Since 1990 numerous Chinese artists have structured their imaginative worlds on the legacy of Mao’s revolution; several have built on it incessantly to develop complex systems of iconography. The phenomenon reflects Chinese intellectuals’ continuous engagement with the project of modernity, even after a century of reforms and revolutions. Liu Dahong, for example, exposes internal links between the ideological discourse of the Cultural Revolution and Christianity by mapping events and protagonists of the revolution onto a classical set of Christian iconography. And yet, as a professor at his art academy, he has also uncharacteristically developed a doctrinaire teaching method inspired by the spirit of collective ideology. Liu’s post revolution reflections take a humorous look at the historical ties of communism to monotheism and its teleological concept of history; yet without compromising his critical scrutiny, his suspicions about radical individuality also keep him at a distance from the liberal right. As Liu revisits enlightenment ideals and politics of liberation, he reappraises freedom and creativity within a collective context. He has not adopted an essentialist Chinese cultural position, nor does he use post-colonial discourse to assert a local cultural position; with a naughty chuckle, Liu peeps through the historical veils shrouding China’s current predicament.

Chinese artists like Liu Dahong and others raise a question: Have we finally moved beyond the shadows of revolution and the project of modernity? What is their relevance today in cultural and political discourse, and artistic creativity? Can this be one of the points at which we can “Farewell” to post-colonialism?

 

Revolution and Modernity

The transition into modernity in the twentieth century for most cultures of the non-western world has been purchased at significant cost, and for China it was cataclysmic. The agonizing nature of this experience is illustrated by the full century of internal revolutions that accompanied modernization; much of it was very violent, even though China never truly underwent political colonization by external powers. As a civilization especially proud of the continuity of its institutions and a coherent sense of order of the world, China has taken extreme measures and means to jettison its old systems. No traditional custom or faith was spared, not even ancestral memory.

Liu’s work illustrates the heart of the matter: radical politics was prompted by a radical change in worldview. Modernity means turning our backs on a complete set of institutions, values, knowledge and customs. A principal reason for this extreme departure is the view of history as a linear development with a predestined end, intrinsic to all Abrahamic religions from Christianity to Islam—and alien to China. Without a cultural immunity against such monotheistic enterprise, Chinese intellectuals of the Left were convinced that the past was the main impediment to a better future. The scientific doctrines that accompany this view of linear time—whether the idealist philosophy of Hegel or the evolutionary theory of Darwin—also introduced a different discourse of knowledge that disoriented Chinese intellectuals as they restructured China’s genealogy of traditional knowledge.

Armed with the support of a system of new “scientific” knowledge, reformers and revolutionaries in late nineteenth and twentieth-century China led a revolt against history and experience. In the Chinese tradition, the pre-eminence of historical paradigm had hitheo been inviolable. The eighteenth-century historian Zhang Xuecheng went as far as to claim that “all the Six Classics are in fact studies of history”. Traditionally, history is where experience is grounded, and paradigms give suggestions as how to deal with the open possibilities of the future. The future was free. Perhaps paradoxically, for traditional China it was upon the vagaries of history that truth was grounded. Now, making the “future” a predestined beacon sealed it off from openness and freedom, yet empowered those who sought change.

After the excessive destructions of a century of revolution comes the query: to modernize, is all this unavoidable? On the brighter side is the current state of China as a modern nation, with a competitive edge commensurate with its size and resources; this also prompts queries: Looking beyond the current stage of development frenzy, what indigenous intellectual resources are there for moving forward? and how to deal with the hegemony of global capital? With the shift towards a market economy, what remains of the legacy of the long and costly revolution; what of the classless society and equality? From a global perspective, what lessons are to be drawn from the Chinese experience? Is the First World the future of the Third World, as the logic of progress would have us believe?

 

The Left and the Other

The Chinese revolution illustrates a relationship of active engagement with colonialism. Invading powers both represent enemies to be repelled, and opening up of new vista. The dynamics between domination and subordination are complex, and the internal dynamics of Chinese modernity draws into itself elements of both the “colonial” and the resisting negotiations that echo the post-colonial.

Looking back a generation away from the human tragedies of Mao’s revolution, what intrigues is the boldness and extremes of his social experiments. Why was it possible for such a stable civilization, complete in all its institutions and deep in history, to take on such radicalism? One main reason was that the concept and word “revolution” has always been in the Chinese vocabulary of traditional politics, but with a meaning different from its use in the West: The traditional Chinese term points to a re-alignment with the order of the world, and seeks the mandate of Heaven. Modern revolution has co-opted the old word, but introduced the novel idea of linear “progress”. Destruction of historical institutions and customs all come as part of “progress”.

Colonial invasion was just the catalyst, the century-long affair with modernization (often confused with westernization) could not have been sustained without the allure of the mystifying “Other”. Fantasies about “the West” have deep roots: ancient myths about the West Mother of Kunlun Mountains, the West Land of Ultimate Happiness, land of the Buddha, are all evocative. Furthermore, the promise of a scientific development towards wealth and power (fu qiang) was irresistible to a defeated nation; and the promise of a new social order, of justice and equality, was alluring. (The Manchu rulers of the last dynasty introduced an ethnic class system of inequality into Chinese society in the seventeenth century, and it was never fully forgiven by ethnic Han Chinese.) Both forces have been at work over this long century. In 1848, not long after the Opium War, without travelling abroad, Xu Jiyu wrote the geography Ying Huan Zhi Lue about foreign nations, in which he described George Washington as the greatest man in the West, comparable to China's legendary sage kings, and recommended learning from the political institutions of the United States. Cultural imagination about the “Other” came into play while politics demanded increasingly radical action.

In the end, it was the Left that was totally enamored by the “Other”, mobilizing the underclass of society, the subaltern “other”, to rise to the occasion. The Chinese existing order, subject of reform, was turned into the villain, now the heretic “other” intolerable to the enlightened. The Left, among its cultural imports, introduced this novel idea of the heretic.

