Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture

Lu

Lu first outlines the trajectory of the body in modern Chinese literature by focusing on the adventures, pleasures, and sufferings of the male (and female) body in the writings of selected authors. He then turns to avant-garde and performance art, tackling the physical self more directly through a consideration of work that takes the body as its very theme, material, and medium. In an exploration of mass visual culture, Lu analyzes artistic reactions to the multiple, uneven effects of globalization and modernization on both the physical landscape of China and the interior psyche of its citizens. This is followed by an inquiry into contemporary Chinese urban space in popular cinema and experimental photography and art. Examples are offered that capture the daily lives of contemporary Chinese as they struggle to make the transition from the vanishing space of the socialist lifestyle to the new capitalist economy of commodities. Lu reexamines the history and implications of China’s belated integration into the capitalist world-system before closing with a postscript that traces the genealogy of the term “postsocialism” and points to the real relevance of the idea for the investigation of everyday life in China in the twenty-first century. Rich in detail, comprehensive in scope, and insightful in its interpretations of a wide variety of sources, Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics makes a significant contribution to the study of modern China. Its analysis of written and visual texts and placement of China’s modernity against changing global conditions open up a transnational and postmodern perspective that will appeal to scholars and others interested in the cultural life of contemporary China.

studies in literature and visual culture

chinese modernity and global biopolitics

This ambitious work is a multimedia, interdisciplinary study of Chinese modernity in the context of globalization from the late nineteenth century to the present. Sheldon Lu draws on Chinese literature, film, art, photography, and video to broadly map the emergence of modern China in relation to the capitalist world-system in the economic, social, and political realms. Central to his study is the investigation of biopower and body politics, namely, the experience of globalization on a personal level.

chinese modernity and global biopolitics

Sheldon H. Lu is professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Davis.

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822-1888

Cover art: Qin Yufen, Lotus in Wind (Feng he), Imperial Summer Palace, Beijing, China, installation, 1994.

Sheldon H. Lu

Cover design: April Leidig-Higgins

www.uhpress.hawaii.edu

chinese modernity and global biopolitics

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chinese modernity

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and global biopolitics Studies in Literature and Visual Culture

Sheldon H. Lu

universit y of hawai‘i press honolulu

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© 2007 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 12 11 10 09 08 07 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lu, Sheldon H. Chinese modernity and global biopolitics : studies in literature and visual culture / Sheldon H. Lu. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3111-0 (alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8248-3177-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Postmodernism — China. 2. Popular culture — China. 3. Biopolitics. I. Title. B831.2.L82 2007 181'.11—dc22 2006037592 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acidfree paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by April Leidig-Higgins Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

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For Angela and Caroline

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contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: China and the Global Biopolitical Order 1

part 1 1

Waking to Global Modernity: The Classical Tale in the Late Qing 23

2

When Mimosa Blossoms: Blockage of Male Desire in Yu Dafu and Zhang Xianliang 38

3

Body Writing: Beauty Writers at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century 53

part 2

art: from the national to the diasporic

4

The Naked Body Politic in Postsocialist China and the Chinese Diaspora 71

5

“Beautiful Violence”: War, Peace, Globalization 93

part 3 6

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liter ature and biopolitics

sinophone cinema and postsocialist television Hollywood, China, Hong Kong: Representing the Chinese Nation-State in Filmic Discourse 115

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7

History, Memory, Nostalgia: Rewriting Socialism in Film and Television Drama 130

8

Dialect and Modernity in Twenty-firstCentury Sinophone Cinema 150

part 4 9

cit yscape in multimedia Tear Down the City: Reconstructing Urban Space in Cinema, Photography, Video 167 Historical Conclusion: Chinese Modernity and the Capitalist World-System 191 Postscript: Answering the Question, What Is Chinese Postsocialism? 204 Notes 211 Chinese Glossary 233 Bibliography 241 Index 255

viii

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illustrations

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8

Street advertisement for an international marriage agency in Odessa.

9

Street advertisement for an international marriage agency in Kyiv.

15

Guan Qi. Miss China and Second Runner-Up in Miss World Pageant.

76

Ma Liuming. Fen-Ma Liuming.

77

Ma Liuming. Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch.

78

Ma Liuming. Fen-Ma Liuming Walks on the Great Wall.

80

Zhang Huan. 12 Square Meters.

81

Zhang Huan. 25 MM Threading Steel.

81

Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and others. To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain.

83

Zhang Huan. Pilgrimage: Wind and Water in New York.

84

Zhang Huan. My America: Hard to Acclimatize.

86

Zhang Huan. My Australia.

89

Zhang Huan. Fifty Stars.

90

Zhang Huan. Peace 1.

91

Zhang Huan. Family Tree.

95

Qin Yufen. Beautiful Violence.

98

Qin Yufen. Lotus in Wind (Feng he).

102

Cai Guo-Qiang. Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows.

104

Cai Guo-Qiang. Transient Rainbow.

105

Cai Guo-Qiang. Inopportune.

107

Konstantin Maksimov. Portrait of a Chinese Sailor.

108

Konstantin Maksimov. Shanghai Harbor II, China Series. 1957.

109

Cai Guo-Qiang. Red Flag.

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109

Cai Guo-Qiang. Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard.

110

Long March Art Educational Project, 2006.

134

The Road Home. Dir. Zhang Yimou.

141

Two Comrades in the Early 1950s.

142

Shower. Dir. Zhang Yang.

146

Hai Bo. They (a.k.a. Them, Tamen), no. 3.

147

Hai Bo. They (Them, Tamen), no. 6.

178

Wang Jinsong. Standard Family (Biaozhun jiating).

178

Wang Jinsong. Standard Family (Biaozhun jiating). No. 13.

179

Wang Jinsong. Parents (Shuangqin).

179

Wang Jinsong. Parents (Shuangqin). No. 1.

180

Wang Jinsong. One Hundred Signs of Demolition (Bai chai tu).

180

Wang Jinsong. One Hundred Signs of Demolition (Bai chai tu).

183

Hong Hao. Beautiful Images in Focus (Meili jingxiang).

183

Hong Hao. Beijing Tour Guide (Youjing zhinan).

184

Hong Hao. Mr. Gnoh the Person I Know Well (Wo suo renshi de Mr. Gnoh).

186

Gao Brothers (Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang). Senses of Space: Anxiety.

187

Gao Brothers (Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang). The Utopia of the 20 Minute Embrace, I.

188

Cui Xiuwen. Lady’s (Shuxi jian).

x

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acknowledgments

This book is the end product of multiple origins, beginnings, and middles. It unifies ideas from different periods of my thinking, living, and research interests. The diverse materials were first presented at numerous places, including the University of California at Davis, University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Riverside, University of Southern California, University of Oregon, New York University, Duke University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, CUNY Graduate Center, CUNY at Staten Island, College of William and Mary, University of Maryland, Drew University, University of Pittsburgh, the Mattress Factory and the Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh, the Asia Society in New York, St. Petersburg State University in Russia, St. Andrews University in Scotland, Tamkang University in Taiwan, Tsinghua University (China), Beijing Normal University, Beijing Language and Culture University, Shanghai University, Nanjing University, University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the annual conventions of the Modern Language Association (New Orleans, 2001 and New York, 2002), Society for Cinema and Media Studies (Atlanta, 2004 and Vancouver, 2006), and the American Comparative Literature Association (Ann Arbor, 2004). Many friends and colleagues read, heard, or commented on earlier versions of the various chapters, and it is impossible to list them all and acknowledge my intellectual and professional debt in this limited space. For their hospitality, critique, or support, I thank Chris Berry, Michelle Bloom, David Bordwell, Chen Xihe, Leo Ching, Ralph Cohen, Shuqin Cui, Arif Dirlik, Mary Farquhar, Lucy Fischer, Poshek Fu, Peter Hitchcock, Huang Du, Dina Iordanova, Joan Kee, Neil Larsen, Wendy Larson, John Lent, David Li, Xiaoping Lin, Kathy Linduff, Perry Link, Jianmei Liu, Liu Kang, Kari Lokke, Gina Marchetti, Jiayan Mi, Paul Pickowicz, Stanley Rosen, Shu-mei Shih, Claire Sponsler, Yanfang Tang, Tao Dongfeng, Georges van den Abbeele, Ban Wang, David Wang, Wang Ning, Wang Yichuan, Chia-chi Wu, Gary Xu, Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Michelle Yeh, Wen-hsin Yeh, Yingjin Zhang, Zhang Yiwu, Zhang Zhen, Zhou Yongming, and Ying Zhu. My graduate students at UC Davis — Haomin Gong, Jing Nie, Andrew Hagemen, and Fei Shi — read some chapters of the book manuscript

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and generously offered their feedback. I especially benefited from the scathing, searching criticism of the two anonymous readers for the University of Hawai‘i Press. Needless to say, I am solely responsible for any remaining shortcomings of the book. I am thankful to the Cai Studio, Zhang Huan, Qin Yufen, Wang Jinsong, Hong Hao, Cui Xiuwen, the Gao brothers (Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang), the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh, PA), the Wood Street Galleries (Pittsburgh, PA), and Courtyard Gallery (Beijing) for providing me with images of artworks crucial to my study. An academic year spent in Kyiv (Kiev), Ukraine as a Fulbright scholar deepened my understanding of the circulation of desires and affects in a postsocialist register and on a global scale. I am grateful for the help of the Fulbright Program and its Kyiv branch, and fondly remember my colleagues, friends, and fellow Fulbrighters in Ukraine. It has been a privilege and pleasure to have the opportunity to collaborate with the University of Hawai‘i Press again and again. Patricia Crosby’s faith in my projects has been a source of encouragement and inspiration. I thank Pat for her unfailing support of my work. The efficiency and professionalism of my managing editor, Cheri Dunn, and manuscript editor Barbara Folsom are also greatly appreciated. I dedicate this book to my beloved wife, Anzhela (Angela) Matyukhina, and to our beautiful baby daughter, Caroline. Caroline’s birth into the world is the source of tremendous fatigue as well as the greatest joy to her parents. Her mama and papa have not been surprised at her incredible innate exuberance, curiosity, and restlessness: she was constantly on the move even before her birth. With us, she circled half the globe, crossed continents, and did what could have been a lifetime of traveling in the months waiting to be born: from Kyiv, Kherson, L’viv, and Odessa in Ukraine; to Beijing in China; to San Francisco and Davis in California, finally to arrive at the world at Sacramento.

Early short versions of some chapters were previously published in the following journals and anthologies. Chapter 1 first appeared as “Waking to Modernity: The Classical Tale in Late Qing China,” New Literary History 34.4 (Autumn 2003): 745–760. Chapter 2 first appeared as “When Mimosa Blossoms: The Ideology of the Self in Modern Chinese Literature,” Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association 28.3 (October 1993): 1–16. Chapter 3 first appeared as “Body Writing: Beauty Writers at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century,” in From National Tradition to Globalization, From Realism to Post-modernism: Trends in Modern Chinese Literature, ed. A. K. Oglobxii

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lin, A. A. Rodionov, Ye. A. Serebryakov, N. A. Speshnev, and A. G. Storozhuk (St. Petersburg, Russia: Roza Mira Publishers, 2004), pp. 171–189. Chapter 5 first appeared as “ ‘Beautiful Violence’: War, Peace, Globalization,” in a special issue on Asian visual culture, positions: east asia cultures critique 12.3 (Winter 2004): 759–711. Chapter 6 first appeared as “Representing the Chinese Nation-State in Filmic Discourse,” in East of West: Cross-Cultural Performance and the Staging of Difference, ed. Claire Sponsler and Xiaomei Chen (New York: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 111–123. Chapter 7 first appeared as “History, Memory, Nostalgia: Rewriting Socialism in Chinese Film and TV Drama,” Asian Cinema 16.2 (Fall/Winter 2005): 2–22. Chapter 9 first appeared as “Tear Down the City: Reconstructing Urban Space in Contemporary Chinese Cinema, Photography, Video,” in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, ed. Zhen Zhang (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

acknowledgments

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introduction

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China and the Global Biopolitical Order

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his book is a multidisciplinary study of Chinese modernity in the areas of literature, visual culture, and biopolitics. In his deceptively titled monograph, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, Fredric Jameson at one point entertains as many as fourteen possible narratives of modernity in European history, extending from the German Reformation through the French Enlightenment to the Soviet Revolution.1 Chinese modernity, from the mid-nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, is necessarily multifarious and open to many possibilities of narration.2 We may enumerate a series of successive or overlapping “modern” moments: incipient modernity in the late Qing, May Fourth bourgeois modernity, capitalist semicolonial modernity in Shanghai-Nanjing in the Republican Era, communist revolutionary modernity, socialist modernity (1950s–1970s), the modernity of the new enlightenment in the New Period (1980s), and postsocialist modernity in the post–New Period from 1989 to the present. The present project covers selected episodes and texts in modern China, from the turn of the twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first. I do not limit myself to one literary form or one artistic medium, but draw on diverse materials from different media — literature, film, art, and photography — in order to better circumscribe and comprehend the nature and characteristics of China’s

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varied experiences of modernity. A central theme of the study is the dialectic of globalization and its discontents.3 We may date the beginning of globalization at the rise of the modern capitalist world-system. The incessant need to seek new world markets intrinsic to the process of globalization contributed to the collapse of the Chinese empire and the advent of capitalism in China. Globalization as we commonly refer to it, namely the post–Cold War era, is but the latest and most intense episode in the long history of globalization. China’s entry into the capitalist world economy, troubled and difficult as always, has unleashed fantasies and imaginings that attempt to bypass the limitations of local and national traditions. Globalization was potentially a liberating force for the body politic. But the constant, ruthless pursuit of markets and profits entails the interruption of traditional ways of life and the destruction of old spaces of living. The teleology of modernization and globalization is thrown into crisis just as they open up new horizons. A tension exists between the universalizing, globalizing tendency of capital and the defensive enclaves of nationalism, localism, and tradition. While looking toward the future, nostalgia has become a resurgent theme in contemporary Chinese cultural production and consumption. More precisely, I dwell here on the biopolitics of modernity and globalization in the analysis of specific texts. The body functions as a cultural, aesthetic, and historical prism through which Chinese modernity and its relationship to global modernity (or modernities) can be looked at anew. I investigate the regulation of desires, bodies, affects, and sexuality in the construction of modernity as embodied in Chinese thought, literature, film, and art.4

Biopolitics Globalization is the ineluctable human condition of our time. But globalization is not just the physical circulation of goods, commodities, industries, hardware, and capital across national boundaries. It must be felt personally in the everyday life of individuals. At a deeper level, the process involves the structure of feelings and the politics of the body, the psyche, and affects. What is needed in cultural studies is a thorough and adequate analysis of what we might call “global biopolitics.”5 At this point, I venture to outline some general tendencies of the global libidinal economy and at the same time describe the current state of socialist/postsocialist China, which was long regarded as the “other” of the capitalist West. The entry of contemporary China into the picture contributes to a vast and significant expansion of the regime of global capitalism and its attendant biopolitical manifestations. According to Michel Foucault, the emergence of modernity since the eighteenth century is crucially predicated upon a new form of disciplinary regime, 2

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“biopolitics” or “biopower.” This is a mechanism for the control and regulation of bodies, desires, and sexuality. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault introduces and elaborates upon this concept. He writes, “there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of ‘biopower.’ . . . This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism. The latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes.”6 The surveillance of human beings for the production of “docile bodies” is critically important for the formation of subjectivities that are compatible with the needs of the modern nation-state and capitalism. The development of the technologies and mechanisms of subjectivization of the individual is fundamental to the establishment of sovereignty in the modern era. Giorgio Agamben follows up on Foucault’s thought and asserts: “the entry of zoē into the sphere of polis — the politicization of bare life as such — constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought. It is even likely that if politics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse, this is because politics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity.”7 In their book Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri expand Foucault’s idea and make it into the guiding principle in the present rule of imperial sovereignty. In their reading of Foucault, the exercise of power over the body has become less heavy-handed and more diff use, internalized, and immanent since the 1960s. Thus, they point to a paradigmatic shift from the modern to the postmodern. Biopower demarcates the shift from industrial production to postindustrial reproduction of life as characterized by affective labor, entertainment, service, and information technology. They outline three successive paradigms and stages of economic development since the Middle Ages. The first one is agriculture and the extraction of raw materials; the second one is industry and the manufacture of durable goods; and the third one is the providing of services and the manipulation of information, or the processes of postmodernization and informatization. Service, information, and knowledge involve the production of immaterial labor. The personal computer is a model of communicational immaterial service. Hardt and Negri explain the notion of affective labor in the following words: The other face of immaterial labor is the affective labor of human contact and interaction. Health services, for example, rely centrally on caring and affective labor, and the entertainment industry is likewise focused on the creation introduction

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and manipulation of affect. This labor is immaterial, even if it is corporeal and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible, a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion.8 What I would like to pursue further at this juncture is the globalization of affective labor, of “in-person service” across national boundaries. Global affective labor covers a vast terrain of human interaction and trafficking, actual or virtual: health service, child care, domestic work, online dating, correspondence marriage, immigrant sex work, entertainment, tourism, digital information, and so on. The global circulation, production, and rendering of affective labor have further created a new shape of biopolitics that Foucault himself did not live to see. Here, I will illustrate several points. First of all, the libidinal economy, or the economy of affect, is often structured in the same way as the global market economy and operates in accordance with the logic of supply and demand. The new geopolitics of affective labor across national and regional boundaries liberates citizens from the political oppression of the old nation-state and frees them from the economic conditions of scarcity, unemployment, overproduction, and overcapacity. There exists a privileged group of “flexible citizens” who navigate the geography of the world with ease while seeking opportunistic gains.9 At the same time, this global biopolitics subjugates human beings to new forms of commodification, control, exploitation, and victimization. The new global biopolitics could be repressive or liberating, depending on the specific conjecture of circumstances. We may call this phenomenon a neoliberalist economy of affect. Second, the questions of victimization and agency are both important in transnational transactions of labor and affect. So long as globalization continues, discontents will be its by-products. Globalization could widen the already existing disparity between the rich, powerful, and upwardly mobile and the disadvantaged, marginal, and disenfranchised. Domination, exploitation, and abuse of men and women occur in the global economy. In the famous words of Karl Marx, the primitive accumulation of capital is barbaric. Yet the power relation embedded in each and every instance of transnational interaction should be examined case by case. As an anthologist researching correspondence marriage between Western men and Asian women observed, “women involved in correspondence relationships are not merely pawns of global political economy or the victims of sexual exploitation, nor are men simply the agents of western sexual imperialism.”10 Men and women can be both the agents of change and subjugated to manipulation and domination in a given process. Third, I wish to point out that in the overarching global economy, nationality and nationalism do not altogether disappear; now and then they surface 4

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and obstruct otherwise smooth business transactions. More important, even if traditional and ancient antagonisms between nation-states no longer exist, the geopolitical unconscious, history, and memory can stubbornly persist and motivate the actions and desires of individuals against the interest and logic of global capital. Affective labor is immaterial and intangible yet corporeal and in-person. The physical dimension is palpable in this new global service industry. Citizens of rich countries fly to developing countries in search of affection, comfort, and even marriage that are difficult to obtain in their home countries. Third-world subjects render such service to people from the rich countries willingly or without a choice. Some of them also migrate to the metropolitan West in search of work and wealth. What should be emphasized is the symbolic and cultural dimension of such types of “immaterial work.” Citizens from formerly colonized and disadvantaged states also seek out such satisfaction and fulfillment from affective laborers of former or present dominant powers. Although the era of colonialism and imperialism has ended, what we witness is a living postcolonial and postimperialist imaginary of vindication, satisfaction, and prestige on the part of third-world subjects. This is the domain of desire and fantasy. The global market economy of affect thus prepares the ground for the reversal of old economic and power relationships between the rich and poor, the empowered and dispossessed. Cash can be exchanged for affective labor. Hence the geopolitical unconscious surfaces even after the physical disappearance of old geopolitics. Residual nationalist sentiments and fantasies can both prohibit and motivate the desires and actions of people from a particular region. In their book Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari comment on the internal schizophrenic contradiction of capitalism. In their words: [Capitalism], through its process of production, produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy or charge, against which it brings all its vast powers of repression to bear, but which nonetheless continues to act as capitalism’s limit. For capitalism constantly counteracts, constantly inhibits this inherent tendency while at the same time allowing it free rein; it continually seeks to avoid reaching its limit while simultaneously tending toward it. Capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting, as best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons who have been defined in terms of abstract qualities. Everything returns or recurs: States, nations, families.11 Global capitalism is, then, a schizophrenic process between the endless, indefinite expansion of capital and the limiting, defensive mechanisms of the nation-state, tradition, and religion. A tug of war exists between the decoding

introduction

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and deterritorialization of flows of capital and desire on the one hand, and the recoding and reterritorialization of old institutions on the other. This will become evident in the examples of biopolitical manifestations that I will now present.

The Geopolitics of the Libidinal Economy and the Ethnography of Desire The trafficking of categories of people in the global biopolitical order is growing in scope and frequency. Transnational corporeal service and the migration of affective labor have become increasingly part of people’s daily existence.12 Pen pals, Internet dating, mail-order brides, foreign nannies, maids, sex workers, and tourists demarcate the new zones of human interaction. Most melodramatic is perhaps the flourish of a vast network of transnational dating services across oceans and continents. There are countless Web sites advertising transnational dating and marriage. Women from Asia and Eastern Europe with disadvantaged economic backgrounds seek men in the West. Dating tours are organized on a regular basis to go to those countries to meet women. For example, American agencies such as A Foreign Affair, Anastasia, and European Connections are among the biggest companies in the trade that specialize in Eastern Europe. Established in the early 1990s, they organize tours to cities in Russia and Ukraine regularly. Each boasts that not a single scheduled tour has ever been nor ever will be canceled. Every male client shells out thousands of dollars and is guaranteed to meet no less than six hundred women in three “socials” on a romance tour. It is informative to examine the advertising strategy of such transnational marriage agencies. The 2002 promotion tour videotape of European Connections is a case in point. It exhorts rich foreigners, especially Americans, to travel with the company to Russian and Ukrainian cities: Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kyiv, Odessa, and Dnipropetrovsk. In the section on Kyiv, the camera pans across the landscape of important sites in the city. While the soundtrack plays a Ukrainian folksong in the seductive voice of a female singer, the camera leads the viewer to the birthplace of Kyiv, the Dnipro River that runs through the city, and above all to the extremely masculine Monument to Victory. The knowledgeable viewer cannot help but be reminded of the grisly battles between the mighty Red Army and Nazi Germany in World War II. The heroic efforts of the Soviets ultimately defeated Hitler and saved Europe. Yet the scene soon becomes a very feminine landscape by featuring beautiful, receptive local women presumably desirous of marriage with American men. A couple of sexy young female swimmers (modern mermaids?) wearing bikinis emerge from 6

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Dnipro River, smiling, waving, and walking toward the camera — and possibly you, a potential American traveler. At a Kyiv reception or “social,” countless Ukrainian women parade themselves in front of the camera making seductive gestures, again all over the soundtrack of an exotic, enticing Ukrainian folksong sung by a female singer. These women are eager to meet you, to be chosen by you. In the videotape, the American bachelors give personal testimonies one after another about the quality and superiority of East European women: for example, “If you dropped a group of women of this quality in a bar in America, there would be a riot”; “These women have all the qualities that American women are missing”; “I have never seen so many beautiful women all in one place.” And the comments go on and on. The awe felt for the former Soviet Empire melts away, and one is now warmed by the multitude of foreign women wanting rich Western men. The video segment on Odessa is equally appealing, especially for connoisseurs of world cinema. The opening shot is one of the enchanting Odessa Steps (Potemkin Steps) in spring, a place that was immortalized in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. The Odessa Steps sequence has been a textbook example of montage, being cited and recycled in later films, such as the sequence “Station Steps” in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables. Once again, the sort of violent struggle in the original film and later imitations is nonexistent in the video promotion. The Odessa Steps, and the Odessa Opera House, which was the target of bombardment by the rebellious battleship Potemkin in response to the massacre of ordinary people on the steps, are now soothing sites of an exotic, peaceful, and friendly city that invites foreign males to rendezvous with its beautiful local women. In fact, tourist maps and street signs in cities such as Kyiv and Odessa prominently point to the exact locations of dating agencies for the convenience of the male visitor from afar. The global circulation of bodies is facilitated by a capitalist economy of demand and supply. The commodification of the body, and more specifically the fetishization and consumption of the foreign body, often results from a geopolitical asymmetry in wealth and power. Mating with the foreigner on the other side of the ocean is a main manifestation of such geopolitics of biopower, or “geobiopower.” A sense of satisfaction is derived from being able to mate women or men from a present or former dominant geopolitical power, be it the former Soviet Union or mainland China. The patron from a rich country meets, dates, and weds a partner from a presently poor but historically dominant power. Sexuality breaks down barriers of nationality, ethnicity, age, and religion. It is the equalizer of all things, but at the same time it operates on the principle of social and economic inequality. The simultaneous cult and debasement of mainland women in Hong Kong

introduction

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Street advertisement for an international marriage agency in Odessa, Ukraine. Spring 2005. Author photo.

and Taiwan’s sex trade and marriage service are worth examination.13 “Mainland sisters” (dalu mei) and “northern sisters” (beimei) are financially poor, yet they come from mighty China. As advertised, these women are supposed to have an attractive physique and possess qualities that are lacking in women from Hong Kong and Taiwan. At the same time, they are stigmatized as sly, opportunistic gold diggers threatening the stability of Taiwanese and Hong Kongese families. Nevertheless, some patrons and would-be husbands derive a sense of superiority and conquest from mating with mainlanders. In certain streets and alleys of Mongkok, Yaumatei, and Shamshuipo in Hong Kong, glitzy neon signs attract the eyes of the locals and offer the availability and prices, in Hong Kong dollars, of varieties of women: mainland Chinese, Thai, Filipina, Malaysian, and Eastern European. The packaged sumptuous body of the mainland Chinese woman, especially from northeast China, is a desirable, exotic object for the southern Chinese male, whose wealth translates into power in such corporeal transactions. The contradiction between territorial nationalism and the borderless transnational sex industry sometimes explodes on the front page of news media. The 8

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Street advertisement for an international marriage agency in Kyiv (Kiev), Ukraine. Spring 2005. Author photo.

story about a Japanese sex-tour group in southern China became the national headline in September 2003. About 380 Japanese male tourists, ranging in age from sixteen to thirty-seven, visited the southern Chinese city Zhuhai, just north of Macau. The hotel management called in about five hundred Chinese prostitutes from various nightclubs to serve this group. These women arrived at the hotel to participate in an orgy of sexual transaction. It would have been another ordinary episode in the bustling transnational sex tour industry, but this time, an indignant Chinese customer at the hotel, a Mr. Zhao Guangquan who happened to be staying at the hotel for a conference, leaked the news to the media. A Japanese tourist was quoted as saying, in Chinese translation: “We come here to play with Chinese girls!” (Women jiushi lai wan Zhongguo guniang de!). Each Chinese girl was paid 1,200 to 1,800 yuan to spend a night with a Japanese client in the hotel. The timing of the Japanese visitors was a politically sensitive day, September 18, a “National Day of Shame” (guochi ri), upon which the Japanese had invaded and occupied northeast China in 1931. This was the seventy-second anniversary of Japanese invasion of northeast China. Nationalism and historical memory blocked the transnational libidinal flow based on introduction

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the economic principle of free exchange between money and service. Chineselanguage newspapers and Web sites across the world reported this event and provided forums for venting nationalistic sentiments. Here are two of the newspaper headlines reporting and commenting on the case: Courtesans Did Not Know the Pain of Loss of a Country, and Still Sang ‘Flowers in the Backyard’ across the River — on 9/18, Three Hundred Japanese Men Bought Sex in Zhuhai, and Chinese Girls Sold Their Bodies to Entertain Them14 Scandal in a Luxury Hotel: Licentious Sound and Lascivious Laughter on the National Day of Shame.15 The lines “courtesans did not know the pain of loss of a country, and still sang ‘Flowers in the Backyard’ across the river” (Shangnü buzhi wangguo hen, gejiang you chang Houting hua) are two well-known lines from the poem “Mooring at Qinhuai River” (Bo Qinhuai) by the famous late Tang Dynasty poet Du Mu (A.D. 803–853). The original poem laments the oblivion of history and the vanquishing of a country in the hands of a decadent court. The last emperor of the short-lived Chen dynasty in southern China, posthumoulsy titled Chen Houzhu, composer of the song “Flowers in the Backyard,” lost his throne and country as a result of indulging in sensual pleasures. The site of the poem, Jinling, was the capital of several Southern dynasties, which were conquered one after another. The poet Du Mu wrote the poem about the decline of the late Tang dynasty and reminded his readers of a lesson from the past. In more recent historical memory, it is also in the same city now called Nanjing, through which the Qinhuai River runs, that Japanese soldiers committed unspeakable atrocities, massacring and raping hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in 1937. The infamous incident has been known as the “Rape of Nanjing.”16 In this instance, both ancient and modern Chinese history was too painful for the average Chinese to tolerate the sexual extravagance of the Japanese tourists. “The conscience of the nation” forbade the unobtrusive flow of transnational transactions. The nation was forced by public opinion and the media to interfere in an otherwise smooth regional border-crossing libidinal economy. The unfortunate Chinese “pimps” were arrested, and some of them were sentenced to life imprisonment. The site of the event, a five-star hotel — Zhuhai International Conference Center Hotel (Zhuhai guoji huiyi zhongxin da jiudian), was shut down by the government for a while. The spokesperson of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kong Quan, also felt it necessary to comment on the event. He instructed foreigners to obey Chinese laws and urged the Japanese government to better educate its citizens on such matters.17 Thus can 10

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nationalism disrupt the normal rhythm in the channeling of libidinal drives and desires in transnational circuits — temporarily. Yes, only temporarily. The arbitrariness of national interference cannot outlast the long wave of economic necessity. Half a year later, business goes on as usual in Zhuhai. The closed hotel is reopened, and Zhuhai is flooded with male tourists from Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. The legendary old streets are again lined with hundreds of sex workers who attempt to pick up passers-by as their customers. The sex industry thrives more than ever because, ironically, the incident of the Japanese tour group has made the place even more famous/infamous. The owner of an entertainment business in Zhuhai is quoted as saying the following: “Zhuhai depends on this (sex industry)! After being shut down for half a year, nightclubs big and small lost tens of millions of yuan, not including related businesses. If things are not relaxed, Zhuhai will be finished.”18 The body revolts against the surveillance and control of the state. More important, the imperative of the global libidinal economy, with all its thrills and cruelty, forbids the long-term halting of the circulation of desire and capital.

Transregional Desire in the Film Culture of Greater China The regional and transregional trafficking in libido, bodies, and money within Greater China is common and far-reaching. Some films from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China are indicative of the situation. One good example is the Hong Kong film Durian Durian (Liulian piaopiao, dir. Fruit Chan, 2001). Xiaoyan, a beautiful young woman from the city of Mudanjiang in Dongbei (northeast China), comes to Hong Kong to work in the sex industry. The first half of the film is set in Hong Kong, and the second half in Mudanjiang after she returns from Hong Kong because her visa has expired. There is a strong contrast between the desolate, empty landscape of postsocialist Dongbei and the glitzy, dizzying, fast-paced, busy street scenes of Hong Kong as a hotbed of capitalism. Toward the end of the film, former cultural workers (male dancers) and Xiaoyan’s friends in Mudanjiang, now unemployed, organize a dance troupe to work for a local nightclub. Their transformation into entertainers in a nightclub is reminiscent of the fate of unemployed male workers in the British film The Full Monty (1997), in which the workers in postindustrial Sheffield have no choice but turn into male strippers in a nightclub. The film illustrates a historical postmodern shift from industrial production to service, entertainment, and affective labor. What happened to a country of the advanced West is now unfolding in a formerly third-world country like China. Dongbei was a major base of industrial production in the Mao era. But as its dilapidated, antiquarian factories went bankrupt and closed down one after anintroduction

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other, millions of people became jobless. Wang Bing’s epic documentary, West of the Rails (Tiexie qu, 2003), offers precisely such a chronicle of the decay of a once industrialized, prosperous district of Shenyang and the dire consequences for the working class. With the decay of old industries and the highest number of laid-off workers from China’s state-owned enterprises, Dongbei is the biggest supplier, along with Sichuan province, of sex workers in the country even though prostitution is officially illegal in China. Leaving the old home in search of work, whether Mudanjiang or Shenyang, is the logical and inevitable choice of many men and women, like Xiaoyan in Durian Durian, when the socialist wealth system collapses and people have nothing to turn to except helping themselves. A new generation of Chinese leaders now targets Dongbei for the nation’s future development. With the decline of the so-called Shanghai gang (Shanghai bang) in Chinese politics, Dongbei is on the priority list of development under Premier Wen Jiabao. At the end of the film, Xiaoyan (Qin Hailu, herself an actress from Dongbei), the heroine, performs a role in an old Chinese opera on a stage in her neighborhood. The camera zeros in on a close-up of her face, highlighting her refusal to go back to Hong Kong and her realignment with traditional Chinese virtues. Thus, the film signifies the change from oldfashioned industrial production to biopolitical reproduction — namely, the production of affect and service; yet the sanctity of virtue halts the smooth flow of sexual transactions based on the principle of free exchange between money and service. Given the pervasive extent of the libidinal economy for sale, Edward Yang’s film Mahjong (Majiang, 1996) is an indignant indictment of the degeneration of social mores in Taiwanese society. The film focuses on an underground transregional and transnational network of male and female prostitution in Taipei. Yang presents vivid portraits of these characters (Ginger, an American woman running an international escort service in Taipei; Marthe, an innocent French girl who was almost lured into prostitution while in Taipei; a gang member named “Hong Kong,” a gigolo at night; Markus, a British national who was fond of picking up local ladies for short-term relations). Red Fish’s father, a married rich Taiwanese businessman, was obsessed with his mistress from Hong Kong, Angela, who depleted his coffer. Many scenes of the film were shot on location at Hard Rock Café and TGI Friday’s in Taipei. Locals and foreigners come to such places to socialize and make business deals. Here foreigners pick up locals or locals enjoy a taste of foreigners in the flesh trade. Indeed, such international hotels, cafés, and restaurants have become the literal contact zone between the local and the global in Asia’s metropolises. The mainland Chinese feature film Purple Sunset (Ziri, 2001), directed by Feng Xiaoning, describes the adventure of a Chinese man, a female Russian 12

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soldier, and a Japanese schoolgirl in Dongbei in the final days of World War II. Lost and having drifted away from their respective national groups, they must help each other in order to survive and move out of danger. The front cover of the VCD case advertises the film with the following enticing words: “A story of a Chinese man and two foreign women in a vast sea of forest” (mangmang linhai zhong yige Zhongguo nanren he liangge waiguo nüren de gushi). But to expect a romantic story about a dashing Chinese male’s dalliance with two foreign women would be far from the truth. In fact, the Chinese man is no more than an ignorant young peasant, who does not even know how to handle a grenade or a gun. Towering and strong, yet feminine and attractive, the Russian woman soldier, Nadjia, shines in comparison to her two Asian companions. She is the real soldier who protects the weak Chinese man and the Japanese girl. And, by extension, Russia is the protector and victor vis-à-vis China and Japan. A climactic moment in the film is a sequence when she hears the news of the surrender of Japan broadcast on radio from Moscow, at which point she takes off her clothes and throws them up to the sky, wearing nothing but her birthday suit. Over the soundtrack of the famous Russian folksong “Kalinka,” she jumps into a river and swims. The long shot of the camera focuses on the naked woman soldier running toward the river through a deep forest. The display of full nudity is intended to be ennobling and uplifting, signifying the beauty of the Russian woman soldier as well as Russia’s liberation of northeast China from Japan at the end of World War II. Beijing, the capital of Red China, is a nodal point in the international flow of libidinal desires. Foreigners sometimes speak of a “German street” near Yansha Shopping Mall (Lufthansa Center) where German tourists and businessmen gather to drink, socialize, and scout. Yet, the Russian quarter is most appealing to the senses and lower instincts of the human body. Near Yabao Road and Ritan Park, a section of the city is lined up with East European restaurants with Russian signs and shops filled with commodities ranging from expensive fur coats to cheap daily necessities, all catering to the needs of Russian business people. At night, a nightclub is populated by a huge number of sex workers from the former Soviet Union and (Outer) Mongolia, as well as China. While the sign at the door occasionally proclaims loudly against prostitution (“Severely Punish Illegal Prostitution!”), the bright neon lights beckon to would-be Chinese voyeurs and flaneurs, inviting them to come inside and participate in active transactions of the flesh. The circulation of people, commodities, natural resources, and libidinal energies across the Sino-Russian border continues, alternating with acceleration and pause. It is reported that some 3.26 million Chinese have migrated and settled in Siberia since the end of the Cold War.19 The Russians embrace this with a mixture of joy and fear. The influx of Chinese immigrants adds new introduction

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fuel to the economy and replenishes the declining Russian population in the Russian Far East (6.70 million). But Russia fears that it will lose its sovereignty over the area in the long run. While the transregional migration of populations is speeding up, old-style Realpolitik remains. China and Japan, two big oil importers, have been courting Russia to build oil pipelines to export Siberian oil to them. While China urges Russia to build pipelines to the Chinese city Daqing, Japan has been trying to persuade her to extend the pipelines to the Russian city Nakhodka, located on the Pacific shoreline, so that Russian oil can be exported to all the countries in the Asian Pacific — Japan, Korea, and China — rather than depending on the need of just one country (China). Russia has been carefully calculating the geopolitical advantages of each plan even though it might take a longer time and be more costly to build a particular proposed route from an economic point of view. Once again, nationalist sentiments obstruct the smooth transactions of the global economy. Historical rivalries among China, Russia, and Japan in the Far East affect present economic considerations. In 2003, The Fifty-third Miss World Beauty Pageant was held in scenic Sanya, Hainan Island, China. Guan Qi, a twenty-one-year-old, 1.79 meters (5 feet 11 inches) tall statuesque beauty from Jilin Province, Dongbei (northeast), captured the Chinese title in the preliminary Chinese round of contests in September 2003 and won the third place in the Miss World Pageant later in the year, while a beauty from Ireland received the world title. This was the first time the Miss World competition was held in China; but the latecomer to the game was the most enthusiastic new member. China also hosted the next Miss World Pageants in 2004 and 2005, three times in a row. Thus, the Chinese organizers had a golden opportunity to further China’s fledgling fashion industry and beauty products. In this way, too, China joins the rest of the world in the production and exhibition of beauty, affect, and desire.

While analyzing various mediums and dissecting recurrent themes, this book is organized in a chronological, historical sequence. I begin with literature in the late nineteenth century, traverse the mid-twentieth century, move on to performance and installation art in the late twentieth century, examine transnational Chinese cinema, and finally review the representation of the modern city in multimedia. In the first part of the book, “Literature and Biopolitics,” I trace the trajectory of the body in modern Chinese literature. The focus is on the adventures, pleasures, and sufferings of the male body as well as female body in the writings of selected Chinese writers from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth. I begin with the utopian longings of a Chinese thinker-writer in the late nineteenth century, Wang Tao. Even before Kang Youwei, Wang envisioned a 14

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Guan Qi. Miss China and Second Runner-Up in Miss World Pageant. City of Sanya, Hainan Island, China, 2003.

grand union (datong) for the future of China and the world. Moreover, he fantasized about a free transnational libidinal economy between Chinese citizens and foreigners across borders and oceans. As the last great master of the classical tale (wenyan xiaoshuo), Wang wrote charming stories in a traditional format that exude a remarkable modern sensibility. They narrate Chinese males’ imaginary travels across the world, where they fall into love with people from other countries. His tales of fantasy project a zone of uninterrupted free flow of polymorphous desires, a world that brings together people from different parts of the planet. Control of the body is of critical importance throughout the twentieth century. I analyze the stories of two male writers, Yu Dafu from the May Fourth period in the first half of the twentieth century and Zhang Xianliang from the socialist era in the second half of the twentieth century. While Yu’s characters are free-roaming male wanderers socially displaced and psychologically alienintroduction

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ated, Zhang’s characters live their lives in the confined space of labor camps. But what is common to the two writers is their exaggerated self-portrayal of the lack of libidinal fulfillment. Society or the state denies them a legitimate channel through which to discharge libidinal energies. In both cases, the plight of the individual is closely related to the fate of the nation at large. Socialist modernity requires the rigorous disciplining of the body. Prisons, labor camps, and penitentiaries are all important sites for the ideological and physical control of the human mind and body. Sexual impotence and regained potency in Zhang’s novel are related to the changing political economy of the socialist state as a whole. Michel Foucault points out that the regulation of the body has become less cumbersome and heavy-handed in the West since the 1960s. The form of control is more relaxed, diffuse, and internalized. In retrospect, this change also indicates a paradigmatic change from modernity and industrial society to postmodernity and postindustrial society in the West. However, during the 1960s and throughout the Mao era (1950s to mid-1970s) in China, the exercise of power through the regulation of the body was brutally intense. This is attested by the “labor camp novels” of writers like Zhang Xianliang. The libidinal economy is regulated in a harsh manner for the construction of a socialist modernity.20 China’s belated entry into postmodernity is in step with its economic transformation from socialism to postsocialism. China has accelerated its assimilation into the global capitalist market economy since the early 1990s. As a result, the libidinal economy has also changed from one of deficit to surplus. It is the overflow of libidinal energies that a young generation of female writers describes in vivid detail. Furthermore, the emergence of polymorphous desires and rampant sexuality in their works is simultaneous with the rise of a new media technology, namely the Internet. The Internet has played a key role in spreading such writings to tens of millions of Chinese readers beyond the limits of national censorship. The flourishing of female sexuality thus has to do with the transformation of serious citizens into virtual netizens owing to the invention of such a new communication technology. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Chinese female body begins to enjoy the thrills of sexual orgasm, especially with the help of foreign males in China’s urban centers. I refer to the writings of authors like Wei Hui. Her bestknown novel, Shanghai Baby, delves into the private sensations and exhilarations of female sexuality in the time of transnational capitalism. This is a period of Chinese history when bodies, desires, and sex circulate much more freely in metropolitan centers. Her sensations as a daydreamer, shopper, stroller, and female flaneur in the streets of Shanghai are described with psychological exactitude. What should be noticed is the emasculation of the Chinese male and the fetishization of the foreign body. In the novel, the female protagonist’s Chinese 16

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lover is an impotent drug addict, whereas her German lover is a masculine (and huge!) businessman. There is a vivid (nauseating) description of their spirited lovemaking in a public toilet. In the “Postscript” to a Chinese edition of Wei Hui’s works, the writer herself says that she received a phone call from her German lover just as she finished the last lines of the novel. This is a deliberate proof that the author herself as a Shanghai lady was indeed satiated by a German man in real life. The Chinese female writer thus contributes to the perpetuation of the image of inadequate Chinese masculinity — a familiar Fanonian complaint about devastating interracial sex for the indigenous male! The second part of my book, “Art: From the National to the Diasporic,” looks at avant-garde art and tackles the body more directly and viscerally. Zhang Huan’s and Ma Liuming’s body and performance art takes the human body as the very theme, material, and medium of their works. They visibly enact the production and reproduction of life and the disciplining of the body. Zhang Huan’s early art dwells on the social, political, and existential dimension of the human subject in postsocialist China. After his immigration to the US, his performances addressed the issues of immigration, diaspora, and cross-cultural identity. Ma Liuming experiments with bodily and gender transgression. His own body was literally disciplined by the Chinese state — he was detained by the police for an art that was perceived as lewd behavior. In the evolution of their art through the 1990s, there has been a significant change, especially in the case of Zhang Huan, from an obsession with the body politic of the socialist nation-state to an engagement with global biopolitics — namely, the body politic of migration, globalization, and multiculturalism, a shift from the national allegory of the existential state of the third-world subject to transnational identity politics. Bloodshed, terrorism, violence, and international conflicts have become the order of the day in the new world disorder, especially since 9/11. War and peace are the themes of two prominent Chinese diasporic artists. Qin Yufen’s installation Beautiful Violence and Cai Guo-Qiang’s explosion series capture our embattled situation in a prophetic manner. Their installations explore the relationship between borders and borderlessness, between nationalism and globalization, in our time in most compelling art forms. The third part of the book, “Sinophone Cinema and Postsocialist Television,” is an exploration of mass visual culture. I analyze artistic reactions to the multiple, uneven effects of globalization and modernization on both the physical landscape of China and the interior psyche of Chinese citizens. In Chinese films and television dramas produced in the 1990s and early 2000s, the viewer often sees nostalgia for bygone socialism and a critique of present postsocialist and postmodern schizophrenia. Nostalgia for the socialist past — huaijiu in Chinese, or Ostalgie (“nostalgia for the east”) in a German neologism — introduction

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addresses the sensitive zones of affect, memory, and sentiment in regard to the socialist legacy. The chapter on the representation of the Chinese state and Chineseness around the time of Hong Kong’s handover to mainland China in 1997 looks at the various shades and discourses of nationalism in films produced in China, Hong Kong, and Hollywood. Again, we see the contradictions between nationalist ideologies and a transnational ethos in the imaginings of the self and the other in our time. The chapter on dialects and language in Sinophone cinema attempts to draw a typology of the varieties of Chinese-language films and their functions in relation to identity formation. More important, it interrogates the boundaries of China as a nation-state and Chineseness as ethnicity. The fourth part of the book, “Cityscape in Multimedia,” is an investigation of contemporary Chinese urban space. Popular cinema as well as experimental photography and art chronicle and describe the destruction of urban space and past communal ways of life, and contest the teleology of globalization and modernization. I offer examples of popular cinema that capture the everyday life of contemporary Chinese citizens as they struggle to make a transition from the vanishing space of the socialist lifestyle to the new capitalist economy of commodities. These films include A Beautiful New World (dir. Shi Runjiu), Shower (dir. Zhang Yang), and A Sigh (dir. Feng Xiaogang) from the late 1990s and the turn of the twenty-first century. The dialectics of flux and stability, destruction and reconstruction are also vividly presented in the photographic works: Wang Jinsong’s Chai (Demolition), Standard Family, and Parents, and Hong Hao’s series Spring Festival on the River. Nostalgia for the past may be the psychological state of many people; meanwhile, the commodification of the past is also an inevitable ingredient of the mass media in contemporary Chinese cultural entertainment. Cui Xiuwen’s video art Lady’s takes a peek at female bodies for sale in a nightclub at a famous international hotel in Beijing. As a woman artist, she looks at the commercial circulation of female bodies from behind the scenes. Hong Hao’s photography Beautiful Images in Focus foregrounds the act of voyeurism and fantasy, with the male camera eye looking unabashedly at the female body. The tortuous nude males in a cramped living space in Gao Brothers’ photography/performance art remind the viewer of the gruesome surveillance and control of bodies, desires, and sexuality in modern China. Toward the end of the book “Historical Conclusion: Chinese Modernity and the Capitalist World-System” reexamines the history and implications of China’s belated integration into the capitalist world system. It looks back over centuries of time at the ocean trotting by the Chinese fleet headed by Zheng He in the Ming dynasty. I also invoke the ever fascinating theory of datong (Great Commonwealth) by the utopian thinker Kang Youwei at the turn of 18

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the twentieth century. As contemporary China is poised to embark upon new rounds of global seafaring in the economic and cultural realms, it is important to delineate its imperial past and its purportedly socialist present. The Postscript, “Answering the Question: What Is Chinese Postsocialism?” revisits a frequently used but vaguely defined term in modern and postmodern Chinese studies. I trace the genealogy of “postsocialism” and point to the real relevance of the idea for the examination of everyday life in contemporary China. Overall, the book aims at painting a broad picture of social life and the private self in the formation of Chinese modernity in a global context as seen in various forms and media. Bare life, or biopower, along with its explosion and control, damming and channeling, exuberance and destruction, constitutes a large part of the subject of the book. The steady advance of capitalist globalization has absorbed and united countries and societies from disparate locales of the planet for the recycling of materials, goods, currencies, and affects across national borders. Without exception, a nominally socialist state such as China has also been locked into the busy global commerce in body, libido, and service as well as trade in the traditional economic domains of industry, manufacturing, and finance. Cultural critics ought to be sensitive to the dialectic of globalization and stay alert to actual patterns of domination and enslavement, as well as to emergent opportunities for liberation and justice.

introduction

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part one

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Literature and Biopolitics

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chapter one

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Waking to Global Modernity The Classical Tale in the Late Qing

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hina’s encounter with modernity in the nineteenth century entailed a radical reconceptualization of China’s position within the new world that it had just discovered. It reluctantly realized that it had to jettison its old universalist yet sinocentric view of itself and the world. The Qing Empire was but a nation-state among a multitude of other countries. At the same moment, the self-reorientation awakened and animated a utopian longing for a future universal unity in imaginary if not real terms. I shall examine a pivotal figure in the genealogy of Chinese reformers in the late Qing, Wang Tao. He wrote political treatises, newspaper commentaries, travel records, diaries, and short stories to advocate his vision of a new world, the world of datong, before Kang Youwei theorized it. Most fascinating are his short stories written in classical Chinese. In some of these love stories, the writer imagines a transnational libidinous economy bypassing existing boundaries between nation-states. In recent years, scholarly attention has once again been directed toward the late Qing period in the attempts to understand the origins and formations of modern Chinese culture. The purpose of this move has been to correct and revise the customary and long-held view that the May Fourth Movement (1919) initiated a revolutionary break from tradition, and that May Fourth culture

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constituted the mainstream of Chinese modernity ever since. The return to the late Qing period (ca. 1840–1911, between the Opium War and the Republican Revolution), or early modern (jindai) China, has produced fruitful results in globalization studies and literary historiography. In retrospect, China’s earliest thinkers about globalization can be found at the very beginning of Chinese modernity, namely, at the moment of China’s encounter with the West in the second half of the nineteenth century.1 Historians of Chinese literature often brushed aside the rich and voluminous output of narrative fiction in the late Qing period in order to establish the orthodoxy of the May Fourth movement. A more productive approach in the archaeology of uncovering the literary works that have been buried is to investigate late Qing literature as the product of dormant, incipient, repressed modernities. In his monumental study Fin-deSiècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911, David Der-wei Wang astutely argues that signs of [reform and innovation] were part of a Chinese contribution to global modernity predating the May Fourth period but that these inventions were subsequently denied and repressed. As China enterered the arena of modern, international history in the late Qing, it was already developing its own complex matrix of incipient modernities. By the time that China was recognized as an important part of modern civilization, however, it had submitted to a monolithic discourse in which only Western theory and Western modernities could be spoken.2 The awakenings to modernity in late Qing culture have been “repressed” because of the teleology of a historiography centered on the May Fourth movement. Or as clarified by Theodore Huters, “This perspective more than likely results from an inflexible notion of modernity itself, as being something essentially universal and invariable in its qualities, but even more fundamentally defined as the Other to that which preceded it.”3 Following Wang’s lead, my discussion also intends to examine the “prehistory” of Chinese modernity as revealed in late Qing fiction. As we well know, to the minds of the reformers in early modern China, the modernization of literature was considered a major constituent in the modernization of culture. Of all literary genres, narrative fiction (xiaoshuo) was singled out as the most important and effective tool in the creation of a new culture. Reformers, social activists, scholars, and critics imbued narrative fiction with high moral, ideological, and social values. The most famous advocate of all was, of course, Liang Qichao, who equated the renewal of narrative fiction to the “renewal of citizenry” (xinmin) in the beginning of the twentieth century. In the retrospective studies of late Qing fiction, scholars usually turn their attention to the production of vast numbers of novels. The extended novels are 24

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seen as the high achievements of a flourishing literary culture in that period. The vernacular novel was also perceived as uniquely equipped with the exposure of the old ways and the creation of new sensibilities. It is also true that, despite the inclusion of new subject matters and new worldviews, the narrative form of the novel itself did not radically change. Lu Xun is often credited with writing the first modern-style short story, “A Madman’s Diary” (Kuangren riji), and hence inaugurating the history of modern Chinese literature. The study of narrative fiction in the late Qing period has mostly focused on long vernacular novels, thought to be the crème de la crème of the late Qing contribution to early modern Chinese literature. The short story has been rarely studied in depth. My purpose here is to examine what amounts to the last flowering of the classical tale in the late Qing, and to investigate the perplexing and yet productive tension between a traditional narrative form and the ever globalizing sensibility of the author. I refer to the collection of short stories by Wang Tao (1828–1897), Hou Liaozhai zhiyi (Post-Tales of the Strange from the Studio of Leisure, 1884–1887), also known as Songyin manlu (Random Records of a Recluse in Wusong). Evidently, Wang Tao models his work after Liaozhai zhiyi (Tales of the Strange from the Studio of Leisure; LZZY) by Pu Songling (1640–1715), an early Qing collection of short stories that has been considered the culmination and apotheosis of the classical tale in imperial China. By adding the prefi x hou (post-), Wang Tao explicitly acknowledges his debt to Pu Songling. Altogether, he wrote and published three collections of short stories written in classical Chinese: Dunku lanyan (Remarks While Hiding in a Cave, 1875), Songyin manlu (a.k.a. HLZZY, published in Shanghai, 1884–1887), and Songbin suohua (Trivial Talks on the Banks of Wusong, published in Shanghai, 1887). These collections were rather popular at the time, and several editions of them were printed. The collection Songyin manlu is also titled Hou Liaozhai zhiyi tushuo (Illustrated Post-Tales of the Strange from the Studio of Leisure), and Huitu hou Liaozhai zhiyi (Post-Tales of the Strange from the Studio of Leisure with Illustrations).4 These individual stories first appeared with illustrations in serials in the Pictorial of the Studio of Touching Stone (Dianshizhai huabao) published by the Shen Journal (Shen bao) office in the mid-1880s. In the course of my study, I will illustrate several points. The last blooming of the classical tale in the final hours of imperial China is as much a response to the modern world as it is a continuation of traditional Chinese motifs and themes. Moreover, the classical tale in the vein of the fantastic, the strange, the marvelous is an effort to wrestle with the profound epistemological, psychological, and social changes of China as it enters the modern world and faces challenges from the West. The stories embody the specific vision, fantasies, and desires of the author in the endeavor to reposition China on the world map in the late nineteenth century. waking to global modernit y

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Wang Tao was a well-known figure in his time and after his death.5 As journalist, writer, translator, traveler, political commentator, and reformer, he was a highly prolific and influential personality. He was born in the suburb of present-day Suzhou in 1828. At the age of twenty-two, he went to Shanghai and worked for thirteen years in a publishing house run by British missionaries. Later on, in order to avoid arrest by the Qing government for his (alleged) relationship with the Taiping Rebellion, he fled to Hong Kong in 1862 and lived there for many years. (Supposedly, he had submitted a plan to the Suzhou commander of the Taiping army about how to seize Shanghai.) While in Hong Kong, Wang collaborated with the legendary James Legge in the translation of the Confucian classics into English. In 1867–1870, at Legge’s invitation, he accompanied him back to his home in Scotland and lived and traveled in Europe (Great Britain, France, and Russia) for three years. Upon returning to Hong Kong, he published one of the earliest and most influential Chinese-language newspapers of the time, Xunhuan ribao (Global Times). In 1879, Wang traveled to Japan, where he met the famous poet, diplomat, and future reformer Huang Zunxian, then consular officer of the Qing court in Japan. Deeply impressed by the veteran spokesman for the movement to reform China with the introduction of Western knowledge and technology (yangwu, literally “foreign things”), the young Huang, in his early thirties, might have petitioned the Qing court to allow Wang to return to China. Wang later wrote and published his travel records of Japan. In his old age and long after the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion, high Qing officials (Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, and Ding Richang) spotted his talent and hoped to recruit him for their cause. In 1884, with the permission of the Qing government, Wang returned to China after having lived in Hong Kong as an exile for about two decades. He settled in Shanghai and lived there until his death in 1897. From Shanghai, he continued to voice his opinions about politics and social reform. The young Sun Yat-sen, future founder of the Republic of China, paid homage to and sought help from Wang Tao, by then a nationally revered senior reformer, in his trip to Shanghai in 1894. In 1898, one year after Wang’s death, and thanks to the tireless advocacy by him and others, the Reform Movement (Weixin) was officially inaugurated under the leadership of Emperor Guangxu and Kang Youwei. Due to personal experiences — his sojourn in Shanghai and especially the long years of stay in Hong Kong, his friendship as well as close working relationship with foreigners as a private person rather than as a court official or overseas student sponsored by the government — Wang Tao had many opportunities to observe the West at close range and to reflect on his own culture in the light of the Other in a way perhaps no other Chinese could do at the time. He was also one of the first Chinese travelers to the West as an intellectual and a private citizen. His travelogue, Manyou suilu (Random Records of my Wanderings), 26

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was also influential in opening the eyes of his fellow countrymen to the West. He recorded his sense of wonder, astonishment, and admiration as he saw busily industrializing Western countries such as Great Britain and France. By publishing his diaries and travel records, Wang communicated to the Chinese the new phenomena and marvels that he witnessed in the trip to the West, from social institutions and political systems, to architecture, cityscape, and art, to social mores, women, marriage, and even dancing. Travel abroad, travelogues, and translations were all indispensable preparations for the modernization process in late imperial China.

Literary Genre, the Classical Tale, the Fantastic The classical tale (wenyan xiaoshuo, lit. “literary-language tale”) is one of the oldest genres of Chinese narrative fiction, dating back to at least the Six Dynasties (317–589) and the Tang (618–906).6 Its major subgenres include zhiguai (records of the strange, a.k.a., records of anomalies), chuanqi (stories of marvels), biji (random jottings), and yishi (anecdotes). The form became perfected itself in the hands of the Tang writers. Pu Songling brought the genre of the classical tale, and especially the subgenre chuanqi, to new heights in his magnum opus Liaozhai Zhiyi.7 From the very beginning, the classical tale traverses the fantastic, the extraordinary, the unfamiliar, in what is regarded as the other side of the rational, the ordinary, and the conventional. “Random jottings” (biji), another subgenre of the classical tale, underwent a great revival during the Qianlong reign period of the mid-Qing in the hands of Ji Yun (1724–1805), who wrote a collection of short stories, Yuewei caotang biji (Random Jottings at the Cottage of Close Scrutiny). These stories take up the usual themes of the supernatural world, a world of demons and foxes, or foxes disguised as beauties.8 The fantasy world of the irrational and the supernatural in such tales runs counter to the rationality, morality, chronology, and temporality of official historiography.9 The nearly five hundred stories in LZZY by Pu Songling include all the subgenres of chuanqi, zhiguai, jottings, and anecdotes. Although the stories often mix elements from different genres, more than one-third of the total output is seen as chuanqi. Since these chuanqi stories are taken to be the most moving and polished tales in the collection, the work of LZZY as a whole is regarded as belonging properly to the chuanqi tradition. Random Jottings at the Cottage of Close Scrutiny by Ji Yun during the mid-Qing in the eighteenth century is the magnum opus of the zhiguai and jottings traditions in late imperial China. Literary historians place Wang Tao’s Post-Tales of the Strange, as a late Qing imitation of the early Qing LZZY (Tales of the Strange), squarely within the generic tradition of chuanqi10 and regard it as the final flowering and the end of the classical tale in China. waking to global modernit y

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Post-Tales of the Strange covers various exotic subject matter: demons, fairies, the supernatural; love stories and amorous affairs; the lives and fates of courtesans; customs of ethnic minorities; and social mores of Europe and Japan. Sometimes these themes overlap in one story. Although Post-Tales of the Strange revisits the same old themes and motifs, Wang’s work differs from Pu Songling’s Tales of the Strange in terms of subject matter to a certain degree. There are fewer stories of the supernatural, of demons and foxes, and more love stories, stories of courtesans, and stories of men frequenting pleasure quarters.11 As commentators have pointed out, visiting courtesans was a lifelong habit of Wang Tao’s. While moral-minded Chinese critics deplore this aspect of Wang’s life as a leftover habit from decadent old China, they give a sympathetic explanation for his behavior. Having lived most of his life as an exile outside officialdom, Wang’s career was full of disappointments, frustrations, and dangers. Therefore, indulgence in sexual pleasures, wine, and women was a way to soothe the pains. The reader sees an overwhelming number of stories about men’s dalliance with women of all sorts in his stories. In fact, Wang’s fondness for love stories is not unique to him, but belongs to a long literary tradition in varieties of Chinese narrative fiction, whether the novel, the vernacular short story, or the classical tale. Classical tales such as “The Tale of Li Wa” (Li Wa zhuan) from the Tang dynasty set the precedent for generations of future stories about love between courtesans and children of the rich.12 As a matter of fact, stories and novels about (visiting) courtesans and brothels constitute a major genre of narrative fiction in the late Qing.13 Lu Xun coined a term for this genre in his Brief History of Chinese Fiction: “depravity fiction” (xiaxie xiaoshuo, or “courtesan fiction”). It seems that Wang Tao is neither more nor less “depraved” as a fiction writer and literatus than others. Depictions of love and women of different backgrounds (Chinese, Chinese ethnic minorities [Miao], Japanese, and European) occupy a large portion of his stories. The occasion for Wang’s writing these stories was the moment when China’s traditional belief system was in crisis with the introduction of modern science from the West. As a passionate political reformer, he strongly advocated the transformation of China by adopting Western rationality, knowledge, and institutions; but as a literary writer, he attempted to reenchant readers with a disappearing magical world. Such is the contradiction of Wang Tao’s worldview caught a transitional historical period. His “Preface” (Zixu) to Songyin manlu (a.k.a. Post-Tales of the Strange) amounts to an apologia for the outdated, anachronistic genre on the eve of a modern era.14 He takes pains to explain why he has written such kinds of tales of the supernatural and the fantastic. With the advent of Western science, traditional Chinese myths and popular beliefs have been discredited. The marvelous things and exotic creatures found in traditional stories — demons, ghosts, strange animals, supernatural beings, 28

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and even hallowed mythical Chinese symbols such as dragons, phoenixes, and unicorns — sound ridiculous, simply do not exist, or, let us say, are not verifiable by Western standards: “empty words” (xuyan) are not as good as “real practice” (shijian). The West has developed science and technology to unlock the mysteries of the universe, whereas China is still befuddled by ignorance and superstition. Physics, chemistry, electricity, and telecommunications have helped Westerners successfully comprehend the world and bring practical benefits to the people. Wang admits that it would be truly absurd if present-day Chinese did not focus on matters of practical importance but dwelt on the insubstantial and the unverifiable. In the preface, Wang Tao describes himself as a person “singularly concerned with the real and the true” (wei shishi qiushi) all his life, as someone who has always detested bombastic, empty talk. But his ambition and strategy to change China have been repeatedly thwarted. Everywhere he goes in China, he witnesses incompetence, stupidity, snobbery, arrogance, and closed minds. His talents and knowledge are not appreciated by his contemporaries. Since there is no place for him to put his abilities to use, he must “go to the deep mountains, thick black forests, and resort to writing to vent sorrows, pains, anguish, love, and emotions.” “If I cannot find [the things I cherish] in China, I look for them in far-away places, remote regions, and among foreign people. If I cannot find them among my contemporaries, I search for them at the beginning of antiquity and thousands of years of future time. Since I cannot find them among my own species, I search for them among ghosts, foxes, immortals, grass, birds, and beasts.”15 Here Wang places himself firmly in a long tradition of discontented writers who resorted to the strange and the supernatural to convey their imaginations in China’s long literary history: Qu Quan, Zhuangzi, Dongfang Shuo, and Pu Songling. We should be cautious in using such terms as the fantastic, the supernatural, and the marvelous in analyzing Chinese literature, however. Western studies on the genre of the fantastic by Tzvetan Todorov and scholars influenced by him refer to specific moments in the cultural history of the West. The post-Enlightenment sense of reality creates a schism in consciousness, a disjunction between humanity and nature, between the self and the other. The reader differentiates between the marvelous and the uncanny; and when the reader cannot make a decision one way or another, she/he is in the realm of the fantastic.16 Chinese attitudes toward supernatural and fantastic events cover a broad range of responses over a long span of history. Readers, commentators, and critics often express a wholehearted belief in these “factual records”; when they cannot take the “recorded” events to be real, they treat them as legitimate allegorical expressions of the feelings of the authors; or they simply relish the style of the works and consider such writings as a useful literary pastime. In ancient waking to global modernit y

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China, “the strange often results when things are paradoxically affirmed and denied at the same time. In other words, the boundary between the strange and the normal is never fi xed but is constantly altered, blurred, erased, multiplied, or redefined.”17 Indeed, it could be quite problematic to define traditional Chinese genres such as zhiguai and chuanqi in terms of the fantastic as established by Todorov. But as I argue and emphasize, the fantastic is a rather useful concept in discussing the literary world of Wang Tao’s fiction. At that historic juncture in the second half of the nineteenth century, China as a whole was experiencing an epistemological change, a psychological disorientation, a blurring of vision, and a doubtful moment about the self (China) and the other (West). This sense of hesitancy is felt in the literary text. The self-contained, well-integrated Sinocentric worldview of humanity, nature, and the cosmos was being shattered by the gunboats of the West. It is important to bear this in mind in order to understand the brief popularity of Wang’s stories toward the end of imperial China. Tales of the supernatural, the fantastic, and the marvelous, whether Chinese or Western, are by definition literary genres that stretch the boundaries of the knowable and the real. What is new and fascinating in Post-Stories of the Strange is the broadening of the scope of human perception and the emergence of a large international stage in many of Wang’s stories. The sights, sounds, scenes, spectacles, and customs of foreign countries are vividly described and vicariously imagined in a number of stories. Here are some titles: “A Tale of a Japanese Girl, A Chuan” (Ji Riben nüzi A Chuan shi), “Talented Women from Japan” (Dongying cainü), “Overseas Beauties” (Haiwai meiren), “Record of Various Kinds of Shows and Performances in the West” (Taixi zhu xiju lei ji), “Biography of Mary” (Meili xiaozhuan), “Wonderland under the Sea” (Haidi qijing), and “Travel Overseas” (Haiwan zhuangyou). Wang also describes the social, marital, and sexual mores of China’s ethnic minorities in the piece “Record of the Customs of the Miao in Guizhou” (Qian Miao fengsu ji). Interestingly enough, transnational romance becomes the stuff and theme of several stories. Moreover, this cross-cultural libidinal economy offers a fantastic, imaginary resolution to real problems in international politics. By situating Chinese men as the center and love object of Western women, Wang Tao reverses the geopolitical situation between declining imperial China and the rising imperialistic West. He recuperates the potency and subject-position of Chinese citizens by masculinizing China and feminizing the West.

