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October 29, 2014

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For cultural renewal, society must be willing to end its enslavement to market dictates

A few years ago, I had to introduce myself to a gentleman who worked for an advertisement firm. After learning that I was a journalist, he exclaimed, “Oh, we are in the same business.”

I did not take that comparison as a compliment. I thought media remained one of the few professions in which business is conducted with a view to moral principles.

But we have been since witnessing a paradigm shift. Unlike traditional media, which are coping, scaling down, or struggling, the advertising business is on the ascent, buoyed by the prospect of marketing to a nation of over a billion people.

Some media are mastering the art of how to stoop under the proud scepter of the market. So when some media professionals want to keep their respectability, they join the advertising business as a positive step of upward mobility.

When observers talk glibly of cultural prosperity, they mainly have in mind the thriving of cultural business that have subscribed to the “sales-led” philosophy. Under the glittering facade of this prosperity, there is a bold testing of the limits, an exploration of the potential of what was once forbidden or morally unacceptable. There is an uneasy sense of the lack of a center.

As the concept of culture broadens, it begins to encompass such things as cooking, golfing, mahjong, or even sex. In a more acceptable sense, it simply refers to the availability of distractions.

For several years during rush hour on the Metro, I have been compelled to endure multiple announcements from the LED screen in the train about KFC’s breakfast deal that starts at only 6 yuan. I sometimes feel that KFC could well save the money, for, at least for children my son’s age, they need little encouragement to rush to the trough of junk food.

My son takes the junk food so seriously that he controls each of his bites carefully so as to prolong the satisfaction. So the real challenge is how to restore their appetite for the family meal, the elaborately cooked fare with a view to their health.

When we no longer mistake the ambient noises, restlessness, or the plethora of distractions as signs of prosperity, it is hard not to feel disturbed. In this wonderful world of free downloads, instant gratification, copy and paste, effortless access, the sad truth is that the amount of our wakeful hours remains the same.

The consequence is easy to see. Bookstores are being resolutely banished from our field of vision. In a suburban neighborhood where my in-laws live, the population has probably seen a ten-fold rise in the past decade, with a comparable increase in the number of commercial outlets. There have been the rise and fall of numerous restaurants, stores, supermarkets, beauty saloons and real estate brokers, but there has never been a single bookstore or newsstand.

Remedies

The bookstores are not just vanishing from the city in general, but from places traditionally deemed vital to culture.

In a one-page feature detailing the plight of bookstores (Xinmin Evening News, October 23), the writer wrote that Shanghai Jiao Tong University is soon to be a university without a bookstore.

“There used to be two bookstores on the second floor of Hualian (department store), which are small restaurants now,” a student blogged recently on the university’s BBS. “There used to be a bookstore in the business street, which is now an air-conditioner repair shop. The imminent closure of Xueren Bookstore (Scholars’ Bookstore) will make Jiaoda a university without any bookstores.”

Jiaoda is not alone in this deprivation. Two years ago, following the closure of the last remaining bookstore at Shanghai Normal University, the Fengxian university town has become a college town without a bookstore.

It is a depressing indicator of the health of our cultural scene.

There are remedies, though. It lies in redeeming our culture from the enslavement of money. Rather than give full play to the market, we can spend a small portion of our GDP on affirming the value of culture in the best sense of the word.

At a small cost, we can easily create 1,000 neighborhood libraries. Remember to stock them with a collection of real books, not those on beauty, cuisines, or pulp fiction, which many librarians have strong incentives to include.

Create public radio, whose quality can aspire to that in the 1980s, when there were no ads and an eager audience would gather before a radio well before the time due for the airing of a program.

Only by redeeming culture from the enslavement of the market can we hope the nation will truly benefit from the prosperity of the culture.




 

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