BOOK REVIEWS

Geremie Barmé, In the Red

Like all of Geremie Barmé’s previous works, In the Red is a thoroughly absorbing volume that chronicles, practically day by day, all the developments on the cultural scene in the People’s Republic of China during the 1990s. Anyone, who in one way or another made even the most fleeting appearance on the official, would-be official, dissident or underground scene, gets at least a mention here, whether writers, philosophers, actors or T-shirt makers. I am convinced that when the bureaucrats of the Central Committee propaganda department want to jog their memories about any controversy that might have caused a stir on the Mainland, they search through Geremie Barmé’s books. Neither Wenyibao (Journal of the Arts and Literature) nor the cultural pages of the national and Shanghai dailies hold any secrets for this author. All of this amounts to saying that reading In the Red will spare the specialist the tiresome task of wading through page after page of propaganda.

But it would be doing the author a great injustice to treat this volume as mere source material. In his own inimitable, often polemical style, and with a characteristic ability to get to what is most important, Geremie Barmé gives us an exciting chronological presentation of the events that have shaken up Chinese cultural circles over the last ten years. He makes no secret of his keen reliance on Miklos Haraszti’s analyses of the intellectual world of post-totalitarian Hungary. He argues that what Mao Zedong used to call the “literary and artistic front” had become a “velvet prison” by the early 1990s, to use the Hungarian critic’s expression, which is why writers who found themselves in trouble in the aftermath of June 4th 1989, did not face heavy prison sentences. The minister of culture, Wang Meng, for example, was “allowed to retire”, and a conservative took his place (p. 24). And contrary to all expectations, “the post June 4th purge had only a limited effect on overall productivity in the arts” (p. 37).

Barmé shows that, far from reintroducing Maoist-type controls, the Party was influenced by the market economy and adopted modern measures very similar to marketing strategies, to prevent the artists from doing it any real harm. Thus there appeared a phenomenon which he calls “packaged dissent”. The avant-garde, which, in the form of the misty poets of the 1980s, had been a threat to Party power, took on a very different social role in the 1990s. Having acquired marketing skills, the communists allowed the most “modern” artists to express themselves, to sign contracts with Hong Kong art galleries, in short, to get rich. So they were re-assimilated by the system.

He gives us a hilarious account of the fake dissidence of the film producer Zhang Yuan, whom he presents as an archetypal “packaged” dissident. After running through the necessary conditions for success—a lack of official backing, partial financing from Hong Kong, and a plot based on fringe rock’n roll events in Peking—Barmé tells us that “all that Zhang needed in order to secure success was an official ban. Overnight, a cinematic non-event was turned into a mini cause célèbre” (p. 195). The producer became a hero not only in Taiwan and Hong Kong, but also in the West, while “the film’s cottage-industry style and indulgent recording of rowdy bouts of drunkenness were enough to win Zhang an award for best director and the jury prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival” (p. 191). Like the rest of the Chinese economy, literature and the arts are market driven. The Party tolerates them, because it understands that this kind of avant-garde art could hardly be called subversive.

Barmé does not stop at films. He deals in detail with all the debates in Chinese intellectual circles, like the case of the two Wangs, when the former minister for culture supported Wang Shuo’s liumang wenxue (Barmé deals with all the major examples of this “hooligan literature”) against the “serious writers” who denounced its commercial character.

The specialist reader interested in intellectual controversies will find valuable references to the debate between the defenders of humanism and those whom Barmé humorously labels the “pomos” (post-modernists). Far from confining himself to Culture (or should it be Kultur?), the author devotes a whole chapter to Kong Yongqian, who invented the talking T-shirts (on which printed phrases expressed the attitudes and outlook of the youth of Beijing) before this idea was taken over by the marketing experts (Chapter 6). He also analyses the shunkouliu, those mocking and familiar expressions that always appear when there is a political shift, and which show what ordinary people really think of official discourse.

It is impossible to do justice here to a volume whose every page testifies to the extraordinary breadth of the author’s knowledge. It encompasses the study of an enormous quantity of written material, together with analytical insights into his own conversations with figures from Chinese cultural circles, which also demonstrate his impressive network of personal connections. All of this makes In the Red an indispensable work for anyone interested in the development of Chinese society in the last decade of the twentieth century.

Translated from French original by Jonathan Hall