Three Tales of Transnational Encounters Post-Tales of the Strange is divided into twelve juan (sections), totaling more than 130 stories. Each story has about three thousand characters, and is written in 30

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refined, ornate classical language. The uniformity in the number of words in all the stories has to do with the fact that they were originally published in a serial in the literature column of a newspaper. I will briefly discuss three stories: “Biography of Mary” (Meili xiaozhuan), “Wonderland under the Sea” (Haidi qijing), and “Travel Overseas” (Haiwai zhuangyou). These tales describe amorous relationships and transnational romances between a Chinese youth and foreign women. More broadly, the stories narrate the plight of China and its citizens within a global framework. At the same time, they propose fantastic solutions to what appear to be irremediable problems in the real world. I begin with the “Biography of Mary.” The story may be summarized thus: Mary (Meili), a great English beauty, was born into a distinguished family in London. She was a very intelligent girl from childhood, spoke many languages, and excelled in mathematics. She and John (Yuehan), the son of a musician, were sweethearts in childhood, fell in love, and swore to marry each other. John was also very good at algebra and trigonometry. Due to the great disparity in social status between their families, they were not allowed to have a lifelong union. Mary’s father picked a mate for her, Simon Lee (Ximen Li), a son from a wealthy family. Mary initially resisted the arrangement, but eventually went along with it. On their wedding night, Simon received from John a past love letter written by Mary to John, and was infuriated. He wanted to kill Mary, but could not bring himself to do it. He wrote a farewell letter to Mary and committed suicide. Mary returned to the home of her parents, and was locked up by her father. In solitude, she thought of the far, prosperous, and beautiful country of China. She brought a large amount of cash with her and embarked on a boat to China. On the boat, she met a handsome Chinese youth, Feng Yutian, who was returning to China from England. They taught each other Chinese and English, and grew fond of each other. Mary proposed marriage to Feng. Feng was worried that Mary would not be used to Chinese food and his poverty, but Mary insisted, and Feng finally agreed to their union. They arrived in China, traveled to various regions, and settled in Shanghai. Mary was an expert in mathematics and distance measurement. When Chinese waters were invaded, Mary urged her husband to join the Chinese military to fight the enemy. She herself joined the battle as well. While traveling on the high seas, they saw three pirate ships about to attack merchant ships. Mary measured the distance with her telescope with great precision and asked her husband to fire at the pirates. Feng destroyed the three pirate ships with three cannonballs and earned great honor for himself. But their talents were not appreciated at the time, and they returned home in loneliness. waking to global modernit y

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John came to China looking for Mary. Discovering that Mary already married a Chinese, he was intent on killing them both. He bought a picture of Feng Yutian with a large sum of money and sought opportunities to ambush them at major roads. Upon returning to Shanghai, Mary lived a comfortable, idyllic life. She studied Chinese diligently and spoke excellent Chinese. When she and Feng traveled in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, she put on Chinese clothes, and looked even more charming. Onlookers were struck by her beauty without knowing she was a Western woman. While reading an English newspaper, she came to know that John had come to China to find her. But she had long determined to make China her final destination, and would never renew old ties with John. In order to prepare for the worst, she carried a pistol whenever she went out. One day, while Mary and Feng were traveling in a carriage on the street, they met John. When John came forward to greet her, she pretended not to know him, but John followed them regardless. Mary sent Feng home and was prepared to fight John by herself. Mary and John fired at each other simultaneously, and both died. Overcome by grief, Feng buried Mary and erected a tombstone, which read: “Tomb of Mary, an Extraordinary English Lady.”18 The tale adheres to the generic convention of “tales of the extraordinary” (chuanqi) by narrating the story of an “extraordinary” (qi) foreign woman. Mary, the Western woman, embodies not only romantic love but also Western science and technology (as exhibited by her mastery of mathematics, distance measurement, and the telescope.) Despite the old narrative structure and classical language, the tale reveals a rather modern sensibility in relating the events of contemporary China and the West. There are two love triangles in the tale. The first consists of Mary and two British men. The second involves Mary, John, and a Chinese man, Feng Yutian. The story establishes the central position of Chinese masculinity in the love affairs. After all the melodrama, heartache, jealousy, fury, and killing, both English suitors die, but Feng is the winner and ultimate love object of the foreign woman. And China, the ancient beautiful country, is the adopted home of this stunningly capable foreign lady. This imaginary fantasy world runs counter to the Realpolitik between China and Great Britain at the time. China, the weakling in international affairs, repeatedly loses wars and makes concessions to Western countries as they flex their muscles in the Far East now and then. However, the author remasculinizes China and restores potency to it by narrating a transnational romance in the realm of private fantasy. As a story written by a leading reformer, it does not forget to mention the importance of Western science, technology, and wealth. Mary, the embodiment 32

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of Western civilization, is described as possessing a great quantity of wealth and excelling in mathematics and science (land measurement, etc.). Her technical knowledge helped her Chinese husband to defeat the enemy. At the conclusion of the story, the only survivor is Feng, the Chinese man, and by extension, China. Again, the narrative strategy reverses existing real power relationships between China and the West at the time when the Qing dynasty is on a steady course of decline and disintegration. The “Biography of Mary” does not relate any supernatural events. But it is an “extraordinary” story, as such things do not happen to ordinary Chinese, or do not exist in reality at all except in the realm of fantasy and dream. The next tale, “Wonderland under the Sea” (Haidi qijing), brings the reader to the domain of the supernatural. It also narrates the story of a marvelous exotic encounter with the foreign. The gist of the story runs as follows: Nie Ruiguo came from a distinguished family in Nanjing. He enjoyed reading and writing, and was especially interested in the important matters of the state. He had studied how to solve the problem of flooding in China’s rivers and how to build railroads. But his contemporaries did not understand him and laughed at his ambitions. Out of frustration, he decided to travel abroad. He journeyed to Europe and brought with him a large amount of funds, as well as four interpreters in English, French, Russian, and Japanese. In every European country he visited, he distributed Chinese treasures as gifts to people, and as a result he was warmly welcomed by these countries. In Switzerland, he met a young schoolteacher, Lana (Lan’na), a “most beautiful woman in the West.” Although they had just met, they felt like old friends. She invited him to her home and presented him with rare treasures from the former French royal household that her family owned. After they parted, he embarked on a boat from London to New York City. The boat encountered a huge storm on the sea and sank to the bottom of the sea. When Nie woke up, he discovered that he was in a wonderland filled with green trees, fragrant flowers, fresh fruits, and singing birds. He was happily surprised to see Lana there too. Lana had drowned in a river on a trip to Scotland and landed here as well. In this wonderland under the sea, they spent several memorable years together. He taught her how to speak Chinese, compose songs and write poetry in Chinese, and play the zither. She became an expert in Chinese culture. But they must part again so that he could return to the human world. She gave him several bags of treasures and carefully planned his trip home for him. After three days and three nights on the sea after his departure, he arrived in Shanghai. He heard about a natural catastrophe in Shandong Province, waking to global modernit y

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and thought to himself: “If it is all right for Chinese treasures to be scattered abroad, why shouldn’t the objects of the French court come into Chinese hands?” He sold a diamond to a merchant for a huge sum of money, and used it to save the people hit by the catastrophe. His loft y deeds and virtues were praised by the people.19 The story begins with the hero’s dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs, with the fact that a learned man was not appreciated in China at the time. Therefore there is the need to leave China and go abroad, in part to find more expedient measures to save China; connecting to the West becomes the solution. But the happy marriage of China and the West is impossible in reality and is only possible in the fantasy world, the supernatural world, the underworld — a world whose laws operate differently from the laws of common sense and rationality. In both stories, science and wealth in the form of desirable foreign women inspire Chinese men to handle and solve real-life practical matters (fighting on the high seas, saving people from natural catastrophes, flood control, etc.). As a leading advocate for reform, Wang promotes Western science and instrumental rationality (technology) in the critical and practical realms. But in the aesthetic realm, so to speak, he delves into the supernatural, the marvelous, and the irrational as a compensation for a lack in real life. The literary domain functions as fantasy, a wish fulfillment of what is missing in China vis-à-vis the technological, scientific, and military superiority of the West. I would like to give one final example of Wang’s tales about supernatural experiences and exotic foreign lands. I read the tale as a case of the fantastic, a case that creates a sense of indecision on the part of the reader in regard to the “reality” represented by the author. A brief synopsis of the tale “Travel Overseas” (Haiwai zhuangyou) goes as follows: Qian Siyan was the son of a rich family in Zhejiang. Early on in his life he resented bookish studies and harbored high ambitions of great achievements. But because his father forced him to go through the civil service examinations, he thought about leaving the mundane world. One day, he met a Taoist priest from Emei Mountain, and rode on a huge dragon with him to Emei Mountain to become a Taoist. At the top of the mountain, he saw the enchanting teacher of the priest, Fairy Ziqiong. When he saw this sixteen-yearold beauty, desire stirred in his heart, and he fell in love with her. She laughed at his state of mind, and told him that he was not yet ready to be initiated into priesthood. In order to purge him of carnal desires and internal obstacles, she recommended that he experience the tranquility of the Tao amid the noises of the human world. Then he rode on a handkerchief above the clouds, looking down at the cit34

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ies below. At the sound of cannonball explosions, he landed on an unfamiliar coastal city in Scotland, Great Britain. There he witnessed the might and advanced weaponry of the British navy and infantry. Dechen (lit. “Virtuous Minister”), a British gentleman who had once visited China, accompanied him on a tour of Edinburgh, the capital city of Scotland, where he saw a most marvelous scene: a social dance by dozens of pairs of men and women. Here he met two rare beauties: Josie (Zhouxi) and a music teacher, Mary (Meili). They escorted him and traveled with him to London, whose mayor happened to be Mary’s uncle. He visited museums, libraries, factories, and shops. He was warmly greeted by pretty ladies in shops, who were all too eager to befriend him. Mary further accompanied him to Paris. On his way to Berlin, he met the Taoist priest again. The priest told him that it was time to go home. Thereupon they mounted a dragon and rode back to China.20 Some details of this story parallel Wang Tao’s travel records. He was often accompanied by British lady friends, and sometimes by the very daughters of James Legge, on his various trips in Europe. In his dairies, he speaks of beautiful “Mary” (Meili, real name of James Legge’s third daughter), “Ellie” (Aili), and “Josie” (Zhouxi) as his close female friends. In the travel records, he also gives a similar elaborate description of Western-style dancing, using the same words. He often marvels at the sights and sounds of European cities and social customs and describes them in the most glowing terms. In this tale, he once again expresses a utopian longing, a wish about the status of Chinese citizens in the global arena, a sentiment ungrounded in cold reality. As expected, the story begins with deep dissatisfaction over the sorry state of affairs in China. Hence the need arises to leave the disappointing secular world, to become a Taoist, or to travel to faraway places. The author makes the Chinese male protagonist the love object of Western people and symbolically situates him in the central position on the world stage. The protagonist is awed by the military might of Britain, yet receives the adoration of British ladies. In “Travel Overseas,” there coexist two worlds, or two worldviews: the ancient, Eastern, and Taoist; and the modern, Western, and secular. The frame of the story tends to subsume the Western world under Taoist epistemology. On the one hand, it seems that the noisy activities and sensual characteristics of the Western world are nothing but an illusion, not real, when viewed from a traditional, religious higher vantage point up on Mount Emei and the top of clouds. On the other hand, the traditional creed and practice of seclusion and self-isolation (by hiding in the mountains) loses its credibility in the face of a looming external threat. A “brave new world” is out there and coming to China, and its existence cannot be wiped out or made to disappear by willful igwaking to global modernit y

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norance and Taoist self-delusion. The reader hence is forced to hesitate between two modes of perception, two traditions, two outlooks — the ancient Taoist belief system of abnegation and transcendence and the alluring spectacles of the Western world. The abrupt ending of the tale leaves the reader with a sense of suspense. Will the hero decide to relinquish the human world and train himself to become an immortal on Mount Emei? Or will what he sees in his trip abroad affect and change his perspective on life, reality, China, and the world? Which way will offer a solution to his personal problems as well as China’s plight?

The inclusion, domestication, and utility of the foreign in the Chinese world as manifested in these stories of fantasy dovetail with Wang’s political views on the relationship between China and the world. Due to his strong advocacy for the introduction of things Western to China, he was celebrated as a visionary of China’s future in the early 1980s at the beginning of China’s OpenDoor Policy.21 After the end of the Cold War, he was credited as having been China’s first “globalization theorist.” He is seen as a homegrown, indigenous internationalist, a Chinese globalist unlike latter-day Chinese revolutionaries who have embraced brands of Western doctrines throughout the twentieth century (e.g., socialism or communism as a form of internationalism).22 Wang Tao spoke of the “planet as one” (diqiu he yi), and envisioned a utopian future, a borderless world, a “great commonwealth” (datong) before Kang Youwei wrote about it. He urged his countrymen to seize a rare historic moment that only comes to China once in thousands of years. He did not see the advent of the West to China as a threat to Chinese civilization. But rather, the fact that “dozens of Western countries congregate in China” provided the country with a unique chance for transformation and renewal.23 The key was to open up China so that it could absorb what the West had to offer and to apply them to Chinese circumstances advantageously. As the world rapidly shrinks due to the speed created by forms of modern technology — trains, boats, and telecommunications — Want Tao believed that humanity would one day become a united global family beyond national boundaries, beyond the narrow nation-state. The classical tale in its final phase in the hands of Wang Tao stands at the other side of the rationality of an incipient modernity by exploring the fantastic, the strange, the marvelous. It arises as a wish fulfillment, a response to a lack in reality — namely, China’s backwardness and lack of modernity, enlightenment, and science. The stories in part serve the goals of modernization, reform (yangwu movement), and globalization. The backward glance to the past is a supplement to the teleology of the forward-looking, scientifically oriented future. The resort to the fantastic is a detour to enlightenment. Wang Tao’s stories narrate the tales of the supernatural and the fantastic at a pivotal mo36

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ment in Chinese history from the premodern to the modern, when beliefs in the supernatural are losing ground. He attempts to resurrect a sense of wonder and fantasy in the classical narrative mode for the last time in Chinese literary history by writing, imagining, and daydreaming about utopian, improbable encounters with the foreign, the exotic, the European, encounters that otherwise have appeared all too real, painful, and threatening to China on the eve of entering the modern era. His short stories mark the final flourish as well as the demise of the classical tale as China approaches the doorsteps of modernity. Through actual literary practice, Wang Tao adroitly used storytelling as a vehicle for social reform. And he did it elegantly, to the applause of readers in his time, long before political advocates and socially conscious writers openly heralded, with great fanfare and earnestness, in manifestoes and newspaper announcements, the importance of narrative fiction for the goals of modernization, national salvation, and “renewal of citizenry” in the late 1890s and early 1900s. But, at the turn of the century, his elite literati mode of storytelling soon gave way to the popularity of the long vernacular novel. The exquisite yet limiting style of his tales could not create an expansive discursive space of dialogism to accommodate the multivoicedness, languages, slang, worldviews, and ideologemes of diverse social strata in Chinese society in a turbulent period.24 The reading public, critics, and social reformers soon favored the vernacular novel for what it could do better than the narrowly refined classical tale at the end of the Qing.

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chapter two

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When Mimosa Blossoms Blockage of Male Desire in Yu Dafu and Zhang Xianliang

I

n this chapter I discuss the stories of two modern Chinese writers: Yu Dafu, of the May Fourth generation in the first half of the twentieth century; and Zhang Xianliang, from the socialist period in the second half of that century. Although they come from two different historical periods, certain commonalities exist between these two male writers. They are linked by what might be called a common political and libidinal “economics of deficits.”1 Politically, their fictional yet autobiographical characters stand at the margins of society, and sexually, their stories often narrate the lack of libidinal fulfillment among Chinese males; there is no proper outlet for the expenditure of libidinal drives. Celibacy, masturbation, impotence, and solitude are the hygienic conditions of the characters. Their stories are revelatory of the modern disciplinary regime. The body and mind of their fictional characters are monitored and controlled through a variety of techniques and institutions: the hospital, the school, and the labor camp. Yu Dafu deplores the psychical and libidinal sufferings of males in semicolonial China, whereas Zhang Xianliang writes about the subjugation of the body and soul in socialist China.

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The nexus of body/power in capitalist modernity is a key issue in the thought of Michel Foucault. What he says about biopolitics in Western modernity since the eighteenth century may also have some bearing on modern China. He states: “In fact, nothing is more material, physical, corporal than the exercise of power. What mode of investment of the body is necessary and adequate for the functioning of a capitalist society like ours? From the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century I think it was believed that the investment of the body by power had to be heavy, ponderous, meticulous and constant. Hence those formidable disciplinary régimes in the schools, hospitals, barracks, factories, cities, lodgings, families.”2 Along these lines, I analyze the heavy-handed disciplining and punishment as well as cure and recuperation of the male body in Chinese modernity. Yu Dafu’s short stories offer a glimpse of semicolonial Shanghai, whereas Zhang Xianliang’s novels reveal the nature of socialist China. In retrospect, the Foucualdian theme of biopolitics runs throughout the works of Yu Dafu and Zhang Xianliang. But in my analysis I also return to the prevalent modes of scholarship in the study of modern Chinese literature. I engage the problematic of the self and the ideological discourse of the subject, and enter into a dialogue with a genealogy of literary analysis running from Jaroslav Průšek, through C. T. Hsia, to Leo Ou-fan Lee and beyond. The hope is to contribute to the examination of “subjectivism” in modern Chinese literary studies as well as to the investigation of “subjectivity” in theoretical discourse.

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Addressing the Modern Subject It has been pointed out by scholars in the West that a basic condition of modern Chinese literature is the emergence of the self from the collective discourse of the old tradition. Such, for instance, is the position taken by Jaroslav Průšek’s classic study “Subjectivism and Individualism in Modern Chinese Literature.”3 In a encapsulated survey of selected travel literature from late Qing to the Mao era and beyond, Leo Ou-fan Lee traces the trajectory of the self across nearly a century of modern Chinese literature. The self has indeed come a long way — “from its initial awareness in late Ch’ing fiction, through its prominence in the May Fourth era and its confrontations with social reality in the 1930s and 1940s, to its final integration in a collective society in which it can no longer assume much significance.”4 In the post-Mao period, one witnesses a resurgence of interest in the self in Chinese literature. The authors depict the problematical relationship of the individual to the collective. Not unlike what one sees in the works by many writers of the May Fourth generation, the homogeneity of tradition and the organic unity of society disappear to a large extent. The ideological uniformity imposed by the state can no longer serve as the basis of the collective after the death of Mao. when mimosa blossoms

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Interestingly enough, even as the critics highlight the subjective tendency in the works of certain authors, they are quick to point out the interweaving of the “lyrical” and the “epic” and the interpenetration of subjectivity and objectivity in these same works. Given the strong expressions of the self in certain texts, it appears that the individual, even at his intensely private moments, is still linked to the fate of the collective. Thus, C. T. Hsia speaks of the “moral burden” and the “allegorization of China” in many Chinese writers.5 The private seems to have been inextricably connected to the public. For instance, the stories of such May Fourth writers as Lu Xun and Ye Shaojun are described by many critics as at once lyrical and epic, subjective and objective.6 This literary condition seems to dovetail with Fredric Jameson’s reformulation of the paradoxical subjective/objective dichotomy with his theory of thirdworld literature. He contends that all third-world texts, Chinese literature included, are to be read as national allegories. What may appear to be a personal libidinal dynamic necessarily projects a public political dimension: “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.”7 Through reading Lu Xun’s stories, Jameson discovers that even the “seemingly private” Chinese texts engage the national and political arena. What is to be noted here is that allegory does not presuppose some one-to-one correspondence or a table of equivalences as in traditional theories of allegory. Jameson seems to follow Paul de Man in defining allegory as a disjunctive, discontinuous relationship.8 He writes: “If allegory has once again become somehow congenial for us today, as over against the massive and monumental unifications of an older modernist symbolism or even realism itself, it is because the allegorical spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the homogeneous representation of the symbol.”9 Even as the personal is inevitably related to the large collective, the relationship is never a simple correspondence or direct projection, but a matter of discontinuities and ruptures. The self’s engagement of the national and the public is full of contradictions, displacements, and nonequivalences.10 We may pursue the same question of subjectivism, individualism, or the self in modern Chinese literature from a slightly different perspective. Let us attempt to examine the self from the viewpoint of the theory of the subject.11 The manifestations of the subjective tendency in the May Fourth era and the post-Mao period may be better seen as a result of the contradictory and problematical relationship between the subject and the dominant discourse(s) of the collective. The new focus is on the ideological and discursive constitution of the modern subject in literary texts. The subject, be it a supposed “unitary” self or an aggrandized romantic ego, never exists as an independent entity, but is always situated in a network of discursive and textual relations. It engages and is 40

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engaged by various discourses: traditional, modern, nationalist, individualistic, romantic, realist, and so on. “Subjectivity, then, is linguistically and discursively constructed and displaced across the range of discourses in which the concrete individual participates.”12 Literary texts are but specific instances of discursive formations. There exist patterns of insertion, dislocation, and fragmentation of the subject. The text becomes the discursive space for the formation and deformation of subjectivity. It is the site of the inscription and clash of different social and ideological voices. Subjectivism is seen as the unfixing and destabilizing of the subject in relation to preestablished social, discursive, and ideological positions. It might be argued that the expressions of the self in the May Fourth texts are the consequences of the failure of the subject to identify himself with the major collective discourses of the time. The reader sees images of the fragmentation and displacement of the subject in many stories. The subject is unable to insert himself within the prevalent ideologies. It is often presented in a discontinuous, antagonistic position to the collective discourse such as the old tradition, Confucianism, nationalism, and partisanship. It is the disjunctions, dislocations, and discontinuities that characterize the position of the modern subject in May Fourth literature.13 Post-Mao fiction of the People’s Republic of China produced a new wave of writings that celebrate individualistic and humanistic values. The self reemerged after decades of suppression. It was rediscovered against the background of the dominant, hegemonic Marxist discourse. In these writings, once again the subject finds itself unable to integrate into the persuasions of the collective. On their way toward a new subjectivity, the stories expose and unmask Marxist-Maoist ideology — namely, the project of transforming individuals into subjects. Ironically, it was the Marxist critic Louis Althusser who best understood the process of ideology: “ideology interpellates individuals as subjects.”14 The collective discourse of Marxist ideology is to subjugate people under the control of the party by overt policing or covert “reeducation.” Post-Mao fiction questions and demystifies the mechanisms of the officially valorized Maoist language. The subject recuperates as it disengages from the dominant ideology. In the words of Mikhail Bakhtin, the subversive “novelistic discourse” parodizes and challenges the solemnity of the elevated official style of writing.15 The ready-made images of the subject in Communist discourse is contested and undermined in new fiction. As critics have pointed out, postMao literature is to a large extent the disengagement from and derision of “Mao style” language.16 The new literature is intent upon laying bare the ideological, linguistic, and representational basis of official literary modes. In the following, I will read two stories of “mimosa,” one from the May Fourth generation and another from the post-Mao period, to further examine when mimosa blossoms

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“individualism,” or the question of subjectivity in modern Chinese fiction. One will find that the position of the subject vis-à-vis the collective is characterized by a set of noncoincidences, ironic situations, contradictions, and disunions.

Yu Dafu’s Story “When Mimosa Blossoms” Yu Dafu’s stories most vividly represent the crisis of masculinity as the crisis of Chinese modernity. The inability of the male hero or antihero to act and effect change in the national-political and libidinal realms is the subject matter of self-exposure in his fiction. Due to the blockage of libidinal drives, the hero is reduced to passivity, self-degradation, voyeurism, or masturbation. Voyeurism, the act of looking at the other rather than acting out a desire with the other, characterizes the psychosexual state of the Chinese male. As Lydia Liu poignantly points out in her discussion of Yu Dafu’s writings, “[voyeurism] also symbolizes the anxiety of the modern intellectual who desires action but feels excluded from it. The consciousness of his own inadequacy paralyzes the will to act. The image of the voyeur epitomizes this state of loneliness and frustration. By the same token, imaginative literature, with which the author engages, embodies the irony of his voyeuristic deferral of action just as the fiction of transgression reflects the irony of his situation.”17 The exaggerated persona of a lonely, self-pitying, unhappy drifter is largely the result of unrequited libidinal fulfillment. Yu Dafu’s short story “When Mimosa Blossoms” (Mayinghua kai di shihou) first appeared in the literary journal Contemporary (Dangdai) in 1932. The story has not been ranked among his finest and has been neglected by critics. Here, I would like briefly to analyze this minor and yet immensely important story in order to address the problem of the subject. Since most readers are not familiar with the story, a brief summary is in order. Simply understood, the story is about a male patient who is recuperating in a hospital, where he meets an affective laborer, a nurse. Like most of his stories, this one is also told by a first-person narrator. The story relates the days the protagonist spends in a French Catholic hospital in Shanghai. The mood, as in other stories by Yu Dafu, is characterized by loneliness, insomnia, desolation, and boredom. The protagonist is a patient suffering from jaundice. While hospitalized, he is never visited by any friends or relatives and is largely ignored by the doctors. In his sleepless first night in the hospital, he curses the hospital and the entire world: “These people who live on philanthropy are really too heartless, too irresponsible, too devoid of love for fellow human beings. Fortunately, my illness is a light one. What if it were a serious illness? They have left me unattended for more than ten hours. Could the miracle of Jesus reviving the dead really appear again in the modern twentieth century?”18 In the chill of the 42

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night, one can only see a distant huge golden cross. The atmosphere of the story is charged with abysmal despair. Fortunately, the man is not entirely without a friend in the hospital. He is regularly attended to by a nurse. A deep friendship develops between the two through their interaction. Each has an affection for the other. In their conversations, they discover that both their homes are in the western section of Beijing, only two to three hundred paces away. At times they take a stroll together in the garden, pray together, and sit on the bench until it is dark. The personal service and caring labor of the nurse are sources of comfort for the patient in the hospital. One day, the protagonist has been anxiously waiting for the nurse’s visit, but she never comes; she has been transferred to a hospital in Hong Kong. In the letter she left for him, she writes that she hopes that as soon as he recovers from his illness, he will realize the love of Mary and thus be converted to the Catholic religion. Once again desolate and lonely, he walks the familiar paths in the garden, thinking of the absent one. The sky is brightened by a large full moon, which indicates that the time must be around the fifteenth of the month. A fragrant aura is borne on the wind, and he notices that mimosa is blossoming! The story ends as follows: “Ah! Mimosa is blossoming!” Having whispered this monologue from my mouth without noticing it, I stood up from the long bench, and returned to the ward.19 The story thus ends without closure, without any resolution of the tensions. The reader does not know what will happen to him next. Will he recover and become healthy again? Will he find another female companion? Will he ever get out of the hospital? These questions are left unanswered. Throughout the story, the sick, solitary persona is desperately in need of love, salvation, and humanity. In the vast universe, he is alone, as no one comes to his aid. Even the nurse has to leave him eventually. Their separation is contrasted to and heightened by the image of the round moon hanging in sky, a traditional symbol of union in China. Moreover, at the end of the story, the mimosa bush is blooming. The flower is also called by another name, hehuan, literally, “happy union.” The penetrating fragrance of the blossoming flowers makes the pain of separation feel even deeper. The patient is still destitute, without companionship, just as he first entered the hospital at the beginning of the story. Life in the hospital is described by the narrator as living in a cage full of ennui and anxiety. “One afternoon . . . , I walked back and forth in the ward, and my heart felt unusually anxious. Perhaps a newly captured lion pacing up and down in a cage could imagine my mood at this time.”20 It is no coincidence that the only slim volume of literature the protagonist has under his pillow, as the story when mimosa blossoms

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tells us, is a work of Baudelaire. Hailed as the first modern poet, Baudelaire describes the predicament of modernity better than any other poet.21 In this story, one notices the absence or weakening of collective discourse. For instance, there is no appeal to some old Chinese tradition or nationalism. As we recall, at the end of Yu’s famous story “Sinking” (Chenlun), the protagonist reaches out to the nation for salvation: “O China, my China, you are the cause of my death! . . . I wish you could become rich and strong soon! . . . Many, many of your children are still suffering.”22 No proper channel exists for the release of libidinal drives of a Chinese male student in Japan. Peeping at the sexual fulfillment of Japanese youth as a voyeur only heightens the consciousness of his own abnormal state of health. Hence, his solution for the release of sexual energy is to visit a Japanese prostitute. Here, the personal libidinal dynamic expands into a national allegory of the impoverished nation. But in the story “When Mimosas Blossoms” there is no attempt to link personal salvation to the destiny of the nation. Instead, one finds the language and images of religion, charity, and love. Spiritual salvation and physical recovery are intertwined in the story. Images of healing and union are present: the glimmering golden cross at night, the bright silver moon, the fragrance of mimosa flowers, and female companionship. Yet, the open, inconclusive ending, the sudden departure of the nurse, and the unknown fate of the protagonist make the chance for salvation uncertain. The healing power of religion, charity, and love is eluding the protagonist just as he seeks to find protection in them. It seems apparent that the subject in the story is unable to align himself with any of the collective discourses available to him: nationalism, religion, and love. His only consolation is perhaps the small volume of Baudelaire’s poetry; the modernist literary discourse is the sole source of strength he can rely on. This story, along with the lyrics of Baudelaire, becomes a modernist “inter-national” allegory, as it were, of alienation, disorientation, and imprisonment. The physical illness of the character is also an allegory of the spiritual illness of the modern man. The restlessness and unstable character of the personae in Yu’s stories indicates the difficulty in securely anchoring themselves in any communal basis, be it nation, tradition, or religion. As the mimosa blooms, symbolizing love, union, and happiness, the persona is sadly left alone, without any hope of salvation. Here we see the familiar homeless, misplaced, and solitary subject in May Fourth literature. The private self is at a disjunction with the collective.

Zhang Xianliang’s Novel Mimosa Like Yu Dafu’s short story, Zhang Xianliang’s novel Mimosa (Lühua shu) is a lyrical, autobiographical first-person narrative. Both authors represent the high points of subjectivism and individualism in the history of modern Chinese lit44

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erature. But what distinguishes Mimosa from “When Mimosa Blossoms” is its self-reflexive, ironic quality. The novel ostensibly takes up the question of the subject, or more precisely, of the ideological transformation of the subject, as its very theme. It reflects and rehearses the mechanisms and terrors of the formation — or better still, the deformation — of the subject under socialism. What is described in the novel is nothing less than the very phenomenology of ideology in action. Zhang’s novel tells the story of the protagonist Zhang Yonglin and his years spent in a labor camp in remote northwest (xibei) China. As a bad element in Chinese society, he is to be punished, monitored, and reeducated through primitive physical labor. The socialist regime exercises its power by disciplining the body, by locking the body up in a labor camp. The body is forced to interact with crude nature, and through such physical labor the petty bourgeois intellectual is supposed to reform his consciousness. The labor camp also deprives him of sexuality and blocks the free discharge of libidinal energy.23 An equally well-known novel by Zhang is Half of Man Is Woman (Nanren de yiban shi nüren), also an autobiographical novel about living in a labor camp. One of the central themes of the novel is precisely male impotence. The hero is unable to make love to his wife and is incapable of erection. Some of the descriptions from Half of Man Is Woman are as vivid as they are painful to read: The first struggle of mankind was not between man and man, or man and beast. The earliest struggle was that between man and woman. It was a struggle that was unceasing and that still continued. It demanded not only strength, but a vital spirit, using emotions and some innate artistic sense in its struggle to find balance, to reach unity and harmony, to achieve wholeness while maintaining its own separate self. In this struggle, I had failed. I had also lost my individuality and my independence. My body was covered with sweat, as though I had just stepped out of a bath. Oddly, the soles of my feet were cold. . . . Every night she tossed and turned in the bed beside me. Like a wild animal who has been loosed into the arena, she was waiting for me to make a move. Proud and contentious, she waited for me to try and conquer her. On that first night, however, I realized that I no longer had the power.24 The sexually devastated male can feel nothing but shame and utter powerlessness. What the labor camp has accomplished is the desexualization of males and emasculation of independent-minded intellectuals in China’s political landscape at the time. One night, the hero discovers that the Communist Party secretary at the labor camp, Cao Xueyi, though a married man, is carrying on a love affair with his wife. The party secretary is power incarnate and when mimosa blossoms

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the Oedipus figure, representing the Name of the Father in Lacanian terms. By extension, Mao is the ultimate father in the socialist regime that forbids the free expression of libidinal drives. Transgression is severely punished. Yet, in the Mao era, Mao himself is the most promiscuous individual in China, bedding countless Chinese women.25 While this is permissible conduct for him, no other male is allowed such extravagance. Chinese males cannot ever obtain a level of parity with the father in the oedipal libidinal economy. Transgression of the law of the father means castration. Zhang Yonglin in the novel is symbolically castrated, as he suffers from impotence and his wife is taken by the party secretary. It is only after some heroic good deed that wins him recognition and applause at the camp that Zhang Yonglin regains dignity, manhood — and, miraculously, erection. As leftist Western critics have pointed out, one of Mao’s great contributions to Marxism-Leninism was his theory of ideology.26 While traditional Marxist theory emphasizes the socioeconomic determinations of the subject, Mao discovered the importance of ideology in social formation. Subjectivity can change the objective world just as it is conditioned by the latter. Mao’s “Cultural Revolution,” a concept originally taken from Lenin, recognized the significance of ideology as a material practice. The Cultural Revolution aimed at transforming the mentality of the Chinese people toward the Marxist line. Like numerous other political campaigns in mainland China, it changed and subjugated individuals into subjects. Through a process of ideological “remolding” and “reeducation,” individuals, especially intellectuals and “petty bourgeois,” were supposed to be led to the correct party line and the Communist worldview. In the extreme case of sending an individual to a labor camp or a prison, the delinquent was also reduced to a “pathologized subject” in Foucauldian terms.27 In the preface to the novel, the narrator states that the protagonist was formerly brought up with the values of humanism and democracy. He intends to tell the story of how a petty bourgeois was changed to a Marxist through “reeducation.” Seen from the point of view of the professed meaning, the story is about the transformation of the consciousness of a bourgeois intellectual to the correct line of Marxism through labor and indoctrination. Ironically, the protagonist Zhang Yonglin, who is sent to a labor camp in the remote countryside, has been, consciously or unconsciously, very resistant to ideological reformation. A most salient feature of the novel is the juxtaposition and incongruence between Zhang’s high level of “bourgeois” and “feudal” education and the simple-mindedness of the working people surrounding him. He enters into a love relationship with a woman, nicknamed “Mimosa,” an uneducated person. Yet Zhang somehow finds himself unable to explain his “love” relationship with Mimosa. His notion of love, consisting of high romantic ideals, often does not square with actual circumstances. The image of the lover in 46

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his mind comes from a whirlpool of figures in Western and classical Chinese literature. His mind is filled with the poetry of Dante, Pushkin, Goethe, and Byron, as well as classical Chinese poetry. The ideal lovers from world literature indeed have little in common with his actual lover, Mimosa. The discrepancy in sentiment and education between them becomes obvious and unbearable at the very height of love. One night, Zhang Yonglin’s heart is filled with tender feelings for Mimosa, and he can only express his emotion by recalling to his mind a poem by the high romantic poet Lord Byron. The passage from Byron’s poem “Maid of Athens Ere We Part” reads: By those tresses unconfined, Woo’d by each Aegean wind; By those lids whose jetty fringe Kiss thy soft cheeks’ blooming tinge: By those wild eyes like the roe, Can I cease to love thee? No!28 Zhang is overcome by a sublime feeling of love and kisses her fingers. “My heart was so stirred by her, by love and by my sublimation, that I couldn’t help blurting out, ‘Darling, I love you!’ ”29 However, this refined declaration of his genuine love is incomprehensible and alien to Mimosa. She does not understand the meaning of “darling,” insisting that she be called rourou (meat, flesh), and he be called gougou (puppy). Zhang is uncomfortable with such a vulgar, uncouth expression of love: “Though gougou was a term of endearment, it was a far cry from my old romantic notions. The form her love took and the terms of endearment she used rather embarrassed me — they seemed so laughable. Though I didn’t want her to sense the gap between us, I was only too well aware of it myself.”30 This dramatic episode does seem to indicate an unbridgeable gulf between the two lovers. However, according to the official Maoist line, Zhang is to reform himself, to learn from the working class and people like Mimosa, to draw closer to them ideologically and emotionally. Physical laborers are the teachers of intellectuals like Zhang. He must be reeducated and changed into a new social being. But, all throughout the story, the resistance to as well as the futility of such a reform is clearly felt. In reading Marx’s Das Kapital, Zhang discovers the logic of the transformation of both nature and consciousness, both the object and the subject. Marx wrote: Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself when mimosa blossoms

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to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway.31 Through forced labor and by reading the works of Marx and Mao, Zhang is supposed to identify with the hegemonic discourse of the collective. He is expected to “transcend his selfhood,” to lose his subjectivity, in order to merge with the collective. For many years he has been acting upon nature through labor, and thus has also been changing himself. “But I had done so unconsciously, in a ridiculous way.”32 In the process of remolding himself and nature in this fashion, he himself is reduced to a primitive and barbaric state of existence. While enjoying reading Marx’s classic work about changing the self and nature, Zhang at the same time questions the Maoist project of the ideological transformation of the individual. He constantly strives to transcend the self, but he also realizes that his self is indeed of a different order from that of the rest. He is aware of his intellectual and educational superiority to the peasants. There is always a chasm between his consciousness and the mentality of physical laborers. It is ironic that Zhang attributes his superb comprehension of Marx’s economic theory to his capitalist, bourgeois family background. “The concepts in the Capital weren’t strange to me. Born into a bourgeois home I had been brought up by capitalists, one a stockbroker, the other a factory owner. . . . So as a boy I had often heard my elders, true disciples of the Morgans, discussing the difference between value and exchange value, the circulation of money and the metamorphosis of commodities, money’s role in circulation, hoarding and the different functions of universal money. . . . I was ten when I first heard of Capital.”33 Thus is Zhang’s supposedly ideologically inferior upbringing that allows him to understand Marx’s classic text with unusual insight. By the end of the story, times have changed. The Cultural Revolution is over. Zhang is rehabilitated and triumphantly returns to city life. The narrative frame at the end seems to reinforce the theme stated at the beginning: the transformation of an individual steeped in feudal and bourgeois culture into a staunch believer in Marxism. The narrator falls back on the language of official discourse at the end: it is the truth in the books of Marx and the physical and material support of the working class that have paved his way to the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. No longer considered a criminal in the eyes of society, Zhang is finally received by the leaders of the country in Beijing. The outcast is reintegrated into society. 48

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Toward the end of the story, the narrator relates an episode in the labor camp when Zhang is unable to find the works of Mao to read but stumbles by chance upon a dictionary. Cihai’s entry on “mimosa” reads as follows: Plant name. Latin name Albizzia julibrissin. Also called “silk tree.” This is one of the leguminosae of the sub-order mimosa. It is a deciduous tree, the leaves folding together at night. It blossoms in summer and has a pink flower. Its small sickle-shaped leaves are edible. Grown mainly in central China, it likes sun, can stand drought and will grow in poor soil. Its reddish-brown wood can be used to make furniture and sleepers. The bark can be made into glue. The dried bark, used in Chinese medicine, is thought to ‘promote joy, assuage sorrow, brighten the eye and give the desire of the heart.’ In the treatment of disease it promotes blood circulation and is regarded as a tonic, vulnerary and sedative. A gummy extract from it is used as a plaster for carbuncles and swellings, and as a retentive in fractures and sprains [italics mine].34 Mimosa is symbolic of union and joy. Moreover, it has a healing, rehabilitating power. It is a medicine for the sick. The narrator wishes that the beautiful mimosa trees could be planted throughout the whole country, thus transforming the entire landscape. For him, the image of a land covered with mimosa trees betokens a new society filled with harmony, beauty, happiness, and good health. Ironically, this exhilarating positive finality seems to be incomplete, partial, and unconvincing. Mimosa herself is missing toward the end of the story. Due to a series of events, Zhang has been accused of various crimes and transferred to several labor camps. When he returns to the old farm in search of Mimosa, she has gone to Qinghai province. No one knows what her life is like in her new place. The former lovers are displaced and cannot be reunited. While mimosa as a plant symbolizes happiness and union, the character Mimosa herself is cut off from her love. The separation of Zhang Yonglin and Mimosa becomes an allegory of the ill-fated merging of a bourgeois intellectual and a working-class woman. A disjunction lies at the very heart of the story. When the protagonist finally returns to normal life and is proven innocent of any “crime,” it also becomes apparent that the process of ideological reformation has been a colossal failure. The individual is eventually freed from many years of nightmarish life in the labor camp. The bond between intellectual and peasant remains as tenuous and uncertain as ever.

Conclusion The dominant collective discourse in modern China has either persuaded or coerced the bourgeois intellectual to adopt the allegedly more advanced con-

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sciousness of the masses, that is, that of workers, peasants, and soldiers. He or she is supposed to strip off false, perverse subjectivity and identify with the thought of the working class. In the stories of modern writers, one sees attempts at forging a strong bond between the two different classes. Female characters from the working class are sometimes represented as redemptive figures who will infuse mentally and physically enfeebled intellectuals with new life. Even in some of Yu Dafu’s stories, such as “The Intoxicating Spring Evening” (Chunfeng chenzui de wanshang), the simplicity, innocence, and steadfastness of the female worker offer a clear contrast to the weakness of the intellectual character. However, despite the repeated efforts of aligning the intellectuals with the consciousness of the “masses,” their former subjectivity seems to remain resistant to change, as attested by Zhang Xianliang’s novel Mimosa. What has been termed subjectivism in modern Chinese literature is the phenomenon of the failure of the modern subject to merge with the discourse of the collective. Indeed, the modern Chinese wenren (literary men) have a problematical relationship with Chinese society. They possess a supersensitivity: “By virtue of this superhuman endowment of sensitivity and feeling, a literary man considers himself superior. Since he is different, he is accursed with loneliness, but because he is also superior, he deserves and demands attention and adulation.”35 Such is the position of the intellectual in the stories of both Yu Dafu and Zhang Xianliang. In the case of Yu Dafu, he is very much the archetype of the drifting individual endowed with a supersensitive male consciousness in the May Fourth generation. The lack of proper channeling of libidinal drives sometimes results in masochistic self-depredation in his stories. In the case of Zhang Xianliang, his social and political marginality is the result of his ideological nonconformity to the state. The socialist project of transforming the bodies and minds of intellectuals is persistent and heavy-handed throughout the Mao era.36 Failure to reform themselves entails their own marginality in society. The real change came in the post-Mao era, when Chinese politics and society underwent tremendous transformations. Intellectuals reassumed their role of the conscience of society. One must say that Zhang Xianliang became such a public, organic intellectual in the 1980s with the publication of his autobiographical novels. He earned his respect in society by narrating the horrors of the socialist disciplining of his own body and soul in labor camps. Thus, his personal testimony to the collective sufferings of the nation as whole made him a national popular figure. Other writers and critics, such as Liu Binyan, Liu Zaifu, and Li Zehou, emerged as celebrated intellectuals and humanists who called for the reconstruction of subjectivity and humanism in Chinese society. Another major sociopolitical change has occurred since the 1990s. This is the 50

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silencing of the political intellectual in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square debacle in 1989 and the nationwide pursuit of a market economy. Once again, Zhang took the lead in this intellectual and social reorientation, becoming a writer-businessman. The news of his turning to business (xiahai) was quite shocking to a nation that was used to the image of Zhang as a loft y-minded, suffering intellectual, the conscience of the country. Today, in the early twentyfirst century, the complicitous relationship between intellectuals and business interests is an accepted fact of life. A signal event of such a change in the literary field is the publication in 1993 of Jia Pingwa’s novel Feidu, translated as Ruined Capital, Capital in Ruins, or Abandoned Capital. First of all, the novel was packaged as best-seller, a modern erotica. It initiates the commercialization of literature and culture. Like any commodity, a literary product now operates in accordance with the rules of the market economy of literary production and consumption. Second, the intellectual-writer figure is a far cry from the usual “soul of society.” In Feidu, the hero Zhuang Zhidie is a male writer who dallies with a multitude of female lovers. He experiences no profound sufferings in the name of the collective that he can tell, nor does he have a plan to redeem the failing society. His excessive libidinal drives are not sublimated into a noble social or cultural project. His energies and drives are dissipated in sexual acts with no intimation of sublimation or redemption, and he collapses psychically at the end of the novel. The writer-intellectual becomes antihero. Michel Foucault suggests that a significant transformation in the form of control of the body took place in the West in the 1960s: “And then, starting in the 1960s, it began to be realized that such a cumbersome form of power was no longer as indispensable as had been thought and that industrial societies could content themselves with a much looser form of power over the body. Then it was discovered that control of sexuality could be attenuated and given new forms. One needs to study what kind of body the current society needs.”37 The exercise of power has become more diffuse, relaxed, and internalized since then. This corresponds to a general epochal shift from modernity to postmodernity. On the Chinese scene, the 1960s were a time when the control of the body was at its most intense moment in the socialist period. The Cultural Revolution, as a struggle of the soul, demanded rigorous and torturous disciplining of the individual’s psyche and body. The decisive change in the regulation of the Chinese libidinal economy occurred in the 1990s, when China accelerated its integration into the capitalist world system. The monitoring and control of sexuality and the body became more “democratic,” internalized, immanent, and less heavy-handed. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the libidinous economy of excess

when mimosa blossoms

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has reached a new height with Chinese women writers. Surplus sexuality is the very theme and subject of these women writers. Literature, sexuality, and the author all turn into commodities. The writer-intellectual strives to become a media personality. I shall discuss these issues in my next chapter on the socalled beauty writers.

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chapter three

............................................

Body Writing Beauty Writers at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century

A

t the end of the twentieth century, two Shanghai-born women writers, Mian Mian and Wei Hui, took China’s literary scene by storm with their shocking stories and writing styles. Their novels were immensely popular with China’s new generation of readers, the so-called Generation X (xin xin renlei, literally “new new human beings”). The writers themselves were born in the early 1970s and have no recollection or experience of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). By the time of their adolescence, China’s modernization and open-door policy were already in full swing. Throughout the 1990s, Shanghai, the city of their birth, had emerged once again as China’s most modern and cosmopolitan city and was emerging from the shadow of China’s capital city Beijing. And the “Shanghai school” (haipai) of writers is poised to recapture its long-lost preeminence in modern Chinese literature. The candid description of a life-world never described before in the literature of socialist China — that of drugs, sex, and prostitution in southern China — attracted the attention of a generation of young readers, who found recognition of their own experiences of contemporary China in these pages. However,

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the novels of Mian Mian and Wei Hui were deemed distasteful, immoral, and harmful by the censors, and were banned in China for some time. Predictably, being “Banned in China!” necessarily enhances the domestic curiosity and international marketability of the authors and novels concerned. There is even more reason for people outside “Red China” to pry into those texts that “a totalitarian regime” forbids people to read. Mian Mian’s and Wei Hui’s representative works, Candy (Tang) and Shanghai Baby (Shanghai baobei), were reprinted and sold by publishers in Hong Kong and Taiwan for Chinese-speaking readers, and have been translated into several foreign languages in the overseas book markets. The writers themselves are supposedly beautiful ladies, hence their honorary title of “beauty writers” (meinü zuojia). They have achieved a cult status among mainland Chinese fans. The quality and details of their writings were hotly debated by Internet surfers. Due to the tremendous popularity of their books, other beauty writers who are even younger have imitated their styles and initiated a cycle of stories in the spirit of Mian Mian and Wei Hui. Their highly autobiographical novels, in part based on the authors’ life stories, have set the trend for a new type of women’s writing, unprecedented in Chinese literary history up to that time, which flaunts female sexuality in the construction of subjectivity. Moreover, the phenomenon of beauty writers is symptomatic of some more profound changes in Chinese literature, culture, and society. This type of literary work signals the reemergence of urban literature based in cosmopolitan Shanghai, the shift from national literature to globalization, and the changing role of the writer in Chinese society. At the center of this new wave of female writers is what they themselves call shenti xiezuo (literally “body writing”).1 Writing with one’s body, or writing about one’s body, is the self-styled, self-advertised strategy among these women writers. Exposing the body, its private parts, private sensations, and private thoughts, constitutes the substance of such novels. Writing about female sexuality by “beautiful women writers” is the vogue today. What is showcased here is the politics of the body — namely, biopolitics, to use Michel Foucault’s term. On the one hand, this is the politics of liberation and excess in the Chinese experience of modernity, an existential condition that has rarely existed, especially for women and women writers. On the other hand, the phenomenon also bespeaks the logic of cultural commercialization, in other words, the selfpackaging of the body for media effects. By posing as sexual, young, beautiful, amoral, rebellious, and anti-intellectual, the female writer dreams of creating a media reaction and becoming a celebrity.

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Female Sexuality in Candy Set in Shenzhen and Shanghai in the late 1980s and mid-1990s, Candy paints a broad picture of a new lifestyle through the recollections and personal encounters of the narrator-protagonist Hong. This is a world of rock musicians, drug addicts, lesbians, and prostitutes in China’s modernizing cities. The protagonist-narrator becomes a high school dropout in Shanghai at the age of seventeen. She moves to Shenzhen, Deng Xiaoping’s favorite Special Economic Zone (SEZ), where she encounters a world filled with drug addition, gambling, and sexual promiscuity. Turning into a drug addict herself, Hong becomes sick and is hospitalized, and eventually returns to Shanghai to enroll in a drug rehabilitation program, in the second half of the book. She carries on an on-and-off, roller-coaster affair with a musician, Saining, also a drug addict. Saining is the spoiled son of rich parents who live abroad and receives money regularly from his mother. Told in the first person by a female narrator, Candy is an extremely subjective novel, chronicling the turbulent lifestyle of the protagonist herself as well as the people she encounters. What is shocking to the readers is the material and spiritual world that she describes. For instance, Mian Mian goes to great lengths to detail the life of prostitutes. Hong narrates the fates and daily routines of prostitutes in Shenzhen such as “Little Shanghai” and Ye Meili (“Beautiful Evening”). The novel also describes the life of a lesbian couple, A and B. The protagonist herself is unabashedly sexually promiscuous and addicted to narcotics. Known by reporters as a “Generation X novelist,” Mian Mian exposes the world of drugs and sex in China’s fledgling youth culture.2 Indeed, the flaunting and self-exposure of female sexuality is a central narrative strategy of Candy. It is also a selling point of the novel. Suffice it to provide one example of such narration. The following is a lurid, pornographic description of Hong performing oral sex on her lover, Saining. It needs to be quoted at length here: In the restaurant toilet I grasped his penis in my hand, and I suddenly felt upset when I realized that I’d hardly ever taken the initiative with him. It was 1992, I was twenty-two years old, and I was useless. This made me start crying all over again. A full moon was rising in the sky outside the window. I had to lock him up tight. I had the tools. I got down on my knees and started to pray. The rays of moonlight there were so hazy that I thought I was losing my mind. His flesh was soft in my hand, and I had to love it. Loving it would make it beautiful. I wanted to hold him, to squeeze him hard until I crushed him. I sucked him, sucking out his wet soul until the end, until the gateway to his

body writing

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life had closed. He was my one and only. I had learned how to give head, how to beg, how to pray. He had become my prey; I wanted to turn him inside out. God, how I wanted to turn all my caresses into curses and caress him all over, with limitless tenderness, until he would whisper to me soft and clear, I love you! I swallowed, and with his semen inside me, I found myself again.3 This sort of exhibition of exhilarating self-debasement is typical of the novel’s language as a whole. Later in the novel, Hong does not hesitate to tell of an episode about herself and her lover arranging to have their lovemaking videotaped by a friend. Yet after endless self-parading of her sexuality and depravity, the physical and spiritual journey seems to come to an end and approaches a moment of awakening and redemption. The last paragraph of the novel concludes on a self-reflective note: “Sometimes we have to believe in miracles. The voice in my writing is like the reverberations of a bottle breaking at midnight. Listening over and over to the Radiohead CD I stole from my friend, on this uniquely pure and stainless morning, at the age of twenty-nine, here at S. I come to the end of this piece of candy.”4 The metaphor of “candy” is an appropriate for the theme of the novel. Something that is sweet and intoxicating can be harmful and toxic at the same time. The narrator seems to have come to a better understanding of herself by the end of an exhausting and costly odyssey.

The Postcolonial Imaginary and Transnational Libidinal Economy in Shanghai Baby There is no less lurid pornographic description of sexual acts in Shanghai Baby, which was first published in 1999. But the novel is more ornate in language. The style of Wei Wei, a graduate of Fudan University, is more nuanced, dense, subtle, and complex. It captures the moods, sensations, and feelings of contemporary Shanghai. The author observes and describes the world of Shanghai in the 1990s through the subjective personal angle of a female. She grapples with a new language and style that are suitable to convey the private impressions and moods of a young woman in Shanghai. The female protagonist lingers in the bars, nightclubs, shops, cafés, streets, and private apartments. A privileged group of youth in their twenties populates the literary world of Wei Hui as they navigate through the dizzying and intoxicating sights, sounds, smells, lights, and darkness of a metropolis that is modernizing itself at breakneck speed. In Shanghai Baby, the central plot hinges on a transnational love triangle among Coco, Tian Tian, and Mark. Love, sex, and a transnational libidinous economy occupy the center stage of the novel. Nikki is the female protagonist, a writer-waitress in a café, also known as Coco to her friends, a nickname derived 56

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from her admiration for Coco Chanel. Tian Tian, a Chinese artist, the son of a rich mother who lives overseas, is Coco’s boyfriend. Due to drug addiction, he is impotent. Mark is a married German businessman in Shanghai, who dates Coco at the same time. Nikki first meets Tian Tian in Green Stalk Café, where she works as a waitress. She then moves into his apartment and lives with him. Wei Hui goes to great lengths in describing the scenes and acts of lovemaking between Coco and Mark, whether in his private hotel room or in a nightclub bathroom. The European is described as hypermasculine, with an animal-like libido that satisfies Coco’s bodily needs. In contrast, her Chinese lover Tian Tian is effeminate, sensitive, soft, melancholic, and impotent. Here we see the familiar libidinal dynamics between China and the West — namely, the feminization of the Chinese male and the hypersexualization of the foreign male. At the end of the novel, Tian Tian dies of a drug overdose, Mark leaves China for Germany, and Coco stays behind in Shanghai. Wei Hui makes sure that her description of sexual acts would not be outdone by her rival Mian Mian. Her language is just as nauseatingly sensational as Mian Mian’s. In Shanghai Baby, there is an even more elaborate description of a lovemaking act in a nightclub toilet between Coco and Mark. What is most striking is the Chinese woman’s fetishization of the body of the European male. Here is a representative passage from the novel: Yet another kiss, long and leisurely. This was the first time that I realized kissing before lovemaking could be so comfortable, steady, unhurried, enhancing my desire. His golden body hairs were like fine rays of sunlight, zealously and intimately nibbling at my body. The tip of his rum-soaked tongue teased my nipples, then moved slowly downward. He penetrated my protective labia with deadly accuracy and located my budding clitoris. The coolness of the rum mingled with the warmth of his tongue and made me feel faint. I could feel a rush of liquid flow out of my uterus, and then he went inside. His huge organ made me feel swollen. “No,” I began to cry out. “No way!” But he showed no pity, never stopping for a second. The pain burst into a kind of apoplexy. I opened my eyes wide and looked at him, half in love, half in hate. I was aroused by his naked white body, only faintly colored from the sun. I imagined what he would be like in high boots and a leather coat, and what kind of cruelty would show in those Teutonic blue eyes. These thoughts increased my excitement. “Every woman adores a Fascist / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you . . .” wrote Sylvia Plath. I closed my eyes and listened to him moan a sentence or two in indistinct German sounds from my dreams that struck the most sensitive part of my body writing

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womb. I thought I could die and he would keep right on going, but then I climaxed with a sharp cry.5 It is the German male who can give the Chinese woman ecstasy, something her feeble Chinese lover could never achieve. She enjoys a masochistic pleasure perpetrated on her by the brute (Fascist) European lover. She is thrilled by and worships the huge European male anatomy. (A more accurate translation of the original Chinese would be “frighteningly large organ” [da de xiaren de qiguan]). The Chinese female willingly surrenders to the libidinal power of the Western male. In contrast, Chinese masculinity is effeminate, lacking, and impotent. In the case of the drug addict Tian Tian, he is incapable of even entering inside Coco’s body. It is interesting to note the self-referential, autobiographical confirmation of the author’s love affair with a German man in the postscript of the book in one Chinese edition. Just as Wei Hui the author finished typing the last word of the manuscript on the computer, she received an international phone call. The male voice on the other end of the line said to her in German, “I love you.”6 In this manner, the life of the real author is directly linked to the character Nikki/Coco. Her entanglement with the German businessman is reminiscent of Shanghai’s colonial legacy. Today, the arrival of multinational corporations and foreign businessmen in Shanghai’s cityscape has revived the colonial memory. The connection between the new globalizing Shanghai and the old colonial Shanghai is at the center of consciousness of the narrator-protagonist in Shanghai Baby. As waitress-writer, Coco muses on what kind of book she should write in the following words: My instinct told me that I should write about turn-of-the-century Shanghai. This fun-loving city: the bubbles of happiness that rise from it, the new generation it has nurtured, and the vulgar, sentimental, and mysterious atmosphere to be found in its back streets and alleys. This is a unique Asian city. Since the 1930s it has preserved a culture where China and the West met intimately and evolved together, and now it has entered its second wave of westernization. Tian Tian once used the English term post-colonial to describe it. The customers in the Green Stalk Café, speaking all sorts of languages, reminded me of the days when old-fashioned salons with their florid talk were in vogue; but time and place had altered, and now it was just like any international scene.7 The narrator reminds the reader of the infamous yet glorious colonial past and the postcolonial present of Shanghai. In Shanghai Baby, each of the thirty-eight chapters begins with an epigraph, citing the words and wisdom of famous au58

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thors, stars, celebrities, and thinkers from the West. This tiresome long list of names includes Joni Mitchell, Henry Miller, Jim Steinman, Erica Jong, Boris Bracht, Helen Lawrenson, Dylan Thomas, the Beatles, Bessie Smith, William Burroughs, Leontyne Price, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Taylor, Flannery O’Connor, Salvador Dalí, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Robin Morgan, Marilyn Monroe, Sigmund Freud, Marguerite Duras, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Ian Curtis, Sally Stanford, Tori Amos, Public Image Ltd., Van Morrison, Nietzsche, Milan Kundera, Suzanne Vega, Suede, Billy Bragg, Virginia Woolf, Mother Teresa, Dan Fogelberg, Descartes, and Lucy Stone. No Chinese name whatsoever is offered here. The postcolonial mentality of mimicry permeates the novel. Her training in Western culture and lack of interest in Chinese philosophy belie her erudition in colonial lore and shallowness in Eastern tradition. “Who am I, indeed? Who am I?” These are the last words of the novel. The novel ends on a note of searching for a self amid the confusions and excitements of a postcolonial Shanghai.

