Notes from ChinaFile

Chang Liu used to write code. Now she throws clay, fashioning understated pieces of teaware and sculptural work that is both contemporary and draws on Chinese traditions. I spoke to her recently about switching careers and how her exploration of different periods of Chinese art influences her approach to ceramics. The transcript below has been abridged and lightly edited for clarity.

Jeremy Goldkorn: You don’t have a formal education in ceramics or art, and you were previously working as a software engineer. How did you get to Silicon Valley, and how did you get out?

Chang Liu: Yeah, I don’t really have a background in art at all, although I was always really interested in something between art and design when I was growing up. I moved to the U.S. to go to grad school in engineering, not necessarily in computer science, but one thing led to another and I ended up becoming a software engineer and that was almost 10 years ago.

I worked for a couple of tech companies. Most recently, I worked at a tool company for digital product design, and there were a lot of like-minded designers and engineers in the company. Everybody’s hobby was making cool paintings or design graphics. It was really inspiring.

Eventually I wanted to just do something different, a lot more creative than engineering. So I quit my job in 2023, for a reason that was unrelated to practicing ceramics, but that was when I started taking ceramics lessons and that just naturally evolved to take over my time.

You mentioned classes, so is that how you began teaching yourself?

I took a beginner class in 2023 with a friend. That was my first real introduction to clay. But I actually did a research project at a porcelain studio when I was an undergrad. I was studying material science, and then it was more about how do you strengthen the porcelain so that it doesn’t break during the firing process. So it’s a very different angle to the craft.

What is your creative process now?

I think this is something that is also evolving very fast. I haven’t been doing this for a long time. I’m just really drawing inspiration from things that are around me in my culture.

I went to China last year, and my parents gave me this really big book of copies of the Dunhuang fresco paintings in the caves. I was fascinated by the figures in the paintings, how they move, their clothing, the way the ribbons on the fei tian [飞天, Flying Asparas] move. That has become an inspiration for me in the most recent collection of work that I’ve made, where I really wanted to channel these movements and the color interactions between them.

You’ve said you’re inspired by the New Ink Movement in Chinese painting. What is it, and how were you exposed to it?

I mostly was exposed to it after I moved to the U.S. When I was growing up, a lot of my exposure to art was either Western or very traditional Chinese paintings and other art forms.

I remember seeing some of Zhang Daqian’s work in the Asian Art Museum back then when I came to the U.S., and that was something that I’d never been really exposed to before—the pocai (潑彩) technique, where you splash the ink onto the paper and then let it create the shapes and what you want to express through a natural process.

Later on, there were more galleries showing the New Ink artists’ work. So I gradually got exposed to more and more of it. The work really resonated with me as a first-generation immigrant, in that there is a lot of tradition in the medium that you use, but you’re interpreting in such a different and contemporary way.

Some of this is pretty nerdy. There is this artist named Li Huasheng. He does these very meticulous drawings that are almost like engineering diagrams, repetitive grids using ink. As an engineer, that really spoke to my heart.

How do you and other artists who are cosmopolitan and live outside of China develop and relate to Chinese artistic traditions? What does it mean to be global Chinese, to be a Chinese artist in America?

When I was growing up in China, I took a lot of things for granted. Our culture, the arts . . . All the pretty mountains are right there, the historic pagodas are just right there. It doesn’t necessarily get viewed in this more inquisitive or critical perspective. Now that I’m surrounded by a very different scene, it does actually allow me to view my heritage and my culture from a perspective that I want to understand the origin of things in a more structural way. So every time I go home . . .

Where is home?

Dalian.

Do you feel a need to go back to replenish your roots in some kind of Chinese water?

I do feel like I need to. I go to China quite often, once or twice a year. And I’m interested in how younger artists live and practice in China as well. Last year, I was in Hangzhou. I visited this little arts village area, a lot of grad students from the Chinese Academy of Fine Art, maybe, and they have a little community where they make and sell work. It’s still impossible to get that setting [here in the Bay Area] with people from a similar background, a specifically Chinese background. . . I really hope that we can get something like that eventually in the Bay Area as well.

One of the premises behind this project, Hǎi, is that there is in fact an emerging global Chinese culture. There are certain places where it seems obvious that it would bloom first, and the Bay Area is one of them.

Yeah, I do feel like there’s a trend. “You’ve met me at a very Chinese time in my life” is up there right now. I’ve been here long enough to feel like this is really the first time I feel like people are genuinely more interested in Chinese culture and understanding the subtleties and subcultures within broader Asian culture.

The traditions get used in a marketing kind of way, but I do feel on some level it is worth getting traditions or concepts spread to people who were not familiar with them before. Hopefully it’s a beginning.

How do you compare working as an engineer, working in code, with working in clay?

I was drawn to how it is so different from working with code. There is overlap, but the overlap is that both practices allow me to focus on one thing, and only one thing, for a while. When I was coding, people would say they entered flow. You’d zone in and you wouldn’t think about anything. I think it’s the same with clay.

When I started learning ceramics, I was in the pottery studio for like five, six hours and the time would pass so fast and my back hurt so much, my wrist hurt so much, that kind of thing. I think both of the practices draw me in in that sense. But I think clay is the opposite of software development in the sense that once the piece is done, you can’t really fix it. With software, you launch MVP [minimal viable product] and then you always iterate on top of it. So that gives me a really different perspective of . . . how I live my day-to-day. It allows me to be slow and not be in a hurry about my practice right now.

There’s more commitment actually with clay because once you’re done, you’re done.

Yeah. Although I do feel like I use a lot of iterative processes when I’m still drawing out my ideas. I don’t really have a finalized idea until the piece is built. So that kind of process of reassessing and then changing or adapting to what has been built is something that maybe I have from software engineering as well.

I wonder if another benefit of coming to an artistic life after engineering is that you’ve trained yourself to operate in a business-like way. Judging from your website and the rapid way you’ve developed a very coherent career, maybe it is a lesson for a lot of young artists to take it seriously as a business and do the management side of it properly?

Yeah, definitely. I think coming into this very different new field, I don’t feel like it’s completely strange to me because I’d already built a lot of the skills in my previous life, like project management, how to actually hit a deadline, branding, how to use design tools because I worked in a company that makes one, the website—I just coded it up all by myself, actually. And then also the business aspects I like, being able to get to know people and understand what their motivations are and needs are. It’s similar to running a startup or small business.

Are all of your pieces usable, like tea cups or pots, or are some of them purely art?

I make two categories of things: teaware and then also some things that are a bit more sculptural. But so far everything is technically usable. Actually, for teaware I do focus more on the usability part of it.

Making functional ware is actually pretty different from making something that’s a sculptural thing. The axis you have to optimize for is quite different. But even for sculptural work, pottery has its roots in being functional. And as an art piece, it is both an image, like a painting that you can look at, but it also invites play and interaction and people’s curiosity. So a lot of my pieces will look very different from different angles. I do want to make them at least barely functional, just so that when you add flowers in the piece, my audience can participate in it, making something that is their own. That part is pretty intriguing to me.

Tell me something else about your work.

I’m still a very young artist, and I think my work hopefully a year from now is going to look very different from the work that I have right now. So I’m really excited. I’m always really excited about uncertainty and the unknown. I want to bring that spirit to my work.

ChinaFile recently published “Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival,” by Zha Jianying, the journalist and author of some of the most memorable recent books on contemporary China and particularly Chinese culture. This is a lightly edited, abridged transcript of a conversation between Zha Jianying and ChinaFile Editor-in-Chief Susie Jakes and Editorial Fellow Jeremy Goldkorn.

ChinaFile: Trains opens with a joyful, cinematic scene of you as a kid, a tough girl who becomes “number one train hopper,” the champion amongst your peers of hitching rides on trains leaving the Beijing railway station. This took place not too far from where you lived, near the Beijing railway station. What is in that neighborhood now? Can you describe the way it was when you were a kid?

Zha Jianying: When I was hopping trains, I was in Beijing Elementary School, a neighborhood school close to where my family lived. Right now, that area east of Jianguo Gate has become full of expensive high rises. It’s sort of a golden area for a lot of companies, and an upscale kind of neighborhood. But back then in the 1960s, my family first moved there because my father was a research fellow for the Academy of Social Sciences. And the Academy had four buildings in that neighborhood surrounded by all kinds of factories and workers’ dormitory complexes in the area. The school that I entered one year after the Cultural Revolution began, which was the time when the [college] entrance exam was abandoned, was the neighborhood school. So my schoolmates were predominantly factory kids.

One of the factories in the neighborhood was [attached to] the Beijing railway station. We could see it from my family’s balcony. This was a workshop for trains. When they come back from a long journey, they need checkups. So the railway tracks happened to be right in front of our school gate. And often in the afternoon, when we finished a day of very boring classes—at that point during the Cultural Revolution, a lot of it was just boring political studies—all of us would get very excited by the passing trains, which would be passing right in front of our school gate at a reduced speed. Most of the kids would rush to the train, but just look or shout at it. But a smaller group, mostly boys, would try to hop onto the train because you can jump up if you aim at grabbing one of the handlebars outside the train.

You can then ride the train. I was pretty much the only girl among that group. I was tallish and sort of a tomboy, so I was pretty good at it. And therefore, that’s what I did. I developed some kind of reputation. These boys would see me coming on the playground and they would sing this sort of ditty about me that rhymes in Chinese.

蹲班生，查建英!
扒火车，第一名!
Class squatter, Zha Jianying!
Number One, Train hopping!

It was kind of a mocking ditty to make fun of me for being tall and doing something boys do. But, you know, I was kind of happy that I got a grudging admiration for train hopping by these mostly factory kids, kind of tough boys. But the “class squatter” part of the ditty was about my being tall. I looked like I’d been held back by a grade, which was true because when I was supposed to get into grade one, it was the year the Cultural Revolution broke out. And so everything broke down and they didn’t have any admission. So as a result, I entered grade school when I was almost eight. I was among the tallest in my class, and among the girls by far the tallest.