With the establishment of the People’s Republic, experiments in social reform were put in a teleological perspective. By eliminating differences between worker and peasant, town and country, intellectual and manual labourer, Mao aimed to eradicate exploitation, and advance China to the next historical level. Of course this Utopian project did not dismantle the party bureaucracy through acts of the enlightened masses, but what it effectively achieved was a clearing of China’s indigenous cultural ground for a radical ideo-religious conversion to a worldview that is Judeo-Christian. (Which serves to underline the praises heaped by Mao on the self-proclaimed Christian rebels of Taiping in the mid nineteenth century, who he celebrated as a landmark in peasant liberation.) Not only has the Revolution and politics of the Left not been the liberating force it promised, it has inadvertently reinforced a fantasy about the West and subordinated Chinese culture to that vision.

 

Confronting Mao with the Post-colonial

Since the dramatic years of the 1960s, the politics of liberation in the West have promoted new awareness about hidden structures of power in the status quo, resulting in social movements and resistance that have widened the field of liberation. Post-colonial politics brought to the fore the internal dilemma of colonialism. The recognition of the mutual dependence of the colonial and the subordinated, together with other measures of the politics of the left, have transformed western society to a “Post-West” condition that is no longer the same “West” battled by former colonies. Moving along a different path, the Chinese revolution of the radical Left that lasted through Mao's reign has transformed China to a “Post-China” that is equally irreversible.

In China, reactions against the violence and injustice of totalitarian rule since the death of Mao Zedong brought a wave of neo-Enlightenment in all professional fields, which formed the foundation for political and economic reform in the 1980s, delivering China to the gate of a market economy in the 1990s. Post-colonial and multi-cultural discourses were introduced to China during this time, but Chinese post-colonial writers’ principle position was a critique of neo-Enlightenment ideas, shunning the idealist program of a new era of rationalization and individual liberty as dated in the wake of global market economy.

A linear time line underlies this attitude, as Chinese post-colonialists perceived post-modern society-characterized by mass media and consumer culture—to be a historical period that follows upon modernism. Instead of reading post-colonial theory as an internal self-criticism that has grown out of the western intellectual world, or applying its teaching to the critique of China’s inner boundaries, Chinese post-colonial writers of the 1990s often focused on a critique of Euro-centricism, and applied it locally as a nationalist position to reinforce the traditional bipolar view of “China vs.the West”, made with modernist implications of a grand narrative. The critique of a new capitalist China and its social reforms have come instead from other quarters.

Ultimately, the Chinese cultural world is generally uninterested in post-colonial discourse because, most people argue, China has never been truly colonized. Mao probably would feel the same; he would have been baffled by the post-colonial in China. The truth is, the Left has subjected China to such thorough self-colonization that there is no outside position. Chinese self-colonization/westernization was pushed through with a cultural scorched-earth strategy to prevent a return to the “feudal” habits of the past; but on the other hand, Mao also pursued an active anti-West/anti-colonial politics that may be said to be a form of militant post-colonialism. The latter did not engender a return to a fundamentalist cultural essentialism, but continued to put the politics of resistance on the agenda of modernity. The self rectifying forces within western modernity that make room for anti-rational, pluralistic tendencies have, in Mao’s case, re-surfaced as an integral part of China’s modern project. The Chinese revolution has internalized westernization and anti-westernization, colonialism and anti-colonialism. It may be said that the self-colonizing of the revolution has put China under a process of “double-colonization”, in which colonialism and post-colonialism were tackled on the same battle field.

Mao put a great deal of resources into the Third World International in order to carve out a territorial realm to combat the capitalist world and “Soviet Revisionism”. Although nationalist self-determination and anti-colonialism were the rallying points, liberation was for him incomplete until it was universal. For the Third World to adopt a post-colonial strategy could only be a part of the strategic arsenal for exposing the capitalist camp’s inner contradictions. Mao would have approved of diverse cultural/political positions only if it meant a united front against the capitalist world. He believed in the irreversibility of history, and he tried to engineer its progress through a series of political campaigns.

Chinese hesitations about the post-colonial are anchored by the experience of a modernization more violent than colonization, more unforgiving than foreign domination. A post-colonial “Post West” may be an attractive model for contemporary society, but China’s indelible experience of the revolution’s contradictions and promises has pointed to an independent model of modernity. After Mao, the return to present reality and new social experimentation began with Deng Xiaoping’s use of a proverbial idiom: “crossing the river by feeling the stones”.

 

A Locus of the International

The project of modernity not only entails a commitment to linear progress, it is all-encompassing in geographical reach. Intrinsically international, it encourages all of its participants to position themselves as competitors in a common race to the future. Mao’s revolution made China an “other” unto itself, but it has also turned China into a platform for the “international”: as a major non-western culture fully committed to modernization, first from a socialist position and later through state capitalism and engagement with the global market. Despite the self-imposed isolation of Mao’s China, it was ideologically brought into the international realm where its actions would be measured against other modernizing societies.

When Chinese artists were finally released from the grips of Mao’s revolution in the late 1970s, a decade of euphoric intellectual explorations in the spirit of “neo-Enlightenment” took over, much of it about liberation of the individual and liberal politics. Keen to “catch up” in the modern project, artists of the 1980s engaged with second-hand experience of twentieth-century western art as their source of ideal and reference; they developed a form of home-grown “avant-garde” that aspired to the western notion of modernist front-runners, except for the fact that the art was closed off at China’s borders.

In Taiwan and Hong Kong, the art world had already made an early attempt to break into “the international” avant-garde in the 1950s and 1960s with an Abstract Expressionist interpretation of ink painting. Although the Chinese/Japanese origin of the “expressionist” brush mark is well established, few native Chinese found acceptance in the western abstract movement which in America was heralded to be an “international” and avant-garde form.

