally preferred graphical arts in the light of it being useful in political propaganda. Such government restriction saw the emergence of unique artist for example Ch’eng Shih-fa and Li K’o-jan. In spite of this phenomenon, other Chinese artists working outside China reveal Western influence; Chao Wu-chi in France and C. C. Wang in New York are notable examples.

Chinese art came to world’s limelight in 1978 at the National Gallery in Beijing. This event also offered a new form of critical realism towards Chinese art that was unheard of during the Cultural Revolution.

Following the succession Mao Zedong by Deng Xiaoping, Chinese artists began to question Maoist ideologies and at the same time sought to create a new form of art that bore western aesthetic ideologies.

In a similar fashion to the Western world, self-taught groups like the Star (Xing xing) and the Scar Painting (Shanghen huihua) emerged and became critical of the earlier Chinese art. Social criticism began to take shape under their numerous exhibition works in a move that was alien to China; challenging political authority as well as aesthetic conventions.

The Stars for instance embraced western styles in art such as Abstract Expressionism and Post Impressionism as part of the newly found freedom. Rustic realism, a concept whereby focus is on the Revolution impact to ordinary people, became another favorite way of expression and which had western origin (Gau 197).

In all these endeavors, Chinese art changed drastically in the 1980s mainly due to western influences. However, the transition was never always without hitch since the authorities in power formed anti-campaigns to reduce the influence. Some like the Anti-Spiritual pollution Campaign of 1982-1984 labored hard to condemn westernizing Chinese art and the consequential contaminating influence.

Despite the hardships, many more westernized arts from Italy and France found their way into Beijing exhibitions and thus increasingly influenced Chinese art.

The ’85 Movement

In 1984 for instance, the government tried to resurrect control of western influence at the Sixth National Art Exhibition held at the Beijing’s National Gallery. This however did not augur well with young Chinese artists who would later on form the ’85 Movement, and which was very vocal in relation to breaking from the government’s restraint.

During this period, avant-gardism flourished in all Chinese arts including in music, dance, film and literature aided by the common goal of shunning antagonism and breaking from traditional grip. They also embraced freedom of expression, individualism and western styles like pop and surrealism.

Notable among the pioneers of western influence in Chinese art were Li Xiaoshan, an art critic, who published “The End and Death of Chinese Painting” and a westerner Robert Rauschenberg who delivered lectures in Beijing. These and many others comprising the ’85 Movement saw new schools of thought emerge as well as breaking free from any authority or doctrine.

It is interesting to note that despite the success of the Movement, the political authorities almost triumphed through the “bourgeois liberalism”; a campaign to oust avant-garde formed in 1987 (Davis 233). The Communist Party also played it part in hindering Chinese-art-western-influence by reducing financial support hence artist could not sell their work unless they moved out of China.

Fortunately, the anti campaigns ended in 1988 paving way for emergence of new artists with westernized approach to art. The following year saw the outbreak of protests notably the Tiananmen Square Protest that led to democracy in China but resulted in tighter control by the government on Chinese artists. A number of artists were left with no option but to leave China and hence the world was exposed the Chinese art which it received warmly.

Modern Chinese art

In 1992, Guangzhou launched an exhibition that amplified avant-garde artists since the protests and which promoted social realism. Themes such as materialism and consumerism found their way into Chinese art mainly due to the aspect of globalization and the western influence.

Up to the late 1990s, many Chinese art exhibitions within and away from China helped sell Chinese art internationally and also bring about new ideologies in what was once a very controlled Chinese art. The trend has continued in the recent past whereby contemporary Chinese art has made it in to international exhibition as well as being valuable.

The authorities have also lessened their control and even continued to provide infrastructure such that China is now recognized as an art center amongst other countries (Croizier 4).

As already discussed, Chinese art has not been left behind in term of it being under certain influences. The most notable have been both political and the western ideologies since these two have contributed to the way Chinese art has fared in modern times.

On the political side, the authorities in China tried very much to influence Chinese art by confining it so that it mainly dwelt on the governments ideologies. This is the reason Chinese art could not flourish internationally at first since it only served the Chinese leaders and their affiliations. Fortunately, the Chinese artists wanted more than this and fought hard to seek freedom so that they could express themselves better.

On the side of western influence, we observe that Chinese art solely moving from traditional concepts which expressed art in natural subjects to more modern abstract forms. This was as a result of Chinese artists desire to know how other cultures were treating art.

Beginning with embracing other artist’s ideas and integrating them with Chinese art, a more robust form of art emerged in China. These new concepts and ideologies helped much in propelling Chinese art in to new heights including international recognition.

In addition, that which was originally considered as valueless Chinese art has in modern times become valuable and hence artists can make a living out of art. It has also helped Chinese art to be part of lucrative business the art collection is.

In all these discussions, Chinese art has had a social impact on the Chinese people. From the foundation of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949 to date, we can see the many forms in which Chinese art has shaped people’s lives. This can be seen on the impact traditional art had on people in that the Chinese loved their surrounding and hence used ink to paint landscapes, flowers and animals.

Later on, the authorities encouraged Chinese art to paint peoples heroes, soldiers and workers. Even though they were restraining freedom of art, the Chinese people were made to recognize the important figures in China whom they could try to emulate. Ironically, the same form of art at the time led to protests, which saw normal people, and artists alike seek other forms of social life (Barnhart & Cahill 25).

In conclusion, Chinese art has undergone much change from what it once was to something entirely new. Much of the changes have been due to political and western influences. This has resulted to a better China where Chinese art can stand proudly amongst those of other civilizations.

Works Cited:

Andrews, Julia F. Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China: 1949 – 1979 . Berkeley [u.a.: Univ. of California Press, 1994. Print.

Croizier, Ralph C. Art and Revolution in Modern China: The Lingnan (cantonese) School of Painting, 1906-1951 , Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Print.

Edward Lawrence Davis. Encyclopedia of contemporary Chinese culture Taylor & Francis, Feb 11, 2005. Print

Fenollosa, Ernest. Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art: An Outline History of East Asiatic Design . Berkeley, Calif: SBP, Stone Bridge Press, 2007. Internet resource.

Gau, Minglu. Inside/out: New Chinese Art , California: University of California Press, 1999. Print.

Latham, Kevin. Pop Culture China!: Media, Arts, and Lifestyle , Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-CLIO, 2007. Print.

Mungello, D E. The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800 , Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009. Print.

Richard Barnhart and James Cahill, et al. “Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting.” New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002

Sullivan, Michael. Art and Artists of Twentieth Century China , Berkeley [u.a.: Univ. of California Press, 1996. Print.

Yang, Lan. Chinese Fiction of the Cultural Revolution , Hong Kong: Hong Kong Univ. Press, 1998. Print.

• The distinction between great and mediocre art
• Effects of World War I on the Development of Modern Art
• “China in Revolution, 1911-1949”
• A Glimpse at the Underlying Values of Modern Culture
• The Middle East Region from 1945 to 1949
• Art and Design Analysis
• Visual Arts in Pre-historic Greek Artworks
• Roman and Greek Art
• Four Scenes from the Life of Buddha
• Midterm Questions: Interpreting the Role of Artwork with Reference to Bourriaud’s Relational Form
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, March 29). Chinese Art's Definition, Influence and History. https://ivypanda.com/essays/chinese-art-2/

"Chinese Art's Definition, Influence and History." IvyPanda , 29 Mar. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/chinese-art-2/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Chinese Art's Definition, Influence and History'. 29 March.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Chinese Art's Definition, Influence and History." March 29, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/chinese-art-2/.

1. IvyPanda . "Chinese Art's Definition, Influence and History." March 29, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/chinese-art-2/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Chinese Art's Definition, Influence and History." March 29, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/chinese-art-2/.

Chinese Art Essays

Chinese and western paintings art, music documentary paper, popular essay topics.

• American Dream
• Artificial Intelligence
• Black Lives Matter
• Bullying Essay
• Career Goals Essay
• Causes of the Civil War
• Child Abusing
• Civil Rights Movement
• Community Service
• Cultural Identity
• Cyber Bullying
• Death Penalty
• Depression Essay
• Domestic Violence
• Freedom of Speech
• Global Warming
• Gun Control
• Human Trafficking
• I Believe Essay
• Immigration
• Importance of Education
• Israel and Palestine Conflict
• Leadership Essay
• Legalizing Marijuanas
• Mental Health
• National Honor Society
• Police Brutality
• Pollution Essay
• Racism Essay
• Romeo and Juliet
• Same Sex Marriages
• Social Media
• The Great Gatsby
• The Yellow Wallpaper
• Time Management
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Violent Video Games
• What Makes You Unique
• Why I Want to Be a Nurse
• Send us an e-mail

IB Extended Essay: Past Essays

• Research Questions
• Past Essays
• Notes & Outlines
• Works Cited Page
• In-Text Citations
• Assessment Criteria
• Reflections
• Supervisor Info
• Net Valley Library This link opens in a new window

Check these CAREFULLY to be sure your topic fits with IB expectations!

• Language & literature (language A)
• Language acquisition (language B)
• Mathematics
• Visual Arts
• World Studies

Business Management

English a & b ee examples.

• English A EE Example
• English A EE Example 1
• English A EE Example 2
• English A EE Example 3
• English B EE Example
• English B EE Example 1
• English B EE Example 2
• English B EE Example 3
• English B EE Example 4
• English B EE Example 5
• English B EE Example 6

Philosophy EE Examples

• Philosophy Example 1
• Philosophy Example 2
• Philosophy Example 3
• Philosophy Example 4

Economics EE Examples

• Econ Example 1
• Econ Example 2
• Econ Example 3
• Econ Example 4
• Econ Example 5
• Econ Example 6
• Econ Example 7
• Econ Example 8

Review Past Papers

• From the IB:  papers from other students and how they scored
• Renaissance Library Past Essays :  Links to all subject area examples

Music EE Examples

• Music EE Example 1
• Music EE Example 2
• Music EE Example 3
• Music EE Example 4

Psychology EE Examples

• Psych EE Example 1
• Psych EE Example 2
• Psych EE Example 3

Chinese EE Examples

• Chinese EE Example 1
• Chinese EE Example 2
• Chinese EE Example 3
• Chinese A EE Cat 1
• Chinese A EE Cat 2
• Chinese A EE Cat 3
• Chinese B EE Example 1
• Chinese B EE Example 2
• Chinese B Example 3
• Business EE Example 1
• Business EE Example 2
• Business EE Example 3

Visual Arts EE Examples

• Visual Arts EE Example 1
• Visual Arts EE Example 2
• Visual Arts EE Example 3
• Visual Arts EE Example 4

Film EE Examples

• Film Example 1
• Film Example 2

Chemistry EE Examples

• Chemistry EE Example

Biology EE Examples

• Biology EE Example
• Biology EE Example 1
• Biology EE Example 2
• Biology EE Example 3

Physics EE Examples

• Physics EE Example
• Physics EE Example 1
• Physics EE Example 2
• Physics EE Example 3
• Physics EE Example 4
• Physics EE Example 5

Math EE Examples

• Math EE Example 1
• Math EE Example 2
• Math EE Example 3
• Math EE Example 4
• Math EE Example 5
• Math EE Example 6

Chinese masters

Wan Chun-Li

He was born in 1944. In 1960 he graduated from the Shanghai Polygraphic Institute, as an expert in watermark. At present time he is the Head of the Watermark Technology Department at the Painting and Calligraphy Shanghai publishing house.

art of life in chinese central asia

Art, politics & the city.

Filter by Month

• October 2022
• February 2022
• December 2021
• August 2021
• February 2021
• January 2021
• December 2020
• October 2020
• September 2020
• August 2020
• February 2020
• January 2020
• December 2019
• November 2019
• October 2019
• September 2019
• February 2019
• January 2019
• December 2018
• November 2018
• October 2018
• September 2018
• August 2018
• February 2018
• December 2017
• November 2017
• August 2017
• January 2017
• December 2016
• October 2016
• September 2016
• August 2016
• February 2016
• January 2016
• December 2015
• October 2015
• September 2015
• February 2015
• January 2015
• December 2014
• November 2014
• October 2014
• September 2014
• August 2014
• February 2014
• January 2014
• December 2013
• November 2013
• October 2013
• September 2013
• August 2013

Filter by Categories

• Han Perspectives
• Photography
• Social Analysis
• Uncategorized

Filter by Tags

Academic analysis of life in xinjiang.

Karamay: Part One (Xu Xin Dir.)

“Disposable” Bodies on Screen in Xu Xin’s Karamay : Biopolitics, Affect, and Ritual in Chinese Central Asia

(this essay first appeared in transnational chinese cinema: corporeality, desire, and ethics . brian bergen-aurand, mary mazzilli, and hee wai-siam eds. los angeles: bridge21 publications. 2014.).