Years later, after you have been writing for many years, you begin to find out the story of your grandfather in whose life trains played a very important role. In “Trains,” you write about his boarding a train to take a ship back to China. He leaves his French wife and child on the platform, never to see them again.

Boarding that train back to China sealed his fate. Do you see his returning as a real choice or was it coercion? Could any young Chinese man of his generation have resisted the telegram he received from his family saying falsely that his mother had died and that he needed to come home for the funeral? He didn’t know it was in order to get him to marry a chosen Chinese bride, he thought his mother had died. Could anybody like him really refuse that kind of request without becoming permanently estranged from his family?

That is a good question. Why did he answer that telegram? My grandfather belonged to that generation of the early kind of Republican, an era between the old and the new. That generation of educated Chinese, they were caught between their duty to the family, to their ancestral home and country, and they were also fired up by a sort of sense of a mission to build a new China through knowledge from the West. That’s why my grandfather went to France to begin with, but he was the oldest son of a landed gentry family in Hubei, which basically instilled in him a deep sense of filial duty.

Features

11.12.24

Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival

Zha Jianying

Every morning, I crossed a stretch of railway tracks on the way to my school. The tracks lay less than a hundred meters from the school gate, and a train often appeared in the late afternoon just as we were discharged. Sometimes it was a freight...

During those 10 years, when he left as a 17-year-old young man and spent a longer than expected time in France, getting his degree, partially funded by family money, and partially by working in French factories, he was part of this famous movement, a work-study program. He survived that by working hard and studying hard. A lot of the students became radicalized because of the lack of funding. They just went into communist revolution, most of them did not really finish their degrees. And the radicals would be more prone to abandon the old culture. Some of the people like that may not have been so deeply caught in the call of family duty, but not my grandfather. He was a nerdy kind of kid, good at studies. He found his calling as an engineer. Part of it was studying, and railway building, things like that. And the other part was that he felt guilty. During the time he was in France, I think he was gradually Westernized by a whole set of more modern values, liking French culture, and he met a French woman who was the daughter of his landlord. After he got his degree, he was working as a young engineer, married to a French woman, with a baby girl. I think he was very ambivalent about breaking this news to his parents. He was taking his time. His family did not know why he took so long [to come back to China], and they wanted to rush him back, and he seemed to be just not coming back. So they came up with this plan to trick him, knowing that he’s the kind of son, he’s kind of Chinese older son for whom not returning for your mother’s funeral would be on his conscience forever. That’s just not something someone like my grandfather would do.

Have you ever attempted to find your grandfather’s descendants in France?

For many years after I knew about this, I felt almost guilty by proxy, that my grandfather abandoned his wife and his own daughter in France. I felt a little bit ashamed about asking into this, what his French wife and daughter did afterwards, do I have French cousins, French aunts, things like that.

But besides my feeling ambivalent about looking them up, what am I going to say? Hi, I’m the granddaughter of so-and-so who abandoned your grandma? But besides that, it’s not my fault, but he’s my grandpa, right? And I have this weird sense of affinity about what he did. But anyway, another factor that would make this whole process tricky was that like many of his contemporaries, he was changing names.

He was born with a given name and family name. And then he changed his name to Liu Xin—the family name stayed the same, but Xin means “new.” He just decided he would take a new name and the name literally means new. And there’s no way for me to know for certain which name he used on his marriage certificate.

What do you make of his decision to maintain his French habits in China? The Omega watch, the fountain pen, French books, and even those mantou buns that you described that were really some kind of fusion bread between a Chinese steamed bun and a croissant that he was secretly making with butter?

I think it wasn’t a decision, it was a habit. After all, he went to France when he was 17, still part of one’s formation period. And he stayed there for 10 years. And he was embedded in his studies, and then he stayed in a French house and he married a French woman. So he really became a kind of immigrant . . . The French way of living was apparently quite attractive to him. But he kept many of [these habits] secret. Bit by bit, I learned he had the Parker pen and this watch and he had a camera, he had a dark room, he developed film in his own house, and he baked and he made sausages.

And he danced. He loved to dance. This was one of the details I learned from my aunt, she said, “our father loved to dance, but our mother had bound feet.” From the late Qing to the early Republican period, in middle class, respected families, the women still bound their feet. She only took the bindings off when my grandfather sent a letter from France knowing this was going to be his future wife, saying no, I don’t like bound feet. But still she wobbled as a result of the binding. And she couldn’t really dance.

But you yourself as a child when you spent time with him, you never saw any of this residue of him having lived in France?

No, the first time I found out that he had a past in France was when I tiptoed into his room when he was visiting my parents’ house in Beijing. This was during the late part of the Cultural Revolution. I was curious about what he was reading. When he went out for a walk, I went [into his room] and saw he was reading these bilingual pamphlets. At that point, I didn’t even know what it was. I knew it was a foreign language on one side. The other side was Chinese. These were Cultural Revolution pamphlets about Mao and People’s Daily editorials. There was a series of them. But on the left side of the pamphlets my grandfather had, there was a foreign language. I didn’t know if it was French or English, and I asked my mother. That was the first time she told me about his past in France. And very soon after that, she told me that when she was a girl, this was actually an open secret in the family, my grandmother and all the children knew about his French marriage. It wasn’t hidden among them when they were young. And she told me one of the vivid images she carried in her mind, because my grandfather told her in great detail about that train station farewell, how they parted and his French wife was holding this baby girl and waving this white scarf until they disappeared and none of them knew this was going to be forever.

This was really shocking to me.

You also write a lot about your Uncle Lusheng, who tracks a trajectory from romantic revolutionary to being horribly persecuted as a rightist. There are parallels with your grandfather’s story of being an idealist and then winding up very disillusioned. Do you see this as a kind of a generational curse?

The journey of disillusionment happened with a lot of Chinese, but most bitterly with the educated Chinese, what we call intellectuals, because they’re the ones who carried this sense of mission about using their knowledge to build a modern China, to build a stronger China. They believed that communism was the answer. In the earlier part of this Trains series, I describe a period where a lot of different ideologies were tossed around in China, like anarchism, like the group of anarchists in China who sponsored the work-study movement in France which my grandfather was a part of. But that road was not taken. It did not win the day. The October Revolution won the day, and so the intellectuals thought that was the way. And the communists had a very strong popular support. The intellectuals willingly accepted this ruling party as the one which would unify the nation. Throughout so many political campaigns, the intellectuals were targeted and still they went along with it, hoping against hope that somehow this is part of the price for their past guilt—like being a part of the bourgeois, being part of the elite privileged class—they have to go through this, in order to achieve the ultimate goal of a stronger China. But I think that disillusionment deepened more and more after the anti-rightist campaign, the Cultural Revolution.

My uncle was just one of the many who started out with this very naive idealism. My uncle faked his age when he was just 15 or something, trying to join the so-called volunteer troops to fight in the Korean War. And then later, when he was still a very young man, during the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign, by submitting some very mild critical suggestions about the army—he was a young officer at that point—he was persecuted, stripped out of the army, sent to a farm where he more or less spent 20 years, and it ruined his life. Later, he became mentally deranged. A lot of it had to do with the shock of the political campaigns and family trauma and all this.

You argue in the fifth part of the piece that China’s historical traumas have created an obsessive focus on stability and prosperity over liberty and that this seems to be something that is just an inherent part of Chinese culture now.

But there are other countries with traumatic histories—Germany, South Korea—that have chosen different paths. Is there something that makes the Chinese case different, this obsessive focus on historical trauma? Or, to put the question another way, are you maybe casting an orientalist gaze on your own country?

I am not sure what you mean by orientalist?

In the West there is a stereotype of Chinese people being willing to put up with any political indignity because of something essential to Chinese culture. I’m wondering, particularly given the context of the United States right now, where many people seem more than happy to completely compromise their principles in order for a little bit of prosperity and stability, is this a China thing, or is it just human nature?

I’m completely aware of the stereotypes about the Chinese national character. But that’s not what I’m trying to portray. I think it’s a lot more complex and layered than that. What you just cited, the examples of Germany and South Korea, both went through war and trauma, and colonization in South Korea. They come out of it differently because, not because their race is different, I don’t think it’s a racial factor, it’s a political system. They both became democracies. Whatever flaws in democracy in those two countries, they both went through a deep political change post-war, post-colonization. They both had to go through a deep national soul-probing, of coming to terms with the dark past. [In Germany it was with] their own internal crimes, like the Nazi crimes against Jews. It took them some time, but they went through that process. And in South Korea, they fought a long war, which even today you can see that legacy again in their attitude towards Japan about the war crimes. And then their own internal dictatorship. They went through a long period of American-supported military, authoritarian rule for the sake of economic growth. And the South Korean economy grew very fast. Still, they did not stop there. They pushed very hard for democracy, for political reform, and they became a democracy. You might add to that Japan. There’s another Asian culture, right? Both Korea and Japan were, by the way, heavily influenced by Chinese Confucian culture, but they became politically modern nations.

Not China. China had the unfortunate reality of picking communism from Russia, from the Soviet Union, and sort of under the cloak of Marxism, has retained a lot of its own feudal ways; its own authoritarian tradition was not changed under communism. So the political system did not really change. Okay. And so.

People here in the U.S. are scared of China in terms of AI and all this, but politically, it’s a dinosaur. Citizens have no right to vote, no right to free speech. You compare the current problems of the two countries, it’s two different animals, apples and oranges. In the long run, no matter how long it takes for Americans to go through this horrible, horrible, horrible period—and a lot of us are quite anguished about this, and it may take a long time—it’s not comparable to what China is. China has high speed rail, but going where? People are just economic animals. They have no rights. All of the Chinese middle class, they do everything by their cell phone. Their life is so convenient, so comfortable. But they’re all scared shitless. No intellectuals dare to say anything contrary to the Party-state. These officials are following Xi Jinping’s cue, they’re no different from the court eunuchs of the past. This is just a modern extension of the Qing dynasty.

