Ethics

A Space for Laughter in Contemporary China

January 19, 2020 by Shuang Lu Frost

Society for East Asian Anthropology
Aaron Su
October 10, 2019

This piece is part of an SEAA series on “An Anthropology of Ethics in East Asia.” The articles highlight different aspects of moral values and ethical practices in a range of Asian regions. They examine how individuals cope with societal changes such as environmental crises, nationalism, economic development, and mobility through lens of everyday ethics.

Last year in Shanghai, I was taken by my friend Mei to an affluent corner of Songjiang District, an hour away from the city center. To our surprise, we encountered a poster of Lei Feng, a deceased People’s Liberation Army soldier known for his thrift and selflessness, hanging on the front gate of a housing community. I had been rambling about jobs and other frustrations when she seized the opportunity to stage a witty comeback by pointing and reading the text on the poster: “Xuexi Lei Feng, kuaile zhiyuan” (Learn from Lei Feng, a happy volunteer). She laughed a bit, and in that moment revealed to me the complex relationship between an ethical claim—one that is issued by the state, on full public display—and the less straightforward way that it came to be interpreted. Laughter, more precisely, bore the trace of Mei’s perception and interpretation, but it was also an opaque utterance that lacked the grounding of a defined conclusion.

Lei Feng poster in gated community. — **Lei Feng propaganda campaign in Shanghai, China, 2018.** Aaron Su.

I wanted her to explain to me the elements behind that humor, since comedy can tell so much about the perceived order of things, especially through implicit judgments about what the real or the serious actually is (Berlant and Ngai 2017). She started with a brief history: Lei Feng was a soldier in the early days of the socialist state, prized for his altruism and revolutionary allegiance. After losing his life from a truck accident at age 22, he became a mythic figure and the subject of a large-scale propaganda campaign. His life stories were substantiated by a diary, published in 1963, replete with praise for Chairman Mao. “I’m not sure why, but he’s still here today, and there’s so much of him around here,” she concluded. As the day progressed, this mismatch she was insinuating between history and the present grew more and more pronounced. Lei Feng’s face graced the front of murals, billboards, and banners everywhere in the wealthy suburbs. There seemed to be an underlying logic that persisted beneath the surface, but in practice it was dismissed by a brief chuckle and cast aside.Humor has traction in post-socialist China, as literary and journalistic sources corroborate. It slows politics down, pauses the drive toward conclusive judgments, and serves as a medium for critique in moments where ethical claims made by the state need to be contested or negotiated.I continued to wonder why Mei met the situation with an ambivalent affect such as humor, rather than the possible range of more direct, more conclusive judgments—approval, disdain, disengagement—so I continued to probe about the posters and about experiencing street propaganda more generally. A haziness loomed over her response, again accompanied by a laugh: “I usually don’t have the time to look, but it feels like the historical campaigns are much stronger recently.” Her observation was reminiscent of my friend Allen’s comments a week earlier, who noted too that recent campaigns “are so blatantly of the past” to the point that their incongruence with the present comes off as “funny.” Allen’s and Mei’s statements share much in common: they both sidestep the quest for comprehension, making a diversion to comedy to fill in the gaps where a conclusive understanding of a political phenomenon doesn’t yet appear to be possible. Humor has traction in post-socialist China, as literary and journalistic sources corroborate. It slows politics down, pauses the drive toward conclusive judgments, and serves as a medium for critique in moments where ethical claims made by the state need to be contested or negotiated.

Recourse to history is a growing trend in China, with Lei Feng representing just one instance in an emergent pattern of the state invoking history in order to stage ethical claims. As Angela Zito (2016) has observed, themes of Confucian filiality that were once not part of PRC dogma have made their way back into political campaigns, perhaps as a way to encourage forms of familial and elderly care that had been neglected in years past. On a similar note, Confucius has returned as a cultural theme and a mechanism of soft power, both in the expansion of mainland campaigns (Xi 2015) and in initiatives to establish educational institutions outside of China, although not without its discontents, some of whom are from the discipline of anthropology (Sahlins 2015).

