The Arts are vital to promoting freedom

Li Xiantang, a founder of the festival, and artistic director Wang Hongwei were temporarily taken into custody after offices were searched and various materials seized by police. The film festival, which dates from 2006, has faced harassment from authorities in the past but was able to carry on.

The event has been ended, for now. The incident is the latest and most dramatic example of Beijing’s hard-line stance on freedom of information under President Xi Jinping, but reflects established practices of what remains a communist dictatorship in political terms.

In 1992, Deng Xiaoping opened China’s economy to private investment and market development with the declaration of “People’s Socialism”. In the two decades since, there have been continuing tensions as authorities strive to control companies and people.

Communist computer cops are guided by a constantly changing official list of banned language. The regime blocks websites that discuss the Dalai Lama, the Falun Gong religious movement and the violent suppression in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Since late 2010, there has been a restriction on searches of the English term “freedom”.

Google in that year withdrew search services from China, though research and sales personnel are still based there, and endeavours to handle search traffic from the relatively more open environment of Hong Kong. More darkly, Cisco has been criticised for cooperating with Beijing in the “Great Firewall” censorship system. Microsoft in 2011 agreed with Baidu, the dominant Web search provider in China, to provide censored Bing searches.

By contrast, in 2012 the renowned National Palace Museum in Taiwan announced a partnership with Google to display art works online, providing comprehensive public access to one of the world’s great collections of masterpieces. From around the world, 150 museums are participating in the programme

This example has political as well as aesthetic significance. The National Palace Museum was established in 1925 in Beijing’s Forbidden City, comprising the art collection of the imperial family. That collection along with precious books and artefacts was removed to escape the invasion by Japan, and reached Taiwan in 1948.

Today economic cooperation between mainland China and Taiwan grows steadily. Transportation accords in 2008 included direct shipping, expansion of weekly passenger flights from 36 to 108 and new cargo flights up to a maximum of 60 per month. In the summer of 2010, the comprehensive Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement took effect.

Projection worldwide of the beautiful images in the National Palace Museum is a skilful way of encouraging cooperation. Joining in appreciation of great art opens doors to other forms of collaboration.

That virtual presentation also symbolises the degree to which the Internet and other media foster rich communication, of all kinds. In entertainment industries, the TV Emmys have risen in influence to rival the movie industry’s Academy Awards. Producing programmes no longer requires the enormous capital infrastructure of the old-fashioned  movie studios.