Based on an analysis of political speech and embodiment in the film Karamay , in this chapter I argue that ritualized ways-of-being, which rose to the fore in Maoist China, continue to form a deeply felt common affect for marginalized people despite rapid changes in the built environment and economic structures of mainstream Chinese society. In an effort to explore these claims, I analyze the way the monumental documentary film Karamay describes the long duration of a historical trauma, injustice, and alienation through its embodiment by a group of Han and ethnic minority oil workers and their families. I then consider the way this ritual embodiment relates to an affective atmosphere of failure for those on the margins of economic development and social justice in Chinese Central Asia. In order to parse the sources and forces of this shared experience, the chapter considers the valence of the biopolitical concept of “disposability” in tension with the anthropological concept of “ritual.” It argues that a refrain that emerges from a close reading of embodiment in contemporary independent cinema in Reform-era China is an effect of political rituals that fail to provide the sense of well-being they promised in the Maoist past. Yet, despite their failure, intimate portrayals of the motion of these rituals still hail the viewer as an embodied phronetic struggle for existential stability.

Keywords: Affect, Ritual, Disposability, Biopolitics, New Documentary, Xu Xin, Xinjiang, China

Introduction

One of the dominant themes that has emerged in many recent neorealist films and documentaries in the Chinese-language independent cinema of the People’s Republic is a focus on forgotten spaces and alienation in the midst of rapid economic development. Films from influential directors such as Jia Zhangke and Wu Wenguang have led the way in escaping the programmatic telos of both critical and socialist realism. Instead, these filmmakers have promoted an “amateur” ( yèyú ) or “on-the-spot” ( jìshí zh ǔ y ì ) phronesis (the social knowledge and ability to act politically). In so doing they have developed a set of practices that privilege the immediacy of direct personal engagement over high production values, melodramatic storytelling, and neat resolutions that typified earlier forms of realist Chinese cinema ( xiànshí zh ǔ y ì ). [1]

By focusing on the lived experience of rapid economic change these films provide a powerful assessment of the efficacy of modernization. Yet, in the analysis of these films, direct attention has rarely been paid to the “stickiness” of pre-Reform comportments that continue to intervene in the embodied rituals of those on the margins of this radical social change; instead, analysis of an “aesthetics of disappearance” and “transformation” as modes of cultural production have been a central focus. Drawing on the work of Paul Virilio and Gilles Deleuze, among others, many scholars have (often quite brilliantly) analyzed Chinese New Documentary and independent cinema in terms of an emerging Chinese urban aesthetics rather than the long duration of ritualized behavior. [2]

This chapter joins this discussion by arguing that ritualized ways-of-being, which rose to the fore in Maoist China, continue to form a common affect for marginalized people despite rapid changes in the built environment and economic structures of mainstream Chinese society. I explore the valence of the biopolitical concept of “disposability” in tension with the anthropological concept of “ritual” to argue that a refrain that emerges from a close reading of embodiment in contemporary independent cinema in Reform-era China is an effect of political rituals that fail to provide the sense of well-being they promised in the Maoist past. Yet despite their failure the intimate portrayal of these rituals in action still hails viewers in an embodied phronetic struggle for political and existential stability. In order to explore this claim I consider the way the monumental documentary film Karamay (2010) describes the long duration of a historical trauma through its embodiment by a group of Han and ethnic minority oil workers. I then consider the way this ritual embodiment relates to an affective atmosphere of failure for those on the margins of economic development and social justice in Chinese Central Asia.

Bodies on Screen in Karamay

Xu Xin’s Karamay , is a meditation on the relationship humans have to the failure of ideology-driven Modernist political projects in our current historical moment. On December 8, 1994, the city of Karamay, the heart of the oil fields in Northwest China’s Xinjiang Province, was the site of a horrific fire that killed 323 people, 288 of whom were schoolchildren. The carefully selected, high-achieving students present that day, clad in red and yellow, were performing dances from Mao’s Eight Model Operas and singing Red Songs for state officials in a concert hall when a thin curtain positioned too closely to a 600-watt spotlight caught fire. As they moved in the synchrony of mass choreography, their red scarves tied neatly in place, acrid smoke from highly flammable insulation began to fill their lungs. Countering instinctual panic with Maoist discipline, the children in the audience were told to remain seated while the officials exited first. Due to lax safety standards, locked doors, and the delayed arrival of the fire department many of the children never escaped. When help finally arrived forty-five minutes later, the bodies of trampled and burned children were piled over a meter deep around locked metal exit gates; most died from smoke inhalation and the weight of bodies on top of bodies rather than the fire itself.

None of Karamay’s city officials died in the fire. Despite initial admissions of guilt and promises of state-level martyr status—which carries with it economic and social security for the families of those who died—after the fire the story was heavily censored in the Chinese state media and street protests were met with brute force. Zhou Yongkong, head of PetroChina, the state-owned company that controlled post-Reform Karamay and today monopolizes China’s oil, quickly stepped in. [3] Speaking on behalf of the children who died, Zhou thundered in archival footage featured in the film, “Those children are in heaven hoping for Karamay’s stability.” Following these remarks and the demotion of Karamay’s mayor, mourning the loss was taken as subversive to the goals of state stability, and the parents who demanded justice were marked as deviants under the Reformist social contract. The moral responsibility for the tragedy had been made to fall largely on the truncated family networks of settlers and already under-privileged local minorities affected by the fire. The families of Karamay were not allowed to publicly mourn their children, and instead were treated by local officials and other members of their work units as embarrassments and in some cases, as mentally deranged. The mayor’s brother, who built the Friendship Hall and bribed the safety inspectors, was never formally charged.

With the exception of a minority of Uyghurs and Kazakhs, the majority of Chinese speakers in Northwest China come from elsewhere. Their families came to China’s far Northwestern province of Xinjiang ( New Dominion ) in the 1960s to work in the oil fields and protect the Chinese frontier. Trading rural social networks for the future benefits of membership in the industrial proletariat, these parents placed their lives in the hands of the Party. They committed themselves to a national-communist project thousands of miles from their natal homes. They developed skills for coping with displacement. They disciplined their bodies and the bodies of their children as biopolitical weapons in a war with nature. Out on the frontier, rituals of patriotic citizenship took on an intensified significance; these pioneering settlers were on the front lines of the nation. If their sacrifice was not completely recognized in the central nodes of Chinese society, it was nevertheless deeply felt at its margins. Although times were extremely tough in Xinjiang, Maoist biopolitics— thought broadly as a system for managing the health and welfare of a population conceptualized as a social whole—enabled Han settlers to realize a poor, yet durable, existence. Xinjiang was not fraught with some of the insecurities that affected other parts of China during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Relative to Beijing, Xinjiang was a stable place for settlers (less so for indigenous minorities under the new regime); rituals of sacrifice and interdependence that came with the infrastructure of rationing and cooperative social organization were largely effective in maintaining a sense of well-being.

Yet as the vitality of the Maoist social-national project dissipated in Xinjiang during the Dengist Reform era, some of these same people found themselves superfluous, caught up in forces much larger than themselves and what they were promised. After the 288 children of  the city of Karamay [4] died in the horrific fire in 1994, unaffected officials and citizens moved on with economic redevelopment, apathetic toward the lingering economic, social, and institutional inequalities that continued to affect the families of the dead. In its late-Socialist iteration, the ethos of their work unit, PetroChina, and its subsidiary support units no longer seems to account for their well-being. The parents Xu Xin interviewed in this film feel stuck, unable to move with flows of power and wealth that buoyed the futures of so many Reform-era Chinese. More than an exposé of the tragedy of loved ones lost, this film is about the corporeal embodiment of social abandonment and failure.

Figure 7.1. One of the Uyghur parents screams in Mandarin in a street protest shortly after the fire in Karamay in 1994—86 of the 288 children killed were minority children in Xu Xin’s Karamay. Image courtesy of dGenerate Films/Icarus Films.

Karamay lays bare the margin of raw violence of human interaction that accompanies the disenfranchisement of collective ideals (Fig. 7.1). In this late-humanist moment “a concern for human beings finding themselves and becoming free in their humanity” is becoming increasingly untenable for those on the margins. [5] The precariousness of those without positive social ranking in China’s late-Socialist context—the “common people” ( l ǎ ob ǎ ix ì ng ) as these parents self-identify—is becoming more acute. What Karamay does, then, is point our attention to what “disposable people”—to use Rey Chow’s turn of phrase—look like in Chinese film.

In developing her concept of “disposability” Chow argues along with Étienne Balibar and Bertrand Ogilvie that the human condition of our present moment of global capitalism is one in which the lives of “millions of human beings are superfluous. ” [6] Reading Balibar and Ogilvie’s claims through the lens of Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology, Chow argues that in our current moment of global capitalism humans are increasingly entering into a state of existential “homelessness.” That is, the being-in-the-world of humans is increasingly rendered in a state of “ oblivion ”; [7] a state in which the techne and poiesis of political action, social organization, and human cultural processes are muted and ineffective. [8]

Discussing the way this phenomena is manifested in Chinese late-Socialism through an analysis of the cruel life world of Northern Chinese coal miners in Blind Shaft , Li Yang’s neorealist 2003 film, Chow argues that “the major culprits here are the structural deficiencies that pervade the entire industrial production system in China.” [9] As in other developing countries, a dominant feeling and experience among many “disposable” people in contemporary China is that the population exceeds the capacity of institutions to provide social welfare or biopolitical health. Yet as Chow points out, the implications of films like Blind Shaft , and I would add, Karamay , should not be thought of as particular to “third-world” states-of-exception. Instead, she argues, what we are seeing on film is “a dramatization … of the predicament of human community formation in general.” [10] The embodied situations of both Blind Shaft and Karamay are entangled in the excavation of energy through which industrial, commercial, and cultural development are made possible. It was, after all, the Modernist project of securing oil and gas as resources for the nation that brought the people of Karamay to China’s Northwest. In the end, the city of Karamay, like countless locations across the planet, is an industrial boomtown inextricably linked to political-economic development.

Certainly, throughout this process of development the people of Karamay have experienced sacrifice for their nation and their families. Yet, as Chow argues, it is only in our contemporary moment of the ascendance of global capitalism that marginalized people around the world have witnessed “the very mutation of the concept of ‘human’ … as the unconcealed process of species differentiation that is happening at the rupturing between … humanity-as-progress, or hope … and the ubiquitous biopolitical warfare around natural and other resources and, above all, around kinship and other types of group survival.” [11] For the parents in Xu Xin’s Karamay it is these basic intersubjective, embodied social relations that are at stake. As these relations are threatened by the welfare abandonment of the social state and its institutions, parents find themselves attempting to reclaim an attachment to the “kinship family,” which throughout Chinese history has been thought of as an “inviolable basic social unit,” [12] and the corporeal rituals and gestures that give this affective attachment its embodiment.

Although the rituals that support the “right-to-a-family” and by extension “the good life” have undergone numerous involutions and deviations over the centuries, they have nevertheless been central and relatively stable modes of reproducing the relations of the individual to the state and of the individual to the family. These rituals of speaking and saving are what are embodied—a process of incorporating the social and material world corporeally—in Karamay . If “speaking bitterness” and “saving face” were actions that brought dominant cultural tropes into the historical lived experience of Chinese subjects, what do these rituals look like in this historical moment of capitalist expansion and the reterritorialized space of social welfare erasure? How are they embodied by people who have sacrificed so much, and, in Heidegger’s sense of being-in-oblivion , seem to be so far from home?

Given its focus on the long duration of processes of failure, perhaps it should come as no surprise that Karamay is a difficult film to watch. It took me over a month to get through all five hours and fifty-six minutes. Why does it feel this way: compelling and repellent, tedious and captivating? Speaking about his feelings making the film, Xu Xin said: “I don’t know how to understand happiness. Although the content of the film is very painful, I had a joyful feeling while making the film itself. I don’t know what to think of this.” [13] Such ambivalence suggests that the film is more than a monument to tragedy. Though the topic is unsettling, the pathos that comes out in the slow minutes of the film is so visceral viewers find it hard to look away. I suggest that this training of attention is drawn from the points in which affect —as a range of feeling—comes to the surface and sorts itself out in emotion and then resubmerges as an unspeakable current in the nervous system. Engaging discussions of affect and ritual, I describe the way affect appears in human embodiment and corporeal sacrifice as a “wisdom of the body.” Following this overview of my terms of discourse, I then turn to the specifics of Karamay as a particular embodiment of trauma and ritual therapy in Sinophone film. I conclude by arguing that the mirroring of the affective atmosphere of the production process which can be observed through the viewing process is important for understanding “disposable bodies” on screen in Karamay and Chinese independent documentary film more generally. Despite the particularity of the historical situation of Karamay , the embodied experience of viewing the film invites an intimate knowledge, an affective atmosphere, of the embodied, corporeal life from which no “exotic other” can be parochialized. Put simply, on the level of the body, viewers are invited to relate with the viewed.

Figure 7.2. One of the most outspoken parents discusses the historical legacy of protest in China while shaking his fist in Xu Xin’s Karamay . Image courtesy of dGenerate Films/Icarus Films.

