In the Name of Bourgeois Freedom

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dogs and Bedpans Sour Franco-Chinese Cultural Ties

                   PARIS, Nov 22, 2000 -- (Agence France Presse)
Franco-Chinese cultural relations, which started the month on a sweet
note with the launch of a season of exhibitions and concerts, suddenly
soured Tuesday after two separate affairs involving dogs and bedpans.

                   The foreign ministry in Beijing last Friday issued
an official protest concerning a play being performed at a Paris
theater entitled "Chinamen and dogs not admitted".

                   Officials objected to the title which they said was
taken from "an insulting term used during the colonial era" and had
"seriously harmed the feelings of the Chinese nation, both at home and
abroad."

                   The play, directed by Pierre Lefebvre, is the
adaptation of a 1997 novel by Francois Gibault and takes its title
from a sign that hung on the gate of a Shanghai park during the era of
foreign concessions during the 19th century.

                   Despite the director's protestation that the play
is purely surrealist and has nothing to do with China, the Beijing
Youth Daily intoned solemnly that "the fight against racism is the
responsibility of everyone," linking the play to right-wing violence
targeted at foreigners in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

                   The Chinese embassy in Paris has asked the French
foreign ministry to order an end to the "insult," and an association
of Chinese people resident in France has filed a suit with the Paris
high court attacking the theater, author and director for "racial
discrimination" and calling for the title to be withdrawn.

                   Gibault, a lawyer who spent a year in China in
1976, told the daily Le Figaro Tuesday that he did not understand
Beijing's reaction. "They shouldn't take the title at face value but
understand that it expresses a revolt," he said, noting that the novel
had been translated into Chinese in 1999 and published in the Chinese
review "World Literature" -- though under a different title.

                   But the Chinese residents' association president,
Gerard Ling-Yang, complained: "Why choose such a title if the play
isn't about China and if the play claims to be saying the opposite?"

                   Meanwhile organizers of an exhibition of Chinese
musical instruments at Paris's Cite de la Musique have moved one of
the items on display to a remote corner of the complex because it
consists of a set of bedpans.

                   The work in question, a set of chimes made out of
wooden bedpans by Shanghai-born artist Chen Zhen and entitled "Daily
Incantations",  was denounced by the Chinese embassy in Paris who
ordered its  removal from the main hall as a condition for allowing
the exhibition to continue.

                   "The embassy was shocked that Chen Zhen should make
a set of traditional chimes replacing the bronze bells with wooden
bedpans, and so we had to move it," curator Emma Lavigne told AFP.

                   Chinese embassy cultural advisor Hou Xiaghua for
her part said the bedpans were "rubbish."

                   "Personally I'm shocked by it.... And any Chinese
person would find it irreverent," she said.

                   However for Chen, who has lived in Paris since
1986, "Daily Incantations" was inspired by the sounds he heard during
a visit to China in 1993 which "express the hybridization of two
cultures, two entities, the East and West."

                   "The sound of bedpans being washed in the streets,
allied to the reciting of the Little Red Book, however prosaic, for me
convey an era in China's history," he says in his exhibition notes.
The
disappearance of bronze chimes "is due to the westernization currently
under way in Shanghai," he says.

                   The exhibition "Voice of the Dragon", presenting
300 musical instruments and works of art representative of Chinese
traditions from the earliest times to the present day, opened Tuesday.

                   It is one of several events in France that will
celebrate Chinese culture until the end of February. ((c) 2000 Agence
France Presse)