Chinese Core Socialist Values Graffiti in London's Brick Lane 3 Favorite 

The graffiti made up of 24 stenciled Chinese characters sprayed in red paint against a white backdrop across walls appeared in East London’s street art haven Brick Lane on August 5, 2023. It was created a group of young people from mainland China, including several art students at London’s Royal College of Art. The group overpainted graffiti and murals on both sides of the walls with white paint, and sprayed the simplified Chinese characters in red paint.

The 24 characters referred to the 12 “core socialist values,” a set of “moral principles” that was first propagated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the 18th Party Congress in 2012, and were defined as “the soul of cultural soft power” according to the Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2014. They include “freedom,” “democracy,” civility,” “justice,” “the rule of law,” “harmony,” “prosperity,” “equality,” “patriotism,” “dedication,” “integrity,” and “friendliness.”

Wang Hangzheng, a student at the Royal College of Art who goes by an artist name Yi Que and the leader of this graffiti operation, dubbed the piece East London’s Core Socialist Values. He claimed on an Instagram post that the work “doesn’t have much political meaning,” but argued that freedom in the Western construct in the name of democracy is a tool of colonization and exploitation, and the freedom defined by the socialist construct is a way to counter such false freedom under Western colonization.

Many accused Wang and his crew for destroying the many street artworks including those by the late street artist known as Marty and a tribute to him by the Israeli street artist Benzi Brofman. Others said the students were “promoting a totalitarian government’s political propaganda without having the guts to mention the political implications and satire behind the “socialist core values,” wrote one Instagram user. Others said it was a great work of art, with Ai Weiwei tweeting “like” and giving a heart-eyes emoji to what appears to be an artist statement.

In the report published by The Guardian, the artists of the graffiti claimed he artwork – which spelled out the Chinese government’s “socialist core values”, including the words prosperity, democracy and freedom – was designed to be a “silent reminder of the oppression of thought, press freedom and free speech that is still rampant in China in 2023”. It obviously revealed not only the disparity between the artistsic statement and the audience's understanding but also the ambiguity of the work's true intention, engendering even more sophisticated contention than the work itself.