This is not a conclusion I arrived at easily or happily. I’m not happy to see my homeland in this state. It’s like a wealthy desert. The food is better, I agree. The food is better.

Why did you choose the railway as the central metaphor for this piece?

In the beginning, I really was just thinking that it was time for me to write about my family history. And I wanted to start with my grandfather because I thought his journey as an abortive immigrant has a lot of echoes with my own life. Making sense of his life is almost like making sense of my own life. So I started with details of my own childhood train-hopping, and that metaphor and image of him saying goodbye to his French wife and daughter, both have to do with trains. But as I dug into it more, I realized trains are a very apt metaphor, both in terms of this particular family history and as sort of a central metaphor for China’s journey of modernization. Building trains was a dream for China, for the Chinese, starting basically soon after the Opium War, and the First Sino-Japanese war in 1894-1895. Japan learned a lot from China in the imperial past, and suddenly China was defeated by its own pupil. And then it looked closer and realized that the Japanese had done so much better with their adoption of Western knowledge. And China focused on railways because they are a sign of a certain stage of industrialization. [The railway was] born together with the modern cinema. Films about railways added to this mystique about railways and trains symbolizing a modern age.

So the great reformists of the late Qing and early Republican period all strongly advocated for the building of railways. And then later, Sun Yat-sen, the first president of Republican China, as soon as he stepped down as president, he became the general director of railway-building. In his major work, something called “Jianguo Fanglue,” a “Plan for National Reconstruction,” is a vision of building a grand national railway system that would connect all parts of Chinese territories and speed up all these other subsidiary industries, like steel production, coal mining . . . everything would be connected.

Of course, he never got to realize that plan. But my grandfather as a young man [took part in] railway-building. His hometown in Hubei happened to be an ancient site for coal mining, and so building the railway started in that area. All this made me realize that this is a ripe metaphor for China’s journey of trying to modernize the country.

And then of course, I started with my own childhood train-hopping and traced back to my grandfather leaving France, and my grandmother’s suicide. That was a crucial event that I discovered a long time later. At the time, suicide was such a shameful act in China, even though it became more common during the Cultural Revolution when a lot of suicides were triggered by political persecution and trauma. But it was a sort of shameful act. The families often tried to hide it because there would be a stigma carried by the surviving family members as a sin, as a crime. The Cultural Revolution code of language for this kind of political suicide literally means to “sever yourself from the people.” In my family’s case, it happened to be a suicide on the railway.

I was reading Anna Karenina shortly after I discovered how my grandmother killed herself. I couldn’t help thinking about how as a woman, you throw yourself under a train, when you’ve completely lost hope, you do this kind of act almost like a self-mutilating protest, because the word “train” was also used in a certain way in the Chinese language. When I was growing up during the Cultural Revolution, it was a culture full of loudspeakers shouting about the train of the times, the locomotive of history . . .

Could you have written “Trains” in Chinese?

I never thought of it because if I write it to be published on a Chinese platform, I have to censor myself, which is one of the main reasons I became a U.S. citizen in 1992, post-Tiananmen. It really made me realize if I want to write without censorship, I would have to write in English. Until recently, all my unabridged writing in Chinese was published only in Hong Kong.

Do you feel like writing in English changes what you would say in other ways? Or are you really just kind of finding English ways to express what you would have said in Chinese or translate in some way from Chinese?

I feel like you’re always kind of the same person, but I know that some writers feel like there are certain things they can express in the language of their exile that they can’t express in their native language.

After many years of writing in English, I really don’t think I’m translating in the literal sense. I’m thinking in English when I write in English. However, clearly Chinese is my first language. I was a Chinese language major until I came to the U.S. as a post-graduate. My whole college education was majoring in Chinese literature and language. So English always felt like a second language to me. And when I write in English, I’m very much aware I’m writing for an audience where I can’t assume that they know certain things about China like I do when I write in Chinese for a Chinese audience.

I do feel the constraint of writing or speaking to an audience for whom [China] is a foreign topic. I have to put in a lot of [explanations] in the text, whereas in Chinese, I can assume. Secondly, I am aware I have a smaller audience in English because, as my agent reminds me, the average American really doesn’t care that much about China. This is just not their issue. Whereas Chinese readers are interested in anything about China, but they’re also more interested in America and the West.

In recent years, I’ve decided I’m fed up with Chinese censorship. I’m going to just focus on writing in English with my limited time and energy.

Violet Du Feng has produced and directed more than a dozen documentary films about China. Her latest is The Dating Game, which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Filmed in Chongqing, the film follows a group of desperate bachelors participating in a dating “boot camp.”

In this Q&A, Feng talks about how a film about women inspired her to make a film about men, the problems facing China’s many young single men, especially those from lower economic classes, their “incel” peers in the U.S., women who “date” AI boyfriends, and filmmaking in a low trust environment.

The interview was recorded via video call, and has been abridged and edited for clarity.

The Dating Game has a New York theatrical run from December 12 to 18.

Jeremy Goldkorn: What drew you to this subject matter?

Violet Feng: My last film, called Hidden Letters, is the story of an ancient secret language called nüshu, created and shared only among women, [and the contemporary women rediscovering it]. Once I finished that film and I was on tour with it, I often had audience members ask me: “Are there any good men in China?” When I was finishing the film, I thought about how we’re living in a society, not just in China but around the world, of extreme gender divides. I knew I had to cross the aisle and challenge my own biases and stereotypes and my own perspective as a woman to try to understand men’s perspective.

I knew these kinds of dating camps existed in China, and I thought they provided a contained and interesting framing for understanding the consequences of the One Child Policy that had led to China’s gender imbalance.

I also think we’re heading towards a time of crisis of how we connect with each other as human beings in this digital age. So I felt like that dating camp also provided me a lens to interrogate larger issues.

How did you find the subjects of the film?

Basic research. There are quite a few of this kind of dating coach. But what intrigued me about Hao [the film’s protagonist] is that he is from the working class, the same kind of group as the clientele that he’s providing services for. He’s very much from one of them. Deep inside, he really understands where they come from, their dire situation emotionally, the psychological profile of that generation of men. And so that part of him is very genuine, sincere. And that’s in contrast to the way that he’s coaching these guys to behave. So I thought there was some conflict inside him; he’s also struggling to figure out who he is.

Did you find him by placing advertisements, or . . ?

He was easy to find. There were several articles written about him, and particularly there was a very sensationalistic article mentioning him and a couple of other dating coaches. That article was published a few years ago. It went viral and almost completely destroyed that entire industry of dating coaches, and Hao thought that he had to change careers. He was really in a really bad place. But then three days later, his phone just started ringing nonstop. And that made him realize that there was actually a huge demand. He couldn’t quit.

And no publicity is bad publicity.

Exactly.

The characters in the film, Hao and his wife and the three dating students, are all telegenic and interesting people. Were you just lucky and those three students were the group that Hao had signed up at the time he agreed to make the film, or did you see other groups that he’d coached and that weren’t suitable?

It took a while for me to build trust with Hao, but once he agreed to be in the film . . . actually, it was thanks to his wife, who is also a dating coach. She saw my previous film, Hidden Letters, and convinced Hao that I was someone he could trust. Hao holds seven-day dating camps all year long, not only in the city where we filmed, Chongqing, where he’s based, but all over the country.

We decided that we were going to film one of his camps, but we would have an open call for his potential clientele, well over 3,000 clients, to see who would be interested in being part of this film. We were very transparent with his potential clients about what we were doing and why: It wasn’t to promote Hao, which he understood too, but it was to reveal the situation the clients were facing, the struggles they were facing. So we asked them if they would be interested in coming forward to share their stories.

So everybody agreed right up front?

I think the reason they decided to come forward was that they wanted to share their stories, not just to say that they were working class and that’s why they were failing, but also to ask how they got to this place. So in the end, these three people, they were comfortable, they trusted me, and then they also have just really adorable voices, and they were excited to be part of this journey.

They are adorable. You said earlier that somebody had asked you, “are there good men in China?” and I was just thinking, these three are such sweethearts.

Yeah, but at the same time, you understand why they’re not seen in China at all. So I think that for them, this whole experience provided a kind of visibility. They finally felt seen.

In The Dating Game, you succeeded in capturing some very revealing moments. There’s the scene at the dinner table with Hao and his wife where she gives him a piece of her mind.

At that point you realize she’s the most grounded person in the film. And you wish the boys would take her advice instead of his advice. And one of the protagonists talks about growing up around only boys, and not understanding women. These are “left behind kids,” their parents went to big cities to work and they were raised by grandmothers, very few girls around them partly because of female infanticide, as one of the boys points out. So they grew up not knowing girls.

A big theme of this film is that young Chinese men of this kind don’t really know even how to talk to women. How difficult is it for young men such as your protagonists to understand how they should approach finding a girlfriend or a wife?

As I was filming, I finally understood on an emotional level the trauma that this whole generation of boys face. We’re talking about this surplus of men in Chinese society, 30 million more men than women. A lot of them are in rural areas, small towns, and when their parents moved to the cities, residency regulations meant they couldn’t travel with their parents and go to school in the cities. So they were left behind, raised by their grandparents. And we’re talking about over 60 million of these kids growing up without parents and now they’re the ones who are on the dating market. I think that it’s not just the boys, but the girls, this whole generation grew up lacking love and that has affected what kinds of relationships they want. They don’t understand what kinds of relationships they want, because they don’t know who they are.