But for many of those who experience these historically-inflected campaigns on a daily basis, attention is seldom devoted to contemplating their magnitude or political origin. On the contrary, my interlocutors spend more time considering how they should interpret and respond to these ethical pleas, producing indirect responses such as laughter and humor, which play with narrative space afforded by ambiguity. As Mei pulled out a trove of experiences with past political campaigns, she could not summon up strong feelings for or against their injunctions; she didn’t experience responses that matched up to the ethical charge of what she was being faced with. The campaigns were quite straightforward in content, but there was a level of confusion about how she or other individuals would interpret them and incorporate them into their own daily practices. This fundamental ambiguity took the shape of a Chinese idiom she muttered to me at the end of our conversation—sidongfeidong (denoting something along the lines of “seeming to understand something at face value is to really not understand it at all”).

Propaganda poster on the streets of Shanghai — **A banner with four Core Socialist Values and a promotion for the Chinese Dream campaign, Shanghai, China, 2018.** Aaron Su.

Consider the Core Socialist Values and Chinese Dream campaigns of recent years, which permeate Chinese streets to a greater extent than any other government initiatives. As Christopher Connery’s (2019: 9) analysis demonstrates, the message is clear-cut: these billboards feature both dynastic and socialist graphics, and they link the ideal Chinese life to ethical values “whose historical scope is civilizational.” At the same time, public responses to these displays of ideal ethical virtue (responses that are formed out of brief, real-time encounters, rather than detached analysis) are not as easily reducible to the straightforward messages they convey. Mei talked to me about these posters, with roundabout statements interspersed with chuckles or shifts in her tone. She alternated between earnest, knowledgeable analyses—“it wants to keep a memory going of national history”—with other more fleeting and rhetorical comments—“it feels like an advertisement.” Despite these vicissitudes, there remained a deeper uncertainty about what to do with the broad ethical imperatives placed in front of her eyes. As my informants’ responses to these campaigns reveal, laughter and moments of comedic relief shift the register of conversation to one less tied to reality, where a direct political judgment need not be made and where closure need not be immediately attained. It therefore seems appropriate that an op-ed in response to recent protests written by a mother to her child in the People’s Daily begins with, “In these tumultuous times in Hong Kong, only your innocent laughter can give me a brief moment of calm and peace.” Laughter, like its varied uses in twentieth-century China (Rea 2015; Zhu, Wang, and McGrath 2019), serves as an expressive device that opens up and sustains a space of indecision, inside of which ambivalences and frustrations can dwell during moments of transformative political change.

Such a space exists now perhaps because of the dramatic shifts in lifestyle and subjectivity borne out of postsocialist transformation in China (Rofel 2007, Zhang and Ong 2008). These changes have widened the gap between the past and the present—unlike these posters, which seem to reconcile it so effortlessly—and scholars have often been left wondering how to bridge the so-called gap in ethics during this time of transition and volatility (Ci 2014, Lee 2014). In practice, as my interlocutors have demonstrated, the gap is often deliberately held open, without a need for resolution, through humor and rhetoric that refuses any concrete determination of the status of ethical claims made by the state. Holding this interregnum open through alternative forms of emotional engagement may even serve as a wellspring of agency.

Ethical values are at once too easy to identify and too difficult to decisively settle in contemporary China. Because of government campaigns that plaster every corner of the street, ethical claims often take the form of spectacles, readily accessible at the glance of an eye. But such visual noise might also conceal how they are interpreted and negotiated by the people who encounter them, in ways that may be ambivalent to political imperatives. Humor and other rhetorical tools are means by which the demand for political and ethical certainties can be suspended temporarily, without defaulting to conclusions too hastily. Because affects, emotions, and expressions are useful ways to understand how ethical engagements play out on the ground, they serve as important sites for anthropology to continue expanding its analytical work.

Aaron Su is a doctoral student at Princeton University whose research focuses on post-socialist China, with an attention to the afterlives of the twentieth century. His interests include social theory, visual culture, modern intellectual history, and gender studies.

“An Anthropology of Ethics in East Asia” series is currently accepting submissions. Please contact Shuang Frost ([email protected]), Hanna Pickwell ([email protected]) with your essay ideas and comments.

