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furiously, threatening to cancel the exhibition if the 13 paintings were banned. The opening ceremony was postponed one hour to wait for a settlement which finally came with concessions from the Chinese officials. In their speeches at the ceremony, the Americans repeatedly referred to the "American" principle of free artistic expression, and Huang Zhen, Commissioner for External Cultural Relation and Wick's Chinese counterpart, expressed strong reservations about the paintings.
To Wick, the exhibition was a showcase to the Chinese that in the United States, free artistic expression was a universally accepted value and artists in the United States enjoyed greater artistic freedom than in China, whose cultural policy, as it refused to accept abstractionism presented by those 13 paintings, was "totalitarian". Wick's hard line on this issue also implied that the United States supported those unorthodox Chinese artists and writers who were being criticized in the campaign against "bourgeois liberalization".
Wick's management of the abstract painting incident indicated that the United States government would sacrifice good relations with China to the goal of presenting American cultural imagery to the Chinese people. Arts exchanges with China were no longer an instrument to create a warm atmosphere, under which circumstance both parties would co-operate nicely when differences occurred. Putting this position in the anti-Communist background of the Reagan Administration, a theme of explicit cultural warfare seems to have raised its head.
Compared with the American Government, the private sector's support for arts exchanges with China was stimulated by fewer political considerations. Private interests provided support for such projects in various forms, including the funding of organizations specializing in U.S.-China arts exchanges, such as the Center for United States-China Arts Exchange, and the funding of specific exchange projects. In the realm of U.S.-China arts exchanges, financial support is a very important factor. The exchange programmes could not be realized without such support, but such programmes normally cannot show a profit. To discuss the numerous organizations and private exchanges involved is impossible. What can be done in this paper with regard to the private sector's support of cultural exchanges is to examine closely the Center for U.S.-China Arts Exchange and to derive some conclusions from the Center's activities.
83
furiously, threatening to cancel the exhibition if the 13 paintings were banned. The opening ceremony was postponed one hour to wait for a settlement which finally came with concessions from the Chinese officials. In their speeches at the ceremony, the Americans repeatedly referred to the "American" principle of free artistic expression, and Huang Zhen, Commissioner for External Cultural Relation and Wick's Chinese counterpart, expressed strong reservations about the paintings.
To Wick, the exhibition was a showcase to the Chinese that in the United States, free artistic expression was a universally accepted value and artists in the United States enjoyed greater artistic freedom than in China, whose cultural policy, as it refused to accept abstractionism presented by those 13 paintings, was "totalitarian". Wick's hard line on this issue also implied that the United States supported those unorthodox Chinese artists and writers who were being criticized in the campaign against "bourgeois liberalization".
Wick's management of the abstract painting incident indicated that the United States government would sacrifice good relations with China to the goal of presenting American cultural imagery to the Chinese people, Arts exchanges with China were no longer an instrument to create a warm atmosphere, under which circumstance both parties would co-operate nicely when differences occured. Putting this position in the anti- Communist background of the Reagan Administration, a theme of explicit cultural warfare seems to have raised its head.
Compared with the American Government, the private sector's support for arts exchanges with China was stimulated by fewer political considerations. Private interests provided support for such projects in various forms, including the funding of organizations specializing in U.S.- China arts exchanges, such as the Center for United States-China Arts Exchange, and the funding of specific exchange projects. In the realm of U.S.-China arts exchanges, financial support is a very important factor. The exchange programmes could not be realized without such support, but such programmes normally cannot show a profit. To discuss the numerous organizations and private exchanges involved is impossible. What can be done in this paper with regard to the private sector's support of cultural exchanges is to examine closely the Center for U.S.-China Arts Exchange and to derive some conclusions from the Center's activities.
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