At the beginning, when I was following this dating camp, I thought that the storyline would be for these men to find love, and whether they found a girlfriend or a date at the end would be the dramatic moment. But I came to realize that the camp was more about helping them find themselves. I also realized they actually came to the camp because they were curious about Hao. He seems very successful today as a dating coach, very popular among this whole group of men. But he’s also from the working class, from deep poverty in a rural area. He was also a left behind child. So these men actually look up to him and they’re very curious how he made it.

I heard again and again from these men that they look up to him because he’s the most relatable person who actually went beyond who they were, and made it.

And that Hao has such a beautiful and educated wife to them is sort of like a dream. So I think all of it together to them is like, how did he do that?

How do you compare the world of these young men in China to what people are calling a “masculinity crisis” in the West, or the problem of “incels” or “involuntary celibates,” who stew in online misogyny because they can’t find a girlfriend?

And what is the relation between this kind of camp and Western “PUA” or “pickup artist” subculture—and also on a related Western phenomenon, the pickup artist, misogynistic men who show off online about how many sexual partners they have? Some of the ideas of this pickup artist culture seem to have seeped through to Hao?

I find it really fascinating because I think the pickup artist concept is kind of outdated in the West already, but it’s been sort of reintroduced in the past 10 years in China. I think it has to do with the rise of capitalism in China, how everything is tied up with a very narrow definition of success in society and everything is intertwined with money and status that's defined by money.

Features

12.20.17

Pickup Artists with Chinese Characteristics

Robert Foyle Hunwick & YiChen

“If you don’t teach her a lesson, someone else will,” Fei explained during his two-hour “Sexual Assertiveness” session, concluding a week-long tutorial offered by Puamap, a team of “professional” seduction artists, marketers, and makeover men. One...

However, I think that there’s another aspect of this particular to China because this whole generation of men has had so little interaction with women, no role models of relationships from their parents. They are completely clueless about what a modern relationship looks like, but at a time when the internet has developed so much and the feminist movement in China is sometimes kind of extreme online. So to a degree, I feel like these men are triple left behind, not only in terms of their material life because of where they come from, educational level, and then, you know, an upbringing without love, but also in terms of their conception of gender roles which is still very much trapped in the old kind of patriarchal mindset.

When the success of a man is defined by how much money he can make, his ability to find a wife, his ability to have children, he has failed on every front. And then they’re in the bottom social class as well. So I think that while some of this owes to the uniqueness of China’s cultural and societal economic situations, there are also the consequences of capitalism that reinforce the patriarchal mindset in the country.

The film is called The Dating Game, but there is not much actual dating that goes on, with the exception of one date that happens off camera. But as you were making the film, did you research how young Chinese people are courting or dating?

“Dating” just wasn’t a thing that young Chinese people did at all for the first decade I lived in China, until maybe the late aughts when there were Valentine’s Day promotions and young people started doing things that looked like American dating. What can you say about the current dating scene, not just for the protagonists of your film, but also for urban Chinese?

There are similarities with New York, where I live. For the younger generation, it feels like not dating is kind of the trend, let alone getting married. I feel like the younger generation are so resistant to marriage now that, as we mentioned in the film, the birth rate is so low, China has had to close a lot of kindergartens all over the place.

And as we mention in the film, a lot of girls not only are not interested in dating real boyfriends, but they’re dating AI boyfriends. They feel their needs for emotional support can be fulfilled by AI.

So the protagonists of the film are not just facing the problem of 30 million too many men for women, they’re also facing competition from beautiful, very tender AI bot men. Can you talk about the AI dating companions?

[AI boyfriends] have been developing so rapidly in China for the last couple of years that by the time we finished filming, I think there were more than 10 million Chinese girls using them because these AI dating apps particularly target women. At least among the women that I talked to, every one of them had no interest in having a real boyfriend. They feel satisfied with AI boyfriends.

I think there are a couple of reasons. One of those is that, as in the West, women are a lot more independent in terms of their careers, in terms of doing what they want. So I think that they are much more focused on themselves, and they feel like their emotional needs can be fulfilled by AI. But at the same time, there was a wave of the feminism movement. And so they realized more and more that in their parents’ generation, their grandparents’ generation, women were treated unfairly. But at the same time, the societal and cultural expectations for women in marriages haven’t really changed at all.

That was kind of in my last film, Hidden Letters. I felt like men’s understanding about gender roles and their expectations for women and wives and mothers haven’t changed either. So for them there’s this gap, they haven’t caught up.

Are there problems with AI boyfriends? In the U.S. in recent months, there have been issues with ChatGPT, teenagers becoming emotionally dependent on chatbots leading to all sorts of unhealthy outcomes. Is this happening in China?

I don’t think there is much open discussion about the damage of these AI phenomena. I think part of it is because the overall narrative in China is to promote AI because we want to beat the U.S. as the number one in that technology.

And also, I think people’s tolerance for privacy violation is much higher in China, and people’s desire for chasing the newest technology—chasing the newest, the coolest—they’re much more thirsty.

Even young kids. Every one of my relatives’ children have these fancy watches that have even more functions than the Apple watches.

However, the [AI boyfriend] game that was portrayed in the film is called Love in Deep Space. [Almost 20 percent of the game’s profit comes from the U.S.] So this is a global phenomenon.

I’m really worried. These AI boyfriends, it really takes it to a different level, emotions of human connections. Once they are able to co-opt that, what is going to happen? I’m really deeply worried. It’s not just about data collection. Once they know how to manipulate human connections . . .

The new documentary feature film Mistress Dispeller probes the unraveling and redemption of a marriage at breathtakingly close range. Director Elizbeth Lo follows Teacher Wang, a professional “mistress dispeller,” as she counsels a middle-aged wife undone by her husband’s infidelity and unspools a covert plan to rid them of his lover. The film is currently playing at the IFC Center in New York through October 30. ChinaFile’s Susan Jakes spoke with Lo about how she made the film. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Susan Jakes: How did you come to make this film?

Elizabeth Lo: After making my first feature documentary, Stray, which was set in Turkey and  follows the perspective of stray dogs as they wander through Istanbul—that was such a revelatory experience for me to get to know a culture that was so different than my own—I knew that I wanted to set my second feature-length documentary in mainland China. As a Hong Kong citizen, mainland China is both foreign but also really close to my own heritage. I wanted to use the documentary as a way to explore this culture and country that’s so vast and so relevant to my own life. . . I had spent quite a lot of time in mainland China, but documentaries take you into a culture in a way that you can’t experience as just a normal, regular person without a camera.

I thought exploring love would be a really interesting way to get to know the country. And I had re-watched Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern, in which [a character played by] Gong Li marries as a fourth wife into a patriarch’s family, and has to navigate the pressures of that.

And I thought it would be really interesting to pose the question of what it is like to be a woman navigating society today, and transpose the spirit of that film to contemporary China. So I was researching mistresses in contemporary China, and that’s how I came across the mistress dispelling phenomenon.

How did you find out about it?

I was researching mistresses in China and I came across articles about mistress schools. . . But then by the time I had asked my producer, Maggie, to look into this, they had all been shut down. But when I asked her to look into mistress dispellers, those actually existed, and there were plenty of them. And I remember at first thinking, you know, this could only be a fiction film when I read about it in the news, because access would be so difficult for a subject matter that’s so enshrouded in shame and secrecy. But Maggie was able to find real mistress dispellers for us to meet in our scouting trip to China, and Teacher Wang [the film’s main character] was the only one who, on day one of the scouting shoot, was able to get us access to film a husband, a wife, and a mistress who are all part of the same case, at its tail end. I was so moved by even the husband’s perspective, because he was crying at this table with Wang, that it really changed the focus of my film. It became much more inclusive, and I wanted to make it about, sort of, how people deal with the pain of being in a marriage, and also figuring out the problems of when love fades or when desire fades. And so that was really the impetus for making the film: To compassionately look at all three angles of a love triangle.

So that couple was not the couple that appears in the film?

No. We ended up following Teacher Wang for three years, hoping the whole time to be able to capture and authentically document a case from beginning to end. We filmed with at least six other couples in those three years who are not in the film. Mr. and Mrs. Li [who appear in the film] came in the third year, and [their story] was filmed over the course of four months. It took us so long to finally get because it’s just really difficult. There were always pieces of the love triangle missing, or people would drop out midway through filming. And we would, of course, respect that decision.

My producer Emma Miller and I were very conscious of how to stay ethical when deception is such a big part of the mistress dispelling process. [Initially] the husband and the mistress couldn’t have known what Teacher Wang’s role was in their lives, and so they had agreed to be in a film just broadly about modern love in China, and that’s what they had agreed to participate in.

Let’s back up a bit. So you first got Teacher Wang to say that she would kind of broker your relationship with her clients?

Actually, to alleviate the burden on her, we initially tried to cast ourselves for potential clients that we could bring to her and say, “Hey, we got their permission to film with them. Can you now fix their problem?” But what we found when we did that was those strangers, you know, wives or mistresses who had no idea who Wang was or her capabilities, they didn’t have the trust that her real clients had for her, and trust and faith in her work is such a big part of her effectiveness. So it just didn’t work. So then we were like, okay, we need to only rely on Wang’s incoming organic pool of clients and see. Out of hundreds of cases, usually it would be a handful who would agree [to be filmed]. And of those handful, it would really depend on the character of those people and whether they could compel you to feel sympathetic to each of their plights.

I guess Mrs. Li knew what you were filming, or understood that you were filming about mistress dispelling?

Yes, but actually by that point, as a backup plan we had filmed so many different other love industries in China, because we weren’t totally sure if we could get access to make a film about an individual story.

What are some other love industries?

We filmed a lot of matchmaking companies. We filmed with dating coaches who help young men. And then we filmed with divorce lawyers, because we thought maybe this would be the end of the process. We also even filmed with BDSM rope play communities in Shanghai. We were looking for textures and tangents around love and desire that might be able to bolster our story. So those were all the different tangents we went on in the event that we would not be able to get as deep access as we hoped to build this Rashomon around a love triangle.