Affect and Ritual Embodiment

The anthropologist Hugh Raffles has noted that “people enter into relationships among themselves and with nature through embodied practice. … it is through these relationships that they come to know nature and each other.” [14] These relationships, knowledge, and practice are always mediated “not only by power and discourse, but by affect … the perpetual mediator of rationality.” [15] Defining this “affective sociality” as “intimacy,” Raffles describes the ideology inhabited by localized rituals as “always within a field of power…always in place…always embodied… always, above all else, relational.” [16] Raffles argues that if “relationality is a social fact,” then “there is no universal against which intimacy is parochialised.” [17]

Moving toward a more precise description of the relationship of the affective to fields of power, the anthropologist William Mazzarella tells us, affect is neither completely external to mediation nor simply a discursive effect . Reviewing ethnographic writing on the subject from Émile Durkheim, Mazzarella concludes there is a “nonsubjective sensuous mimetic” power to this register of the social; particularly as it is converted to ritual . [18] He writes, “the language of ritual is the language of power;” [19] it is an untimely grammar that works through the mediation of the body to exert power in the world. As anthropologists have long observed, rituals—broadly defined as actions intended to reproduce social norms and political conventions—are what organize and animate a society in the absence of an intervening ideology. The range of action and feeling we see arising out of the socio-political atmospheres of late-Socialist Xinjiang are therefore a local iteration of historical forces and contemporary circumstances. Mainstream values such as social stability and economic development are meeting a ritualized system that is no longer amplified. The microphone that projected messages of bitter Socialist struggle has been unplugged, yet the embodied expression of these performative rituals still remains at the margins of Chinese society: confronted with a public space of petition in front of Xu Xin’s camera, parents are first animated by the ritual of baring their scars only, in turn, to sag defeated as the ritual fails (Fig. 7.2).

If the institutionalized practice of “telling bitterness” [20] ( sùk ǔ ) was a form of performative Socialist ritual, a mimesis or imitation of the affective that fitted power into place, then it seems likely that affective feelings entwined in Socialist subject-making are not something that have been completely jettisoned by Chinese late-Socialist reforms. Robert Chi’s reading of Red Detachment of Women— Jin Xie’s 1961 Maoist film — compels us to acknowledge that official narratives ascribed to “history” cannot be detached from mnemonics. Noting the way these performances of showing and telling bitterness serve “to focus particular attention on the body as the site of both memory (as suffering, as an effort against negation) and sociality … the mass public experience,” Chi reads the legacy of Socialist ritual aesthetics as containing both a catalyst for “somatic gesture and as emotional stimulation.” [21] If one of the dominant visual-somatic ritual elements of Socialist China was “the baring of scars and the shedding of tears,” [22] then the parents bearing witness in Karamay must be considered as disjointed, yet derivative, of that same Chinese “spectatorial body.” As the disciplinary power of this past discourse dissipates and joins with the discipline of the Neoliberal state to come, we see Chinese citizens turning to the discipline of new ritual forms of mediation. These are forms that involve the techne and poesies of the digital video camera, the video archive, the presence of the interviewer-as-interlocutor; yet, as Xu Xin’s film shows us, the memories of those earlier forms of petition and protest have not yet been completely erased. When a man who is speaking bitterly hurls the Chinese sign for “six” at viewers with an up-turned hand, his pinky and thumb extended as he corporeally emphasizes the fact that fire fighters were stationed only five or six minutes away but still took forty-five minutes to arrive; when parents “bare their scars” through the onomatopoeic invocation of their phantom children running down the stairs ( dùng, dùng, dùng ) for the last time and then turn inward, heads bent, their elbows on their knees; when they hold each other heaving in pain and scream that “heaven is blind;” when they explain that their households are “broken”—their hands moving out from their chests in open-handed gestures; they are showing us that a shared affective experience, crystalized in the rituals of a Maoist political body, resists easy erasure. They are showing us that people always attempt to stay attached to the conventionality of life even when that form of life is mutating. They are showing us that the ordinariness of the long duration of social crisis forces people to struggle for existence using obsolete forms of composure even as a tractable future is steadily contracted.

Starting from the assumption of the theorist Lauren Berlant that “affective atmospheres are shared , not solitary, and that bodies are continuously busy judging their environments and responding to the atmospheres in which they find themselves,” [23] we can see that the ubiquitous horror of the fire provided a common historical grounding across class and ethnic divides for the families of those who died. At the same time, the easy disposal of children’s bodies, the absence of death certificates for those who died, the quick dismissal of parents’ claims to justice, the shunting to the asylum of those crazy with grief, and the way their bodies are wracked by nervous and psychic maladies, tells us something also about the contemporary mood and mode in which “common people” experience their value as Chinese citizens, people, and loved ones. Although it may be tempting to consider the collectively experienced disaster and subsequent position of the parents and children of Karamay as an exception to the Chinese narrative of progress building on a deep body of literature from Ann Anagnost, Pun Ngai, and many others, the symptomatic experience of alienation and impasse felt by the parents of Karamay must be considered in light of the erasure of the Maoist class structure and the abandonment of social welfare concerns. This political-economic structural bifurcation geared toward rapid development and increased individual-family network responsibility is felt ubiquitously in contemporary Chinese society. Framed in this way, the situation in Karamay can be read as just one acute iteration of the simultaneous reshaping and durability of Chinese conventions.

Figures 7.3-4. Subjects seem to forget about the camera in moments of nervous distraction and unspoken melancholy in Xu Xin’s Karamay . Images courtesy of dGenerate Films/Icarus Films.

Ritual Therapy under the Affect of the Impasse

In Bérénice Reynaud’s 2010 reading of Chinese independent cinema as typified in Wu Wenguang’s approach to documentary craft, we see that the aggressive silence of the filmmaker-as-therapist can be a quiet intervention that allows the subjectivity of the observed to emerge. Rather than invoking a scripted reaction, the therapy of silence can allow a subject “to express a discourse of desire.” [24] Citing a pivotal scene in Wu’s Fuck Cinema where the main protagonist confronts Wu by speaking directly into the camera, Reynaud argues with Lacan that it is in this encounter, where discursive desire falters and the imaginary fails to surface, that a version of “the Real” can be glimpsed. What makes Karamay distinct from Fuck Cinema is the repetition of the therapeutic silence necessary for a ritual circuit—as a repeated set of bodily techniques—to be performed on film in a wide range of similar yet slightly different circumstances. While Fuck Cinema is largely framed around a single decontextualized individual and aggressively questioned migrant women, Karamay is centered by a shared duration of a collective experience of trauma. This difference, along with the temporal scale of the film, are what make Karamay a limit case for analyzing the embodiment of ritual in Chinese New Documentary cinema.

By rendering the iterative collective process of disposability visible in what Gilles Deleuze refers to as repeated filmic “time-images,” we can begin to identify a movement of affect as a range of feeling between anger and failure before and after it comes to be recognized as either of these discursive emotions. [25] It is in these moments when the play of ritual runs its course that an embodied gesture that resists symbolization appears: a movement of a hand, a turning away, a drawing into the body, a flash of life void of being, the sag of failure. Seeing the repeated circuit of this embodied turning from norms of resolution and social integration conveys something of the trajectory of existence for these parents; seeing the repetition of these somatic gestures captured in a time-image on film (rather than described in a text) conveys something of the immediacy of this sensorium. To my thinking, these instances are analogous to Barthes’s idea of the punctum in a still image: the kernel of “the Real” or, on a discursive level, “the reality effect,” which survives mechanical automatism. [26] It is a kind of animacy that sears something into viewers’ brains; it triggers empathy and intercorporeality. Wrapped around the failure of “telling bitterness” in Karamay it evokes an affective tuning that is more than the sum of its parts. These rituals of anger that inevitably turn to failure communicate the corporeal feeling of bodies rendered disposable . As the feeling of the oblivion-of-being , of being without place, is invoked, viewers are invited to share, to relate to, the embodied pain of the impasse.

The scenes of embodied disposability that rise to the surface in Karamay (Fig. 7.3-4), that bring forward the shattered affect of those who passed through the “door to hell” (as they refer to the lowered gate on the Friendship Hall), are the poignant images such as that of a mother, who after speaking for many minutes, lapses into silence and forgetting about the camera compulsively strokes at phantom dust on the frame of a photo of her dead daughter—an image of the void of being-without-language; there is the image of a father leaning back his eyes pinched in frustration, then defeat—an image of the slump of powerlessness; there is the image of a young woman who survived the fire who lapses into melancholy, thinking about her object of desire: Nanjing University and the promises of the good life she will never have. Her face, masked by ruined and grafted skin, contained by the anonymity of her secluded hospital room, still conveys an image of the pathos of human longing for a barred object of desire.

Xu Xin approached each interview with the same gray-scale palette, straight-ahead composition, and minimal direction. Like Huang Weikai and many other contemporary Chinese documentary filmmakers, Xu Xin’s educational background was in painting and the fine arts. It is perhaps because of this training in color and frame that Karamay is so effective in constructing nested worlds of color and gray scale. With the exception of four scenes of Karamay’s cityscape and flashes of horror from the parents’ personal video archive of the fire, the world of the film is muted gray walls—there is no horizon for these parents. They are alone, stuck with their grief, and outside the affluence and forgetfulness afforded by Karamay’s vast oil wealth. The repetition of framing and the minimalism of their colorless world have the effect of amplifying the tension in the non-linear narrative of the film. That is, the tension of the narrative in this diegesis displays not only the textual and ideological position of the film, but also the parameters that direct viewers as subjects and expose the embodied presence of the filmed. As parents repeatedly smack the backs of their right hands into the open palms of their left and describe the injustice of their state, as they sketch the contours of the building where their children died, “the pull” ( l ā ) of ripping off the locked gates that trapped their children, viewers sense that Karamay is the same brutal story told over and over again, yet slightly refracted by the many angles of singular storytellers.

In order to foreground the long-duration of trauma, Berlant has described such experiences of precariousness as “an impasse” (Fig. 7.5). This refocusing away from crisis-events, such as a fire or some other drastic action that seems to have a clear cause and effect, toward the long aftermath where interrupted norms of life are reconfigured, trains viewers’ eyes toward inexplicable moments that appear outside narrative genre. The way Xu Xin captures dramatic gestures of anger, fingers pointing and fists clenched, followed by quiet gestures of failure, of heads buried in hands, of eyes looking to the side, lost in the middle distance, shows us how people are struggling to adapt to the impassivity of what we see as the Real. In Berlant’s words, “An impasse is a holding station that doesn’t hold securely but opens out into anxiety, that dogpaddling around a space whose contours remain obscure.” [27] As the parents and children of Karamay come to terms with the ineffectiveness of old modes of ritual protest, the impassivity of the new situation simultaneously demands action and delay.

After a social catastrophe there is always a period of adjustment. This is the shared affective atmosphere in which we see the figures of Karamay forced into new gestures of composure, new forms of phronesis : for example, we see parents describing the way a person’s shoulders are pulled back when they are manhandled by police during a protest; we see the embodied mimicry of suicides attempted. But even more affecting is the heavy gaze of the disposed at the end of the ritual circuit. There is a numb lifelessness in many of those looks—their eyes are open but they are not looking at anything. It is this diegetic world that exposes viewers to moments of affective rupture as autonomous time-images. As rituals of “speaking bitterness” are shown to be ineffective, the unarticulable affect of failed attachments rises as a punctuation that transforms viewers from passive spectators to active witnesses of powerful forces at work in the time-space of these disposable bodies on screen. As the time of repetition ( chronos ) is interrupted by these small temporal events ( aion ), viewers are presented with a disorienting vision of the present within the duration of the lives we see on film.

As Xu Xin thinks of it, what he was trying to establish through this approach to interview was a “spiritual connection” that comes from honest exchange and direct recognition. He writes,

I came to feel the kind of emotion that [the parents] had really deeply. Before every visit [I told them] “you don’t have to speak to me.” I told them …very explicitly, I’m making a documentary about the fire in Karamay. They were all very clear about what I had in mind. Because of this when I was shooting, they all looked straight into the camera. This aspect was extremely important: I looked straight into their eyes, we really had a spiritual connection, I used my soul to listen to their stories . If, say, we didn’t have this exchange, they also could have spoken, but speaking is not the same as communicating. The things they kept in their hearts for the past ten years all of the sudden burst out . [28]

In order to get at this trust and catalyze this “bursting out” of a discourse of desire, Xu Xin positioned himself directly behind his camera and “just sat” there. The “soul tending” that Xu Xin is respecting here is the same feeling that invites viewers as they move deeper into the world of the film. As viewers learn to be intimate with failure, the disposable bodies on screen  begin relating or “connecting” with viewers on a corporeal level. By allowing the camera to linger on center-posted parents during small moments of not speaking, framed by white walls on broad Chinese couches, Xu Xin allows us to become proximate to the feelings of these people.

Clearly there was much that these parents wanted to say; rituals are on one level an iterative public performance (in this case, for the camera). Yet, the readiness-to-hand of their rhetoric of “speaking bitterness,” the naturalness with which they “bared their scars,” and the sag of defeat that comes through as they lapse into silence point more deeply to an embodied intercorporeal experience rather than to narratives that operate solely on the ideological-political register of identity performance. Of course the embodied cannot be detached explicitly from the ideological. [29] Yet what this film points us toward is an understanding of the weight of embodied experience that is immanent in the performance of political identity—be it national, ethnic, socialist, or capitalist. These parents—Chinese subjects officially recognized as Han, Hui, Kazakh, and Uyghur citizens—felt as though they had nothing to lose by speaking to Xu Xin, and they felt a catharsis in his public recognition of their personal stories. These rituals of petition, largely emptied of political force in this late-Socialist moment, still convey a catalytic pathway for the “somatic gesture and as emotional stimulation” of cultural replication. [30] Yet on the threshold of an economy of “development” and “progress” the repetition of these ritual performances of “baring scars and shedding tears” are now marking these parents as disposed rather than heroic.

