Shuang Lu Frost

Staging Harmony in China’s Urban Dance Competitions

May 14, 2019 by Shuang Lu Frost

At a recent government-sponsored dance competition for retirees in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan province, more than 20 groups of retired women took to the stage to perform a dance routine set to Kangding Qingge, a Chinese pop song with lyrics extolling the romance of the Tibetan grasslands. This competition, and others like it, was a colorful staging of social harmony belying a more complex picture beneath the surface.

**Women wearing Tibetan-style costumes purchased from Taobao while watching another dance group on stage.** Claudia Huang

Between 2015 and 2017, I spent 18 months in Chengdu, researching the collective dancing phenomenon. Attending competitions was part of my regular routine. When I arrived at this competition on a summer morning, I saw hundreds of retirees sitting together in what looked like a rainbow sea of lustrous polyester. I first approached a group of women dressed in flamingo pink robes with yellow and green embroidered trim. They were helping each other put on complicated headpieces consisting of plaited ribbons with beading directly over the forehead and long, thin black braids flowing from the back. They each wore red satin stockings over their shoes to mimic knee-high boots when seen from afar. Next to these flamingo-hued dancers sat another group in nearly identical getups, save the fact that theirs were sky-blue. Still another group rehearsed nearby in red robes with detachable long sleeves extending more than 12 inches past their fingertips and a slightly different version of the same headpiece. As each of the groups ascended the stage to perform the same routine in succession, these sleeves and the ubiquitous black braids created graceful shapes in the air as the women danced. Behind them on the stage, a large banner displayed the names of the competition’s sponsors, which included the China Sports Lottery, the municipal district government, the district elderly sports association, and the local district’s social work organization. These state institutions and the retired dancers do not share the same agenda, but dance competitions offer organizers and participants alike the opportunity to broadcast their respective messages for a wide audience.

In preparation for this competition, organizers informed participating groups three months in advance that they would be competing to Kangding Qingge, which gave them ample time to practice the official, pre-determined routine and to get their costumes in order. Like the song Kangding Qingge, these costumes are not so much Tibetan as they are Tibetan-esque.Although some elements like the long sleeves and thin braids do appear in traditional Tibetan dress, the outfits are haphazard amalgamations of customary attire from different Tibetan regions and social classes. When I asked the dancers—all belonging to the majority Han ethnic group—about the origins of what they were wearing, they invariably answered that they were purchased online. Indeed, dance costumes like these can be found on China’s mega online-retailer sites like Taobao for less than 100 RMB (about 15 USD). On these shopping websites, there is often a category dedicated to minzu wu (ethnic dance), organized by sub-categories such as Tibetan, Mongolian, Miao (Hmong), and Uighur. The costumes of each sub-category reference key elements of traditional dress from each minority nationality, such as elaborate silver headdresses for Miao outfits and cowboy hats for Mongolian ones.

Competitions like these have been taking place in China’s urban centers since the early 2000s, when retired and aging women as well as some men began dancing together in informal groups in the aftermath of massive layoffs and early retirements stemming from China’s State-Owned Enterprise (SOE) reforms. The vast majority of dance group participants belong to China’s so-called “Lost Generation.”. Many spent their youths surviving the brutal excesses of Mao Zedong’s political campaigns. Then, decades later when China was transforming into the world’s second largest economy, they were squeezed out of their jobs to make way for younger workers. By the 2015, there were over 100 million participants throughout China. They crowded parks and sidewalks, leading city residents to complain about the noise from the dancers’ music. As part of their larger efforts to regulate the burgeoning phenomenon, municipal and provincial governments began organizing competitions in order to bring the groups under official control. Today, publicly sponsored dance competitions between groups of retirees occur regularly in Chinese cities.

Dance group participants have no say in what to perform during competitions; selected pieces range from patriotic Chinese numbers to contemporary pop performances, all set to official choreography. That said, the fact that organizers chose Kangding Qingge is neither an accident nor an anomaly. I attended over 20 competitions during my fieldwork and “ethnic minority” dances featured in more than half of them. Tibetan dances were by far the most common, but there were also two Miao dances and a wintertime competition where groups performed a Uighur dance while wearing costumes trimmed with faux fur.

