IN THE HEAT OF SENTIMENTS: NATIONALISM, POSTSOCIALISM, AND
POPULAR CULTURE IN CHINA, 1988-2007
by
YIPENGSHEN
A DISSERTATION
Presented to the Department ofEast Asian
Languages and Literatures
and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor ofPhilosophy
June 2010
11
University of Oregon Graduate School
Confirmation of Approval and Acceptance of Dissertation prepared by:
Yipeng Shen
Title:
"In the Heat of Sentiments: Nationalism, Postsocialism, and Popular Culture in China, 1988-
2007"
This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of East Asian Languages & Literature by:
Tze-lan Sang, Co-Chairperson, East Asian Languages & Literature
David Leiwei Li, Co-Chairperson, English
Maram Epstein, Member, East Asian Languages & Literature
Bryna Goodman, Outside Member, History
and Richard Linton, Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies/Dean of the Graduate
School for the University of Oregon.
June 14,2010
Original approval signatures are on file with the Graduate School and the University of Oregon
Libraries.
© 2010 Yipeng Shen
iii
Yipeng Shen
An Abstract of the Dissertation of
for the degree of
IV
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
to be taken June 2010
Title: IN THE HEAT OF SENTIMENTS: NATIONALISM, POSTSOCIALISM, AND
POPULAR CULTURE IN CHINA, 1988-2007
Approved:
Tze-lan Sang, Co-Chair
Approved:
David L. Li, Co-Chair
My dissertation delves into the recent articulation of popular nationalism in
Mainland China, with particular emphasis on the changes that globalization and
transnationalism have brought about to the representation of the Chinese nation in
sentimental terms. Complementing the rich existing literature of Chinese nationalism that
focuses mainly on the pre-1949 period, my study explores the less-treaded contemporary
era characterized by the new historical condition of postsocialism, which features a
residual of the socialist past as well as its reinvention under new overwhelming trends of
globalization. Postsocialism and its consequences-the deepening of a neoliberalist
veconomic refonn, the state-intellectual promotion of cultural economy, the emergence of
a dominant consumer culture, etc.-have produced new issues existing scholarship on
Chinese nationalism has yet to address. One such issue is how the paradoxical entity of
the "nation" in time and space has been fragmented by the accretion of diversified voices
from a wide spectrum of Chinese society. In postsocialist China, the agents imagining the
nation include not only regulars like the state and intellectuals, but also new players like
mass-media elites and netizens (wangmin). I argue that these voices of different social
forces that break up the hegemony of the state in representing the nation-the result of
which being not that the state is excluded from this enterprise but that it now tells only
part of the story-become expressed as modes of national sentiments (minzu qinggan)
when the nation is imagined under the historical condition of postsocialism. My study
then explores in detail the fashioning and refashioning of contemporary Chinese
subjectivity, as it relates through the joining of national sentiments to the literal and
figurative body of the nation and the social power structure, by analyzing these specific
voices in a broad range of popular texts from TV, film, and the Internet. The detailed
examination includes four chapters dealing with specific modes of national sentiments
articulated by the intellectuals, the state, the mass-media elites, and the netizens,
respectively.
CURRICULUM VITAE
NAME OF AUTHOR: Yipeng Shen
GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED:
University of Oregon, Eugene, USA
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
DEGREES AWARDED:
Doctor of Philosophy, Chinese, 2010, University of Oregon
Master ofArts, Chinese, 2006, National University of Singapore
Bachelor of Arts, Chinese, 2002, Nanjing University
AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST:
Modem and Contemporary Literature and Cultural Studies
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
Visiting Instructor, College of the Holy Cross, 2009-2010
Graduate Teaching Fellow, University of Oregon, 2005-2009
Teaching Assistant, National University of Singapore, 2004-2005
VI
VB
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First of all, I wish to express sincere appreciation to Professor Tze-Ian Sang and
Professor David L. Li, for their careful advising, patient guidance, and numerous
assistances in my preparation of this dissertation. Their dedication to the field has set a
great example for me to follow. I also owe an academic and personal debt to Professor
Maram Epstein, who teaches me to live a positive, diligent, and grateful life as a scholar.
Special thanks to Professor Su lui-lung and Professor Zhu Chongke, whose generosity
and strength have helped me survive the most difficult period ofmy life in Singapore.
In addition, throughout my years in University of Oregon I have benefitted from
the generous help from my professors: Wendy Larson, Steven Durrant, Bryna Goodman,
Alison Groppe, Daisuke Miyao, and Alisa Freedman. I must also express my gratitude to
all the UO librarians, especially the people working at the circulation desk in the past four
years, who have endured my more-than-frequent visits and catered to many of my
reasonable and unreasonable requests.
Applauses also go to my beloved friends and colleagues: Nathan Freud, Giulio
Bonacucina, Denise H. Gigliotti, Nobuko Wingard, Antonella Antonelli, Nora Fandino,
and Nicolino Applauso. The wonderful time we spent together has greatly brightened up
my Ph.D years.
Final glory belongs to my American family-the Valenzuelas. Thanks for taking
me in. You are the best!
To my dear mother, Zhang Rubo
& in memory of my beloved grandmother, Wang Zhijian (1917-1993)
V111
IX
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. INTRODUCTION 1
Notes 40
II. HESHANG: THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SORROW AND WORRY AND
THE NATIONAL PEDAGOGY OF REFORM...................................................... 42
Heshang-Unnarrated National Sentiments? 42
Heshang-Imperial Nationalism of Intellectuals?............................................... 49
History, the Consciousness of Sorrow and Worry, and People Quality.............. 64
Reform, Spirit of Enterprise, and the Inappropriate Other 81
Weak Political Agency, the Inappropriate Masses, and the Cultural Authority
of Intellectuals................................................................. 88
The "Elusive Masses"? Contextualizing the Three Sights in Post-Mao China... 94
Conclusion........................................................................................................... 105
Notes 106
III. A NATIVE OF BEIJING IN NEW YORK: MALE DESIRES AND
PATRIOTISM ON THE SMALL SCREEN 108
Mass-media Elites: Cultural Brokers in Postsocialist China 110
,--------------------
x
Chapter Page
Transnationalism, Nationalism, and Gender-the Context ofNBNY Study...... 115
Patriotism, the Socialist Past, and the Male Desire for Money 126
"To Screw Foreigners Is Patriotic"? The Sexual Desire as a Surrogate for the
Monetary Desire 132
The Curse ofMoney, the Failed Man, and the Pre-socialist Past.. 138
Conclusion 147
Notes 148
IV. ORIENTALISM, GLOBAL CONSUMERISM, AND THE CHINESE
LEITMOTIF FILM IN THE 1990S..................... 149
Global Consumerism, Cultural Imagination, and the Postsocialist Film
Industry 0.................................................. 153
HHJL: The Orientalist Mode ofNational Sentiments 163
"Zhang Yimo Mode", Indigenous Consumers, and the Convergence of
Nationalism and Consumerism 195
Conclusion 209
Notes 210
V. NETIZENS, COUNTER-MEMORY, AND THE CHINESE
CYBER-LITERATURE IN THE 21ST CENTURy , 212
Qidian.com: The Thriving of Chinese Cyber-literature 215
----- ---_..._----
Xl
Chapter Page
In the Name ofRighteousness (Yi): Netizens' Counter-memory in Cool Evil 224
Neoliberalism: Ambivalences and Contradictions of Yi 243
Conclusion........................................................................................................... 267
Notes 268
VI. CONCLUSION 271
REFERENCES 276
1CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
My dissertation delves into the recent articulation ofpopular nationalism in
Mainland China, with particular emphasis on the changes that globalization and
transnationalism have brought about to the representation of the Chinese nation in
sentimental terms. As one of the most appealing political ideologies and cultural
discourses to Chinese people, nationalism persistently looms large in shaping modem
Chinese subjectivity in the last one and a half centuries. Following up the late-Qing
initiation of Chinese modernization, turbulent modem history sees varied yet determined
cultural practices of articulating and redefining sentiments (qinggan 'tW~) as an
indispensable part ofthe nationalist project. Under the rubric of the Chinese nation,
people constantly invest their heroic aspiration and quotidian pleasure in qinggan, be it
traditional ethical sentiments waiting to be reformed in the late Qing, romanticist free
love as moral foundation in May Fourth, or national sympathy and fervor undergirding
the grandiose cause of revolutions. Since China's economic takeoff in the 1980s, Chinese
culture has been rigorously reassessed and reconstructed towards a more "popular"
2outlook by the increasingly diversified social spectrum that results from China's
relentless incorporation into a global economic system. The context of the dominance of
popular culture and global capitalism actually makes articulating and defining sentiments
complicated discourses replete with contestation and hybridization.
What is striking about these discussions of sentiments is how the paradoxical entity
of the "nation" in time and space has been fragmented by the accretion of diversified
voices from the wide spectrum of Chinese society. In sentimental languages these
different layerings of Chinese society break up the hegemony of the state in representing
the nation, while entangling themselves more closely with the de facto national power
structure. Therefore, with the theme of "national sentiments" (minzu qinggan ~~'tw~),
I group up all the meanings in an attempt to capture the particular positionalities of the
contemporary Chinese nation from the perspective of popular culture, encompassing such
a complex topography of the disparate "spaces of the nation" against the backdrop of the
new overwhelming trends of globalization.
The probing of the role of sentiment in its historical production accords with the
"sentimental tum" in academia in the last thirty-some years. Raymond Williams' study of
the "structure of feeling" is well presented to evaluate the political nature of the
production of feelings. Contrary to the common belief that feelings are inner emotions
devoid of large social significance, Williams argues that feeling has a structure that refers
3to a "particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from
other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or of a period" (1977,
131). According to Haiyan Lee, the structure of feeling captures social consciousness as
lived experience in process, or in solution, before it is "precipitated" and given fixed form.
Lee emphasizes that feeling is not opposed to thought, but rather embodies thought. In
other words, feeling has structures that can be subjected to rational analysis (2007, 10-11).
Although philosophers, ethnographers and cultural anthropologists cast different light on
the interpretation and application of Williams' concept, 1 the structure of feeling
nevertheless inspired many influential studies that treat discourses of feelings and
emotions as social practices bespeaking power structures within diversified national
contexts. For example, AIjun Appadurai's study of praise in Hindu India demonstrates
that sentimental bonds underlying praise can be reproduced separately from the supposed
"real feelings" ofpeople. Setting up the contrast between "real feelings" and "voiced
sentiments", he persuasively argues that the voicing of sentiments is regulated by a
shared, socially constructed set of codes in the course of Indian modernity (1990).
The political nature of sentiment, or more precisely, of the representation of
sentiment-which indicates the signification of sentiment as the legitimizing basis for a
new social order-and its meanings to the mapping of non-Western modernities provide
new possibilities to theorize the linkage between modem subjectivity and modem
4political institutions, particularly the nation-state. Generally more attuned to the political
culture mobilized by nationalism, political scientists emphasize its state and ideological
formation as shaped by institutions and international conflicts. Literary scholars, on the
other hand, reinvest the category ofnationalism with the broader significance ofcultural
agency and prefer to examine the "nation" as a nexus for competing narratives of culture,
power, and discourse (Tsu 2005, I). The trend of examining the politics of sentiment
under the rubric of the nation has had a significant impact on recent scholarship on
Chinese nationalism of the pre-1949 period,2 which, in a hope to somewhat bridge the
gap between a humanistic approach to modernity and a social-scientific one, intensely
constructs the connections between sentiments, subjectivities, and the national power
structure. One such work is Haiyan Lee's 2007 study ofthe genealogy oflove in China in
the first half of the twentieth century. She approaches the discourses of love as
articulatory practices that participate in defining the social order and producing forms of
self and sociality, of which the premiere one is the linkage between modem people and
the nation. Based on this point, she delineates the course of Chinese modernity in
sentimental terms by proposing three structures of feelings-the Confucian, the
enlightenment, and the revolutionary-that register the major shifts in the notion of love
as well as the vicissitudes of Chinese history in the first half of the twentieth century.
Seemingly, her most valuable contribution is a caution against taking love for granted "as
5a transhistorical and transcultural constant rather than as a linguistic and cultural resource
mobilized and mobolizable by the project of modernity" (8). The central issue she
pursues is-in her own words-in what sense the changing meaning of qing was part and
parcel ofthe changing conception of self, gender, and community in modem China (6).
As she laboriously contoured in her work, the actualization of this process-defining
Chinese modernity through defining the individual-nation nexus in sentimental terms-is
fraught with confusions, contentions, and compromises.
These complexities in mapping Chinese national sentiments in the first half of the
twentieth century bring to the forefront the fundamental aporia of the nation-that is, the
nation is an "impossible unity" that must be narrated into being in both time and space.3
The aporia of the nation consists first and foremost in the fundamental ambivalence of the
time of modernity. Hegel's historical philosophy has occasioned the hitherto dominant
mode of understanding time-i.e., a linear and progressive history. In the Hegelian mode
of history, the history of human beings is a linear progress from the pre-modem to the
modem, from the barbaric to the civilized-the course ofwhich is steered by the
Enlightenment movement that thrived first in the West, then expanded to the whole world.
In this process the West successfully incorporated the non-West as its homogenous Other,
through which the progressive mode of history also gained its universality. This totalizing
mode of experiencing time bears insurmountable internal disjunctions as derived from the
6perpetually unsolvable impasse, in which a disjunctive temporality is "given" on account
of the finitude of the human life span, while a continuous temporality is "desired" by
people whose subjectivity is unbound. Prasenjit Duara pinpoints in this mode a
fundamental problem that the linear, progressive history is not only the dominant mode of
experiencing time, but also the dominant mode ofbeing, which enables modernity to be a
possibility. This condition requires the nation to function as the only exclusive agency to
achieve modernity, in the process ofwhich the nation becomes the subject of this
Enlightenment history (1995, 17-20).
The conflict of the finitude ofhuman time (phenomenological time) and the
(assumed) infinitude of time ofmodernity (pedagogical time) is thus transferred onto the
nation-space. Using Duara's words, the nation on one hand must daily reproduce the
project ofrecovering its national essence to secure its transparency as the always-already
of the nation-space. On the other hand, it must commit itself to modernity and progress
by glorifying its historical embodiment-the nation-state-as the unprecedented form of
"subjecthood" in history that is able to realize the goal of modernity (29). In the context
ofmodem Chinese history, the notion of national sentiments epitomizes the ambiguities
and ambivalences in constructing the always-already of the nation-space and threads up
the multiple series of events in the historical actualization of China into a nation-state. It
is in this sense that Haiyan Lee argues for the centrality of sentiment in the
7transformation of Chinese modernity by claiming that "the modem subject is first and
foremost a sentimental subject and that the modem nation is first and foremost a
community of sYmpathy" (2007, 7). In this light, dissecting the paradoxical notion of
"national sentiments" is critical to understand, and thus breaks up a monolithic construct
ofthe Chinese nation as the evolution of a selfsame subject through time and space.
The aporia of the nation and its grips with sentiments persist in the contemporary
condition of globalization. Globalization, as Sheldon Lu puts it, is the "ineluctable human
condition of our time". It concerns not only the "physical circulation of goods,
commodities, industries, hardware, and capital across national boundaries", but also the
personal feelings in the everyday life of people. As Lu explains, "At a deeper level, the
process involves the structure of feelings and the politics of the body, the psyche, and
affects" (2007, 2). In a Chinese context, globalization roughly started with the era of
"Deng's China" (1979-1997)-bearing critical historical moments such as Deng
Xiaoping's initiation of the "Reform and Opening" (gaige kaifang E&~3fJJJO policies in
the late 1970s, the "New Enlightenment" cultural fever in the 1980s, the military
crackdown on the student protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and Deng's Southern
Tour in 1992-and continued with the Post-Deng decade that witnessed Hong Kong and
Macao's repatriation into China in 1997 and 1999, China's entry into The World Trade
Organization in 2001, and the official canonization of Jiang Zemin's "Three Represents"
8(sange daibiao -:=:f-1~~) discourse in 2002 and Hu Jingtao's "Hannonious Society"
(hexie shehui 5fOi~1±~) discourse in 2005. The national significances of the "structure
of feelings" and the "politics of the body, the psyche, and affects" in Deng's era have
been touched upon in some China-specific works,4 of which Ann Anagnost's1997 study
stands out in my discussion because of its focus on power and presentation in delineating
contemporary national sentiments, feelings, and affects. In the introduction of her book,
Anagnost notes:
Not only does the nation mark its impossible unity in relation to time, but also
in space. The nation-space is never unitary but multiple within itself. Communist
rhetoric, in its exquisitely detailed language of class analysis, situated subjects in
differential positions in relation to the national culture...The principle of inclusion
and exclusion, however authoritatively stated, are never completely successful but
are always subject to contestation by those who have been closed out or ... forcibly
included. All these paradoxical sites-the primordiality ofthe modern nation, the
contestation ofboundaries defining the national space, the "awakening" to
self-awareness through the embrace of global process-require narrative to do its
job, endlessly constructing an apparently seamless story ofthe nation's place in
space and time.
9Narrative, however, requires the presence of an enunciating subject. This
simple fact directs our attention to the power of a national imaginary to call forth
subjects who "speak for" the nation. In the history ofmodem China, the designation
ofwho or what class represents the agency to propel the nation forward in its
historical destiny has been very much at stake in national struggles. Implicit in this
contestation has been a "politics ofpresence" in which the speaking subject claims
to or is attributed with the power to speak with the force ofhistory. In this sense, the
national subject is made to embody abstract conceptions which are not immediately
present to experience (such as History, Nation, Society, People) but which become
emblematic ofthe nation speaking with the voice ofhistory. (1997,4)
This central thread ofthe politics ofpresence is quite illuminating to my study of the
contemporary discourses of Chinese national sentiments. At the heart ofmy study is the
premise that contemporary sentiments must be articulated and defined by multiple
national subjects holding different positions in a national power structure increasingly
shaped by the overwhelming trends of globalization. The contractions, contestations, and
confrontations globalization has brought into the national power structure are
increasingly embodied in the diversified voices of the national subjects, of which a
10
central task is to empower their respective positions in the national structure through the
designation of appropriate or desirable sentiments.
Hence comes the theme ofnational sentiments ofmy study, which postulates that the
meanings of sentiments are historically and culturally situated and subject to the
maneuvering of social power. Qinggan for the national subjects is the significant concept
through which one negotiates one's social position or one's relationship to power. The
contemporary discourses ofminzu qinggan-social positioning, radical embodiment of
oneself in relation to power, and profound emotional and intellectual identification with
that position and the structure of the relationship it implies~ut1inethe construction of
Chinese national subjectivity with a globalized vision.s Therefore in this study I define
minzu qinggan as a spiritual quality that integrates the individual emotions, feelings, and
desires with the practical needs of the Chinese nation as dictated by the intellect of the
multiple national subjects.
Ifminzu qinggan is a quality through which contemporary Chinese subjects
negotiate their respective self-positions with the national power structure, the centering of
minzu qinggan in subjectivity demands a passionate embodiment of its underlying
suppositions that are closely related to the specific historical conditions ofcontemporary
China. In my study the vicissitudes ofminzu ginggan and its meanings to Chinese history
are rigorously examined under the critical lens ofpostsocialism. The central argument of
11
my study is that the positionalities of the multiple national subjects become expressed as
modes of national sentiments when the nation is imagined under the historical condition
of Chinese postsocialism.
Sheldon Lu suggests, "Chinese socialism has been a dominant tradition throughout
the twentieth century and beyond". As he explains, "It is no exaggeration to say that
Chinese modernity has been to a large extent the development, revision, and rethinking of
socialist modernity" (2007, 204). From Kang Youwei's utopian socialist vision of Great
Commonwealth (datong :kIPJ) in late Qing, to Chainnan Mao's mass movement of
People's Communes (renmin gongshe A ~-0U) in the high time ofthe Cultural
Revolution, socialism has played one of the highest tenors on the center stage of modem
Chinese history.
In the post-Mao era, fundamental changes in politics, economics, ideology, and
everyday life have occurred to every layer of the Chinese society. Deng's Refonn and
Opening policies introduced a new round of socioeconomic refonns to a nominally
socialist state. Erstwhile prevalent theoretical models, such as postcolonialism, proved
inadequate to map out such a historical condition. As a result, the tenn "postsocialism"
has been invented to describe the new condition of China.
12
ArifDirlik first used "postsocialism" in the 1989 anthology Marxism and the
Chinese Experience. By that term he refers to the condition of socialism in a historical
situation where:
(a) socialism has lost its coherence as a metatheory ofpolitics because ofthe
attenuation of the socialist vision in its historical unfolding; partly because of a
perceived need on the part of socialist state to articulate "actually existing socialism"
to the demands of a capitalist world order, but also because of the vemacularization
of socialism in its absorption into different national contexts; (b) the articulation of
socialism to capitalism is conditioned by the structure of "actually existing
socialism" in any particular social context which is the historical premise of all such
articulation; and (c) this premise stands guard over the process of articulation to
ensure that it does not result in the restoration of capitalism. (1989, 364)
Shortly after Mao's demise, Deng ousted Mao's chosen successor Hua Guofeng and
proceeded with socioeconomic reforms such as disbanding People's Communes,
restoring private ownership, and establishing capitalist-style special economic zones.
What Deng did seems to prove the accuracy ofMao's prediction that Deng would be a
"capitalist roader" (zouzi pai Jt~~rtR) from within the ranks of the Chinese Communist
13
Party. However, Deng's departure from Maoist socialist fanaticism was not necessarily
the doom of socialism in China. Dirlik insists that "postsocialism, rather than signaling
the end of socialism, offers the possibility in the midst of a crisis in socialism of
rethinking socialism in new, more creative ways" (380).
Besides Dirlik, other scholars of China studies also applied this term in their works.
In his discussion of New Chinese Cinema in the 1980s, Paul Pickowicz suggests that "we
consider using a framework that might be called postsocialist" (1994,60). "[The] idea of
a distinctively postsocialist condition is best used to refer to the type ofpopular cultural
diversity, cultural ambiguity, and cultural confusion that became so pronounced in China
in the 1980s" (61). Although it thrived in the 1980s, Pickowicz dates postsocialism back
to a much earlier time when "the massive disillusionment with socialism among true
believers and ideological agnostics and the onset of an alienated postsocialist mode of
thought and behavior began midway through the Cultural Revolution (and perhaps earlier
in the countryside)" (62).
Although both Dirlik and Pickowicz focus their studies of Chinese postsocialism on
the 1970s and the 1980s,6 younger scholars have deployed this seminal concept in
studies of China in the 1990s and the twentieth-century. Sheldon Lu starts his delineation
of Chinese postsocialism with a discussion of the pivotal significance of the year 1989:
14
As we know, 1989 was an eventful and crucial year in contemporary Chinese history,
the year in which the student democracy movement in Tiananmen Square was
suppressed by the regime. Furthermore, it was in the 1990s that China completed its
transformation from a predominantly socialist planned economy to a diverse and
largely capitalist market economy and consumer society. It was also in the last
decade of the twentieth century that actually existing socialist states in Eastern
Europe collapsed one after another and the Cold War between capitalism and
communism/socialism ended. If the pace and manner ofreform were gradual,
incremental, and tentative in the 1980s, China accelerated its full-scale incorporation
into the capitalist world economy in the 1990s and beyond. (2007,206-7)
Based on such an understanding of the "watershed" status of 1989 in contemporary
Chinese history, Lu posits that the post-Mao period from the late 1970s through the 1980s
is the "pre-postsocialist" stage while postsocialism "blossomed fully in the 1990s and the
twenty-first century" (207). In a similar vein, Xudong Zhang specifies the postsocialist
period of China as the years of the "long 1990s" between the 1989 Tiananmen Incident
and China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 (2008, back cover).
The careful examination of the ups and downs of minzu ginggan and its meanings to
contemporary Chinese history demands a genealogical understanding ofpostsocialism.
15
According to Anagnost, Michel Foucault reminds us that "the world of speech and desires
has known invasions, struggles, plundering, disguises, ploys"~everything, in short, that
disrupts the attempt to construct a coherent narrative of evolutionary unfolding in human
cultural history (1997, 178n9). The genealogical approach "insists on tracing the
trajectories of discursive elements stemming from unlikely places, deploying transformed
meanings in disrupted histories" (6). Anagnost argues:
The genealogist must be sensitive to resonances across time-not to set them into a
continuous evolutionary narrative but to "isolate the different scenes where they
engaged in different roles." Therefore, we have to be attentive to the ways in which
the present reprise of notions that were current earlier in China's modem history
mark a conscious retrieval of the past that is nevertheless fundamentally conditioned
by the tumultuous history of the socialist era separating then from now. (6)
The genealogical approach to postsocialism-through which Chinese national
sentiments are sketched out under the new context of globalization-proposes an
explanation to a fundamental problem in the application ofWilliams, conceptualization of
the "structure of feelings" to study national sentiments in a contemporary milieu. In his
writing, Williams insists that structures of feeling do not respond to either dominant or
16
residual social formations; rather, they represent an emerging social formation still
unidentifiable in an explicit way:
It is a structured formation which, because it is at the very edge of semantic
availability, has many of the characteristics of a pre-formation, until specific
articulations-new semantic figures-are discovered in material practice: often, as
happens, in relatively isolated ways, which are only later seen to compose a
significant (often in fact minority) generation; this often, in tum, the generation that
substantially connects to its successors. It is thus a specific structure of particular
linkages, particular emphases and suppressions, and in what are often its most
recognizable forms, particular deep starting-points and conclusions. (1977, 134)
Because of the supposed "forward" gaze of the structure of feelings-i.e. the emerging
social formation it represents is to some extent still a pre-formation awaiting significant
articulations to come in the future, some people believe that it is impossible to delineate
the social meanings of the structure of feelings in the present. What people are capable of
doing is only to study, in a backward gaze, ''how particular structures of feeling,
undetectable at their time of origin, managed to contribute to the solidification of a
contemporary dominant social formation" (Benavides 2006, 12). It seems to me that
17
Benavides' notions of the forward and the backward, and the dominant and the residual
still embody an attempt to construct a cohesive, evolutionary narrative in which the time
follows a linear trajectory from the past to the future. The past, the present, and the future
are so seamlessly united that no room is left for imagining the time other than through the
"forward" or the "backward" gaze. And the demarcation between the dominant and the
residual is so clear-cut and stable that in the present the dominant functions as nothing
other than a repressive, exterior force over the residual.
I, however, refuse to adhere to the somehow reified unity between the forward and
the backward, and demarcation between the dominant and the residual. I argue that the
social meanings of the structure of feelings in the present are available for analyses only
if these meanings are examined with a genealogical understanding ofhistory. I, therefore,
examine the contemporary discourses of national sentiments by identifying their different
points of emergence, appropriation, and interpretation with a genealogical approach to
postsocialism.
In what follows, I discuss the significances of the genealogical approach to Chinese
postsocialism with regard to national sentiments from three mutually entangled
perspectives: time, space, and power. The genealogical approach to postsocialism allows
me to break up the linear, progressive mode ofhistory by first calling into question the
periodization scheme of previous scholarship on postsocialism that suggests a radical
18
break between the 1980s and the 1990s. Significant indeed in contemporary Chinese
history, the year of 1989 heralds an abrupt tum more than an end to China's reform era.
The overemphasization of the "watershed" status of 1989 and the exclusive focus on the
"long 1990s" may keep people away from a more comprehensive understanding of
Chinese postsocialism in global and local histories. On the one hand, a kind of historical
continuity undeniably exists between the 1990s and beyond and the 1980s in that the
social mechanisms of national representations in the 1990s and onward are deeply rooted
in the socio-historical conditions and cultural policies of China in the 1980s and even
earlier years.7 A well-informed study of Chinese nationalism and postsocialism cannot
afford to completely sever the 1990s from its immediate past. On the other hand, I argue
that postsocialism is the Chinese condition of globalization. The historical actualization
of Chinese postsocialism features convoluted interactive processes between China and
the rest of the world that span both Deng Xiaoping's governing years and the post-Deng
decade. Deng's economic reforms in the 1980s and 1990s are neatly contemporaneous
with the dramatic reorganization of capitalism in the past three decades: an era that has
been characterized as "the age of flexible accumulation", "post-Fordism", or "late
capitalism".8 I do not intend to write in this study a narrative about the 1980s and 1990s
China per se. Instead, I attempt to position this part of Chinese history within the larger
picture of the global development of capitalism and socialism in the twentieth century.
19
Applying Partha ChatteIjee's schema defining the development of nationalist
thought, Anagnost writes about the twentieth-century Chinese history from a global
perspective:
The early part of the century represents a moment in Chinese history when it was
being pulled into the orbit of global capitalism. Because of China's semi-colonial
status, however, this process operated on vastly different terms from those of the
present, resulting ultimately in a rejection of capitalism. In contrast, China is now
undergoing a "passive revolution" marked by the controlled insertion of capitalist
forms by a powerful bureaucratic state, a revolution that is producing unimaginable
wealth for those functionaries who can provide a docile, disciplined, and cheap labor
force for transnational capital in a globalized marketplace. (1997, 6)
Anagnost identifies in her study three critical moments in the twentieth-century Chinese
history: China being pulled into the global expansion of a capitalist economy in the first
half of the century, the rejection of capitalism in socialist China, and the controlled
insertion of capitalism into the national economy in the Deng's era (6_8).9 The
juxtaposition of the three moments fundamentally changes our perceptions of the history
of the 1980s and 1990s in China, and of the twentieth-century Chinese history as a whole.
20
If the genealogical approach takes as its task to compose a genealogy of dispersed
elements from disrupted histories, the history of 1980s and 1990s China undoubtedly
better serves the discursive genealogy of the twentieth-century Chinese history when it is
understood as but one dispersed element to speak for the revival of capitalism in China
after the disruption of socialism. It is also in this sense that I combine the 1980s and the
1990s under the rubric of postsocialism as a Chinese parallel to the condition of
globalization.
Relevant to the genealogical demystification ofthe progressive mode of history is
also the disruption of the received myth of origin in the studies of Chinese postsocialism.
While it is certainly true that "Chinese socialism has been a dominant tradition
throughout the twentieth century and beyond" (Lu 2007,204), it is insensible to trace the
origin of everything in the postsocialist society back to the socialist era. Rather than the
original birthplace of everything postsocialist, the socialist era is seen "in the density of
the accumulation in which [it is] caught up and which [it] nevertheless never cease[s] to
modify, to disturb, to over throw, and sometimes to destroy" (Foucault 1972, 125). The
genealogical approach to postsocialism requires the reprise of minzu ginggan-the notion
that persists in China's modern history despite its vast structural and articulatory
transformations throughout history's trajectory. The reprise must be conducted with the
full awareness that on the one hand the conscious retrieval of the past is "fundamentally
21
conditioned by the tumultuous history of the socialist era separating then from now"
(Anagnost 1997, 6); on the other hand the retrieval of the past goes far back beyond the
socialist era and speaks directly with diversified social memories within the complex web
of cultural meanings shaped by both present national positionalities and thousands of
years of historical sediments. As I will demonstrate in the following chapters, disparate
means of agency of the multiple national subjects are identifiable in the negotiations for
their preferred modes of national sentiments with Chinese cultural memories, which both
include and exceed those of the socialist era.
In addition, the idea that postsocialism is the Chinese condition of globalization
poses new questions to the relationship between Deng's era and the post-Deng decade
within the frame of Chinese postsocialism. As I have noted, the historical actualization of
Chinese postsocialism features convoluted interactive processes between China and the
rest of the world that span both Deng Xiaoping's governing years and the post-Deng
decade. Ann Anagnost's work was published in 1997, the year ofDeng's demise. Thus
her work has a contemporary focus that mainly discusses issues of national relevance in
Deng's era. I continue her interest in the nexus ofpower and representation of a
globalized China and extend my critical attention to the post-Deng decade. Post-Deng
China stays on the track of globalization as initiated in Deng's regime, while
simultaneously generating new problems impinging on the articulation of national
22
sentiments. The postsocialist nation that underwent fundamental structural
transformations under Deng's regime has tacitly welcomed a new round of challenges
after 1997. After many years ofmarketization and reforms, Chinese people have
gradually realized the menace of the capitalist market to their private spaces and personal
welfares. They are believed to be "condemned to live in the worst of both worlds"-"the
rampant corruption and endemic nepotism caused by the institutional structure of the
one-party state, which is nothing but a perversion of the utopian longing for real
socialism" in conjunction with "ruthless capitalist profiteering that creates a
disproportionate disparity the haves and have-nots" (Lu 2007, 209). On another note,
China's tremendous influences on the world economy and its increasingly aggressive
foreign policies in the post-Deng decade have deeply upset the previous balance of world
geo-political power. The "accidental" bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in
1999 by the US-led NATO air force brought on a new wave of nationalism and
anti-Americanism in China. Ten years after the students' blood spilled on it under the
order of the Communist Party government, Tiananmen Square ironically witnessed
China's largest mass protest since 1989, in which the party-state and the masses seemed
to have formed a firm alliance to fight against NATO and the United States. In the final
years of Jiang Zemin's regime, wealthy businessmen and entrepreneurs were admitted to
party membership and given the rank of "proletarians". According to his theory of"Three
23
Represents", the Chinese Communist Party represents the most advanced force of
production, the most developed culture, and the interests of the broadest masses. The
official rhetoric of the fourth generation of the Communist Party leadership has
highlighted Hu Jingtao's discourse of "Harmonious Society", in which the building of a
"harmonious society" is indispensible to the "great renaissance of the Chinese nation"
(Zhonghua minzu de weidafuxing ~:I::d¥:~~1¥J1:tA~~).
To borrow Sheldon Lu's words, Post-Deng China testifies that "the artistic and
cultural heart ofpostsocialism lies in a pre-capitalist, socialist life-world even while the
technological head ofpostsocialism faces in the direction of a global capitalist rationale
of business management and creating surplus value" (209). The tensions between culture
and technology within postsocialism itself increasingly rip the political meanings of
socialism off the post-Deng era, while making nationalism the only ideology and cultural
norm to hold people together. It is in this sense that I give considerable attention to the
discourses of national sentiments after 1997. Two out of the four following chapters are
dedicated to the post-Deng era. The state-sponsored leitmotif film in the late 1990s and
the netizens' (wangmin IXXJ~) cyber-literature (wangluo wenxue IXXJ~~Jt~) sensation in
the twenty-first century form an intriguing conversation addressing the disparity of
national sentiments in this era. The popular discourses of the state from the top and the
masses from the bottom, as I will detail in these two chapters, both ratify and reject the
24
seemingly impossible alliance between the state and the masses on Tiananmen Square in
1999.
The genealogical meanings of Chinese postsocialism to contemporary national
sentiments can also be examined through the perspective ofthe space. Ifpostsocialism is
the Chinese condition of globalization, it bespeaks the "reshuffling" impact of the
overwhelming trends of globalization on the spaces ofthe nation, which constitute the
national power structure in which the multiple national subjects dwell. In light ofthe
genealogical approach, the fundamental changes globalization has brought on to the
positionalities of the multiple national subjects must be analyzed through their disparate
"resonances over time-not to set them into a continuous evolutionary narrative but to
isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles" (Anagnost 1997,6). In
other words, how the national subjects idiosyncratically appropriate the past-the
"different scenes"-represents their respective positionalities within the national power
structure, which must be understood not as continuous evolutionary narratives, but as
"isolated", case-by-case studies ofthe power maneuverings behind the discourses of
national sentiments.
In contemporary China, the postsocialist conditionings of the national subjects'
appropriation ofthe past in the articulations of national sentiments are most significantly
incarnated in the nascent-in the sense of emerging only in the last thirty-some
25
years-interactions between the state and the market and their consequences. In
examining the intellectual contentions of nationalism and mass culture in China in the
early 1990s, Xudong Zhang contends that a new generation of Chinese nationalists has
emerged from the discursive space being created by an omnipresent market and a
decentralized state power (2008, 103). Intended to apply to the situations of the early
1990s only, Zhang's contention is nonetheless illuminating to the understanding of the
whole postsocialist period. In Zhang's words, the "expanding gray area" between the
absolute state and the intellectual-dictated civil society has dramatically changed the rules
of describing and interpreting the Chinese economy, politics, everyday world, and
cultural life (ibid). To my understanding, the "expanding gray area" certainly refers to the
market-oriented popular culture--or the "mass culture" in Zhang's terms. The realm of
the market that strives for its own expression finds its closest company of the state, which,
in the new conditions of globalized productions and consumptions, is more and more tied
to the capital and ensures with its power a smooth transition of China from a rigid
planned economy to a market economy. The globalized conditions of the Chinese market
economy require the intervention of the state. Thus it seems all the more natural to
maintain the power of the state in order to seek a globalization with "Chinese
characteristics".
26
The merging of the realms of the state and the market certainly gives rise to a new
wave of affirmation of the state as the primary unit for perceiving life, society, and
culture in both official and popular culture. However, this structural transformation of the
postsocialist China also produces another effect:
[A] discerned overlap between the state and the mass culture reinvention of the
nation indicates a broader basis of national experience in both real and imaginary
terms.... [T]he basically free flow of labor, goods, and capital, as well as the boom
in formation and cultural signs and images, undoubtedly presented the nation in
vivid terms for the first time for the majority of Chinese people. Until this moment,
the people's sense of their nation had remained abstract and impersonal, as the state
took national affairs exclusively in its own hands. (106)
The breaking up for the "majority of Chinese people" of the hegemony of the state in
representing the nation gives birth to the diversified topography of the subjects "speaking
for" the nation in sentimental terms. In postsocialist China, the subjects imagining the
nation through the joint of minzu qinggan include not only regulars like the state and
intellectuals, but also new players like mass-media elites and netizens. It is not that the
27
state has been excluded from the enterprise of articulating national sentiments, but that
the state now tells only part of the story.
Moreover, these multiple national subjects are most acutely experiencing the global
pulse in daily life in the interactions between the state and the market. As Xudong Zhang
suggests, on one hand globalization has "exposed the Chinese market and the realm of
daily life to global capital, and to international fashions and ideologies"; on the other
hand "the massive entry into and by the world market also enabled Chinese consumers to
encounter a world of difference, often delineated in terms of nation-state borders". In this
world the Chinese were reminded of"belonging to a particular community identified by
geography, economy, language, politics, a common history, and 'culture'" (107). The
sentimental disquiet of the Chinese national subjects will be its ineluctable by-product as
long as globalization, as the terms such as "the age of flexible accumulation",
"post-Fordism", and "late capitalism" suggest, embodies the intersecting command of
money, time, and space to form a substantial nexus of social power in the specific
national context. One thing for sure is that benefits and burdens of globalization are
unequally distributed among the multiple subjects in accordance with their respective
positionalities within the power nexus of the postsocialist China. This unequal
distribution deeply disquiets these subjects and in tum inspires more sentimental
investments from them in appropriating different cultural remembrances of the past-in
28
doing so to reflect upon their respective positions in the contemporary national power
structure. It is in this sense that the discourses of national sentiments under
postsocialism---or the Chinese condition of globalization-seem to corroborate David
Harvey's famous postulation that in the contemporary cultural milieu the changing
experience ofmoney, time, and space may be the basis for the rise of distinctive systems
of interpretation and representation, and may find itself as a primary bearer of cultural
codes (1989,299).
The link between the national subjects' cultural remembrances of the past and their
respective positionalities within the postsocialist power structure is therefore the lynchpin
ofmy interpretation of the various discourses ofnational sentiments in the following
chapters. In light of the genealogical approach, the consequences of Chinese
postsocialism-as were generated from, among other things, the merging of the realms of
the state and the market-to the various articulation ofminzu qinggan must be analyzed
in an "isolated", case-by-case method. However, one question remains: How does the
case-by-case study ofminzu qinggan find its points of focus in the vast tapestry of
contemporary social life? At this juncture comes the third perspective of the genealogical
study-power, domination, and their relationship to everyday life. Xudong Zhang points
out that the market-oriented popular culture "adds a crucial variant to the considerations
of notions of nationalism and intellectual discourse in the Chinese context, and changes
29
the historical and ideological implications of these notions in China today" (2008, 103).
He keenly notes that a new nationalist sentiment emerged in China when the
postrevolutionary masses-as citizens and consumers--encountered Western images of
and discourses on China through their own market-based media (109). He argues that this
market-oriented, popular-culture-based nationalist sentiment nevertheless exemplifies
that an intellectual-dictated, theoretically articulate political philosophy and cultural
vision are missing in this economic alliance between economic sphere and mass culture
(112-3).
My study takes a different angle than that of Zhang's and explores the interrelations
between minzu qinggan, the market, and popular culture. Instead of considering the
effects of the absence of an elitist intellectual vision on popular articulation of minzu
qinggan, I attempt to examine those interrelations without preferring an a priori
intellectual stance and recover the original trajectories of the power maneuverings of the
multiple national subjects underlying the various discourses of minzu qinggan. I argue
that in postsocialist China popular culture is the most critical site where diversified
narratives of minzu qinggan could make their presence and strategically enframe new
realities and new political possibilities within the national power structure. Antonio
Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault's observations on contemporary cultural
hegemony, power, and popular culture retain their sharp relevance at this juncture.
