MCLC: interview with Tian Qing

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: ian johnson (iandjohnson at gmail.com)
Subject: interview with Tian Qing
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There's a video accompanying this interview.

Ian

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Source: NY Review of Books (4/7/12):
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/apr/07/worse-cultural-revolution-
interview-tian-qing/

‘Worse Than the Cultural Revolution’: An Interview With Tian Qing
Ian Johnson

Tian Qing may be China’s leading cultural heritage expert. A scholar
of Buddhist musicology and the Chinese zither, or guqin, the
sixty-four-year-old now heads the Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage
Protection Center, an institution set up by the government to protect
China’s native traditions in the performing arts, cuisine, rituals,
festivals, and other forms of culture. As Tian notes, these are
gaining in popularity but the nature of this revival is ambiguous: Are
they being recovered as living traditions or as objects for urbanized
Chinese to enjoy as tourists in their own land?

Tian grew up in Shandong province but his education was interrupted by
the Cultural Revolution. He spent five years as a “sent-down youth” on
an agricultural production team in Heilongjiang province. Nearly
thirty by the time he graduated from college, he moved to Beijing to
work as a musicology professor at the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts; in
recent years he has served primarily as a cultural official. Along
with running the Intangible Cultural Heritage center, he sits on the
Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress, a body of cultural
and social figures that advises the government on policy, as well as
half a dozen other government bodies. I spoke to him recently at his
offices at the Academy of Fine Arts, which are stuffed with volumes of
research, scrolls, recordings, and papers.

Ian Johnson: The government has declared culture to be a national
priority. It’s also promoting Chinese culture abroad as a kind of soft
power.

Tian Qing: I think it reflects a genuine desire by people to preserve
their culture. It doesn’t matter what system you have, but governments
often reflect popular desires. It’s the same here. It’s a very popular
issue so the government is addressing it.

IJ: It sounds like a race in China to get UNESCO World Heritage
designations. Every locality is lobbying to get its temple or city
wall put on the list. And now the hot topic is “intangible cultural
heritage”: China already has thirty six items on the UNESCO list.

TQ: It’s true. Every county chief began to want to get his local music or
dance troupe on the list. It’s seen as a national honor to get on the
U.N. list. But this new category is more than face. It gave Chinese
society a new way of looking at culture. In the past, no one paid
attention to intangible heritage, but suddenly now society does.

In 2005 we proposed an exhibition on Intangible Cultural Heritage to
the National Museum of Arts but they declined and said no one would
go. So instead we went to the National Museum, which back then was
about to be renovated and agreed to let us exhibit. [The show included
music and theater among other arts.] We thought that fifteen days was
enough but then visitors came in droves. We extended the show to
twenty days, then a month, then forty days. It was a huge success.

IJ: What accounts for this interest?

TQ: We wondered why it was like this. It’s because for thirty-five years
we have opened our doors and studied foreign things with the aim of
modernizing China. That became our top priority, our national
priority. But modernization is a foreign concept, it’s a Western
concept. We did whatever the West did, that was modernization for us.

And then there was the speed. When you run so fast you can only look
ahead, you can’t look back. But after a while we realized that the
little treasure my grandfather had left for me was falling out of my
pocket. I’m not saying there haven’t been huge advantages but people
are wondering what they’ve lost.

IJ: When did all this start?

TQ: The term “intangible cultural heritage” is in fact relatively new. It
came to China in 2003 when UNESCO passed its convention on
safeguarding cultural heritage. The term came from the Japanese, who
have a long-standing program to protect their “national
treasures”—singers, actors, and others who possess unique skills. At
first, many Chinese people found it strange. People said “Non-cultural
Material Heritage” (非文化物质遗产), which is quite funny when you think
about it. But very quickly we adopted it.

It’s not that we didn’t have this idea beforehand. Look at this shelf
of books—thirty volumes on Chinese folk music, most of it collected in
the 1980s. In the past, we called this “folk culture.” (民间文化) But the
new term sounded much grander—like the kid who went abroad to study
and now comes home with a fancy degree. Suddenly everyone in the
neighborhood wants to have a look at him.

IJ: Some critics say the government program to protect intangible culture
is more about spending money on cultural bureaucracy than supporting
Chinese performers.

TQ We had to train people at the national level, provincial level, city
and county levels. Our first thought was we should do a survey of
every tradition in every county of China. But local officials didn’t
know how to do this. So we actually produced a handbook—for example
how to record a theater piece, how to survey it. Or vital questions
like who the art form’s master is, who the disciples are, and how it’s
transmitted. Or even simple things like how to properly use video
recorders. So we did spend a lot of money on this, but it was
unavoidable and the survey revealed that we have 870,000 intangible
cultural heritage items, including 1,200 that are designated
“national-level.”

And now money is flowing to the masters who practice this. Just like
the Japanese have their “national treasures,” we have designated one
person for each of these 1,200 national-level heritage items who
“transmit” the culture. In 2010, each one got 8,000 yuan ($1,200) a
year. Starting last year it is 10,000 ($1,600).

IJ: I’ve talked to some performers who say they don’t get the money.

TQ: The money is definitely being sent from the central government. Just
the national subsidies alone total 12 million yuan ($2 million). The
problem is that the localities are supposed to match this amount but
some localities don’t have the money. That is not going very well. But
overall the government is spending money on these people.

