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.

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.

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

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.

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

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!

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)

“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!

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

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