Duelling Dreams at the 2008 Beijing Olympics

Jim Leibold originally developed this piece on Chinese and Western viewpoints on the Beijing Olympics for use in his teaching; he's adapted it here for the China Beat audience.

By Jim Leibold

This year is China’s year. On the 8th day of the 8th month at 8pm, it will light the flame of the 29th Olympics Games—bringing not only the world’s athletes to Beijing but also thousands of foreign visitors and millions more through the massive global media contingency that will descend on the capital.

What will the media spotlight capture? The luster of an ancient civilization and emerging superpower as many in China hope; or the darker, seedier corners of an authoritarian yet fragile party-state as many in the West suspect.

According to the Chinese government, the Olympics games have never been about politics and nor should the Beijing Games. The Games are all about sports: the principles of peace, fair play, friendship, honour and glory on the track and in the pool. The Games are about cultivating and spreading the “Olympic Spirit” and “Olympic Culture” throughout China and the wider world.

But in reality the Games have always been about politics. One only has to recall Hitler’s showcase Berlin Olympics of 1936, the tragic deaths at the Munich Olympics in 1972, or the boycotts of the Montreal, Moscow and Los Angeles games. And the Beijing Olympics are shaping up to be the mother of all political events: as different global constituencies compete for resources, power and influence (not to mention money) in the main event as the athletes go for gold on the sidelines.

If we hope to understand the significance of the Olympic-size struggle that is playing out on the front pages of our newspapers, online chat-rooms and city streets in the lead up to the Beijing Games, we need to first contextualize (dare I say essentialize) the two contrasting worldviews at play here. I would like to suggest that the ongoing controversy surrounding the Games is a reflection of two competing social imaginaries which go well beyond the swimming pool and the track and are deeply rooted in how China sees its place in the world and how the rest of the world views China.

Competing Worldviews: China
Despite China’s rising economic and political muscle, it still views itself as a victim of the international system. Modern history as it is taught in Chinese classrooms begins with the 1840 Opium War. And the story of how the British government ordered a military attack on the forces of Qing China because one of its officials, Lin Zexue, dared to destroy the British opium supplies that were poisoning its youth and destroying its economy. This was the opening salvo on what the Chinese rightfully remember as the “century of humiliation.”

From Sun Yat-sen to Mao Zedong, Chinese leaders called on their people to “wake up” and throw off their slavish mentality so that they could once again stand up in front of the world. This narrative of national victimhood and the resulting struggle for national dignity is perhaps most clearly symbolized by the apocryphal sign which supposedly forbade dogs and Chinese from entering Huangpu Park in the foreign concessions of late 19th century Shanghai.

Although the sign appears to have never existed (at least as a posted placard), the very idea of its existence circulated widely among turn of the century Chinese nationalists, who used it as a highly emotive example of the humiliation the Chinese were suffering at the hands of the foreign imperialists. Take for example Li Weiqing’s 1907 appeal:

“On the banks of the Huangpu river the foreigners have set up a garden where the green grass is like carpet and the flowers like silks and satins. People from all countries of the world are admitted, even Indians who have lost their country, indeed even the dogs of foreigners are admitted. Only Chinese are not allowed to go there. Foreigners despise us so much, they regard us as more base than slaves, horses and dogs…So it can be seen that in the modern world only power counts. We should exert ourselves to obliterate this disgraceful humiliation.”

For many Chinese living both at home and abroad, this struggle for national dignity continues today, making another imaginary scene—this time from Bruce Lee’s 1972 film Fist of Fury—a source of great inspiration and hope. Set in 1930s Shanghai, where the Chinese faced not only the oppression of the West but also the rising militarism of their fellow Asian neighbours Japan, Bruce Lee fights back on behalf of his nation and people, defeating the Japanese traitors and destroying the symbol of foreign insult:

VIDEO 1: “no dogs and Chinese allowed”:


But didn’t this “century of humiliation” end in 1949 with the Communist revolution? After all Mao had claimed that the Chinese people had finally stood up from the rostrum at Tiananmen Square. Yet, the chaos of the Cultural Revolution left China looking like the “joker in the pack” of the international system. When Mao died in 1976, China was still one of the poorest countries in the world, with an average caloric intake lower than those experienced in the Auschwitz death camp if we are to believe Jung Chang and Jon Halliday.

China has come a long way since 1976. Proud of their country’s achievements over the last three decades, most Chinese look to the 2008 Olympics with a sense of rising confidence. For them, the Olympics is about pride and dignity: the reversal of historical wrongs and the restoration of a once proud and mighty nation. Today’s Chinese youth are extremely patriotic and highly sensitive of any criticism which seems to hark back to the bad old days when their countrymen were viewed as backward, yellow-skin coolies.

Competing Worldviews: The West
Yet, outside China, the world continues to look at the “dragon” with a combination of fear and desire. On the one hand, the West has long looked to Asia with a lust for the exotic and the erotic: the lost and hidden realm of Shangri-la and the fragile submissiveness of the Oriental beauty. In the ancient traditions of the East, and in particular its Tibetan incarnation, the West has long sought an escape from the brutal realities of Western modernity: its wars, its poverty, its social atomization.

This desire for escape was brilliantly captured in James Hilton’s 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, which told the story of British diplomat Hugh Conway’s discovery of the hidden paradise of Shangri-la deep within the Himalayan mountains of Tibet, where he found love, happiness and, most importantly, meaning. This hugely successful paperback was made into an academy award winning movie in 1937 by leading Hollywood director Frank Capra and then remade into a dreadful, almost comical, musical in 1973 with a memorable Burt Bacharach score. It didn’t seem to matter that the wise High Lama was a Belgium friar named Father Perrault nor that the only Tibetans or Chinese depicted in the film version were played by Western or Japanese actors. For both the book and the films represented a sort of Western fantasy, a postmodern simulacra, where one could sing and dance without the troubles of war, disease or those “dirty Orientals” getting in one’s way:

VIDEO 2: “Lost Horizon 1973 Remake”:


In the final scene from the 1973 remake, Conway has escaped from an Indian hospital in an effort to get back to Shangri-La while American government officials (he’s American in the remake, of course) attempt to bring him back home. Asked if he believes Shangri-la exists, the Indian doctor replies: “Yes. Yes, I believe it. I believe it because I want to believe it.” In other words, there is no need to concern yourself with the reality of China or Tibet when you can create your own version of Shangri-la in the back lots of a Burbank studio.

Yet this desire for the lost wisdom and beauties of the East has been accompanied by an equally strong fear of its “Yellow Hordes” and looming “Yellow Peril.” There is a long history of anti-Chinese racism and migration exclusionism which is deeply rooted in the histories of Australia, America and other Western nation-states.

Like Hilton’s Lost Horizon, the fictional character of another English novelist tapped into this fear of the menacing Oriental: Sax Romer’s evil criminal genius Dr. Fu Manchu. In his first book, The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu (1913), Rohmer wrote:

“Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, ... one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present ... Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.”

One of Fu’s greatest agents was his daughter, Fah Lo Suee or “Sweet Perfume,” who seduced and then tortured Western man in Rohmer’s 1930 The Daughter of Fu Man Chu. Here the fear of pain mixed with the masochistic tickle of pleasure:

VIDEO 3: “I Am The Daughter of Fu Manchu by Charong Chow”:


In sum, we can best understand the ongoing political drama surrounding the Beijing Olympics as a clash of competing worldviews: for the Chinese, the games are a battle ground for upholding national dignity and the rewriting of past historical crimes; for the West, the games are yet another opportunity for it to project its unrealistic fantasies of fear and desire on the Chinese people.

Now, let me see if I can explain what I mean in further detail by taking a closer look at some of the ways that the Games have been politicized both inside and outside of China. Here my aim is to demonstrate how these two radically different social imaginaries are shaping the language and actions of different actors during China’s Olympic moment.

A Game of Cat and Mouse
Since its initiation during the controversial 1936 Berlin Olympics, the torch relay has always been one of the more colorful and symbolic acts of the games, as well as its most overtly political. But the Chinese have taken the relay to a new level: on what was originally dubbed the torch’s 130-day, 137,000-kilometer “journey of harmony.” Not only did they hope to stage the longest relay in Olympic history--with over 20,000 torch bearers carrying the torch to over 20 countries on 5 continents before finally encircling (or rather literally enclosing) the Chinese nation-state, including its highest and lowest points in Mount Everest and the Tarim basin in Xinjiang.

Yet, as all are aware, the torch’s journey around the globe has been anything but harmonious. From the moment it was lit in Athens, the torch has been dogged by controversy. First in London, then Paris and San Francisco, pro-Tibetan independence groups attempted to douse, grab and disrupt the torch while a group of ex-Chinese army strongmen and national police tried to escort it through chaotic city streets. As more than one commentator has pointed out, the entire relay descended into a comic book style farce, with organizers forced to take last minute detours, freeway “jogs,” or laps around a lockdown stadiums or parks to avoid protestors.

