Tag Archives: china. cultural diplomacy. imogen heap

It’s the same there: China and cultural diplomacy

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There is an interesting diplomatic spat between USA and China at the moment.  No not the headline human rights case of Chen Guangcheng, now safely at a New York university (but not his family who are held as hostages in effect: a time-honoured tactic) .

The spat is over teachers at Confucius Institutes in the USA.   According to reports:

A policy directive sent by the U.S. Department of State to universities that sponsor Confucius Institutes suggests that the language and cultural centers that are a key piece of the Chinese government’s diplomatic outreach will have to change how they operate or fall afoul of American visa laws.

The memorandum, dated May 17, states that any academics at university-based institutes who are teaching at the elementary- and secondary-school levels are violating the terms of their visas and must leave at the end of this academic year, in June. And it says that, after a “preliminary review,” the State Department has determined that the institutes must obtain American accreditation in order to continue to accept foreign scholars and professors as teachers

State Department has said that it expects the issue to be resolved: it seems to link to a Chinese adminstrative move against foreign teachers in China.

The Chinese press has had a field day.  What struck me was how the comments to news stories are identical to comments about European cultural diplomacy activity and organisations.    Look at the comments in this report: on the 500,000 tweets on China’s own twitter system, Sina.

I oppose these kinds of Confucius studies organized by the government. It’s quite soured. How about our government spend more money on its own people? Confucius Institutes are really funny

I think it is quite normal. Chinese people haven’t made its domestic education good. How can they go to promote “Confucius Institutes”?!

Different values; same debates.

 

China: in sounds and images

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Imogen Heap, an award winning, musician, recently spent six weeks in Hangzhou in China.    She made this beautiful video  http://www.youtube.com/embed/jgvAx2Bdt-o.

The song will form part of her next album.  It’s interesting to see how an artist sees, and hears, a different city; which images and impressions make it to the finished product.

In the Guardian she explains:

Well, I’ve just come back from six weeks in Hangzhou in China. The British Council and the PRS for Music Foundation helped fund the trip – I had to put in an application – but it ended up being much more expensive than planned. Before I went I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but I’d heard that people practise qigong by the lake, and that there’s a famous temple bell that’s rung at sunset every evening, so I was thinking about finding a rhythm in the chaos of this huge city and a journey through it in the course of a day.

I ended up curating this 24-hour period. It was my birthday as well.  I wanted to combine the sorts of things that happen there every day with different media and art forms. We filmed the whole thing and then I drew on all the sounds for my latest Heapsong.  So we filmed the fishermen out on the lake at midnight, but it’s kind of illegal to do that, so we had them fishing out a treasure map. And there are a lot of skateboarders there, so we filmed them at 1am, surrounded by a ring of taxi drivers shining their lights on them.

We went into a primary school class, where the children were doing their eye exercises, and the teacher giving them their instructions gave us our tempo. The sound of the newspaper printing presses – that became the beat. And we caught this woman who heads up this huge hill to a temple every day at sunrise and screams at the top of her lungs, so the sound of that is now in the middle section of the song.