Weblog with daily updates of the news on a frugal, fair and beautiful China, from the perspective of internet entrepreneur, new media advisor and president of the China Speakers Bureau Fons Tuinstra
Bridging cultures between Chinese and international companies is harder, now the golden age of foreign companies in China is over, says international coach Gabor Holch in an interview with marketing guru Ashley Dudarenok.
Sharon Gai, a China-born Canadian who is an expert in e-commerce, digital transformation, and AI, and worked as head of Global Key Accounts at Alibaba. She explains what lessons she learned about cultural fluidity in business and society to IKNS Conversations That Matter, in places where different cultures meet, and how cultural intelligence can help.
Investor William Bao Bean, Managing Director of Orbit startups, explains how he helped artists make money from their music at All That Matters 2023, introducing three successful investments from his portefeuille. Explaining the fast-changing models to generate money, using for example Tiktok/Douyin, and many more new tech models.
COVID-19 did put pressure on the global turnover of public auctions of artworks, but their value has gone up, says Hurun chairman Rupert Hoogewerfat Shine. Artists from China have been moving up in the ranking, in line with China’s economy, he adds.
Shine:
As a benchmark for collectors or potential collectors, many eyes are focusing on the results of the SICA-Hurun Global Art List 2021 – a ranking of the top 50 living artists in the world based on sales of their works at public auctions last year.
This is the second year the Hurun Global Art List is released by the Shanghai International Commodity Company and Hurun Research Institute.
Artprice.com, a leading art market information platform, provided the art auction data for foreign artists, while data about Chinese artists came from the CAFA National Institute of Art and Cultural Policy.
“COVID-19 has had a big impact on the art market, with the works of the Hurun Top 50 living global artists only selling US$1.4 billion at public auction last year, down 24 percent. However, this does not necessarily mean the value of artworks decreased. It may be because good works were not put up for auction by collectors last year,” said Rupert Hoogewerf, Hurun Chairman and Chief Researcher.
British artist David Hockney, 84, topped the list for the second year in a row, with sales bringing in US$132 million.
Hockney, a painter, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.
Beijing-based Chinese painter Cui Ruzhuo, 77, shot up eight places on the list to second, with sales of his works more than doubling to US$113.1 million.
A student of Li Kuchan (1899-1983), one of the Chinese painters known for combining Western techniques with traditional Chinese styles, Cui left Beijing for the United States in 1981, but soon ran out of money in his rented basement.
Fortunately, he sold a painting for US$400,000 four months after arriving in the US, and the buyer introduced him to wealthy collectors and important people in art circles.
He started to prosper, so much so that he began collecting, and today his collection contains an album of paintings created by Shi Tao from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).
The 89-year-old German artist Gerhard Richter, ranked third, with US$102.4 million in sales, down one place from last year.
In terms of countries, the US had the most artists on the list, followed by China, the United Kingdom and Japan. Curiously, traditional art powerhouses like France had only one artist on the list, while Italy had none.
One reason might be that “the world’s leading art auction houses are based in New York, London, Hong Kong and Beijing,” said Hoogewerf.
Twelve Chinese artists made the list, one more than last year, including four new names. Beijing-based Zeng Fanzhi, 57, broke into the top 10, moving up 24 places.
“The achievements of Chinese contemporary artists in the secondary market cannot be separated from the development of the Chinese economy and the strong community of Chinese collectors,” Hoogerwerf said. “Influenced by China’s profound cultural tradition, Chinese contemporary artists have experienced social changes, the development of globalization and frequent international exchanges.”
Outsiders often see China as a coherent country, with a similar culture, while they do not see the huge differences between different parts of the country, argues China expert Arnold Ma in his vlog. When you believe Western movies, you think China is only about fighting and kungfu, and fighting and kungfu, he says in a clip fighting myths about the country.
Marketing expert Ashley Dudarenok discusses the origins of the Chinese Spring festival and how it translates into modern times, on her vlog. On red envelopes, the dragon, and much more.
Chinese-American rockstar Kaiser Kuo used to be frontman of the Beijing heavy metal band Tang Dynasty. For Sixth Tone he explains how Chinese culture can make a difference in music. "Drawing on Chinese culture can help bands stand out from the rest," he says.
Sixth Tone:
Kaiser Kuo, a co-founder of Tang Dynasty, tells Sixth Tone that drawing on Chinese culture can help bands stand out from the rest. “It’s an obvious touchstone for a musical genre that’s aggressive and quite martial,” says Kuo over email. Western metal bands have long drawn from Western legends, and Chinese artists have plenty of their own material to do the same, he says, pointing to the hero-filled epic “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” or Louis Cha’s martial arts novels as examples.
But it can be hard to incorporate Chinese musical influences without sounding monotonous or tacky, says Kuo. What’s more, metal bands with Chinese characteristics can face criticism from Chinese metalheads who suspect the musicians do so just to win over foreign audiences, even though — as Kuo notes — that’s not the only way to gain success. This summer, Beijing metal band Die From Sorrow won the battle of the bands at Wacken, Germany — the biggest metal festival in the world — without any traditional Chinese elements. “Without naming names, I’ve certainly seen some bad efforts to incorporate recognizably Chinese elements … that I suspect had no commitment to it and were clearly doing it in the mistaken belief that it would be a marketing plus,” says Kuo.