For most Westerners, the relay is all about freedom of speech and the right of the individual: the right of athletes and others to criticize the human rights abuses that they claim are occurring in Tibet and elsewhere in China. Take for example, the actions of American environmental advocate Majora Carter, who was selected as one of the torch bearers for the San Francisco leg of the relay. When she attempted to pull out a small Tibetan flag from her sleeve, she was pounced on. In her words:

“The Chinese security and cops were on me like white on rice, it was no joke. They pulled me out of the race, and then San Francisco police officers pushed me back into the crowd on the side of the street.”

As the below video reveals, Carter seemed to be more offended by the denial of her own freedom of speech than anything that was happening in Tibet:

Video 4: “Olympic Torch Bearer Removed For Carrying Tibetan Flag”:


For most Chinese, however, the often comic kafuffle surrounding the relay has been deeply felt, and personally insulting. This sense of anger propelled 27 year-old, disabled fencer Jin Jing into the national spotlight. Dubbed by Chinese netcitizens “the Smiling Angel in Wheelchair,” Jin Jing tenaciously clung to the torch from her wheel chair as several protestors attempted to wrestle it from her hands during the Paris leg of the relay. And as the following YouTube montage reveals, these heroics have transformed her into a national hero:

Video 5: “Jin Jing Chinese National Hero”:


Boycotting the Games
While the Chinese see the Olympics as a sort of coming-out-party and showcase for Chinese national pride, others have used the spotlight to highlight any number of beefs they have against the Chinese state. Many of these groups have adopted a very slick, PR-style approach to their protests, one which makes full use of the multimedia potentials of the internet. Take for example the following:

Video 6: “Olympic Boycott ad”:


In their campaigns, these e-activists have either re-packaged the five cute and cuddy Olympic mascots, the fuwa or “friendlies,” or manipulated the Game’s official motto, “One world, One dream,” and its associated logo. And it seems that there is no shortage of causes that they are fighting for: global warming; religious freedom; labour rights; unfair trade; human rights; press freedom; and even animal cruelty.

The two most vocal groups have been the Dream for Darfur NGO backed by actress Mia Farrow and Students for a Free Tibet headed up by the Canadian-Tibetan activist Lhadon Tethong.

In a 2007 Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, Mia Farrow dubbed the Beijing games the “Genocide Olympics” due to the Beijing government’s continued support for the Khartoum regime and their ethnic cleansing of the non-Arab tribes in the Darfur region of Western Sudan. While Beijing claimed that it was “an insult to the Olympic spirit to wantonly blame China for the Darfur crisis,” it also dispatched a special envoy to the region to pressure the Sudanese government into agreeing to a UN peacekeepers force. Yet, with only a handful of peacekeepers on the ground due to continued foot-dragging in Khartoum, the group has kept the heat on. In February, it claimed its first major scalp when Steven Spielberg announced that he was resigning from his role as a special adviser to the Game’s opening ceremony, claiming that China must do more to pressure its African ally over the Darfur crisis.

As a global franchise of sorts, Students for a Free Tibet have launched a number of creative “direct action” campaigns across the globe aimed at rising awareness of China’s own “genocide” in Tibet. A year prior to the start of the games, they managed to unfurl a huge banner on the Great Wall of China, reading: “One World; One Dream; Free Tibet 2008.” They have also launched a campaign against the Olympic mascots, in particular the Tibetan antelope Yingying or Yingsel as she is known in Tibet. In June of 2007, they had the following press conference to announce that Yingsel had defected from the Olympic team:

Video 7: “Students for a Free Tibet Press Conference”:


While Yingsel might be in hiding, she isn’t hard to find on the internet: she has her own website and can be found networking on Facebook and Myspace, and now even has her own Pac-Man style game where Chinese cops chase her around a maze as she searches for tsampa and momos in a quest for survival. On YouTube, Yingsel can also be seen taking on Olympic sponsors Coca-Cola:

Video 8: “Yingsel Thinks Coke Is GROSS”:


Selling the Games
Facing a PR crisis of disastrous proportions, the Chinese government hired the New York-based global communications consulting firm Hill and Knowlton to help it wrestle back the message from the activists. Their brief: repackage China as a kinder, gentler state—a “responsible stakeholder” and a modern superpower with a glorious past.

Domestically, Beijing’s charm offensive has focused on cultivating the “Olympic Spirit” among its citizens, as this advertorial demonstrates:

Video 9: “Catch the Olympic Spirit – CCTV Advertorial”:


And it seems to be working, if we are to believe official Chinese government statistics: 95% of Beijing citizen agree with their government’s handling of Olympic preparations, and the government has had little trouble filling the estimated 200,000 volunteer slots needed to guide foreign visitors and athletes around while keeping a watchful eye on any “suspicious behaviour.”

Internationally, Beijing’s charm offensive has focused on re-packaging the ancient Occidental desire for the jewels of the Orient, albeit with a distinct postmodern twist. Dubbed the “Green Games; High-tech Games; and People’s Games,” Beijing has set about reinventing its cityscape: a dozen or so new sports venues include the “Bird’s Nest” and the “Water Cube”; an extended cross-city underground; a massive new airport terminal; a series of new, gleaming office buildings; an egg-shaped national theatre and; even the world’s highest ferris wheel.

To spruce up the city’s environment, the government has reportedly planted of over 10 million trees around the city of Beijing while moving 200 factories outside the city confines. It now boasts that 90% of city buses and 70% of its car run on clean burning LPG. The “Beijing Weather Modification Office” has even promised to produce clear skies for the games through cloud seeding. Yet, with the Games less than a month away, the city is still struggling to meet WHO guidelines for clean air.

But it is not all about high-rises and clean air, the organizers have also attempted to play to the Western desire for the traditional secrets of the Orient – Shangri-la with a distinctly post-Mao face. To some extent, one could argue, that it is about putting forward Chinese culture as a positive and palpable alternative to Hollywood-articulated Western modernity.

And here, the Chinese have brought in the big-guns, such as this promotional video for the games directed by the now world famous film director Zhang Yimou. As artistic director of the Opening Games, we can get a feel here for how Zhang wants to use the games to re-package Chinese culture:

Video 10: “Zhang Yimou Beijing Olympics Advertorial”:


Some critics inside China have argued that this type of stereotypic and sentimental imagery only serves to cheapen the country’s rich cultural heritage. Unmoved, Zhang has claimed that his opening ceremony “will offer ‘Chinese cuisine’ which suits foreigners’ palates.”

All this doesn’t come cheap. It is estimated that the final price tag for staging the games will be somewhere in the range of US$50 billion–over 10 times the cost of the Sydney games and more than 5 times the last games in Athens. But all this money appears to have done little to dampen the growing anxiety about what a rising China might mean for the future of the globe.

That was until the 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck Sichuan province on 12 May, killing nearly 100,000 people and leaving another 5 million homeless. The openness and speed with which the Chinese government responded to this crisis (especially when compared to the foot-dragging of the Burmese authorities) has helped to take some of the bite out of international criticism of China, at least for now. But it’s uncertain whether this goodwill will outlast the Olympic flame.

Cyber Games
Olympic protest movements are nothing new, as I have already pointed out. Yet, in recent years, the battle ground has significantly shifted as new communication technologies have unleashed new platforms and outlets for both activist groups and the state to get their messages out. The tragic outbreak of violent riots in Lhasa on March 14th and in surrounding Tibetan areas and the way in which these events were reported highlights how these new technologies have altered the landscape in which this ancient struggle between fear and desire is being playing out.

Students for a Free Tibet has made extensive use of the Internet and other visual media to get images and information out of Tibet and spread word about what they see as the Communist regime’s brutal response to these Tibetan “protests.” To further their cause, they have created clever, eye-catching animations, such as this video:

Video 11: “Boycott Beijing Olympics”:


But it is also about presenting much more graphic, disturbing and confronting videos, such as this recently released video (warning these images are quite disturbing):

Video 12: “Students for a Free Tibet March 14th Video”:


By distributing and sharing these graphic images on the Internet, Students for a Free Tibet bypass the mainstream Western media (which would never contemplate showing such a video), thus taking their message directly to their target audience: the globally wired and connected youth.

In China, however, such confronting imagery is central to the government’s propaganda on the Tibet riots. The blooded bodies are just different: Chinese rather than Tibetan. Take for example, this documentary which has been repeatedly shown on state-owned CCTV in China:

Video 13: “CCTV 3.14 Doco on Tibet”:


Fed a steady diet of this type of highly emotive imagery, it is not surprising that few Chinese have any sympathy for the Tibetans and their international supporters. Rather, most Chinese believe that these continued attacks on their national dignity go well beyond a few radical fringe elements in the West. They have accused the mainstream Western media of bias in its coverage of the Tibetan riots, and it would appear with some merit (albeit minor when compared to China’s propaganda machine). To highlight their claims, a group of Chinese net-citizens set up the website http://www.anti-cnn.com/, where they have sought to counter the pro-Tibet lobby.

