Cultural Work to Be ‘Purified’ : China’s Writers, Artists Feel Chill of Crackdown

It was just five months ago today when artist Xiao Lu opened fire with a pellet gun on her own “destruction art” sculpture at Beijing’s China Art Gallery, when Gao Qiang fashioned three meteorological balloons into giant breasts and suspended them from the gallery’s ceiling to “oppose tradition” and when Wang Guangyi placed a sign next to his huge, cubified portraits of Mao Tse-tung that declared, “A great figure should be evaluated objectively and soberly.”

The exhibit, entitled, “China/Avant Garde,” was billed as “the largest modern art show in Communist China’s 40-year history,” and the state-controlled China Daily newspaper said it “testifies to the government’s growing tolerance toward art.” Papers throughout Asia and the West proclaimed it the turning point for artistic expression in a new China.

The exhibit’s logo: a “No U Turn” road sign.

Although the show’s organizers could not have known it at the time, nothing could have been further from reality.

This week, through a series of official proclamations, subtle implications and, some sources say, secret arrests, China’s new hard-line leadership has made it clear that its current purge of liberalism and pro-democratic forces will go well beyond politics and into art, literature, film and journalism, fields that were blossoming with new-found freedom before the crackdown began last month.

In the aftermath of the brutal June 3-4 army assault on the pro-democracy movement in Beijing, security police have quietly been interrogating or arresting lesser-known artists, writers, reporters and actresses, in addition to the student leaders who commanded the weeks of popular protest in Tian An Men Square.

Now, the government is beginning to put up road signs of its own--strong signals that it wants to “purify” and re-educate not only the political participants in the protests but the artistic community as well, weaning both groups from what China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, has called “evil influences from the West.”

On Tuesday, Wang Renzhong, a senior Communist Party official, announced that an often-quoted government policy, “Let 100 flowers bloom, let 100 schools of thought contend,” remains unchanged. But it must be “better implemented,” he stressed.

But a more significant development, according to several cultural and political analysts here, was revealed in a state-run television program Monday night, in which two prominent writers argued strongly that Chinese artists must closely study Mao’s principles on the arts and literature, as outlined in a May, 1942, speech.

‘Unity of Politics, Art’

In that speech Mao declared: “What we demand is unity of politics and art, of context and form and of the revolutionary political content and the highest degree of perfection in artistic form.” It was used as ideological underpinning for the repressive Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, when thousands of artists were arrested or sent to work camps.

Although few analysts said they expect a repeat, they said they saw the appeal for a return to the aesthetic austerity of Mao’s teachings as a concrete sign of the depth of the current purge.

“The propaganda may be largely cosmetic,” said one Western analyst close to the Beijing arts community. “But the secret arrests certainly are not.”

Sources at several state-controlled daily newspapers in Beijing said young reporters who joined in or sympathized with the pro-democracy movement have been arrested in recent weeks. Mid-level party officials in several ministries, among them culture and foreign affairs, have been detained and interrogated, they said. And many artists and writers reportedly are now trying to escape China through an underground network that has been used by several student leaders.

The party has yet to publicly initiate stricter censorship or begin removing volumes from the shelves of bookstores. But it has launched a propaganda campaign in the bookshops and art stores that is as intensive as it is unpopular.

The government’s biggest downtown bookstore on Tuesday had sold all 4,000 copies it had been given of a party-produced, 149-page volume entitled “Quelling of the Counterrevolutionary Rebellion.” The book praises the soldiers who fired on civilians during the assault, in which at least several hundred are believed to have been killed, as “guardians of the People’s Republic,” and it explains how the protest movement was actually an attempt to overthrow the party leadership.

But a clerk in the store confided, “Nobody really wanted to read it. It was bought by enterprises and businesses for study sessions.” And on the shop’s second floor, where “edited” photographs of the bloody crackdown are on sale, another clerk revealed Beijing’s popular cynicism when she told an American customer: “This book doesn’t show anything about tanks crushing people in the (Tian An Men) square. Don’t yours?”