30
Antonio Gramsci's original proposal to explain communities' self-imposed domination
(1971) inspired critical studies of cultural hegemony in contemporary societies. Louis
Althusser's study of political domination (1971) freed the discussion ofpower from both
the economic and the dialectical determination of traditional Marxist class analyses. He
placed the formative elements of ideological power in the cultural production of material
processes that constrain and define political domination. His examples of state education
and religious indoctrination furthered the exploration of ideology not as a mere
epiphenomenon of economic production but as a quasi-independent element of cultural
interaction. Despite struggling to maintain a more orthodox Marxist perspective, and
significantly distancing himself from his own problematic conclusions, Althusser opened
the way for addressing the independent productive power of domination instead of
assessing it only in negative and repressive terms. This is precisely where Michel
Foucault's work is most enlightening. Some of his main contributions are located within
his studies of social institutions-prisons, asylums, hospitals-as normalizing agents as
well as the elaboration of social discourse as a useful analytical tool. For Foucault,
hegemony works not because it is actively operationalized from the outside but because
domination is actually connected to our very inside, making us the most active imposers
of our own constraints:
31
What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it
doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces
things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be
considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much
more than as a negative instance whose function is repression. (1980, 119)
In thinking of the mechanism of power, I am thinking rather of its capillary form of
existence, the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches
their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, leaning
processes and everyday lives. (39)
In a similar vein, in his Marxism and Literature (1977) Raymond Williams develops
elements that, according to him, serve to access hegemony and offer a better
understanding of how it is deployed. He takes "structures of feeling" as such an element
that helps bridge the gap between a static understanding of class formation lodged in its
own formative institutions and corresponding ideology and the daily life of individuals
and the production of popular culture. 10 In other words, Williams regards "structures of
feeling" as a privileged entry point to behold the mutuality between the normative
32
cultural/political domination-or the "hegemony"-and the individual-oriented,
everyday-life-participating popular culture.
It is against such a theoretical background that my focus on popular culture-for
excavating the paramount meanings of contemporary national sentiments--embodies a
genealogical perspective of Chinese postsocialism. In postsocialist China, popular culture
is the most important entry point of the "self-imposed", "productive" power into
everyday life. Paraphrasing Foucault's terms, power runs through the figurative body of
the nation-the social structure conditioned by, among other things, postsocialism-to
the literary body of the nation-the individual bodies of people capable of various kinds
of agencies-through the joint of popular culture, in which minzu qinggan makes the
prominent presence of the multiple national subjects and powerfully enframes their
feelings, desires, attitudes, and actions on an everyday basis in regard to the Chinese
nation. The various forms of present domination-as incurred by normative forces like
the merging of the realms of the state and the market-are fundamentally "internalized"
as a source, in integration with the residual thoughts, memories, and cultural forms from
the long history, fueling the perpetuated construction and deconstruction of contemporary
Chinese subjectivity in sentimental terms.
I use the term "popular culture" in a broad sense, referring it to the various popular
forms targeting the vast masses in contemporary Chinese society. On this register my
33
usage of this tenn echoes Xudong Zhang's aforementioned notion of "mass culture". It is
from the perspective of the vastness and breadth of the targeted audiences that I define
the meanings of"popular". Moreover, the popularity with the masses of these cultural
fonns is increasingly detennined by the extent of their "multimedia-rization". In line with
the fadeaway of the vitality and impact of the intellectual cultural vision in the
postsocialist society is the decline of the traditional book media as the main fonn of
cultural communication and circulation. Multimedia, which includes a variety of
visualized and non-visualized fonns such us film, TV, and cyber media, becomes instead
the critical venue whereby the multiple national subjects participate in the construction of
rninzu qinggan in popular culture. Thus the direct research object of my study is nothing
but the multimedia-rized discourses of rninzu qinggan. The key media-texts I will
examine in this dissertation include one TV documentary River Elegy (Heshang ¥PJ~,
1988), one TV serial A Native o/Beijing in New York (Beijingren zai Niuyue ~~~A{E~.B.
~J.j, 1993, hereafter NBNY), one leitmotifmovie Griefover the Yellow River (Huanghe
Juelian "¥PJ~{g~, 1999, hereafter HHJL), and one cyber-literature novel Cool Evil
(Xieqi Linran ~~~i.~, 2007). One commonality of all these works is that they all
address human sentiments as the critical agency to connect individual subjects and the
nation under the contemporary conditions ofpostsocialism.
34
Chapter II "Heshang: The Consciousness of Sorrow and Worry and the National
Pedagogy ofReform" foregrounds the postsocialist dilemma reform intellectuals were
confronted with and their cultural responses in the late 1980s. In summarizing the cultural
strategies for social power of Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century, Tani E.
Barlow furnishes five aspects in point, of which three are especially pertinent to my
discussion. One aspect is the instrumental use of master narrative: "Chinese intellectuals
have redeployed and excessively privileged modernist discourse" (1991, 212). Another
aspect is the strategy of reversal: on the one hand they "transform[ed] received ideas,
formerly a part of simple, everyday common sense and intellectual convention, into
something they called the Chinese tradition" and targeted it for attack; on the other hand
they "located a Western authority, privileged his writing over all others, and translated his
texts to serve as weapons against indigenous social custom" (212-3). The third one is the
construction and vilification of multiple pasts:
This habit of demonizing the past charged "culture" not just with the powers
accorded tradition in any modernist discourses, but also with the power to infect.
The infectiousness ofthe past, not coincidentally, keeps alive the need to purge, and
make cultural critique-the province of intellectuals-into necessary political
intervention and therefore a form of national salvation. (213)
35
Barlow's summary is inspiring in that it exposes the centrality of the desire for social
power in the modem Chinese intellectual discourses ofmodernity, history, and the nation.
Chinese intellectuals have always been endeavoring to acquire a powerful position in the
national power structure by fervently establishing the necessity of their
expertise-modernist cultural critiques targeting the constructed/vilified "multiple pasts"
and "Chinese tradition"-in "speaking for" the nation. In the late 1980s, the merging of
the realms of the state and the market in the global order of capital has caused a split of
intellectuals into two influential camps: that of "establishment intellectuals"-in
Barlow's term-who were largely part of the ideological state apparatus and that of
reform intellectuals who were mostly scholars and teachers at universities and research
institutes in big cities. Excluded from state power and political decision-making, the
reformist intellectuals nevertheless demonstrated a strong will of political participation
and desire for social power by furnishing popular discourses addressing the state-initiated
reforms in relation to national sentiments.
Hence Chapter II looks into a special discourse of national sentiments in the
influential 1988 TV documentary Heshang to examine how those Barlow noted strategies
for social power were re-operated by the reformist intellectuals at the junctures between
the state, the masses, and themselves. The reform intellectuals such as Su Xiaokang (d}
36
~~) and Wang Luxiang (.=E.#~) perceptively discerned their awkward position within
a national power structure where the party-state increasingly appropriated the
masses-especially the peasant class-through its disciplinary practices of economic
reform to new heights ofproductivity. The state's microtechnologies ofpower along with
its exclusive focus on the incorporation of the Chinese economy into a global system
alienated the reform intellectuals who held on to their agendas in the political and other
aspects of social life. Taking the alienated condition as the point of departure, the reform
intellectuals launched a "come-back" project by associating the image of the
"inappropriate other" with the masses in a lashing out of the Chinese culture and tradition
under the rubric ofmodemity. Heshang's narrative of fashioning the national sentiments
as a general spiritual quality shared by, and working on, the consciousness of the Chinese
masses does not contradict the desire of the reform intellectuals for social power. I argue
that by propagating a "correct" mode of the national sentiments-the consciousness of
sorrow and worry (youhuan yishi '17t}~~m) that both dovetailed with and went beyond
the ongoing reform run by the state-as something the Chinese masses lacked, the reform
intellectuals established their image as the cultural authority to enlighten the
"inappropriate other" of Chinese modernity. However, in a contextual study of the
media-text, I also question the self-claimed authoritative status of the reform intellectuals
against the backdrop of a forming alliance between the state and the masses.
37
Chapter III "A Native ofBeijing in New York: Male Desires and Patriotism on the
Small Screen" deals with a mode of national sentiments fashioned by the emergent
mass-media elites in the early 1990s. An important consequence of Chinese postsocialism
in the 1990s is the burgeoning of the so-called "cultural economy", in which the
production of cultural forms and meanings were more and more commodified and
molded upon the patterns of economic globalization. The state's promotion of the cultural
economy expedited both the transformation of the cultural capital owned by Chinese
intellectuals into the economic capital, and the dismemberment of intellectuals as one
solid social force. The mass-media elites such as Zheng Xiaolong (:*~aJeJt) and Feng
Xiaogang O~/J\IXJIJ)-the producers of the extremely popular 1993 Mainland TV serial A
Native ofBeijing in New York---emerged out of this dismemberment and assumed the role
ofmiddlemen between the market and the intellectual circles. They collaborated with the
state and the international and domestic capital and made themselves powerful market
manipulators and cultural trendsetters.
The relationship between male desires and patriotism functions as the pivot in NBNY
of the mass-media elites' rumination over the notion of national sentiments. The central
plot of the serial-a homosocial rivalry in New York over wealth and women between the
Chinese male protagonist Wang Qiming and his white opponent---endows the economic
logics underlying male desires with the aura ofpatriotism. The keynote of the mode of
38
national sentiments propagated by NBNY is that making money is patriotic. In order to
facilitate this notion, NBNY appropriated the socialist past quite differently than Heshang
in its minzu qinggan discourse. If it was but one integrated part of the condemned
Chinese tradition in the reform intellectuals' vision, the socialist era was singled out in
NBNY as the core cultural wellspring of discursive elements in the mass-media elites'
articulation of male desires and patriotism. I argue that by creatively appropriating the
cultural memories of the socialist era to validate the central notion of "making money is
patriotic", the mass-media elites justified their powerful position in postsocialist China as
market manipulators and cultural trendsetters. However, the ultimate failure ofWang
Qiming also embodies the keen concerns and worries of the mass-media elites about the
postsocialist conditions ofthe cultural economy, the state-sponsored rampant
privatization, and the all-society celebration ofprofit-seeking.
Chapter IV "Orientalism, Global Consumerism, and the Chinese Leitmotif Film in
the 1990s" explores the state's national agency in a specific category ofcontemporary
Chinese film-the leitmotif film in the 199Os-under the critical lens oforientalism and
consumerism. My analysis of the state's agency in an influential leitmotif movie -Grief
Over the Yellow River (Huanghe Juelian .~IlJ~ts~, 1999)-demonstrates that the
state-sponsored leitmotif film advocates a mass-appealing mode ofnational sentiments
highlighting individual passions ofromantic love (aiqing ~'tff), familiar affection
39
(qinqing mt~), and clan loyalty (zongzu zhi qing *~z..'tl!f) as the foundation of
Chinese national identities. By situating stories of these individual passions within the
anti-colonial history of the 20th-century China, the leitmotif film promotes this
sentimental mode in which the endangerment of individual passions gives rise to the
ultimate passion of dying for one's nation. I argue that the state maintains its premier
status within the national power structure under the new overwhelming trends of
globalization by exteriorizing the masses' focus-through manipulating the narration of
this mode of national sentiments into an orientalist discourse that promotes a superior
Chinese self "being looked at" by its Western other.
Chapter V "Netizens, Counter-memory, and the Chinese Cyber-literature in the 21st
Century" delineates the Chinese netizens' favored mode ofnational sentiments. Written
and released online, and circulated and responded to on an anonymous basis,
cyber-literature (wangluo wenxue IXXJ M~ )(~) provides a online space with relative
freedom for 21st-century Chinese netizens to articulate their ideological thoughts and
political passions through literary imagination. I analyze the commercial mechanism of
the most successful Mainland cyber-literature website Qidian.com (Qidian zhongwen
wang /E9g 9=t)( IXXJ) to demonstrate how this commercialized online space has created a
moderate opportunity for Chinese netizens to articulate their own feelings with their own
voices. I then provide a case study of a prominent cyber-literature novel Cool Evil (Xieqi
40
Linran ~~EOlr!.t 2007). In this novel a young Chinese man struggles his way from
grass roots to mafia boss in Canada, then helps the Chinese government with its
expansion policy in Africa and North America, and finally gets the permission of the
government to go back to China as a legal businessman. I argue that the complicated
notion ofyi (righteousness 5(), that is deeply rooted in Chinese tradition constitutes the
counter-memory of the writer and readers of Cool Evil, which simultaneously fuels and
discourages the netizens' cause for more freedom.
Notes:
1 See, for example, Lindholm (1998), MacIntyre (1984), and Abu-Lughod (1986).
2 See, for example, Fitzgerald (1996), Tsu (2005).
3 Many scholars have committed significant attention to this issue. See, for example, Balibar (1991),
Duara (1995), and Bhabha (1990, 2004).
4 The representative works include Wang (1996), Zhang (1997), and Lu (2001).
5 This characterization ofnational sentiments is inspired by Wendy Larson's theorization of the
"revolutionary spirit". See Larson (2009).
6 The contrast between Dirlik's notion of postsocialism and Pickowicz's is discussed in Lu (2007,
206).
7 This point will be further discussed in the following chapters dealing with the specific discourses of
national sentiments by different national subjects. Each post-l 989 discourse under scrutiny, as I will
demonstrate in these chapters, is closely related to the pre-1989 conditions.
8 David Harvey is one of the most influential scholars writing about post-Fordism and the
economic-cultural logics of globalization. See Harvey (1989).
9 Chatterjee distinguishes three "essential" moments in defining the development of nationalist
thought: the "moment of depart", which is an elitist project of defining the national essence; the
"moment ofmanoeuvre", in which the people are mobilized by a rhetoric of anticapitalism; and the
"moment of arrival", when the nation has congealed into a stable power ensuring the "passive
41
revolution" of capitalist transfonnation. Chattetjee believes that this schema represents the general
fonn of the transition for colonial to postcolonial states in the twentieth century. To some extent China
fits this paradigmatic mode. See Chattetjee (1986), also Anagnost (1997, 6-7).
10 Benavides (2006,8-9) provides this summary of the theories particularly concerning contemporary
cultural hegemony, power, and popular culture.
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42
CHAPTER II
HESHANG: THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SORROW AND WORRY
AND
THE NATIONAL PEDAGOGY OF REFORM
Heshang-Unnarrated National Sentiments?
River Elegy (Heshang ¥PJ1%) is a Chinese TV documentary series aired on Chinese
Central Television (CCTV) in 1988. Its provocative condemnation of the
thousand-year-old "yellow civilization" (huangse wenming ~-@.)( ~~) of China stirred
up a tornado of controversy among Chinese audiences. Intense debates and reflections on
the series have been going on both inside and outside China ever since its airing, making
River Elegy one of the most intriguing "phenomena"lin contemporary Chinese culture.
The Chinese title ofRiver Elegy is Heshang. "He" means river, and especially the
Yellow River which is the cradle of China's ancient civilization. "Shang" means to die
prematurely. The image of a premature death thus sets the tone for the whole
documentary, which can be readily understood as a "death song" of the
Yellow-River-centered Chinese civilization. Divided into six episodes-"In Search of a
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Dream" (Xunmeng ~~), "Fate" (Mingyun 1fI1;lg), "A Glimmering Light" (Lingguang
~Y6), "The New Era" (Xinjiyuan #JT~c5G), "Sorrow and Worry" (Youhuan 'I:jt,~), and
"Azure" (Weilanse if~{g), this documentary laments the decline (shuailuo ::&¥t) of
Chinese civilization (Su and Wang 1988,9) and calls for thorough reforms (gaige c~:9)fi)
aiming at making China a modem nation. As Su Xiaokang (;Jj: BJtll)--{)ne of the main
script writers of the TV documentary-says, Heshang is to "reckon the issue of the
Yellow River under the rubric of reform" and to "engage once again a comprehensive
reflection of the national history, civilization, and fate" (1988, 1).
Interestingly, the declared "comprehensive reflection" of the documentary starts
with nothing other than a visit to Chinese national sentiments (minzu qinggan ~~tw-~)
through a tragic accident in 1987. The first episode "In Search of a Dream" begins with
the following narrative:
On June 13, 1987, the rafting expedition on the Yellow River that had attracted
the interest of hundreds and thousands of Chinese people sent back bad news.
Members of two rafting teams from Luoyang and Beijing were killed when the rafts
overturned at the lower part of Lajia Gorge. Our heroes Lang Baoluo and Lei
Jiansheng, who had previously rafted through Tiger's Leap Gorge on the Yangtze
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River, were also swallowed up by the swift water of the Yellow River. For a while,
the entire nation was engaged in heated debate.
According to the news, these young men took this great risk because they
would not let the American rafter Ken Warren take away their right to be the first to
raft down China's rivers. Ken Warren was very puzzled by this. He said that no one
would object if Chinese came to America to raft down the Mississippi River. Of
course Mr. Warren could never associate today's rafting with the history of a
hundred years ago when the gunboats ofthe Western powers sailed China's rivers in
disregard of China's rights. Yet the youth ofChina cannot forget.
Now that these rafters had tossed their lives away in the Yellow River, should
we praise them for their patriotism or should we criticize them for their blind
national sentiments?2 (Su and Wang 1991, 101-2)
Some critics believe that the idea of minzu qinggan holds the key to the proper
understanding of the whole documentary. According to Toming Jun Liu, this opening
shows that nationalist concerns are the starting point and driving force ofHeshang. The
difference between the nationalism in Heshang and that of the rafters is that the latter is
"blind" (mangmu lr §). Assuming that the rafters' national sentiments signify "the
foolhardiness and the futility of a kind of sentimental nationalism that remembers the
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humiliation China", Liu believes that the main course of the nationalism in Heshang is to
call for the rational recognition that the enclosed ancient Chinese civilization, symbolized
by the Yellow River and the yellow earth, must join with the oceanic "blue" of the West
(Liu2001, 186-7).
Such a binarism between fallacious national sentiments and a more
intellect-orientated-thus better in his mentality-nationalism as embodied in Heshang is
predicated on Liu's postulation of nationalism. He argues that nationalism has two states
that should be treated as separate categories in order for "a clear comprehension of the
interrelationship". Minzu qinggan-national sentiments or sentimental nationalism-is
the unconscious state of nationalism, which is often unnarrated and "specifies more or
less a space of cultural anthropology and related sentiments". The conscious state of
nationalism is "state nationalism" that is often narrated and denotes the sphere of
governmental politics (2001, 181-3). Up to this point, the logic conclusion will be that the
nationalism in Heshang is a form of "state nationalism" that rationalizes unnarrated, often
"blind" national sentiments.
However, aside from reinforcing such a binarism by relegating to the margin of
human subjectivity the unconscious and unnarrated national sentiments waiting to be
rationalized, Liu simultaneously engages in his interpretation a paradoxical, sometimes
even self-contradictory, reinvigoration of the notion of national sentiments. He argues
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that he disagrees with critic Wu Guoguang's theory of "rational nationalism" in that it
places too much faith in the nation state's rationality and gives insufficient attention to
sentimental nationalism (2001, 183). Citing Johann Gottfried von Herder, he agrees that
the nation is a naturally formed society bounded together by nothing other than a
common culture and shared sentiments. Sentimental nationalism, in such a positive light,
is an indispensible part of the identity of anyone born in the homeland (183-4). According
to him, nationalism is a mnemonic dynamism constantly shaped by disquiet related to the
perceived needs of a nation in the present, and the dynamic process can be explained as
interactions between the two states of nationalism. Disquiet, as a manifestation of
national sentiments, can be defined as the feeling of a nation when confronting the
"foreign". Different types of disquiet can be analyzed and understood in terms ofhow a
past is selectively remembered (180, 184). As the title of his paper suggests, Heshang as a
whole is a case in point of such use of sentimental nationalism. At some point in his paper,
he even suggests that the unconscious state of nationalism is a sentimental existence
supported by all kinds ofnarratives specific to a culture. It is a huge mnemonic reservoir
containing what has been accumulated in the nation's narratives-language, literature,
philosophy, etc-that have been shaped by the nation's history and its natural
environment (181-2).
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The discursive interspersion ofthe relegation and reinvigoration of national
sentiments indicates Liu's indeterminacy over the function of the national sentiments in
Heshang. There are two directions of my inquiries to solve the doubts lurking behind
Liu's ambivalent understanding of the national sentiments in Heshang. First, at one point
Liu specifies that national sentiments are unnarrated, while at another venue he notes that
the sentimental existence of nationalism is supported by all kinds of narratives specific to
a culture. His ambiguous and self-contradictory descriptions of the "narratability" of
national sentiments pose two relevant questions on national sentiments that demand
answers: Are national sentiments narratable? If so, what changes does the narration of
national sentiments bring about? The answer to the first question is a quick yes. If
national sentiments do not go through a process of narration and become a narrative form,
in most occasions they do not qualify to be subjected to the analyses of humanities study.
If the national sentiments in Heshang are narrated, what changes does the narration
create? To answer this we have to go back to Liu's seminal concept of "disquiet". On the
one hand, disquiet is a manifestation of national sentiments; on the other hand, it is
related to the perceived needs of a nation in the present. Disquiet looms large because it,
according to Liu, "shapes" nationalism in general. From this theoretical frame it seems
that the nationalism in Heshang actually thrives upon a manifestation-that is,
narration-----ofnational sentiments, in the process of which the emotional forces of the
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sentiments are integrated with the practical needs of a nation recognized through the
"perception" that is dictated by human intellect. In other words, the nationalism in
Heshang is also a kind of national sentiments that are imbued with careful consideration
and intellectual thinking. In this sense it is safe to say that national sentiments, at least in
the narrated form, are not only what the nationalism in Heshang argues against, but also
what it argues for.
Relevant to this line of argument is the second direction of my inquiries. It casts
doubts over the claim of the "state nationalism", which inLiu's theorization refers to the
conscious state of nationalism that is often narrated and denotes the sphere of
governmental politics. As Ann Anagnost notes, a narrative requires the presence of an
enunciating subject. This simple fact directs our attention to the power of national
imagination to call forth subjects who "speak for" the nation. In the history ofmodem
China, the designation of who or what class represents the agency to propel the nation
forward in its historical destiny has been very much at stake in national struggles.
Implicit in this contestation has been a "politics ofpresence" in which the speaking
subject lays claims to or is attributed with the power to speak with the force of history. In
this sense, the national subject is made to embody abstract conceptions which are not
immediately present to experience-such as History, Nation, Society, People-but which
become emblematic of the nation speaking with the voice of history (1997,4).
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Liu's designation of "state nationalism" seems to rule out the possibility of subjects
other than the state to speak for the nation and get involved in governmental politics, to
which Heshang certainly gives the lie. This documentary exemplifies one ofthe strongest
voices made by Chinese intellectuals as a social group in the 1980s. Harking back to Su
Xiaokang's description of Heshang's main theme, the "comprehensive reflection ofthe
national history, civilization, and fate" of the documentary is exactly how intellectuals
like Su Xiaokang and Wang Luxiang, appropriating Anagnost's words, speak with the
force ofhistory and narrate the emblems ofthe nation. In this process Chinese
intellectuals in the 1980s fully demonstrate their agency as subjects speaking for the
nation. Moreover, often associating historical wrongdoings with contemporary social
ailments, every episode of the documentary implicitly criticizes the one-party political
system and different government policies. The anti-official ethos ofHeshang
undoubtedly accentuates the "other-than-the-state-ness" of Chinese intellectual subjects.
Heshang-Imperial Nationalism of Intellectuals?
If Liu's work represents some critics' indeterminacy over the characterization of the
national sentiments in Heshang, some other critics are more determined to deem national
sentiments as obstacles to shaping appropriate Chinese subjects for the cause of
modernity. A representative critique along this vein is offered by ling Wang. She bases
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her critique on the narrative ofHeshang as a clear embodiment of the sentimentality of
Chinese intellectual subjects. In a central section of her critique (1996, 121-7) Wang
argues that Su Xiaokang and his generation of enlightened intellectuals attempt to
provide us with a new perspective in place of the vision of the imperial past. And in
catering to the needs of the present and future, they argue that imperial nationalism,
which defined the interest of old China, must be replaced by a genuine cultural
enlightenment. However, such an attempt is destined to fail because:
Although the narrator attempts to ridicule the delusions of patriotic dreamers,3
conflicting emotions riddle the intentionally sarcastic voice with unrelieved
sentimentalism. The preaching of the futility of dreaming such a dream is
unmistakably accompanied by a deeply seated, albeit unconscious, nostalgia for the
golden past. Even at those moments when Su Xiaokang preaches most eloquently
the elimination of such nostalgia, his vision for the future is helplessly and
unconsciously embedded in the same rhetoric of imperialistic nationalism. At its
heart, Heshang often betrays the cause of enlightenment and lapses into the
nationalist discourse it is struggling so hard to free itself from. (1996, 122-3)
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To facilitate her argument that the enlightenment cause ofHeshang degenerates
ambivalentiy into its own opposite-imperial nationalism-because of the
sentimentalism of Chinese intellectuals, Wang brings forth the example of the dragon
metaphor. In Wang's opinion, the long-lasting, awe-inspiring dragon metaphor in Chinese
history that is mocked and repudiated by Su Xiaokang and his fellow iconoclastic
intellectuals at the beginning of the documentary, firmly comes back to haunt them with
its potent symbolism in the final episode because these intellectuals "never successfully
sever their deep emotional ties to what dynastic history symbolizes". In Wang's eyes,
Heshang's project ofliberating the present from the burden of history is thus
contradictory. When the construction of new mental categories is embedded within the
old nationalist and imperial discourse, such a project is doomed to contradict itself
(123-4).
Predicated on the idea that history is both the dream and the nightmare from which
the Chinese intellectuals under discussion have not awakened, Wang's narration depicts
Heshang as nothing but an atavistic effort modeled on the futile enlightenment cause of
the May Fourth intellectuals. She claims that "little has changed since the May Fourth
Movement" and Su Xiaokang and his fellow intellectuals inherited both the iconoclasm
and the "superiority-inferiority complex" directly from their May Fourth predecessors. As
she explains, "Since iconoclasm was generated by the external force of imperialism in the
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case ofMay Fourth, the enlightenment program could quickly reverse itself and be
transformed from a discourse of genuine self-reflection into a counterimperialist and
eventually nationalist discourse". The driving force behind such a "reverse" is the
"superiority-inferiority complex" that refers to "an ambivalent attitude that makes
Chinese intellectuals at once proud of and hostile toward their own cultural and national
heritage, while defiant toward and subservient to the imported Western culture at the
same time". It is this emotional complex that doomed the May Fourth Movement from
the beginning and compelled the enlightened reformers to give up the agenda of
enlightenment for the cause of patriotism (124).
Paralleling Su and his cohorts with the May Fourth intellectuals whose
enlightenment project, according to Wang, was drowned out by the cause of the national
salvation, Wang proceeds to argue that the tension between intellectual emancipation and
nationalism continues to characterize the struggles China is engaged in today in shaping
and articulating its own modernity. Constantly misguided by the obsession with the
wealth and power (fuqiang M~$) of the nation, therefore equatingfuqiang with
modernization, the post-Mao intellectuals like Su Xiaokang are still motivated by the
compulsion to recover the status of the "Dynasty of Heaven" and their modernity is
ultimately identical to the political and economic hegemony of a nation. Thus the claims
of enlightenment that are predicated on the autonomy of the individual inevitably
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contradict the utilitarian and collective interests of nationalism (124-6). With such
recognition of the historical function of the Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century,
Wang delivers a quite "sentimental" and pessimistic message to conclude her analysis:
Until enlightenment is generated from the genuine impulse of self-examination, until
China's intellectuals resolve their superiority-inferiority complex toward their own
culture and history, the project of enlightenment will remain a spurious one, forever
submerged by the thousand-year-old discourse ofpower. The lesson that Heshang
delivers is dire: The nationalist complex that characterizes the way the elite
intellectuals look at China's historical past determines the deep structure of their
historical imagination for the future. This is a vicious cycle that Su Xiaokang
himselfwams against, but which he involuntarily reproduces. (126-7)
Wang believes that Heshang is a vivid embodiment of how the "nationalist
complex" discouraged the genuine cultural enlightenment. Her critique of Heshang
creates more problems worthy of further exploration. A central thread of Wang's critique
is that the cultural enlightenment cause ofHeshang lapses into a kind of imperial
nationalism that contemporary Chinese intellectual subjects claim to argue against, but
deeply identify with. Thus she establishes a dichotomy between enlightenment and
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imperial nationalism in forming Chinese intellectual subjectivity. The first issue the
proposed dichotomy brings about is how to understand the "imperial nationalism" in
question. From various places in Wang's narration we can gamer three points: first, the
imperial nationalism is a kind of unrelieved sentimentalism ofChinese intellectuals;
second, it is an unconscious nostalgia for the "golden" imperial past when China as a
dynastic state possessed wealth, power, and the hegemonic status in the pre-modem age;
third, it is a compulsion to recover the status ofthe "Dynasty ofHeaven" in the
contemporary world. Based on the three points, Wang's imperial nationalism is intended
to characterize the national sentiments ofChinese intellectuals throughout the twentieth
century.
The second issue concerning the dichotomy is the validity of the enlightenment
project. Wang believes that "enlightenment" is a genuine self-critique leading to
intellectual emancipation of individuals. Applying a historical parallelism to the Heshang
producers and the May Fourth enlightened intellectuals, she argues that in the context of
modem Chinese history the claims of enlightenment that are predicated on the autonomy
ofthe individual inevitably contradict the utilitarian and collective interests of
nationalism. And the intellectuals' nationalism-shaped perspective on China's past
determines their historical imagination for the future, which produces a "vicious circle"
from which the Chinese enlightenment can never break away. Wang's narration brings to
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the fore the two statuses of enlightenment. One status is enlightenment in ideal or in
"claim", which is supposed to be a genuine self-critique; the other is enlightenment in
practice or in history, which refers to the historical facts of Chinese enlightenment in the
twentieth century. Ironically, if the enlightenment in practice is always how it "reversed"
into nationalism, it nevertheless attests to the historical significance and omnipresence of
nationalism, which to some extent invalidates the dichotomous construct of
enlightenment versus nationalism. In other words, the genuinely "enlightened" self is so
illusory that the self in reality is always fully immersed in, and actually becomes part of,
national sentiments.
A more dubious issue in Wang's characterization of the national sentiments of
twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals is the relationship of the sentiments to China's
imperial past. To delineate how the May Fourth intellectuals conceived the relationships
between nationalism, China's imperial history, and themselves is a giant project and is
certainly beyond the scope of this chapter. Here I will only focus my attention on the
so-called "imperial nationalism" of the Heshang producers. Generally speaking, I do not
agree with this characterization for a few reasons. First, this characterization has too little
direct support from the Heshang narrative. Throughout the section centering the imperial
nationalism, Wang offers only one textual example-the dragon metaphor-to support
her argument that the enlightenment cause ofHeshang degenerates into the imperial
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nationalism because of the sentimentalism of Chinese intellectuals. The textual evidence
in this section is too feeble to substantiate the argument. Second, the central theme of the
documentary is to reflect on the decline of Chinese ancient civilization in relation to the
contemporary problems ofthe post-Mao Chinese society, which is largely left untouched
in this characterization. To Wang, the documentary narrative is not what her analysis
should be based on, but that which works as a "camouflage" to the true meanings she
wants to excavate. It seems that the unsubstantiated belief in the "deeper" nostalgia
"behind the narrative" actually prevents Wang from looking into the documentary
narrative itself in the first place. Third, the narrative ofHeshang actually goes beyond if
not belies the seemingly in-depth parallelism between the Heshang producers and the
May Fourth enlightened intellectuals who, according to Wang, share the unconscious
nostalgia for the glorious imperial past and a compulsion to recover the status of the
"Dynasty ofHeaven" in the contemporary world. For example, ifit is arguable that the
"superiority-inferiority complex" caused the May Fourth intellectuals to "reverse" their
enlightenment project into national salvation, by no means can the same emotional
complex and its specific historical references account for the subjectivity ofpost-Mao
intellectuals like Su Xiaokang and his cohorts. Protean references in the documentary to
history from the arrival ofWestem imperialism in the mid-19th century to the 1980s
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indicate that in any event "the glorious imperial past" is not the only powerhouse for
shaping post-Mao intellectual subjectivity.
Furthermore, the questioning of whether the documentary narrative supports Wang's
argument on the imperial nationalism leads to the problematics in Wang's episteme of the
nation, the state, and the intellectual subjectivity. Prasenjit Duara describes a multiplicity
of historical representations of premodern political communities in China and India,
which include the representation oftotalizing communities that both resemble modem
nations and continue to be relevant to them. According to Duara, the modem nation is
formed through a process similar to that of its totalizing predecessors which deploys a
narrative ofdiscent4-the tracing of a history which legitimates its difference from the
Other-to fix and privilege a single identity from among the contesting multiplicity of
identifications. The representation of political community in the modem nation continues
to be shaped by the transactions between historical narratives and the discourses of the
modem nation-state (1995, 51-82). The nation-state-the "territorially sovereign form of
the modem nation" (81) in Duara's words-is an important player in appropriating the
meanings ofpremodern Chinese political communities-ofwhich a crucial one is the
dynastic state-to the ends of modem nation-building. As Duara renders, nation-states
seek to emphasize the unprecedented nature of the nation-state, because it is only in this
form that the people-nation has been able to realize itself as the self-conscious subject of
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History (29). In Wang's words, the imperial nationalism that characterizes the Heshang
producers-an unconscious nostalgia for the glorious imperial past and a compulsion to
recover the status of the "Dynasty ofHeaven" in the contemporary world-bespeaks the
obsession with the wealth and power of the nation. In light of Duara's insightful historical
analysis, it is clear that the "nation" in Wang's understanding is a highly politicized
construct defined by the interests of the modern nation-state, which looks back in the
imperial history and to some extent models itself on the dynastic state. Put differently,
what Wang's nationalism bespeaks-the obsession with the wealth and power of the
nation-is de facto the obsession with the wealth and power of the state.
Perhaps Wang is too aware of the importance ofthe modem state in the Chinese
nation-building project that she tends to equate the nation with the modern state. An
important constituent of her argument on the twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals'
imperial nationalism is the parallelism between the Heshang producers and the May
Fourth intellectuals. Specifically, she believes that the "superiority-inferiority
complex"-which doomed the May Fourth Movement from the beginning and compelled
the enlightened reformers to give up the agenda of enlightenment for the cause of
patriotism-also explains the failure of the cultural enlightenment project ofHeshang. It
seems that Wang does not think it is necessary to differentiate nationalism-the love for
one's nation-from patriotism-the love for one's state.5 Harking back to Ann
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Anagnost's observation, the designation of who or what class represents the agency to
propel the nation forward in its historical destiny has been very much at stake in national
struggles. However, the "politics of presence" in which the speaking subject claims to or
is attributed with the power to speak with the force of history is downplayed by Wang's
equation of the nation/nationalism with the state/patriotism. To Wang, any narrative of
nationalism--even it is not enunciated by the state and its bureaucratic system, as in the
case of Heshang-will always come back to the interests of the state. And the
enunciating subject-in the case ofHeshang, the intellectuals-is left with nothing other
than the national sentiments deemed as an unconscious nostalgia for, and a compulsion to
recover, the glorious past of the dynastic state. In this sense Wang's equation of the nation
with the state actually eliminates the possibility of studying national sentiments as a
narrated form to understand post-Mao intellectual subjectivity beyond a statist schema.
This chapter proposes a new perspective to read Heshang, tackling it as a
historically situated narrative that embodies a post-Mao intellectual discourse ofnational
sentiments. After a fallible but immense endeavor to characterize the sentimentality of
twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals on the whole with the imperial nationalism, in a
brief following section (1996, 127-30), Wang makes a V-turn in her approach to grapple
with the documentary. She explicitly notes:
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We need first of all to remind ourselves that [Heshang] was not produced for the
college history curriculum, but for mass consumption...The promotion of historical
action rather than the transmission of pure knowledge serves as the focal point of
reference to the emotive content ofHeshang.. .the production of the documentary is
meant to arouse the masses to action by effecting a deep structural transformation
not only of society and its ethos, but also of individuals and their moral and
psychological composition ...The deep structural transformation that Heshang hopes
to witness and contribute to, if not trigger, is a process that has to take place within
the consciousness of the newly discovered yet precariously balanced individual.
(128-9)
The recognition that Heshang is by nature a mass cultural product intended to bring about
changes of the mass-audience consciousness points out a more productive way to
interpret the documentary. That is, what the mass audiences experienced ofHeshang is
first and foremost the audio-visual narrative of the six-part TV documentary per se. And
if the narrative ever works on the mass-audience consciousness-a kind of general
subjectivity ofthe Chinese masses, the mass audiences must have understood the
meanings ofthe documentary within the specific context of the late 1980s wherein they
actually lived. Unfortunately, this section is so brief that Wang cannot engage in more
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substantial discussions to elucidate how exactly the documentary narrates the general
subjectivity of the Chinese masses.
This chapter will further explore the general subjectivity of the Chinese masses in
the narration ofHeshang by dealing with the documentary as a historically situated
narrative appealing to the popular interest of the mass audiences in the late 1980s. In
order to do that, this chapter will focus on national sentiments as the pivot of the
documentary narrative to understand the general subjectivity at issue. Looking back on
the previous scholarship on Heshang, especially that of Liu and Wang, what calls for
attention is their problematic approaches to national sentiments. Liu is hesitant to admit,
but paradoxically implies, that Heshang actually argues for a kind of national
sentimentality that integrates the emotional forces of the sentiments with the practical
needs of a nation discerned by human intellect. However, he explicitly advocates a
dichotomy between sentimental nationalism and state nationalism, and relegates national
sentiments to an unconscious and "blind" status as opposed to the conscious and
rational-thus more superior-status of the state nationalism. In Wang's case, she mostly
predicates her critique in the first place on that the national sentiments-the imperial
nationalism denoting an unconscious nostalgia for, and a compulsion to recover, the
glorious past of the dynastic state-predominate the subjectivity of the Heshang
producers. Largely arguing without textual support from the documentary narrative,
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Wang deploys an unsubstantiated parallelism between May Fourth intellectuals and the
Heshang producers to establish a problematic binarism between the enlightenment and
the imperial nationalism, in which the enlightenment in practice is always "reversed" into
nationalism because of Chinese intellectuals' unconscious national sentiments.
What both Liu and Wang have failed to properly understand is the multiplicity of
national sentiments. There are national sentiments both within and out o/the narrative of
Heshang. Liu rightly implies that Heshang actually argues for a kind of national
sentimentality that integrates the emotional forces ofthe sentiments with the practical
needs of a nation discerned by human intellect. These are the ''within'' national
sentiments that can be subjected to rational analysis. But he actually confuses the
''within'' national sentiments that the documentary propagates with the "out-of' ones-as
embodied by the deeds of the Chinese rafters mentioned at the beginning of the
documentary-that the documentary argues against. The dichotomy between sentimental
nationalism and state nationalism only adds to the misleading conception that national
sentiments in general are unnarrated and unconscious, and thus do not qualify as an
object for rational study. Wang's critique, on the other end, presupposedly characterizes
the Heshang producers with the so-called imperial nationalism. In Wang's discussion,
national sentiments are by and large associated not with the documentary narrative, but
with the enunciating subject of the narrative. In other words, what Wang's study of
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Heshang fleshes out about national sentiments almost exclusively falls in the "out-of'
category. What's more, both the unverified binarism between the enlightenment and the
imperial nationalism, and the tacit equation of the nation with the state, shed negative
light on the national sentiments of Chinese intellectuals as an unconscious,
out-of-narrative emotional force that "dissolves" Chinese intellectual subjectivity, which
precludes Wang's critique from treating national sentiments as a narrated form that can
lead to a proper understanding of post-Mao Chinese subjectivity.
This chapter will reset the critical focus onto the national sentiments within the
documentary narrative, and see through the national sentiments as a viable channel to
comprehend the subjectivity of the post-Mao Chinese masses. In fact, the narrative of
Heshang argues for national sentiments as a necessary spiritual quality of the Chinese
masses in post-Mao society, which integrates individual emotional forces with the
practical needs of the Chinese nation. However, the narration of the national sentiments
as a general spiritual quality shared by, and working on, the consciousness of the Chinese
masses does not contradict the distinct position ofthe Heshang producers in the narration
process. As mentioned above, the enunciating subject of the documentary narrative is
undoubtedly Su Xiaokang and his fellow Chinese intellectuals. In the narration they
actually decide what individual emotional forces and practical needs of the Chinese
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nation are included and reckoned, and how the relationship of the two is understood and
uttered-thus to fonn the national sentiments they are in favor of.
In what follows, I disentangle the documentary by identifying some of its most
significant issues pertaining to national sentiments. I argue that the key content of the
national sentiments that Heshang propagates is the consciousness of sorrow and worry
(youhuan yishi '17C,~~ i,g). Heshang's discourse ofyouhuan yishi aims at fashioning a
general Chinese subjectivity that dovetails with the ongoing refonn-the most important
historical condition of post-Mao Chinese modernity. The producers-the representatives
ofpost-Mao intellectual subjects-establish in the discourse the Chinese masses as the
"inappropriate other" of Chinese modernity. Specifically, I examine how the discussion of
"people quality" (renmin suzhi A~~M)-an important issue concerning the
consciousness of sorrow and worry-recognizes the historical crises of Chinese
civilization and seek solutions to them by resorting to reform, and how in the discussion
the producers defines in the frame of Chinese modernity the positionalities of the masses,
the state, and themselves.
History, the Consciousness of Sorrow and Worry, and People Quality
Heshang is a six-episode TV documentary aimed at providing a comprehensive
reflection of Chinese civilization and history. Each episode is equipped with a unique
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angle to interpret manifold historical events and figures, in which the national sentiments
that the documentary propagates are firmly grounded. Among all the episodes, the fifth
episode "Sorrow and Worry" most explicitly narrates the producers' understanding of the
consciousness of sorrow and worry in relation to history. The episode starts with a
retrospect of the natural disasters and threats the Yellow River has brought to the people
and society since the dawn of Chinese civilization. It highlights the immense power of
destruction produced by the cyclic flooding of the Yellow River. However, the narrative
does not stop at emphasizing the cyclic flooding as a catastrophic natural phenomenon.
"What is even more frightening", the narrative continues, "is that this kind of cyclic
destruction is not just a natural phenomenon in China, but a socio-historical phenomenon
as well". It says, "In measuring the feudal dynasties of Chinese history by a long
chronological yardstick, from their founding to their rise to a peak, from the gradual
emergence of crisis to the outbreak of turmoil and to collapse, they experience a violent
upheaval once every two or three hundred years". "This kind of collapse of the social
structure"-that is, "the destruction of the old dynasty and the rise of a new dynasty to
replace it"---demonstrates "a startling destructive force and cruelty" (Su and Wang 1991,
187).