In other words, in the lead up to the Beijing Olympics, these clashing worldviews are being played out daily not only on the world’s streets but also increasingly in cyberspace. Spend a bit of time on youtube and you will get a feel for type of video jostling which continues on the Tibet issue.

Games for Sale
Finally, the Olympics are not only about politics and sports but also money: vast sums of it. The selling of the Beijing Games has recast that ancient Oriental desire to consume and possess the “Other” in a new economic light: the craving to hawk one’s wares in the world’s largest marketplace.

In the arena of global capitalism, the Beijing Games are truly big business–a virtual orgy of dollars and brands. And all the world’s leading multinational companies are planning to be there: Adidas, BHP Billiton, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Kodak, Lenovo, McDonald's, Microsoft, Panasonic, Samsung, Visa and Volkswagen. Some have committed upwards of $100 million dollars to put their goods and brands before China and the world’s consumers.

To land the sale, they have turned to familiar faces, Chinese stars such as Jackie Chan and Yao Ming who are just as well known in the West as they are in China itself. Take for example the follow Visa commercial:

Video 14: “Jackie Chan Olympic Commercial”:


The opening ceremony is expected to be the first TV sporting event watched live around the world by more than 4 billion people (1 billion of them in China itself) and the games will bring over half a million international tourists to China.

Multinational brands are using the event as an opportunity to build credibility and visibility with the booming Chinese consumer market. And unlike their Western counterparts, it appears that Chinese consumers are extremely brand conscious with one recent survey revealing that 68% of Chinese would be significantly more interested in brands that sponsor the world’s biggest sporting event.

Yet for most Olympic sponsors, the controversy surrounding the Beijing Games has become an Olympic-size headache. Activist groups like Dream for Darfur and Amnesty International have been making it difficult for these companies, calling in some case for a boycott of their products back home.

In November of last year, Dream for Darfur issued a report card on the Olympic sponsors, rating their actions, or rather inaction, on the issue of Darfur and what they claim is the Chinese government’s complicity in the crisis. In the report, 13 of the 19 top corporate sponsors were issued with a failing grade, including Kodak, Microsoft, BHP, and Visa. McDonald’s was the only company to escape with a satisfactory C grade.

Caught in a difficult catch-22 position, these companies risk losing consumers back home if they don’t address the concerns of these activist groups, but if they criticize Beijing, they also risk running foul of the Chinese government and jeopardizing their future in the world’s fastest growing consumer market. Thus far their strategy has been to join the Beijing government in stressing the apolitical nature of the games while highlighting their charitable record on other social issues around the globe.

China’s Olympic Moment
So how will China’s Olympic moment turn out? I think a couple of things are certain:

1) China will win the most gold medals—topping their performance in Athens where they won 32 gold medals to America’s 35;

2) Multinational companies will make heaps of money as they increase their brand profile in China;

3) International activists will stage creative protests and other forms of “direct action” in Beijing during the Game which will be covered cautiously by international media outlets and completely ignored by the Chinese media;

4) The vast majority of Chinese people will continue to vigorously resist any attempts by “outside forces” to ruin China’s coming out party, or at least those attempts that they learn about through China’s great firewall of media censorship.

What remains unclear is just how significant the 2008 Beijing Olympics will be viewed in the history of China’s post-Mao era. Will it mark China’s ascendancy to global superpower status as the CCP hopes: what some academics have referred to as a global “power shift” from West to East? Or will it mark the beginning of the end to a brutal authoritarian yet fragile regime as many of its Western critics hope?

Nazi Germany won nine more gold medals than the USA at the 1936 Berlin Game and the Soviet Union won over 80 gold medals at the 1980 Moscow Olympics boycotted by the USA and others, but both regimes collapsed soon thereafter. While Japan and Korea won few medals at the 1968 Tokyo and 1988 Seoul Olympics, these games marked an important turning point in the economic and political development of these two Asia countries.

Which category will the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games fit into: Berlin and Moscow or Tokyo and Seoul? Time will tell.

Jim Leibold teaches at La Trobe University in Australia and recently published Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and Its Indigenes Became Chinese.

Things We'd Rather You Not Say on the Web, Or Anywhere Else

Following George Carlin's death last month, China Beat got to thinking about his "seven dirty words" and what those same "seven words" might be in China. We invited David Bandurski of China Media Project to write a satirical piece in the style of Carlin, riffing on this idea of banned words in China.

By David Bandurski

I love words. And I thank you in advance, dear citizens, for obeying mine. Words are dangerous and slippery things. Some people in the West will tell you that words are playthings, and that we should all be free to do with them as we please. But I want to tell you that words are really all we have – and this is why the Party has troubled itself to choose them so carefully on your behalf.

You will have heard, I suppose, that Article 35 of our nation’s constitution guarantees that you enjoy “freedom of expression.” You will no doubt agree, however, as a matter of moral principle, that responsible citizens must enjoy all things in moderation. No good can come of enjoying words too much – and this is why we have taken it upon ourselves to parcel out this freedom, so that all Chinese can enjoy words with more or less equal moderation.

Comrade Mao Zedong once said, “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” But words too are powerful. It is not my intention to spook you, dear citizens, but we must all remember the way that too many words under the policy of “glasnost” – a Russian word whose direct translation is “chaos” – spelled the end of the Soviet Union.

We must not forget – and this begins with not remembering – how Zhao Ziyang said on May 6, 1989, in the midst of popular demonstrations, that propaganda leaders should “open things up just a bit.” “There is no big danger in that,” he said. His words were careless, and the end result was chaos. Nobody wants chaos. Just try to picture what it does to GDP.

Comrade Zhao, you see, failed to understand the real power of words. He failed to understand that the Party and the masses must not be too profligate with them if they are to “do the great work of socialism with Chinese characteristics.” That is why the Party had to step in afterwards to reorder your words and ideas. We have our own word for this: “guidance of public opinion.” Say it with me: “guidance of public opinion.”

Good. Now, dear citizens, I think it is best to instruct you with a couple of examples of what I mean about words. This way you will understand how to use them with responsibility and care, correctly upholding – say it with me – “GUIDANCE of PUBLIC OPINION.” Right. I hope these examples will help you remember how to forget the right things.

There are more than 40,000 characters in the Chinese language. Fortunately, basic literacy requires only about three to four thousand of these words, which makes it much easier for us to keep an eye on the ones that matter. The most important thing is not the characters themselves, but rather how they are put together. Words are like chemicals. You have to mix them carefully. I’m sure you would agree that’s just good science.

Take, for example, the character for “people,” min (民). When we place it behind the character for “person,” ren (人), we get a very nice word that means generally “the people.” We can use it in sentences like, “The Party cannot do without the people and the people cannot do without the Party,” in which the Party and the people are more or less interchangeable.

On the other hand, if we take this harmless character min, and place behind it the character for “host” or “master,” zhu (主), the result, “democracy,” is a dangerous discharge that upsets the harmony of our first sentence. One simple character rips the Party and the people apart. We must not let words come between us, dear citizens.

This word, “democracy,” is a perilous word that must be handled with great care. The only ones we can trust to use “democracy” safely are trained Party scholars. They are able to neutralize the word by sealing it up in proper contexts. Phrases like “intra-Party democracy” and “developing socialist democratic politics” are some of the more advanced ways the Party has managed to quarantine this word and keep all of you safe. On the Web, we have more sophisticated technical means of protecting you – by blocking, for example, searches of words like “constitutional democracy.”

We are constantly improving our technical and other means of fighting dangerous words so that your thoughts and ideas can be healthier. But we do need your help and cooperation. This is a “people’s war” on vocabulary, and our enemies are spilling off the tongues of the West.

Still, if we use words like “democracy” at the discretion of the finer minds in the Party, this can sometimes help promote international harmony. In my report to the 17th Party Congress last year, I used the word “democracy” in a safe context more than 60 times. Hearing the word so often, Western media got a bit over-excited. Their words for us were kind and harmonious.

“Harmony.” Now that’s a nice word. What should you say to help you fend off dirty words like “democracy”? That’s right: “Harmony.” Say it with me: “Harmony.”

“Harmony” packs quite a punch for such a small word. It muffles socio-economic problems of all kinds, most of which have arisen from the last decade of reforms.

Let’s just say you’re eaten up with words about how you were kicked off your farmland to make room for a big shopping mall that lined your local Party secretary’s pockets. The Party deals proactively with such issues by stepping back and taking a birds-eye view of your grievances. We call this the “scientific view of development.” I don’t want to get bogged down in details – the Party prefers economy of words. But basically, we are working toward a “moderately well-off” and “harmonious society” where you can afford to buy Fendi at your neighborhood shopping mall.

