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NY Times, May 22 2017
Why Send Germany a Statue of Marx? The Chinese Have Some Ideas
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW
BEIJING — From China, with love. Or something more insidious?
For weeks, Chinese have been debating the meaning of a superhero-size
statue of Karl Marx headed to Trier, the German town where the political
philosopher was born. An attempt to spread Communist revolution back to
democratic Germany? A joke?
The 18-foot work by the sculptor Wu Weishan is a gift from the Chinese
government and is to be unveiled next May as part of wider
commemorations for the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth. Marx is
officially revered in China, the last major Communist state after the
fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
This noble-looking Marx gazing into the future expresses “the confidence
of today’s China in its own theories, path, system and culture,” Mr. Wu
wrote in People’s Daily, the party newspaper, in January describing a
visit he made to Trier last year to conceptualize the work.
Mr. Wu’s vision prompted controversy in Germany after a model was
unveiled in Trier in March. Historians and politicians asked whether it
was appropriate to honor so uncritically a man whose ideas led to
dictatorship, including in the former East Germany. In April, Trier’s
City Council gave final approval to the gift but whittled down its size
by more than two feet.
In China, “there are two completely different voices in the debate” over
the statue, said Zhu Dake, a cultural commentator and professor at
Tongji University in Shanghai.
“One is that Germany is now a wholly capitalist state that has abandoned
Marxism. Sending the statue is tantamount to sending his ideas back to
try to reignite the spark of revolution,” he said in an interview.
“The other is that Marx’s theory of class struggle had a very negative
effect on China,” he said. “Sending the statue is symbolically returning
defective goods.”
Much of the discussion in China is taking place in private, given the
sensitivity of commenting publicly on a project overseen by the
Communist Party’s Propaganda Department. But Zhihu.com, a
question-and-answer service, provides glimpses of those views.
“The International will certainly succeed!” wrote a user identified as
Wang Dongyang, referring to the Communist International, founded in 1919
to advance world Communism.
“Am I the only one who thinks this looks like Mao in ‘Chairman Mao Goes
to Anyuan’?” asked another commenter, referring to a famous propaganda
painting from the Cultural Revolution.
“At midnight on day two a South China Sword team” — a special forces
unit of the People’s Liberation Army — “will leap out of the statue,”
wrote a person with the handle Ning Andong, comparing it to a Trojan horse.
“What China means is: We’re sending it back to you. We don’t believe in
it,” the user Wu Jia said.
Millions died in Communist political campaigns after the founding of the
People’s Republic in 1949, and in a famine precipitated by an effort to
collectivize agriculture in the late 1950s. Still, the government
insists the party remains essential to China’s prosperity and stability,
pointing to recent decades of high economic growth.
In that time, trade with Europe has also prospered, raising for some
questions of how democratic nations should deal with an economically
powerful state that rejects democracy and has a poor human rights
record. Last year, China became Germany’s leading trading partner with
two-way trade of $180 billion, overtaking the United States for the
first time.
“Haha, Germans have to kowtow to the renminbi. They no longer care about
political ideology when the money pours in from rich Chinese,” a user
identified as Guo Xiaomeng wrote on Zhihu.com.
To Chang Ping, a Chinese journalist who has lived in exile in Germany
since 2011, the Marx statue represents a challenge most Germans fail to
understand.
“This is not just a question of commemorating a historical figure. It’s
also a question of how to deal with the Chinese government’s ambition to
shine on the world stage,” Mr. Chang said by email.
“I think that I can see better than ordinary Germans the hideous grin
behind the statue that is to be erected in Trier, and the threat it
represents to the civilized political cultures of the world,” he said.
The mayor of the city, Wolfram Leibe, finds such concerns overblown.
“It was a gesture of friendship and has nothing to do with ideology,”
Mr. Leibe said in a telephone interview in April, shortly after
returning from China, where he met with Mr. Wu, the sculptor.
“Maybe a certain naïveté is not always bad if it prevents
over-interpretation, so you don’t always dissect things in detail and
suspect everything,” he said.
Mr. Wu declined three requests for an interview, saying that the statue
was a state affair and that he did not want to interrupt his creative flow.
Well known in China for his monuments to historical and cultural
figures, as well as his flowing mane of hair and cravats, Mr. Wu, 55, is
the director of the National Museum of China and holds a seat in the
Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a government
advisory body.
He has produced other sculptures of Marx, notably one that shows him
with his collaborator Friedrich Engels, at the party’s Central
Compilation and Translation Bureau in Beijing. In 2011, an enormous
statue of Confucius he created briefly stood near Tiananmen Square in
Beijing, before being removed under circumstances that have never been
fully explained.
He is known internationally, too, having won the 2003 Pangolin Prize of
the Royal British Society of Sculptors, sculpted a bust of Queen Beatrix
of the Netherlands and presented a sculpture to the International
Olympic Committee.
Mr. Wu’s grandiose vision for the statue in Trier overturned a more
approachable concept proposed by residents who wanted Marx depicted as a
child, seated on a bench in a small square, where people could sit
beside him.
“Mr. Wu came to Trier and said, ‘This square is too small and cramped.
Karl Marx was a great man and we can’t put him in a small square,’” Mr.
Leibe said.
To Geremie Barmé, a founder of the Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology in
New Zealand, the sculpture is an expression of party power.
“The Germans’ suggestion was for an early, humane, humanist Marx, a
source for change in China — not the heroic, sclerotic, formalized Marx
used for party purposes that Wu offered,” Mr. Barmé said by telephone.
China’s message is, he said, “Since we’re the only one that’s been
successful and adapted Marxism to state leadership, we’ll tell you what
it’s about.”
Karoline Kan contributed research.
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