In subsequent decades, curators tried to compete in the West by bringing Chinese art onto elevated western platforms as equals, and had minor successes in the 1980s. But it was not until Chinese artists appeared as a national group in Venice Biennial in 1993 and in Sao Paulo Biennial in 1994 that they won recognition from Western critics. To the great surprise of those who participated, their artistic intention was often distorted to fit a political instead of “artistic” reading. This was possible because of the emergent discourse of post-colonialism and post-modern approaches to “international” art. In fact, as Chinese came onto the global scene, they were also confused by the multiple faces of the “international”: South American art, Middle Eastern art, African art, other Asian art. The complexity of this “international” did not fit the genealogy of the “avant-garde” of the “China vs. the West” binary model; nor did it give a coherent picture of “international art”. “International” was in fact national representation processed by a particular discursive network. Artists who immigrated abroad further discovered that the West would most readily accept art that asserted their national cultural identity, slotted into the rising tide of post-colonial discourse. As a result of this experience, since the early 1990s, the implicit objectives of the more astute Chinese artists have either been: to escape the discursive net cast around marginality on the one hand,or to avoid cold war ideological representation on the other.

In the present Triennial, the satire of national representation made by Zhu Yu's artwork is poignant. For 192 Proposals for Member Nations of the United Nations (2007) the artist created 192 different proposals based on the political and cultural condition of each nation; each one is unique, and many of them look completely plausible for an international exhibition. Zhu Yu’s artwork raises the query: is contemporary art just intelligent responses to curatorial discourse? What would Zhu Yu do if he was making a “real” artwork? The artist described this work to be “ideas derived from a communal mindset, without any relation to ‘me’”. This also leads to the other question: why are “traditional” style artworks not fit for an “international” exhibition, however artistically accomplished? Is the “international” a special domain?

It was also during the post-1989 era that the Chinese public returned to Mao’s revolution, and the revival of Maoist iconography was nation-wide and spontaneous. In the art world a vigorous post-revolution Pop interpretation emerged, and was met with international critical success. The end of the Cold War in 1989 invalidated the ideological divide; utopia foundered and free market democracy won the day. But it was precisely at the end of the Cold War that popular interest in Mao’s revolution was revived. Has the war of ideology been won? Or has it changed into other forms of conflict and resistance? From the perspective of present cultural politics, perhaps we may revisit Mao’s New China as a version of post-colonial enterprise. Mao’s resistance against western political/cultural hegemony from the 1950s onwards made it a national culture and propaganda policy to modernize and transform national (traditional) culture. This produced a socialist form of modern art; it is decidedly not “traditional”, and has no intention to be. The art uses a selected set of traditional iconographic elements to juxtapose with elements representing progress; it also employs a language that echoes post-colonialism, such as self-determination, national identity and regional characteristics, mixed in with socialist slogans of progress and collective goal. In today’s context, art from the revolution would also make compatible companions for contemporary art inspired by concerns of local identity, hybridity and relational aesthetics. Looking at this art, we cannot but ask: does the revolution mean China has already had its era of the “post-colonial”? or if it indicates that post-colonialism has offered another door to enter the ideological divide of the Cold War, which has now splintered from the two international camps to all nations on earth.

In any case “international” remains part of the larger framework of modernity, which is being battled over and modified, but is still alive and booming. Modernity has claims over both the framework of universal discourse as well as that of its anti-modern detractors. Therefore, when the “international” convenes there can be no other subject but that of modernity and its aftermath. The post-colonial has not managed to circumvent this blockade, and the power structure controlling institutions is left untouched. In Mao’s words, one would say that the politics of resistance and empowerment have only served to splinter the united front, but missed the “principal contradictions”.

The “principal contradiction” of the hegemony of global capital has now infiltrated the fabric of social behaviour and the economics of daily lives. The legacy of the revolution is here to alert us to its threats and, reminding us that subversion is effective only when it emerges from the depth of existential experience, touches the nerves of the multiple others that are present within ourselves.

 

One Country Two Systems, Under Heaven Myriad Nations

In Hong Kong, a recent colony (British from 1842 to 1997), the post-colonial never caught on. The Hong Kong Museum of Art started to support the indigenous New Ink Painting movement in the 1960s and for over two decades made it a principal feature for representing Hong Kong in international events. The Museum’s collection policy clearly intends to make nineteenth and twentieth-century ink painting a cornerstone of the official collection. The collection strategy is clear: in the aftermath of the cultural devastations of the Mao’s revolution, it was Hong Kong's mission to preserve the grand lineage that was being discarded across the border. The New Ink Painting movement was also not too interested in its Hong Kong identity, its eyes were always trained on both the lineage and modern art. Gradually the concern for being “avant-garde” lapsed as this movement failed to find a niche within international modernism in the 1960s and 1970s, it then settled happily into the role of “modern masters of the Chinese tradition”. From the late 1980s, as the deadline for the 1997 handover of the territory loomed near, new art in Hong Kong started to take a consuming interest in local experience. This was partly borne out of a fear that the greater force of Mainland culture would smother local identity; it is not a result of a post-colonial tactic. The new art’s focused attention on real experience and subtle, circumspect subversion, without reverting to ideological generalization, has produced a new breed of artists who are making genuine contributions to China’s art scene as a whole.

Taiwan, another veteran post-colonial (Japanese colony from 1895 to 1945), was consumed by Nationalist ideology opposed to Communism until President Chiang Ching-kuo handed over the reins to “local” Taiwanese, meaning settlers from the mainland who arrived earlier than the retreating Nationalist. The subsequent settling of scores and retributions between these groups have formed the colourful political drama of the last two decades. The dominant cultural concern during this time has been the political and cultural identity of the Taiwanese, which includes their colonial history; but the heart of the issue is about the political claim of “China” and “unity”, and not about marginal recognition. The local identity of Taiwanese contemporary culture forms the most powerful narrative for art of the last two decades, and dynamic interactions with the “Chinese” grand narrative, symbolized by the Taipei Palace Museum, have produced richly layered artworks that cover all aspect of cultural and political concerns.

