When China Rules the World (69 page)

It seems likely that Chinese universities will, over the next two decades, rise steadily up the global rankings to eventually occupy positions within the top ten. In order to accelerate this process the government is making determined attempts to attract leading overseas Chinese scholars to take up appointments at Chinese universities.
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Universities like Beijing, Tsinghua, Fudan and Renmin will, in time, become institutions of recognized global excellence that are increasingly able to attract some of the best scholars from around the world, Chinese or otherwise, while the trend already evident for Chinese universities to become a magnet for students in East Asia will grow as they begin to perform an equivalent academic role in the region to that played by the Chinese economy.

When a country is on the rise, a virtuous circle of expanding influence tends to develop. As China grows more powerful, more and more people want to know about it, read about it, watch television programmes about it and go there as tourists. As China grows richer and its people enjoy expanding horizons, so the cultural output of the country will increase exponentially. Poor countries have few resources to devote to art galleries or arts centres; can sustain, at best, only a small film industry and a somewhat prosaic television service; can afford only threadbare facilities for sport; while their newspapers, unable to support a cohort of foreign correspondents, rely instead on Western agencies or syndicated articles for foreign coverage. A report several years ago, for example, showed that only 15 per cent of Chinese men aged between fifteen and thirty-five actively participated in any sporting activity, compared with 50 per cent in the US, while on average the country has less than one square metre of sports facilities per person.
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As China grows increasingly wealthy and powerful, it can afford to raise its sights and entertain objectives that were previously unattainable, such as staging the Olympic Games, or producing multinational blockbuster movies, or promoting the Shaolin Monks to tour the world with their kung fu extravaganza, or building a state-of-the-art metro system in Beijing, or commissioning the world’s top architects to design magnificent new buildings. Wealth and economic strength are preconditions for the exercise of soft power and cultural influence.

Hollywood has dominated the global film industry for more than half a century, steadily marginalizing other national cinemas in the process. But now there are two serious rivals on the horizon. As Michael Curtin argues:

Recent changes in trade, industry, politics and media technologies have fuelled the rapid expansion and transformation of media industries in Asia, so that Indian and Chinese centres of film and television production have increasingly emerged as significant competitors of Hollywood in the size and enthusiasm of their audiences, if not yet in gross revenues . . . Media executives can, for the very first time, begin to contemplate the prospect of a global Chinese audience that includes more moviegoers and more television households than the United States and Europe combined.
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Over the last decade, mainland film directors like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige have joined the Taiwanese Ang Lee in becoming increasingly well known in the West, as have Chinese film stars like Gong Li, Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi and Hong Kong’s Jackie Chan. In recent years there has been a series of big-budget, blockbuster Chinese movies, often made with money from China, Hong Kong and the United States, which have been huge box office successes both in China and the West. Obvious examples are
Hero
,
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
,
House of Flying Daggers
,
The Forbidden Kingdom
and
Curse of the Golden Flower
, which together mark a major shift from the low-budget, art-house films for which China was previously known. The blockbuster movies are generally historical dramas set in one of the early dynasties, drawing on China’s rich history and punctuated with dramatic martial arts sequences.
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Not surprisingly, the storylines and approaches of Hollywood and Chinese movies differ considerably, reflecting their distinctive cultures. While Hollywood emphasizes the happy ending, this is never a major concern for Chinese films; action ranks highly for Hollywood, martial arts for the Chinese; cinematic realism matters for the US, social realism for Chinese audiences. In the longer run the Chinese film industry is likely to challenge the global hegemony of Hollywood and embody a distinctive set of values. It also seems likely that, in the manner of Sony’s takeover of Columbia, Chinese companies will, in time, acquire Hollywood studios, though this will probably have little effect on their output of Hollywood-style movies.
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It is worth noting in this context the extraordinary influence that martial arts already enjoy in the West. Fifty years ago the pugilistic imagination of Western children was overwhelmingly dominated by boxing and, to a much lesser extent, wrestling. That picture has completely changed since the 1970s. The Western pugilistic traditions have been replaced by those of East Asia, and in particular China, Japan and Korea, in the form of tae kwon do, judo and kung fu, while amongst older people t’ai chi has also grown in influence. The long-term popularity of martial arts is a striking example of how in the playground and gym certain East Asian traditions and practices have already supplanted those of the West.
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The economic rise of China, and of Chinese communities around the world, is changing the face of the market for Chinese art. Chinese buyers are now as numerous as Western ones at the growing number of New York and London auctions of Chinese art, a genre which, until a few years ago, was largely neglected by the international art market. In 2006 Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the world’s biggest auction houses, sold $190 million worth of contemporary Asian art, most of it Chinese, in a series of record-breaking auctions in New York, London and Hong Kong. At the end of that year a painting by contemporary artist Liu Xiaodong was sold to a Chinese entrepreneur for $2.7 million at a Beijing auction, the highest price ever paid for a piece by a Chinese artist. With auction sales of $23.6 million in 2006, Zhang Xiaogang was second only narrowly to Jean-Michel Basquiat in the ArtPrice ranking of the 100 top-selling artists in the world: altogether there were twenty-four Chinese artists in the list, up from barely any five years ago. These changes reflect the growing global influence of Chinese art and artists.
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China, however, still lags hugely behind the West when it comes to the international media. Recently the Chinese government has attempted to expand their international reach, upgrading Xinhua, the state news agency, creating new overseas editions of the
People’s Daily
and an English-language edition of the
Global Times
, professionalizing the international broadcasting of CCTV, and enabling satellite subscribers in Asia to receive a package of Chinese channels.
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Compared with the international audiences achieved by Western media like CNN and the BBC, the Chinese media have barely begun to scratch the surface, but the success of Al-Jazeera suggests that mounting a serious challenge to the Western media is not as difficult as it once seemed. Over the next decade or so, we can expect a major attempt by the Chinese authorities to transform the reach of their international media, employing a combination of new international television channels, perhaps an international edition of the
People’s Daily
and new websites. The potential of CCTV, for example, should not be underestimated. It already reaches 30 million overseas Chinese, while its broadcast of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics commanded an average home audience of half a billion, rising to 842 million at its peak. Its revenues in 2008 were expected to top $2.5 billion, compared with about $1 billion in 2002. With this kind of domestic base, its international potential, as China reaches out to the world, and vice versa, could be enormous.
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Sport is not an activity in which China has traditionally excelled, but over the last twenty years Chinese athletes have become increasingly successful. The government has invested large sums of money in sports facilities in order to try to raise China’s level of achievement, with the main emphasis being on those disciplines represented at the Olympics, where success has been seen as one of the requisite symbols of a major power. Although China has only been competing in the modern era since the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, the investment was rewarded at the Athens Olympics in 2004 when China won thirty-two gold medals, behind the US but ahead of Russia. China first applied to hold the Olympics in 1993 but only in 2001 did its bid finally succeed. The 2008 Beijing Olympics was the first occasion that China had ever hosted a great global sporting event and it was clear during the build-up that the Chinese government saw them as an opportunity to demonstrate to the world what China had achieved since 1978. The preparations were enormous and lavish, with little expense spared. Magnificent new stadiums were constructed, new parks laid out, and many new roads and subway lines built - with the Games costing, including the many infrastructural projects, an estimated $43 billion. The centrepiece was the Bird’s Nest, which has rapidly become one of the world’s iconic landmarks - a work, notwithstanding its scale, of beauty, intricacy and intimacy. It was designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with the Chinese artist Ai Wei-wei, and contains many traditional Chinese motifs.
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The Chinese authorities went to great lengths to try to deal with the pollution that envelopes Beijing on most summer days, including banning around 2 million cars a day from its streets, a measure that proved relatively effective and which has been continued subsequently.
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The Games themselves were generally agreed to have been a tour de force. They were very well organized and ran perfectly to time, the athletes were well cared for and there were no serious mishaps. The Chinese topped the medal table for the first time, with fifty-one gold medals compared with thirty-six for the United States, although the latter’s total medal haul exceeded China’s by ten. Arguably the most impressive event was the opening ceremony, which was directed by the Chinese film director Zhang Yimou. The elaborate show included 15,000 performers and a three-part production focused largely on China’s history; it was suffused with many typical Chinese elements, including the choreography of dancers on a giant calligraphy scroll and the serried ranks of 2,008 drummers on a traditional Chinese percussion instrument, the
fou
. It was a demonstrably confident, sure-footed and highly accessible statement to the world about Chinese history and culture.
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After the Games, there was general agreement that China had raised the Olympic bar to a new level which it would be well-nigh impossible for others to equal, let alone surpass; as the baton passed to London, which holds the 2012 Games, there was some trepidation in the UK as to how it might stage an Olympics which did not pale in comparison. Notwithstanding that China is a poor country and Britain a rich one, the UK authorities made it clear from the outset that the 2012 Games will be a much more modest affair.

