Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (17 page)

Instead of class-based mass mobilization campaigns reminiscent of the Mao era, we see campaigns that are exemplary of liberal techniques of governance, such as the exhortations to build “a harmonious society.”
18
The personal narrative lies at the heart of what Nikolas Rose (1996) has called enterprise culture. These narratives are fundamentally different from the “speaking bitterness” (
suku
) narratives used to raise class awareness of exploitation during the Maoist era. The development of the self lies at the heart of opportunities made possible by the economic liberalization policies. The structure of personal narrative tells of the individual’s responsibility to overcome poverty, and this narrative allows each individual to insert his or her own glorious ending or moral failing (see Yan,
Chapter Six
in this volume). The narrative structure is a political technology at the level of the personal. These stories structure the boundaries of the public imaginary and motivate individuals to serve the nation while simultaneously achieving personal wealth (Kohrman 2003).

We can easily identify the spaces for celebration of the economic miracle, but how does the current social order make a space for the expression of pain, suffering, and dying? Is there a way to speak about suffering that is divorced from the state script of moral failing? Modernity has meant the adoption of a logic that embraces technology and a rationality of enterprise that makes life a continuous project (Farquhar and Zhang 2005). The extension of this logic is evident in macrolevel development policies and is also experienced individually in the atomistic realm of the everyday. While reminiscent of speaking bitterness in their evocation of pathos, the social scripts today follow a different trajectory for the Chinese nation but still employ the spectacularization of the suffering body. The encouragement to speak of past bitterness was a means to remember a past that was prior to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, and these testimonials were used to legitimate the power of the ruling party state (see Anagnost 1997). Speaking bitterness narratives in the postreform era invokes another (socialist) past to embrace how good life is
now
under market reform.

However,
the market reforms have also produced new kinds of inequality. With the privatization of health care, medical attention requires money. The parents on the street were willing to use any means possible to raise money for their son’s treatment. What was not being communicated in the performance of their story was their acceptance of their son’s imminent death. To communicate that would be futile because the ending to their story is already obvious to passersby. Anyone living in China today is aware of the uneven conditions of the health care system and the stark reality of illness and poverty. Although the parents may well understand fully the futility of their situation, their stubborn determination to show their son something of the world before he passes away suggests a yearning on their part to give him a meaningful life. The Chinese herbal medicine they gave him was not merely to alleviate his suffering but also to alleviate the emotional pain caused by their inability to provide him with the care he needed. It was an anodyne for their failure. The underlying pathos to this story is that hope and aspiration are believed to be located only in the city, while the countryside has been drained of all that makes a life worth living in China. This sentiment was echoed in Chengcheng’s appeal to bring the village a road that will serve as a link to the city and thus to prosperity.

Chengcheng’s melodrama moves audiences with emotional appeals to participate in a charitable campaign that they know in the end to be an exceptional response to a specific case rather than a systematic resolution to a structural inequality. Melodrama may well be “the principal mode for uncovering, demonstrating, and making operative the essential moral universe in a post-sacred era” (Brooks 1976: 15), but the use of melodrama in this case focuses so intently on the individual, private, and banal that we begin to lose sight of “the political” and “the moral.” This orientation does several things to the experience of the everyday. It evacuates it of any sense of history and thus diminishes the importance of the everyday as a site for political signification. The lack of historicity to this everyday story enables it to be portrayed as a tragedy on a singular scale rather than a public illustration of slow death for rural families. This type of individualized medical emergency requires a systemic response that is qualitatively different than the exceptional moments of humanitarian crisis or catastrophe when medical aid and rescue arrive into an underserved region, as happened with the devastating earthquakes in Sichuan in May 2008 and again in the primarily Tibetan area of Qinghai in April 2010. The Chinese government in times of natural
disasters
can exercise its sovereignty in a grand spectacle by prohibiting international aid agencies from entering the afflicted region.
19
However, emergency aid is not a substitute for systemic change. The ability of the Chinese government to mobilize resources in instances of highly visible “emergency” thus highlights a failure of political will in meeting the everyday medical needs of those who do not have the means of purchasing access.