Cite as: Su, Aaron. 2019. “A Space for Laughter in Contemporary China.” Anthropology News website, October 10, 2019. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1277

Gendered Moral Codes in China

January 19, 2020 by Shuang Lu Frost

Society for East Asian Anthropology
Jacqueline Zhenru Lin
December 23, 2019

This piece is part of an SEAA series on “An Anthropology of Ethics in East Asia.” The articles examine how individuals cope with societal changes such as environmental crises, nationalism, economic development, and mobility through lens of everyday ethics.

Mao Yu was a 91-year-old man who lived in a remote village in the westernmost region of Hunan province in south-central China. As a peasant without children or relatives in his local community, he relied on a group of volunteers who had recognized him as a national hero in 2012, for his service in the National Revolutionary Army in the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945). In September of 2015, Mao suffered a seizure. The volunteers cooperated with the media to publicize his life story and launch a public fundraiser for his medical expenses. When Mao Yu awoke from his surgery, he was surprised to be surrounded by more than 20 journalists and visitors who glorified him as “a modern Guan Gong.”

Guan Gong (an honorific for Guan Yu) is a legendary figure worshipped as a deity in Chinese folk culture, who exemplifies masculinity, righteousness between rulers and ministers, and the respect for patriarchal hierarchy (Louie 2002). How could a peasant who had made a living by farming for over 70 years suddenly become “modern Guan Gong” overnight? To answer that question, it is necessary to understand both Mao Yu’s life story and the historical story of Guan Gong, which is essential to the root metaphor (Ortner 1973) of the authenticity of Mao Yu’s masculinity. The gendered moral code it emphasizes—restraint of sexuality—is key in the construction of an ideal national hero in today’s China.

Image of a Chinese deity called Guan Gong in a temple — **The statue in the middle is a typical image of Guan Gong as a general. Guan Gong temple, Luoyang, China.** Jacqueline Lin

From 2012 until now, I have been investigating a grassroots hero-making movement self-described as “searching for the authentic national heroes,” which was initiated by civic organizations and local communities in the late 1990s. Major activities of the participants include seeking and assisting local veterans of the Second World War, recording their experiences during and after the war, and publicizing their stories and images as heroes to the public. While the conventional images of national heroes relate to brave fighting with invaders and selfless sacrifices for the country, Mao Yu’s case sheds light on a rarely explored site of national heroics: their sexuality and private life.

A closer look at the publicity and various promotional materials about Mao Yu shows us that the righteousness ascribed to Mao Yu was, to a very large extent, due to his relationship with a woman who resided with him for nearly 70 years. However, their relationship was an unconventional one, because the two were never married nor believed to be sexually intimate.Mao Yu promised to safeguard the colonel’s family no matter how long it would take, and he kept his promise, even though the colonel never returned to the Mainland until his death in 1988.In 1938, the 14-year-old Mao Yu was captured by the Nationalist government and forced to join the army. He was assigned to manage the logistics for an elder colonel, whose wife and two sons were living in Hunan. Around 1949, when the Communist Party began to govern, the colonel followed the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) army to Taiwan alone, entrusting his family to Mao Yu. Mao Yu promised to safeguard the colonel’s family no matter how long it would take, and he kept his promise, even though the colonel did not return to mainland China until his death in 1988. His wife, whose picture hung on Mao Yu’s wall, died in 2009. During the six decades that the colonel was absent, Mao Yu kept his promise, caring for the colonel’s wife and raising her two children.

Most of the newspaper headlines for this story were quite similar, such as “Modern Guan Gong: Veteran Guarded His ‘Sister-in-Law’ for 60 Years to Keep his Promise,” (Xinhua News 2015); and “Veteran Never Married and Helped to Take Care of His Comrade’s Wife and Sons for 66 Years” (CNR News 2016). The content generally consisted of three major sections. The first section was his promise to take care of this “sister-in-law” and his two “nephews” for life. The second was about giving his own food to them at the most difficult time of the famine. The third was his remaining a bachelor and not marrying his sister-in-law and thus not betraying the colonel.

In my interaction with the volunteers, the above three points in Mao Yu’s story were the key reasons that moved them to tears and increased their respect for the veteran. In narrating Mao’s story in daily conversation, my informants would elaborate on the second part about Mao fulfilling the promise. They added that during the Cultural Revolution, Mao Yu bore great suffering and was about to be expelled from the province and sent back to his hometown. The colonel’s wife stood up and said that her husband would never return and that Mao Yu was her family member.

