【纽约时报111107】中国着手促进文化大发展
本帖最后由 weater76 于 2011-11-8 15:51 编辑【中文标题】中国着手促进文化大发展
【原文标题】China Tries to Add Cultural Clout to Economic Muscle
【登载媒体】纽约时报
【来源地址】http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/world/asia/china-seeks-cultural-influence-to-match-economic-muscle.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
【翻译方式】 人工
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【译 文】
An art exhibition this month at the Sunshine International Art Museum in Songzhuang, an artists' colony in suburban Beijing.
在北京郊区的艺术家村宋庄，这是本月阳光国际艺术馆的一场展出。
BEIJING — Last month, the cream of the Communist Party leadership gathered here to proclaim a national effort to make China a cultural tastemaker, one whose global creative influence matches its economic clout. “A nation cannot stand among great powers,” the official party newspaper People’s Daily said on its front page, “without its people’s spiritual affluence and the nation’s full expression of its creativity.”
The question is how to square that goal with what just happened to Yue Luping.
Mr. Yue, a professional artist for more than 10 years, was preparing his works for an exhibition in the Shunyi District of north Beijing last month when government officials and police officers abruptly canceled the show.
The next day, he said, agents of the local Public Security Bureau interrogated him about one work, a collection of peppercorns arranged to form numbers. Security officers had already photographed the piece, studied it for an entire night and consulted cryptography experts to divine its message.
As they eventually discovered, the numbers were in a computer language, Unicode, spelling out five phrases that Chinese censors have banned from the results of Internet search engines. And the pungent peppercorns were a metaphor for what Mr. Yue called people’s undue sensitivity to ordinary words.
（北京消息）上月，中国的领导精英们聚集在这里，宣布将举国之力将中国打造成文化强国，让国家的文化影响力与经济实力相匹配。党报《人民日报》在头版发表文章：“一个国家的崛起离不开人民的精神富裕和民主的创新能力”。
问题在于，在岳路平的遭遇之后，如何继续朝这项目标前进。
岳先生是拥有超过十年职业经历的艺术家，在上月北京顺义为个人展出准备时，被政府官员和警察突然阻止。
他说，当地公安局探员因为一件作品对他进行了审问，这件作品是由花椒排成的数字。安全官员已经拍照记录了作品，对此研究了一整个晚上，还咨询了密码学专家来分析其意义。
他们最终发现这串数字用计算机语言Unicode写成，代表五个被中国监管者在搜索引擎中屏蔽的敏感词。刺鼻的花椒被岳先生比喻成对平常词语不必要的敏感。
“It’s very ironic,” Mr. Yue, 36, said in an interview last week. “On the one hand, they want to boost cultural development. And on the other, they call off our exhibition.”
Ironic is one way to describe it. But viewed against the language of the party’s declaration on culture — the Oct. 25 report on the annual Central Committee plenum, held last month — there is not much inconsistency at all, some analysts say.
Rather, they suggest, the leaders’ approach to building a world-class culture is not all that different from the one that powered China’s economic miracle: set a long-term goal, adopt rigid specifications, pour in copious amounts of public money, monitor closely to ensure the desired result.
In this case, as the report repeatedly stated, the specifications are to adhere to “core socialist values” in cultural activities. The desired result is “to build our country into a socialist culture superpower.”
The monitoring affects artists like Mr. Yue and Yu Jianrong, a painter and photographer whose works — on the petitions prepared annually by thousands of ordinary Chinese whose grievances have been ignored by the government — were banned two weeks ago from being exhibited in Songzhuang, a suburban Beijing artists’ colony.
