A New Cultural Revolution in China . . . or Is It?
By JIM YARDLEY
Published: December 21, 2003
BEIJING — Friday marks the 110th anniversary of Mao Zedong's birthday and the Chinese government has rolled out the obligatory blizzard of tributes. There are compilations of Mao's poems, biographies, television documentaries, a photography exhibit and a compact disc with Maoist maxims pounding to a rap music beat.
Yet if the transformation of the Great Helmsman into the Great Rapper seems a stretch, it reflects the continued emergence, under the watch of Communist Party censors, of a middle-class pop culture increasingly like that in the West: loud, sensationalistic and often banal, driven largely by a marketplace where the purse strings are increasingly controlled by the young - even the very young.
The question is whether this noisy pop culture represents a meaningful increase in personal freedom for Chinese citizens or merely serves as a superficial distraction from a repressive political structure.
The shattering of taboos and upending of traditions is widespread. For decades, beauty pageants were banned, but earlier this month, China was host to its first Miss World pageant. Polls show that far more Chinese couples are having premarital sex or living together before marriage than ever before. Plastic surgery is thriving in a country where bodies were once hidden in drab Mao suits. And divorce rates, once almost nonexistent, are rising.
"China is going through a very chaotic time right now," said Jianying Zha, whose 1995 book, "China Pop," chronicled the rise of popular culture in the early 1990's. "All the old values are being turned upside down."
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