Organizer: James Farrer, Sophia University, Japan Discussant: Andrew Field, Duke University, China Chinese capitalism has produced a proliferation of spaces of cultural productivity, rearranging activities of leisure and consumption and creating new scenarios for narratives of urban life. The new genres of urban space discussed in this panel are inhabited by new types of characters, such as the fashionable “white collar” women in Huang’s paper, who are likely to become customers in global culinary zones described by Farrer, or perhaps patrons of the Beijing’s galleries described by Ren and Meng. But elderly people and working-class adults are also producing their own zones of free leisure, as described by Chew and Zeng. All these new spatial imaginaries and new urban geographies of cultural production are sites of intense state control and political contestation. The foci of cultural politics range from the labor practices of restaurants, to the state regulation of parks, to the bureaucratic politics of surveillance of art districts in Beijing. Although spaces of cultural production can be celebrated as sites of sub-cultural creativity and alternative community formation, they are simultaneously “contact zones” in which diverse social actors cooperate and compete for control The production of urban space thus involves a very uneven field of cultural politics, pitting individual cultural actors against the state. The papers in this panel investigate these cultural and political processes of producing new urban spaces in China using the methods of ethnography and cultural analysis.
This panel is part of the Changing China multi-session series sponsored by the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs.
The emergence of Falun Gong has alerted the Chinese state to the possible dangers of letting citizens—especially retired and elderly citizens with a large amount of free time—engage in politically destabilizing leisure activities. This study investigates the mechanisms through which the Chinese state attempts to discipline the leisure activities of the urban elderly through encouraging them to participate in specific forms of non-commercial nightlife. The state in the 2000s has developed sophisticated and powerful ways to induce the elderly to self-organize collective nightlife activities in urban public spaces. Firstly, we will trace how the state deliberately strengthens bureaucratic engagement in the daily lives of the elderly through establishing new formal institutions. Secondly, we will explore the inconspicuous and informal disciplinary strategies through which these institutions are helping to control elderly people's night-time leisure activities. Thirdly, we will investigate how Chinese civil society’s legacy of socialist collective activities (which pervaded the “work unit” system from 1949 to the early 1990s) has colluded with state power in disciplining nightlife for seniors.
The emergence of Falun Gong has alerted the Chinese state to the possible dangers of letting citizens—especially retired and elderly citizens with a large amount of free time—engage in politically destabilizing leisure activities. This study investigates the mechanisms through which the Chinese state attempts to discipline the leisure activities of the urban elderly through encouraging them to participate in specific forms of non-commercial nightlife. The state in the 2000s has developed sophisticated and powerful ways to induce the elderly to self-organize collective nightlife activities in urban public spaces. Firstly, we will trace how the state deliberately strengthens bureaucratic engagement in the daily lives of the elderly through establishing new formal institutions. Secondly, we will explore the inconspicuous and informal disciplinary strategies through which these institutions are helping to control elderly people's night-time leisure activities. Thirdly, we will investigate how Chinese civil society’s legacy of socialist collective activities (which pervaded the “work unit” system from 1949 to the early 1990s) has colluded with state power in disciplining nightlife for seniors.
The imagining of a rising female middle class in contemporary China hinges on an intense desire to reclaim urban spaces in various forms such as succeeding in the public workplace, acquiring homeownership and managing interior space (decoration or renovation). The laboring female subject in China continues to develop its speculative connection with global capitalism through such spatial imaginaries and their associated narratives. This paper focuses on a representative narrative of female success, the so-called Du Lala story, which originated from from Li Ke’s A Story of Lala’s Promotion, published in 2007. An ordinary young lady with an office job serves as the story’s protagonist; the story itself is a Bildungsroman of survival in a multinational company. Targeting the increasing number of Chinese white-collar female readers, the novel quickly reached bestseller status in China, and the subsequent eponymous movie and TV drama, along with plays and other novels in the same vein, created a Du Lala phenomenon. Worthy of exploration in this popular narrative is the logic of gender and space in the self-narrative of contemporary China’s middle class, providing the “post-70” and “post-80” generation of urban females a vocabulary for expressing their new identity of female autonomy and fluid class mobility. Meanwhile, I seek to explain that these cultural productions, (novels, films, TV dramas and plays) serve as examples of how urban females explore ways of managing materials and objects that come in abundance in contemporary urban spaces.
The local geographies of global cities are heterogeneous consumer spaces marked by a complex transnational system of culinary and ethnic classifications. Restaurants are also cultural “contact zones” in which producers, consumers, food workers and food critics from around the world interact in concrete spaces characterized by differences in power, language, tastes and professional perspectives. New culinary cultures emerge from these compact contact zones. The focus of this project is on the international restaurant scene that has been developing over the past two decades in Shanghai, a “rising global food city.” This research is based on historic case studies of Shanghai’s foreign restaurants and interviews with key actors, including owners, managers, chefs, servers, food writers and customers; and an analysis of English and Japanese language magazines aimed at Shanghai’s expatriate population as well as the Chinese publications aimed at the emerging Chinese upper classes. In general, the findings support the idea that global high cuisine is more of a transnational than a “glocalizing” phenomenon, in which transnational customers, producers and forms of transnational culinary cultural capital are socially and culturally dominant. Local tastes play a role, but are also radically reshaped through exposure to this transnational classificatory system of high/low and ethnic cuisines. At the same time, the transnational flows of cuisine have transformed the social geography of eating out in Shanghai, and even the marketing and consumption of Chinese cuisine.
This paper examines the geography of and the role of the state in contemporary cultural production in China. The central issue facing the development of cultural industries in China is the conflicting role of the state as it tries to privatize and capitalize on creative industries while maintaining its control over cultural production. Based on fieldwork in Beijing, we examine the new forms of state control reconstituted through the everyday surveillance in various art districts at the city’s periphery. The local state has extended its creative control over cultural production by using interlocking directorates—a practice of appointing the same government officials to serve across the executive boards of multiple key organizations in art districts. In the context of the international art market boom, China’s real estate fever, and political decentralization, the “districtification” of former artist villages with interlocking directorates has led to an “artistic urbanization,” a process in which rural villages at the periphery of Beijing quickly urbanize in the midst of art-led development endorsed and monitored by the local state.
This paper examines the geography of and the role of the state in contemporary cultural production in China. The central issue facing the development of cultural industries in China is the conflicting role of the state as it tries to privatize and capitalize on creative industries while maintaining its control over cultural production. Based on fieldwork in Beijing, we examine the new forms of state control reconstituted through the everyday surveillance in various art districts at the city’s periphery. The local state has extended its creative control over cultural production by using interlocking directorates—a practice of appointing the same government officials to serve across the executive boards of multiple key organizations in art districts. In the context of the international art market boom, China’s real estate fever, and political decentralization, the “districtification” of former artist villages with interlocking directorates has led to an “artistic urbanization,” a process in which rural villages at the periphery of Beijing quickly urbanize in the midst of art-led development endorsed and monitored by the local state.
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