Art, Nature, and Inequality


Greetings once again.  A recent visit to the National Art Museum of China with our friend Ming-Ming (who's been generous with her time and friendship) left me with new thoughts and questions.

 Ming-Ming told me that much of the work on the floor we were then on reflected the government's effort to reach out to isolated rural communities to better their lives.  Here we see a large sculpture (behind us) of a joyful farm family with their large harvest of squashes, grains, and other essentials of a rural diet.  They are presumably benefitting from efforts made on their behalf for more secure lives.
A painting also suggests the central government's role in nurturing rural communities.  Here we see (at left) a community in the lower right, now connected by modern bridges over a deep gorge, and a small city at the top that's been reached by similar bridge and highway projects.  Local people should now be more able to access markets, jobs, health care, and schools as a result.  Some of you may have heard a recent NPR story about a small peasant community in southwest China which could until recently only be reached by climbing a sequence of wooden ladders up a tall cliff face, but which now has metal ladders allowing a quicker and safer climb (perhaps an extreme example, but in fact many of the more rugged parts of southern and western China have been historically filled by non-Han Chinese ethnic groups, now called "national minorities," their distinctive cultures in part shaped by the ecological niches to which they've adapted).

 But as Ming Ming and I explored traditional art on the upper floors of the museum (which her husband actually practices) I couldn't help also noticing that much of this art has reflected a view of nature as one in which people find nature a place of peace and reflection, and in which humans are a relatively small part.  Sometimes older Chinese art simply depicts a bit of nature, with a lot of white space along with words (sometimes poetry) about the inspiration or meaning of the painted images; when people are present they are often rather tiny.  See the image below--a different sense than one of taming nature for the benefit of human beings.
I wonder how the combined impact of rapid industrialization in China's recent history, urbanization (China is majority urban in its population now, unlike India) combined with immense population growth, as well as the ideology of the 1949 revolution, make it less possible to hold onto the older cultural image (ideal?) of people's place in the natural world seen in traditional brushwork paintings.  Yet those paintings seem to still embody, for many, certain cultural ideals, while also increasingly out of synch with the daily economic concerns for ordinary Chinese folks and the government drive for rapid economic growth.  Perhaps traditional paintings are still admired, but with a nostalgia for a "world we have lost"?  

I'll conclude here with some thoughts about increasing economic inequality in China in recent decades, paradoxically combined with rapid economic growth.  
In the chart below we see a drop in the share of national income of the bottom 50% of China's people (the blue line) from 1980 to 2016, from about 27% to only about 15%.  At the same time, the share of income enjoyed by the top 1% (one percent, not 50%) rose from about 7% to 14% over the same time period (the orange line).  

Yet, because annual economic growth in China has been so rapid in recent years, a very substantial portion of the poor have become better off in real terms even if their share has declined.  This appears to be politically important because the legitimacy of the government is said to depend today more on its ability to provide a rising standard of living than any deep public commitment to socialist ideals.  (Note: it appears that inequality in shares of national income--a piece of the national economic pie, at one level--has grown even more sharply in the U.S. than in China, where the share in income of the top 1% has grown from about 10% to over 20% over the same time span, but where real income growth for the poorer half of Americans has been minimal, shaping some of our recent political trends.)
OK---enough for now.  I feel like I'm sliding into a more sociological talk than a blog entry, a temptation when much of how I understand the world has been shaped by a long immersion in the social sciences.  Bye!  Bruce

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