Neoliberalism

Society for East Asian Anthropology
Jingyi Tian
February 26, 2020

For Hongkongers, kendo offers practice in the pursuit of self-cultivation and ethical work.

This piece is part of the SEAA series “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.

“Many people can’t control their egos in kendo. They hit one after one—pong, pong, pong! It’s pointless. This is where kendo mirrors their inner characters,” said a senior Hong Kong practitioner who has been practicing kendo, a Japanese combative martial art, consistently for more than five years. The practitioner told me that kendo helps him to cultivate a strong mind. Many practitioners had similar ethical reflections, which led me to ask, How does kendo serve as a tool of self-cultivation?

Hong Kong fans of Japanese culture are often drawn to the sport by the iconic image of samurai fashion. Although kendo is not the most popular sport in Japan (the All Japan Kendo Federation counted 1.8 million practitioners in 2017), the martial art is noteworthy because its practitioners devote themselves to the practice for years, even decades, in pursuit of moral self-cultivation. Like the man quoted above, many kendo practitioners regard kendo as a life practice (Cantonese: sau hang; Mandarin: xiu xing, 修行). This term has a strong connotation of spiritual exercise in Chinese, and an association with ascetic practices. It accurately reflects a feature of kendo—practitioners engage in a highly intensive, exhausting, and challenging combative activity that forces them to endure hardship and injuries. Yet, many dedicated practitioners are more than willing to endure such rigors.

Photo of a practice room with numerous people in kendo gear. — **Hong Kong kendo practitioners in their regular practice.** Jingyi Tian

The ideal status and traits of the better person produced through kendo practice vary from individual to individual. Practitioners have similar physical experiences, but their own interpretations and goals. Kendo works as a tool for personal growth for some practitioners. Others find kendo helpful in learning how to cultivate social relationships. I will highlight three examples to showcase the range of practitioners’ ethical desires: a financial trader who wants to become a person who can make sharp and accurate decisions at work through better control of his ego; a Christian who aims to practice compassion and love through kendo, which helps him to do a better job as a manager; and a young practitioner who seeks self-empowerment to cope with the harsh yet routinized work. They all have a telos in a Foucauldian sense, namely, a goal of pursuing an “ethical self”—a status or a state of being that they wish to achieve.

A financial trader
Edward is a financial trader in his forties. Before he began learning kendo, he read the book Gorinsho (TheBook of Five Rings), which is filled with stories of a famous Japanese swordsman, Musashi Miyamoto. Edward told me that both kendo and his job require making the right decision at the right moment under pressure. In kendo, a combatant needs to practice how to manage their fear or anxiety, which helps to build up inner power. Edward insists that kendo helps him make good decisions. In that sense, he believes that kendoinstills self-control and a tranquil mindset, both of which benefit his career. Although the inner power that practitioners seek is unlikely to solve all their worldly problems, their dedication to developing such power reflects their keen ethical aspirations.

A Christian
Christopher is a pious Christian and entrepreneur who opened his own business when he was in his forties. He adopted kendo as a training regimen that helps him learn how to get along well with his coworkers. Christopher has found that kendo’s moral messages align with his Christian beliefs—especially the call to show love and care in practice. When he spars with less experienced opponents, he tries to help them improve their kendo skills through courtesy, which he sees as another kind of training that he applies in his work life as well.

A young practitioner
Melissa is in her mid-twenties and works as a legal clerk. She told me that her routinized job made her feel powerless for not being able to make a difference. She wants to be more energetic and positive toward life, and kendo offers her a scheme in which she can transform herself.

To reach their goals, kendo combatants seek self-improvement and self-advancement through exhausting bodily practices that challenge their limits. They often trace kendo’s moral codes to Inazo Nitobe’s famous 1905 book, Bushidō:The Soul of Japan, which offers a genealogy of kendo’s moral framework that various practitioners’ find useful. Practitioners regard the moment they are faced with an attack as the moment to transcend their fear like a warrior; when presented with opportunity to initiate an attack, they practice self-control to repress the impulse. They strive to refine their inner selves in combat with a diligent attitude, and such refinement will not happen unless they keep practicing over the long term. In this process, physical combat not only trains the body but also constitutes ethical work, as the moment when one faces a challenge in combat is a good time to train “heart” (心). The written character of the heart is the same in Japanese (kokoro) and Chinese (Mandarin: xin; Cantonese: sam). In kendo culture, the heart represents inner power that can be obtained through training.

Although the inner power that practitioners seek is unlikely to solve all their worldly problems, their dedication to developing such power reflects their keen ethical aspirations. Recalling Michel Foucault’s theoretical reflections on ethics and self-formation, practitioners adopt the moral framework of kendo practice as a “technology of the self” through which they hope to transform themselves and attain an ideal state of being. Practitioners hold that kendo practice helps them find the weaknesses in their own characters and become better people.

The demand for self-cultivation through kendo reflects a larger neoliberal social milieu in Hong Kong where individuals are left to individually cope with intense pressure from their jobs, including finances, harsh demands in the workplace, and routinized work life. Kendo’s moral framework provides a means for practitioners to build up a strong mindset to cope with their anxiety and suggests a culture of the body that emphasizes self-reliance, self-improvement, adaptability, and individualism. Their experiences resonate with similar patterns of self-cultivation among practitioners of yoga, judo, wingchun, and taichi.

Joseph Alter’s study on yoga in India shows that middle-class yoga practitioners adopted yoga practice as a spiritual antidote to the anxiety and pressure in their fast-paced capitalistic lifestyle. This work has inspired other scholars to contextualize bodily practices within a larger socio-moral landscape. The case of Hong Kong kendo practitioners suggests that kendo’s moral framework is particularly appealing to middle-class practitioners who experience extraordinary pressures in daily work life and culture.

Cite as: Tian, Jingyi. 2020. “Cultivating the Ethical Self in the Way of the Sword.” Anthropology News website, February 26, 2020. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1356

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