36岁的岳路平在上星期的采访中说：“这很带讽刺性，一方面他们要推动文化进步，另一方面他们叫停我们的展出。”
讽刺是一种描述方法。不过和党在文化方面的话语体系相矛盾——上月25日召开的年度中央全会上，一些分析人士称和以前并没有太大不同。
他们表示领导人对提升中国文化影响的思路与推动中国经济发展的思路别无二致：设定一个长期目标，制定刚性规范，投入大量财政资金，紧密监控以确保目标实现。
因而，报告反复强调，在文化活动中要坚持“社会主义核心价值”，目标是“把我国建设成为社会主义文化强国”。
被监控的艺术家包括岳路平和于建嵘，后者作为一名画家和摄影师，其作品主要反映了每年成百上千普通中国人的冤屈被政府置之不顾的处境。他们的作品在北京郊区艺术家村宋庄的展出在两周前被禁止。
Mr. Yu declined to be interviewed. But The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong quoted a microblog post, since deleted, in which Mr. Yu wrote that exhibition officials in Songzhuang had told him that “the situation this year is tense, and no sensitive topics are allowed.”
Such tales show that there is nothing ironic about the current censorship, said Zhang Ming, a political science professor at Renmin University of China.
“The government is overconfident about controlling art,” he said. “They think as long as they provide money and they provide a value orientation, there can be good art produced. This is not surprising at all, because they have never experienced the process of free expression.”
In that view, the notion is lost on Chinese leaders that a great culture — whether in painting, science or journalism — rests on people’s abilities to push the boundaries of creativity, no matter whom it offends.
There is much to support that view, including the arrest in April of the internationally famous artist and dissident Ai Weiwei and the banning of literature like “The Fat Years,” Chan Koonchung’s bleak depiction of a China-dominated future.
于先生没有接受采访。但是香港《南华早报》引用一条已被删除的微博，其中于建嵘说明宋庄的展览官员告诉他“今年形势很紧张，敏感主题的展出都不允许。”
中国人民大学的政治学教授张鸣说，如此案例显示了在目前的监管制度下也没什么讽刺性。
“政府对控制艺术太有信心了”，他说，“他们以为只要他们提供资金和价值观取向，优秀的艺术作品就能被创造出来。这一点也不令人惊讶，因为他们从来没有体会过自由表达是怎么样的。”
支持这一观点有很多案例，包括四月份对国际著名艺术家和异见人士艾未未的拘捕，以及禁止发行陈冠中对未来中国悲观预期的小说《盛世中国》。
Not a few officially approved commentaries cast Chinese culture as a sort of zero-sum contest with its rivals. Xinhua, the government news agency, described the challenge last month as an “international cultural competition,” in which controlling the world stage is one more hurdle to surmount in a triathlon toward global greatness.
“Chinese cultural companies have yet to produce a world-famous brand,” that commentary groused, offering a litany of shortcomings: China’s television programs have an “embarrassing” export record; its total published literature does not approach the output of a single German firm, Bertelsmann.
Most embarrassing, the 1998 animated film “Mulan,” based on a Chinese heroine, was produced by the Walt Disney Studios in California. “China has yet to produce an animated film as internationally successful,” the commentary said.
There is an alternative view in the party’s report last month on culture, one that hints at a less rigorous official stance. That view points to other snippets of the report — led, ironically, by a famous statement by Mao Zedong, the leader whose Cultural Revolution plunged China into years of repression and torment.
不少官方认同的观点认为中国文化在于对手较量时毫无表现。官方通讯社新华社上月将这一挑战描述为“国际文化竞争”，并认为这是中国走向世界舞台中的一大障碍。
“中国的文化公司并没有创造出世界知名品牌”，评论提供了一连串的缺点：中国的电视节目出口拥有“令人窘迫”的数量；文学作品的总出版量还不及德国一家贝塔斯曼公司。
最令人尴尬的是，1998年动漫电影《花木兰》基于中国女英雄的传说，却在加利福尼亚的沃尔特•迪斯尼公司制作。新华社评论说：“中国尚未生产一部在国际上成功的动漫电影。”
上个月的文化报告一些片段也可以看出官方限制不那么严格了，引述了毛泽东曾经的一个观点——尽管在文化大革命中他给中国带来了多年的灾难。
But before that, in 1956, Mao made a famous speech in which he summoned ordinary Chinese to speak out about their needs: “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” he said, “and a hundred schools of thoughts contend.”