Figure 7.5. The impasse in Xu Xin’s Karamay . Image courtesy of dGenerate Films/Icarus Films.

I began this chapter with a discussion of Karamay as a film about the way bodies are caught in political projects and how blockages in these forceful systems can result in anomie and affective inertia. Yet Karamay is also a film about the relationship between cinema and witnessing. As Shoshana Felman writes about a similar project, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah , a film can embody “the capacity of art not simply to witness, but to take the witness’s stand: the film accepts responsibility for its times by enacting the significance of our era as an age of testimony , in which witnessing itself has undergone a major trauma.” [31] In the context of precariousness, witnessing the objective reality of people under trauma becomes “in all senses of the word, a critical activity.” [32] Yet like Laura Marks, I would emphasize a bit more strongly than Felman that both Shoah and Karamay do more than “authenticate,” in a legal sense, the truth of the trauma survived by those filmed. Rather, these films unfold a “sheet of past from a peak of present.” [33] The ethical nature of these films exists therefore “not in authenticating testimonies, but rather in demonstrating that some events are too terrible to be fully actualized…while insisting that they must be conceived of.” [34]

In Karamay people find themselves in states of affective inertia—a nervous abnormality that renders them unable to act or react to their social world in normalized ways. As the bodies of their children and, likewise, their kinship family more generally, are rendered disposable, the parents in Karamay reel between anger and defeat. Although these feelings are certainly not evenly distributed across time-space among “common people” in Northwest China (many have found ways to detach from Maoist comportments and “move on” in the new political economy), in the sample population of the film we see a qualitative, palpable presence of these cycles: first fingers pointing, fists clenched, palms smacking, then heads buried in hands and, finally, almost universally, a vacant gaze disengaged both with the world of the film and, viewers are invited to extrapolate, the broader social world. What we see is that the worlds of the parents in Karamay are punctuated by states of psychic rupture and stall. In Xu Xin’s gray-scale long-takes, time-space is therefore seen as charged with muted affective intensities and subtle feeling that appear to have an anomalous, unmotivated, autonomous temporality.

The long duration of the viewing experience of the durative present is important for understanding disposable bodies on film in Karamay and Chinese independent documentary film more generally. Like much of early Chinese independent film from Jia Zhangke to Wu Wenguang, Xu Xin’s approach to documentary craft lends itself to a detachment of a humanist ethos of filmmaker-as-intervening benefactor. Instead, like the vast majority of Chinese independent cinema, it attempts to make explicit the terrain of the sensible in Chinese late-Socialism without foreclosing its message with programmatic narrative or ideological indictment. It is instead a documentary that bears witness to the duration of lived experience in Northwest China and allows critique to emerge from the material, embodied world on film.

When asked about the reasons he made the film, what sort of contribution he and his informants were hoping to achieve, Xu Xin declined to comment. He said that beyond telling their stories, those “deeper reasons I’m not capable of analyzing. Furthermore I don’t want to analyze those reasons.” Rather than pointing us toward a hopeful future or even a recognized clarification of the past, the film instead directs viewers to the embodied particularity of this shared historical moment after the capitalist mutation  of the social state in a discrete social location in contemporary China. Even more important, it invites viewers to share in their feeling of first the animas of anger and then the slackness of anomie as the contours of a gutted existence come into view.

The parents’ repeated demands for martyr status or at the very least, death certificates, for their children, are claims that operate on both a utilitarian and spiritual register. While the first claim is toward a project identity organized by a collective attempt to claw out a space of social security, the second is an intercorporeal operation that implicates all citizens of  social states. By requesting martyrdom the parents are demanding that their children’s sacrifice be recognized by the sovereign state as a contribution to the spiritual mission of the nation. By first promising then denying this recognition, the state is delineating its values in biopolitical management. For the state there seems to no longer be a utopian future toward which common citizens can sacrifice themselves. The new political economy depends less on ontological security and more on productivity. As Rey Chow puts it, “the future is contingent on the status quo … the continued solicitation, exploitation, and extermination of ‘foreign’ bodies that are considered as excess and disposable once they have served their utilitarian purpose.” [35] For these parents, and viewers who share this embodied experience, the concept of the human itself is under mutation. Although manifested differently in other situations where alternate failed rituals operate in other margins, the intensity of feeling embodied in Karamay is indicative of an ordinary atmosphere of disposal in the shadows of the global capitalist iteration of biopolitical success.

Writing in response to Xu Xin’s film and the way certain aspects of the Chinese world frequently disappear from view, Ni Ba had this to say about the film,

When I asked a few of my friends if the name Karamay made any impression on them, a few friends said, “Is Karamay a country?” One friend said Karamay is a desert, still another said Karamay is a person’s name. When I then told them about the great fire in 1994, they said: “Oh yeah!” They said that now they could recall it, vaguely…. Perhaps this is precisely our society’s present condition . Development as the imperative, stability as the paramount priority, and patriotism that parrots the greatness of the motherland, have all served as powerful ideals for the duration of our great journey to revival. People with or without intention have chosen to forget about the way the lives of others confront the real and the future. Yet hearing the immediacy with which many regular people in Karamay know the way their children were blocked in the course of the events, and knowing that according to the official rhetoric better times should have come to that place, I can’t help but wonder what kind of success is bound up in [ our economic development ]. [36]

Cinematic witnessing, which we see exemplified repeatedly by Chinese independent films such as Karamay , is a presentation of objective reality that demands that the stratified order of things not return to normal. It makes us recognize that the normal discourses of the dominant are incomplete and inaccurate. [37] This radical cinema of witnessing is concerned with making visible “the sensible” as a terrain of what can be shown and felt on ethical, representational, and aesthetic registers. It presents a social project defined as a struggle for recognition and legitimation in which the “excluded part” of social systems demands a space of common relation. This sort of therapeutic intervention must be understood as a perpetual phronetic practice of sharing a feeling, sharing a cadence of a particular experience of the Real.

Many New Documentary films such as Zhao Liang’s Petition , Wu Wenguang’s Fuck Cinema , and neorealist fiction films such as Jia Zhangke’s The World and Still Life use a long view of alienation and displacement to present an implicit critique of the disposability that accompanies rapid economic change. Karamay extends and amplifies these feelings of anomie by drawing out the ritual circuit of failure in a prismatic repetition of framing and narrative variation. By centering the film on the collective repetition of embodied rituals rather than the singular movements of isolated individuals, Karamay brings forward the way old feelings of collective affective atmospheres continue to operate in the durative present of contemporary Chinese traumas. Rather than describing an aesthetics of disappearance and transformation , Karamay hails viewers with an aesthetics of feelings that remain . The critical ethics of Karamay is one that belies the perception that problems experienced by disposed people are felt in largely singular, unmediated ways. Rather, it is in order to undermine the rhetoric of “free market” success and embody the stubborn shadows in narratives of progress, that Xu Xin gives us these “disposable” bodies on screen.

[1] Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel, introduction to The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 3–13.

[2] Here I am thinking in particular about work on contemporary cinema catalyzed by Ackbar Abbas and Zhang Zhen; Ackbar M. Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance , vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Zhang Zhen, ed., The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

[3] Zhou was also head of national security and Xinjiang security in particular under Hu Jintao’s administration—making him the ninth most powerful man in China’s Politburo. In August of 2013 a graft investigation of his political-economics was initiated by the Xi Jinpin administration.

[4] Karamay (Ch: Kèl ā m ǎ y ī ; En: Black Oil ) is historically a Mongol, Kazakh, and Uyghur city in what is today Northern Xinjiang. Due to its vast oil resources, over the past few decades it has become a seventy-five percent Han city dominated by state-owned enterprises. According to a 2011 list of richest cities, Karamay is now one of the wealthiest per-capita cities in China (Si Han, “China’s Richest 20 Cities,” 2012, http://business.sohu.com/20120327/n339020485.shtml.).

[5] Rey Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 178.

[6] Étienne Balibar quoted in Chow, Sentimental Fabulations , 167.

[7] Ibid., 168.

[8] Ibid., 173.

[9] Ibid., 170.

[10] Ibid., 173.

[11] Ibid., 178.

[12] Ibid., 174.

[13] All direct quotes from Xu Xin in this chapter are my own translation drawn from a Chinese language interview conducted with Ni Ba, “‘Kelamayi’ daoyan su sin fangtan,” Fanhall.com (2010), http://gsz2006.i.sohu.com/blog/view/154025600.htm.

[14] Hugh Raffles, “Intimate Knowledge,” International Social Science Journal 54, no. 3 (2002), 326.

[17] Ibid., 332.

[18] William Mazzarella, “Affect: What Is It Good For?” Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization (London: Routledge, 2009), 298.

[20] “Telling bitterness” finds its most visible institutional iteration in the Communist People’s Courts of the 1940–1950s. These village meetings were a stage at which “common people” would articulate the injustices committed by their landlords. One could argue, however, that this mode of gaining a sense of agency and recognition has much deeper roots in Chinese literary traditions and popular culture. Since Guan Hanqing’s Yuan Dynasty “Injustice to Dou E,” Chinese popular culture has featured instances of misrecognized subalterns speaking “truth to power” as dominant themes in staged performances. See Ann Anagnost, National Past Times: Narrative, Representation and Power in Modern China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 28–35, for a thoughtful account of how this ritual came to be embodied in revolutionary China.

[21] Robert Chi, “ The Red Detachment of Women : Resenting, Regendering, Remembering,” In Chinese Films in Focus II , ed. Chris Berry (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 154, 158.

[22] Ibid., 154.

[23] Lauren G. Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 15.

[24] Bérénice Reynaud, “Translating the Unspeakable: On-Screen and Off-Screen Voices in Wu Wenguang’s Documentary Work,” in The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record , ed. Chris Berry, Lu Xinyu, and Lisa Rofel (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 175.

[25] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

[26] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Macmillan, 1981).

[27] Berlant, Cruel Optimism , 199.

[28] Xu Xin in Ni Ba, “Interview with Xu Xin.” Emphasis added.

[29] If, as Louis Althusser described, “ideology” is in many ways the relationship of our empirical experience to “the Real,” social training in emotional expression are crucial nodes in the development of our mimetic practices. Rituals taught through social interaction introduce subjects to a dense play of signifiers. Yet the immediacy of embodied affect at the bounds of imagination and desire still seems to exceed this symbolization. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1971).

[30] Chi, “ The Red Detachment of Women ,” 158.

[31] Shoshana Felman, “Film as Witness: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah ,” In Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory , ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 91.

[32] Ibid., 92.

[33] Laura Marks, “Signs of the Time: Deleuze, Peirce and the Documentary Image,” in  The Brain Is the Screen: Gilles Deleuze’s Cinematic Philosophy , ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 205.

[35] Chow, Sentimental Fabulations , 175.

[36] Ni Ba, “Interview with Xu Xin.” Emphasis added.

[37] Slavoj Žižek in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2006), 70–71.

Share this:

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

China’s Age of Malaise

Twenty-five years ago, China’s writer of the moment was a man named Wang Xiaobo. Wang had endured the Cultural Revolution, but unlike most of his peers, who turned the experience into earnest tales of trauma, he was an ironist, in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut, with a piercing eye for the intrusion of politics into private life. In his novella “Golden Age,” two young lovers confess to the bourgeois crime of extramarital sex—“We committed epic friendship in the mountain, breathing wet steamy breath.” They are summoned to account for their failure of revolutionary propriety, but the local apparatchiks prove to be less interested in Marx than in the prurient details of their “epic friendship.”

Wang’s fiction and essays celebrated personal dignity over conformity, and embraced foreign ideas—from Twain, Calvino, Russell—as a complement to the Chinese perspective. In “The Pleasure of Thinking,” the title essay in a collection newly released in English, he recalls his time on a commune where the only sanctioned reading was Mao’s Little Red Book. To him, that stricture implied an unbearable lie: “if the ultimate truth has already been discovered, then the only thing left for humanity to do would be to judge everything based on this truth.” Long after his death, of a heart attack, at the age of forty-four, Wang’s views still circulate among fans like a secret handshake. His widow, the sociologist Li Yinhe, once told me, “I know a lesbian couple who met for the first time when they went to pay their respects at his grave site.” She added, “There are plenty of people with minds like this.”

How did Wang become a literary icon in a country famed for its constraint? It helped that he was adroit at crafting narratives just oblique enough to elude the censors. But the political context was also crucial. After the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, in 1989, the Communist Party had risked falling into oblivion, behind its comrades in Moscow. It survived by offering the Chinese people a grand but pragmatic bargain: personal space in return for political loyalty. The Party leader Deng Xiaoping broke with the orthodoxy of the Mao era; he called for “courageous experiments” to insure that China would not be like “a woman with bound feet.” Soon, new N.G.O.s were lobbying for the rights of women and ethnic minorities, and foreign investors were funding startups, including Alibaba and Tencent, that grew into some of the wealthiest companies on earth. Young people were trying on new identities; I met a Chinese band that played only American rock, though their repertoire was so limited that they sang “Hotel California” twice a night. Above all, the Party sought to project confidence: Deng’s successor, Jiang Zemin, visited the New York Stock Exchange, in 1997, rang the opening bell, and boomed, in English, “I wish you good trading!”