Encountering Anthropology

The case of the family on the street offers an occasion to contemplate what anthropologist Kathleen Stewart calls “ordinary affects”—that is, “public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they’re also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of” (2007: 2). In other words, these are the intensities and banalities of fleeting encounters, fragmented moments, little pleasures, partial exchanges, glimpsed events, sad episodes, and funny or unnerving scenes that constitute everyday experience. For Stewart, “ordinary affects” are dense with possibility, potential, and insights into social existence. I saw this family only once, yet their situation serves to illuminate serious questions about the direction of development in China and the human costs of a neoliberal vision of society. Why is this story not considered newsworthy enough?

Václav Havel recounts a story about his friend with asthma who was having difficulty breathing because he was imprisoned with smokers: “Newspapers need a story. Asthma is not a story. Death could make it one . . . we are unworthy of attention because we have no stories, and no death. We have only asthma. And why should anyone be interested in listening to our cough?”
20
For Havel, the story and its open-ended potential have been obliterated under totalitarianism because history is overcome by ideology. Humans experience life through stories, but under totalitarianism there is no longer potential for stories because history has already been determined by one source of truth and power. In Havel’s story, the asthmatic friend is a metonym for Czechoslovakia. The attention and interest the Czech nation fails to receive from the world community is due to the fact that it is not a place of warfare and senseless murder—the stuff that is newsworthy. The killing here happens more systematically and slowly through a daily dulling of the senses and the human will. I cannot help but see resonances to the father’s idea to
commit
a spectacular suicide to attract attention to his son slowly dying on the street.

Of course, China is not the Czechoslovakia described by Havel prior to the end of the Cold War. Beyond the obvious dissimilarities, the Chinese state has ushered in economic plurality with the introduction of markets. For Havel, the suppression of economic activity under a totalitarian system led to an environment in which citizens “can no longer participate with relative autonomy in economic life, man loses some of his social and human individuality, and part of his hope of creating his own human story” (1992: 342). On the contrary, in China stories abound of entrepreneurial citizens getting wealthy and creating their “own human story.” This family, too, is free to come to the city to seek assistance and collect money. Nonetheless, these stories retain a similar moral structure precisely because what is acknowledged is not a “plurality of truths, of logics, of agents of decisions, and of manners of behavior” (Havel 1992: 332) inherent in the story but a central logic of behavior that is continually prescribed and reenacted in each variation of the same story. Is life in China now any more open ended than it was in Czechoslovakia, or are subjects bound in fact by the very promise of freedom to take responsibility for themselves? Freedom in itself may in fact be no less a mode of subjection inherent to a neoliberal ethos (Read 2009).

If this story is not worthy of media attention, it is worthy of anthropological attention in its potential to capture social phenomena in all their complexity. Kathleen Stewart argues that everyday ephemera illuminate the potential for an alternative politics. The family on the street is making a life in a complex social and symbolic field. In that sense, this story is relevant and representative of the various tactics people employ to get by each day. But even more important, it offers the possibility of seeing how more abstract processes become registered in the experience of everyday life. The fact that I came on this family and not another is inconsequential. The ephemerality of the encounter is exactly what gives stories such as this their open-ended potential. This is my attempt to write a ghost story and “strive to understand the conditions under which a memory was produced in the first place, toward a countermemory, for the future” (Gordon 1997: 22).

In the shift from the Maoist to the post-Maoist era, health care facilities have advanced and expanded primarily in the cities, but access and affordability remains problematic for impoverished families. In response to the growing rural and urban divide, this family is being resourceful in their
strategies
to seek medical assistance. Their performance on the street is a negotiation of the market sensibilities that now permeate everyday life. In their calculation, their chances on the streets of Beijing are better than they would be if they remained in the countryside where the odds are even more dismal. The promise of basic universal coverage sometime in the future is a hopeful sign, but the reforms may still not fully serve to rectify the growing social disparities. By appealing to public compassion, these families and individuals on the street are acknowledging the shift from government responsibility for social welfare to citizen responsibility and responding to that transformation with their own enterprising practices.