By the time we got to Mr. and Mrs. Li, we had actually filmed with [Mrs. Li’s] little brother who had been a male mistress two years prior to production, and we had filmed with him as he was getting dispelled by Teacher Wang himself. And so two years later, when his older sister comes to him with her problem, he says, I have a great solution for you. You know this film crew are lovely, and then Teacher Wang is also a magician who will make your problem go away. So with that pre-existing vouch of approval and relationship with us through a trusted relative, Mrs. Li was on board.

Why do you think she wanted to be filmed?

We asked her, and it actually appealed to her altruistic side. Teacher Wang said to her, you’re struggling so much in private, and so many women struggle in private with this domestic issue, but if you share your struggle publicly, you may be able to help other families navigate with this situation. You can see her temperament in the film. She’s a brave, strong woman who’s very kind at the end of the day. And that really appealed to her, and I think that’s why she participated.

How did you film Mr. Li (the cheating husband) and his mistress (Feifei) without their knowing what was happening?

We didn’t have contact with them at first, it was Teacher Wang’s business partner who also kind of works in psychology who approached them, separately, and asked whether they would be part of a production that was about love and China—that’s what they [initially] agreed to. And our interactions with the wife, the husband, and the mistress were intentionally kept to a minimum because Wang didn’t want [us] to inadvertently sort of spill the beans to them or reveal too much to them and disrupt her mistress dispelling. At the end of the process, once everybody completely understood what Wang did in their lives, we traveled back to China and showed a cut of the film to each of them separately to sort of get their blessing and offer them the opportunity to reconsent to being a part of the project.

How do you understand why Mr. Li and Feifei were willing to be in the film?

With Mr. Li, I think he felt compelled to because of his wife. He knew that his marriage was struggling. So I think partly to save his family, he felt being a part of this project that his wife wanted to be a part of would help.

But with Feifei, we asked her at the end why she had agreed to be in this, and why she had stuck with it even as the relationship was falling apart. And what she said was so striking to me. She said that she thought that the film was going to be a gift from the husband to her, a document of their love story in which she was the central character. And she kept staying because she wanted to know how their love story would end or continue. She wanted to know what would happen. So I think, on a very deep level—and we don’t know what was said to her off camera by her lover—she didn’t think that she would lose to the 55 year old wife, and so that’s partly why she kept staying and wanted to see it through, because she didn’t believe that the relationship would come to an end.

When we started talking you said you knew you wanted to film in China. Did you think of yourself as making or having made a film that is about China or Chinese society?

People always ask me, could mistress dispelling [work] in the West or, you know, internationally, this business itself? And I’m of two minds. I do think on one hand, infidelity is universal. It’s a human condition. But I do think there is something culturally specific to mistress dispelling and why it thrives in Asia. I think that has to do with this difference between a culture which prioritizes the collective over the individual, the greater good of the family and keeping the family, preserving the family unit, versus in the West, a more individualistic culture where pursuit of your own personal happiness is paramount.

And that’s why mistress dispelling works, because in the West, I think if you found out your spouse was cheating on you, divorce would be almost the first resort. Actually a divorce lawyer said to me, “this plays like science fiction. I cannot believe that these scenes are taking place.” And also, a lot of men in the West will ask me, “why did the husband choose to stay? I don’t understand.” Whereas in Asia, it was never a question in the husband’s mind that he would leave his wife, because even if having a mistress is more socially acceptable, leaving your wife would make you human scum.

And yet divorce rates in China have risen dramatically in recent decades.

I think mistress dispelling is sort of a symptom and a response to enduring patriarchy. But also it’s a way that women, contradictorily, are empowering themselves to reassert fidelity within their own homes and reassert control in their families and demand fidelity. And I also think the way that at least Teacher Wang goes about solving a case and approaches conflict resolution does feel Asian to me in that it’s not directly confrontational, it’s very indirect, and it it’s trying to seek a harmony where everything is sort of simmering under the surface, but you’re allowing every person in the conflict to emerge unscathed.

Maybe one could say that it’s China, how innovation and the entrepreneurial nature of this industry collide with pragmatism and preservation of family in a way that allows the mistress dispelling phenomenon to thrive there. But I think as ethically murky and dubious as this profession can be, that there is something redeeming and beautiful about resolving a conflict in this way, in which nobody’s screaming. The cost is that there’s no accountability and no confrontation ever. But I do think there’s something really beautiful about an alternate mode of conflict resolution. I don’t know if that’s specific to China. The reason why I was drawn to this subject matter was not because it represented China, necessarily, but that I knew as a Hong Kong citizen to go and make a film in China in this day and age where there’s so much anti-Chinese sentiment in the West that I wanted to pursue subject matter that wasn’t going to further alienate China from Western audiences.

And so few documentaries that have gotten exposure in the West have explored just middle-class, ordinary people’s domestic lives in contemporary China. A love story involves universal emotions, and that was part of why I was drawn to this subject matter, as a person who is very conscious of what stories we tell that come out of China, that are consumed in the West, and what that does to the psyche in the West about China. So to me, the story of love and betrayal—even though there’s a strange profession that is handling it in a slightly different way than it would be handled in the West at the heart of it—these people, what they’re going through, it’s super universal. And that’s what drew me.

China’s appetite for critical minerals, fossil fuel, timber, and other commodities is the subject of countless news articles and has created anxiety in capital cities around the world. The dominant narrative is one of concern over Beijing’s dominance of global supply chains. Yet while the country clearly exhibits strengths as a commodity superpower, it also suffers from important vulnerabilities. A new book by political economist Pascale Massot, China’s Vulnerability Paradox: How the World’s Largest Consumer Transformed Global Commodity Markets, examines this paradox, and is the subject of this Q&A by author Paul French.

Paul French: Pascale, can you explain for us succinctly China’s “vulnerability paradox” when it comes to commodities?

Pascale Massot: China’s “vulnerability paradox” refers to the tension between China’s market size and its (actual or perceived) market power. As I was conducting interviews for the book with industry and government insiders in China, it struck me that the perception of China’s power in the West was not necessarily shared by commodity market participants in China. This is one of the puzzles I seek to elucidate in the book.

This “vulnerability paradox,” or how a country can be the largest player in a market and yet feel vulnerable, is, I suggest, the result of a few interrelated dynamics. One of them is the fact that China remains heavily import-dependent for most raw metals and minerals (rare earths and a few other critical minerals are the exception). China’s current dominance of global supply chains is in the refining and processing segments.

There is another way in which China has experienced vulnerability vis-à-vis global commodity markets over the past decades, which I label “market vulnerability,” referring to the market power differentials between domestic and global market stakeholders. Given China’s industrial and development history, the political economy of certain domestic Chinese markets is particularly fragmented—here iron ore comes to mind. China is home to thousands of iron ore mining and steel firms and has consistently missed its own consolidation targets. At the turn of the century, the top four Chinese steel producers were responsible for around 30 percent of domestic production, compared to over 70 percent for the top three Japanese steel makers, and over 500 Chinese firms were importing iron ore. In 2020, the top four Chinese steel producers were responsible for less than a quarter of domestic production, whereas the top two Japanese firms were responsible for over 80 percent of domestic production. High fragmentation has led to domestic difficulties in China, for sure, but here what interests me is the negative impact on China’s capacity to coordinate its procurement behavior internationally. To put it plainly, it is more difficult to coordinate import strategies among a handful of large importers, like Japan did for decades, than it is to do so among hundreds of firms, going from medium-size to larger importers, as was the case for China. In fact, I was able to document in my book the extent to which Chinese iron ore importers ignored or actively skirted coordination attempts by the central government in the late 2000s. Adding to this fragmentation was the fact that the global iron ore exporters are very concentrated (four companies are responsible for 70 percent of global iron ore exports). So you have a combination of China’s domestic market fragmentation and the concentrated nature of the global iron ore producers, and this resulted in a position of market vulnerability that was particularly sharp for China in this case.

I don’t want to suggest that China is experiencing only vulnerabilities in regard to global commodities. In fact, China is in a position of strength when it comes to the production of some commodities such as rare earths or graphite, and quite dominant in the refining and processing of a number of others as well. Rather, I want to help us understand where the current situation comes from. First, China’s current position of dominance in the global value chains for many critical minerals is uneven, both across commodities and across the various supply chains. By this I mean that China’s dominance or vulnerability modulates (goes up or down) along the supply chain. It can be vulnerable to imports of raw commodities, then dominate the refining and processing segments, then dominate some of the product creation/research/innovation space but be dependent on the West in some areas. Then it may dominate the manufacturing space, but be vulnerable to export acceptability at the very end of the supply chain, as it faces pushback from a growing number of countries internationally. These patterns are not the same for every metal and mineral. Rare earths, germanium, or copper supply chains shake out differently. Second, China’s overall approach to commodities procurement is directly linked to its experience of import vulnerabilities over the past decades. We have to remember that China’s deep concerns about import dependence for food, energy, and resources go back to the Mao era and even prior to that. This has led to a more assertive set of commodity procurement policies over the years. In the West, the dominant paradigm until recently was a market-led one. Only since the pandemic have we seen a resurgence of economic security narratives regarding China’s dominance of critical minerals supply chains.

You also talk about a second paradox—that China’s rise in consumption (using the example of iron ore) was “too fast for its own good.” Usually, the story of rapid growth in China is presented as a good one, beneficial for the country, so why was this growth problematic?

China’s rise was in some ways too fast for its own good. There were growing pains that resulted from the speed and amplitude of China’s growth over the past decades. At the turn of the 21st century, global commodity supply was squeezed by China’s rapid consumption rise. The scale and speed of China’s growth in resource consumption was nothing the world had ever seen, and it took many seasoned market participants by surprise. This led, in part, to the commodities supercycle of 2007-2008, in which prices rose rapidly in the leadoff to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Commodity prices have continued to experience a high level of volatility in subsequent years, most recently illustrated by the spike in lithium carbonate prices which rose above $70,000 in 2022 and dipped below $10,000 in early 2025.