The Heshang producers question the so-called "super stable structure"
(chaowendingjiegou m~~JE~s;f1;J) oftraditional Chinese society as embodied in the
---------- ----_.----
66
cyclic destruction of Chinese dynasties, and warns the audiences of the possible return of
its gloomy influence in contemporary society:
This mysterious super-stable structure has dominated us for two thousand years.
Yet today the gold imperial throne in the Forbidden City has long since become a
museum-piece, and the huge bureaucratic network of Confucian scholars has
vanished like ash and smoke. Yet it seems that the spectre of great unification still
wanders across China's great land. The nightmare of social upheaval is still fresh in
people's memories. Evan harder to overlook is the fact that bureaucratism, notions
of privilege, and localized corruption are still doing damage to our great plan of the
Four Modernizations. These ancient symbols of a sick society are very much like the
sediment brought down by the Yellow River each year, which day by day silts up the
river bed in its lower reaches and gradually builds up to a crisis.
As man-made disasters-such as the great forest fire in the Daxingan Range,
the airplane accident at Chongqing, the trains that crashed into each other, and the
epidemic of hepatitis in Shanghai occur one after the other,6 can we not say that our
decaying social mechanism is sending us subtle warnings, over, and over again?
67
Perhaps just as people are deeply concerned about the dikes that rise ever
higher, should our eternal super-stability not make us worried too? Has history not
given us enough food for thought already? (Su and Wang 1991, 196-7)
The documentary concludes this historical reflection of Chinese society and history with
the commentary of Jing Guantao (:£z:"XJI1~)---one of the two main scholarly advisors
consulted in Heshang:
I think it is very appropriate to use the "the sorrow and worry about Yellow River"
(Huanghe youhuan ,-¥"iiHJt}@) as a metaphor for China's history.. .Ifwe take a very
broad view ofthe two thousand years of China's feudal social history, we can
discover two salient characteristics: first, that Chinese feudal society has endured for
a very long time; and second, that every two or three hundred years there occurs a
great cyclical upheaval and destruction in which the whole society falls apart.
We think that there is a close, inherent relationship between these two
characteristics. We have presented the hypothesis that China's feudal society is a
super-stable system... While history is the facts ofthe past, I believe even more
strongly that history is an endless dialogue between past and present. In this
dialogue, we can create a very deep consciousness ofsorrow and worry. This is
68
beneficial to the people o/the present... At present I think that the consciousness of
sorrow and worry, whether for the Yellow River or for China, is a good thing. To
have a sense ofcrisis is in itself an indication of an historical consciousness, which
permits the entire people to stand on the height of history in order to sum up their
past. I believe that if the Chinese people can, while reflecting on their history, truly
come to understand their history, absorb its experiences, and then transform them
into a kind of historical wisdom, then the forthcoming twenty-first century will be a
new starting point from which the Chinese people can head towards prosperity.?
(197-9)
The Heshang producers have made it clear that the consciousness of sorrow and worry is
a historical consciousness, which reflects upon history as an endless dialogue between
past and present. What looms large in the construction is the complicated concept of
history, which seems to stand out as a "present past" that constantly brings to the fore the
contemporary impact of past aporias. The "present past" endows the consciousness of
sorrow and worry with a two-dimensional sense of urgency. On one hand, the
consciousness of sorrow and worry must demonstrate its capability to understand the
historical-thus both present and past--crises of China; one the other, the past is so
"present" that it urges looking for solutions for the crises.
69
The key content of the national sentiments that Heshang propagates is the
consciousness of sorrow and worry, the articulation of which is organized through a
systematic historical reflection of Chinese civilization. Underlying the theme is a
pervasive concern with China's "people quality". Heshang starts its inquiry on "people
quality" by asking the audiences a provocative question: "Why did the industrial
civilization and capitalism that bring vast wealth and power never happen in Chinese
history?" The producers of the documentary then provide four examples of critical
historical periods in which China missed the opportunity to develop industrial civilization
and capitalism: the Song Dynasty in the 12th century; the Ming Dynasty in the 16th_l i h
century; the late Qing period at the tum of the 20th century; and the Cultural Revolution
period of PRe. According to the documentary, that China missed the opportunity to
develop industrial civilization and capitalism is fundamentally determined by the "nature
of Chinese civilization"-that is, Chinese civilization is essentially an agricultural
civilization (Su and Wang 1991, 159-66).
It is intriguing that the crisis of China's "backwardness" (luohou ¥E)§) in the
narrative is primarily established with a comparison between the agricultural China and
the "capitalist West and Japan". It is "how developed the capitalist West and Japan were
and how comfortably their people lived" (Su and Wang 1991, 162) that sets off the
70
poverty and underdevelopment of today's China, allegedly occasioned by the nature of
Chinese civilization. The producers lament:
Let us open our eyes and see our people's situation on this planet! The World
Bank's annual reports reveal the following figures: Out of one hundred twenty-eight
nations in the world, China's average per capita GNP ranks about twentieth from the
bottom, in company with poor African countries such as Somalia and Tanzania.. .In
1960, China's GNP was equivalent to Japan's; by 1985, it was only one-fifth of
Japan's; in 1960, U.S. GNP exceeded China by 460 billion U.S. dollars, but by 1985
it exceeded China by 3 trillion 680 billion dollars.
Though we always thought we were making strides towards progress, how little
we knew that others were making far faster strides than us! Ifthis gap should
continue at present rates, some people have made a frightening comparison: that in
another fifty or sixty years, China will once again be in the situation of the Opium
War: that foreigners will possess foreign guns and cannon, leaving Chinese with
only long knives and spears. No wonder then that someone has made an even louder
appeal: that ifthings go wrong, China's global citizenship (qiuji J;j<~)will be
revoked! " (171)
71
This narration of China's "backwardness" has important implications in several aspects.
First, it sets the standards of industrial civilization, or the Western-style capitalism, as the
universal criterion to judge the "civilization quality". That China has missed so many
historical opportunities to initiate industrialization and develop capitalism results in the
backward position of China in today's world. Second, by setting the universal criterion,
China is put back into the mix of national competition in the contemporary globalized
world. Mao Zedong (-=51:f:*) discussed the possibility of China losing its global
citizenship in an August 1956 speech included in volume 5 of his Selected Works: "They
say [socialism] is superior, but if after fifty or sixty years, you still can't overtake the U.S.,
then what will you look like? In that sense, your global citizenship would be revoked!"s
(1977,296) Both Mao's alert and the lament of the Heshang producers automatically
position China as one member of the global community constituted ofmodem nations,
and call for a sense of crisis largely engendered by the backwardness of China in
comparison to the highly developed West, especially the U.S. The problematics of
Chinese civilization, as the Heshang producers imply, continue to influence the fate of
the contemporary Chinese nation. In other words, Chinese civilization is not a past issue
irrelevant to the present, but continuously embodies itself in the ups and downs of
contemporary China-the territorially defined nation-state.
72
Third, pertaining to the comparison between the agricultural civilization of China
and the industrial civilization of the West is the problem ofhow the "advancement" of the
Western civilization-the opposite of the backwardness of the Chinese civilization-is
understood and demonstrated. To the Heshang producers, the judgment of the
advancement or backwardness of a civilization is manifested in the comparison of GNP
numbers. The solid, impersonal numbers of GNP most eloquently measure the material
developments of a civilization/nation, or the lack thereof. The producers' focus on the
material developments broaches another notion in Heshang's discourse of civilization
quality-the relationship between material civilization (wuzhi wenming ~~)(~) and
spiritual civilization Uingshen wenming ~1~)(~). At this juncture, civilization refers
not to the entire range of cultural and technological developments characteristic of a
certain time, or place, or way of production-e.g. Chinese civilization and American
civilization, or agricultural civilizations and industrial civilizations-but to specific
developments of a certain civilization in the former sense.
Partha ChatteIjee notes that the anticolonial nationalisms in Africa and Asia cannot
be subsumed within a modular adoption of the West, but are predicated on a difference,
marked out by dual domains of the material and the spiritual, in which the latter bears the
essential markers ofnational identity. These spiritual resources reassure that the nation is
the selfsame subject emerging out of an immemorial past, that it can, indeed, claim a past
73
and a future (1986).9 Although the Heshang producers also acknowledge the duality of
the material and the spiritual, they nevertheless emphasize the congeniality of the two.
After summarizing the failure of Chinese civilization to produce industrialization and the
subsequent wealth and other material developments, the producers voice such comments:
There are some scholars who don't feel that China is a "failed civilization" just
because it didn't produce industrialization. On the contrary, they appreciat.e the
bucolic atmosphere of this agricultural civilization with a low standard ofliving.
(color: peasants driving donkey carts loaded with casks)
Yet the problem lies in how this civilization has nurtured the Chinese people.
As late as 1980, in a rural community forty kilometers from Lanzhou, the average
per capita grain consumption was only twenty to fifty kilos; in two out ofthree
peasants homes, the earthen kang (J;it) lacked a mat; on the average, three people
would share a single ragged quilt; and over sixty percent of people had no padded
cotton clothes for the winter.
(Poor mountain village ofwooden shacks. A mother pig leading piglets. Camera
approaches a cave-house dug beneath ground level & looks down from above.)
74
The style of small-scale production has also created a whole set ofvalues
stressing setting low targets in order to keep oneselfon a psychological equilibrium.
Are not philosophies oflife such as "being content with one's lot", "taking things as
they come", "not taking risks", and "even a bad life is better than a good death" still
practiced by the great majority ofpeople? When we asked this youth in this northern
Shaanxi village why he remained at home in poverty and didn't go out to seek his
fortune, he responded "my mom and dad didn't give me the guts to do so"!
(Chinese muslims in white caps praying. Close-ups ofpeasants' faces. Peasants
bum spirit-money and incense. Film crew interviews young man in green army
fatigues.)
In the vast backwards rural areas, there are common problems in the peasant
quality (nongmin sushi :&~~~)lO such as a weak spirit of enterprise (chuangye
chongdong .g1J~{1:j:J~}]), a very low ability to accept risk, a deep psychology of
dependency and a strong sense ofpassive acceptance of fate. No wonder that some
scholars sign with regret: faced with the people quality such as this, not to mention
the many limitations of government policy, even if a great economist like Keynes
were to come back to life, what could he do about it? It's not the lack ofresources,
nor the level of GNP, nor the speed [ofdevelopment], but rather the low people
quality that is the essence of this so-called notion of"backwardness".
75
(Series of close-ups ofpeasant faces, ending with man in a blue cloth hat, with a
tobacco pipe: his eyes and mouth wide open in amazement.)
(Su and Wang 1991, 166-70,234-7)
In the lengthy citation above, the producers highlight the "style of small-scale
production" of the Chinese agricultural civilization as the linchpin to understand the
relationship between the material civilization and the spiritual civilization. Not only has
the style of small-scale production decided the failure of Chinese civilization to provide
vast wealth and improved living conditions ofpeople-i.e. the lack of the material
developments, and therefore the lack ofmaterial civilization, it has also created a whole
set of values that, according to the producers, has contaminated the spirit of the Chinese
masses. The low people quality is the manifestation of the lack of spiritual developments.
The lacks of both material civilization and spiritual civilization are caused by the same
reason-the style of small-scale production. The congeniality of the material and the
spiritual is further accentuated by the last paragraph of the above citation, in which the
producers indicate that the ''backwardness'' is embodied not only in the lack of material
developments, but also, if not more essentially, in the low spiritual quality of the Chinese
masses. The strongly rhetorical question concerning Keynes drives home that at least for
some scholars, the low people quality even has a decisive influence on economic
76
activities. That is, to some extent the low people quality-China's lack of spiritual
civilization---determines her failure in the pursuit ofmaterial developments.
Heshang's discourse of people quality bases the recognition ofthe historical crises
of China on the congeniality, instead of the split, of the material civilization and the
spiritual civilization. At this juncture, civilization refers not to the whole cultural and
technological developments characteristic of a certain time, or place, or way of
production, but to specific developments of a certain civilization in the former sense.
Chinese civilization is not a past irrelevant to the present, but continuously embodies
itself in the ups and downs of contemporary China-the territorially defined nation-state.
As the basis ofthe nation's sovereignty, the people were old, and yet the people had to be
reborn to partake of the new world. The nation emerged in the name of the people, but the
people who mandated the nation would have to be remade to serve as their own sovereign
(Duara 1995, 32). Intrinsic to the idea of the nation as deeply historical is the concept of
the people as embodying the primordial character of the nation (Anagnost 1997, 79).
Hence there is little surprise that in post-Mao China the issue of the "low people quality"
has come to signify the root cause of China's "historic failure of the nation to come to its
own" (1997, 77),11 which constitutes the fundamental source for the "sorrow and worry"
the documentary propagates.
77
Interestingly, if we focus on the previous citation once again, it is easy to notice that
the target of the producers' criticism is exclusively peasants (nongmin ;& ~). The
emblems of the low quality of the Chinese masses are the peas~ts, who, according to the
producers, have "a weak spirit of enterprise, a very low ability to accept risk, a deep
psychology of dependency and a strong sense of passive acceptance of fate". This
discursive gesture indicates an interesting doubleness, in which an intellectual subject
detaches itself from the masses-especially the peasants-and in tum criticize the masses
as the "inappropriate other" as from a distance. Few critics will miss Heshang's blunt
elevation of Chinese intellectuals as the authority ofthe historical reflection of China's
past and present. As Jing Wang puts it, in Heshang there is little ambiguity over who
should assume the cultural authority. Nowhere can one find a better prescription of such a
privileged role of intellectuals than in the last episode: "History, however, created a very
unique species for Chinese people-the intellectuals ...The weapons that could eliminate
ignorance and superstition are held in their hands; they are those who could conduct a
direct dialogue with maritime civilization;12 they are those who would irrigate the yellow
earth with the fresh sweet spring of science and democracy!" (1996,134)
According to Ann Anagnost, this detached objectification of the other within the
nation-space is what Gyan Prakash, in the context of colonial India, has called "second
sight", the articulation of class difference within a colonial frame. Prakash uses the
78
"inappropriate other" in the sense of the subaltern as both the other ofmodernity-a
"necessary but embarrassing presence"-and that which eludes appropriation into the
project of modernity and thus engenders anxiety about the very constitution of this binary.
In China today, this distanced gaze is allowed by a few speaking subjects, among which
there is the group of intellectuals (1997, 77).
In tracing the history of institutionalizing Western science in museums and
exhibitions in colonial India, Prakash notes that the rearticulation of the
Western-prototypical science-superstition opposition into an Indian non-binary
relationship between wondrous science and knowledge-seeking wonder opened up an
ambivalent space for the subjectivity and agency of Western-educated Indian elites. So
long as the propagandizing ofWestern science was construed as a conquest over Indian
superstition, there was no place for these elites. But because the functioning ofmuseums
and exhibitions reformulated conquest as translation, the Indian elites could surface as
subject-agents with second sight. It was precisely between the utterance of the text and
the process of articulation that the elite found its second sight. Having found it, the elite
went on to distinguish their visual power from the superstitious eye of the subaltern
masses whose education was their task. This became possible because the functioning of
museums and exhibitions required that the superstitious eye become curious (1992,
163-4).
79
The Heshang producers are similar to the colonial India elites in many aspects. First,
they both depend on their reworking of the imported Western discourses to appeal to the
non-Western "indigenous" peoples. Like the case of India elites importing Western
science into India, the producers of the documentary have to revamp the
Western-prototypical discourse of industrial civilization and work out the liaisons
between the revamped version and the context of contemporary China. The elites in both
national contexts can successfully do so partly because they are, or at least they claim to
be, part of the indigenous cultures. What if, we can imagine, it is the British colonial
government in India or the US embassy in China to preach the same Western discourses
ofknowledge to the Indians or the Chinese? An unwelcome gesture is almost predestined.
It is precisely through their reworking aided by their identity as "one of our own", or in
Prakash's words, through their reformulation of conquest as translation, that the
disseminations of the Western discourses ofknowledge are made possible. Second, they
both establish their cultural authorities in the importing processes by appointing their own
inferior others within the national-spaces. As that in colonial India the second sight of the
elites emerges in the process of encountering the objects in the museum, out of the
bewilderment poised in between scientific gaze and superstition (Prakash 1992, 165), the
discussion of Chinese people quality in Heshang furnishes a distanced gaze of the
producers that crafts a privileged niche within the national-space for the intellectuals in
80
the process ofdesignating the vast masses as people of low quality. Third, they both rely
on the visual power of their pedagogical media to educate their respective "subaltern
masses". In colonial India the survival of the elites' sight necessitated that their
pedagogical media-museums and exhibitions--ean catch the "superstitious eye" of the
Indian masses. In post-Mao China, the emergence ofHeshang also represents a new trend
in the process of intellectuals obtaining the cultural authority. "TV is after all [a] cultural
[form] that focuses on visuality", the director ofHeshang Xia Jun (~:.!MO says, "and those
independent, influential paragraphs of visual languages would probably leave an
impression on the audiences" (1988, 107-8). Judging from the conspicuous mass fever
inspired by the airing of the documentary, it is safe to say that the application of the
visual media TV is critical to get the intellectuals' ideas across to, and arouse the curiosity
of, the masses. In other words, what socially mobilizes the distanced gaze of the
producers and endows them with distinguished cultural power is the mechanism ofmass
communication that focuses on visuality. It is the mass-media mechanism that guarantees
the efficiency of the producers' pedagogical project to define for the masses what they
should be sorry and worried for.
To sum up, the constructing of the low-quality masses as the inappropriate other of
post-Mao Chinese modernity furnishes the Heshang producers with the position of
cultural authority. In the process of tracing the origins of the "backwardness" of Chinese
81
civilization, the producers fashions themselves as a superior "national self' in opposition
to the inappropriate other-the exact mass audiences the documentary is addressing. In
their tutelage faulting the inappropriate other, the Heshang producers establish their
powerful position as the legitimate subject "speaking for" the nation.
Reform, Spirit of Enterprise, and the Inappropriate Other
The Heshang producers unwaveringly tum to "reform" for the solution. At the
beginning of Episode Four "The New Era", they claim with firm determination that
reform is the "ineluctable current of history" (1991, 161):
Right now we are standing at a crossroads: either we can allow our ancient
civilization to continue to decline, or we can force it to acquire the mechanism of
revitalization. But no matter which way we choose, we cannot shirk this historical
responsibility. (162)
The rendition of a "historical crossroad" does not actually suggest an alternative to
reform. Instead, the "either. .. or..." rhetoric highlights the vision that to revitalize the
Chinese civilization is the only option because "allowing our civilization to continue to
decline" is certainly out of the question. According to the producers, reform is the
82
channel through which the transformation of the Chinese civilization is made possible.
That is, reform will realize the transformation of the agricultural civilization into an
industrial one, which will mean the revitalization of Chinese civilization.
The objectification of Chinese peasants as the inappropriate other within the
nation-space speaks of the low people quality as an origin of China's historical failure to
accomplish such a transformation. To improve the quality of the Chinese masses is thus a
primary focus of the kind of "reform" advocated by the Heshang producers. At one point
ofthe documentary narrative they utter with hard-won relief:
At present Zhao Ziyang (~~~B)13 is finally able to say directly and forthrightly
that:
"The socialist economy is a planned commodity economy on the foundation of
public ownership. This is the scientific conclusion our Party has drawn about the
socialist economy; it is a great advance in Marxism and is the fundamental
theoretical underpinning of our country's economic structural reform."
(Reappearance ofthe title: The New Era)
(color: close-up of Zhao Ziyang. The stage of the Great Hall of the People, Nov.
1987, with banners proclaiming the 13th Party Congress. Delegates at the meeting;
camera zooms in on the red star in the ceiling.)
83
Over the past century, this vast western Pacific Ocean has uninterruptedly sent
our continent both shame and hardship, while today over its stormy surface there
would seem to float that vast wealth which so strongly tempts us ...The western
Pacific is right now becoming the new stage for the world economy. Destiny is once
again giving us a once-in-a-millennium chance. Our coastal areas, silent for
centuries, this Gold Coast of the Chinese people, with an appetite long held in check,
are now the first to rush towards the Pacific.
(The Pacific Ocean. Surf breaking on the shore. Aerial view of city. Beach. Oil
exploration platform moored at dock. CAAC plane lands. Waves on the beach.)
The Chinese people at this moment are more eager than ever before to enter the
world market (shichang rjJ:l:m) ...
We have now finally understood that we want to have an outer-directed
economy... (172-3,240-1)
However, their happiness at witnessing the reform that has prompted the littoral people to
develop a market economy is clouded by a deeper sense of sorrow and worry towards the
people of the periphery:
84
(Scene of a thousand people from Ansai in northern Shaanxi playing waist-drums)
These old men and young guys, whose ancestors once erupted from this
continental heartland to conquer all of China, and now still bound to this shrunken
stretch ofland and with it their once magnificent energy has also diminished. It's
hard to believe that these few young men are actually members of this lively team of
one thousand waist-drummers. Does it mean that their vitality (shengmingli 1:.iP fJ)
will forever be expended only in the frenzy of playing the waist-drums? (214)
What the Heshang producers feel sorry and worried about is these peasants' aimless
waste of their vitality. Compared to the littoral people whose spirit of enterprise was
incited by, and has in tum fueled the progress of, the reform aiming at developing a
Chinese market economy, the cathartic waist-drum playing ofAnsai people only lays bare
northwestern peasants' torpor towards the newly-emergent reform. The producers'
comparison between the littoral people and the Chinese peasants living in the periphery
seems to suggest that developing the market economy is critical to improving people
quality. The level ofthe market-economy development in a certain area to some extent
decides the level ofpeople quality in that area. In this sense the producers actually define
people quality through the perspective of its "fitness" to the market-economy-oriented
reform. In other words, people quality is embodied in a market-oriented spirit of
85
enterprise-a self-benefiting spirit that actively seeks material interests and creates value
by offering a product or service, by carving out a niche in the market that may not exist
currently, and by identifying a market opportunity and exploiting it through organizing
available resources effectively to accomplish an outcome that changes existing
interactions within a given sector.
In this light Heshang insists that the Chinese masses-the inappropriate other-be
awakened by the market-economy-oriented reform and be made into a more
"appropriate" existence within the frame of Chinese modernity. In the case of "Science
goes native" in colonial India, the educated elites appealed to the masses through the
reformulation of the science-superstition opposition into a non-binary relationship
between wondrous science and knowledge-seeking wonder. In post-Mao China a strategy
of dramatic demarcation of the national-space is deployed in Heshang to "make
appropriate" the largely torpid Chinese masses:
An even greater potential problem is the extreme unevenness of economic
development, which is revealing itself now in a "Matthew effect" in which the
backward areas get increasingly backward, and the advanced areas increasingly
advanced. The daily-increasing severity in the difference between poor and rich
86
areas has...caused people to be greatly concerned for the homeland of our
civilization-the vast yellow-soil plateau.
At the same time that the consumer expectations of city-dwellers in the south
are fixed on the living standard of Hong Kong and Macao, there remain a
considerable number of northern peasants who are still struggling to feed and clothe
themselves.
At the same time that the commodity economy in the East has already
penetrated the very cells of the family, there are some backwards areas in the West
that are still waiting for the state to give them a "blood transfusion". (Su and Wang
1991, 178-9)
This dramatic demarcation of the national-space indicates a sharp contrast between the
developed, wealthy, civilized regions of the littoral and the backward, poverty-ridden
regions of the periphery. This discursive maneuvering "internalizes" the contrast between
the Western industrial civilization and the Chinese agricultural civilization and transforms
it into a domestic contrast between the developed and the underdeveloped. This contrast
has a two-fold implication: First, the low people quality has greatly held back the
development of the periphery; second, accompanying the crisis is the hope, which lies in
that the underdeveloped areas more closely follow the steps ofthe developed littoral to
87
engage in the reform. The originally incompatible binary between the Western-style
industrial civilization and the masses of the agricultural civilization has been transformed
into a non-binary relationship, in which the masses of the agricultural civilization are
prescriptively endowed with the capability to live up to the standards of the "high
quality" through transformation. The discourse of the difference between the industrial
civilization and the agricultural civilization has been appropriated by the Heshang
producers into one of"not yet", which deterministically foresees the realization of the
transformation of the Chinese agricultural civilization. What calls for attention at this
juncture is the agency of the enunciating intellectual subjects. Their dramatic demarcation
of the national-space seems once again to suggest their irreplaceable position as the
speaking subject for the nation. Their status as the cultural authority is substantiated by
their prescription of the market-economy-oriented reform as the hope to increase the
quality of the Chinese masses. To some extent, the demarcation of the national-space
becomes the surrogate of the distance between the speaking intellectual subjects and the
"spoken-for" low-quality masses. How well the different parts of the latter can defer to
the teachings of the former results in their respective statuses in the frame of post-Mao
Chinese modernity. The documentary seems to suggest that the more the masses learn
from the intellectuals, the better their own situations-and by extension, the Chinese
nation-will be.
88
This section discusses how the documentary looks for solutions to the problem of
low people quality. This concern with low people quality is intended to construct the
necessity for a national pedagogy of reform as well as to instigate the mass emotions of
sorrow and worry. The emotional force of sorrow and worry makes it even more urgent
for the national pedagogy to address such poignant questions: How are the unwashed
masses to be made into modern people of high quality? How are the Chinese masses
remodeled from the state of backwardness and ignorance to that of modernity? In their
preaching of the market-economy-oriented reform as the solution, the Heshang producers
nevertheless deploy the strategy of dramatic demarcation of the national-space, in which
the intellectuals' status of the cultural authority is consolidated.
Weak Political Agency, the Inappropriate Masses, and the Cultural Authority of
Intellectuals
On another register, the Heshang producers relate people quality not only to the
masses' entrepreneurial "fitness" to the market economy, but also to the masses' political
agency in contemporary politics. Ann Anagnost rightly notes that in post-Mao China
constructions of low quality reanimate a party apparatus that has willingly ceded much of
its control over the economy with a new sense of mission to remodel the Chinese people
from a state of backwardness and ignorance. The inflow of colossal foreign capital is
----~----
89
indispensible to the construction of a national structure of market economy. The
speculative gaze of the foreign capital becomes translated into the party's obsessive
concern with a new architectonics of disciplinary practices regulating work and
leisure-inciting greater productivity with the lure of an emerging mass commodity
culture and arousing the "latent potential" of the Chinese worker to produce more and
better. Her field work at Jiangdong Township-the rural area located just beyond the
outside perimeter of Nanjing City-indicates that through the "remodeling" and
"disciplining" some rural communities of the southeastern coastal areas are ready to
become integrated into global flows of capital and labor. (1997, 76-8)
Both the Heshang producers and the party-state agree that the Chinese
masses-especially the peasants-are an "object" that must be awakened by the refonn
from a state of torpor. However, the post-Mao state and intellectuals are different in their
refonnist focuses and strategies. This kind of differences is clearly fleshed out in the
relationship of power and market. The state and the intellectuals differ in who should be
involved in the making of a political system that best accommodates the construction of a
national market economy. As Anagnost notes, the state addresses the masses as incapable
ofpolitical responsibility, thereby in need of a strong party organization to subject them
to the disciplinary practices of the state's symbolic order. The project of some
intellectuals, on the other hand, addresses the masses directly as a "call to anns", a plea to
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aspire to political agency (79). Heshang embodies such a plea in its discussion ofpeople
quality. The producers appeal:
Only when we can develop a healthy market can we ensure that opportunity, equality,
and competition will start to link; yet this is precisely the thing that our people with
their ancient civilization know the least about.
As long as competition exists without the prerequisite of equal opportunity,
then the loosening of price control, which seem to be appropriate to the rules of a
commodity economy, can actually create economic disorder and dislocation; the
friction between the old structure and the new one will cancel out the positive
elements on each side; the many evils such as "bureaucratism", "feudalism", the use
ofpublic power for private ends, and so forth will all seem to find their "common
yardstick" and reflect themselves in society in the form of commodity prices ...And
if for this reason we lose the support of the majority for economic reform, then
China will once again be mired in stagnation. (Su and Wang 1991, 175-6)
They indicate that the market-economy-oriented reform is never only about the attraction
of foreign capital or the numbers of economic growth. In order to develop a "healthy"
market, China must also develop a new political system that can maintain the positive
91
elements of the market economy. In their words, competition must exist with the
prerequisites of opportunity and equality that should be guaranteed by the political
system.
Heshang bespeaks what the Chinese masses should feel sorry and worried about is
not only the lack of the new system, but also their inactiveness in the participation of
constructing such a system. To the Heshang producers, an important criterion for people
quality should be the masses' political agency and participation in contemporary politics.
They pungently ask:
And yet, while reforms move ahead quickly, how many Chinese are
consciously participating in them?
A series of reports from the Chinese Citizens Political Psychology Research
Group has indicated that Chinese citizens very commonly exhibit an overly-cautious
attitude towards political participation. Of citizens surveyed, 62.41 % said that "they
were very careful about discussing political issues", while 73.79% said that they
either "agree with", "basically agree with" or "did not oppose" the statement that
"It's best to minimize one's participation in politics". They continue to worry that
political participation could invite trouble for them, and they continue to lack a
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feeling of security about political participation...This will definitely constitute a
serious obstacle to the progress of democracy (minzhuhua ~'±1t). (1991,215)
To readers with attentive ears, the leap from the economical reform to the "progress of
democracy" is a little far-fetched in the above citation. After all, there is no consensus on
how the reform should be theoretically defined and practically conducted. The fact is that
a significant portion of the Chinese population, as the producers have admitted earlier in
the documentary, has "consciously participated" in the reform, especially in activities of
the economic realm. However, the worry about weak political agency as another
embodiment oflow people quality does point at a direction of the Chinese reform
deviating from the course laid down by the party-state. While the direct involvement of
the Chinese masses in the establishment of a new democratic political system is not the
primary goal of the party-state-dictated reform, it is the option proposed by the Heshang
producers who truly believe in their authoritative position as the speaking subject for the
nation.
How do we understand this discourse that inspires from different angles constant
sorrow and worry about low people quality? How does the discourse reflect the
relationship between the self-appointed authority of the intellectuals and the inappropriate
masses? In the discussion of science and the subaltern in colonial India, Prakash argues:
93
The project of science had begun by targeting the subaltern as the object to be
transformed by the exposure to new forms ofknowledge. But those defined as
ignorant and superstitious could never be fully understood or completely
appropriated-for if they ever became fully intelligible and completely assimilable,
the project of educating them would have come to an end. Therefore, if the lower
classes were silenced or made to speak only through "superstition," they were also
assured an intractable presence in the discourse of colonial science; the discourse
had opened an incommensurable gap between elites and subalterns that could never
be accurately measured or closed. (1992, 168)
In a similar vein, Heshang's blaming of the Chinese masses for their weak political
agency fashions an a priori denial of the commensurability between the intellectuals and
the masses. In a deeper sense, the incommensurability between the wise authority of the
national self-the intellectuals-and the inappropriate masses is desired by the Heshang
producers because, as Prakash has argued in the case of the colonial India, if the objects
of the national pedagogy "became fully intelligible and completely assimilable, the
project of educating them would have come to an end". Put differently, it is precisely the
constant discursive construction of the low people quality-first the lack of
94
entrepreneurial spirit, then the lack of political agency, as embodiments of the
"intractability" of the Chinese masses-that makes necessary a lasting second sight of the
post-Mao intellectuals functioning as the cultural authority who can always come to the
rescue. In this sense the existence of the inappropriate masses is crucial to the
sustainability of the cultural authority of the post-Mao intellectuals.
Inasmuch as the masses are spoken for by the intellectuals, the intractability of the
masses as the inappropriate other in the frame ofChinese modernity is ineluctable in the
intellectual discourse speaking of the consciousness of sorrow and worry. What matters
most is not so much about the authenticity of the representational content of the discourse
as about the speaking gesture that bases the cultural authority of the speaking subject on
the constructed intractability of the other.
The "Elusive Masses"? Contextualizing the Three Sights in Post-Mao China
Pushing further from Gyan Prakash's stance, there is one more angle we can utilize
to perceive Heshang's discourse of the consciousness of sorrow and worry in relation to
the positioning of the inappropriate other within the national-space. As Anagnost has
noted, Prakash has paid in his study enough attention to the possible agency of the
inappropriate other. He calls attention to the phenomena that the subaltern India masses
eluded appropriation into the project of modernity and thus engendered anxiety about the
95
very constitution of the binary between modernity and its other. In his seminal analysis of
rumors from the Indian masses about the agricultural exhibitions held by the British
colonial government in the l850s, Prakash notes that the colonial rulers registered the
intractability of the masses when, wishing to uplift peasants by dazzling them with
agricultural exhibitions, they were shocked by rumors sweeping the Madras countryside
that said the real purpose ofthe exhibitions was to plot a new tax scheme or to convert
Hindu to Christianity. In interpreting the rumors the government tried to "normalize"
them as attributable to the masses' ingrained superstition (1992, 168-9). Prakash argues
that the very strategy of normalization by showing the far-fetched nature of the rumors
opened a place for the subaltern, for its agency-rumors "designedly spread and
seized"-and for its "original" speech. The very strategy ofdefining and appropriating
the Other in rumors compels the colonial officials to give life to rumors, to make a place
for "absurd" tales (169). In accommodating them, the elites opened their discourse to the
wild contagion of indeterminacy characteristic of rumors, to the menace of their shadowy
origins, and to their reckless reverberation once set forth in motion. Anticipating a similar
outbreak of rumors due to the impending census operation, Abdool LuteefKhan, an elite
Bengali Muslim, recalled the atmosphere created by rumors at the time of the Alipore
Agricultural Exhibition in 1864. These rumors prompted Khan to launch a campaign of
education. He issued a pamphlet in Urdu which, along with its Bengali translation, was
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96
widely distributed by the government (169-70). Prakash concludes his analysis with the
following comments:
It is true that later exhibitions did not record similar outbreaks of rumors, but the
subaltern continued to occupy an intractable position in colonial and Indian elite
conceptions; if the lower classes did not spread the contagion of rumors, they
disclosed bad cultural taste in their predilection for amusement that exhibitions had
to provide in order to attract them (170).
Prakash correctly notes that the very act of eluding the appropriation of
modernity-here creating and disseminating rumors about exhibitions-demonstrates the
agency of the subaltern masses. Although our knowledge about these acts is totally based
on the preserved narratives ofthe colonial rulers and Indian elites, their recordings,
retellings, and rebuffings of the subaltern rumors nevertheless "give life" to the
intractable agency of the masses in the frame of colonial Indian modernity. If the
distanced gaze ofthe educated elites is the second sight, the gaze of the British colonial
government can be regarded as the "first sight", and the agency ofthe subaltern masses as
the "third sight". As Prakash's study has demonstrated, the second sight in colonial India
usually emerged out of the tension between the first sight of "appropriating" and the third
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97
sight of "eluding the appropriation". The national pedagogy of the second sight largely
chose to side with the first sight insofar as the elites also defined the subaltern masses as
inappropriate and tried to change them. In the frame of colonial Indian modernity, the
third sight was usually confronted with an ally of the first sight and the second, and the
national pedagogy of the second sight usually worked better on the subaltern than that of
the first. We can clearly see this in Prakash's description of the result ofAbdool Luteef
Khan's effort to prevent the generation of the rumors about the Alipore Agricultural
Exhibition in 1864. That is, Khan's effort-the embodiment of the national pedagogy of
the second sight-prevented the "similar outbreaks of rumors", but the intractability of
the subaltern masses remained: The subaltern continued to occupy an intractable position
in colonial and Indian elite conceptions.
The historical conditions of post-Mao China are quite different from those of
colonial India in the mid-1800s. This chapter deems Prakash's study as a good
application of subaltern theories within a third-world national context, but does not take
for granted the conclusion of his study. That is, this chapter turns a suspicious eye on the
generalization of his conclusion on the situation of colonial India-the third sight was
confronted with an ally of the first sight and the second, and the national pedagogy of the
second sight worked better on the subaltern than that of the first.
98
How, in the new context of post-Mao China, do the relationships between the three
sights fashion themselves through Heshang? What does Heshang tell of the relative
positionalities of the intellectuals, the masses, and the state in the frame of Chinese
modernity? How do we dialectically understand the documentary's national pedagogy of
reform in relation to the elusive agency of the low-quality Chinese masses? With these
questions in mind, I revisit Heshang's claim of weak political agency as an embodiment
oflow people quality. In one article Wang Luxiang (.:E.¥fg)-another main script writer
of the TV documentary-talks about the origin of the producers' concern for the Chinese
masses' weak political agency:
At Ansai we14 met a group of young peasants. They told us that they joined the
splendid thousand-people waist-drum team organized by the cultural bureau of the
county when the joint Chinese-Japanese production team came to shoot the
documentary Yellow River. The production team paid one yuan to each member of
the waist-drum team. But the money was appropriated by the county government.
When they told us this their tone was gentle, slightly complaining, but never upset. I
was somewhat saddened. Chinese peasants who are so plain and docile never
thought it was illegal that the county government blackmailed and exploited them
under the name of "government". They silently suffer from all kinds of things like
99
this, do not know how to fight back, and do not know that it is their basic human
right that they must strive for and defend. They regarded us as people sent from the
central government. They didn't talk until they were asked. When they actually
talked, they talked about this like it was some boring story of somebody else.
Then we went to Henan...The quality of the peasants here were quite different
from that of the northern Shaanxi peasants. They were very emotional, and
sometimes sarcastic, when they expressed criticism [of the government]. They made
loud complaint about the low prices of agricultural products and the constantly
increasing prices of instruments of labor (shengchan ziliao 1:.f= '8i -*4). Almost all
of them knew this couplet (duilian xtmc): "I refuse to buy your overpriced chemical
fertilizers; 1 refuse to sell my underpriced wheat-I do not give a damn as long as 1
have enough to eat!" They started to bargain prices with the government. They knew
to sign contracts with the government. They knew the government has obligations
and responsibilities. In a nutshell, they knew that their agricultural production is
producing commodities for exchange instead of fulfilling a coyw!e. This is a great
historical progress for Chinese peasants.. .It is that the peasants are using the law of
value to take revenge on the unreasonable price system-this single point is enough
to prove that the thousand-year-unchanged peasants are changing. Some people may
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think they are getting illy cunning. But I think they are getting more modem. We are
thrilled to see that. (1988)
Wang reiterates in the above citation the Heshang producers' belief in their national
pedagogy of reform. To some extent the comparison between the Shaaxi peasants and the
Henan peasants in the narrative falls into line with the strategy of dramatic demarcation
in the proper text of Heshang. The comparison in Wang's article also suggests that the
more the masses learn from the reform, the better-off their situations will be indefinitely.
Although in such secondary materials it is still the intellectual speaker speaking for the
masses, the existence of such materials nevertheless allows us to situate the documentary
within a specific historical context and conduct a historical reflection on Heshang's
national pedagogy of reform.
In the context of post-Mao China in the 1980s, the first sight of the state realized,
mostly from the gloomy consequences of the Cultural Revolution, that the Maoist ways
of governing did not function well as long as China still intended to be incorporated in
the global system of nation-states. One fundamental motive for the state to engage in
reform was to improve the living conditions of the colossal population of China who
were suffering from the dilapidated national economy as one consequence of the Cultural
Revolution. It is no exaggeration to say that the state-initiated reform was originally
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based on a "survival" instinct-trying to feed and clothe the vast masses. Thus to some
extent the refonn functions for the state as a pragmatic tool with an economic focus, a
focus that aims at promoting the material wellbeing of the Chinese masses.
The second sight of the post-Mao intellectuals understands the refonn differently.
Heshang's national pedagogy ofrefonn finnly claims:
[R]efonn doesn't just mean that "steamed wheat buns have replaced sweet potatoes,
and the bachelor gets a wife"; that it doesn't merely mean color TVs, refrigerators
and higher salaries, nor even the comfortable living standard of one thousand U.S.
dollars [per annum]?
In the majority of cases and in its deeper sense, refonn is rather a great burst of
pain in which a civilization is transfonned, a task fraught with danger, a difficult
process which will require sacrifices from our generation and even several yet to
come. (Su and Wang 1991, 161-2)
To the producers the refonn is anything but a pure economic tool. Instead it is a long and
painful process of a civilizational transfonnation which requires full mobilization of
economic, political, and spiritual elements. It is in this sense that their pedagogy of
refonn finds in the issue of people quality the urgency to improve the spiritual quality of
102
the Chinese masses and makes them amenable to the economic and political reforms on
schedule.
The elusive agency of the Chinese masses-the third sight-nevertheless questions
the efficacy on the masses of the pedagogical project ofthe second sight. As mentioned
earlier, the Heshang producers address the masses directly as a plea to aspire to political
agency. However, Wang's article divulges the discrepancy between the supposed
connections between the second sight and the third sight, and the actual positionality of
the inappropriate masses within the context ofpost-Mao China. In Wang's article, the
Henan peasants are singled out as the positive example of stronger political agency in
comparison to the Ansai peasants. How to understand the "stronger political agency"
figures importantly in the working out ofthis problem of the discrepancy. The Henan
peasants knew to bargain prices and sign contracts with the government. They even knew
how to prompt the government to make policy changes in their idiosyncratic
way-threatening to not sell or buy in the government-controlled price system. In this
sense they do demonstrate a kind ofpolitical agency. However, this kind of agency is de
facto quite different from the kind of active political agency aiming at building a new
political system that has been hoped for by the Heshang producers. The agency of the
Henan peasants is "political" only in the sense that they actively engaged in negotiations
with the government. The motive behind all their means of negotiations-bargaining
103
prices, signing contracts, and threatening to quit the price system-is to use the law of
value to protect their material interests. The nature of their political negotiations is urging
the current political system to acknowledge their material interests, instead of waging
political campaigns to create a new system. In other words, Wang presumes in the
comparison of the Ansai peasants and the Henan peasants the similarity between his own
idealistic mode of political agency and the real agency of the Henan peasants whose
efforts wind up being nothing beyond striving to secure their material interests in the
current system. It is ironic that Wang's preaching of the political reform that is intended
to change the politically apathetic masses-which presupposes the intractability of the
masses in post-Mao modernity-is so anxious to discover evidences bespeaking the
"tractability" of the masses to his preaching, no matter how feeble and erratic the
evidences actually are.
