As he considered going home he returned again to the ‘My Identity’ series, which, when he had completed it in 2003, had seemed to be the final word on his struggle with who he was. Now he added a new photograph to the set in which he imagined himself as a painter in a contemporary Lhasa studio. On every visit home since his first in 2004 he had haunted the Lhasa studios of the thangka painters, fascinated by their eclecticism and charmed by their habit of always leaving their doors open for visitors.
In the new photograph, which is called My Identity, no. 5, Gonkar surrounds himself with the décor he had seen in the thangka painters’ studios: prayer wheels flanked by Coca-Cola cans, pictures of American pro basketballers sharing wall space with posters of Chinese leaders, a small statue of the Buddha and a bust of Mao serving as bookends to a shrine to the exiled Karmapa Lama. On the easel, where in earlier versions of the series portraits of Mao and the Dalai Lama had once sat, rests a portrait in progress of Aung San Suu Kyi.
‘She is a big figure in Tibet,’ he told me. ‘She is seen as a fighter, someone who had been defeated for many years and now has emerged. She embodies a kind of hope.’
In November 2015 Gonkar flew into Chengdu in China’s southwestern Sichuan province. The city sits just to the east of the Tibetan plateau and is home to many Tibetans. There he reacclimatises to life in China and waits to organise his return to Lhasa, where he hopes one day he, too, will run an open studio like the thangka painters of his home town.
At the same time that Gonkar was choosing to go home, Guo Jian was settling into his life as an exile. The first months he spent restlessly, travelling on from Sydney to New York and then to Miami, where he recreated his meat-covered Tiananmen Square at the North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art.
Back in Sydney in 2015 he started to engage with the issues that were wracking his second home of Australia, particularly around immigration and asylum seekers, looking for ways to connect as an artist. But before he could move on he was determined to recreate the work that he had made back in China, which exposed the trashed environment and ‘rubbish culture’ of his home province of Guizhou.
When he had been deported he had had to leave all his works behind, but his photographs were still safe in his laptop. Now, with the support of the Sydney philanthropist Judith Neilson, he painstakingly reassembled the photomontage he called Picturesque Scenery 26. To create it, he had used the photos he had been taking of riverbank and street rubbish when I visited him in Guizhou in 2014. He had isolated the faces of the celebrities on the discarded packaging and assembled them into what from a distance looked like a pointillist Chinese landscape. Closer inspection showed the peaks and the shimmering water in which they were reflected to be made up of thousands of these discarded celebrity faces.
And yet for all the darkness behind this work, Guo Jian remains optimistic about what China could be. ‘It’s about the system,’ he says. ‘A good environment can make people into good people.’ He knew this, he told me, because he had seen it. ‘For a short time, in Beijing in 1989, you saw everybody helping each other. Just for that moment it was a different society.’
In March 2016 Guo Jian’s Picturesque Scenery 26 was hung in an exhibition at Judith Neilson’s private museum in Sydney, White Rabbit Gallery. The exhibition was called ‘Heavy Artillery’.
Sheng Qi has embraced the life of exile. He values the perspective his distance gives him on China, which is and will remain his subject.
Like Guo Jian, he is optimistic. He points to the lively online space that still exists in China despite all attempts by the government to shut it down. ‘People who want to express a view can always find a channel and even if the discussion is shut down after an hour or two, in that length of time in China a post can attract a million hits! The censors close one hole and another opens up. No manpower can beat it.’ And meanwhile, he says, more and more people jump the Great Firewall to find out what things are like on the other side.
He believes that the role of an artist is to be a witness to history, and a custodian of memory.
I ask him if he doesn’t find his position lonely. ‘If you are a radical artist, you should feel like this, you should feel isolated,’ he told me. ‘You should never be popular, you should be alone, because to be alone is powerful. It isn’t being surrounded by people, but by being alone—that’s where the power comes from.’
In December 2015 I visited Huang Rui at 798. He was busy putting together a design proposal for a park in southern China. His elegant sketches for giant park sculptures suggested a cluster of columns like the standing stones in the ruins of the Old Summer Palace. But when viewed from above, the arrangement of the columns spelt out the word ‘love’.
Not far from 798 he was doing more work on his home and studio, which he hoped one day to make into a kind of ‘Stars Institute’ where other artists, Chinese and foreign, could come to live and work. He had built some of the structure out of found materials: old grey bricks salvaged from the demolition of China’s hutong houses formed its retaining walls. The front door was a wooden gate rescued from the ‘renovation’ of the Beijing mansion of the Qing Dynasty statesman Prince Gong.
