Hello all,
The Society for East Asian Anthropology’s (SEAA) column in Anthropology News is excited to invite abstract submissions for this quarter’s theme, “Signal/Noise.” As a section of Anthropology News (the American Anthropological Association’s member magazine), we select pieces to be published on its online forum, corresponding to themes chosen by AN as well as critical concerns of East Asia studies.
General CfP by Anthropology News (Full description available here)
We are looking for stories about how communities, cultures, and individuals distinguish meaningful patterns from background noise, interpret disruptions, and find (dis)connection amid interference. What counts as signal versus noise, and who gets to decide? How are fuzzy boundaries clarified or precarious structures disrupted? What happens when communication is both necessary and fraught, or what makes messages shared or misconstrued?
At SEAA, we are particularly interested in soliciting a piece that uses “Signal/Noise” as a lens to examine social, cultural, economic, and political processes in East Asia. We invite submissions that explore questions such as:
What insights can the duality of signal/noise (with its original or metaphorical meanings) provide to think through (mis)communication and (dis)connection within soundscapes, communities, structures, and activities in East Asia?
How can the reality and representation of “signal/noise” in East Asia help us revitalize such longstanding anthropological concepts as voice, dialogue, boundary, intervention, rapport, and distinction, among others?
How can the lens of “signal/noise” inspire us to rethink ethnographic approaches in East Asia as a particular site?
Submissions, targeted toward a general audience, can take the form of a short essay (up to 1,600 words and 3 images) or a photo essay (up to 750 words and 8 images). We invite contributions from scholars who are involved with a broad range of ethnographic methods, from archival to digital, in-person, and remote fieldwork. We highly encourage you to visit the Anthropology News website to get a sense of its accessible, jargon-free, and storytelling-based pieces. If you are interested in working with us, please send your 250-word abstract to co-editors Alex Wolff (alex_wolff@brown.edu) and Yanping Ni (yn4683@princeton.edu) by March 12th, 2025. For a photo essay, please also include 2-3 sample images. Decisions will be made one week after the due date.
The selected piece will go through one or two rounds of edits with section editors, and will be published in Anthropology News in September 2025. Although we are only able to accept one piece per quarter, we cherish every submission and will keep excellent abstract proposals in mind for future themes to come.
Anthropology News boasts a readership of about 25,000 unique views per month, providing a significant platform for your work to reach a wide audience. We publish articles from members that address contemporary issues with original ethnographic research. Scholars of all stages currently possessing or anticipating SEAA membership are encouraged to participate. To learn more about what we publish, please check out previous articles here.
Sincerely,
Yanping & Alex
Practicing Self-Care Beyond Self
Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Jung Eun Kwon
December 27, 2024
It was a beautiful day in October 2022, and the leaves were turning vibrant shades of red and yellow. I was interviewing Yuna (all names in this article are pseudonyms), one of my interlocutors for my research on suicidality—including suicidal thoughts, plans, and attempts—among young South Korean women in their twenties and thirties. Yuna, a 34-year-old woman, had been experiencing suicidal thoughts since she was around 13 and had attempted suicide multiple times since the age of 21. Throughout our conversation, I noticed that she kept glancing around the coffee shop and asked to use the restroom several times within the hour and a half we were talking. I felt a sense of concern for her, and my initial instinct was to think that I could or should help her in some way. However, what Yuna said next completely shifted my perspective.
“Usually [for me], an intense suicidal thought lasts about 15 minutes or so, no more than an hour, or it ends within 3 hours at the longest. But in the meantime, with the right intervention, you can get through it. So, I have an automatically-run protocol [created and implemented by myself]—for example, I call a suicide prevention center, and after receiving the consultation, I wait a few minutes. If the suicidal thought is still severe, I just call an ambulance [to stop myself from attempting suicide].”
An SOS suicide prevention hotline phone on a bridge in South Korea, providing help for those in crisis. This phone was not used by Yuna during her experience of crisis. Credit: Jung Eun Kwon
Her self-analysis and the creation of her own “protocol” by strategically using institutional care services left me in awe. It led me to reflect on my own assumption that I needed to help her, an assumption partly influenced by South Korea’s broader social discourse on mental illness and suicide. In South Korea (hereafter Korea), mental illness has increasingly been viewed as a psychiatric disorder that requires medical treatment, and suicidality is largely seen as an unusual condition caused primarily by depression. This framework, which stems from disciplines such as psychiatry and psychology, positions people experiencing suicidality as patients or objects of intervention, reducing them to passive recipients of care.
Since the late 1990s, Korea’s suicide rate has risen significantly, ranking among the highest globally since the early 2000s. Although young women do not have the highest suicide rate, their suicidality has sharply increased since the 2010s, in contrast to other demographic trends. In response, the Korean government launched a national suicide prevention project to expand access to psychological and psychiatric support, framing suicide, particularly for women, as a result of ‘mental difficulty” (jeongsinjeok eoryeoum). This view individualizes the issue, also overlooking the creative and diverse care practices these individuals use to manage their suicidality.
The Infographic of 2022 Suicide Motives by Gender and Age Group in South Korea. Data Source: 2024 White Paper on Suicide Prevention (Ministry of Health and Welfare, 2024). Credit: South Korea Ministry of Health and Welfare
However, Yuna’s skillful management of her own mental health made me wonder: Is Yuna uniquely skilled at taking care of herself? Or might others who experience suicidality also be this adept at self-care? If so, what do their care practices look like? As I tried to answer these questions, my interlocutors’ various care practices came to my mind.Although most of my interlocutors had received institutional care, such as medication and psychotherapy, they were dissatisfied with these disciplines’ focus on individualizing their experiences. Thus, my interlocutors’ self-care practices tended to stretch toward communal practices, extending attention to society and their roles within it.
