A national meeting was held in China on October 7-8, which formally advanced the concept of Xi Jinping Thought on Culture for the first time. In an instruction sent to the meeting, President Xi Jinping, who is also the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, called...
I hope this involves stuff like funding primary/secondary/tertiary education in the arts and opportunities for the display and appreciation of art such as concerts, festivals, competitions, and, museums, and not just commissioning obvious propaganda and tightening censorship. As much as I love communist media such as Minning Town and 1921, it's not improving the image of China or inspiring cultural self-confidence in people who aren't already pro-China. Instead, we need more contemporary and not-obviously-political works like Three Body and The Wandering Earth, Lexie Liu's The Happy Star, and The King's Avatar. And for traditional culture, independent creators like Dianxi Xiaoge, Chef Wang Gang, and Yin Que Shi Ting have done a million times more than anything commissioned by the out-of-touch geezers who run the propaganda department. What these all have in common is that they're made by people who have a genuine passion in an art or craft and have the opportunity to create works on their own terms.
And of course, there are things that should be done to promote desirable cultural values other than through art and media. It could be things like promoting group activities, team sports, and socializing in school while reducing the harsh workloads that many students face to a reasonable level, for example.
Have you read any Julius Deutsch on sport? He tried to develop a system of proltarian sport. Would be good to see China develop that and a similarly proletarian culture for export as well as domestically. It's doing some movie stuff but the Deutsch thing is decidedly less commodity-based. Maybe it's already doing similar things – it's hard to learn of this kind of thing from the outside.
I read somewhere that often when the Chinese talk about culture they are thinking about it in a more Confucian perspective and so often don't quite mean what we do when we say culture
Thanks for the link. It doesn't seem like the author makes any concrete suggestions for implementing anything. Curious to see how it would translate to actual legislation. But in my admittedly amateur opinion, I think stuff like Liu Cixin's works are a great avenue for inspiring cultural self-confidence and reinforcing socialist and Chinese values - it's interesting to people who aren't necessarily politically inclined and innocuous enough to make it on international platforms like Netflix, while still hinting at socialist values such as collectivism and international cooperation and making allusions to Chinese traditional culture.
The Battle at Lake Changjin was better than any American movie ever made, including that unwatchable piece of crap Citizen Kane, and I will die on this hill
mfw Westerners complain about how Lake Changjin is obvious, in-your-face propaganda that can't be taken seriously, and can't see the same is true of every Western war movie ever.
REEEEE FASCISM REEEEE PROMOTING YOUR OWN CULTURE IS NAZI ALL CULTURE IS SUPPOSED TO BE AMERICAN GLOBAL GIVE ME SOME MARVEL-STARWARS CROSSOVERS AND LIFESTYLE PODCASTS
funny, Rudolf Rocker would agree, but not in the way Xi does. An authoritarian state suppresses culture and all socialist ideas. With all due respect, I really like most of your memes, I just think that supporting state capitalism won't liberate us
Once people in the west show how to build something better than what China is doing then I'm all ears. So far, what we see in China is demonstrably better than what we see in the west pretty in every way that matters. China isn't perfect, but we need to compare its system to the real world alternatives available to us. Nobody says the west needs to copy what China is doing, but at there's clearly much to learn.
It's also not the place for westerners to tell Chinese people how to run their society. Seems to me that vast majority of people in China support their government and the way their political system works. If people in the west want to do something different, then nobody is stopping them.
I totally understand the point, I can't and don't want to tell the Chinese how to run their society.
I also agree that the West mutch can learn China.
I don't think "but we need to compare its system to the real world alternatives available to us." is a good argument. Its used by those in power to deny new ideas and stay on the status quo. Capitalists use the same argument to excuse their dysfunctional system.
Just think, if you want socialism, you should look at different approaches. Perhaps we can learn not only things from China, but also anarcho-syndicalism, troscism or other ideas.