This anxiety is brought into the proper text of Heshang. The producer's eagerness to
target the masses' weak political agency as a source of sorrow and worry betrays, in an
unexpected manner to themselves, the actual elusion of the masses to their national
pedagogy of reform. With the contextual knowledge of the actual agency of the Henan
peasants made known by Wang's article, the very attempt of the Heshang producers to
relate the reform to establishing a democratic political system lays bare the precise
elusion of the masses to such relating. The example of the Henan peasants suggests what
104
the producers believe a "deeper" reform should go beyond is exactly what the masses
hope for from the reform. To borrow from the producers' own words, it is the "steamed
wheat buns", "color TVs", and "refrigerators" that the masses hope the reform will bring
them. To a large extent, the masses expect from the reform material wellbeing and
improved living conditions while eluding the "pains", "dangers", or "difficulties" that the
intellectual-defined reform will bring upon them. Establishing a democratic political
system is certainly not as appealing to the masses as other more immediate and material
benefits the reform may promise.
At this juncture a retrospective look at the state-defined reform brings forth that the
"elusive" Chinese masses to the appropriation of the Heshang producers tend to subject
themselves more amenably to the appropriation of the post-Mao state. The first sight of
the state treats the reform as an economic tool promoting the material wellbeing of the
Chinese masses, which to some extent dovetails with the materialistic concerns of the
masses. Different from the situation in colonial India-that the second sight of the Indian
elites allied with the first sight of the British colonial state and carried on an efficient
educational program targeting the subaltern masses, the contextual study ofHeshang
reveals that in the 1980s the Chinese masses may have positioned themselves in the
frame of post-Mao modernity closer to the first sight ofthe state than to the second sight
of the intellectuals. The producers' national pedagogy meant to inspire the feelings of
105
sorrow and worry in the Chinese masses may be founded on an anxious recognition of
the masses' elusion and apathy towards that very pedagogy in real life. The elusion and
apathy-the third sight targeted by the second sight as the evidence of the masses'
inappropriateness-may well be a more appropriate existence to the reformist scheme of
the post-Mao state.
Conclusion
The 1980s' intellectual reflection on Chinese civilization culminates in the making of
Heshang, which sets up the standards of the Western industrial civilization as the
universal criteria to judge the "backwardness" or "advancement" of civilizations. In this
light the Heshang producers engaged in a project of remaking the national sentiment that
aims at fashioning an appropriate subjectivity of the Chinese masses in the frame of
post-Mao modernity. The key content of the remade national sentiments is the
consciousness of sorrow and worry, which focuses, among other things, the issue of low
people quality. The discussion of people quality provides for the intellectuals a space-a
second sight-to promote their national pedagogy ofreform, in which they highlight their
authoritative position as the wise speaking subject for the Chinese nation through
delineating the masses as the inappropriate other of Chinese modernity, and the reform as
a process of civilizational transformation requiring full mobilization of economic,
106
political, and spiritual elements. However, a contextual study of the documentary
questions the alleged efficacy of the national pedagogy of the producers. The masses may
have largely eluded the appropriation of the intellectual second sight while subjecting
themselves more amenably to the appropriation of the post-Mao state.
Notes:
I The observation that Heshang has become a phenomenon is mentioned by Xiaomei Chen. See Chen
(2002,33).
2 The translation is based on Richard Bodmann and Pin Wan's in Su and Wang (1991). They
translated "minzu qinggan" as "love for one's country". "National sentiments", it seems to me, is
certainly a better translation. Unless otherwise noted, all the translations of the original script of
Heshang in this chapter are from Su and Wang (1991).
3 The aforementioned Chinese rafters who lost their lives in the competition with Ken Warren to be
the first to raft down the Yellow River make a good case of the "patriotic dreamers" here.
4 All italicized items in this paragraph are by the original author.
5 "The love for one's nation/state" are certainly not strictly academic definitions for
nationalism/patriotism. They are used here to highlight the central difference between nationalism and
patriotism this chapter discusses.
6 The forest fire in the Daxingan Ran~e burned from May 6th to June 2nd, 1987. The airplane accident
at Chongqing occurred on January 18t , 1988 when Flight 4146 crashed into a mountain causing the
deaths ofninety-eight passengers and three crew members. The crash was discussed extensively at the
National People's Congress in March, 1988. On January 17, 1988 two trains crashed head-on in
Heilongjiang Province; and on March 24th another two trains crashed head-on at a Shanghai suburban
station, causing 127 casualties. The hepatitis epidemic occurred in Shanghai in the spring of 1987,
lasting for almost one year. Several thousands of people were hospitalized and the city declared a
disaster area. This note is provided by the translators.
7 Richard Bodmann and Pin Wan translated "Huanghe youhuan" as "Yellow River's troubles", and
"youhuan yishi" as "a sense of (social) concern".
8 The translation of Mao's work is from Su and Wang (1991, 171-2n38).
9 The recapitulation ofChattetjee's ideas is from Anagnost (1997,80).
10 Richard Bodmann and Pin Wan translated "nongmin suzhi" here as "peasant makeup".
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11 The quoted phrase is originally from Guha (1998, 43).
12 Heshang applies a few highly symbolic and simplistic pairs ofmodifiers to characterize the
dichotomy between the Western industrial civilization and Chinese civilization. For example, the blue
versus the yellow, and the maritime versus the hinterland.
13 Zhao Ziyang, Premier from 1980 to 1987; General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party,
1987-1989.During the Tiananmen Incident, Zhao was suspended from his duties after failing to take
part in the decision to enforce martial law on May 20, 1989. This note is from Su and Wang (1991,
172n40).
14 "We" refers to the production team ofHeshang.
108
CHAPTER III
A NATIVE OF BEIJING IN NEW YORK: MALE DESIRES AND
PATRIOTISM ON THE SMALL SCREEN
The TV serial A Native ofBeijing in New York (hereafter, NBNY) was aired on the
CCTV (China Central TV) in October 1993. Between eight and nine hundred million
viewers watched it (Liu 1999, 763). The main story of the media text is as follows: The
protagonist, Wang Qiming, is a Beijing-born musician who comes to the United States in
search ofthe American dream. Because of Wang's lack of English and basic survival
skills, he and his wife, Guo Yan, suffer every form of discrimination and exploitation
after they first arrive. Failing to receive their relatives' assistance as they had hoped, they
start their new life at the rock bottom ofAmerican society. Wang begins working in a
Chinese restaurant as a dishwasher, while Guo Yan becomes a seamstress in a factory
owned by a white American man, David McCarthy. Before long, husband and wife drift
apart. In dire financial circumstances, Wang loses his wife to McCarthy, who not only
alienates Guo Yan from her Chinese husband but marries her in his place. Wang, in the
mean time, develops a romantic relationship with his employer, Ah Chun, a smart,
109
attractive, independent Chinese American woman ofpossible Taiwanese origins. Through
her generosity and compassion, Wang overcomes his circumstances and starts a
manufacturing business that closely replicates McCarthy's-a sweater factory-in order
to get even with his enemy. McCarthy is defeated by Wang in due time (783). Constantly
tormented by his family tragedy and gradually corrupted by the decadent American life
style, he gambles away all his fortune and becomes poor again in the end.
Mainland audiences cheered for this serial and it won almost every major Mainland
TV award. Academia is also impressed by its rippling effect in Mainland China as well as
in Chinese-speaking communities throughout the world. Some scholars have devoted
significant attention to the TV serial, tackling it as an important media text demonstrating
Chinese popular nationalism in the post-Cold War world. 1 This chapter continues the
dialogues about NBNY between popular nationalism and the small screen in
contemporary China, by focusing on the enunciation of a newly emergent national
subject-the mass-media elites-through this TV serial. I argue that by creatively
appropriating the cultural memories ofpre-socialist and socialist past, the mass-media
elites fashion a mode ofnational sentiments of which the central thread is "Making
money is patriotic".
This chapter is divided into three parts. First, I historicize the process in which the
NBNY producers Zheng Xiaolong C*~B~:ft) and Feng XiaogangC {~/j\Mlj ) ascended to the
110
status of "mass-media elites" through cultural brokering. Second, I examine the ways in
which these mass-media elites imagine the contemporary love for the nation from the
perspective of male desires and sexuality. Third, I study the meanings of Wang Qiming as
a failed man for this new mode of national sentiments against the backdrop of
pre-socialist modem history.
Mass-media Elites: Cultural Brokers in Postsocialist China
In her paper, Lydia H. Liu makes a perceptive observation on the social context of
NBNY:
(The serial's) erasure of the socia11andscape in the United States coincides with the
making of a new social elite in contemporary Chinese society, the so-called nouveau
riche know as dakuan (big bucks) and sometimes dawan (big wrists) ... Wang
Qiming would fit the image of this new class of social elites who own private homes
and luxury cars, play golf, buy apartments in Paris or Canada, go to expensive clubs,
flaunt their wealth and young mistresses, and are admired and resented by common
folks ... It is hardly surprising that Wang Qiming's story strikes a sympathetic chord
among some Chinese audiences and arouses a tremendous voyeuristic interest
among others. (Liu 1999, 790)
111
What Liu does not mention is that this TV serial actually helped the mass-media
practitioners involved in its production-especially Zheng Xiaolong and Feng
Xiaogang-become part of the emergent social elites in her description.
Contributing to their ascendance to the elite class is the rise of "cultural
economy"-a prominent symbol of Chinese postsocialism in the 1990s. After the 1989
Tiananmen Incident, especially after Deng Xiaoping's southern trip in the spring of 1992,
the rampant wave of marketization promoted by the Party-state gave birth to the
phenomenon of the "cultural economy", or wenhuajingji. Mass-media practitioners
acquired opportunities to collaborate with domestic and international entrepreneurs to
make profitable popular cultural products. In this process some mass-media practitioners
successfully used their prestige, access to resources, and popular appeal of mass media to
become brokers between culture and capital. Through their mediation cultural references
were cashed in to enhance the monetary value of a cultural project, and these cultural
brokers became powerful elites.2
The production ofNBNY is a good example of such cultural brokering. It is worth
noting that the main plot of the TV serial-the homosocial rivalry between Wang Qiming
and David McCarthy-is absent from the original novel3 from which the serial is
adapted. The fabrication of this plot was a strategic move of the serial producers to
112
instigate sensations among Mainland audiences and to expand market returns. Through
his connections with Bank of China-the state-owned bank in charge ofChina's
international financial business, Zheng Xiaolong secured a joint investment of 1.2 million
US dollars from both domestic and international investors. After the production was
finished, China Central TV bought the copyright ofthe serial, whose first round of airing
only brought CCTV an income of about 5 million US dollars.4
NBNY won almost every major Mainland TV award and became a textbook case of
TV marketing for later TV producers in Mainland China. It is also an important step to
fame and fortune for Zheng Xiaolong and Feng Xiaogang. Zheng Xiaolong is one of the
most powerful "TV-serial dawans"s in Mainland China. Since he became head of Beijing
TV Arts Center-the largest TV production center of its kind in Mainland China-in
1984, he has produced some of the most popular Mainland TV serials like Yearning
(1990), Stories o/the Editorial Staff(1991), and The Golden Marriage (2007). In 1991 he
established in the United States Huayi Film and Video Co. Ltd, which still dominates the
North-America distribution of Chinese-language programs produced by Beijing TV Arts
Center and China Central TV. The success ofNBNY gave Zheng an opportunity to
reshuffle the domestic TV-serial market as the industry leader. In 1995 he aligned with 28
province-level TV stations to establish the first united TV-serial broadcasting
113
system-The Ivy Theater. In recent years major players of the international mass-media
market like Sony (America) have also become his business partners. 6
For Feng Xiaogang, this serial's success provided him the necessary fame and
prestige to leap from the "small screen" ofTV to the "large screen" of film, where he
demonstrated his skills of practicing and representing cultural brokering to a fuller extent.
According to Yomi Braester, Feng Xiaogang is a prominent figure among Chinese
directors practicing filmmaking as cultural brokering in the 1990s cultural economy:
Whereas Maoist thought required artists to "unite with the masses," directors now
merge with the commercial production and distribution units. Filmmakers take over
not only directing but also advertising and promotion, and their work expands far
beyond the artifact screened in theatres. A new mode of filmmaking is in the process
of emerging, which is akin to other forms of entrepreneurial use of culture. A certain
symbolism may be found in that both masterful artists and real estate moguls7 are
referred to as dawan 'r, a term reserved for large-scale market manipulators. (2005,
550)
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What makes Feng Xiaogang distinct from other filmmaker-as-cultural-brokers is that he
not only relies on practicing cultural brokering in making films, but also makes films to
promote the image of filmmakers as dawan 'r.
Feng Xiaogang made the self-referential movie Big Shot:S Funeral in 2001. It starts
as a famous Hollywood director, Donald Tyler, arrives in Beijing to shoot an updated
version of The Last Emperor and falls into a coma. The cinematographer Yoyo takes to
heart Tyler's request for a "comedy funeral" and plans an uplifting spectacle worthy of
the director's reputation, to take place in the Forbidden City. To cover the costs, the
cinematographer takes every opportunity for direct advertising and product placement.
The body of the deceased is to be placed on sponsored furniture, surrounded by large
product mockups and dressed in sponsor brands. The event, attended by cultural
luminaries and featuring various performances, ends up in the cinematographer's
imagination as the shell for an elaborate lucrative enterprise (554).
As Braester argues, the filmic narrative distinguishes Yoyo as a cultural broker and
Feng Xiaogang, like his cinematic reflection in Yoyo, makes use of his position as a
mediator between culture and capital. "Both the pattern ofproduction and the narrative
reflect recent and anticipated changes in the way film business is conducted in China, and
the movie lends itselfto be read as an allegory ofFeng Xiaogang's role as a director in an
increasingly commercialized market" (555-8).
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What remains vital in the activities of these mass-media dawans is the mutuality
between their manipulation of capital and their trendsetting of the mass culture. In the
process of bending culture to accommodate the needs of the market, mass-media elites
like Zheng and Wang become figures the masses look up to. Their products aim not only
at success on the market but also at shaping visual experience, social networks, and
cultural environment.8 As Braester observes, these mass-media elites "could benefit from
their skills as producers of artifacts of wide appeal and their proximity to intellectual
circles to become influential middlemen" (551). Although in the 1980s the reformist
intellectuals played the role of cultural authority to define national sentiments with mass
appeal, it is in this process of "middling" that the mass-media elites assumed this role in
the 1990s.
Transnationalism, Nationalism, and Gender-the Context ofNBNY Study
These mass-media elites set the trends for the masses through their literary
sensibility-an ability to discern, represent, and evaluate social issues and their own
subjectivity with critical thinking and vast knowledge of the past, which is a legacy they
undoubtedly inherited from intellectuals. The knowledge of critical discourses on NBNY
since its production is important for the understanding of such sensibility.
116
Lydia H. Uu has done an insightful study of the TV serial in the discursive scheme
of Chinese transnationalism and postsocialism. According to Liu, the fictive figure of
Wang Qiming-a self-made Chinese entrepreneur (qiyejia) in America-and the
extraordinary commendation such figures receive from both mass audiences and the
government reflect the historical condition of postsocialism in contemporary China. Liu's
understanding of the contemporary Chinese condition is largely based on ArifDirlik's
definition ofpostsocialism. By that term Dirlik refers to the condition of socialism in a
historical situation where:
(a) socialism has lost its coherence as a metatheory of politics because of the
attenuation of the socialist vision in its historical unfolding; partly because of a
perceived need on the part of socialist state to articulate "actually existing socialism"
to the demands ofa capitalist world order, but also because of the vemacularization
of socialism in its absorption into different national contexts; (b) the articulation of
socialism to capitalism is conditioned by the structure of "actually existing
socialism" in any particular social context which is the historical premise of all such
articulation; and (c) this premise stands guard over the process of articulation to
ensure that it does not result in the restoration of capitalism. (1989, 364)
117
Liu takes the "actually existing socialism" to be a residual of the past as well as its
reinvention under new historical conditions. To her understanding postsocialism does not
constitutes resistance to transnational capitalism; instead, the existence of residual
socialist thought, state apparatuses, and historical memory do complicate the ways in
which transnationalism and its critique operate in a postsocialist context (Liu 1999, 767).
This chapter continues to use the concept of postsocialism as it is defined and
interpreted by Dirlik and Liu. Liu thinks that a specific sequence from the 1993 TV serial
illuminates the Chinese condition of postsocialism. The sequence she refers to is in the
second half of the serial where there is a highly dramatized confrontation between the
immigrant entrepreneur Wang Qiming and his daughter Ningning, both of whom now
live in New York. In the heated confrontation Ningning suddenly blurts out, "You are a
stinking zibenjia [capitalist]". Liu comments:
"Stinking capitalist" sounds strangely familiar and ironically anachronistic to the
Mainland Chinese audience (and, I am sure, to the majority of the serial's intended
audience)9 who lived through the decades of the Chinese socialist revolution and
were made to hear and rehearse the language of class struggle repeatedly in this
fashion. Ningning's parodic evocation of a language that has nearly been banished
from people's consciousness in the 1990s brings back a history, only to bury it
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deeper in the collective memory. In other words that which stinks is no longer the
capitalist, who has now got a new name, qiyejia (a remarkable transvaluation), but
the words stinking capitalist themselves. (767-8)
From my understanding the televisualized trope of "stinking capitalist" points right to a
subtle psychic process shared by the producers and audiences of the TV serial. To some
extent, their aversion to the Maoist past of class struggle was transformed into a form of
approbation of the "actually existing socialism" of China in the 1990s, when the Chinese
society was increasingly shaped by transnational capitalism. Put differently, the traumatic
memory ofthe Maoist socialist past sti11lingering on people' minds seems to provide, at
least for the producers and audiences of the TV serial, the raison d'etre of the postsocialist
reality.
In a similar vein, Liu calls our attention to how the TV serial allegorizes the
remaking of official ideology in the 1990s. She argues:
(T)he existence of the residual class discourse of the past and historical memory
have played an important part both within and outside the televisional serial. A
powerful ideological process emerges from these interactive moments of
representation and viewing ... (T)he residual elements of socialist discourse tend to
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be an enabling factor for transnationalism much like the epithet stinking capitalist
expresses its opposite in postsocialist China ... It seems also true that Chinese
official discourse embraces the ideology of entrepreneurship with more enthusiasm
than some Republicans display in the United States. This does not mean, however,
that the Chinese government and business sectors succumbed to the transnational
processes when they rejected the Maoist past. I would argue the opposite, namely,
that these people are the movers and shapers of transnational processes to the extent
that they have successfully transformed the potential obstacle (socialist discourse) to
global capitalism into an enabling force on the ideological front. (791-2)
Sponsored by the state and the increasingly privatized business sectors, Chinese mass
media timely fashions a folk hero like Wang Qiming to affirm the social and economic
agenda set by the former. By investigating the production and consumption of the TV
serial with sufficient knowledge ofboth the theoretical proliferation of globalization and
the historical development of the Asian Pacific region, Liu's study persuasively argues
that transnationalism and postsocialism must be treated as a simultaneous process for
contemporary cultural studies.
Liu's study ofthe TV serial helps elucidate the complicated relationships between
transnationalism and the postsocialist Chinese reality. Her critique of this media text is
120
supplemented by Mainland-based critic Dai Jinhua. Dai perceptively analyzes China's
self-portrayal in this media text against the backdrop of an imagined global arena. She
argues that this serial manifests how Chinese media constructed the screen image of the
folk hero Wang Qiming to suit the needs ofa nation facing an identity crisis in light of
globalization (2002). Although Dai and Liu share the insights on the collaboration ofthe
state and the mass media to embrace the capitalist logics through the production and
consumption ofpopular cultural products like NBNY, Dai's reading ofthe TV serial
nevertheless points to another direction of its interpretation--one that focuses on the
nationalist concerns of the media text.
As the title ofDai's article-"National Identity in the Hall ofMirrors"-suggests,
she thinks that the TV serial exemplifies an idiosyncratic articulation ofnationalism and
illustrates a specific trend of making national identities in postsocialist China. An
immediate question arising from such an interpretation is: Is the nation still a significant
node through which subjectivity is constructed and represented in the age of
transnationalism and globalization? As Anthony D. Smith cogently argues, although the
economic logics of globalization have to some extent eclipsed the political hegemony of
territorially bound nation-states, the nation-especially the nation as a cultural
construct-is still influential and irreplaceable in shaping contemporary human
subjectivity:
121
(T)he nation and nationalism provide the only realistic socio-cultural framework for
a modem world order. They have no rivals today. National identity too remains
widely attractive and effective and is felt by many people to satisfy their needs for
cultural fulfillment, rootedness, security and fraternity. (1995, 159)
Iftransnationalism is the cultural specificities of globalization, it simultaneously gives
rise to the thriving of nationalism because an important embodiment of these cultural
localities and specificities, as they are shaped by the global flows of capital, culture, and
bodies, is precisely the persistent and sometimes violent will for ethnic and cultural
differences as markers of identities-which are more often than not discussed under the
rubric of nationalism.
NBNY attests to such subtlety of globalization and nationalism. The emphasis ofthe
interrelation between transnationalism and postsocialism notwithstanding, Liu's article
does not ignore the equally important sentiment ofpatriotism generated in the production
and consumption of the TV serial. Commenting on the serial applying visual technologies
to accommodate the 1990s social ethos of embracing American commodities and
prosperity, she nonetheless notes:
122
(C)oexisting with the desire and demand for American goods and cultural products
are anti-American sentiments and a rising nationalist discourse in contemporary
China. In the serial Beijing SojournersJO this paradox seems to find a perfect locale
of reconciliation as the serial reinvents-perhaps more than it reflects-what it
means to be patriotic today without contradicting the desire for American products
and commodity culture. As opposed to the outdated denunciation of the West as a
source of self-strengthening discourse, an alternative and more tempting form of
patriotism would be to compete with America to be the world's leading economic
power. (1999, 781)
Although it is not the central focus ofLiu's study within the limited scope of her article,
her observation of the TV serial as a perfect site for the reconciliation between
nationalism and material desires is quite illuminating. Following up this dialogue of
globalization and nationalism as initiated by Liu and Dai, this chapter analyzes the
patriotic sentiment of the TV serial-as a specific case of the reconciliation between
nationalism and desires fashioned by contemporary Chinese mass media-with a critical
understanding ofpostsocialism that is supplementary to Liu and Dirlik's.
One issue worth noting is that Liu uses the concept of transnationalism not only in
the sense of its economic logic-Leo transnational capitalism, but also referring to its
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cultural dynamics that shape human subjectivity. In her study of flexible citizenship
among Chinese diasporas, Aihwa Ong defines transnationalism as "the cultural
specificities of global processes". By exploring the relationships between elite diasporic
Chinese subjects and states in terms of capital and mobility, Ong brings into the same
analytical framework the economical rationalities of globalization and the cultural
dynamics that shape human subjectivity. She notes that people's everyday actions should
be perceived as a kind of cultural politics embedded in specific power contexts. "Flexible
citizenship" is narrated within particular structures of meanings about family, gender,
nationality, class mobility, and social power (1999, especially 4-6)-all of which loom
large in shaping human subjectivity in transnational economic flow. Liu is fully aware of
the significances of Ong's study. In her article Liu cites Ong's work in positive light and
supplements Ong's discussion of transnationalism with evidences from the field ofAsian
American studies. Sau-ling Wong's study ofnew immigrant groups from East Asia, as
Liu notices, reveals that frequent Asian fliers across the Pacific Ocean have acquired the
status of transpacific folklore in places like Hong Kong and Taiwan. The displaced wives
and children of these frequent fliers-Asian American men notorious for their marital
infidelity-constitute a unique generation ofnew Asian Americans in the 1980s and
1990s. As Liu summarizes, Wong's research "raises important questions about the gender
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and class aspects of transnational Chinese cultural identity as well as their implications
for the economic future of the Asian Pacific region" (Uu 1999, 774-5).
In light of the multivalent implications of transnationalism, Liu broaches in her
article the issues of gender and class in relation to the transnationalist representations in
NBNY. Liu argues that the central plot of the serial-the homosocial rivalry between
Wang Qiming and David McCarthy-is carried out both in terms of and at the expense of
Chinese women. She points out that Wang's wife, Guo Yan, is seduced by McCarthy
when she is hired by him as a factory worker. The TV serial allows Guo Yan to marry her
white boss after the seduction and thus displaces the gender and racial conflict in the
workplace onto the level of a fight between two men over the right to a Chinese wife. The
eroticized refashioning of oppressive gender/labor relations becomes the condition of
Guo Yan's ultrafemininity as a desirable woman. Gender formations do not begin to gain
value as potential material for fictional dramatization until the women relate to the men
sexually and erotically. Liu also highlights the significance of Wang's reconciliation with
McCarthy toward the end of the serial:
(T)hese men seem to respect each other for wanting to own the same kind of
manufacturing business and hire the same ethnic, immigrant female labor. As for the
immigrant female laborers hired first by McCarthy and then by Wang and again by
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McCarthy, their gender identity remains the same as their class, which condemns
them to low wages, long hours ofwork, social obscurity and utter inability to
transcend their racial and class identities. (787-8)
Liu's emphases on gender and class provide a valuable feminist perspective to understand
the imprints that globalization and transnational economic and cultural flows bear upon
individual bodies.
Relevant to the gender-and-class perspective of the relationship between individuals
and globalization in contemporary China is the problem of enunciating subjects of the
nation. As Ann Anagnost notes, narrative requires the presence of an enunciating subject.
This simple fact directs our attention to the power of a national imaginary to call forth
subjects who "speak for" the nation. In the history of modem China, the designation of
who or what class represents the agency to propel the nation forward in its historical
destiny has been very much at stake in national struggles. Implicit in this contestation has
been a "politics ofpresence" in which the speaking subject claims to or is attributed with
the power to speak with the force of history. In this sense, the national subject is made to
embody abstract conceptions which are not immediately present to experience-such as
History, Nation, Society, People-but which become emblematic of the nation speaking
with the voice of history (1997,4). IfLiu's article highlights the collaboration of the state
126
and the mass media to forge a sensational televisualized experience affirming the
capitalist logics of the 1990s, this chapter accentuates the status of the mass media as an
enunciating subject ofthe nation related to, but still different from, the state.
In this respect, we cannot fully understand the implications of the mass media as a
enunciating subject of the Chinese nation without taking into consideration the gendered
voice of the most eloquent enunciators of the serial-the two male directors Zheng
Xiaolong and Feng Xiaogang. How does gender interfere with Chinese mass media's
articulation ofpatriotic sentiments? What changes does Chinese postsocialism bring to
the male gender and their self-fashioning? Whither does postsocialism affect the
mass-media discourses of Chinese nationalism and the formation of Chinese national
identities in the globalized world? In an attempt to answer these questions, the following
discussions ofNBNY proceed with the dual emphases of patriotism and the male gender,
which illuminate the postsocialist articulation of the mass-media elites' national
sentiments.
Patriotism, the Socialist Past, and the Male Desire for Money
Postsocialism-as the Chinese condition of globalization-is not only a variety of
economic logics regulating the reforms and the global exchanges of resources, money,
and labor, but also the discipline of cultural dynamics that shape contemporary human
127
subjectivities. Specifically, the cultural dynamics of Chinese postsocialism are embodied
in the mass-media elites' literary sensibility as is manifested through NBNY. Zheng
Xiaolong and Feng Xiaogang's literary sensibility is supplementary to Dirlik and Liu's
understandings of postsocialism in that their sensibility of postsocialist reality is not only
the reinvention of the Maoist socialist past per se, but also the integration of the
represented cultural memories of both the socialist and the pre-socialist past.
In the postsocialist cultural economy, a variety of cultural memories based on the
socialist past provide for the literary sensibility of these mass-media elites, whose dawan
status guaranteed their cultural concerns to be repacked into sensational visual sequences
ofNBNY on the small screen. Then, what exactly are these concerns? How do they
negotiate with the socialist past? Harking back to Lydia Liu's comments on the social
context of the TV serial, if Wang Qiming fits the image ofthe dawan, what do the
directors and the audiences make of men like Wang Qiming "who own private homes and
luxury cars, play golf, buy apartments in Paris or Canada, go to expensive clubs, flaunt
their wealth and young mistresses"? What kind of audiences is the life style of men
flaunting wealth and young mistresses most appealing to? Although Liu does not
explicitly state it, hardly can we miss the intriguing gendered network here: the two male
directors making a TV folk lore of a male hero favorably consumed by a (heterosexual)
male audience.
128
In light of the perspective of the male gender, the pivot of the whole serial-a
Chinese man Wang Qiming making/losing money-entails a central question of the
literary sensibility of these mass-media elites: How does the TV serial justify the male
desire for money in representation? A central strategy of the serial is to situate the desire
under a dramatized environment ofthe Chinese-American clashes so that the personal
pursuit of wealth is discursively constructed as a patriotic sentiment. Few people having
seen this serial would neglect the prologue, in which two verses made up of pure-white,
motionless Chinese characters occupy the whole black screen, with a resolute male voice
reading them in English:
If you love him\
Bring him to New York\
For it's heaven
If you hate him\
Bring him to New York\
For it's hell.
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What this prologue features are undoubtedly stark contrasts, contrasts between white and
black, love and hate, Chinese and English, and heaven and hell. It heralds a Chinese
fa-i.e. "him" in Chinese-who travels to a completely alien environment, which, being
either heaven or hell, is different from his own world. America in this discourse is not so
much a developed and civilized country as a de-humanized, natural frontier waiting to be
explored by Chinese men like Wang Qiming.
To some extent, the narrative ofNBNY radicalizes the difference between China and
America, viewing the two as incommensurate entities. This radicalization readily echoes
Samuel Huntington's claim of "the clash of civilizations" (1996). The claim's implied
incommunicability and hatred between nations are often dramatized in the TV serial. In a
conversation between Wang and Ah Chun taking place almost halfway through the serial,
she tells Wang Qiming that the Americans can quite easily imagine a world without
China but can never conceive of a world without themselves. Wang bursts out, "Fxxk
them! They were still monkeys up in the trees while we were already human beings.
Look at how hairy they are. They're not as evolved as us-just 'cause they have a bit of
money!"!! This telling detail about "monkeys" and "money" furnishes the image of
Americans-monkeys with money-that Zheng Xiaolong and Feng Xiaogang are
anxious to articulate. Asserting the truthfulness of the Darwinist theory, Wang Qiming
obtains his moral ground-however feeble it may actually be-to pursue money in order
130
to reaffirm that Chinese are more evolved than Americans. Through the mediation of the
Darwinist theory, the homosocial rivalry between Wang and McCarthy for wealth is
constructed as a rivalry between two nations, and the Chinese male desire for money is
interpreted as an embodiment ofpatriotism.
How do Zheng and Feng understand such desiring patriotism with regard to the
socialist past? Another sequence of the TV serial helps to illustrate this issue.
Immediately after the Lydia Liu-mentioned sequence in which Ningning calls Wang
Qiming a "stinking capitalist", Wang bitterly responds as follows:
Have you had enough of this? Do you know what I was like when I did not have
money? I am a stinking capitalist?! In order to make my first fortune, you
know, your father! Me! I slept only two hours every day for seven straight days. I
almost drowned myself in the bathtub. l2 That is your father. Do you know that? I
am a stinking capitalist?! To be a capitalist I have to drink my own fxxking blood
first!"l3
Beyond the overt expression of agony over his daughter's disrespect, Wang's emotional
outburst also indicates that the premise ofhis success is nothing but a painstaking move
of "drinking his own blood". It does not take much effort for Chinese audiences to relate
131
this idiosyncratic metaphor to the socialist discourse the mass-media elites appropriates
here-that class struggles were vividly in-carnated as capitalists drinking the blood ofthe
working class. The metaphor of "drinking one's own blood" has double implications. On
the one hand, it reaffirms the exploitative relationship between capitalists and the
working class as defined by socialist discourses. Both Ningning and Wang Qiming seem
to have no objection to this recognition that capitalists are born to exploit the labor
of-that is, to "drink the blood of'-the working class. On the other hand, an identifiable
discursive "self-relocation" emerges here. While Ningning's claim ofthe "stinking
capitalist" certainly puts herself at the position of the working class and her father
capitalists, Wang Qiming's defensive response fashions a simultaneous self-positioning
and self-relocation. That is, he does not deny his identity as a capitalist but identifies
himself as a capitalist "drinking his own blood".
While speaking from the position ofcapitalists-to suck out blood, Wang ironically
includes the vision of the working classes-blood to be sucked out-to secretly relocate
himself to the position of the working class. In other words, while Ningning attempts to
radicalize the class antagonism by making capitalists "stink", Wang Qiming neutralizes
the antagonism by endowing himself the status of the exploited to "de-odor" the image of
capitalists. This sequence manifests that historical memories ofthe socialist era are still
an important source for the literary sensibilities of the postsocialist mass-media elites.
132
The socialist discourse that provided the moral superiority of the exploited working class
resurfaced in NBNY and was re-appropriated by the mass-media elites to justify the male
desire for money.
In a nutshell, postsocialism has remarkably shaped the 1990s mass-media
articulation ofpatriotism through the venue of the male desire for money. These
mass-media elites relied heavily on their literary sensibility inspired by the socialist past.
The aforementioned sequences reveal how the NBNY directors have produced the
discourse of the male monetary desire as the embodiment of patriotism in contemporary
China.
"To Screw Foreigners Is Patriotic"? The Sexual Desire as a Surrogate for the
Monetary Desire
From a perspective of gender and class, Lydia Liu cogently argues that in NBNY the
homosocial rivalry between Wang Qiming and David McCarthy is carried out both in
terms of and at the expense of Chinese women. It is interesting that Liu applies a similar
angle to analyze the situation of white women in NBNY. She remarks:
One of the most bizarre moments in the serial occurs when Wang visits a white
prostitute after losing Guo Yan. As ifhe were reenacting the unequal power
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relationship between Guo Yan and McCarthy, Wang slams dollar bills on the naked
back of the white prostitute and forces her to say "I love you" repeatedly. This
sadistic and impotent revenge '" has something to do with race hatred and Chinese
masculinity and its symbolic connection with the dollar bill. The scene makes a
strong yet disturbing statement about who owns the dollar and power, and where to
spend it. Gender, class, and race all collapse into a single assertion of troubled
Chinese masculinity. (Liu 1999, 788)
Liu's seminal observation of the "troubled Chinese masculinity" bespeaks the centrality
of the male gender in the postsocialist cultural matrix created by Chinese mass media.
The mixed background of class and race-as it is noted by Liu in the prostitution
sequence-complicates the NBNY articulation of the desiring patriotism.
Wang Qiming's sadism is one important factor Liu picks up in the prostitution sequence.
Its sexual connotation is commensurate with the duality of the male desires in
NBNY-that is, the desires for both money and sex. As a cultural critic, Liu's treatment
ofwhite women-here the white prostitute in particular-as victims sexually exploited
by men nevertheless presents only part of the troubled Chinese masculinity.
At first glance, the NBNY producers seem to celebrate another nationalist triumph in
this sequence. The fulfillment of Wang Qiming's sexual desire achieves its national aura
134
of greatness with a postcolonial vengeance projected onto a gendered and raced
object-the white prostitute. The political implication of colored men sexually possessing
white women could not be better expressed than in Franz Fanon's lines:
I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness.
When my restless hands caress those white breasts,
they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine. (1968, 63)
To sexually possess a white woman means for colored men to get a genuine hold of white
civilization. The ritual of claiming modernity as their own for Third World male subjects
could not be accomplished without resorting to the eroticism of white female bodies. As
Colette Guillaumin puts it, the natural characteristics of ethnicity, gender, race, or nation
inscribe the system of domination on the body ofthe individual, assigning his/her place
as a dominated person (1995). While the colonial power hierarchy leaves its most
ingrained trace on dominated bodies, the bleaching of its influence carried out by
postcolonial national subjects starts paradoxically with similar strategies, only in an
opposite direction. In contrast to previous narrative paradigms in which amorous
encounters between Chinese men and Caucasian women usually bring to light the
passiveness, impotency, and unrequited desires of Chinese men, the story ofWang
135
Qiming features how a Chinese man satisfies his sexual desire by possessing a white
woman. It is in this sense that Geremie R. Barme argues in his paper with a sensational
title-"To Screw Foreigners Is Patriotic: China's Avant-Garde Nationalists"-that Wang
Qiming's action is of a paradigmatic significance and is the most eloquent recent
statement (and inversion) of the century-old Chinese-foreign dilemma (1996, 183-4).
However, a close look at the media text tells a more complicated story. The
consummate moment of the sequence is undoubtedly the interaction between Wang
Qiming and the prostitute in the motel. After a seductive foreplay, the prostitute stops and
insists that Wang pay her first. Wang asks her with a wry grin, "So you mean you can do
anything if I give you money?" He starts to put money on her naked back and she keeps
begging for it. However, he soon gets angry with her, pulling off her underwear and
throwing her onto the bed. From this point he assumes a dominant role in their sensual
play:
Prostitute: "I said get off me." (A little annoyed)
Wang Qiming: "Really?"
P: "Really."
W: "I pay you!" (Starting to pull out IDO-dollar bills)
"Ok, go say you love me! You love me! 'C02 I give you money!"
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P: "What do you want me to say?! What do you want me to say?!" (Confused)
W: "Say 'love me'!" (Throwing money over her body)
P: "I love you."
W: "No, say 'love me' like a lover! Very tender, soft... " (Pulling out another
1OO-dollar bill)
"Again."
P: "I love you." (With a more tender tone)
W: "No. Look at me, look at me. What is this? Money! Say..." (Waving money in
his hand)
P: "I love you." (With a really tender tone, and smile on her face)
W: "Yeah, again. 1 give you money, OK?" (Throwing more money on her body)
"More, soft, like you real' love me, Ok?" (With a satisfied smile)
Although the Chinese man seems to have accomplished the revenge on the West through
possessing the white female body, this sequence also implies that this revenge could not
be accomplished without the power ofmoney.
One important but often neglected element in Wang's acclaimed conquest ofa white
woman (Barme 1996, 183) is its "business" nature. The white woman Wang Qiming
sexually possesses is a prostitute who obviously has no feelings for him but just provides
137
her "service" for money's sake. In this particular sequence the only moment her true
emotion is disclosed is when Wang stars to play rough with her. However, she stops
acting it out when she gets more and more greenbacks from Wang Qiming. From "get off
me" to "I love you", the prostitute undergoes a persona transformation in which she ends
up being a self-conscious performer/feigner of emotions. Wang Qiming, on the other
hand, is determined from the very beginning to stage such a performance as a director in
charge.
Inasmuch as the power of money over emotions is concerned, this mutual
performativity betrays its double implications: On the one hand, money does have the
power to make people feign emotions; on the other hand, they are just performances short
of real substance. Put differently, in the staged performance demonstrating the power of
money, what is also delivered is precisely its limitation. The white prostitute, in this sense,
is not only a sexual object exploited by Wang Qiming, but also a sexual mirror reflecting
the paradoxical power of money. This perplexing sequence to (in)validate the power of
money therefore testifies that in NBNY the male sexual desire is by and large conceived
by its producers as a surrogate for the monetary desire.
138
The Curse of Money, the Failed Man, and the Pre-socialist Past
The ambivalence over the power of money as embodied by the prostitution sequence
sheds doubtful light on the NBNY producers' advocacy of the desiring patriotism. If, as
Lydia Liu comments, the mass-media elites are "the movers and shapers of transnational
processes to the extent that they have successfully transformed the potential obstacle
(socialist discourse) to global capitalism into an enabling force on the ideological front"
(1999, 791-2), wither is the transformation "successful" on a personal level? Whence
does this transformation shape the national sentiments of"making money is patriotic" in
the media text? And how do these mass-media elites demonstrate their self-reflective
agency in this gendered discourse ofdesiring patriotism? Attempting to answer these
questions, this section dissects the mass-media elites' literary sensibility through which
they reflect upon their patriotic sentiments defined by male desires in the transition from
Maoist socialism to global capitalism.
Accompanying their advocacy ofthe desiring patriotism is another ethos of the
mass-media elites: Money is the curse oflife. After Guo Yan divorced Wang Qiming and
married McCarthy, out of profound guilt and pity she reveals the sources ofMcCarthy's
clientele to Wang, thus giving Wang a clear edge in his competition with McCarthy in the
sweater-manufacturing business. Wang defeats McCarthy in the business and he hires
McCarthy to work for him as revenge. At this juncture Guo Yan's sense of guilt and pity
139
sides with McCarthy. Deeply appalled by what a cold-blooded businessman Wang has
become, Guo Van leaves Wang for good. In his relationship with his daughter Ningning,
Wang Qiming is also cursed by money. In his pursuit ofwealth Wang neglects the
necessary education of and communication with Ningning, who becomes increasingly
decadent and disrespectful under the influence of the American materialistic way of life.
She ends up being sexually promiscuous and drug addicted. When she asks Wang Qiming
to disown her, she blames Wang for caring about only money and nothing ofher. At
another point, Wang's sweater factory is in trouble because he expands his business too
fast and takes too many bank loans. Wang's mistress Ah Chun offers him two options:
One is to keep all his workers-most ofwhom are new immigrants from Mainland just
like Wang himself a few years before-and spend all his savings paying the interests
generated by the loans; the other is to fire all his workers and file for bankruptcy
protection-this way Wang can keep all his money and his factory but all his workers
wi11lose their badly-needed jobs. Tormented by the hard choice between his conscience
and his money, Wang nevertheless chooses to fire all his workers and keep his money.
