Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

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. [1316] [1316] David Barboza, ‘At Christie’s Auction, New Records for Chinese Art’, International Herald Tribune , 29 November 2006; David Barboza, ‘In China’s New Revolution, Art Greets Capitalism’, International Herald Tribune , 4 January 2007; Jonathan Watts, ‘Once Hated, Now Fêted — Chinese Artists Come Out From Behind the Wall’, Guardian , 11 April 2007; Souren Melikian, ‘The Chinese Advance: More Bids, Many Buys’, International Herald Tribune , 8–9 April 2006.

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. [1317] [1317] Kurlantzick, Charm Offensive , p. 63. 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. [1318] [1318] David Barboza, ‘The Games Are Golden for Beijing Network’, International Herald Tribune , 23–24 August 2008.

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. [1319] [1319] Edwin Heathcote, ‘Power Games’, Financial Times , 19 July 2008; Nicolai Ouroussoff, ‘ Beijing Unveils a Landmark Olympics Stadium’, International Herald Tribune , 7 August 2008. 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. [1320] [1320] Shi Jiangtao and Al Guo, ‘Clear View for the Games?’, South China Morning Post , 21 July 2008.

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. [1321] [1321] Christopher Clarey, ‘Spectacle Has Viewers Floating on Air in Beijing ’, International Herald Tribune , 9-10 August 2008. 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. [1322] [1322] Pete Thamel, ‘Future of NBA Lies in China and Millions of Fans’, International Herald Tribune , 11 August 2008. 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. [1323] [1323] Frank Ching, ‘Sport For All in China’, South China Morning Post , 8 September 2004; Rice, ‘China’s Long March’; Brook Larmer, ‘The Center of the World’, Foreign Policy , September-October 2005; Ian Whittell, ‘How a Small Step for Yao Can Become a Giant leap for China’, The Times , 10 February 2007; Chih-ming Wang, ‘Capitalizing the Big Man: Yao Ming, Asian America, and the China Global’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies , 5: 2 (2004).