Of course, a “harmonious society” can only be achieved by dint of hard work. No one can get anything done when faced with constant distractions. I urge you to keep your voice down and be “harmonious.” I know that’s easier said than done. And that is why the Party lends a hand, “harmonizing” news, blogs, chatrooms and any other places where words tend to cause trouble.

“Harmony” is one of my favorite words. It reminds us that the only way we can give proper and “scientific” attention to solutions is by drowning out the noise of nagging problems.

There are many words we’d rather you not say or enjoy publicly, especially as the Olympic Games draw nearer. But you need not worry yourself over this. The Party has put numerous measures in place to ensure that you are free to make the right word choices. Sometimes, as your options are managed, you may feel at a loss for words – and really that is OK. After all, so long as your tongue is tied, we have no reason to bind your hands.

David Bandurski is a free-lance journalist and a scholar at the China Media Project, a research program of the Journalism & Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong.

Kung Fu Panda, Go Home!

By Haiyan Lee

It seems that boycott fatigue has finally hit the Chinese, in a year that has lurched from one boycott to another—against such entities as a French supermarket chain, a Hollywood star, and an American cable channel. When the latest clarion call was issued by a performance artist named Zhao Bandi赵半狄 against Kung Fu Panda, he was greeted with jeers and mockery. Zhao presented his case in a blog: Hollywood is morally corrupt for churning out loathsome personalities like Sharon Stone (who betrayed schadenfreude over the Sichuan earthquake as “karmic retribution” for Tibet) and Steven Spielberg (who quit his role as artistic advisor to the Olympics over Sudan). Therefore it should not be allowed to profit, in China, and so soon after the earthquake, from China’s most iconic “national treasure” (国宝)—the panda. And for Chinese to help line the pockets of the Hollywood reprobates would be tantamount to stripping valuables off the bodies of the quake victims.



The banner that Zhao strung up outside the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, telling Kung Fu Panda to go home (《功夫熊猫》滚出去！), was taken down within 20 minutes by plainclothes police (see picture above). The movie opened in multiple cities on June 20 as scheduled to huge mirthful crowds. But Zhao’s effort was not a complete failure: the release of the movie was delayed for one day in Sichuan—home of the panda reserve and site of the earthquake—over concerns about possible “misperceptions” and hurt feelings. For this minor victory, Zhao received a phone call from an irate Sichuanese who gave him a bank account number and demanded that a suitable sum be deposited into it. For what? To compensate for the psychological loss he allegedly sustained for being prevented from enjoying the movie simultaneously with his dear compatriots throughout the rest of the country (全国人民)!

Most of the detractors simply regarded Zhao as a clown and a hypocrite, asking tongue-in-cheek if he had come down with a case of “boycott disease” (抵制病), or if he was jealous of Hollywood’s high-tech virtuosity. Zhao has indeed made a name for himself (“the Pandaman” 熊猫人) with his panda-themed performance art, most notably a goofy line of black-and-white and furry fashion gear (picture below). Apparently his being Chinese not only entitles him to playful (and gainful) appropriation of his national patrimony, but also obligates him to guard it against profiteering interlopers.



Given how favorably predisposed the Chinese generally were to the movie, it seems that Dreamworks has hit the right note in saying that the movie is intended to be a love letter to the Chinese and a tribute to Chinese culture. Audiences across China have indeed been duly pleased (and tickled) by the movie’s clever blend of made-in-Hong Kong kungfu lore, Chinatown chinoiserie, American teenage humor, and state-of-the-art animation technology. Commentators can’t seem to get over the realization that a didactic story （励志）could also be so fun, unlike so many Chinese-made “main-melody” (主旋律) fares featuring humorless, grandstanding heroes. Of course, the tried and true technique of defamiliarization is key here: a wok may be just a wok in a Chinese movie, but in Kung Fu Panda it is also a fight prop and hence an ingredient of hilarity. Other everyday objects too tumble through a riotous kungfu career: noodles, dumplings, chopsticks, and whatnot, cooking up a pandamonium unlike anything the Chinese audiences are accustomed to—with perhaps the exception of Stephen Chow’s manically droll Kungfu Hustle.

The subversion and parodying of kungfu movie conventions doesn’t stop with substituting woks and chopsticks for swords and nunchakus. Genre bending seems to come with the territory of global mass culture. If Zhao Bandi had spent some time pondering the losses and gains of commercialized cultural borrowing, including his own, he might come to see the movie not as the battered victim of cultural imperialism coming home to roost, but a celebration of middle-class values—hardworking and having faith in yourself—and a dramatization of the middle-class predicament—to live a life of ordinary fulfillment (such as carrying on the family noodle soup business) or to pursue lofty ambitions (such as becoming the dragon warrior and savior of the realm). These values and predicaments can hardly be stamped Chinese. They are rather the stuff of a bourgeois fairytale in an amusingly exotic (or, shall we say, multicultural) getup designed to ensure the movie’s global marketability. Po the panda is the classic involuntary hero, a burly version of Spiderman. Martial arts (kungfu), like Spiderman’s web or the Hulk’s gamma rays, is the magical force that enables the virtuous to triumph over the wicked who wields it for nefarious ends.

Yet Kung Fu Panda does Americanize the kungfu genre far more radically than, say, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This it does by playing fast and loose with a crucial genre device. On the surface, both movies honor the idea that supreme martial arts skills can be codified in writing and that the book—the Holy Grail of kungfu—is usually hidden in some secret location or jealously guarded by an impartial agent. In Crouching Tiger, Jade Fox steals the secret manual from her master because he would not transmit esoteric Wudang techniques to a female disciple. She then uses it clandestinely to train her young aristocratic mistress Jen to fight. However, she does not know that Jen is stealthily studying the text of the manual whereas she, being illiterate, can only make out the pictures. As a result, Jen blindsides Jade Fox when they are pitted against each other in a match. The assumption is that writing encodes greater cosmic-martial truth than image. Those who can read attain higher occult power than those who can only view. While this may sound hopelessly snooty in the age of YouTube, the basic idea still resonates in Chinese cultural spheres.

Variations of this idea can be found in most Chinese-language kungfu movies. The literary and martial arts are taken to be two sides of the same cosmic coin, or the Way. Both are said to be inspired by the tracks and movements of birds and beasts. Hence the same metaphors and protocols inform both the civil and martial domains, invariably urging the harmony of heaven, earth, and man. Zhang Yimou rehearses this idea to a fare-thee-well in Hero. In that movie, the king becomes enlightened of the essence of swordsmanship by mediating on the majestically rendered calligraphic character for “sword” (劍). Such hyperbole can strike an uninitiated viewer as all very “mystical and kungfu-y” (Po’s complaint against Master Shifu the red panda), if not downright silly. But a bona fide kungfu flick really can’t do without it. Just ask any kungfu junkie.

Interestingly, Crouching Tiger almost went without this essential device. James Schamus recalled that after his Taiwan-based scriptwriting partners perused his initial draft, they wanted to know where “the book” was. Apparently not understanding the special status of writing in Chinese culture, he had done away with “all the bother about who has the book, who stole the book, who understood the book and why the book was variously hidden, coded, burned, memorized, etc.” In the end, he was glad that his collaborators insisted on putting the book back in.

In Kung Fu Panda, the Holy Grail is the “dragon scroll” lodged securely in the mouth of a stone dragon on the high ceiling of the Jade Palace. It is destined, intones its guardian Master Oogway the tortoise, for the eye of the true dragon warrior. And yet when Po finally fetches it with the blessing of Shifu, he finds himself staring into a flimsy blank scroll with a reflective surface. The significance of the blank scroll eventually dawns on him when his goose father the noodle-maker confides to him that there is no such thing as the “secret ingredient of the secret recipe.” “Things become special,” he explains, “because people believe them to be special.”

Thus a homely American self-help maxim (dubbed “Hallmark-Fu” by a British reviewer) steals the thunder of oriental mysticism. Intriguingly, the image of the wordless scroll evokes the point I made in an earlier post about the ring as the forbidden symbol of power in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. There I suggested that the imperative to destroy the ring is connected to the idea that power in a democracy is in theory an empty place. Here, the secret that is supposed to empower whoever possesses it once and for all turns out to be a hoax, so to speak. The hero (Po) and the villain (Tai Lung the leopard) are forced to fall back on their native moral endowments and painstakingly acquired martial capabilities. The quest is turned inward. And the true hero prevails because of the nobility of his purpose and because the people are on his side, not, in the last analysis, because he has the book.