While acclaiming the sentiment of"making money is patriotic" to a certain extent,
the NBNY producers simultaneously bring to the forefront the curse ofmoney on
contemporary Chinese men through the heartbreaking story ofWang Qiming, who suffers
the losses of his marriage, his relationship with his daughter, and his conscience on the
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way to pursue money. It is intriguing that the NBNY producers, while fashioning the
discourse of the desiring patriotism, simultaneously endeavored to shape the character
Wang Qiming-the very embodiment of such patriotism-as a failed man on the
social/familial and ethical levels. The staging of such a failed man in a postsocialist TV
serial must be understood within a broader context ofmodem Chinese history. As
Eugenia Lean notes, contemporary China is under the influence of a global pattern among
non-Western societies of the strategic employment ofpre-existing "traditional" fOnTIS of
virtue and sentiment in their creation ofmodern societies and identities (2007, 20). In this
light, I supplement Lydia Liu's understanding of postsocialism in relation to this serial by
proposing that the historical contextualization ofNBNY and the tracing of the
mass-media elites' literary sensibility should span not only the socialist period but also
the more "traditional", pre-socialist period of China.
The mass-media elites' portrayal of Wang immediately conjures up other classic
figures of failed men in the century-long history of modem Chinese literature. Among
these figures the most relevant to this chapter's discussion is the protagonist ofYu Dafu's
Sinking (Chen/un 1921). A Chinese male student living in Japan to study Western
medicine, the protagonist gradually divorces himself from the community of Chinese
students by studying in distant N city where he rejects offer of friendship by
well-intentioned Japanese students. He finds an excuse to sever his relations with his
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elder brother and finally sequesters himself in the hillside park. He finds Japanese people
hostile and believes that Japanese girls do not like him because he is Chinese. He relieves
his sexual desire by masturbation, voyeurism, and visiting brothels, which severely
torment his mentality. The story ends with the protagonist's attempt to throw himself in
the sea while painfully lamenting the weakness of his homeland. 14
Dissecting the male subjectivity in Sinking against a backdrop of Chinese national
history, Haiyan Lee points out that with the aid ofpositioning the Chinese protagonist in
a supposedly hostile foreign colonial milieu, unrequited love as the code word for failed
sociability is the key to understand why the discourse of nationalism is mobilized to
articulate a preeminently personal crisis. She adds that with the nation as the hegemonic
referent, the sense of frustration from his failure to win love and sympathy from Japanese
girls is exteriorized as a consequence of his national identity as a despised Chinaman,
rather than that of his personal traits (2007, 250-1). To some extent, Sinking and NBNY
are both national allegories grounded in male desires. However, while Sinking is an
appropriation of the Freudian psychoanalytical theory to deliberately associate the
unrequited sexual desire-disguised as a romantic quest for love though-with national
humiliation, the central desire under scrutiny in NBNY is the monetary desire that is
sometimes refashioned as a sexual desire. If Sinking still features a comparatively
straightforward link between the unrequited male sexual desire-as a symbol of personal
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failure-with the national failure, NBNY fashions Wang Qiming as a more insinuating
failure, a failure based not on the insatiation of, but on the fulfillment of, his desires.
The protagonist of Sinking and Wang Qiming nonetheless share much in common: a
Chinese man sojourning in a supposedly hostile foreign country; failure in sociality and
familiality; further failure in ethics because of prostitution; and the association of their
mental pains generated by these personal failures with the Chinese nation. Modeled on
the protagonist of Sinking, Wang Qiming's visit to the prostitute and his subsequent
mental pains bespeak another dimension of the curse of money that questions the
sentiment of "making money is patriotic". The somewhat simple-minded acclaim of
"screwing foreigners is patriotic" misses an important message the NBNY producers
attempt to convey-that the nationalist "triumph" of a Chinese man possessing a white
prostitute is actually not that triumphal on a personal level.
The necessary intervention of money in Wang's fulfillment of sexual desire through
prostitution testifies his failure as a man to attract a woman. More importantly, visiting a
prostitute brings about guilt and pains that severely torment Wang's mentality. Right after
his wild night with the prostitute, Wang Qiming takes a very long shower during which
he keeps knocking his head against the wall and restlessly rubs his skin with lotion. After
he got out of the bathroom he throws away what appear to be all the clothes he wore
when he was with the prostitute. This sequence unmistakably articulates Wang's guilt and
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pains resulting from his visit to the prostitute. Applying this hindsight, the brief sensual
pleasure the prostitute brings to Wang Qiming is like a prologue that heralds the deep and
profound pains that follow. If anything, Wang's visit to the prostitution and its
repercussions on his mentality evidence a new level of his personal failure-that he even
fails to hold himselftogether under the curse ofmoney.
All these plots telling of the curse ofmoney seem to cast the NBNY producers'
doubt on the desiring patriotism. Instead of uncritically celebrating the national
sentiments of "making money is patriotic", the producers seem more inclined to portray
Wang Qiming as a failed man with a failed redemption through money. Juxtaposing the
patriotic sentiment defined by the monetary desire and the self-reflective agency of the
producers as embodied by the curse of money, the narrative ofNBNY seems to construct
a utopian vision ofthe world built upon the double-edged power ofmoney. This utopian
vision can perhaps only be measured in its failure-in its negation which will
retroactively give national means to it. As Frederic Jameson theorizes the failed
radicalism in literature and culture, "all the radical positions of the past are flawed,
precisely because they failed ...What they achieved, however, was something rather
different from achieved positivity; they demonstrated, for their own time and culture, the
impossibility of imagined Utopia" (1991, 208-9). Put plainly, it is precisely the emergent
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impossibility from the triumphalist tone ofmoney as panacea that marks the desiring
patriotism with a dark streak ofpersonal failure.
In her theorization ofvisual representation and identity, Shu-mei Shih calls for
attention to the necessity and importance of contextualization in analyses ofvisualized
identification:
As the particular practice and usage of a medium relies heavily on local and other
contexts for its signifying function, the geopolitical, spatial, as well as historical
contexts of a given articulation become necessary knowledge to understand, not the
infinite but the necessary, elements to different overdeterminations in visual
representation. (2007, 11)
In this insight, this chapter searches for possible reasons for the mass-media elites'
persistent interest in associating the cultural archetype of failed men with the new
patriotic sentiment defined by the male monetary desire with a careful historical
contextualization, which revolves around Chinese postsocialism and the male
mass-media elites' literary sensibility that speaks to the postsocialist reality, the socialist
past, and the cultural memories ofpre-socialist China.
145
First, the mass-media elites, as the middlemen of intellectuals and the market, retain
a keen intellectual concern with current social issues. Although they have made up their
mind to say "farewell" to the traditional social responsibilities shouldered by intellectuals,
their intellectual heritage-as centrally embodied in their literary sensibility in
NBNY---does not diminish. The mass-media elites retain their self-reflective sensibility
in their cultural articulation despite being beneficiaries of the rapid transformation of
China into a postsocialist country-which is epitomized in the cultural economy, the
rampant state-sponsored privatization, and the all-society celebration of the profit-seeking
dawans. They must feel troubled by the clash between their gained interests and their
critical sights of the social illnesses in the transformation. Their doubts on the patriotic
sentiments that are constructed by themselves is transposed to the personal failure of
Wang Qiming. These felt issues ofpostsocialist development and social illnesses by the
mass-media elites will be more eloquently broached by Chinese netizens through the
venue of cyber-literature in ten years, which is the topic of another chapter of this
dissertation.
Second, the historical memories of the socialist period still linger in the mass-media
elites' cultural representations. The legacies ofMaoist class struggles in postsocialist
China include not only the overt aversion to the bloodsheds and political persecution, but
also the covert obsession with the moral superiority ofthe working class and the poor.
146
The ingrained sense of guilt for being rich, as it is the case with the mass-media elites,
may prompt them to cast a less triumphal image of Wang Qiming.
Third, the cultural sediments generated from the long history of China still influence
the postsocialist negotiations of the Chinese national subjects with both their
positionalities within the national power structure and their activities of cultural
rememberance. The reprise of the postsocialist national subjects' appropriation of the past
must be conducted with the full awareness that on the one hand the conscious retrieval of
the past is "fundamentally conditioned by the tumultuous history of the socialist era
separating then from now" (Anagnost 1997, 6); on the other hand the retrieval ofthe past
goes far back beyond the socialist era and speaks directly with diversified social
memories within the complex web of cultural meanings shaped by both present national
positionalities and thousands of years ofhistorical sediments. After the emergence ofNeo
Confucianism in the Song dynasty, its advocacy of "Preserving heavenly reason and
eliminating human desires" became one of the most eloquent voices of the
bureaucratic/intellectual/mainstream Chinese culture. The time-honored hostility to a
complete validation of the fulfillment of human desires in Chinese tradition may also
contribute to the portrayal ofWang Qiming-a full-fledged "desiring subject"-as a
failed man.
147
Conclusion
As Sheldon Lu describes, postsocialism is a socioeconomic condition in which
capitalist modes and relations of production haven been increasingly implemented in
nominally socialist China. It is a cultural logic in accordance with which artists,
filmmakers, and writers negotiate the residual socialist past and the emergent capitalist
present to concoct new imaginaries of a transitional society (2007, 208). As a
representative masterpiece of Mainland Chinese TV serials in the 1990s, NBNY's
discourse of the desiring patriotism firmly participates in such a negotiating process.
Through the small TV screen, the contradictions and anomalies of the Chinese nation in
the global era are vividly represented and reconsidered.
NBNY tells the story of Wang Qiming-an ambitious native ofBeijing moving to
the United States to realize his "American Dream" that is largely comprised of the male
desires for money. Through the TV serial NBNY, the male mass-media elites such as
Zheng Xiaolong and Feng Xiaogang fashioned a mode of national sentiments with mass
appeal, whose central thread is "Making money is patriotic". The male desire for money
functions in NBNY as the lynchpin that connects the male body, the nation, and the
postsocia1ist reality and imagination. Wang Qiming' fate comes full circle at the end of
the serial. He gambles away all his fortune and becomes poor again. If making money is
patriotic, the loss of all his money ironically hollows out the meanings of Wang as the
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embodiment of such d~siring patriotism. The ultimate failure ofWang Qiming embodies
the keen concerns and wornes of the mass-media elites about the postsocialist conditions
in China.
Notes:
1 See, for example, Barme (1996).
2 The ideas of "cultural economy" and "cultural broker" are inspired by Braester (2005).
3 See Cao (1991).
4 http://yule.sohu.com/20081124/n260814254.shtml, accessed August 15,2009. The currency
exchange rate of 1993 is used here.
5 This term is used in http://tvshow.smgbb.cn/dianshi/zixun/qifenzhiyi/2009-06-22/14662.html,
accessed August 16, 2009.
6 http://baike.baidu.com/view/68947.htm, accessed August 16, 2009.
7 According to Braester (2005), Chinese real estate tycoons like Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi are
examples of businessmen making use of culture.
8 The description of the cultural function of these mass-media elites as cultural brokers is inspired by
Braester (2005).
9 The parentheses and italicizations in this citation are Lydia Liu's.
10 The translated title of the TV serial in Uu's article is "Beijing Sojourners in New York". This
chapter adopts the translation "A Native of Beijing in New York" from its international DVD version.
11 The translation is mine.
12 Here Wang refers to the situation after he manually finished his first big order of clothing-making.
13 The translation is mine.
14 The summary of the story is inspired by Denton (1992).
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CHAPTER IV
ORIENTALISM, GLOBAL CONSUMERISM, AND THE CHINESE
LEITMOTIF FILM IN THE 1990S
The publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978 marks a critical moment in
the development of modem Western humanities and social sciences. According to Said,
the cultural difference between "the Orient" and "the Occident" is a discursive structure
made possible by the Western capitalist world rather than a basic truth of the history of
human civilization. The Orient is rendered as a necessary Other of the Eurocentric Self of
the West. Providing a new critical space and path to self-cognizance and reflexivity,
Orientalism ranks as one of the most significant contributions to Western sociocultural
critical theories (Dai 2002, x). Saidian Orientalism brings to the fore the constant efforts
of European culture to represent and reconfigure the Oriental Other in relation to the
Occidental Self, and directs critical attention to the imbalanced power relations inherent
in such practices. Orientalism is necessary to "understand the enormously systematic
discipline by which European culture was able to manage-and even produce-the
Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively
150
during the post-Enlightenment period". As Said says, "European culture gained in
strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even
underground self' (1978,3).
Said's discussion pertains to Western representations of the East, particularly to the
Muslim "orient" with which his study was primarily concerned (Schein 2002, 387).
However, "his critics and supporters alike have extended his model far beyond the
confines of that part of the world" (Chen 2002, 1) and Saidian Orientalism has inspired
the productive explorations of the manifold representations of the "self-other" nexus in
different local contexts. Critics have pointed out that the Saidian paradigm excludes the
"West" as a potential object of essentialist representation, stopping short at the conclusion
that the "East" is mute and is therefore inherently incapable of othering (Schein 2002,
387-88). Ever since the publication of Orientalism, many derivative studies inspired by it
have identified in non-Western cultural locations creative "othering" practices that do not
necessarily cohere with the Saidian paradigm.
This chapter examines such a creative Orientalist cultural practice by the Chinese
state in postsocialist China. The central concern of the chapter is how the state-as one of
the national subjects whose positionality within the national power structure was
fundamentally complicated by postsocialism-negotiated the Orientalist structures of
feeling in the Leitmotif Film in the 1990s. The dominance of consumerism in Chinese
151
society-an overwhelming consequence caused by the postsocialist
conditions-prompted the state to deploy consumerist venues such as cinema spectacle
for a mass-appealing project ofnationalism in the 1990s. The Orientalist structures of
feeling in the Leitmotif Film were an important vehicle of the Chinese state to conjure up
mass-appealing nationalist ethos through cinema narratives and thus become the key spot
for the investigation of the state's agency in the postsocialist articulation of nationalism.
This chapter is divided into three parts. First, I offer an interpretation of the
historical context of the 1990s Leitmotif Film from the perspective of global
consumerism in relation to the novel positionality of the Chinese state. The postsocialist
Mainland film industry is shaped by the demands of a globalized market economy, the
state's novel needs to reaffirm its legitimacy as both the political ruler and the champion
of the new economic order on an everyday basis, and the desires of Chinese people who
have integrated into the global capitalist system and become the largest group of
consumers in today's world. The state is confronted with dual pressures: one is from the
long tradition and still ongoing need of holding on to film as an important part of the
ideological apparatuses of the Communist party-state; the other comes out of the
unstoppable trend of commercialization of Chinese film in which the market and
consumers persistently accumulate their sway over the production, circulation, and
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reception of Chinese film works. The Leitmotif Film with overt nationalist claims came
out as a response of the state to such double pressures.
The second part explores the state's appropriation of the Orientalist structures of
feeling in an influential leitmotifmovie GriefOver the Yellow River (Huanghe Juelian
jHpg{g~, 1999, hereafter HHJL). In HHJL the invocation of China's anti-Japanese
history in the twentieth-century as the main story setting and the maneuvering of an
"internalized" Western character as a main participatory element of story telling fashion a
mode of national sentiments that romantic love (aiqing ~tw), familial affection (qinqing
*tw), and clan loyalty (zongzu zhi qing *Mcztw) give birth to the ultimate passion of
dying for China. I argue that the Chinese state, through the instrument of the director,
reworked Orientalism to foreground the transformation of the Western character into yet
another embodiment of this mode of national sentiments. This reworked Orientalist mode
of national sentiments bespeaks the Chinese state's endeavor to govern the people
through cinematic narratives.
Finally, a comparison between the Orientalist trends of Chinese film making in the
1980s and early 1990s, and that in HHJL, is followed by a contextual study of Chinese
audience responses to HHJL. Its vast popularity in Mainland and general unpopularity
beyond China proper prove that HHJL-and by extension, the Leitmotif Film in the
1990s-encodes and projects an indigenous audience susceptible to its sentimental power.
153
I argue, through the case ofHHJL, that the film media's efficacy of enunciating the
state's nationalist agenda is increasingly integrated with its ability to mobilize the
indigenous audience/consumers through the configurations of Orientalist structures of
feeling. It is in this sense that my study ofthe 1990s Leitmotif Film provides a point of
convergence between nationalism and consumerism in postsocialist China.
Global Consumerism, Cultural Imagination, and the Postsocialist Film Industry
Consumerism, in a narrow sense of economics, refers to the belief that the free
choice of consumers should dictate the economic structure of a society. In a broader sense
of cultural studies, consumerism is a way of thinking that tends to perceive and define all
the social relationships through the central social behavior of commodity consumption. In
the era of globalization, consumerism features changes in both the "objective" and the
"subjective" dimensions of consumption. On one hand, "signs rather than just
economic/materialist forces are dominant" (Clammer 1997, 9) in the consumptive objects.
Signs-words, images, sounds-and the encoded meanings they carry become prominent
commodities contemporary people consume. On the other hand, the subjectivity of
consumers-their minds, desires, and sentiments-is liable, in a self-willing fashion, to
the influence of their own consumptive activities. Film is a major venue for encoding the
changing experience of money, time, and space in the age of global consumerism. The
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"image-making" business of film simultaneously endows it with the most robust capacity
to handle the global theme of space-time changes (Harvey 1989, 308), and makes it a
primary cultural commodity for consumption. According to Atjun Appadurai, "[t]he
image, the imagined, the imaginary-these are all terms that direct us to something
critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice...the
imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form ofwork (in the
sense ofboth labor and culturally organized practice), and a form ofnegotiation between
sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields ofpossibility" (1996, 31). The
same "form ofwork" appears in his elaboration on consumption:
[C]onsumption has become the principal work oflate industrial
society...Consumption has now become a serious form of work, however, ifby
work} we mean the disciplined (skilled and semiskilled) production of the means of
consumer subsistence. The heart ofthis work is the social discipline of the
imagination, the discipline of learning to link fantasy and nostalgia to the desire for
new bundles of commodities. (82)
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Put plainly, from a perspective of global consumerism, a large portion of the critical
global processes of cultural imagination are now embodied in people's consumption of
filmic images-through which their subjectivity is shaped.
Global consumerism has greatly changed the Mainland film industry since the
mid-1980s. Since film was introduced to China in the 1900s, it has provided Chinese
people with vast new possibilities to experience modem life. Filmography, film criticism,
and various histories regarding film production and consumption constitute an
indispensible part ofpre-1949 Chinese modernity. Some studies on Chinese film of this
era have been published.2 In the socialist period (1949-1978) film was first and foremost
a tool for political propaganda justifying the Communist regime through, among other
things, glorifying the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the
twentieth-century revolutionary history. The film industry was under direct control of the
state and was an important part of the "ideological state apparatuses" (Althusser 1998).
Film's political function largely eclipsed its other values, such as the entertaining value
and the commercial value. The free flow of capital, technology and cultural signs that
globalization produces started to alter the development trajectory of the Mainland film
industry by transforming Mainland Chinese people into consumers of filmic images.
When postsocialism became the main theme of the social changes of China, the economic
reform and China's integration with the global capitalist economy also promoted the
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reform ofthe film industry per se. The reform of Chinese film industry since the
mid-1980s is clearly reflected in aspects such as film financing, film subjects (zhuti .:±
~), and film distribution (Yu 2008, 90-126). Underlying these changes are the
self-adjusting cultural politics ofthe Chinese state in accordance with its new
position-as both the political ruler and the champion of the new economic order-in the
postsocialist national power structure.
Wang Hui reflects upon the formation of the new political and economic orders of
postsocialist Mainland China in his seminal 2003 book. He disagrees with the clear-cut
explanation of the events of 1989 as the final victory of the Western social system and
insists on reading them as a violent, in both figurative and literal senses, adjustment of
the Party-state to the new historical conditions of globalization. To him 1989 stands as an
abrupt tum-but certainly not an end--ofChina's reform era and must be understood
within a larger temporal and conceptual frame. In a case study he analyzes the
implementation of the price reform around 1989 as follows:
The price reform that had been called to a halt in the second half of 1988 just
happened to begin to be fully implemented in September of 1989, three months after
June Fourth, with the adjustments concentrated in the areas of price, exchange, and
interest rates ....But we should still ask how it came to pass that two market reforms
157
that had failed to be implemented in the late 1980s just happened to have
implemented in the post-1989 environment? The answer is that the violence of 1989
served to check the social upheaval brought about by this process, and the new
pricing system finally took shape. In other words, the new market system and the
pricing mechanisms that lay at hits heart were the result of political interference or
arrangement, and the relationship of exchange between political power and the
market could not help becoming an integral part of the economic system. (65-6)
Based on such an observation, he argues that the creation oftoday's market society was
the result of "state interference and violence" (65). In a similar vein, Xudong Zhang
continues his observation ofthe state's interferences with the market in the 1990s:
When the Chinese state engineered a new round of economic liberation in 1992, the
state itself was by far the biggest shareholder, stakeholder, and employer in an
already diversified, mixed economy. The state controlled key infrastructures such as
energy, transportation, telecommunication, finance, and foreign trade; state
enterprises still represented close to 50 percent of the gross national product (GNP),
and there were more than 100 million people on the state's payroll. (2008, 106)
158
It is clear that to a large extent the state power has integrated itself with the economic
rationalism of globalization in postsocialist China, making the state both the political
ruler and the champion of the new economic order.
However, the reorganization of the postsocialist political and economic orders also
challenged the legitimacy of-as much as it established-this new position of the state.
As Wang Hui notes:
[T]he 1989 social movement originated out of general protest against the unequal
devolution of political and economic power, out of dissatisfaction of local and
Beijing-based interest groups with the central government's policies of adjustment,
out of internal splits within the state, and out of the conflictual relations between the
state apparatus and various social groups. (2003, 63)
The upheaval of 1989 revealed the signs of social disintegration, and, with this as
backdrop, the state took stability as the premise of its own legitimacy. Because the
state apparatus of violence came to be regarded the sole force for maintaining
stability, it eventually obscured the crisis of state legitimacy that had gradually come
into being since the onset of the reforms. The basic historical fact (or paradox) was
that while governmental economic policy had brought about social upheaval, the
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need for stability following the upheaval became the justification for state power to
expand into society. (62)
The 1989 social upheaval is a central embodiment of the tensions between the state and
the masses in the processes of deepening the state-initiated economic reform. The state's
effort of calling for "stability"-such as the famous slogan of "Stability Overwhelms
Everything Else" (~5Eff1f~-W}-afterthe violent suppression of the upheaval cannot
disguise the fact that although it de facto contained the mass discontent with the state
policies and smoothened the process of the economic reform, the state's suppression
automatically put an end to the moral legitimacy of its ruling. A relevant ramification is
that the violence in 1989 has perpetually driven the masses and various social groups
away from the political sphere. To a large extent, the post-1989 period witnesses the
political disintegration of the society from the state. Allowing the masses more access to
the state power being out of the question, the state must figure out new means to
reintegrate the society with itself and reaffirm its legitimacy as the political
ruler/economic champion.
The promotion of nationalism in cultural imagination is an important maneuver of
the state to culturally reintegrate the society with itself. Borrowing from Ernest Gellner's
(1983) insights of nation and nationalism, Xudong Zhang furnishes a persuasive
160
interpretation of the historical inevitability of the thriving of nationalism in postsocialist
China. The premise of his interpretation is that postsocialist nationalism is a
mass-appealing, popular-culture-oriented process, which I agree with on principle. Zhang
notes:
In short, the nineteenth-century European industrialization and social mobility
described by Ernest Gellner resonated in China at the end of the twentieth century.
In the global system of capitalism, postrevolutionary China may find its situation
similar to Gellner's imagined Ruritania. Surrounded by the modem, dynamic
Empire of Megalomania, the local, agrarian, and dialect speaking Ruritanians not
only find the will to modernize, that is, to join the "universal high culture" of
industrialization, but they also discover the will to become a nation. (2008, 108)
He places two important qualifications onto this parallel though. First, he argues that the
assimilation of Geller's Ruritania into Megalomania is not a valid option for postsocialist
China. Contributing to this conclusion are factors such as China having the longest
centralized state tradition in documented history, the uncompromising pride associated
with its regional cultural and political hegemony, and the recent memory of its
semi-colonization by the Western powers. Second, the kind of "universal high culture"
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that mobilizes postsocia1ist China towards modernization and nation-building is quite
different from that which once mobilized Ruritania in the nineteenth-century Europe. As
Zhang notes, the cultural norms that mobilize postsocia1ist China are consumerist,
mundane and pleasure centered, and generated from "post-Fordist production and
postmodernism" (ibid).
The thriving ofpostsocialist nationalism at both the state and popular levels is
indispensable with the dominant milieu of the consumer culture. On one hand, "[a]s
modem transportation and communication reach the majority ofthe Chinese population,
a modem, secular notion of the nation becomes possible for the first time in a land where
it has historically been the political state, and not the 'natural' socioeconomic relations of
a community, that gives form to the nation"; on the other hand, the progressive
integration of the state power with the economic rationalism of globalization, "combined
with a modernizing socialist bureaucracy, allowed the state to be an integral, indeed
omnipresent part of the new image of the nation" (106). In short, the postsocia1ist
reorganization of the political and economic orders simultaneously established and
challenged the legitimacy of the state's new position as both the political ruler and the
champion of the new economic order. It also produces the consumption-driven Chinese
masses ready to embrace a secular, everyday-life based notion of the nation. Nationalism
therefore becomes the new cultural "glue" for the state to reintegrate itself with the
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society and mass consumers. It is in this sense that the appeal ofthe state's nationalist
imagination to the Chinese mass consumers-or the lack thereof-is crucial to the state's
adaptability to its new positionality within the national power structure.
The state's nationalist agenda is saliently embodied in its governing policies of the
film industry. Generally speaking, the Mainland film industry since the mid-1980s is still
under tight control of the state. Although in this era many profit-driven entertainment
movies were produced by Chinese filmmakers backed by non-state and overseas capital,
the trend toward entertainment film was "a simple matter of commerce" and "no political
freedom was granted (by the state) to endanger the Party control" in the reform of the
film industry (Yu 2008, 100). An equally powerful trend is the state's promotion ofthe
Leitmotif Film to emphasize official ideologies and shape social ethos. The literal
meaning of "leitmotif', or zhuxuanlU (.±:1iJE1*) in Chinese, is main melody in music. In
the late 1980s this term started to appear in state policies regarding the film industry. At
the official National Filmmakers' Conference in 1987, "highlighting the leitmotif' (tuchu
zhuxuanlii ~ te .±:1iJE1*) became a new official guideline to regulate the film industry.
Under this guideline, entertainment film productions could be granted only when the
mainstay of filmmaking remained a political tool ofpropaganda and education. A special
fund to subsidize the Leitmotif Film was also set up by the Ministry ofRadio, Film and
Television (MRFT), the then state bureau administering the film industry (101).
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The "main melody" of promoting contemporary Chinese film as "a political tool of
propaganda and education" was further endorsed by the state in the 1990s. At the
National Propaganda Conference held in 1994, Chinese President Jiang Zeming reiterated
that the Party guideline on propaganda is to "promote model heroes in contemporary
society through patriotism, collectivism, and other philosophies that are constructive to
reform: modernization, social progress, and ethnic coherence". Based on the
aforementioned special fund ofMRFT, a national film foundation was established by the
central government for the exclusive purpose of supporting Leitmotif Film production.
According to Hongmei Yu, the Leitmotif Film usually includes: 1) films focusing on the
revolutionary history (of Chinese people) since 1840, with some made in
quasi-documentary style; 2) biographical films of heroic characters, especially
communist revolutionary models; 3) films representing the achievement of contemporary
political and economic reform (106-7). Clearly, nationalism is the central theme and
imperative to the postsocialist, state-sponsored Leitmotif Film.
HHJL: The Orientalist Mode of National Sentiments
Orientalism provides a productive entry point for the postsocialist Leitmotif Film to
conjure up nationalist narratives appealing to the consumption-driven Chinese masses. In
his analysis of the contemporary triumph of the prototypical Orientalism-the
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West-centered cultural paradigm persistently producing the various images of the
Oriental Other-in non-Western locations, Edward Said pinpointed consumerism in the
Orient-that is, the Arab and Muslim world in his study-as the major factor contributing
to this triumph:
The Arab and Islamic world as a whole is hooked into the Western market system.
No one needs to be reminded that oil, the region's greatest resource, has been totally
absorbed into the United States economy....Arab oil revenues, to say nothing of
marketing, research, and industry management, are based in the United States. This
has effectively made the oil-rich Arabs into huge customers ofAmerican exports:
this is as true of states in the Persian Gulf as it is of Libya, Iraq, and
Algeria-radical states all. My point is that the relationship is a one-sided one, with
the United States a selective customer of a very few products (oil and cheap
manpower, mainly), the Arabs highly diversified consumers of a vast range of
United States products, material and ideological.
This has many consequences. There is a vast standardization of taste in the
region, symbolized not only by transistors, blue jeans, and Coca-Cola but also by
cultural images of the Orient supplied by American mass media and consumed
unthinkingly by the mass television audience. The paradox of an Arab regarding
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himself as an "Arab" of the sort put out by Hollywood is but the simplest result of
what I am referring to. Another result is that the Western market economy and its
consumer orientation have produced (and are producing at an accelerating rate) a
class of educated people whose intellectual formation is directed to satisfying
market needs ....So if all told there is an intellectual acquiescence in the images and
doctrines of Orientalism, there is also a very powerful reinforcement of this in
economic, political, and social exchange: the modem Orient, in short, participates in
its own Orientalizing. (1978, 324-5)
Using as an example the imbalanced consumptive liaisons between the Arab world and
the United States until the 1970s, Said made the seminal conclusion that the modem
Orient participates in its own Orientalizing. I agree with Said's conclusion on principle,
but in a different light. If in Said's theorization the Arab world until the 1970s was largely
the "unthinking" consumer ofAmerican material and cultural commodities, the "Orient"
in a broader sense-i.e. not only the Muslim Orient but the vast regions of Central Asia,
South Asia, and East Asia-has a long history of not being the mute object ofthe Western
gaze and the passive receiver/consumer of the Western ideological and cultural products,
but establishing its own national identities through actively appropriating time-honored
Orientalist epistemes.
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The discrepancy between the Saidian paradigm and the local histories of the vast
Orient especially looms large in the contemporary, post-Fordist cultural environment. In
critiquing Said's book Culture and Imperialism (1993), Ernest Gellner points out that
although Said's arguments of Orientalism aim against Western imperialism, they
fundamentally neglect that "the industrial/agrarian and Western/Other distinctions cut
across each other, and obscure each other's outline". The current economic prosperity
along the Pacific Rim may well call for a critical refashioning of the power structure of
the Saidian paradigm, since one may be able to argue that industrialism---one of the
crucial criterion with which Said developed his binary categories of the Orientalist and
Orientalized entities-might be better run in a Confucian-collective spirit in the
non-Western societies (1993,3-4).3 Geller's critique is corroborated by Aihwa Ong's
study of "petty Orientalism", She argues that Overseas Chinese from Hong Kong and
Southeast Asia rework in "the transnational context of corporate and media circulation"
Anglo-European academic concepts-the grand Orientalist discourses-into confident
pronouncements about Oriental labor, skills, deference, and mystery. In contrast to Said's
assumption that the object of Orientalism cannot respond, she suggests that Asian
subjects selectively participate in Orientalist formulations as they negotiate shifting
discursive terrains in the world economy (1993, 746). These studies have brought to the
fore the significant agencies of the indigenous states and educated elites in contemporary
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cross-cultural imagination and communication between the Orient and the Occident. The
globalized, infonnation-based modem economy has created non-Western, indigenous
societies with readily-made consumption-driven masses, in which the state and the elite
class of the Orient exert their agencies through appropriating various Orientalist
epistemes and establish "Oriental" identities that, in many occasions, appeal to the
indigenous masses.
The coincidence of the publishing of Orientalism and the Party-state's initiation of
the Mainland economic refonn in 1978 seems to tell of the intricate entanglements of the
state power and Orientalist epistemes. As mentioned previously, nationalism is the new
cultural "glue" for the state to reintegrate itself with the society and mass consumers and
thus is the central theme of the state-sponsored Leitmotif Film in the 1990s. This section
will examine the articulation of mingzu qinggan in an influential leitmotif movie Grief
Over the Yellow River (1999, hereafter HHJL) to elucidate how the state appropriates the
Orientalist structures of feeling in cinema narratives to facilitate its nationalist agenda.
HHJL tells the story of Owen, a grounded American pilot during the Second World
War who learns about the noble spirit of the Chinese people and the greatness of the
Chinese culture when he is rescued by the Communist-led Eighth Route Anny after an
emergency landing near the Great Wall. Owen joins a detachment of the Eighth Route
Army to march to the Communist base across the Yellow River. On the way to the base
-----_ ...._---_ ..._- --_.---
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Owen falls in love with a girl soldier An Jie Ct(1S), whose lingering memory of being
raped by the Japanese makes her a determined fighter. The detachment is disarmed and
jailed by the militia force of the An clan, whose members have a long feud with the clan
of the detachment leader Heizi (~T). The leader of the militia force is An Jie's father,
who eventually releases the detachment and tries to help them ferry across the River.
Both Heizi and An Jie die from a Japanese ambush by the River but Owen survives it.
Half a century later, Owen returns to the Yellow River to pay his respects to the native
people who rescued him.
HHJL was directed by Feng Xiaoning U~/J'l'), a filmmaker who graduated from
the Beijing Film Academy in 1982 along with Fifth Generation directors such as Zhang
Yimo and Chen Kaige. Different from his classmates, Feng is known for his persistent
exploration of the themes ofpatriotism and nationalism in film making. Besides HHJL,
he was handpicked by the state film bureau to direct a series of influential leitmotif
movies such as Red River Valley (Hong He Gu h1PJ1t, 1996) and Purple Sun (Zi Ri ~
E3 , 2000), which made him one ofthe most distinguished Leitmotif Film directors in the
1990s and after. After its release in 1999, HHJL won the three major film awards in
Mainland China: the Golden Rooster Award (jinjijiang ~x~~), the Hundred Flowers
Award (baihuajiang s1t~), and the Palace Column Award (huabiaojiang $~~).
The Golden Rooster Award is awarded by the China Film Association (Zhongguo
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Dianyingjia Xiehui 9=t 00 ~~~i1J'4~:)-a professional association ofMainland film
practitioners; the Hundred Flowers Award by the magazine Popular Cinema (Dazhong
Dianying jef;;;.~~)-a film magazine having a vast audience in China; the Palace
Column Award by the state film bureau. In the current one-party totalitarian system, the
professional and popular film awards in Mainland China cannot shed offthe immense
influence of official imperatives. The vast endorsement HHJL received from the layers of
the professional, the popular, and the state testifies to its significance in the
developmental history of the 1990s Chinese film industry and therefore makes it a good
venue for the investigation of the state's agenda for the Leitmotif Film.
The reason that HHJL received the state's endorsement is partly explained in a talk
given by Zhao Shi (~~)-Vice Chief ofthe State Administration of Radio, Film, and
Television (SARFT)4-in 2005. Zhao claims that patriotism is a good tradition of film of
China and leads it to "share the fate of the nation and apportion the breathing air with the
people" ( Yu minzu gong mingyun, yu renmin tong huxi .!§ ~~:tt1fl:rJE, .!§ A~ [PJ n-rIJ&):
Surveying the hundred-year history of Chinese film, it embodied prominent patriotic
themes at every critical historical moment of the nationaljoumey. Examples are
movies such as Along the Sungari River (Songhuajiang Shang ft fEtLt, 1947),
Lin Zexu (~* jj1~1*, 1959), Guerrillas on the Plain (Pingyuan Youji Dui .3fJ*WI-dr~A,
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1955), Zhang Ga, a Boy Soldier (Xiaobing Zhang Ga /J...~*PI, 1963), GriefOver
the Yellow River, My 1919 (Wo de 1919 ~i¥J 1919, 1999), and The Moon (Yilun
Mingyue -~a)jJj, 2005). Patriotism in Chinese film-which has enriched and
developed itself from the vicissitudes of history and the fate of the nation, and has
extended (its influence) into contemporary film making-is always the symbol of
national spirit and the spiritual momentum for the progress of the time.5
In Zhao's grandiose rendition of the correlation between patriotism and Chinese film is a
time-honored concern of the Chinese Party-state that comes to grips with the anti-colonial
history of China-especially the twentieth-century anti-Japanese history-for its
nationalist agenda. All but one movie6 mentioned in Zhao's talk narrate stories of
Chinese people fighting the Japanese invasion and reflect upon the critical issues of
national subjectivity under this single most overwhelming crisis confronting China in the
first half of the twentieth century. Zhao's talk embodies the contemporary phase of this
concern that keenly addresses the liaisons between the film media and national
subjectivity. Highlights have been given to film's capacity to fashion--or
fabricate-national subjectivity of contemporary Chinese people under new historical
conditions.
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In this process of shaping contemporary national subjectivity, patriotism is the
symbol of the "national spirit"-or in my terminology, the central thread of the
state-sponsored mode of national sentiments in the leitmotif movies such as HHJL. Based
on the vast scholarship on human subjectivity, sentiments and feelings, and the nation and
nationalism, Haiyan Lee's study of modem Chinese literature and history fosters the
intriguing claim that the modem subject is first and foremost a sentimental subject, and
that the modem nation is first and foremost a community of sympathy (2007, 7). Citing
Jean-Luc Nancy, Richard Sennett, and Naoki Sakai, she argues that nationalist ideology
represents the modem nation as a transparent community united in its affections and its
commitment to abstract, universal values. Its members identify with one another
primordially, regardless of each person's particular position in the national power
structure (226). Within the context of modem China, this vision of the nation as a
community of sympathy is subject to the power maneuverings of multiple national
subjects, of which the state is the most powerful and skillful one. As Naoki Sakai points
out, the principle of national sympathy demands that the circuit of feeling be coterminous
with the boundaries of the nation as defined by the state, that one extends sympathy to
one's fellow countrymen and antipathy to those designated as enemies of the nation, and
one maintains a practical, interactive, and empathetic relation with one's fellow
countrymen, and an epistemic, objectifying, and antipathetic relation with outsiders (1997,
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142).7 In the first half ofthe twentieth century the overt national crisis of the Japanese
invasion provided occasion to harden the national boundaries between China and Japan,
the process of which was heavily participated in by the two statist political
groups-Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party and Mao Zedong's Communist Party. At
the price of huge warfare and millions of Chinese and Japanese lives, this historical
hardening process solidified the object of the originally abstract national sympathy and
transformed the general love for China into specified loyalties to either of the two groups.
In other words, overt historical crises such as the Japanese invasion gave the state
naturalized power to speak for the nation and transformed the abstract, universal national
sympathy into specified, hardened loyalties to the state-represented nation--or, the
nation-state.
Film of China after 1949 refurbished and reinvented these critical historical
moments in cinema spectacles. The Communist Party-state constantly resorted to the
cinematic representation of the anti-Japanese history to instigate mass allegiance to its
various causes. Patriotism-the ideology to sacrifice individual welfare, happiness, and
lives for specified causes of the state in the name of the survival and glory of the
nation--eomes right out of such maneuverings ofthe state power. As Jing Tsu puts it,
antiforeignism has always served as a sure catalyst in consolidating national communities
and professions of national sovereignty occur most passionately with injuries done by
------------------
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perceived outsiders (2005, 2-3). HHJL's well-crafted narrative setting of the
anti-Japanese history powerfully foregrounds the patriotic theme that the Communist
Party-state anxiously promotes under current circumstances. That is, its shaky position of
the political ruler/economic champion in postsocialist China entails the Communist
Party-state's even greater need of patriotism to demand loyalties from the masses. In this
light, HHJL's patriotic theme is not only a recast of historical wounds but also a starting
point for reading contemporary Chinese society.
However, the sole emphasis of the state's schema on patriotism-eonsolidating its
central status in "speaking for" the nation under contemporary conditions-is not enough
to tease out the complicated relationship between postsocialism, the state, and the
consumption-driven masses as exemplified by HHJL. Patriotism is one of the most
prominent traditions of the politically sensitive Mainland film from 1949 through the
early 1980s.8 How does HHJL-the representative work of the Leitmotif Film in the late
1990s-stand out in this time-honored tradition of Mainland film? Upon answering this
question the state's appropriation of Orientalist epistemes comes under my scrutinization.
Although patriotism is the central thread of the state-sponsored mode ofnational
sentiments in HHJL, it cannot be successfully delivered without the state's reworking of
Orientalism. I argue that the Chinese state reworked Orientalism to transform the Western
character Owen into but another embodiment of the mode of national sentiments in which
174
romantic love (aiqing ~tw), familial affection (qinqing *tw), and clan loyalty (zongzu
zhi qing *~z.tw) give birth to the ultimate passion of dying for China. It is the state's
appropriation of Orientalist epistemes that made a mass-appealing project ofHHJL's
mode of national sentiments. The following discussion ofHHJL will explore the state's
agency in this appropriatory process from three interrelated perspectives: the construction
of the "internalized" Western character, the gender politics of China-West interactions in
the articulation of national sentiments, and the significant trope of "dying for China".
Abdallah Laroui understands Western Orientalism as follows:
Orientalism is Western when it takes the West not as an event, but as an idea
preordained in all eternity, complete and final from the beginning. And if it starts
from this point, it has to construct its subject-matter as an explicitly, totally different
item, reduced to the form it had at its birth. The two assumptions are clearly related;
if the West is a fulfilled promise, the non-West has to be unfulfilled since
unannounced. If the first is predetermined the second is necessarily accidental. In
both cases no evolutionary process is ever conceived. Positive changes, when
detected in the West, are predicated on preexistent seeds, and so are defects, flaws,
wants in the non-West. One is a welcome miracle, which can change and remain the
I
I
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same, while the other, particularly Islam, is an unwelcome accident, not permitted to
change without betraying itself. (1997)
This characterization of Western Orientalism brings to light the imbalanced relationship
between the Western "gazer" and the non-Western "gazed" on an epistemological level.