Inside the house hung a painting called Democracy Wall. He had painted it in the summer of 1981 when the wall was already passing into history. There on the canvas was his friend Bei Dao and his fellow poet Gu Cheng, and someone selling a magazine with a blue cover off a pedal cart. There was his girlfriend, and off to the side was his friend Liu Qing, who by the time he had painted him had been imprisoned for more than eighteen months but still hadn’t been brought to trial. The painting was a symphony of grey and blue—the blue of the clothes everyone wore back then, and the grey of Democracy Wall. He would never sell the painting, he told me, and he had made a private pledge when he finished it. From then on, every painting he worked on would include a touch of grey in honour of the Beijing of his youth, and of the wall where thousands of his contemporaries had their first experience of speaking for themselves and being heard. It is a pledge he has never broken.
Before I left Beijing at the end of 2015 I dropped in to visit Cao Fei in her new studio in the eastern suburbs of Beijing. It was a wonderful space, an abandoned movie theatre, still with its old mouldings and theatrical lighting. The Beijing authorities had closed the theatre down in 2008 when they swept the capital in the months before the Olympics.
The building was perfect for a studio, and I started to enthuse about all the things she could do there in the future, but she cut me off. That would never happen, she told me: the city’s development would soon catch up with it and it would be gone. But she was philosophical: ‘In China you never expect anything to last for very long.’
Writing the early chapters of this book, I visualised the recent history of China as a series of waves, each peak a period of openness and freedom, each trough a reversal. There is no doubt now that we are seeing a trough, one of the deepest of the last four decades.
The intense crackdown on China’s civil society, which began with the ascension of President Xi Jinping in late 2012, is now in its fourth year and shows no sign of slackening. Instead, an ever-widening circle of people is being caught up in a campaign to silence alternative voices.
In July 2015 a major police operation targeting China’s rights lawyers was launched across the nation. More than 300 people were picked up for questioning and nineteen were charged after months in secret detention. The severity of the charges shocked even the most seasoned observers of China’s human rights record. Five were charged with ‘incitement to subversion of state power’, the same crime that saw Liu Xiaobo imprisoned for eleven years in 2009. Eleven more faced indictment for the graver crime of ‘subversion of state power’, which can carry a life sentence. Among them was a 23-year-old paralegal who had started her job in the practice of rights lawyer Li Heping a scant nine months previously.
Censorship has now reached heights not seen since the months after June 4 1989. The policing of the int
ernet has intensified, while the intolerance of alternative views has reached even into the party itself, with cadres being informed that no ‘improper discussion’ of policy will be tolerated. ‘Patriotic education’ has been stepped up and university lecturers have been told to keep discussion of Western ideas out of the classroom. At the same time, both state and privately owned media have been left in no doubt that their role is to act as a cheer squad for the government and not as a forum for ideas.
Xi Jinping has gathered extraordinary power into his own hands, turning his back on the tradition of collective leadership which had been a hallmark of China’s governments since the death of Mao. The premier, Li Keqiang, has been effectively sidelined as Xi has taken control of economic management, in addition to foreign affairs, defence, the anti-corruption campaign and indeed every other significant government priority.
The span of control that Xi now exercises has led to comparisons with Mao himself—something that Xi has done little to disavow. A mini personality cult has developed around him, featuring patriotic songs, internet videos, badges bearing his visage and other memorabilia. In October 2014 he gave a speech to the arts community clearly modelled on Mao’s infamous 1942 ‘Talks on Literature and Art’, when the Great Helmsman established the principle that literature should serve the needs of the state. Xi’s take on the proper role of the artist is similarly chilling: in his speech he instructed that they should be concerned with spreading ‘positive energy’, and criticised what he saw as the negative tendency of much contemporary work: ‘They subvert history and smear the masses and heroes. Some don’t tell right from wrong, don’t distinguish between good and evil, present ugliness as beauty, and exaggerate society’s dark side.’
At the same time a new prudery has been promoted, with everything from too much cleavage to same-sex relationships being banned from television drama; out, too, are smoking, drinking, adultery, and even reincarnation.
This level of social control is out of step with the country China has become. More than a quarter of the wider population is middle class, as is half the population of the key cities of Beijing and Shanghai. Some 270 million rural people have left their homes for new lives in the city, while millions of other Chinese have studied abroad. In 2015 alone 120 million Chinese travelled overseas as tourists.
The old post-Tiananmen bargain that traded political freedom for ever-rising living standards is under pressure from a slowing economy and an increasing number of environmental and safety issues that threaten public trust in the authorities. In August 2015 a catastrophic industrial accident in the port city of Tianjin killed 173 people and left thousands homeless. The disaster directly impacted middle-class homeowners, who learnt at first hand what many in China’s more remote regions have known for a long time: when disaster strikes, public accountability is hard to find.
Meanwhile, people have watched China’s stock market, where they had been encouraged to put their money, go into freefall.
Suddenly things which are not being delivered by the one-party state, like an independent legal system and vigilant and accountable regulators, seem a lot less like luxuries and a lot more like essentials.
There is an increasing number of ‘mass incidents’ in China as both farmers and workers agitate for a better deal. The transformation of China would not have been possible without the entrepreneurship of its rural population and the labours of its urban workforce, and yet both sectors have seen their progress stall.