Such is the coup pulled off by Kung Fu Panda against the genre to which it also pays earnest tribute. Audiences of course can enjoy the movie for whatever reasons, but at least part of the pleasure, I suspect, is coming from its cheeky deflation of the ponderous mood that sometimes weighs down the kungfu genre. If anyone should be upset about the movie, it should be the diehard kungfu aficionados. The movie has so upped the ante that future makers of kungfu movies will have to think twice before they whip out the ubiquitous book, however much it is rooted in Chinese cosmology. In this sense, Kung Fu Panda is a disarmingly cute and merry face of the global modernity that has made it impossible for anyone to lay claim to beloved cultural symbols as inviolable national patrimony.

From Lovers to Volunteers: Tian Han and the National Anthem

By Liang Luo

As the clock counts down towards the opening of the Olympic Games at 8 p.m. on August 8, 2008, the Chinese government and many ordinary Chinese citizens are hoping that one particular song will make an impression on television viewers in all corners of the globe: “March of the Volunteers,” the country’s National Anthem. Not only will it play during the Opening Ceremony and the Closing Ceremony, but also every time a Chinese athlete wins a gold medal, and expectations are running high that this will happen a lot, thanks largely to the high caliber of the women competing for the PRC.

Even if international audiences grow accustomed to the sound of the tune, they are unlikely to know that the national anthem is actually a theme song of a film that antedates the founding of the PRC by a decade and a half, a film that was just as much about Chinese nationalism as it was about sentimental young lovers and their struggles in troubled times. And even within China, many people don’t know much about the two originators of the song, composer Nie Er and poet and playwright Tian Han, beyond a few recycled clichés about their dramatic lives.

Given the obsession with the supposedly auspicious number 8, Tian Han’s own biography is a very appropriate point of departure. He was born in 1898, a year famous for the “Hundred Days of Reform,” an effort at radical change stymied by conservatives within the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). And he died in 1968—not, as one might expect from the author of the lyrics to a national anthem, in the limelight, but rather in obscurity, under an assumed name, in a military hospital. So who was this man? How did he emerge as the key creator of the National Anthem of the PRC? More importantly, how did expressions of nationalism come to be so intricately connected with images of strong-willed (and bodied) women in modern China?

Born into a declining gentry family in the countryside of Hunan, Tian Han came to understand the world around him through local operas and puppet plays. In 1913 and 1915, while still a teenager, he took the step from being a consumer of opera to a producer and published two opera librettos, the very first literary works in an extremely prolific career. During Tian Han’s Tokyo sojourn from 1916 through 1922, his love for Chinese opera, combined with his sensitivity to new cultural trends, immediately drew him towards film and drama. What began as love at first sight in Tokyo became a lifelong passion for film and drama throughout Tian Han’s cultural journey from Tokyo to Beijing, culminating in his attempt to reform Chinese opera “from the perspective of the film art.”

This genre-centered biographical sketch by no means suggests that Tian Han somehow lived in a sociopolitical vacuum. He was, at one and the same time, a man of letters and a man of action: an active student leader during his Tokyo sojourn, a famous “leftist” playwright during his Shanghai years, an organizer of anti-Japanese “guerrilla drama troupes” during the war with Japan in the Chinese hinterland, and a middle-ranking cultural bureaucrat in Beijing after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.

By the time Tian Han came to conceive the film story Fengyun ernü (Lovers in Troubled Times) which the future National Anthem emerged from, he had undergone radical self-criticism some four years earlier, and had joined the Communist Party in 1932. One would expect to see a film made by a Communist-controlled film company portraying soldiers on the warfront; however, the film rather faithfully follows Tian Han’s story, opening with a scene of flirtation between a Westernized femme fatale and two young men.

Tian Han immediately configured his male protagonists in relation to two spatially hierarchical worlds: the world of the poor young girl and her laboring mother living downstairs from the two young men’s attic room; and the world of the seductive Mrs. C, living on the third floor of a private villa, who has “the eyes of a wolf” and who, in the young man’s poem, is “the daughter of Eve, the messenger of Satan.” The young men gradually enter deep into these two worlds. When they pawn their valuables to pay the rent for the poor young girl, she visits their room and discovers there the painting of a phoenix. The story of the immortal phoenix that leaps into fire every five hundred years to be reborn fascinates the girl and she decides to change her name from Ah Feng to Xin Feng, that is, from a “little phoenix” to a “new phoenix.”

After the death of Xin Feng’s mother, the poor virgin becomes a member of the two young men’s “artistic family.” No sexual relationship in this “artistic family” of two young men and one young girl is depicted. However, celibacy does not mean lack of romance. On the contrary, the lack of obvious sexual encounter could itself be an indicator of the underlying romance. In particular, for the “lovers in troubled times” in Shanghai, physical sacrifice and anti-Japanese activism seem to substitute for sexual intercourse. The sexual energy between the young men and the young girl is further disguised as educational zeal to mold the virgin girl into a modern woman. Baihua, the Romantic poet, insists that she should receive modern education; while his friend Zhifu, the practical “revolutionary,” wants to introduce her to factory work.

When Zhifu is arrested for his radical activities and Baihua is hunted by the police, the poet finds shelter with the mysterious Mrs. C, who treats him like her husband, greets him with a warm kiss and keeps him at her place overnight. The overflow of sexual energy and the mutually beneficial sexual relationship between the poet and the femme fatale further illustrate the uneasiness surrounding the platonic relationship between the young men and the virgin. As if mesmerized, the poet goes with the femme fatale to the seashore of Qingdao, a German colony and an escapist utopia; while Xin Feng, the girl under the protection of the poet, has to quit school and join a touring dance troupe to make a living.

The climax, both in terms of plot and in terms of the sexual energy circulating within that plot, comes when Baihua and Mrs. C go to a variety show in which Xin Feng, the virgin girl touring with the dance troupe, performs a miniature opera entitled “Tieti xia de genü” (“Singing Girl under the Iron Hoof”). This “New Phoenix,” the patriotic singing girl, is indeed the virgin Baihua helped to educate. The image of a virgin under the iron hoof, though charged with sexual energy, is used here as a warning bell to awaken the poet from the licentious life he was living in his escapist dreamland. The poet starts to feel a more important task waiting for him after this dramatic encounter. He gets in touch with Zhifu and through Zhifu’s introduction joins the volunteer army in the northeast.

Baihua’s troop happens to be in Xin Feng’s village where he discovers the phoenix painting and reunites with Xin Feng, who, after meeting Baihua, leaves the dance troupe for her homeland and warfront. Facing Japanese air raids, with flag in hand, Baihua and Xin Feng, marching with the masses, start to sing the last stanza from the long poem “Great Wall”:

Arise, you who refuse to be slaves (of the femme fatale!).
With our flesh and blood let us build our new Great Wall.
The Chinese nation has come to the time of greatest danger
Every person must join the ultimate cry:
Arise! Arise! Arise!
The masses are of one mind,
Brave the enemy’s gunfire,
March on! March on! March on! On!

Situating the young poet Baihua first and foremost in his struggle between the world of the virgin girl and the world of the femme fatale, the theme song of the film, Yiyongjun jinxingqu (“March of the Volunteers”), which has been regarded only as a nationalist call to arms in the face of the Japanese invasion, can be interpreted rather differently. “The nationalist poet” Xin Baihua, writing his epic poem in the hopes of educating the poor girl to become a “modern woman,” found himself the prey and a love slave of the femme fatale.



The almost comical displacement from freed slave of a femme fatale to freed slaves of the national enemy is suggestive of the intrinsic connections between the personal and the political. Just as in the painting entitled “Fenghuang niepan” (named after Guo Moruo’s poem), in which a phoenix throws itself into the fire to gain a new life, the young intellectuals were also transforming themselves through a baptism by fire, from sentimentalists to revolutionaries throughout the political vicissitudes of modern China. However, the sudden and complete transformation of the poet Xin Baihua, mesmerized by a femme fatale until the very end of the film when he not so convincingly rises up to defend a greater cause, cannot be taken as representative of a generation of modern intellectuals. The apparently seamless transition from individual desire to collective ideology did not turn out to be as smooth in real life, as exemplified in Tian Han’s own painful metamorphosis throughout the Communist era, culminating in his silent death during the Cultural Revolution in Beijing.

Tian Han took part in the new Political Consultative Conference that designated “March of the Volunteers” as the temporary national anthem for the PRC in 1949. According to Chinese researcher Guo Chao, Zhou Enlai nominated “March of the Volunteers” based on its popularity among the Chinese people and argued against others’ reservation towards its “outdated” lyrics. This “temporary” national anthem was in use for more than a decade and a half, until the Cultural Revolution, when “East is Red” and “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman” in reality replaced “March of the Volunteers” as national anthems. When Tian Han was criticized as a “poisonous weed” during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, though the tune could still be played, the lyrics of “March of the Volunteers” were banned. After the Cultural Revolution, a new committee was established to create a “new” national anthem, and finally new lyrics were written collectively to the tunes of “March of the Volunteers” in 1978. The new lyrics end with the following lines: “We will for generations/Raise high Mao Zedong’s banner/March on!”

