Beijing. A Ministry. An alpha-team of Government agents. Mission: strategic reconnaissance. Target: New York City. Assignment: reconnoiter and penetration, and capture of secret formulas. At stake is the key, not to biological weapons, but to ... Broadway musicals!
It's true. Last month a small squad of mainland operatives executed this sortie, under cover of neon lights. They sat surreptitiously among unaware audiences in crowded Manhattan theatres. When knowledge of this first came to my attention, I naturally thought the worst. History might repeat itself! A Zheng He redux. The parallel was compelling. The Ming Imperial Court had commissioned an expedition with a similar portfolio: to travel to the extreme end of the then known world (The Big Apple), seek about, gather intelligence and bring back the best of what they found. Zheng He brought back a giraffe. All else, the Middle Kingdom deemed, in current media-speak, was worthless content. This conclusion may well have spared the west from subjugation and Mandarin, not English, being its dominant tongue today.
I shuddered that these emissaries might have, in following the order of my old friend, Minister of Culture Sun Jiazheng, to snoop into America's high culture, somehow gone to view actual, current hits like Urine Town, The Vagina Monologues, and The Puppetry of the Penis.
Would not the Ming conclusion be justifiably repeated? Would the anticipated 'opening' of China's media sector be delayed further, or worse yet, derailed?
Fortunately, intense interrogation by New York's news reporters extracted the truth from China's agents. The secret they had been sent to uncover and purloin was benign capitalism: how profits are made from Broadway musicals. They had not seen the "genital origami" of Puppetry. The cultural hegemony of American theatre was secure. The mission's motive was box office - currency generation. I had long ago concluded that while "content is king" (so long as it co-ruled with distribution), in actuality, "content is currency". Content is, like money, a medium of exchange, whether for airtime or renmimbi. This was, I suspect, the secret of the alchemy of the finance of Broadway and all media, which was revealed to the team and debriefed to the Ministry of Culture (MoC).
Apparently attendance at performances by the thousands of arts groups sponsored by the MoC, had been dropping as audiences gravitated to newer productions by independent arts groups. Mainlanders are voting with their cultural feet away from rigid, censored, traditional art forms, toward that catalyst of radical progess: choice. Comfort must be taken that China feels compelled to find new models, profit-generating models, even modified cultural models.
One shouldn't expect a performance of The Lion King - with Chinese characteristics - anytime soon. But, if currency generation is the underlying goal, then content, which attracts it, must be provided, which satisfies an indigenous audience increasingly more aware of global content choices and cultural alternatives.
This time, more than a giraffe will come back to China: one more compelling argument for choice - the sine qua non of socio-political pluralism and a true market-driven economic system.