The first decade of the century presented unique difficulties for China. There can be certain advantages to relative technological “backwardness” for developing countries that allow for leaping over technological stages. However, this was not the case for the commodities that China needed, especially for legacy metals and minerals. First, the best international mining deposits, with the highest grades and easier logistical access, had already been discovered and were owned by large mining conglomerates by the time of China’s emergence. This pushed China into developing deposits that were not economically efficient, often in politically unstable countries. Many Chinese-backed projects floundered over the past decades, for a variety of reasons. One example is the Simandou iron ore project in Guinea, which China became involved in in 2010. It encountered decades of setbacks and has yet to ship a single ton of iron ore.

Aside from the difficulty of securing mining resources, at the turn of the century China faced commodity markets that were firmly embedded in Western institutional systems, including the U.S. dollar, and price-setting mechanisms and commodity exchanges that were located in the West, such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or the London Metals Exchange (which Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing acquired in 2012). Chinese commodity market stakeholders entered an arena that was already occupied by mining giants, and dominated by Western market institutions.

During the course of the interviews I conducted for the book, these issues came back often enough that I had to stop and reflect about them. I think this taps into a reality that is shared broadly across developing countries. The extractive resource industry operates under extraordinary levels of industry concentration, and a difficult history of exploitation by Western powers, which we have to consider carefully as we think about China’s evolving role in global commodity markets—and how the West should respond.

China’s growth was in large part predicated on its ability to acquire vast amounts of commodities (inputs) to drive manufacturing, infrastructure development, and energy production. Yet to achieve this China had to deal with a relatively small number of global mining giants. This had led to some tricky, and sometimes adversarial, negotiations over the years, not always to China’s benefit. How well do you think Beijing has handled this situation?

It has varied. In the book, I devote a chapter to the iron ore market, and I do this in three parts. First, I do a deep dive into the 2010 fall of the iron ore benchmark pricing system, which consisted of annual, closed-door negotiations between iron ore importers and global producers for a price that remained valid for the global market that year. Then I study some of the parallel developments in the iron ore shipping sector. I also conduct a historical comparison with Japan’s emergence as the number one consumer of iron ore 50 years earlier.

When China replaced Japan as the lead benchmark pricing negotiator in 2006, only three years after becoming the world’s number one consumer of iron ore, it took a hard stance against the “Big Three” global iron ore producers (Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, and Vale) in the annual benchmark negotiations, and tried to negotiate markdowns. In 2009, while the negotiations were ongoing, the China Iron and Steel Association (CISA) demanded that its members (and iron ore import license holders) refrain from buying on the global iron ore market. However, CISA’s strategy backfired. A multitude of small- and medium-sized Chinese firms ignored the request and purchased iron ore on the global market through individual “spot” contracts, delivered to China by BHP Billiton, quickly followed by Vale and then Rio Tinto.

Only three years after China had become the world’s top iron ore consumer, the behavior of its iron ore importers disrupted a decades-old, stable pricing system that had been established by Japanese buyers. The iron ore benchmark pricing system was China’s to lose. The Chinese position of market vulnerability and its lack of coordination of procurement behavior, combined with the decisions of key global iron ore producers, led to this outcome. The fall of the iron ore benchmark is a fascinating case, because the outcome is the opposite of what the most powerful Chinese stakeholders wanted.

Diagnosing this exact lacuna—the lack of domestic coordination—in 2022 the Chinese government announced the creation of the China Mineral Resources Group, a $3 billion procurement giant whose mission explicitly includes the coordination of the various Chinese iron ore market stakeholders at the interface with global markets. China’s experience in the iron ore market may have informed its policy decisions in the rare earths space, including the consolidation of the industry and the creation of the China Rare Earth Group in 2021.

One lesson is that we cannot assume that China’s largest impacts internationally would be the result of a position of strength, whereas a position of weakness would lead China to be a “rule-taker” or to seamlessly integrate into international markets. The relationship between Chinese domestic dynamics and institutional change at the global level is more complex. Given China’s size, vulnerability and strength can both create a large global impact.

You give a good history of the development of benchmark pricing in commodities, using Japan’s economic emergence as an example. How has China’s supremacy in the market as a customer changed international pricing in sectors like iron ore, uranium, potash, etc. in the last few decades?

As a comparativist, I pay attention to variation across cases. I coin a phrase in the book to describe this variation: China is a heterogenous power. I think it is important to understand why there is concurrent variation in Chinese behavior and impacts at the international level. This is more intuitively recognized across different issue areas (say climate policy vs. defense policy), but it also happens within the same issue-area, in this case commodities procurement.

As I touched on earlier, Chinese market stakeholders’ fragmented behavior in the iron ore market led to the fall of a decades-old pricing regime. This was the very regime that Japanese iron ore importers had spearheaded decades earlier. At the time, Japanese iron ore importers acted as part of a coordinated purchasing group, while Japanese financiers invested upstream in the mining industry to guarantee adequate supply. Chinese importers were not able to maintain this regime in the iron ore case, even though this was very much the wish of the leading Chinese state-owned enterprises and CISA.

In the potash market, however, the benchmark system survives to this day. China is the lead benchmark price negotiator, despite the fact that the global potash market had many similarities with the global iron ore market when China emerged as the number one consumer. This derives from a more evenly balanced position of market power between Chinese domestic and global potash market stakeholders. It turns out that Chinese potash importers are much more concentrated and better coordinated than their iron ore counterparts. Indeed, two key state-owned entities control close to half of all imports and negotiate their import strategy carefully as part of a leading group. This has led to more stability in the international potash pricing regime.

If the Chinese importers continue, with the support of the government, to coordinate their behavior and extract rents from other Chinese fertilizer market players, such as distributors and fertilizer manufacturers, the benchmarking system could survive a while longer. If they fail, we could see the fall of the relevance of benchmark negotiations as price signals, and the rise of the dominance of spot pricing.

Interestingly, Brazil’s rise as a significant consumer of potash (it now is responsible for over 20 percent of global potash imports) and the fragmentation of its domestic industry have weakened the benchmark system and the influence of Chinese importers. Just as in the iron ore market, the gradual dissolution of the potash benchmark pricing regime is the result of the emergence of a fragmented consumer, facing oligopolistic global producers, and occurring despite contrary preferences from the largest Chinese importers.

Arguably, we are now seeing China’s economy slowing—manufacturing as well as infrastructure/property development and perhaps power consumption. How will this affect China’s commodity hunger and how does that affect its “vulnerability paradoxes”?

I’m not in the business of predicting Chinese commodities consumption trends, but I would just say that while some legacy commodities such as iron ore and coal are unlikely to see as big a rise in demand as the one we have seen at the turn of the 21st century, absolute levels of consumption will remain very high. Just to give a sense of the scale here, China has gone from importing around 1 percent of global iron ore exports in the 1970s to importing over 65 percent of global iron ore exports in the 2020s. The end products driving domestic demand for steel are shifting in China, and as a result it has sought to find overseas sources of demand to compensate. This means that China remains the number one steel producer with over 50 percent of global production even despite decreasing domestic consumption, and will remain the dominant global actor for the foreseeable future. China’s share of copper ores and concentrates (a more processed form of copper, ready for smelting) imports is also at 65 percent currently.

Of course, in terms of commodities needed for the green transition and growing need for energy given the expansion of AI, worldwide demand is projected to grow rapidly. Here, China’s share of global consumption is not only dependent on China’s domestic needs, but also on the world’s continued reliance on China for refined commodities and manufactured products, which has opened new vulnerabilities.

It may be that the Chinese government, understandably, makes decisions based on a predominantly domestic reading of the economy. However, many stakeholders central to China’s continued economic development sit outside of China’s borders now, whether China likes it or not. At the same time, the “open markets” assumptions that had underpinned global economic exchange over the past decades are being profoundly disrupted. China now needs to address concerns about the impact of its exports on the job markets of countries far away from its borders, as part of its domestic economic policymaking. This is a tough spot for China, as Xi Jinping had specifically decided to solve some of China’s domestic economic issues (post-COVID economic recovery, real estate market restructuring, self-reliance agenda) via a huge ramp-up in manufacturing exports.

Every economy that has a relationship with the global economy has vulnerabilities. What we are seeing right now is the evolution of China’s—and other countries’—vulnerabilities over time. A more granular understanding of both could help better guide an economic resilience agenda, in an age of continued global interactions.

Where is all this going? A slowing China maybe, a changing international trade regime perhaps, a move away from non-renewables hopefully? What do you think the future holds, and where does that leave China in terms of vulnerability?

We have entered a different era in the relationship between China and the global economy. The reform and opening-up era, where the ramping up of China’s economic interdependence with the rest of the world was seen as a net positive, especially in the West, ended sometime in the 2010s. A few years of escalating tensions with the U.S., starting in 2017 and continuing under President Joe Biden, until the return of President Donald Trump in 2025, saw the Chinese leadership react with what was seen by many as relative measure, at least in the economic sector. The rare earths export control measures announced by China in April 2025, and the subsequent panic that ensued around the world, signaled a change in the leadership’s willingness to use critical minerals and associated technologies as tools of economic leverage. There remains high uncertainty regarding how the U.S.-China relationship may evolve over the next few years. One of the many unfortunate impacts of escalating distrust and strategic tensions across the Pacific is that this may lead to entrenched positions and hubris, lowering the likelihood of needed structural readjustments. We have not arrived at a place where a new “grand bargain” that would recalibrate China’s economic relationship with the rest of the world can be found—yet it is needed.

