In a speech given last October, and published in a Party theoretical journal on January 1st (Happy New Year!), China's President, Hu Jintao, throws down the cultural gauntlet:

“We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration….  We should deeply understand the seriousness and complexity of the ideological struggle, always sound the alarms and remain vigilant, and take forceful measures to be on guard and respond….”

I guess he really didn't like that last Lady Gaga song…

But seriously, it is obvious what is going on here, and it is not really anything new for China or for anywhere else in the (post)modern world for that manner.

Hu is expressing a certain anxiety regarding the instability and fluidity of national cultural identity.  Rick Santorum is pretty much with him on this, except, of course, Santorum blames "liberalism" and "hedonism," instead of "Westernization," and also would find the primary source of the problem in domestic politics as opposed to "international hostile forces" (although those European socialists are pretty dangerous….).  But the rest of it – the fear of some sort of cultural corruption; the need for vigilance in protecting the most essential aspects of cultural identity; the cultural division of the nation; the nostalgia for a purer cultural past – it's all pretty standard culture warrior talk.  Wonder what Santorum would say if he realized he was down with the CCP party line….

The quesiton, then, for Hu and Santorum and anyone who thinks he or she can somehow stop cultural change is: what is to be done? 

For Hu the answer is top-down, state control of cultural production and exchange.  That is why they are banning inane TV shows and working hard to gain "soft power" for the PRC (big PDF!).  But this strategy will certainly fail, and it will fail because it misunderstands how "culture" is produced and disseminated.

First, let's just note that the term "culture" is problematic.  What are we including in it?  I think most uses of the term tend to idealize certain practices and ideas and traditions as being essential to certain cultural identities.  In China, "Confucianism" invariably is invoked when talking about "Chinese culture."  But we need to be careful. Culture is always and everywhere larger and more dynamic than any one referent (like "Confucianism") or time period.  Culture changes; indeed, culture is always and constantly changing.  What Chinese culture is now is not what it was in the time of Confucius, much less the time of Mao, or even the time of Zhao Ziyang.  We must be open to a definition of "culture" as what people are actually doing now.  And by that definition the Carsick Cars – a popular Chinese rock band – are as much of Chinese culture as Confucius.

With that understanding of "culture" in mind, we should realize that many, many cultural products and productions are created not by the state but within civil society.  Joseph Nye, the great guru of "soft power" reminded of this last year:

After my lecture at Beijing University, a student asked how China could increase its soft power. I suggested that he ask himself why India’s Bollywood films command far greater international audiences than do Chinese films. Does India have better directors and actors? When Zhang Yimou, the acclaimed Chinese director, was asked a similar question, he replied that films about contemporary China are neutered by the censors. I told the student that much of a country’s soft power is generated by its civil society and that China had to lighten up on its censorship and controls if it wished to succeed. But I also admitted that he would probably not find my answer very helpful.

Culture, and especially cultural change, is driven by creativity, and creativity is not simply planned and executed by bureaucrats, whether state or corporate.  It emerges from workshops and theaters and garages, from within the minds of small groups of creative individuals.  

Hu Jintao does not get that.  He also does not get that a lot of what is created culturally will be bad, at least as judged by the standards of "high cultural" elite intellectuals and impresarios.  Rock and Roll, when it was first created, was seen as degenerate, even dangerous (I remember my father reacting to the Beatles when they first appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, shouting: "Apes, apes.") .  Now, of course, rock and roll is a completely mainstream cultural medium, an element of global popular culture.  

Culture can also be produced from the top-down.  States can sponsor artistic and academic work that spawns significant and popular cultural products.  But that is, I suspect, a lesser element of the broader phenomenon than "popular culture" or "low culture." 

Long story short: Hu wants to try to control culture, but in doing that he stifles it.  Yes, passage 29 of the Daodejing comes to mind here: "try to improve it and you ruin it.  Try to hold it and you lose it."  He wants to censor and manage from the top down, a move that will stifle the wider and more dynamic potential for cultural creativity within civil society.  He wants to blame the "West" for the inevitability of cultural change.  He wants to instill fear in Chinese people, fear of cultural change, in order to bolster the political power of the authoritarian regime.  He wants to deny that what many Chinese people are actually doing now is legitimately a part of "Chinese culture."  

And he will lose.  Because you can't stop cultural change.  You can't blame it on foreign bogey men.  You can't deny people their cultural expressions, even if they don't align with some ossified definition of "culture."  For example, here is a video of the Carsick Cars doing their now classic tune "Zhongnanhai" on this past New Year's Eve in Beijing (i.e. just as Hu's speed was about to be published).  A person who was there reported: "The doors to the club closed at 10:30 when there was a line of at least 200 people still waiting in the frigid weather to get in.  They had been in line for nearly two hours and many had said on various websites that they were taking time away from studying for final exams just to catch them." 

I would argue that this now counts as "Chinese culture:"

http://player.youku.com/player.php/sid/XMzM4NTMwNTky/v.swf