Creative Care Practices
I regularly asked the question, “How do you take care of yourself in your everyday life?” during the interviews to explore my young women interlocutors’ care practices, and I was often met with creative and unexpected responses. What impressed me was how these women expanded the boundaries of (self-)care, diverging from institutional care, which emphasizes paying attention to one’s inner self and emotions, as seen in psychology, or to biological factors, as seen in psychiatry. Institutional care often guides individuals to immerse their attention inward, rather than allowing them to explore sociocultural factors beyond their family. Rather, their practices pushed these narrow boundaries, allowing them to reflect on themselves concerning broader social issues prevalent in Korea, such as socioeconomic inequality, discrimination, and marginalized others.
Da-In, a 28-year-old woman working at a small company and living with her mother, offered one such example.She had been writing fantasy novels since high school, a practice she began after experiencing her first suicidal thoughts at 11 and attempting suicide at 14. Initially, she started with short stories, but over time, her narratives expanded into longer works. By the time of our interview, she had completed multi-book-length fantasy novels. She hinted at the pride she felt in her lengthy writing and spoke of her love for writing novels. When I asked her what aspects of writing fantasy novels drew her in, she said it was the ability to create a better world that she hopes to see.
“First of all, [in the fictional world,] the gap between rich and poor is extremely small, there is no discrimination at all, no unreasonable things happen. [People from] this world goes around to civilize other worlds [where the gap is wider, and discrimination and unreasonable things pervade].”
I realized that the setting of her novel both reflected and subverted the difficulties she faced as a teenager. Earlier in the interview, she had spoken at length about her family’s lower economic status, which caused her significant distress during her adolescence. She also mentioned that her classmates disliked her because she was considered “weird or peculiar” for enjoying philosophical books and showing herself off with those books, leaving her isolated most of the time. My interlocutors were deemed unusual in that they desired different paths from what is considered “normal” tracks of life in Korean society. As students, for example, the focus should be on getting into an elite college, then securing a high-paying job with tenure. As daughters, they are expected to obey their patriarchal parents and aim for heteronormative relationships and families to reproduce middle- or upper-class status. The continuous norms and roles imposed throughout their lives contributed to many of my interlocutors’ suicidality, as did the exclusion they experienced when veering from these prescribed paths.
Graffiti reading “Talchul (escape, in Korean)” and “Suicide” on a construction wall in front of high-rise apartments. Credit: Jung Eun Kwon
Against this backdrop, Da-In was flipping the script through her novel on the circumstances that had caused her pain and the prevailing norms, aiming for a society characterized by equality and the absence of discrimination.Imagining and bringing to life a society she hoped to inhabit within the pages of her story brought her a sense of joy and healing. This creative self-care practice reminded me of what Da-In and my other interlocutors commonly shared with me regarding institutional care: they believed it disregarded social issues and did not question social norms, which, in fact, caused their suicidality. Although institutional care was partially helpful to continue their everyday lives through medication and temporary emotional uplift, it could not address their fundamental factors of suffering. In this vein, Da-In was turning toward seeking alternatives that gave her hope, and she was trying to raise her voice through her novel.
Yoobin and Misun, whom I met through a support group meeting, had also been practicing an unexpected kind of self-care. Yoobin, a 32-year-old woman, was a freelancer relying on unemployment benefits at the time, having previously worked as a designer for a startup NGO. Misun, a 36-year-old woman, worked full-time as a support worker for the visually disabled. At the beginning of the group interview with both Yoobin and Misun, they commonly talked about how broader social issues—specifically mentioning the Russia-Ukraine War and climate crisis—were vividly embodied in their suffering, making them feel powerless and their lives useless. They expressed having developed a “deeply rooted distrust against this world” by observing a series of disasters, both far and near.
When I asked them what they do for self-care, their answer first took me by surprise: volunteering. Their response sounded paradoxical to me because I had specifically asked about self-care, not care for others. However, I came to understand their motivations for volunteering as driven by both their own well-being and care for others, especially in light of their discussions about social issues and feelings of powerlessness. Against these feelings, Misun wanted to “feel a sense of accomplishment in this really harsh and unfortunate world,” to feel that she was at least helping others. Yoobin also stated that she is “quite selfish about” volunteering in a similar vein. Rather than being self-absorbed in their emotions and situations, as institutional care often recommends, they directed their attention outward, searching for their space to connect with others, thereby expanding self-care to include care for others and society. In doing so, they situated themselves within a broader world, seeking to contribute to a more livable society.Shedding light on these creative care practices from “suicidal” women shifts our focus from viewing these individuals purely through the lens of their suffering towards recognizing their unique capabilities and resourcefulness. In other words, we realize their active roles in shaping their own well-being rather than viewing them as passive recipients of institutional treatment. This recognition also challenges the narrow boundaries of institutional care, which urges attention inward. In contrast, my interlocutors’ practices of care are oriented not only inward but outward, expanding the meaning of self-care by situating themselves within broader worlds and seeking their roles within it. Similar to Black feminists’ radical perspectives on self-care as a tool for social justice, their care practices encourage us to rethink both self-care and institutional care, emphasizing the need to go beyond self-absorption and foster social connections and collective efforts.
Aaron Su and Jieun Cho are the section contributing editors for the Society for East Asian Anthropology.
The Moral Complexities of Delegate Children in Aging China
Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Fei Yuan
December 18, 2024
What does it entail for care practices when non-affiliated strangers manage your property and make critical “life-matter” decisions on your behalf? Known as “delegate children,” these legal guardians fill gaps left by the state welfare system while navigating complex moral dilemmas.