Through their narratives, the volunteers drew a parallel between Mao Yu’s life history and Guan Gong’s legendary stories. Most frequently represented with an image of a red face and wielding a weapon called the Green Dragon Crescent Falchion, the historical character of Guan Yu lived in the Three Kingdom Period (AD 220–228). He was a military general serving under Liu Bei, the King of Shu. His fictionalized and popularized life stories were mainly found in the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which portrayed his loyalty. After his death, Guan Yu became a religious figure and was often reverently called Emperor Guan or Guan Gong. His acclaim was so great that he has been revered as a saint in Chinese culture. In his work on Chinese masculinity, Louie (2002) highlighted wu (martial valor) masculinity in the Chinese context and Guan Gong was considered the wu masculinity incarnate. Guan Gong’s chivalry and his model masculinity has inspired several key operas and metaphors. In Louie’s analysis, Guan Gong was first a sexualized general, and his red face is a symbol of yang, referring to masculine power. “Beautiful-beard man” referred to the masculine appeal of men with long beards (Louie 2002:28).

Guan Gong’s masculinity was also shaped by his relations with women (Louie 2002:47). When escorting the two wives of Liu Bei (Guan Gong’s ritual brother and the king), Guan Gong had a terrible dream that he had killed Liu Bei and committed incest with his two sisters-in-law, and he awoke in a cold sweat from fear (Louie 2002:49). Then, when many possible occasions to have sexual relations with his two sisters-in-law occurred, Guan Gong tried hard to restrain himself, and this restraint became a widespread story.

Therefore, Mao Yu, presented as a modern Guan Gong, won praise for his controlled masculinity and heroic image. The war experience and the 70 sexless years of living with a woman corresponded to Guan Gong’s restraint toward his sisters-in-law. Resistance to illicit sexual relationships was the source of Mao Yu’s masculine authenticity.The qualities of grandpa Mao reflect what we cannot find among our youth any longer: valiance, loyalty to the faith, and discipline in private life. Young men today are lost in money-centered and hedonist lives. That’s why people love my story.The head of the hero-making movement in Hunan province, Hui, is a media expert in his late 50s. He works in the most influential provincial television station in mainland China known for its entertaining programs. For a fundraising campaign in 2015, he designed the “Guan Gong and his ‘sister-in-law’” theme, which was very successful. During an interview, Hui stated proudly to a reporter, “The qualities of grandpa Mao reflect what we cannot find among our youth any longer: valiance, loyalty to the faith, and discipline in private life. Young men today are lost in money-centered and hedonist lives. That’s why people love my story.”

Hui’s observation reflects the desire for contemporary Chinese to promote “missing” moral values related to masculinity and sexuality in post-socialist China. Contrary to scholarship on “the desiring China” (Rofel 2007) that emphasizes an ethos of sexual freedom, individualism and neoliberalism (Kleinman, Yan, Jun, et al. 2011), this case study sheds light on voices of the urban middle class who continue to value sexual constraint, the sacrifice of individual pleasure for the collective unit, and loyalty to authority. The legacy of collectivism and communism has been revived in the construction of a modern Guan Gong, a hero who embodies socially-desired moral codes and concepts of masculinity. From the volunteers’ points of view, what made Mao Yu, this elderly peasant, a moral exemplar was his service in the war and his sexual discipline in his post-war life with a woman “left by” and “belonging to” a senior in a patriarchal power relation. By presenting Mao Yu as a model of loyalty and restraint and linking him to the legendary Guan Gong of the Three Kingdom Era, not only is a forgotten veteran remembered, but so, too, is a legendary past.

Jacqueline Zhenru Lin is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. Her dissertation sheds light on a historical-redress movement aiming at re-evaluating the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945) in contemporary China. Through an anthropological lens, her work examines the relationships between memory and heroism, civic engagement and volunteerism, and charity and activism.

Cite as: Lin, Jacqueline Zhenru. 2019. “Gendered Moral Codes in China.” Anthropology News website, December 23, 2019. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1334