Urban Literature and Shanghai Cosmopolitanism Now and Then For many decades after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Shanghai had been subjected to the role of playing second fiddle to Beijing. The city deteriorated and lost its former glamour. In the eyes of the communist leaders who seized power from the rural revolutionary bases, Shanghai represented the evils of the old China — the legacies of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. It was a city of decadence and sin. But since the 1990s, the Chinese central government, controlled by the so-called Shanghai gang (Shanghai bang), has heavily invested in Shanghai and given it a beautiful new facelift (the new Pudong, the renovated Bund, and so forth). It has rapidly transformed into a lively new city. Such physical and cultural changes created the material condition as well as inspiration for the beauty writers.8 It is the writers from Shanghai who are able to capture a modernist/postmodernist sensibility at the turn of the twenty-first century, as if reviving and redeeming modernism in 1930s Shanghai. This revival of Shanghai, economic, political, and literary, is also part of a larger project of rethinking Chinese modernity. Modern Chinese history is reassessed now under the developmental teleology of capitalism. A retrogressive nostalgia for the old Shanghai — namely, the semicolonial and republican Shanghai of the 1920s and 1930s — is a cultural reorientation among people in Greater China and the Chinese diaspora: “This is the nostalgia that imagines a strain of modernity that had supposedly been repressed by socialism but is said to enjoy a renaissance in recent years, promising to deliver China from body writing

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its revolutionary ‘deviations’ to the global arena of capitalism. Liberalism and the unquestioned acceptance of the market are inclined toward this version of nostalgia.”9 Indeed, Shanghai has become the bastion of Chinese neoliberalist thought and nostalgic literature today. The novel Song of Unending Sorrow (Changheng ge, 1996), by the great contemporary Shanghai writer Wang Anyi, is such a grand experiment with the nostalgic projection of the past and present of this city.10 But Wang Anyi’s literary sensibility is too temperate and disciplined for the new generations that are getting only younger and younger. The novels of Mian Mian and Wei Hui indicate a radical discontinuity from previous authors and styles in the literary history of socialist and postsocialist China. It seems as though the fictional characters in the novels were dropped into the midst of a new society of materialism, hedonism, sensual pleasure, and affluence. The novelists have brought the reader back to the literary world of semicolonial Shanghai in the 1930s, the period of literary modernism, the height of the socalled neosensationalism (xin ganjue pai), a literary sensibility characterized by decadence, dandyism, subjectivism, and cosmopolitanism.11 After half a century of suppression, modernism returns to postmodern Shanghai with vengeance. At the end of the twentieth century, once again the reader witnesses a city of freedom, excess, self-destruction, and potential redemption. On the side of international reception, finally the reader sees something different from the “Cultural Revolution” genre in the representation and self-representation of “Red China.” This is a youth culture that can be found in any country. Conventional cultural markers of China are erased. China is neither politicized (as a repressive political regime) nor orientalized (as an exotic, different culture). Now international readers are curious to find out how China as a nominally socialist country has changed, and how Shanghai has revived to be the capital of wealth and sin in the Far East. Leo Lee points out the importance of literary modernism in pre-1949 Shanghai. However, that tradition had been denigrated, condemned, buried, and brushed aside by leftist critics and historians. It was regarded as decadent and bourgeois. Realism reigned supreme for many decades until the late 1980s. Commenting on the portrayal of women in modernist stories, Lee wrote: “Before leftist critics in the 1930s began to sell all such women as oppressed and downtrodden, some Shanghai writers — particularly those of the ‘neo-sensationalist’ school (xin ganjue pai) — had chosen to ‘modernize’ such a long-standing trope in traditional Chinese popular literature by making these female figures, even as embodiments of urban material culture, more dynamic and ironically more confident in their own subjectivity as women — to the extent that they can play with men and make fools of them in such public places of leisure as the dance hall, the coffeehouse, and the racetrack.”12 However independent and strong 60

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these female figures in the dance halls and coffeehouses may appear to be, they are nonetheless constructed by male writers like Mu Shiying and Liu Na’ou. They are objects subjected to male fantasy and the male gaze. After being suppressed for half a century by the realist doctrine, modernist sensibility returns to the Shanghai literary scene as “the return of the repressed.” But the crucial difference is that, this time, such stories are written by women writers and narrated from women’s points of view. The body, sexuality, seductiveness, and manipulation are in part what endow the female characters with agency and power over the male. In a facetious, self-depreciatory yet selfcongratulatory tone, Coco thus thought about the nature of the feminine gender in Shanghai Baby: “Women are born liars, especially when they traffic between men. The more complex the situation, the more resourceful they are. From the moment they can speak, they know how to lie. Once, when I was very young, I broke a priceless antique vase and said the family cat had done it.”13 She was pondering how to lie to Tian Tian about her affair with Mark. It is helpful to trace the figure of the (post)modern girl in postsemicolonial Shanghai in the works of Mian Mian and Wei Hui to literary antecedents of Chinese modernism in semicolonial Shanghai in the 1930s. Shu-mei Shih ascribes a more active, positive role to female characters in the fictional works of writers such as Liu Na’ou. Shih writes: “the modern girl becomes a reciprocal metaphor of the city. The city is eroticized as the girl is eroticized; the girl is gazed at as the city is observed.” And, “[T]he modern girl’s sexual promiscuity, rather than being condemned on patriarchal moral grounds, becomes the mark of her free will to pursue her own desires. Her materiality is not condemned as vulgar and corrupt, but rather becomes the sign of her ability to adapt to the modern world. Her materiality is a metonymic extension of the inescapable materiality of modernity.”14 In the case of contemporary Shanghai writers, it is the women characters who look at and ogle men, women, Chinese, and foreigners. In their erotic longings, the city is erotized, men are erotized. The modern girl is not a passive object to be gazed at by male characters as created by the pens of male authors. The modern girl acts out her sexuality on men. With the early Shanghai male writers, the characters’ desire for the modern girl is “a desire for capitalist modernity with all its seductive allures of commodification, consumption, and entertainment.”15 But here, there is a reversal in the agency of such desire. The woman is the desiring agent. She desires men, things, and material objects. She uses her wit, body, looks, and sexuality to seduce men, sleep with them, move into their apartments, live on their money, and control them. Men, Chinese or foreign, become their vehicles in the pursuit of capitalist consumption and entertainment. To be sure, there have indeed been accomplished women writers from Shanghai, such as Ru Zhijuan and Wang Anyi, in the post-Mao era. But the excessive body writing

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foregrounding of female sexuality in identity formation in a globalized urban setting has been heretofore unseen in the literature produced in Shanghai, or anywhere in China. Mian Mian and Wei Hui have led the way in launching a new type of women’s writing. Their works further confirm a trend in Chinese culture and society, namely, the changing role of the writer in Chinese society. Previously, writers based in Shanghai or anywhere else in China, such as Lu Xun and Ba Jin, consciously positioned themselves as the soul of the people, the conscience of society, and the guardian of culture. One recalls the utmost sincerity of tone and attitude expressed in Ba Jin’s memoirs, Random Reflections (Suixiang lu), written in the post-Mao era. This seriousness of purpose and tone has been turned into a cultivated superficiality by the beauty writers. The important function of the writer-intellectual has been deliberately abandoned by a young generation of writers. This trend began with the Beijing writer Wang Shuo, the author of “hooligan literature” (pizi wenxue), which uses Beijing street slang. The novel/modern erotica Ruined Capital (Feidu), by the Shaanxi writer Jia Pingwa, also vividly describes the intellectual’s fall from grace in contemporary Chinese society. In the hands of Mian Mian and Wei Hui, the figure of the writer has become a capitalist consumer, a drug addict, a promiscuous lover. As Mian Mian states, “my books are not for intellectuals.”16 The writer has changed from an intellectual, the conscience of society, the architect of the soul, to, at best, a celebrity figure in a consumer economy, or, at worst, to a self-styled outsider. Furthermore, these works signal a shift from the paradigm of national literature to the necessity of globalization. Historical depth is absent, and only a glistening surface remains. Such literature obviously differs from previous literary trends and movements in the post-Mao era — “Literature of Wound and Scar” (shanghen wenxue), “Literature of Root-Seeking” (xun’gen wenxue), “Literature of Native Soil” (xiangtu wenxue), and so on. Urban literature makes a major comeback with beauty writers. As cultural products, these works partake of a transnational network of postmodern consumer culture. Chinese history matters less these days, since the writers themselves arrived in the world after the end of the Mao era. What matters is the instantaneous surface feeling of a street wanderer, shopper, consumer, and lover in a metropolis. There is a carefully cultivated materialism and superficiality in tone, style, and sensibility. The reader feels a palpable flat presentism rather than historical depth, especially in the case of Shanghai Baby.

Tidal Waves of Beauty Writers The theme of female sexual promiscuity further opens the floodgates for even more daring literature about sexuality in contemporary China.17 A new genre 62

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of Internet literature has appeared. “One-night-stand literature” flourished on China’s Internet in 2003. Titles like Farewell before Daybreak (Tian bu liang jiu fenshou) and Farewell at Dawn (Tianliang yihou shuo fenshou) purport to be factual records of real women’s one-night-stand sexual encounters (yiye qing). These books are later published in print and sold at bookstores and even bookstands at airports. (I picked up copies of these books at the Beijing International Airport on December 26, 2003.) Ordinary city women as well as stars, celebrities, TV hostesses, actresses, models, and “beauty writers” (meinü zuojia) are emerging to tell their private stories. These tales are told by first-person female narrators, who candidly expose their sexual secrets to the readers. In this sense, Mian Mian and Wei Hui’s novels laid the groundwork for a new kind of women’s literature in contemporary China that highlights the theme of female sexuality. Interestingly, Beijing writers and Beijing youth were determined not to be easily out-performed by Shanghai writers. In spring 2002, the novel Beijing Doll (Beijing wawa) was published and created quite a stir in China. It was written by a Beijing girl, Chun Shu, still a teenager at the time of the publication of the novel.18 Obviously, the title of the book alludes to Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui. However, the politics of generation and age is pursued to a new height. If Wei Hui and Mian Mian were born in the early 1970s, Chun Shu and her generation were born in the 1980s. If Wei Hui and Mian Mian belong to “new humanity” (xin renlei), so to speak, they are already old in comparison to Chun Shu and her like, who are indeed “newer new humanity” (xin xin renlei). The politics of being even younger is won by the Beijing teenagers in this round of competition between the two cities. Chun Shu herself was born in 1983, and her group is called the post-eighties generation of writers. Born in the Age of Reform and Openness (gaige kaifang) and growing up in the time of globalization, these ultra-young writers have no experience or memory of economic hardships and political turmoil. Like Mian Mian, Chun Shu was also a high school dropout and decided to pursue the career of a writer. The author’s pen name, “Chun Shu,” means literally “spring tree.” But it is also the kanji of Murakami Haruki, the famed Japanese writer of “cruelty of youth.” Beijing Doll describes the awakening of female sexuality in the body and mind of a teenage girl. The autobiographical novel offers candid depictions of sex and the rock-and-roll subculture among Beijing’s youth. As expected, the stance of the rebel, the punk, who is antiintellectual and antiacademic, is evident in such novels by school dropouts. Chun Shu’s second novel, Fun and Game, literally A Pleasure That Lasted Half a Day (Changda bantian de huanle) consists of her own one-night romance.19 She is an active participant in the shaping of this fashionable literary trend in early twenty-first-century China. body writing

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Interestingly enough, a Guangzhou woman writer steals the limelight and breaks the record of online readership in a new round of writing about female sexuality. Again, it is the Internet that has provided the forum for the explicit, uninhibited self-exposure of sexuality. Beginning on June 19, 2003, a young woman under the pen name of Mu Zimei publishes her diaries of onenight stands on China’s Internet. Her real name is Li Li, a twenty-five-year-old woman at the time and a former magazine columnist in Guangzhou. Her diaries, under the tile of Yiqing shu (Extravagant Love Letters), record her sexual encounters with several dozens of men. But it is when she reveals her sleeping with Wang Lei, one of the best known rock-and-roll singers in southern China, in August 2003 that her stories caught the eyes of numerous readers. By November 2003, more than 160,000 people had visited her website. In another account, as many as 10 million netizens logged onto her site to read the stories.20 In them, she bares all of her sexual pleasures/perversions to the nation’s readers: constantly changing sexual partners, sex orgies, and making love with the friends of friends in front of her friends. She took the lead in “alternative lifestyle” and “alternative entertainment” (linglei shenghuo fangshi, linglei yule). Her cyberlink, her “blog” (boke), became China’s most frequently hit link for some time. One only needed to log onto Blogcn.com to read her diaries! The diary form also helps to ensure the authenticity of her sexual adventures. Talking dirty has become a way of deconstructing hallowed Chinese traditions. Here is a passage from Mu Zimei’s story “Rongqi” (lit. Container). The female narrator “I” has a noncommittal on-and-off sexual relationship with her lover Rongqi, a playboy. We chatted continuously, about Karl Popper, about Chinese intellectuals. The television was just mentioning Yu Qiuyu’s A Sigh in a Thousand Years (Qiannian yitan). “There were some virtual interviews on the Internet. They asked a reader’s impression of reading A Sigh in a Thousand Years. The answer was ‘a big patch down below got wet’ (xiamian shi le yi da pian). A classic citation of Shanghai Baby.” Hearing this, Rongqi laughed rather mysteriously. This was the only laugh I saw on his face the entire evening.21 Yu Qiuyu is a celebrated essayist, scholar, and historian in contemporary China. He has been championing high cultural values in his erudite reflections on Chinese history. His travel records and historical essays, written in elegant prose, describe the spiritual journeys of a modern Chinese intellectual across the landscape of Chinese and world history. His writings embody the soul and consciousness of the high-brow Chinese intellectual.22 But in Mu Zimei’s lewd 64

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tale, Yu and the Chinese intellectual tradition are made a target of satire, and the “low-brow” popular writer Wei Hui has displaced them as the canonical reference point for a new generation of people. Chun Shu’s joyful teenage characters get no less wet in her novel Fun and Game. Teenagers were spirited players of virtual sex games on the net. Below is an excerpt from the novel: Tanyi and I often chatted on the QQ Net. After the usual greetings of “little fuck” (xiaobi), we began flirting and cursing. For example, I asked: “Did you make (love)? He asked back, “Did you get wet (shi)?” “Yip, I made.” Tanyi told the truth this time, unexpectedly. “Wet, I got wet as soon as I saw your name.” Right after I finished typing this sentence, I read from Tanyi that he made love all night and did not feel well. Several days later, Tanyi asked: “Did you do it today?” “Did it.” “How was it?” “Alright. Not bad.” “Wow. . . .” The male poet was a little sentimental. The female poet also asked, “And you?” “Also did it. Did it all night.” The male poet keyboarded a sentence in an instant: “God said, ‘in order for you both not to be sad, may you together make love for once, please.’ ” “That is to say, if we need to make love, we must get permission from God, is that right?”23 The female narrator and her male lover — both self-styled “poets,” cavort in virtual space as well as in real locale. Sexuality is all fun and the games for the new generation born in the post-Mao era. Indeed, a new lexicon and a new writing style have emerged in the wet hands of these ever younger female writers. Mu Zimei’s online letters were later collected and published in a book format. In the words of her editor, “What Mu Zimei describes is a lifestyle: alternative, non-mainstream, distant from tradition, remote from morals. With her truthful, passionate words she tells us that she and her chosen lifestyle do exist in this civilized, tolerant, varied, multicultural society. Do we need to pass judgment on such thing? Maybe, but this is not the job of the editor.”24 Moral judgment aside, the editor urges the reader to at least acknowledge the social life that Mu Zimei describes in her intimate revelations. Online chat rooms have also become a platform for airing public opinion and constitute a new form of “public sphere.” Readers’ reactions to Mu Zimei’s diaries are predictably divergent. Many trash her as a despicable whore; some envy her carefree attitude; and others disagree with her behavior but respect her right to self-expression. The Internet has developed into a unique, indispensable forum that is at once conducive to private expression and public discussion. It is a new intersubjective medium that tolerates the channeling of individual feelings and the exchange of opinions. It is interesting to observe the extent to which life and art imitate each other. As a matter of fact, www.com (written by Yu Rongjun, 2000)

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is such a play about the fledging online dating scene in contemporary China. The fact that it won the Cao Yu Dramatic Literature Award in China testifies to the popularity of the phenomenon in everyday life. The quality of literary writing has been inevitably affected by the new mode of production and dissemination of the net writers. The finely crafted prose of the print media gives way to the crude sensations of instantaneous net production. As Shuyu Kong cautions us, “the traditional artistic merits associated with printed culture, characterized by Alvin Kernan as ‘the intricacy of structure, complexity of meaning, irony, ambiguity, multivalency and indeterminacy,’ will become more and more difficult to sustain on the quick-flashing, ephemeral computer screens and websites of the future.”25 Perhaps we should hasten to add that much of the self-exposure of these female writers was never intended to be “literature” in the traditional sense. The rise of female body writing is concurrent with the spread of the Internet in China. That is to say, a new technology of gender has to do with the invention of a new media technology. The writings of Mian Mian, Wei Hui, Chun Shu, and Mu Zimei were either widely circulated on the net, or even first published there and subsequently in book form. The net is different from traditional media — print media such as newspaper and the novel, and audiovisual technology such as film and television. It bypasses national censorship more easily and is more difficult to contain. Whereas a “citizen” lives within the restrictions of the regime of the nation-state, a “netizen” moves in a dispersed, nebulous, intangible, virtual web of social relationships, body politics, and modes of technology.26 The Internet allows the netizen to engage in new forms of deterritorialization and reterritorialization of information, knowledge, and political agency. In fact, the formation of the netizen is by definition the result of a deterritorialized virtual network, and as such differs from the social, moral, and political constitution of citizenship. The citizen has been formed by the technologies and models of traditional media. But the Internet spreads materials (e.g., sexuality) more widely and quickly than traditional media such as the printed novel, which is cumbersome to circulate, or public television, whose message is too immediate. The net is intensely private and public at the same time and serves as a public network for netizens to communicate and debate about any matter they choose. Nevertheless, the dizzying array of sexually hyperactive websites should not make us forget the nature of Chinese society, which is still officially a MarxistLeninist state. State supervision of on-line activities might place limits on the development of the new form of public sphere that has been opened up by the Internet. For instance, Zhou Yongming, an anthropologist, cautions against overly hasty euphoria about the advent of a new technology of communication, 66

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for the emergent embryonic public space newly established by the Internet is still too weak and fragile in China. He writes: What I call a public e-sphere is still in the process of being created, and when realized, it may bear unique Chinese characteristics and differ from other public spheres. Both the state and the societal players on the Internet are exploring various ways to push the newly opened public space in the direction they want it to go. The ideal scenario for the formation of a public e-sphere is no government control, free participation by self-disciplined discussants, and the formation of sites with well-established authority and credibility. Under the current political situation however, this scenario is far from the present realities of China, and it may never exist.27 Meanwhile, the narcissistic, self-indulgent sexualization of the female body on the Internet appears to be oblivious of the reality of state politics. To the extent that such female writing directs the reader’s attention away from direct political action to the ephemeral realm of fantasy and nauseatingly graphic erotica, state censorship periodically turns a blind eye to the online production of sex in the public e-sphere. Casual sex, extramarital sex, sex with strangers — this is the lifestyle artfully packaged by female writers and vigorously pursued by a relatively small group of the affluent urban population in cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou. To put it more moderately, a cultivated, self-conscious, sexy, and sexual lifestyle is the pursuit of a class of young professionals called xiaozi, or “petty bourgeoisie,” who are China’s yuppies. An “alternative” (linglei) way of living to the mainstream catches their fantasy now and then, and they would not resist the temptation to try something new. The politics of the body, or biopolitics, is the central topic of these emergent young women writers. Gone are the libidinal constraints of previous Chinese writers of the generation of Yu Dafu or Zhang Xianliang. If lack (manque), discipline, and punishment characterized the experience of modernity among Chinese writers in the long twentieth century, excess and overflow are the state of affairs among China’s urban youth at the turn of the twenty-first. Gone is the libidinal economy of scarcity, deprivation, and austerity. Gone also is the notion of “pure literature.” Literature has indeed become a sexy form of cultural entertainment in postmodern urban China.

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part two

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Art From the National to the Diasporic

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chapter four

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The Naked Body Politic in Postsocialist China and the Chinese Diaspora

T

his chapter explores the body art of Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan, two leading body/performance artists from the People Republic of China since the early 1990s.1 Throughout ancient China, the naked body, or full nudity, was relatively absent in iconography, in contrast to Western art.2 In modern and contemporary China, the naked body cautiously surfaces in art works once in a while. Today, no public platform for the artistic performance of the naked body in postsocialist China exists. Perceived as subversive and perverse, such exhibitions are held in private, nonpublic, nonofficial spaces in the small circles of a fledgling avant-garde within China. Yet, in international art circles the performances by Chinese body artists such as Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan have been warmly embraced by critics and audiences. Ma Liuming’s and Zhang Huan’s works challenge the boundaries and standards of acceptable art in postsocialist China in regard to gender, sexuality, nudity, and the body. Ma Liuming’s performances defy the biopolitics of traditional patriarchal authority by opening up the questions of gender-bending, cross-dressing, and sexual ambiguity. At the same time, his persistent exploration of sexuality and gender identity contributes a broad international politics

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of multiculturalism in art. In Zhang Huan’s early site-specific works produced in China, the artist addresses the domestic themes of endurance, cruelty, selftorture, and self-mortification, and creates allegories of the living condition of the artist-citizen in China. Since he came to the US in 1998, Zhang Huan has been funded and supported by a transnational network of museums and institutions in the West. His more recent art actively engages issues of identity, multiculturalism, diaspora, and immigration in a postnational borderless world. There seems to be a shift of focus in Zhang’s art from the notion of third-world national allegory to the strategies of diasporic identity politics and transnational subjectivity. In the original Chinese context, Ma’s and Zhang’s body art most vividly subverts the disciplinary politics of sexuality and gender that is necessary for the maintenance of the socialist regime and the sovereign nation. Their work directly confronts the disciplines of the body in the modern era. In the words of Michel Foucault, there exists a vast yet tightly organized network of control and monitoring of sex and the body: “the harnessing, intensification, and distribution of forces, the adjustment and economy of energies.” Such procedures range from “infinitesimal surveillances, permanent controls, and extremely meticulous ordering of space, indeterminate medical or psychological examinations, to an entire micro-power concerned with the body.”3 This is a fundamental condition of modernity, be it a capitalist economy or a totalitarian state. Giorgio Agamben continues this line of thought in Foucault and unequivocally states: “It can be even said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.”4 By using their own bodies, Ma’s and Zhang’s performances rehearse the production and policing of the biopolitical body, question the modern procedures of the subjectification of the individual, and contest the laws and taboos of the socialist sovereign state.

A Historical Overview of the Naked Body in Modern Chinese Art Art historians have noticed the relative absence of the unclothed body in traditional Chinese high art in contrast to Western art from the Greeks and Romans through the Renaissance to the present.5 In Greek and Roman sculpture, the naked body is an expression of dignity and nobility. For instance, the most sublime subjects, such as the creation story of Adam and Eve, as seen in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, depict nude human beings. The naked body is a signifier of dignity rather than of moral depravity. It is an assertion of humanity and divinity from classical antiquity, through the Renaissance, and up to the modern period in the West. Thus, a Western critic wrote the following on the occasion of an art exhibit of the naked body: “In the Renaissance, the Christian 72

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and Classical traditions came together as the rediscovery of Greek art gave artists justification for celebrating humanity, and hence, the human body, as God’s greatest creation. External beauty became a marker for inner perfection. Saints, heroes and even Christ himself were depicted in paintings and sculptures with magnificent bodies which were frequently nearly or completely unclothed.”6 In contrast, landscape painting (shanshui hua) is the sublime art form in ancient China. Human beings are dwarfed by the immense size of mountains and rivers. Tiny human figures are often found in some corner of a landscape painting. Humanity is overshadowed by the power of nature and the cosmos. Perhaps one can draw comparisons of basic philosophical premises between ancient China and certain periods of Western history. In the Chinese case, human beings exist in contexts, in relation to other categories of reality: nature, society, nation, and the world. Humanity is not a self-absorbed, narcissistic, individualistic state of existence. Thus depictions of humanity show it within nature, the universe, the cosmos, or a social network. There is no naked self; wearing appropriate clothing (robes) is a sign of civilization. To distinguish themselves from the barbarians, the Chinese were proud of China as a “country of clothes, caps, cultural objects” (yi guan wenwu zhi bang), a “country of rites and rituals” (li yi zhi bang). In the early twentieth century, Western-style training, art institutions, life drawing, and oil painting were introduced to China. Liu Haisu (1896–1994), one of the most prominent artists and art educators in modern China, established a modern art school — Shanghai Meishu Zhuanke Xuexiao, or Shanghai Art School. He introduced nude figure studies, but evoked the anger of a conservative public. What he did was deemed immoral and decadent. The warlord Sun Chuanfang even wanted to arrest him, and he had to hide in the French Concession. This has become a famous episode in the history of modern Chinese art education.7 The difficulty of establishing a Western-style art school has also been vividly re-created in the film Hua hun (The Soul of a Painter, 1994), directed by Huang Shuqin and starring Gong Li. It is a biopic detailing the life story of a woman painter, Pan Yuliang (1899–1977), who studied under Liu Haisu in Shanghai Art School. Pan was later known for her paintings of the female nude. In the film, the art school got into trouble for its educational convictions and practices. The school was shut down by the authorities. Consequently, Pan had no place to paint. During the day, she went to a public bathhouse to paint naked bodies of women, only to be discovered and kicked out of the bathhouse. At night, she sat in front of a mirror and painted her own naked body. In modern China, public display of the naked body carries the stigma of being unorthodox, rebellious, and perverse. But the use of nude models has been gradually institutionalized in art schools in China because of the efforts of the naked body politic

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generations of art educators. Art students are required to draw and paint nude models within the walls of the secluded academy as part of their basic training. But there has been no public platform for body art, especially if it involves the naked body. Public exhibition of the naked body is still seen as scandalous. Such exhibitions can only be organized in nonofficial, nonpublic venues, among small circles of friends and dedicated artists. In the Mao era, nudity in painting did not exist as it was regarded as bourgeois, decadent, and Western. Workers, peasants, and soldiers properly clothed constitute the subjects of representation in revolutionary and socialist art. These heroes of New China wear unisex clothes and exude a healthy glow on their happy faces. Therefore, it was with a sense of newfound liberation that the nude figure reappeared in the post-Mao era. But the nude figure was still mostly confined to small elite circles of academic painting. In 1979, the expanded Beijing International Airport was opened to the public as China pursued its goal of Four Modernizations. The lobby area of the airport features a huge new mural, Song of Life, by Yuan Yunsheng (acrylics on canvas, 1979). The work is startling and daring because it displays nude figures in a premier public space! However, they represent the life of ethnic minorities in southwest China, not Han Chinese. The Han Chinese spectator can therefore maintain a safe distance from the exoticized, eroticized minorities. It is “their” lifestyle, not “ours.” (The civilized/oppressed Chinese cannot run around, play, and dance naked. Only the non-Chinese Chinese living in nature could do that!) Yet the spontaneous celebration of life and lack of inhibition in the rituals of a water festival project the hopes of a nation that has entered a new historical period. In pace with the youthful spirit of the so-called New Era in the 1980s, the oil painting A New Era: Revelation from Adam and Eve (oils, 1985) by Zhang Qun and Meng Luding is a bold, imaginative, refreshing adventure. Here Adam and Eve are represented as two Chinese youths in full nudity. The hunger for knowledge, the bursting of old mental frameworks, and a forward-looking attitude in this painting symbolize the collective agendas of Deng Xiaoping’s “reforms and openness.” The attractive, well-proportioned, muscular, and sculptured naked bodies of Chinese youths convey the energy and hope of a renewed people and nation. The painter’s abstract surrealist-symbolist style and the subject matter (biblical story) come from the West, but the painting serves a Chinese purpose. By the same token, the nude figures created by Jin Shangyi and others were refreshing and groundbreaking in the political and artistic atmosphere of the 1980s, when people could still be accused of the sin of “bourgeois liberalization.” (See, for instance, Seated Nude by Jin Shangyi, oils, 1988.) Jin’s nude figures look like sanitized, aesthetically pleasing studies of the human body. The 74

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salon-style oil paintings do not arouse any improper sexual feelings but evoke the beauty and purity of the human figure. Needless to say, the reappearance of the nude is a reassertion of the self, of “humanism” in the academic and artistic world at that time vis-à-vis decades of collectivism and effacement of the self. The surfacing of the individual and the private in China’s cultural life paves the way for a new tolerance toward the nude. Since the 1990s, the nude in painting and sculpture is no longer a novelty or a scandal in Chinese society. It is a fait accompli. There is nothing unusual, shocking, or scandalous about it anymore. In fact, the female nude has been commodified and commercialized, sold to and purchased by businesses and individuals, and is frequently displayed on the wall of hotels, bars, cafés, and private homes. It serves as a pleasing decorative function in China’s social and private space. The nude appears rather mild, bourgeois, academic, or even pedantic in the dramatic transformations of China’s national psyche in the age of “socialist market economy” or capitalist profiteering.

Ma Liuming: The Biopolitics of Gender and Sexuality Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan emerged as two of the most prominent body/ performance artists in China and the Chinese diaspora since the early 1990s.8 Yet there has been no domestic public platform for their kind of art. Within China, their influence is minimal. They do not tread the hallowed halls of official exhibition. Predictably, in a postsocialist society of control and surveillance, Ma Liuming was harassed and arrested a couple of times by the police because his body art was seen as immoral and subversive. These artists operate and move in a transnational network of art circles and exhibition halls. They are better known outside China than inside China. In this sense, experimental art still has a cutting edge, and is indeed unconventional and “avant-garde” in China. Their naked politic is not soothingly pleasant like the nude in Chinese academic oil painting, but appears ghastly, perverse, and grotesque in the eyes and minds of the authorities and the general public. Ma Liuming explores issues of gender construction, gender-bending, sexuality, sexual ambiguity, and cross-dressing. He pushes the limits of gender identity or gender-bending in such performances. It is interesting to note that Ma Liuming changed his name to Fen-Ma Liuming. “Fen,” “fragrance,” has a feminine connotation in Chinese. That adds ambiguity to gender fixity. “Fen-Ma Liuming is neither homosexual, hermaphrodite, transvestite, nor androgyne. This creature’s face and body exude conflicting images of traditional gender categories, blurring the boundaries between ‘male’ and ‘female.’ One of the purposes of this boundary blurring is to provoke questions about the validity of our knowledge of what constitutes gender and delimits a person.”9 More important, the oddthe naked body politic

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Ma Liuming. Fen-Ma Liuming. Performance. China.

ity “Fen-Ma” continually challenges the biopolitics of the “disciplinary regime,” in Foucault’s words — namely, the control and monitoring of desires, bodies, and sexuality in society. In Ma Liuming’s own words, “ ‘Fen-Ma Liuming’ is the character — with an effeminate face and a man’s body — that I have enacted constantly in my performances. In China ‘Fen’ is a feminine name that has the same pronunciation as the character for ‘separate.’ I combined ‘Fen’ and ‘Ma Liuming’ to create a new name so as to separate the character from reality.”10 In Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch (Beijing East Village, 1994), a naked Ma cooks fish at a private home. As the performance progresses, he sits down, attaches one end of a long plastic hose (laundry tube) to his penis, and sucks and breathes at the other end of the hose from his mouth. Suffice it to mention that the long hose itself resembles a huge phallus. A crowd of artists and critics sit in room, observe him, take pictures, and videotape his performance. In Fish Child, Ma takes a shower and caresses his body inside a shower stall with live fish suspected from the ceiling. In both pieces, what we see is an androgynous, gender-ambiguous, autoerotic performer in a sexually charged atmosphere (fish, naked body, sucking a phallus-like object, washing oneself in a shower.). In his other works, whether completely naked or cross-dressing as a woman (Fen-Ma Liuming, 76

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Ma Liuming. Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch. Performance. Beijing. 1994.

Beijing East Village, 1993),11 the created persona of Fen-Ma Liuming poses as a person with a pretty girlish face, a slender body, and a male anatomy. In such a way, his performances probe the flexible boundary between male and female, and tackle issues of gender identity, homosexuality, and sexuality as such. In some performances, such as New Long March (Breda, the Netherlands, 1997) and elsewhere, the naked Fen-Ma Liuming invites members of the audience to interact with him directly and physically, by posing with him for photographs or holding him in their arms. In such a way, the artist encourages the audience to experience the meaning of his performance in a personally meaningful way. Perhaps the most daring, and I would venture to say most sublime, work of Ma’s is the videotaped performance entitled Fen-Ma Liuming Walks on the Great Wall (China, 1996). As everyone knows, the Great Wall is a ubiquitous symbol of China, a national monument to unity as well as insularity. The wall is the boundary that separates China from the world, the inside from the outside, and the “civilized” from the “barbarians.” At the beginning of the performance, Ma applies lipstick in front of a mirror. His lean body, long hair, and makeup give him the appearance of a girl. A completely naked Ma Liuming walks along a segment of the Great Wall. A lone, small, slender, naked body takes on an enthe naked body politic

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Ma Liuming. Fen-Ma Liuming Walks on the Great Wall. Performance. China. 1998.

tire tradition and nation. The artist subverts thousands of years of Chinese tradition by walking the Great Wall. He challenges patriarchy, authority, symbols of Chinese tradition, and accepted notions of masculinity. The video camera captures Ma walking on the Great Wall from multiple angles, especially in long shots that place Ma’s body in perspective against the background of the endless Great Wall, the vast sky, and huge mountains. The videotaped performance turns into a new-age landscape painting that reveals the immensity of a force and tradition against which a tiny human figure is pitted.

Zhang Huan: From Third-World National Allegory to Diasporic Identity Politics Zhang Huan started his artistic career in mainland China, then moved to New York City in the late 1990s. His geographic move has also caused changes in the style, content, and subject of his art. Zhang has repeatedly expressed that he chose body art, as opposed to, say, painting, because he feels that he can most directly and fully express himself in such a manner. His body art has evolved over 78

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time. It seems to me that there are at least three prominent themes in Zhang’s works to date. First is the theme of endurance, pain, self-torture, cruelty, and masochism in the Chinese context. It is a pain that is felt at both the personal and social level in postsocialist China. These performances of his speak out loudly as allegories of China and of Zhang’s personal existential state. Such works include 12 Square Meters (Beijing East Village, 1994), 65 Kilograms (Beijing East Village, 1994), 25 mm Threading Steel (Beijing, 1995), and to a certain extent Dream of Dragon (Performance at Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, 1999). 65 Kilograms refers to the body weight of Zhang Huan. He was tied to iron chains and hung up from the ceiling, facing down. A doctor drew blood from his body, and red blood dripped to a heated plate below. The boiled blood produced a pungent smell. Sweat and pain were visible on the face of an agonizing Zhang Huan. 12 Square Meters is a one-hour solo performance in a public toilet in Dashan Village, which is later nicknamed by the artists as Beijing’s “East Village.” In this filthy toilet, Zhang Huan anointed his own body with honey and fish oil. As a result, a mob of flies descended on him and covered all of his body. He sat in the toilet for an hour while the fliers perched on, crawled on, and bit his face, head, arms, and entire body. It was an agonizing, repulsive experience amid all the filth that he must endure. Zhang Huan’s self-abusive performance is not only an expression of his personal state of existence but also an enactment of the general condition of the people at large. As art historian Wu Hung points out, “12 Square Meters combines personal experience with a social critique — two essential elements of his performance art.” 12 In Original Sound (Beijing, January 1995), Zhang Huan lies on the floor while earthworms crawl on his face and in and out his mouth. The scene of 25 mm Threading Steel (Beijing 1995) is a construction site at Jianguomen in Beijing. The work features a completely naked Zhang Huan lying on the ground in front of a threading machine. Continuous streams of red-hot sparks shoot from the machine and land on Zhang Huan’s body, legs, upper body, penis, testicles. Zhang’s body is visibly shaking in pain as the incoming sparks fly his way. In all these performances, the audience watches spectacles of Zhang as a lone human being enduring self-inflicted pain and hardship. The second category of Zhang’s performances concerns the relationship between the body and the environment, between human beings and ecology/ nature. These performances include Raising the Water Level of a Fish Pond (Beijing, 1997), To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain (collective work with others, including Ma Liuming, Beijing, 1995), and 3006/M3:65KG (Watari Museum, Tokyo, 1997). They are echoes of the devastating effects of social developments in China, especially the construction and destruction of space. They articulate the grandiose plans of modernization at the expense of the enthe naked body politic

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Zhang Huan. 12 Square Meters. Performance. Beijing, China. 1994.

vironment. Sandstorm, flood, and deforestation have become common phenomena in China because of environmental destruction in the process of reckless modernization. The human conquest of nature is often celebrated in the modernization project. Zhang’s performances highlight the tension between human will and nature, between human effort and ecology. To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain happens in the Miaofeng Mountain region (May 1995). Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and several other people, including two female performers, participate in the event. The performers line up, take off their clothes, step on a scale, identify themselves by name, and announce their body weight. Then they stack up their bodies on top of each other. Somebody comes over and measures the height of the stacked bodies, which comes to one meter. This absurd and humorous exercise amounts to a critique of the human ambition to change nature. 80

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Zhang Huan. 25 MM Threading Steel. Performance. China. 1995.

Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and others. To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain. Performance. Beijing. 1995.

While stacked on each other with only naked skin visible, Ma and Zhang can be identified in the group. Ma is the one wearing a wristband on his left wrist; Zhang is the one with a shaven head and a queue in the back. (It is interesting to notice how the ownership of this work is claimed. Ma or Zhang? One person owns the copyright of the photograph and the other the copyright of the video.) the naked body politic

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The same conception and implied critique informs Raise the Water Level in a Fish Pond. Zhang Huan and a group of migrant workers stand in the water of a fish pond in a village in the suburbs of Beijing, attempting to raise the water level of the pond with the mass of their bodies. Is this a laughable futile effort or a laudable assertion of the human will? We notice a significant detail in the performance — a child sits on Zhang’s shoulders. Why a child? The future of China? In 3006/M3: 65KG, Zhang Huan, with a body weight of 65 kilograms, faces the immense size of the Watari Museum in Tokyo — 3006 cubic meters. Multiple robes are attached to the museum building on one end and to two big wheels to the other. A fully naked Zhang Huan approaches the wheels and pulls on the ropes as though he intends to bring down the whole building. But as he pulls on the ropes, he himself is in fact pulled by the building in the opposite direction. The wheels roll a little bit toward his intended direction at first but then roll back to the initial position due to the force of the building. How far can human volition go? Can a lone person overcome the environment, a physical structure, a museum, an institution, a tradition? Now we come to a third category of Zhang’s performances. It consists of Zhang Huan’s works outside of China. There is a noticeable change here from his previous works. Rather than focusing on the physical pain of the Chinese artist-citizen, he turns to a nexus of issues concerning cultural identity in a transnational, diasporic, border-crossing context. The examination of the coexistence of different races and cultures in a diasporic background has set the tone for much of his new works. No longer singularly focusing on the fate of the individual of a nation-state, he now dwells on the creation of a transnational subjectivity. There appears to be a change of artistic strategy from third-world national allegory to diasporic identity politics.13 As a result, his art stands at the cutting edge of contemporary critical discourse about art and theory, and thus has been extremely popular in the West. Pilgrimage: Wind and Water in New York was done at the PS 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island, New York, in 1998. It was Zhang’s first major public performance work after his arrival in the US. This is a transitional work, still replete with old-style postures of pain and endurance. But the theme of culture speaks louder this time than before. Religious piety and Eastern rituals are the components of his cultural meditation as a new newcomer to the West. Zhang Huan is the lone performer in this piece. Accompanied by the music and chanting of Tibetan Buddhism, Zhang enters the exhibition space. He kneels down, prostrates himself on the ground, and clasps the wooden clappers in every step. This is the ritual of Tibetan Buddhists on their pilgrimage journey to Lhasa, their holy land. At the center of the arena lies a bed on top of which is a layer of ice. A completely naked Zhang Huan lies down on ice with the inten82

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Zhang Huan. Pilgrimage: Wind and Water in New York. Performance. 1998.

tion of melting it with his body heat. But his body temperature quickly drops to a dangerous level, and he has to get off the bed of ice without being able to melt it. As in his earlier performances in Chinese settings, the experiencing of direct physical pain is still at the heart of this performance. Yet, there is a new element here. “Pilgrimage,” with all its religious and spiritual connotations, has become a regular theme in his works. His pilgrimage to New York, where he now lives, is filled with experiences that alternate between the extremities of heart-warming acculturation and icy-cold nonassimilation. My America: Hard to Acclimatize, a performance at the Seattle Art Museum in 1999, relates such experiences. The work is a refraction of Zhang’s impressions of and encounters in America as a new immigrant. The personal pronoun “my” indicates a personal quest and a private vision. The pursuit of the American Dream is not an easy process for a new immigrant. This elaborate performance involves numerous volunteers and enacts all sorts of rituals. We witness sequences of Tibetan Buddhist rituals, Chinese tai chi, and Western religion. My America consists of elaborately choreographed sequences of performances heavily laden with symbolisms. These sequences seem to indicate different phases of a human experience and various states of a mind. The performance begins with the entrance of Zhang Huan and dozens of naked performers into the exhibition area. Volunteers found by the curator of the museum are all adults, with a wide range in age, and are mostly white, with a few Asians. Again to the sound of Tibetan Buddhist chants and music (drum and trumpet), each performer clasps the wooden clappers in his/her hands, and kneels and prostrates on the floor in every step as he or she advances to the center of the exhibition space, reminiscent of the piety of Tibetan monks. Then in the next sequence, the performers crawl on the floor and howl like dogs and the naked body politic

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Above and facing page: Zhang Huan. My America: Hard to Acclimatize. Performance. Seattle Art Museum. 1999.

wolves. These animal-like creatures create a atmosphere of confusion, chaos, and fear. But immediately in the next sequence they all get up and perform Chinese tai chi, a physical exercise to cultivate harmony and tranquility in the body and mind. Yet at the very end of the tai chi exercise, the performers freeze in a posture of salutation — with a raised right arm, a familiar and terrifying gesture that originated with the ancient Romans and was later adopted by the Nazi Party in Germany (“Heil Hitler!”). The gesture still causes chills in any viewer who has some knowledge of the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the name of their leader (Führer). The naked bodies of performers inevitably bring back the memory of the innocent civilians and Jews who were stripped off their clothing and massacred in concentration camps by the Nazis during World War II. Toward the end of the show, Zhang sits in a chair in the middle of the exhibition space. The other performers throw bread at him, hitting his face, head, and body. The spectator sees pain and agony on the face of Zhang as he endures the endless volleys of bread coming his way. Does this imply the stoning of an outsider, as one recalls a horrible incident in US history in the late nineteenth century, namely, the killing of Chinese immigrants in California with stones? Is it an intimation of ultimate exclusion and failure to assimilate? Or does the performance suggest the welcoming and feeding of foreigners in a nourishing country? Soon after, the performers all come to the center, break and pass bread 84

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to each other in a communal situation. Finally, they all exit the scene, again with a noise that sounds like the howling of hungry dogs and wolves, and run out like a mob of lost animals. These performance sequences seem to describe the ever-changing phases of friendliness and violence, of piety and discordance, that are integral to the trials and tribulations of a new immigrant like Zhang Huan himself. My Australia was a performance at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, Australia in 2000. It is an even grander performance by Zhang Huan after his arrival in the West. In this piece, Australia is represented as a melting pot of different ethnic groups with a long history of immigration. The performances by Zhang and a large number of volunteers enact the relationship between nature and culture, between humanity and the environment, and between human beings and other species (animals). Despite episodes of violence and bloodshed in Australia’s history of immigration and settlement, it seems that a more positive vision of acclimatization, diaspora, and multiculturalism is projected in this work. People from heterogeneous familial and linguistic backgrounds unite under the Australian flag. They go through a religious/ nationalistic ritual of “naturalization” and are baptized to become citizens of a new land. My Australia is one of the longest, most extravagant, and most lyrical performances of Zhang’s to date. The museum commissioned him to do the show. the naked body politic

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Right and facing page: Zhang Huan. My Australia. Performance. National Gallery of Art. Australia. 2000.

Zhang spent a great deal of time preparing for this work by studying the history of Australia. The elaborate sequences evoke a mirage of loaded symbolisms about immigration, naturalization, war, violence, and peace. Over the sound of uplifting religious music and songs, the show begins with the naked Zhang Huan crawling to a tree. He climbs it and poses like an angel in European iconography. A flock of naked performers come over to this “tree of life” and surround Zhang Huan. Nature, nudity, sincerity, and angelic body to lyrical musical refrains make Australia appear to be a blissful land populated by innocent natives and aboriginals in their natural state of existence. In the next sequence, Zhang Huan kneels behind an Australian flag to administer a ritual of initiation, serving very much like a priest in a church. All the performers line up to meet him, and they come over and kneel down one by one, announcing their names and the names of their family members, the names of their fathers and mothers. In this ritual of initiation, confession, and naturalization, they become newborn citizens of a colony. The naked bodies of the performers seem to exude nothing but beauty and naturalness. 86

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In the next sequence, the performers, standing or lying down, freeze and pose like sculptures next to real sculptures outside the National Museum. Art, history, and reality merge, time freezes, and the performance itself is monumentalized as national history by the performers. After the end of this segment of performance, they bring in buckets of water to clean and wash the sculptures and the ground at the site. Then each one of them stands inside a bucket of water as if undergoing a ritual of baptism and purification. Soon after, the music turns somber, and an old man in a green military uniform, the only clothed performer, appears. He sprays a red liquid onto the bodies of the other performers. This seems to point to a bloody chapter of Australian history in the country’s treatment of the aboriginals. After the departure of the uniformed man, the nudes continue to wash their bodies with water and purify their minds in prayer. In the next episode, the performers lie down on the ground as if they were dead and wounded. A thick smoke is released over the site. This painful sight of dead bodies brings back memories of the victims of genocide and atrocities committed against humanity. Lying amid all the bodies is Zhang Huan himself, whose body and hands slightly shake in convulsion. This art show as a whole is a grand reenactment of national history and creates nothing less than a shocking spectacle. Toward the end of this extraordinary performance, all the performers leave the scene except Zhang Huan. And then a flock of sheep arrives. The sheep obviously are an index of the agricultural and indigenous origins of the nation. Yet, Christian religious connotation is unmistakably present as well. Zhang Huan attempts to feed (or misfeed) the sheep with bread, to no avail. He fithe naked body politic

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nally picks up a little lamb and carries it inside the exhibition hall. Inside the museum, Zhang Huan holds the lamb and poses in front of the big sign “Inside Out: New Chinese Art: 3 June – 13 August,” to be photographed by journalists. Then Zhang puts down the lamb, and leisurely strolls inside the museum, looking at the artworks in display, including photographs of his own performance work Raise the Water Level of the Fish Pond, as well as Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky (Tian shu). My Australia thus ends on a humorous, self-reflexive, happy note about the creation of art and the transnational traveling Chinese artist. Many of such later works of Zhang are no longer solo performances of a painful single person, but stage communal experiences involving a multitude of participants in a collective experience on a massive scale. In these elaborate, extravagant, extended spectacles of nudity, Zhang’s language consists of the naked bodies of himself and co-performers together enacting rituals. He creates a collage of symbolisms associated with different cultures for the audience to see and interpret. Here lies the richness, multi-dimensionality, and suggestiveness of his body art. These performances constitute a narrative, an account of the sequence of things that have happened or might happen in real time. The naked body is the most direct and visceral form of art, and yet the body politic is multivalent, profound, and evocative in meaning. Zhang Huan has continued his personal odysseys to other locales. My Australia was followed by My Japan (2001), Pilgrimage to Santiago (2001), My New York (2002), My Sydney (2004), My Boston (2005), My Switzerland (2005), and My Rome (2005). These site-specific performances mix ethnographic details of the cities with Zhang’s personal ruminations about cross-cultural encounters. “My” indicates the transformation of a foreign cityscape into intimate, personal experiences of a particular artist. The naked body of the artist-performer, joined by local volunteer-participants from the cities, enacts such rituals of spiritual quest and cultural acclimatization. Zhang Huan, arriving in the US as a citizen from the People’s Republic of China, is no longer a total foreigner in the West. He is the father of two children who were born in the US and are US citizens. Such a shift in familial affiliation was expressed in his performance Fifty Stars at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati in 2003. Originally conceived as My Cincinnati, Zhang changed the title of his performance to Fifty Stars after the tragedy of September 11, 2001. In it, Zhang wears the uniform of an American police officer, carries two baby dolls and an American flag, and is accompanied by a dog while the American national anthem is played. Zhang lies down on the American flag as the dog sniffs and searches him and the dolls. This sort of experience is what many new immigrants would encounter as they cross the border to the US after 9/11. In such a manner, Zhang tests the boundary between guaranteed civic liberties and national defense against terrorist attacks. Zhang himself has 88

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Zhang Huan. Fifty Stars. Performance. Cincinnati, Ohio. 2003.

made the following remarks about the meaning of this performance: “The policeman and dog symbolize today’s America, especially New York, where you see them everywhere. They give you a very nervous feeling. The U. S. is also the policeman of the world. But after September 11, Americans realize they are no longer safe here.” “My children were born here. They are American citizens.” “I love this country. The American flag in ‘Fifty Stars’ symbolizes the United States and my inspiration was my life here.” 14 As Zhang has planted his feet in America, his works have begun to tackle the collective fate of global terrorism. At the end of the performance Fifty Stars, he releases white doves as tokens of peace. Peace has been a recurrent theme in Zhang’s works, especially in the post9/11 era. Such works include Peace 1 (2001), Peace 2 (2001), Seeds of Hamburg (2002), and Peace (2003). However, Zhang’s awakening to a global consciousness does not imply forgetfulness of his own local roots. He gives the following explanation about his installation/performance Peace in the following words: My installation, entitled “Peace Bell” or “Guarded Bell,” addresses the significance of the Chinese temple bell. It utilized the form of a traditional temple bell and assigns it a new meaning, based on my own personal story. In this installation, numerous people’s names are inscribed on the surface of the bell. All of the names are taken from people I know from the small village where I grew up. These names symbolize the genealogy of my family. the naked body politic

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Zhang Huan. Peace 1. 2000.

Of these people, perhaps half of them have passed away and half of them are still alive. In this installation, a sculptured figure meant to resemble myself rings the bell by its head. This act symbolizes the contact I have with my own life. Invoked by piercing, resonant bell sounds, I try to communicate with my ancestors. When the trace of human civilization starts to vanish 90

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Zhang Huan. Family Tree. 2000.

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with time, history anticipates the coming of future. The bell fills with hope and no longer mourns.15 The bell is therefore a concrete embodiment of the artist’s ancestral tradition. The bronze figure, cast in the shape of Zhang Huan’s body, collides and maintains contact with the bell. Suspended horizontally in midair, the bronze human figure, standing in for Zhang, uses his head to hit the bell and ring in peace by enduring what could be piercing pain, so that history is not forgotten. The vital link to the indigenous tradition in globalized art circuits is also underscored in performances such as Family Tree (2000) and Shanghai Family Tree (2001). In Family Tree, Zhang Huan invites three Chinese calligraphers to inscribe words and stories on his face from dawn to dusk. These are Chinese fables, family tales, and personal recollections, including the famous story “The Old Fool Moves the Mountains” (Yugong yishan). At the end of the day, Zhang’s face is completely blackened. The writings become illegible. Layers and layers of inscription by way of Chinese calligraphy obliterate any recognizable trace on his face. Family Tree is reminiscent of a similar procedure of writing Chinese characters in Qiu Zhijie’s work Copying the “Orchid Pavilion Preface” a Thousand Times (Shuxie yiqianbian Lantingxu, 1992–1995).16 The copying of a master cultural text from ancient China signals identification with tradition and the past on the part of the artist. But the repetition of the same exercise on the same piece of paper up to a thousand times wipes out all previous traces, graphs, and words. Layers of black ink destroy signification and meaning, but at the same time they thicken, solidify, and condense a cherished cultural tradition. In Family Tree, the overdetermined Chinese upbringing and sedimentation of collective and personal history ultimately amount to the obliteration of identity. Yet, the face, the head, and the skull are the sites of Zhang’s unforgettable ancestral lineage. An invisible China speaks through the transnational artist. The Chinese family tree is firmly planted in the soil of the global village.

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chapter five

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“Beautiful Violence” War, Peace, Globalization

Q

Qin Yufen and Beautiful Violence

in Yufen (b. 1954), a Chinese woman artist based in Berlin, Germany, created a gigantic installation, Beautiful Violence (Meili de baoli), at the Mattress Factory, a museum of contemporary art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as part of the exhibition “Visual Sound” in 2001. Beautiful Violence consists of 5.75 miles of barbed wire configured in loops. Multicolored party balloons are attached to the wire. Small speakers suspended from the ceiling play fragments of traditional Chinese flute music and electronically altered noise of balloons rubbing together through an eight-channel audio. Accompanying the installation is a verbal text — memoirs written by Qin Yufen and hung on the wall. Qin composed the reminiscences of her childhood during the socialist years in China when she stayed at the Mattress Factory as a resident artist in February–March 2001. The beginning of the memoirs is translated into English, framed, and posted on the wall at the site of the installation. It reads as follows: One essential element of the composition of Beautiful Violence — text — serves as a long distance lens shot, focused on my early youth in China from 1954– 1970. The nationalism that was advocated at the time, the theory of just wars

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that was pursued, and large and small political campaigns that were carried out in China rationalized violence. This made a kind of virus of rationalized violence which infiltrates our way of thinking through daily life, and becomes our unchangeable principle when evaluating things. Under the “red” ideology, each of us becomes the carrier of the virus in varying degrees. The written part of this artwork uses the experience of a child’s life to analyze the Chinese model of this phenomenon of viral infection. Today, in democratic and non-democratic countries alike, violence is on the rise between states, between nationalities, as well as in daily life. Particularly in Germany where I live, violent incidents of Neo-Nazism take place one after the other, which shocks me. My work Beautiful Violence is a reaction from myself as an artist to what I would call “black” violence. It is not just anger, resistance and worry; more importantly, it is an exploration of the origin and root of this kind of violence. In contrast to “black” violence, “beautiful” violence is the virus of rationalized violence that spreads all over society today. It invades our life through ideology, news media, public education as well as entertainment and consumption in a way that we are not easily aware of. Our infected way of thinking has caused our attitudes and opinions to give black violence space to expand. The work Beautiful Violence questions the social system and the reliability of our way of thinking. It provides us with a point of entry for thinking, and lets us oppose violence from a more fundamental perspective.1 In Qin’s own words, a central theme of this work is the “theory of just wars” (zhengyi de zhanzheng lun), which advocates “rationalized violence,” the use of brute force against people. Qin first speaks of the “red ideology” of rationalized violence symptomatic of the Mao years in China that she experienced and witnessed in her youth. Yet, more broadly, she brings up the question of “black violence” that has become a global phenomenon, including violent incidents against ethnic minorities in Germany and Europe. In these instances, rationalized violence is often tied to what she calls “nationalism” (minzuzhuyi). A visitor to the exhibit is immediately awestruck by the sheer size of the installation. The piece occupies an entire room on the third floor of Mattress Factory. The audience is dwarfed by the immensity of more than five miles of barbed wire in coils. It is impossible for the viewers to take in the entire piece from a single perspective. They must walk around the installation to see the details. The colossal size of the barbed wire poses a real physical threat, pointing to the seriousness and enormity of the problem of violence in society and human history. The layers of jarring juxtapositions of different materials and sentiments in 94

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Qin Yufen. Beautiful Violence. Installation. Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 2001.

this work are provocative enough even for the casual viewer. While barbed wire is a symbol of division, separation, imprisonment, violence, hate, and war, the colorful balloons in red, orange, green, purple, and white are associated with joy, festivity, life, and unity. Some balloons are fully inflated, while others are pierced and deflated, lying on the floor as if they stood for victims of cruel violence. The soft, fragile, colorful balloons form a strong contrast to the dull gray web of hard wire. The barbs on the wire are all red, possibly alluding to war, blood, and more specifically to what Qin Yufen mentioned as “red ideology” in communist China. The installation is a juxtaposition of the extreme opposites of war and peace in our world. The artwork elicits feelings of both happiness and thwarted hope. In the course of the exhibition, the staff of the museum periodically replaces the broken balloons with new ones. This continual process of replacement and replenishment may also point to the inevitable cycles of life — death, destruction, and renewal. The balloons are “individuals” in society, who are engulfed in conflicts and become the victims of violence and war. Furthermore, “party balloons” are most closely associated with children’s parties, or children. These symbols of innocence, hope, and the future are, then, subject to cruel violence. Even given the massive size of aggressive barbed wire, the world is not entirely hopeless. The balloons, no matter how vulnerable they are, are continually re-

“beautiful violence”

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plenished and changed during the days and months of the exhibition. So the human cycle of life continues amid adversity and destruction. In regard to the sound aspect of the work, the audio channels play a mixture of melodious traditional Chinese flute music and the noises of balloons rubbing against each other. Harmony and dissonance are both built into the texture of the installation. The grating, harsh sound of balloons rubbing together alternates with interludes of soothing, peaceful flute music. Again we experience the simultaneity of opposite forces at the level of sound: these noises of conflicts and collisions — the balloons — are now and then drowned out by serene, harmonious traditional Chinese music, and vice versa. Beautiful Violence is a synthetic visual-audio-verbal text. Besides the visual and sound elements, the verbal text is also a component of the installation. A long autobiographical text written in Chinese is posted on the wall in entirety as part of the work. However, only the first segment of the text is translated into English and made available to the general audience. Chinese-language speakers can read the whole narrative text by Qin. The narrative was first written in the month of February 2001, and the last entry ends on March 4, 2001. During this period, Qin lived at the Mattress Factory to work on her installation. The memoir was very much a private soulsearching narrative, as Qin related the big and small things that had happened in her life in Beijing during 1954–1970. She recounted many interesting and revealing episodes from her childhood. For instance, Beijing residents were told to prepare for war and build “air-defense tunnels” (fangkong dong) in the early 1970s. Short of construction materials, Qin and her schoolmates went to the remains of the centuries-old city wall of Beijing and took away some wall bricks to build the tunnels. Each of these ancient bricks measures 30 centimeters wide, 60 centimeters long, and 15 centimeters in height, and weighs about 20 kilograms. It was a hellish job for little schoolchildren at Qin’s tender age to move these bricks to the construction site as building blocks for China’s future. But in the name of nation building and socialism, children were indoctrinated to willingly shoulder the burden of revolution and the motherland. Qin also describes her experiences of watching films in her childhood. Her elementary school often organized students to watch films as a revolutionary educational experience. She never liked war films that involved killing and bloodshed, and tried to escape from seeing them as often as possible. But she did end up seeing a few classic Chinese war films such as Tunnel Warfare (Didao zhan), Railroad Guerrilla (Tiedao youjidui), Heartbreak Ridge (Shanggan ling), and Heroic Sons and Daughters (Yingxiong ernü). Like most Chinese viewers in her time, Qin was fascinated and touched by the beautiful theme song of the film Heroic Sons and Daughters, “My Motherland” (Wo de zuguo), sung by the singer Guo Lanying. The film depicts the heroism of Chinese soldiers in the 96

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Korean War and has become a classic of Chinese patriotic film. The song “My Motherland” has been a hit for generations of mainland Chinese in its own right. It also became one of Qin’s favorite songs in her childhood. The song expresses the love of the Chinese people for their country and their readiness to defend it — to engage in a just war. The last entry of the memoirs is written on March 4, 2001. A full translation of the text goes as follows: Today is the first day after the inauguration of Visual Sound. Only now can I rest and visit the National Aviary in Pittsburgh, the Vogel Haus. To be honest, I have not visited a zoo for at least 15 years. But going to this bird house is like attending a live exhibition of visual sound. The rare and precious birds in different colors and sizes sing songs. I could hardly tear myself away. Being in this world of birds, my thoughts travel back to the time when I worked at the Beijing Zoo while in high school. During my first year of high school, the school organized students to go the zoo to help with the workers and at the same time spread Mao Zedong Thought. Several of us women students were assigned to work in the elephant house. I remember there were three to four elephants. The elephant house was rectangular in shape, with wood fences around it. Outside the elephant house, there was a big yard where the elephants could play and perform. We usually went to kitchen to fetch food — carrots, rice, sugar, and so on, for the elephants. We mixed rice and sugar to make buns of ten centimeters in diameter, and then put them in the noses of the elephants to feed them. At other times, we stayed near the elephants and read Sayings of Mao for visitors. I could almost memorize the whole red book, and could recite some famous sayings and short phrases. Several classmates and I recited phrases from Sayings of Mao and sang songs of them, either separately or in unison. We sang such Mao songs as “Revolution is not a dinner party, not writing a refined essay . . .” at least a hundred times. If the elephants could speak Chinese, could sing songs under this kind of forceful education, they must have been spreading Mao Zedong Thought with us [my translation]. The thrust of criticism and target of satire in this verbal text is the kind of dehumanizing brainwashing that people suffered in the Mao era whether adults or children. In the name of advancing revolutionary thought, human intelligence is reduced to the level of mechanical repetition of animal behavior. By virtue of its overwhelming size, powerful message, and level of complexity, Beautiful Violence should be rated as a “sublime” work of art created by Qin Yufen. It stands out as a unique piece in Qin’s oeuvre, for she has been known for the “beauty” and poetic quality of her installations.2 Her creations often evoke and represent the aesthetics and sensibility of the world of ancient “beautiful violence”

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Qin Yufen. Lotus in Wind (Feng he). Installation. Beijing, China. 1994.

