Diplomatic World_nummer 56.

Zhang Xiaogang, Amnesia & Memory, 2003
© Jan De Maere
citizens. They see the State and its leader as the guardian
of their civilization, giving the president a legitimacy hardly
known at this extent in the West. Stability and collective
wellbeing in this capitalistic society under autocratic
leadership on an ideological basis are more important than
Western individualism, privacy, law and political rights.
China pirates up to 600 billion $ of US intellectual property
rights a year. Europe loses 140 billion € because of the
structural bilateral trade deficit with China and sees this
not as a threat but as a challenge. Mao and the excesses of
his Cultural Revolution were not challenged until after the
great leader’s death. Confucianism is a pragmatic oriented
moral without abstract principles about the Good and the
Bad. In 2011, China took the lead of the world art market
for a short time. The international aspect of Chinese
Contemporary art became popular everywhere in the West,
while traditional Chinese art was sold at even higher record
prices in China, a total of 10 billion last year. Two art
worlds and art economies at the same time, differing in all
their aspects. Chinese art in the Western tradition fell down
40% last year in volume. Christies and Sotheby’s sell 40%
of impressionist and modern art to Chinese bidders (cfr
Artnet). Half of the Chinese bidders did not pay for their
acquisitions in the West. Thirteen thousand auction houses
operate in China, mostly at a very low level. The biggest
player on the auction field is China Guardian Auctions Co.
Ltd., a Chinese pioneer in this area since 1994, catering to
local and international buyers. It is named a ‘Trustworthy
Enterprise’ by the Government bureau of Commerce and
Industry. Sotheby’s and Christie’s compete with Guardian,
which is a strong player.There is no global art market, only a
complex of niche markets in different worlds.
Experiences in life shape the strength of the connections
between particular sets of neurons. Emotions are an
essential part of intuition, an unconscious-primary thinking
process. Each unconscious activity, such as love, starts by
the establishment of hierarchy in the incoming information.
The action of neurotransmitters (serotonin) transcribes
those cues into a time code. Intuition reveals immediately
esthetic arousal and acts faster than consciousness and
logical reasoning. The constant state of neuronal upheaval
(synchronic vibration) created by the object seen, needs a
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