Sorry for the sabbatical…post-Olympic malaise plus the start of a new semester and a few key research deadlines, conspired to push my little hobby to the back burner.
I know he’s a divisive figure, love ‘em or hate ‘em, but he’s always worth reading. Check out this piece in The American Scholar by Ha Jin on “The Censor in the Mirror.”
Rigid censorship not only chokes artistic talent but also weakens the Chinese populace, who are forced to be less imaginative and less inventive. The crisis in education has been a hot topic in China for years. Why are so many Chinese students good at taking tests but poor at analytical thinking? Why are many Chinese college graduates less creative and innovative than college graduates in the West? Besides the commercialization of education, the absence of a free, tolerant environment has stunted the intellectual growth of students and teachers. People often ask how many great original thinkers and artists modern China has contributed to the world, and how many original products China has created on its own. Very few, considering that the country has 1.3 billion people. True, China is richer than before, but its wealth relies on duplicating and emulating foreign products. Such wealth is temporary and will dwindle away. Without its own original cultural and material products, a country can never stay rich and strong. In other words, the real wealth a country has is the talent of its people. In the case of China, the way to nurture that talent is to lift the yoke of censorship.
Amen, brother…and we hardly need limit such sentiments to the PRC.
2 responses so far ↓
1 wu ming // Oct 2, 2008 at 3:18 pm
while i applaud ha jin’s general argument, this line struck me as strange:
People often ask how many great original thinkers and artists modern China has contributed to the world, and how many original products China has created on its own.
just because the (english speaking, western) world doesn’t care about the wealth of modern chinese thinkers and artists doesn’t mean they’re not out there, their talents honed by learning how to evade, criticize, and work around stupid and oppressive censorship laws.
just because chinese artists and writers don’t roll off the tongues of your average american (whom i suspect ha jin is imagining when he says “the world”) doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy, it just means that there’s a dearth of translators and a long history of the western world assuming that the only thing worth reading from their former colonies is their classical stuff, not their postcolonial writings and art.
internalized orientalism, IMO. i’m all for no censorship and freer modes of education and letting the people achieve their potential without being stomped on by petty tyrants and second rate minds (in all countries including my own, not just china), but this constant imagined judging of china by the world is such a tired and irritating refrain.
2 NateT // Oct 15, 2008 at 5:13 am
“internalized orientalism, IMO”
Perhaps for the cultural part. I might be weird but I found there to be quite a bit of acting talent in China. One of the best TV shows I have ever seen (it was about Ji Yun, Tiechi Tongya Ji Xaolan) was Chinese. While this area of talent might not be recognized worldwide, it is still talent.
One thing I noticed when I lived in China is the looking to the outside world for justification and pride, which I found very unusual for a country with what had seemed to me a strong nationalist identity. Could it be that there is a small worm of imagined national inferiority in the Chinese national consciousness?
But in the product, they have a point. In most commercial situations creation pays quite a bit better than replication. While many larger companies have located R&D resources in China, most produce refinements to existing products and services (in my experience) rather than generate new products. The education system in Singapore has tried to deal with this same issue by instituting a kind of creativity class into their education system, from what I understand.
Leave a Comment