Tian Wei - CCTV News Anchor
The Lady with the Ear of 1.4 Billion People
CCTV is a news station on the rise that has over 50 bureaus and unlike other large media companies of the U.S. and West, can compensate their employees better and attract better talent. They are considered the mouthpiece for the government and cover 1.4 billion citizens of china. Her position as the line of official communication with the people on behalf of the government is a position of public influence like Anderson Cooper that I had no considered before. This is especially true in a society that has just begun to appreciate the journalistic profession.
Subsequent to touching on traditional media, we she spoke about social media, specifically weibo, Twitter's Chinese equivalent. She touched on the positives of weibo in spreading news, yet also spoke of the dark side of rumors, breaking news and off the record information all spreading at the same pace and the public not being able to critically evaluate what is being said. She then spoke further of how on weibo people even buy followers for 50 cents, called the 50 cent party, leading to the dissemination of misinformation.
When she opened the floor for discussion, I introduced myself as an East Asian studies major specializing in economics. She followed up by saying "oh, you'd better have a good question!" That got me a little nervous, but then I dived into my two questions - first regarding my thesis topic and her thoughts of journalists role in covering the senkaku island conflict. My second questions was about media's role in propagating Xi Jinping's china dream. She said that the senkaku island conflict was a hot topic that was covered 1 out of 4 of every one of her stories and Xi Jinping's had said that he was smart, but the resolution of the issue should be left to later generations. That is incredible to hear because Deng Xiaoping, the reformer of 1979 that opened china to capitalism, said the same thing 30 years prior, employing the delaying strategy that is considered least costly political strategy in this situation.
She then spoke more broadly about remilitarization of Japan and shed light on the Chinese perspective that the US does not understand the risk that it is taking by supporting it. The US was never colonized so I do not believe that we can understand the fear the Chinese and Koreans have against Japan. One of my Korean friends, told me separately that he thinks of Japan as very militaristic militaristic culture even beyond World War II aggressions and when thinking of the samurai. I always thought of Japan as a peaceful state, but there is truth to the soul of the warrior as a driving cultural force. Then she spoke of the issues of the cold war mentality that has arisen from this conflict and that as a world we are moving backwards instead of investing more money into the economy and a peaceful future. She referred this to NASA and how many of the achievements of the Cold War are not even in use today.
Towards the end of the talk, a question was asked by one of the group members that was something along the lines of china being a post-socialist country. In response, our speaker asks, "what is post-socialism". Our summer course was renamed because the name socialists and post-socialist cities was not an acceptable course title by the Chinese government. The idea of post-socialist is a western conception of China and because there was no collapse of the government like in the case of the Soviet Union, there is no clear distinction between the transition and more of a gray area as China moves in the direction of capitalism under authoritarian rule that claims to be communist.
After the lecture, we took the subway to Xu Bing’s art
studio. Xu Bing is a famous modern artist and we were supposed to meet with
him, but he got pulled away for an emergency meeting. Xu Bing was sent to the countryside during
the Cultural Revolution where he wasn’t sent as a part of labor reform, but to
learn the life in rural China. When he was there he was exposed to wax prints
and sculpting that cultivated his interest in art. The focus of his art is
interpreting meaning and repetition. When I arrived at the studio, I realized
that I had actually seen it during senior year when I went to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art’s East Asia Exhibit’s opening night with my friend Mirabel, my Columbia Culture Buddy.
Since he was not present, some elderly man, with half the
teeth from his bottom row missing, gave us a short lecture with a powerpoint, but he only spoke Chinese, so the Fenco and Moore helped translate.
Although that helped to grasp what was going on, he would speak for so long
that I could tell that the when the girls translated, everything was not getting
across to us. That being said, he was a fountain of knowledge and he had tons and tons to say about all the art.
His most impressive piece of art was The Book From The Sky, which
he spent 5 years on during his time at the academy and was on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He took the wood block
print making style and created fake characters using his knowledge of the
construction of Chinese characters. Xu then created an entire book using these
incomprehensible words as a social commentary on the communist party during the
Cultural Revolution. The formatting he used was similar to the little red book,
that would bold and increase the size of the characters with more importance.
The irony is that in a book with all incomprehensible characters, everything
has no meaning, ultimately emphasizing arbitrary things.
The Book From The Sky
Another method he used to manipulate Chinese Characters was by taking
American letters and transforming them to similar looking Chinese radicals
(parts of characters) or creating completely new radicals. He would then
combine radicals to form fake Chinese Characters that could be read in English.
These were incredibly fun to decipher and bridged a gap between the two
cultures with regards to understanding of characters and text. He had two
beautiful scrolls on the wall: one wrote Faithful To Your Art You Know No Age and the other wrote Letting Wealth And Fame Drift By The Clouds.
Letting Wealth And Fame Drift By The Clouds
Can you decipher it?
Another interesting piece that they showed us was a piece
that had a quote “Where does the dust itself collect”. It does not look impressive at
first, but Xu Bing was actually in the US during 9/11 and he collected the ashes from
the collapse of the Twin Towers. Because America forbids the exportation of any of the dust, he
molded a sculpture using the inside of a cabbage patch kid and sent it to China and
created the exhibit. Although I was not happy that he took a sacred “object”
from the states by means of smuggling, his way of changing the dust into
something meaningful was amazing. This also made me appreciate that when it
comes to art, there are so many different mediums than oil on canvas or marble
and the medium may have some incredible meaning in itself.
The last piece that we heard about was the Phoenix in St.
John the Divine, right near campus. It is a giant piece made completely of
garbage like old tires and bicycle frames. In this piece he juxtaposes what is
considered waste with something grand and beautiful. The phoenix also symbolize
rebirth, playing well with this theme. It was first commissioned by a large
Chinese corporation, but after the 2008 financial slowdown, it became
unaffordable and the phoenix was not desirable by any of the Chinese elite was then sent to the US where it was well received in the states.
Karaoke with King Charles!!
At the Club
Skewers Until The Sun Comes Up
Can barely keep my eyes open
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