The political dynamics between China, Taiwan and Hong Kong illustrate their universal interest in the issue of “Chinese”-ness, which forms the background to all cultural productions in these ethnic Chinese territories. The competition for difference is made in a context of the larger cultural allegiance which in the twentieth century has also been at the centre of politics. In the 1980s, during negotiations the return of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China, Deng Xiaoping received a Hong Kong delegation that arrived to explain the political concerns of Hong Kong Chinese. He was irritated by the faux pas committed by Chung Shi-yuan of the Hong Kong delegation, who kept referring to the Mainland as “you Chinese”; and Deng reiterated that Hong Kong “self-rule” also meant rule by “the Chinese”, especially by “patriotic Chinese”. Similarly, the political tussle with Taiwan also centres around the interpretation of “Chinese”-ness. The sub-text to all this is of course the rejection of Communist ideology by Hong Kong and Taiwan, who see it as the “other”, not appreciating the fact that from Mainland China’s perspective the “other” has become those who got left behind with the historical past.

“One Country Two Systems”, a practice full of legal incongruities, reflects a way of handling domination and the subaltern that steps outside western imperial concepts. It reflects a historical Chinese structure of rule that makes allowance for difference in a non-subordinate manner. It echoes the traditional dual system used for the Chinese empire and its periphery: “feudal” vs. “provincial rule” (feng jian and jun xian), within or without the realm of “the cultured” (hua nei and hua wai). Politics comparable to the modern nation-state is practiced for “provincial rule”, but “feudal” rule permitted varying degrees of autonomy and diversity, so long as political allegiance was acknowledged. When it comes to regions beyond “the cultured”, especially smaller nations at the periphery, the association with the centre further loosens to a political alliance in which the centre not only does not exact taxation and service, it endows “gifts” far exceeding the formal “tribute” paid as acknowledgement of political subordination.

This is unlike the European empires or the Romans. At the heart of modern European empires is the nation-state, and national policy is essentially based on ethnic separation. Roman policy was different from the later empires, and they did accord citizenship to diverse races. However, for both two types of empires, rights enjoyed within the domain were set off against an “other” that required domination. In contrast to the European models, the Chinese empire is defined both nationally and culturally, which is how the Manchu dynasty won legitimacy to rule as a minority, by acknowledging and aligning with the Chinese historical lineage. The traditional attitude towards the periphery and beyond is: “the Emperor’s rule does not extend to those outside the cultured realm” (wang zhe bu zhi hua wai zhi ming). (It should be noted that “the cultured” is not the same as the Roman “civilized”, as the Confucian cultural concept is centred on morals around the family, not the polis). Without being handicapped by the concept of religious or cultural “heretics”, Confucian rule is tolerant of cultural difference and tries to keep a “cultured” distance with aliens.

As a diplomatic and ethical guide for multi-national relationship, the Spring and Autumn Annals edited by Confucius in the fifth century BC illustrates the traditional attitude of relationship with the “other”. Through a system of attributions the Annals makes ethical and legal commentary about historical events and protagonists, which scholar-officials interpreted and referenced. The Spring and Autumn principle for dealing with the “self” and the “other” is: reproach the self before reproaching others; show tolerance and try to teach by example. These principles are manifest in historical examples that were used by scholar-officials in the same manner as customary law.

Post-colonial, and post-Handover, Hong Kong has finally re-entered the Chinese orbit through a special link between the centre and the periphery. The link affirms Hong Kong’s political identity; it also affirms the central position of the mainland as “China”. Going beyond the nation-state, new concepts in a global scale remain a challenge for real politics. In recent years, Chinese scholars have started to dust off old traditional concepts such as “under heaven” as a starting point for a global “world view” that steps outside strictures of the “nation state”. Philosopher Zhao Dinyang has recommended “under heaven” as the model of an overarching cosmic principle that accords a position to all political parties, and to reconsider its usefulness as a principle for international relationships. All this is no more than a tool for philosophical reflection, but it is still a prescient point, especially for returning to large concepts like the “international”.

 

The Order of Knowledge and Threshold of the Moment

Art as a special locus of knowledge is where critical reflections on the modern condition can go beyond the framework of academic disciplines. Art brings personal experience under direct scrutiny, and offers the possibility for understanding through creative engagement, by returning to the centre of the self. This is the radical “politics” of art.

To take art as a production centre of “knowledge” represents an attempt to return to the point where Enlightenment reason compartmentalized knowledge; art may be a starting point to look for severed links where the disciplines should have deeper confluence. Cross disciplinary knowledge is becoming more urgent today with changes in information exchange and new modes of production; the increasing independence of economic decisions from political ones, for example, is granting uncontrollable powers to global capital. Without throwing away the benefits of Enlightenment, having already paid dearly for it, contemporary knowledge can start to revisit historical experience outside the logic of western modernism, beyond the parameter of post-colonial criticism.

When Leibniz first read the I Ching (Book of Change), he was so impressed he called China the “Europe in Asia”, meaning to praise Chinese culture for its command of reason. However, the seventeenth-century Chinese did not use the same “reason” as in Europe to structure its world of experience. To appreciate the Chinese version of “reason”, it is necessary to take a big cultural leap, beyond the post-colonial corrective measure, and put the “reason” seen by Leibniz in the nexus of another order that constitutes a complete field of knowledge. To access this “reason” it is necessary to enter into the flesh and blood of history and look out from inside.

Going beyond the Enlightenment, recent historians have started to look for roots of China’s “modernity” away from the rise of early capitalism. For example, how should we understand historical time and its momentum? Instead of the concept of temporal evolution, contemporary historian Wang Hui has pointed out the dominant concept of “temporal power-configuration” (shi shi) in traditional Chinese power politics. Shi shi remains in flux, but it is still historical. Shi shi is concerned with adjusting oneself in the ever-changing balance between “heaven’s reason” (tian li), ritual order (li yue) and the political order of the idealized “three early dynasties” (san dai). With a different set of coordinates such as this the structuring of knowledge changes; the understanding of historical process and its relation to local experience also change.

Leibniz'encounter with the I Ching at the height of the Enlightenment suggests alternative approaches to “reason”; it points to other methods of organizing experience and diverse mechanisms for arriving at decisions. The I Ching reminds us of the importance of returning to the moment of now; its “reason” deposits us at the threshold of the moment, no further. We can be shown the coordinates and the symbolic signs for grasping our situation, while the next moment remains open; this creative moment, the future.

