The Creative Creation of Creativity in China

I have heard this same underlying adage in economics departments for many years, though in recent years I haven't heard it as often:

From Gunpowder to the Next Big Bang, by Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times: There is a techie adage that goes like this: In China or Japan the nail that stands up gets hammered, while in Silicon Valley the nail that stands up drives a Ferrari and has stock options. Underlying that adage is a certain American confidence that whatever we lack in preparing our kids with strong fundamentals in math and science, we make up for by encouraging our best students to be independent, creative thinkers.

I've always wondered if it the adage is a rationalization for poor U.S. performance in math and science, but apparently the belief has support in China as well:

...Even the Chinese will tell you that they've been good at making the next new thing, and copying the next new thing, but not imagining the next new thing. That may be about to change. Confident that its best K-12 students will usually outperform America's in math and science, China is focusing on how to transform its classrooms so students become more innovative. ...Harry Shum, a Carnegie Mellon-trained computer engineer ... said: "A Chinese journalist once asked me, '...what is the difference between China and the U.S.?...' I joked, '... the difference between China high-tech and American high-tech is only three months - if you don't count creativity.' When I was a student in China 20 years ago, we didn't even know what was happening in the U.S. Now, anytime an M.I.T. guy puts up something on the Internet, students in China can absorb it in three months.

How do you create imagineers?

"But could someone here create it? That is a whole other issue. I learned mostly about how to do research right at Carnegie Mellon. ... Before you create anything new, you need to understand what is already there. Once you have this foundation, being creative can be trainable. China is building that foundation. So very soon, in 10 or 20 years, you will see a flood of top-quality research papers from China." Once more original ideas emerge, though, China will need more venture capital and the rule of law to get them to market. ... Dr. Shum said. "... I will be teaching a class at Tsinghua University next year on how to do technology-based ventures. ... You have technology in Chinese universities, but people don't know what to do with it - how to marketize it." ...

How do you say "Ferrari" in Chinese?

Creativity is built like everything else of value is built, with long hard work and as the commentary notes it starts with the construction of the proper foundation, a thorough understanding of what is known and how it came to be known, what is unknown, and what among the unknown is the most important to solve.

Comments

[STS]

There's also the "brain drain" effect -- so much Asian talent has emigrated in past decades that we get an artificially low impression of those nations' domestic potential for innovation. As Asia becomes wealthier and the advantages of emigration diminish, the most innovative individuals will be less prone to do their best work in the US or Europe.

Of course, it isn't only about wealth. There's also the question of repressive governments to consider. Freer civil societies are also an important factor in motivating the most talented to stay at home. I hope that freedom actually matters enough that China (for example) will need to liberalize politically in order to continue to prosper. Otherwise, I fear for democratic institutions here in the US.

[anne]

Simply pay attention to the arts in China, and you will have a sense of just how creative the Chinese are and can be in the sciences. Yes; the arts reflect a social and cultural structure, and I am finding thrilling Chinese work from dance to painting.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/arts/dance/08joyc.html?ei=5070&en=7fcc98505141c024&ex=1120622400&emc=eta1&pagewanted=all&position=

February 8, 2005

In Modern Dance, Reflections of a Restless China in Flux
By ANNA KISSELGOFF

In a country where the arts are expected to support government policy rather than exist primarily as independent forms, China's still-young and rapidly expanding modern dance has a distinct advantage. It is a wordless means of individual expression, especially open to ambiguity and interpretation.

When the Beijing Modern Dance Company, founded in 1995, makes its New York debut tonight at the Joyce Theater, with "Rear Light," a piece choreographed to music from "The Wall," the 1979 rock album by Pink Floyd, viewers will certainly spot the general aura of alienation. It may be less easy to agree about specifics.

The sight of young people placed "up against the wall" and of crime-scene body silhouettes painted on the floor as well as dancing that veers between turbulence and regimentation may all evoke the 1989 repression of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

Yet there is also an intimate male-female duet and a wild disco scene, usually with audience participation onstage. For Willy Tsao, the company's Hong Kong-born artistic director, this disco episode is not just a release but also a critique of mindless youth. "It shows a wild bunch of kids enjoying themselves," Mr. Tsao said. "They don't know what's going on around them. They hide from the truth."