For international viewers under unfriendly regimes, this well-produced caricature of Washington proffers an unspoken truth about the duplicity of American power. And their governments have been all too happy to have their citizens believe that these dark shenanigans are realistic.
Since its debut, the show has reached millions of viewers in China, as well as top leaders of the Communist Party. Netflix isn’t available in China (and it doesn’t release any data about viewership), but “House of Cards” has received millions of downloads through pirated torrents and third-party streaming websites like SohuTV, which secured the rights from Netflix for the show’s early seasons. Sohu ranked the second season, which features a Chinese oligarch trying to influence a U.S. election and a trade war between Beijing and Washington, as the most popular American show on its site after its 2014 release. According to the site, the first season received 24.5 million views in China, with the largest portion coming from residents of Beijing and government employees.
“ ‘House of Cards’ had a huge impact in China,” said Tom Doctoroff, the chief cultural insights officer at Prophet, a brand and marketing consultancy, and an expert on the Chinese market, “because it essentially confirmed that our government is not so different than theirs. People took a great deal of satisfaction and maybe a little schadenfreude in that.”
The show also portrayed Beijing as the United States’ adversarial equal while reaffirming Chinese propaganda about American double talk on democracy and human rights. President Xi Jinping famously referenced the show during a visit to the United States in 2015. Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to Washington, said in 2014 that “House of Cards” embodied “some of the characteristics and corruption that is present in American politics ” and that it highlighted the disadvantages of bipartisan politics.
No day passes by without another story on Chinese cheating themselves into university, IP theft, corruption, avoiding of the rules. China veteran Kaiser Kuo dives into the culture of cheating for SupChina.
Kaiser Kuo:
I don’t think there’s much of a mystery here. It’s all basically a function of scarcity and of the intensity of competition, and these in turn come down to the fact of China’s enormous population, breakneck development, and brutally pragmatic focus on results.
In the nearly 40 years since reform and opening began at the very end of the 1970s, China has been a place where a kind of Social Darwinian law of the jungle has prevailed. A society where the bedrock Confucian ethics already tended toward situational, where there’s never really been any dominant religious institution claiming transcendent moral authority, and where access to every rung on the ladder of success was already contested, the introduction of an ethos of “to get rich is glorious” was bound to create something of a mad scramble.
To be sure, there are still many, many good and honest people in China for whom the rules still matter, who would never think to cheat, or to falsify data, or to jump the queue or bribe an official. But I think anyone who looks at China today honestly must recognize that those solid citizens have diminished in number appreciably over the last four decades.
2017 is going to be a productive year for both Zhang Lijia and Ian Johnson as they are going to publish their long-awaited books. Both are very well versed in documenting cultural change in China, a development that often remain undetected for the outside world.
Zhang Lijia will publish in January Lotus: A Novel, based on the stories she noted from her grandmother, who was a concubine. Zhang Lijia has done extensive research into prostitution in China and although the book is a novel, there is a strong overlap with reality.
Ian Johnson will have his bookThe Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao on the shelves in April. Emerging Christianity pops up in the headlines now and then, but Pulitzer-price winner Ian Johnson promises to go beyond those superficial media hypes.
I did it for the kids, says former Baidu communication director Kaiser Kuoin his exit interview on the Sinica podcast. He recently swapped Beijing for Chapel Hill, NC in the US. I wanted them to be truly bi-cultural, and after learning and submerging in China during their first years, going to college in the US was inevitable. `We planned this move for five years." While the political climate is not improving, it was not the reason to leave, he says. "It was way worse when I arrived here."
Interesting observation I noted in an article I help to correct. The so-called American-born Chinese of ABC's were also called banana's, yellow on the outside but white on the inside. Now, says the article, the ABC's are now rather turning into mango's, yellow outside, and yellow inside. The article might be online later in Dutch, but will come back on this.
Amy Gu went to Disneyland in Hong Kong and comes back with a useful observation: Donald Duck, the hero of the park, does not speak proper mandering, while many of the visitors come from the mainland. A major cultural issue, of course.
The cartoon Donald Duck looks similar, but we are more familiar with the Chinese voice of Li Yang, instead of the English one or Cantonese one. Especially, for some interactive program, languages become a huge problem and I don't think my friend, who couldn't understand Cantonese, could enjoy the program as it is supposed to be. I remember I went to another theme park in Shenzhen, where my friends and I could enjoy the conversation from staffs and learn the culture from the Mandarin tour guide. But in Disney, I feel nothing.
Last night I reported that Jacky Cheung was performing at the other side of the street at Shanghai Stadium. Now, I had already noted that the Japanese Ayumi Hamasaki will be in action at the same location tomorrow. But when I came out this afternoon to enjoy the warm weather a bit, the crowds were - still, again, already? - milling around. I just discovered that Jacky Cheung is again here this evening. Still, it only starts at 7:30 PM, but thousands of people make it into a day-long outing. The tickets are costing an arm and a leg. They start with 1,580 Rmb and go down to 120, but that might be for rather poor seats.
Ticket-sellers were out in force, thousands of people were milling around and all the restaurants in my neighborhood had long queues. This evening Jacky Cheung is performing in Shanghai Gymnasium and it looks I will enjoy at least the music.