China. “Tranquility,” “calm,” and harmony are the “Eastern” qualities that are conveyed in many of her pieces. Abstract postmodern installation art turns into classical Chinese poetry in her hands. A particularly memorable installation by her, which matches Beautiful Violence in scale, imagination, and boldness, in my opinion, is Lotus in Wind (Feng he), completed in 1994. Qin scattered ten thousand Chinese lotus fans in Kunming Lake at the Imperial Summer Palace (Yi he yuan) in the suburbs of Beijing. Man-made objects — lotus fans in yellow and white, lie next to natural green lotuses in the blue water of Kunming Lake. This massive invasion of nature by wasteful human products calls upon the spectator to seriously ponder her/his relationship to the environment. Nature and artifice, and humanity and the world come into uneasy cohabitation in this tranquil yet disturbing installation. Lotus fans aspire to be like nature, whereas natural lotuses imitate art. But at the same time the serenity of nature is interrupted and disfigured by the intrusion of human volition, leaving behind ruins and scars. Having a similar creative principle but a different message, Beautiful Violence directs our attention to the arbitrary, ghastly violence and division in our world by way of clever artistic juxtapositions of disparate materials.

Excursion into the Theory of “Just War” At the surface level, Beautiful Violence is a commentary about violence in the history of communist China and contemporary Germany. But the power of 98

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the work has a global resonance. As Qin herself indicated, this work is about both “red” ideology and “black” violence. Completed in early 2001, Beautiful Violence is unquestionably a prophetic, visionary work of art, for it addresses the most fundamental issues in international politics today, presaging a series of contemporary events such as 9/11 in 2001 and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. The work transcends the Chinese origins of Qin’s childhood and youth as well as personal experiences of living in Germany as an immigrant and a foreigner. Indeed, the theory of “just wars” has been a cornerstone of the political landscape in the so-called New World Order. The first Persian Gulf War of 1991 and the Kosovo War of 1999 have redefined international relations. The sovereignty of the nation-state aside, the United States, the sole superpower, could legitimately invade and attack a country in the name of a just war, a war based on human rights considerations. Human rights take precedence over national sovereignty. In fighting the first Gulf War and the Kosovo War, the United States was able to garner international support, usually under the aegis of the United Nations. It led multinational coalition forces in its intervention in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia. In other words, the “sovereignty” of a given nation-state is no longer the determining criterion in international relations as established after the end of the World War II. In the New World Order, the United States, sometimes in the name of the United Nations, is endowed with a policing power; it can launch a “just war” against an unruly country in the international community. In their influential book Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri regard this phenomenon as the reemergence of a form of sovereignty, or what they call “Empire.” Empire, or imperial sovereignty, as distinct from the old imperialism based on the unit of the nation-state, is global and knows no spatial boundaries. Empire is a supranational order, a juridical formation in a time of economic and cultural globalization. As Hardt and Negri explain: “One symptom, for example, is the renewed interest in and effectiveness of the concept of bellum justum, or ‘just war.’ This concept, which was organically linked to the ancient imperial orders and whose rich and complex genealogy goes back to the biblical tradition, has begun to reappear recently as a central narrative of political discussions, particularly in the wake of the Gulf War.” 3 Although not a supranational organization beyond and above specific nation-states, the United States has invariably become the vehicle of such a new empire in terms of action, having assumed the “right of police,” “the right of intervention,” by “appeal to essential values of justice.” 4 The authors of Empire take pains to describe the passage of sovereignty from the form of the nation-state to empire, which they consider a paradigm change, an epochal shift in global politics, in their efforts to formulate a theory of glo“beautiful violence”

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balization. As indicated earlier, a premise of this new political theory of sovereignty is based on the notion of universal consensus, sometimes sanctioned by the UN, to launch a “just war” against a renegade regime, be it Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which invaded Kuwait, or Serbia engaged in ethnic cleansing. However, the elegant theorizing about the emergent empire is all too quickly shattered by the unauthorized American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the second Gulf War. The United States failed to win the approval of the UN and attacked Iraq unilaterally. Rather than the emergence and consolidation of an empire, the world is sundered into various geopolitical groups: the European Union led by France and Germany; Russia; China; the Arab League; and so on. Each of these groups has its own interests and designs. It seems that George W. Bush has led the world into a post–New World Order and departed from the order his father established after the first Gulf War a decade ago. In the eyes of many other countries, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq is far from being a just war. Rather, it is the naked, unabashed assertion of American hegemony, an old-fashioned imperialist (not imperial) domination of the world serving the political and economic interests of a single nation-state: the USA. To use the felicitous title of Qin Yufen’s powerful work of art, the American invasion of another country is nothing less than an act of “beautiful violence.” Barbed wires between national borders are dismantled for the sake of a superpower’s global domination, if that is what is called “globalization” these days. Again using the insightful words of Qin, this rationalized violence is an infectious “virus” that is everywhere, in “ideology, mass media, public education as well as entertainment and consumption.” This is a lethal virus, very much like SARS, that quickly spreads among people and literally kills them. Grand theory in the style of Hardt and Negri announces the advent of empire prematurely. It seems that the world is facing a renewed imperialism.

Cai Guo-Qiang: Of Gunpowder, Explosives, and Arrows As suggested by Beautiful Violence, our contemporary world is still marked by borders, walls, divisions, and even hatred, although we are supposed to have entered the “age of globalization.” Our mode of thinking is appropriately postmodern schizophrenia, a split mentality. Qin attempts to bring fragments of the world and the dualities of our lives into dialogue and contestation through multilayered constructions within single works. Her idiosyncratic “Eastern” and occasionally “feminine” sensibility makes the theme of violence even more obtrusive and incongruent amid the artistic aims of calm and peace. By way of contrast, it is fruitful to bring up at this juncture the works of another Chinese avant-garde artist, Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957), based in New York City, who habitually meditates on the predicament of globalization from the male 100

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perspective of an émigré Chinese artist. Cai’s famed explosion series endlessly elaborates on the dialectic of war and peace, border and borderlessness, and nationalism and globalization in world history. In regard to the multiple uses and symbolism of gunpowder in Chinese society, Cai offers his take on the issue: In China every significant social occasion of any kind, good or bad, weddings, funerals, the birth of a baby, a new home — is marked by the explosion of fireworks. They even use fireworks when they elect Communist party officials, or after someone delivers a speech. Fireworks are like the town crier, announcing whatever’s going on in town. . . . I saw gunpowder used in both good ways and bad, in destruction and reconstruction. Gunpowder was invented in China as a by-product of alchemy. It is still called “fire medicine” because it was accidentally created during an attempt to produce a medicine.5 The vehicle of Cai’s art, gunpowder, is both a weapon of destruction and the material for festivities in peaceful times. Gunpowder can lead to war or peace. He explodes gunpowder, an ancient Chinese invention, at numerous sites in the world. The shadow of war hovers over his explosions at sites such as Nevada (where the first nuclear bomb was tested) and Hiroshima (where the first nuclear bomb was dropped), sites that have been painfully associated with mass destruction and violence. At other times, gunpowder is used to celebrate peace, friendship, and happiness at various centers of civilization. Wondrously patterned fireworks hailed from ancient Japan in Project for Heiankyo 1200th Anniversary: Celebration from Chang’an (1994; ca. 2,600 pounds of burning sake). In Project for Extraterrestrials No. 32: Dragon Sight Sees Vienna (Museumsquatier, Kunsthalle Wien, November 6, 1999; 15 kilograms of gunpowder, 600 meters of fuse, duration 16 seconds), dragon-shaped fireworks on top of the Art Museum of Vienna illuminated the sky and inaugurated a new millennium to the cheering crowd of a European cultural center. Gunpowder could also be used to package and sell fashion and beauty in a time of peace and luxury in works such as Dragon: Explosion on Issey Miyake Clothing (Paris, 1998). Gunpowder was exploded directly on women’s garments and left the imprints in the form of a Chinese (male) dragon. Shapely models of various ethnicities (white, black, Asian) paraded this line of designer clothes and strutted their way on the stage. This ingenious use of gunpowder with an Asian flavor thus created a subtle realignment of gender, race, masculinity, and femininity in a transnational context. Project to Add 10,000 Meters to the Great Wall (Jiayu Pass, China, 1993; ca. 1,320 pounds of gunpowder and 6,500 feet of gunpowder fuses; duration of explosion 15 minutes) was a massive, spectacular display of such a reflection on “beautiful violence”

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Cai Guo-Qiang. Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows. Installation. 1998.

the boundary between war and peace, nationalism and globalization, China and the world. The Great Wall has stood for millennia as a monument to both division and isolation. What did it mean to extend the Great Wall by 10,000 meters at Jiayu Pass, the western border of the Ming dynasty, in the so-called borderless world? Was this an affirmation of Chinese solidarity, or a questioning and mocking of some outdated sense of national unity? Among Cai’s well-known works is Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows (Caochuan jiejian), which was part of the New Chinese Art Exhibition at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center on Long Island in 1998. The work derives from a famous Chinese story dating back to the Three Kingdoms period. The legendary commander of the small Shu army, Zhuge Liang, launched empty boats with dummy straw soldiers across the Yangtze River on a foggy day. The powerful Wei army mistook this as an invasion and consequently fired tens of thousands of arrows at the enemy boats. In this way, Zhuge Liang “borrowed” an enemy’s arrows to equip his own troops.6 Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows entails the same kind of interpretive ambiguity as Project to Add 10,000 Meters to the Great Wall. It is also tempting to read this work as an assertion of Chinese nationalism and thus lose the irony. Understood in such a way, the backward Chinese state borrows and steals Western technology in order to defeat advanced Western powers. But in the age of globalization, the trafficking of technology, ideas, goods, and images tends to be a two-way exchange. Such processes can be liberating or subversive to a given 102

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society at both receiving ends of the circuit. Foreign arrows can also create unexpected headaches for a regime. “Whose arrows, one wonders, are being used against whom?” 7 Cai does not hesitate to give his own explanation of this intriguing work that has sparked controversy in regard to some latent Chinese nationalist import. He speaks for himself as follows: Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows was a work on Chinese philosophy. When I made it in 1998 . . . , I was thinking mostly of the trauma of cultural conflicts and the price you pay for opening up. The other aspect of the work is the idea of using the strengths of one’s opponents to empower oneself, as in Chinese martial arts in contrast to Western boxing. I’m interested in exploring these opposing dynamics in my work. Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows is a wooden boat suspended in mid-air, struck with 3,000 arrows and with a red Chinese flag at the tail end, blown by a small electric fan. Even though you feel that the arrows symbolize wounding and pain, at the same time the boat is uplifted; the features of the arrows enable it, at it were, to take flight. So there is a beautiful contradiction which resembles elements in Chinese martial arts. To describe it in basic terms, in Western boxing if the opponent is hit in the face hard enough he falls, so it’s easy to decide who’s won. In Chinese martial arts it’s much more complex, more internal. The exchanges are more subtle, often using the opponent’s own force to defeat him. Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows was perceived by much of the Western media as a very nationalistic work, pitting Chinese against Western culture, but I didn’t perceive it this way.8 According to Cai, this work attempts to illustrate a Chinese philosophy, a certain way of looking at the world. People do not exist in a state of absolute opposites and stark antagonisms, in a world of impossible differences between black and white, East and West. Things, categories, and events change, move, and sometimes evolve into their opposites. “Using the strengths of one’s opponents to empower oneself” implies a multichannel exchange of ideas, techniques, and technologies. Identity ceaselessly moves into difference, and vice versa. Such is the logic of the still ill-defined, so-called phenomenon of globalization.9 After many years of success at international art circuits outside China, Cai finally won acclaim and official recognition in his original home country, China. He became a major presence at the Shanghai Biennial in 2000. More significantly, he was invited to create spectacular fireworks to mark the conclusion of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in Shanghai in 2001. (The work is entitled APEC Cityscape Fireworks, October 20, 2001; 20,000 shots of explosives.) This time the Chinese explosion artist could create something on his native soil for an official political event, which was attended “beautiful violence”

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Cai Guo-Qiang. Transient Rainbow. New York. 2002.

by dignitaries such as Chinese president Jiang Zemin and American president George W. Bush. Fireworks launched from barges in the Huangpu River illuminated the sky of the Bund, the old colonial quarter. On the other side of Huangpu River is the showcase of China’s economic reform, the Pudong district of Shanghai, now crowded with gleaming skyscrapers made of steel and glass. 104

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Cai Guo-Qiang. Inopportune. North Adams, Massachusetts. 2004.

Cai’s international fame continues to grow. To celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year in 2003 in London, Cai created a firework spectacle — a gigantic dragon across Thames River. As a diasporic Chinese, he was a logical choice for such a task. Cai’s beautiful fireworks on such occasions were meant to celebrate regional prosperity and global cooperation. Boundaries between nation-states should dissolve and disappear in the joint efforts to build a new global world order that would facilitate unfettered flows of ideas and products. But stark realities and historical events often confound human predictions. Ironically, gunpowder and firearms are now being employed again and again for the purpose of war in the name of ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction. We can only hope that what was a beautiful human invention to mark joy and festivity does not all too easily turn into “beautiful violence.” Since September 11, 2001, the phenomenon of explosion, which lies at the heart of Cai’s artistic projects, has become a painful reality in the everyday life of ordinary people around the world, especially in the US, and particularly in New York City where Cai resides. Therefore, it was only appropriate for the Museum of Modern Art in New York to commission Cai to choreograph an explosion over the East River in Manhattan and Queens in 2002. Transient Rainbow was a hauntingly beautiful spectacle of fireworks that lit up the sky over New York at night. And to mark the 150th anniversary of Central Park in New York City, Cai created another visual spectacle. At 7:45 p.m. on September 15, 2003, Cai’s work Light Cycle exploded and illuminated the sky above Central “beautiful violence”

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Park. The huge circle of fireworks, 1,000 feet in diameter, rang in prosperity, hope, and peace to New York, something all the more needed in the aftermath of the explosions in downtown Manhattan on the tragic day of 9/11.10 Cai also relentlessly pursues the spectacles of car bombs — which has been a trademark of terrorist attacks in our time. Works such as Inopportune (North Adams, Massachusetts, 2004) and Auto-Destruct (Herford, Germany, 2005) remind the audience of recent political events in the world and the “inopportune” moment of our collective historical existence. The fiery explosion of cars is at once enticing, terrifying, and sobering. Here, Cai’s Chinese fireworks have gone beyond narrow national origins to engage the widespread concerns of a world that is diversely multipolar and yet led by the US, the lone superpower. The erstwhile dichotomy between globalism and nationalism that was used in the discussion of overseas Chinese artists misses the real point. As Xiaoping Lin concludes in analyzing the works of Cai Guo-Qiang, Zhang Huan, and Xu Bing, “these three New York-based overseas Chinese avant-garde artists have assumed a ‘postmodern, globalist identity.’ ” 11 These artists born and raised in the People’s Republic of China respond willy-nilly to the perils and demands of a world situation from which no responsible citizen can escape. In the words of another art historian, Wu Hung, “Cai Guo-Qiang is another artist who has made the global/local dialogue a central theme of his art.”12 For Qin Yufen, Cai Guo-Qiang, and others, the transnational enactment of artistic rituals and rites generates global resonance precisely because it draws from native inspiration.

Besides Explosion: Postsocialist Afterthought? Cai is also an art collector. He holds a collection of the paintings of Konstantin Maksimov, a Soviet painter who came to China in the 1950s and taught in the Central Academy of Art, introducing the doctrine of the practice of socialist realism to Chinese art students. Today’s art world knows very little about this man and his work, which exists only in the memories of die-hard socialist pupils like Cai Guo-Qiang, who is himself, ironically, such a well-placed figure in the contemporary capitalist art market. Are we witnessing the return of the repressed, the slipping back of socialist nostalgia at the very hour of personal triumph in the capitalist world-system? The 1950s were the honeymoon years of Sino-Soviet friendship, when China systematically brought Soviet institutions and practices into its own yard. The influence of Soviet culture in China is still incalculably resilient even half a century later, long after the “Soviet experts” (Sulian zhuanjia) left China. Chinese children of Cai’s generation grew up in the shadow of the giant socialist neighbor. Cai worked his way up in the Chinese socialist educational system that was based on the Soviet model. In Shanghai in 2002, Cai mounted an exhibition of 106

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Konstantin Maksimov. Portrait of a Chinese Sailor. 1956. Oil on canvas. 20 x 25 cm (7.87 x 9.84 in.). Cai Guo-Qiang collection.

Maksimov’s paintings and drawings. This was a Chinese art student’s homage to a forgotten teacher and a trashed artistic doctrine. The socialist legacy does not easily disappear from the mind of a Chinese artist. (In his explosion mode, Cai did not forget the political complexities of a postsocialist society in transition, for example in a work such as Red Flag [Warsaw, 2005].) Indeed, it is socialist art that once brought international distinction to Cai in a major way. At the 48th Venice Biennial in 1999, he was given the International Award for his project Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard. But this work is a replica of a massive Chinese original, Rent Collection Courtyard (Shou zu yuan). The latter is a clay group sculpture consisting of more than one hundred life-sized figures, completed by artists in Sichuan province in the 1960s. The work has been a classic of socialist realist art in China. The realistically depicted emotions and figures narrate the oppression and exploitation of peasants by rich landlords, as well as a consequent revolutionary uprising to overthrow the old system. In vivid group sculpture, Chinese peasants’ bodies are being abused, beaten, and whipped by the evil, cruel rulers. These frozen statues expressing intense feelings speak of toil, labor, suffering, and pain. The belated staging of revolutionary socialist art at the heart of a prestigious Western art venue — the Venice Biennial — is a significant statement about the nature of art and politics. “beautiful violence”

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Konstantin Maksimov. Shanghai Harbor II, China Series. 1957. Oil on canvas. 65.5 x 46 cm (25.79 x 18.11 in.). Cai Guo-Qiang Collection.

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Cai Guo-Qiang. Red Flag. Warsaw, Poland. 2005.

Cai Guo-Qiang. Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard. Clay Sculpture. 48th Venice Biennial. 1999.

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Long March Art Educational Project. Photograph taken in front of Lu Xun Art Academy in Yan’an. Spring 2006. Second on right is Cai Guo-Qiang.

Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard is thus a powerful comment on the nature of the capitalist economic system to which art, art patronage, and art exhibition must be subjected. The work points to an alternative as to how art can be produced and given a useful function. As typical of artistic production in Red China in those years, Rent Collection Courtyard is the result of anonymous, “collective authorship” (jiti chuangzuo). It does not purport to be the product of any one individual but the result of the teamwork of a group of self-effacing artists who were not interested in establishing their own names. No one owns this work of art. In making the replica, Cai and his team worked on ten tons of clay to construct more than one hundred clay figures. At the same time, the replica was decontextualized from the Chinese original and recontextualized as a piece of conceptual art in the space of an international exhibition. Yet, the final product was credited to one artist, an East–West cultural broker, Cai, when the final moment of international recognition at the Biennial came. Unsurprisingly, Cai’s bold appropriation of a revolutionary classic was controversial for art educators and critics in China. The Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts accused Cai of violating the copyright of the original creators of Rent Collection Courtyard. This time, the academy was operating on the principle of 110

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individual ownership of artworks characteristic of a capitalist economy. They were reclaiming the long neglected private property of an institution that had rejected such a notion as reactionary and bourgeois in the revolutionary period. The lawsuit was predictably inconclusive. But this anecdote does shed light on a number of issues in the trafficking of ideas and artworks between China and the West. On the one hand, Cai’s cross-cultural transference of a Chinese work of art was a daring, venturous move that ultimately won him personal glory and international prestige. He gained cultural capital by cashing in on uncopyrighted socialist art that criticizes and exposes the capitalist money system. On the other hand, the academy’s lawsuit against the infringement of the copyright of a socialist artwork, which is by definition public and collective, is blindly anachronistic and humorously absurd. The anger at a former countryman for stealing an intellectual property right seems misdirected. By being so upset by the incident, the academy is oblivious to its own great artistic tradition at the very moment it is trying to reclaim it. Cai’s love affair with China’s socialist legacy continues unabated. He spearheaded the Long March Educational Project in May 2006. Led by Cai, a group of Chinese artists, art critics, art educators, and curators congregated at the holy site of the Chinese revolution, Yan’an, and together discussed the prospects of China’s future art education. Yan’an became the Red Capital after the Chinese Red Army reached northern Shaanxi at the end of the legendary Long March. It was also the place where Mao gave his influential “Yan’an Talks on Literature and Arts,” which later dominated cultural production in the People’s Republic of China during the Mao era. Cai’s example again testifies to the fact that the revolutionary past does not simply fade away in the consciousness of Chinese artists, no matter how deeply entangled they may have become in global (capitalist) art circuits.

“beautiful violence”

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part three

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Sinophone Cinema and Postsocialist Television

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chapter six

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Hollywood, China, Hong Kong Representing the Chinese Nation-State in Filmic Discourse

M

edia theorists and cultural critics have argued that the post–Cold War era is the age of transnational media and cultural globalization. Transnationalization, in this formulation, breaks down national barriers and extends to the remote corners of the globe. Globalization, as succinctly defined by Roland Robertson, “refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole.”1 This space-time compression has in part been brought about by the spread of new communication technologies across the globe. Residents of third-world countries can gain easy access to the cultural products of the first world such as film, TV programs, popular music, and fashion. At first glance, the primacy of the nation-state is fading, and cultural production and consumption occur frequently at the local, transnational, and global levels.2 Such a view seems to be confirmed by the global box-office success of the Hollywood blockbuster Titanic in 1998. The film was widely seen all over the world, including in Chinese-speaking communities — mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong — and even won the praise of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin.3 As Titanic suggests, the transnational distribution of Western cultural prod-

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ucts appears to have the power to transcend geographic barriers and ideological differences. For example, the Disney animated film Mulan (which had been banned by Chinese censors because of Disney’s production of Kundun, which touched on the sensitive topic of Tibet) was finally released in mainland China in 1999, one year after it was already screened elsewhere in the world. As a contemporary Western hi-tech rendition of a centuries-old Chinese folktale, the film has now entered the film market of the original home country and further proves the invincibility of transnational media. Mulan reveals how the memory and deep history of indigenous cultures are being hollowed out and appropriated by giant media corporations, with the result that subjectivities and cultural identities across the globe are reconstituted in accordance with the operations of capital and the market. Therefore, identity formation has increasingly become a “horizontal” process — in which identities are traded like commodities across national borders — as opposed to being a “vertical” construction based on the time-honored traditions of local communities and their status hierarchies. Yet theorists also point out that the irreversible process of modernization / postmodernization does not necessarily mean the eclipse of the nation in cultural formation. Mike Featherstone argues that “theories of modernity which emphasize a relentless process of instrumental rationalization which effectively ‘empties out’ a society’s repository of cultural traditions and meanings are misconceived.” 4 In this chapter, I want to expand on such claims, showing, in particular, how mainland China and the West have drawn upon history, memory, and tradition in the imaging and imagining of modern “China” as an object of representation in film. As I intend to demonstrate, the portrayal of China and of Chinese identity in both Hollywood and mainland films has not been able to escape the trap of national and political stereotyping. In both sets of films, East does not meet West in any mutually enriching way. Only in films made in Hong Kong during the period under discussion is the possibility of a truly transnational perspective explored. The rare historic moment of the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 aroused tremendous worldwide interest in questions about “China” and Chinese national identity. Who is a Chinese? Who is a Hong Kongese? What does China or “Chineseness” refer to? In a number of films and other popular cultural products made in 1997, China as a nation-state and a geopolitical entity and Chinese/Hong Kongese as a national and cultural identity became the subjects of representation. In this study, I briefly examine three clusters of films released since 1997: Hollywood films about China and Tibet; mainland Chinese films about modern Chinese history; and Hong Kong films about Chinese/ Hong Kongese identity. My purpose is to discover and compare the critical assumptions in these films about the nation-state, nationality, and identity in regard to the subject of China. This critique is especially important given that, 116

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due to censorship, political control, and film distribution networks, Chinese and American audiences do not get to watch the films of the other countries, and thus remain blind to other points of view.

Hollywood’s China In 1997–1998, a series of highly publicized Hollywood films related to China were released: Kundun, Seven Years in Tibet, Red Corner, and Chinese Box. All these films depict various ethnicities and employ an international cast of actors and actresses; in that sense, they seem to be transnational. Yet, although the Hollywood and Chinese films are diametrically opposed to each other in ideology and historical representation, they are all premised on the notions of the nation-state, fi xed territoriality, and sovereignty. In fact, a residual Cold War politics informs these Hollywood productions, as is obvious from their consistently heavy-handed recourse to anti-Red sentiments or cultural stereotypes. Film critics based in the US have not failed to notice the overtly political intentions of Red Corner. As a matter of fact, the film and its lead actor, Richard Gere, have received some of the worst and most disparaging reviews for a bigbudget Hollywood film. Roger Ebert flatly states that “Red Corner plays like a xenophobic travelogue crossed with Perry Mason.” “To some degree,” Ebert continues, “Gere set himself up by appearing in this film; as an outspoken critic of China and follower of the Dalai Lama, he has a case to plead. It’s surprising, then, that he chooses to do it so lamely in such a lugubrious movie.” 5 In his review article “Corner: A Heavy-Handed Battle with Justice in China,” Kenneth Turan characterizes the film in a similar way: “its one-man-against-the-system story is hackneyed and the points it thinks it’s making about the state of justice in China are hampered by an attitude that verges on the xenophobic.” For Turan, the Chinese as presented in the film “are among the most sinister and unsmiling group of Asians to emerge from Hollywood since the ‘Beasts from the East’ movies of World War II.” 6 In her review “Red Corner: Melodrama Cum Credibility Snag,” Janet Maslin points out: “Red Corner shows an earnest, committed interest in criticizing Chinese totalitarianism (the film’s opening date, timed to President Jiang Zemin’s visit, is apparently no accident) even as it piles on some of the standard twists and turns associated with cinematic trial stories.” 7 As these reviewers’ comments suggest, the heavy dose of anti–Red China ideology and the forceful performance of Richard Gere diminish the film’s credibility. Kundun, a visually stunning work, released in the same period, is nevertheless troubled by similar problems. It is perhaps appropriate that Kundun was directed by none other than Martin Scorsese, a former altar boy in a Roman Catholic church, who once contemplated becoming a priest and who made the h o l ly wo o d, c h i n a , h o n g k o n g

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film The Last Temptation of Christ. The lofty spiritual aspirations of Kundun are what make the film beautiful and compelling. However, as critics have noted, this deep spirituality “denies the Dalai Lama humanity; he is permitted certain little human touches, but is essentially an icon, not a man.” The enchanting visuals and music are “an aid to worship: the [film] wants to enhance, not question.” 8 Religious iconography thus takes over and any chance for a realistic representation is lost. The simplistic portrayal of pious Tibetans and the gross caricature of the Chinese in the film also stand in the way of an engaging drama. One reviewer states that “In the film’s most jarring sequence, the boy, now a teenager, travels to Beijing for a meeting with Mao Zedong, whom Robert Lin plays as a shrill, campy caricature.” For him, “Scorsese has made a film that is as much as a prayer as it is a movie.”9 In the words of another reviewer, “both Kundun and the earlier and sillier Seven Years in Tibet have had trouble making Tibet’s plight as moving as it ought to be. And Kundun’s decision to turn Chairman Mao (Robert Lin) into an oddly fey and borderline campy maximum leader does not help the situation.”10 The viewer cannot help but compare Kundun, a biopic of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, with the highly successful epic film The Last Emperor by Bertolucci. The lives of these two historical figures are similar in many respects. What makes The Last Emperor a much more credible and moving tale is precisely the depiction of the emperor from early childhood to old age as a deeply human figure caught in a complex web of historical events and the avoidance of stereotypical representations of Chinese characters, whether they are communist officials or loyal subjects of the emperor. Hollywood’s fascination with Tibet/China in this period resulted in another major picture: Seven Years in Tibet. It is the story of the adventures of Heinrich Harrer, an Austrian mountain climber in the 1930s and 1940s. Like Red Corner, which showcases Gere, the film is essentially a star vehicle for Brad Pitt, who plays the role of Harrer.11 The story details Harrer’s departure from Austria for Tibet, his mountain climbing in Tibet, the hardships he endured as a prisoner in a British concentration camp during World War II, and finally his return to Tibet and his meeting with the Dalai Lama after the war. Yet, the film does not escape the same anti–Red China bias toward the end of its narrative. The director inserts horrendous scenes of the invasion of Tibet by masses of Chinese soldiers at a time when Harrer had already gone back to Europe after his “seven years in Tibet” and had nothing to do with this period of Tibetan history. In the words of one film critic, what is lamentable is that “Perhaps suspecting that his audience is falling asleep, Annaud ends Tibet with violent but pointless scenes of the 1950 Chinese invasion.” 12 Chinese Box, directed by Wayne Wang, which tackles the subject of Hong 118

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Kong’s reversion to China, also suffers from heavy-handed political allegory and a simplistic delineation of East–West cultural dynamics. The film depicts the lives of several people living in Hong Kong on the eve of its return to mainland China. John (Jeremy Irons), a British journalist who will die of leukemia in a matter of six months, Vivian (Gong Li), a nightclub hostess and an ex-prostitute from mainland China, Jean (Maggie Cheung), a Hong Kong street girl with a scarred face — these characters are, respectively, none too subtle symbols of Great Britain, mainland China, and Hong Kong. Early in a party scene in the film, a student/democracy fighter shoots himself to death as a gesture to warn the residents of Hong Kong of the impending loss of their freedom, which is assumed will occur after the handover of Hong Kong to China. Clearly the film is siding here with a pro-Western, anti-China position in a way that falls back on stereotypes and unexamined assumptions about East and West. In addition to its overt political symbolism, the film also harks back to orientalist representations of Hong Kong and the East. Reviewer Kevin Thomas reminds the viewer: “John is the dashing, reflective but impassioned AngloSaxon and Li’s Vivian the dazzling Asian beauty from countless movies and plays past. Anyone hear strains of Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing? Echoes of Suzie Wong?” 13 Elements of Cold War ideology, East–West political antagonism, and entrenched orientalist habits of thought inform these Hollywood films.14 Indeed, it seems that politicizing cultural production from and about China or Tibet has been a time-honored manner of dealing with postsocialist China in the West, even in the post–Cold War era. See, for instance, a simple advertisement page in The New York Times. In a May 1999 edition, there is an advertisement for a new film about China, directed by the former Chinese actress, now a Chinese-American actress, Joan Chen (Chen Chong) — Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl. The advertisement includes the words: “Banned in China for sexual and political content.” 15 As this sentence suggests, the worth of this film seems to depend on its having been banned in China. Not surprisingly, the advertisement adopts the marketing strategies of politicization and eroticization in order to arouse the public’s interest in a film about Red China. Joan Chen provides a particularly instructive example of cross-cultural flow and horizontal identity exchange. The actress has appeared in both Chinese and Hollywood films and is well known in both countries. Here, in Xiu Xiu, she turns into a director. This change in role is applauded by Richard Corliss, a US-based critic, in his review of the film. Yet his words tellingly reveal an extremely limited horizon for filmmaking about China in the West. His remarks are noteworthy, and indeed psychoanalytically uncanny: “Clearly, Chen’s striking beauty — searching eyes, long, strong neck and, it must be said, the most luscious mouth on either side of the Pacific — is merely the wrapping for surh o l ly wo o d, c h i n a , h o n g k o n g

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passing talent and drive. Hollywood’s favorite China doll wanted to direct.” 16 On the left side of the page featuring the article is a full-page frontal picture of a smiling Joan Chen, with the caption “Joan of art.” In making this new career move from symbol of Asian femininity to director, Chen cannot escape Western (male) assumptions that effectively typecast her as “China doll,” even as she moves behind the camera into the director’s chair. Once again, film production about or from China must conform to a familiar formula of politics plus sex plus exoticization, the recipe needed in order to be successful in the West. This manner of wishful thinking or willful misunderstanding is well explained in the words of Orville Schell in his review of a low-budget American film partly shot in Tibet by Paul Wagner, Windhorse. He writes the following about the Western fantasy about Tibet: We tend to see Tibet through one of the most powerful utopian mythologies of this century — of a fabled, Shangri-La-like refuge from the outside world. . . . So deeply rooted in the Western psyche is our version of Tibet that it has become virtually part of our mental DNA. One way or another every article, book or film on Tibet must contend with the political and cultural determinism of this myth. . . . Although old Tibet has all but vanished and Lhasa is turning into a charmless Chinese city, we Westerners still love to retreat into virtual versions reconstructed on film sets.17 Be it Tibet or China, preexisting manners of perception still play a large role in the international politics of cultural production and exhibition in the post–Cold War era. To what extent do such perceptions reveal more about the self rather than the other? It seems that the Hollywood films that I briefly discussed above are as much expressions of the American frame of mind as they are representations of the reality of a foreign country. It may be the case that as long as the nature of the Chinese state remains the same, or as long as the memory of the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident does not fade, the Western public’s attitude toward China, and what it wants to see and know about China, will not alter significantly. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that China has become an integral part of American domestic politics, as the country looms large as a potential competitor to the US in terms of geopolitics, global trade, military buildup, and international influence at the turn of the millennium. The question of China, Taiwan, and Tibet is a key issue that must be passionately addressed by every presidential candidate. The demonization of China by a politician is a cheap and easy way to show patriotism and loyalty to America, and to fortify the moral supremacy of Western culture. The media, the Congress, and politicians have made sure that the ordinary American citizen is inundated with endless stories of Chinese espionage, illegal presidential campaign donations, human rights violations, and so forth. In the realm of popular culture, 120

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Hollywood films play a part in the perpetuation of an image of China as the demonic other.

Films from Mainland China To celebrate the return of Hong Kong to the motherland, China produced a flood of artistic works in various forms and media: drama, music, TV programs, and films. Most noticeable are two big-budget epic films — The Opium War (Yapian zhanzheng) directed by Xie Jin and Red River Valley (Hong he gu) directed by Feng Xiaoning. Both films attempt to chronicle the military interference in China as a result of British imperialism and to narrate the painful and difficult emergence of China as a would-be modern nation-state. Red River Valley further involves the triangular relationship among China, the West, and Tibet, and describes the plight of China as a multiethnic nation. As we might expect, its treatment of these issues is very different from those of the American films mentioned earlier. At both the beginning and end of Red River Valley, the voice-over, the voice of an old (Tibetan) lady, recounts an ancient legend: Goddess Mount Everest gives birth to three brothers who are best friends; the eldest is the Yellow River, the second is the Yangtze River, and the youngest is the Yarlung Zangbo (Yalu Tsangpo) River. In such a way, the film establishes a relationship between the Chinese (Han) and the Tibetans as grounded in nature and blood. The narrative hinges on a romantic love story between Tibetans and Chinese. In the beginning of the twentieth century, there is a severe drought along the Yellow River. A Chinese daughter, Xue’er, is to be sacrificed and thrown into the river during a prayer for rain. She jumps into the river, manages to escape, and is later rescued by an old Tibetan woman. She then lives among the Tibetans, takes the name Xue’er Dawa, and falls in love with a Tibetan youth, Gesang. The film as a whole repeatedly thus confirms that the Han nationality and the Tibetan nationality in fact belong to one Chinese family and are mutually indebted to each other. In contrast, the British expedition troops and Colonel Rockman are described as the evil force that slaughters the Tibetans. The British attempt to break up the great Chinese family of nationalities and take Tibet away, but they fail. The only British person who still has a conscience is the journalist Jones. At the end of the film, he says: “Why should we change their world with our world? This is a people that can never be conquered and destroyed. Behind its back there is an even vaster land; that is the East that we can never conquer.” Through the words of a westerner, the film affirms the independence and solidarity of the peoples of the East. A noteworthy event was a transnational, East–West romance that developed h o l ly wo o d, c h i n a , h o n g k o n g

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during and after the shooting of the film. Ning Jing, the mainland actress who played the part of the proud daughter of a Tibetan leader, and Paul Kersey,18 the American actor performing the role of Jones, fell in love, married each other, and gave birth to a child. Ironically, this love story that took place outside the text of the film deconstructs the East–West ideological antagonism within the filmic discourse. In this instance, the politics of filmmaking to uphold the integrity of the nation-state betrays a discrepancy between reality and representation, between the bonding of people across national boundaries on the one hand and a monologic cinematic discourse in the name of the nation-state on the other. (Subsequently, the husband-wife team starred in a 1999 film about an East–West, cross-cultural romance set in China during World War II: Romance of the Yellow River [Huanghe juelian], the official entry submitted by China to the Academy Awards to compete for the Oscar for the Best Foreign Picture.) Produced at the time of Hong Kong’s handover, another widely publicized film is The Opium War, which narrates the impotence of the Qing court, the encroachment of China by the West, and the loss of Hong Kong to Britain. In 1959, the mainland-produced film Commissioner Lin (Li Zexu) depicted the same set of historical events. The last part of the 1959 film described the spontaneous uprising against foreign invaders of the peasants in Sanyuanli, an event that heralded a century of revolution in China culminating in the communist revolution. In the new film directed by Xie Jin, this grand narrative of the people’s struggle against imperialism is absent; the film adopts a different narrative strategy. Rather, it probes into the state of isolation and ignorance of the Qing dynasty vis-à-vis the West at the dawning of the modern age. Despite the steely determination and bravery of the Qing people to end the opium trade — from the emperor, the ablest ministers (Lin Zexu included), the generals, local officials, and ordinary citizens — China cannot avert a losing battle against a fully industrialized modern nation, Great Britain. On a par with the policy of “reform and openness” of the current regime, the film implicitly points to the urgent need for modernization and globalization so that China may become a strong, independent country among the nations of the world.19 A precursor on the subject of Tibet is the 1963 mainland film classic Serfs (Nongnu). The film portrays the Han people as the liberators of the Tibetans, and the People’s Liberation Army as the savior that freed Tibet from feudalism and slavery. Han/Chinese society is supposed to be at a higher stage of civilization, whereas the Tibetans are seen as living at a lower, primitive, barbaric stage of human history. Again, Serfs narrates the grand tales of liberation and class struggle. Red River Valley, in contrast, does not criticize the old social system, nor does it make an attempt to unveil the plot of the historical evolution of humanity from a Marxist, Maoist, and revolutionary perspective. Instead, it painstakingly depicts a natural, deep, intimate relationship between the Chi122

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nese and Tibetans that transcends class, social, and institutional barriers. It is an ahistorical affirmation of the unity of the Chinese family of nationalities. Mainland films such as Red River Valley and The Opium War stress the integrity and continuity of China as a multiethnic nation and condemn the invasion of the Chinese sovereign nation-state by the colonialists. In contrast, Hollywood productions such as Kundun, Seven Years in Tibet, and Red Corner assert the moral superiority of the West and Tibet over the Chinese and castigate the Chinese rule of Tibet. The two sets of films could not be further apart ideologically. Nevertheless, they share some basic assumptions — the integrity of the nation-state, fi xed territoriality, the inviolability of sovereignty, and the idea that cultural and political identity derives from identification with the nationstate. In these films, a Cold War style ideological opposition between East and West seems rooted in a shared model of geopolitics as well as in a common conception of fi xed, unchanging national borders. Judging by these films, our present historical moment, the so-called era of transnationalism, falls far short of the utopian vision of a “borderless world.”

Films from Hong Kong Films made by Hong Kongese themselves around the handover period offer a different take on Hong Kongese or Chinese identity. Comrades, Almost a Love Story (Tian mimi) by Peter Chan and Happy Together (Chunguang zhaxie) by Wong Kar-wai are of particular significance for this issue.20 Comrades tells the story of two mainland immigrants in Hong Kong, a man and a woman. The film details the events of their work, life, love, and their eventual reunion in the US. Happy Together relates the life, travel, and love of two Hong Kong gay men in South America. The two films do not repeat the grand historical narratives about the formation of the Chinese nation-state, but unfold the little tales of ordinary citizens. Here, Hong Kongese/Chinese identity becomes a mobile, deterritorialized, transnational, and changing mechanism. In both films, that identity does not depend on one’s place of birth or residence: one does not have to live in China or Hong Kong, be an active member of a nation-state, or define oneself in political, territorial, and legal terms. Who is Chinese? Who is Hong Kongese? How does one define Chineseness? The films do not provide direct answers to these questions, but offer some hints. In Comrades, the cultural and national identity of the protagonists, Li Qiao (Maggie Cheung) and Xiaojun (Li Ming), is grounded primarily in their common love of the songs of the Taiwanese singer Deng Lijun (Teresa Tang). Toward the end of the film, the news of the singer’s death is broadcast on TV, and the broadcaster says, “Some people say: wherever there are Chinese, Deng Lijun’s songs can be heard.” In recognizing that cultural productions like songs can become strong markers of identity, h o l ly wo o d, c h i n a , h o n g k o n g

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the film posits identity-formation as a transnational, deterritorialized activity. For the characters in Comrades, Chineseness does not mean identification with a specific national and political entity but can be constructed via something as simple as a song. It is only logical that a territory handed off from one nation to another would spawn films in which nationality is seen as borderless, a state of mind rather than of place. It appears in historical retrospect that Hong Kong films dealing with the theme of identity and diaspora are in response to three key defining moments in the 1980s and 1990s: the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984, the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989, and the handover in 1997. These decisive events created the deep “collective unconscious” of Hong Kong residents, as it were. Hong Kong people knew for certain that the island would return to mainland China after Deng Xiaopeng and Margaret Thatcher concluded the Joint Declaration in 1984. Hence, Hong Kong cinema looked to the mainland as the motherland, the root, the home, and the “father” with nostalgia and attachment, and exhibited a “China Syndrome.” (A prime example is Yim Ho’s Homecoming [1984].) A few years later, the Tiananmen incident in spring 1989 shattered the hope of a happy unification with the mainland. As a result, Hong Kong films of the time express a feeling of repulsion toward the mainland and delineate the experiences of alienation, homelessness, displacement, and exile on the part of Chinese nationals and Hong Kong residents. (Examples include Ann Hui’s Song of Exile [1990], Evans Chan’s Wrong Love [a.k.a. Crossings, 1992], Clara Law’s Farewell China [1990], and Stanley Kwan’s Full Moon in New York [1990].) Since 1992, the Chinese government has officially adopted the principle of “socialist market economy,” and Hong Kong has been one of the biggest foreign investors in mainland China. Its capital propels the economic development of China, which in turn fosters a prosperous Hong Kong economy and makes its business tycoons richer and richer day by day. The memory of Tiananmen Square dims in the minds of business leaders and politicians in Hong Kong, China, and the world. Transnational capitalism is now the modus operandi of daily business. Thus, a flexible and transnational mechanism of national and cultural affiliation has taken place in Hong film discourse as well, especially in Wong Kar-wai’s films.21 Identity formation is not necessarily defined in relation to China as a nation-state, but often happens in diasporic, transnational settings. Moreover, a number of high-profile Hong Kong film talents operate truly across the borderline in film and TV industries between the East and the West: John Woo, Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung, Jet Li, Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, Yuen Woo-ping, Sammo Hung, and others. Their hybrid film productions and performances have become the sources and materials of popular entertainment for audiences in Hong Kong, the West, and all over the world. 124

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The end of colonial rule in Hong Kong and its return to China prompted renewed reflections on the nature of China and the Chinese across the globe. As I mentioned earlier, the Hollywood and mainland films I have discussed all purport to tell big stories about China. Their point of departure is to examine China as a geopolitical entity, a nation-state, rather than looking at the question of identity-formation as a flexible, fluid process that happens at the level of the individual. Inevitably, Hollywood and mainland films reveal an embedded ideological and political opposition between East and West. The films from both countries tend to fall back on cultural stereotypes and national animosities. Film portrayals of China and Chineseness seem to be vehicles for both East and West to work out their anxieties over China as a nation-state in particular, and more abstract questions about nationalities and borders in general. We should not, therefore, expect to see genuinely “borderless” films from either Hollywood or mainland China anytime soon — at least not before both countries take much greater steps toward a transnational perspective themselves. In contrast, films form Hong Kong display a much more supple touch. Instead of invoking grand historical narratives or relying on rigid political positions, Hong Kong films explore the possibility of a thoroughly transnational ethos.22

Fast Forward to the Turn of the Millennium: Shanghai Dreamin’ The nexus of the local, national, and global has taken new turns in Chineselanguage films since Hong Kong’s handover to China. At the moment I wish to examine briefly several films that are related to Shanghai as locale, as memory, as imagination. Shanghai was the premier modern Chinese city and dwarfed Hong Kong up until 1949. But in the Cold War years, Hong Kong outpaced Shanghai in development and modernization as all of China was sealed off from the capitalist world. However, Shanghai has returned to the world stage as one of the fastest-developing megacities since the 1990s, and is poised to recapture the lost position of the most affluent and cosmopolitan city in East Asia in the coming years. Shanghai is not an ordinary locale in China, but a thriving metropolis with an international appeal. In the heart and mind of a local Shanghainese or a diasopric Shanghainese, the city may well transcend the myopic scope of the nation-state and occupy a special place that is like no other in China or the world. Shanghai is both local and global, as if bypassing the national route. Wong Kar-wai consolidated his status as the leading art-house director hailing from Hong Kong in international film festival circuits. But he has also self-consciously positioned himself as a Shanghainese, or an old-fashioned descendant of a Shanghainese émigré family. In the Mood for Love (Huayang h o l ly wo o d, c h i n a , h o n g k o n g

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nianhua, 2000) aims precisely to capture a bygone era, a vanished Shanghainese community in Hong Kong in the 1960s, before the advent of a new era when, from the 1970s onward, everybody is a Hong Kongese. In contrast to the anticipatory, future-oriented tone of “California dreamin’ ” in Chungking Express (Chonqing senlin, 1994), In the Mood for Love casts a nostalgic backward glance at the past, although both films have been applauded for their artful crystallization of the modality of temporality, or Deleuzian “time-image.” The film begins in 1962 and ends in 1966, the eve of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, antiestablishment student movements in the West, the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests in the US, and worldwide anticolonial, anti-imperialist struggles. The film includes documentary footage of French president Charles De Gaulle’s visit to Cambodia. All Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) would be soon engulfed in an armed revolution to repel Western powers (first France and then the US) for national independence. In other words, Wong attempts to describe a short-lived period of life before the world became embroiled in revolution and radicalism, and before Hong Kong itself turned into a homogenous Cantonese-speaking society. In the interview with Wong Kar-wai included in the Criterion DVD edition of In the Mood for Love, Wong speaks about himself as a true Shanghainese who finds numerous recent representations of Shanghai and its people untrue. According to him, in the 1960s Shanghai immigrants in Hong Kong and the local Cantonese Hong Kongers are separate groups. Shanghainese mothers do not like their daughters to go out with Cantonese boys. In a massive process of indigenization and Hong Kongization, all previous regional enclaves die out and everybody becomes a Hong Kongese. Hong Kong has changed so much that Wong and his team could not shoot the exterior scenes of the film there. It is in the streets of Bangkok that Wong finds houses resembling what Hong Kong would have looked like back in the 1960s. Wong’s film thus evokes a vanished old Shanghainese community through exquisite framing, lighting, costume, and camerawork. As in all his films, music is quintessentially important in establishing the mood. The Chinese title of the film, Huayang nianhua (literally, “blooming years”) refers to a popular song, “Huayang de nianhua,” from Shanghai in the 1930s, sung by the legendary actress-singer Zhou Xuan. The song itself is played in the film. The film aligns itself with the great tradition of Shanghai cinema that burgeoned in preCommunist China in the first half of the twentieth century. Hence, abstract nationalism and the nation-state seem to give way to a structure of feeling that could only be felt, experienced, or nostalgically imagined at the local and regional level. The nostalgia for Shanghai, despite all the bourgeois, capitalist, colonial connotations, is a matter of the heart for what I call the “Shanghainese diaspora.” 23 126

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Another film about Shanghai, or the outer edge of Shanghai, Suzhou River (Suzhou he, 2000) by a mainland Chinese director from the so-called sixth generation, Lou Ye, has also garnered international prestige. The feature film is an engrossing Hitchcockian story of double identities, mysteries, suspense, hallucination, and death, with a raw, documentary feel.24 Narrated from the point of view of an absent narrator, a video artist, the film’s camera eye captures the turbid yet fascinating landscape along Suzhou River at the fringe of Shanghai. It is the sight and sound of an old Shanghai that was disappearing from the horizon just as Lou Ye was filming it. Since the completion of the film, Suzhou River has been cleaned up and given a new facelift by the municipal government and real-estate developers. The ugly, ghostly storehouses are transformed into chic art galleries in a smart postmodern leap of imagination. A few remaining old-style residential houses, longtang, are preserved as the last traces of a vanquished cityscape. Gleaming skyscrapers loom large around the Suzhou River area, as if alerting the visitors to the great comeback story that is contemporary Shanghai. Shanghai is ostensibly the absent presence in Wang Xiaoshuai’s film Qinghong (2005), or Shanghai Dreams. In the Mao era, countless educated youth (zhishi qingnian) from China’s urban centers such as Shanghai were exhorted or coerced to relocate to the remote countryside to help the locals build socialism using their knowledge. Young people abandoned the comfort and conveniences of life in the metropolis and left for the impoverished areas away from home and old family. This personal sacrifice made for the large collective was presented as a noble cause in the name of socialist nation building. Wang Xiaoshuai’s family was one of the many families that left Shanghai for Guiyang, Guizhou province, in southwest China. The director himself grew up in Guiyang as a child. Wang’s film begins in the pivotal years of the early post-Mao era, the late 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping’s economic and social reforms began. Qinghong and many of her teenage friends grow up in Guiyang, an underdeveloped city in southwest China. Having never seen Shanghai, this is the place they call home. Qinghong dates a local boy, Xiaogen, who works in the same factory as her father. But the adults — the parents of Qinghong and her friends — have long been disillusioned with life in a backwater of China, and dream of retuning to their home, Shanghai. In the eyes of the father, Lao Wu (“Old Wu”), Qinghong’s dating a local boyfriend means the end of her future. In an intriguing scene in the public bathhouse, Qinghong’s father and Xiaogen have a chat. Lao Wu warns Xiaogen to stay away from his daughter. While both are totally naked and stripped of clothing, trappings, and ranks, appearing as equal human beings, Lao Wu tells Xiaogen that Qinghong and he are not equal after all! Qinghong will go to college, gain a higher education, and return to Shanghai, living a life fundamentally different from that of a manual factory worker in h o l ly wo o d, c h i n a , h o n g k o n g

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Guizhou province. Class consciousness resurfaces in this film, and by extension in post-Mao China. It is this notorious sense of privilege and superiority among Shanghainese vis-à-vis all other Chinese, as exemplified by Qinghong’s father, that brings tragedy at the end of the film. What is Shanghai in filmic representation, then? It is romantic bourgeois sentimentality between private lovers, a class consciousness, a mentality of superiority, the best Chinese place to live, a fast-changing metropolis mixing wealth and poverty, ordinary citizens and gangsters. It is an enchanted locale that is like no other place, and the Shanghainese is truly a special person, like no other Chinese.

Concluding Note on Tibet and Planet Earth Acclaimed as an engineering miracle, the Qinghai-Tibet railroad was completed in 2006. The railway was built across the Tibetan plateau on a terrain with the highest elevation in the world and passes through an extremely fragile ecological environment. It is said that the builders of the railroad tried their best to avoid environmental damage in the construction process. Trains will bring all things Chinese straight to the heartland of Tibet — Lhasa. Will this further contribute to the destruction of a pristine indigenous culture? Kekexili (a.k.a. Mountain Patrol, 2004) a feature film by the young Chinese director Lu Chuan, is about the subject of how to maintain and preserve the fragile ecological system of Tibet. Based on real events, it tells the heroic story of how a Tibetan patrol team tracks and stops poachers of Tibetan antelopes. Tibetan antelopes have been slaughtered by poachers for their skins and fur to be sold in the international market at a lucrative price. Massive numbers of antelopes are killed each year by illegal poachers with the effect of the near extinction of this rare species. Ethnographic, exotic details of Tibet are present in the film, such as traditional Tibetan burial (tianzang, “sky burial”). The Tibetan language is sprinkled here and there throughout the film. People in the film, the patrol team as well as the poachers, are Tibetan people. The presence of China, or Beijing, is embodied in the journalist from Beijing, Ga Yu. Other than that, there does not seem to be obtrusive, overtly didactic allusion to the motherland China as an organizing thematic principle. The representation of Tibet in mainland Chinese film has evolved over different historical periods of mainland China. Serfs, from the 1960s, the heyday of the Mao era, uses a Marxist interpretation of human history by pointing out how an advanced socialist society (Red China) liberated backward, feudalistic, theocratic Tibet. The Han soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army and Tibetan serfs share a common class interest in overthrowing an evil system of 128

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class oppression and exploitation. A revolutionary moment in the representation of ethnic minorities in Chinese cinema is Tian Zhuangzhuang’s film Horse Thief (Dao ma zei, 1986), from the post-Mao era of reforms. True to the general querying spirit of the so-call fifth generation, the film does not employ the usual coding of socialism and liberation. It simply narrates a life story of a Tibetan horse thief in 1923.25 Indeed, there is no familiar master interpretive code to read the film. Like Yellow Earth, it empties out previous interpretive strategies and brings the reader to ground zero for interpretation. What is the film about? How do we make sense of it? The viewer is at a loss. Tian continues the exploration of China’s ethnic minorities, especially Tibetans, in his documentary Delamu (2004). It relates the difficult journey of a trade caravan along the “old tea and horse road” (cha ma gu dao), or the “southern silk road,” that links Yunnan province to Tibet. Tian offers us breathless images of traveling on the treacherous mountainous road, interviews local villagers, and narrates the lives of Tibetans along the road. In the 1990s, at the time of Hong Kong’s reunion with the motherland, Red River Valley shied away from the rhetoric of liberation and class consciousness typical of the Mao era. The film enforces another kind of master plot — namely, the solidarity among Chinese nationalities and their common resistance to foreign separatist interference. Tibet is part of China, and no one can take it away. In the new millennium, Kekexili introduces another twist in the perpetually fascinating representation of China’s minorities and their land. The new master plot is ecosystem, or nothing less than planet earth. It goes without saying that in their common instinct to preserve life on the planet, the Chinese and the Tibetans, the journalist from Beijing, patrol team members, and the heroic team leader Ri Tai, form a life-and-death bonding. In this way, China and Tibet support each other’s cause and share the same human fate on planet earth.

h o l ly wo o d, c h i n a , h o n g k o n g

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chapter seven

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History, Memory, Nostalgia Rewriting Socialism in Film and Television Drama

T

he legacy of Chinese socialism has been a hotly contested issue both inside and outside China from the vantage point of the postsocialist, postmodern, post–Cold War present. Chinese socialism, through such momentous historical events as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), had been an inspiring experience in worldwide anticolonial, anti-imperialist, anticapitalist struggles as well as academic Marxism in the West.1 Yet inside China a series of political campaigns in the Mao era, such as the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957) and the Cultural Revolution, have been denounced by the official party line as “past party mistakes” and castigated by intellectuals and critics as “traumas” and “wounds.” As a socialist/communist country in name, and with a fledgling quasicapitalist economy, China confronts a series of social, institutional, and psychological problems that are not necessarily unique but are common to many postsocialist countries. By “postsocialism” I mean a society that was a Sovietstyle socialist country before the end of the Cold War around 1990, and still maintains a socialist/communist political structure today but pursues capitalist economic practices in the era of globalization, as in the case of China; or a

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society that has shed its Stalinist political and economic structure but must come to terms with the aftereffects of its historical legacy psychologically, as in the case of the countries of the former Soviet Union and the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe.2 The ideas, ideals, and affects associated with socialism as both a historical experience and a utopian longing did not necessarily die with the demise of the Soviet Union. Human beings are haunted by history and memory. The engagement with the socialist and communist past comes in a variety of positions, ranging from nostalgia and longing to revulsion and rejection. These different attitudes toward the past find expression in cinematic discourse. As we recall, the domestic popularity of the New Chinese Cinema (the films of Xie Jin and others) in the early and mid-1980s, as well as the international showcase of the fifth generation (To Live, Farewell My Concubine, Blue Kite, and other titles), rests on a sense of “humanism” and the relentless criticism of the excesses of past political movements in the Mao era. In this study, I focus on a group of new films and television dramas that revisit and rewrite the history of Chinese socialism from a different point of view in light of the capitalist frenzy of commercialism and commodification in contemporary postsocialist China. It seems that it is only possible after some twenty years, after the historical wounds and traumas have been largely healed, that a new critical detachment can be reached in regard to the past. Socialism during the 1950s to 1970s has conveniently come to signify values and ideals that are putatively absent today — idealism, egalitarianism, self-sacrifice, and innocence. The critique of the present consumer society thus comes in the form of nostalgia for the past in contemporary Chinese cinema. What appears to be most intriguing is the dialectic of the production of nostalgia. First of all, nostalgia for the socialist past is evidently a reaction against the present capitalist consumer society. But at the same time, nostalgia is a fabricated cultural product used to cater to the tastes and sentiments of vast numbers of Chinese consumers. Nostalgia, as a structure of feeling, is subject to the logic of capitalist consumption in the culture industry of film and television. Nostalgia as a frame of mind calls for cultural production, and cultural production in turn feeds imagined nostalgia. There are many things in the past for which people are nostalgic. But there are two principal historical moments in modern China that call for nostalgic representation. One is the capitalist, semicolonial Shanghai in the 1920s–1930s. Old Shanghai embodied a Chinese modernity that was supposedly short-circuited by the communist revolution. The revival of Shanghai since the 1990s articulates this buried, suppressed modernity. The other historical, social, and political object of nostalgia is the socialist era. The reimagined socialist past may be used as a cure for the excesses of present capitalist commodification.