The subjectivity of the Western gazer is a preordained eternity-a wellspring of wisdom
from an external, perfect realm that sheds light on everything of this imperfect,
non-Western world. However, in HHJL the incarnation of the Western gazer-American
pilot Owen-is displaced from his advantageous epistemological position as an external
referee. Owen's epistemological adventure-that is, his "knowing" of China-is
"internalized" into the cinema narrative and actually becomes a key element of the state's
imagination of national sentiments.
In the narrative ofHHJL Owen is positioned as a truthful witness to the
anti-Japanese history of the Chinese people. The movie starts and ends with Owen's trip
back to China in the 1990s and his experience with the Eighth Route Army detachment in
the Anti-Japanese War is told in a flashback style. His "witness-ness" is highlighted in a
formal introduction issued by the publisher of the film's VCDs:
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...... a detachment of the Eighth Route Army saved an American pilot and escorted
him to the Communist base...The pilot witnessed (mudu § llt) the unyielding
national spirit of the Chinese people in front of the cruel invader and deeply felt the
great bosom (xionghuai B~r'~) of the Chinese people and the Eighth Route Army...
The literal meaning of mudu in Chinese is "eye-witness". This function of Owen as a
truthful witness is upheld by two narrative strategies. The first is that the cinema narrative
is interspersed with English voice-overs produced by Paul Kersey-the American actor
playing Owen--himself. Since Paul Kersey's native voice gives a "formal" sense of truth
to what he states, the voice-overs are deployed to expose the "real thoughts" of the
Western character---or put in a more accurate way, what the Chinese state likes the
Western character to think. The second strategy is that the different parts of the
flashback-styled narrative are threaded by several photos featuring Chinese people Owen
met in the War. As Roland Barthes argues, compared to "motion pictures", the genius of
photography-"still pictures"-is the specificity of the subject of the image, that the
subject "really was there" (1981). The semiotic authenticity ofphotography also
contributes to the formal truth of Owen's story.
The creation of this American pilot character in HHJL not only adds to the formal
truth of its anti-Japanese story, but also participates heavily in its discourse of national
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sentiments. Owen is projected as a genuine lover ofWartime Chinese people. As an
elderly man sitting on a Chinese flight when the movie begins, Owen reflects upon his
experience in Wartime China:
Everyone has special times in their life; one ofmy greatest memories is a few short
days I spent in China more than 50 years ago. I'll never forget the land ravaged by
the War, or the valiant Chinese people who faced the challenges of their incredibly
hard lives with unwavering courage and spirit, the cave dwellings and the ancient
temples built on the foundation of silt clay, and the magnificent Yellow River ...
Not only is Owen a lover ofWartime Chinese people in a general sense, his love is
specified in his engagement with various female and male Chinese characters in his
journey through China. In the movie the Chinese state plays with the gender politics of
Orientalism and bends Orientalist paradigms to its own ends. Orientalism brings to the
fore the Western cultural hegemony usually defined by a dominating, exploitative gaze.
For instance, in his work on Egypt, Timothy Mitchell writes that the West is
characterized since the nineteenth century by an "ordering up of the world itself as an
endless exhibition". Everything seemed to be set up as though it were the model or the
picture of something, arranged before an observing subject into a system of signification,
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declaring itself to be a mere object, a mere "signifier" of something further (2002, 496 &
500).
Not surprisingly, the dominating Western gaze and its object are recast in
cross-cultural communication as an imbalanced gender relationship. Non-Western
females are perceived as vulnerable objects under a dominating Western male gaze. As
Wendy Larson argues in discussing the gender implication ofWestern fascination with
China's tradition of foot binding, the interest in this practice makes clear that "Westerners
both eroticize and exoticize Chinese culture. Their obsessive interest in the prurient
aspects of China serves to set them apart as [male] masters looking down on a vulnerable
[female] subject, as well as to situate Chinese culture as the object oftheir gaze and the
cause oftheir pleasure" (2002, 185). The first encounter between Owen and the Chinese
girl soldier An Jie is staged in a classic Orientalist style. After his emergency landing
Owen is attacked by a Japanese fighter jet and faints on the ground. He wakes up and
finds himself on the Great Wall. He is greeted by a beautiful Chinese girl speaking fluent
English. Then the voice-over cuts in:
It was a miracle to meet an English-speaking girl in such a small village. So I was
rescued by a group of Chinese soldiers in the Eighth Route Army...An Jie was a
medical student in Peking. She resolved to join the Eighth Route Army while the
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war was breaking out. Because of her medical training and English-speaking skills,
she was assigned to accompany me. It seemed that God had sent me an angel ...
When An Jie treats Owen's wounds, he starts calling her "Angel". He keeps calling her
that and she eventually gets used to-even starts to like-her new name. On their way
back to the Communist base, Owen and An Jie fall in love with each other. After their
release by the militia force of the An clan, they hid in an ancient temple while Heizi went
out for help. At this moment Paul Kersey's passionate voice comes in, "Within the walls
of the temple the war seemed faraway; I was lost in the mysterious ambience of the
oriental culture. The birds and the other greens were our companions. Angle and I had
our own little paradise... " Accompanying the voice-over are visual sequences of their
romantic life in the ancient temple. These narratives embody many elements of typical
Orientalist cliches: that a Western male gets lost in a mysterious non-Western land; that
he finds his God has prepared everything in his favor, including having an indigenous
girl ready as the company of his exotic-mostly also erotic-journey; and that the
indigenous girl can speak-in other cases she can be taught to speak-his language and
is willing to be named and loved by him. What seems to be restaged at this juncture is the
Orientalist paradigm of an indigenous girl being named and penetrated by her Western
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master--one of the bluntest heralding non-Western people being "enlightened", mentally
and physically, by the preordained, unique Western culture.
Although to a certain extent An Jie does function as an erotic object of Owen's
exploitative gaze, the Chinese state bestows on the female character more culturally
intervening power than a mere vulnerable object under the dominating Western male
gaze would have. This intervening power is first embodied in the female body's
challenge to the erotic Western gaze. On their way to the Communist base the
detachment takes a break by a brook where people can bath. When An Jie is bathing
alone at the brook edge, Owen walks close to sneak a peek at her. In contrast to the
paradigmatic female body in an Orientalist peeping game-an indigenous female nude
body full of sexual temptation, An Jie's body is mostly covered by clothes and features
two unusual "adornments": bruises on her leg-the only exposed part of her body
besides her face and hands, and a grenade hanging in front of her chest. The bruises tell
of the physical sufferings the Chinese female has been through while the grenade reveals
a more symbolic danger that her life could come to an end at any moment. The erotic
pleasure Owen hopes for from his voyeuristic peek is abruptly intercepted by An Jie's
body. He starts to look intimidated and scared even before An Jie notices his existence.
At this moment An Jie is alerted by Heizi who finds out Owen's peeking from the
distance and gives a warning yell. An Jie is so angry that she starts to stare back at Owen.
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Under her fierce gaze Owen loses his composure, recoils from the brook edge, and ends
up slumping on the ground. In this sequence Owen's erotic gaze is challenged by the
Chinese female body, which successfully disrupts the erotic pleasure of the Western gazer,
bringing out shocking visual and psychic impacts he cannot bear. In this sense, An Jie's
body becomes a weapon that the gazed Chinese female-the supposed "vulnerable
object"-uses to overwhelm the gazing Western male-the supposed "master". The
erotic object of the Western gaze notwithstanding, An Jie manages to transfer her
prescribed sexual vulnerability back to the Western gazer through her "body weapon".
The challenge ofthe Chinese female body to the Western male gaze tells only part
ofthe story in HHJL's portrayal of the romantic love between An Jie and Owen. An Jie's
intervening power as an atypical Orientalist object is also manifested in that her love
works well on Owen as a catalyst for political conversion. That love is never a purely
individual passion, but is always mixed with a sense of political duty to "convert" the
Western other into one of "our own". During their stay in the secluded ancient temple, for
instance, their dates are hardly distinguishable from political lectures. Sitting close to
each other, An Jie teaches Owen how to say and write in Chinese "Flying my plane to
fight the Japanese" and "I am a friend ofthe Chinese people". Owen's eagerness in
learning is part of his courtship in which he nevertheless voluntarily surrenders himself
to his Chinese lover's political agenda. In the Chinese state's imagination this
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pedagogical process is necessary for a "right date" between China and the West, in which
the former subjugates the latter-emotionally and politically-in the name of love.
Thirdly, An Jie's intervening power on Owen's subject-matter is fully embodied in
her voluntary sacrifice of her romantic love and her very life for China. When they are
detained by the militia force of the An clan, Owen intensely argues with An Jie on
whether they should surrender to the Japanese in exchange for their lives. Owen insists
that they should value their lives but An Jie says, "We would rather lose our lives than
our dignity as soldiers". In an intimate atmosphere at the ancient temple An Jie finally
opens herself up to Owen. When Owen asks why she does not value her life and wears
the grenade all the time, An Jie says, "I am a soldier and I am also a woman...When I
have to make a choice between death and imprisonment I have to choose death because I
know exactly what kind of demons the Japs are". Then a flashback cuts in and tells An
Jie's experience in Peking where she got raped by Japanese soldiers. Terribly sorry for
what has happened to An Jie, Owen gently comforts her while the voice-over narrates, "I
finally understood this dear Chinese girl standing in front ofme. The Japanese had forced
her and her countrymen to live under terrible conditions. The Chinese would rather die
fighting the Japanese than lose their dignity and live." The secret of the grenade lays bare
the significance of raped female bodies in the statist imagination of national sentiments.
An Jie's rape bespeaks the loss of Chinese people's "dignity" and thus puts in danger the
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greatness of the nation. The only acceptable minzu qinggan for An Jie, it seems to the
Chinese state, is to die for China so that her utter sacrifice of individuality-love,
happiness, and life-may redeem the threat that her rape has posed to the greatness of the
Chinese nation. An Jie's voluntary wearing of the grenade-a literal weapon and a
figurative symbol of war-embodies her commitment to such qinggan.
Right before they leave the ancient temple for a ferry by the Yellow River, Owen
asks An Jie to quit the army and go the United States with him. Owen argues that they
have both served their military terms and from then on they deserve the right to pursue
their own happiness. Although she is deeply moved, An Jie firmly declines Owen's
invitation and says, "My countrymen are still fighting ....Military service term? When
others put a sword on your neck, you do not have any right". Here contrasted are two
means of conceiving the relationship between individual life and national duty. Owen
insists that the restrictions national duty puts on individual life are limited and
conditional. As long as he has served his term, his duty towards his nation is fulfilled and
he has the right to pursue personal happiness. An Jie nevertheless believes that the nation
rightfully demands unconditional sacrifice of its people. If China is in the middle of a
war, her duty is to fight and be ready to die for China. In other words, in such conditions
she has no right to love but a duty to fight and die.
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This minzu qinggan that An Jie has exemplified-to voluntarily relinquish one's
romantic love in order to die for China-totally wins over Owen and transforms him into
a soldier willing to fight and die for the Communist-led anti-Japanese cause. Owen does
not get upset after his de facto proposal is declined by An Jie. Instead, he walks towards
her and gently takes offher grenade, saying "I will be around to protect you". He does
not throw the grenade away but keeps it with his own body. In the ambush by the Yellow
River, the Japanese troops hold Heizi's daughter Huahua (itit) hostage, asking for the
surrender of the Chinese soldiers and Owen. Owen volunteers to go to the Japanese side
in exchange for Huahua. When surrounded by the Japanese soldiers, he threatens to
detonate the grenade and successfully gets Huahua back. That Owen puts his life on the
line to save Huahua declares his departure from his old self and his becoming ofone of
"our own", who, according to the statist imagination, can sacrifice his life for China
without hesitance. The eventual transformation of Owen powerfully testifies the prodigy
ofAn Jie's intervening power that the state endeavors to bring out.
In sum, HHJL reworked the Orientlist paradigm of the relationship between Western
males and indigenous females to foreground the culturally intervening power of the
Chinese female An Jie and the national sentiments she represents. In the sentimental
interplay between Owen and An Jie, she manages to challenge his erotic gazing pleasure,
instill into him her political agenda, and eventually transform him into a determined
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soldier ready to die for the Communist-led anti-Japanese cause. The national sentiments
An Jie represents-to voluntarily sacrifice one's romantic love in order to die for
China-are critical in Owen's political conversion into a Communist soldier.
It is intriguing to examine one more dimension in the state's imagination of Owen as
the internalized Western character. The romantic encounter between Owen and An Jie is
only part of the story that tells of Owen's fascination with Wartime Chinese people. His
China complex also comes from his experience with various Chinese male characters. In
HHJL there are three major Chinese male characters: Heizi, An Jie's father, and a
subordinate ofAn's father named Sanpao (.=.~§). Not only an issue between the Western
male and the non-Western female, the imbalanced gender relationship of Orientalism is
also embodied in the interactions between the Western male and the non-Western male in
which the former often renders the latter as a feminized other. Male Sexuality is a point
ofdeparture in order to look at the Chinese version of this issue within a global context.
Jackie Chen's (pj(;:/t) "emasculation" in Hollywood is a case in point. In classic Hong
Kong movies ofthe 1980s Jackie Chen is usually portrayed both as a dare-devil fighter
and as a humorous man winning ladies' love. However, after starting his career in
Hollywood in the 1990s Chen's filmic characters in American productions have been
largely stripped ofmale sexual appeal. It seems that in Hollywood movies his charisma
lies only in "his uncanny capacity to withstand pain and his relentless tenacity in
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defeating his evil opponent" (Choi 2005, 208). Certainly involved in this transformation
is the long-time Orientalist bias of Hollywood film that stereotypes Asian men as
sexually-unappealing as compared to "masculine" Western men.
Interestingly, in HHJL the Chinese state does not defy the Orientalist episteme on
Chinese males' sexual inferiority as many thought it would. Instead, the Chinese state
strategically deprives the Chinese male characters of their sexual appeals to set off a
Chinese form ofmasculinity that is grounded not in sexuality, but in familial affection,
clan loyalty, and the passion to die for the nation. Contrasted to Owen's sexuality-driven
body, the Chinese male bodies in representation are prescriptively rid of their sexual
appeals. The detachment leader Heizi is portrayed as a father caring much for Huahua
and as a widower deeply mourning his wife who was killed by the Japanese. Neither of
these two identities has sexual potentials in the story. Similarly, An Jie's father is also a
widower whose sentimental drives are exclusively embodied in his paternal affection for
An Jie and his sorrow for losing his wife in a clan fight. As Hongmei Yu suggests, the
widower identity ofboth Heizi and An Jie's father indicates a suspension of their male
sexuality (2008,246). If the male sexuality of these two characters is suspended, Sanpao
is physically deprived of his male potency because of a wound from a fight with Heizi's
clan.
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The weakening of the three characters' sexual appeal nevertheless highlights their
non-sexual affective power. In the statist imagination, the asexualized male bodies
connect family, clan, and the nation through their perceived losses and sufferings of their
beloved people. These losses and sufferings endanger the male sentiments for families
and clans, driving the Chinese males to die for the nation. On their way to the
Communist base Owen tries to strike a conversation with Heizi by complimenting the red
undergarment (hong dudou £I~±.9B) Heizi wears. However, Heizi gets upset when Owen
asks about where he bought the undergarment. Owen finds the answer for his confusion
about Heizi's reaction when Huahua tells him that her mother died and the red
undergarment originally belonged to her. At this moment the camera moves back and
provides a medium close shot of saddened Heizi with his machinegun. With a flashback
of the Japanese troops killing Chinese people, a voice-over cuts in to tell Heizi's family
tragedy:
I learned later that his hometown had been attacked by the Japanese three years
earlier [to] test the effectiveness of the newly-invented gas bombs. More than a
hundred villagers were captured by force and locked in a temple. Among them were
Huahua's mother and brother. Shortly after Heizi found his wife's body, he removed
her red undergarment and carried it with him as he rejoined the Eighth Route Army.
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This sequence indicates that the loss of his wife and son-the endangennent of Heizi's
familial affection-fuels his detennination to fight and die for China. In order to protect
Owen and An Jie, Heizi eventually fights until death by the Yellow River.
In a similar vein, the paternal love ofAn Jie's father trivializes his other concerns
such as the clan feud, the collaboration with the Japanese, and his own life. When the An
clan attempts to execute Heizi as revenge, An Jie rushes into the execution court and
threatens to kill herself if her father orders the execution. The father is surprised, then
amazed by An Jie's behavior. He orders the release of all the detainees and says with
pride, "Only my daughter can play this trick". Another telling sequence takes place when
Heizi goes to the father for help with An Jie and Owen staying in the ancient temple.
Heizi tells the father about An Jie's rape and entreats him to fight the Japanese troops. At
this juncture a medium shot comes in featuring the father gazing at a photo album in dim
light. Then the camera gives a close shot of two old photos of him holding An Jie when
she was still a little girl. Finally a medium close shot displays the father's face. Tears in
his eyes, the father seems to have made a decision. The following narrative tells that the
father gets killed in a failed attempt to send An Jie, Heizi, and Owen across the Yellow
River through his collaborator within the Japanese troops. These sequences and
narratives work towards shaping the character as a caring father who would sacrifice
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anything for his daughter. Behind the father's story of self-sacrifice lies the logic that the
sufferings ofAn Jie-the endangennent of the father's familiar affection towards his
beloved daughter-makes possible his passion to die for China.
Compared to Heizi and An Jie's father, Sanpao is a more morally ambiguous figure.
He is a member of the An clan and works as the intennediator between the clan and the
Japanese anny. He is portrayed as a corrupt, cowardly collaborator for the majority of the
movie. However, what is unquestionable is his personal loyalty to An Jie's father, and by
extension, to the An clan. When the militia force first detains the detachment, An Jie's
father asks for Sanpao's opinion on dealing with the detainees. Sanpao answers without
hesitation, "My lord, your daughter is family (qinren *A), foreigners is outsiders
(wairen )7rA), and Heizi is the enemy (chouren 1fLA). The foreigner is not worth all
the lives of the clan. As for Heizi, he is the long-time enemy of our clan and must be
killed". This answer manifests Sanpao's loyalty to the An clan. Whether turning in Owen
to the Japanese or taking revenge on Heizi, his morally questionable proposals come out
of his genuine concerns for the An clan. At the final climax of the movie-the Japanese
ambush by the Yellow River, An Jie's father is trapped and killed by the Japanese troops
who have known of his smuggling plan in advance. Sanpao is jailed in a hut where the
detachment and An Jie's father are supposed to meet, deeply terrified by the brutality of
the Japanese troops. However, a brief flashback of the father's last gaze on Sanpao comes
190
in at this moment, suggesting the clan leader's will to fight the Japanese and protect the
detachment. Sanpao winds up burning the hut to alert the detachment of the ambush and
being buried alive by the Japanese. The endangerment of his loyalty to the An clan-the
Japanese murder ofAn Jie's father -empowers Sanpao to alert the detachment at the
cost of his life. The endangerment ofSanpao's clan loyalty becomes the key in
transforming a cowardly collaborator into a martyr for the cause of national salvation.
The death of the three male characters by the Yellow River comprises one of the
strongest beats of the national sentiments in HHJL. However, the male sentiments
intervene with the internalized Western character differently from the female ones
represented by An Jie. Compared to An Jie who takes the initiative to transform Owen
and frequently puts him under her gaze, the three male characters intervene through
being viewed by the Western character rather than viewing. As Owen recalls of his first
impression ofHeizi, Heizi is "a dark-faced fellow of few words". The represented
communication between Owen and Heizi is never as rigorous as that between Owen and
An Jie; the encounter between Owen and An Jie's father is also quite brief; throughout
the movie there is no exchange of words between Owen and Sanpao at all. The Chinese
male characters' lack of initiative in viewing largely shifts the task back onto Owen. In
this sense they more readily fall in the category of "traditional" Orientalist objects than
An Jie.
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The Chinese male characters nevertheless 100m large in preparing Owen to die for
the Chinese nation. Although the viewing initiative between the Chinese male characters
and Owen by and large falls back onto the Western man, the male sentiments intervene
with Owen in a more intangible way. IfAn Jie's intervening power work on Owen
through detailed conversations, moves, and gestures, its male counterpart relies on music,
a form whose sentimental effects go beyond the descriptive ability of words and images.
Soon after Owen and Heizi's squabble over the red undergarment, Heizi walks away and
starts playing some sad folk music through a leaf whistle in his mouth. The most
flamboyant still shots of the movie-presumably as the gaze of Owen-are used at this
point to portray, first in a medium shot and then in a long shot, Heizi sitting alone among
trees while playing the music. Owen shows great interest in the leaf-whistle music and
soon becomes a master of it. He plays it at different critical moments in his life: his
romantic stay in the ancient temple, An Jie's confession of her rape, and the
commemoration by the Yellow River of his lost comrades in the 1990s. Although Heizi
never conveys verbally to Owen his passions for family and the Chinese nation, Owen
feels them and is transformed by them through the mediation of music. Premising that
music is the sound of heart and can make communicable sentimentalities of different
people, the Chinese state suggests that despite the lack of direct communication Owen
still inherits the passion of dying for China from Heizi, and by extension from all the
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male Chinese characters. However intangible it is, the lasting intervening power of the
male Chinese sentiments on Owen is brought to the fore by the repetitive music theme in
the cinema narrative.
The intangibility of the male characters' intervening power by no means implies its
inferiority to its female counterpart. Instead, the different strategies of intervention attest
to the versatility of the Chinese state's appropriation of Orientalist epistemes. In the case
of the female sentiments, the ultimate passion to die for China necessitates the
endangerment ofAn Jie's romantic love. The romantic, sexually appealing female body
must go through a rite ofpassage-the rape by the Japanese in HHJL-to bring about its
national agency. As for the male sentiments, the state fashions an a priori link between
the male body and the nation. The asexualized male body ensures that the endangerment
of the male sentiments for family and clan suffices it to generate the death passion of
Chinese men. Either way, the internalized Western character is subjugated to the Chinese
passion to die for the nation-admiring it, cherishing it, and willing to be assimilated by
it. Through these appropriatory strategies the Chinese state successfully transformed
Owen into but another embodiment of the mode of national sentiments in which romantic
love, familial affection, and clan loyalty give birth to the ultimate passion of dying for
China. The relegation ofthe Western character to a position of "but one of our own"
generates an imagined superiority of the Chinese national culture.
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In HHJL the state pitches the individual sentiments against a significant intruder of
the nation-state-the Japanese who endangered them in various ways-to bring about a
situation in which the needs of the nation-state are firmly grounded in those gendered
sentiments. On one hand, the Japanese in the story are the perpetrators who bring marks
of national shame to An Jie's body, the contamination of which gives rise to her willful
sacrifice of romantic love for the sake 0 the Communist-led anti-Japanese cause; on the
other hand, the violent murder of Chinese compatriots causes the Chinese men's losses of
beloved people, which suffices to mobilize the Chinese men into dying for this cause.
The overt national enemy sutures the fulfillment of the individual sentiments--or the
lack thereof-and the needs of the nation-state, producing the patriotic mode of national
sentiments in which romantic love, familial affection, and clan loyalty give birth to the
ultimate passion of dying for the Communist-led cause of saving China from the
Japanese invasion. This patriotic mode of national sentiments is constructed by the state
to offer to the masses an alternative Orientalist discourse ofEast-West cultural
communication. Harking back to Abdallah Laroui's rendition ofWestern Orientalism, a
typical Western Orientalist discourse has to construct the Western subject-matter as an a
priori existence. Accordingly, in terms of "changes", the West is a welcome miracle that
can change and remain the same, while the Oriental other is an unwelcome accident that
is not permitted to change without betraying itself. The state largely reversed the power
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relationship in the representation of national sentiments in HHJL. The Western character
Owen is internalized into the world of the Wartime Chinese people. His
subject-matter-that is, his experience and memories with these people-is to validate
the a priori existence of this world, instead of that of himself. As the VCD introduction
of the movie puts it, throughout the movie Owen the Pilot is intended to "witness" and
"feel" the national sentiments of the Chinese people and the Eighth Route Army when
they are confronted with the cruel Japanese invaders. Owen's changes indicate his
betrayal of his old self and embody the overwhelming intervening power of the Chinese
national sentiments. Through such a reversed representation, the Chinese state fashions
this mode of national sentiments as an a priori existence that bears dominant power of
cultural conversion in East-West communication.
This Orientalist reworking of the patriotic mode of national sentiments generates a
productive reading of the postsocialist Chinese society. As HHJL demonstrates, the
Party-state invites the contemporary Chinese masses to project an "outward and
backward" gaze in cultural imagination through vehicles such as the Leitmotif Film. The
patriotic mode of national sentiments lures the contemporary Chinese masses to review
the Wartime history with heartwarming nostalgia and to retrospect on the external
communication of China with the West regardless of the Party-state's internal faultlines.
This "outward and backward" gaze creates the habitual consumption of alternative
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Orientalist spectacles which also normalizes the Communist Party-state's status of
speaking for the Chinese nation. In this sense the less heavy-handed, emotionally
appealing mode of national sentiments in HHJL provides a new possibility for the
postsocialist state to govern its increasingly diversified masses.
"Zhang Yimo Mode", Indigenous Consumers, and the Convergence of Nationalism
and Consumerism
As recently as the early 1980s, Chinese film barely constituted an academic subject
in the West (Zhang 2002,43). Things have changed since and in the last thirty years
Chinese film study has become a vibrant field in Western academia. More studies are
devoted to the development of Chinese film after the foundation of the People's Republic
of China (PRC). "New Chinese Cinema"-works of the Fifth Generation directors like
Zhang Yimo and Chen Kaige, their associates, and other prominent directors since 1980
(Zhang 2002, 24)-in particular has received immense attention from Western critics.9
Marked by global consumerism, New Chinese Cinema embodies Orientalist
aesthetics especially appealing to the Western audiences. Said rightly argues that
consumerism in the Orient has made major contributions to the triumph ofOrientalism
(1978,324-5). A revamped version of his argument seems in order in the case ofNew
Chinese Cinema. That is, consumerism in the Occident has promoted Orientalist
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discourses in New Chinese Cinema. A prominent example supporting this renovated
argument is the trend of "autoethnography film" in New Chinese Cinema. The
autoethnographic films of Zhang Yimo and Chen Kaige were closely examined by Rey
Chow in her trend-setting study Primitive Passions (1995). She detects in Zhang and
Chen's cinematic reinvention of ethnic Chinese culture a voluntary confirmation of
China's status as an object-of-gaze in cross-cultural representation. "Woman", for
example, is a prominent object of such an object-of-gaze. As Chow puts it, "[i]n Red
Sorghum, Judou, and Raise the Red Lantern, women occupy the traditional spaces of
frustrated, dissatisfied, or tortured young wife, widow, mother, adulteress, and concubine,
who despite their strength of character remain always trapped in a hopeless situation"
(1995,44).10 In these directors' willing exhibitionism, China's primitive passions are
displayed in seductive surfaces to the Western audiences. Thus, by means of looking at
oneself (China) being looked at by others (the West), New Chinese Cinema seems to
ethnographize China and becomes, in the end, an "autoethnography". I I
In Zhang Yimo's authethnographic works such as Red Sorghum (1987), Judou
(1990), and Raise the Red Lantern (1992), the so-called "Zhang Yimo Model" gives
special prominence to "young women with numerous pseudo-traditional Chinese rituals"
(Lu 1999, 13). Accompanying those young women as fetish objects ready for the Western
audiences' consumption are always sexually impotent Chinese men who cannot satisfy or
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control their female partners' sexual desires. Despite harsh criticisms of his ideological
inclination and aesthetic taste in these works both within and outside China, these works
nevertheless brought Zhang Yimo many internationally-renowned film awards and made
him the biggest winner in the global trend of consuming ethnographized Chinese culture.
Yingjin Zhang examined the deterministic influence of global consumerism and the
Western audiences on contemporary Chinese autoethnographic film in the analysis of the
cultural politics of international film festivals. According to Zhang, contemporary
Chinese autoethnographic film is "not so much a result of the automatic or voluntary
consent from Chinese directors as that of transnational economic coercion or unequal
power relations". "Such a situation", as he suggests, "seems to have implicated
contemporary Chinese cinema in a prefixed cycle of transnational commodity production
and consumption: favorable reviews at international film festivals lead to production of
more 'ethnographic' films, and the wide distribution of such films is translated into their
availability for classroom use and therefore influences the agenda of film studies, which
in tum reinforces the status of these films as a dominant genre" (2002,34-35). To a large
extent the popularity of contemporary Chinese autoethnographic film in the West results
from the nature of the Western audiences' habitual consumption of things from China. On
one hand, the Western audiences are eager to find differences in China and Chinese
culture; on the other these differences must be exotic, erotic, harmless and
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entertaining-in a nutshell, they must be able to be effortlessly incorporated into the
self-same Western cultural hegemony to which the Western audiences are accustomed. To
a significant extent contemporary Chinese autoethnographic film satisfied the Western
audiences' needs by ethnographizing Chinese culture and packaging it as a museum
object ready for exhibition.
The autoethnographic trend of Chinese film in the 1980s and early 1990s marks a
sharp contrast to the Leitmotif Film in the 1990s, which certainly encodes and projects an
indigenous audience rather than Western audiences. In HHJL the Chinese culture is no
longer an object-of-gaze for the Western audiences. Instead, it forms its own hegemony
that significantly shapes and transforms its Western other-e.g. Owen the Pilot. HHJL's
patriotic mode of national sentiments with an alternative Orientalist style wins over the
favor of domestic film critics. Many writings have been published in esteemed domestic
film magazines like Contemporary Cinema (Dangdai dianying ~1~~~) to pay
homage to the movie and to Feng Xiaoning's accomplishments in the LeitmotifFilm. 12
On a more plebeian ground, ordinary consumers have found the Internet as a convenient
platform for their voices. In the HHJL forum at an influential Chinese film
website-douban.com (douban wang Rl$/XXJ), User "Light Ferryboat past Tens of
Thousands ofMountains (Qing zhou yi guo wan chong shan $.£-f.t Btt7:1.m. L1J)" posted
on March 4,2008, claiming that HHJL is "one of the best films in China". All the users
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who replied to this post supported this claim and offered their own praises ofthis movie.
User "Tangtang (¥m1m)" commented that this movie is absolutely a good movie (juedui
hao pian ~fgxtW#) and one of his/her favorites. User "aka" even asserted that this
movie is the pinnacle of domestic film products (guochanpian de dianfeng 00 rz;# B<J Jt1n
rut).13 The popularity ofHHJL to ordinary consumers, it seems to me, results by and
large from the "tear-jerking" effect of this mode ofnational sentiments on the consumers.
Chinese consumers have been so moved by the movie that many of them cannot
hold back their tears. In addition, the sentimental drive ofHHJL is so persistent that even
after five or ten years the "tear-jerking" effect still works on many re-watchers ofthis
movie. Many users of douban.com offered their sentimental reactions to watching HHJL.
User "Fantasia~"wrote on March 10, 2007 about hislher personal experience of
watching it for a second time: 14 "To my surprise HHJL was shown in the outdoor theater
at my school last night. r stood in the tender rain ofMarch until all the people were gone.
r concede that I am an eye-shallow (yan qian ~lU3e)15 person. Although it was my
second time [watching the movie], my tears dropped again-luckily it was dark already".
Following Fantasia~'s story, on April 09, 2008 User "Foggy Flower April (yanhua siyue
~1t1m fj )" added on the same webpage:
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Very good movie. Ten years. It has been ten years [since HHJL's release]. Tears still
came down my face when I re-watched it. I like its music. I like the beautiful smile
ofNing Jing ('J"D).16 I like the gentle feeling of the foreigner when he calls her
"Angle". I like the national pride in it. When moved to tears I always feel
heartened...
Another "tear experience" was provided by User "Mao Xiaomao (.:£/J'~)" in a post
dated April 26, 2008, in which the user recounted that hislher tears even went down
hislher neck in the re-watching. 17 All the cited experiences of the Chinese Internet users
here attest to the powerful tear-jerking effect ofthis state-sponsored mode of national
sentiments on the domestic audience.
Compared to its general popularity in China, HHJL's reception in the United States
is a different story. A sensational title-Heart of China-was chosen for the movie's
US-exported edition18 and it was submitted by the Chinese government to compete for
the Best Foreign Picture of the 72nd Academy Awards. The title "Heart of China"
embodies the Chinese state's anxiety to promote its own version of "China" when it is
faced with the "crisis" of contemporary Chinese film that "China" is largely what has
been represented by the "non-official" autoethnographic film of the Fifth Generation and
the unrulier works of the Sixth Generation in the eyes ofWestern consumers in general
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and American consumers in particular. Deeply upset by the massive Western app1auses
given to those non-official film works, the Chinese state has determined to win over the
acclaim of the Western consumers with its own products. The submission ofHHJL to the
Academy Awards, the single most representative voice ofmainstream Western film
consumers, epitomizes the effort of the Chinese state in this regard. However, the fact
that HHJL did not even get nominated for the Best Foreign Picture of the 72nd Academy
Awards indicates its failure to gain the general acceptance of the Western consumers. 19
It is at this juncture that I attempt to broach the Mainland Chinese audience's
habitual patterns of film consumption in the postsocialist society. It seems that the
Mainland Chinese audience is more attracted to the very sentimental mode in which
individual desires and passions integrate with the imperatives of the historical nation than
to the specific ideological contents of the mode. The popularity ofHollywood
blockbuster movies in contemporary China manifests this point. Hollywood blockbuster
movies became favored cultural commodities in a globalized China in the 1990s. Thanks
to globalization, Sheldon Lu notes, "[r]esidents of third-world countries can gain easy
access to the cultural products of the first world such as film, TV programs, popular
music, and fashion". Lu then pinpoints two examples of the popularity ofrecent
Hollywood blockbuster movies in China. One is Titanic in 1998, which was widely seen
and hailed in Mainland China and "even won the praise of former Chinese president
-------------_._------_. -_.-
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Jiang Zemin". The other is the Disney anime Mulan that was released in China in 1999,
which, "[a]s a Western hi-tech rendition of a centuries-old Chinese folktale", "has now
entered the film market of the original home country and further proves the invincibility
of transnational media" (2007, 115-6). Compared to their predecessors whose selection
of foreign movies were mostly limited to the politically didactic products of the
(ex-)Communist countries, Chinese consumers of the 1990s enjoyed Hollywood
blockbuster movies made possible by high technologies and investments ofmillions of
dollars. Faced with the overt propaganda ofAmerican statist ideologies in those
introduced blockbusters such as Forrest Gump (1995io and Saving Private Ryan (1998),
the Chinese consumers were nevertheless intoxicated by their articulated national
sentiments in which the American characters' individual, quotidian desires and passions
are seamlessly amalgamated into the imperatives of the American state.
Forrest Gump is a simple man with limited intellectual capacity but good intentions.
He struggles through childhood with his best and only friend Jenny. Although he can
only think of his childhood sweetheart Jenny, Forrest joins the army for service in
Vietnam, helps initiate the diplomatic relationships with China through table tennis,
creates a famous shrimp fishing fleet, inspires people to jog, and meets the president
several times. As for Saving Private Ryan, in the Allied invasion ofNormandy on 6 June
1944, two brothers of the Ryan family are killed in action to secure a beachhead. Plus the
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fact that earlier in New Guinea a third brother is killed in action, their mother is to
receive all three of the grave telegrams on the same day. The United States Army Chief
of Staff, George C. Marshall, is given an opportunity to alleviate some of her grief when
he learns of a fourth brother, Private James Ryan, and decides to send out 8 men led by
Captain Miller to find him and bring him back home to his mother. In the cause of saving
Private Ryan, Captain Miller and his soldiers trade their own lives for the safety ofthe
private. These two movies strike the beat of the "American leitmotif' in that they
highlight ordinary American people's emotions challenged and motivated by the critical
imperatives of their nation in the twentieth-century history. Through the rhetorical
mechanism of melodrama, the protagonists' individual desires and passions smoothly
converge with the historical imperatives ofAmerica. Although they did not necessarily
agree with those American statist ideologies per se, the Chinese film consumers
undoubtedly enjoyed and endorsed the articulated mode of national sentiments that has
brought them intense emotional fluctuation and resonance along with the characters on
screen.
As Haiyan Lee argues, the fundamental predicament of modernity is how to affirm
the value and dignity of ordinary life without abandoning a sense of the heroic (2007,
301). Although history does not have a definite solution to it, people are always looking
for solutions. Film promises to confer on its consumers, at least in the process of
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consumption, an experience of binding up the two. HHJL advocates romantic love,
familiar affection, and clan loyalty as the foundation of Chinese national identities. By
situating stories of these individual sentiments within the anti-Japanese war and thus
integrating the quotidian enjoyment with a heroic promise of defending the nation-state,
HHJL promotes a mode of national sentiments in which the endangerment of individual
sentiments gives rise to the ultimate passion of dying for China. Juxtaposing the Chinese
consumers' fascinations of "American leitmotif' movies such as Forrest Gump and
Saving Private Ryan and the Chinese leitmotif movies such as HHJL, it seems that what
the Chinese film consumers need is an emotional experience of combined quotidian
enjoyment and heroic promise indifferent to specific ideological preferences.
Besides ideological indifference, Chinese film consumers do care about the alterity
to Western Orientalism. In the heyday of classic European Orientalism, French and
British "gentlemen" relished the opportunity to see their superiority from the mute
"others" of the Near and Middle East. With a more "modem" American Orientalism,
popular Hollywood film allows the non-Western other to speak while largely confining
the utterance of the other to a more vivid proof ofthe Western superiority. Taking a 2008
big hit Australia as an example, the aristocratic Lady Sarah Ashley travels in 1939 from
Great Britain to meet her husband in northern Australia. The husband's drover comes to
the city ofDarwin to bring Sarah to their farm; however, when they reach Faraway
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Downs Farm, they find her husband murdered and their farm in crisis. Sarah befriends
Nullah, who tells her that the administrator Neil Fletcher is stealing her cattle; has killed
her husband; and is working for the cattle baron King Carney. Sarah, the drover, and
Nullah ride together to take the cattle to supply the army and win a tender in times of war.
But the ambitious Fletcher has other intentions and uses Nullah to press Sarah. When
Japan attacks the Northern Territory, the newly formed family of Sarah, the drover, and
Nullah scattered but finally managed to reunite. Nullah the "creamy" boy, whose father is
white and mother aboriginal, is undoubtedly the most favorable character for the Western
consumers. In his rusty English and through his innocent aboriginal perspective, the
"white" nobility of Lady Ashley (Nicole Kidman) and the drover (Hugh Jackman) is
persuasively brought to the fore. Going through a moving layer of familial affection
created by the well-orchestrated plots, what is left is a delicate dictation of the white
superiority. That the little Nullah addresses Lady Ashley "Mrs. Boss" with whole-hearted
love and respect epitomizes the ingrained Western Orientalism of popular Hollywood
film, whose symbolic Western superiority aptly inspires favorable emotions of the
Western consumers.
The entrenched Western Orientalism of popular Hollywood film has in tum shaped
the preferences of Western consumers who, in consuming non-Western film products,
still expect to find certain affirmations of Western superiority one way or another. The
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symbolic Western superiority on the consumer end is largely embodied in the process of
"looking at" non-Western film products. Although the direct acclaim of the Western
superiority is hard to find in non-Western products per se, the Western consumers
nevertheless enjoy the craved position of superiority by being the "looker" in the
imbalanced power relations between the looker and the "being-looked-at". Even if there
are certain forms of the "non-Western" self, to the Western consumers the "non-Western"
self must be put in the position of "being-looked-at", or represented as an ethnographized
object ready for their appreciation/consumption. This is certainly exemplified by the
autoethnographic trend of contemporary Chinese film. In discussing the decisive impact
of the Western consumerism on contemporary Chinese film, Yingjin Zhang notes that
"not only film directors but film critics as well have yielded to market demand in general
and international film festivals in particular". A Chinese film "most likely to satisfy
Western expectation (or aesthetic taste)" should include formulaic elements of China as
follows:
primitive landscape and its sheer visual beauty (including savage rivers, mountains,
forests, desserts); repressive sexuality and its eruption in transgressive moments of
eroticism (read "heroism"); gender performance and sexual exhibition (including
homosexuality, transvestism, adultery, incest) as seen in erotic operas, rituals, or
207
other types of rural custom; and a mythical or cyclical time in which the
protagonist's fate is predestined (2002,32).
If anything, the Western consumers believe that the non-Westerners can, and must, only
represent "them-selves" in a passive, ethnographic way. The popularity of the
autoethnographic film in the West derives precisely from that it displays to the
Westerners "China", and "China" only. The metaphor of a tinted-glass box helps to
explain the nuances of the Western consumers' attitude towards non-Western film
products. The non-Western films in the West are like aboriginal cultural exhibitions in a
Western museum. The Western patrons pay to get in to see all the exhibited aboriginal
objects that are kept in tinted-glass boxes. The Western patrons try very hard to see, and
see only, every detail of the exhibited objects. If such an attempt ever fails, for example,
they by chance seeing their own reflected images on the tinted-glass, they get upset and
think that the exhibition is not worth their money. The underlying logic is that they do
not come to the exhibition to see themselves, or more exactly, they think that the
tinted-glass box of an exhibited aboriginal object is not good enough for the display of
their images.
HHJL challenges such a symbolic Western superiority and offers an alterity to the
ingrained Western Orientalist traditions through the maneuverings of the state. It
208
provides solid grounds for the indigenous audience to imagine cross-cultural
communication as they like. The reverential voice of the American pilot paying homage
to the Chinese people and the Chinese culture facilitates the indigenous audience's wild
imagination to build a new Chinese cultural hegemony while overthrowing the old
Western one. The Chinese film consumers seem really fascinated by HHJL's reworked
Orientalist discourse promoting a symbolic Chinese superiority.