Since 1990 numerous Chinese artists have structured their imaginative worlds on the legacy of Mao’s revolution; several have built on it incessantly to develop complex systems of iconography. The phenomenon reflects Chinese intellectuals’ continuous engagement with the project of modernity, even after a century of reforms and revolutions. Liu Dahong, for example, exposes internal links between the ideological discourse of the Cultural Revolution and Christianity by mapping events and protagonists of the revolution onto a classical set of Christian iconography. And yet, as a professor at his art academy, he has also uncharacteristically developed a doctrinaire teaching method inspired by the spirit of collective ideology. Liu’s post revolution reflections take a humorous look at the historical ties of communism to monotheism and its teleological concept of history; yet without compromising his critical scrutiny, his suspicions about radical individuality also keep him at a distance from the liberal right. As Liu revisits enlightenment ideals and politics of liberation, he reappraises freedom and creativity within a collective context. He has not adopted an essentialist Chinese cultural position, nor does he use post-colonial discourse to assert a local cultural position; with a naughty chuckle, Liu peeps through the historical veils shrouding China’s current predicament.

Chinese artists like Liu Dahong and others raise a question: Have we finally moved beyond the shadows of revolution and the project of modernity? What is their relevance today in cultural and political discourse, and artistic creativity? Can this be one of the points at which we can “Farewell” to post-colonialism?

 

Revolution and Modernity

The transition into modernity in the twentieth century for most cultures of the non-western world has been purchased at significant cost, and for China it was cataclysmic. The agonizing nature of this experience is illustrated by the full century of internal revolutions that accompanied modernization; much of it was very violent, even though China never truly underwent political colonization by external powers. As a civilization especially proud of the continuity of its institutions and a coherent sense of order of the world, China has taken extreme measures and means to jettison its old systems. No traditional custom or faith was spared, not even ancestral memory.

Liu’s work illustrates the heart of the matter: radical politics was prompted by a radical change in worldview. Modernity means turning our backs on a complete set of institutions, values, knowledge and customs. A principal reason for this extreme departure is the view of history as a linear development with a predestined end, intrinsic to all Abrahamic religions from Christianity to Islam—and alien to China. Without a cultural immunity against such monotheistic enterprise, Chinese intellectuals of the Left were convinced that the past was the main impediment to a better future. The scientific doctrines that accompany this view of linear time—whether the idealist philosophy of Hegel or the evolutionary theory of Darwin—also introduced a different discourse of knowledge that disoriented Chinese intellectuals as they restructured China’s genealogy of traditional knowledge.

Armed with the support of a system of new “scientific” knowledge, reformers and revolutionaries in late nineteenth and twentieth-century China led a revolt against history and experience. In the Chinese tradition, the pre-eminence of historical paradigm had hitheo been inviolable. The eighteenth-century historian Zhang Xuecheng went as far as to claim that “all the Six Classics are in fact studies of history”. Traditionally, history is where experience is grounded, and paradigms give suggestions as how to deal with the open possibilities of the future. The future was free. Perhaps paradoxically, for traditional China it was upon the vagaries of history that truth was grounded. Now, making the “future” a predestined beacon sealed it off from openness and freedom, yet empowered those who sought change.

After the excessive destructions of a century of revolution comes the query: to modernize, is all this unavoidable? On the brighter side is the current state of China as a modern nation, with a competitive edge commensurate with its size and resources; this also prompts queries: Looking beyond the current stage of development frenzy, what indigenous intellectual resources are there for moving forward? and how to deal with the hegemony of global capital? With the shift towards a market economy, what remains of the legacy of the long and costly revolution; what of the classless society and equality? From a global perspective, what lessons are to be drawn from the Chinese experience? Is the First World the future of the Third World, as the logic of progress would have us believe?

 

The Left and the Other

The Chinese revolution illustrates a relationship of active engagement with colonialism. Invading powers both represent enemies to be repelled, and opening up of new vista. The dynamics between domination and subordination are complex, and the internal dynamics of Chinese modernity draws into itself elements of both the “colonial” and the resisting negotiations that echo the post-colonial.

Looking back a generation away from the human tragedies of Mao’s revolution, what intrigues is the boldness and extremes of his social experiments. Why was it possible for such a stable civilization, complete in all its institutions and deep in history, to take on such radicalism? One main reason was that the concept and word “revolution” has always been in the Chinese vocabulary of traditional politics, but with a meaning different from its use in the West: The traditional Chinese term points to a re-alignment with the order of the world, and seeks the mandate of Heaven. Modern revolution has co-opted the old word, but introduced the novel idea of linear “progress”. Destruction of historical institutions and customs all come as part of “progress”.

Colonial invasion was just the catalyst, the century-long affair with modernization (often confused with westernization) could not have been sustained without the allure of the mystifying “Other”. Fantasies about “the West” have deep roots: ancient myths about the West Mother of Kunlun Mountains, the West Land of Ultimate Happiness, land of the Buddha, are all evocative. Furthermore, the promise of a scientific development towards wealth and power (fu qiang) was irresistible to a defeated nation; and the promise of a new social order, of justice and equality, was alluring. (The Manchu rulers of the last dynasty introduced an ethnic class system of inequality into Chinese society in the seventeenth century, and it was never fully forgiven by ethnic Han Chinese.) Both forces have been at work over this long century. In 1848, not long after the Opium War, without travelling abroad, Xu Jiyu wrote the geography Ying Huan Zhi Lue about foreign nations, in which he described George Washington as the greatest man in the West, comparable to China's legendary sage kings, and recommended learning from the political institutions of the United States. Cultural imagination about the “Other” came into play while politics demanded increasingly radical action.

In the end, it was the Left that was totally enamored by the “Other”, mobilizing the underclass of society, the subaltern “other”, to rise to the occasion. The Chinese existing order, subject of reform, was turned into the villain, now the heretic “other” intolerable to the enlightened. The Left, among its cultural imports, introduced this novel idea of the heretic.