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hi s t o r y, me mo r y, n o s ta l g i a

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These two nostalgias speak to two distinct, competing visions of Chinese modernity. In this chapter, I shall analyze postsocialist nostalgia, or nostalgia for socialism after the historical event of socialism.3 The idea of nostalgia itself has yet to be further differentiated. We may speak of traditional nostalgia for the past, Jamesonian nostalgia for the present, and postsocialist nostalgia for the future. In her study of post-Soviet culture, Svetlana Boym points out that nostalgia can be “retrospective” or “prospective.” Nostalgia for the future is nostalgia for “unrealized possibilities.”4 Boym delineates two types of nostalgia: the restorative and the reflective. She writes: “Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming — wistfully, ironically, desperately. Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.”5 In the vein of Boym’s heuristic distinction, the kind of postsocialist nostalgia that I consider is more like “reflective nostalgia.” Longing for the socialist past does not imply a simplistic, naive return to the negative aspects of Stalinism or Maoism. Postsocialist nostalgia for the future is a reflective and self-reflexive reaction to both the truths and the tragedies of the past in anticipation of a better future. This is nostalgia for what did not happen but could have been done and delivered to the people in the name of socialism, and it looks forward to possible future fulfillment of the original promise. Postsocialist nostalgia in the reflective mode is aware of the contradictions of modernity and the ambivalences of socialism, as erstwhile socialist citizens themselves have lived through historical lessons. The number of films that narrate revisionist histories of Chinese socialism are abundant. Here are some examples. Zhang Yimou’s film The Road Home (Wo de fuqin muqin, 2000) makes a strong contrast between the gray, drab world of commercialized contemporary China and the bygone days of innocence, naïveté, and love, and cinematically between darkness and vibrant colors! Jiang Wen’s film In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguang canlan de rizi or, more appropriately translated, The Sunny Days, 1995) rewrites the later years of the Cultural Revolution in the early and mid-seventies as a time of carnivalistic merriment, a rite of passage, in the absence of the father. Huang Jianxin’s film The Marriage Certificate (or Who Cares?, Shui shuo wo bu zaihu, 2001) confronts the effects of amnesia, schizophrenia, psychosis, and madness that beset the generation of Chinese who grew up in the Cultural Revolution and were sent into to the countryside as “educated youth” (zhishi qingnian). These people, now in their forties and fifties, cannot seamlessly integrate memories of their past experiences with the new reality of contemporary China, and cannot 132

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pass into middle age without undergoing marital and personal crises. Hence the schizophrenic postmodern present (read: postsocialist China) is a marked departure from the historical fullness of the past despite the political indignities in those days. Zhang Yang’s Shower (Xizao, 2000) describes the imminent demolition of a communal lifestyle characteristic of the socialist era, a destruction that causes a new kind of “historical trauma.” Any visitor to China these days would notice the tremendous physical changes in urban landscape, the disappearance of traces of history, the destruction of the past.6 What should be noted here is that such films and TV dramas take on the everyday in the representation of the past. That is, they do not linger on the sublime historical moments in national history and narrate the stories of great heroes, but rather focus on the personal and private dimensions of individuals. One no longer sees the deification of founding fathers, revolutionary heroes, and model workers, or the monumentalizing of the historical past, or the castigation of collective traumas and national disasters, but witnesses the daily chores and mundane events in the lives of ordinary citizens. As a result, such a strategy of storytelling depoliticizes and humanizes socialism, and brings down grand ideologies to the level of the lives of ordinary people. It is the everyday, the quotidian, that structures the existence and aspirations of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens in decades of socialist nation building.7

The Road Home: The Politics of Nonpolitics The Road Home is a film about memory and recollection. It is the love story of parents in the socialist era as remembered by the village community and narrated by the son in present-day China. The purity of form and lyricism of sentiment makes The Road Home another masterpiece of Zhang Yimou’s. I want to start by commenting on the cinematography of the film, which is particularly noteworthy. Rather than employing the usual device of representing the distant past in black and white and the present in color, Zhang Yimou reversed the process by shooting the past in vibrant colors and the present in black and white. The early part of the film, set in contemporary China, uses low-key lighting and creates a drab, gray, cold world. The mother, the son, and the villagers discuss possible ways of bringing back the coffin of the deceased father, who had been the beloved village teacher for decades. The son thinks that money can solve everything, and that he can persuade the villagers to carry his father’s body back by paying them cash. As he looks at an old photograph of his parents when they were young, the screen changes to bright colors. The field and country road are shot in warm colors, resembling a nineteenth-century Impressionist oil painting. In sharp contrast to the image of the wrinkled, decrepit old lady, the mother (Zhang Ziyi), Zhaodi, is a bubbling young woman. Her youth and hi s t o r y, me mo r y, n o s ta l g i a

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The Road Home. Dir. Zhang Yimou. 1999.

vitality are magnified by a series of close-ups and tracking shots. The scenes are filled with light and sunshine. Even in the following domestic indoor scene, the mother’s home is shot in high-key lighting, which is very different from the dismal gloomy indoor setting in the beginning part of the film about contemporary China. The warm colors of orange, yellow, and red dominate the middle part of the film in line with the tone of excitement associated with first love. Such is the filmmaker’s way of reimagining the historical past and reinventing a precapitalist, preindustrial, prelapsarian world of simplicity. The film seems to be politically innocuous at first glance because it does not explicitly allude to any specific political event in the way Zhang’s other films do, such as the heavy-handed To Live, which offers a timetable of socialist China’s political history. However, midway through the film, a political event does enters into the story. Father, or Teacher Luo Changyu, gets into trouble and is dismissed from school and not allowed to return to the village for some time. The film does not give any explanation for what exactly happened to Luo or what is going on in the Chinese nation at large. The well-informed viewer would know 134

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that this incident probably has to with the Anti-Rightist Campaign Movement in 1957. The cruelty of this political event becomes a test of the strength of the love between Father and Mother. We see beautiful yet heartrending shots of Mother waiting for Father’s return in the cold winter. The two persist through adversity and eventually marry. Although arbitrary politics in the Mao era is implicitly denounced in the context of the film, the past is glorified nevertheless, for it represents youth, innocence, and love. The lack of love, or the inability to fall in love, is a blight characteristic of the contemporary period. At the end of the film, the mother tearfully asks her son to bring home a bride. She advises him not to be too picky. The absence of love in the son’s generation is a sharp contrast to the single-minded, indestructible bond between people in the mother’s generation. It is noteworthy that Teacher Luo does not teach his students political doctrines. His text for children is politically innocuous. He asks them to recite passages that underscore human wisdom rather than prevalent political slogans. It should be emphasized that this nonpolitical and wholehearted devotion to teaching is remembered with nostalgia and imbued with a sense of heroism. While the film may point to the harshness of a given political campaign, it also reinforces the loftiness of mind and purity of sentiment of a bygone era. The Road Home does not examine the foundation of knowledge and culture in Chinese society in a laborious, circuitous way like Chen Kaige’s film King of Children (Haizi wang), which is characterized by its intellectual elitism and lack of visual pleasure for the average viewer. The narrative strategy of The Road Home is to reach the hearts of the audience through an extremely simple and yet beautiful cinematic language. The son of Zhaodi, the narrator of the film, lives in the city. But any shot of the city is significantly absent in the film. The life-world of the film is rural China. The camera offers enchanting shots of a preindustrial landscape: nature, peasantry, the village well, peasant houses, the country road, the field’s path, hills, autumn foliage, and winter snow. Repeated extreme long shots establish the cinematic ontology of the village school. The school building is visually rendered into a “Temple of Being,” as it were. Waking up one day from (love)sickness due to Luo’s prolonged absence from the village, an excited Zhaodi hears him lead children in reciting these simple words of eternal truth in the classroom: Our spirit comes alive. It carries wishes, full of hope. Spring is here. It melts snow. Farmers sow. hi s t o r y, me mo r y, n o s ta l g i a

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Oxen plow the field. Wild geese return. Frogs begin to hop. Swallows start to sing. Spring is the season to sow. All starts to grow again. The world is full of life again. The perennial agricultural cycle of life affirms the naturalness and legitimacy of love and growth, and thus defies the vagaries of specific political struggles at the historical juncture in China. The end of the film is appropriately shot in black and white again, for it deals with a cold winter in contemporary China rather than the warmth of the past. The son and the village chief discuss business together and calculate the cost of hiring villagers to carry the corpse of the father back to the village. The village chief figures that thirty-five or thirty-six people would be needed. If they pay one person 100 yuan, the total cost would be 3,500 to 3,600 yuan. The son generously gives the chief 5,000 yuan for the job. Little they know that when the day comes more than a hundred people gather for the event. All of them are former students of the father. Many come from faraway towns and cities expressly for this purpose. Nobody, even the hired villagers, wants to be paid. They solemnly carry the body of the teacher to the village, walk on foot for miles under a heavy snowstorm, and bury him next to the old well. The ending thus proves the total irrelevancy of the capitalist money economy to an affair of the heart. Memory of life in the socialist era still matters to ordinary folks.

The Marriage Certificate: Postsocialist Schizophrenia The Marriage Certificate (dir. Huang Jianxin) is a film about the middle age crisis of a couple. Gu Ming (Feng Gong) and Xie Yuting (Lü Liping) have been a model couple in the eyes of their work units and neighbors. They are about to be awarded a “model couple comforter.” But in order to receive this award they must present their original marriage certificate. In the attempt to retrieve the lost certificate, the couple comes to the brink of divorce. Xiaowen, their thirteen-year-old daughter, is witness to all the farce and comedy enacted by her adult parents. The single child of the family is represented as a member of a new generation distinct from the life experiences of her parents’ generation. Her perception of the world and her parents is filtered through cartoon images. In fact, the film is narrated from the perspective of the child. Even the projection of her parents’ dating and marriage in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution is through animation, the very stuff and material amid which her 136

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generation grew up. At one point in the film, Xiaowen the precocious child says that she doesn’t care if her parents divorce. Yet ultimately she does care, and she pulls her parents back from the verge of divorce by running away from the family. The certificate of marriage is recovered at the end of the film, and the couple survives their middle age crisis, on the surface. In the final scene, Gu Ming is shown dancing amid a group of old ladies with red silk bands, a form of exercise common among senior citizens in Chinese cities. Hence Gu Ming goes through the ritual of entering middle age in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. Gu Ming is a psychiatrist in a mental hospital. Among his mental patients is a young woman who was a former dancer. In one particularly intriguing scene, the woman loses control of herself. She runs around the hospital brandishing a knife. She climbs on top of a table and dances with her knife. In order to calm and disarm her, Gu Ming’s assistant, Xiao’an, turns on a portable cassette recorder and plays a famous interlude from the revolutionary ballet Red Detachment of Women. The music has an immediate soothing effect on her. She calms down and returns to a normal state of mind to the applause of the patients and doctors surrounding her. Being first alarmed by her insane, dangerous behavior, now they are all relieved by her temporary return to sanity. After the incident, Xiao’an, Gu Ming’s attractive young female assistant, who is conversant in both Cantonese and Mandarin, explains to him the cause of this patient’s mental illness. Some time before she had had a boyfriend who used to dance with her in this particular scene of the revolutionary classic. He was about to go to the United States to study, and promised to meet her in New York City one year later. Not long after it took off, the aircraft he was on crashed, and all passengers on board were killed, including her boyfriend. Xiao’an tells this story all in Cantonese, which Gu Ming does not understand. After she finishes her speech, Gu Ming says, “I did not understand a single word of what you said.” This lighthearted comic moment reveals something more profound. It indicates a lack of understanding of history, the past, and the present among contemporary Chinese people, among patients and doctors alike. They do not understand themselves and thus do not comprehend the causes of their own spiritual disorientation and mental disorder. The former dancer has been disillusioned and crushed by two sorts of historical developments. The first is the disappearance of the socialist, revolutionary past. The revolutionary background in which her generation grew up is gone forever. Now is the heyday of a “socialist market economy.” The affective, intellectual, and social contexts that sustained her generation are fast disappearing. The second traumatic event in her life was the loss of her boyfriend, and attendant upon that the impossibility of going to America to pursue the capitalist dream in the West. As both options are now out of reach, this patient is stuck in the middle of nowhere without an exit and can only indulge in fleethi s t o r y, me mo r y, n o s ta l g i a

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ing moments of memory and wishful thinking. One may draw the conclusion that those Chinese citizens who have abandoned the socialist past are similarly condemned to suffer from mental disorder, from schizophrenia. They are unable to put their lives into proper historical perspective, namely, to come to terms with history itself. The Road Home and Marriage Certificate are not exactly “nostalgia films” in the sense that Fredric Jameson uses the term in his discussion of postmodernism. However, a propensity toward nostalgia is prominent in these films. Their “glossy qualities of the image” and “interesting new formal inventiveness” may create an impression of the past, but fail to capture history as such.8 Nevertheless, such films portray the attempts of both the filmmakers and characters to grasp history and the past. The drastic schizophrenic disjuncture between the revolutionary past and the quasi-capitalist present in the Chinese case makes such a task all the more elusive, yet urgent. In the words of Jameson: Historicity is, in fact, neither a representation of the past nor a representation of the future (although its various forms use such representations): it can first and foremost be defined as a perception of the present as history; that is, as a relationship to the present that somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as historical perspective. It is appropriate, in other words, also to insist on the historicity of the operation itself, which is our way of conceiving of historicity in this particular society and mode of production. . . .9 To fully comprehend the past is to come to terms with the present — the present historical circumstances, socioeconomic conditions, and mode of production. By stepping back from the immediacy of the hustle and bustle of the (capitalist) present, and by creating a defamiliarizing perspective on the (socialist) past, the camera eye may find a way to present a properly historical understanding of reality.

Years of Burning Passion: The Drama of Socialism on Television In 2002, the twenty-two-part TV drama, Years of Burning Passion (Jiqing ranshao de suiyue, dir. Kang Honglei), became the most popular TV program in China. Many TV stations across the country have rerun the series many times. As of August 15, 2002, Beijing TV Station completed its seventh rerun of the drama. Years of Burning Passion tells the story of two generations of Chinese from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s and spans nearly half a century of Chinese history. It details the love story and family life of Shi Guanrong (Sun Haiy138

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ing), a commander of the People’s Liberation Army, and Chu Qin (Lü Liping), who joined the PLA as a cultural worker during the civil war. It also narrates the tale of their three children as they grow up in socialist China from the early 1950s to the mid-1980s. What makes the TV drama so popular is fact that two generations of the Chinese audience find shocking recognition of themselves in the drama. Commentators and viewers tend to describe the drama as “real” (zhenshi), “pure” (pusu), “passionate” (jiqing), “moving” (dongren), and as something that could restore the ethical foundation of Chinese society.10 The older generation, now in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, joined the revolution and participated in socialist construction, fell in love, married, and established families at the same time as the two main characters did. The trials and tribulations, joys and sorrows of the TV characters are the collective story of that entire generation of people who gave their life to socialism. The story of the children, their troubled relationship with their parents, is equally shared and recognized by the younger generation. They see image reflections of themselves as well as their parents. The story time of the TV drama appropriately ends in the mid-1980s, before the full unfolding of the market economy in the 1990s. Passion, self-sacrifice, heroism, simplicity, political innocence, and devotion to the nation are the qualities that two generations of audiences recognize in themselves in the old days, and qualities that have become things of the past. As Chinese citizens are transforming themselves into well-informed, sophisticated consumers in today’s “socialist market economy” in the midst of building a cozy lifestyle, the pathos as represented in the TV drama seems so endearing and yet distant. The TV series adopts a depoliticized approach to representing past political events. It does not dwell on the specific content and nature of the various political movements at great length, but rather focuses on the interpersonal, domestic, private aspects of family, parents, and children. The daily decisions and rituals of life take the center stage of the series — falling in love, getting married, giving birth to children, raising them, educating them, sending them to school, relationships with in-laws and relatives, the parent–child relationship, friendship between comrades, domestic quarrelling, reconciliation, children falling in love and getting married in their turn, and so forth. These are the things that any Chinese family must have gone through. Told with exact verisimilitude and great sentimentality, the drama captures the attention and identification of vast numbers of viewers as they sit in front of the TV watching the story unfold. Whatever happens in the story is set within the time frame of the chronology of socialist China from the founding moment to the mid-1980s. As a result, Years of Burning Passion, the top-rated Chinese TV program in 2002, is the very history and story of life in socialist China.

h i s t o r y, m e m o r y, n o s ta l g i a

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Rehabilitation of the Father Figure Both domestic and international audiences of the New Chinese Cinema are familiar with how the Chinese father has been represented on-screen. Very much a ridiculed or hated figure, the father is often used to stand for patriarchy, feudalism, political oppression, and dysfunctional masculinity. There are numerous well-known examples in the genealogy of New Chinese Cinema. Consider the father in the foundational text Yellow Earth (Huangtu di). He is an ignorant old peasant who cannot be enlightened in any way by the modern ideology of the communist revolution. He himself and his fellow male villagers live perpetually in a land of superstition and isolation locked beyond the reach of civilization. It is hopeless to enlist and mobilize such an apathetic, lethargic, and pitiful group of people for the cause of revolution. The father figure in Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou, Yang Jinshan, backed by his entire clan, abuses and oppresses the young generation out of his own frustration and impotence. The husband/father in Raise the Red Lantern, Master Chen, imprisons and enslaves his concubines within the confines of his mansion. Chen, a faceless figure who is never given a frontal shot of the camera, is Chinese patriarchy incarnate. In other films, the Chinese fathers could not save their spouses and children from the cruelties of the world. We can produce a long list of such films: The Story of Qiu Ju (dir. Zhang Yimou), To Live (dir. Zhang Yimou), Women from the Lake of Scented Souls (dir. Xie Fei), and so forth. Shower deliberately alludes to Yellow Earth in a sequence about Shaanbei, the birthplace of the father, Master Liu. This film, centered on the theme of water, is an inversion of the ideology of Yellow Earth. The father figure here is a benign, gentle, considerate protector of the weak. His death in the middle of the film indicates a loss of a way of life, and the last chapter of a historical era. The death of the father implies the death of an entire community, a whole neighborhood, for the bathhouse has served as an extended family for the “leftovers” from a previous period, the “misfits” in present-day China. The mentally challenged second son of Master Liu, Erming, stands for numerous “mentally challenged” citizens who are losers in the game of economic globalization, the people who cannot function and compete in a market economy. They are dislocated from the secure shelter of socialism. As the old bathhouse is demolished to make way for the building of a new shopping mall, Erming is rendered homeless. He has lost both his old home and the protection of the father. In an emotional scene set in the bathhouse in the morning, Erming finally understands the implications of “Dad is gone,” spoken by his elder brother, Daming. His loud, uncontrollable wailing is a heartbreaking elegy to both a personal death in the family and a communal loss. The equally memorable opening shots of In the Heat of the Sun also speak 140

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Two Comrades in the Early 1950s. Author photo.

volumes about a different representation of the father. The film begins with a tilt shot of a statue of Chairman Mao against a blue, clear, sunny sky. Then the camera cuts to a scene of families and children sending off their officer-parents, again under a huge portrait of Mao, the father figure of all father figures in socialist China. These children of Beijing grew up under the gaze and leadership of Mao. However naughty and boisterous they might be, they are still heirs to Mao’s socialist China. The ending of the film indicates that they have successfully grown up to be mature adults, as the film is narrated by the adult Ma Xiaojun, nicknamed Monkey, looking back at his adolescence. Monkey’s father, a military officer and most of the time absent, is also seen as a loving, caring father. The mother (Siqin Gaowa) angrily scolds her boy Monkey by saying that he is, after all, the son of his father, being uneducated and absent. The mother’s bitter accusation turns out be an accurate, sweet description of the troublesome yet ultimately successful passage to adulthood on the part of the son, who grows under the watchful eyes of his father, and more significantly under the aegis of the ultimate father, Mao. The narrator-main character Monkey reminisces that he spent “the most beautiful day of my life” with his first love, Milan, in the waning years of the Cultural Revolution as he biked her home one morning.11 The father figure in Years of Burning Passion, Shi Guangrong, can be rather difficult, stubborn, unreasonable, and inflexible, as displayed in numerous scenes. He is an orphan from a poor peasant’s family and has lived most of life in the army. But his wife, Chu Qin, comes from an educated middle-class background, her father being a shopkeeper. The man from peasant stock and the h i s t o r y, m e m o r y, n o s ta l g i a

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Shower. Dir. Zhang Yang. 1999.

woman with a “petty bourgeois” background literally become odd bedfellows in terms of educational level and habits throughout the length of the drama. Their different temperaments and tastes clash constantly, from the moment they meet until old age, resulting in frequent quarrels and disagreements. The TV drama traces and focuses on the development of the main male character over the course of several decades, from the times of the civil war in Dongbei (Northeast) in the late 1940s to the year 1984, the thirty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. The series ends with the father and wife watching the TV coverage of the celebration of the National Day in Tiananmen Square, where Deng Xiaoping, as China’s commander-inchief, reviews the military parade. Despite all the flaws in the character of Shi Guangrong, he earns respect from the audience as a tough man with a good heart, who has weathered the storms of war and revolution. The most amazing offshoot of this drama of love and passion is that Sun Haiying and Lü Liping, the two lead actors in the roles of Shi Guangrong and Chu Qin, fall in love and get married in real life off-screen just like the characters they play on-screen. Shi and Chu have three children — two boys and one middle daughter. The 142

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father has a rocky, roller-coaster relationship with his two sons. His relationship with his eldest son, Shi Lin, is strained for many years. The son wants to become a university student, as is appropriate in a peaceful time when the country needs modernization and knowledge. But Shi Guangrong forces him to join the army and become a soldier against his will. The father sends his son to the most remote army post and subjects him to brutal training and a hard life in order to toughen him into a noble soldier. Misunderstanding and the generation gap create a rift between the two. They do not speak to each other for many years. When the son is in his late thirties, a father and an army commander in his own right, he finally understands the life-world of his father. At the end of the film, the son is recalled to father’s bedside in the hospital when he almost dies. They are reconciled in a tearful reunion scene. Born into the privileged family of an army general, Shi Lin has an “attitude problem” in the army. He appears arrogant and condescending in his daily interactions with other soldiers, who mostly come from poor peasant families. After years of humbling experiences, he finally understands and bonds with his fellow comrade-soldiers. He learns to respect the nobility of spirit in these people from the working class. In this way, the father, himself from a poor family, has transformed his son into a good citizen of a socialist country. Shi Lin earns merit and promotion, not because of his family connection, but through his own efforts and exemplary conduct in the army. The younger son, Shi Hai, has been a pampered boy in the family. Being the littlest child, he has been well protected by the mother from the bullying of the father. Shi Hai is very popular among his schoolmates and especially girls, but the father speaks of his “sissy” demeanor in a disapproving manner. Although he has always been a bright student in school and seems to be destined to enroll in a university, Shi Hai joins the army at the end of the film. He ultimately identifies with the values of the father. The daughter, Shi Jing, is always treated differently from the boys by the father. He loves her, and there is special father–daughter bond in the family. Without exception, Shi Jing joins the army as a grown-up and lives the life of a soldier for several years. After demobilization from the army, she works as a judge in the court. Haunted by a past relationship with a dashing army officer, she cannot enter a new relationship. (Her lover mysteriously disappears and loses touch with her. Later on, in an unexpectedly chance encounter with him on a train, she learns what has happened to him. He fought in the SinoVietnamese War in 1979 and lost a leg. He did not want to burden Shi Jing, and married another woman instead.) Mother was afraid her daughter would turn into an old maid and tries to introduce a series of men from whom to choose a possible future husband. But it is the father who understands her and supports her. He convinces his wife, Chu Qin, that their daughter is not “abnormal” and hi s t o r y, me mo r y, n o s ta l g i a

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is doing just fine in her personal life. With enough patience, the parents finally see their daughter find a nice fiancé. Despite the gruff, uncouth, old-fashioned manner of the father, all three children eventually come to understand him and look up to him as a role model. The symbolic order of the father is ultimately affirmed and internalized by the children after undergoing many years of apprenticeship in the real world. The TV drama was so popular that a sequel to it was made in 2003, Years of Burning Passion 2 (Jiqing ranshao de suiyue 2), with twenty episodes. Set in the 1970s, the sequel focuses on the life of the eldest child, Shi Lin, an ordinary soldier in the People’s Liberation Army. He is posted to a remote island along China’s coastline. The viewers follow a series of dramatic ups and downs in his military career and personal life. Again, his personal fate is meant to represent the zeitgeist of young people in his generation at that historical juncture in the nation’s history. To denounce the political excesses of the socialist era is one thing. But generations of people grew up, grew old, and lived their lives in those years. They devoted all their youth and adulthood to what was believed to be a meaningful cause. To completely deny their past would be like not having lived at all. The socialist past cannot be swept away so easily. Despite all the horrors and tragedies that occurred in the period, the past is a time in which people were born into the world, grew up, married, divorced, raised children, and lived lives. To say all that was wrong and meaningless is to negate life itself. This seems to be the appeal of such a TV drama to vast numbers of ordinary Chinese viewers. Chinese socialism was seen and represented often in its most horrifying and inhuman forms in many literary and filmic texts in the New Era, an era of “Reforms and Openness.” The success of two decades of intense economic reforms and social changes in the post-Mao era has revealed in due course the failure of such “success,” or what is lacking in the present moment. Hence the nostalgia for the disappearing past, for what socialism promised to be. Such is the dialectic and “cunning” of history.

A Variety of Nostalgias At this point, we may ponder another dimension to the meaning of nostalgia. This involves the commodification of time for mass consumption.12 Despite the sincerity of some age groups in watching the remakes of old films and revolutionary classics, fabricating the past and allowing the audience to relive it vicariously are necessary marketing and commercial strategies for the producers who must make good their investments. Nostalgia for the revolutionary and socialist past is incessantly produced and reproduced. The re-presentation of revolutionary history in new perspectives and the remaking of old revolutionary films 144

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and novels into soap operas offer a steady diet for China’s TV watchers. The TV series How Steel Was Forged (Gangtie shi zenyang liancheng de, 1999) is an adaptation of a Soviet novel with the same title (Kak zakalyalas stal) written in the 1930s by Nikolai Ostrovsky. The novel was extremely influential in China in the 1950s and 1960s and impacted a whole generation of youth. In fact, the feature film How Steel Was Forged (Zhangda chengren, 1997), made by a “sixthgeneration director,” Lu Xuechang, explicitly pays homage to the revolutionary classic. The film chronicles the life of a generation of youth who grew up with the kind of socialist idealism of Ostrovsky’s novel but became socially alienated in the era of reforms. Other popular TV series include The Long March (Changzheng, 2001) and Hymn to Yan’an (Yan’an song, 2003), wherein Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Chiang Kai-shek, and other Chinese political figures are reinterpreted and re-presented from fresh angles. In these instances, history and memory are as much authentic personal states of mind as necessary ingredients of mass entertainment and consumption. The trivialization and atomization of elevated collective national history into disparate personal fragments has become a common strategy used in the production of TV dramas and soap operas. There has been a proliferation of TV dramas about China’s past, not just the socialist past, but imperial China, and especially the Qing dynasty. But the focus on the Qing court is less on serious matters of the state and more on the private lives of emperors, empresses, princes, and princesses. It is these silly love stories and all-too-human follies that are being represented and fabricated on the TV screen and captivate the domestic viewers in their private homes in the evening. The consumers of these TV programs are watching the tales of the members of the imperial family as fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, and lovers, as people who operate on a mundane plane of behavior just like the everyday life of any individual today. Such decidedly ahistorical, fabricated TV shows about the historical past have ironically won the attention and adoration of countless viewer-consumers in contemporary China. For instance, the pan-Chinese TV drama Princess Huanzhu (Huanju gege), based on the script of the famous Taiwanese romance writer Qiong Yao, was enormously popular among TV audiences in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, especially young and female viewers, and catapulted its lead actress Zhao Wei in the role of “Little Swallow” (Xiao Yanzi) to stardom in the entire Chinese-speaking world.13 The Qing court is turned into a playground for young lovers in the show. The logic of history is now subjugated to the rules of consumption and entertainment. Depoliticization, trivialization, and privatization are the necessary recipes for cannibalizing history, which here is nothing more than a soap opera for evening consumption. As we know, TV drama is a genre that by definition caters to the fantasies and tastes of the masses in a domestic setting. But there is another more serious issue h i s t o r y, m e m o r y, n o s ta l g i a

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Hai Bo. They (Them, Tamen), no. 3. Photograph. 1999.

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Hai Bo. They (Them, Tamen), no. 6. Photograph. 1999.

to be explored at this juncture. This renewed backward glance at the past was also part of a broader social and cultural phenomenon in the late 1990s. Huaijiu (lit. “cherishing the old,” translated as “nostalgia”) was a mood that occupied the minds of many people in late socialist China. There was also a similar “old photo fever” (lao zhaopian re) in the late 1990s. Old photographs not just from historical archives but from families and private individuals were republished hi s t o r y, me mo r y, n o s ta l g i a

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as books and journal issues to be collected and purchased by a large number of readers in the nation. Yet this sort of historical consciousness, whether in the publication of old photos or the production of TV dramas and films, is fundamentally different from the grand historical discourse of state socialism and official historiography. The socialist past becomes a matter of the private history of each and every individual who lived through those years. As a result, there is no one monolithic grand history of the socialist state, but there do exist countless small stories of individual Chinese citizens. Photographs and films covering various political movements and periods of Mao’s China constitute important moments of people’s lives in a personally meaningful way. Erstwhile Red Guards and “sent-down youth” (zhiqing) revisit the past and redefine the present as they look at old images of themselves in Mao’s China during the 1960s and 1970s from the long distance of quasi-capitalist China in the 1990s.14 Explained in the most straightforward fashion, the late 1990s also happen to have been the time when the zhiqing generation reached middle age. Huaijiu is part of the inevitable process and ritual of reaching adulthood. Children and youth are incapable of feeling it. A sense of historicity, or historical perspective, is most graphically presented in Hai Bo’s series They (Tamen). It consists of sets of two photographs of groups of people, one taken in their youth, and another taken decades later in the 1990s, in their middle age. While they are the same people as a group, their faces, demeanor, clothes, and age have visibly changed between the photos. In other words, time has changed, history has changed. Such affects and sentiments created by the historical gap, along with attendant re-visions of the past and reevaluations of the present, make up the subject of representation in much contemporary cultural production in China. Finally, it may be helpful to look at the case of another former socialist country, East Germany, in a comparative framework. Nostalgia for the past, or “Ostalgie” in a German neologism (“nostalgia for the East”), has become an important issue in Germany’s cultural production. The film Goodbye Lenin (dir. Wolfgang Becker, 2002) was a well-received film in Europe and especially Germany upon release, and has been widely screened in US theaters. It details the life of an ordinary East German family caught in the difficult transition from socialism to a capitalist market economy. How to say goodbye to the past, how to bring a sense of closure to history, is the theme of the film. Each family must heal the wounds and traumas of the past as well as cope with the ideals and beliefs (make-beliefs) of the socialist legacy. The sudden transition from socialism to capitalism is a coma-like experience, as the mother (Christiane) actually suffers one. Memory and forgetfulness are her alternating states of consciousness and, by extension, the frames of mind of an entire generation. The son, Alex, will not let the past go so easily, and continues to live a lie, in a 148

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make-believe system. What is interesting and convincing about the film is that it does not reduce the two Germanies into a simplistic battleground of grand ideologies, but instead dwells on the small objects in the everyday lives of ordinary people (e.g., food, a particular favorite East German brand of pickles that is disappearing from the shelves of grocery stores), and shows how sweeping historical changes affect people on the most mundane level. This is not a matter of Manichean opposition between black and white, East and West, capitalism and socialism, but an intangible web of memories, affects, emotions, past experiences, and lived lives. Therefore, we see that multiple layers of meaning constitute the phenomenon of postsocialist nostalgia, whether in Germany or China: longing for past economic and social security in the midst of a merciless capitalist economy; longing for the past as an assertion of the self while some people are turned into second-class poor citizens living alongside affluent neighboring Wessies (West Germans) or Hongkies (Hong Kongese); protest against economic disparity and unequal distribution of wealth; or simply remembrance of years spent in the socialist era. In the East European context, the denunciation and invalidation of communism does not imply the total rejection of one’s childhood and adolescence, or of all the things and values that were once cherished. This is a search for personal identity as well as a collective reorientation for people who have lived through the old years. How to find a niche in the present is accomplished by revisiting the past through memory. This is the state of mind in Ostalgie in Germany, and huanjiu in China.15 And finally, such nostalgia is as much a genuine emotional revolt against the present as it is a cultural artifact produced and packaged by the media industry in these new consumer societies. “East Germany” as a social-historical entity is no more. It has been absorbed into what was West Germany. Socialist China still exists in name, but is now a member of the regime of the World Trade Organization. The country has been integrated into the capitalist world economic system. The global marketplace thus threatens to annihilate all local differences for the production of maximum profit. The neoliberalist ideology of the free market prophesizes the universal triumph of capitalism across the world. We have seen the “end of history.” But history, as recollected in the memories of individuals and reimagined in cinematic discourses, offers glimpses of life that reject the homogenization of the world under a single capitalist model — call it globalization, Americanization, or McDonaldization.

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chapter eight

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Dialect and Modernity in Twenty-first-Century Sinophone Cinema

T

his chapter attempts to explore and differentiate the uses and functions of dialects in varieties of Chinese-language films in the early twenty-first century. I briefly examine such diverse films as The Dance Age (Taiwanese documentary, 2003), which hinges on a notion of local modernity based on the Fukienese/Taiwanese dialect in early twentieth-century Taiwanese popular songs; a mainland Chinese art-house film The World (2004) by Jia Zhangke, whose works have developed a dialectal film aesthetics based on the Shanxi dialects of Fenyang and Datong; Feng Xiaogang’s new-year films Cell Phone (2003) and A World without Thieves (2004), in which some key characters speak provincial dialects; and Zhang Yimou’s pan-Chinese films Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004), which employ a cast of stars from Greater China, all of whom speak Mandarin. I analyze the articulation of distinct visions of China as nation-state and Chineseness as ethnicity in such films. The films address different audiences and embody various conceptions of China. The employment of specific local and provincial dialects, or the lack thereof, is an important marker of the cultural imaginary of a film, be it local Taiwanese identity, the moral economy of the mainland Chinese nation, or

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historico-cultural China. Overall, the chapter lays out a spreadsheet of the typography of different dialectal strands that make up contemporary Chineselanguage film production in relation to identity formation at various levels: local, national, subnational, supranational, and global.

The Dance Age and Taiwanese Modernity

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In 2003, the Public Television Service (Gonggong dianshi tai) of Taiwan produced and broadcast a documentary, The Dance Age (Tiaowu shidai), about the flourishing of popular Taiwanese-language songs in the 1930s. The title of the film is taken from that of a 1933 popular song written by the songwriter Chen Junyu. The film documents the rise and fall of Columbia Records, which produced Taiyu songs; interviews singers and staff of the company; and broadly canvases a large picture of Taiwan’s modernization under Japanese colonial rule. The narrative voice of the documentary is that of a female speaking in Taiyu, southern Fujianese (Hokkienese) dialect, or Minnanese. The narrator asserts that, although citizens of Taiwan lost their political rights under Japan’s colonial rule (1895–1945), Taiwanese society modernized quickly. The island’s infrastructure improved enormously. Railroads, electricity, tap water, and medical schools were made available to Taiwanese, and items and icons of modern life such as bicycles, eyeglasses, watches, photography, radio, and the music record became part of people’s daily lives. People’s consciousness underwent a modern transformation as they tuned in and sang along with Taiyu songs, with the words “Ruan is a civilized woman” (Ruan shi wenming nü). The documentary valorizes the values of civilization (wenming), modernization, and freedom in the early twentieth century. In this nostalgic reconstruction of a bygone golden age of popular culture, Taiwan appeared on the same page as such metropolises of the world as New York, Tokyo, and Shanghai. The beat of the age was foxtrot and waltz. The pastime of the modernizing urbanites was ballroom dance and drinking coffee in cafés. The phonograph became a symbol of Taiwanese modernity. The key to the commercial success of a recording company such as Columbia Records was to produce songs in Taiyu, or to translate and rewrite Japanese and Chinese songs into Taiyu songs. Linguistic determination was of paramount importance to win the hearts and minds of the local residents of Taiwan. Taiwanese politicians were quick to seize upon the relevance of the film to promote their political agenda. Pro-independence leaders such as ex-president Lee Teng-hui and current president Chen Shui-bian praised the film as a good example of Taiwan’s independent spirit. But the documentary itself is more nuanced. Although it highlights the importation of modern ideas and inventions from Japan to Taiwan, the documentary also points to the importance of moddialect and modernit y in sinophone cinema

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ern China in the formation of the Taiwanese cultural imaginary of the times. The narrator states that the May Fourth Movement, cultural enlightenment, and Chinese nationalism on the mainland exerted a strong impact on the intellectuals and cultural workers of Taiwan. Chen Junyu, a main songwriter of the period, visited mainland China and brought back Chinese songs to Taiwan. He wrote criticism in journals on such topics as the New Literature Movement, New Poetry, the avant-garde, and the relationship between art and the masses. Such cultural movements and intellectual inquiries united writers, artists, and critics in the pan-Chinese world of mainland China and Taiwan across geopolitical divides. After the end of World War II, Chen Junyu became a teacher of Mandarin (Beijinghua). More generally, in the 1930s, Taiwanese people readily embraced Shanghai’s modern urban culture and enjoyed Chinese films made in Shanghai. Films such as Peach Blossoms Shed Tears of Blood (Taohua qixue ji, dir. Bu Wancang, 1931) and New Woman (Xing nüxing, dir. Cai Chusheng, 1934) were screened to enthusiastic audiences in Taiwan. It is important to note that these films were dubbed live in Taiyu by an interpreter in the theater while each film was being screened. Despite the audience’s warm reception of the cultural products of Shanghai, nevertheless they needed to understand these things in their own idiom and language. The golden age of Taiwanese-language songs was brought to an end by the outbreak of the Pacific War. The colonial government then forced the populace to sing Japanese propaganda songs to support the war effort. As a “treasure island,” Taiwan has also been an “island on the edge”: on the geopolitical edge of empires, on the cutting edge of world cinema, and also on the cutting edge of sectors of economic and technological development.1 And Taiwan has had an ambivalent relationship with Japan, China, and the West as revealed in its cinema. The Dance Age implies that Taiwanese modernity is of necessity an indigenous modernity grounded in the dialect of its people. Even if it is a borrowed foreign phenomenon at moments — Japanese, Chinese, or American — modernity must be translated into the speech of Taiwanese people for it to take root on the island.

A Migrant Dancer in The World For the purpose of contrastive analyses of the range of Chinese-dialect films, I turn our attention to another film about dance, dancers, and dialect, The World (Shijie, 2004) directed by Jia Zhangke, the wunderkind of post–fifthgeneration Chinese art cinema. Consistent with the usage of dialect in his previous films, Jia Zhangke’s The World is another Shanxi dialect film. However, set in twenty-first-century Beijing, the film is about more than a provincial dia152

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lect; it intervenes in the mixed premodern, modern, and postmodern condition of China at large. The film’s protagonist, Zhao Xiaotao, is a dancer in Beijing’s World Park (Shijie gongyuan). World Park consists of miniature replicas of famous sites in the world: the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Great Pyramid, the Vatican, London Bridge, Manhattan, and so forth. It is a simulation of a world where tourists can vicariously experience the real. Zhao Tao, the actress in the role, was herself a dancer from Shanxi until being spotted and chosen by Jia to star in his films. She played lead female roles in Platform (Zhantai, 2000) and Unknown Pleasures (Ren xiaoyao, 2003).2 Like other migrant workers, Zhao Xiaotao, a native of Fenyang, Shanxi province, comes to Beijing to seek new opportunities. She dances to entertain guests in World Park in the evenings. During each show, she dons exotic, glamorous Indian costumes and performs along with other dancers representing various nationalities on a huge stage. Once she takes off her costumes, she returns to her usual lower position as a migrant worker trying to make a living in China’s capital city. Russian dancers also work in World Park. The Chinese and Russians speak little of the other’s tongue. But Zhao Xiaotao bonds with a young Russian woman, Anna, and they manage to communicate despite linguistic difficulties. In the middle of the film, Anna ventures beyond her routine dances and resorts to doing something she dislikes in order to make ends meet by becoming a worker/prostitute in a nightclub. But outside the simulated world, the real living space is a dismal place for the people who work there. These migrant workers are displaced laborers in China’s capital city. The beautiful postcard-like postmodern simulacra of the world’s landmarks in the park stand in sharp contrast to the squalid, premodern living condition of the workers and entertainers there. These people are condemned to live in a narrow corner of the wide real world. World Park is a monument to China’s imaginary integration into the world at large, but the characters from Shanxi province are not part of this brave new world. They are vagrant people at the margins of China’s modernization. Indeed, such people are nicknamed “ beipiao jituan” (northern floating group). The floating population comes to Beijing to pursue their dreams and look for jobs, only to be abandoned. They live in a fake realm and can only dream about catching a ride on the bandwagon of getting rich. A tragedy occurs at the end of the film, when Zhao Xiaotao and her lover, Taisheng, a security officer in the park, are inadvertently poisoned by gas in their apartment. They nearly die. The dialect of the film is a Shanxi dialect. It is spoken by Zhao Xiaotao, Taisheng, and folks from their native city, Fenyang. The local dialect spoken by

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these characters clashes with the anonymous, universal putonghua (Mandarin) blaring out from loudspeakers in the park. The provincial dialect is a mark of backwardness, lack of modernity, and the incommensurability of China’s poor with the postmodern virtual world. These migrants stand in for vast numbers of Chinese citizens who have been left out of China’s economic boom and the fruits of modernization. World Park showcases the world to Chinese visitors, but beneath the glitzy surface lies the struggle for survival among ordinary citizens. In fact, the miniature virtual world entraps its workers and is a mockery of globalization. The provincialism of the dialect and the characters reveals that the provinces are not at the same stage as Beijing, the capital city, and that people do not dance to the same modern beat throughout the vast country. On dark, rainy days, characters dream about possible happier things in life — love, friendship, parties. Flashes of hope are bracketed in short, bright animated sequences. These are surreal, childlike, and cartoon-like fantasies that may not come true. A message in the mobile phone left by a loved one or a friend is the sole source of happiness; its ring brings hope and mobility to the characters caught in the quagmire. Each time Zhao Xiaotao receives a message, the film turns into an animation, with hopeful bright colors. She then flies to the site for a rendezvous with her lover or friends. The dreamworld and harsh reality juxtapose and intertwine in the postmodern simulacrum of World Park. Now and then, the private life of the dancer Zhao Xiaotao is in and out of sync with the rhythm of globalization. The World reveals Jia’s usual film aesthetic: static immobile camera, slow horizontal pans, long takes, long shots, medium shots, and an absence of close-ups. By denying close-ups to the spectator, a critical distance is maintained between the spectator and the actor. The Shanxi dialect also creates a defamiliarizing, alienating, and distancing effect for the ordinary viewer. The viewer is positioned as a detached, coolheaded observer of the events and lives unfolding in the film. She/he is prompted by the camera’s eye to be witness to an objective, realistic description of a Chinese world characterized by great disparity and nonsynchronicity among its citizens who are entangled in the heated games of modernization and globalization. In addition to the example of Jia Zhangke, other eminent directors have recently used dialects in crafting their film language. The two films by the popular young director Lu Chuan are both dialect films. The Missing Gun (Xun qiang, 2002) uses a dialect of Yunnan province. The “funny” accent of the province, coupled with Jiang Wen’s stellar performance, augments the comic flavor of the film. Kekexili (Mountain Patrol, 2004) mixes Tibetan language and the Chinese dialect spoken in Tibet-Qinghai, and infuses the film with a raw, gritty, documentary, authentic feel. Peacock (Kongque), the winner of the Silver Bear Award (Jury’s Grand Prize) at the Berlin Film Festival in 2005, directed 154

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by cinematographer-turned-director Gu Changwei, uses entirely the dialect of Anyang, Henan province, throughout the film. The local speech of the Anyang area helps to convey the confining small-town lifestyle of an ordinary Chinese family in the late 1970s, a transitional period of Chinese history between Mao’s socialist planned economy and Deng’s market economy, a time that sparked both hope and desperation. When the paratrooper recruitment officers of the People’s Liberation Army arrive in the town, Sister’s (Weihong) soul is instantly engaged by the beautiful Beijing accent of a handsome young officer. The Beijing dialect, as the “standard national speech,” embodies the hopes and dreams of local dialect speakers.

The World of Thieves and Cheaters in the Telecommunication Age The flashy, fast-paced film style of China’s prominent commercial filmmaker Feng Xiaogang could not be more different from the ponderous, austere aesthetics of Jia Zhangke’s dialectal art films. But local dialects also fulfill important thematic functions in the recent new-year pictures of Feng Xiaogang. The use of the Sichuanese dialect in Cell Phone (Shouji, 2003) and the Hebei dialect in A World without Thieves (Tianxia wu zei, 2004) produces comic effects to entertain the domestic Chinese audience on the New Year’s Eve in 2004 and 2005. More important, these dialects are subtly employed to mount a social critique of China’s modernization. The 2004 new-year picture Cell Phone takes up the themes of language, communication, surveillance, and marital infidelity. A prologue precedes the film proper. It was the year of 1969 in a northern Chinese village in Hebei province, not far from Beijing. Yan Shouyi, a name that connotes fidelity, the would-be superstar TV talk host, was a thirteen-year-old boy. He spoke a heavy Hebei dialect just like everyone else in the area. It was the year when a telephone line reached the village. He took Lü Guihua, the beautiful young bride of his cousin Niu Sanjin, on a bicycle newly purchased by his father to the post office in order to place an important phone call to Niu Sanjin. A long line of peasants were waiting to make phone calls at the post office. Lü Guihua and Yan Shouyi were finally able to call Niu, who worked at a remote coalmine. This telecommunicational breakthrough was a joyful day as well as a personal accomplishment for the teenager Yan Shouyi. What becomes evident in the prologue is Yan Shouyi’s purity of heart, his faithfulness to his family, cousin, and cousin’s wife, and more generally the social mores of the villagers in primitive, premodern China. When the film itself begins, a magical fetishized commodity object, a cell phone, occupies the center of the frame of the film in the opening credits. The dialect and modernit y in sinophone cinema

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actors’ names are listed and introduced in the directory section of a cell phone on screen. Blatant product placements (China Mobile and others) appear at the very beginning and run throughout the film. Adult Yan Shouyi (Ge You), far from being a primitive, tongue-tied, simple peasant boy, is a glib talk host at a major television station, speaking putonghua (literally, “universal language”). The rest of the story then unfolds the farce of how married, professionally successful men such as Yan Shouyi attempt to cheat on their wives with the help of cell phones. But the cell phone, with deceptively placed messages, beeps, is turned on and off, and ultimately turns against its user and exposes the infidelity of the husband to his spouse. Time has proven that the technology of the cell phone brings people too close to each other. It even has the feature of global satellite positioning, which pinpoints the exact location and apartment number of the user of the phone, as demonstrated in the film. There is no place to hide secrets anymore. Ironically, the cell phone destroys the bonding between people and within families rather than bringing them closer to one another. An interesting character is the head of the television station, Fei Mo, or Lao Mo (Old Mo, played by Zhang Guoli, who also stars as an endearing yet compromised husband in Feng Xiaogang’s film A Sigh [Yisheng tanxi, 2000]). He is a Sichuanese-speaking character. Lao Mo tries to have an affair with his female assistant, but does not carry it out. He is incapable of adultery despite his secret wish, and yet is still disgraced and shamed once his wife finds out what he is up to. The postmodern technology of a cell phone does not help him, but in the end betrays him in his hide-and-seek game with his wife. The voice-over narrator tells the audience that Lao Mao quits his job at the TV station, leaves China and goes to Estonia to be a Chinese-language teacher. No further news about him is heard. What is charming about this character is the fact that he consistently speaks Sichuanese in the capital city. His provincial quality and clumsiness are thus his saving grace. He retains a measure of purity and has not descended to the lower depths of sweet talkers of putonghua in the postmodern metropolis. The final sequence of the film jumps from the global village of Beijing to Yan Shouyi’s old childhood premodern village, with the haunting echo of the teenager Yan calling out the name of his cousin’s wife, Lü Guihua, reminding people of a prior primitive stage of society, a time when a legendary, irretrievably strong bond existed in a small local community. The ending thus dovetails with the prologue, visually and thematically. In Feng’s 2005 new-year picture The World without Thieves, the prologue to the film is an intriguing, comic episode that nevertheless sets the scene for the serious main themes of the film: money, lust, technology, and language. General Manager Liu (Fu Biao), an obese, bald, middle-aged man, is having 156

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an English lesson with a female tutor, Wang Li (Liu Ruoying), in his luxury private mansion. Liu has a loving, caring, beautiful wife, portrayed by Xu Fan, Feng Xiaogang’s real-life wife. (Xu Fan also acts the roles of a loving, suffering, cheated wife in Feng’s film A Sigh and in Cell Phone). Liu wants to study English in order to improve his ability to deal with foreign businessmen. But he also wants more. He tries to have sex with Wang Li behind his wife’s back. Liu’s compromising action is recorded by Wang Bo (Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau) with a Canon camcorder (product placement!) from a hidden position in the house. It turns out that Wang Li is Wang Bo’s girlfriend. They are a couple of conspiring thieves. While threatening to expose Liu’s infidelity, they take away his expensive BMW (product placement!) as a substitute for a one million yuan cash payment. The thieves use English, the corrupt lingua franca of international business, as a foil for extortion. The couple drives away in the BMW and heads toward remote western China to arrive at a Tibetan monastery. Thus the film begins. But the most hilarious and extraordinary character in the film is a young male peasant, Shagen (Root, or literally, Dumb Root), a migrant worker at the Tibetan Buddhist temple, who speaks with a heavy provincial dialect. The actor in the role is Wang Baoqiang. He also successfully portrays a similarly innocent young man who becomes easy prey for bloodthirsty predators in Blind Shaft (Mang jing, dir. Li Yang, 2003). Root has been hired to repair a Tibetan temple for several years. Having earned 60 thousand yuan, he is eager to return to his village to build a house and find a wife. His coworkers advise him that it is not safe to carry the money home because there are thieves everywhere, and urge him to wire the money home. That means he would need to pay 600 yuan for the postal service. But Root does not believe there are thieves in the world. Root’s naïveté and simple manners are a contrast to the wiles and guiles of the thieves equipped with the postmodern technologies of camcorders and cell phones. While boarding the train, he announces to the crowd of passengers that he is carrying 60 thousand yuan with him and challenges any thief to come get him. Subsequent to his self-exposure, he is targeted for robbery by two gangs onboard. Root’s outrageous rhapsodizing about manure and wolves to Wang Bo and Wang Li on the train is absurdly laughable as well as authentically moving, delivered in a quaint Hebei dialect: In our village, people collect cow manure. When people forget to bring their manure baskets, they use stones to mark the manure. Other people would know this manure belongs to somebody else already and would not touch it. In the highland where I work, I am often alone, and have nobody to talk

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to. I talk to wolves. I am not afraid of them, nor do they harm me. Now there are so many people on the train who talk to me. Wolves do not harm me. How can human beings harm me? Such words touch the even most jaded, cynical thieves, such as Wang Bo. In the world known to Root, human beings and animals live in a perfect moral order; robbery is unheard of. Ultimately, his innocence protects him and moves the heart of the veteran pickpocket Wang Bo. Wang Bo dies protecting Root’s money in a fatal fight with the head of another gang, Li Shu, or “Uncle Li” (Ge You). The crystal-clear blue lakes, green grassland, snow-capped mountains, and pristine landscape of western China, the murals inside the temple, and the religious devotion of pilgrims appear all the more otherworldly to visitors from inland China, where ordinary citizens have been accustomed to lying and stealing in a frenetically busy consumer society. Root is meant to be the redemptive figure in the fallen world of consumerism and theft. A dumb figure, speaking an uncouth provincial Hebei dialect, he embodies a critique of the calculating manners of urbanites in their mindless nationwide rush toward modernization. Feng Xiaogang is China’s most outspoken director for commercial cinema. This film is not short of deep-pocketed sponsors. The credits at the end of the film give a long list of rich transnational and local corporations, including Nokia, Canon, BMW, Hewlett-Packard, the Beijing Morning Post, and so on. But Feng the citizen of Beijing gives eloquence to a dialect speaker, Root. Root, the quintessential noncommercial character, articulates a vision of China caught in the shady pursuit of capitalist consumerism. The film is the return of the repressed unconscious on the part of Feng, as it were. Admittedly, these “quaint” local dialects add to the humor of the genre of comedy, which, after all, is intended to provide fun and entertainment to the Chinese audience. At the same time, local dialects symbolize premodern, innocent forces in these instances. They bemoan the woes of reckless globalization and modernization. The idealist vision of the film, as the title loudly proclaims — “There are no thieves in the world” (tianxia wu zei) — must find expression in a local dialect, rather than in putonghua or English. But that said, it is obvious that provincialism in the form of dialects in Feng’s films does not mean a retreat to some subnational level of identity formation. Feng is describing a general comedy or malaise in contemporary China. The Beijing-based commercial filmmaker is not outlining and calling for some regional independence. The use of dialect amounts to a carefully orchestrated critique of the uneven state of modernity in the Chinese nation at large. 158

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The World of Dancing Martial Arts Heroes Now I would like to examine how language functions in another kind of Chinese film, that is, in Zhang Yimou’s commercial blockbusters Hero (Yingxiong, 2002) and House of Flying Daggers (Shimian maifu, 2004). In these two films, only standard Mandarin is used. “All under heaven” (tianxia), these heroes speak a universal putonghua. Their combats and showdowns appear more like well-choreographed dance sequences than actual fighting. Special effects enhance the quality of improbable feats of martial arts. Indeed, in the beginning of House of Flying Daggers, the Zhang Ziyi character, Xiaomei, a member of a secret society, pretends to be a blind dancer, showcasing an extraordinary, putatively Tang dynasty–style dance in a pleasure quarter. The characters in the films come from northern China — especially Zhang’s home province, Shaanxi. Hero is set in the Qin (modern Shaanxi province). House of Flying Daggers is set in the Tang dynasty, and the locale of action is in Feng Tian county, near the capital city Chang’an, or modern Xi’an, Shaanxi province. But the Mandarin spoken by some of Zhang’s larger-than-life, ancient heroes and martial arts experts is slightly accented. However slight their accents are, the speeches of Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, and Andy Lau do not sound like the kind of elegant Mandarin delivered by mainland Chinese actors and actresses in traditional films and historical dramas. Chinese drama and film academies have trained their actors to speak and act in certain appropriately “dramatic” fashions. It appears that the Mandarin spoken by these most highly paid megastars from Hong Kong lacks the lyricism and eloquence that audiences in mainland China and Taiwan expect. But director Zhang Yimou has the entire Asian and world market in mind, and uses stardom to appeal to global audiences. He is looking at the example of the worldwide commercial success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which is notorious for its Cantonese-accented speeches by the lead actors (Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh). The dialectal implausibility did not affect the warm international reception of Ang Lee’s film. The audiences did not understand any Chinese dialect anyway and relied on subtitled English translation, which in itself is full of classical lyricism. Therefore, it does not matter if Zhang Yimou’s cast of superstars delivers Mandarin lines with small local accents in his martial arts films. What matters is that the presence of these stars from Greater China guarantee box-office success. Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in Hero and Andy Lau (Captain Liu) in House of Flying Daggers speak a Cantonese-tinged Mandarin, and Jin Chengwu (Kaneshiro Takeshi, Captain Jin) in House of Flying Daggers speaks in the style of Taiwanese-Mandarin (Taiwan guoyu). It is far from the truth to say that only

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speakers of perfect Mandarin lived in ancient China. The fact of the matter is that the audience’s linguistic expectations have been conditioned by what they have watched on screen and TV. Television series and historical dramas produced in mainland China and Taiwan have been watched by people in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the diaspora. They set the standards for what appears to be authentic historical events and plausible historical characters. Mainland Chinese actors such as Chen Daoming in Hero and Zhang Ziyi in House of Flying Daggers thus appear to be more believable characters and steal the show. The First Emperor speaks through the mouth of the Beijing-trained actor Chen Daoming and expounds the virtues of creating a grand Chinese empire, a globalized Chinese world — tianxia. Hero is also a story abut the Chinese language, the Chinese written script, and Chinese calligraphy. When the assassin Wuming (literally, “Nameless,” Jet Li) tells the emperor that there are nineteen ways of writing the word jian (sword), the emperor retorts that in his future unified world there will not be the confusion of so many ways of writing one word, there will be only one way of writing it. In fact, the historical First Emperor was the person who unified the Chinese language. He ordered all the former feudal states to adopt the Qin zhuan (zhuanti) as the standard Chinese script. The nationalist ideology of the film may be lost to world audiences, to non-China specialists unfamiliar with intra- and inter-Chinese politics as they are engrossed by the beautiful cinematography, fantastic choreography of action, and neo-orientalist spectacles. Zhang’s film has faint echoes of the real historical story of Jing Ke’s attempted assassination of the First Emperor as recorded in historical records, but the details are largely fictional. Jing Ke does try to kill the First Emperor at the Qin court, but Wuming backs down from his original plan, becomes a follower of the emperor’s Great China ideology, and willingly sacrifices his life for the sake of national unity.3 With the ambition to capture the global box office the primary concern, it does not matter if Mandarin sounds impure or inauthentic to the ears of Chinese-language speakers. What matters to Feng Xiaogang matters less to Zhang Yimou. Dialectal authenticity is important for the effect of fictional realism in Feng’s films. As we know, Feng’s films are extremely popular in mainland China but do not circulate in the movie theaters of the world. But Zhang Yimou aims at creating a pan-Chinese, pan-Mandarin world in the Greater China area for his films to circulate freely. Linguistic authenticity is not an issue in the targeted international market. The desired effect is the creation of a breed of supranational Chinese films to be watched and enjoyed by global audiences. The Zhang Yimou of pan-Chinese martial arts has come a long way from the early Zhang who diligently explored contemporary social problems of 160

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mainland China. For example, in The Story of Qiu Ju (1993), dialectal authenticity was crucial to his film aesthetics. Gong Li and other actors had to learn how to speak proper Shaanxi dialect in order to portray their characters faithfully. More specifically, the Shaanxi dialect used in the film is no ordinary Shaanxi dialect, but the dialect of Baoji, “a crossroads of migrants from Sichuan, Gansu, and Ningxia.” As Edward Gunn reminds us, “Like Zhongjiang and Wanxian in the comedy of Chengdu and Chongqing, or Subei in the comedy of Shanghai, the residents of Baoji were ridiculed in Xi’an as the stereotype of quaint, slowwitted boors.”4 The Baoji dialect sounds even more rustic and local than some other dialects of Shaanxi. But that kind of linguistic and atmospheric realism is no longer a consideration in Zhang’s new films, whose success is built on fabricating unreal yet aesthetically pleasing scenes and actions. The Story of Qiu Ju, Hero, and House of Flying Daggers are all set in present-day Shaanxi province, Zhang’s homeland and pride, and his favorite locale of action. But his strategy of filmic representation has changed.

Sinophone Cinema? Evidently, we are looking at examples of Chinese-language films in which dialects serve different functions. They may address the domestic audience of mainland China (Feng Xiaogang’s films), or resonate with the tastes and aspirations of a local audience (The Dance Age), or spill over national boundaries and target global audiences and markets (Zhang Yimou’s films). The Minnan dialect in The Dance Age establishes a Taiwanese modernity distinct from that of guoyu-speaking mainstream mainland culture, a modernity that could be local or national, depending on one’s political persuasion. Local and provincial dialects in The World, A World without Thieves, and Cell Phone are not about the provinces per se, but are emblematic of larger national predicaments in China’s modernization efforts. The bland, ubiquitous putonghua in Zhang Yimou’s martial arts films does not enhance the building of a credible regional flavor and an ambience of cinematic verisimilitude. These films sell themselves out to pan-Chinese audiences in Greater China as well as to non-Chinese spectators around the globe where the issue of Chinese language is irrelevant. In a state of polyglossia, dialects in such diverse films constitute subjectivities at not only the national but also the subnational and supranational levels. In the analysis of dialectal aesthetics, the model of national cinema can cover only part of the problem at hand. The “transnational” is better suited to track the flows and circulations of film culture beyond the limits of the nation-state. We may explore these multidialectal phenomena in yet another direction by looking into the problematic of what we may call “Sinophone cinema.” 5

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Naturally, Chinese-language cinema calls for a comparative study of parallel cinematic traditions where language transcends the territorial boundaries of nation-states, such as German-language cinema, Francophone cinema, and Anglophone cinema. Not unlike these traditions, Chinese-language films express the claims and convictions of diverse communities with varied cultural, political, and dialectal backgrounds, albeit all under the loose rubric of “Chineselanguage speakers.” 6 “Huayu dianying,” “Chinese-language cinema,” and “Sinophone cinema” seem to be equivalent terms denoting the same field of cultural production and the same analytic framework. But the connotations of these terms may diverge as well as overlap. To use Sinophone cinema to describe our field is to open up a new range of issues. Can we speak about Sinophone cinema in the same way we talk about Anglophone and Francophone cinema? Colonialism, mimicry, decolonization, national independence, identity politics, and postcoloniality often define the perimeters and themes of these cinematic traditions. Obviously, China was subject to colonization historically, and it also acted like a colonial-imperial power to its periphery. Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and parts of mainland China became colonies or were granted the status of extraterritoriality. The aftermath of the colonial legacies continues to be felt today. In cinematic production, the use of dialects indicates such historical and present divisions within the Chinese body politic and mindset. We may float the idea of “Sinophone cinema” in order to draw certain preliminary comparisons and contrasts with related situations in world film. In the anthology World Cinema: Critical Approaches, the cinemas of Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and Canada are listed and studied under the category of “Anglophone national cinemas.” 7 Hollywood, an Anglophone yet global cinema, is too large and international to be subsumed under “national cinema.” Francophone cinema refers to the films of Francophonie or Francophonia, namely, the former French colonies outside the sovereignty of France. Although France hopes to assert its influence on these countries by promoting the notion of Francophonie, post-independence Francophone Africa is steadily moving away from France’s cultural and linguistic hegemony by asserting its own indigenous traditions and idioms. Nevertheless, African filmmakers sometimes strategically identify themselves with the Francophone world for a wider distribution of their films. “Despite the increasing use of Arabic and local languages throughout the African continent, reference to Francophone African cinema continues to be valid; it views African cinema in its historical context and is a means of promoting the films of these individual countries more strongly. It also provides a counter-balance against an increasing incursion of Anglophone cinema.” 8 In the terrain of Francophone cinema, there are the simultaneous movements of extending the neocolonial cultural influence on the part 162

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of France and of the resurgence of indigenous cultures in postcolonial African states. Resistance and self-affirmation in postcolonial African cinema nevertheless operate within and take advantage of the larger Francophone network of production, funding, and distribution. Yet, between the Francophone and the postcolonial, there are further important distinctions. “Unlike francophonie, the political dimensions of which are masked by a term which superficially appears to denote a purely cultural field of reference, the post-colonial highlights a political condition characterizing certain forms of cultural production, i.e. the legacy of colonial domination out of or against which cultural practices are seen to emerge.” 9 Greater China is not necessarily a monolithic, colonial, oppressive geopolitical entity, or an intrinsically conservative concept. Neither is Sinophone cultural production from the margins an inherently postcolonial, counterhegemonic discourse. The political and cultural impact of a film depends on specific conjectures of forces and circumstances. It might be useful to revisit the old problematic of colonial/postcolonial in the context of our present state of existence, namely, a new wave of globalization that has intensified in the post–Cold War era. Transnational, border-crossing Sinophone cinema goes hand in hand with globalization and is its epiphenomenon. Chinese-language films address audiences beyond the Chinese nation-state; engage citizens of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau; spread to the Chinese diaspora; and reach interested spectators anywhere in the world. Sinophone cinema thus assumes a more flexible position in regard to national identity and cultural affi liation. There is no one dominant voice in the field. The multiple tongues and dialects used in varieties of Sinophone cinema testify to the fracturing of China and Chineseness. Each dialect speaker is the voice of a special class, represents a particular stage of socioeconomic development, and embodies a specific level of modernity within a messy ensemble of heterogeneous formations in China and the Chinese diaspora. This profusion of accents in fact comprises a pan-Chinese world — a collective of diverse identities and positionalities that a single geopolitical, national entity is unable to contain. Shijie or tianxia is not a monologic world speaking one universal language. The world of Sinophone cinema is a field of multilingual, multidialectal articulations that constantly challenge and redefine the boundaries of groups, ethnicities, and national affiliations.