The report repeated those words verbatim, citing them as a guiding principle for China’s cultural development. Other passages call for an “opening and reform” in China’s cultural development, echoing the economic approach to the rest of the world that spurred China’s growth over the last two decades.
Liang Xiaosheng, an author and a government-appointed member of China’s legislative advisory body, said last week that Mao’s statement and other clauses in the report are a muted call for more artistic freedom, at least over the long haul.
“In China, the policy won’t be quickly carried out because the executors need a digesting and understanding process,” he said. “Even a small step for China may take as long as 10 years.”
不过在之前的1956年，毛泽东在一场著名演讲中鼓励普通中国人说出他们的愿望：“百花齐放，百家争鸣。”
报告一字不差地重复了这句话，并将它作为指引中国文化发展的原则。另外一些段落则称之为中国文化发展的“改革开放”，与中国在过去二十年经济发展的巨大成就相对照。
全国政协委员、作家梁晓声上周表示，报告中毛泽东的论断和其他语句至少在长期内反映了对艺术自由的期待。
“中国的政策不会迅速发挥作用，因为执行者需要消化和理解的过程”，他说，“即便在中国走一小步也可能花费十年”。
People here pay great attention to history. Mao’s hundred-flowers campaign was a disaster. Freed to say their piece, intellectuals denounced government repression and incompetence, and party leaders quickly reverted to a crackdown on expression.
It may not be lost on the creative community that Mao quickly replaced his hundred-flowers campaign with an anti-rightist movement in which hundreds of thousands of intellectuals were stripped of their jobs, with many of them sent to labor camps. Mao later said he had been seeking to lure the snakes from their dens in order to cut off their heads.
In China, then as now, liberalization and crackdown reliably — and unpredictably — ebb and flow.
人们对历史表现了极大的关注。毛泽东的百花齐放运动演变成了一场灾难。知识分子以为能够自由发言，他们谴责了政府的无能与压制，党的领导人很快就将放言转化为打压。
艺术创造者们不会忘记毛泽东迅速将他的百花齐放运动转向为反右运动，成百上千的知识分子被迫离开岗位，他们中的许多被送往劳改。毛泽东随后说他通过引蛇出洞再砍头。
至今为止，中国对自由化的打击仍然不可预测，犹如潮起潮落。
Free-thinking students spawned the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, which, in turn, provoked a new crackdown that has lasted to this day. Which may explain one genuine irony: when asked, some of the artists who organized the Shunyi and Songzhuang exhibitions chose to pretend that their colleagues were not censored at all.
Free-speech principles or not, some artists here appear to have no appetite for trouble.
“There is some misunderstanding going on,” Shen Qibing, an organizer of the exhibition that was to have shown Mr. Yue’s peppercorn art, said in a telephone interview. “The exhibition was called off because more and more artists are trying to sign up for the exhibition, and we feel we have a lot of work to do.
“I am the executive organizer,” he said. “I know what is going on. Some of the artists try to exaggerate things.”
自由思想的学生在天安门广场行走集会，最终导致了延续至今的对自由思想的镇压。这或许可以解释一个真正的讽刺：当向顺义和宋庄组织展览的艺术家询问他们的同事是否被监视时，他们假装说一点也没有。
无论是否支持自由的原则，一些艺术家对招惹麻烦并没有特殊的兴趣。
“对这里发生了什么存在误解”，本该展览岳路平花椒作品的展览策展人沈其斌在电话采访中说，“因为越来越多的艺术家希望参展，我们感觉工作量太大，这才取消了展览”。
“我是执行的组织者”，他说，“我知道发生了什么，一些艺术家试图夸大其词”。
看了这篇文章才明白，原来在中国只有艾末末的艺术才算得上是艺术~
我估计作者连百家争鸣是什么意思都不清楚就来抨击毛的政策哦 讽刺、隐晦、自私、矫情——这是艺术？老百姓知道吗？看得懂吗？警察凑什么热闹？让他搞吧！别围观、他就不亢奋。
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