Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (4 page)

In neoliberal globalization, enterprising selves are not just buying and selling commodities in a marketplace, they are also put into a more direct relationship with the commodity value of their labor power within a global market. However, this value can vanish overnight as once-reliable jobs migrate elsewhere, or, as in the case of China, the ready availability of migrant populations of rural workers becomes the means of displacing state sector workers. Workers are abundantly clear as to where their jobs have migrated. What is less clear is how to find a new pathway to the future. The worker who must continually add to the list of his or her assets through perpetual retraining to remain employed becomes the new norm as global capital ensures its profits. Indeed, neoliberal conceptions of human capital are useful for economic logics premised on the increasing precariousness of labor (Gordon 1991). But this vision of never-ending self-development would seem to capitalize on the energies and resilience of youth, while refusing to acknowledge
the gradual erosion of life and spirit by the stresses of constantly having to remake oneself. Workers become terrorized by the specter of redundancy when their labor power will no longer be of any “use to society.” Over the course of a lifetime, it becomes harder to maintain a forward-moving life-building project when one’s embodied value is constantly being negated. The body is, therefore, not just an “accumulation strategy” (Harvey 2000) in neoliberal economies, but it is also that which absorbs the contradictions of global capitalism through a mounting debt of stress, a slow attrition of life that Lauren Berlant (2007) refers to as “slow death.” But it also offers the possibility for projects of self-appreciation outside the circuit of commodity value (Feher 2009).

Making New Spaces, Making New People

All of the chapters in this volume focus on new kinds of spaces, institutional structures, pedagogies, discourses, and practices engineered to produce new kinds of people. In
Chapter One
, Hai Ren explores the emergence of the new middle class, which has acquired the status of being an anticipatory sign of China’s emergence as a leading economic power. However, this project is haunted by the specter of social inequality, which has become weightier as the chasm between the haves and have-nots of China’s new economy continues to widen. Ren explores the concrete social space of Beijing’s ethnic theme park as both a technology and a theater of middle-class self-making by detailing the visitors’ complex negotiations of the park as an engineered space designed to produce certain effects. He examines the complexity of these negotiations on witnessing the theft of an umbrella from a souvenir stand under the cover of middle-class respectability as an example of the risk taking that underlies many a middle-class economic success story.

Hence, Ren proposes the “risk subject” as an analytical fulcrum to open up the question of the root causes of inequality in China today that underlie the new models of success in an entrepreneurial culture. In this respect, the risk subject is one who is able to calculate the costs and benefits of breaking the rules rather than abiding them. The subject who is willing to embrace risk as opportunity can be counterposed to another kind of risk subject, the so-called weaker groups (
ruoshi qunti
) who are rendered vulnerable by these
very
same transformations. Their structural disadvantage—as rural, impoverished, uneducated—is transformed into a problem of subjective lack of awareness of how to take advantage of the opportunities offered them.

In
Chapter Two
, Ching-wen Hsu offers another example of producing new kinds of people by producing new kinds of spaces in the project to update the New Kujiang shopping area in Taiwan’s southern port city of Kaohsiung. This project exemplifies the problem of postindustrial development: How does one transform a prior history as a place of production into a storied place of consumption? New Kujiang participates in the imagineering of Taiwan’s passage to a postindustrial economy through developing the power of the attractions of place. In the case of Taiwan, the off-shoring of industrial jobs has necessitated a revisioning of what development can mean. Taiwan, as one of the East Asian Tigers, was a poster child of state-led developmentalism. However, development, which was once conceived of as the ultimate goal of modernizing states, turns out to be something that, once achieved, is not forever. In the global competition for capital investment, redevelopment becomes not only a reengineering of the built environment but also of the kind of person to inhabit these new spaces, that is, a highly educated, high-earning, consumer citizen. Moreover, this new kind of person is one who is self-enterprising and able to recognize the new, more flexible terms of the labor contract as opportunity rather than risk. The hip-hop artist encountered by Hsu in New Kujiang sees in dance an alternative career track similar to those devised by the youth identified as
freeter
in postrecessionary Japan who seek careers in the creative professions in reaction against the soul-deadening ethos of the salaryman. His dream of expanding his hip-hop empire into China can be put into the context of how a late starter such as Taiwan can see itself as more progressive than the mainland in terms of pop-cultural temporalities of the latest thing. The production of culture is where the future of accumulation lies for an economy hollowed out by the flight of industrial jobs to the very place where he plans to build his empire. At the same time, in Hsu’s account of the efforts of New Kujiang planners to create a dreamscape that evokes other places (for example, the streets of Austria) to attract Chinese tourism as a strategy of accumulation, we see a triangulation of where precisely these subjects locate Taiwan in a global mapping of the hierarchy of places worth going to. As Hsu concludes, for these planners and consumers there is a “double distancing.” Both the mainland of China and the streets of Austria are brought into the visual field of New Kujiang as a
way
of situating it within a global frame. The world is both near and far at the same time.

In
Chapter Three
, Trang X. Ta looks at urban space from the perspective of the weaker groups in Chinese society. In the heart of Beijing’s own “Silicon Valley,” where high rises gleam, the parents of a terminally ill child come from the countryside to engage unsuccessfully in the production of affects that will move people to donate money. However, in following the script of what makes a story moving, the family risks becoming misrecognized as merely a facsimile of tragedy rather than the real thing, enabling passersby to dismiss the disquiet that the family enacts on the street. This disquiet is the knowledge that China’s economic miracle is not bought without incalculable cost in the growing chasm between the country and the city. The fact that these desperate parents have no access to adequate health care for their son is a story that is utterly banal, but it is this very banality that is the most shocking thing of all. The failure to recognize what is truly shocking in their condition is what the author wants us to recognize. If this is a form of affective labor enacted by subjects disadvantaged from the biopolitical effects of the economic reforms, it is a failure in its inability to produce the desired affects in others. However, the ethnographer wishes to reanimate the potential of the disquiet implicit in the practice of these parents to move her readers to critical reflection. This suggests the possibility of scholarship itself as a form of affective labor from below that works at cross-purposes to logics of capital accumulation.

