China orders wall of silence over Berlin Wall anniversary (Feature)

By Andreas Landwehr Aug 23, 2009, 8:28 GMT

   Beijing - China's censors want to muffle any domestic commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the historic events leading up to it.

   Chinese journalists have been barred from reporting on the event 'Mauersteine' (wall bricks) in which four of the country's internationally famous artists are participating to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the wall's fall on 9 November this year.

   'This clearly is press censorship. We find that simply stupid,' said the director of Beijing's Goethe Institute, Michael Kahn-Ackermann, who together with German Ambassador Michael Schaefer had organized the event in Beijing.

   The 'wall bricks' of the event in Beijing are four of 1,000 polystyrene reproductions of Berlin Wall segments; 970 of these were distributed to artists in Germany for them to decorate.

   The remaining 30 were sent to eight countries around the world that had their very own experiences with walls of one kind or another.

   China was among these countries and received four segments, not because its Great Wall was symbolic of separation but rather of unity.

   The local organizers initially thought themselves lucky to interest four highly acclaimed artists in China in working on the segments.

   'Elsewhere [in the world] we don't have such internationally famous names,' said Kahn-Ackermann.

   Wang Guangyi, Zhang Xiaogang, Xu Bing and Huang Rui recently revealed their artistically enhanced segments to about a dozen Chinese journalists in the garden of the German ambassador's residence.

   Cameras rolled and clicked, and interviews with the four representatives of China's artistic avant-garde were recorded.

   On the day before the event the daily newspaper Xinjingbao had proudly announced that the four artists would 'adorn the segments with graffiti.'

   But then censorship officials apparently intervened.

   Editorial departments immediately received a notice barring them from reporting on this unusual example of Chinese-German cooperation.

   The Xinjingbao article was swiftly deleted from the newspaper's website.

   'It is still a sensitive subject,' remarked a Chinese journalist, hinting at images of China's 1989 democracy movement, which Huang Rui had assembled into a montage and pasted on his wall segment.

   While 1989 in Germany may stand for the toppling of the Berlin Wall which led to German reunification, the year is symbolic to many Chinese for the crackdown on the democracy movement near Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989.

   As East Germany experienced the crumbling of communism and gained its freedom, China's communist leadership further cemented its dictatorial powers.

   Since 2009 also will mark the 60th anniversary of the foundation of the People's Republic of China on 1 October, the authorities obviously want to avoid any debates or commemorations of the unsavoury events of 1989.

   Meanwhile, Zhang Xiaogang transformed his segment with polished metal pieces into a 'mirror of reflection.'

   He also applied Chinese characters that philosophically explain that 1989 not only was a 'turning point' for the world but also for China.

   Even the Chinese 'could sense freedom' that year, he wrote, and added that since then 'nothing has remained the same as before.'

   His fellow artist Wang Guanyi worked his segment completely differently: in propagandist style and using the black, red and yellow colours of Germany's national flag he painted a Chinese revolutionary cadre chiselling away at the wall.

   Xu Bing, on the other hand, decided on a more poetic theme. On his segment he painted the German translation of a well-known poem about the tragic separation of a pair of lovers who are only reunited again after many years.

   However, he replaced his erstwhile polystyrene piece of barely 20 kilogrammes with a segment of real concrete that weighs more than one and a half tons.

   It is now difficult to move and poses considerable transportation headaches for the organizers.

   The original idea was to eventually collect all 1,000 wall sections, including those distributed overseas, bring them to Berlin, re-erect them in time for the celebration on 9 November along the former border in a kind of 'domino line' and then topple them.