For two decades after Deng made his deal with the people, the Party largely held to it. The private sector generated fortunes; intellectuals aired dissent on campuses and social media; the middle class travelled and indulged. When I lived in Beijing from 2005 to 2013, the social calendar was punctuated by openings: concert halls, laboratories, architectural marvels. At a celebration for a new art museum, an international crowd peered up at a troupe of Spanish avant-garde performers dangling from a construction crane, writhing like flies in a web—just another evening in what a writer at the scene called “the unstoppable ascension of Chinese art.”

When I return to China these days, the feeling of ineluctable ascent has waned. The streets of Beijing still show progress; armadas of electric cars glide by like props in a sci-fi film, and the smoke that used to impose a perpetual twilight is gone. But, in the alleys, most of the improvised cafés and galleries that used to enliven the city have been cleared away, in the name of order; overhead, the race to build new skyscrapers, which attracted designers from around the world, has stalled. This summer, I had a drink with an intellectual I’ve known for years. He recalled a time when he took inspiration from the dissidents of the Eastern Bloc: “Fifteen years ago, we were talking about Havel.” These days, he told me with a wince, “people don’t want to say anything.” By the time we stood to leave, he had drained four Martinis.

The embodiment of this reversal is Xi Jinping, the General Secretary and President, who has come to be known among the Party rank and file by a succinct honorific: the Core. In the years before Xi rose to power, in 2012, some Party thinkers had pushed for political liberalization, but the leaders, who feared infighting and popular rebellion, chose stricter autocracy instead. Xi has proved stunningly harsh; though at first he urged young people to “dare to dream,” and gestured toward market-oriented reforms, he has abandoned Deng’s “courageous experiments” and ushered his country into a straitened new age. To spend time in China at the end of Xi’s first decade is to witness a nation slipping from motion to stagnation and, for the first time in a generation, questioning whether a Communist superpower can escape the contradictions that doomed the Soviet Union.

At the age of seventy, Xi has removed term limits on his rule and eliminated even loyal opponents. He travels less than he used to, and reveals little of the emotion behind his thinking; there is no public ranting or tin-pot swagger. He moves so deliberately that he resembles a person underwater. Before the pandemic, China’s official news often showed him amid crowds of supporters applauding in stilted adoration. The clips circulate abroad with the mocking caption “West North Korea,” but at home censors vigilantly guard Xi’s honor; a leak from a Chinese social-media site last year revealed that it blocks no fewer than five hundred and sixty-four nicknames for him, including Caesar, the Last Emperor, and twenty-one variations of Winnie-the-Pooh.

Unlike Deng and Jiang, Xi has never lived abroad, and he has become openly disparaging about the future of the U.S. and its democratic allies, declaring that “the East is rising and the West is declining.” He does not mask displeasure at the occasional run-in with a free press; on the sidelines of a G-20 summit last year, he complained to the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, “Everything we’ve discussed has been leaked to the papers, and that’s not appropriate.” In the exchange, captured by a Canadian television crew, Xi flashed a tense smile and demanded “mutual respect,” adding, “Otherwise, there might be unpredictable consequences.”

Year by year, Xi appears more at home in the world of the man he calls his “best and closest friend,” Vladimir Putin. In March, after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the Russian President on war-crimes charges, Putin hosted Xi in Moscow, where they described relations as the best they have ever been. Clasping hands for a farewell in the doorway of the Kremlin, Xi told Putin, “Right now there are changes—the likes of which we haven’t seen for a hundred years—and we are the ones driving these changes together.” Putin responded, “I agree.”

In China, as in much of the world, you can tell a lot about a place by its bookstores. For years, readers in Shanghai, the nation’s most cosmopolitan city, had Jifeng—“Monsoon”—which opened in 1997, just as Wang Xiaobo was breaking through. It was the city’s undisputed liberal outpost, where even the most esoteric speakers drew a crowd. But in 2017 the public library, which owned the building, cancelled the lease, citing “increased regulations” on state-owned property. The owner, Yu Miao, scouted new sites, but, every time, the landlord got a call and Yu was turned away. He ultimately realized that “Jifeng can’t get a foothold.” Even the farewell party, to sell off the last books, was plunged into darkness by sudden “equipment maintenance.” Buyers kept shopping in darkness, using cell phones as flashlights. Today, nobody would dare try to open a store like that.

Link copied

Measuring a nation’s mood can be difficult—especially in China, which doesn’t allow independent polling—but there are indicators. In America, when the nineteen-seventies brought inflation, gas lines, and turmoil in the Middle East, the public mood could be read on the roadways; the car industry still calls the sluggish, boxy aesthetic of those days the Malaise Era. Ask Chinese citizens about their mood nowadays and some of the words you hear most are mimang and jusang —“bewildered” and “frustrated.”

As in America, China’s changing temper partly reflects economic concerns. After Party leaders embarked on market reforms, in 1978, the Chinese economy more than doubled in size every decade. Infrastructure was built at such a pace that China used more cement in a three-year span than the U.S. had used in the entire twentieth century; Guizhou, one of the poorest provinces, has eleven airports, to serve an area the size of Missouri. But that boom is over now. China has all the airports—and railways and factories and skyscrapers—that it can justify. The economy grew three per cent last year, far short of the government’s target. Exports have dropped, and debt has soared. Economists who once charted China’s rise are now flatly pessimistic. Dan Rosen, of the Rhodium Group, a research firm in New York, told me, “It is not just a blip. This is a permanent new normal.”

As a matter of scale, China is as formidable as ever: it is the largest trading partner for more than a hundred and twenty countries, it is home to at least eighty per cent of the supply chain for solar panels, and it is the world’s largest maker of electric vehicles. But the downturn has shaken citizens who have never experienced anything but improvements in their standard of living. People who shunted their life savings into contracts for new apartments are contending with unfinished concrete blocks in overgrown lots, because the developers ran out of money. Civil treasuries are similarly depleted, by the shutdowns required by China’s “zero- COVID ” policy; there are reports of teachers and civil servants going unpaid.

China’s present troubles are about far more than the economy. Four decades after Deng and his peers put their country on a path of “reform and opening up,” his successors have reversed course, in politics and in culture. For ordinary Chinese citizens, that reversal is as jarring as it would have been for American homesteaders if the U.S. had retreated from the frontier. Joerg Wuttke, the president emeritus of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, who has lived there for more than thirty years, told me, “China always had comeback stories. But not now.” He recalled addressing a roomful of students at Peking University: “I said, ‘Who among you is optimistic?’ It was one-third—which means two-thirds are pessimistic at the best university in China. There’s this feeling of ‘What are we here for?’ ”

Over the summer, in visits to China and to émigré communities abroad, I interviewed several dozen people about their work and private lives, their sense of the direction in business, art, and politics. I was surprised how often they spoke about Xi without uttering his name—a single finger flicked upward can suffice—because the subject is at once ubiquitous and unsafe. (To a degree I’ve rarely encountered, many asked to have their identities disguised.) Most of all, I was struck by how many people have come to doubt that China will achieve the heights they once expected. “The word I use to describe China now is ‘grieving,’ ” an entrepreneur told me. “We’re grieving for what was an exceptional time.”

The Party has taken steps to obscure problems from foreign inspection: overseas access to corporate data and academic journals has been restricted, scholars are warned not to discuss deflation, and, in stock-market listings, lawyers have been told to cut routine suggestions that laws could change “without notice.” (Instead, they are to use the phrase “from time to time.”) Officially, China is encouraging foreign companies and scholars to return, but an expanded “anti-espionage” law puts a vast range of information off limits, including “documents, data, materials, or items related to national security and interests.” Authorities have raided consultancies with long histories in China, including Bain & Company and Mintz Group, a due-diligence firm that said five of its Chinese employees had been detained.

The space for pop culture, high culture, and spontaneous interaction has narrowed to a pinhole. Chinese social media, which once was a chaotic hive, has been tamed, as powerful voices are silenced and discussions closed. Pop concerts and other performances have been cancelled for reasons described only as “force majeure.” Even standup comics are forced to submit videos of jokes for advance approval. This spring, a comedian was investigated for improvising a riff on a Chinese military slogan (“Fight well, win the battle”) in a joke about his dogs going crazy over a squirrel. His representatives were fined two million dollars and barred from hosting events.

Into the cultural void, the Party has injected a torrent of publishing under Xi’s name—eleven new books in the first five months of this year, far more than any predecessor ever purported to write—collecting his comments on every topic from economics and history to the lives of women. Geremie Barmé, a prominent historian and translator, calls it “Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium.” “Here is one of the great cultures of succinct telegraphic communication, and it has ended up with this tsunami of logorrhea,” Barmé said. The system is fumbling in search of an answer to the big question: Can Xi’s China still manage the pairing of autocracy and capitalism? “What do you do with an economy that can’t deal with unemployment created by mismanagement?” Barmé asked. “What do you do with people who feel their lives are aimless?” He said, “They don’t have a system that can cope with the forces they’ve unleashed.”

Late one Saturday night in Beijing, I met friends at a hole-in-the-wall called Xiao Kuai’r—“A Small Piece”—to hear a lineup of local bands. During the day, the bar doubled as a recording studio, turning out retro-chic plastic cassettes. After dark, twentysomethings crowded in to see groups with names like Black Brick and Ionosphere.

Despite the enthusiastic audience, there was a fin-de-siècle vibe in the air: the couple who ran the bar were giving it up at the end of the month. They had hoped to promote “independent culture,” they wrote in a farewell note, but had struggled to manage the “shifting line of what’s permissible and what isn’t.” Xiao Kuai’r was joining a list of Beijing haunts—Temple, Cellar Door, 8-Bit—that have disappeared in recent memory.

Disappearances, of one kind or another, have become the backbeat of Chinese public life under Xi Jinping. The head of China’s missile force, Li Yuchao, was secretly detained sometime during the summer. His political commissar vanished, too. Under the unwritten rules of these kinds of disappearances, an official report will eventually disclose what the two men did and what happened to them, but in the meantime there was little more than a rumor that they were being investigated for corruption or, perhaps, leaking state secrets.

The missing generals marked an unusually busy summer of purges. China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang—last seen shaking hands with a Vietnamese official at a meeting in Beijing—vanished at around the same time. His disappearance attracted attention; among other tasks, he had been involved in delicate dealings with the United States over Taiwan and over access for businesspeople and students. A spokesperson initially said that Qin was gone for “health reasons,” but the ministry cut that statement from the official transcript and took to saying that it had “no information” on him. In Washington, where he had previously served as Ambassador, I used to meet him occasionally; he was a smoothly pugnacious presence, who liked to boast of how many American states he’d visited. (Twenty-two, at the highest count.) The last time I saw him, he was about to visit St. Louis, where he would throw out the first pitch at a Cardinals game, and was nervously preparing by studying videos on YouTube.

In Mao’s day, a purge within the Party required skilled technicians to excise a comrade from photos. In the digital age, it is easier; entries on Qin vanished from the foreign ministry’s Web site overnight. But the references to the minister were restored when the change attracted attention abroad, and during my visits this summer everybody was still talking about him. Some theories were grim. “Word is he got the bullet,” a man in Shanghai said, over coffee. Others were outlandish: one businessman picked up my audio recorder, held it behind his back, and leaned in to whisper, “I heard he slept with Xi Jinping’s daughter.” But most people offered versions of the same story: Qin, who is married, had an affair that produced a child born in America, exposing him to blackmail by foreign intelligence services. (The mother of the child was thought to be Fu Xiaotian, a television reporter, who has also dropped out of sight.)

Since 2012, when Xi launched an “anti-corruption” campaign that grew into a vast machine of arrest and detention, China has “investigated and punished 4.089 million people,” according to an official report from 2021. Some of the disappeared eventually go on trial in courts that have a ninety-nine-per-cent conviction rate; others are held indefinitely under murky rules known as “double restrictions.” The disappeared hail from every corner of life: Dong Yuyu, a newspaper columnist, was arrested last year while having lunch with a Japanese diplomat, and subsequently charged with espionage; Bao Fan, one of China’s best-known bankers, vanished in February, though his company later reported that he was “coöperating in an investigation carried out by certain authorities.” In September, Rahile Dawut, a prominent Uyghur ethnographer who had been missing for almost five years, was found, by a human-rights group, to be serving a life sentence on charges of endangering national security.

In addition to the disappearances, the deepening reach of politics is felt throughout daily life. Early this year, the Party launched a campaign to educate citizens on what Party literature habitually refers to as “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” All manner of institutions—laboratories, asset-management firms, banks, think tanks—are expected to make time for regular lectures, followed by the writing of essays and the taking of tests. Some business executives report spending a third of the workday on “thought work,” including reading an average of four books a month. A microchip engineer at a university lab told a friend, “Going to meetings every day literally eats away at the time for scientific discoveries.”