At the same time, China’s economy is so large and so globally entwined that domestic Chinese dynamics have, as a result, an impact on global markets, whether China intends them to do so or not. This is not only true for commodities, including critical minerals, but also for a range of advanced manufactured products, technologies, and, more broadly, domestic economic policy decisions, investment, standards, and even meta narratives.

This for me demonstrates the importance of studying the impact of China on global markets from the perspective of deep resonance dynamics. The resurgence of discussion about economic security and self-reliance around the world comes from the perceptions of each other’s actions, like a traditional security dilemma, but it also stems from profound domestic realities—fractures and failures in both sides’ domestic systems of political economy, which are, incidentally, not entirely unrelated to each other.

Another lesson I draw from this book is the importance of unintended consequences and second-order effects. The impacts of China’s rise on the economies of other countries vary only in part according to the preferences of the Chinese Communist Party, state, and private actors. In the case of resource security and supply chain resilience, there are many interacting effects and powerful drivers at play. This means, on the one hand, that we cannot underestimate the structural forces that have taken us to where we are today. In the case of critical minerals today, it also means that given the complex nature of global supply chains, their excessive securitization and weaponization would be detrimental to global resilience and supply security. In other words, while recalibration is clearly needed, we should, on the one hand, encourage the development of realistic and specific critical mineral supply chain resilience goals and, on the other, realize that these should be balanced with investments in bolstering trust, the elaboration of credible reassurances, and a commitment to stability, transparency, and continued open access for most metals and minerals.

For several generations now, the overriding philosophy of life for many Chinese intellectuals and average citizens has been “mingzhe baoshen,” (明哲保身) which dictionaries define as “a wise man looks after his own hide” or “put one’s own safety before matters of principle” but can be also be rendered more colloquially as “keep your head down, mouth shut, and stay out of trouble.” After decades of political movements that have targeted intellectuals and citizens for speaking out, alternately resulting in criticisms, attacks, imprisonment, re-education, and other forms of persecution, most Chinese people have learned that there is no benefit to protesting, or speaking “truth to power.”

Shirley Xinyi Cai is a researcher in comparative politics and political theory, pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science at McGill University. One of her ongoing projects is about the caili (彩礼, i.e. bride price or betrothal gift), a deep-rooted marriage custom that calls on the family of the groom-to-be to pay a sum of money to the bride’s family.

The scholar and journalist Kejia Wu is the author of A Modern History of China’s Art Market, a fascinating book that examines the relationship between the Chinese government’s push for cultural “soft power” and its desire for control. In the book, Wu looks at the rise of contemporary art and a market for it after the end of the Cultural Revolution; the oddity of China’s parallel art systems: one highly ideological, censored, and state-organized market, and the other market-oriented; and five Chinese artists from different generations whom she profiles.

Jeremy Goldkorn spoke to Kejia Wu in 2023 about her book, and then edited and updated this Q&A with her by email in 2024.

Jeremy Goldkorn: Your book looks at the market for Chinese art going back to the Cultural Revolution. But I first want to talk about the 1990s and the 2000s, when you and I were both in Beijing, and I was tangentially involved in the art scene.

It’s not just that we were there, it was also the period when China’s art market went from basically nonexistent in the ’90s to taking up 30 percent of the global art and antiquities market by 2011, surpassing the U.S. and becoming number one in the world.

How did you land in the middle of the art scene?

Kejia Wu: I went to college in Beijing at Renmin University from ’94 to ’98. My major was real estate management.

Great timing! Just before the real estate industry boomed! But not the usual entry into the art world.

Yes. No.

After graduation, I joined COSCO Real Estate Development Company. And the project I got involved in was on land owned by one of the largest textile factories in Beijing, just near the East Fourth Ring Road. With the government restructuring state-owned enterprises, and the downfall of the textile industry, the factory had to sell the land and move production somewhere else.

And just for context, COSCO is China Ocean Shipping Company, right, and this was the real estate division they launched in the 1990s?

Yes. And I was on the project development team for the takeover of the textile factory site. The factory had been one of the largest state-owned enterprises in Beijing, which contributed a lot of employment to the city. We were thinking, what can we give back to the community?

Valery Hache—AFP/Getty Images

A gallery at the 789 Art Zone in Beijing, August 9, 2008.

At the time, there was news about a “loft culture” in New York and London, where large warehouses and industrial spaces with high ceilings and big windows were being converted to contemporary art spaces. I was on a development team working together with a marketing team and we felt like we could do something similar for Beijing. As the residential real estate project was being developed, we decided to keep the textile factory building and turn it into a contemporary art center, and offer free space for painters and dancers to do contemporary projects for free. That was before the 798 project—the idea was still new in Beijing.

There were many artists, including dancers, performing artists, and painters, who were desperate to find a place that was more modern and contemporary for them to exhibit or showcase their performances. And there was nowhere else like that space, a large-scale industrial space with high ceilings.

But since there was nobody at the company who was interested in such an endeavor, the general manager at the real estate company asked me to run it as a contemporary art center. So at the end of the ’90s, and early 2000s, I got the chance to oversee 50,000 square feet of space, and work together with architects and artists and dancers to put together programs for the space. That was the East Modern Art Center (远洋艺术中心).

One of the opening shows was Dancing with Farmworkers, in which I worked together with Song Dong, Yin Xiuzhen, Wen Hui, and Wu Wenguang. They invited migrant construction workers to do an improvised dance performance. The final performance was quite a huge deal in Beijing because of word of mouth. There was not much of an Internet or social media presence back then, but tons of people came.

Yeah, I remember that. What year was it?

The final performance was in August 2001. And there were a few weeks of improvised rehearsals which you may have visited. There was no script. Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen and Wen Hui and Wu Wenguang just worked and danced with construction workers on a daily basis, purely based on improvised movement.

That’s such an interesting way to get into the art world—via real estate! Such a story of China’s reform and opening era!

Yes.

And at that time, there was no censorship or review process. The whole idea of the dance with the construction workers came up in a brainstorm over the summer. I was sitting on the roof of the Drum Tower [a tower in central Beijing built in 1272] with Song Dong, Yin Xiuzhen, Wen Hui, and Wu Wenguang, just chatting, drinking beer, and eating peanuts. And they’re like, “Why don’t we do something together with construction workers, because they contributed a lot to the urban development of the city but were always the marginalized community and through this collaboration with dancers, they will be put at the center stage.”

Beijing was full of such opportunities.

We didn’t try to plan far in advance. It was all based on this feeling: “Oh, why don’t we do this, this will be exciting.” We just made a decision, we decided to do it then and there. We didn’t have to go through any cultural bureau for a censorship review, or write a memo to get their approval. At that time, you could just think about an idea, you start to do it, and a lot of people come to see the rehearsal. Maybe because of that, the word of mouth got out really quickly, and lots of people came for the final performance.

What did you do next?

There were no alternative spaces like that, so the East Modern Art Center got famous very quickly, and many artists and dancers came to apply for the opportunity to do a show or performance for free.

But then from the management point of view, the brand-building purpose was achieved, and they wanted to focus on growing the business and generate more profit. And I think it was too edgy, too avant-garde, and the concept of having something like 798 that would last for decades, that didn’t really occur to them. They felt that the mission was accomplished within a short period of time and decided to demolish the art center and build residential buildings on the land [in 2003].

So I left. For a time, I ran the communications department for Dow Jones. Then I joined a British firm called Brunswick, which had an art advisory practice. I was advising foreign institutions like the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum on their China programs. Then I got my business degree at Yale, and then I joined Sotheby’s, the auction house in New York City, and subsequently taught at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in NYC and Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles.

And based on all those experiences and quite a bit of research, I wrote the book. But I think everything that got me interested in this topic can be traced back to the end of the 1990s and early 2000s. Because that experience at that time cannot really be replicated, anywhere in the world.

Such an exciting time. And as you said or hinted, if you operated outside of the official cultural system, or in my own experience the publishing and Internet systems, you didn’t really have any censorship. It was the age of not asking for permission but saying sorry later if you got into trouble.

That started to change quickly, as the government started to figure out that people were doing cultural things beyond their control, but also, as your book documents, that there was money to be made.

So can you explain how art systems developed? Your book describes the evolution of two separate, parallel art systems: the private market system and the state system. What does that look like now?

The state system has a structure where the leadership on content is by the Ministry of Propaganda and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. They basically will review and make sure the message is right. It must be in line with “Cultural Construction” (社会主义文化建设) and “the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation,” and everything defined clearly as “Xi Jinping Thought on Culture” [introduced in October 2023]. The whole trend started when Xi became Party General Secretary in 2012.

So pretty much that means under the leadership of Xi Jinping, there is the Party, the Propaganda Department, and the administrative infrastructure, including the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and the universities, like the Central Academy of Fine Arts [CAFA], and then the Chinese Artists Association. Everyone in these organizations has to abide by guidelines instructed by Xi Jinping to “tell China’s story well.”

How does it function as a market? If you do the officially approved type of art, how do you get paid?

The state has funding to support artists to do those officially-approved creative projects. For example, in 2021, the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] History Museum was officially launched in Beijing. At the time, the government allocated funds to the top academies, including the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. They selected “reliable” faculty members and commissioned them to create art works to be displayed in the CCP History Museum as educational tools.

There’s a China National Arts Fund. It’s a grant-making fund which has been funding a variety of projects. If you look at the list of the projects [such as those] discussed in my book, you see they are pretty much restricted to works which promote traditional Chinese culture, or that tell attractive, good China stories, or endorse “the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation.” Artists who need to get paid and want to advance their career in the state system are willing to compete for those opportunities.

Mark Ralston—AFP/Getty Images

A statue depicting the former Chinese leader Mao Zedong stands at the 798 Art Zone, as the country prepares for leadership change, in Beijing, February 29, 2012.

(China Photos/Getty Images)

Visitors sit in front of a sculpture titled “Arresting Sex Worker” during the 2007 Beijing 798 Art Festival, at 798 Art Zone in Beijing, May 5, 2007.