Performing Care as a “Delegate Child”
It was a snowy day in late December 2022 when I accompanied Xiao Zhang on her visit to a nursing home in the Jing-Jin-Ji region of northern China. It had been a month since her client, Granny Shi, moved into the facility. A steelworker who entered the factory at eighteen, Granny Shi was highly regarded for her mechanic skills. After her child’s death, she became one of the “elders who lost their single child (shidu laoren),” overwhelmed by the pressing concern of her late-life care. As an employee at a social guardianship organization, Xiao Zhang performs the role of “delegate children” (daili ernv) to Granny Shi. In China’s legal service market, “delegate children” is a new profession. Although “legal guardians” is the more formal term, staff members at the civil guardian organization often identify themselves as “delegate children”. This label underscores the surrogate care they provide, which is akin to the support traditionally expected from biological children. In this article, I explore the divergent perceptions and expectations surrounding care duties held by elders and their guardians. Elder care is becoming a key venue for the contestations of post-socialist China’s care regime, where market-driven care models are increasingly displacing the extensive welfare benefits once guaranteed by the work unit (dan wei) system, all occurring within a legal context that heavily favors familial rights.
China is facing a critical eldercare crisis driven by a rapidly growing aging population, shrinking family sizes, and exorbitant costs of private eldercare facilities and assisted care. The repercussions of the one-child policy are profoundly evident, as it has left numerous elderly caught in a critical predicament: they struggle to access necessary care because of the lack of a family member to act as a guarantor for authorizing their hospital and institutionalized care admissions and to make medical care decisions on their behalf. Many of my interlocutors refer to this situation as a “dead end” or “impasse.”
In Granny Shi’s case, she wished to spend her remaining years in a nursing home. However, admission to such facilities requires the signature of a relative, preferably biological children. After four years of fruitless searching for a guardian, Granny Shi left her steel city home and relocated to the Jing-Jin-Ji region. This decision was prompted by the discovery of a newly founded social guardianship organization specifically designed to resolve these childless elders’ dilemmas. At the beginning of today’s visit, Xiao Zhang showed Granny Shi a list of tasks to accomplish. She accompanied Granny Shi to a nearby bank to make payments to the notary office. They then stopped by a grocery store to shop for the daily necessities Granny Shi needed at the facility. Xiao Zhang reminded Granny Shi to buy winter gloves and offered to bring a thermos from home to avoid unnecessary expenses. On the way back to the nursing home, Xiao Zhang held Granny Shi’s hands tightly, guiding her on the icy paths. These acts and gestures underscore the informal, interpersonal facets of care that are not encapsulated by the formal legal duties of guardianship.
The 2021 Civil Code introduced multiple new articles on adult guardianship, including the provision for individuals to select their guardians when fully capable. However, the government policies fail to outline practical measures, leaving a gap in the market for exploring professional standards. During my 2023 fieldwork in China, I observed various entities—including law firms, notary offices, legal service companies, nursing homes, and household management services—attempting to fill this void. The social organization where Xiao Zhang is employed exemplifies a broader trend. In their operations, the role of delegated children extends beyond traditional “care work,” which is typically limited to daily caregiving tasks. Their responsibilities encompass navigating the constraints of established systems, collaborating with bureaucracies, bridging gaps in social services, and channeling necessary care resources. Additionally, their work often requires mediating between the client’s wishes and a legal culture that favors familial ties and the rights of biological children.
Xiao Zhang walked alongside Granny Shi on the sidewalk at the nursing home. Xiao Zhang’s signature is required when Granny Shi leaves the facility. Credit: Fei Yuan
The Nuances of “Guan” in Guardianship
What does it mean for elders to sign a contract with a guardian organization or individuals when they cannot depend on their children for support in their later years? Through conversations with elders, I have found that many view guardianship not merely as a legal arrangement but as a promise of security. This suggests a relationship that is fundamentally about care rather than simply fulfilling legal obligations. Elders frequently seek care in the form of “guan”—a term that captures both caretaking and an element of control, indicative of the nuanced interplay between autonomy and dependency. This dual meaning highlights the elders’ need for care models that respect both their autonomy and their comprehensive care needs; moreover, as the duties of guan are customarily performed by children, the term also implies a desire for emotional attachment. Elders who engage in guardianship contracts often pursue authentic care, which implies genuine relationships that extend beyond legal ties and form kin-like connections.
Notably, understandings of care are diverse and context-dependent. For Granny Shi, the guardianship organization serves as a trustworthy work unit (dan wei), reminiscent of the comprehensive welfare systems provided by state enterprises during the socialist era, ensuring care for her needs throughout her life. The guardians, in contrast, are supposed to fulfill a distinctly contractual role—adhering to the duties explicitly outlined in their agreements. In practice, many guardians strive to fulfill the role of “delegated children,” aiming to provide both professional oversight and emotional support for their elderly clients. In fact, guardians like Xiao Zhang view their work as more than merely “a job.” One guardian described it as follows: “Guardianship enables us to forge a close relationship [with the elders], grounded not in blood but in trust, commitment, and oversight.” This perspective is indicative of how most guardians view their roles: they consider themselves both altruistic caregivers engaged in “good deeds” and professional agents, providing a level of “professional care” unmatched by actual family members.