I consider myself lucky to have no recollection whatsoever of the new lyrics. When I started elementary school around 1980 in a mountain village in Sichuan province, it may have been too backward to quickly adopt the recent changes in the lyrics of the national anthem; or more likely, I was simply too young to take notice of such changes. After I transferred to a bigger city in 1984, the lyrics of the national anthem that I heard and sang at the weekly flag-raising ceremony were always Tian Han’s original, which, I now know, was restored to its original tune and reestablished as the National Anthem in 1982.

My personal encounter with the National Anthem coincides with the first meaningful participation of the PRC in the Olympic Games, in 1984. When Xu Haifeng won the first gold medal in Los Angeles and “March of the Volunteers” was heard for the first time in the history of the Olympic Games, the PRC announced its Olympic dreams to the world through its newly restored National Anthem. China would finally win its bid for the 2008 Olympic Games seventeen years later, in 2001, after its failed attempt in 1993; and “March of the Volunteers” would for the first time be written into the Chinese Constitution as the National Anthem of the PRC in 2002.

It is high time for us to look back and gain some historical perspective on “March of the Volunteers,” the most popular song of 1949’s China: born out of anti-Japanese sentiments as well as youthful desires of modern Chinese intellectuals at a time of personal and national crises, this film song celebrated modern Chinese intellectuals’ metamorphoses from lovers to volunteers; however, that process has not been as smooth in real life as in the film, and lovers and volunteers seem to have always coexisted in their mutual desire for sexual and patriotic expressions.

Olympic Readings

For those keeping up on coverage of the Olympics and China, the new issue of Foreign Policy has a piece by John Hoberman, professor of German Studies at UT-Austin. In FP’s regular “Think Again” feature (which seeks to challenge conventional wisdom), Hoberman argues that the Olympics are political, are not intended to promote human rights, are not (necessarily) a catalyst for change, don’t generate a lot of revenue for the host or sponsors, are not the most controversial Games ever, and that the IOC is even more corrupt than already reported. In an additional piece, “Prime Numbers: Rings of Gold,” Brad Humphreys presents data to show that it isn’t the host countries that are making big money on the Games, but rather sponsors and the IOC itself.

In her regular Olympics FAQs for us at China Beat, Susan Brownell has already debunked or complicated several of these ideas (check out all our Beijing Olympics coverage here). If you’d like to get a second peek at Brownell’s Olympic writing, she has revamped several of her China Beat posts for Japan Focus and The Huffington Post.

If you are having trouble tracking all the Olympic rules, the Wall Street Journal China Blog has put together a primer, including links to the 128-page list (in Chinese) of guidelines for Olympic spectators (just in case those of you making the trip to Beijing needed a little light plane reading). Danwei features a story today on Olympics security (and it’s worth taking a look if only for the picture of the Segway assault squad). CDT has an interview with Chinese journalists about the Olympic Games, Beijing pollution continues to be a central story (such as in yesterday’s report on Marketplace and at Time), and various bloggers, from CLB to Sinosplice, have been detailing the visa crackdown.

In physical fitness-related news, Rebecca MacKinnon has a fabulously-linked post on the early-July fascination with push-ups in China following the Weng’an Riots, and, since the push-up meme was in part a way to circumvent internet censorship of discussions of the riots, you might also find interesting David Bandurski’s piece at FEER on Communist Party web infiltrators.

Bourgeois Shanghai: Wang Anyi's Novel of Nostalgia

After the recent publication of a translation of Wang Anyi's 1995 novel A Song of Everlasting Sorrow, we asked Howard Choy to reflect on the novel's contents and importance. Below, Choy draws on his recently published work on late twentieth century Chinese fiction to contextualize Wang's Shanghai story.

By Howard Y. F. Choy

Among all the major cities in China, Shanghai has become the most popular in recent academic research and creative writings. This is partly a consequence of its resuscitation under Deng Xiaoping's (1904-1997) intensified economic reforms in the 1990s, and partly due to its unique experience during one hundred years (1843-1943) of colonization and the concomitant modernization that laid the foundation for the new Shanghai we see today. Many stories of Shanghai focus on the city's prosperous history from the late Qing dynasty to the end of World War II, during which time the French Concession, the British-American International Settlement, and later the Japanese occupation dominated the treaty port. For instance, Leo Ou-fan Lee's Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 (1999) and Sherman Cochran's Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945 (1999) both conclude in 1945.

In this light, it is interesting to see that Wang Anyi begins her novel of Shanghai, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Changhen ge, 1995), not in the flourishing 1930s, but in late 1945, when Japan had surrendered and the "Paris of the East" danced its last colonial tango before the communist liberation. Wang Anyi's Shanghai affords entry to its residential lanes beyond the neon lights and at the end of nightly carnivals. Her Shanghai tale traces the changes of the city from pre-liberation times to the post-revolution days by following in the footsteps of a Miss Shanghai, as she walks along the longtang alleyways. It is her fellow townspeople's humdrum existence under the rumbling state machine that concerns Wang. Clothing, food, shelter and transport—all basic aspects of everyday life—are depicted in such detail that a social history is created against the grain of the grand narrative of political history. Effeminated in the contours of qipao and the fragrances of perfumes, Wang's Shanghai provides some counter-memories of communist China's revolutionary history through her nostalgia for the colonial past fantasized in the capitalist present.

It seems that Wang Anyi was not the only one feeling nostalgic at the turn of the millennium. The Song of Everlasting Sorrow was so well received in China that it won the prestigious Mao Dun Literature Award in 2000. It was then presented on the stage by the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center in 2004, cinematized by Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan in 2005, adapted for TV by Ding Hei in 2006, and recently translated into English by Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). With this canonical work, Wang Anyi once again proves herself as a major figure in the scene of contemporary Chinese literature.

Spanning forty odd years from 1945 to 1986, the novel is tripartite. Book I is set in the glittery city of Shanghai during the latter half of the 1940s. Wang Qiyao, a glamorous girl from a lowly family who dreamed of becoming a movie star in her school days, takes third place in the first Miss Shanghai beauty contest after the war. She is then kept as a mistress by a politician, who is unfortunately killed in a plane crash in 1948. In Book II she retreats to the countryside and soon returns as a neighborhood nurse to the fallen city in the 1950s. Associating with three men—a profligate son of the rich, a half-Russian loafer, and a photographer—she gives birth to a girl out of wedlock in 1961. Largely skipping the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Book III covers the decade after the political turmoil. The protagonist spends a simple life with her daughter and young admirers in the reviving city until her daughter gets married and leaves for the United States. With its thinly veiled allusions to Lady Yang Yuhuan's (719-755) demise romanticized in Bo Juyi's (772-846) oft-quoted poem "The Song of Everlasting Sorrow," the story ends with Wang Qiyao's violent death while protecting a box of gold bars left to her by the politician. The last thing she sees on her deathbed is the mise en scène of a bedroom murder that she watched forty years ago in a film studio. Miss Shanghai Wang Qiyao's declining life from youth to old age can be understood synecdochically as Shanghai's vicissitudes from the postwar to the post-revolutionary periods.

Writing Shanghai women and writing Shanghai through women have a long tradition in modern Chinese fiction. Cao Juren's (1903-1972) literary comment has characterized the urban styles in terms of the female sex: “The Peking school (Jingpai) is like a boudoir-bound lady, whereas the Shanghai school (Haipai) is like a modern girl.” The lyrical writing of the romantic and the nostalgic has distinguished the Shanghai style from the didactic Peking style. Uncomplicated as the storyline appears, the novel is nearly four hundred pages long, because the author devotes her energy to nuances of the physical and psychological worlds instead of to an intricate plot. The prolonged descriptions in The Song of Everlasting Sorrow are redolent of the nineteenth-century romanticist Victor Hugo and naturalist Émile Zola. Its meticulous writing points ironically to the futility of life, resonating with Cao Xueqin's (1715-1763) classic Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng), in which the once prosperous Prospect Garden falls into a lost paradise. The close attention to every bit of life as well as subtle emotional changes is enhanced by feminine sensibility. Like Cao Xueqin and Eileen Chang, Wang Anyi is good at in-depth depiction of the female psychology.

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow starts with a five-page section describing old Shanghai's longtang alleys. From a bird's-eye view of the city, postwar Shanghai is read as a negative print: while the lights form punctuation and lines, the massive alleyways are the darkness behind them. It is not at night, but at daybreak when the narrator enters into the particulars of various classes of the longtang, making a tour from the stone-gate houses (shikumen) to shanty towns (penghu). Roofing tiles and roofing felt, roof ridge and roof dormer (laohuchuang), window frame and windowsill, wooden staircase and wooden partition, street lamp and street door, rear window and back door, iron gate and cement floor, wing-room and pavilion room (tingzijian), courtyard and parlor, kitchen and boudoir, terrace and balcony, gable and sewer—the domestic architecture is presented with the utmost exactitude as in a traditional Chinese realistic painting.

