China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Qin Shao, College of New Jersey
Chair: Xudong Zhang, Rutgers University
Discussant: Paul G. Pickowicz, University of California, San Diego
The post-Mao reforms have brought Chinese people maximum exposure to Western influence and the market economy. Commercial culture has begun to play a vital role in daily life, especially in urban China. In the process, new social groups have emerged and new norms have taken shape. While the Chinese government has tried to contain reform within the economic domain, market forces have inescapably challenged the established political order and value system, making state control an increasingly difficult task. Informal institutions of sociability are actively shaping this profound change.
This part of the panel investigates manifestations of consumer culture in such public spaces as restaurants, dance halls, and parks and the impact of such gatherings on state power and accepted values. Ren discusses how theme parks, intended to promote Chinese nationalism, turned patriotism into a commodity for public consumption. Brownell surveys the fads of recreational dancing in Beijing. The influence of commercial culture and the desire for sociability have stimulated large numbers of people to engage in communal dance in styles ranging from disco to folk, posing an implicit challenge to the government’s control over public assemblies. Wang focuses on luxury restaurants in Shenzhen as arenas where entrepreneurs gather to shape their role as an important force in the Chinese economy and polity.
These papers suggest the breadth of post-Mao reform and the strength of a consumer culture that has blurred the fine between economy and polity and has overpowered the state’s efforts to confine reform to the economic sector.
Hai Ren, University of Washington
The 1990s has witnessed the blossoming of theme parks in China: about 200 theme parks have been built as a result of newly emerged commodity capitalism. By focusing on the theme park as an institution for organized cultural consumption and socialization, this paper explores the relations of the commodity form to Chinese state nationalism. Using interviews (of visitors, ethnic performers, and managerial staff), surveys of visitors, as well as studies of exhibitions and performances at "Zhonghua Minzu Yuan" (Chinese Ethnic Culture Park) in Beijing, this paper inquires into three sets of relationships: between spatial planning and urban identity in Beijing, between commodities and ethnic cultures, and between consumption and nationalism.
In contrast to a common view that emphasizes commodity capitalism’s capacity for subverting Chinese state nationalism, this paper argues that commodity capitalism as manifested in theme parks relates to Chinese nationalism in contradictory modes. On the one hand, Chinese state nationalism is produced as a commodity; its use value is concealed in its exchange value. As a result, the commodity form offers state nationalism with new interpretations. On the other hand, the commodity form of nationalism is subject to the interrogation of Chinese nationalism. In the form of commodity, new meanings of Chinese nationalism—for example, cultural diversity—are produced through recycling traditional forms of nationalist ideals.
Susan E. Brownell, University of Missouri
Since the era of reform began, three major waves of recreational dancing have taken over the streets of Beijing: disco flourished in the late 1980s, ballroom dancing in the early 1990s, and yangge in the mid 1990s.
Over the years, the large numbers of people participating in these activities in parking lots, parks, and median strips in the early morning hours have amazed foreigners and even Chinese recreation experts. For foreigners, the surprise is that such large numbers of people are allowed to congregate in public spaces by a central government which is usually hostile to any kind of public assembly. For Chinese, the surprise is that the pathbreakers in these fads have been older retirees who are otherwise politically passive in comparison with other groups. This paper discusses the desire for sociability and other social factors, including the commercialization of culture, which drive these fads, as well as the government efforts to control, co-opt, and sometimes ban them. This paper illustrates the strength of the desire for sociability in Beijing, which tends to exploit any cracks in the state’s attempt to structure association.
Gan Wang, Yale University
In Shenzhen since the economic reform, there has been proliferation of conspicuous consumption activities in the newly emergent places such as luxury restaurants, singing-dancing-halls, golf courses, etc. It was regarded by many as the showing-off of the nouveaux riches or corruption of the state officials. However, a closer look at the activities happening in these places reveals the significance of conspicuous consumption in the formation of personal networks of the entrepreneurs. In China’s transition from a planned economy to the market economy, personal connections have played very important roles as the entrepreneurs struggle to survive and prosper.
In this paper, I examine the ways that luxury restaurants become an important social space where entrepreneurs build up social networks, under the name "friends." The functions of banqueting illustrate the characteristics of the development of a market system and the evolving state power. Then, using an anthropological approach, I try to probe the question of why conspicuous consumption is frequently used in networking for entrepreneurs. I propose that places such as luxury restaurants have provided entrepreneurs arenas where they try to manipulate relationships with other social groups and assert their identities. With the rising status of the entrepreneurs in the society and their close relationships with the state functionaries, the social networks developed in conspicuous consumption activities will have important influence upon China’s economy as well as politics.