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The bold text below is an excerpt from the field notes taken by the anthropologist Ann Anagnost in July of 1991.

The railway compartment contained two women. One was middle-aged, dressed in a white polyester pantsuit. Her sunglasses made it difficult to read her face. She seemed almost asleep at times; at others, she stared out of the window with a sour expression that seemed to register extreme distaste bordering on despair. This was her first trip to the mainland after her flight to Taiwan as a young girl. The other woman was in her twenties, returning home from Shanghai after escorting a friend on her way to study in Japan. The older woman explained she was visiting relatives left behind so many years before. “My uncle told me Shanghai was a beautiful city.” Her tone clearly registered disbelief. Indeed, the bund and other famous sistes of the pre-revolutionary colonial city looked shabby and worn. Eventually the filth of the train and the surly unwillingness of the train personnel brought forth the agonized question, “What is wrong with the Chinese people, why can’t we do anything right?” The younger woman calmly replied, “The quality of the people is too low, and the reason that the quality of the people is too low is because there are too many people.”

 This text essentially gives away the crux of my project, so I mean you don’t really have to come to class on Wednesday… JUST KIDDING. kind of.

 

Anagnost, Ann. National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation and Power in Modern China. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1997.

Subalterns of the world

So I had one of those universal truth questions come up as I was writing my paper on Blind Shaft this afternoon, ever get those? Here it is, the story of the subaltern is highly prevalent in China because of the dramatic turnover from a command economy to free market, yet is the subaltern an inevitable reality in any capitalist economy? Unfortunately, after pondering, I’ve realized that this subaltern category of individuals who get lost in the competition and become nothing but nameless numbers is a tragic side effect of any free market economy.

This is a rather unsettling realization for a fan of capitalism like myself, but even this reality does not condemn capitalism to the trash bin. The fact is that even when they attempt to or want to, the state can never sufficiently care and support everyone in their nation. Stalin realize this when in the 1920s he proclaimed joyfully that communism would result in the disintegration of the family, yet by the 1950s he realize the family was the only structure that could sufficiently provide the social network he had expected communism to produce and so instituted a massive propaganda campaign promoting the family unit (check me on my dates here Colin). In Blind Shaft Song and Teng are driven solely by the need to support themselves and their families, though eventually this is compromised by Song’s compassion for Feng Ming…but thats a theme for another blog post.

Subaltern sagas

This may be a total oversimplification of the entire reform movement in China but what really struck me in Dutton’s book is that these market reforms cannot by nature be limited to the market. Because the market so clearly effects social structure, it really is impossible to have a capitalist market that is somehow isolated from affecting the social realm that the Communist party seeks to maintain a hold of. The work units are an example of the Party’s simultaneous control of market and social structure, intrinsically linked together, and the market economy is infringing on the hold work units have over both realms.

We gotta get out while we’re young

So I had way too much fun working on the music analysis for Friday, gave me a great excuse to go through song by song my extensive Springsteen collection, even though I ended up just copping out and picking one of his most well known anthems!

The idea of analyzing music as a historical source is exciting; as we talked about in class no element of a song is there by accident- the artist had a precise vision and message he wanted to convey. However, because music is an art form it is meant to appeal to our emotions and therefore transcend that particular situation. Its fascinating when you think about it, we often love music that really has no literal connection to our lives, yet we infuse our own meaning into it. I think that transcendent quality is important to analyze too when considering the reception of a particular song; why was it popular, because of what the artist wrote and intended or because of the experiences of a particular audience that shaped their perception of the song.

Anyway, fun stuff. I wish we could have spent more time on it. I mean we didn’t even get to Dwayne’s song

Tiananmen Square

I was absolutely fascinated by the narrative on Tiananmen Square we watched in the documentary today.  Previously I roughly understood Tiananmen as a brutal crackdown on liberal protest in China in the late 1980s, but I really knew nothing of it’s extent as a social movement. It’s mobilization within a period of only about 3-4 weeks is amazing, definitely indicative of a longterm growth of discontent.

A little line that really struck me was from a song by the rock artist Cui Jian, “the day you tied my eyes with red cloth and covered up the sky”… it reminded me of the imagery (and possibly ideas?) we were just talking about in Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum.

Bizzare

A WashPost headline this week caught my eye ” In China, Stern Treatment for Young Internet ‘Addicts.’” It describes the phenomenon of government funded/military run rehab centers for internet addiction, apparently prevalent among the youth. Reportedly 14% of Chinese youth are “vulnerable to becoming addicted to the internet.” Apparently the patients are often brought by their parents who are willing to pay large amounts for the intensive treatment, which sometimes includes hypnosis or shock treatments. What threw me off about this was when one of the patients told the reporter that he used to spend 5 hours per week on the internet, and that his parents wanted them to quit cold turkey so he could focus on his studies!

There were certainly many other cases described that were much more serious, instances of depression and real addiction. However that one case in particular made me wonder about the “singleton” atmosphere of family life in China, and how that would drastically impact parental involvement and familial expectatations.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/21/AR2007022102094_2.html

So many questions

My goal in this projects is to examine how a law is transformed from a rule into a belief, in particular in the case of China’s One-Child policy. Along the way I have lots of questions about how far this belief can go, how long the principle will be accepted. I’m not really sure if I’ll be able to pursue them as this paper isn’t about philosophy, but thought I’d through them out there.

The policy is essentially sold by the idea that the State can excercise control over individuals for the betterment of the whole group. Thus by individual families having fewer children, there will be greater wealth for the whole population to benefit from.

However, in the instance of Chen Guangcheng’s case, weren’t the officials were just trying to keep the birthrate at the quota-for the benefit of all? It was the same principle; government control over individual’s lives for the sake of group benefit. Yet the people rejected. Forced abortions and sterilizations were too far for them.

So ultimately it mattered whether the control was exercised by force or achieved voluntarily.  So, how did the Chinese government get the people to “voluntarily” accept this policy?

One answer is by the creation of a “cultural model of modernization.”

And now I have to find out what that means!

Making up for lost time

When I began this research I ignorantly didn’t connect the role of Western values on China’s one-child policy; I thought of it as some weird internal issue special to China. However as I mentioned in my oral introduction last week, Vanessa Fong highlights the “cultural model of modernization” as a strong Western influence on the Chinese policy. As all modern industrialized nations have a low, stablized birth rate, China sought to achieve the modernization they strived for by artificially cutting their birth rate.

Western influence continues to reinforce China’s policy, because Chinese citizens in the global world compare their lives to the Western/American lifestyles they see on the TV and internet. And they equate the wealth they see there with low birth rates and smaller families.

Vanessa Fong, “Only Hope: Coming of Age Under China’s One-Child Policy” (2004)

Image anaylsis

“Educated youth must go to the countryside to recieve re-education from the poor and Lower-Middle peasants!” (1969)

http://www.iisg.nl/~landsberger/xf.html

I picked this image because it is direcetly from the Cultural Revolution, and part of the “Up to the Mountains, Down to the Villages” campaign, that seems to me a program that would really have to be sold well via propaganda, because I don’t think the concept would sell on it’s own. The whole idea of it seems just so unnatural and prone to tension and resentment that I would think they would need as many pictures of smiling peasants and students as possible!

Pretty posters as propoganda

Found these at a website on use of propoganda posters in culture (just from google)

www.iisg.nl/~landsberger/pop.html