After this intimate invitation into the heart of the city, the reader is saddened to see that Shanghai is no longer the same city when its street names are decolonized and revolutionized. Thirty years after the liberation, the alleys are beaten-up, both the Huangpu River and Suzhou River are badly polluted, and the trams whose clanging bells sounded like the city's heartbeat have disappeared. The mechanical dingdong sound made by the tolling of a bell on the tram is frequently mentioned to invoke a nostalgic mood in the novel. After decades of suppression of material desires, in the first chapter of Book III we revisit the longtang and the houses connected by them—again under the author's descriptive guidance. While the apartment complexes' carved Romanesque designs have gathered dust and cobwebs, the Western-style houses' semicircular balconies are divided into two kitchens by the families residing in them. Gone are the splendor of all architectural adornments and the exquisiteness of the metropolis. Echoing her city-text simile at the outset of the novel, the author laments that the cityscape has become chaotic and unreadable, even though the old street names are now restored.

It is precisely because of Wang Anyi's focus on the cramped longtang, instead of the bustling Bund, as a sublime spectacle that Chinese critics read the novel as a postsocialist nostalgia of bourgeois Shanghai, hence the first example of an emerging middle-class literature in post-Mao China. The telos of proletarian revolution in twentieth-century Chinese literature is undercut by everyday concerns of the urban petty bourgeois in Wang's writing. The changing Shanghai lane-scape has accumulated a history, but the marginal culture of the longtang precludes a grande histoire. The trivial matters of everyday banality in alleyways reveal Shanghai people's apolitical and ahistorical attitude toward life. This philosophy of life prevails against the agenda of communist revolution. Mainland critic Zhang Qinghua thus concludes: "'Revolutionary Shanghai' seems never to be able to beat the 'urban petty bourgeois Shanghai'—revolution and politics stand above the roofs of Shanghai, but the daily life of the urban petty bourgeois is deep-seated in every alley and corner" (Dangdai zuojia pinglun, 2003, no. 2: 86).

Wang Qiyao is neither an all-conquering hero of the times nor a classical tragic hero against fate but, if I can be oxymoronic, a hero of everyday life. The quotidian 'hero' knows best how to lead the urban life under all circumstances. Such heroism lies in the self's immersion in the struggle for a livable life and material amenities. The materiality of the mundane world that Wang demonstrates is the city dwellers' device to distance themselves from state ideology. Of the basic necessities of life, clothing—read 'fashion'—is what Wang Qiyao hankers after. Pages of graphic details are given over to discussions and descriptions of her dress styles for the Miss Shanghai pageant. Concerning people's bodily relation to their garments, Eileen Chang has pointed out the politics in her 1943 essay "Chinese Life and Fashions": "In an age of political disorder, people were powerless to modify existing conditions closer to their ideal. All they could do was to create their own atmosphere, with clothes, which constitute for most men and all women their immediate environments. We live in our clothes." The space created by fashion on the body counteracts the sartorial practice of the Cultural Revolution, when personal style and Western dresses were considered to be bourgeois. The clothing space as the closest space next to the skin is the ultimate space that one should defend.

The politics of apparel lies in the wearer's retreat into the textile space, where the immediacy of attire allows the most direct expression of personal taste in times of prosperity and minimal comfort of the corporeal self in periods of turmoil. Following the change of regime in 1949, the 1950s lost city of Shanghai witnesses the replacement of Western-style men's suits by modified Sun Yat-sen suits (Zhongshan zhuang) and the gradual disappearance of the once fashionable Manchu banner gowns (qipao), whose modern version, cheongsam, has become more fitted and waisted to reveal the contours of the female body since the 1920s and 1930s. The Cultural Revolution is marked by its anti-fashion trend under the dominance of uniform blue cotton clothes. After the revolution, while her daughter and other young fashionists embrace the brave new world of street fashion, Wang Qiyao, seeing the origin of new fashions in the old styles, welcomes it as a reminder of her bourgeois experience in the bygone days.

The tedious descriptions of day-to-day bourgeois experience in Wang Anyi's nostalgic novel of Shanghai are commeasurable to the trivial round of daily life in the real world. Here the everydayness of urban middle-class life has dissolved the greatness of political grandiloquence. For Wang Anyi, history is not to be redeemed from major political events, but from minor personal matters, which the author often likens to leftover pieces of fabric. She sees history in private life, in its smallest trifles. Trifles are worth ruminating upon because they are the bits of the past that one was able to control (e.g., choice of one's clothing—at least its size and degree of cleanliness), is able to re-create (according to one's nostalgic desires), and will be able to engage (in one's daily routine). And this minimal freedom of the individual can be materialized only through the petty bourgeois practices in a consumer city such as Shanghai.

Howard Y. F. Choy is assistant professor at Wittenberg University. His research interests focus on Chinese culture and literature, with his most recent project being a comparative study of political jokes across mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States.

(This article is an excerpt with minor revisions from the author’s Remapping the Past: Fictions of History in Deng's China, 1979-1997 [Leiden: Brill, 2008], pp. 169-180.)

China Images from the Library of Congress

For those always on the lookout for more teaching images, you may be interested in taking a gander at the Library of Congress's Flickr account. Though mainly featuring images of the United States (altogether about 4,000 images), if you search "China" at the top of the page you will receive several pages of images from or about China. (You can easily download the images to your computer by clicking on the photo, then selecting "all sizes," then selecting "download the original size.") These fascinating images include the photos below, taken between 1910 and 1915. The first is a photograph of Shanghai's "Native Quarter," the second of a Chinese railroad, the third of a funeral in Beijing, and the final image is titled "China in N.Y. 4th of July Parade 1911."

After the Olympics, What?

By Nicolai Volland

Exactly one month before the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games, all attention seems to be focused on those magic sixteen days, from August 8 through August 24. It is surprising, however, how rarely the question is raised: what will happen once the Games are over?

In the run-up to the Summer Games, China has been placed under an undeclared state of emergency. Special regulations and restrictions are effecting almost every of daily life. Taxi drivers and Beijing residents had to brush up their English and study brochures that explained how to stand in line and be courteous to foreigners. On a more serious note, vehicle traffic in the capital will be reduced for the time of the Games, and industrial production is being brought to a standstill across vast regions of Northern China, in order to ensure blue skies over Beijing and reduce the city’s notorious smog.

To heighten security, baggage screening – usually conducted at airports only – has been introduced at the Beijing subway, leading to incredibly long queues, even as the system has to deal with the extra traffic caused by residents unable to move via their treasured cars, and the influx of visitors. Travelers from abroad as well as foreign residents in Beijing had to deal with drastic new visa rules: embassies issue no more multiple entry visas, foreign students and self-employed foreigners can no longer extend their visas and must leave the country, and tourists must now produce return air tickets and hotel reservations to obtain their visas. Backpacking to the Olympics: meiyou. In addition, international academic conferences, cultural festivals, and music performances had to be cancelled for the period surrounding the Olympic Games.

Restrictions on civil rights for Chinese are more worrying. Repression of human rights activists and lawyers has increased while Beijing has issued orders to the provinces to keep any forms of social unrest under control. With an estimated 30,000 foreign journalists due to arrive in the country, the government wants to portray China as stable, prosperous, and above all harmonious. No more incidents like the Weng’an riots, please! To reduce tensions, Beijing has instructed regional authorities to strictly control the flow of petitioners seeking redress in Beijing. Internet and press controls are likely to be stepped up in early August.

But what happens when the Games are over? Chinese and foreigners alike have accepted the heightened degree of control with some grumbling. Security concerns ahead of a mega-event like the Olympic Games are understandable. The common perception of the new measures as temporary in nature, lasting just a few weeks, makes them acceptable. However, will things go back to what they were after the end of the Games? Will the various restrictions end with a big bang – the lifting of the Olympic emergency? Will they be allowed to trickle out slowly, gradually reverting to the status quo ante? Or will the Chinese government adopt a more eclectic approach, trying to keep in place some of the new measures, while allowing others to fade out?

Nothing more than speculation is possible at this moment, but the Olympic Games and the massive amount of preparations for the event are certain to have implications far beyond the end of the Games on August 24. Our attention span should be longer, too, so some speculation will be in order.

The last of the scenarios outlined above is probably the most likely. Factory production cannot be halted indefinitely without an economic toll; neither will vehicle owners accept a longer than necessary ban to use their cars. But the air pollution in the capital is a very real concern, and if the “temporary” measures were to show a significant improvement on air quality, the municipal government might be tempted to consider making some of the traffic restrictions permanent, even if that means angering the newly affluent middle-class.

