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By Root 1464 0

barbarians out now swarms with their heirs, the ever more ubiquitous tourists who are becoming the basis for a vital Chinese industry. The Chinese have responded to the challenge of McWorld with what the Chinese like to call “market socialism,” what the former New York Times Beijing bureau chief dryly calls “Market-Leninism.”8 Leninist political institutions can initially coexist very nicely with market capitalism, and the thirty or forty Rolls-Royces imported in each of the last few years have not shaken Communist rulership. However, Chinese-Communist and pre-Communist Chinese cultural values are vulnerable to the messages played in the CD players and to the images conveyed by the internal appointments of the Rolls-Royces (and Land Rovers and Mercedeses) being brought in. The Chinese hope to make foreign cultural imports their own, welding together the artifacts of McWorld and the images of traditional Chinese communism—as artist Wang Guangyi has done in his canvases integrating Western advertising logos into revolutionary posters or Feng Mengbo did in his Video End Game Series in which Mao’s revolutionary-model operas appear on canvas as video games.9

Soap operas too are popular, so the Chinese have begun producing their own with considerable success. In 1991 the fifty-part series Aspirations created a sensation and gave serious competition to the Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and Mexican soap operas already on the air. In boom cities like Shanghai, there are few signs of the local culture that fuels Jihad, subtle or otherwise. Shanghai is not “like” Hong Kong and Singapore: it is Hong Kong and Singapore, except the traffic is worse. Chu Chia Chien has returned from her New York exile to the city of her youth and says of her new neighbors: “They are very fashion-conscious, but now they like to have a name brand—it is very important because it says ‘I have money.’”10 Meanwhile, the China Culture Gazette, official organ of the Ministry of Culture, has gone slick and fashionable, featuring busty Western nudes and sincere discussions of sexuality and eroticism. Editor Zhang Zuomin uses Red Guard language of the cultural revolution to advance the interests of the market. “I believe we must smash open Chinese culture, and apply ‘the great fearless spirit’ to our newspaper work,” he says.11

With such developments made rampant by official support for markets, it is not hard to appreciate why Asian authorities in Communist and non-Communist countries alike insist on state control over information and the media, though for the most part in vain. Indonesia has shown a radical intolerance toward its independent media in recent years, in the main to forestall political opposition. But the government clearly also feels some need to use media control in its struggle against foreign culture. The cola companies, after all, have declared war on Indonesian tea culture. And while free-market philosophy urges freedom for advertising, it is agnostic about intervention via censorship against the kind of free cultural lifestyles advertising promotes.

China, no less culturally defensive than France, is tightening control over the production and screening of films with even more fer vor than the French. It has restricted foreign films to 30 percent of the total market. Yet though the government tries to retain absolute control over political ideas, in leaving cultural images and commercial information to the marketplace it flails at mosquitoes with a butterfly net. In the long run the cultural mosquitoes are more likely to bring down the regime than the political butterflies that are captured. Artists have learned to use irony in place of anger, while publications like the Cultural Gazette make sure that between the nudes and gossip no political criticism slips in. The authorities understand that what they keep out via locks and bars on the front door labeled politics often creeps in through the wide-open back door labeled markets, but what is to be done? For example, aware of how ubiquitous McWorld’s satellite transmissions have become, they have dutifully