With the establishment of the People’s Republic, experiments in social reform were put in a teleological perspective. By eliminating differences between worker and peasant, town and country, intellectual and manual labourer, Mao aimed to eradicate exploitation, and advance China to the next historical level. Of course this Utopian project did not dismantle the party bureaucracy through acts of the enlightened masses, but what it effectively achieved was a clearing of China’s indigenous cultural ground for a radical ideo-religious conversion to a worldview that is Judeo-Christian. (Which serves to underline the praises heaped by Mao on the self-proclaimed Christian rebels of Taiping in the mid nineteenth century, who he celebrated as a landmark in peasant liberation.) Not only has the Revolution and politics of the Left not been the liberating force it promised, it has inadvertently reinforced a fantasy about the West and subordinated Chinese culture to that vision.

 

Confronting Mao with the Post-colonial

Since the dramatic years of the 1960s, the politics of liberation in the West have promoted new awareness about hidden structures of power in the status quo, resulting in social movements and resistance that have widened the field of liberation. Post-colonial politics brought to the fore the internal dilemma of colonialism. The recognition of the mutual dependence of the colonial and the subordinated, together with other measures of the politics of the left, have transformed western society to a “Post-West” condition that is no longer the same “West” battled by former colonies. Moving along a different path, the Chinese revolution of the radical Left that lasted through Mao's reign has transformed China to a “Post-China” that is equally irreversible.

In China, reactions against the violence and injustice of totalitarian rule since the death of Mao Zedong brought a wave of neo-Enlightenment in all professional fields, which formed the foundation for political and economic reform in the 1980s, delivering China to the gate of a market economy in the 1990s. Post-colonial and multi-cultural discourses were introduced to China during this time, but Chinese post-colonial writers’ principle position was a critique of neo-Enlightenment ideas, shunning the idealist program of a new era of rationalization and individual liberty as dated in the wake of global market economy.

A linear time line underlies this attitude, as Chinese post-colonialists perceived post-modern society-characterized by mass media and consumer culture—to be a historical period that follows upon modernism. Instead of reading post-colonial theory as an internal self-criticism that has grown out of the western intellectual world, or applying its teaching to the critique of China’s inner boundaries, Chinese post-colonial writers of the 1990s often focused on a critique of Euro-centricism, and applied it locally as a nationalist position to reinforce the traditional bipolar view of “China vs.the West”, made with modernist implications of a grand narrative. The critique of a new capitalist China and its social reforms have come instead from other quarters.

Ultimately, the Chinese cultural world is generally uninterested in post-colonial discourse because, most people argue, China has never been truly colonized. Mao probably would feel the same; he would have been baffled by the post-colonial in China. The truth is, the Left has subjected China to such thorough self-colonization that there is no outside position. Chinese self-colonization/westernization was pushed through with a cultural scorched-earth strategy to prevent a return to the “feudal” habits of the past; but on the other hand, Mao also pursued an active anti-West/anti-colonial politics that may be said to be a form of militant post-colonialism. The latter did not engender a return to a fundamentalist cultural essentialism, but continued to put the politics of resistance on the agenda of modernity. The self rectifying forces within western modernity that make room for anti-rational, pluralistic tendencies have, in Mao’s case, re-surfaced as an integral part of China’s modern project. The Chinese revolution has internalized westernization and anti-westernization, colonialism and anti-colonialism. It may be said that the self-colonizing of the revolution has put China under a process of “double-colonization”, in which colonialism and post-colonialism were tackled on the same battle field.

Mao put a great deal of resources into the Third World International in order to carve out a territorial realm to combat the capitalist world and “Soviet Revisionism”. Although nationalist self-determination and anti-colonialism were the rallying points, liberation was for him incomplete until it was universal. For the Third World to adopt a post-colonial strategy could only be a part of the strategic arsenal for exposing the capitalist camp’s inner contradictions. Mao would have approved of diverse cultural/political positions only if it meant a united front against the capitalist world. He believed in the irreversibility of history, and he tried to engineer its progress through a series of political campaigns.

Chinese hesitations about the post-colonial are anchored by the experience of a modernization more violent than colonization, more unforgiving than foreign domination. A post-colonial “Post West” may be an attractive model for contemporary society, but China’s indelible experience of the revolution’s contradictions and promises has pointed to an independent model of modernity. After Mao, the return to present reality and new social experimentation began with Deng Xiaoping’s use of a proverbial idiom: “crossing the river by feeling the stones”.

 

A Locus of the International

The project of modernity not only entails a commitment to linear progress, it is all-encompassing in geographical reach. Intrinsically international, it encourages all of its participants to position themselves as competitors in a common race to the future. Mao’s revolution made China an “other” unto itself, but it has also turned China into a platform for the “international”: as a major non-western culture fully committed to modernization, first from a socialist position and later through state capitalism and engagement with the global market. Despite the self-imposed isolation of Mao’s China, it was ideologically brought into the international realm where its actions would be measured against other modernizing societies.

When Chinese artists were finally released from the grips of Mao’s revolution in the late 1970s, a decade of euphoric intellectual explorations in the spirit of “neo-Enlightenment” took over, much of it about liberation of the individual and liberal politics. Keen to “catch up” in the modern project, artists of the 1980s engaged with second-hand experience of twentieth-century western art as their source of ideal and reference; they developed a form of home-grown “avant-garde” that aspired to the western notion of modernist front-runners, except for the fact that the art was closed off at China’s borders.

In Taiwan and Hong Kong, the art world had already made an early attempt to break into “the international” avant-garde in the 1950s and 1960s with an Abstract Expressionist interpretation of ink painting. Although the Chinese/Japanese origin of the “expressionist” brush mark is well established, few native Chinese found acceptance in the western abstract movement which in America was heralded to be an “international” and avant-garde form.