Identifying, categorizing, and codifying ethnic groups was one of the new Communist government’s first projects after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. China now officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups including the majority Han. Since 1949, displays of national unity have prominently featured popular understandings of minority groups’ cultural heritage. While the state exerts tight controls over minority populations’ expressions of their own cultural practices, performances of minority songs and dances make regular appearances on state-run television programs. The idea that China is composed of 56 distinct but harmoniously co-existing ethnic groups remains a foundational tenet of the modern state. Nowhere was this more prominently displayed than during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics, when 56 schoolchildren representing the 56 ethnic groups carried the Chinese flag into the stadium while wearing versions of traditional attire.

Dance competitions may lack the grandeur of these official spectacles, but the presence of state agendas is no less apparent. Competitions are invariably judged by a panel of government officials, sometimes with input from a professional dancer or choreographer. At the Kangding Qingge competition, the most senior official present was the district deputy party secretary, a visibly bored man in his 50s who struggled to conceal his lack of interest in the performances. For government representatives like him, dance competitions are public events where ideals—about active aging, the preservation of cultural traditions, and the existence of a unified multi-ethnic Chinese nation—can be communicated to the masses. At the conclusion of the Kangding Qingge competition, another local official gave a rousing speech on the beauty of Tibetan culture and exhorted the performers to work harder to perfect their routines in the future.

For the retired dancers, on the other hand, performing onstage in brightly-colored, attention-grabbing costumes offers a chance to be noticed again after a lifetime of being overlooked. Despite their shoddy construction and cheap materials, the costumes have an ostentatious beauty that is normally deemed immodest for retired women but is sanctioned during performance events such as these dance competitions. My 61-year-old friend Qiu, whom I met while conducting participant observation with a dance group, immediately named the outfits when I asked what she enjoyed most about the competitions. She said she loved the outfits for their brightness, and for the way they popped in photographs. “At our age,” she explained, “the only way to add color to our appearance is with clothing.” If the cultural insensitivity of the costumes ever gave them pause, the dancers did not voice it. After all, they would be just as happy performing a folk Chinese dance in traditional Han clothing. After the event concluded, the women gathered on the stage to pose for photos, taking care to display the colorful skirts and bright embroidery. For these retirees, dance competitions are performances of visibility.

Dance competitions that showcase happy elders dancing in Tibetan dress must be understood within this broader tradition of staging national and ethnic harmony. The boundaries of the modern Chinese state are asserted through this highly visible and officially sanctioned cultural phenomenon to emerge in recent years. At a time when scholars are (rightly) paying attention to the ways that the Chinese state manages minority cultures through economic incentives, intimidation, and force, we must also understand how majority attitudes toward minority groups are shaped and maintained through everyday events. The dancers may not even be aware that they are acting out a political narrative, but this is how dance competitions effectively mask underlying social tensions. The state and the dancers have their own agendas, but for a few brief hours, these dual performances converge onstage in aesthetic—if not ideological—harmony.

Claudia Huang is a doctoral candidate at UCLA. Her research interests include aging and retirement, kinship and families, and state-society relations. She will be joining the faculty of the Department of Human Development at California State University, Long Beach in fall 2019.

Please contact Shuang Frost ([email protected]) and Heidi Lam ([email protected]) with your essay ideas and comments.

Cite as: Huang, Claudia. 2019. “Staging Harmony in China’s Urban Dance Competitions.” Anthropology News website, May 10, 2019. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1159

Privatizing the Silk Road in Contemporary China

January 25, 2019 by Shuang Lu Frost

Society for East Asian Anthropology

Jing Wang, January 24, 2019

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of a SEAA column themed series on “Cultural Consumption and Performance in Asia.” The articles highlight different aspects of consumption and performance in a range of Asian regions. They examine issues such as cultural curation, the uses of the past, material culture, power and market, as well as the enactment of lived experience.