Any recent visitor to China who has run into the night life in Shanghai and Beijing or seen the pop art in official museums that portrays Maoists and punk rockers side by side will understand that artists who do not want a return to the past may also be unhappy with China's rediscovery of materialist values.

An allegorical transposition of the original tale about an alienated rock star in the 1982 movie version of "The Wall," "Rear Light" is at a far remove from a realistic dance about peasants in the fields that was included in the 1991 United States debut of the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, the seedbed of Chinese contemporary dance.

Reflecting a society in flux, professional modern dance has spread beyond Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai to attract budding choreographers in universities in other provinces. True to the essence of modern dance anywhere, it is no longer limited to one kind of movement idiom or aesthetic....

[calmo]

Glad someone pulled the imagination prize away from the engineers. Thanks Anne.
That nail, the one that gets driven down in China but transformed in the US to a Ferrari, rubbed me the wrong way.
Wounded me.
It's an Italian sports car costing several times what an American sports car costs, yes? People who drive these have piles of money they may have earned honestly by working diligently and imaginatively (like Bruce) and needed to express themselves in non-Mother Teresa like fashion, but not likely.
We regard these people as successful rather than imaginative (although should I be arrested for some self-indulgent offense, this would be my first line of defence: I was using my imagination your Honor.)

The beauty of pounding a proud nail home cannot be underestimated.
Whomp!
It feels good because it is good.
Need to stuff those Ferraris back where they belong: the toy box.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/arts/dance/06kour.html

March 6, 2005

Dancing a Dream, From a Child of Mao's Revolution
By GIA KOURLAS

NOMAD: THE RIVER
Yin Mei

LIKE millions of girls who had come before her, the choreographer Yin Mei was staunchly devoted to her diary. But the thoughts she poured onto its pages were drastically different from those of a typical angst-ridden adolescent. She grew up in a town in central China during the Cultural Revolution. At age 7, she, along with her classmates, started a journal to record, as she puts it, "her progress along the revolutionary road."

"We were the children of Chairman Mao," Ms. Yin, now 42, said recently. "We wanted to offer our life to him. It was real. From the ages of 7 to 14, I sincerely wanted to become a farmer or a soldier. During the Cultural Revolution, everybody spoke the same meaningless words. But as I was reading my later diaries, I can tell I started to have other feelings and sensations. I started to think about myself."

Around the same time she began her diary, Ms. Yin watched a ballet film and fell in love with dance. One of her most treasured childhood memories occurred when her father surprised her with a pair of ballet slippers.

"As students, we had to work on the farm to help with harvest time," she said. "We were basically doing all kinds of things except studying in school. I came home from the country and saw this pair of slippers. I was so excited that I did not even wash my feet. From then on, I was dancing."

During the Cultural Revolution, Ms. Yin, whose outward fragility belies a tougher inner core, performed with a traditional Chinese company before moving to New York in 1985. In her newest piece, "Nomad: The River," to be performed at Dance Theater Workshop beginning on Wednesday, she strives to resolve the experiences of her childhood, not through a linear depiction but through strange and bewitching imagery that is pieced together like a dream.

"Nomad," a quartet, features a set by Christopher Salter so extravagant it could be taken for an installation....

[anne]

Agreed, Calmo :)

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/11/arts/design/11SOLO.html

November 11, 2001

An Ancient Garden Youthfully Abloom: Chinese Art Today
By ANDREW SOLOMON

AT an exhibition of early Picasso last year at the National Gallery in Washington, a woman in a red dress stood in front of a beautifully drawn nude and said with surprise: ''Glory be! He was perfectly capable of painting people the way they look.''

Savvier viewers know that Picasso's abstractions came of seeing reality so clearly that he could see past it; to them his literal early material is unsurprising. He had to be able to do some sort of realism in order to invent cubism. Realism was the point of origin.