In the countryside, more and more farmers are demanding that the government return ownership of the land to them. Farmers are given independence in how they work the land but can have it taken at any time for developments that rarely benefit them and for which they are inadequately compensated. Workers are also increasingly prepared to stand up for their rights, organising their efforts via private messaging, and forming loose associations to advocate on their behalf. Some 2700 strikes and protests by workers occurred across China in 2015, more than double the number of the previous year.
Meanwhile, members of the floating population continue to be deprived of the rights accorded to the urban population at large. Access to health services and education for their children is limited as the government refuses to register them as legitimate members of the urban community despite their contributions to the cities they live in.
These developments in the city and the country are all against a backdrop of widening inequality, with one-third of China’s wealth being held by the top 1 per cent of households while the bottom quarter of households control just 1 per cent of the wealth between them.
This is all at a time when China is attempting another great economic transformation to a service-based economy driven by domestic consumption. China badly needs greater private sector investment to drive this change but the state-owned sector, with its inefficiency and crony capitalism, drains the economy of capital and resources.
China’s giant stimulus package during the GFC led to a building boom and a revival of the state-owned sector which had been painfully winnowed during the late 1990s. Now around three million workers are facing unemployment as the government moves to deal with overcapacity and massive debts in the mining, steel and cement-making industries. But while the government knows that the only way to ensure the economy grows fast enough is to give the market a decisive role, they are reluctant to cede control. Through the state-owned system the government dominates heavy industry, natural resources, infrastructure and the banking sector, and knows that to retreat from them is to relinquish control of the commanding heights of China’s economy.
The range of issues that China now faces—economic transition, unrest among workers, farmers and the floating population, failures of regulation, and ethnic unrest in Xinjiang and Tibet—cannot ultimately be dealt with by increasing the level of control.
These issues call for debate, new kinds of cooperation between sectors of society, and transparency and accountability. But institutions that create co-operation—such as vibrant NGOs and meaningful worker organisations—are targeted for closure and arrests. Mechanisms for transparent governance—an independent judiciary, open public accounts, independently reviewable decision-making, anti-corruption systems and independent media—are anathema to the current regime. Independent thinkers with alternative ideas are also being silenced.
China is now simply too diverse, complex and vibrant to be able to tolerate autocracy in the long term. Even inside China prominent voices have started to openly express concern at the effect that Xi’s level of control and censorship may be having on the quality of decision-making. Editorials have appeared in both state and prestigious private media, and at least one government adviser has been prepared to go on the record. Concern is being expressed that alternative sources of advice and divergent critiques are being ignored in favour of the counsel of a small coterie of like-minded officials. Good policy cannot be made inside an echo chamber.
The Tiananmen generation is entering their late forties. These people who came of age in a time of unprecedented debate and optimism are moving into positions of authority both in government and in the wider society.
In 2017 the next generation of leaders will be endorsed at the nineteenth Communist Party Congress. These new junior leaders will serve beside Xi Jinping and his Premier Li Keqiang for another five years until those two men are due to retire in 2022. Among those likely to be nominated for membership of the new Politburo and leadership positions are some from the Tiananmen generation. How this cohort will behave when they reach the heights of power is an open question, but the rise to influence of people whose formative experience is not the Cultural Revolution but instead the intellectual ferment of the 1980s and the Tiananmen protests will take the country into fascinating new territory.
Hanging over this generational change is the question of June 4 itself.
When Deng Xiaoping took control of the Chinese government in 1978 one of his first actions was to reverse the official party verdict
on the ‘Qing Ming Incident’ of April 1976. This was the public protest that grew out of mourning for the death of Premier Zhou Enlai, and brought tens of thousands of ordinary Beijingers to Tiananmen Square. At the time the protests were condemned as a ‘counter-revolutionary riot’, and many involved were imprisoned. In November 1978, at the outset of Deng’s new rule, their protests were rebranded as an act of patriotism. It was a decision that was heavy with symbolism, signalling a new path for China. In the same way, a future leadership must one day change the verdict on June 4 1989.
The Tiananmen massacre affected millions of people all over China who joined the demonstrations in the spring and summer of 1989. To do nothing to acknowledge their experience, not to mention the pain of those who were bereaved, will eventually be impossible as China recognises that to distort its past is to poison its future.
The government’s inability to face the truth of national tragedies such as the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen massacre has created a hole at the heart of Chinese culture. The efforts of the Tiananmen Mothers, of young documentarians, of artists like Sheng Qi and Guo Jian, and brave self-made historians like Yang Jisheng may vary in scale but they all seek the same thing—to fight historical amnesia and wrest control of the nation’s history from the hands of the government and deliver it to the people.
Looking back over the four decades since the spring of 1976, when demonstrators gathered in Tiananmen Square to protest at how low the rule of Mao and the party had brought the country, what is most striking is how each decade since has demonstrated the resilience of that vision of the right of ordinary people to participate in guiding the course of their nation.
The Phoenix Years Page 30