Making of an Urban Spectacle

In 2013, I first stepped into the Tang West Market Museum in Xi’an. This museum, situated in the historical Tang Dynasty (618-907 C.E.) West Market site, is China’s first heritage museum run by a private corporation specializing in real estate and cultural business. Lü Jianzhong, CEO of the museum, identifies the museum as the cultural core (wenhua hexin) of his enterprise. Formerly known as Chang’an, Xi’an is recognized as one of the starting points of the Silk Roads by the Chinese government and the UNESCO World Heritage Center. As early as the 1980s, the local government began to promote heritage-related tourism for economic development (Zhu and Yang 2016). Noticeable changes took place during the 2000s when the government further allowed privatized corporations to manage heritage sites.

In 2016, however, two archaeologists Zhang Jianlin and Gong Guoqiang publicly voiced their concerns about the West Market site’s third phase of development. They pointed out that the corporation had not notified the archaeological team in advance about their excavation work, which could have severe consequences for the heritage site. If the same development model were replicated for other privately funded Silk Road–related sites, the archaeologists suggested that more precautions be taken to balance heritage preservation and real estate development (Gong and Zhang 2016). Thanks to the intervention of archaeologists and heritage workers, the development project was halted for further inspection. This incident also reflects the deep-seated conflicts between profit-making and preservation as the city undergoes constant development.

A panoramic view of the northwestern section in the Tang West Market complex, featuring the museum (center), residential buildings (left), and commercial building (right). Jing Wang

This double binding of culture and business not only brings the destructive force of neoliberalism to the forefront; it also produces new urban spectacles. The chief architect Liu Kecheng, the Dean of the School of Architecture in the Xi’an Architecture and Technology University, is well known for his hybrid use of classic Chinese and modernist styles. While the heritage museum takes the modernist outlook made from high-vault glass ceiling and corridors, the surrounding buildings feature a neoclassical Chinese style with dark blue tiles, white and grey walls, temple-shaped roofs, and overhanging eaves. This reversal of temporalities in architectural representation reminds us of Guy Debord’s conceptualization of modern spectacles. “Reality rises within the spectacle,” Debord writes, “and the spectacle is real.” The reality of capital accumulation is revealed and accentuated through the heritage site expanded into an urban spectacle.

From Spectacle to Neoliberal Reality

By tracing the multifaceted practices in a heritage site, this essay shows the neoliberal forces to privatize the Silk Road in the Chinese cities. It highlights the private corporations’ voluntarism to manage heritage sites and develop real estate. It also attends to the limits of privatizing the heritage economy through urban spectacles. While heritage becomes a brand, the need to preserve is often trumpeted in a performative fashion. However, we cannot overlook the critical role of the post-socialist state in these processes.

During a speech in Kazakhstan in 2013, the People’s of the Republic of China President Xi Jinping proposed reviving the ancient Silk Road and expanding it into economic and geopolitical networks between China and Central Asia. Since then, the Chinese government has been promoting the Road and Belt initiative (yi dai yi lu, or R&B) at the state level as a nation-building schema involving cultural diplomacy and economic policies across Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America. As a result, the Chinese state has invested massively in the foreign financial loans and infrastructure projects. It is in that year that the Tang West Market complex was further branded the “commercial starting point of the Silk Road.”

While Beijing deploys the R&B initiative as a geopolitical imaginary for international networks, such policies also heavily impact the ways in which local practices adapt to the initiative. Among different efforts to privatize the Silk Road, the physical remains of heritage sites become key spaces where local actors deploy a neoliberal logic to blend heritage management and business development. In Xi’an, where the Tang West Market Museum is located, this shows how the past and present reinforce one another.

In post-socialist China, the historical metaphor and physical remains of the past have been corporatized, commodified, and spectacularized as a neoliberal reality. As Jean and John Comaroff point out, the “rise of neoliberalism” tend to “encourage the outsourcing of the functions of state to the private sector” (2009, 120). This outsourcing includes the cultural heritage management through real estate development and the tourist industry, and results in the emergence of new urban spectacles predicated upon the dual use of the past, mirroring the neoliberal expansion of capital abroad.

Jing Wang is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department at Rice University and currently a visiting scholar in the Anthropology Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include globalization, nationalism, memory, Muslim minorities, diaspora, heritage, media, and cities in contemporary Asia.

Please contact Shuang Frost ([email protected]) and Heidi Lam ([email protected]) with your essay ideas and comments.