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Blakemore Freeman Foundation Fellowship provided advanced language training from 2004 to 2005, and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship and University of Washington Jackson School Chester Fritz China Studies Fellowship provided dissertation research support from 2005 through 2007. A Simpson Center Society of Scholars Fellowship at the University of Washington provided writing support. Chris Brown, Jennifer Leehey, and Leila Sievanen read earlier versions of this chapter and offered valuable comments. Ann Anagnost, Steve Harrell, Lorna Rhodes, and Janelle Taylor also provided constructive feedback. I thank the anonymous reviewers for Stanford University Press for their suggestions on revisions and Ann Anagnost for her editorial encouragement.

1
. Li Zhang (2001, 2002) has written about rural migrants and the politics of space in urban China. Elsewhere, I examine another group of migrants to Beijing, petitioners at the Ministry of Health, seeking adjudication for medical malpractice cases (Ta 2011).

2
. With the dismantling of the Rural Cooperative Medical System in the 1980s, the cost of medical care shifted to individual families. In late 2002, the central government introduced the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme, but participation was voluntary, and each enrolled rural resident was asked to pay 10 to 20 yuan (approximately US$1.50 to US$3.00) annually with matching funds coming from central and local government. The high deductibles, miniscule matching
funds
from the government, and voluntary basis of the programs failed to provide adequate coverage. Commercial health insurance became the only available coverage with the collapse of the cooperatives. The government neglect of health care created increasing anxiety as risks to health were growing due to environmental degradation, the deteriorating relationships between patients and doctors, skyrocketing medical costs, and the commercialization of the health care industry, resulting in disparities in rural and urban medical infrastructure. In April 2009, the Chinese government unveiled plans to overhaul the health care system. Details of the plan to offer universal coverage and restructure the medical system can be found at
http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90782/90880/6634394.html
(“New Healthcare Reform Plan” 2009). The first phase (2009 through 2011) allocates funds to expand medical insurance coverage to 90 percent of the population; build more village-, township-, and county-level health stations, clinics, and hospitals; lower the cost of commonly used medicines; increase the number of trained health practitioners; and implement a pilot program to reform public hospitals. The reform of the health care system aims to provide basic universal health care coverage for all citizens by 2020. Additional reforms include the regulation of pharmaceutical companies, increased monitoring of medical institutions, the
implementation
of an essential drug-pricing scheme, and the expansion of public health services to improve preventive care.

3
. Prior to the Olympics, national and local television stations aired human interest stories showing Chinese citizens learning English, redecorating their homes with Olympic memorabilia, and making their neighborhoods more welcoming for international visitors. I was living in Beijing during the period of intense construction to widen roads and build the now iconic structures in the National Olympic Park. The ideograph
chai
(“tear down” or “demolish”) was painted on structures lining the streets surrounding the Park. Government efforts ranged from the temporary shutdown of polluting factories to seeding the sky to ensure rainfall to cleanse the air pollution, building new public transportation routes, and even editing Chinese menus translated into English. The reengineering of Beijing included the construction of elaborate shopping malls to attract upwardly mobile Chinese middle-class consumers. Michael Dutton argues, “In this new economy of the eye, the first task is destruction. Shopping centres are transformed from factory-style distribution points into enchanting, seductive feasts for the eye and the wallet. In the process, everything is made ‘for sale’
” (1998: 223). For Dutton, the changing landscape is a reflection of the changing social mentalities of the market economy. The market sensibilities that he traces on Chinese streets illustrate how neoliberal governance technologies work in a Chinese state of surveillance to patrol the movement and livelihood of citizens.