The indifference to ideological contents and the fascination with the alterity to
Western Orientalism constitute the essences of the habitual consumptive patterns ofthe
contemporary Mainland Chinese audience, which also gave birth to the situation that the
film media's efficacy of enunciating the state's nationalist agenda is increasingly
integrated with its ability to mobilize the indigenous audience through the appropriations
of Orientalist structures of feeling. With such habitual patterns of film consumption, the
Leitmotif film must package the patriotic theme with a layer of "sugarcoating"-the
Orientalist epistemes reworked in a way that can instigate mass fever among the Chinese
audience. The contemporary Chinese audience is susceptible to various ways of
emotional appropriation. The case ofHHJL illuminates that the state's adjustments of
self-fashioning in the Leitmotif Film can be effective to Chinese film consumers and that
the state's voice is still powerful and sound in the polyphonic articulation ofpostsocialist
Chinese nationalism. It is in this sense that my study ofthe 1990s Leitmotif Film
209
provides a point of convergence between nationalism and consumerism in postsocialist
China.
Conclusion
The postsocialist Mainland film industry is increasingly shaped by the demands of
market economy and by the desires of Chinese people who have integrated into the
global capitalist system and become the largest group ofconsumers in today's world. The
Chinese state undergoes double pressures from the ideological imperatives ofutilizing
the film media for its political ends and the overwhelming trends of film
commercialization in globalization. The LeitmotifFilm with overt nationalist claims
came out as a response ofthe state to such double pressures. The case ofHHJL evidences
that the Mainland Chinese audience is fascinated by its reworked Orientalist mode of
national sentiments in which romantic love, familial affection, and clan loyalty give birth
to the ultimate passion of dying for China.
An appropriate understanding ofthe relationship between self and other in the
dominant consumer culture-a trend permeating "the world system ofnation-states"
(Duara 1995, 8) in postmodem nation-states in general and in postsocialist China in
particular-requires more than an essentialized and universalist interpretation of
Orientalism. The state-sponsored mode ofnational sentiments in the 1990s Chinese
210
Leitmotif Film bespeaks that the construction of a non-Western self both disrupts the
Western/Other paradigm and affirms the Western influence in the making of indigenous
non-Western identities. In this process the relationship between self and other is
historically and culturally situated, and there is no universal set of principles from which
derives, in a deterministic fashion, a singular type of this relationship. On the contrary,
the relationship between self and other is always embodied in dynamic politics ofcultural
difference. Orientalism operates through the dynamic politics of cultural difference in
which the contrasts and comparisons between self and other are subject to the
enunciators'maneuverings and positionality within the national power structure. It is in
this sense that the 1990s Chinese Leitmotif Film furnishes a good venue to look into the
specifics of the state as a national subject speaking for the nation in postsocialist China.
Notes:
1 Italicized by the author.
2 For example, Cinema and urban culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943 (Zhang 1999); Building a new
China in cinema: The Chinese left-wing cinema movement, 1932-1937 (pang 2002); Projecting a
nation: Chinese national cinema before 1949 (Hu 2003).
3 Geller's reflection on Said's Orientalism was also introduced in Chen (2002), 7.
4 SARFf has been the state bureau administering the film industry since 1998.
5 The translation is mine.
6 The only exception is Lin Zexu, which deals with the confrontation between China and the British
Empire in the Opium War (1839-42).
7 This recapitulation of Sakai's ideas is from Lee (2007, 227).
211
8 See Zhang (2002), 182-5.
9 For a brief history of Chinese film study in the West, see chapter 3 ofZhang (2002).
10 Red Sorghum (1987), Judou (1990), and Raise the Red Lantern (1992) are all directed by Zhang
Yimo. According to Chow, Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimo differ in representing women in line with the
themes of "nature" and "culture" (1995, 45-8). However, in a more general sense both directors
self-willingly exhibited Chinese women as an object-of-gaze for the largely West-based film
consumers.
II This introduction of Chow's ideas is based on Yingjin Zhang's recapitulation ofher book. See
Zhang (2002), 34.
12 See He (1996), Wu (1999), lia (2002) and Zhao(2002).
13 http://www.douban.comlsubject/discussion/1153789/. accessed April 19, 2009.
14 http://www.douban.comlreview/1010103/. accessed April 20, 2009.
15 An "eye-shallow" person is a person who is easy to be moved to tears.
16 The name of the Chinese actress who played An lie. Ning ling won in 1999 the Best Actress of the
Golden Rooster Awards because ofthis role.
17 http://www.douban.comlreviewI1363118/. accessed Apri120, 2009.
18 See the relevant information at imbd.com-the most authoritative Internet-based movie database.
Available at http://www.imdb.comltitle/tt0229539/. accessed April 21, 2009.
19 A quick look into the comments about HHJL made by the Western consumers at imdb.com helps us
understand the reasons the Western consumers do not like this movie. Available at
http://www.imdb.comltitle/tt0229539/usercomments. accessed April 23, 2009.
20 Forrest Gump was originally released in 1994, but was not officially introduced into mainland
China until 1995.
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CHAPTER V
NETIZENS, COUNTER-NIEMORY, AND THE CHINESE
CYBER-LITERATURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
In 1994, China was first connected to the World Wide Web. Thousands of
Chinese-language websites and millions of Internet users have emerged in Mainland
China since. In as short as four years, 40 million Chinese people became frequent users
of the Internet-related services.! The Internet, as Liu Kang puts it, is "an important aspect
of globalization, and plays an increasingly actively role in China's transformation from
its Maoist past to a post-revolutionary, post-socialist society" (2004, 187). The cyber
space that the Internet technologies have created furnishes a novel site where manifold
political agendas, ideological thoughts, and private emotions are articulated. The first ten
years of the twenty-first century has witnessed the flowering of nationalism and various
forms of counter-memories in Chinese cyber space.
Since Michel Foucault initiated the discussion of "counter-memory" through a series
ofpapers in the late 1960s (1977), it has inspired many scholarly discussions. One
important application of the Foucauldian idea of counter-memory in the studies of
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nationalism is Lauren Berlant's discussion of early American national imagination, as is
embodied in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850). Berlant suggests that
nations provoke fantasy and Hawthorne's work is the "fantasy-work ofnational identity"
(1991,2). In The Scarlet Letter different official and popular subjective modes ofnational
identity characterize both the narrator's representation of the 1ih-century Puritan history
ofNorth America and his allusive construction of the national-political reality ofthe
United States ofAmerica around 1850. These subjective modes of national identity,
whether official or popular, explicate how American citizens have been "positioned"
within a national domain. As Berlant argues, while the official modes of national identity
are based on the official memory-usually the state-sanctioned meanings of "public or
national figures, bodies, monuments, and texts", the popular subjective modes draw on
the counter-memory, "the residual material that is not identical with the official meanings
of the political public sphere". The popular knowledge that constitutes the
counter-memory, contradicts the official material that so often becomes the "truth" of a
historical period and political formation. Official memory and counter-memory do not,
however, necessarily oppose each other. Their relation represents the dispersal of
experience and knowledge that constitutes the social realms (6).
This chapter looks into the intertwined relationship between official memory and
counter-memory through the venue of cyber-literature (wangluo wenxue IXXJ ~~ )(~), a
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new popular cultural fonn appropriated by the emergent national subject-netizens
(wangmin ~ ~)-in contemporary China. The chapter is roughly divided into three
parts. In the first part, I reconstruct a brief history of the development of Chinese
cyber-literature by examining the commercial mode of the most successful Mainland
cyber-literature website Qidian.com. The cyber space created by Qidian.com provides an
"easy to write & easy to read" platfonn for Chinese netizens. It bolsters the
communication between cyber-literature writers and readers through virtual dialogue, and
literally makes cyber-literature writing a process of "mass production". And it also
provides new possibilities for Chinese netizens to circumvent-at least partially-the
Party-state's censorship. I argue that the counter-memory of Chinese netizens has
historically thrived upon the official meanings of the public sphere that has given birth to
the commercialization of Chinese cyber-literature.
I then provide a case study of a prominent Mainland Internet novel Cool Evil (Xie qi
lin ran ~~4.{~?&, 2007) in relation to the netizens' mode of national sentiments. In this
novel a young Chinese man-Chen Yang (~*~B)-struggles his way from grass roots to
mafia boss in Canada, then helps the Chinese government with its expansion policy in
Africa and North America, and finally gets the pennission of the government to go back
to China as a legal businessman. I argue that the notion of righteousness (yi )()-an
important tradition of Chinese popular literary imagination---constitutes the
215
counter-memory of the author and readers of Cool Evil, which gives birth to a mode of
national sentiments that simultaneously fuels and discourages the netizens' pursuit of
political and economic freedom in contemporary China. The second and third parts of
this chapter focus on the processes of "fueling" and "discouraging" on two discursive
levels.
Qidian.com: The Thriving of Chinese Cyber-literature
By July 2008, the number of frequent Internet users in China had reached 253
million,2 roughly one fifth of its whole population. Out of the vast number of frequent
Internet users emerged a brand-new national subject-the netizens. In a broad sense
"netizen" can refer to any "active participant in the online community of the Internet".3
However, as Jack Linchuan Qiu notes,
[M]ost importantly, the role of grassroots user networks should be emphasized
because their everyday activities not only ensure the continuation of China's Internet
but also embody personal experiences that transform the new technology from an
abstract cyberspace to meaningful places of social significance. User networks at the
grassroots level constitute the most innovative source of change in China's virtual
216
landscape, forming an unpredictable dimension imbued with tremendous potential
for liberalization which is just beginning to be understood.(2004, 102)
In this light a more productive understanding of Chinese netizens must be achieved
through investigating their "social significance" and political "potential" within a
historically specific context. To anticipate my argument, in the specific context of
postsocialist China the netizens become a significant national subject through actively
negotiating with the neoliberalist state politics on behalf of people at the grassroots level.
Therefore the working definition of "Chinese netizens" in this chapter is "representatives
of Chinese grassroots people with self-appointed authority as generated from their
Internet-based negotiating activities with the neoliberalist state".
Not until recently did academia start to give serious attention to the Internet-based
activities of Chinese netizens, of which the new social and cultural phenomenon of
Chinese Internet nationalism has interested many scholars. To the best of my knowledge,
Xu Wu's book (2007) is by far the most comprehensive research on this topic in English.
Wu defines Chinese cyber nationalism as a "non-government sponsored ideology and
movement that has originated, existed, and developed in China's online sphere over the
past decade (1994-present)" (2). He argues that the waning of Communist doctrines, the
reach and power ofonline technology, and nationalism's inherent grassroots appeal are
217
the main reasons that made Chinese cyber nationalism a powerful factor in China's
overall policy decision-making process (3). Although his research provides some
ice-breaking insights on contemporary nationalism, its limited focus on the direct
political responses of Chinese Internet users to international conflicts between China and
foreign countries4 leaves unexamined many critical issues.
First, Xu's approach focuses on the monolithic function of the cyber space-that is,
as a transparent and immediate channel-in the formation ofpolitical ideologies and
ethos instigated by anti-foreignist nationalism, while largely leaving out the complexity
of cyber space in the figuration ofthe nation. Nationalism is never a pure socio-political
movement dedicated to its state and ideological formation as shaped by institutions and
international conflicts. It is also a process in which people conceive their relationship
with this imagined community ofthe nation through various representational activities. In
such representational activities in contemporary China, the cyber space functions more
than a transparent and immediate channel.
Second, despite a prominent trend of contemporary Chinese nationalism,
anti-foreignism certainly does not equal nationalism. In arguing for rejoining Chinese
nationalism at the tum of the twentieth century to a global history, Rebecca Karl notes
that the historical process ofnationalism-as concept formation-and that of statism-as
either the retrospective renarration of the nation in light of the achievement of
218
nation-statism or as the purely functional pursuit and institutional elaboration of state
power-should be, but are often not, disentangled (2002, 17). The tendency to conflate
state and nation in China studies persists and is reflected in Xu's study too. The
anti-foreignist ethos in Chinese cyber space that Xu studied is by and large the
contemporary reincarnation of the conflation of the grassroots nationalism and the statist
nationalism, which is but one of a variety of forms of contemporary popular nationalism.
It is precisely from these two perspectives that this chapter broaches Chinese
Internet nationalism in a different light. The Chinese cyber space is not only a transparent
and immediate channel for the Internet users to articulate their instant responses to recent
international conflicts, but also a passionate public space for the netizens to negotiate
with state politics in the name of national sentiments. The netizens' modes of national
sentiments are grounded in their various forms of counter-memory, which simultaneous
connect to and contradict the official meanings of the public sphere. Through the
privileged angle of cyber-literature, this chapter brings to the fore a prominent mode of
national sentiments shared by a significant number of Chinese netizens.
Cyber-literature has yet to have a unanimous definition. In this chapter
"cyber-literature" refers to fictional texts that are (1) created by netizens; (2) originally
released online; (3) almost exclusively circulated and responded to on an anonymous
basis in cyber space. Chinese cyber-literature has existed since China was first connected
219
to the World Wide Web in 1994, but its "golden age" did not come until the new
millennium. Chinese cyber-literature in the 2000s has firmly taken the path of
commercialization, rhyming with the general trend of "everything looking towards
money" (yiqie xiang qian kan --J:;)] rPJ~~) in the increasingly consumerist society.
Qidian.com has since October 2003 launched the "Fufei yuedu" (Pay to Read 11~
I#J -w;) service. Writers usually serialize their novels online on a daily basis. Readers can
read some beginning chapters of a novel for free, but in order to read the whole work they
have to become VIP users and pay for subscription. Writers get paid by how many
subscriptions their works receive. This mode has made Qidian.com commercially
successful and the website has become the leading force in the cyber-literature-related
market of China. According to an interview with CEO of Qidian.com Wu Wenhui C~)(
~~), Qidian.com has been making profits since the initiation of its commercial mode in
October 2003. It has so far 200,000 original novels in store, 150,000 on-site writers, and
close-to-300-million visits per day. 5
Based on solid empirical studies and detailed statistics, Jack Linchuan Qiu
persuasively characterizes Chinese cyber space in the following paragraph:
State agencies, IT firms, and activist groups interact to establish, transform, and
control the fundamental parameters of Chinese cyber space. Simultaneously,
220
Chinese netizens are constructing their online identities in a peculiar Internet culture
that bears both Chinese and universal characteristics. To a great extent, the forging
of identities among Internet users is a process shaped by ...the flourishing of
consumerism fostered by the party-state and multinational corporations. (2004, 114)
Qidian.com is certainly one of the most seminal cases of the commercialization of
Chinese cyber-literature, which fully embodies the complexity of Chinese cyber space in
the articulation of Chinese Internet nationalism. As part of the Chinese public sphere, the
online space created by cyber-literature bespeaks its official meanings as "fostered by the
party-state and multinational corporations".
As one of the most important aspects of the public sphere, the dominant
consumerism contributes directly to the commercialization of Chinese cyber-literature.
Online fictional texts are produced and circulated through websites with well-crafted
commercial mechanisms such as Qidian.com as ready-made commodities for mass
consumption, which, among other things, greatly shape grassroots people's nationalist
imagination.
By July 2008, the number of frequent Internet users in China had reached 253
million. Considering the immense popularity Qidian.com enjoys among Chinese Internet
users, a significant number ofthe users have become cyber-literature consumers.
221
Qidian.com is owned by a multinational IT firm Shanda Interactive Entertainment Limited.6
Its commercial drive makes it necessary that the website has a large variety of online
fictional texts for the readers' selection. For this reason Qidian.com sets few criteria of
screening the writers. Any person with basic literacy and Internet access may post their
writings on Qidian.com. The production costs of cyber-stories are so low that
cyber-literature becomes an affordable public access for the netizens to articulate their
feelings and thoughts. Compared to film, TV series, and books in print form whose
production expenses most people have no way to afford, cyber-literature offers a viable
means by which the netizens could participate in the public life. Besides this, the "Pay to
Read" mode focuses more on the total number of pay-to-read customers than on how
much money an individual reader pays. The price to read at Qidian.com is set at a
reasonably low level that most Chinese Internet users can afford. 7
Qidian.com not only provides an inexpensive platform for producing and purchasing
cyber literature works, but also creates virtual communities where the communications
between writers and readers are made possible. At the homepage of Qidian.com one can
easily find the access to on-site virtual communities like geren kongjian (blogs 1-A'S!.
rBJ),pinglun (forums l,Sfi~), andjulebu (reader's clubs 1~*fffl). Because the writers'
financial interests are directly related to the readers' subscriptions, the writers actively
partake in discussions in these virtual communities and care much about the readers'
222
responses to their works. The writers often ask their readers questions like "what should I
write next?" and actually incorporate the ideas and thoughts from the readers into later
serializations. John Fiske posits, "if the cultural commodities or texts do not contain
resources out of which the people can make their own meanings of their social relations
and identities ... They will not be made popular" (1991, 2). Works on Qidian.com are
welcomed by mass readers precisely because those works directly embody thoughts and
passions not only of the writers, but also of themselves. The virtual communities help
make cyber-literature a field that invites the production of meanings in consumption,
through which inter-subjective communication is made possible.
Freedom of speech is also partially realized in the virtual realms of Qidian.com.
There is no doubt that the media laws set by the party-state in contemporary Chinese
society still upholds the principle that media should serve the needs of party politics. That
the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square in fact put an end to the moral legitimacy of
the old party-state system (Wang 2003, 116-7) has made it more urgent for the state to
censor mass media so that the articulation of discontent with the state can be kept at bay.
The government blocks many topics it considers sensitive or controversial and often
punishes those who try to get around those bans.8 However, to some extent
cyber-literature can bypass the governmental censorship on account of the nature of its
production and consumption. According to the aforementioned interview with Wu
223
Wenhui, more than thirty million words of new works are produced on Qidian.com every
day. Readers' responses also contribute significantly to the daily increase of on-site
virtual texts. With the overwhelming amount of new virtual texts posted per day, censors
of the Chinese government have so far neither enough resources nor feasible
technological means to set up a permanent and effective censoring mechanism over
Qidian.com. Furthermore, registered users of Qidian.com mostly remain anonymous
when they buy, read, and comment on cyber literature works.9 This "invisibility" protects
readers from direct surveillance and possible persecution coming from the government
for giving politically sensitive speech.
More importantly, some discernible characteristics of China's Internet censorship
highlight the ambiguity of the Party-state in this matter, which also allows
cyber-literature writers and readers to articulate their own feelings with their own voices.
The internal redundancy of the censorship regime has been increasing along legislative,
administrative, and technological dimensions since 2000. This gives rise to a network of
censors which includes multiple state agencies and commercial entities with relatively
independent political and economic goals (Qiu 2004, 114). This redundancy and these
sometimes clashing goals also help cyber-literature writers and readers to construct their
own space relatively free from statist intervention.
224
In a nutshell, the commercial cyber-literature websites such as Qidian.com have
combined profit-seeking motives, consumer desires, and Internet technologies to create
the new cyber space of literary imagination in postsocialist China. The new space
provides an "easy to write & easy to read" platform for Chinese cyber-literature writers
and readers. It bolsters the communication between cyber-literature writers and readers
through virtual dialogues, and literally makes cyber-literature writing a process ofmass
production. It also provides them new possibilities to circumvent-at least partially-the
party-state's censorship. As the following case study will demonstrate, this
newly-constructed cyber space has created a moderate opportunity for Chinese netizens
to articulate their own feelings with their own voices. The existence of this space makes
possible the online articulation of their various forms of counter-memory that speaks
directly to the neoliberalist state politics in the postsocialist era. It is in this sense that I
argue that the counter-memory of Chinese netizens has historically thrived upon the
official meanings of the public sphere in contemporary China.
In the Name of Righteousness (11): Netizens' Counter-memory in Cool Evil
The popular knowledge of the counter-memory in Chinese cyber-literature covers a
wide arrange of topics, themes, and ethos. It appropriates Chinese cultural materials
through a variety of angles. However, as Eugenia Lean suggests, we can also identify a
225
global pattern among non-Western societies of the strategic employment of pre-existing
"traditional" forms of virtue and sentiment in their creation of modem societies (2007,
I
20). In this light I find that the notion of righteousness (yi) that is deeply rooted in the
tradition of Chinese popular literary imagination constitutes the counter-memory ofthe
writer and readers of a prominent Internet novel Cool Evil. 10
In January 2007 writer "Dancing" (Tiaowu W5~) started to serialize Cool Evil at
Qidian.com. Throughout the year 2007 Cool Evil was one of the most popular topics in
the virtual communities at Qidian.com and beyond. ll By the end of its serialization in
December 2007, Cool Evil became a three-volume novel of more than 2.3 million words
and 503 chapters.
Yi, or righteousness, constitutes the counter-memory of the writer and readers of
Cool Evil. The articulation ofyi abounds in pre-modem literary representations, of which
the traditional vernacular novel Outlaws ofthe Marsh (Shuihu zhuan 7k:fflf~, hereafter
SHZ) (Shi and Luo 1980) is one of the most prominent cases. SHZ is a literary
representation of the insurgence led by Song Jiang (*IT) in North Song Dynasty
(961-1125). Starting from Gao Qiu's (~{:J() rise to power and persecution of the faithful
and upright, the novel depicts that the heroes in the country gathered in the Liangshan
Mountain (~W) to start an uprising, and then they were offered amnesty and enlistment
by the imperial court. After conquering the state ofLiao (jI)and another uprising army
226
led by Fang La (1J ~j\If) ,they were murdered by treacherous court officials. Yi is the
central theme of 8HZ. One interpretation ofyi in 8HZ is "personal honor" that tends to
emphasize reciprocity among friends or brothers who are mainly from plebian
backgrounds. Through adhering to the code ofyi the Liangshan heroes create Jianghu (rr
¥J'i)J), a private and plebeian domain that is often beyond the control of the government
(Huang 2006, 98-99 & 104-5).
The literary imagination of righteousness in Cool Evil is significantly modeled on
and develops from that in 8HZ. In what follows, the discussion of righteousness and the
netizens' national sentiments in Cool Evil will frequently refer to 8HZ. Harking back to
the working definition of "Chinese netizens" in this chapter-"representatives of Chinese
grassroots people with self-appointed authority as generated from their Internet-based
negotiating activities with the neoliberalist state", the writer and readers of Cool Evil
become part of the netizen group when they engage in active negotiation with state
politics through their specific Internet-based activity-the production and consumption of
this Internet novel. In this process, the counter-memory of righteousness gave birth to a
mode ofnational sentiments that speaks directly to the official memories shaped by,
among other things, the neoliberalist state politics.
In Cool Evil, yi is first expressed as a sentiment of discontent. In 8HZ, as Martin
Huang notes, yi often represents a sentiment of discontent toward the society and the
227
government. For example, Wu Dalang (~*~~) was poisoned by his wife Pan Jinlian
(~~~) and her adulterous lover Ximen Qing ( @ nIX) ,a rich businessman and
influential official. The local government dismissed Wu Dalang's murder case under the
influence of Ximen. Wu Song (~:tt), the younger brother ofWu Dalang, had no legal
means to correct his brother's wrongs so he ended up joining the Liangshan gang after
killing the two adulterers. What Wu Song did is considered behavior ofyi because he
chose to stand up and fight back when confronted with social injustice and the corrupt
ruling class. Underlying his behavior is a sentiment of discontent with the social reality,
and by extension, with the political system that has caused such reality. A contrast
between righteous individuals and the unjust government is pitched through yi.
In Cool Evil, yi is recast as the protagonist Chen Yang's sentiment of discontent with
the postsocialist government. Through his perspective, the readers get a sense of the
many social problems in contemporary China. His sentiment of discontent toward the
government is reflected throughout the long novel in many aspects, a significant one of
which is his experience with female sex workers in contemporary China. Chen works in a
nightclub in Nanjing. His job is to make arrangements for xiaojie (!J'~£l.) to provide
service to customers. Xiaojie literally means "Miss" or "Lady", but it also refers to
female sex workers in contemporary China. The mushrooming ofnight clubs in Chinese
cities has been an impressive social phenomenon since the 1990s. Wealthy men, many of
228
whom are corrupt officials or businessmen with government connections, become regular
patrons of night clubs, where they can find young and beautiful girls to sing, drink, and
sleep with.
Chen Yang obviously hates his job because ofwhat he sees and does in the night
club. One line he often says is "I am a bad man". The author invites the readers to think
of this question: "what makes Chen Yang a bad man?" Xiaoiie come from various social
strata but a significant number of them enter the sex industry because of poverty. Poverty,
a by-product ofthe economic reform that many grassroots people have to deal with in
their daily life, has everything to do with the neo1ibera1ist state policies. Neo1ibera1ism, as
the dominant governing mode of thought in the postsocia1ist China, understands
development narrowly-as being only a matter of economic growth-and disregards the
connection between this growth and political freedom and social benefits (Wang 2003,
104). One ofthe gloomiest consequences of this development mode is the polarization of
the society in terms of economic and political power. On one end of the social structure
are the grassroots people having little sway over political, economic, and social policies
of the state; on the other end the Party cadres and their affiliates hold tight to power and
capitalize on it. In Chen Yang's eyes, the contrast between xiaojie and their customers
most vividly represents the polarization of the Chinese society. Positioned at a privileged
venue-inside a night club, Chen witnesses and feels biting pain because ofthe way the
229
rich and powerful are entitled by the neoliberalist power structure to violate,
psychologically and physically, the poor and powerless.
Through the character Chen Yang, the author brings on his sentiment of discontent
with the social polarization caused by the neoliberalist state. In the process of asking
what makes Chen Yang a bad man, the author transfers the question "what is wrong with
me?" to "what is wrong with (the governing body of) the society?". By examining the
ailments caused by the social polarization through Chen Yang's perspective, the author
articulates his righteous sentiment against the unjust state.
In 8HZ, yi is also the heroic code to form a community of brotherhood. The heroic
code ofyi ensures the cohesion of a mythic, communal and quasi-biological brotherhood
(Ding 2002, 144). Although it is not blood-bound, to some extent this community
replaces family and is more exclusive and politically oriented. Drawing from 8HZ, the
author "Dancing" designed in Cool Evil a plebeian community based on the code ofyi
the protagonist Chen Yang fully embodies in his life.
Chen Yang's nightclub career evidences his righteous principle of life-"all my
co-workers are my brothers and sisters". First, he carries out his righteousness by helping
and protecting other grassroots members of his self-identified community at any cost. In
the first one third of the novel, his self-identified community is the night club he works
for. Chen gets hurt in a fight with some hooligan customers to protect a night-club
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waitress he does not know. At this juncture his yi creates a reciprocal community the
actualization of which depends on his larger-than-life behavior to self-willingly identify
with and sacrifice for the community. It is his larger-than life insistence on protecting any
member of the night club that makes it a community for his grassroots co-workers.
The flip side of unconditional sacrifice for the community is the urge to punish those
insiders who backstab other members of the community. Since the sustainability of the
community relies on the mutual care and help among the community members, its own
members' failure to live up to those standards is the most fundamental threat to its
existence. In chapter seventy-one of the Liangshan heroes' "grand confluence of
chivalry"(dajuyi *~)(), the solemn vow of setting up the brotherhood reads, "from
this day on, if any of us acts in a deliberately unvirtuous manner, or offends our code of
chivalry, we pray that Heaven and Earth scourge him, that the spirits and men destroy
him, that he never again be reincarnated in human form and remain forever sunk in the
depths" (Shi and Luo 1980, 1141). Violence is usually resorted to as a solution to such
situations, and the practice of violence in such situations is also considered as an
embodiment ofyi. Just as the Liangshan heroes vow, Chen violently punishes his
co-worker Ah-Qiang (~riJ~$.)who drugged another waitress and got her raped for money.
The desire for money and material profits is considered as a major hurdle to form
and maintain the plebeian community in Cool Evil. In SHZ the desire for money usually
231
leads to morally corrupt behavior. For example, Wang Po (.::E~) facilitates the adultery
between Pan Jinlian and Ximen Qing for the sake of money. And all the three people are
eventually killed by Wu Song. The clash between Chen Yang and Ah-Qiang foregrounds
Cool Evil's anti-profit ethos, which forms a dramatic contrast with the pervasive
profit-seeking milieu promoted by the state and the market economy. The state-dictated
neoliberalist economic reform has created the opposite of grassroots people-Party
cadres and businessmen having close connection with the government, or in Wang Hui's
words, specific interest groups within the state structure. One commonality of all these
interest groups is their fanatic pursuit of material profits.
Cool Evil's anti-profit ethos is deeply rooted in a real grassroots sentiment against
such a milieu. The "realistic" tinge of Chen's heroic story is located not so much in the
noble needs of Chen as in the character Ah-Qiang. The hidden truth overshadowed by
Chen's righteous behavior is that when facing a choice between profits and yi, few people
would actually go for yi instead of going for profits. The threat ofAh-Qiang to the
plebeian community ofyi is fundamental because he is one of "their own". The
centrifugal threat from inside, as demonstrated by Ah-Qiang, sourly attests to the
influence ofneoliberalism at the grassroots level. The counterposing of Chen to
Ah-Qiang exemplifies the author's repulse to the neoliberalist state and the profit-driven
market economy. By conjuring up a plebeian community and a grassroots hero like Chen
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the authors furnished a counter-discourse to the mammonist official discourses, through
which the moral authority of grassroots people is reestablished against the backdrop of
the corrupt and oppressive state.
Besides being a sentiment of discontent and the code of a plebeian community, yi is
also recycled as the revival of Maoist egalitarianism within the context of contemporary
China. SHZ promotes the practice of "Distributing Gold Between Brothers"(Dachen
Fenjin *~7t~).Many heroes, especially those from the lower-class, join the
Liangshan gang because within the community of brotherhood they can enjoy equal
economic rights regardless of their class backgrounds. In this sense, yi represents a kind
of grassroots proto-egalitarianism in the tradition of Chinese popular literary imagination.
In Cool Evil, this proto-egalitarianism is recycled within the contemporary context
of global capitalism. By "recycling" I mean the process in which the socialist past is
reinvented under the overwhelming trends of global capitalism. I argue that an important
condition of recycling in the novel is that benefits and burdens of globalization are
unequally distributed among the multiple national subjects due to their respective
positionalities within the national power structure as shaped by neoliberalism. The
grassroots people's uneasiness about shouldering most burdens while enjoying few
benefits forms a complicated cultural-psychological situation that is recast in Cool Evil as
the author' worship ofMao.
233
After quitting his job at the night club, Chen Yang went through a series of dramatic
incidents and eventually come to Canada and become a member of a mafia organization
Daquan (*11). His new identification with the mafia organization Daquan originates in
the collective memory of many Mainland Chinese-the memory of Mao's Cultural
Revolution.
Although the critical reflection on the cruelty and inhumanity of the Cultural
Revolution never stops since 1978, the equally gloomy and unjust social reality in
post-revolutionary China has prompted more and more Chinese people, especially people
at the grassroots level, to look back at the more idealistic and egalitarian period with
heart-warming feelings. Daquan's founders are first-generation Mainland Chinese who
were born and raised right after PRC was founded. Most of them are retired soldiers who
fought the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979 and were once red guards in the Cultural
Revolution (voU, chp.146). Once he comes to Daquan's headquarter in Canada-a
garage in Vancouver BC, Chen Yang is immediately fascinated by the people and decor
there. The boss of the Canadian Daquan is Fang Bazhi CJi)\1~), a old man dressing like
an accountant in a state-owned factory (guoyingqiye de kuaiji 00 gJ1:~8"J~it) who
works and eats with the other members of the mafia. Chen Yang lives in a place like a
workers' group dorm (jiti sushe ~fzls:1Ei1%f) and dines in a publicly-owned canteen
(shitang it.'£) (voU, chp.135-7). All of this reminds him of the "good old time". The
234
common history and memory reflected in the people and decor endows the mafia
organization with a nostalgic sense of Maoist culture, which Chen Yang comfortably
identifies with.
Chen Yang cherishes the revolutionary history of Mao's era in his "fight in exile" in
North America, which inspires his new goal to build a plebeian and egalitarian
community within this specific transnational setting. Whether in the night club or later in
the Canadian mafia, Chen Yang never gives up his passion to build such a plebian,
egalitarian community to redistribute wealth. This passion to redistribute wealth is
epitomized in his big dream of Chairman Mao and White House.
Chen Yang's new roommate Xiluo (1ZE~), a second-generation Chinese whose
father fought by Fang Bashi's side as a Daquan member, plays him an old record of
music-dubbed recital of Chairman Mao's poems. The fact that "Chairman's poems ravage
Vancouver's streets" inspires Chen Yang to have a more daring dream:
"One day, I will bring an old-style microgroove machine to the White House and
play Chairman Mao's poems with the machine pointing right to its windows for a
whole day. Let the great revolutionary leader's poems ravage the heart zone of the
hegemonic capitalist power!" (Cool Evil part. I, chp. 136)
235
The dramatic juxtaposition of Chairman Mao with the derogatorily inferred capitalism
easily bestows on Chen Yang and his fellow Daquan members a plain sense ofmoral
authority. Instead of criticizing specific policies of the neoliberalist state, Chen Yang's
dream embodies an antagonistic gesture of Chinese grassroots people toward the
fundamental hotbed of these policies-the global capitalist economy per se. Not only
does this provide Chen Yang a certified reason to go on his adventure in exile as a
righteous person-making Daquan a plebeian community as he did the night club, Chen
Yang's big dream demonstrates the author's will to tear down the neoliberalist capitalism
with Maoist egalitarianism. In this sense the author's worship ofMao has integrated with
his advocacy ofyi to make righteousness the revival ofMaoist egalitarianism in
postsocialist China.
One important thing to keep in mind is that cyber-literature is more than a
transparent and immediate channel for Internet users to articulate their spontaneous
thoughts. From the production and consumption of Cool Evil, the form of cyber-literature
creates a passionate public space for the author and readers to negotiate with state politics
in the name of national sentiments, in the process of which they become a significant part
of the netizen community.
The production mechanism of cyber-literature ensures that the novel reflects the
collective will of the readers' community, instead of only the author's will. This result
236
certainly benefits from the "easy to write & easy to read" function of cyber-literature and
its capability to circumvent censorship. But more importantly, it results from the author's
self-conscious application of author-reader communication. "Dancing" is one of the
earliest Qidian writers who applied the mode of mass production in his writing. Using his
net alias "Dancing's Sword" (Tiaowu dejian W~~i¥J§l'j),he was frequently online to
communicate with his readers about plots, themes, and controversies during his writing.
His idiosyncratic method of incorporating the readers' ideas was to wage online votes. He
usually wrote a few possible subsequent plots after hearing his readers' thoughts, posted
all ofthem for the readers' votes, and then picked the one with the highest votes as the
real subsequent plot. In this sense all the aforementioned applications of
righteousness-to negotiate with neoliberalist state politics in the novel-are done not
only by Dancing but also by his vast online readers.
In addition, the consumption of cyber-literature becomes the readers' way of active
participation with political significance. Going beyond participating in producing the
meanings of the texts, the readers participate in the passionate public space by having
heated discussions and debates over these meanings in cyber space. The online sensation
over "People's Police" in the consumption of this novel epitomizes the readers'
participation in this public space in this respect.
237
At one point of the novel, Chen Yang becomes a victim ofpolice abuse ofpower in
Nanjing. He holds off several hooligans who try to harass his friend. But because one of
them is the brother-in-law of the local police chief, Chen is taken into custody and
persecuted at the local police bureau. He is handcuffed to the heat pipe,12 slapped in the
face and tasered. A biting sense of irony lurks in the following description:
...... a young policeman shouts, "Behave yourself1 Don't you know what
place this is?" "What place? Just the place ofRenminjingcha (People's Police)!"
I knock the heat pipe with my handcuffs ...
Chen's ironic mentioning of the term "People's Police" ("Renminjingcha"Aff!:/»~)
points to the very falseness of the state-sanctioned official memories. "The people" is the
legitimate subject of a modem nation. The nation is based on the formation of "the
people" in human imagination, which naturalizes "its juridico-utopian promise to protect
the local while abstracting the person from his body and everyday life experience to
another, more stable, symbolic order" (Berlant 1991, 12). This symbolic order of "the
people" legitimizes the existence of the nation. Although the 1989 Incident fundamentally
shook the party-state's legitimacy to represent the nation and the people, the Party-state
still holds power tight and has become an increasingly oppressive structure over
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grassroots people with the deepening of the neoliberalist refonn. The Party-state
habitually manipulates the rhetoric of "renmin" (the people .A~) in the political public
sphere. In China, the names of government offices at all levels carry a prefix of"renmin",
such as Renmin Jiefangjun (People's Liberation Army .A~MJVl~),Renminfayuan
(People's Court .A~y!~3t), Renminjingcha, etc. The official memories of the
Party-state create a legitimate sense of its regime generated from its self-claims of
"daibiao renmin" (representing the people 1~*.A~) and "wei renminfuwu" (serving
the people 79.A ~~a~). The juxtaposition of the glorious tenn "People's Police" and
the actual treatment Chen receives from the local policemen fashions a sharp contrast
through which the falseness of the official memories concerning "the people" is brought
to the fore. By implying that "People's Police are persecuting the people", this story adds
a biting sense of irony to the depiction of state apparatuses like the police in
contemporary China.
The author's sentiment of discontent toward the police soon created heated online
discussions through reader-reader communication in the virtual communities of the novel.
User "Late Sunshine" (Chimuyangguang :i8.1H87't) initiated a discussion in the Qidian
forum of Cool Evil on July 29, 2007. 13 He claimed that he was a policeman and was tired
of the negative descriptions of the police in the novel. He thought that Dancing did not
have enough breadth of knowledge (zhishi mian ~Qi,ROO) and should learn more about
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Chinese laws. Late Sunshine's defense of the Chinese police at once ignited
counterstrikes from other users. User "Suiyuan-Piao" (1W~-'JXl) ridiculed Late Sunshine
by saying "LZ thinks Little Five does not have enough breadth of knowledge; the people
think you are too assertive.,,14 Many readers furnished personal stories on the police's
corruption, abuse of power, and violent suppression of grassroots people. IS Even more
used derogatory terms for the police in their replies. User "Once Witness of Wars"
(Jiceng shi gan 'ge JL 'tffl i~ -=f:lG) commented that Late Sunshine could not blame anyone
(giving negative descriptions of or comments on the Chinese police) because what the
police did had "kindled the people's indignation" (ji qi minfen t~j(j§~'I:~).16 He
continued, "Usually we dare not say anything although we are furious (gan nu bu gan yan
~~/F~1~-n.Now is there anything we dare not say here?"I? The comments of Once
Witness of Wars testifies that cyber-literature and the space it creates do provide a viable
channel for grassroots people to actively participate in the public life ofpolitics in
contemporary China.
Some other users went beyond the emotional charges against the police and pointed
out that the origin of the police's problems was nothing but the political system itself.
User "2006 Jingzhe" (2006 t~m) argued that blame should go not to the policemen but
to the political system. The system has many loopholes (loudong im¥lPJ) the policemen
could utilize and in a sense the policemen were also victims (of the system).18 Following
240
up the thoughts of2006 Jingzhe, User "Opposing Wind Shattering Moon 2003" (Nifeng
suiyue ~)X1..WJj 2003) lamented:
Too much the government has lost of its authority (wei xin ~1§) and people's faith
(min-xin ~IL.') in it. ..Who is to blame? Let's blame our Party. Let's blame Deng
Xiaoping's "Opening and Reform" (gai ge kaifang B5c~7f~) that boosted the
economy at the cost of the ideology(si xiang }~,~,).We miss Chairman Mao who
was resolute in taking down corrupt officials and ill-behaved policemen. Let's
eliminate all the capitalists and brutal (shou xin ~ IL.,) officials that harm the
interests of us-the people. 19
In his speech Opposing Wind Shattering Moon 2003 is openly critical of the Chinese
government, the Communist Party's leadership, and its fundamental policy (guo ce ~~)
of the economical reform in the last thirty years. The militant slogan of "eliminating"
capitalists and government officials that "harm the interests ofus-the people" delivers
two messages from the grassroots people: first, it is the state-sponsored neoliberalist
reform that has recreated a class society, in which ''we''-the people-belong to one class
and "they"-capitalists and officials-belong to another; second, "we the people" will
take action to protect our interests.
241
As Wang Hui suggests, the principal embodiment of Chinese neoliberalism lies in
the benefits accruing to specific interest groups within the state structure. Neoliberalism,
"with its core content being the intensification of reforms calling for great devolution of
political and economic power and the contract system", germinates "the furtherance of a
comprehensive course of spontaneous privatization under the guiding premise of a lack of
democratic guarantees, and the legitimization through legislative means of the
polarization of classes and interests" (2003, 59). The lament of Opposing Wind
Shattering Moon 2003 is a popular response to Wang Hui's observation. It does not take
much effort to notice that the targeted "capitalists and brutal official" in his speech fall
exactly into Wang Hui's category of the "interest groups within the state structure" that
have benefited from the economic reform. And the speech has made it clear that people at
the grassroots level will not acquiesce in allowing those interest groups to appropriate the
state power to take their interests away. The historical paradox of the state-the withering
of the capacity of the state and the over-involvement of the state in the working of the
market at once diminish and necessitate the power of the state in contemporary Chinese
society-renders it impossible for any demands for freedom from the grassroots level to
separate a critique of the state from a critique of the move toward a consumerist,
market-oriented society. The trajectory of the readers' criticism under discussion-from
242
targeting the police itself to criticizing the Party-state system, "Opening and Reform",
and the capitalist economy-seems to evidence this point.
Echoed and elaborated on by the readers, the author's political discontent becomes a
collective voice of Chinese grassroots people that wrestles with the neoliberalist state.
Through these criticisms most readers of Cool Evil shared the author's sentiment and
found their own way of practicing yi-that is, to enunciate their voice of political
discontent in the online space of cyber-literature. It is in this sense that the author and
readers of Cool Evil have created a netizens' public space of righteousness.
