Dishonest beauty in pursuit of profit

A new buzzword doing the rounds of the media in China is "soft power". There are many manifestations, so we are told, of soft power, the "culture industry" being one. The culture industry includes, among other things, the performing arts such as songs, dance, music, theater, opera, puppetry and movies, as well as painting, sculpture, pottery and even handicrafts.

Indeed, there is need to promote these forms of human expression, intellectual and emotional, to the highest possible levels of excellence. The problem, however, is, in our desperation to push our soft power, we are falling prey to the very traps that we should be steering clear of.

For quite some time, the media have been crying over the lost opportunities or yielding to the power of the Western (mainly American) cultural bandwagon. Chinese commentators have been lamenting the backwardness of the domestic movie industry and the ineffectiveness of the other performing arts in taking on Western productions.