The over-all effect is a revival of what the late Sinologist Simon Leys called the “lugubrious merry-go-round” of Communist ritual, and a culture of deliberate obfuscation that he likened to deciphering “inscriptions written in invisible ink on blank pages.” The return of disappearances and thought work on this scale has made clear that, for all of China’s modernizations, Xi is no longer pantomiming the rule of law; he has returned China to the rule of man. At his core, a longtime observer told me, Xi is “Mao with money.”

At the bar in Beijing, I stepped outside for some air with a man named Steven, who had graduated from a top Chinese university. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and Nikes. After a few minutes, he told me that he was plotting to ditch his lucrative job—editing energy reports—in order to travel. “A lot of the interesting people are leaving,” he said. “My friends have left.” A little while later, at the bar’s entrance, a guy carrying a guitar case barked into his phone, “I just quit my job! I’m done.” He hung up, lit a cigarette, and told a friend, “I’ll figure out something to do.”

The sense that China’s march through time has stalled is especially acute among the young, who are contending with stagnant wages and a culture of enervating limits. For a generation raised on the mythology of social mobility, the loss of optimism aches like a phantom limb.

In 2021, a thirty-one-year-old former factory worker named Luo Huazhong posted a photo of himself in bed, with the caption “Lying flat is my sophistic act,” he said, professing solidarity with the philosopher Diogenes, who is said to have protested the excesses of Athenian aristocrats by living in a barrel. The post spread, and “lie flattists” formed online groups to commiserate. The censors closed the discussions, but the phrase has lingered, especially among urbanites, some of whom liken themselves to the Beat generation, which originally took the name to mean “weary” in the face of materialism and conformity.

In July, the National Bureau of Statistics revealed that youth unemployment had hit a record high of twenty-one per cent, nearly twice the rate four years earlier. Then the bureau stopped releasing the numbers. Zhang Dandan, an economics professor at Peking University, published an article arguing that the true rate might be as high as forty-six per cent, because she estimated that up to sixteen million young people have temporarily stopped looking for jobs in order to lie flat.

Young people raised under the one-child policy want smaller families, because they fear the cost of supporting kids alongside retired parents. As a result, by mid-century, China’s working-age population is expected to decline by nearly twenty-five per cent from its peak in 2011. The prospect of constrained growth has returned the bedroom to the focus of political attention—not to police extramarital sex anymore, but to urge procreation in the name of patriotism. Local officials have taken to calling newlyweds to inquire and encourage, and a county in Zhejiang Province has offered cash incentives to couples with brides under the age of twenty-five, to promote “age-appropriate marriage and childbirth.”

In Xi’s China—like Putin’s Russia and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary—a war on democratic influence has brought about a resurgence of gender inequality; in 2021, the Party committed itself to “traditional virtues of the Chinese nation” and the “social value of childbearing.” Signs of regression are stark: for the first time in decades, the Politburo is composed entirely of men. Feminist activists are often prosecuted.

For many Chinese women, political pressure on their personal decisions has fed broad disaffection. China’s birth rate has plunged by more than half since 2016—even after the government changed the rules to let people have up to three children. This kind of drop has rarely been recorded in a nation that is not at war or in the throes of upheaval. The last time China reported a population decline of any kind was 1961, when it was reeling from the famine that followed Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist who studies population trends at the American Enterprise Institute, has described the birth crisis as “internalized civil disobedience.”

“For me, it’s a hard no,” a twenty-four-year-old named Sybil said over dinner, when I asked if she plans to marry. She had recently visited a cousin’s house, and watched as his parents tyrannized his wife. “If you don’t do what they expect as a wife or a mother, they’ll kick you out,” she said. “So why carve out the prime of your life?” For a long time, Sybil said, she had a recurring nightmare that she was pregnant. “I would wake in the middle of the night, and I couldn’t get back to sleep,” she said. “If I have kids, I wouldn’t live up to my potential. I think a family can’t have two people’s dreams.”

Sybil’s distaste for marriage is inseparable from China’s fierce competition for college and employment. She is in a master’s program in linguistics, and has a flexible attitude. “If you give me a job, you can send me to Mars,” she said. But the best position she could find for now was an internship at a P.R. firm—and she figures that, if she leaves to have a kid, she’ll never catch up. “We’re running like hamsters on a wheel,” she said.

Historically, young people have been a volatile presence in Chinese politics. In 1989, students protesting corruption and autocracy led the occupation of Tiananmen Square. In the present moment, their distress takes other forms. For years, young graduates have streamed into China’s big cities in pursuit of wealth and stimulation, but, in August, state media reported that almost half of new graduates were returning to their home towns within six months, unable to afford the cost of living. Among those who stay, some are answering advertisements for “bedmates”—sharing a bed with a stranger—or living rent-free in nursing homes, in return for spending ten hours a month entertaining the residents.

A decade after Xi told young people to “dare to dream,” he now admonishes them to curtail their expectations; in recent speeches, he has said that disgruntled youth should “abandon arrogance and pampering” and “eat bitterness”—basically, Mandarin for “suck it up.” The exhortations land poorly. Young people mock the implication that they are little more than a renkuang —a “human mine”—for the nation’s exploitation. As a subtle protest during college-commencement season, graduates took to posting pictures of themselves sprawled face down, or draped over railings, in a manner they named “zombie style.”

Spend some time on the edges of China’s business world these days and you’ll pick up new rules of thumb. If you have to speak publicly, stick to the Party patois; when the first large cruise ship built in China was launched, last year, the company’s C.E.O. pledged devotion to “a new concept of cruise culture and tourism with Chinese cultural identity as the core.” If you are abroad, be wary of urgent requests to come home. “Several people I know have been called back to China for a deal. It was a setup by the government, just to nab them,” a financier told me. In custody, there are clues to help gauge the gravity of the interrogation. “If they give you your phone at night, everything is going to be O.K.—they just want to talk to you,” he said. “You can WeChat your wife or your mistress.” But, if investigators keep your phone from you, the odds are you are a target, not a source.

It is difficult to overstate how much Xi has shaken China’s private sector. Decades ago, as Deng began opening up the country, he said, “Let some people get rich first and gradually all the people should get rich together.” For years, each successive wave of aspirants watched the entrepreneurs before them and then “dove into the sea” themselves. In 2014, Alibaba went public on the New York Stock Exchange and raised twenty-five billion dollars, the largest I.P.O. in history at the time. New enterprises proliferated; by 2018, China had attracted sixty-three billion dollars in venture-capital deals, up nearly fifteenfold in five years.

When Xi first became President, he revealed little of his view of the private sector. “Nobody was sure what we were getting,” Desmond Shum, a real-estate developer based in Beijing at the time, recalled. But businessmen figured that the private sector was too important to mess with. A Chinese saying held that entrepreneurs produced sixty per cent of the nation’s G.D.P., seventy per cent of the innovation, eighty per cent of the urban employment, and ninety per cent of new jobs.

By 2015, Shum said, “you started seeing things going a different route.” That December, Guo Guangchang, the industrialist known as China’s Warren Buffett, was held for several days; later, his company sold a series of major assets. In 2017, Xiao Jianhua, a billionaire with ties to politicians, was taken from his apartment at the Four Seasons in Hong Kong, in a wheelchair, with a sheet over his head. (His disappearance went unexplained until last August, when authorities announced that he had been imprisoned for embezzlement and bribery.)

But it was only in 2020 that the risks became truly evident. Jack Ma—the founder of Alibaba, China’s richest man, and a role model to younger entrepreneurs—criticized the Party’s handling of financial reform, and then disappeared for months. Regulators postponed the I.P.O. for Ant Group, another of Ma’s companies, and fined Alibaba a record $2.8 billion for antitrust violations. Similar disappearances and penalties swept through one industry after another: education, real estate, health care. The Party explained that it was targeting inequality, monopoly, and excessive financial risks, but some of the arrests seemed personal. Ren Zhiqiang, a real-estate tycoon, received an unusually harsh sentence of eighteen years on corruption charges, after someone leaked an essay in which he mocked Xi as a “clown stripped naked who still insisted on being emperor.”

None of the targets showed any organized political intentions. The only visible pattern is that Xi and his loyalists appeared intent on snuffing out rival sources of authority. One after another, he got rid of anyone with power, the entrepreneur said: “If you have influence, you have power. If you have capital, you have power.” Xi is said to have spoken bitterly of watching Boris Yeltsin contend with Russian tycoons in the nineteen-nineties. Joerg Wuttke told me, “When Putin entered the Kremlin in 2000, he assembled the oligarchs and said, basically, You can keep your money, but if you go into politics you’re done.” He went on, “In China, the big names should have learned from that meeting, because in this sense Putin and Xi Jinping are soul mates.”

For years, economists have urged the government to stop relying on real-estate investment and bloated state-run companies, and to increase health and retirement benefits so that ordinary households consume more, spurring the private sector. But Xi, a Marxist-Leninist at his core, said last fall that state-owned enterprises would “get stronger, do better, and grow bigger.” Foreign investors are alarmed. In the second quarter of 2023, according to JPMorgan, direct investment from overseas fell to its lowest level in twenty-six years. Local governments, short of cash, have adopted a subtle extortion method that lawyers call “taxation by investigation.” A factory owner in Shanghai told me that Party officials used bank records to identify residents with liquid assets of at least thirty million yuan—about four million dollars—and then offered them a choice: hand over twenty per cent or “risk a full tax audit.”

Recently, the Party has signalled that the purge of the private sector is over, but many have grown wary. A former telecom executive cited an ancient expression—“ shi, nong, gong, shang ”—which describes a hierarchy of social classes: scholar-officials, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants. “For two thousand years, the merchants were the lowest,” he said. “What Xi is doing is just a reversion to the imperial Chinese mean.” The big winners, in the current era, are officials with deep personal ties to Xi; he has stocked the Politburo with trusted aides, and has cultivated the military by boosting investment and replacing top leaders with loyalists. The People’s Liberation Army, in the words of Deng Yuwen, a former Party editor who now lives in America, has become “Xi’s personal army.”

Among the unintended effects of Xi’s campaign against the private sector has been an awakening of political consciousness. For years, many of China’s entrepreneurs expressed ambivalence about the Party’s abuses of authority. China is flawed, the thinking went, but it was moving in the right direction. That mind-set of compromise is rarer now. “This reversal has already been going on for many years,” an investor who now lives abroad told me. “Of course, I miss China. But China has changed so much that it’s no longer the same country.”

Nobody I met thinks politics will loosen up as long as Xi is at the top, and he could rule for decades. (Xi’s father lived to eighty-eight, and his mother is ninety-six. Xi, like many heads of state, can expect excellent medical care.)

The darker prospects of China’s private sector have inspired job seekers to rush toward security: in 2023, 1.5 million people sat for China’s national civil-service exam, up by half in two years. The popularity of securing a state job—known in Chinese as “landing ashore”—has fuelled an unlikely fashion trend, in which young men display their aspirations with sombre suits, windbreakers, and even Communist Party badges, a vogue known as “cadre style.”

In less than five years, the Party has hobbled industries that once supplied tax revenue, jobs, inspiration, and global stature. For a generation, the Party found ways to put practicality ahead of ideology. “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white,” Deng said, “as long as it catches mice.” In the Xi era, that principle has become, in effect: It doesn’t matter if the cat catches mice, as long as it’s red.

Year by year, Xi has rescinded the deal—space for loyalty—that Deng and his generation made with their people. He broke the compact first with the political class and then with the business community. Finally, during the pandemic, he seems to have alienated vast reaches of the Chinese public, in ways that are only beginning to be truly visible.

For a time, China’s approach to COVID was highly popular. In 2020, after failing to contain and cover up the initial outbreak, in Wuhan, the Party adopted a “zero- COVID ” strategy, of closed borders, mass testing, and strict quarantine procedures, which allowed much of China to resume normal life, even as schools and offices in the U.S. struggled to maintain basic operations. Tech companies and the government collaborated to assemble huge tranches of medical and location data to assign everyone a health code—green, yellow, or red. Lockdowns were finite; volunteers went to work for the ubiquitous testing-and-enforcement crews, in white Tyvek suits that earned them the affectionate nickname dabai (“big whites”).

But, over time, the zero- COVID strategy combined with the politics of fear to produce extraordinary suffering. Local apparatchiks, fearing punishment for even tiny outbreaks, became rigid and unresponsive. In Shanghai, most of the twenty-five million residents were confined to their homes for two months, even as food and medicine ran low. A woman whose father was locked down so long that he nearly ran out of heart medication told me, “We don’t have to imagine a bleak future with robots controlling us. We’ve lived that life already.” After citizens took to their balconies to sing or to demand supplies, a video circulated of a drone hovering above a compound in Shanghai, broadcasting a dystopian directive: “Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window to sing.”

Some patients with problems other than COVID were turned away from hospitals. Chen Shunping, a retired violinist with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, was vomiting from acute pancreatitis before he jumped from his apartment window. In a note left for his wife, he wrote, “I couldn’t stand the pain.” In perhaps the greatest provocation, parents who tested positive were separated from their babies and toddlers, who were taken to state wards. Last November, demonstrations erupted in Shanghai and other cities; protesters held up blank sheets of paper to symbolize all they could not say. Dozens were detained, and an unknown number remain in custody. Kamile Wayit, a Uyghur college student who shared video of the protests online, was sentenced to three years in prison for “promoting extremism.” When the zero- COVID policy was finally abandoned, the following month, the change was so abrupt that at least a million people died in a matter of weeks, according to independent analyses; the state stopped publishing cremation statistics.