To sum up, yi is the counter memory of the author and readers of Cool Evil that
contradicts the official memories created by the neoliberalist state. Yi is a sentiment of
discontent toward the government; it is a heroic code that promises the formation and
sustainment of a plebeian community; it is also recycled as Maoist egalitarianism in the
contemporary condition of global capitalism. The form of cyber-literature per se creates a
passionate public space for the author and readers to negotiate with state politics in the
name ofnational sentiments, in the process ofwhich they become a significant part of the
netizen community striving for more political and economic freedom under the current
social structure.
243
Neoliberalism: Ambivalences and Contradictions of Yi
The netizens' advocacy ofyi in Cool Evil-especially in the first volume-targets
the neoliberalist state and its policies, which seems to give such an impression that
neoliberalism is the attribute of an oppressive third-world state structure over grassroots
people in economic globalization. However, this impression is problematic if we analyze
the transformation of righteousness in the latter part of the novel. Much has been written
about Foucault's concept of governmentality (Burchell, Gordon, and Miller 1991). These
writings have emphasized how power operates not just from the centralized locus of the
state toward citizens but in a dispersed and diffused manner through experts, leading
citizen-subjects to take it upon themselves to monitor their own conduct.
Recently the concept has been used to develop the idea that neoliberalism is a form
of governmentality in which economic policies, regimes ofpower/knowledge, and
subjectivities structurally line up together in a coherent manner (RofeI2007, 176).
Recent work on neoliberalism raises critical questions about transformations in the
relationship between capitalism, governance, and subjectivity (15). Nikolas Rose traces
the assemblages of each stage of history that link "the regulation of public conduct with
the subjective emotional and intellectual capacities and techniques of individuals, and the
ethical regimes through which they govern their lives" (1996, 38). Advanced liberalism (a
term he uses coterminously with neoliberalism) was sparked by a set ofpolitical critiques
244
on how to overcome the interventionist nature of the liberal welfare state. These critiques
led to a neoliberal mentality of government. Rose argues that neoliberal political theorists
do not take the market to be a natural entity but rather believe government needs to
ensure that the market functions properly by, paradoxically, governing less. Advanced
liberal rule devises new technologies of governance by reconstructing individual citizens
as subjects of entrepreneurial choices. It seeks to marketize expertise within calculative
regimes of competition, accountability, and consumer demand.
Where Rose implicitly discusses Great Britain, Wendy Brown explicitly situates her
analysis of neoliberalism in the United States. For Brown, neoliberaqlism is a response to
the challenges from the left as well as a provocation to the left. She delineates the
political rationality that subtends neoliberalism. When deployed as a form of
governmentality, neoliberalism "reaches from the soul of the citizen-subject to education
policy to practices of empire" (2003, 2). She describes four main characteristics of
neoliberal governmentality: (1) It extends and disseminates market values to all
institutions and social action. (2) The market provides the organizing and regulative
principle of the state not only because the state responds to the needs of the market but is
itself rendered as an enterprise organized by market rationality. (3) Economic rationality
extends to formerly noneconomic domains. (4) Profitability becomes the criterion for
245
good social policy. In a word, in American neoliberalism market economics are offered
not merely as the path to democracy but as the measure of democracy.
Finally, while Brown and Rose examine neoliberalism within the nation-state,
Aihwa ang interrupts both of their versions of neoliberalism by describing a global
structure of sutured differences. The subjects of ang's story--diasporic Hong Kong
capitalists, Southeast Asian governments, and Cambodian refugees in the United
States-implicitly furnish the opportunities of rethinking on the versions ofneoliberalism
by Rose's experts and Brown's US leftists. In the case of diasporic Hong Kong capitalists
(1999) she examines the phenomenon of "flexible citizenship", by which she means the
ability of these professionals and entrepreneurs to both circumvent and benefit from
various nation-state regimes by selecting distinct sites for investment, work, and family
relocation. 20
Based on her exploration of works on neoliberalism by Rose, Brown, and ang, Lisa
Rofel contends in her book about contemporary Mainland China that neoliberalism is not
"a universal set of principles from which derives, in a deterministic fashion, a singular
type ofneoliberal subject". She argues that neoliberalism has been an ongoing
experimental project that began in the global south, in which nation-state-China being
one of the most prominent and peculiar examples as her book testifies-reorder
themselves to participate in the post-Cold War world and is particularly germane to
246
"Chinese citizens in a postsocialist humanity" (2007, 2-3). As she defines her own study
of Chinese neoliberalism, she inquire about the role of public culture in fostering novel
subjectivities by asking "how non-expert, ordinary citizens grapple with broad-ranging
public discourses and how they actively negotiate, ague about, desire, and differentiate
the kinds of subjectivities they are encouraged to embody"; and by asking "how
differentially positioned citizens in China grapple with the market economy in their lives
and how they evaluate questions of freedom and constraint in relation to it" (19).
Inspired by Rofel's treatment of Chinese neoliberalism as a "national project of
global reordering", this chapter attempts to analyze the cultural meaning of the Chinese
public sphere as shaped by it from the perspective of cyber-literature. My study focuses
not on any citizen, but on the particular group of netizens---eitizens who, with the help of
Internet technologies, most passionately participate in producing and defining the
meanings of the public sphere on behalf of grassroots people. Specifically, I explore in
the case of Cool Evil how the counter-memory ofyi negotiates in the name ofnational
sentiments with neoliberalism and its multifaceted
consequences/conditions---eonsumerism, historical re-evaluation of freedom, and
reconstructing subjectivity through economic logics.
It is advisable not to dissect counter-memory from official memory when defining
and constructing cultural meaning of a public sphere within a specific national context.
247
Nor is it wise to conceive the two as totally contradictory to each other. Harking back to
Berlant's rendition of the relationship between the two, it is the intertwinement of them
represents the dispersal of experience and knowledge that constitutes the social realms.
Within the specific context of Cool Evil, the counter-memory of righteousness and the
official memory ofneoliberalist state policies combine to fashion a complicated picture
of neoliberalist governmentality.
As the last section manifests, in the first volume of Cool Evil the counter-memory of
yi forms the netizens' mode of national sentiments contradicting the neoliberalist state
that to some extent looms as an oppressive overarching structure and as a constraint on
grassroots people's pursuit of political and economic freedom. In this light the national
sentiments of righteousness seems to promise a herald and champion of emancipatory
grassroots freedom.
However, the transient discourses ofnational sentiments in the latter part of the
novel complicate such a pursuit of emancipatory grassroots freedom. The development of
Chen Yang's character-especially in the second and third volumes-indicates that
righteousness as the netizens' counter-memory does not necessarily contradict but
sometimes collaborates on a deeper level with the official memories fashioned by the
neoliberalist state.
248
There is clear class differentiation among the Liangshan heroes in 8HZ, The
grassroots heroes like Wu Song usually struggle at the bottom level of the social
hierarchy before they join the Liangshan brotherhood. Rich and powerful heroes like
Chai Jin (~J!) and Chao Gai (~~) often provid economic support and political refuge
to their grassroots friends in need. Rich heroes invariably have the fame of "executingyi
by disseminating his fortune" (zhang yi shu cai 1t)(i9iE~J) and a premier quality of these
grassroots heroes in 8HZ is the strong will to repay others' kindness and help, or put in a
popular Chinese saying, "to return others' drops of kindness with an overflowing spring"
(dishui zhi en, yongquan xiang bao ~OO"7.kz.J@.l, ~RHJU1HIi). The reciprocal relationship
between the two types of heroes is the foundation of the mythic community of the
Liangshan brotherhood. However, from another perspective the grassroots heroes'
righteous quality is especially tied to the trade of their valor and life for material profits
provided by their rich friends. In this sense the most indicative speech is given by two
grassroots heroes Ruan Xiaowu (~/J'.li)andRuan Xiaoqi (~/J'-t), who overtly claim
that "We sell this column of hot blood to the man who appreciates its worth" (zhe qiang
rexue, zhiyao mai yu shihuode ~B~~1fn., ~Jf~EjiQ:1E:ft-J)when they join Chao Gai's
robbery.
The entanglement of righteousness with material profits is also reflected in Cool Evil.
Starting from the second half of the first volume, Chen Yang's experiences with the harsh
249
reality in China have purged him of some idealistic ideas about yi. He gradually realizes
the importance of "strength" (shi Ii 3;; fJ) in practicing yi in this world. Fang Dahai (11
j(1HJ)-a veteran member of the mafia organization Daquan---offers Chen two choices:
first, to hide in a small village in China and "be a docile man at the bottom of the social
hierarchy for the rest of your life" (yibeizi an/en de dang yige zuidiceng de xiaomin -~
-r:R7t±fu3 -1-JIJ~m EJ<J IJ' ~); second, join Daquan and fight a way to wealth abroad
(vo1.l, chp.123-24). That Chen Yang takes the second option without hesitation reflects
the very will of Dancing and his readers to change their current grassroots lives through
pursuing wealth.
Chen Yang's righteous life in North America is grounded in an intersubjective
self-benefitting motive. In the "exile" stage of Chen Yang's growth, Dancing portrays
Chen's yi in three mutually related aspects: compassion (ren 1=), wisdom (zhi 1'), and
courage (yong ~). Compassion denotes the capability of understanding others'
aspirations and fulfilling them. With the goal of pursuing wealth on his mind, Chen Yang
soon finds similar aspirations in other Daquan members. However, Daquan's boss-Fang
Bazhi-turns out to be a very manipulative leader and is not willing to give Chen and
other members opportunities to make fortunes. Fang Bazhi's governing style soon leads
to a series of betrayals and one of them ultimately costs Fang's life. When Chen Yang is
sent to finish offTiger-a betrayer who used to be a senior subordinate of Fang Bazhi,
250
Chen and Tiger have a conversation in which Tiger asks what people like him have got
after risking their lives twenty years fighting for Fang Bazhi (vol. 1, chp. 172-3).
The death of Tiger promotes Chen Yang to seriously rethink his fate in Daquan. He
makes up his mind to be a compassionate leader who understands and helps other
members' aspiration to make fortunes. Chen Yang believes that the Chinese saying-- "A
person who does not plan for himself should be eliminated by the heaven and the earth"
(ren bu wei ji tian zhu di mie A/F79 c. :R.15tdllt1Z)-makes much sense. There is
nothing wrong fighting for oneself, unless it involved selling out fellow brothers (vol.2,
chp.66). Under such a guideline Chen Yang tries his best to lead Daquan toward the
goal of making fortunes for every member. During such processes his courage and
wisdom help him survive extremely harsh conditions. His efforts prove effective and he
soon advances to Daquan's highest leadership.
From the night club in Nanjing to the mafia organization in Canada, the switch of
Chen Yang's self-identified community is accompanied by the transposing of the
relationship between righteousness and material profits. From the major hurdle of
forming and sustaining a plebeian community to the embodiment of a compassion that
holds together a community of self-benefitting individuals, the transformation of material
profits highlights that Chen Yang's practice of righteousness has gained new meanings.
Obtaining material profits becomes an emancipatory tool for the netizens to economic
251
freedom. That to guarantee material profits for Daquan members is righteous testifies that
neoliberalist governmentality has greatly shaped the subjectivities of Chinese netizens. It
bespeaks that economic logics have extended to the subjective dimensions of the author
and readers of Cool Evil, who firmly embrace the self-benefiting actions.
The emancipatory nature of righteousness through obtaining material profits poses
new questions for the author and readers. One central issue is how to better justify the
self-benefitting motive of righteousness. First, race and ethnicity play an important role
conjuring up a chauvinist zeal to glorify the profit-seeking motive ofDaquan. The
explicit threats to the development of Chen Yang's Daquan are "the four troubles: the
Vietnamese gang; the Indian gang; the Iranian gang; and the native Chinese gang" (vol. 1,
chp.146). Chen Yang provokes fights among these gangs by "muddying the waters of
Vancouver" (ba Wengehua zhe tan shuijiao hun :fE¥1fum1¥i3:1lbj(m~).21 When the
gang fights escalate and the Canadian government starts to intervene, Chen Yang steps in
as the mediator between the government and other gangs. And finally a new peace
agreement between the gangs and the government is achieved on the basis that both the
underworld and the "over-world" acknowledge Daquan's leadership of the Vancouver
underworld (vol.2, chp.28-68). Without much difficulty people can identify in Chen
Yang's strategies the influence oftraditional Chinese military intelligence.22 To some
extent the fights between Daquan and the other gangs for material benefits become racial
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wars between Chinese and the Vietnamese, Indians, and Iranians. Race is an important
criterion for Chen Yang to differentiate the "self' and the "other". He is involved in a
gunfight between Daquan and the Vietnamese gang the first day he disembarks in
Vancouver:
I actually do not need to make a judgment.
I am in between two gangs fighting each other. One is Chinese, one is Vietnamese.
Even a fool knows which side to help! (voU, chp.134)
The statement of "choice without judgment" undoubtedly attests to his racia110yalty. The
Vietnamese gang directly confronts Daquan and it ends up being totally eliminated. The
Iranian and Indian gangs later become Daquan's secondary allies/subordinates. These
gang fights over material benefits are generally applauded by the Chinese readers as a
proof of the superiority of the Chinese race.
Similarly, an imagined ethnic absolutism that "both predates and colors
contemporary Chinese notions about the nation,,23 also influences Chen Yang. The
complicated relationship between Daquan and the native Chinese gang brings to the fore
this pro-Mainland absolutism. On the one hand, Chen Yang's Daquan does not want to
confront the native Chinese gang because "we are both Chinese and should not let the
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foreigners laugh at us fighting each other"(vol.l, chp.139). On the other hand, Chen Yang
and other Daquan members are infuriated that the native Chinese gang is "a plate of
scattered sand" (yi pan san sha ~:m:ltX¥y) so that every other gang bullies the Chinese
(vol. I , chp.151). Looking at the terms Daquan members use to describe themselves and
the native Chinese gang tells how Chen Yang and other Daquan members-at this
juncture the representatives ofMainland Chinese-understand this issue. Daquan
members call themselves "purebred Chinese" (chunzhong de zhongguoren ~*~ I¥J~ ~
A.) and the native Chinese "AB boys" (AB zai ffi4 (voU, chp.135). "Purebred"
alludes to the central, authoritative, and legitimate position in the genealogy of a species
or breed. By claiming "purebred" identity, Daquan assumes the centrality and authority of
their ethnic "Chineseness". The opposite of "purebred" is bastard and accordingly, the
"Chineseness" represented by the bastard is not as legitimate and authoritative as its
"purebred" fellows. Although the pairing of the "bastard" with the "purebred" may also
tacitly recognize the belongingness of the bastard to the Chinese, the contrast of "people"
(ren A.) and "boys" (zai if) indicates the constructed ethnic hierarchy within the
Chinese race. Compared to the general term ren, zai is an informal and sometimes
derogatory term for people, especially immature males. Zai as the preliminary or
imperfect form of ren should receive purgative practices in order to be ren. In the novel
one of the most significant "purgative practices" is violence-e.g., Chen Yang kills the
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best fighter of the native Chinese gang with his own hands (vol. 1, chp.150-3). Not
surprisingly the imagined superiority ofMainlanders' "Chineseness" is welcomed by its
Mainland-based readers. The advancement of Chen Yang to the highest power in the
Canadian underworld fashions an imaginative power map of the world in which
Mainland Chinese triumph over people of other races and their "bastard" fellow people.
Second, justifying the new profit-seeking motive of righteousness involves the
reinvention of the righteousness-loyalty (zhong ,~,) nexus from the tradition of popular
Chinese culture. In chapter seventy-one of SHZ, Song Jiang's leadership in the Liangshan
brotherhood is sanctified by the unearthed stele (shijie ;p~).After the ritual of
"receiving the edict from the heaven" (shou min yu tian ~1fIJTj(), his will becomes the
only legitimate will of the whole community as a symbol of the heavenly will (tian yi j(
;@:). When Song Jiang proposes the surrender of the whole brotherhood to the Song court
(quan huo shou zhao 'an :i:1:k.:?l:tB~), the grassroots heroes such as Wu Song and Li
Kui (*~) vainly express their discontent but still stand by Song's side for the sake of
preserving their loyalty and righteousness (yi quan zhong yi ~:i:,~,5().The concern of
"preserving loyalty and righteousness" has broached an important issue of the
relationship between loyalty to the government/state and righteousness. The targets of the
righteous Liangshan heroes are always those corrupt officials and their affiliates instead
255
of the symbol of the state itself-the emperor. This is most explicitly represented in Ruan
Xiaowu's song:
Kill all those corrupt officials and their cruel affiliates.
This is my way of repaying the Zhao emperors.25
(Kuli zangguan dou shajin Wj!f51~]!ft,§,t~*,&.,
Zhongxin baoda Zhao guanjia I~AJ'1~~~'§'~)
Compared to the unanimous hatred for those evil officials in SHZ, Chinese people's
attitude toward the Liangshan heroes' loyalty to the Song state is more ambiguous. The
heroes' deeds to embody their loyalty--especially their courage in warding off the
invasion of the Liao army under the command of the Song state-are largely perceived in
a positive light. To some extent their loyalty is integrated with their righteousness and
exists as its ultimate goal.
The righteousness-loyalty (zhong I~') nexus from the popular Chinese tradition is
reinvented in Cool Evil to justify the convergence of righteousness and profit-seeking. An
interesting negotiation between the author Dancing and his readers lays bare the internal
tension of the netizens' counter-memory on this issue. After inspiring the initial sensation,
Chen Yang as a mere mafia boss alone could no longer satisfy the majority of his readers.
,..--------------
256
Many readers started to criticize Dancing's plot design.26 Some pointed out that the
reason for their dissatisfaction with Dancing's writing was the "malaise" (yumen ~~I;6j)
because of Chen Yang's inability to return to China.27 While Dancing initially insisted
his more individualist plot design featuring Chen's adventure of making fortunes for his
gang members and himself, the downfall of Cool Evil's subscription at Qidian.com
prompted him to seek alternatives to develop this character.
Cool Evil was produced in the commercialized system of cyber-literature. The
readers' subscription literally decided Dancing's financial interests. In discussing the
influence of consumerism on Chinese netizens, Jack Linchuan Qiu points out that they
"care more about subjects that can be discussed and celebrated, generating instant
gratification for mass consumption than the grand narratives ofmodernity: rationality,
liberalism, or 'social democracy'" (2004, 114). The notion ofloyalty is a subject with
such profound emotional appeal and cultural-psychological impact to Chinese netizens
that Dancing wrote the last volume of Cool Evil featuring Chen Yang's return to China to
contemplate the nexus ofloyalty and righteousness in the netizens' counter-memory.
The urge to go back to China manifests a delicate psychology of Cool Evil's readers
regarding the new economic initiative ofrighteousness. Although they agree with
Dancing on practicing yi through obtaining material profits, they believe that obtaining
material benefits should not be the ultimate goal of righteousness. In other words,
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obtaining material benefits must be accompanied with something else-something they
believe to be more glorious and sublime. It is at this juncture that the notion of loyalty
cuts in to provide this something "glorious and sublime". Combining profit-seeking and
providing service to the nation-state becomes the ideal mode of righteousness for Cool
Evil's readers, who are eager to see Chen Yang not only as a mafia boss in foreign land
but also as a hero welcomed back in China.
The author Dancing seemed to understand his readers' urge very well. In the last
volume he wrote about how Chen Yang embodies his new sense ofyi as a Chinese-to
serve the Chinese government with his money and power as a mafia boss. Chen Yang
helps the Chinese government with its expansion policy in Africa and North America. In
an African country he helps the Chinese government obtain military aircraft technology
originally from the United States. In the United States he buys off some American
politicians to represent Chinese interests in the House and the Senate. The new
development of Chen Yang's yi soon won back the readers' support and created a new
round of online sensation.
The new developed meanings of Cool Evil's yi-the profit-seeking initiative and the
loyalty to the nation-state-drive home the complexity between righteousness and
neoliberalist governmentality. Throughout the novel it is clearly manifested that the
economic logics of global capitalism gradually ascend to the center in defining the
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netizens' righteousness. Harking back to Chen Yang's initial dream of using Maoist
egalitarianism to demolish the global capitalist order, his Daquan career ironically
evidences the firmness of global capitalism and its overwhelming impact on grassroots
Chinese people. If in Mao's era Chinese people were called upon to build a Communist
society and to "liberate the whole humankind" (jiefang quanrenlei Mn)C~A~), this
ideal is twisted in Chen's Daquan community into the urge to survive the capitalist
competitions and to distribute wealth among the small circle ofDaquan members.
Revolutionary slogans-such as "using the intrepid revolutionary spirit to overthrow any
evil" (yi dawuwei de gemingjingshen sao qing yiqie niuguisheshen ~A7C~1¥J.!~:-~*ij
t$13~~~t}]Lt jit,!lffit$) and "flying the red flags all over the world" (wu zhou si hai hong
qi yang liJj+1 [9~tr1Jjt1m)-are cited by Chen and his followers. However, those slogans
have been stripped of significant political meanings enjoyed in Mao's era and exist only
to provide some aura to Daquan's economic war in a transnational setting.
Chen Yang's service to the Chinese government-as a central embodiment of the
righteousness-loyalty nexus in the novel-is also intertwined with his capitalist
profit-seeking drive. When he is approached by the Chinese government and commits to
the secret task of obtaining aircraft technology in Africa, his first reaction to the task is
nothing but "Here comes the business" (shenyi shang men 1:~L r'l). Besides obtaining
the technology the government wants, Chen makes a deal with the dictator ofthis African
259
country and achieves the exclusive right to exploit the local oil and diamond resources. In
the United States, in exchange for his help to buy offAmerican politicians the Chinese
government helps Chen Yang become a large shareholder of Las Vegas casinos and
Hollywood film industry.
Another illuminating detail in this respect is Dancing's explanation of the
significance of Chen Yang's trip to Africa. In the postscript of chapter twenty-five of
volume three, Dancing explains to his readers that Chen's adventure in Africa is a special
toumingzhuang (19:1S~) for him to go back to China. In 8HZ the toumingzhuang is a
required ritual of new heroes to join the Liangshan brotherhood. In chapter eleven of8HZ
Zhu Gui C*:m-) explains to Lin Chong (~*{tf), "We demand a membership certificate
from any bold man who wants to join our band. That means you have to go down the
mountain, kill a man, and bring us his head to prove yourself' (Shi and Luo 1980, 180).
If anything, the requirement of the toumingzhuang as a "membership certificate" for
joining a brotherhood reveals the ambiguity of righteousness. The toumingzhuang tests
the new member-to-be on whether he has the required "strength" (shi Ii ~ iJ) to benefit
the community. Martial prowess, smartness and courage to break law-the embodiments
of strength in 8HZ----can be tested in the experiment of killing. The consequence of the
toumingzhuang binds the outlaws with the shared pragmatic concerns (Ii hai %U'8).
260
Killing costs a person's legal status and thus he has to join the community of outlaws for
survival and protection.
Dancing's equation of Chen Yang's adventure in Africa-a major embodiment of his
righteous loyalty to the Chinese state-with a toumingzhuang indicates the author's
awareness of the two-fold significance of Chen's loyalty to the state. First, Chen's service
to the Chinese state evinces the immense power brought by his fortunes, which, to
borrow the title of the third volume, represents the "summit" (dian/eng j(j)1~) of his
personal growth. Second, Chen Yang's re-alliance with the Chinese state is based not on
utopian principles but on pragmatic concerns. The words describing Chen's negotiations
with the state in this African operation-such as "business" (shengyi 1:".:W:) and
"transaction" (jiaoyi )(~)-lay bare his concern of material interests, or Ii (%U), in his
offering ofyi to the state.
After he successfully accomplishes his tasks in Africa and the United States, Chen
gets government permission to go back to China. As the title of chapter twenty of volume
three suggests, Chen continues to bargain (taojiahuanjia i11f1~1f1) with the Chinese
government concerning the terms of his return. He promises to abide by Chinese laws in
exchange for full protection of and special treatments to his businesses in China (vo1.3,
chp.19-21). Compared to the majority of his readers who simply applaud Chen's loyalty
-------------------
261
and his return to China, the author persistently portrays Chen's righteous loyalty as an
opportunity for further development of his business empire.
To some extent the development of Chen Yang's righteousness is commensurate
with the new tendencies of the neoliberalist state policies. As Lisa Rofel notes, Chinese
neoliberalism is an "ongoing experimental project" that fashions and is shaped by various
kinds ofneoliberalist subjects. Many scholars have paid attention to the ways in which
the Chinese state-as one of the neoliberalist subjects-shapes its citizens in global
capitalist economy. For example, focusing on the influences of the economic reforms on
Chinese peasants in the 1980s and 1990s, Ann Anagnost registers in her book various
state efforts to reform the peasants into a better-quality population that will deliver to the
state an educated and disciplined labor force (1997). With China's increasing economic
and political influences on a global level in twenty-first century-e.g. its economic
expansion in Africa and its attempt to influence US domestic politics28-the shaping
process is unavoidably diversified too. Compared to the early stage of the economic
reform in the 1980s, in the expedited neoliberalist reform since the 1990s the Chinese
state finds it increasingly attractive that a small number of entrepreneurial citizen
subjects-especially in a transnational setting-collaborate with the state to facilitate its
global expansion.
262
Central to modem govemmentality is the power intended to subjugate the people in
a pastoral way-a power "bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering
them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying
them" (Foucault 1990, 136). In twenty-first-century China, such power looms large with
the irreversible trend of economic globalization and the concomitant flow of body, capital,
and cultural forms on a transnational scale, which has brought about new modalities of
subjectivity. As Nikolas Rose observes, in the regimes ofneoliberalism one can best
fulfill one's obligations to one's nation by most effectively pursuing the enhancement of
one's own economic well-being. The public benefit and the private one are reciprocal,
with the functioning of a free subject who while enjoying his freedom also enhances the
national economy (1999, 145). Although the historical conditions of Britain and China in
the twentieth-century are disparate, Rose's depiction of the twentieth-century British
experience nonetheless sheds some light on China in the twentieth-first century, which
seems to firmly catch up Western capitalist countries in terms of social economic
reconstructing under globalization. The power of freedom has fashioned entrepreneurial
Chinese subjects who unabashedly pursue material profits and self-expressively endow
the process with the aura of national greatness. These subjects find their voice in the
netizens' counter-memory of righteousness in Cool Evil, whose inclusion of
263
profit-seeking drives and loyalty to the nation-state in the name of righteousness is to
some extent commensurable with the official memories defined by the neoliberalist state.
From a disenfranchised citizen struggling at the bottom of the polarized Chinese
society to a powerful mafia boss walking over the legal margins in a transnational milieu,
Chen Yang's development reflects Chinese people's passions and disillusions in
participating in the Chinese neoliberalist project. The Chinese state and grassroots people
do not merely embrace the cultural and political situations that constitute the order of our
post-Cold War world but rather participate in creating it. While the neoliberalist state
intends to shape its grassroots citizens into docile and efficient labor in the transnational
economy, people at the grassroots level also articulate in cyber-literature their hope to
utilize the transnational cultural and economical flow to their ends for emancipatory
economic freedom.
However, more critical thinking is required to evaluate the emancipatory economic
freedom introduced by Cool Evil's notion of righteousness. Although the emancipatory
function of economic freedom is upheld by both the specific netizen group-the producer
and consumers of Cool Evil-and the neoliberalist state, its evaluation needs to break free
from an evaluative paradigm based on interests of any specific nation-state or nation-race
group. Relevant to Daquan's economic logics of capitalism is its rampant ethos of
anti-civility in the pursuit of material profits. Ifcompassion is the goal and fundamental
264
principle ofthe community ofyi, wisdom and courage are the specific means to realize
the goal of compassion. Chen Yang's wisdom is demonstrated in his novel and efficient
strategies to tackle legal problems in Daquan's development in Canada. The legal
problems Daquan faces in its development revolve around how to conceal the nature of
Daquan as a crime organization. Chen Yang implements various strategies to dress up the
Daquan organization as a legal business and successfully wins the support of the
Canadian government. To lead a crime organization like Daquan to success also needs
courage to challenge the civil orders of foreign countries. In the novel Chen is tested by
his lawyer Baoya Zhou (tMi!ZmJ) on whether he has enough courage to be Daquan's
leader. According to Baoya Zhou, courage has three different levels: the lowest level is
blood courage (qi xue zhi yang 1=(.1fn.z.~); the intermediate level bone courage (gu yang
ff ~); the top level spirit courage (shen yang *$ ~). And only a person with spirit
courage can be a successful mafia boss that leads Daquan to "manipulate the laws and
disturb the social order" (fan yun fu yu fUI idl I\ffi). Without surprise Chen Yang passes
the test and demonstrates his great spirit courage in "playing the laws" (wan nangfa Iv
liGWr!1f) (vo1.2, chp.57) in his Daquan career.
It is interesting to notice how closely the qualities of compassion, wisdom and
courage are tied to the outlaw practices that defy the civil orders of foreign countries.
Chen Yang's re-alliance with the Chinese state not only continues his racial-territorial
--------- ----
265
understanding of the national community that demands his loyalty-which has been
demonstrated in his exile career-but also implies his problematic longings for civility in
China and for chaos in foreign countries. Careful readers will notice that Chen Yang's
mafia organization creates social problems in foreign countries that he does not want to
see in China. Chen Yang does not deny it:
(Chen monopolizes the smuggling business on the west coast of Canada after
quitting the drug business)
Fundamentally the damage of smuggling is no less than that of drugs But I am
doing this in Canada. I am not a Canadian. I come from China. Canada is not my
motherland (zuguo :t13.OO). I do not have belongingness (guoshugan Y3jt~) to this
country.... ,. I do not give a damn about whether the fiscal income of the Canadian
government will be influenced by the smuggling or not. (vo1.2, chp.88)
Chen Yang justifies his crimes with his lack ofidentification with non-motherland
Canada, which seems to suggest that one's racial-territorial identity prevails over his civil
codes. His attitude of "not giving a damn" indicates xenophobia among Chinese netizens.
The problematic relationship between upholding yi and the violation of laws
questions the emancipatory function of economic freedom for Chinese netizens. The
-----_..._-_ ..._-_ ..._._-------- - ---------- ----
266
netizens' unanimous acclamation to Chen Yang and his Daquan gang seems to advance a
logic that righteousness justifies the violation of civil laws in foreign countries. The
discourse of civility in contemporary China is integral to the modernization project ofthe
state, particularly the drive to become integrated into global capitalism. It is also a
top-down effort to dress up the realm ofpublic authority as a voluntary but compliant
public sphere.29 Far from acquiescing in being docile, disciplined and law-abiding
citizens as the statist discourse of civility has imagined, Chinese grassroots people
articulate in Cool Evil their determination to overcome the legal barriers of civility to
pursue individual wealth and prosperity. By exiling themselves to be heroic outlaws in
foreign countries, Chen Yang and his brothers pursue the vast opportunities provided by
globalization and neoliberalism without directly confronting the Chinese state. On the
one hand, being heroic outlaws in foreign countries furnishes Chen Yang and his Daquan
gang the opportunity to be neoliberalist, entrepreneurial citizen subjects and therefore
fosters the netizens' pursuit of economic freedom. On the other hand, the netizens'
imagined economic emancipation is based on a rampant anti-civility ethos that promotes
the specific interest of China at the cost ofpolitical stableness and economic development
of other nation-states. This anti-civility ethos reeks ofchauvinist, xenophobic trends of
Chinese grassroots nationalism, which eliminates the possibility ofpursing grassroots
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267
economic freedom on a democratic and egalitarian basis. It is in this sense that the
netizens' country-memory ofyi simultaneously discourages this cause.
Conclusion
David Harvey argues in his seminal book The Condition ofPostmodernity that the
more unified the space, the more important the qualities of the fragmentations become for
social identity and action. He explains that the shrinkage of space that brings diverse
communities across the globe into competition with each other implies localized
competitive strategies and a heightened sense of awareness ofwhat makes a place special
and gives it a competitive advantage. This kind of reaction looks strongly to the
identification of place, the building and signaling of its unique qualities in an increasingly
homogeneous but fragmented world (1990, 271). This identification ofplace is germane
to the Chinese netizens' national imagination, in which "nation" and its variants are still
the most important narrative resources for conceiving of globalized identities based on
those Harveyan "unique qualities", and closely tied to the historical, political, and
cultural meanings of the Party-state.
Cyber-literature is a venue through which the emergent national SUbject-the
netizens-negotiates its positionality within the national power structure. As the case of
Cool Evil has demonstrated, the country-memory of righteousness gives rise to the
268
netizens' mode of national sentiments which simultaneously fuels and discourages their
pursuit of emancipatory freedom in negotiation with neoliberliast state politics. The
production and consumption of cyber-literature in contemporary Chinese public shphere
is a vivid case ofneoliberalist governmentality with "Chinese characteristics", The
aesthetic representation of nationalism in Chinese cyber literature is part of a larger
process of constructing Chinese identities in the era of globalization, which depicts in
detail how "in an era of promised technological communicability between cultural
localities, the desire for separate and, in many cases, incommensurable ways of life and
identities has not faded", and how "the insistent and violent will for ethnic and cultural
difference as markers of identities persists amid visions of new world order" (Tsu 2005,
4).
Notes:
1 According to Miaomiao Xu, it took radio and TV 38years and 18 years respectively to have the
same amount of frequent users. See Miaomiao Xu (2004, 8).
2 See the twenty-second CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) official report,
available at http://www.cnnic.cn/index/OE/00/11/index.htm?87754l270=1240513137.
3 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/netizen.
4 The point could be illustrated by the titles of some individual chapters of his book, like chp.2 "Say
No to Indonesia's Anti-Chinese Riot"; chp.3 "Sino-U.S. Cyber Wars"; and chpA "Post 9/11 Transition
of Priority".
5 http://www.cnii.com.cn/20080623Ica49937l.htm. A more objective report on Qidian.com could be
find at the Alexa online-traffic ranking report at http://www.alexa.com. On Nov. 2,2008, the traffic of
Qidian.com ranks 579th globally, and 62n among all Mainland Chinese-language sites.
269
6 According to its website (http://www.snda.com). Shanda Interactive Entertainment Limited is "is a
leading interactive entertainment media company in China". It offers a portfolio of diversified
entertainment content including some of the most popular massively multi-player online role-playing
games (MMORPGs) and advanced casual online games in China, as well as online chess and board
games, e-sports game platform and a variety of cartoons, literature works and music. Its stocks are
traded at Nasdaq (NasdaqGS: SNDA).
7 The price is 0.02-0.03 yuan/ 1000 words. See http://www.qidian.comlHelp/vipshenqin.aspx.
8 http://www.cnn.com/interactive/world/0603/explainer.china.intemet/frameset.exclude.html.
9 Though asked to fill in personal information, users have the option to leave little, or even fake
information to make sure they are untraceable in the real world.
10 http://www.qidian.com/book/93l22.aspx.
11 Cool Evil forum at Qidian.com is at http://forum.qidian.com/BookForum.aspx?forumId=93l22;
Outside forums for Cool Evil could be found at Chinese portals like Baidu.com and Sina.com.
12 This will result in an awkward gesture that exhausts the body quickly.
13 http://forum.qidian.com/ThreadDetail.aspx?threadid=24380209&IsNewForum=false.
14 See Reply No. 57. "LZ" is the acronym of the pinyin (mi§-) of louzhu (~±), which usually refers
to users who initiate a discussion in an online forum or bbs. "Little Five" (xiaowu Ij'Ii) is a
nickname both of Dancing and of Chen Yang in the novel.
15 E.g., Reply No. 10,36,37,48,53, etc. The police abuse of power has been so serious an issue that
even official medias could not deny its existence.
For a recent case reported on the website of the official China Daily (Zhongguo ribao r:p 00 Bta),
see http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2008-ll/11/content7l92004.htm.
16 The grassroots people' reactions to a recent sensational case of police killing in Shanghai also
bespeaks their indignation toward the law-enforcements in China. See "Confessed Police Killer
Lionized by Thousands in China: Crime Seen as Blow Against Oppression" at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/l1/l3/AR20081 1l304384.html.
17 Reply No. 23.
18 Reply No. 87.
19 Reply No. 96.
20 The recapitulation of Rose, Brown, and Ong's ideas ofneoliberalism is from Rofel (2007, 15-8).
21 The basic strategy of "disturbing the water" is: if there are two mafia organizations A and B
Daquan wants to fight, Daquan attacks A and pretends it coming from B. When B fights back for
revenge, it goes for A and thus the real engagement between A and B is produced.
270
22 The most obvious example of traditional Chinese military intelligence that can be associated with
Chen Yang's strategy is the twentieth of the "Thirty-Six Strategies" (Sanshiliuji =:+1\ it): Catching
a Fish in Disturbed Water (hun shui mo yu ~*m{B).
23 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics ofTransnationality (Durham & London:
Duke University Press, 1999),56.
24 "AB" is the acronym of "America Born".
25 The surname of emperors of Song dynasty.
26 http://forum.qidian.com/ThreadDetail.aspx?threadid=26130444&IsNewForum=false.
27 http://forum.qidian.com/ThreadDetail.aspx?threadid=2227021O&IsNewForum=false.
28 A quick search in recent titles of The Economist and Far Eastern Economic Review will provide
sufficient information in this respect. Although there is no guarantee that this information is totally
accurate, it nevertheless bespeaks the general tendency of China's global expansion.
29 This summary of contemporary Chinese civility is from Lee (2007,307), which is based on
Anagnost (1997).
271
CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION
My dissertation delves into the recent articulation of popular nationalism in
Mainland China, with particular emphasis on the changes that globalization and
transnationalism have brought about to the representation of the Chinese nation in
sentimental terms. Complementing the rich existing literature of Chinese nationalism that
focuses mainly on the pre-1949 period, my study explores the less-trod contemporary era
characterized by the new historical condition ofpostsocialism, which features a residual
of the socialist past as well as its reinvention under new overwhelming trends of
globalization. Postsocialism and its consequences-the alienation of intellectuals from
the center ofpolitical power, the deepening of a neoliberalist economic reform, the
state-intellectual promotion of cultural economy, the emergence of a dominant consumer
culture, etc.-have produced new issues the existing scholarship on Chinese nationalism
has yet to address. One such issue is how the paradoxical entity of the "nation" in time
and space has been fragmented by the accretion of diversified voices from a wide
spectrum of Chinese society. In postsocialist China, the agents imagining the nation
272
include not only regulars like the state and intellectuals, but also new players like
mass-media elites and netizens (wangmin). I argue that these voices of different social
forces that break up the hegemony of the state in representing the nation-the result of
which being not that the state is excluded from this enterprise but that it now tells only
part of the story-become expressed as various modes of national sentiments (minzu
qinggan) when the nation is imagined under the historical condition of postsocialism. My
study then explores in detail the fashioning and refashioning of contemporary Chinese
subjectivity as it relates through the joining of national sentiments to the literal and
figurative body of the nation and the social power structure, by analyzing these specific
voices in a broad range of popular texts from TV, film, and the Internet. Under the current
structure ofmy dissertation, the detailed examination includes four chapters dealing with
specific modes of national sentiments articulated by the intellectuals, the state, the
mass-media elites, and the netizens, respectively.
As one of the most appealing political ideologies and cultural discourses to Chinese
people, nationalism persistently looms large in shaping modem Chinese subjectivity in
the last one and a half centuries. Generally more attuned to the political culture mobilized
by nationalism, political scientists emphasize its state and ideological formation as
shaped by institutions and international conflicts. Literary scholars, on the other hand,
reinvest the category of nationalism with the broader significance of cultural agency and
273
prefer to examine the "nation" as a nexus for competing narratives of culture, power, and
discourse. Within the context of contemporary China, my study is intended not to join
either group, but to bridge the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the two by
concentrating on national sentiments-the spiritual quality that is, despite a pivot of
nationalist articulation in popular culture, long overdue for academic consideration.
Departing from the common assumption that national sentiments are transhistorica1 and
transcultural inner emotions, I treat contemporary discourses of national sentiments as
articulatory practices that participate in (re)defining the social order and power structure,
and (re)producing forms of subjectivity and sociality. My study therefore demonstrates a
possibility of uniting the nation's historicity and its figuration through the key construct
of national sentiments.
My interdisciplinary approach to national sentiments brings to light some new
materials that hitherto have been overlooked in the studies of contemporary Chinese
nationalism. The leitmotif film in the 1990s demonstrates how the Communist party-state
adapts its self-fashioning style to "go pop" in grappling with the immense and threatening
impact of the Western popular culture-especially that of the Hollywood film. The
brand-new form of popular representation--eyber-1iterature in the 21 st century provides
the venue for netizens-the representatives of grassroots Chinese people with
self-appointed authority as generated from their active negotiations with the politics of
274
the neoliberalist state in cyber space-to articulate their version of imagining the nation.
My devotion to the production and consumption of popular nationalist (media-)texts also
entails critical reassessment of some widely-studied materials like the 1988 Chinese
documentary River Elegy within a new discursive scheme of intellectuality in relation to
popular nationalism in postsocialist China. The central notion-national
sentiments-threads together all the individual chapters of this dissertation. I treat
contemporary discourses of national sentiments as articulatory practices that participate
in (re)defining the social order and power structure, and (re)producing forms of
subjectivity and sociality. Therefore I look into not only the meanings of these popular
media texts per se, but also their production, consumption and circulation within the
specific context of Chinese postsocialism and global capitalism.
As a result ofmy dissertation, I hope to make a significant contribution to the
understanding of the ambiguous possibilities produced by the integration of China into
the global capitalist system and the merging of the realms of the state and the market, as
well as their implications to the postsocialist articulation of issues like race, class, and
gender in the name of national sentiments. Addressing the fundamental issue of how
people, as historically situated subjects, articulate their attachment for the imagined
construct ofthe nation with full awareness of the persistent divide between a humanistic
and social-scientific approach to modernity, I hope to furnish a productive way to
275
theorize the linkages between modern subjectivity and modern political institutions,
particularly the nation-state. It is in this sense that my dissertation provides an
unconventional, popular-culture-oriented study of the intriguing yet complicated theme of
Chinese modernity.
276
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