Blessed Bodies, Extraordinary Exhibitions and Missed Opportunities: Forty Years of Chinese-German Cultural Projects and Diplomacy—A Conversation with Chen Ping

To write about foreign cultural politics and projects in the Chinese German context is not an easy task: literature about intercultural projects mostly focuses on some specific genre; studies about foreign cultural politics or cultural diplomacy are extremely limited, especially when it comes to the most recent era. What follows here is a conversation with Chen Ping, Counsellor for Culture at the Chinese embassy in Vienna, who has worked for many years at the Chinese embassies in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. He has organized and co-curated events such as the Cultural Years of China in Germany and Italy, the Europalia China Festival in Belgium, the China-Fest in Berlin and many others. By discussing examples from the fields of the visual arts, theatre (including acrobatics) and music, the conversation outlines the major shifts in Chinese foreign cultural policy since the late 1970s and its interconnections with intercultural projects.