What about the market system that used to be almost completely separate? How did the private art market develop and what does it look like now?

In the late 1990s to mid-2000s, artists like Zhang Xiaogang, whom you mentioned before we started recording, that kind of artist became popular with foreign collectors. At that time, the Chinese contemporary market was starting to do very well, driven by new demand from international collectors, people like Guy Ullens and Uli Sigg. Very soon, Chinese artists like Zhang Xiaogang were represented by blue chip Western galleries like Pace.

Artists like that are often not part of the official state system. They make their living by having shows through their galleries, and galleries often bring the artists’ work to art fairs. The galleries help generate sales for them. Artists can survive outside of the state system by being represented by commercial galleries.

However, now the authorities review all their exhibitions (unless the Chinese artist creates their work outside of the country and it is exhibited overseas), including gallery shows, domestic public and private museum shows, and any artworks sent abroad. If these artists have shows in New York, all their paintings will have to be reviewed. And the review process can take three months, but it’s very hard to predict, it can take longer.

How strict is it now? When I was writing about art in the late 1990s, I remember the Post-Sense Sensibility exhibition that had works with human body parts. Crazy stuff with dead babies and animals. And there were plenty of artists who totally lacked the “positive energy” the government asks of its artists today: Fang Lijun, Zeng Fanzhi, Zhu Wei, and everyone in the Life exhibition.

I can’t imagine anything like that would pass muster today. How much stricter has it got?

There are no clear official guidelines of art exhibitions that say, oh, you can’t show this or that. But you can discern some basic rules over the years from seeing what was actually regulated.

When you and I were in Beijing art circles in the late ’90s, the criteria were quite simple. Nothing pornographic, nothing clearly anti-socialism, but everything else was pretty much okay.

Mike Clarke—AFP/Getty Images

Workers prepare giant woodblock-print hanging scrolls by artist Fang Lijun to be auctioned by Sotheby’s, in Hong Kong, April 5, 2008.

Liu Jin—AFP/Getty Images

Artist Xin Ba presents a performance art piece calling for the release from house arrest of blind human rights activist Chen Guangcheng, at the 798 Art Zone in Beijing, January 9, 2012.

But it’s been getting stricter and stricter, especially in recent years. In 2016, the Ministry of Culture issued a regulation with 11 clauses [about] visual artworks forbidden from exhibiting/exporting. Let me quote them, from chapter six of my book:

1. Opposing the basic principles established by the Constitution
2. Endangering national unity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity
3. Leaking state secrets, endangering national security, or harming national honor and interests
4. Inciting ethnic hatred, ethnic discrimination, undermining national unity, or harming ethnic customs and habits
5. Undermining national religious policies, promoting cults and superstition
6. Promoting terrorist activities, spreading rumors, disturbing social order, undermining social stability
7. Promoting obscenity, pornography, gambling, violence, or abetting crime
8. Insulting or slandering others, infringing on the legitimate rights and interests of others
9. Contrary to social morality or national cultural traditions
10. Deliberately falsifying history, serious distortions of history
11. Any other content that is prohibited by laws, regulations, and state regulations

Look at this list, it’s very ambiguous. For example, nudity in the past was tolerated, but now is a taboo subject. Anything related to nudity will be taken out, although it is still at the discretion of the local Culture Bureau officials and in very rare cases may still be shown.

(Voishmel/AFP/Getty Images)

Visitors pass by statues in a gallery in the 798 Art Zone, May 25, 2008.

For example, Taikang [Space] art museum, which is owned by Chen Dongsheng who founded China Guardian Auctions. They just opened their private museum in Beijing last year. There was at least six months of review process for the opening show. First they had put what they intended to include in the exhibition on a list, and sent it to the Cultural Bureau for at least three rounds of reviews. After that, they put the approved paintings on the wall, and then officials from the local Cultural Bureau will show up in person for the last time before the show can open to the public.

What happened to Chen Dongsheng’s Taikang Art Museum? [He is supposed to be] a “safer” entrepreneur because his wife is the granddaughter of Chairman Mao, right? You would think that after all the paperwork, this private museum should be okay. But what I heard was, on the VIP preview day before the exhibition opened to the public, the cultural bureau officials showed up in person. And they were pointing at a number of paintings, including a Zeng Fanzhi painting, which, despite the fact it had the paperwork review, had to be taken down because of nudity, and a Zhang Xiaogang painting had to be taken down because the government officials felt the ambiance of the painting was negative, it didn’t tell a good China story. There is just so much ambiguity, the decision was completely up to the government officials who were standing in the gallery space, making the decision right there.

All of Zhang Xiaogang’s paintings are negative! That’s kind of the whole point, that you don’t know what’s going on in the paintings, and it’s never 100 percent good, right?

For example, he had his show last year in spring at the Long Museum in Shanghai, which was a recap of his experience during the pandemic because he was in lockdown, including being put into a fangcang hospital [temporary hospitals designed to be set up quickly in existing spaces to isolate COVID-19 patients] multiple times. During the pandemic, he was in pretty tough lockdowns for a total of more than 40 days. He wrote a quarantine diary and described those experiences in his paintings.

Six months after the show, his catalogue was still being reviewed. He said words like “pandemic” and “quarantine” and “death”; all these words had to be removed from the catalogue. The catalogue went through multiple publishers—some of them decided to give up because the review process was so long. The catalogue finally came out at the end of 2023 but none of the catalogue essays included words like “pandemic,” “quarantine,” and “death.”

It sounds like there’s not going to be a meaningful difference between the private and state systems, with this level of scrutiny and censorship?

There are a number of examples that can help us to see where things are going. There are certain artists, for example, Qiu Zhijie: he was quite edgy, avant-garde. He did calligraphy on his body and those early works were included in numerous international museum collections. But now he’s the President of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, one of the state-run art academies in China. He’s an example of an experimental contemporary artist who sees the benefit of being in the state system, and he would like to advance his career within the system. Maybe from his perspective, he has a desire to elevate his social impact. And being in China with funding from the government, he can do a lot of things, which might be hard to do overseas, even though he’s very famous among international museum curators.

There are artists who are like Liu Xiaodong, whose paintings have become much less critical. He even went to the National People’s Congress [NPC] as a representative. And then he would share his experiences at the NPC in lectures at CAFA. The state system has grown so powerful, if you become a director or deputy director at a university or at CAFA, you have so many international exchange opportunities, and government funding. For ambitious artists, that could be very attractive.

CAFA recently chose a new president, Lin Mao, born in the mid-70s, one of the youngest ever appointed. Initially, a group of old professors at CAFA jointly wrote a collective open letter to the Ministry of Education to say “please reconsider, we need somebody who has better credentials because CAFA has a long history of choosing well-established, renowned artists as its president, including Xu Beihong, Wu Zuoren, etc.” The Ministry of Education wrote back to those professors who complained and said Lin Mao is very loyal to the CCP, we believe he’s committed and he’s a good choice. And I heard those professors who wrote the letter were investigated. So very soon, everyone became pretty obedient to this decision. The dean of CAFA’s architecture school, who was one of the professors who wrote and signed the letter of complaint, joined the new President Lin Mao to meet the celebrity architect Rem Koolhaas—he went to Beijing to meet with the faculty and talk about collaboration. That kind of social status is really attractive for a lot of people. [Koolhaas’ firm designed the iconic CCTV building.]

On the other hand, artists who don’t want to be part of the system will stick to collaboration with their galleries or independent art institutions (including international museums). And hopefully, those galleries, particularly Western galleries, can help them generate more sales overseas or create exhibition opportunities outside of China. So the two trajectories are happening at the same time.

What about the Chinese world outside of the People’s Republic of China? People like Ai Weiwei. He is unusual in that he has made a global career, he’s part of a global art market that doesn’t really have anything to do with China anymore. Are we going to see more exiled Chinese artists like Ai Weiwei?

In the next five to 10 years, definitely more artists will establish studios overseas, some people might decide to immigrate to another country, depending on their family situations.

The censorship is getting so much worse. For example, there is an artist whose work is based on Buddhist philosophy, and often incorporates elements of human limbs and bodies—nudity. Before 2019, she often had artworks shown domestically, but now her figurative artworks that reference nudity would not pass the censorship review domestically. She has a studio in Austria, and is trying to create a studio in Berlin. [She is not named to protect her identity as she is still working in China.]

And then there is one artist I described in my book who has already established a studio in Tokyo, Lu Yang. Although he has a studio in Shanghai, he pretty much creates all his artworks in Tokyo now. Because he’s a Buddhist, and almost all of his artworks are related to Buddhism, he likes to explore subject matter such as the concept of hell, death, and bardo. That’s not a positive kind of story from the official arts and culture rhetoric perspective. When I was writing the book, around the time when the pandemic broke out, he still had videos being exhibited in China, but now, many of his videos cannot be shown in China.

Everything got worse after the pandemic, I guess.

We updated our suite of graphics tracking the impact of Hong Kong’s National Security Law. The law, which went into effect on June 30, 2020, and the allegation of “sedition,” have been used to arrest 292 individuals, charge 159, and convict 71 as of January 31, 2024.

Among arrests under the law in recent months, four individuals were arrested for signing up for paid subscriptions to Patreon accounts for Nathan Law and Ted Hui, Hong Kong politicians now living in the UK and Australia, respectively. Reasons cited for other recent arrests include posting on social media criticizing officials, as well as calling for protests and threatening the families of government officials, leading to charges of sedition.

In March, legislators passed a new security law in Hong Kong. Enacting a mandate in Article 23 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the territory’s constitution, the new legislation expands on the 2020 National Security Law to cover sedition (and increases the maximum sentence for this offense), collaboration with “external forces,” treason and insurrection, and other acts. We will be looking into how this new legislation will affect national security cases going forward.

You can see our full dataset and graphics here.