George Orwell said it best: “All a society asks from an artist is that he shall not tell lies.” Be sincere. Express what you think. Express what you feel. But if you belong to a society that will not allow you to speak the truth (or will punish you severely if you attempt to speak it), then what options do you have left? Do you seek asylum? Commit suicide? Extinguish your talents? Or do you revolt?

Orwell’s maxim is truer today than at any time in human history, but in light of what is happening in China at the moment his words would be considered a malicious falsehood, and if Orwell were himself Chinese, he would be resolutely punished without leniency.

I mention Orwell because at last week’s highly secretive meeting of the 6th plenum of the 17th CCP Central Committee in Beijing a document was released regarding the country’s long-awaited ‘cultural reforms’. This document, which has yet to be officially translated into English, outlines how every Chinese artist, novelist, filmmaker, journalist and individual should go about their business. In typically robust totalitarian language, the document is entitled The Central Committee Decision Concerning the Major Issue of Deepening Cultural System Reforms, Promoting the Great Development and Prosperity of Socialist Culture. Broadly speaking, the Party is going to take back the centre-stage in the daily lives of the people. The Party will thus be providing cultural guidance, just as it has provided economic guidance, and it will define what the phrase ‘civic consciousness’ truly means in the hearts and minds of its 1.4 billion citizens.

So, outward support for the dissident artist Ai Weiwei, or the blind human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng, or the imprisoned writer Liu Xiaobo, will no longer be considered the correct civic conscious (not that it ever was). According to state-owned media outlets, the correct civic conscious is to ‘seriously study and understand, grasp the spirit and essence… and provide better and more spiritual food for people’. As for the media themselves, their job, according to the All-China Journalists Association, is to provide a national ‘spirit’ in their news reporting in order to ‘guide public opinion’. (If you agree with this message, please turn back to page 6.)

Orwell expressed his artistic vision of the individual at a time in the 20th century when artists, novelists, poets and filmmakers across Russia were either committing suicide or vanishing into gulags. He feared that all artists, and therefore all individuals, were ceasing to exist in an increasingly totalitarian world.

However, he did hope that China ‘will know how to evolve a form of socialism which it is not totalitarian, in which freedom of thought can survive the disappearance of the individual’. Rarely can I say this, but Orwell was wrong. As China’s political power continues to dominate the globe, so the Party’s power over its people will tighten like a vice. The next logical step is for the Party to control not just the individual’s actions, but their thoughts and feelings. On this matter Orwell was unquestionably right.

So what can Chinese artists do to prevent this living death? The right choice is very simple, but also very dangerous.

Unless the artists of China revolt against these ‘victoriously’ resolute cultural reforms then the Chinese individual, as we know it, is coming to an end. If the 200 million bloggers on Weibo do not intensify their true convictions, then crackdowns will escalate and freedom of online speech will die. If filmmakers continue to make movies about cosmetically-varnished revolutionary nostalgia, then Chinese filmmaking will die. If Chinese novelists confine themselves (and their language) to safe historical genres, then Chinese literature will die. And if Chinese journalists fear to expose the widespread bribery, extortion and corruption that is evidently eating away at the CCP (in every department, at every level, even in those who wax strong about ‘civic guidance’) then journalism has no business in China. All an individual asks of society is that it not make them swallow lies. 
Jake Hamilton