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part four

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Cityscape in Multimedia

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chapter nine

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Tear Down the City Reconstructing Urban Space in Cinema, Photography, Video

C

hai-na (literally, “tearing down!”) is indeed the proper name for contemporary China, as we witness the destruction of old buildings and the construction of new structures wherever we go in a Chinese city. This process of massive scale gathered great momentum throughout the 1990s with the infusion of transnational capital and continues into the twenty-first century. Chai (demolition) is the very theme of much contemporary Chinese visual art. It points not only to the physical demolition of the old cityscape, but more profoundly to the symbolic and psychological destruction of the social fabric of families and neighborhoods. This chapter is a multimedia exploration of the theme of the destruction/reconstruction of the city as expressed in contemporary Chinese popular cinema and avant-garde photography and video. The formation of new subjects and new social relationships in contemporary China is concomitant with the destruction of old spatial forms and the construction of new cities. I will examine such phenomena as manifested in relevant examples of photography, cinema, and video. A major achievement in the recent transition of the Chinese economy to-

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ward a market mechanism is housing reform. The socialist system of subsidized public housing has been largely suspended, and residents are encouraged to purchase “commodity-houses” (shangpin fang). A privately purchased and owned home has turned into a new fetish object among the populace as the booming real estate has become a driving force in the growth of China’s fledgling market economy. In year 2000, commodity houses worth 23 billion yuan were sold in Beijing alone.1 The commodification of housing, and consequently the commodification of the private home and the inner life of individuals and families, has created tensions in the formation of subjectivity for those people caught in the process. The logic of capital and commercialization steadily takes over both public and private space, day-by-day and inch-by-inch, in postsocialist China. As can be seen in the visual texts that I will discuss, there is an acutely felt collision between culture and capital. In the formation of a global “singular modernity,” what has transpired is more than the “becoming cultural of the economic, and the becoming economic of the cultural.”2 Culture and economy often stand in asymmetrical, disjunctive, and antagonistic relations to each other even as they may be partners in the global leveling of differences in accordance with the principles of the marketplace. In the Chinese instance, residual traditional culture and socialist habits clash with the emergent capitalist economy. Whether it is a state-sponsored project or the injection of transnational capital, relentless modernization and homogenization have produced sites of contradiction and discontent throughout the country. In the words of a sociologist, what is happening in the modern city in regard to the linkage of people to territory is globalization and its discontents, the “unmooring of identities from what have been traditional sources of identity, such as the nation or the village. The unmooring in the process of identity formation engenders new notions of community, of membership, and of entitlement.” 3 As city planners and municipal governments lay out grandiose projects to transform cityscapes by constructing new buildings and roads and by tearing down existing structures on the way, the impact on the psyche of city residents is far more contradictory and uneven. Daily reports about city constructions — building new roads and widening old ones, planting trees and grass, cleaning polluted rivers and canals, moving into new apartments, and so forth — fill Beijing’s newspapers. New streets and neighborhoods grow annually in great numbers, and it is estimated that about three hundred new place-names were added to Beijing’s map in year 2001. While old alleys and hutong are torn down, most new place-names include “gardens” (yuan), “plazas” (chang), and “malls” (cheng).4 Among the results of Beijing’s modernization efforts, housing space per capita in the city reached 16.2 square meters in the year 2000, and according to the new five-year plan (2001–2005), the figure would be increased to 18 square meters by the year 2005.5 In reality, Beijing’s per capita housing space 168

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doubled in these five years, reaching nearly 33 square meters. The supreme goal of the Chinese nation at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first has been the “all-out construction of a society of moderate affluence” (quanmian jianshe xiaokang shehui), a main component of which is the realization of the dream of a sweet home for each and every citizen. As per capita housing space increases, the domain of memory and history diminishes proportionately for those who have lived in the past. While dreaming about the new in their heads, many citizens do not let the old go so easily in their hearts.6 The new generation of filmmakers, photographers, and video artists rightfully claim the modern Chinese city as their own. In representing the construction and demolition of urban space through their own media, they evoke the memories, nostalgia, intimacy, affect, and habits of life associated with the old city, and at the same time project new zones of hopes, desires, and dreams in the rapidly changing social landscape. These media and the texts of such cultural productions enter into an uneasy, asymmetrical, and contradictory relationship with the teleologies of modernization, developmentalism, globalization, and social progress. This chapter will examine two kinds of visual materials on the theme of urban space — popular cinema and avant-garde photography and video. While both deal with the restructuring of architectural and social space and the attendant psychological impact on people in contemporary China, they differ greatly in terms of audience and mode of representation. Popular cinema’s targeted audience is the vast number of average middle-class Chinese citizens, and its mood of presentation tends to be sentimental and reflectionist in nature. By focusing on mundane and familiar scenes of family relationships, love affairs, and resultant moral crises, these films easily relate to the daily life and spiritual state of the ordinary Chinese person. In contrast, the works of avant-garde photography and video aim at more critical, quizzical, and abstract interventions of everyday life and social space and speak to a smaller circle of specialized people — art connoisseurs, intellectuals, cultural workers, and critics. It requires a bit of intellectual labor on the part of the audience to decode the form and message of this sort of art. The differences between these two types of visual materials will become more evident in the course of the ensuing analyses.

Nostalgia for the Old and Dream of the New in Popular Cinema In the investigation of contemporary Chinese urban space, I shall focus on several examples of what I call “popular cinema,” which is to be distinguished from independent cinema. Popular films are produced and distributed through regular channels within China’s film industry. They address urgent topical issues tear down the cit y

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in contemporary Chinese society and strike a chord with Chinese audiences. The viewers usually will not find remarkable stylistic innovations or shocking revelations about culture and history in this kind of film. Rather, they are heartwarming melodramas and moral tales aimed at capturing the hearts of the majority of average urban people.7 Although some of these films have captured the attention of international film festivals, China’s domestic market is the primary, never secondary, consideration in the minds of the filmmakers. These films must sell and make a profit by appealing to the sentiments and life-world of ordinary folks. Hence, the strategy of this group of new urban filmmakers is a significant departure from the so-called independent, sixth-generation directors whose films are often not allowed, or ever intended by the filmmakers themselves, to be publicly screened in China, as international audiences are their primary markets. Either because of their subject matter or style, such films do not enter the mainstream of Chinese cinema after their initial release. The features commonly associated with these films, such as marginal social groups (rock musicians, independent artists, squatters), “abnormal” sexual behavior, urban malaise, alienation from society, autobiographical narration, coming-ofage anxiety, the use of nonprofessional actors, documentary style, and so on, define the field of independent cinema. As will be shown in my ensuing analysis of specific examples, popular cinema is rather different from the category of independent films.8 I have chosen three popular films as case studies: A Beautiful New World (Meili xin shijie, 1998; dir. Shi Runjiu), Shower (Xizao, 1999; dir. Zhang Yang), and A Sigh (Yisheng tanxi, 2000; dir. Feng Xiaogang). My analysis will focus on two interrelated issues: the articulation of the everyday and the restructuring of spatial relationships in the contemporary Chinese city. The filmmakers depict mundane daily events in the lives of ordinary citizens and describe how identities and subjectivities are decisively shaped by new configurations of urban space (in the forms of apartment, bathhouse, and hotel, respectively). These two elements account for the mass appeal of such popular cinema. In one way or another, all these films respond to the drastic transformation of the living space of the Chinese citizen as a result of the advent of a new capitalist commercial housing system (shangpin fang) in postsocialist China. Commodity housing based on the purchasing power of people uproots and dislocates folks from their habitual living environment, long established under the old socialist system for decades. At the same time, commodity housing raises the expectations of average citizens for a brave new world before they are psychologically and financially prepared for it. The promise of a future home is often withheld, or never delivered. I begin with A Beautiful New World (Imar Film Co. Ltd, with Xi’an Film Studio), a film set in Shanghai in the 1990s. The protagonist’s hopes and dreams 170

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are predicated upon having won the lottery for a new apartment under construction. The awaited future home creates a clash of old and new social mores in the everyday life-world of ordinary Shanghai residents. The narrative of the film is framed by storytelling in the mode of traditional Suzhou chanting performance (Suzhou pingtan). This narrative structure of a story within a story is evident in the film’s beginning and end, as well as being interspersed throughout. In a teahouse filled with auditors, the storytellers narrate the tale of Zhang Baogen (Jiang Wu), a young man from a small town who is lucky enough to win a new apartment in Shanghai in a lottery. The beginning of the film offers shots of rivers in southern China (Jiangnan) leading to Shanghai, the dreamland of many southern Chinese. Baogen comes to Shanghai to receive the new apartment, but the promise of a new home seems to be perpetually deferred and withheld. The manager of the construction company tells him that his apartment is not yet ready, as the entire building is still under construction. His future apartment, worth hundreds of thousands yuan, is located in beautiful surroundings, is on the thirty-seventh floor at the top of the building, and commands a grand view of Huangpu River. While waiting for the completion of the construction of the building in Shanghai, Baogen stays in the home of a distant relative, Jin Fang (Tao Hong), a lower-middle-class young woman, stereotypically portrayed as a snobbish yet kindhearted Shanghainese. Throughout the film, the viewer sees shots of brand-new skyscrapers and glitzy neon lights of an ultramodern Shanghai, all of which stand in sharp contrast to the cramped, crowded house of Jin Fang and the narrow old lanes of her neighborhood. Baogen, as the figure of the country bumpkin, personifies honesty, simplicity, and good nature in contrast to the urban attitudes of calculation and selfishness of the citizens of metropolitan Shanghai, who seem to single-mindedly seek status and wealth and are contemptuous of low social classes. His country and small-town mentality is markedly different from the wiles and guiles of Shanghai folks such as Jin Fang. But by the end of the film, mutual appreciation and even love have grown between Baogen and Jin Fang, and together they go to the construction site of the new apartment building under a downpour of rain. Baogen looks up at the sky and tells Jin Fang that his future new apartment up there will give him a most beautiful view of Shanghai. It is evident in the film that the construction of new space is also the formation of new hopes and dreams. Perpetual waiting, dreaming about the future, and hoping for the materialization of a “beautiful new world” are the modes of living in the world for many urban dwellers in China’s quest for modernization. Another enormously popular film produced by Imar in association with Xi’an Film Studio is Shower, which provides us with a contrasting view of the tear down the cit y

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same dilemma. Whereas Beautiful New World narrates the creation of new living space in Shanghai, Shower depicts the disappearance of old urban space in Beijing. The film is set against the background of the imminent demolition of an old-style bathhouse in Beijing. With the disappearance of the bathhouse, previous lifestyles and communal relationships will be gone as well. The film offers a nostalgic look at a bygone way of life. Shower is the third film from the independent film company Imar, headed by Peter Loehr, and the second film directed by Zhang Yang and produced by Imar. The first three films of Imar, Spicy Love Soup (Aiqing mala tang, dir. Zhang Yang, 1997), A Beautiful New World, and Shower, were all domestic box-office hits. They gained popular applause precisely because they portrayed the ordinary daily life of the populace in mainland China. Shower tells the story of a father and his two sons. The aged father, Master Liu (Liu shifu, played by Zhu Xu) manages an old bathhouse; the elder son, Daming (Pu Cunxin) has long left Beijing and works in Shenzhen as a businessman; the second son, Erming (Jiang Wu), is mentally retarded, stays with the father, and helps him in the bathhouse. The narrative frame of the film covers Daming’s home visit, a period of time in which he rediscovers what life is like in his father’s bathhouse, the local community, the neighborhood, and old Beijing. As a result, he gains a new understanding of his family, father, and brother. At the end of the film, the father dies, and the bathhouse is closed and torn down. Daming realizes the importance of his old family and decides to take care of his retarded brother. The film begins with shots of a man taking a shower in a futuristic automatic shower machine, something very much like a car-wash machine. Such a shower machine, like a car wash and fast food, is necessarily devoid of intimacy and feelings. But as we soon find out, such “futurism” in the film, as in A Beautiful New World, is illusory and misleading. The film then cuts to a traditional-style Chinese bathhouse and proceeds to unfold a human story at a leisurely, slow pace. In the bathhouse, the father has a steady stream of loyal old-time customers. People live their lives here: they rest, chat, drink tea, play chess, bet on cricket matches, have massages, and receive Chinese cupping jar treatments (ba huoguan’er). The film reiterates and rehabilitates the Chinese father figure, unlike the parricide impulse of the rebellious fifth-generation Chinese filmmakers. It upholds the wholesomeness of the traditional nuclear family and places the father at the head of such a healthy institution. One recalls Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1984), the foundational text of the fifth generation, in which the father figure is contested and questioned. In the frenzy and fever of “historical and cultural reflection” (lishi fansi, wenhua fansi) in the 1980s, the Chinese father was seen as inept and unfit for the task of national modernization. So much has changed in China with the elapse of time. In Shower, 172

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the father reconciles quarrelsome neighbors, repairs damaged marriages, and protects customers from brutal assaults from outside. The bathhouse becomes an enclave of peace and tranquility amid the pains, dangers, and violence of the rapidly changing and modernizing outside world. In a flashback sequence, the film establishes the important link between the father and water, both of which are precious sources of life. The father recounts his life story to his two sons. He originally came from northern Shaanxi province (Shaanbei), from “yellow earth,” a barren land lacking water yet often seen as a cradle of Chinese civilization. Shots of the yellow earth are reminiscent of the style of the film Yellow Earth. We see his new bride taking a bath the night before her wedding, as residents in impoverished northern Shaanxi can afford the luxury of taking a bath only a few times in their entire lives. The importance and vitality of water is emphasized by the father in his story and throughout the film. (For example, among other film characters, the fat boy, Miaozheng, can sing only while water is being sprinkled on his body, or while taking a shower.) The father dies at the moment when Daming rushes to pick up his ringing mobile phone, a call from his wife in Shenzhen. After the father dies, Daming takes Erming to a mental hospital out of good intention, but the environment of the hospital makes Erming truly insane. Erming was used to and content with the daily rituals and tasks of the bathhouse: mopping, cleaning, scrubbing, changing the water. During the day he helped the father run the bathhouse, and in the evening they ran and played together in the old alleyway. As soon as he wanders too far from home, he is lost in the confusing outside world. He does not quite understand his brother’s world even as he tries on Daming’s suit in front of a mirror and curiously toys with his mobile phone. Daming is an entirely different type of person. One sequence of the film shows him discussing the fast-food business with his friend in a car wash. He actually brings home an automatic, electric massage machine for father and brother, but nothing is like the touch and feel of a real human massage administered by the father to his clients in the bathhouse. He begins to understand the world of his father and brother and delays his return again and again. There exists a clear contrast between the two brothers, between the smart elder brother and the retarded younger brother, and by extension between the new capitalist, profit-making, southern culture (Shenzhen) and old Beijing culture. Toward the end of the film, the bathhouse is torn down (chai) to clear space for the building of a new commercial district. The whole neighborhood is torn apart and all residents must move away. Old neighbors will be scattered to different corners of the big city. No more crickets — crickets can’t live in an apartment building removed from the vital force of the ground (di qi), as one old neighbor complains. Water heaters in new apartments cannot compare with the tear down the cit y

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old bathhouse, where people could gather and chat. The bulldozers, hammers, shovels, trucks, and construction workers are frightening to Erming as his home and very life-world are leveled and destroyed. He becomes a real madman and beats back the workers as they dismantle the bathhouse. The film ends without supplying an answer to the question — now homeless, what will happen to Erming? Erming and the old-timers of the bathhouse stand for those Chinese citizens who are indeed too “mentally challenged” to deal with the destruction of the secure web of life from the old days, and are psychologically ill-prepared to face the competition and fast pace in the quasi-capitalist present. Three points about the film should be emphasized at this juncture. First of all, at the level of textual meaning, Shower presents the nostalgia for the old disappearing Beijing and offers a critique of the effects of modernization and globalization that uproot old communities and their lifestyles. Second, despite its critique of globalization, still the packaging of the film follows the logic of globalization in selling and marketing consumable images of an exotic, traditional China, and makes the “bathhouse” into another new icon of China for international audiences. Such is the internal contradiction of our present. Third, equally important, the self-conscious evocation of Yellow Earth adopts and inverts fifteen years of New Chinese Cinema up to the moment of the film’s release (1984–1999) — not by dismissing the Chinese father as a backward figure in the nation’s quest for modernity, but rather by returning to the father as the root of harmony and life much needed in the time of mindless commercialization and globalization. Thus, Shower bears witness to how much China has changed from the beginning years of its reforms to the turn of the twentyfirst century. It addresses a new set of problems in China’s urban centers as the country labors to advance from the backwater of the world market to the scene of active participation in globalization and modernization. Beyond the new apartment building and the old bathhouse, I now move to another kind of spatial form, the hotel room, in a film by Feng Xiaogang. A highly popular film in China, A Sigh touches on the sensitive yet widespread phenomena of extramarital affairs and divorce in postsocialist China. In fact, what it does is to depict in minute detail the dissolution of the “standard family” in the present time. In the film, playwright Liang Yazhou (Zhang Guoli) is writing a screenplay for a TV drama. In order to concentrate on his work and not be distracted, he lives in isolation, separated from his family, in a hotel room in a seaport city. To speed up his writing and make his life more comfortable, his producer, Liu Dawei (Fu Biao), sends an assistant, Li Xiaodan (Liu Bei), to his side. Although married at the time, Liang Yazhou soon falls in love with his assistant — a beautiful young woman who adores him and admires his genius. While Liang is entangled in a love affair with his assistant in the promiscuous space of a hotel room, his wife, Song Xiaoying (Xu Fan), unaware of her hus174

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band’s infidelity, is busy decorating their newly purchased apartment — their dream home. Once again, Liang is sent away by his producer to live in a hotel in the suburbs of Beijing in the company of Li Xiaodan, so that he may focus on his writing and be free of daily family responsibilities. During a visit to his hotel, Song Xiaoying finally discovers her husband’s extramarital affair. The couple is separated, and Liang Yazhou moves out and lives with Li Xiaodan in another apartment. In one scene, Liang and Li check into a hotel for one night’s stay. As soon they walk into the room, the police arrive to conduct a routine “sweeping of prostitution” (saohuang). The lovers are asked to prove their marital status, which they cannot do. Along with other hotel guests who cannot prove their legal marital status, Liang and Li are rounded up, humiliated, and ordered to squat against the wall in the hotel. One male guest protests, “Isn’t this a fivestar hotel where people can do anything as they please?” A police officer replies, “A five-star hotel is still a hotel under the five-star flag” (China’s national flag)! Toward the end of the film, the couple reconciles and Liang’s mistress seems to have disappeared from his life. In the final sequence, Liang takes his family to a seaport for a vacation, and the scene returns to the beach in a warm climate, just like the opening scenes of the film. Sitting alone in a hotel room, Liang receives a phone call from his former lover — what’s going to happen next? Thus the film ends.9 Although the film won the prize of Best Film at the Cairo International Film Festival in 2000, it did not win any Golden Rooster award in China. Though immensely popular with China’s audiences, the subject matter seems to have been too sensitive for the judges to give the film an award. It is evident that Feng’s and his generation’s approach to filmmaking is decidedly different from that of the previous fifth generation. In this melodrama about life in contemporary Beijing, there is no elaborate display of ethnographic, anthropological details about an exotic China; nor is there any attempt at soul-searching or root-seeking by returning to primitive, premodern, rural China. What it does is to tackle sensitive yet widespread social phenomena that are seen and felt by a large number of urban residents. In the words of one Western critic: Sigh is not a movie made to reinforce Western views of the mainland. No mandarins inhabit wooded courtyard houses with a gaggle of concubines; there are no stunning long shots of the Yellow River or of toothless peasants; nobody rides a rickshaw; no exotic women wearing cheongsams peek out from behind gaily colored fans. Representatives of the Communist government appear in only two scenes, neither of them negative. Instead, Sigh is a movie that provides Western audiences one of their first glimpses of the fast-changing, fast-paced city life in China. . . . tear down the cit y

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Feng belongs to a new generation of filmmakers who have steered away from the deep thinking of the art-house directors and smirk at the party’s heavy-handed approach. They want to do two things: tell stories and make money.10 This kind of film has done away with the self-orientalization for the other, or introspective deep thinking for the self, or the politicization of China to arouse sympathy and indignation in Western audiences. Feng Xiaogang has been a master of popular films in China. His “New Year films” (hesui pian) — Part A Part B (Jiafang yifang, 1998), Be There or Be Square (Bujian busan, 1999), and Sorry, Baby (Meiwan meiliao, 2000) — earned the highest box-office sales for domestic films in those years. His work best defines the path and nature of popular entertainment cinema in contemporary China. In the three popular films I have discussed above, it is apparent that the formation of identities and relationships goes hand in hand with the transformation of the spatial fabric of Chinese cities. Subjectivity is created and destroyed with the appearance and disappearance of old and new forms of space: hotel rooms, apartments, public bathhouses, and neighborhoods. In A Beautiful New World, the promise of a new apartment determines the “structure of feelings” for average people in southern China. The delivery of a future home demarcates their zones of hope and longing. In contrast, the nostalgia for the fast disappearing space in old Beijing — a public bathhouse, in Shower — is a lament for the destruction of a mode of productive, caring, collective life. Somewhere in the middle between these extremes, characters in A Sigh hesitate between the old and the new. Love and marriage are forged and broken in the nexus between the pleasures afforded by the promiscuous hotel room and the security of the home — a dream apartment. The precarious balance between personal freedom and familial commitment is vividly sketched as the main character shuttles between the hotel room and his home, between his lover and his wife. The psychological confusions, moral dilemmas, and spatial dislocations in these films are symptoms of the larger processes of social transitions in the postsocialist state.11 Therefore, popular urban cinema has become a particularly important form of representation for addressing widespread “popular” phenomena and the attendant anxieties about change in Chinese cities. It is neither official big-budget “main melody” (zhu xuanlü) film nor outlawed, high-minded, low-budget indie/art film, but serves a unique social, artistic, and economic function. It caters to the tastes, dreams, pursuits, and disillusionments of a rising Chinese middle class, which cares less about politics but more about money and family values in a time of socioeconomic transformation. Imar productions as well as Feng Xiaogang’s films are mainly domestic commercial films, and as such they 176

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are complicit with the market economy and contribute to the transformation of the Chinese film industry. Moreover, although they themselves are commercial products and operate in accordance with the law of a “socialist market economy,” at the same time these films contain parodies of the commodification of life. In A Beautiful New World, the high-rise promises upward mobility, but the protagonist Baogen actually descends the social ladder: he is reduced to a homeless migrant worker in the city as a result of his quest for some illusory commodity — a new apartment. In Shower, the dismantling of an antiquated bathhouse is supposed to be social progress, but this modernization process makes the residents feel less secure than before. In A Sigh, the modern-style “hotel” is intended to create a room of one’s own, a space for leisure, independence, and creativity. But in the end, it turns into a desire-charged place that breaks apart the traditional family. It is interesting note that the protagonist in this film is himself a writer and thus adds a level of “reflexivity” to the meaning. In all these films, the ambivalent sweet promise of a new home does not necessarily lead to happiness. Demolition destroys the old-style family and community; the new commodity housing is threatening to the new-style middle-class nuclear family. More space creates more separation and alienation. As is demonstrated in these films, the radical restructuring of spatial-social relationships can be discomforting and even traumatic to contemporary city dwellers.

Remaking Urban Space in Avant-Garde Photography and Video In fact, the theme of Feng’s film A Sigh can be most succinctly understood if we look across the broad spectrum of visual arts at a photographic work by Wang Jinsong. Wang’s photographic series Standard Family (Biaozhun jiating) and Parents (Shuangqin) describe stable family ties and enduring marital relationships in the bygone socialist era. The Standard Family pictures are photographs of the standard three-member nuclear family under the one-child policy — a young couple and their child. The Parents series consists of photographs of old couples serenely sitting in their living rooms, including a picture of Wang Jinsong’s own parents. This world of permanent relationships and a standardized lifestyle brings with it peace and tranquility, shelters the protagonists of these images from the pain and destruction associated with the world of flux and change, but also cuts them off from the excitement, thrills, pleasures, and opportunities of the “brave new world.” In a cross-cultural perspective, Wang’s Parents calls for a comparison with similar works from the West, most obviously Janine Antoni’s work Mom and Dad (1993–1994). Antoni’s piece consists of a set of three photographs of her mother and father in the same pose. In these three pictures, with the help of makeup, her parents are portrayed as (1) a heterosexual couple, (2) a gay couple, tear down the cit y

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Wang Jinsong. Standard Family (Biaozhun jiating). Photograph. Beijing. 1996.

Wang Jinsong. Standard Family (Biaozhun jiating). No. 13. Photograph.

and (3) a lesbian couple, respectively. Hence, Mom and Dad opens up a range of possibilities of upbringing, leading to different sexual orientations, lifestyles, responsibilities, and social obligations, all of which would have been unknown to the Chinese parents photographed by Wang, who lived blissfully in their isolated environment. In a different visual medium, the feature film A Sigh points to the corrosion of the standard family in the urge and rush for a modern lifestyle and material acquisition. Although photography and video art cannot compare with feature films in stretching the narrative potential of their media, they nevertheless depict aspects of public and private life in their own unique manner, and excel in the im178

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Wang Jinsong. Parents (Shuangqin). Photograph. Beijing. 1998.

Wang Jinsong. Parents (Shuangqin). No. 1. Photograph.

mediacy and directness of their appeal. Photography has become a favorite and important mode of representation among China’s avant-garde artists since the late 1990s.12 Here I would like to focus on the recent works of Wang Jinsong, Hong Hao, and the Gao Brothers (Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang). Wang Jinsong’s photographic series One Hundred Signs of Demolition (Bai tear down the cit y

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Wang Jinsong. One Hundred Signs of Demolition (Bai chai tu). Photograph. 1999.

Wang Jinsong. One Hundred Signs of Demolition (Bai chai tu). Catalogue no. 1968. Photograph. 1999.

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chai tu, 1999) epitomizes the theme of urban destruction in a most laconic fashion. It consists of pictures of the sign “Tear down” (Chai) that is seen everywhere in China, signaling the destruction of old walls, spatial enclosures, communities, and neighborhoods. Wang took one hundred photographs of the character “chai” that marked buildings for demolition. He numbered these pictures of chai from 1900 to 1999, significantly alluding to the course of modern Chinese history throughout the entire twentieth century. Evidently, Bai chai tu reminds people of traditional Chinese paintings such as bai shou tu (one hundred pictures of longevity) and bai fu tu (one hundred pictures of prosperity). However, Wang focuses on the relentless forces of change and destruction as opposed to the wishes for continuity and permanence. The old Beijing is being destroyed, while neoclassical simulations of traditional Chinese architecture line the streets, such as the newly buit Ping’an Boulevard (Ping’an dadao). Wang’s simple photographic work is the most direct, forceful representation of the disappearing old city. Such avant-garde works document the loss of touch with the familiar, the natural, the personal, and the material; evoke the feelings of living in an opaque, mediated, dematerialized world; and convey the anxieties of being dislocated from tradition, roots, and home. This distorted experience of being-in-theworld is what is called “post-material” (hou wuzhi) by Huang Du, curator of the exhibition Post-Material: Interpretations of Everyday Life by Contemporary Chinese Artists, held at Red Gate Gallery, Beijing, in October–November 2000. As Huang explains, post-material “implies an artificial manifestation of modern technology, distinguished from naturally produced or handmade objects.”13 The world has entered the post-materialistic age with the advent of new technologies. In the case of China, Huang writes the following: The age of “Post-Material” finds its unique expression in the visual reconstruction of contemporary Chinese society. The old system of the so-called “planned economy” is gradually being replaced by the market economy. This drastic transition is embodied by the massive expansion of China’s modern cities. . . . Numerous buildings arose while the old Peking City was being torn down. The architectural space of Beijing is hitherto disordered and chaotic, which implies nothing but [the] emotional uncertainty and insecurity of its urban residents. Hair salons, bathing centers and nightclubs compose the core physical structure of the city. The basic materialistic desire now motivates almost every action in the city, which used to be known for its glorious imperial past. . . . Now Chinese are struggling to build their own consumer culture while dealing with their loaded historical past such as thousands [of] years of cultural residue and the more recent political turmoil such as the Cultural Revolution.14 tear down the cit y

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For Huang, the affluence of material objects is an indication of “spiritual paleness” in the present time. Hence, he calls for the establishment of “new moral criteria” in response to the profound social changes. This avant-garde exhibition is “an effort to present a visual narrative of artists’ redefining of the dialogue between art and life, and their attempt to reclaim a visual possibility of rebuilding a moral ideal.” 15 While Wang Jinsong’s Chai series describes the disappearance of the old Beijing in with almost an elegiac tone, Hong Hao’s photographic pieces about the new Beijing offer a humorous, slightly satiric touch to the subject. Hong Hao’s solo exhibition Scenes from the Metropolis (Jing xiang) was held at Courtyard Gallery in Beijing in November 2000. While alluding to Zhang Zeduan’s masterpiece by the same title from the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127 A.D.), the Spring Festival on the River series (Qingming shanghe tu, 1999) are images of the sprawling cityscape of the modern/postmodern Beijing made of glass and steel, of skyscrapers, hotels, shopping malls, office buildings, and highways. In Spring Festival on the River No. 7 (38 cm x 1200 cm, 2000), Hong Hao has pasted bits and pieces of contemporary scenes onto the original work of Zhang Zeduan to create jarring yet comic effects. In the words of Meg Maggio, “The result is a jumble of parallel images which relay the confused and frenetic atmosphere of the new Chinese capital as it sprints forward at a break-neck pace toward the ever elusive goal of ‘modernity.’ ” 16 Against the background of the ancient capital Bianliang (Kaifeng) of the Northern Song dynasty, we now see colorful images and photographs of cars, motorcycles, trucks, and telephone booths. The original landscape is populated by contemporary street strollers, foreign tourists, half-naked swimmers, golfers, and the artist Hong Hao himself, next to monks, merchants, peasants, soldiers, donkeys, and carts along Bian River from the Song. Some numbers of the series are direct photographs of scenes of contemporary Beijing. No. 1 (37 cm x 1200 cm, 2000) is a juxtaposition of sections of the original Song masterpiece and pictures of contemporary Beijing. Beautiful Images in Focus (Meili jing xiang, 40 cm x 600 cm, 2000) consists of photographs of rear views of women walking in the streets, with their buttocks in focus. The male gaze by way of the camera eye captures the voyeuristic pleasures of peeping urbanites and points to the sexual/sexist obsession of men in a city of desire. The Beijing Tour Guide (Youjing zhinan, 1999–2000) series features Hong Hao as a tour guide leading various groups of foreign tourists at famous sites of Beijing, such as Tiananmen Square, the Imperial Palace, and the Great Wall. The photographs highlight Beijing as a mecca of tourism and orientalist fantasy. As opposed to grand panoramic views of the physical structure of Beijing, Hong Hao’s self-portrait series depicts the subtle inward process of subject formation among city dwellers in the era of globalization. In Mr. Gnoh the Person 182

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Hong Hao. Beautiful Images in Focus (Meili jingxiang). Photograph. Beijing. 2000.

Hong Hao. Beijing Tour Guide (Youjing zhinan). Computer imaging. Beijing. 1999–2000.

I Know Well (“Gnoh” is “Hong” spelled in reverse), the artist holds a mirror, seeing a reflection of himself transformed into a person looking like a westerner with blonde hair and blue eyes. The picture exposes the fantasy of westernization among China’s young generation. In Yes, I Am Gnoh, we see a picture of Hong Hao, again with blonde hair and blue eyes, talking into a mobile phone and wearing a Western suit. In the process of westernization, “Hong” becomes “Gnoh,” an unreadable foreign name. In parodic self-portraits such as Mr. Hong, Please Come In and Mr. Hong Usually Waits under the Arch Roof for Sunshine, Mr. Hong is still Chinese, wearing traditional Chinese clothes, but enjoys the luxuries afforded by a Western lifestyle (posh swimming pool, Western furniture, etc.). These images are both real and false reflections of the schizophrenic, tear down the cit y

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Hong Hao. Mr. Gnoh the Person I Know Well (Wo suo renshi de Mr. Gnoh). Photograph and computer imaging. Beijing. 2000.

fragmented self. They bespeak the follies and comedies of modernization and westernization, and constitute travesties of the desire and wish-fulfillment of ordinary citizens. In spring 2001, Courtyard Gallery hosted an exhibition of the photography of the Gao Brothers (Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang), who were based in Jinan, Shandong. Urban space again becomes the ostensible theme of their works.17 They portray the tortuous process of the formation and deformation of subjectivity in adverse existential space, and their heavy style is a sharp contrast to the playfulness of Hong Hao’s pieces. In the Senses of Space series (Prayer, Anxiety, Pain, Sleep), totally naked males are positioned in the cramped narrow space of partitioned bookshelves and cupboards. Their bodies curl up and cannot fully extend themselves. The candles, the doll, the dildo, the pistol, the hammers, the screwdrivers, and the bandage in the series are symbols and intimations of the existential(ist) struggles of the soul and the body. These signs of anguish, sexual deprivation, masochism, solitude, lack of communication, and absence 184

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of privacy betoken a pervasive urban malaise in China. Chinese Noak’s Ark No. 2, which combines bits and pieces of Senses of Space into the shape of the Sistine Chapel, elevates the plight of daily existence to a spiritual, religious level. Overcrowded indoor living space as described by the Gao Brothers suggests the ineluctability of urban reconstruction in contemporary China. In contrast to the spatial confinement in Senses of Space, The Utopia of the 20 Minute Embrace series takes us to vast outdoor space. On the bank of Yellow River, under a railroad bridge, or inside a building, strangers meet and embrace each other for a short period of time. These utopian sites of contact, communication, and intimacy build a “space of love,” as it were, in a world full of conflicts and strife. At this point, it is timely to examine a form of art that provides the middle link and linchpin between popular cinema and experimental photography, namely, video art. Chinese video artists have also gone to great lengths in probing the depths of drastic spatial transformations in China’s metropolises. The six-minute video Lady’s (Shuxijian, 2000), by the Chinese woman video artist Cui Xiuwen, is a particularly noteworthy case. The piece offers an intimate look into the sexualized, eroticized, and private space of women in a public setting, a zone of desires situated in discos, bars, karaoke rooms, and nightclubs that sprang into existence throughout the 1990s. Cui secretly placed a video camera that recorded women’s actions in the lady’s toilet at the nightclub of a well-known luxury hotel, an (in)famous place for meeting the priciest and putatively most beautiful prostitutes in Beijing. Men come here, married or not, to strike up casual relationships with women, to look for gratification of desires and bodily needs. Cui’s video unveils these working women looking at themselves through the mirror, fi xing their makeup and attires, and trying to present themselves as sexually attractive as possible. The camera lens focuses on their hair, faces, panties, bras, underwear, breasts, and thinly veiled pubic hair. Body, flesh, and looks are used as commodities to exchange for cash in such space. Like Hong Hao’s Beautiful Images in Focus, the private camera eye in this woman artist’s work also indicts urban spectators/consumers as complicit voyeurs and peeping toms guilty of the commodification of women’s bodies. Cui also described what she observed at the site with the precision and insight of a realist novelist: When the girls adjusted themselves in front of the mirror, they looked almost religious. The number of times they looked in the mirrors is much higher than an average person. They would suddenly lift their skirt, examine their panties, and put the skirt down again. Or they would reach into their bra and adjust their breasts. Or touch their faces and tidy their hair. Or apply more makeup. Or subconsciously touch their private parts with two

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Gao Brothers (Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang). Senses of Space: Anxiety. Photograph/performance. 2000.

hands. Or change underwear. Or do some twists along with music outside. Or squeeze the unwanted flesh on the waist. Or turn around to see their backs. Or mechanically walk back and forth in front of the mirror. Or pee with the toilet door open. Or count the money they just earned. They did these things with no expression or awareness of others. But you could sense that they were getting ready for a war, that the dance hall outside was the battlefield.18 Cui’s candid camera, as shorthand cinema verité as well as docudrama, mediates the terrains between mass culture and avant-garde work, between the documentary impulse and the melodramatic, between the object and the subject. It vividly captures the emergence in postsocialist China of a new space that blurs the demarcation between the public and the private. The nightclub in a luxury hotel provides a public platform for the express purpose of satiating private fantasies based on the money principle. Indeed, karaoke rooms and bars have blossomed forth as new spatial forms in Chinese cities since the early 1990s. They 186

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Gao Brothers (Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang). The Utopia of the 20 Minute Embrace, I. Photograph/ performance. 2000.

constitute a mixed public/private space, heretofore unseen in mainland China, existing outside the family, the work unit, the restaurant, and the teahouse. A whole new social class — service girls who are addressed as “Xiaojie” (Miss), has come into being. One particular type of miss, sanpei xiaojie, literally “threecompany miss,” who is paid to accompany male guests to drink, eat, and sing karaoke, makes up a large segment of the sex and entertainment industry. These service girls are potential candidates for disanzhe (third person, mistress) and ernaizi (second wife) for the wealthy and willing. They shake the foundation of the socialist-style standard monogamous family. Large numbers of them come from the provinces, especially from Sichuan and the northeast (Dongbei), where the rate of unemployment and the number of laid-off workers from state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are the highest in the nation. In 1989, the first bar in Beijing, Frank’s Place (“Wanlong jiuba” in Chinese), opened near City Hotel (Chengshi binguan). As of the year 2000, in the span of a decade, there are about four hundred bars in Beijing.19 Reserved karaoke rooms (KTV baojian), bars, massage parlors, beauty parlors, and clandestine tear down the cit y

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Cui Xiuwen. Lady’s (Shuxi jian). Video. Beijing. 2000.

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hair salons ( falang, more precisely the backrooms of these parlors) are new sites of sociality, indulgence, and transaction in the metropolis. They erode, loosen, and at times destroy traditional social relationships built on the model of the “standard family” and the institution of marriage.

Conclusion In comparison to mainstream popular urban films, works of avant-garde photography and video are rarely exhibited in official public venues. They are shown in privately owned galleries in Beijing such as Red Gate Gallery and Courtyard Gallery. And they are viewed, consumed, and purchased by a small group of interested people. Instant appeal, the artistic conception, and the subject and manner of representation are factors that determine whether a work can seize the attention of the viewer in such mediums (photography and video). Popular film and the avant-garde thus speak to different segments of the Chinese population and occupy distinct public and critical spaces.20 However, despite the differences in medium and approach, both popular cinema and avant-garde art tackle the central themes of urban transformation in our time. The various texts that I have discussed, as sites of cultural formations, do seem to be at odds with the linear temporality of modernization, globalization, and historical progress. They offer critiques of socialist/capitalist commodification. In the current era of social and economic reforms, drastic changes in the public infrastructure of the city as well as the private space of the home inevitably affect the interiority of the minds of the subjects who live in such environments. We may borrow the metaphor of post-material again in order to describe the problem facing hundreds of millions of Chinese. The present materialism in the form of commodity-fetishism in an ostensive market economy may well be a reaction to and correction of the impoverishment, scarcity, and deprivation of material objects suffered under the name of the Marxist doctrine of materialism in a socialist planned economy during the Mao era. However, this obsessive and excessive impulse toward material acquisition has also led to another kind of impoverishment by virtue of the success of more than twenty years of economic reforms in the Deng era and beyond. That is the loss of touch with the materiality of things, namely, with what really matters to urban folks in the soulful realms of the personal, the natural, and the private. It is this phenomenology of material, materialism, materiality, and post-material, as it were, that the visual works of art attempt to reveal and circumscribe.

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historical conclusion

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Chinese Modernity and the Capitalist World-System

I

n 2005, China officially named July 11 national “Navigation Day.” On that day six hundred years ago in the Ming dynasty, Admiral Zheng He and the Chinese fleet launched the first of a series of sea voyages. The Chinese government conspicuously organized a commemoration of the six hundredth anniversary of this primal event. Special postage stamps were issued to mark the anniversary and editorials in official newspapers such as the People’s Daily pointed out the inspiring example of an ancient hero for modern Chinese, who must brace up for the era of the ocean. The invention of a new national day is no coincidence, but bespeaks both a deep-seated mentality and an unfolding reality of the Chinese nation. Even as a new China thrives on global trade and enjoys the wealth that the blue ocean has brought to it at the dawn of the twenty-first century, people lament China’s missed historic opportunities and look back nostalgically to the golden age of China’s overseas expeditions. Had China followed the path of Zheng He, who circled half the globe eighty years before Columbus, it would have been China that discovered the world. In the early twenty-first century, the Chinese government and Chinese companies rush to approach various regions of the world in hopes of striking deals to import energy and minerals to fuel the Chinese economy. The country’s strategic planners worry about how to safeguard the

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sea routes for an ever-expanding economy that will increasingly depend on the importation of materials from foreign countries.

From Anti-System to Integration into the Capitalist World-System In a twenty-eight-year period from 1405 to 1433, Admiral Zheng He (Cheng Ho, 1371–1435) and his Chinese fleet made seven trips to the “western oceans” (xiyang). They went to Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and East Africa, and visited more than thirty countries and places such as Sumatra, Ceylon, Malacca, Arabia, and Mogadishu. At its height, the Chinese fleet consisted of some three hundred ships and twenty-eight thousand sailors in one voyage. The size of a “treasure ship” in the fleet was four hundred feet long. The magnitude of the fleet and the number of crewmen were unprecedented in human history.1 These voyages were the greatest maritime explorations that had taken place in the world up to that time. Zheng He sailed to the far corners of the world well before the European discovery of the world by Christopher Columbus (1492) and Vasco da Gama (1498) in the fifteenth century, and Ferdinand Magellan (1521) in the sixteenth. He’s fleet also dwarfed the European fleets in size. But the purpose of Zheng He’s far-reaching trips was not to seek newer markets for Chinese businesses or to set up colonies for the Ming Empire as was the usual goal of European powers in the times of colonialism and imperialism. The point of departure was an internal imperial struggle: Zheng He was instructed to discover the whereabouts of the previous Ming emperor, the Jianwen emperor, who had been defeated by his uncle Zhu Di and lost the imperial throne to him, and might have fled overseas, according to one speculation. But, more significant, the Chinese empire was then operating under the ideology and assumptions of a China-centered tributary system. The intention was to display the might and glory of the Ming dynasty to the world so that the multitude of nations would acknowledge the superiority of the “Middle Kingdom.” The Chinese navy demanded tributes from the countries it visited and bestowed lavish gifts upon them in return. Ambassadors from these countries boarded Zheng He’s ships and visited the Ming court. They kowtowed to the Chinese emperor, symbolically acknowledging his sovereignty, and were later escorted back to their home countries in subsequent voyages. Zheng He’s voyages were ordered by the third emperor of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Di, or the Yongle emperor. He moved the capital from Nanjing (southern capital) to Beijing (northern capital) and initiated the construction of the Imperial Palace, or the Forbidden City. He rebuilt the Great Wall and relentlessly 192

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attacked the Mongols north of it. (The Forbidden City and the Ming Great Wall are known to tourists from all over the world who travel to Beijing these days.) On the cultural front, the Yongle emperor organized scholars to compile the voluminous Yongle dadian, or Yongle Encyclopedia, which summarized and categorized all existing knowledge. But all this still did not suffice for imperial ambitions. The emperor dispatched Zheng He, his confidante, a seven-foot-tall Muslim eunuch, to head expeditions to the oceans and “go as far as possible.” 2 However, the Ming court stopped the naval expeditions as abruptly as it had launched them. After the death of the Yongle emperor, courtiers argued that Zheng He’s trips were extravagant, costly, wasteful, and useless. The Ming dynasty banned further voyages and sealed off China’s coastline. The court even burned Zheng He’s log and other records to prevent future maritime undertakings. Nobody was allowed to build a ship with two masts, and a transgression of this law was considered a capital offense. The dynasty looked inward and reverted to the conventional state of a land empire.3 The successor to the Ming, the Qing dynasty, also adopted the policy of closing off the coastline and banning maritime expeditions. China self-destructed and plummeted from being the greatest seafaring nation to an isolationist nation from the time of the death of Zheng He to the very end of the imperial age. The motivation for China’s seafaring adventures appears all the more incomprehensible in hindsight, namely, in view of the subsequent history of European capitalism and colonialism. The Chinese naval expeditions did not seek to discover new markets in which to sell Chinese goods. They were not serious about establishing trade; nor were they interested in setting up colonies. They brought no commercial benefit or economic advantage to China. Although they exacted tributes paid to the Ming court from those countries, the imperial gifts were often more valuable and abundant than the tributes. Zheng He’s ships brought envoys, tributes, exotic objects, and oddities to China from abroad. For instance, they brought back a giraffe and a zebra from Africa in 1415, creatures heretofore unseen in China. People thought the giraffe was the auspicious mythical animal qilin (unicorn). The Yongle emperor was enormously pleased to see the animal from afar and praised Zheng He’s accomplishments. Such was the extent of the benefits that China received from these costly expeditions. These maritime activities were not undertaken for the accumulation of capital in order to facilitate the generation of wealth and the development of further productive capacities, as in the case of capitalism. They were indeed “wasteful,” antieconomic activities. Soon after the death of Zheng He, China sunk back into its usual cozy position as a content agrarian civilization. China had no use for the blue ocean. A network of rivers and canals was enough for the subsistence of a land empire.

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Moreover, the Ming perceived the north, rather than the sea in the south, as the main threat to its security. It rebuilt the Great Wall to ward off invasion from nomads in the north. The Qing dynasty (1644–1911) that succeeded the Ming (1368–1644) created one of the largest land-based empires in the world. The nomadic Manchus first conquered the Han Chinese, then built an empire stretching from the Pacific east coast to central Asia, from Mongolia to Tibet, with a ring of tributary states all around it. The ethnic Han (Chinese) never held together and sustained such a far-flung empire. The size of the great Chinese empires, the Qin, the Han, the Tang, and the Ming, paled in comparison to the imperial expansion of the Manchus. Modern Chinese nation-states, the Republic of China (1912–1949) and then the People’s Republic of China (1949–present), inherited the territory of the Qing Empire, minus independent (Outer) Mongolia and territorial concessions made to Tsarist Russia in the nineteenth century. However, the Qing was singularly uninterested in world trade and foreign markets. In 1792–1794, King George III of England dispatched a mission to China. Led by Lord Macartney, the British delegation brought lavish gifts and asked for trading privileges from the Qing court. The Qing took the British mission as a “tribute” and turned down its requests. The Son of Heaven, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–1796), wrote a condescending letter to George III, telling him that China possessed everything and had no need for “strange or ingenious objects” from foreigners. The Qing also limited foreign trade to a few city ports at the southern edge of the empire, such as Canton. This isolationist policy and lack of interest in maritime economy led to China’s stagnation and decline.4 While China as a world empire clung to its premodern ethnocentric tributary system, an entirely new kind of capitalist world system was emerging and growing in Europe in the wake of the great geographic discoveries and the Industrial Revolution, and finally transformed the entire planet. Consequently, the Middle Kingdom (Zhongguo) was pushed to the periphery of the new capitalist world system, whose center was Europe and then North America. The capitalist world economy as it has developed since the sixteenth century is characterized by the geographic expansion of world markets, the central importance of international trade, and the pursuit of profit for its own sake. This is fundamentally different from the practice of the old-fashioned world empire. As Immanuel Wallerstein explains: World-empires were basically redistributive in economic form. No doubt they bred clusters of merchants who engaged in economic exchanges (primarily long distance trade), but such clusters, however large, were a minor part of the total economy and not fundamentally determinative of its fate. 194

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Such long-distance trade tended to be, as Polanyi argues, “administered trade” and not market trade, utilizing “port of trade.” It was only with the emergence of the modern world-economy in sixteenth-century Europe that we saw the full development and economic predominance of market trade. This was the system called capitalism. Capitalism and a world-economy (that is, a single division of labor but multiple polities and cultures) are obverse sides of the same coin.5 Admittedly, globalization in the broad sense of cross-national trade has been going on since the beginning of civilization. In the case of China, the ancient Silk Road and the cross-continental Eurasian Mongol Empire were prime examples of China’s commerce with the rest of the world. But globalization here refers to a phase of human development concurrent with and dependent upon the rise of capitalism and the opening of world markets for the sake of profit making. The Chinese empire as a land empire did not pursue this path of development. While the Chinese fleet rotted in the docks, the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English circled the world and built maritime empires, opening a new page of human history. As China stopped its seafaring, Europeans knocked on the doors of China. They arrived in the outlying islands of China: the Dutch occupied Taiwan, the Portuguese landed in Macau, and the British took over Hong Kong. The British demanded “free trade” with China (free circulation of opium produced in British-controlled India), and when the Qing court refused, the British imperial navy sailed to China and soundly defeated the defense forces of the Qing. Thus began a series of forced “unequal treaties” between China and the “barbarians” from the seas in the nineteenth century. China had no choice but to abandon its centuries-long closed-door policy, upheld since the end of the Zheng He era. Modern China was born in its confrontation with seafaring powers from the oceans. The Chinese communist revolution in the first half of the twentieth century was initially part of a global international movement remote-controlled by the Third Internationale (Commintern) in Moscow. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the country allied itself with the socialist bloc and resisted the capitalist West. But from the 1960s to the end of the reign of Mao Zedong, China withdrew into itself and cut off economic relationships with most of the world. The aging Red Emperor reverted to the closed-door policy of “Self-Reliance” (zili gengsheng), and insulated the country from both the capitalist West and the Soviet-led socialist bloc. China was a huge chunk of landmass that resisted and existed outside the capitalist world economy. As such, Maoism was upheld as a shining example of “delinking” from the capital-

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ist world system, an inspiring model for the independence-minded developing countries.6 Modern Chinese history has been marked by turmoil, wars, and political movements. The communist revolution, socialist nation building, and the Cultural Revolution all impacted the course of world history in some measure. These are what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the “antisystemic movements” in the capitalist world system. Such movements fight for either national liberation or social and economic equality, or both, and challenge and disrupt the functioning of the capitalist and imperialist world order. If unable to overhaul capitalism, they at least cause a self-correction of the capitalist world system. Since 1968, the world has witnessed the “efflorescence of the multiple Maoisms,” namely, a multitude of large and small movements that drew inspiration from revolutionary China.7 How times have changed! Now China has turned into a major participant in global capitalism. International trade contributes as much as one-third to China’s GDP and employs tens of millions of Chinese workers. It sounds almost like an untimely joke when one periodically hears news reports about “Maoist” insurgents fighting the government troops in the mountains of Nepal and the Philippines these days. Mao’s guerilla warfare and the Cultural Revolution inspired worldwide revolutionary, anticolonial, anti-imperialist movements in the 1960s and 1970s. But Mao’s home country has now abandoned his revolutionary vision and has been integrated into the capitalist world economy. The Chinese state has propagated a new set of slogans and strategies: “socialist market economy,” “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” and “linking with the world.” These jingoisms refer to such policies as the appropriation and advancement of capitalist means of production, the establishment of private property, and the formation of a market economy. Since China joined the World Trade Organization at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the total volume of its foreign trade has increased manifoldly. China became the third largest trading country after the United States and Germany in 2004, and has been the biggest recipient of foreign investment, averaging about US$50 billion a year. China has become a necessary link in the global production, consumption, and circulation of people, commodities, images, capital, money, sex, food, and fashion. Globalization has reached all levels of everyday life in China, from fast food to high fashion. It is a little piece of amusing news that Kentucky Fried Chicken, nicknamed “Laotou ji” (Old Man’s Chicken) in Chinese, opened its one hundredth restaurant in both Beijing and Shanghai simultaneously on September 3, 2003. There were some 850 Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants nationwide in China by that date.8 However unhealthy these foods might be, hamburgers, fried chicken, and pizzas offer an alternative diet to the Chinese and provide them with a taste of the West. 196

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China and the World Economy Since the late 1970s, China has embarked on the path of a single-minded developmentalism. Typical of his many simple yet forceful aphorisms, China’s former leader Deng Xiaoping proclaims, “Development is the hard truth” (fazhan shi ying daoli). In the official parlance of the Communist Party, China is building “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” David Harvey translates this into “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics.” Since the late 1970s and the early 1980s, a transcontinental “Gang of Four” — Deng Xiaoping of China, Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain, Ronald Reagan of the US, and Paul Volcker of the US Federal Reserve — effected what amounted to a global neoliberalist revolution. “Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”9 China under Deng’s leadership was a powerful engine in the worldwide turn toward a new economic and ideological trend that has created economic prosperity as well as devastating side effects. The incipient neoliberalism in the beginning years of the regimes of Deng, Thatcher, and Reagan would logically lead to full-blown globalization after the end of the Cold War. Today, China is a manufacturing giant, nicknamed “the factory of the world.” Due to its cheap labor, the world is flooded with products bearing the label “Made in China.” China has become the leading exporter to the US. WalMart is just the most glaring example of how American customers are inundated with low-price Chinese products. Wal-Mart has surpassed all its competitors and become the largest retailer in the US, as the US itself is undergoing a process of Wal-Martization in terms of pushing down prices as low as possible by outsourcing inventory and siphoning off supply to developing countries, especially China, to the satisfaction of consumers but at the expense of domestic American industries and jobs. The United States under the administration of George W. Bush, lost two to three millions of jobs in the manufacturing sector. The fi xed low exchange rate of the Chinese yuan, or renminbi, was a hot issue in both US domestic politics and international trade policy. The yuan had been pegged to the US dollar at a fi xed rate of about 8.28 since the early 1990s. At the same time, transnational corporations (TNCs) reaped huge benefits from China’s cheap labor by outsourcing and relocating production to China. They set up factories on Chinese soil, employed cheap Chinese labor, made products with foreign brand names inside China, and sold the products back to the West and Japan. These TNCs made a profit for themselves while contributing to the loss of jobs and the diminution of manufacturing in the West. historical conclusion

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In the early years of the 2000s, the West had been pressuring the Chinese government to appreciate the yuan and raise its exchange rate. Huge trade deficits with China, the loss of American jobs, and the decline of the American manufacturing industry were attributed to the artificially low exchange rate between the yuan and the dollar. But the Chinese government and media resisted the appeal from the West for some time. For them, this was part of American domestic politics. Some people even believed that this was a plot on the part of the US and Japan to find a scapegoat for their own economic stagnation and to stem China’s rise. But, more important, a recent historical lesson alarmed China’s economic planners, namely, the famous Plaza Accord of 1985. In September 1985, the G-5 at that time — the US, Japan, West Germany, France, and Great Britain — joined forces to interfere with the world foreignexchange market. In signing the Plaza Accord, they decided to depreciate the dollar in order to solve America’s huge deficit. The US dollar devalued against the Japanese yen by as much as 50 percent in the next few years, and the American economy and the government’s fiscal situation improved as a result. But Japan’s economy became a bubble economy and began a long downturn. The aftereffect of the Plaza Accord for Japan in the past provided a lesson for China to learn in the present. Economists have noticed the long-term consequences of the Plaza Accord for the world economy. Robert Brenner writes, “The Plaza Accord, and its sequels, proved to be the turning point in the US manufacturing turnaround, and a major watershed for the world economy as a whole.” 10 The devaluation of the US dollar against the Japanese yen and the German mark brought about a recovery of the competitiveness of US companies. But throughout the 1990s, the inflated value of the yen contributed to the bubble economy of Japan, and Japan entered a decade-long recession. In July 2005, due to high pressure from the United States, European Union, and Japan, China finally abandoned its policy of pegging the yuan to the dollar and began to float the yuan against a basket of foreign currencies. The yuan has appreciated slightly against the dollar, as China’s planners were afraid of international financial speculators who would seize the opportunity and wreak havoc as they had during the Asian financial crisis in 1997–1998. The Chinese government pledged to make the yuan freely exchangeable in the international market in a controlled and gradual manner. The yuan will join the dollar, the euro, and the Japanese yen as a major international currency in the near future. China’s entrance into finance capitalism is a significant further step in its incorporation into the regime of world capitalism. The governments of China and other East Asian economies have adopted a policy of recycling their trade surpluses into dollar-denominated assets. Here 198

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are some revealing statistical figures in the beginning years of early twenty-first century: Today, East Asia holds $1.6 trillion in dollar reserves, 70 per cent of the world’s total, up from just 30 per cent in 1990. As the US entered its slowdown, and the American current-account deficit widened even further, China, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong entered the currency market as never before, raising their combined ownership of US treasuries from $512 billion to $696 billion in the brief period from December 2001 to June 2003. Indeed, over the first ten months of 2003, Japan and China alone covered an estimated 55 per cent of the US current-account deficit, buying $150 billion and $100 billion worth of dollars, respectively.11 The statistics and numbers only increase each year, but the described basic pattern remains. China held the largest amount of foreign reserves in the world by 2006. These reserves are in the form of low-interest US government bonds and help to finance the US government’s deficit. The gigantic Chinese trade surplus is in large part generated by American customers’ purchase of Chinese goods. And, at the same time, China’s trade surplus is used to buy American treasuries that finance the spending of the American government. The insatiable demand for raw materials and natural resources (petroleum, iron ore, metals, cement, etc.), machinery, and agricultural products in the ever-expanding Chinese economy has driven up the prices of many products in the world market just as China has become a new engine of the world economy. Meanwhile, the Chinese economy has widely extended its arms in attempts to buy off American companies in various sectors of the economy — personal computers (IBM), oil (Unocal), electronics (Maytag) — with or without success. The prosperity of the US in the 1990s was the result of a major economic reorientation. Deindustrialization and the financialization of capital have caused the decline of manufacturing, but also have brought about wealth and strength in other sectors and the economy as a whole. The hegemonic position of the US in the world economy seems secure and unshakable. Giovanni Arrighi thus concludes a study of the global economy: “There are no credible aggressive new powers that can provoke the breakdown of the US-centred world system, but the United States has even greater capabilities than Britain did a century ago to convert its declining hegemony into an exploitative domination. If the system eventually breaks down, it will be primarily because of US resistance to adjustment and accommodation.” 12 The world economy has gone through a series of downtowns as well as belles époques: Dutch capitalism in the eighteenth century, British capitalism in the nineteenth century, and US capitalism in the twentieth century and beyond.

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China, the latecomer, has turned into a major player in the scene of finance capitalism as well as the domain of traditional manufacturing. Will the rise of China be bane or boon? Will it usher in a new phase of global capitalism and bring about another belle époque in the world economy?

