Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (9 page)

One of the major ways through which an ordinary Chinese individual becomes subject to the regulation of the middle-class norm is consumption. Not only does consumption constitute an important domain of everyday life that is inseparable from the economy, but it also underscores the individual’s capacity of living with dignity. Issues of “choice,” “style,” and “taste” mark consumption not simply as a buying process but as a complicated sequence of activities, including but not limited to experiencing, learning, choosing, experimenting, creating, transgressing, accepting, and performing (de Certeau 1984; de Certeau, Giard, and Mayol 1998). Thus, the capacity of addressing these issues is closely tied to the empowerment or disempowerment of subjective agency in the practice of everyday life in an enterprise culture that pins great significance to consumer goods as badges of class position. It is important to note that consumption’s self-transformative role cannot be overvalued. Neither can the agency of “freedom” always be positive. Consumer agency may take the form of sovereignty, but this does not necessarily lead to liberty and freedom.
30
In Deborah Davis’s (2005) study of the narratives of Shanghai residents who came of age during the 1950s and 1960s and have become successful (that is, earning US$5,000 per year), the agency of freedom is positive and even revolutionary. In contrast, the migrant female
factory laborers in southern China (Pun 2003; 2005) find their efforts to refashion themselves into consumer citizens to end in failure. A danger of overvaluing consumption’s self-transformative role and its relation to the positive agency of liberty is that we may disconnect China’s recent development of consumer culture, which includes reconfiguring the relationship between production and consumption, from its historical and global contexts of neoliberalization.
31
Consumption neither guarantees upward class mobility nor does it prohibit class status from falling. Under neoliberal policies of entrepreneurialism and self-responsibility, consuming practice often becomes an adventurous process of discovering insecurities and risks, especially those posed by actors such as monetary regulatory agencies, financial service organizations, credit rating agencies, bankers, accountants, brokers, and their benefactors, in their rule-calculating practices for the purpose of making profits.
32

In responsive and responsible consumer practices, the middle-class norm becomes disseminated to the individualized process of life-making and life-building. In this practical context, it is practically impossible to speak of a set of consistent characteristics that positively constitute the ideal middle-class subject. At the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park in Beijing, participatory consumption is an individual-based process in which a visitor becomes a consumer and makes and builds her or his life by bearing certain responsibilities in capital accumulation and risk reduction. My ethnographic analysis highlights three important consumption-related issues that link middle-class self-formation to the risks in China’s neoliberalization. First, consumption marks a distinction between those who can consume and those who cannot. For this reason, the status of the middle class achieved through consumption is indeed a
class
position. Social stratification marked by the middle class becomes inseparable from certain structural issues, especially unequal opportunities caused by unequal access to resources (economic, political, and cultural). It is also made possible by the involvement of a series of actors, ranging from organizations (government, nongovernmental organizations, corporations), individuals (the nouveaux riches and ordinary citizens), and different ethnic groups (the ethnically Chinese Han and China’s ethnic minorities).

Next, one important expression of taking social responsibility is helping others, especially the poor or those facing devastating incidents such as earthquake, famine, and flood. As the Chinese government has shifted its responsibilities for addressing social and economic problems to nongovernmental
organizations,
corporations, and individuals, charity and philanthropy have become popular mechanisms in recent decades (Ma 2002). The rapid rise of charitable organizations in China, for example, shows a general shift from government-funded welfare to charitable work by individuals, corporations, and nonprofit organizations (Shue 1998; Chen 2004). In Chinese media, the richest members of society are called on to demonstrate their social responsibility by participating in philanthropy.
33
Meanwhile, ordinary Chinese citizens, especially college students and urban professionals, are encouraged to undertake the work of generosity, whether through donation or voluntary work. Under neoliberal conditions, however, charitable work operates in a lateral way: It surely raises funds for charitable purposes from as many people as possible (that is, not merely from wealthy populations), but it is unfolded as a politics of rerouting personal, corporate, and governmental responsibilities.
34

In leisure and tourist contexts, some aspiring middle-class subjects often voluntarily take on the responsibility of monitoring other middle-class subjects. The incident of disciplining the woman who tried to take an umbrella without paying for it at the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park might be small, but it is related to nationwide efforts to make Chinese tourists behave more civilly. Both domestic and international news media in recent years, for example, have frequently published stories about successful mainland Chinese citizens traveling overseas, whether as students, shoppers, business people, or tourists. Some compare the spending habits of Chinese shoppers with Americans, Japanese, and Germans in the post–World War II period, while others discuss the impact of their behaviors in the host countries. One major issue repeatedly raised is about the uncivil behavior of Chinese tourists.
35
In September 2005, for instance, pictures and reports of mainland Chinese tourists spitting, sprawling on the ground, allowing their children to urinate in public, and smoking in prohibited areas at Hong Kong’s newly opened Disneyland triggered scathing criticism in the Hong Kong, mainland, and overseas media. This event underscores the ways in which middle-classness is defined as a cultural category in terms of the new norms of civility and responsibility for the actions of one’s self. Chinese middle-class commentators on this news story argued that their fellow citizens need to improve their “human quality” (
suzhi
) by changing their old habits and learning to conduct themselves in a more civil manner.
36
China’s tourist industry and the Chinese government responded by launching a series of campaigns to promote courteous behavior. In September 2006, the China National Tourism Administration released two detailed lists of behaviors recommended for
the
civilized Chinese traveler, one addressing domestic travel and the other for overseas.