Affective Economies

Many of the chapters in this volume focus on the production of affects in the formation of new kinds of embodied labor and citizen subjects. Whereas
emotion
refers to a mental state,
affect
expresses “a certain state of the body along with a certain mode of thinking” (Hardt and Negri 2004: 108). Hence, affective labor works to produce certain kinds of affect (that is, “service with a smile”), in which a focus on social skills becomes predominant.
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In this respect, these chapters develop ethnographically the ways in which forms of affective production have been incorporated into the global capitalist economy as one of the “highest value-producing forms of labor” (Hardt 1999).
The
concept of “affective economies” provides a frame for tracking transformations of value that take place in the realm of affective production. Most of the chapters in this section of the volume focus on education and training in the formation of new labor subjectivities: “A worker with a good attitude and social skills is another way of saying a worker adept at affective labor” (Hardt and Negri 2004: 108). The workers trained to do affective labor are themselves the product of another form of affective labor, called training, that is intended to produce an alignment between their emotional experience and the real material conditions of their labor.

In
Chapter Four
, Nancy Abelmann, Sojin Park, and Hyunhee Kim explore the production of affects in the context of higher education. A young college woman, whom the authors name Heejin, plots her course on a global stage through the deployment of the “brand capital” of the elite university she attends in Seoul. Her vision of the vital life, as one that is “not just comfortably enjoyed but more actively lived,” is an endless striving for competitive advantage that excludes the possibility of any point of rest or pursuit of contemplative realms of value other than the market-driven ones of the global economy.
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For her, the world appears open ended, and her university degree promises to be a global passport to the future. She views the failure of others to set such goals and actively pursue them as a mark of their personal insufficiency—a lacking of spirit, discipline, and will—rather than ascribing them to more structural constraints such as class, gender, and nationality. And yet, some of the other students interviewed by the authors suggest that Heejin’s subjectivity is not universal. Others of her generation question the value of this perpetual striving, opting instead for other realms of value, leading not necessarily to economic rewards but to personal fulfillment and happiness.

Both Nickola Pazderic (
Chapter Five
) and Yan Hairong (
Chapter Six
) offer us a sense of how happiness, in the form of a smile, is made into an imperative for those wishing to be recognized as employable labor value, but at quite different levels and locations of the labor hierarchy. Pazderic’s essay begins with a description of “Smile Chaoyang,” a university campaign to exhort students to embody a new formation of human capital defined as a form of affective discipline. His discussion can be put into the context of transformations to the political shifts in Taiwan as it moved from state-led developmentalism to democratization and the changing role of education in relation to these shifts. Pazderic explores how Taiwan’s unique positioning
in
the world system of nation-states as a U.S. client-state and poster child for developmental statism has both contributed to its miraculous economic rise and set its limits. He examines the impact of the global economy on the institutional context in which he teaches, a third-tier university specialized in training students for service sector jobs in a moment of uncertainty about the national economic future. Educational credentials now enter into a global circuit of value, institutions of higher learning become increasingly entrepreneurial to compete in a global market for tuition dollars, and faculty are under increasing pressure to publish their work in journals of international standing in a global standardization of academic credentialing. In other words, we see the restructuring of education in relation to the entrepreneurial state—Taiwan, Inc.—and its project to produce a “second miracle” to ensure Taiwan’s transcendence in the new global order. Education has become a profitable investment sector. It has become the primary service provider in the production of the new knowledge economy. The graduates of Chaoyang are encouraged to be the very embodiment of flexible labor, conditioned to accept whatever changed life chances the global economy might bring—with a smile. The objective of training in Chaoyang’s programs is to produce a labor force that is above average on the global scale of things. The smile effectively becomes a school brand. The student acquires the imprimatur of the school’s affective disciplines as a professionalized service worker.

We see how the smile similarly figures into an economy of affects in Yan Hairong’s study of a Beijing school for training rural women as domestic workers. If the Chinese state promotes migration to the city in search of wage labor as a form of “social university” (Yan 2008), we see in this case how this idea has become literalized in the founding of a school where migrant women learn to objectify their own labor as a commodity in a process of self-objectification and alienation. They are taught that they are service providers, not servants, and that their employers are their clients, not their masters. This is an education of affects: The worker becomes an eager seller of his or her own labor power. Moreover, the conflict that will occur in the labor process when the interests of master and servant inevitably collide will be successfully negotiated through the smile as the sign of sovereign self-possession and the stamp of professionalism as an asset in human capital formation. The object of the institute is not so much to teach the technical skills of domestic labor as it is to prepare the worker for the workplace at the level of her subjective transformation.

Yan
explores the military imagery that she discovers in descriptions of the market given in class as a battleground, sorting out winners and losers. To put this in a regional perspective, the image of the battleground, along with survival games, is a common trope in Japan as well. The
manga
-turned-film
Battle Royale
discussed by Andrea Arai, in which schoolchildren are compelled to compete in a life-and-death struggle until a sole survivor remains (with a smile on her face), is a particularly vivid example of this. It adumbrates in a particularly ominous way what Teacher Yin, in Yan’s account, meant by consequences—the loss of one’s value as labor results in a symbolic death. In both these accounts, we see a subtle transposition of the battleground of the marketplace into a battleground within, one that lies internal to the self in the struggle for self-transformation. At the same time, these military metaphors resonate with the resurgence of hypernationalism in which the nation is seen as engaged in a Darwinian struggle for survival.