Apart from the Olympic events, Chinese players have managed to make a mild impact on the tennis circuit, with six figuring amongst the top 120 women in 2007, and Zheng Jie reaching the Wimbledon women’s semi-final in 2008. The most dramatic success so far has been the emergence of China’s Yao Ming as one of the top basketball players in the US’s NBA and a huge star in China. Like the leading European football clubs, the NBA sees China as offering a major new market for their sport.
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The Chinese government - unlike Japan or India - sees sporting success as important to the country’s status and prestige, and consequently over the coming decades China is likely to become a major player in a range of prominent sports.
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There are two ways in which China already enjoys a major global cultural influence: food and, to a rather lesser extent, traditional Chinese medicine. The global spread of Chinese cuisine has been taking place for many decades, consequent upon Chinese migration, to the point where it is now highly familiar in most parts of the world. Even if people know little about China, they are often familiar with a Chinese dish or two, and are conversant with chopsticks even if they cannot use them. Interestingly, the global influence of Chinese food stems not from China’s rise but from the opposite - its previous poverty and the desire of poor Chinese to seek a better life elsewhere. Typically, migrants either sought to establish a Chinese restaurant in their adopted homeland or, more likely, get a job in one as a stepping stone to later owning a restaurant of their own. The spread of traditional Chinese medicine outside the mainland has largely been an outcome of the same process, with overseas Chinese taking the traditions of Chinese medicine with them and slowly introducing them to the host population. Both Chinese food and medicine are products of China’s long and rich history and its ancestry as a civilization-state.
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Indeed, it is interesting to reflect that what most of the world knows about China is through these two quintessentially civilizational legacies. Although their diffusion long predates China’s rise, the country’s growing influence can only accelerate this process. For over two centuries the Chinese cuisines familiar to foreigners have been those associated with the regions from which Chinese migrants have predominantly come, notably Guangdong and Fujian provinces; but the knowledge and availability of other cuisines is now spreading rapidly.
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The richness and diversity of Chinese cuisine means that it is highly flexible, able to cater for many different tastes and needs, from cheap takeaways at one end to lavish, upmarket banquets at the other. Until recently it has been mainly associated with the former, but in recent years that has changed.
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The growing popularity of Chinese food is closely linked to the post-war spread of restaurant eating in the West, a relatively new Western phenomenon, but one which dates back over a millennium in China.
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