China's Glasnost

The push for more artistic openness has sent expectations soaring. "In the past, if we could just have an exhibition without it getting shut down, that was good enough," says mixed-media artist Qiu Zhijie, who recently set up a Web site for artists to display works. "Now we have greater demands. We want a bigger audience. We want domestic and private foundations to support us."

Some forms of creative expression remain more circumscribed than others. The mainland doesn't have a single radio station dedicated to rock music, says a local DJ, because so much rock is anti-authoritarian. Censors still restrict alternative music, maintaining the right to vet song lyrics before all public concerts, from those of local rockers to the Rolling Stones. But some underground bands are emerging into the open. Last year state-run China Central Television invited heavy-metal band Black Panther to perform--one of the first times a Chinese rock band had been shown live on mainland TV, says Liang Long, the 27-year-old lead singer for Secondhand Rose, another Beijing band. "The government didn't understand rock and roll in the '80s and '90s," he says. "Today's leaders are younger and more open-minded."

Literature, drama and especially mainstream media remain on a tighter leash. That's because top leaders are still queasy about anything that might have unpredictable mass appeal. But public discontent is mounting: when government officials recently tried to stifle media coverage of the popular but controversial Beijing play "Toilet," media outlets revolted. Many simply disobeyed the ban, running articles about the drama, which traces three decades of Chinese history through the lives of a public-restroom custodian and his patrons.

Increasingly, being banned in Beijing is no deterrent to making a living. In fact, sometimes it actually helps propel an artist onto Western radar screens. Shanghai author and former junkie Mian Mian maintains that the ban in China on her two novels about sex, drugs and despair helped make her name abroad. The book "Candy" was published in the United States and France and ultimately became an underground best-seller on the mainland as well. Mian says her third novel, "Panda Sex," due out this year, may even pass the censors because it has "no drugs and no sex."

Chinese artists who once fled to the West in search of freedom and a broader audience are beginning to return home. This literary elite is no longer producing as many "Chinese books aimed at a Western audience," says London-based literary agent Toby Eady, who represents a dozen Chinese novelists. "It's indigenous Chinese writing for Chinese people." And today those writers are more interested in addressing such modern taboos as high-level corruption, AIDS, urban crime and the growing gap between rich and poor. Lu Tianming, a former TV scriptwriter, has become a sensation in China by writing about crooked government officials and corrupt underlings. One recent novel, "Pure as Snow," was inspired by a real-life whistle-blower in northeastern Heilongjiang province. By tapping into China's insatiable appetite for anti-corruption themes, it sold 185,000 copies. Shen Shao-min, a 48-year-old artist from Heilongjiang, moved to Australia in 1990 because his exhibitions were closed after the Tiananmen Square crackdown. But now, he says, "it's better for my art to be in China. I can think more deeply in China because things are changing so quickly."

Indeed, for artists who rely on tension to fuel their creativity, there's no place like home. "In the West there isn't enough conflict," says Huang Rui. "In China there are conflicts everywhere--between capitalism and socialism, between tradition and modernization, between rural life and urbanization." The big question is whether China's cultural flowering will ultimately wither--or be crushed--without fundamental political reform. "Artists make the people smarter," claims rock-music pioneer Cui Jian, "and the leaders think that smarter people are harder to control." For the moment, China's seething frictions and contradictions are helping spawn creative energy--and, just as important, a growing market to bankroll it.

WITH CRAIG SIMONS AND JEN LIN-LIU

© 2004