Xiaokang (Moderate Affluence) or Datong (Noncapitalist Globalization)? As one of the actually existing socialist states, ironically China has been busy integrating itself into the global capitalist economy since the late 1970s. Its former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping urged his countrymen to build a society of xiaokang (small prosperity, moderate affluence). Such a society implies a certain level of modernization, the material well-being of the citizens, relatively high living standards, and rising per capita income. The current generation of the communist leadership, the so-called fourth generation headed by Hu Jintao, after the previous generations of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin, continues to valorize the notion of xiaokang. In fact, the highest goals of the Chinese nation-state in the twenty-first century have been defined by the Communist Party as the “all-out construction of a society of moderate affluence” (quanmian jianzhe xiaokang shehui) and the “great revival of the Chinese nation” (Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing). One wonders what would happen to the ideology of the Communist Party after the achievement of xiaokang and the revival of the Chinese nation. What next? Communism? There is silence on the part of the party. Is it, then, possible at all to conceive of a mode of globalization outside the prevalent capitalist world system, some form of noncapitalist globalization?13 That hypothetical sublime stage of human history seems to elude representation. It is unsayable, nonsignifiable, unimaginable. The concept of xiaokang dates back to Li ji (The Book of Rites), whose authorship was attributed to Confucius, but the book was most likely compiled after Confucius, in the fourth or third century B.C. It appears in the chapter “Li yun” (Evolution of Rites) of this classic. Xiaokang denotes a relatively peaceful and affluent society, where people can pursue their selfish, individualistic happiness. In the same text, however, xiaokang is considered to be an inferior society in comparison to datong, the world of great unity. Datong is a golden age in the legendary past, when sage-kings ruled China. But through a hermeneutic of the past, a Chinese politician-thinker at the turn of the twentieth century made it into the guiding principle of the future society. Regarded as the last great traditional Chinese philosopher, Kang Youwei (1887–1927) dreamed and theorized about a grand, globalized world, datong. However, this utopian future world was conceived in ostensibly noncapitalist indeed anticapitalist terms. 200

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Kang drew up the blueprint and outlines of such a world in Datong shu (The Book of Great Union). The book was drafted as early as 1884–1885, circulated among Kang’s friends and published in fragments in his lifetime, and finally published in its entirety in 1935, after his death. In it, Kang envisions a borderless world order, what he calls “ datong.” The term has been variously translated as One-World, Great Union, Great Unity, Great Harmony, Great Community, Great Commonwealth, and so forth. In his view, the goal of humanity is to break down existing “boundaries” in order to build a supranational world order. Since most English readers are not familiar with this man and his work, I shall list the complete contents of Datong shu here. I. Entering the World and Seeing Universal Suffering II. Abolishing National Boundaries and Uniting the World III. Abolishing Class Boundaries and Equalizing All People IV. Abolishing Racial Boundaries and Amalgamating the Races V. Abolishing Sex Boundaries and Preserving Independence VI. Abolishing Family Boundaries and Becoming “Heaven’s People” VII. Abolishing Livelihood Boundaries and Making Occupations Public VIII. Abolishing Administrative Boundaries and Governing with Complete Peace-and-Equality IX. Abolishing Boundaries of Kind, and Loving All Living Things X. Abolishing Boundaries of Suffering and Attaining Utmost Happiness14 In this grand commonwealth, the various social institutions that have hitherto been taken as given would be abolished or gradually wither away — the nation-state, the family, and private property. Other traditional boundaries that separate people, such as class, race, and gender, would also be dismantled. With the disappearance of the nation-state, Kang points to the appearance of a supranational governing body, a “World Parliament,” that administers world affairs. In Kang’s estimation, the age of datong might arrive in two to three hundred years from his time. Datong is that highest stage of social development after and beyond capitalist globalization.15 The idea and ideal of datong inspired numerous Chinese reformers, revolutionaries, anarchists, nationalists, socialists, and communists in the first half of the twentieth century. Dr. Sun Yat-sun, the visionary founder of the Republic of China, dreamt about and spoke of the establishment of a world of datong. In fact, the word/notion is in the anthem of the Nationalist Party/ Guomindang, which in turn became the national anthem of the Republic of China. By appropriating the Buddhist notion of compassion for all beings, Kang condemns all boundaries separating humanity. In the grand scheme of things, nationalism would have no place. In his book on anarchism and the

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Chinese revolutionary tradition, Arif Dirlik proffers a perceptive analysis of Kang Youwei’s thought: Within the context of this utopianism that was its dialectical counterpoint, the emerging Chinese national consciousness appears not merely as a defensive parochialism, but as a step in an idealistic project whose ultimate goal was the transformation of humanity globally. China, moreover, must participate in this global project, not just as its object but as a subject that had much to contribute to its realization. The utopianism hinted at a discomfort with nationalism, for it looked beyond the achievement of national goals to a global transformation. Kang Youwei, whose reinterpretation of Confucianism was to establish the intellectual premises of nationalist ideology, nevertheless expressed in his utopia a profound discomfort with all institutions that divided people from one another, including nationalism, to which he traced the causes of human suffering.16 In the future world thus envisioned, cosmopolitanism and internationalism would reign supreme, and nationalism would have no place. Datong is as much a utopian longing as the real shape of the world to come. Kang’s theory of globalization, if it can be called that, implies historical evolution on the progress toward datong. He goes back to the scholastic tradition and reinterprets previous interpretations of Confucian classics, especially The Gongyang Commentary (Gongyang zhuan) of The Spring and Autumn Annals (Chun qiu).17 According to him (and ultimately Confucius), humanity must pass through three ages: the “age of disorder” (juluan shi), the “age of rising peace” (shengping shi), and the “age of great peace” (taiping shi). A constitutional monarchy, or even a republic, would be at best the “age of rising peace.” In the “age of great peace,” or datong, there would be no nation-states anymore and the world would be one. And such a global order would be decidedly noncapitalist, because private property, private means of production, competition, and even the family would no longer exist. What is good is public (gong, first tone) and common (gong, fourth tone). Suffice it to say that what Kang outlined in his book is a way of imagining globalization based on socialist and communist principles. Kang’s theory of race is both intriguing and disturbing. Racial boundaries would be eliminated through migration and intermarriage between peoples of different colors: white, black, yellow, and brown. However, his theory of race is filled with contradictions. Despite his utopian longing for perfect racial harmony, Kang’s thought is hampered by historical limitations. Sometimes he speaks with disdain of people of black and brown color. He himself succumbs to the white supremacist racial theory. Yet, at the same time, intermarriage and cohabitation across racial boundaries are the necessary conditions and results 202

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of datong, the great commonwealth. Racial prejudice and utopian longing are both present in his thought. Datong is to be achieved when all the asymmetries and boundaries between races, social groups, and economic zones disappear altogether. It is not anachronistic or untimely at this juncture to bring up the thought of Kang Youwei, an influential figure at the turn of the twentieth century. Although all he could do was fight for reform and institutional monarchy in his time, his vision of the future transcends the immediate historical circumstances of his era. He and his followers, such as Tan Sitong, articulated an alternative vision of globalization. Today, loud voices in opposition to globalization are heard everywhere.18 To be more precise, these voices decry capitalist globalization. Socialist China itself is in the process of being absorbed into a worldwide capitalist market order, a “singular modernity” beyond all cultural differences.19 Is there, then, an alternative, noncapitalist globalization? Interestingly, the word datong is not heard anymore in contemporary China; it is as if it had disappeared from the Chinese lexicon. The agenda of Chinese communism has changed its nature as well: it means building a society of moderate affluence amid global capitalism.

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postscript

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Answering the Question, What Is Chinese Postsocialism?

C

hinese socialism has been a dominant tradition throughout the twentieth century and beyond. It is no exaggeration to say that Chinese modernity has been to a large extent the development, revision, and rethinking of socialist modernity. Much of the socialist legacy has been repudiated and jettisoned, and yet much of it persists in people’s minds and still exists, like a ghost from a previous life, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the first half of the twentieth century, anarchists, socialists, and communists projected a vision of socialist society for China’s future as well as fighting for the material realization of such a blueprint. Even a traditional thinker like Kang Youwei, under the mystical cloak of Confucianism, described his utopian Great Commonwealth (datong) in thinly disguised socialist terms. After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, socialism achieved a hegemonic status. Socialist policies were implemented in all realms and in various ways, for example, in the abolishment of private property, the nationalization of means of production, economic egalitarianism, plus a Mao-style “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In the post-Mao era, fundamental changes have occurred in politics, economics, ideology, and everyday life. Deng Xiaoping’s policy of Reform and

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Openness (gaige kaifang) introduced a new set of socioeconomic practices to a nominally socialist state. Prevalent theoretical models such as the fanfare over postcolonialism were inadequate to describe such a historical condition and intellectual-emotional syndrome. Consequently, in Chinese studies, a new term has been invented to signify mainland China: “postsocialism.” Arif Dirlik first used this term in the anthology Marxism and the Chinese Experience, published in 1989. The term is partly derived from the notion of “postmodernism,” defined by Jean-François Lyotard as “incredulity toward metanarratives.” Postsocialism is first and foremost a historical condition in which “socialism has lost its coherence as a metatheory of politics because of the attenuation of the socialist vision in its historical unfolding; partly because of a perceived need on the part of socialist states to adjust ‘actually existing socialism’ to the demands of a capitalist world order, but also because of the vernacularization of socialism in its absorption into different national contexts.”1 Postsocialism, then, is the historical condition of Deng’s China, where the masses have lost faith in the ideology of socialism and the regime has endeavored to inject capitalist elements into the Chinese economy and society in order to facilitate the state’s modernization program. Nicely put, the aim of postsocialism is to “use capitalism to develop socialism.” Immediately after the death of Mao and the arrest of the Gang of Four headed by Madame Mao in late 1976, the Chinese regime declared the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and “class struggle” as the central task of Chinese socialism. Mao’s vision and practice of “permanent revolution” were brushed aside. Instead, the state turned its attention to the agenda of modernization, or the Four Modernizations as outlined by former premier Zhou Enlai. After he ousted Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping went ahead with broad social economic reforms, such as disbanding collective farms and people’s communes (renmin gongshe), reinstating private ownership, setting up capitalist-style special economic zones, and seeking technological know-how from the capitalist West. Mao had predicted that Deng would be a “revisionist,” a “capitalist-roader” (zouzi pai) from within the ranks of the Communist Party, and someone who would “overturn the appraisal” (fan’an) of his prized Cultural Revolution once in power. Mao was right. The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party under Deng’s control officially denounced the Cultural Revolution as a major error of Comrade Mao Zedong. Shortly before, Mao’s China had been held up as a paragon of socialism by radical revolutionaries and socialist sympathizers from around the world. Deng Xiaoping confronted worldwide leftist condemnation for his betrayal of Mao’s revolutionary legacy. However, Deng’s deviation from Mao’s orthodoxy was not necessarily the demise of socialism in China. Dirlik hastens to add, “postsocialism, rather than

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signaling the end of socialism, offers the possibility in the midst of a crisis in socialism of rethinking socialism in new, more creative ways.” 2 Postsocialism is hence an opportunity for renewal and transformation. China has become a huge field of social praxis and socialist-capitalist experiments with elements hitherto unknown to the Chinese — in Deng’s own words, one must “cross the river by feeling the stones” (mo zhe shitou guohe). Besides Dirlik, other China scholars also use the analytic framework of postsocialism in their writings. In his discussion of New Chinese Cinema of the 1980s, Paul Pickowicz recommends that “we consider using a framework that might be called postsocialist.” 3 Postsocialism “deals with the domain of perception.” “[The] idea of a distinctively postsocialist condition is best used to refer to the type of popular cultural diversity, cultural ambiguity, and cultural confusion that became so pronounced in China in the 1980s.” 4 Postsocialism “refers in large part to a negative, dystopian cultural condition that prevails in late socialist societies. . . . It would be wrong, however, to suggest that the phenomenon of postsocialism appeared only after the death of Mao or that it is simply a cultural by-product of the reform decade. . . . In reality, however, the massive disillusionment with socialism among true believers and ideological agnostics and the onset of an alienated postsocialist mode of thought and behavior began midway through the Cultural Revolution (and perhaps earlier in the countryside).” 5 In these various formulations, postsocialism is an analytic framework, a perception, a historical cultural condition, and a phenomenon. Although it flourished in the 1980s, Pickowicz dates postsocialism to a much earlier time. Film scholar Chris Berry also takes up the issue of postsocialism in his study of a group of films made between 1976 and 1981. While concurring with the idea that postsocialism implies the loss of faith in the grand ideology of socialism, Berry dates postsocialism in Chinese cinema to the period immediately after the death of Mao.6 For Pickowicz, postsocialism seems to be, above all, the perception of a dehumanizing, dystopian reality. It has none of the sense of a new series of social practices full of possibilities for regeneration and experimentation as seen in Dirlik’s formulation. Thus, the same appellation of postsocialism could refer to two opposed phenomena — a potentially positive historical juncture or a negative appraisal of a nightmarish situation. Dirlik’s seminal essay was published in 1989. The historical period he covered was the late 1970s and the decade of 1980s. As we know, 1989 was an eventful and crucial year in contemporary Chinese history, the year in which the student democracy movement in Tiananmen Square was suppressed by the regime. Furthermore, it was in the 1990s that China completed its transformation from a predominantly socialist planned economy to a diverse and largely capitalist market economy and consumer society. It was also in the last decade 206

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of the twentieth century that actually existing socialist states in Eastern Europe collapsed one after another and the Cold War between capitalism and communism/socialism ended. If the pace and manner of reform were gradual, incremental, and tentative in the 1980s, China accelerated its full-scale incorporation into the capitalist world economy in the 1990s and beyond. In the language of many cultural critics in mainland China, 1989 was the watershed between the New Period (xin shiqi, c. 1977–1989) and the post–New Period (1989–present). Since Zhang Yiwu’s coinage of the term “post–New Period,” it has been widely used in cultural criticism in regard to China. Zhang explains: What is the “post–New Period”? To me, this concept represents the course of new cultural developments in mainland China since the 1990s. It is a general description of the state of contemporary Chinese culture in the global “post–Cold War” cultural context. It refers to a period of new culture directed toward consumption, supported by mass communication, guided by the values of pragmatism, and constituted by a plurality of discourses. It has ended the authority of the discourse of enlightenment, and has entered into a dialogic relationship with the international current of “postmodernity.” It is a concept of periodization as well as a code of cultural interpretation. The appearance of this concept and the debates about it indicate the enormous, obvious cultural differences between the 1990s and the “New Period.” 7 Although Zhang Yiwu limits the scope of the post–New Period to the realm of culture in this particular paragraph, the concept could be extended to refer to the general historical condition of post-1989 China. In my own thinking, I have noticed the pivotal significance of 1989 and have taken the 1990s as a time of social, economic, and cultural development distinct from the 1980s. In terms of periodization, the postsocialist phase is the post–New Period, the postmodern moment in China. For me, postsocialism blossomed fully in the 1990s and the twenty-first century. I see the postMao period from the late 1970s through the 1980s as only the pre-postsocialist stage. In analyzing the characteristics of China’s avant-garde art and the general cultural climate in the post–New Period, I wrote in 1997: “The incongruent coexistence of an (emegerent) materialism and a (fading) revolutionary ethos in Feng [Mengbo]’s art is indeed the reality of ‘postsocialism’ in China — the combination of capitalist economy and communist politics.” “As the official slogan of the state in the 1990s is the building of a ‘socialist market economy’ and ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics,’ one may say that the cultural dominant in the post–New Era is then a postmodernity with “Chinese characteristics,” a “post-socialist postmodernity.” 8 What is postsocialism, then, in view of the historical developments after the 1980s, a period outside the analysis of earlier commentators? It is not just the postscript

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Marxian “economic base” or the superstructural cultural dominant of contemporary China, but is rather best understood as a totality encompassing the economic, the social, the political, the cultural, and the ideological. To paraphrase the facetious official line of the Chinese state, postsocialism is postmodernity with Chinese characteristics.9 Here is a series of propositions about Chinese postsocialism for further consideration. Postsocialism is above all a periodizing concept and a historical condition. It is more than a matter of perception and dissatisfaction. Although disillusionment with the Mao regime may well have occurred even in the early years of the People’s Republic among erstwhile true believers of socialism, the institutions and policies of the traditional Maoist socialist state did not change. Important differences from Maoist socialism did not emerge until after Mao’s death. In the post-Mao period, and especially during the Deng era, policy changes from the top and grassroots practices from the bottom steadily steered China away from Mao-style socialism. The gradual quantitative reforms in the 1980s led to fundamental structural transformations in the 1990s and the twenty-first century. Postsocialism is a socioeconomic condition in which capitalist modes and relations of production have been increasingly implemented in nominally socialist China as the country has joined the global capitalist regime of the World Trade Organization (WTO). It is a peaceful yet contradictory overlapping of capitalist economics and communist politics. As such, postsocialism embodies the essential internal contradictions of Chinese society. Postsocialism is a cultural logic in accordance with which artists, filmmakers, and writers negotiate the residual socialist past and the emergent capitalist present to concoct new imaginaries of a transitional society. These “cultural workers” reflect and mediate the contradictions and anomalies of the Chinese nation in their works. As we recall, in the early years of the post-Mao era (late 1970s and early 1980s), writers and visual artists were engaged in cathartic rituals of exposing and healing the wounds, scars, and traumas inflicted by a brutal totalitarian regime in hopeful anticipation of a more humane society that would respect the autonomy of the free citizen. After many years of marketization and economic reforms, however, a different and equally menacing regime is engulfing the private spaces of each and every citizen — the capitalist marketplace. Hence, since the 1990s, we have seen more and more artistic works that contain a tinge of nostalgia for a precapitalist way of life. Such postsocialist cultural deep “logic” is not unlike the dilemma of Euro-American high modernist culture in the early twentieth century. Scientific, technological modernization and artistic, literary modernism stood in opposition to each other within the framework of modernity.10 The backward glance toward the communal, idyllic past existed in opposition to the forward-looking teleology of progress. In an 208

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analogous situation, the artistic and cultural heart of postsocialism lies in a precapitalist, socialist life-world even while the technological head of postsocialism faces in the direction of a global capitalist rationale of business management and creating surplus value. This schism between culture and technology within postsocialism itself has become the subject of artistic representation with increasing frequency. Postsocialism pertains to perception and affects. With the partial disappearance of old socialist practices and institutions, ordinary citizens are reacting to the legacy of socialism in different ways, from revulsion toward a dystopian one-party state to nostalgia for the bygone old times of putative idealism and egalitarianism, while they face spiraling socioeconomic gaps among people in a new capitalist market economy. In other words, postsocialism is everyday life, in which ordinary citizens struggle to make a transition from the guarantees and rigidity of socialist welfare to the fluctuations and freedom of a mass consumer society. It is an existential space where people live their lives and conduct their daily business. Chinese citizens may well have been condemned to live in the worst of both worlds — that is, (1) the rampant corruption and endemic nepotism caused by the institutional structure of the one-party state, which is nothing but a perversion of the utopian longing for real socialism, in conjunction with (2) ruthless capitalist profiteering that creates a disproportionate disparity between the haves and have-nots. Or, alternatively, postsocialist China can be seen as a place for the emergence of a new life-world and the creation of as yet unseen socioeconomic practices that have learned lessons from the catastrophes of previous purist, fundamentalist “isms.” There is little doubt that postsocialism is a special form of political culture with Chinese characteristics. It is a civil society and a public sphere where discussions about lifestyles and disputes about consumer rights are protected. Citizens are guaranteed personal freedoms while being denied civic liberties. Participation in social-democratic processes is precluded and political debates about the socialist system and the one-party state are barred. Postsocialism is a battlefield of intellectual and ideological contention between different persuasions. It is also the testing ground for a confrontation between the neoliberals who champion the advent of bourgeois civic autonomy and the rights of private ownership, on the one hand, and the New Leftists who advocate justice of redistribution and class equality on the other. Different visions of China’s future direction are being fought over at this point of conflict. In the final years of the leadership of the former Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin, rich capitalist entrepreneurs (ziben jia) were admitted to party membership — with the rank of “proletarians.” Jiang also launched a theory of postscript

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“Three Represents” that valorized the ideology of communism. According to Three Represents, the Chinese Communist Party represents the most advanced forces of production, the most developed culture, and the interests of the broadest masses. Such rhetorical and technical adjustments were endeavors to resolve a “legitimation crisis,” to revamp the theory and credibility of socialism. The official rhetoric of the fourth generation of Chinese leaders headed by Hu Jintao is to follow Mao Zedong thought, Deng Xiaoping theory, and the theory of Three Represents. But Hu’s favorite slogans are emptied of socialist content. They concentrate on the building of a “harmonious society” (hexie shehui), China’s “peaceful rise” (heping jueqi), and the “great renaissance of the Chinese nation” (Zhonghua minzu de weida fuxing). These catchphrases appeal to Chinese nationalism rather than socialism. In the absence of a grand socialist ideology, patriotism is what holds people together. China was already admitted into the WTO at the turn of the twenty-first century. In a further move along the path to total incorporation in the capitalist world economy, China overhauled the fi xed artificial exchange rate of the Chinese yuan with the US dollar and floated the exchange rate in the international currency market beginning in July 2005. China has thus taken the logical next step toward entering the volatile and lucrative arena of finance capitalism. As a hyphenated construction, post-socialism is by definition the coexistence of multiple temporalities and modes of production, the symbiosis of capitalism and socialism, and the embodiment of continuities as well as discontinuities. As China moves further and further away from socialism and is absorbed into global capitalism, the nature of its socialism evolves into something else on the verge of tilting a delicate balance. It appears that postsocialism in the era of cautious reform and openness in the 1980s has transformed into postsocialism in the age of grandiose transnational capitalism from the 1990s to the present. But socialism itself in all guises does not disappear easily. “The return of the repressed” comes in the forms of affects, sentiments, and feelings, which are expressed in cultural, literary, filmic, and artistic creations. Postsocialism is not the end of socialism. It is an expectant present moment of unprecedented social experimentation that looks in two directions — back to the past and forward to the future. It feels nostalgia for the revolutionary past even as it enters the doors of the supermarket of capitalism.

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notes

Introduction 1. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London and New York: Verso, 2002), pp. 31–32. 2. Sinologists sometimes push back the timetable of Chinese modernity and speak of the late Ming period (17th c.) as “early modern China.” Without going into a complex debate, I start with the Opium War in the mid-nineteenth century for the purpose of my present study. 3. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: The New Press, 1998). The contradictions and dilemmas of globalization in regard to the humanities are studied from various angles in David Leiwei Li, ed., Globalization and the Humanities (Hong Kong: Hong University Press, 2004). The promises and problems of globalization in specific reference to China in the last decade of the twentieth century up to the time of China’s official entry into the “capitalist world economy,” i.e., the World Trade Organization, are studied in Sheldon H. Lu, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Kang Liu, Globalization and Cultural Trends in China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004). For additional broad critical discussions of contemporary Chinese culture and art, see Gregory B. Lee, Chinas Unlimited: Making the Imaginaries of China and Chineseness (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003); Claire Huot, China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Geremie R. Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). On intellectual politics, see Ben Xu, Disenchanted Democracy: Chinese Cultural Criticism after 1989 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). 4. Body politics and the “aesthetics of corporeality” in different periods of modern Chinese literary history have been fruitfully investigated from various angles in recent scholarly works. David Der-wei Wang takes up important moments in the entire twentieth century in his monumental study The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Jianmei Liu focuses on the theme of revolution and love from the 1920s to the late twentieth century. See her book Revolution Plus Love: Literary History, Women’s Bodies, and Thematic Repetition in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003). 5. “Biopolitics” and “body politics” are sometimes interchangeable terms. But within the analytic framework of my present study, it might be useful to take body politics as a subfield of biopolitics. For a history of the body, see Thomas Laqueur, Making

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Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). On the issue of body and performance, see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). On feminism and the body, see Avril Horner and Angela Keane, eds., Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Elizabeth A. Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Susan Bordo, The Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). For body and sexuality, see Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000). For body and masculinity, see Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999). For the body and femininity, see Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). On body and technology, see Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); Katherine N. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). On Chinese body politics, see Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow, eds., Body, Subject, and Power in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 6. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 140–141. 7. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 4. 8. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 292–293. 9. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 10. Nicole Constable, Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and “Mail-Order” Marriages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 30. On the question of active subjects vs. passive victims among women workers in Asia and the third world, see Kamala Kempadoo, “Slavery or Work? Reconceptualizing Third World Prostitution,” positions 7.1 (Spring 1999): 225–237; L. H. M. Ling, “Sex Machines: Global Hypermasculinity and Images of the Asian Woman in Modernity,” positions 7.2 (Fall 1999): 277–306. 11. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 34. 12. See, for instance, Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds., Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2002); Nicole Constable, Romance on a Global Stage; Nicole Constable, Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Philippina Workers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 13. For discussions of transnational marital desire and unequal power relationships between different regions and countries, see Shu-mei Shih, “Gender and a Geopolitics of Desire: The Seduction of Mainland Women in Taiwan and Hong Kong Media,” in Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, ed., Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transna212

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tional China (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 278–307; Kathleen Erwin, “White Women, Male Desires: A Televisual Fantasy of the Transnational Chinese Family,” also in Yang, pp. 232–257. 14. Author unknown, “Shangnü buzhi wangguo hen, ge jiang you chang Huoting hua: Jiu yiba sanbai rihan Zhuhai maichun, Zhongguo xiaojie maishen zhaodai” (Courtesans did not know the pain of loss of a country, and still sang ‘Flowers in the Backyard’ across the river — on 9/18, three hundred Japanese men bought sex in Zhuhai, and Chinese girls sold their bodies to entertain them), Qiao bao (The China press), September 27, 2003, A5. 15. “Haohua da jiudian chouwen: Guochi ri yinsheng langxiao” (Scandal in a luxury hotel: Licentious sound and lascivious laughter on the National Day of Shame), Qiao bao (The China press), September 27, 2003, A5. 16. See Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997). 17. Author unknown, “Riren maichun shijian, gong’an fengcun fandian luxiandai” (The incident of the Japanese sex tour: The police sealed the videotapes of the hotel), Shijie ribao (World journal), September 29, 2003, A12. 18. Yuan Rong, “Wuju maichuntuan jiaoxun, Zhuhai yinye zai fengkuang” (Unmindful of the sex tour lesson, Zhuhai’s sex industry goes crazy again), Dong zhoukan (East week), no. 011 (March 28, 2004): 102. 19. Anonymous, “Zhongguo yimin 326 wan, E tixin diaodan” (Chinese immigrants number 3.26 millions, Russia is worried), Shijie ribao (World journal), January 26 (2004), A1. 20. For Giorgio Agamben, the kind of work that Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt did not carry through from a new biopolitical perspective but needed to do was to examine the “exemplary places of modern biopolitics: the concentration camp and the structure of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century.” See his book Homo Sacer, p. 4, and especially part 3: “The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern,” pp. 119–188.

Part 1. Literature and Biopolitics

Chapter 1. Waking to Global Modernity 1. Such is the view held by Wang Yichuan, a Chinese scholar based at Beijing Normal University. See his book Zhongguo xiandaixing tiyan de fasheng (The experience of modernity in China) (Beijing: Beijing shifan daxue chubanshe, 2001). 2. David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities in Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 1. For the consolidation of the hegemony of the May Fourth tradition, see Milena DolezelovaVelingerova and Oldrich Kral, eds., The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001). 3. Theodore Huters, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), p. 4. 4. Modern editions of some of these works were published in the 1980s and 1990s. See, for instance, Wang Tao, Hou Liaozhai zhiyi quanyi xiangzhu (Complete modern notes to pages 10 –25

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translation and detailed connotation of Post-Tales of the Strange from the Studio of Leisure), 3 vols., trans. and annot. Wang Lin, Chen Ba, Guo Yinghai, and Li Siying (Harbin: Heilongjiang renmin chuban she, 1988); Wang Tao, Songbin suohua (Trivial talks on the banks of Wusong), collated by Wen Dasan (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1987). 5. For biographical studies of Wang Tao in English, see Paul A. Cohen, Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T’ao and Reform in Late Ch’ ing China (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987); Henry McAleavy, Wang T’ao: The Life and Writings of a Displaced Person (London: The China Society, 1953). 6. Karl S. Y. Kao gives a structuralist introduction to this genre and provides English translations of selected tales. See his edited volume Classical Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 7. Judith T. Zeitlin offers a comprehensive study of the author and the genre in her book Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). 8. For an updated new study of this work, see Leo Tak-hung Chan, The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts: Ji Yun and Eighteenth-Century Literati Storytelling (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998). 9. See my From Historicity to Fictionality: The Chinese Poetics of Narrative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), especially chap. 5, “Reading T’ang Fiction as History, Allegory, and Fantasy,” pp. 93–128. 10. Hou Zhongyi and Liu Shilin, Zhongguo wenyan xiaoshuo shigao (Draft history of the Chinese classical tale), vol. 2 (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1993), pp. 252–260; Zhang Jun, Qingdai xiaoshuo shi (History of Qing fiction) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 1997), pp. 460–461. 11. This aspect of Wang Tao’s fiction is noted by Lu Hsun (Lu Xun) in a cursory comment in his A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang (Peking: Peking Foreign Languages Press, 1964), p. 286. 12. See Glen Dudbridge, The Tale of Li Wa (London: Ithaca Press, 1983). 13. It is interesting to note how Hou Hsiao-hsien’s fi lm Haishang hua (Flowers of Shanghai) re-creates the world of brothels in Shanghai in the late nineteenth century. Hou’s fi lm is adapted from Zhang Ailing’s (Eileen Chang) Mandarin translation of a 1892 novel, Haishanghua liezhuan (Biographies of flowers of Shanghai), written in the Wu dialect by Han Bangqing (Han Ziyun). 14. Wang Tao, Songyin manlu (Random records of a recluse in Wusong), collated by Wang Siyu (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1999), “Zixu” (Preface), pp. 1–3. 15. Wang, Songyin manlu, p. 3. 16. For sample studies, see Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973); Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London and New York: Methuen, 1981); Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 17. Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange, p. 7. 18. Wang Tao, Songyin manlu, juan 7, pp. 305–309. 19. Ibid., juan 8, pp. 350–354. 20. Ibid., pp. 355–359. 214

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21. Wang Tao’s records of his travels in Europe and Japan — Manyou suilu (Random records of my wanderings) and Fusang youji (Records of my travels in Japan) — were published as part of the book series Zouxiang shijie congshu (Going to the World Series, a.k.a. From East to West), a massive publishing effort that is the intellectual counterpart to the political and economic open-door policy in the 1980s. See Wang Tao, Manyou suilu & Fusang youji, collated by Chen Shangfan and Ren Guangliang (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1982), as one installment of the Going to the World Series. 22. Wang Yichuan, Zhongguo xiandaixing, chap. 4, pp. 133–184. 23. Wang Tao wrote numerous essays expressing his political views about reform, change, domestic affairs, and international relations. Many representative essays are selected in a new collection of his works as part of a book series of “influential scholarly works in modern China” (Zhongguo jindai xueshu mingzhu). See Wang Tao, Tao yuan wen xin bian (New collection of the writings of Wang Tao) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1998). 24. On the question of dialogism in the novel, see the numerous writings of M. M. Bakhtin, for instance, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

Chapter 2. When Mimosa Blossoms 1. On the relationship between economics and sexuality in modern literature, see Michael Tratner, Deficits and Desires: Economics and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 2. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972– 1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 57–58. 3. Jaroslav Průšek, The Lyrical and the Epic, ed. Leo Ou-fan Lee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 1–28. For an instructive assessment of Průšek’s views, see Theodore Huters’s review article “The Difficult Guest: May Fourth Revisits,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 6 (July 1984): 125–150. 4. Leo Ou-fan Lee, “The Solitary Traveler: Images of the Self in Chinese Literature,” in Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature, ed. Robert E. Hegel and Richard C. Hessney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 307. 5. C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 539. 6. The mingling of the lyrical and the epic is a central theme in Jaroslav Průšek’s study of both traditional and Chinese literature. For instance, he sees the mixture of poetry and prose as the distinguishing hallmark of Chinese popular narratives from Dunhuang bianwen to huaben stories. See pertinent essays in his Chinese History and Literature (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1970). The same quality is also evident in modern Chinese literature as he discusses it in The Lyrical and the Epic. Fredric Jameson notices the entwinement of the private and the public in Lun Xun’s stories. See his article “Third-world Literature in the Era of Multi-national Capitalism.” For another discussion of the combination of the subjective and the objective in May Fourth writers, see Marston Anderson, “The Specular Self: Subjective and Mimetic Elements in the Fiction of Ye Shaojun,” Modern China 15 (January 1989): 72–101. notes to pages 36 –40

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7. Fredric Jameson, “Third-world Literature in the Era of Multi-national Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 69. 8. Allegory was discredited by the Romantics but has been rehabilitated by critics such as Paul de Man. Speaking of allegory, De Man states that “the relationship between sign and meaning is discontinuous, involving an extraneous principle that determines the point and the manner at and in which the relationship is articulated . . . The sign points to something that differs from its literal meaning and has for its function the thematization of the difference.” Paul De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), p. 192. 9. Jameson, “Third-world Literature,” p. 73. 10. Given my appropriation of Jameson’s heuristic reformulation of the issue through redefining allegory, I also want to say that one should take extreme caution when applying Western theories such as Jameson’s to Chinese experience. His notion could be easily critiqued as either neo-Orientalism, which reads the text of the other as reflecting the values of the self in the West, or as neocolonialism, which attempts to colonize the cultural and symbolic capitals of the third world after its previous economic and political conquests. See, for example, Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’ ” Social Text 17 (Fall 1987): 3–25. 11. Among PRC critics, Liu Zaifu attempts to reconstruct a new theory of subjectivity. See his “Lun wenxue di zhuti xing” (On the subjectivity of literature), Wenxue pinglun (Literary review) 6 (1985): 11–26; and Wenxue pinglun 1 (1986): 3–32. To be sure, Liu’s project is a much needed one in terms of the political dynamics of mainland China. Liu’s return to a humanist, romanticist, and subjective theory of literature not only provides a corrective to the official doctrine of socialist realism but also implicitly condemns decades of dehumanization and alienation caused by the suppression of individuality. Yet the theory of subjectivity that I subscribe to, as I will briefly explain, takes a different point of departure. Subjectivity is always inescapably enmeshed in a web of “collective” and “impersonal” relations — an intertextual and “intersubjective” system of discourses, images, representations, and ideologies. 12. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1960), p. 61. 13. For an informative study of the issue, see Kirk A. Denton, “The Distant Shore: Nationalism in Yu Dafu’s ‘Sinking,’ ” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 14 (December 1992): 107–123. Denton also offers his take on the question of subjectivity in modern Chinese literature through the study of Hu Feng and Lu Ling in his book The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 14. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Press, 1971), p. 170. 15. The struggle between open-ended nonofficial discourse and the dominant official discourse permeates Mikhail Bakhtin’s work. See, for instance, M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 16. For instance, Mo Yan’s new novel Shisan bu (Thirteen steps) closely engages and parodies Maoist language. See Zhang Ning’s review of the book, “Wenxue yuyan di dianfu yu jiazhi yuyan de wenluan” (The subversion of literary language and the 216

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disorder of the language of value), Dangdai (Taiwan) 50 (June 1990): 138–148. I would also suggest, without going into any analysis, that A Cheng’s story “Haizi wang” (The king of children) could be read as an allegory of the learning and unlearning of the automated Maoist language. The new teacher discovers that, after years of study, the schoolchildren are unable to write anything except official slogans and set pieces. He has to teach them to write about the simplest facts of their life from scratch, and this amounts to a job no less momentous than teaching them a new language. The teacher is eventually discharged and sent back to do physical labor again. See A Cheng, Qiwang, shuwang, haiziwang (King of chess, king of trees, and king of children) (Taipei: Xindi wenxue chubanshe, 1988). 17. Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity — China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 148. 18. Yu Dafu, “Mayinghua kai di shihou” (When mimosa blossoms), in Yu Dafu wenji (Writings of Yu Dafu), vol. 2 (Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 1982), pp. 301–302. 19. Ibid., pp. 306–307. 20. Ibid., pp. 305–306. Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Der Panther,” which Yu Dafu himself might have appreciated, seems to provide the appropriate historical and literary context for the image of an animal/human rendered impotent by imprisonment. The lyric reads as an allegory of the existential and psychological state of the modern man: Sein Blick is vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe so müd geworden, dass er nichts mehr hält. Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt. Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte, der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht, ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte, in der betäubt ein grosse Wille steht. Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille sich lautlos auf — . Dann geht ein Bild hinein, geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille — und hört im Herzen auf zu sein. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), p. 24. 21. One of Baudelaire’s famous “Spleen” poems could be used as a subtext to the story, a lyric that closely matches the feeling of “I” in Yu Dafu’s text. Quand le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle Sur l’esprit gémissant en proie aux longs ennuis, Et que de l’horizon embrassant tout le cercle Il nous verse un jour noir plus triste que les nuits; Quand la terre est changée en un cachot humide, Où l’Espérance, comme une chauve-souris, notes to pages 42–44

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S’en va battant les murs de son aile timide Et se congnant la tête à des plafonds pourris; Quand la pluie étalant ses immenses traînées D’une vaste prison imite les barreaux, Et qu’un peuple muet d’infâmes arraignées Vient tendre ses filets au fond de nos cerveaux, Des cloches tout à coup sautent avec furie Et lancent vers le ciel un affreux hurlement, Ainsi que des esprits errants et sans patrie Qui se mettent à geindre opiniâtrement. Et de longs corbillards, sans tambours ni musique, Défi lent lentement dans mon âme; l’Espoir, Vancu, pleure, et l’Angoisse atroce, despotique, Sur mon crâne incliné plante son drapeau noir. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. Richard Howard (Boston: David R. Godine, 1982), pp. 253–254. Baudelaire’s text, serving as the context of our present story, dramatizes the encaging, suffocation, and desolation of humanity in the modern city, be it Shanghai or Paris. 22. Joseph S. M. Lau, C. T. Hsia, and Leo Ou-fan Lee, eds., Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas 1919–1949 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 141. 23. Philip F. Williams and Yenna Wu offer an informative study of the Chinese prison system and its literary representation in their book The Chinese Prison Camp through Contemporary Fiction and Reportage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 24. Zhang Xianliang, Half of Man Is Woman, trans. Martha Avery (New York and London: Norton, 1986), pp. 133 and 135. 25. Mao’s personal doctor, Li Zhisui, wrote an exposé of Mao’s private life, including his insatiable appetite for sex with young women. See his book The Private Life of Chairman Mao (New York: Random House, 1994). See also Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Knopf, 2005). 26. See Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject (London: Routledge, 1977), especially chap. 5, “Marxism, Language, and Ideology.” Fredric Jameson also draws upon the Chinese experience of “Cultural Revolution” in the construction of his Marxist hermeneutics. See his book The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 95–102. 27. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 277. 28. Zhang Xianliang, Lühua shu, Shiyue (October) 32.2 (1984): 62; Zhang Xianliang, Mimosa, trans. Gladys Yang (Beijing: Panda Books, 1985), p. 136. 29. Zhang, Lühua shu, p. 62; Mimosa, p. 136. 30. Zhang, Lühua shu, p. 62, Mimosa, 137. 31. Zhang, Lühua shu, p. 62; Mimosa, p. 134. 32. Zhang, Lühua shu, p. 61; Mimosa, p. 134. 218

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33. Zhang, Lühua shu, p. 62; Mimosa, p. 138. 34. Zhang, Mimosa, p. 178. 35. Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Chinese Writers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 252. 36. Specific mechanisms for the control of writers and literature in socialist China also existed as late as the early 1980s. For an informative and insightful study, see Perry Link, The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). This socialist literary system of control gradually disappeared with the rise of commercialized popular culture and the ascendancy of a market economy in the 1990s. 37. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 58.

Chapter 3. Body Writing 1. The term “body writing” was invented by Ge Hongbing, a professor at Shanghai University, to refer to the writings of Wei Hui, Mian Mian, and their like. See “Bodies Melting into Words,” China Daily, December 4, 2003, at http://www .chinadaily.com.cn/endoc/2003-12/04/content_287341.htm (accessed Dec. 16, 2003), author unknown. Ge himself is a prolific novelist and enjoys the reputation of a “stud writer” (meinan zuojia). See his novel Love and Illusion (Sha Chuang, lit. “Sand Bed”) (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 2003). Set in Shanghai, the first-person narrative describes the numerous amorous affairs of the male protagonist, a young professor like the author himself. The hero’s varied lovers are not only Chinese but also foreign (Japanese, American). 2. See the report “Best-selling Gen X novelist Mian Mian exposes youth drug culture in changing China,” by Anna-Sophie Loewenberg, special to SF Gate, in SF Gate (Jan. 28, 2004), available online at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/ archive/2004/01/28/mian.DTL (accessed Feb. 19, 2004). 3. Mian Mian, Candy, trans. Andrea Lingenfelter (Boston: Little, Brown & Company), pp. 47–48. The Chinese edition of the novel that I have consulted is Tang (Candy) (Taipei: Shengzhi, 2000). 4. Man Mian, Candy, p. 270. 5. Wei Hui, Shanghai Baby, trans. Bruce Humes (New York: Pocket Books, 2001), pp. 62–63. 6. Wei Hui, Wei Hui zuopin quanbian (Complete works of Wei Hui) (Guilin: Lijiang chubanshe, 2000), p. 888. 7. Wei Hui, Shanghai Baby, p. 25. 8. For books that describe the new culture of Shanghai, see James Farrer, Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Birth of China’s Legendary City (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000). 9. Ban Wang, “Love at Last Sight: Nostalgia, Commodity, and Temporality in Wang Anyi’s Song of Unending Sorrow,” positions 10.3 (Winter 2002): 671. 10. Wang Anyi, Changhen ge (Song of unending sorrow) (Haikou: Nanhai chuban gongsi, 2003). 11. For informative analyses of modernism in semicolonial Shanghai, see Leo Ou-fan notes to pages 48– 60

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Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), especially part 2, pp. 151–303; Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 12. Lee, Shanghai Modern, p. 29. 13. Wei Hui, Shanghai Baby, p. 64. 14. Shih, Lure of the Modern, pp. 294 and 299. 15. Ibid., p. 301. 16. Jonathan Napack, “A Conversation with the Author of Candy,” appended at the end of the novel Candy (Little, Brown & Company, 2003); no page number is given. 17. Farewell before Daybreak (Tian bu liang jiu fenshou), ed. Tu Lengxi et al. (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexue chubanshe, 2003); Farewell at Dawn (Tianliang yihou shuo fenshou), ed. Zhi Chuan (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2003). 18. One can access many reports about Chun Shu online or on paper. See the prominent special report on her and her generation in Time magazine, Asian edition, February 2, 2004. The front cover of the issue features a picture of Chun Shu. 19. Chun Shu, Changda bantian de huanle (Fun and game, lit. “A pleasure that lasted half a day”) (Beijing: Shijie zhishi chubanshe, 2003). 20. There is plenty of information about the Mu Zimei phenomenon. For example, see Jim Yardley, “Internet Sex Column Thrills, and Inflames, China” New York Times, November 30, 2003, at http://www.nytimes.co,/2003/22/30/international/ asia/30CHIN.html (accessed Dec. 4, 2003); the link http://muzimei.feiwen.com/ offers a lot of material about Mu Zimei. Her online self-exposé, along with her poems, stories, and jottings (suibi), has been collected and published in book format. See Mu Zimei, Yiqing shu (Ashes of love) (Nanchang: Ershiyi shiji chubanshe, 2003). 21. Mu Zimei, Yiqing shu, p. 210. 22. See Yu Qiuyu, Wenhua kulü (The difficult cultural journey) (Taipei: Erya, 1992). 23. Chun Shu, Changda bantian de huanle, p. 136. 24. Peng Xuejun, “Postscript” (Bianhou ji), in Mu Zimei, Yiqing shu, p. 226. 25. Shuyu Kong, Consuming Literature: Bestsellers and the Commercialization of Literary Production in Contemporary China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 182. 26. New media technologies such as the Internet have profoundly changed the formation of citizenship and subjectivity in our time. For a cluster of informative essays, see Special Topic: Mobile Citizens, Media States, PMLA 117.1 (January 2002). 27. Zhou Yongming, Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political Participation in China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 240.

Part 2. Art: From the National to the Diasporic

Chapter 4. The Naked Body Politic I would like to thank the following people for their assistance and insight during my research on the topic: Kathy Linduff, with whom I taught a graduate seminar on twentieth220

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century Chinese art in the art history department at the University of Pittsburgh twice; Murray Horne, curator of Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and artist Zhang Huan. I gave presentations on the subject at the exhibition “Naked” at Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh in October 2001, at the conference on postsocialism and China at Duke University in February 2002, and in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of California at Riverside in February 2004. I thank the organizers for their invitations and the audiences for their feedback. 1. The works of Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming were part of the exhibition “Naked: The Naked Body in Contemporary Video, Photography and Performance” at the Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in September 7–October 28, 2001. Other artists featured in the exhibition were Spencer Turnick, Tina Barney, Jaan Toomik, Bruce Weber, Anton Corbijn, and Manabu Yamanaka. Zhang Huan appeared and gave a talk on his art during the exhibition. See the exhibition catalogue Naked: The Naked Body in Contemporary Video, Photography and Performance (Pittsburgh: Wood Street Galleries, 2001). 2. For a historical study of the body in Chinese visual representation, see Wu Hung and Katherine R. Tsiang, eds., Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005.) 3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 145–146. 4. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 6. 5. For a discussion of this matter, see John Hay, “The Body Invisible in Chinese Art?” in Body, Subject and Power in China, ed. Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 42–77. 6. Eleanor Heartney, introduction to the exhibition catalogue Naked, p. 5. 7. The question of nudity in the history of modern Chinese art is discussed here and there in Michael Sullivan’s monumental book Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); see pp. 30–46, 255–281, and passim. 8. For some informative studies of Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming in English, see Qian Zhijian, “Performing Bodies: Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and Performance Art in China” (interview), Art Journal 58.2 (Summer 1999): 60–81; Maranatha Ivanova, “Ambiguity, Absurdity, and Self-Creation in the Art of Ma Liuming,” positions 7.1 (Spring 1999): 201–223; and relevant sections of Inside Out: New Chinese Art, ed. Minglu Gao (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 9. Ivanova, “Ambignity, Absurdity, and Self-Creation,” p. 203. 10. Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips, Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China (Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2004), p. 209. 11. See the cross-dresser Fen-Ma Liuming and his personal statement on art in Zhongguo xinrui yishu: 23 wei qianwei yishujia zuopin shilu (China’s new art: Works of 23 Chinese avant-garde artists), ed. Zhang Nianchao, Chinese and English bilingual edition (Beijing: Zhongguo shijieyu chubanshe, 1999), pp. 34–35. 12. Wu Hung, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, 1999), p. 107. notes to pages 71– 79

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13. As we all know, the question of third-world national allegory is outlined by Fredric Jameson in his influential essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 65–88. I wondered whether there had been a slight move away from this strategy in the cultural production of former third-world countries such as China in the post–Cold War era. See my book China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 157–158, and, more broadly, the two chapters on art, pp. 141–192. 14. Marilyn Bauer, “Artist Inspired by His Life in U.S.,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, Sunday, June 1, 2003, posted on Zhang Huan’s website, http://www.zhanghuan.com/ Fift yStars.htm (accessed April 19, 2006). 15. Cited from http://www.zhanghuan.com/Peace1.htm (accessed April 19, 2006). 16. Lu, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity, pp. 164–166.

Chapter 5. “Beautiful Violence” 1. Publicity and descriptive materials about the exhibition “Visual Sound” and Qin’s Beautiful Violence can be obtained by contacting Mattress Factory, 500 Sampsonia Way, Pittsburgh, PA 15212, phone: 412-231-3169, fax: 412-322-2231, website: www .mattress.org. 2. For comprehensive, informative discussions of Qin Yufen’s works, see, for example, Qin Yufen, ed. Kunstverein Göttingen e. V. (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth Verlag Tübingen, 2001); Qin Yufen — Xing yin/Walking Sound (Saarbrücken: Stadtgalerie, 1998). 3. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 12. 4. Ibid., pp. 17–18. 5. Friis-Hansen, Dana, Octavio Zaya, and Serizawa Takashi, Cai Guo-Qiang (London/New York: Phaidon, 2002), p. 14. 6. I discussed this piece and other works of Cai in China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 185–189. For useful recent monographs on Cai’s art, see Cai Quo-Qiang, Cai Guo-Qiang (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000); Friis-Hansen, Zaya, and Takashi, Cai Guo-Qiang. 7. Eleanor Heartney, “Cai Guo-Qiang: Illuminating the New China,” Art in America 90.5 (May 2002), p. 95. 8. Friis-Hansen, Zaya, Takashi, Cai Guo-Qiang, pp. 26–28. 9. Fredric Jameson arrives at this conclusion through a reinterpretation of the dialectics of Hegel at the end of his essay “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 75–76. 10. Zhou Ruopu, “Zhongyang Gongyuan qingsheng: Cai Guo-Qiang yanhuo hui ‘Guanghuan’ ” (Celebrating the birthday of Central Park: The fireworks of Cai GuoQiang paints a “light cycle”), Shijie ribao (World journal), September 15, 2003, A3. 11. Xiaoping Lin, “Globalism or Nationalism? Cai Guoqiang, Zhang Huan, and Xu Bing in New York,” Third Text 18.4 (July 2004): 294. 12. Wu Hung, “Global and Local,” in The First Guangzhou Triennial — Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990–2000), Wu Hung with Wang

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Huangsheng and Feng Boyi (Guangzhou: Guangdong Museum of Art; Chicago: Art Media Resources, 2002), p. 398.

Part 3. Sinophone Cinema and Postsocialist Television

Chapter 6. Hollywood, China, Hong Kong 1. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage Publications, 1992), p. 9. 2. John Fiske, “Global, National, Local? Some Problems of Culture in a Postmodern World,” The Velvet Light Trap 40 (Fall 1997): 57. 3. Alan Riding, “Why Titanic Conquered the World,” New York Times, April 26, 1998, sec. 2, p. 28. 4. Mike Featherstone, “Localism, Globalism, and Cultural Identity,” in Global/ Local: Cultural Production and Transnational Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 58. I have also outlined several major theories of modernity in the contemporary Chinese context. See my essay “Universality/Difference: The Discourses of Chinese Modernity, Postmodernity, and Postcoloniality,” Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 9.1 and 2 (1999): 97–111. 5. Roger Ebert, Review of Red Corner, Chicago Sun-Times, October 1997; http:// www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert-reviews/1997/10/103102.html. 6. Kenneth Turan, “Corner: A Heavy-Handed Battle with Justice in China,” Los Angeles Times, October 31, 1997. 7. Janet Maslin, “Red Corner: Melodrama cum Credibility Snag,” The New York Times, October 31, 1997. 8. Roger Ebert, review of Kundun, Chicago Sun-Times, January 1998; http://www .suntimes.com/ebert/ebert-reviews/1998/01/011604.html. 9. Stephen Holden, “Kundun: The Dalai Lama, Toddler to Grown Man, in Exile,” The New York Times, December 24, 1997. 10. Kenneth Turan, “Kundun Lacks a Certain Presence,” Los Angeles Times, December 24, 1997. 11. See Roger Ebert, review of Seven Years in Tibet, Chicago Sun-Times, October 1997; http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert-reviews/1997/10/101003.html. 12. Kenneth Turan, “More Pitt Than Politics,” Los Angeles Times, October 8, 1997. 13. Kevin Thomas, “Lovingly Wrapped Chinese Box Transcends Melodrama,” Los Angeles Times, April 17, 1998. 14. Tomorrow Never Dies, a 1997 installment of the endless cycle of James Bond fi lms, also takes up the relationship between China and the West, but adopts a new strategy in East–West geopolitics. The film tells a story of collaboration and potential romance between a British and a Chinese secret service agent. For a detailed study, see Anne T. Ciecko and Sheldon H. Lu, “The Heroic Trio: Anita Mui, Maggie Cheung, and Michele Yeoh — Self-Reflexivity and the Globalization of the Hong Kong Action Heroine,” a special issue on Hong Kong cinema, Post Script 19.1 (Fall 1999): 70–86, esp. 78–81.

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15. See, for example, the film ad in The New York Times, Saturday, May 8, 1999, AR18. 16. Richard Corliss, “Once the Transpacific Princess of Good Films and Bad, Joan Chen Is Now an Award-winning Auteur,” Time, April 5, 1999, p. 61. 17. Orville Schell, “Once a Shangri-La Where China Now Dominates,” The New York Times, Sunday, May 9, 1999, AR31. 18. I thank Shelly Kraicer for finding the relevant information for me about this American actor. 19. Fore relevant discussions of the film, see Pu Feng, ed., 1997: Xianggang dianying huigu (1997: Retrospect of Hong Kong cinema) (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Critics Society, 1999), pp. 244–247. 20. For a detailed study of the two films, see Sheldon H. Lu, “Filming Diaspora and Identity: Hong Kong and 1997,” in The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Form, Genre, ed. Poshek Fu and David Desser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 21. See my “Filming Diaspora and Identity”; see also Yeh Yueh-yu, “A Life of Its Own: Musical Discourses in Wong Kar-wai’s Films,” in a special issue on Hong Kong cinema, Post Script 19.1 (Fall 1999): 120–136. 22. Such is the general thesis of Kwai-cheung Lo in his new book on Hong Kong popular culture as a whole, Chinese Face/Off: The Transnational Popular Culture of Hong Kong (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005). The most comprehensive analysis of pan-Chinese film culture from the Tian’anmen debacle to Hong Kong’s handover to China is Gina Marchetti’s illuminating new book, From Tian’anmen Square to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989–1997 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005). 23. Zhang Zhen, a native of Shanghai and now a member of the Shanghai diaspora, reconstructs the golden days of Shanghai cinema in her scholarly monumental study An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). The opening sentences of the book offer personal testimony to the author’s amorous relationship with the city and its cinema: “Some of the oldest and finest movie theaters in central Shanghai were within a stone’s throw of the neighborhood where I grew up. Behind the ‘iron curtains’ of the cold war in the 1960s and 1970s, I enjoyed countless trips to these cinemas, especially Da Shanghai (Metropol) on Tibet road . . .” (p. ix). 24. Jerome Silbergeld offers an insightful, detailed analysis of Suzhou River in his book Hitchcock with a Chinese Face: Cinematic Doubles, Oedipal Triangles, and China’s Moral Voice (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004). 25. Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar point out several important differences between Serfs and Horse Thief in this regard. See their insightful discussion in their book China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 184–187.

Chapter 7. History, Memory, Nostalgia 1. An analysis of the position of socialist China in the cultural and geopolitical imaginary of the West is given in Sheldon Lu, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 4–11. 2. For discussions of a wide range of institutional, political, economic, and social 224

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readjustments and transformations in the postsocialist countries, see, for example, Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia, ed. C. M. Hann (London and New York: Routledge, 2002); Strategic Choice and Path-Dependency in Post-Socialism: Institutional Dynamics in the Transformation Process, eds., Jerzy Hausner, Bob Jessop, and Klaus Nielson (Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar, 1995). 3. Much has been written about the subject of nostalgia in contemporary Chinese visual culture. For some provocative discussions, see Dai Jinhua, “Imagined Nostalgia,” boundary 2 24.3 (Fall 1997): 143–161; Geremie Barmé speaks of “totalitarian nostalgia” in his book In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Augusta L. Palmer, Crossroads: Nostalgia and the Documentary Impulse in Chinese Cinemas at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2004). For an informative introduction to the idea of nostalgia, see Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: The Free Press, 1979). 4. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. xvi. 5. Ibid., p. xviii. 6. A few recent studies offer well-informed analyses of the themes and styles of China’s new generation of filmmakers. They also provide useful discussions of some of the fi lms that I mention in this chapter. See Shuqin Cui, “Working from the Margins: Urban Cinema and Independent Directors in Contemporary China,” Post Script 22.2 and 3 (Winter/Spring and Summer 2001): 77–93; Xiaoping Lin, “New Chinese Cinema of the ‘Sixth Generation’: A Distant Cry of Forsaken Children,” Third Text 16.3 (September 2002): 261–284. 7. In regard to the everyday, see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Svetlana Boym looks at the everyday in postsocialist Russia in her book Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Xiaobing Tang examines the issue in the Chinese context; see his book China Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 8. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 19. 9. Ibid., p. 284. 10. For some representative commentaries on the TV program in Chinese periodicals, see, for instance, Xu Qianyin, “Yikuai jiqing de dangao” (A piece of cake filled with passion), Sanlian shenghuo zhoukan (Sanlian life monthly), no. 206 (Aug. 26, 2002), pp. 64–65; Li Nan, “Yu jiqing youran” (Infected by passion) Xinwen zhoukan (News weekly), no. 25 (Aug. 26, 2002), pp. 46–47; Wang Chenbo and Wei Qing, “Zhenshi zui dongren” (True and most moving), Xinwen zhoukan, no. 25 (Aug. 26, 2002), p. 49, Li Nan, “Jiqing, jishi liangfang?” (Passion: A cure for the world?), Xinwen zhoukan, no. 25 (Aug. 26, 2002), p. 50. 11. Informative critical analysis of the film In the Heat of the Sun is given by Xinmin Liu, “Play and Being Playful: The Quotidian in Cinematic Remembrance of the Mao Era,” Asian Cinema 15. 1 (Spring 2004): 73–89. Also see Tonglin Lu, “Fantasy and Ideology in a Chinese Film: A Zizekian Reading of the Cultural Revolution,” positions: east asia cultures critique 12.2 (Fall 2004): 539–564. 12. On this point, see Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions no te s t o page s 132 –14 4

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of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), chap. 4, “Consumption, Duration, and History,” pp. 66–85. 13. The effect of popular soap operas on ordinary Chinese viewers cannot be underestimated. I cannot help but recall an event I witnessed while in Beijing in spring 2001. While I was taking care of some personal matter in a public security office (gong’an ju), a police officer brought in a young teenage girl with a suitcase. The girl had packed and run away from home to Beijing in search of Xiao Yanzi, Zhao Wei’s character in the soap opera Princess Huanzhu! 14. A fi lm about the experiences of zhiqing (educated youth living in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution), directed by Dai Sijie, a fi lmmaker of the zhiqing generation, is The Little Chinese Seamstress (Xiao Caifeng, 2003). The work decries the intellectual deprivation and spiritual hunger suffered by Chinese youth at the time, and thus reimagines the socialist legacy in a way rather different from the fi lms and TV dramas I have discussed in this chapter. The discourse of humanism returns in Dai Sijie’s film. 15. Related German “nostalgia films” include Helden Wie Wir (Heroes like us, dir. Sebastian Peterson, 1999); Sonnenallee (Sons’ alley, dir. Leander Haussmann, 1999). For critical studies, see Daphne Berdahl, “ ‘(N)Ostalgie’ for the Present: Memory, Longing and East German Things,” Ethnos 64.2 (1999): 192–211; Martin Blum, “Remaking the East German Past: Ostalgie, Identity, and Material Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture 34.3 (2000): 229–254; Paul Cook, “Performing ‘Ostalgie’: Leander Haussmann’s Sonnenallee,” German Life and Letters 52.2 (2003): 156–167; Kersten Zelle, Ostalgie? National and Regional Identifications in Germany after Unification (Birmingham, AL: University of Birmingham Press, 1997).

Chapter 8. Dialect and Modernity in Twenty-first Century Sinophone China 1. Emilie Yeh and Darrell Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Chris Berry and Feii Lu, eds., Island on the Edge: Taiwanese Films (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005). See also Tonglin Lu, Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 2. Xiaoping Lin offers an insightful study of Jia’s films in his essay “Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Trilogy: A Journey across the Ruins of Post-Mao China,” in ChineseLanguage Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, ed. Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yuehyu Yeh (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), pp. 186–209. 3. Yingjin Zhang points out, “in the eyes of many Chinese critics, art is complicit with politics in Zhang’s symbolic submission to tyrannical power in a new allegory of the unified China as tianxia (literally ‘under the heaven’).” Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), p. 293. 4. Edward M. Gunn, Rendering the Regional: Local Language in Contemporary Chinese Media (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), p. 197. 5. Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yeh expound the ideas of “Chinese-language cinema” and “Sinophone cinema” in their introduction to Chinese-Language Film, especially pp.

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4–9. Shu-mei Shih undertakes the study of a broad range of visual culture that she terms as “Sinophone.” See her book manuscript Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming). 6. In the case of German-language film studies, “A film history that acknowledges such differences has to take into account, for example, the fertile influence of Germanspeaking cultures from Eastern Europe, or from areas which have always had a distinct or separate national identity (i.e. Austria, Switzerland), not to mention wider transnational and transcultural connections. It needs to counterpoint the rabid nationalism of the 1930s and 40s with the cosmopolitan legacy of Jewish diaspora and exile, and to chart the ideological divisions and boundaries of the Cold War, as well as the reemergence of a more multicultural conception of Germanness in recent years.” The German Cinema Book, ed. Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk (London: British Film Institute, 2002), p. 1. 7. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, eds., World Cinema: Critical Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), the section “Anglophone National Cinemas,” pp. 117–142. Anglophone cinemas include films from Great Britain as well as its historical colonies — the US, Canada, Australia, and so on — whereas Francophone cinema does not include French cinema but the cinemas of France’s former colonies that continue to use the French language to a certain degree. To my mind, Chineselanguage cinema, or Sinophone cinema, embraces the films of mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and films from any region of the world so long as the films themselves predominately use Chinese dialects. 8. Live Spaas, The Francophone Film: A Struggle for Identity (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 131. 9. Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney, “Introduction: The Post-colonial Problematic in Contemporary France,” in Post-Colonial Cultures in France, ed. Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 4.

Part 4. Cityscape in Multimedia

Chapter 9. Tear Down the City 1. Yu Meiying, “Qunian Beijing shangpin fang mai le 230 yi” (Last year commodity houses worth 23 billion yuan were sold in Beijing), Beijing qingnian bao (Beijing youth daily), February 13, 2001, p. 34. 2. Fredric Jameson, “Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 60. See also Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London and New York: Verso, 2002). 3. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. xxxii. 4. Zhou Jiawang, “Xin diming Beijingren zhao bu zhao” (Beijingers can’t find the new place-names), Beijing wanbao, (Beijing evening news), March 22, 2001, 1. 5. Liao Yan, Huang Dongjiang, “Duo jian jingji shiyong fang, ladong fangjia wang xia jiang” (Build more economic practical houses, bring down the price of houses), Chen bao (Beijing morning post), February 7, 2001, 1.

notes to pages 162–168

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6. For a report on cherished old Beijing buildings in destruction, see Hong Jianshe, “Shi!” (Gone!) Xiaofei zhe (Consumer), no. 12 (2000): 48–49. 7. This orientation in popular cinema is fully discussed in Zhang Yiwu, “Zaidu xiangxiang Zhongguo: quanqiuhua de tiaozhan yu xin de ‘neixianghua’ ” (Reimagining China: The challenge of globalization and the new “inward turn”), Dianying xinshang (Film appreciation journal) (Taiwan), no. 105 (Fall 2000): 35–43. 8. For characterizations of China’s new generation of urban fi lmmakers, especially independent fi lmmakers, see Chris Berry, “Staging Gay Life in China: Zhang Yuan and East Palace West Palace,” Jump Cut 41 (1998): 84–89; Zhang Zhen, “Zhang Yuan,” in Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers, ed. Yvonne Tasker (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 418–429; Shuqin Cui, “Working from the Margins: Urban Cinema and Independent Directors in Contemporary China,” Post Script 20, nos. 2 and 3 (Winter/Spring and Summer 2001): 77–93, part of a special double issue on Chinese cinema, coedited by Sheldon H. Lu and Yeh Yueh-yu, and reprinted in ChineseLanguage Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, ed. Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yuehyue Yeh (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), pp. 96–119; Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, “Globalization and Youthful Subculture: The Chinese Sixth Generation Films at the Dawn of the New Century,” in Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia, ed. Jenny Kwok Wah Lau (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), pp. 13–27; Lin Baocheng, “Dalu diliudai daoyan de chuangzuo tiaozhan yu meixue fangxiang” (Artistic challenges and aesthetic orientations of the sixth-generation film directors from the mainland), Dianying xinshang (Film appreciation journal) (Taiwan), no. 105 (Fall 2000): 67–75; Xiaoping Lin, “New Chinese Cinema of the ‘Sixth Generation’: A Distant Cry of Forsaken Children,” Third Text 16, no. 3 (September 2002): 261–284. 9. Events in the film seem to parallel director Feng Xiaogang’s own personal experiences. Divorce is a rampant phenomenon in Chinese cities, and Feng himself went through one. He left his wife and daughter, who also played the piano. Later he married actress Xu Fan, who plays the role of Liang Yazhou’s wife in the fi lm. Also like the characters in the film, Feng and his family live in a huge, luxurious, exquisitely decorated apartment in Beijing. 10. John Pomfret, “From China’s Feng Xiaogang, a ‘Sigh’ of the Times; Filmmaker Skirts the Censors — and Western Expectations,” The Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2000. 11. The acute tension between traditional culture and the forces of postmodernization is the subject of Feng Xiaogang’s latest New Year fi lms Cell Phone (Shouji, 2003) and A World without Thieves (Tianxia wuzei, 2004). See Chapter 8. 12. For an overview of contemporary Chinese avant-garde photography, see Li Xianting, “Dangdai yishu zhong de sheying meijie re” (The photography craze in contemporary art), Jinri xianfeng (Avant-garde today), no. 10 (Jan. 2001): 136–147. I offer an examination of strategies of representation in contemporary Chinese avant-garde art in the same issue of Jinri xianfeng. See Lu Xiaopeng (Sheldon H. Lu), “Gouzao ‘Zhonguo’ de celüe: Xianfeng yishu yu hou dongfang zhuyi” (Strategies of constructing ‘China’: Avant-garde art and postorientalism) Jinri xianfeng (Avant-garde today), no. 10 (January 2001): 148–161. A revised and expanded English version is in Sheldon Lu, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University 228

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Press, 2001), chap. 8: “The Uses of China in Avant-Garde Art: Beyond Orientalism,” pp. 173–192. For a comprehensive introduction to contemporary Chinese photography and video, see Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips, Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China (Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago: 2004). 13. Post-Material: Interpretations of Everyday Life by Contemporary Chinese Artists, ed. Huang Du, exh. cat., bilingual edition in English and Chinese (Beijing: World Chinese Arts Publication Company Limited, 2000), p. 9. 14. Ibid., p. 13. 15. Ibid., p. 14. 16. Meg Maggio, “Introduction,” in Hong Hao: Scenes from the Metropolis (Jing xiang), ed. Meg Maggio, exh. cat. (Beijing: The Courtyard, 2000), p. 2. 17. See the exhibition catalogue Gao Brothers, ed. Meg Maggio (Beijing: The Courtyard, 2001). 18. Making China: Cultural Implosion, ed. Philip Lisio, Megan Connolly, and Sasha Welland (New York: Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, 2002), pp. 39–40. 19. See the special section on Beijing’s bar culture in Xiaofei zhe (Consumer), no. 11 (2000): 8–27. This is a Chinese journal published in Beijing. 20. The question of public and private space in the Chinese metropolis as represented in avant-garde art is explored in Xiaoping Lin, “Discourse and Displacement: Contemplating Beijing’s Urban Landscape,” Art Asia Pacific, no. 25 (2000): 76–81.