Despite the skepticism, it is clear that the government’s subtle campaign against the artists, writers and intellectuals who remain sympathetic to the movement already is having an effect.

Many of Beijing’s artists are in hiding. Those who speak about the purge say they do so only out of a sense of continuing obligation and responsibility to their cause. Even then, they demand anonymity.

Here is how one young woman painter, who was involved in the protests, described the party leadership and its new line:

“They are obsolete. The problem is, when culture goes up against barbarism, there is no way to have a dialogue. It’s like a person trying to speak to a snake.

“Under this government’s domination and control, I can never use the potential that I have. I have discovered thoroughly after this period that they basically don’t need any culture at all.

“They have left me with a feeling of dread, and they have made the world fear them.”

Reacting to the party’s use of Mao and his teachings to justify the campaign, the young artist, who blends traditional Chinese folk art with modern Expressionism, echoed the sentiments of many of her colleagues in saying that, like the logo for the avant-garde show, China’s artists had gone well beyond the point of no return in realizing their freedom of expression before the pro-democracy movement erupted on the streets.

“Mao said that art should serve politics and that artists should express the masses’ sentiments, but art must have its own domain within itself,” she said. “Artists all have their own lives, and all of their own realities or feelings can never be unified into just one. Every person has their own individuality.

“So, speaking from an art perspective, if there were no individuality in art, then it would not exist. . . . If you paint the feelings of the masses, you’re not making art. You are just a political tool.”

To understand the depth of such a commitment to individuality and free expression is to understand the popular backdrop that the artists’ community provided for the student-led democracy movement.

Indeed, the avant-garde show climaxed a nearly yearlong relaxation of the strict artistic rules originally laid down in Mao’s 1942 speech.

As early as last fall, poets and intellectuals, with the tacit encouragement of senior party members such as former party chief Zhao Ziyang, were gathering in dingy Beijing dance halls for political readings and discussions that stressed the need for a new democratic order in China.

Then came the first nude art show ever in Communist China, a prelude to the avant-garde exhibit.

More than 200,000 people attended the 18-day exhibit of nude paintings, which opened in December. In statements now viewed as extraordinary, the state-run New China News Agency quoted Ying Ruocheng, vice minister of culture, as saying the show had “positive social significance.” The agency itself declared the exhibit “triumphant,” adding that it was “lauded by high-ranking cultural officials, as well as farmers, soldiers and ordinary citizens.”

Barely a month later, during the avant-garde exhibit at the same gallery, the artists went a step further, defying a government ban on what the Chinese call “action art”--living sculpture in which the artists participate in their exhibits.

Artist Wang Deren threw condoms and small change at his audience as he tried to make an artistic statement on China’s population of 1.1 billion. Another artist, Zhang Nianchao, simply sat inert on a nest of straw filled with chicken eggs, wearing a sign around her neck that proclaimed: “All theories are rejected so as not to bother the next generation.”

The uniformed police at the show permitted it all--until, three hours after the opening Feb. 5, Xiao Lu fired two rounds from a pellet gun at the two telephone booths she had built for her exhibit, “Dialogue.”

Lu was arrested and the show was closed, but she was later released after serving a five-day sentence for public disorder. The controversial show officially reopened.

In April, a heavily political exhibit of Chinese Expressionism opened at Beijing’s Museum of Revolutionary Chinese History, which chronicled the growing ills of Chinese society and relied heavily on Western techniques and philosophy. In the words of artist Ma Gang, 27, quoted in a government magazine at the time: “The appearance of this exhibition presents a challenge to our new era, no matter how moderate that may be . . . “

But now, just two months after that show closed, there are no political exhibits at all at Beijing’s prominent museums.

Nick Driver, The Times’ research assistant in Beijing, contributed to this story.