The not-so-discreet charm of the cultural bureaucracy: Everyone’s a critic, especially this plainclothes note-taker. His opinion? Censored.
It’s not often that I’m able to write something for my current corporate day job that I really like. But along with the travel guide copy and any and all other conceivable copy writing and editing needs an enormous Chinese travel company with a rapidly growing English-language website might require, my colleagues and I are blogging a bit on the China experience in a fairly personal vein.
Of all I’ve done to date for the travel site, this feels the best and most honest: Catch as Catch Can: Beating the Man to Shanghai’s Most Wanted Art. It was published months ago, before the larger crackdown that has seen Ai Weiwei disappeared – along with a slew of Chinese intellectuals, activists, lawyers, artists and good church-going folk – had taken shape (it was also before my mobile phone received a strange series of calls).
It’s as much about the strangeness not only of being in such a situation, but having chosen to be so in a crucial sense.
The opening paragraphs:
A Shanghai art gallery runs afoul of the local Culture Bureau, and we reflect on the fact that artists and curators in China run real risks every time they push the envelope. For art-curious foreigners, ham-handed government interventions in the arts may be in turns annoying, amusing, or plain befuddling. For the artists and galleries involved, however, it’s serious business.… »
Though many would deny it, for most first-time Western visitors to China — especially Americans, I suspect — part of the allure is the thrill of being watched. A light bout of paranoia puts an edge on things, and imagining that you’re somehow important enough to bear watching can flatter the ego and create an easy sense of drama.
It’s a bit like being in a film, or watching a film: Was that click on the phone a bug? Did my Internet connection time out again because I attempted to view Forbidden Content? Is that man with the bad dye-job and comb-over eavesdropping on our conversation about the latest news that Hurts the Feelings of the Chinese People? Should my feelings be hurt by all this control freakery? Or am I merely a badly mannered, obtuse and rude foreign guest, an ugly-American bull in the China shop?
Read the rest at the China Travel Blog.…