Since the pandemic, a new strain of cynicism has emerged. “I’m shocked at how angry people are,” an entertainer in Shanghai told me. For the first time, he hears acquaintances openly share doubts about the competence of the leadership. “Confidence is like faith in religion,” he said. “It’s a belief in the evidence of things unseen.”

I visited a respected writer, who works at the foot of a crooked alley, in a hideaway almost entirely overtaken by books. (He distrusts e-books, because they, too, can be disappeared.) Nudging a cat from a stool to make sitting room, he spoke with a scowl about the pandemic. He identified a dynamic among people he knew: the older and more powerful they were, the more they were destabilized by the lockdown. “These are the élites,” he said. “They did a good job, they’re influential people. But they were left to wail in anguish. I kept thinking, If someone speaks up, maybe we can unite to say we don’t like the policy or the irrational conditions. But no one wanted to be the first to poke their head out.” He went on, “The most troublesome thing in China is that the open-mindedness—the ability to learn—has come to a halt. For forty years, we learned things, and then people concluded that China was formidable and capable, that the East is rising and the West is declining, that China is already a big boss in the world. And so we stopped learning. But, in reality, we haven’t even established a society with a conscience.”

People describe psychological marks that they are still uncovering. Months after the lockdowns, a friend was walking home from dinner and passed a testing booth. She felt a sudden, inescapable urge to kick it. “I was very angry—about everything,” she said. The shattered glass opened a gash in her ankle. Blood spilled out, and, to make matters worse, she suddenly remembered the surveillance cameras. “I was so afraid,” she told me. “Am I going to get in trouble?” Visiting the hospital felt risky, but the bleeding was too heavy to ignore. She made up a story about bumping into a glass wall, and by dawn she was bandaged up and limping home, her shoe caked in blood. She is left with a long scar snaking up her ankle, and the persistent remnants of the rage that triggered her outburst. “Subconsciously, it’s never going to be gone,” she said. She spends much of her time these days trying to find a way to emigrate.

In 2018, online discussions in China started to feature a Mandarin neologism: runxue —“the art of running.” When Shanghai went into lockdown, the saying took off. Tencent, a tech platform, reported a surge of people searching the phrase “conditions for emigrating to Canada.” Authorities were displeased; the immigration department announced plans to “strictly restrict the nonessential exit activities of Chinese citizens.”

But people found ways out. More than three hundred thousand Chinese moved away last year, more than double the pace of migration a decade ago, according to the United Nations. Some are resorting to extraordinary measures. In August, a man rode a Jet Ski, loaded with extra fuel, nearly two hundred miles to South Korea. According to rights activists, he had served time in prison for wearing a T-shirt that called China’s leader “Xitler.” Others have followed arduous routes through a half-dozen countries, in the hope of reaching the U.S. Some take advantage of Ecuador’s visa-free travel to enter South America, and then join the trek north through the jungle of the Darién Gap. This summer, authorities at America’s southern border reported a record 17,894 encounters with Chinese migrants in the previous ten months—a thirteenfold increase from a year earlier.

For years, wealthy Chinese argued that they had more to gain by staying than by leaving, but many have changed their minds. In June, Henley & Partners, which advises wealthy individuals on how to get residence and citizenship by investment, reported that China lost a net total of 10,800 rich residents in 2022, surpassing Russia as the world’s leading exporter of wealthy citizens. Last fall, in the name of “common prosperity,” Xi called for “regulating the mechanism of wealth accumulation,” raising expectations of new taxes on inheritance and property. “If you are part of the .01 per cent, you are trying to get out,” the entrepreneur told me.

Jun, a technologist in his fifties, who has a shaved head and a casual bearing that disguises intense sentiments, bought a place near the Mediterranean. “There’s an expression in Chinese: A smart rabbit has three caves,” he told me. “My biggest fear is that someday, with a Chinese passport, you can’t go out.” Chinese citizens can buy a foreign passport for about a hundred thousand dollars from a Caribbean tax haven such as Antigua or Barbuda. Since Malta started selling permanent residence, in 2015, eighty-seven per cent of applicants have been Chinese. Earlier this year, Ireland abandoned its investment-migration program, amid concerns over China’s domination of the process.

Jun is hardly a dissident; he has prospered through a series of Internet and entertainment ventures, but he has come to believe that the Party’s need for control is untenable. By choking off private life and business, it is hastening a confrontation—which Jun sees as painful but necessary. “The more pressure there is, the sooner it will open up,” he said. “In five years, China will be diminished. In ten years, it will be in conflict. But in fifteen years it might be better.” Versions of this view circulate widely enough that some Chinese have given Xi the nickname the Great Accelerator, in the belief that he is pushing China toward a reckoning. For now, Jun said, “nobody will say anything. They’re just watching the pressure cooker.”

Chinese leaders know the risk of a brain drain. In a speech in 2021, Xi said, “Competition for comprehensive national strength is, in the final analysis, competition for talent.” But, when that priority collides with the need for control, control wins. In Beijing, a man told me that his social circle has been so severely depleted by migration that he’s “trying to make new friends on the badminton court.” He relayed a recent family drama that combined multiple strands of distress: “My nephew told his parents, ‘If you don’t let my wife and me move to Canada, we’re going to refuse to have children.’ ”

David Lesperance, a former lawyer who helps wealthy clients leave China, said that inquiries tend to increase after a high-profile disappearance. One of his first clients was a member of a prominent Shanghainese family, he told me. “This guy said, ‘Look, my family’s lived through the emperor, the Taiping Rebellion, the Boxers, the Japanese, the Nationalists, the Communists.’ He said, ‘Our family motto was, no matter how good things are, we always keep a fast junk in the harbor with a second set of papers and some gold bars. Well, the modern equivalent of that is second passports, second residences, and second bank accounts.’ ”

Chinese citizens are generally allowed to convert no more than fifty thousand dollars a year into foreign currency. There are work-arounds, though. An underground network known as feiqian (“flying money”) lets you put money into a local account and retrieve it abroad, minus a fee. For larger sums, people rely on bogus invoices—sending, say, a million dollars for machine parts that cost a hundred thousand. In August, police arrested the head of Shanghai’s largest China-U.S. immigration company, the Wailian Overseas Consulting Group, and accused her of “collecting RMB in China and issuing foreign currencies abroad”—a signal that Chinese authorities are wary of an outflux of cash.

When I visited Singapore this summer, Calvin Cheng, a local businessman with close ties to Chinese élites, told me, “Singapore is a refugee camp for these people.” He said, “They eat the same food, speak the same language. They don’t feel like second-class citizens here.” Chinese émigrés have taken to calling it Singapore County, as if it were another district of China. In 2022, the state registered 7,312 corporate entities with Chinese owners, up forty-seven per cent from the previous year. The wealthiest migrants congregate on the tony island of Sentosa, where villas rent for thirty-five thousand dollars a month. There have been so many new arrivals in rich neighborhoods that one Chinese resident told me, “They would just be hopping from house to house and toasting each other.”

The press in Singapore tracks the movements of prominent Chinese businesspeople, including Zhang Yiming, the founder of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance; and Liang Xinjun, a founder of Fosun, the conglomerate that was pressured to sell off key assets. “A significant number of the founders of Alibaba are here,” Cheng told me. “But they all keep a low profile.” A businessman close to the new arrivals said that many of his Chinese friends are reading “1587, a Year of No Significance,” a classic account of imperial hubris, which describes how the Emperor Wanli’s rule descended into autocracy as an epidemic swept the land and his bureaucracy lost faith. “There have been thirteen dynasties in China,” he said. “A lot of what Xi is doing is like the late Ming emperors. People see that and they say, ‘Time to go.’ ”

Holly, a Chinese documentary filmmaker in their late twenties, told me that they recently secured a U.K. visa. “The most important thing for me is freedom. The ability to choose, and to control things around me,” Holly said. In the past, they had misgivings about leaving China: “I felt guilty or ashamed. But after the lockdown, and after my friends were leaving, I was, like, ‘Well, sometimes we can just take care of ourselves.’ ”

One afternoon, I waited at a side gate of Peking University, where a metal barricade was watched over by a drowsy guard in a booth. During the pandemic, China closed its campuses to outsiders, and the reopening has been slow. The guard studied a list of visitors until he found me, pointed to a camera that captured my face, and then allowed me through. I was there to see Jia Qingguo, the former dean of the School of International Studies. In his office, he told me that the scarcity of foreign visitors was about more than Covid ; the university was increasingly reluctant to allow in reporters from abroad. For a time, he had stopped answering interview requests almost entirely. “I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t respond,” he said glumly. “I don’t know what they’re thinking of me now.”

Jia spoke with alarm of the trend in relations between the world’s two most powerful countries—of the Chinese balloon that was shot down in American territory, of U.S. export controls on technology, of a darkening mood in Beijing. “If you put these together—the economics and the U.S. pressure—a lot of people think that China’s current problem is caused by the U.S.,” he said. Jia suspects that American politicians’ jockeying for the toughest approach to China could heighten the chance of a violent confrontation. “By early next year, we’ll have the U.S. Presidential race in full steam,” he said. “People are very pessimistic.”

The feeling is mutual. President Joe Biden has sent a series of Cabinet officials to repair ties—even as Republican critics complained that the visits looked needy, and the State Department warned ordinary Americans to reconsider visiting China, citing a growing risk of “wrongful detention.” In Washington, the mutual antipathy fuels a daunting question: Is a stagnating China more likely to end up at war with America, or less?

The answer may depend on the trajectory of the economic decline. Economists generally agree that the boom years are over, but they disagree—even within the same institution—about how bad things will get. At the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the China specialist Nicholas Lardy expects slow but steady growth; he points out that imports are recovering and Internet companies are hiring again, and that the property slump has not undermined the financial system. “The banks can weather that hit,” he said. But Adam Posen, the institute’s president, predicts long-range problems. Historically, he notes, autocrats—such as Hugo Chávez, Orbán, and Putin—have tended to achieve high growth for a time, but, eventually, their capricious use of force and favoritism creates a frustrated, cautious society. Citizens who can’t vote out their leaders resort to hoarding cash or sending it abroad. Xi, compared with other autocrats, has a vastly larger, more functional economy, but the dynamics are similar; the zero- Covid policy, in Posen’s view, was “a point of almost no return for Chinese economic behavior.”

In the darker scenario, China faces “Japanification”—a shrinking workforce, lost decades of growth. It might avoid that with quick, decisive policy changes, but Cai Xia, who was a professor at the élite Central Party School until she broke ranks and moved abroad, in 2020, told me that mid-level administrators have grown paralyzed by fears of a misstep. “Officials are ‘lying flat,’ ” she said. “If there is no instruction from the top, there will be no action from the bottom.” It is equally unlikely that change will be inspired from abroad. A Chinese diplomat recently told me that the government was annoyed by Westerners preaching reform. “We will stick to our plan,” he said. “The Chinese are stubborn,” he added, smiling tightly. “Principles are more important than tangible benefits.”

The economist Xu Chenggang told me that he regards the Party’s current leaders as political “fundamentalists” who are blind to the risks of doctrinal rigidity. Xu won China’s top economics prize in 2013, and four years later left his post at Tsinghua University, where a climate of ideological stricture has set in. He is now a researcher at Stanford.

During the boom years, China made rapid gains in technology using foreign investment and training, as well as rules that required “technology transfer.” But the U.S. has narrowed those channels: new export controls cut off China’s access to advanced chips, and Biden issued an executive order that bars investors from funding Chinese development of A.I. In response, Xi has repeatedly declared China’s ambition to achieve “self-reliance and strength in science and technology.” Xu is skeptical. “In the U.S., you have a jungle of free competition, dozens of laboratories competing—no one knows what is going to work,” he said. “But the Communist regime will not allow for this. That’s the key issue.” The Chinese government sank billions of dollars into two failed efforts to build foundries for advanced chips; Chinese chatbots have struggled to compete with ChatGPT, because the Party imposed rules requiring them to uphold “socialist core values.” (If you ask Ernie Bot, a Chinese version of ChatGPT, whether Xi Jinping is pragmatic, it replies, “Try a different question.”)

In Washington, the ascendant view, in recent years, has been that Xi will respond to slower growth with greater aggression, including a possible invasion or blockade of Taiwan. In a 2022 book, “Danger Zone,” the scholars Hal Brands and Michael Beckley popularized a theory called “peak China,” which holds that the country is “losing confidence that time is on its side,” and might risk a war to make “nationalism a crutch for a wounded regime.” A related view, popular among Chinese abroad, is that Xi might attack Taiwan to elevate his status at home and to insulate himself against revenge for his brutality.

