If you believe the mission of the NAMOC is to showcase the best Chinese art you are wrong, the President says. It should teach visitors the “correct political orientation.”
by Hu Zimo
If you are a resident of Beijing, even if you are critical of the government, you are probably proud of some of the city’s cultural institutions. You have a feeling that they do not “belong” to the CCP but to China, and document the excellence of its ancient and modern culture. One such institution is the NAMOC, the National Art Museum of China.
We know it has been founded by Chairman Mao—before the Cultural Revolution, in 1958. It had its ups and downs, yet many citizens of Beijing acknowledge that it has a certain basic honesty in telling the history of Chinese art, Imperial and modern, without too much ideological censorship (although, of course, contemporary dissident artists are not there).
What many like, Xi Jinping probably dislikes. He wrote a letter on May 21 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of NAMOC’s full opening, which happened in 1963, six years after the project was started, and just in time to suffer mightily during the Cultural Revolution.
While Xi celebrates the achievements of the NAMOC, he also explains that a “new journey” should now start, one in which the NAMOC will “adhere to the correct political orientation.” Implicitly suggesting that this has not happened so far, or not enough; he tells the NAMOC management that the time has come to “put into practice the core socialist values in running the venue,” even if this would cost “painstaking efforts.”
In short, the NAMOC should understand that its mission is to “develop socialist culture.”
This is not, of course, the typical mission of a leading international art museum as the NAMOC always aspired to be. Art museums are not about preaching an ideology. While no museum is really “neutral” in its choice and presentation of works, an art museum should be about art. If the visitors have the impression that art is just a pretext to teach them the “correct political orientation” and the “core socialist values,” the museum will lose its purpose and nature as a museum. It will become just another propaganda center.
Reading between the lines, one understands that museum curators have not reacted so far to such orders with enthusiasm, and may even have put up a certain resistance. But spaces of resistance are being destroyed in all fields in Xi Jinping’s China.