In subsequent decades, curators tried to compete in the West by bringing Chinese art onto elevated western platforms as equals, and had minor successes in the 1980s. But it was not until Chinese artists appeared as a national group in Venice Biennial in 1993 and in Sao Paulo Biennial in 1994 that they won recognition from Western critics. To the great surprise of those who participated, their artistic intention was often distorted to fit a political instead of “artistic” reading. This was possible because of the emergent discourse of post-colonialism and post-modern approaches to “international” art. In fact, as Chinese came onto the global scene, they were also confused by the multiple faces of the “international”: South American art, Middle Eastern art, African art, other Asian art. The complexity of this “international” did not fit the genealogy of the “avant-garde” of the “China vs. the West” binary model; nor did it give a coherent picture of “international art”. “International” was in fact national representation processed by a particular discursive network. Artists who immigrated abroad further discovered that the West would most readily accept art that asserted their national cultural identity, slotted into the rising tide of post-colonial discourse. As a result of this experience, since the early 1990s, the implicit objectives of the more astute Chinese artists have either been: to escape the discursive net cast around marginality on the one hand,or to avoid cold war ideological representation on the other.

In the present Triennial, the satire of national representation made by Zhu Yu's artwork is poignant. For 192 Proposals for Member Nations of the United Nations (2007) the artist created 192 different proposals based on the political and cultural condition of each nation; each one is unique, and many of them look completely plausible for an international exhibition. Zhu Yu’s artwork raises the query: is contemporary art just intelligent responses to curatorial discourse? What would Zhu Yu do if he was making a “real” artwork? The artist described this work to be “ideas derived from a communal mindset, without any relation to ‘me’”. This also leads to the other question: why are “traditional” style artworks not fit for an “international” exhibition, however artistically accomplished? Is the “international” a special domain?

It was also during the post-1989 era that the Chinese public returned to Mao’s revolution, and the revival of Maoist iconography was nation-wide and spontaneous. In the art world a vigorous post-revolution Pop interpretation emerged, and was met with international critical success. The end of the Cold War in 1989 invalidated the ideological divide; utopia foundered and free market democracy won the day. But it was precisely at the end of the Cold War that popular interest in Mao’s revolution was revived. Has the war of ideology been won? Or has it changed into other forms of conflict and resistance? From the perspective of present cultural politics, perhaps we may revisit Mao’s New China as a version of post-colonial enterprise. Mao’s resistance against western political/cultural hegemony from the 1950s onwards made it a national culture and propaganda policy to modernize and transform national (traditional) culture. This produced a socialist form of modern art; it is decidedly not “traditional”, and has no intention to be. The art uses a selected set of traditional iconographic elements to juxtapose with elements representing progress; it also employs a language that echoes post-colonialism, such as self-determination, national identity and regional characteristics, mixed in with socialist slogans of progress and collective goal. In today’s context, art from the revolution would also make compatible companions for contemporary art inspired by concerns of local identity, hybridity and relational aesthetics. Looking at this art, we cannot but ask: does the revolution mean China has already had its era of the “post-colonial”? or if it indicates that post-colonialism has offered another door to enter the ideological divide of the Cold War, which has now splintered from the two international camps to all nations on earth.

In any case “international” remains part of the larger framework of modernity, which is being battled over and modified, but is still alive and booming. Modernity has claims over both the framework of universal discourse as well as that of its anti-modern detractors. Therefore, when the “international” convenes there can be no other subject but that of modernity and its aftermath. The post-colonial has not managed to circumvent this blockade, and the power structure controlling institutions is left untouched. In Mao’s words, one would say that the politics of resistance and empowerment have only served to splinter the united front, but missed the “principal contradictions”.

The “principal contradiction” of the hegemony of global capital has now infiltrated the fabric of social behaviour and the economics of daily lives. The legacy of the revolution is here to alert us to its threats and, reminding us that subversion is effective only when it emerges from the depth of existential experience, touches the nerves of the multiple others that are present within ourselves.

 

One Country Two Systems, Under Heaven Myriad Nations

In Hong Kong, a recent colony (British from 1842 to 1997), the post-colonial never caught on. The Hong Kong Museum of Art started to support the indigenous New Ink Painting movement in the 1960s and for over two decades made it a principal feature for representing Hong Kong in international events. The Museum’s collection policy clearly intends to make nineteenth and twentieth-century ink painting a cornerstone of the official collection. The collection strategy is clear: in the aftermath of the cultural devastations of the Mao’s revolution, it was Hong Kong's mission to preserve the grand lineage that was being discarded across the border. The New Ink Painting movement was also not too interested in its Hong Kong identity, its eyes were always trained on both the lineage and modern art. Gradually the concern for being “avant-garde” lapsed as this movement failed to find a niche within international modernism in the 1960s and 1970s, it then settled happily into the role of “modern masters of the Chinese tradition”. From the late 1980s, as the deadline for the 1997 handover of the territory loomed near, new art in Hong Kong started to take a consuming interest in local experience. This was partly borne out of a fear that the greater force of Mainland culture would smother local identity; it is not a result of a post-colonial tactic. The new art’s focused attention on real experience and subtle, circumspect subversion, without reverting to ideological generalization, has produced a new breed of artists who are making genuine contributions to China’s art scene as a whole.

Taiwan, another veteran post-colonial (Japanese colony from 1895 to 1945), was consumed by Nationalist ideology opposed to Communism until President Chiang Ching-kuo handed over the reins to “local” Taiwanese, meaning settlers from the mainland who arrived earlier than the retreating Nationalist. The subsequent settling of scores and retributions between these groups have formed the colourful political drama of the last two decades. The dominant cultural concern during this time has been the political and cultural identity of the Taiwanese, which includes their colonial history; but the heart of the issue is about the political claim of “China” and “unity”, and not about marginal recognition. The local identity of Taiwanese contemporary culture forms the most powerful narrative for art of the last two decades, and dynamic interactions with the “Chinese” grand narrative, symbolized by the Taipei Palace Museum, have produced richly layered artworks that cover all aspect of cultural and political concerns.