But the “diversionary war” theory faces skepticism from some experts on China’s military. M. Taylor Fravel, the director of M.I.T.’s Security Studies Program, who conducted the first comprehensive study of China’s territorial disputes, told me, “Not only did China not engage in diversion during periods of economic shock or unrest—it often became more conciliatory.” When China was isolated after the massacre at Tiananmen Square, Deng told colleagues to be “calm, calm, and more calm,” and he repaired troubled relationships with Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam. Nobody knows yet if Xi will follow Deng’s pattern, but Fravel is wary of a mood in Washington in which, as he put it, “whether China is rising or falling, some people will say they’re going to become more aggressive.” Attempting to exploit China’s economic weakness could backfire, he said: “If China believes people are taking advantage of their insecurity—especially on things they care a lot about—then they may be more willing to use force to restore the credibility of their position.”

In testimony before Congress this year, U.S. defense and intelligence officials said they saw no evidence that Xi had imminent plans to attack Taiwan. By most accounts, the more immediate risk is that rising tensions in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Straits could yield an accidental collision that leads to war. After Nancy Pelosi visited the island, in 2022, Chinese leaders launched the most threatening military exercises in decades. Wang Huiyao, a former adviser to China’s cabinet and the head of the Center for China and Globalization, a think tank in Beijing, sees the makings of a downward spiral of mutual antagonism. Chinese leaders, he said, “feel they’ve been provoked. Of course, the U.S. is saying, ‘Oh, China is doing another big military showdown—they’ll never give up using force!’ So this reinforces each other, escalating things.”

When I saw Nicholas Burns, the U.S. Ambassador to China, he predicted “a competitive, contested relationship for the next ten to twenty years,” though he observed that recent high-level meetings had “brought greater stability.” Burns anticipates that America will continue to bring home more of its supply chain—a process that politicians call “de-risking”—but warned against following that impulse so far that the two societies lose touch. According to the U.S. Embassy, the number of American students in China has plummeted from several thousand in 2019 to fewer than four hundred today. “You need ballast, and people are the ballast—students, businesspeople, N.G.O.s, journalists,” he said. “There’s no scenario where divorcing the two countries helps us.”

Walk down any street in Beijing before a big day on the political calendar and you’ll see a profusion of mantras, emblazoned on posters and brilliant red banners. The era of Xi Thought is rich with pithy aphorisms, which somewhat cryptically remind the public to heed the “Two Establishes,” the “Three Imperatives,” and the “Four Comprehensives.”

Xi has always spoken more bluntly in private. In a speech behind closed doors, shortly after he came to power, he uttered what remains the clearest statement of his vision. “Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse?” he asked, according to excerpts that circulated among Party members. One reason, he said, was that the Soviets’ “ideals and beliefs had wavered.” More important, though, “they didn’t have the tools of dictatorship.” With dogged efficiency, Xi has set out to strengthen belief in the Party and to build the tools of dictatorship. He has succeeded more in the latter than in the former. These days, the most prevalent belief in China is that anyone—from the truest believer to the canniest tycoon—can disappear. This fall, there was fresh evidence: yet another powerful general, the defense minister, Li Shangfu, never arrived at a meeting he was scheduled to attend.

A wily editor who has fought with censors for years told me that people are growing increasingly unwilling to mortgage their rights in exchange for a higher standard of living. Without mentioning Xi’s name, the editor said, “To use an expression that’s popular online, everyone has a moment when they are ‘punched by the iron fist.’ Some were shattered by the constitutional amendment in 2018,” which removed term limits on Xi. “For others, it was the second reëlection. And for others it was the crackdown on the education industry or on tech. Every person has a different pressure point.” As a result, society is not united in its frustrations: “The frustration is fragmented. It’s not collapsing all at one point. There is one bit that is cracking here and another bit cracking there.”

If public frustration continues to build, there is always the prospect that it will produce more than a short-lived protest with blank pages of paper. But history suggests little chance of a palace coup; since the founding of the People’s Republic, in 1949, no head of the Party has been deposed by underlings. (Three have been toppled by Party elders.) For the moment, China’s economic problems are unlikely to doom the Party. To make up for its diminishing ties with the West, China is devoting more attention to making deals in the Global South. It now exports more to the developing world than it does to the U.S., Europe, and Japan combined.

For all of China’s ambitions to greatness, it faces a consuming struggle to restore the trust and vigor of its own people. The stagnation could pass, as it did for America in the nineteen-eighties, or it could deepen, as it did for the Soviet Union during the same years. (A decade later, one of those empires was gone.) Wuttke’s father-in-law was the first Russian Federation Ambassador to China; at a Party reception in 2011, his father-in-law cautioned Chinese comrades against the dangers of hubris. “We were in office for seventy-four years. You are at just about sixty-one,” he said, adding, “The last ten years are the worst.” As of this year, the Chinese Communists have matched the length of the Soviets’ tenure. I asked Wuttke how Americans might misread China from afar. “The twentieth century could have been the German century, but we screwed up—twice,” he said. “And the twenty-first century could have been the Chinese century, but they’re now running the risk this is not going to happen.” Xi, in the minds of some of his most accomplished citizens, has squandered that potential. The entrepreneur said, “Someone has to tell the Americans that the idea that China is going to overtake them is over. This guy has ended that game.”

A decade into Xi’s campaign for total control, he has awakened China’s beliefs, but not in the way he imagined. I spoke with a former banker who moved his family from Shanghai to Singapore, after concluding that his expertise on powerful people and their finances put him at risk. “Even though I love China, the nation is one thing and the government is another—it’s a group of individuals with power over the country for a brief period in the grand sweep of history,” he said. “I have no intention of overthrowing the government, nor do I have the ability. But there are truths that I believe Chinese citizens have the right to know. We’ve all been educated to say, ‘Better to keep our mouths shut.’ But this is wrong. When information doesn’t flow, the whole country will go backward.”

Xu, the economist who fled China, surprised me by describing this sort of political evolution as “enlightenment.” He explained that his father, a prominent physicist and dissident, had spent decades under house arrest, but never lost faith in a comment from Albert Einstein: “The state is made for man, not man for the state. . . . I regard it as the chief duty of the state to protect the individual and give him the opportunity to develop into a creative personality.” Xu told me, “Historically, Chinese people didn’t know anything about constitutionalism or human rights. The proportion who do now is still small, but the number who are enlightened is not small. They know. That is going to be part of the future.” ♦

New Yorker Favorites

As he rose in politics, Robert Moses discovered that decisions about New York City’s future would not be based on democracy .

The Muslim tamale king of the Old West .

Wendy Wasserstein on the baby who arrived too soon .

An Oscar-winning filmmaker takes on the Church of Scientology .

The young stowaways thrown overboard at sea .

Fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri: “ A Temporary Matter .”

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

The trace is not a presence ... exploring Chinese heritage through art

Exploring the passage of time and memory, this exciting range of works includes paintings, sculptures, ceramics, installations, videos and prints. They connect the artists’ material histories – including historical objects and cultural items – with their present lives. The works often draw on familiar iconography and materials but are reconfigured and adapted to tell artists’ personal stories. 

A ‘trace’, China Gallery curator Shuxia Chen explains, is the passage of time, history, and memory delved into by the artists for this exhibit.

“These pieces illustrate how traces can be fabricated, replicated and threaded into the present,” she said. “They explore the power of ephemeral and intangible elements in art, challenging notions of presence and absence.

“Objects that belonged to the past are a fundamental element of this exhibition, with the artists reclaiming these objects, transforming them to the present – transcending the material and the history they embodied.”

Historical documents and cultural objects complement the contemporary works by these renowned and emerging artists.

Fan Dongwang, ‘Willow Tree’, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Art Atrium Gallery.

Dongwang Fan will reclaim the iconic ‘Willow Pattern’, a design of willow trees that was appropriated in blue and white porcelain for European audiences. He reappropriates the pattern associated with Chinese culture and introduces elements of his Australian migration experience to his work. Fan has embraced a signature style, combining traditional Chinese carving techniques with new acrylic paintings. 

Jenna Lee, ‘Bound by thread’, 2021. Installation view, Hyphenated Biennial, The Substation, 2021. Image credit: Janelle Low

Jenna Lee, a Larrakia artist with Chinese, Japanese and Anglo Australian heritage, is presenting an exploration of core moments in Australian history through the lens of her own family history. Her work specifically relates to the pearl shell button industry in Australia during the late 1800s, reshaping found objects into new narratives. 

Cyrus Tang, ‘The Final Cast Off (Alice Lim Kee and Daisy Kwok)’, 2016-2017. Courtesy of the artist and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne. Image credit: Cyrus Tang

Cyrus Tang  presents video projection of recreated portraits made of charcoal mixed with the ashes of incense dissolving in water. The portraits are of two significant Australian-Chinese women, Alice Lim Kee and Daisy Kwok, who helped fundraise for war relief during World War II. Tang celebrates them as Chinese women who confronted and rejected traditional expectations and roles set upon them. Tang’s other presentation for this exhibit uses firing process in ceramic practice to transform a set of antique encyclopedias into new form, exploring the concept of knowledge and learning from our past. 

John Young, ‘Times Slow Passing #1’, 2023. Courtesy of the artist. Image credit: The Australian Print Workshop

An alumnus of Sydney College of the Arts,  John Young  returns to the University to present a project of retelling. His work is a replica of a palm-sized diary written by Chinese-Australian miner Jong Ah Siug who had come to Australia to find gold but was unjustly incarcerated for 33 years in lunatic asylums. He learnt English in an attempt to exonerate himself which he documented in his diary. Young hand-traced Jong Ah Siug’s words of broken English (with Cantonese grammar) to create his presentation, the process of which evoked reflections on agency, endurance and hope. The original diary, written in 1866 is displayed alongside Young’s prints.

Louise Zhang, ‘Python egg on scholar rock (large)’, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and N. Smith Gallery, Sydney. Image credit: Jessica Maurer

Louise Zhang 张露茜 is a Chinese-Australian multidisciplinary artist who presents sculptural works in her signature hyper-coloured and sugary palette. Zhang contrasts attraction and repulsion in her works to navigate the anxiety, fear and ‘otherness’ reflected in her identity. A 2024 Wynne Prize finalist, Zhang has developed a large following for works that mash together diverse references, like horror films and Chinese mythology. 

Michael Dagostino, Director of the Chau Chak Wing Museum said that this exhibition speaks to the rich history of the Chinese diaspora and its history in Australia.

"The Chinese diaspora in Australia is a unique story of migration, adaptation, and resilience. Its complexity lies not just in the varied origins and experiences of its people, but in how these narratives interlace to shape a multifaceted, dynamic heritage that enriches the Australian cultural landscape."

“ The trace is not a presence … tells the story of some of these unique perspectives, encouraging a visitor to learn and delve deeper about the materiality of an artist’s world. The artists and their works reject the concept of defining, instead embracing the ongoing journey of identity, of which doesn’t neatly fit one ideal but reflects the multifaceted experience of the artist and the sub-cultures of which they belong.”

Juliet Rayner

• 0418 374 544
• [email protected]

Visit the Chau Chak Wing Museum

• +61 2 9351 2812
• [email protected]
• University Place Camperdown NSW 2050 Chau Chak Wing Museum F21

Related articles

Max dupain captures university life in the cold war era, what an exchange to arnhem land taught one sydney student about the power of music, consuelo cavaniglia: seeing through you.

Visiting Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion? You must join the virtual exhibition queue when you arrive. If capacity has been reached for the day, the queue will close early.

How to Read Chinese Paintings

The Chinese way of appreciating a painting is often expressed by the words du hua , "to read a painting." How does one do that? Because art is a visual language, words alone cannot adequately convey its expressive dimension. How to Read Chinese Paintings seeks to visually analyze thirty-six paintings and calligraphies from the encyclopedic collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in order to elucidate what makes each a masterpiece.

Maxwell K. Hearn's elegantly erudite yet readable text discusses each work in depth, considering multiple layers of meaning. Style, technique, symbolism, past traditions, historical events, and the artist's personal circumstances all come into play. Spanning more than a thousand years, from the eighth through the seventeenth century, the subjects represented are particularly wide-ranging: landscapes, flowers, birds, figures, religious subjects, and calligraphies. All illuminate the main goal of every Chinese artist: to capture not only the outer appearance of a subject but also its inner essence. Numerous large color details, accompanied by informative captions, allow the reader to delve further into the most significant aspects of each work.

Together the text and illustrations gradually reveal many of the major themes and characteristics of Chinese painting. To "read" these works is to enter a dialogue with the past. Slowly perusing a scroll or album, one shares an intimate experience that has been repeated over the centuries. And it is through such readings that meaning is gradually revealed.

Met Art in Publication

You May Also Like

How to Read Chinese Ceramics

Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China

Along the Riverbank: Chinese Paintings from the C. C. Wang Family Collection

Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting

Straddling East and West: Lin Yutang, A Modern Literatus

Related content.

• Essay Nature in Chinese Culture
• Essay Art of the Edo Period (1615–1868)
• Essay Painting Formats in East Asian Art
• Essay Ming Dynasty (1368–1644)
• Essay Chinese Calligraphy
• Essay Landscape Painting in Chinese Art
• Essay Chinese Handscrolls

———, eds. 2008. How to Read Chinese Paintings ; [in Conjunction with the Exhibition Anatomy of a Masterpiece: How to Read Chinese Paintings Organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Held There from March 1 through August 10, 2008] . New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art [u.a.].