Cite as: Wang, Jing. 2019. “Privatizing the Silk Road in Contemporary China.” Anthropology News website, January 24, 2019. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1067

A Seductive Power Disturbing #MeToo

August 19, 2018 by Shuang Lu Frost

Shanni Zhao

Echoing the global #MeToo movement, Chinese social media have raised a new wave of debates on issues of sexual harassment in Chinese educational institutions. Most critiques attend to the unequal power relations in which faculty members offer scholarly opportunities or advancement in exchange for sexual contacts with students, mostly female. Student victims and classmates of deceased victims are courageous enough to confess their experiences, and demand the punishment of the sexual offenders. Feminist activists organize social media campaigns, urging university administrators to establish preventive and investigative mechanisms against sexual misconduct, and demanding student participation in policy making and investigation. People are acting to empower female voices, destigmatize sexual harms, and bring attention to the loopholes in the protective mechanisms against sexual harassment on campus.

Alongside my admiration of these efforts, I would like to further reflect on the cultural and psychic dimensions of the issues of campus sexual harassment. Institutional frameworks—such as law, policy, and bureaucratic procedures—aim to exert a sort of repressive power against sexual misconduct, setting limits on words, behaviors, and interactions, and punishing their violation. However, these institutional frameworks often fail to take into consideration the forces of sexuality, such as desire, fantasy, and sentiment, when they tackle with sexual harassment. Since these forces often play a key role in sexual interactions, ignoring them can be problematic. Understanding the role of these forces requires recognizing power as seductive. Admittedly, the psychic and cultural dimensions that I intend to reflect on can be ambiguous and transgressive. These dimensions often elude current feminist debates in China, probably to avoid trespassing the boundary of political correctness. However, it is this ambiguity that I often see in the post-facto interviews of victims. Recognizing the psychic and cultural processes will improve people’s capacity of discretion and judgment about sexual interactions, and may forestall unpleasant happenings.

A victim rejecting her victimhood

One of the most widely discussed cases labeled as sexual harassment on Chinese media outlets is about Taiwanese female writer Lin Yi-han. Born in 1991, Lin committed suicide in 2017. Over the course of her 26-year life, she was diagnosed with depression at 16, maintained a sexual relationship with her Chinese tutor from 17, and at 26—two months before her death—published Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise, a novel about four teenage girls who were seduced by their Chinese tutor. While Lin denied the public’s identification of her with the characters, her parents later confirmed that Lin’s tutor had debauched her and three of her schoolmates.

What draws my attention in this event is how Lin interprets her intention to write about the sexual experiences of her characters, experiences that the public often categorizes as “debauchery.” In press meetings and public readings, she claims, “This is a book not about anger, but a girl’s love, desires, and erotic fantasies. My writing is disgraceful. It is to do things I know I should not do. I am like my heroines who do things they know they should not do.” While she identifies the relations between the underage heroines and the male tutor as seductive and violent, she refuses to recognize the former as “victims”: “For feminists without experiences of sexual violence, they can lightheartedly claim patriarchy rapes feminism. However, for women who fall in love with a sex offender, it is too complicated to say so.” Lin explains that the feminist anger is too simple and pure an emotion to represent the sexual experiences and power relations trapping her heroines. Here, how do Lin’s words challenge the political concept of victimhood?

Lin, Yi-han, the author of Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise. Public Domain

Examining the 1960s feminist consciousness-raising movement in the United States, Webb Keane (2015) explains that, to make the intimate political, people need to learn a language that allows them to swap speaking roles from the first-person stance of “I” to the first-person-plural stance of “we,” namely “me too,” in discussing sentiments and experiences. Meanwhile, consciousness-raising also relies on cultivating the emotion of anger. As Keane articulates, affect, or neuro arousal, has to be transformed into the emotion of anger to have ethical valence. Lin Yi-Han exists as a token of the first-person who consciously refuses the first-person plural and the categorized emotion of anger. She thus poses a challenge to the political call of “MeToo.” How does such a refusal to victimhood and will to be independent of larger structural forces come into being?

