CHINA
Official Country Name PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
Languages MANDARIN AND CHINESE DIALECTS
Population 1,384,688,986
Median Age 37.7
GDP Per Capita US $16,700
Source: CIA World Factbook
Total Value of Art Exported (UN Comtrade Database 2017) US $128,227,925
Arts Funding (Culture and Tourism) US $726,247,000
Art Programs (University Level) 383
Student Enrollment 1,758,702
Source: Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Education and AAP (non-official)
Museums Exhibiting Contemporary Art 230
Contemporary Art Galleries (Commercial) 497
Contemporary Art Spaces (Nonprofit) 194
Art Foundations (NGO + Private) 141
Sabrina Fu, Karen Lin
Source: AAP (non-official)
On October 1, Beijing came to a standstill to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, with a military parade and mass celebration in Tiananmen Square intended to demonstrate the enduring support for the regime of President Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Communist Party of China and chairman of the Central Military Commission. The government’s attempts to consolidate its power have been far-reaching, impacting Chinese citizens at home and abroad, and entangling China in a host of international disputes.
For Chinese citizens, the official ideology of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” is now taught in schools, announced on billboards and posters, and cited daily in the news media. The state has also launched increasingly restrictive forms of digital surveillance, exemplified by the smartphone app named “Study the Great Nation,” which has been downloaded by more than 100 million people, who are given daily scores for watching news of President Xi and memorizing socialist principles. The app also allows the government to track users’ locations and access all their communications.
Freedom of expression is highly curtailed in the media, digital forums, and cultural fields. WeChat users report that their conversations are deleted when certain sensitive topics, including the 2019 Hong Kong protests, crop up. The nationwide social credit score system, set to be rolled out by 2020, has not progressed beyond a series of regional initiatives, though already the system has banned millions of people from buying train or airplane tickets.
Meanwhile in China’s far west, Muslim minorities (primarily Uighurs, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and the Hui) in the Xinjiang Autonomous region have been targeted in a brutal crackdown since an uprising against the Han majority in 2014. More than one million Muslims have been detained in camps, purportedly for re-education. The region’s remaining Muslim residents are tightly surveilled.
Xi’s administration has increasingly pressured international companies—from Apple to hotel chain Marriott, the NBA, clothing retailers Givenchy, Coach, the Gap, and Versace, and others—to retract statements or advertisements perceived as slights over its territorial ambitions or ideological positions. Though assertive, and despite a “truce” announced in late June at the G20 Summit in Osaka, China has struggled to negotiate a way out of trade disputes with the United States. Combined with the decline in the value of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which consists of infrastructure projects in 61 countries, China’s economic growth has slowed to the lowest level in more than 27 years, hovering at around six percent.
In the art field, censorship at exhibitions and art fairs is routine, as each work must be submitted for approval before display. A retrospective of Chinese-American painter Hung Liu, due to be held at UCCA Beijing in December, was canceled when the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture refused to grant import licenses for the works. Ahead of the November launch of the Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum in Shanghai, “fewer than five works” were not approved for display, according to Pompidou president Serge Lasvignes.
BEIJING
Funded by the Ministry of Culture, China’s major state-run art institution is the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), which held over 30 shows over the course of 2019. The vast majority of these short-running exhibitions play into tropes of nationalist ideology and use artworks from across history to display a unified national identity, as in “Mount Meru in the Beyond, Lotus of the Other Shore – Exhibition of Treasure Tibetan Thang-ga Art” (7/5–14) and “The Love of Rivers and Mountains – Exhibition of Qin Dahu’s Oil Painting Works” (7/4–14).
On the eastern flank of Tiananmen Square is the , which chiefly hosts ethnographic presentations in support of a similar cohesive nationalist narrative, epitomized by shows such as “Derived from