This is a list of the services offered by a social guardian organization. They provide “all-life-course affairs services” that support elderly individuals at various stages of life, from self-independence to post-mortem affairs. Credit: Fei Yuan
Moral Dilemmas and Constraints
The notion of “professionalism” in guardianship, however, invites skepticism. Without clear professional standards, how one performs “genuine care” while maintaining professionalism lacks clear guidance. Such questions keep presenting themselves in practice. Mr. Chen, the founder of a civil organization in the process of transitioning to a guardianship organization, often finds himself facing dilemmas. As the leader of a newly established organization, he is particularly meticulous about avoiding legal disputes and maintaining the organization’s social reputation, especially given its status as a civil organization committed to philanthropy.
During a webinar I attended hosted by a social guardianship organization, a spokesperson highlighted a recent moral quandary: An elderly client collapsed. He had signed an advance directive against any form of medical intervention. Despite this wish and the doctor’s warning about the surgery’s side effects, the guardian still chose to admit the person to the ICU. The spokesperson remarked, “If it were his son, he could decide freely. However, as an organization, we are afraid of being accused of failing to save lives.” This decision highlights the moral complexities encountered by guardians, who, despite having the legal authority to act on behalf of elders, still confront judgments within the prevailing legal culture, especially when making the aforementioned “life mattering” decisions. The guardians need to heed the rights of related kin, including spouses, parents, children, and other relatives to avoid potential charges.
These guardians’ struggles raise profound questions about the nature of good care: should guardians honor the client’s own wishes and adhere to professionalism, or should they perform acts of filiality to comply with social expectations? And how to navigate the rights of biological children or other relatives within the legal framework of China?
Bridging Welfare Gaps and Offering Hope
In summary, I contend that guardians like Xiao Zhang emerge as pivotal figures within the evolving care regime, bridging the substantial gaps created by the transition from the comprehensive Dan Wei system to a market-driven eldercare model. By meeting the urgent demand of care for elders like Granny Shi and numerous older people who age alone, these organizations offer hope to elders in desperate need of guardian service. However, this hope remains tenuous, as the legal status and rights of guardians are often questioned and subordinated to familial rights. The legal framework and prevailing distrust toward non-familial caretakers present significant barriers, inhibiting their capacity to effectively execute wills and to exercise the agency of the elderly client.
The guardians’ efforts to establish professional organizations do more than just tinkering or filling these gaps; they underscore the urgent need to develop new mechanisms that are attuned to the altered dynamics of eldercare. The dilemma of care examined in this article reflects broader questions about the definition of “good care,” raising important questions about whose will should be honored, and how China’s transitional and transforming care regime can be supported by more refined legal regulations for these crucial services.
SEAA section contributing editors Aaron Su and Jieun Cho, and incoming editors Alex Wolff and Yanping Ni, all contributed to this piece.
How Beggars Help Us Understand Public Space in China and Beyond
Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Ryanne Flock
May 28, 2024
Performances of panhandling in Guangzhou teach us about public space in modern Chinese cities and elsewhere.
Guangzhou—also known as Canton—is a city of zuo shengyi, of “doing business.” As one of the oldest trade harbors in the south of China, Guangzhou opened up early when the country’s reform program of 1978 reintroduced the importance of money and markets. As a result, its bustling shopping streets are loud and radiant, with music blaring from the stores and clerks or automated megaphones shouting out the latest offers. Uniqlo, KFC, Metersbonwe—well-established national and international brands—speak of comfortable wealth and guangjie (window shopping) as a way to relax and enjoy life (Figure 1).
Beijing Road is one of Guangzhou’s most-popular shopping streets. The picture is artificially blurred to ensure anonymity. CREDIT: RYANNE FLOCK
The greater the contrast, then, when I observed a scraggy woman asking for alms by crawling in the middle of the Beijing Road Pedestrian Area, the city’s retail center. Barefoot and with rolled-up sleeves, she exhibited her body’s disabilities: no fingers, deformed toes. Amid her stuffed and worn bags stood a crying toddler. A crowd gathered around the heartbreaking scene, and a skirted lady jumped forward to help while the urban management personnel became nervous. Usually, these patrols hired under the umbrella of Chengguan—the bureau in charge of an orderly cityscape—expel beggars from the shopping street. But this time, the officials in their dark-blue uniforms did not intervene. I was intrigued by this scene and its broader implications. How do beggars gain access to public space in Guangzhou through such performances, navigating local governance and social norms?
Scholars often define begging or panhandling (I will use these terms interchangeably) as asking for money or goods in public space. However, I found performances in China more intense and elaborate than those described in the academic literature or encountered during my travels in “Western” cities. I observed various ways of asking for alms in different urban locations for four years (2010–2014) in Guangzhou and talked to people panhandling in the present or the past. I approached beggars as a vulnerable social group, aiming to create situations of trust and free of hierarchies. We met in public places where we generally felt safe while also considering the attention of public security personnel. Most beggars I met responded to Chinese regional disparity and migrated from the deprived countryside to wealthy Guangzhou. Moreover, their capacities for physical work were limited due to age, illness, or disability, and they lacked family and state support. The turnover rate among this group was high during my fieldwork, and I cannot say how many are still in Guangzhou. Their agency, however, teaches us about public space in China and in a modern city. In the following, I will show how panhandling adapts to a changing spatial culture and the local state’s attempts to “beautify” the commons.
In Guangzhou, ways of panhandling differed according to space. There was a strong contrast between religious sites versus areas of commerce, entertainment, and transport. Some beggars slept in areas near temples and churches in the evening, stored their belongings in the bushes, and stayed longer during the day, panhandling but also chatting and relaxing with acquaintances. Visitors to these places of worship gave a few Yuan to most of them. Interestingly, at shopping and bar streets, and other commercial spaces of lively foot traffic, the performances were unusually comprehensive and layered, incorporating sight, sound, and story.