Visa regulations are a hassle, and are said to be responsible for a drastic drop in foreign visitor arrivals. But admittedly, the hurdles for Chinese citizens trying to obtain visas for the United States or the European Union are still significantly higher than the new Chinese visa rules. Will the government decide it can well live with less backpackers who don’t spend a lot anyway, as well as hard-to-control foreigners running their own small companies? If the current visa regime does not lead to major disruptions for business travelers, the current visa regulations might stay around for a longer time than anticipated.

Finally, the clampdown on dissent and the stricter handling on local forms of resistance (prevention of mass incidents and the flow of petitioners to Beijing) has enhanced the power of the central state, and the CCP will be unlikely to give away easily the increased leverage over local politics. There is little to be gained for the Party-state from easing controls in the area of civil liberties, and the forms of repression we witness currently might, at best, be allowed to fizzle out over a longer period of time. It is likely, however, that the central government will find it desirable to perpetuate at least some of the “emergency” powers gained in the name of a one-time event.

With the Olympic Games approaching, attention nationally and internationally is focusing on the event itself. To watch the long-term implications of the current nationwide mobilization, however, might prove to be at least as interesting as the competitions in the Olympic stadium themselves.

Out and About

It's been a while since we've done a reading round-up--here a few things we've been reading (and writing) on the web lately:

1. If you've been picking up rumblings about "soy sauce" and "push ups" and haven't been able to sort out the details, the always savvy Sky Canaves (with Juliet Ye this time) at Wall Street Journal's China Blog sorts it out for you. Check out Time's report for the basics. As CDT reports, debates over the Wengan riots have turned to the topic of internet censorship, while EastSouthWestNorth notes that discussions of the incident are cooling down.

2. Looking for some last minute Olympic reading? Try Jeff Wasserstrom's recommended list at Huffington Post. (Kate Merkel-Hess and Jeff W. posted another piece there on the Chinese internet yesterday--please join us in mocking the little grey head cutouts). We have a few more China Beat-related pieces on the line at HuffPost soon, so we'll let you know when they go up too.

3. Tang Buxi over at Blogging for China continues his interesting work in a recent post on comparisons, corruption, and government buildings.

4. Danwei blogs that "China votes for Obama," in a posting by Thomas Crampton on the results of the Asia Society's survey (though it should be noted that this survey is neither scientific--it is a tiny sample--nor just about China--leaders from all over Asia were interviewed; in any event, the interviews are interesting).

5. The Olympics are coming, and so are the predictions for Olympic events. Not the sporting events, of course. The real betting surrounds what will go wrong, and in how many ways. As a report at Shanghaiist notes, Slate is running a "Summer Olympics Disaster Guide," an overly gleeful guide to August rubbernecking (The tagline: "What could go wrong in Beijing? Everything.") Other outlets have continued to flog the old standbys of pollution and Chinglish.

Service Encounters

By Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

The action in Amy Hanser’s Service Encounters (Stanford University Press, 2008) moves smoothly among three separate but related urban consumer settings in Harbin: the Mao-era relic of Harbin No. X department store, Sunshine Department Store, a swanky oversized shrine to the new conspicuous consumption of wealthy Chinese, and the chaotic marketplace of The Underground, where young women will literally sell the shirts off their backs when presented with the opportunity. Hanser, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, focuses on these three sites as she examines the shifts that have taken place in Chinese retail practices during recent decades. To enhance her understanding of the exchanges occurring across the sales counter, Hanser herself donned a salesclerk’s uniform in both the Harbin No. X and Sunshine stores and worked several months in each location as an “intern.” Having held (and disliked) similar jobs in the US, I am just as impressed by Hanser’s hands-on approach to research as I am by the thorough and tightly-woven literature reviews sprinkled throughout her chapters.

Almost all the salesclerks in Service Encounters are female, and Hanser’s analysis is most intriguing when she contemplates the relationships between class and gender in the Chinese retail profession. Harbin No. X clerks, representing the egalitarian working-class mindset of the pre-reform period, frequently remind me of my own opinionated aunts as they “establish themselves as both experienced and expert regarding the products they sold” (80), often disregarding customers’ preferences and asserting that this is the coat they must buy. Generally of the same class background as the people who shop at No. X, the clerks there feel considerable freedom to declare their authority and assure customers that their purchases are both of “good quality and good value” (175). The women of The Underground, a less expensive but riskier alternative to Harbin No. X, are “widely perceived as unscrupulous and disruptive people” (121), whose clothes and bodies emphasize a wild and even dangerous sexuality. Although The Underground provides young Harbin women with the latest fashions at affordable prices (much like H&M does for my friends in the States), it is still considered a morally questionable and problematic place, tainted by its association with rural China and primitive capitalism (135-136). Sellers in the market might fight this perception, claiming that the differences between department stores and The Underground are merely cosmetic, but nevertheless many city residents continue to consider both the market’s knock-off goods and its vendors “cheap, low-class, and disreputable” (123).

While Hanser’s coworkers at Harbin No. X and the sellers she observes at The Underground all emerge from her pages as vibrant and memorable characters, the sales associates of Sunshine Department Store mostly fail to do so—for good reason. Sunshine’s emphasis on deferential service and its strict rules and requirements concerning the appearance and behavior of its salesclerks results in women who are mute, at times even invisible to store customers (107-108). In Hanser’s description, the store becomes an enormous glass display case, filled with row after row of beautiful, demure, polished porcelain dolls, trapped inside until they grow too old for the job (at the ancient age of thirty!), after which they are cast aside and a new crew is brought in to replace them. The upper-class shoppers of Sunshine demand “visible rituals that recognize customers’ class-based claims to esteem and respect” (88), and the store’s management provides this by insisting that its clerks strictly distinguish themselves from the unruly and unprincipled sellers of The Underground, located directly beneath Sunshine. While the two retail sites are not physically distant from each other, customers, managers, and clerks at Sunshine all make a tremendous effort to draw a clear line between their carefully organized store and the exceedingly disorganized market lying below them.

Boundaries and their permeability are situated at the heart of Service Encounters; the three sites Hanser examines are all constantly establishing or negotiating the borders that lie between them. This continuous struggle over the demarcation of boundaries is evidence of what Hanser terms “distinction work” (9); in essence, the activities of salesclerks are organized in such a way as to emphasize the differences between them and those performing the same tasks in other settings. In other words, while salespeople at Harbin No. X, Sunshine, and The Underground are all executing similar tasks—replenishing stock, arranging goods on the sales floor, tending to customers—the manner in which they carry out those tasks is tailored to fit their specific environment (and, furthermore, would be inappropriate in any of the other retail sites Hanser examines). The attitudes exhibited by clerks in each setting reflect the symbolic boundaries they wish to establish between their store and others in Harbin, related to the class identity generally assigned to each retail site.

This is a complicated argument, and Hanser navigates its twists and turns skillfully; I was not at all surprised to learn that Service Encounters is based upon an award-winning dissertation. My only quibble with Hanser’s work is her claim that Harbin No. X suffers from a “crisis of trust” (165) due to customers becoming more fearful of purchasing shoddy or fake goods and less willing to take a salesclerk’s words at face value, an effect, she claims, produced by their experiences with the poor quality merchandise and dishonest vendors of bazaars like The Underground. Yet Hanser also notes that during the pre-reform era, “quality might be poor, but at least everything was cheap” (160); could this crisis of trust be a result of the fact that today’s working-class consumers pay higher prices for goods that they have always considered of questionable quality? Or that they feel more freedom to challenge a state-owned department store now that it is not their only possible source of merchandise? With more shopping options, customers can afford to be picky, and the clerks of Harbin No. X must work harder to make a sale.

In Service Encounters, Amy Hanser compellingly depicts the different distinction work done by clerks at each site as they strive to establish the boundaries of their organization in relation to other stores. That Hanser herself is part of the narrative and can share her own often humorous experiences as a sales associate contributes to the strength and readability of the work. Ultimately, I find myself most engaged by the questions Hanser raises about the role of women in the urban Chinese retail world: as department stores bloom across the country, will salesclerks become associated only with the Sunshine type of submissive, decorous, feminized service? Or will they resist the restrictions this imposes and incorporate the more assertive qualities frequently seen in Harbin No. X associates and Underground sellers? Given the fragmented but nonetheless interconnected retail culture among the three sites considered in Service Encounters, it seems possible that stores like Sunshine might absorb some of the ethos from markets such as The Underground. As Chinese society continues to change and social mobility increases, the boundaries painstakingly established by Sunshine’s management will become progressively more vulnerable to penetration by retail practices carried by customers from other sites, and sales associates will transform themselves once again.