The political dynamics between China, Taiwan and Hong Kong illustrate their universal interest in the issue of “Chinese”-ness, which forms the background to all cultural productions in these ethnic Chinese territories. The competition for difference is made in a context of the larger cultural allegiance which in the twentieth century has also been at the centre of politics. In the 1980s, during negotiations the return of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China, Deng Xiaoping received a Hong Kong delegation that arrived to explain the political concerns of Hong Kong Chinese. He was irritated by the faux pas committed by Chung Shi-yuan of the Hong Kong delegation, who kept referring to the Mainland as “you Chinese”; and Deng reiterated that Hong Kong “self-rule” also meant rule by “the Chinese”, especially by “patriotic Chinese”. Similarly, the political tussle with Taiwan also centres around the interpretation of “Chinese”-ness. The sub-text to all this is of course the rejection of Communist ideology by Hong Kong and Taiwan, who see it as the “other”, not appreciating the fact that from Mainland China’s perspective the “other” has become those who got left behind with the historical past.

“One Country Two Systems”, a practice full of legal incongruities, reflects a way of handling domination and the subaltern that steps outside western imperial concepts. It reflects a historical Chinese structure of rule that makes allowance for difference in a non-subordinate manner. It echoes the traditional dual system used for the Chinese empire and its periphery: “feudal” vs. “provincial rule” (feng jian and jun xian), within or without the realm of “the cultured” (hua nei and hua wai). Politics comparable to the modern nation-state is practiced for “provincial rule”, but “feudal” rule permitted varying degrees of autonomy and diversity, so long as political allegiance was acknowledged. When it comes to regions beyond “the cultured”, especially smaller nations at the periphery, the association with the centre further loosens to a political alliance in which the centre not only does not exact taxation and service, it endows “gifts” far exceeding the formal “tribute” paid as acknowledgement of political subordination.

This is unlike the European empires or the Romans. At the heart of modern European empires is the nation-state, and national policy is essentially based on ethnic separation. Roman policy was different from the later empires, and they did accord citizenship to diverse races. However, for both two types of empires, rights enjoyed within the domain were set off against an “other” that required domination. In contrast to the European models, the Chinese empire is defined both nationally and culturally, which is how the Manchu dynasty won legitimacy to rule as a minority, by acknowledging and aligning with the Chinese historical lineage. The traditional attitude towards the periphery and beyond is: “the Emperor’s rule does not extend to those outside the cultured realm” (wang zhe bu zhi hua wai zhi ming). (It should be noted that “the cultured” is not the same as the Roman “civilized”, as the Confucian cultural concept is centred on morals around the family, not the polis). Without being handicapped by the concept of religious or cultural “heretics”, Confucian rule is tolerant of cultural difference and tries to keep a “cultured” distance with aliens.

As a diplomatic and ethical guide for multi-national relationship, the Spring and Autumn Annals edited by Confucius in the fifth century BC illustrates the traditional attitude of relationship with the “other”. Through a system of attributions the Annals makes ethical and legal commentary about historical events and protagonists, which scholar-officials interpreted and referenced. The Spring and Autumn principle for dealing with the “self” and the “other” is: reproach the self before reproaching others; show tolerance and try to teach by example. These principles are manifest in historical examples that were used by scholar-officials in the same manner as customary law.

Post-colonial, and post-Handover, Hong Kong has finally re-entered the Chinese orbit through a special link between the centre and the periphery. The link affirms Hong Kong’s political identity; it also affirms the central position of the mainland as “China”. Going beyond the nation-state, new concepts in a global scale remain a challenge for real politics. In recent years, Chinese scholars have started to dust off old traditional concepts such as “under heaven” as a starting point for a global “world view” that steps outside strictures of the “nation state”. Philosopher Zhao Dinyang has recommended “under heaven” as the model of an overarching cosmic principle that accords a position to all political parties, and to reconsider its usefulness as a principle for international relationships. All this is no more than a tool for philosophical reflection, but it is still a prescient point, especially for returning to large concepts like the “international”.

 

The Order of Knowledge and Threshold of the Moment

Art as a special locus of knowledge is where critical reflections on the modern condition can go beyond the framework of academic disciplines. Art brings personal experience under direct scrutiny, and offers the possibility for understanding through creative engagement, by returning to the centre of the self. This is the radical “politics” of art.

To take art as a production centre of “knowledge” represents an attempt to return to the point where Enlightenment reason compartmentalized knowledge; art may be a starting point to look for severed links where the disciplines should have deeper confluence. Cross disciplinary knowledge is becoming more urgent today with changes in information exchange and new modes of production; the increasing independence of economic decisions from political ones, for example, is granting uncontrollable powers to global capital. Without throwing away the benefits of Enlightenment, having already paid dearly for it, contemporary knowledge can start to revisit historical experience outside the logic of western modernism, beyond the parameter of post-colonial criticism.

When Leibniz first read the I Ching (Book of Change), he was so impressed he called China the “Europe in Asia”, meaning to praise Chinese culture for its command of reason. However, the seventeenth-century Chinese did not use the same “reason” as in Europe to structure its world of experience. To appreciate the Chinese version of “reason”, it is necessary to take a big cultural leap, beyond the post-colonial corrective measure, and put the “reason” seen by Leibniz in the nexus of another order that constitutes a complete field of knowledge. To access this “reason” it is necessary to enter into the flesh and blood of history and look out from inside.

Going beyond the Enlightenment, recent historians have started to look for roots of China’s “modernity” away from the rise of early capitalism. For example, how should we understand historical time and its momentum? Instead of the concept of temporal evolution, contemporary historian Wang Hui has pointed out the dominant concept of “temporal power-configuration” (shi shi) in traditional Chinese power politics. Shi shi remains in flux, but it is still historical. Shi shi is concerned with adjusting oneself in the ever-changing balance between “heaven’s reason” (tian li), ritual order (li yue) and the political order of the idealized “three early dynasties” (san dai). With a different set of coordinates such as this the structuring of knowledge changes; the understanding of historical process and its relation to local experience also change.

Leibniz'encounter with the I Ching at the height of the Enlightenment suggests alternative approaches to “reason”; it points to other methods of organizing experience and diverse mechanisms for arriving at decisions. The I Ching reminds us of the importance of returning to the moment of now; its “reason” deposits us at the threshold of the moment, no further. We can be shown the coordinates and the symbolic signs for grasping our situation, while the next moment remains open; this creative moment, the future.