Contrasting with the middle-class environment, beggars stood out with their simple and sometimes worn-out clothes, sad demeanor, and stooped postures. Many exhibited injuries, mutilations, and burned and diseased skin. One day, I saw a healthy-looking man in his mid-30s stripping down to his underpants (Figure 2). He stood silently, his head bowed, his clothes at his feet. The skin expressed his neediness and desperation by renouncing his social “face” (mianzi). Additionally, he laid out a big poster in front of him to tell his story. Later, I realized that many beggars explained their reasons for poverty and panhandling in writing. I saw smaller notes and big declarations arranged with photos, hospital reports, and other official documents. “I suffer from rheumatism, the many years of treatment have not been effective, and I became disabled, for a long time I could not get out of bed, and [the challenges] of daily life are [still] difficult for me to handle.” The author of this piece specified his home village via province and city; others presented their ID or added phone numbers. In most of these scenes, passers-by stopped to read and some put a few Yuan in the beggar’s cup. Andrew Travers argues that begging is a staged “self-destruction” to create a hierarchy which argues: You are better off; you are in the position to help me.
The photograph shows a panhandling man from behind and someone from the audience watching from some distance. The beggar has stripped down to his underpants, put his shoes, jeans, and shirt, in front of his naked feet, and spread a poster before the cloth pile. We cannot read what is written on the poster, but in other cases, beggars often explain why they ask for alms. The beggar exposes his skin, holds his head high, but puts his hands on chest and stomach in a protective posture.
A panhandling man in his 30s in Guangzhou’s city centre. The picture is artificially blurred to ensure anonymity. CREDIT: RYANNE FLOCK
When I met 70-year-old Mr. Song, he too was lying on his stomach, moving on a rolling board. However, he was busy writing calligraphy with a moist brush on the pavement, completing an ever-growing artwork by outlining the characters with colorful chalk. Three years ago, he told me, he was panhandling by waiting for alms with a bowl in his hand. But people insulted him because they could not see his leg disease, and he feared their contempt. Thus, he started street calligraphy, feeling that he would give something back, nurturing his self-esteem. Other panhandlers combined performances of misery with music, singing, or playing an instrument. Referring to Mr. Song’s explanation, we can understand this not only as a strategy to gain more attention and alms but also to deal with the stigma of begging and handling the hierarchy toward the audience. However, his answer also made me think of the “deserving poor”—a ubiquitous discourse in Chinese society—and the words of panhandling Mr. Mo: Only when you see someone’s disability can you be sure a beggar is “real” (and therefore deserving). Could emphasizing physical challenges as part of panhandling performances be a form of empowerment to have a claim on help and even access to public space?
Today’s Chengguan Bureau was established in the late 1990s to create an orderly and “civilized” city inspired by the clean streets of other world metropolises. At the same time, however, the social issues caused by the market transition intensified and urged more “humanist” governance, according to the official jargon. Thus, on the national level, the State Council emphasized that panhandling is not forbidden; instead, those in need should be offered assistance and not be harassed in any way. Yet, on the local level, Guangzhou and other cities issued regulations defining panhandling as an aesthetic disturbance which should be punished and removed from public space. The policy contradictions leave patrols in a legally grey area when approaching beggars.
Chengguan tolerated asking for alms at religious settings. Once in a while, I saw them drive by Guangzhou’s famous Guangxiao Temple, but their patrols were nowhere to be seen most of the time. Instead, they concentrated on areas of commerce, entertainment, and transport. Mostly in groups, by foot or electrical cart, Chengguan personnel moved back and forth within the radius of their responsibility. They expelled beggars from these popular and prestigious areas, sometimes with a frown or harsh words, while most beggars avoided the confrontation. Mr. Song wrote his calligraphy near Beijing Street—not under Chengguan’s immediate gaze, but within a regularly controlled radius. He would panhandle until a patrol shooed him away, he explained to me. Watching the comprehensive performances, I realized that most beggars seemed to make the most of the time given, trying to convey the message of misery and deservingness as fast and efficiently as possible.
Moreover, variations in governance and performance relate to the specific spatial culture grown through a place’s history and social functions, connected to social norms and accepted behavior. If we think of religiosity as a market of transcendent ideas whose members gain self-affirmation through charity, then beggars belong to churches, temples, and mosques. Observing how visitors gave alms almost automatically, I understood that those asking for alms were integral to the ritual of piety and did not need to perform elaborately. However, shopping streets, tourist spots, and metro stations are different: for the Guangzhou city government, they display ideals of modernity and the city’s political and economic success. As this success is contradicted by visible poverty, the number of Chengguan personnel concentrates on those bustling areas. One could argue that panhandling performances adapted to this spatial culture of an entertainment-hungry society as they became themselves a spectacle of sight, sound, and story.
When we encounter ideas of public space—in politics, academia, or the media—the concept is often idealized and defined as open and accessible to allmembers of society. In our everyday lives, however, we recognize that space is structured; it enables, guides, and limits the agency of individuals and groups. Chengguan’s management is one example of how the state can influence the spatial order and access strategies of marginalized groups. Beggars in China develop various performance skills to fit in, be seen, be heard, and convince and deal with differentiated governance. Thus, access to public space is more than being present; the hierarchy of public space raises questions about social status and performance expectations to benefit from the commons and participate in urban society. Public space is a medium of ordering urban society—a characteristic we must acknowledge if we want to understand its future. For whom and how to lower access barriers and hierarchies, then, is another story.
This piece is part of the SEAA series “The Future of the ‘Public’ in East Asia.” Aaron Su and Jieun Cho are the section contributing editors for the Society for East Asian Anthropology. Contact them at jieun.cho@duke.edu and aaronsu@princeton.edu.