With the proliferation of new media such as the Internet and mobile media, Chinese netizens in recent years have developed a popular practice called “human flesh search” (
renrou sousuo
). Although it is mainly used as a popular way to expose corrupt officials, it may also be used to reveal any ordinary person’s life history, especially his or her personal or private matters such as marriage, sex life, and leisure activities. The deployment of the spectacle as a means to communicate the norm of calculated self-responsibility becomes common. Online uses of images often are intended to embarrass offenders, whether individually or collectively. In the 2007 Green Woodpecker Project that curbed public spitting, its leader Wang Tao posed action shots on his website to humiliate offenders. The Shanghai World Exposition in 2010 is the latest international event that has generated numerous discussions about the behavior of Chinese visitors. The popular Chinese website Tianya.cn has even launched a special public forum devoted to the Shanghai Exposition. Since late April 2010, when the public was first allowed to visit the Exposition, pictures and reports of bad behavior have appeared on the website. Early reports focused on how panicked the crowd behaved. By July, reports and photos often addressed delinquent visitors such as those pretending to be disabled by using a wheelchair to bypass other visitors waiting in a long line. To manage the crowd, the organizing committee decided in September to allow some visitors to use one or two hours to serve as “little Chinese cabbages” (
xiaobaicai
), volunteers whose job is to both assist visitors and monitor their behavior.
37
Those visitors whose bad behavior is captured and circulated in public via the Internet will be held accountable for as long as their records are kept online.

Entrepreneurialism, a practice critical to middle-class self-formation, may enable one’s success, but it may also lead to delinquency, marking social differentiation in relation to capital accumulation and risk reduction. As neo-liberal policies promoting the individual’s do-it-yourself biographical process are widely implemented, calculating (rather than abiding) rules and laws becomes an integral part of self-enterprise. Consequently, as in cases of memorable visits to the theme park, life-building through self-fashioning may become positive if the enterprising subject successfully exercises calculation. But it also may become a negative process, whether deferred, regressive, or sidetracked, when the exercise of calculation is recognized as a delinquency,
38
as in the case of the tourist stealing an umbrella at the ethnic theme park. In
this
situation, instead of a project of future anterior (anticipating the coming of the future), this form of life-building accumulates risks and liabilities to social prosperity of one sort or another. In governmental and social policies, the middle class as a responsible figure is an abstract idea. It is only in the practice of everyday life that a citizen may discover whether he or she can claim middle-class status and thus not be subject to the kind of social scrutiny that applies to the “disadvantaged groups.”
39
Ironically, this discovery is, nonetheless, made at the expense of the rules and laws that regulate the social order. Therefore, the normative bifurcation of the life-building process into positive and negative directions through acts of transgression underpins neoliberal social differentiation.

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My fieldwork for this project was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, a faculty development grant from Bowling Green State University, a visiting scholar fellowship from the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities at Ohio State University, and an international travel grant from the University of Arizona. A small section first appeared in “The Neoliberal State and the Risk Society: The Chinese State and the Middle Class” (
Telos,
Issue 151, Summer 2010, 105–128).

1
. Many economists of China who have studied the process of China’s economic transformation during the Deng Xiaoping era (1978–1997) argue that the transition to market-oriented system is characterized as gradualism, a developmental process based on a series of experiments (for example, Bramall 2009: chapter 10). Missing in their studies is the understanding of the way in which national reunification in general, and Hong Kong’s return to China in particular, becomes inseparable from economic transformation.

2
. See “Jiang Zemin zai Guangdong kaocha gongzuo qiangdiao, jinmi jiehe xin de lishi tiaojian jiaqiang dang de jianshe, shizhong dailing quanguo renmin cujin shengchanli de fazhan.”

3
. Hong Kong’s economy has generally been ranked very high by the four major international economic indexes of free market practices and competitiveness, the
Economic Freedom Index
(jointly published by the Heritage Foundation and the
Wall Street Journal
), the
World Competitiveness Yearbook
(published by the International
Institute for Management Development of Lausanne), the
Global Country Forecast
(published by the Economist Intelligence Unit of
The Economist
), and the
Global Competitiveness Report
(by the World Economic Forum, based in Geneva). From 1996 to 2007 the
Economic Freedom Index
consistently ranked Hong Kong as the world’s freest economy. Milton Friedman (1998), the world’s leading neoliberal economist, argues that since the end of World War II Hong Kong has been the only world economy close to his ideal of a private free market system.

4
. Elsewhere I discuss the relationship between sovereignty, the state, and the people (Ren 2010a: xi–xv).

5
. Here, risk is both real and imagined in relation to the future of the state (see Beck 1992; 1994; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Lash 2003).

6
. In this sense, the middle-class norm is inseparable from the governmental discourse of human capital on
suzhi
, as examined in detail by Yan (2003) and Anagnost (2004).

7
. For a systematic examination of these studies, see Anagnost (2008a).

8
. Wang Xiaoming vividly describes this lifestyle:

Among tens of thousands of matters in the world, money is the most important. Lots of money in his packet defines “practical existence”; once having money, he can do whatever he wants to do and buy whatever he wants to buy. This is the meaning of “freedom”; spending generously, treating money like dust, attracting beautiful young women, this is the meaning of style or “respect”; wearing expensive and luxurious clothing, following fashion trends, this defines beauty or “aesthetic quality.” (1999: 34)

9
. A number of important studies have affirmed this. Jing Wang’s critical study of “Bobo” (bourgeois bohemians) argues that marketing professionals construct the middle class through their cosmopolitan taste and lifestyle rather than through their structural class position (2005: 532–548). Deborah Davis’s study of housing consumption among Shanghai residents reports an explicit connection between their embrace of economic success and their rejection of historical memories associated with the Cultural Revolution (2005: 692–709).