>Wen Yang: The Cultural Proposition of the Communist Party of China

Wen Yang: The Cultural Proposition of the Communist Party of China From October 15th to 18th, the Sixth Plenary Session of the Seventeenth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China was held in Beijing. For the first time, "...

Wen Yang: The Cultural Proposition of the Communist Party of China From October 15 to 18, the Sixth Plenary Session of the 17th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China was held in Beijing. For the first time, the "Cultural Proposition" was made an issue of the Central Plenary Session, proposing to "deepen the reform of the cultural system" and "promote the great development and prosperity of socialist culture." On the 15th, the People's Daily published a signed article "China's Road to a Cultural Power". The article contained many new rhetoric, such as, "A country that can only export televisions instead of ideas cannot become a world power." "A nation can only achieve greater civilizational progress if its culture embodies a power more powerful than material and capital; a country can enter a higher stage of development only if its economic development embodies the character of its culture." The general impression is: from now on, the Chinese Communist Party will engage in cultural development just as it engaged in economic development thirty years ago. "Deepening the reform of the cultural system" corresponds to the "deepening the reform of the economic system" of that year, and "promoting the great development and prosperity of socialist culture" corresponds to that of "promoting the great development and prosperity of the socialist market economy." After thirty years of economic reform, China's economy has gone from having a GDP only one-sixth that of Japan to surpassing Japan and ranking second in the world, setting off an unprecedentedly spectacular positive trend. So, judging from the formulation of this Central Plenary Session, does it mean that Chinese culture will also create a great positive line of unprecedented development and prosperity in the next thirty years? With the confidence, pride, and ambition of the economic development achievements of the past thirty years, the Communist Party of China has launched a new blueprint, called the "Great Cultural Reform." With such a great river flowing eastward into the sea, who can question it? Why question it? It can be said that if we look at the overall situation of China's economic reform in the past thirty years, it is indeed difficult to doubt. At the beginning of the reform and opening up, the Communist Party had never had a glorious history of success in economic development. Only the "Great Leap Forward" and the "Cultural Revolution" successively brought the terrible reality of the national economy to the brink of collapse. At that time, the statements that "the Communist Party does not understand the economy" and "the Communist Party cannot handle the economy" were popular in the intellectual and cultural circles without any hindrance. No one could have predicted China's economic achievements today thirty years later. However, the subsequent reality exceeded all the most optimistic estimates. This is the view of the Communist Party on economic development, but what about culture? Thirty years ago, not long after the "Cultural Revolution" that launched a counter-culture, destroyed culture, and revolutionized the cultural revolution, the entire Chinese intelligentsia and cultural circles had just struggled out of a near-death purgatory and were recovering from their wounds. At this time, if someone said that the Communist Party is a master of culture and that the great development and prosperity of Chinese culture depends on the Communist Party, they would be regarded as deliberately sarcastic or a "leftist" nonsense, and would not win any support. Even today, people do not think that the Communist Party has achieved a success in promoting cultural development that matches economic development. The fact is that history has not proven that the Communist Party can also succeed culturally. So? Will the same prediction failure happen again? Although the Chinese Communist Party of today is no longer the Chinese Communist Party of the past; although the Communist Party has won sufficient support and trust for itself in the process of creating China's economic miracle; however, when the Communist Party proposes to "promote the great development and prosperity of socialist culture," the doubts it faces will still be profound and strong. For example, people may ask: The "Cultural Revolution" back then was an unprecedented disaster. How can today's "Cultural Reform" ensure its success? People will ask: Economic development and prosperity can be measured quantitatively through popular economic indicators, but how can cultural development and prosperity be measured? In particular, how to judge whether the development of culture is developing in the "advanced" and "correct" direction, and whether the prosperity of culture is the prosperity of the best and most essential parts? Generally speaking, the development and prosperity of various ethnic cultures in human history are naturally formed. There is no precedent for a ruling party to realize the cultural prosperity of the entire country through the implementation of its principles and policies. Perhaps, China and the world will witness a miracle again. October 18, 2011