Yet realist painters in the West are in an awkward position: for more than 100 years, many of them have chosen not to practice the form. A gift for representation is usually what gets them going as artists in the first place, when they are children. Later on, they ignore this physical talent or put it in the service of larger and often more intellectual goals. This seems to us normal: we see realism as the natural and only starting place for art. We therefore expect all other art to be derived from it. In other cultures, however, the starting point is very different.

Ink painting is the realism of China. It is the beginning and the end; it is the grand objective around which artistic practice is built. Calligraphy is the religious art of China. It carries value beyond what it conveys to the untutored eye. The verbal and the visual are much more richly entangled in the Chinese tradition than anywhere else, and realism, or what we would perceive as accurate depiction, is associated not with high art but with low-level court painting.

Indeed, classical Chinese artists trained not by working from nature or models but by imitating the work of past masters. The third dimension was not introduced into images. So artists trying to grapple with their past either had to make reference to the great calligraphic tradition or participate in it. A classical Chinese scholar would learn early to express himself with the brush; for such scholars, painting was not one step away from seeing but one step away from writing.

Just as literal realist technique enters into contemporary work by such diverse artists as Chuck Close, David Salle and Gerhard Richter, classical calligraphic technique -- guohua, or national painting -- enters into the work of many contemporary Chinese artists. There, it mixes with recent ideas, Eastern and Western. Some contemporary Chinese artists are uninterested in the guohua tradition, but most are, and theirs is the more interesting work: it is historically engaged, acknowledging its predecessors in one way or another....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/03/books/03jian.html

November 3, 2005

A Novel, by Someone, Takes China by Storm
By HOWARD W. FRENCH

BEIJING - For the author of one of China's best-selling novels of recent years, and moreover, one about rugged life among wolves on the Mongolian plains, Jiang Rong makes a surprisingly timid introduction.

"I am sorry, I have no name cards," said the man meekly as he entered the living room of his home here, where a foreigner was waiting to see him recently. Having no cards, at least, seemed appropriate, for much about Mr. Jiang, beginning with his real name, is a mystery.

When asked who he is, the writer demurred, embarking on a halting defense of his efforts to remain anonymous from behind the screen of his heavy-framed, somewhat antiquated eyeglasses. "This is the first time I've received anyone in my home," he said. "You must understand, my situation is a bit complicated."

This much is known: Mr. Jiang, a 59-year-old political scientist at a Beijing university, has written his first novel, "Wolf Totem," a stirring allegorical critique of Chinese civilization, which he calls soft and lacking in individuality and freedom. He volunteered for farm work on the prairie of Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution and became versed in the ways of China's northern hinterland. And although he will not comment, it is rumored that he was in political trouble in China in the late 1980's, perhaps spending time in prison.

There are also these much happier facts: The legally published version of Mr. Jiang's book has sold at least one million copies in China since its release last year, along with perhaps six million black market copies and other knockoffs. The novel was also recently bought by Penguin for $100,000, a record for the overseas rights for a contemporary Chinese writer. And Peter Jackson, the New Zealand director, a specialist in dark fantasies like "The Lord of the Rings," has bought the story rights to the novel and plans to produce a film based on it, recounting how a young Han Chinese man and his friends steal a young wolf from its pit and raise it in their tent.

The main character, clearly drawn from Mr. Jiang's own experience, watches with mounting dread as the Han population and cultural influence on the plains rise, leading to the killing off of the wolves and the desertification of the grasslands.

One might assume that the delicacy of Mr. Jiang's situation lies in the novel's criticism of China's Han majority and its Confucian-inspired culture, which he repeatedly called autocratic and sheeplike. The author insists this is not so, however, and the evidence seems to support him. "Wolf Totem" vaunts the cultural merits of Mongolian nomads, which the author lists as "freedom, independence, respect, unyielding before hardship, teamwork and competition." It has been talked up abundantly on television programs, handed out by corporate executives as a motivational tool and, it is said, praised among the officer corps of the People's Liberation Army.

There is another mystery at work besides Mr. Jiang's identity, however: how could a book that is heavy on anthropology and philosophy, concerned with obscure rituals and Mongolian folk tradition, and lacking in traditional plot lines have captured the attention of so many readers? ...