We’ve also set up Intangible Cultural Heritage experimental zones.
We’ve found that you can’t separate the cultural product from the
environment. For example the shamanistic Nuoxi opera [performed in
southwestern China]. If you just say it’s a piece of theater that’s
not right. It’s part of the Nuo people’s culture. It has a social use
you have to consider. Another one is the Qiang people in Wenquan [a
county in Sichuan province, site of a major earthquake in 2008]. This
zone includes the architecture, how they build things, their oral
histories, their agricultural planting techniques, their clothing, how
they cook and eat—we’re trying to record everything and protect it.

But I agree that all of this is too little. The difficulty is that
China is too big. There are fifty-six ethnic groups and each one has
its own special culture. Some art forms are very different—for
example, Peking Opera but also local oral histories. So we have to
keep changing how we do things.

IJ: Last year parliament passed a law to protect intangible cultural
heritage. It required foreign scholars to obtain permission before
taping or studying.

TQ: This is not a new requirement. Foreign scholars were always supposed
to go through a local university or institute. But if you are
genuinely studying a cultural issue, we welcome it. We’re mainly
concerned with protecting people’s intellectual property rights—like
you make a commercial recording and try to make money with it. That’s
not permitted. But genuine scholarship is very welcome.

IJ: Sometimes I wonder if people want to have their old traditions
protected. You note that people flood to museums, but in daily life
it’s a different story.

TQ: The problem is that modernization and protecting heritage are at odds
with each other. It’s like driving a car and then you tell someone to
look back. You can’t do it. On the one hand everyone says yes, yes
it’s great, wonderful, let’s do it. But you say, for example, to a
Miao woman, “Your clothes are beautiful,” but she says, “No, I want to
wear jeans”. The old clothes are so difficult, they take half a year
to make and you can’t wash them easily; jeans are better. Or you say
to a Dong person [an ethnic minority concentrated in south China’s
Guizhou province], “Your homes are great—wow, it’s made of bamboo,
it’s great!”—and they say, “I don’t want it. It’s cold and there’s no
running water”. People want modernization.

IJ: Can’t one unite the two? For example, Bach’s sacral music is now more
often than not performed in a concert hall. The music has been
preserved but has a different function in society.

It’s possible. But it can lead to horrible things too. In Yunnan
Xishuangbanna [a popular tourist area in China’s far south] there’s a
Water Splashing Festival of the Dai minority. It’s related to the
birthday of Sakyamuni and used to be once a year. But now people
splash water on you every day. As long as tourists come, they splash
water. It’s lost its religious function. Or after [the director] Zhang
Yimou filmed Red Sorghum and showed the bride in a sedan chair. That
used to take place in a really small area of Shanxi province. Now
across the country at every tourist spot are people with sedan chairs
for hire—hey, for 50 yuan you can ride in it. Tourism. It’s terrible.

As for Bach, yes, he left the church but it was slow. Your
modernization took two hundred years. For us it’s been thirty years.
You went step by step. We ran. So a lot of the experience that you had
isn’t applicable here. Humanity hasn’t ever experienced such sudden
change, where such a large number of people are going through
modernization at such a fast pace. No one before us has had that.

IJ: What about Taiwan? Maybe its experiences are applicable?

TQ: Definitely. We can learn a lot and we have exchanges with Taiwan. But
they are a lot smaller and had more time than we did.

IJ: They also didn’t have a Cultural Revolution.

TQ: Yes, the Cultural Revolution was terrible, but sometimes outsiders
exaggerate it. It lasted at most ten years but really the main attacks
[against cultural traditions and monuments] were limited to the early
years. The key point is the Cultural Revolution was top-down. Ordinary
people really didn’t like it. They resisted it and protected many
things. I went with the British scholar Stephen Jones around Beijing
and we found many things that had been saved, like Qing-era musical
scores. As the locals recalled, “They ordered us to destroy them but
we didn’t. We buried them.” This was despite the fact that the
Cultural Revolution was worst in the environs of Beijing. Mao himself
recognized this. When Nixon met Mao, Nixon tried to flatter him by
saying “You changed China” and Mao said, “No, I just changed Beijing
and a few areas around it.” He knew it.

IJ: I visited a Daoist music troupe in Shanxi and the youngest member of
the troupe is ninth generation. He has an eleven-year-old son and said
he won’t let his son learn the music because it’s a poor job—there’s
no real money in it despite the subsidies and it has no status.

TQ: There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s from their own heart. This
is typical in humans. Most people look forward and forget the past.
It’s mainly a few intellectuals and experts who say that the past is
ke ai (cute). You can go to the countryside and say to a musician, why
don’t you use sheep gut strings for your stringed instruments? But
they want to use steel. They say it’s longer-lasting.

IJ: How do you feel about your work? It sounds hopeless.

TQ: No, we’ve had some successes. One is the national holidays. In the
past we just had three: Chinese New Year, Worker’s Day on May 1, and
National Day on October 1. But now we’re celebrating soon the Qingming
Tomb-Sweeping Holiday on April 4 [during which families visit
cemeteries and leave offerings or flowers for departed ancestors] and
we have others as well. A few years ago the government announced that
half a dozen traditional holidays were now national holidays. That
changed people’s awareness. Most young people are still more
interested in Western holidays like Valentine’s Day. But now people
are aware of these other festivals and some will learn about the
stories behind them or the traditions associated with them.

The real problem is modernization. It’s worse than the Cultural
Revolution. The Cultural Revolution was forced on people. But
modernization is yearned for by people themselves, it’s their own
desire. You can’t force the Miao girl to wear traditional garb. If she
wants to wear jeans, she will.

—Ian Johnson previously interviewed Ran Yunfei, Chang Ping, Liao Yiwu
and Yang Jisheng for the NYRblog.

April 7, 2012, 1:35 p.m.