Being Global and Chinese on WeChat
Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Xinyu Promio Wang
February 22, 2024
Does using WeChat qualify someone to be “Chinese”?
“So, you are not like a real Chinese . . . I mean, you are just someone who has Chinese heritage, right?” This was what one of my interlocutors, Fangyi, said to me in the middle of our in-person interview after I told her that I do not use WeChat, except for research purposes, as none of my friends or families were on the app. Currently holding a permanent residence visa (永住者) in Japan, Fangyi came to the country six years ago from her hometown, Shanghai, initially as a student. Upon finishing her higher education, she began to work as a medical interpreter, and then later married her Chinese husband, a pharmacist who had acquired Japanese citizenship. After I inquired about the relationship between “not using WeChat” and “not like a real Chinese,” Fangyi explained to me that using the app “is like the Chinese thing. I feel close to home when I’m immersed in this Chinese-language platform while abroad.” For her, it seems like being a “real Chinese” is not simply about having Chinese “heritage,” sharing a Chinese blood tie and celebrating Chinese culture. For her, it is also about “having a constant presence in this Chinese-language environment and sharing your everyday life episodes with families and friends back home so that they can see you, remember you, and recognizing you as one of them, instead of as a bystander.”
Comments like this show how social interactions taking place in digital spaces can be an important means through which Chinese migrants negotiate and represent their senses of identity. As Fangyi indicated, digital media such as WeChat allow many Chinese living overseas to establish a unique public presence in a particularly “Chinese” space. Being seen and visible to her fellow Chinese consequently helps Fanyi not only to maintain her “Chinese roots” but also to acquire senses of being a “real,” somewhat more “authentic” Chinese. However, as I will show, Fangyi’s expression of her “authentic” Chineseness on WeChat as a migrant in Japan is markedly different from, say, that of her friends who use WeChat while living in China. This article aims to nuance the understanding of digital media’s impact on how Chinese migrants see and represent themselves. A closer look at the way people like Fangyi maintain their public presence on WeChat tells us how the use of digital media itself is shaped by desires for mobility as a privilege.
Following the launch of the app Weixin, targeted for mainland China, in January 2011, WeChat went to market in August 2012, created by Chinese tech company Tencent. WeChat and Weixin provide essentially identical functions, such as personal and group messaging, “Moments” (similar to Facebook’s “Wall” function), and news subscriptions. The difference is that Weixin is designated for users whose address is physically registered to China. Free of such territorial restriction, WeChat soon became one of the most popular apps within Chinese-language-speaking publics. Sometimes it is even considered the most important—if not the only—channel through which Chinese migrants and diaspora can maintain their emotional and familial ties with the mainland while living abroad.
While WeChat has some similarities with sites like Facebook and Twitter, it also has some differences. For example, content that users share on WeChat, such as their profiles and posts, are inaccessible to others who are not on the user’s contact list. In this sense, WeChat has a unique social logic that prefers and promotes one’s existing social relationships, rather than encouraging users to discover new connections. This closedness by design explains how Fangyi equates using WeChat with constructing a “constant presence” among her Chinese circles. Keeping up on WeChat gives her a sense that she is being recognized by her close ones as “one of them.” Being constantly present in this setting by, for example, sending out messages and updating information does not simply indicate wanting to be seen by and communicate with anonymous others, as is often taken to be a feature of exchanges on digital platforms. Rather, following the embedded logic of closed publicity, it is driven by the desire to virtually stay close to “us” among families and friends back “home.”
To this point of “staying close to us,” Fangyi stressed the importance of individual messages in managing her diasporic life. She said, “No matter how many years I’ve stayed in this country [Japan], chatting with family is an irreplaceable part of my life. It gives me a sense of intimacy and makes me feel warm.” This perspective is shared by my other interlocutors, who often emphasized that interactions in the closed social spheres on WeChat made them feel connected to “home”—in both senses, as families and as homeland. Another interlocutor, Youan, echoed this point in an interview. Despite having lived in Japan for more than three decades, he said, “Chatting with friends and relatives on WeChat is the most intuitive way to feel my Chinese [roots], like how our culture is always family-oriented, and how we try to keep our friends close [to us].”
However, interestingly, “staying close to us” does not necessarily mean that Chinese migrants like Fangyi wish to identify themselves with this “us.” For example, her “Moments” show how she tries to manage senses of both intimacy and distance as she constructs her migrant self in specific ways. On the one hand, she frequently shares episodes from her everyday life in Japan, posting several photos coupled with short writings two to three times a day. On the other hand, the majority of these posts are written either entirely in Japanese or in a combination of simplified Chinese and Japanese, being partially or completely inaccessible to those who do not understand Japanese. In fact, when I counted, out of 154 “moments” posts she created over three months, only 19 of them were fully written in simplified Chinese.
A screenshot of a man in traditional Japanese clothing talking to a rabbit; the text message below describes Fangyi’s thoughts of “loving the country you reside in.”
Screenshot of one of Fangyi’s “Moments” posts. (A screenshot of a man in traditional Japanese clothing talking to a rabbit; the text message below describes Fangyi’s thoughts of “loving the country you reside in.”) CREDIT: AUTHOR
About her Japanese posts on WeChat, Fangyi confirmed to me that most of her WeChat contacts cannot read Japanese and therefore wouldn’t be able to understand her posts. Moreover, when Fangyi wants to communicate in Japanese, she uses a separate app called LINE, arguably the most popular messaging app in Japan. When I asked her why Japanese is her main language in cultivating her online presence on WeChat, she said,
“As someone who lives in Japan, I feel naturally I should write things in Japanese because I’m part of its culture . . . and so my friends know that I’m abroad. I may not necessarily enjoy a better material life here in Tokyo compared to my friends in Shanghai. But we are different. (I want to show that) I’m not your typical, average Chinese who has never seen a different world [outside China].”