Historical Conclusion 1. For a study of Zheng He’s voyages in English, see Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). See also the more controversial study by Gavin Menzies, who claims that it was Zheng He who discovered America. See his 1421: The Year the Chinese Discovered the World (New York: William Morrow, 2003). 2. Zheng He was born into a non-Chinese, Muslim family in Yunnan, southwest China. His family originally came from central Asia. In the Chinese overthrow of the Mongol dynasty, he was captured as a small boy, castrated, and sent to serve in the house of Prince Zhu Di, the future third Ming emperor. He proved his loyalty and bravery in a series of events, and won the trust of Emperor Zhu Di. In 2005, to commemorate the six hundredth anniversary of Zheng He’s first voyage, China Central Television produced and aired a sixteen-part TV series, A Trip to the Hometown of Zheng He (Zheng He guli xing). 3. The Ming decision to halt costly maritime explorations has been a cautionary tale for the future of the American space program, especially in the aftermath of the Columbia disaster. See, for instance, Orville Schell, “A Ming Emperor Would Have Grounded the Shuttle. Bad Idea,” Washington Post, Sunday, March 2, 2003, B02. 4. Frederic Wakeman perceptively discussed the Qing mentality and its eventual demise in his study The Fall of Imperial China (New York: Free Press, 1975). 5. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979; rpt. 1997), p. 6. Scholars give explanations about the rise of capitalism and world trade in Europe rather than in China despite Zheng He’s unnotes to pages 181–195

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precedented large-scale seafaring in the fifteenth century. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1976), pp. 40–47; Enrique Dussel, “Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 3–31. 6. Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World, trans. Michael Wolfers (London and New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd, 1990). 7. Immanuel Wallerstein, “New Revolts against the System,” New Left Review 18 (Nov.–Dec. 2002): 34. See also Wallerstein, The Politics of the World-Economy: The States, the Movements and the Civilizations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), especially part 2, “Antisystemic Movements,” pp. 97–145; Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy. 8. “Kendeji liansuodian pao diyi, Jing Hu shuangpo baijia” (Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant chain took the lead, and broke the record of one hundred in both Beijing and Shanghai), Shijie ribao (World journal), September 4, 2003, D7. 9. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 2. See especially chapter 5, “Neoliberalism ‘with Chinese Characteristics,’ ” pp. 120–151. 10. Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble: The US and the World Economy (London and New York: Verso, 2002), p. 27. 11. Robert Brenner, “New Boom or New Bubble? The Trajectory of the US Economy,” New Left Review 25 (Jan.–Feb. 2004): 86–87. 12. Giovanni Arrighi, “The Social and Political Economy of Global Turbulence,” New Left Review 20 (March–April 2003): 71. 13. Indeed, Immanuel Wallerstein, the founder of world-systems analysis, forecasts the decline and disintegration of the current capitalist world system, hence the need to imagine alternative systems of living. See his Utopistics: Or Historical Choices of the Twenty-First Century (New York: New Press, 1998). 14. Cited from Laurence G. Thompson’s translation. See his book Ta T’ung Shu: The One-World Philosophy of K’ang Yu-wei, translation from the Chinese with introduction and notes (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1958), p. 5. For a recent critical, annotated edition of Datong shu, see Kang Youwei, Kang Youwei datong lun erzhong (Kang Youwei’s theory of datong, two works), ed. Pan Zhenping (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1998). For pertinent critical studies of Kang in English, see Kung-chuan Hsiao, A Modern China and A New World: K’ang Yu-wei, Reformer and Utopian, 1858–1927 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1975); Jung-pang Lo, ed., K’ang Yu-wei: A Biography and a Symposium (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1967); Martin Bernal, Chinese Socialism to 1907 (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1976), chap. 1, “Datong,” pp. 11–32. 15. Kang’s global project is a synthesis of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Western thought (socialism). He begins with a hermeneutic of the canonical Confucian texts. As mentioned, the idea of datong comes from the chapter “Evolution of Rites” (Li yun) in The Book of Rites (Li ji). The word datong was first used in the “Hongfan” (Grand paradigm) chapter of The Book of Documents (Shang shu), one of the oldest extant Chi-

230

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nese books. Kang attributes datong to the words of Confucius as found in The Book of Rites, and then further develops it as the universal principle of the future world. 16. Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 56. Li Zehou gives an insightful Chinese Marxist analysis of Kang’s thought in his book Zhongguo jindai sixiang shilun (On modern Chinese intellectual history) (Taipei: Sanmin, 1996), pp. 95–185. 17. I discussed the politics of historical interpretation in the Chinese tradition in reference to these Confucian classics at great length in my book From Historicity to Fictionality: The Chinese Poetics of Narrative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), especially chap. 3, “Chinese Historical Interpretation in the Reading of Narrative,” pp. 53–73. 18. See Stanley Aronowitz and Heather Gautney, eds., Implicating Empire: Globalization and Resistance in the Twenty-first Century World Order (New York: Basic Books, 2003); James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the Twenty-first Century (Halifax, Canada: Fernwood Publishing, 2001). 19. Jameson writes, “The standardization projected by capitalist globalization in this third or late stage of the system casts considerable doubt on all these pious hopes for cultural variety in a future world colonized by a universal market order.” See Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London and New York: Verso, 2002), pp. 12–13.

Postscript 1. Arif Dirlik, “Postsocialism? Reflections on ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,’ ” in Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meisner, eds., Marxism and the Chinese Experience (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989), p. 364. 2. Ibid., p. 380. 3. Paul G. Pickowicz, “Huang Jianxin and the Notion of Postsocialism,” in Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, and Esther Yau, eds., New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 60. 4. Ibid., p. 61. 5. Ibid., p. 62. 6. Chris Berry writes, “I argue that these films constitute the first cinematic site where postsocialist Chinese culture is constructed in a significant and sustained manner.” See his book Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), p. 1. See also Chris Berry and Mary Ann Farquhar, “Post-Socialist Strategies: An Analysis of Yellow Earth and Black Cannon Incident,” in Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan, ed. Linda C. Ehrlich and David Desser (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. 81–116. 7. Zhang Yiwu, Cong xiandaixing dao houxiandaixing (From modernity to postmodernity) (Nanning: Guangxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 1997), p. 74. 8. Sheldon Lu, “Art, Culture, and Cultural Criticism in Post-New China,” New Literary History 28.1 (Winter 1997): 121, 125.

notes to pages 202–207

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9. I outlined a theory of Chinese postmodernity in my China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). The present chapter supplements and expands my arguments in the book. 10. The conservative, antimodern ideology is obvious among “high modernists” such as W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. Also See Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987).

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chinese glossary of names, titles, and terms

A Cheng 阿城 Ai zai biexiang de jijie 《爱在别乡的 季节》

Aiqing mala tang 《爱情麻辣烫》 Anyang 安阳 ba huo guan’er 拔火罐儿 Ba Jin 巴金 Bai chai tu 《百拆图》 bai fu tu 百福图 bai shou tu 百寿图 Baoji 宝鸡 baojian 包间 Beijinghua 北京话 Beijing qingnian bao 《北京青年报》 Beijing wawa 《北京娃娃》 beimei 北妹 beipiao jituan 北漂集团 Bianwen 变文 Biaozhun jiating 《标准家庭》 biji 笔记 boke 博客 ‘‘Bo Qinhuai’’ “泊秦淮” Bu Wancang 卜万仓 Bujian busan 《不见不散》 Cai Chusheng 蔡楚生 Cai Guoqiang 蔡国强 Cao Xueyi 曹学义 Cao Yu 曹禺 Caochuan jiejian 《草船借箭》 chai 拆 chai-na 拆那 chang 场 Chang’an 长安

Chang da bantian de huanle 《长达半 天的欢乐》

Changhen ge 《长恨歌》 Changzheng 《长征》 Chen bao 《晨报》 Chen Chong ( Joan Chen) 陈冲 Chen Daoming 陈道明 Chen Guo (Fruit Chan) 陈果 Chen Houzhu 陈后主 Chen Junyu 陈君玉 Chen Kaige 陈凯歌 Chen Kexin (Peter Chan) 陈可辛 Chen Shui-bian 陈水扁 Chen Yaocheng (Evans Chan) 陈耀成

Cheng 城 Cheng Long ( Jackie Chan) 成龙 Chengshi binguan 城市宾馆 ‘‘Chenlun’’ “沉沦” Chongqing senlin 《重庆森林》 Chu Qin 褚琴 chuanqi 传奇 Chun Shu 春树 ‘‘Chunfeng chenzui de wanshang’’ “春风沉醉的晚上”

Chunguang zhaxie 《春光乍泻》 Cihai 《辞海》 Cui Xiuwen 崔岫闻 Cuo Ai 《错爱》 da de xiaren de qiguan 器官

Dai Sijie 戴思杰 dalu mei 大陆妹 Daming 大明

大得吓人的

Dangdai 《当代》 Dao ma zei 《盗马贼》 datong 大同 Datong 大同 Datong shu 《大同书》 Dechen 德臣 Delamu 《德拉姆》 Deng Lijun (Teresa Tang) 邓丽君 Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 Dianying xinshang 《电影欣赏》 Dianshizhai huabao 《点石斋画报》 Didao zhan 《地道战》 Ding Richang 丁日昌 diqi 地气 diqiu heyi 地球合一 disanzhe 第三者 Dongbei 东北 Dongfang Shuo 东方朔 dongren 动人 ‘‘Dongying cainu¨’’ “东瀛才女” Dong zhoukan 《东周刊》 Du Mu 杜牧 Dunhuang 敦煌 Dunku lanyan 《遁窟谰言》 ernaizi 二奶子 Erming 二明

Gangtie shi zenyang liancheng de 《钢铁是怎样炼成的》

Gao Qiang 高强 Gao Zhen 高兟 Ge Hongbing 葛洪兵 Ge You 葛优 gong 公 gong 共 Gong Li 巩俐 gong’an ju 公安局 Gongyang zhuan 《公羊传》 gougou 狗狗 Gu Changwei 顾长卫 Guan Jinpeng (Stanley Kwan) 关锦鹏

Guan Qi 关琦 Guiyang 贵阳 Guizhou 贵州 Guo Lanying 郭兰英 guochi ri 国耻日 guoyu 国语 Hai Bo 海波 ‘‘Haidi qijing’’ “海底奇景” haipai 海派 Haishang hua 《海上花》 Haishang hua liezhuan 《海上花列 传》

falang 发廊 fan’an 翻案 Fangkong dong 防空洞 Fazhan shi ying daoli 发展是硬 道理

Fei Mo 费墨 Feidu 《废都》 Feng Gong 冯巩 Feng he 《风荷》 Feng Xiaogang 冯小刚 Feng Xiaoning 冯小宁 Feng Yutian 丰玉田 Fen-Ma Liuming 芬-马六明 Fenyang 汾阳 Fu Biao 傅彪 Fusang youji 《扶桑游记》 gaige kaifang 234

改革开放

. chinese glossary

‘‘Haiwai meiren’’ “海外美人” ‘‘Haiwai zhuangyou’’ “海外壮游” ‘‘Haizi wang’’ “孩子王” Haizi wang 《孩子王》 Han Bangqing (Han Ziyun) 韩邦庆 （韩子云）

hanghai ri 航海日 hehuan 合欢 Henan 河南 heping jueqi 和平崛起 hesui pian 贺岁片 hexie shehui 和谐社会 Hong Hao 洪浩 Hong he gu 《红河谷》 Hong Jinbao (Sammo Hung) 洪金宝 ‘‘Hongfan’’ “洪范” hou 后 Hou Liaozhai zhiyi 《后聊斋志异》

Hou Liaozhai zhiyi tushuo 《后聊斋 志异图说》 hou wuzhi 后物质

jiti chuangzuo 集体创作 juan 卷 juluan shi 据乱世

Hou Xiaoxian (Hou Hsiao-hsien) 侯孝贤

Hu Jintao 胡锦涛 huaben 话本 Hua Guofeng 华国锋 Huahun 《画魂》 huaijiu 怀旧 Huang Du 黄笃 Huang Jianxin 黄建新 Huang Shuqin 黄蜀芹 Huang tudi 《黄土地》 Huang Zunxiang 黄遵宪 Huanghe juelian 《黄河绝恋》 Huanzhu gege 《还珠格格》 ‘‘Huayang de nianhua’’ “花样的年华” Huayang nianhua 《花样年华》 huayu dianying 华语电影 Huitu Hou Liaozhai zhiyi 《绘图后聊 斋志异》 胡同

hutong

‘‘Ji Riben nu¨zi A Chuan shi’’ “记日本 女子阿传事”

Ji Yun 纪昀 Jia Pingwa 贾平凹 Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯 Jiafang yifang 《甲方乙方》 jian 剑 Jiang Wen 姜文 Jiang Wu 姜武 Jiang Zemin 江泽民 Jiangnan 江南 Jianwen di 建文帝 Jin Chengwu (Kaneshiro, Takeshi) 金成武

Jin Fang 金芳 Jin Shangyi 靳尚谊 jindai 近代 Jingxiang 《景象》 Jinri xianfeng 《今日先锋》 jiqing 激情 Jiqing ranshao de suiyue 《激情燃烧 的岁月》

Kang Honglei 康洪雷 Kang Youwei 康有为 Ke ke xi li 《可可西里》 Ketu qiuhen 《客途秋恨》 Kong Quan 孔泉 Kongque 《孔雀》 ‘‘Kuangren riji’’ “狂人日记” Lanna 兰娜 Laotou ji 老头鸡 Li An (Ang Lee) 李安 Li Denghui (Lee Teng-hui) 李登辉 Li Hongzhang 李鸿章 Li ji 《礼记》 Li Li 李丽 Li Lianjie ( Jet Li) 李连杰 Li Ming 黎明 ‘‘Li Wa zhuan’’ “李娃传” Li Xiaodan 李晓丹 Li Yang 李扬 li yi zhi bang 礼仪之邦 ‘‘Li yun’’ “礼运” Li Zehou 李泽厚 Li Zhisui 李志绥 Liang Chaowei (Tony Leung) 粱朝伟 Liang Yazhou 梁亚洲 Lin Lingdong (Ringo Lam) 林岭东 Liaozhai zhiyi 《聊斋志异》 Lin Zexu 《林则徐》 linglei 另类 linglei shenghuo fangshi 另类生活 方式

linglei yule 另类娱乐 lishi fansi 历史反思 Liu Binyan 刘宾雁 Liu Dehua (Andy Lau) 刘德华 Liu Haisu 刘海粟 Liu Ruoying 刘若英 Liu Zaifu 刘再复 Liulian piaopiao 《榴槤飘飘》 Lo Zhuoyao (Clara Law) 罗卓瑶 Lou Ye 娄烨 chinese glossary

. 235

Lu Chuan 陆川 Lu¨ Guihua 吕桂花 Lu¨ Liping 吕丽萍 Lu Xuechang 陆学长 Lu Xun 鲁迅 Lu¨hua shu 绿化树 Ma Liuming 马六明 Majiang (Mahjong) 《麻将》 Mangjing 《盲井》 mangmang linhai zhong yige Zhongguo naren he liangge waiguo nu¨ren de gushi 茫茫林海中一个中 国男人和两个外国女人的故事

Manyou suilu 《漫游随录》 Mao Zedong 毛泽东 mayinghua 马缨花 ‘‘Mayinghua kai di shihou’’ “马缨花开 地侍候”

Meili 媚梨 Meili de baoli 《美丽的暴力》 Meili jingxiang 《美丽景象》 ‘‘Meili xiaozhuan’’ “媚梨小传” Meili xin shijie 《美丽新世界》 meinu¨ zuojia 美女作家 Meiwan meiliao 《没完没了》 Meng Luding 孟禄丁 Mian Mian 棉棉 Minnan 闽南 Mo Yan 莫言 mo zhe shitou guohe 摸着石头 过河

Mu Zimei 木子美 Mudanjiang 牡丹江 Nanren de yiban shi nu¨ren 《男人的 一半是女人》

Nie Ruiguo 聂瑞国 Ning Jing 宁静 Nongnu 《农奴》 Pan Yuliang 潘玉良 Ping’an dadao 平安大道 pizi wenxue 痞子文学 Pu Cunxin 濮存昕 Pu Songling 蒲松龄 236

. chinese glossary

pusu 朴素 Putonghua 普通话 qi 奇 Qianlong 乾隆 ‘‘Qian Miao fengsu ji’’ “黔苗风俗记” Qian Siyan 钱思衍 Qiannian yitan 《千年一叹》 Qiao bao 《侨报》 Qilin 麒麟 Qin 秦 Qin Hailu 秦海璐 Qin Yufen 秦玉芬 Qinghai 青海 Qingming shanghe tu 《清明上河图》 Qiong Yao 琼瑶 Qiu Zhijie 邱志杰 Qu Yuan 屈原 Quanmian jianshe xiaokang shehui 全面建设小康社会

Ren xiaoyao 《任逍遥》 Ren zai Niuyue 《人在纽约》 renmin gongshe 人民公社 Rongqi 容器 rourou 肉肉 Ru Zhijuan 茹志娟 Ruan shi wenming nu¨ 阮是文明女 san’ge daibiao 三个代表 Sanlian shenghuo zhoukan 《三联生 活周刊》

sanpei xiaojie 三陪小姐 saohuang 扫黄 Shaanxi 陕西 Sha chuang 《沙床》 Shagen 傻根 Shang shu 《尚书》 Shanggan ling 《上甘岭》 Shanghai bang 上海帮 Shanghai baobei 《上海宝贝》 shanghen wenxue 伤痕文学 Shanghai Meishu Zhuanke Xuexiao 上海美术专科学校

Shangnu¨ buzhi wangguo hen, gejiang

you chang Houting hua 商女不知 亡国恨，隔江犹唱后庭花 shangpin fang 商品房 shanshui hua 山水画 Shanxi 山西 Shen bao 《申报》 shengping shi 升平世 shenti xiezuo 身体写作 Shenyang 沈阳 shi 湿 Shi Guangrong 石光荣 Shi Hai 石海 Shi Jing 石晶 Shi Lin 石林 Shi Runjiu 施润玖 shijian 实践 Shijie 《世界》 Shijie gongyan 世界公园 Shijie ribao 《世界日报》 Shimian maifu 《十面埋伏》 Shisan bu 《十三步》 Shiyue 《十月》 Shouji 《手机》 Shouzu yuan 《收租院》 Shuangqin 《双亲》 Shui shuo wo bu zaihu 《谁说我不 在乎》 Shuxi jian 《梳洗间》 Shuxie yiqianbian Lantingxu 《书写一 千遍 “兰亭序” 》 Siqin Gaowa 斯琴高娃 Sishui liunian 《似水流年》 Song Xiaoying 宋晓英 Songbin suohua 《淞滨琐话》 Songyin manlu 《淞隐漫录》 suibi 随笔 Suixiang lu 《随想录》 Sulian zhuanjia 苏联专家 Sun Haiying 孙海英 Suzhou pingtan 苏州评弹 taiping shi 太平世 ‘‘Taixi zhu xiju lei ji’’ “泰西诸戏剧 类记”

Taiyu 台语 Tamen 《他们》

Tang 《糖》 Tanyi 潭漪 Tao Hong 陶虹 Taohua qixue ji 《桃花泣血记》 Tian bu liang jiu fenshou 《天不亮就 分手》

Tian liang yihou shuo fenshuo 《天亮 以后说分手》

Tian mimi 《甜蜜蜜》 Tian Tian 天天 Tian Zhuangzhuang 田壮壮 Tianxia wuzei 《天下无贼》 tianzang 天葬 Tiaowu shidai 《跳舞时代》 Tiedao youji dui 《铁道游击队》 Tiexie qu 《铁西区》 Wang Anyi 王安忆 Wang Baoqiang 王宝强 Wang Bing 王兵 Wang Jiawei (Wong Kar-wai) 王家卫 Wang Jinsong 王劲松 Wang Tao 王韬 Wang Xiaoshuai 王小帅 Wanlong jiuba 万龙酒吧 Wei Hui 卫慧 wei shishi qiushi 惟实事求是 Weihong 卫红 weixin 维新 Wen Jiabao 温家宝 Wenhua kulu¨ 《文化苦旅》 wenhua fansi 文化反思 wenren 文人 Wenxue pinglun 《文学评论》 wenyan xiaoshuo 文言小说 Wode fuqin muqin 《我的父亲母亲》 ‘‘Wode zuguo’’ “我的祖国” Women jiushi lai wan Zhongguo guniang de 我们就是来玩中国 姑娘的

Wu Ming 无名 Wu Yusen ( John Wu) xiahai 下海 xiamian shi le yi da pian

吴宇森

下面湿了

一大片 chinese glossary

. 237

xiangtu wenxue 乡土文学 Xiao caifeng 《小裁缝》 Xiao Wu 《小武》 Xiao Yan 小燕 Xiao Yanzi 小燕子 Xiaofei zhe 《消费者》 xiaobi 小逼 Xiaogen 小根 xiaojie 小姐 xiaokang 小康 Xiaomei 小妹 xiaoshuo 小说 xiaxie xiaoshuo 狭邪小说 xiaozi 小资 xibei 西北 Xie Jin 谢晋 xin ganjue pai 新感觉派 Xin nu˝xing 《新女性》 xin renlei 新人类 Xin shqi 新时期 xin xin renlei 新新人类 xinmin 新民 Xinwen zhoukan 《新闻周刊》 Xiu Xiu 秀秀 Xizao 《洗澡》 Xu Anhua (Ann Hui) 许鞍华 Xu Bing 徐冰 Xu Fan 徐帆 Xu Ke (Tsui Hark) 徐克 Xue’er 雪儿 Xue’er Dawa 雪儿达娃 xun’gen wenxue 寻根文学 Xunhuan ribao 《循环日报》 xuyan 虚言 Yan Hao (Yim Ho) 严浩 Yan Shouyi 严守一 Yan’an song 《延安颂》 Yang Dechang (Edward Yang) 杨德昌

Yang Ziqiong (Michelle Yeoh) 杨紫琼 Yangguan canlan de rizi 《阳光灿烂的 日子》

yangwu 洋务 Yapian zhanzheng 《鸦片战争》 Ye Shaojun 叶绍钧 238

. chinese glossary

Yi he yuan 颐和园 Yiguan wenwu zhi bang

衣冠文物

之邦

Yingxiong 《英雄》 Yingxiong ernu¨ 《英雄儿女》 Yiqing shu 《遗情书》 Yisheng tanxi 《一声叹息》 yishi 轶事 yiye qing 一夜情 Yongle 永乐 Yongle dadian 《永乐大典》 Youjing zhinan 《游京指南》 Yu Dafu 郁达夫 Yu Qiuyu 余秋雨 Yu Rongjun 喻荣军 Yuan 园 Yuan Heping (Yuen Woo-ping) 袁和平

Yuan Yunsheng 袁运生 Yuehan 约翰 Yuewei caotang biji 《阅微草堂 笔记》

Zeng Guofan 曾国藩 Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) 张爱玲 Zhang Baogen 张宝根 Zhang Guoli 张国立 Zhang Huan 张洹 Zhang Manyu (Maggie Cheung) 张曼玉

Zhang Qun 张群 Zhang Xianliang 张贤亮 Zhang Yang 张扬 Zhang Yimou 张艺谋 Zhang Yonglin 章永璘 Zhang Zeduan 张择端 Zhang Ziyi 章子怡 Zhangda chengren 《长大成人》 Zhantai 《站台》 Zhao Guangquan 赵广泉 Zhao Tao 赵涛 Zhao Wei 赵薇 Zhao Xiaotao 赵小桃 Zheng He 郑和 Zheng He guli xing 《郑和故里行》 zhenshi 真实

zhiguai 志怪 zhiqing 知青 zhishi qingnian 知识青年 Zhongguo 中国 Zhongguo jindai xueshu mingzhu 中国近代学术名著

Zhonghua minzu de weida fuxing 中华民族的伟大复兴 Zhou Enlai 周恩来

Zhou Runfa (Chow Yun-fat) Zhou Xuan 周璇 Zhouxi 周西 Zhu Di 朱棣 Zhu Xu 朱旭 zhu xuanlu¨ 主旋律

周润发

Zhuang Zhidie 庄之蝶 Zhuangzi 庄子 zhuanti 篆体 Zhuge Liang 诸葛亮 Zhuhai 珠海 Zhuhai guoji huiyi zhongxin da jiudian 珠海国际会议中心大酒店

ziben jia 资本家 zili gengsheng 自力更生 Ziri 《紫日》 ‘‘Zixu’’ “自序” zouxiang shijie congshu 走向世界 丛书

zouzi pai

走资派

chinese glossary

. 239

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23 Chinese avant-garde artists). Chinese and English bilingual edition. Beijing: Zhonguo shijieyu chubanshe, 1999. Zhang Ning 张宁. ‘‘Wenxue yuyan de dianfu yu jiazhi yuyan dd wenluan’’ 文学语 言的颠覆与价值语言的紊乱 (The subversion of literary language and the disorder of the language of value). Dangdai (Contemporary) (Taiwan) 50 (June 1990): 138–148. Zhang Xianliang. Half of Man Is Woman. Trans. Martha Avery. New York and London: Norton, 1986. ——— 张贤亮. Lu¨hua shu 绿化树 (Mimosa). Shiyue 32.2 (October 1984): 4–80. ———. Mimosa. Trans. Gladys Yang. Beijing: Panda Books, 1985. Zhang, Yingjin. Chinese National Cinema. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Zhang Yiwu 张熙武. Cong xiandaixing dao houxiandaixing 从现代性到后现代性 (From modernity to postmodernity). Nanning: Guangxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 1997. ———. ‘‘Zaidu xiangxiang Zhongguo: Quanqiuhua de tiaozhan yu xin de ‘内向化’(Reimagining ‘neixianghua’ ’’ 再度想象中国：全球化的挑战与新的 China: The challenge of globalization and the new ‘‘inward turn’’). Dianying xinshang (Film appreciation journal) (Taiwan), no. 105 (Fall 2000): 35–43. Zhang, Zhen. An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. ‘‘Zhang Yuan.’’ In Yvonne Tasker, ed., Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers, pp. 418–429. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Zhi Chuan 之川, ed. Tianliang yihou shuo fenshou 天亮以后说分手：19位都市女性一 夜情口述实录 (Farewell at dawn: A record of real stories of one-night-stand by 19 city women). Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2003. ‘‘Zhongguo yimin 326 wan, E tixin diaodan’’ 中国移民326万，俄提心吊胆 (Chinese immigrants 3.26 million, Russia is worried). Shijie ribao (World journal), January 26 (2004), A1. Zhou Jiawang 周家望. ‘‘Xin diming Beijingren zhao bu zhao’’ 新地名北京人找不 着 (Beijingers can’t find new place-names). Beijing wanbao (Beijing evening news), March 22, 2001, 1. Zhou Ruopu 周若朴. ‘‘Zhongyang Gongyuan qingsheng: Cai Guo-Qiang yanhuo ‘光环’ (Celebrating the birthday hui ‘Guanghuan’ ’’ 中央公园庆生：蔡国强烟火绘 of Central Park: Fireworks of Cai Guo-Qiang paint a ‘‘light cycle’’). Shijie ribao (World journal), September 15, 2003, A3. Zhou, Yongming. Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political Participation in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

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index

Abandoned Capital (Feidu) (Jia), 51 Agamben, Giorgio, 3, 72 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari), 5 APEC Cityscape Fireworks (Cai), 103– 104 Auto-Destruct (Cai), 106 Battleship Potemkin, 7 Beautiful Images in Focus (Meili jing xiang) (Hong Hao), 18, 182–183, 185 Beautiful New World, A (Meili xin shijie) (Shi Runjiu), 18, 170–171, 177 Beautiful Violence (Meili de baoli) (Qin), 17 beauty writers (meinü zuojia), 54, 62–67 Becker, Wolfgang, 148 Beijing: Hong Hao and, 182; and impact of bars/beauty parlors/massage parlors, 187, 190; libidinal economy and, 13; and urban reconstruction, 168–169 Beijing Doll (Beijing wawa) (Chun), 63 Beijing Tour Guide (Youjing zhinan) (Hong Hao), 182–183 beimei, 8 Be There or Be Square (Bujian busan) (Feng), 176 “Biography of Mary” (Meili xiaozhuan) (Wang), 30–33 Blind Shaft (Mang jing) (Li Yang), 157 Blue Kite (Tian Zhuangzhuang), 131 body art: environment of China and, 79–82; historical overview of, 72–75; nudity as beauty/purity, 74–75; space construction/destruction and, 79–80. See also Ma Liuming; Zhang Huan body writing (shenti xiezuo), 54 Book from the Sky, A (Tian shu) (Xu), 88

Lu13.idx 255

Book of Great Union, The (Datong shu) (Kang), 201 Book of Rites, The (Liji), 200 Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows (Cai), 102–103 Cai Chusheng, New Woman (Xin nüxing), 152 Cai Guo-Qiang: art collection of, 106– 111; Auto-Destruct, 106; Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows, 102–103; Dragon: Explosion on Issey Miyake Clothing, 101; Inopportune, 105–106; international conflicts and, 17; Light Cycle, 105–106; Project for Extraterrestrials No. 32: Dragon Sight Sees Vienna, 101; Project for Heiankyo 1200th Anniversary: Celebration from Chang’an, 101; Project to Add 10,000 Meters to the Great Wall, 101–103; Red Flag, 107, 109; Rent Collection Courtyard, 107, 110–111; and symbolism of gunpowder, 100–106; Transient Rainbow, 104–105; Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard, 107, 109–110 Candy (Tang) (Mian Mian), 54–56 Capital in Ruins (Feidu) (Jia), 51 capitalism: global 5–6, Middle Kingdom (Zhongguo) and, 194–195; postsocialism and, 210; Qing Empire and, 194; Zheng He and, 192–193. See also economy Cell Phone (Shouji) (Feng), 150, 155–158 censorship, 54, 116,119 Chai (Demolition) (Wang), 18, 182 Chen Chong, 119–120 Chen, Joan (Chen Chong), 119–120

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Chen Junyu, 151–152 Chen Kaige, 129, 135, 140, 172 Cheung, Maggie, 123–124, 159 Chinese Box, 117–119 Chinese-language cinema, 162–163. See also Sinophone cinema Chinese Noak’s Ark No. 2 (Gao), 185 Chinese socialism: and father figure in film, 140–144; legacy of, 130–133; The Marriage Certificate (Huang Jianxin) and, 136–138; and nostalgia in fi lm, 144–149; The Road Home (Zhang) and, 133–136; Years of Burning Passion (Jiqing ranshao de suiyue) (Kang) and, 138–139 Ch’ing (Qing) fiction, emergence of self in, 39 chuanqi (tales of the extraordinary), 27, 32 Chun Shu, 63–64 Chungking Express (Chonqing senlin), 126 classical tales (wenyan xiaoshuo), as literary genre, 27–30 Commissioner Lin (Li Zexu), 122 commodity-houses (shangpin fang), 168 Comrades, Almost a Love Story (Tian mimi), 123–124 Copying the “Orchid Pavilion Preface” a Thousand Times (Shuxie yiqianbian Lantingxu) (Qiu), 92 Corliss, Richard, 119 courtesan fiction, 28 Courtyard Gallery (Beijing), 182, 184, 190 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee), 159 Cui Xiuwen, 18, 185–190 cultural imagery of film: dialect and, 150–151; extramarital affairs/divorce and, 174–177, 187 Cultural Revolution: capitalism and, 196; control of sexuality and, 51; generation of “educated youth” and, 132–133; The Marriage Certificate (or Who Cares?, Shui shuo wo bu zaihu) and, 136–137; Marxism and, 46 256

Lu13.idx 256

Dalai Lama, Red Corner and, 117–118 Dance Age, The (Tiaowu shidai), 150– 152, 161 Das Kapital (Marx), 45–46, 48 dating services, libidinal economy and, 6–7 datong (Great Commonwealth), 18–19, 200–204 Datong shu (The Book of Great Union) (Kang), 201 Delamu (Tian), 129 Demolition (Chai) (Wang), 18, 182 Deng Lijun (Teresa Tang), 123–124 Deng Xiaoping: neoliberalism and, 197; postsocialism and, 205–206; Reform and Openness policy of, 74, 204–205; Shanghai Dreams (Qinghong) and, 127–128; Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of, 55; xiaokang (moderate affluence) and, 200 depravity fiction (xiaxie xiaoshuo), 28 desire, ethnography of, 6–11 dialect: Anyang, 154–155; Baoji, 161; cultural imagery of fi lm and, 150–151; economy and, 158; Fujianese (Hokkienese), 151; Fukienese/Taiwanese, 150; Hebei, 155, 157–158; impact of globalization on, 160–161; Mandarin, 159–160; Minnanese, 151; modernity and, 152–155; Shaanxi, 161; Shanxi, 150, 152–155; Sichuanese, 155–158; Taiwanese, 150–152; Yunnan, 154 Dirlik, Arif, 202, 205–206 Disney, and Mulan, 116 Dragon: Explosion on Issey Miyake Clothing (Cai), 101 Dream of Dragon (Zhang), 79 drug use/abuse, Candy (Tang) (Mian Mian) and, 55 Durian Durian (Liulian piaopiao), 11–12 East Germany, Goodbye Lenin (Becker) and, 148–149 Ebert, Roger, on Red Corner, 117 economy: capitalism and, 194–195; contemporary developmentalism and, 197–200; current monetary reserves,

. index

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199; economy of affect (libidinal), 4– 5; and Feng Xiaogang’s use of dialect, 158; Post-Material: Interpretations of Everyday Life by Contemporary Chinese Artists and, 181; post-materialism and, 190; postsocialism and, 208–209; transnational capitalism, 124; and urban reconstruction as art theme, 167–169; yuan rate of exchange, 197–198; Zhang on pursuit of market, 51. See also Cultural Revolution Eisenstein, Sergei, 7 Empire (Hardt & Negri), 3, 99 environment of China, body art of Zhang Huan and, 79–82 explosives/fireworks, Cai Guo-Qiang and, 103–106 Extravagant Love Letters (Yiqing shu), 63 Family Tree (Zhang), 91–92 fantastic, literary genre, 27–30 Farewell at Dawn (Tianliang yihou shuo fenshou), 63 Farewell before Daybreak (Tian bu liang jiu fenshou), 63 Farewell My Concubine, 131 Feng Boyi, 146–147 Feng Xiaogang, 121–122, 155–158, 170, 174–177 Feng Xiaoning, 12–13 Fen-Ma Liuming, Ma Liuming as, 75–76 Fen-Ma Liuming (Ma), 76 Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch (Ma), 76–77 Fen-Ma Liuming Walks on the Great Wall (Ma), 77–78 Fenyang, 153–154 Fifty Stars (Zhang), 88–89 fi lm: Cui Xiuwen and, 185–190; Hollywood’s China in, 117–121; from Hong Kong, 123–125; from mainland China, 121–123; Shanghai and, 125–128, transregional desire and, 11–14. See also specific titles Fish Child (Ma), 76 Foucault, Michel, 2–3, 16, 37, 51, 76 Frank’s Place (bar in Beijing), 187–188 Fu Biao, 156–157, 174 Full Monty, The, 11

Full Moon in New York (Kwan), 124 Fun and Game (Chun), 63–64 Gang of Four, 197, 205 Gao Brothers (Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang), 184–187 Ge You, 156, 158 gender roles: Beautiful Violence (Meili de baoli) (Qin) and, 100; body art (see Ma Liuming; Zhang Huan); father figure in film, 140–144; Fen-Ma Liuming Walks on the Great Wall (Ma) and, 77–78; Ma Liuming and, 16–17, 75–78. See also libidinal economy Generation X (xin xin renlei), 53 globalization: Age of Reform and Openness (gaige kaifang), 63; biopolitics and, 2–6; body art of Zhang Huan and, 82–92; Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows (Cai) and, 102–103; capitalism and, 195–196; China’s early commerce and, 195; empire sovereignty and, 99–100; impact on film dialect of, 160–161; Peace (Zhang) and, 89–91; preconceptions and, 120–121; and study of Qing period, 24; transnational subjectivity and, 115–116; violence and Beautiful Violence, 93–94, 98–100; World Trade Organization and, 149. See also postsocialism; Zhang Yimou Global Times (Xunhuan ribao), 26 Gong Li, 73, 161 Gongyang Commentary, The (Gongyang zhuan), 202 Goodbye Lenin (Becker), 148 Great Commonwealth/Community/ Harmony. See datong (Great Commonwealth) Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), 130 Gu Changwei, 154–155 Guan Qi, 14–15 Hai Bo, 146–148 Half of Man Is Woman (Nanren de yiban shi nüren) (Zhang), 45 index

Lu13.idx 257

. 257

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Han people, 122, 128–129, 194 Happy Together (Chunguang zhaxie) (Wong Kar-wai), 123 Hardt, Michael, 3–4, 99 Heartbreak Ridge (Shanggan ling), 96 Hero (Yingxiong) (Zhang), 150, 159–161 Heroic Sons and Daughters (Yingxiong ernü), 96–97 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault), 3 Hollywood, 115–121 Homecoming (Yim Ho), 124 Hong Hao, 18, 182–184 Hong Kong: Chinese Box and, 118–119; films from, 123–125; and films from mainland China, 121–123; handover to China of, 18; The Opium War (Yapian zhanzheng) and, 121–122; sex trade of, 7–8; transnational subjectivity and, 116–117; Wang Tao in, 26 Horse Thief (Dao ma zei) (Tian), 129 House of Flying Daggers (Shimian maifu) (Zhang), 150, 159–161 How Steel Was Forged (Gangtie shi zenyang liancheng de), 145 How Steel Was Forged (Zhangda chengren) (Lu), 145 Hua Guofeng, 205 Huang Jianxin, 132, 136–138 Hymn to Ya’an (Yan’an song), 145 Illustrated Post-Tales of the Strange from the Studio of Leisure (Hou Liaozhai zhiyi tushuo) (Wang), 25 Imar Film Company, Limited, 170–172, 176–177 In the Heat of the Sun (Sunny Days, Yangguang canlan de rizi, Jiang Wen), 132 In the Mood for Love (Huayang nianhua) (Wong), 125–126 individualism: body art and, 71–72; Cultural Revolution and, 46; Mimosa (Lühua shu) (Zhang) and, 44–50; in modern Chinese literature, 39–42; “When Mimosa Blossoms” (Mayinghua kai di shi hou) (Yu), 42–44 Inopportune (Cai), 105–106 258

Lu13.idx 258

Internet: biopolitics and, 67; forms of literature and, 66; Mu Zimei blog (boke) and, 64; “one-night-stand literature” of, 63; sexuality and, 16, 65 irony, Mimosa (Lühua shu) (Zhang) and, 45 Jameson, Fredric, 1, 40, 138 Jia Zhangke, 150, 152–155 Jiang Wen, 141 Jiang Wu, 171–172 Jiang Zemin, 115, 209–210 Jin Shangyi, 74–75 Ju Dou (Zhang), 140 “just war,” 94, 99–100. See also violence Kak zakalyalas stal (Ostrovsky), 145 Kang Honglei, 138–139 Kang Youwei, 18–19, 23, 200–203 King of Children (Haizi wang) (Chen), 135 Kong Quan, 10–11 Kundun, 116–117 labor, 4–5, 15–16, 50, 197. See also economy Lady’s (Shuxijian) (Cui), 18, 185, 188– 189 Lam, Ringo, 124 Last Emporer, The (Bertolucci, Bernado), 118 Lee, Ang, 159 Lee, Leo Ou-fan, 39, 60 Li Hongzhang, 26 Li, Jet, 124 Li ji (The Book of Rites), 200 Li Zehou, 50 Liang Qichao, 24 Liaozhai Zhiyi (Pu), 27 libidinal economy, 4, 6–11, 15–16 Light Cycle (Cai), 105–106 literary genre: beauty writers (meinü zuojia), 54; body writing (shenti xiezuo), 54; classical tale/fantastic, 27–30; post-Mao period and, 62 literature: Generation X (xin xin renlei) and, 53; Internet “one-night-stand literature,” 63; narrative fiction (xiao-

. index

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shuo), 24–27; urban (Shanghai), 59– 62; wenren (literary men), 50 Literature of Native Soil (xiangtu wenxue), 62 Literature of Root Seeking (xun’gen wenxue), 62 Literature of Wound and Scar (shanghen wenxue), 62 Loehr, Peter, 172 Long March, The (Changzheng), 145 Long March Educational Project, 110– 111 Lotus in Wind (Feng he) (Qin), 98 Lu Chuan, 128, 154 Lü Liping, 136, 138–139, 142 Lu Xuechang, 145 Lu Xun: Brief History of Chinese Fiction, 28; modern Chinese literature Xun Art Academy, 110 Ma Liuming: biopolitics and, 71–72; experimental art of, 75; Fen-Ma Liuming, 76; Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch, 76–77; Fen-Ma Liuming Walks on the Great Wall, 77–78; Fish Child, 76; human body and, 17; libidinal economy and, 15–16; and nudity in art, 74; To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain (Zhang) and, 80–81 Macartney, George, 194 “Maid of Athens Ere We Part” (Byron), 45 Maksimov, Konstantin, 106–108 Mao Zedong, 205 marriage: extramarital affairs/divorce and, 174–177, 187; libidinal economy and, 6–7 Marriage Certificate, The (or Who Cares?, Shui shuo wo bu zaihu) (Huang), 132, 136–138 martial arts, 159–161. See also Zhang Yimou Marx, Karl, Das Kapital, 45–46, 48 Marxism: Cultural Revolution and, 46; and post-Mao emergence of self, 41; and Tibet in film, 128–129 Mattress Factory (Pennsylvania), 93, 96.

See also Beautiful Violence (Meili de baoli) (Qin) May Fourth Movement (1919): culture, 23–24; and emergence of self in literature, 39–42; Taiwanese culture and, 152; “When Mimosa Blossoms” (Mayinghua kai di shi hou) (Yu), 42–44 media, 120–121. See also film Meng Luding, 74 Mian Mian, 53–56, 60, 62 Middle Kingdom (Zhongguo), 194–195 mimosa: Mimosa (Lühua shu) (Zhang), 44–50; symbolism of, 49; “When Mimosa Blossoms” (Mayinghua kai di shi hou) (Yu), 42–44 Mimosa (Lühua shu) (Zhang), 44–49 Missing Gun, The (Xun qiang) (Lu), 154 modernity: and films of Feng Xiaogang, 155–158; modernization versus, 208; Shanghai and, 59–62; Shanxi dialects and, 152–155; and study of Qing period, 24; Taiwanese, 151–152 Mom and Dad (Antoni), 177–179 “Mooring at Qinhuai River” (Du Mu), 10 Mountain Patrol (Kekexili) (Lu Chuan), 128–129, 154 Mr. Gnoh the Person I Know Well (Wo suo renshi de Mr. Gnoh) (Hong Hao), 182–184 Mr. Hong, Please Come In (Hong Hao), 183 Mr. Hong Usually Waits under the Arch Roof for Sunshine (Hong Hao), 183 Mu Zimei, 64–65 Mulan, 116 music, Beautiful Violence (Meili de baoli) (Qin) and, 93–97 My America/Australia/Boston/Cincinnati/Japan/New York/Rome/Switzerland/Sydney (Zhang), 83–85, 88 “My Motherland,” 97 naked body in art, 72–75 narrative fiction (xiaoshuo), Qing period and, 24–27 National Day of shame (guochi ri), 9–10 index

Lu13.idx 259

. 259

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nationality/nationalism: Beautiful Violence (Meili de baoli) and, 93–94; Cai Guo-Qiang and, 102–103; globalization and, 4–5; Hu Jintao and, 210; Kang Youwei on, 201–202; sex trade and, 8–11 Navigation Day, 191–192 Negri, Antonio, 3–4, 99 Neo-Nazism, Beautiful Violence (Meili de baoli) (Qin) and, 94 neosensationalism (xin ganjue pai), 60 New Chinese Cinema, 131, 140, 174. See also Xie Jin New Era: Revelation from Adam and Eve, A (Zhang and Meng), 74 New Long March (Ma), 77 New Period, 207 New Woman (Xin nüxing) (Cai), 152 New Year fi lms (hesui pian) of Feng, 176 nostalgia: contemporary cinema and, 138, 169–177; historical moments and, 131–132; Navigation Day and, 191–192; postsocialism and, 207–209; variety of, 144–149 nudity. See body art “Old Fool Moves the Mountains, The” (Yugong yushan), 92 One Hundred Signs of Demolition (Bai chai tu) (Wang), 179–181 One-World. See datong (Great Commonwealth) Open-Door Policy, 36 Opium War, The (Yapian zhanzheng) (Xie Jin), 121–122 Original Sound (Zhang), 79 Ostalgie (nostalgia), 17–18 Ostrovsky, Nikolai, 145 “Overseas Beauties” (Haiwai meiren) (Wang), 30 pain/masochism and Zhang Huan, 79 Parents (Shuangqin) (Wang), 18, 177, 179 Part A Part B (Jiafang yifang) (Feng), 176 Peace/Peace I/Peace II (Zhang), 89–91 Peach Blossoms Shed Tears of Blood (Taohua qixue ji) (Bu Wancang), 152 260

Lu13.idx 260

Peacock (Kongque) (Gu Changwei), 154–155 People’s Republic of China. See socialism photography: avant-garde, 177–190; Hai Bo, 146–148 Pickowicz, Paul, 206 Pictorial of the Studio of Touching Stone (Dianshizhai huabao) (Wang), 25 Pilgrimage to Santiago (Zhang), 88 Pilgrimage: Wind and Water in New York (Zhang), 82–83 Pitt, Brad, 118 Plaza Accord of 1985, 198 Pleasure That Lasted Half a Day, A (Changda bantian de huanle) (Chun), 63 popular cinema, 169–177 populations. See biopolitics Portrait of a Chinese Sailor (Maksimov), 106–107 post-Mao period: and emergence of self in literature, 39–42; Mimosa (Lühua shu) (Zhang Xianliang), 44–49; postsocialism and, 207–209; Shanghai Dreams (Qinghong) and, 128; Shanghai female writers of, 61–62; urban literature and, 62. See also Mian Mian; Wei Hui postsocialism: A Beautiful New World (Meili xin shijie) and, 170–171; Cui Xiuwen and, 186–187; definition, 130; economy and, 208–209; global capitalism and, 210; and impact of bars/ beauty parlors/massage parlors, 187, 190; Mao era and, 205–208; nostalgia and, 207–209; A Sigh (Yisheng tanxi) and, 174. See also Chinese socialism; economy Post-Tales of the Strange from the Studio of Leisure (1884–1887) (Hou Liaozhai zhiyi) (Wang), 25, 27–28, 30–36 power: control of sexuality in 1960s and, 51; Foucault on capitalist modernity and, 37; globalization and, 4. See also sexuality Princess Huanzhu (Huanju gege), 145 Project for Extraterrestrials No. 32: Dragon Sight Sees Vienna (Cai), 101

. index

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Project for Heiankyo 1200th Anniversary: Celebration from Chang’an (Cai), 101 Project to Add 10,000 Meters to the Great Wall (Cai), 101–103 Průšek, Jaroslav, and emergence of self, 39 Pu Songling, 25, 27–28, 30 Public Television Service (Gonggong dianshi tai), 151 Purple Sunset (Ziri), 12–13 Qin Yufen: Beautiful Violence (Meili de baoli), 92–93; film influence on Beautiful Violence, 96–97; international conflicts and, 17; Lotus in Wind (Feng he), 98; narrative/text for Beautiful Violence, 96–97; violence and Beautiful Violence, 93–94, 98–100 Qing Empire: capitalism and, 194; The Opium War (Yapian zhanzheng) and, 122; Princess Huanzhu (Huanju gege) and, 145; about Wang Tao, 23, 26–27 Qinghai-Tibet railroad, 128 Qiong Yao, 145 Qiu Zhijie, 92 racial issues and datong, 202–203 Railroad Guerrilla (Tiedao youjidui), 96 Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou), 140 Raising the Water Level of a Fish Pond (Zhang Huan), 79–80, 82 Random Jottings at the Cottage of Close Scrutiny (Yuewei caotang biji) (Ji Yun), 27 Random Records of a Recluse in Wusong (Songyin manlu) (Wang), 25 Random Records of My Wanderings (Manyou suilu) (Wang), 26–27 “Rape of Nanjing,” 10 Reagan, Ronald, neoliberalism and, 197 “Record of the Customs of the Miao in Guizhou” (Qian Miao fensu ji) (Wang), 30 “Record of Various Kinds of Shows and Performances in the West” (Taixi zhu xiju lei ji) (Wang), 30

Red Corner, 117–118 Red Flag (Cai), 107, 109 Red Gate Gallery (Beijing), 181, 190 Red River Valley (Hong he gu) (Feng Xiaogang), 121–123, 129 Reform and Openness policy of Deng, 204–205 Reform Movement (Weixin), 26 Remarks While Hiding in a Cave (Dunku lanyan) (Wang), 25 Rent Collection Courtyard (Shou zu yuan), 107, 110–111 Republic of China, 26, 201 Road Home, The (Wo de fuqin muqin) (Zhang), 132–136 Robertson, Roland, 115 Romance of the Yellow River (Huanghe juelian), 122 “Rongqi” (Mu), 64 Ru Zhijuan, 61 Ruined Capital (Feidu) (Jia), 51 Russia: Konstantin Maksimov and, 106–107; post-Cold War Chinese immigration to, 13–14 Sanyuanli, 122 Sayings of Mao, 97 Scenes from the Metropolis (Jing xiang) (Hong Hao), 182 science, impact of, 28–29, 32–33 Scorsese, Martin, 117–118 Seated Nude (Jin Shangyi), 74–75 Seeds of Hamburg (Zhang), 89–91 self, Generation X (xin xin renlei) and, 53–59 semicolonial Shanghai, Yu Dafu and, 36–37 Senses of Space series (Gao), 184–186 Serfs (Nongnu), 122 Seven Years in Tibet, 117–118 sexuality: biopolitics and, 2–3; body art (see Ma Liuming; Zhang Huan); Candy (Tang) (Mian) and, 55–56; feminization/hypersexualization of male, 57–59; Happy Together (Chunguang zhaxie) and, 123; Hong Kong/Taiwan sex trade, 7–8; Internet and, 16; Internet “one-night-stand index

Lu13.idx 261

. 261

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literature,” 63; Mimosa (Lühua shu) (Zhang) and, 44–49; Ruined Capital (Feidu) (Jia) and, 51; Shanghai Baby (Wei) and, 56–59; transregional desire in film culture, 11–14; “When Mimosa Blossoms” (Mayinghua kai di shi hou) (Yu) and, 44–49; Zhuhai sex trade, 10–11. See also libidinal economy Shanghai: A Beautiful New World (Meili xin shijie) and, 170–171; fi lm and, 125–128; fi lms and, 125–128; and nostalgia in film, 131–132; Shower (Xizao) and, 171–174 Shanghai Art School, 73 Shanghai Baby (Wei Hui), 16–17, 54, 56– 59, 63 Shanghai Dreams (Qinghong) (Wang Xiaoshuai), 127–128 Shanghai Family Tree (Zhang Huan), 92 Shanghai Harbor II, China Series (Maksimov), 108 Shanghai school (haipai) of writers: Candy (Tang) (Mian) and, 54–56; Shanghai Baby (Wei) and, 56–59; urban literature and, 59–62 Shen Journal (Shen bao), 25 Shower (Xizao) (Zhang Yang), 18, 142, 170–174, 177 Sigh, A (Yisheng tanxi) (Feng), 18, 156– 157, 170, 174–177 Sigh in a Thousand Years, A (Qiannian yitan) (Yu Qiuyu), 64 Silk Road, 195 Silver Bear Award at Berlin Film Festival, 154 “Sinking “ (Chenlun) (Yu Dafu), 44 Sino-British Joint Declaration, 124 Sinophone cinema, 161–163. See also dialects Siqin Gaowa, 141 65 Kilograms (Zhang), 79 social systems: Beautiful Violence (Meili de baoli) (Qin) and, 94; Rent Collection Courtyard (Shou zu yuan) and, 107, 110–111. See also Cai GuoQiang 262

Lu13.idx 262

socialism/postsocialism: huaijiu and, 147–149; People’s Republic of China, 195. See also Chinese socialism Song of Exile (Hui), 124 Song of Life (Yuan Yunsheng), 74 Song of Unending Sorrow (Changheng ge) (Wang Anyi), 60 Sorry, Baby (Meiwan meiliao) (Feng Xiaogang), 176 Soul of a Painter, The (Hua hun) (Huang Shuqin), 73 sovereignty, phenomenon of, 99–100 space construction/destruction, 79– 80 Special Economic Zone (SEZ), 55 Spicy Love Soup (Aiqing mala tang) (Zhang Yang), 172 Spring and Autumn Annals, The (Chun qiu) (Confucius), 202 Spring Festival on the River series (Qingming shanghe tu) (Hong), 18, 182 Standard Family (Biaozhun jiating) (Wang Jinsong), 18, 177–178 Story of Qiu Ju, The (Zhang Yimou), 140, 161 subjectivism: and consciousness of the masses, 49–51; Cultural Revolution and, 47; Mimosa (Lühua shu) (Zhang) and, 44–50; modern Chinese literature and, 39–42; “When Mimosa Blossoms” (Mayinghua kai di shi hou) (Yu), 42–44 Sun Haiying, 138–139, 142 Sun Yat-sen, 26, 201 Taiwan: Mahjong (Majiang) of, 12; sex trade of, 7–8 “Tale of a Japanese Girl, A Chuan, A” (Ji Riben nüzi A Chuan shi) (Wang Tao), 30 “Talented Women from Japan” (Dongying cainü) (Wang Tao), 30 Tales of the Strange from the Studio of Leisure: LZZY (Liaozhai zhiyi) (Pu), 25, 28 Tan Sitong, 203 Tang, Teresa (Deng Lijun), 123 Tao Hong, 171

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technology, Project to Add 10,000 Meters to the Great Wall (Cai) and, 102–103 television: How Steel Was Forged (Gangtie shi zenyang liancheng de), 145; Princess Huanzhu (Huanju gege), 145; Years of Burning Passion (Jiqing ranshao de suiyue) (Kang Honglei), 138–139, 141–144 terrorism of 9/11/2001, Zhang Huan and, 88–91 Thatcher, Margaret, neoliberalism and, 197 theory of “Three Represents,” 209– 210 They (Them, Tamen), 146–147 Third Internationale (Commintern), 195–196 3006/M3:65KG (Zhang Huan), 79–80, 82 Tian Zhuangzhuang, 129 Tiananmen Square, 50–51, 206 Tibet: ethnography in film of, 128–129; Han people and, 122; Hollywood’s China and, 118; Red River Valley (Hong he gu) and, 121–123; Windhorse (Wagner), 120 Titanic, 115 To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain (Zhang), 79–81 To Live (Zhang), 131, 140 Todorov, Tzvetan, 28–29 tradition, and emergence of self in literature, 39 Transient Rainbow (Cai), 104–105 transnational capitalism, 124 transnational subjectivity, 210 “Travel Overseas” (Haiwan zhuangyou) (Wang), 30, 34–36 Tsui, Hark, 124 Tunnel Warfare (Didao zhan), 96 Turan, Kenneth, 117 12 Square Meters (Zhang), 79–80 25 mm Threading Steel (Zhang), 79, 81 United States: and contemporary developmentalism of China, 197–200; My America: Hard to Acclimatize (Zhang), 83–85; Pilgrimage: Wind

and Water in New York (Zhang), 82–83 utopianism: datong and, 200–204; Kang Youwei and, 201–203; Wang Tao and, 14–15 Utopia of the 20 Minute Embrace, The, series (Gao), 185, 187 Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard (Cai), 107, 109–110 victimization, labor and, 4 violence: Beautiful Violence (Meili de baoli) (Qin) and, 93–94, 98–100; and symbolism of gunpowder, 100– 106 Volcker, Paul, neoliberalism and, 197 Wagner, Paul, 120 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 194–195 Wang Anyi, 60–61 Wang Baoqiang, 157 Wang Bing, 12 Wang, David Der-wei, 24 Wang Jinsong, 18, 177–182 Wang, Wayne, 118–119 Wang Lei, 64 Wang Tao: biographical notes, 25–27; fiction of, 30–36; as internationalist, 36; as pivotal reformer, 23; utopian thinking of, 14–15 Wang Xiaoshuai, 127–128 Wei Hui, 16–17, 53–59, 60–62 West of the Rails (Tiexie qu), 12 “When Mimosa Blossoms” (Mayinghua kai di shi hou) (Yu Dafu), 42–44 Windhorse (Wagner), 120 Women from the Lake of Scented Souls (Xie), 140 “Wonderland under the Sea” (Haidi qijing) (Wang), 30, 33–34 Wong Kar-wai, 123–124, 126 Woo, John, 124 World, The (Jia), 150, 152–155 World Trade Organization, 149, 208, 210 World without Thieves, A (Feng), 150, 156–157 Wrong Love (Chan), 124 index

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Wu Hung, 79, 146–147 www.com (Yu), 65–66

Yuan Yunsheng, 74 Yuen Woo-ping, 124

Xi’an Film Studio, 170–171 Xiao Yanzi, 145 xiaojie, 187 xiaokang (moderate affluence), 200–203 xiaoshuo, 24 Xie Fei, 140 Xie Jin, 121–122 Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl (Chen), 119 Xu Bing, 88 Xu Fan, 174

Zeng Guofan, 26 Zhang Guoli, 156, 174 Zhang Huan: Dream of Dragon, 79; Family Tree, 91–92; human body and, 17; My America: Hard to Acclimatize, 83–85; My Australia, 85–88; Original Sound, 79; Peace I, 89–90; Pilgrimage: Wind and Water in New York, 82– 83; Raising the Water Level of a Fish Pond, 79–80, 82; 65 Kilograms, 79; theme of body/environment, 79–82; theme of endurance/pain/self-torture, 79; 3006/M3:65KG, 79–80, 82; To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, 79–81; 12 Square Meters, 79–80; 25 mm Threading Steel, 79, 81; works outside of China, 82–92 Zhang Qun, 74 Zhang Xianliang: body control and, 15–16; body/soul subjugation and, 36; Half of Man Is Woman (Nanren de yiban shi nüren), 45; Mimosa (Lühua shu), 44–49; transnational subjectivity and, 72 Zhang Yang, 142 Zhang Yimou, 18, 133–136, 140, 159–161, 170–171 Zhang Ziyi, 133–134 Zheng He, 18, 191–193 zhiguai (records of the strange), 27 Zhou Yongming, 66–67 Zhu Di, 192–193

Yan’an, 110–111 Yang, Edward, 12 yangwu (foreign things), 26, 36 Years of Burning Passion (Jiqing ranshao de suiyue) (Kang Honglei), 138–139, 141–144 Years of Burning Passion 2 (Jiqing ranshao de suiyue 2), 144 Yellow Earth (Huangtu di) (Chen), 129, 140, 172, 174 Yeoh, Michelle, 124, 159 Yim Ho, 124 yishi (anecdotes), 27 Yongle Encyclopedia (Yongle dadian), 193 Yu Dafu: and psychical/libidinal male suffering, 15–16, 36; “Sinking” (Chenlun), 44; “When Mimosa Blossoms” (Mayinghua kai di shi hou), 42–44 yuan rate of exchange, 197–198

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about the author Sheldon H. Lu received his doctorate in comparative literature from Indiana University, Bloomington. Among his publications are From Historicity to Fictionality: The Chinese Poetics of Narrative (1994); China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (2001); Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (editor, 1997); and Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (coeditor with Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, 2005). He is currently a professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Davis.

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Production Notes for Lu | chinese modernity and global biopolitics Cover and Interior designed by April Leidig-Higgins in Garamond PremierPro, with display type in Champion and Seria Sans Composition by Copperline Book Services, Inc. Printing and binding by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Printed on 60# Text White Opaque, 426 ppi

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