The aesthetic pleasure

To understand this refusal, I consider the structure of feeling (Williams 1978) and the cultural materials shaping the psychic processes. Lin’s attitude towards sexual violence is not without anger, but anger based on a different structure of feeling from Western feminism. She chews on the event of “aesthetic pleasure”— the entanglement of pain and happiness—in relation to morality, instead of the event of sexual victimhood to politics. She identifies the harm in her characters’ relationships as primarily semiotic, and then psychological and physical. He also reduces the rich semiotics of desire and sentiment to bleak sexual instinct, and thus pollutes the rhetoric. Yet, Lin adds, “How can one deny the beauty of his words?” Her anger also reveals her recognition of and preoccupation with a seductive power connecting the tutor and students, mediated by language and knowledge.

This recognition and preoccupation with the seductive forces of the intellectual are probably rooted in a collective aspiration for modernity dating back to the intellectual movements in early-twentieth-century China. Memoirs, correspondence, and novels of the period show that sexual affairs between male intellectuals and female students indexed the modern ideals of humanity, liberty, and progression, as opposed to the Confucian strictures on women’s marriage and sexuality, which were deemed “inhumane.” Even today, movies, dramas, novellas, documentaries continue transforming modern female students—together with their romantic and sexual relationships, their sufferings of miscarriage, abandonment, illnesses, or death at an early age—into legends. These media valorize the form of love, romance, and womanhood modeled on this master-student relationship in Chinese modern literary tradition, contributing to a structure of feeling, in Lin’s words, on aesthetic pleasure.

Power as a seductive mechanism

In a number of accusations of professors’ sexual misconduct echoing #MeToo, victims often admit their ambivalent distinction between love and violence, recognition and harassment. In a post-facto interview, a female student reflected on her relationship with the vice director in her department. When asked why not end the relationship at the very beginning, “I got Stockholm syndrome,” she explained. Her later words indicate that their initial sexual intercourse was unexpected; nevertheless, she didn’t categorize it as violence. Her awareness of harm and anger arose only after she discovered that he maintained multiple sexual relationships. Here, the sense of harm arose primarily from his violation of the cultural expectation of exclusive love, rather than his abuse of institutional power. In such cases, the question of harm is more than a legal question of consent. The power mechanism also functions at the psychic level, producing the attachment to “sexual offenders” and disavowing this abusive power.

When studying power relevant to issues of love, desire, and sexuality, scholars have criticized the conceptualization of power relations as “capture” and “escape,” dominance and resistance (Foucault 1978, Berlant 2011, Mazzarella 2017), because it assumes individuals and institutions act as sovereign entities, standing in opposition with clear boundaries. However, we as human beings have empathy—the capacity to suspend immediate judgment and share others’ feelings and affects. In suspending critical faculties, we can establish unconscious proximity even with people who may be harmful to us (Borneman 2015). This is one way to see power as seductive. Individuals inevitably develop unconscious proximities with peer fellows and larger structures. This makes people vulnerable and penetrable. Power, more than pre-existing, is often enacted in an encounter when the unconscious proximity is activated as a felt resonance with the person on the spot, our cherished desires, larger structural promises, or age-old cultural scripts. The complicated affective, moral, political values therein pose an excess to discursive meaning.

Michel Foucault (1978) reminds that discourse as a means of resistance may not empower us, but rather energize power to further subject us to its grid. For the #MeToo movement, the striking force that its confessional mode of resistance generates is undeniable. However, the belief in discursive power should not overshadow the psychic struggles confronting sexual misconduct. I hope a knowledge of this seductive mechanism of power will make more intelligible the ambivalent forms of affect activated by sexual encounters, and encourage ethical reflections on the psychic processes generating the attachment to the potentials of harm. I also hope this will help conceive preventative strategies against sexual harms that applicable to the moments of intimate encounters prior to rational consent.

Shanni Zhao is a PhD candidate at Harvard University. Before starting her PhD, she spent a year in a feminist NGO in Beijing as an intern and researcher. Her research explores intimacy and affect, citizenship and belonging, and (post-) socialist state formation.

Cite as: Zhao, Shanni. 2018. “A Seductive Power Disturbing #MeToo.” Anthropology News website, July 26, 2018. DOI: 10.1111/AN.935