As with Fangyi, digital media platforms can inspire a complex range of self-positionings and identifications among its users. In contrast to her private messages, Fangyi’s language choice in the public realm of “moments” seems more like a strategy to distinguish herself from, instead of aligning herself with, those “typical” Chinese who are “at home.” In this sense, her transnational mobility and foreign-language skills acquired through that position serve as capital that she can leverage to perform and claim her identity to be, say, an “above-average” Chinese.
A screenshot of a picture that consists of two photos. The one on the left shows the back side of Fangyi’s head, and the one on the right is a photo of cherry blossom; the Japanese text message below translates as “both the cherry blossom and my hair wither away.”
Screenshot of one of Fangyi’s “Moments” posts. (A screenshot of a picture that consists of two photos. The one on the left shows the back side of Fangyi’s head, and the one on the right is a photo of cherry blossom; the Japanese text message below translates as “both the cherry blossom and my hair wither away.”) CREDIT: AUTHOR
In my digital ethnographic observation, I found that many Chinese migrants tend to manage their online presence in ways that are similar to Fangyi’s. Despite the fact that WeChat is a platform designated for Chinese-speaking audiences, I frequently see Chinese migrants using languages such as Korean, French, German, and Italian in relation to their respective migratory experiences. In this way, whether consciously or unconsciously, their privilege of international mobility becomes leverage that allows them to de-homogenize a uniform Chinese identity and to allude to the difference between themselves and their nonmigrant counterparts in the publicly visible digital sphere. While understanding migrants’ identities as a fluid and multilayered concept is not new, this illuminates that such multilayeredness is partially inspired by their engagement with multipublic digital spaces. In this sense, their experiences invite us to think about the way that our own identities and relationships with our home(lands) are now constructed in relation to digital connectivity and technological affordance.
This piece is part of the SEAA series “The Future of the ‘Public’ in East Asia.” Aaron Su and Jieun Cho are the section contributing editors for the Society for East Asian Anthropology. Contact them at jieun.cho@duke.edu and aaronsu@princeton.edu.
What Can White Paper Do?
Society for East Asian Anthropology
Mengzhu An, Jing Wang & Wei Ye
January 9, 2024
During #A4Revolution, protestors used blank white paper to express their voices while remaining in the shadows of state censorship and surveillance.
On November 26, 2022, a college student in black clothes, black hat, and black mask was standing on campus, holding aloft a blank piece of white paper. A middle-aged man walked up to them and ripped away the paper from their hands.
“Why did you take away their white paper?”
“What threat does the white paper pose?”
The questions of angry observers remained unanswered. Even after the paper was taken away, the young Chinese protestor stayed in their posture, holding nothing in their hands.
This scene at Nanjing Media College, in Nanjing, China, was captured in a video clip that went viral online. The determined image of a young Chinese person holding a blank white paper was so powerful that it became an icon in what was the then-emerging #A4Revolution protests. In small and large cities across China, people stood in the cold night air holding up sheets of white paper, silently demanding freedom from the extreme levels of surveillance and control enacted under the country’s zero-COVID policies. The protests against such policies that broke out around the world have come to be considered as the most influential public defiance in China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. What can a blank piece of paper do? As this article shows, blank white paper presents both strategic opportunities and ambiguities for social movements in China. In the case of #A4Revolution, protestors used blank white paper to express their voices while remaining in the shadows of state censorship and surveillance.
IMAGE CREDIT: NONENULLNAN
IMAGE CAPTION: The Elephant
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A grayscale image showing a person with a baseball cap, holding an A4 paper, facing a large elephant across a diagonal divide of light and shadow. Hashtags #白纸革命 and #A4Revolution are written below.
Why White Paper
White paper originated from local protests that were triggered by a tragic fire at a Uyghur-majority residential building in Ürümqi on November 24, 2022, killing at least 10 people living there. Some blamed the incident on the government’s zero-COVID restrictions, where the discovery of one COVID case could lead to the grounding of all residents until the neighborhood became free of COVID again. Such long-term lockdowns severely limited residents’ capacity to respond to emergencies, such as the fire in Ürümqi. But people stressed that this disaster could have happened anywhere, not just in Ürümqi. One Weibo user posted, “After waiting for more than a hundred days, what we got was not freedom, but a raging fire and thick smoke.” In another viral post, Ürümqi officials’ irresponsible explanation of the fire was sarcastically rephrased as “The road is open, they don’t run,” implying that residents were at fault for not being able to escape the disaster. Such criticism against government officials was met with swift censorship. The accumulated resentment and anger were partly why people began to appear on the streets across China with blank paper on the evening of November 25, 2022.
In contemporary China, people have long strategized means of expression to deal with government censorship and surveillance. Netizens learn to maintain anonymity and adapt to the ever-changing codewords and techniques to discuss “sensitive” topics online. Such tactics of playing hide-and-seek with Big Brother were also evident in the protests against zero-COVID policies. The #A4Revolution was particularly “ghostly,” in Jacques Derrida’s terms, as it engaged in invoking the “visibility of the invisible” and “tangible intangibility.” Protests painted slogans in unmonitored public restrooms, posted flyers on telecom poles in the dead of night, communicated through anonymized channels, and stayed masked at events to avoid identification.
But this did not mean that they were immune to surveillance. The omnipresence of state censorship and violence is equally spectral. As Derrida says, “We do not see who looks at us.” In the video clip referenced at the beginning of this article, the white paper was eventually taken away without explanation from a silent protestor by a street-level bureaucrat who also remained silent. Political dissent is met by arbitrary crackdown through vague charges such as “picking quarrels and provoking troubles” (xunxing zishi) or a “pocket crime” (koudai zui). Though existing before the pandemic, such control and violence have been greatly intensified and normalized under zero-COVID policies. Always in danger, white paper protestors consciously used anonymity and silence as a counter-strategy. Not a single word was written on the countless sheets of white paper, but their silence loudly defied state tools of repression.
Protesting with provocative silence, like holding a white paper, is not unique to China. Following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian streets were swept by antiwar protests. In March 2022, the Russian Federation parliament passed a law that criminalizes the spread of “fake information” about the Russian army and forbids referring to the invasion as war. The protestors with “no to war” signs became targets for arrests based on this law. As with the #A4Revolution, Russians came up with creative ways to express dissent against their authoritarian government. One woman, for example, held a paper saying dva slova (two words), gesturing to the forbidden slogan net voine (no to war), and other demonstrators just held blank paper, like their Chinese counterparts. These show what white paper can do as a symbol of civil resistance against authoritarian regimes around the world.
A four-panel comic. The first panel draws a huge red two-dimensional code on the floor, which is erased by a person in the second panel. The third panel leaves only the person standing on the floor. In the fourth panel, many people walk around with red traces of the code on them, symbolizing the lasting impact of the trauma caused by the zero-COVID policies that cannot be erased. This four-panel comic illustrates how even though the government may have tried to erase the visible signs of violence, the psychological scars on those who experienced it cannot be easily healed.
IMAGE CREDIT: NONENULLNAN
IMAGE CAPTION: luminol
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A four-panel comic. The first panel draws a huge red two-dimensional code on the floor, which is erased by a person in the second panel. The third panel leaves only the person standing on the floor. In the fourth panel, many people walk around with red traces of the code on them, symbolizing the lasting impact of the trauma caused by the zero-COVID policies that cannot be erased. This four-panel comic illustrates how even though the government may have tried to erase the visible signs of violence, the psychological scars on those who experienced it cannot be easily healed.
From Ghostly Public to Fragmented Solidarity
Both in China and overseas, protestors shared a common challenge of not knowing what to chant. Without a singular rallying cry, blank white paper could be used to obscure dissonant claims or internal rivalries within the movement. While some simply held up blank sheets of paper in silence, others cursed Xi Jinping and called for his removal. Fearing that such explicit words would give the police an excuse to enact suppression, many insisted on a more practical demand to end the zero-COVID policies and return to a normal life. Meanwhile, the national anthem sounded at some of the rallies, which was intended to strengthen solidarity, but also provoked mixed reactions. Some non-mainlanders who originally came to show support left the rally as soon as they heard it out of distaste for such nationalistic symbols. Beyond holding up blank paper, it was a challenge for protesters from different groups to identify any other code or symbol upon which to build connections.
The disputes over symbols, slogans, and language on-site and after the protests reflected the varied agendas within the #A4Revolution. This revolution became a reincarnation of public grievances and a gathering of revenants, including the suppressed protestors of Hong Kong’s anti-extradition movement, the Uyghurs and Tibetan victims of anti-religious policies, and feminists and young dissidents in exile. The mishmash of revenants infused the superficial solidarity with implicit fragility, which reflects the precarious conditions of civil disobedience and the limits of public protest under authoritarian rule.
Although the vast majority of the dead and injured in the fire that triggered the #A4 Revolution were Uyghurs, some of whose families had been imprisoned in the government-run “re-education camps” or exiled overseas, the protests everywhere were dominated by Chinese-chanted slogans centered on the demands of urban Han people. One anonymous Han Chinese woman criticized this for overlooking the structural violence imposed on the Uyghur community by the Chinese state. At the vigils in two cities in the United States that some of us attended, young women spoke out against the misogynistic words that some male participants used to curse Xi Jinping and the CCP. They preferred chanting slogans such as “End Patriarchy” and “End Police Violence.” However, when such gendered frictions and disparities were pointed out in online group chats after the rally, they were dismissed by some people as “overly sensitive.” Ironically, while many women’s complaints were met with contempt, they made up the majority of those arrested and unexpectedly became the iconic symbol of this revolution.
After the Revolution
In December 2022, shortly after the rise of the #A4Revolution, the Chinese government rolled back its stringent zero-COVID policies. But it is debatable whether this was a gesture of surrender to the white paper protesters. In the aftermath of the #A4Revolution, the police continued to arrest those who were presumed to have participated in the #A4Revolution. Several female participants in vigils in Beijing were detained for about four months. The ghostly publics of the A4 movements and their temporary solidarity seemed to have dissipated, or so we thought—until a female protester suggested otherwise. With difficulty, she delivered a message from the detention center:
“Even though they made us feel like we were betraying each other during the interrogation, I still believe that we are in solidarity. On New Year’s Eve, A, B and I [all arrested protestors] had a concert through the doors of the prison, singing songs together . . . and we will join you again, start preparing.”
This message has circulated anonymously on encrypted social media platforms. It has inspired a renewed belief in the significance of resistance and the potential for solidarity. “A specter is always a revenant,” and the ghostly publics of the A4 movements will continue to haunt the future.
Some participants of the White Paper Movements made cards in solidarity with the girls in detention, with their faces drawn and names written, as well as the words “Release Our Friends.”
CREDIT: @ANOSARTOR
IMAGE CAPTION: Girls in detention.
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Some participants of the White Paper Movements made cards in solidarity with the girls in detention, with their faces drawn and names written, as well as the words “Release Our Friends.”
Acknowledgments
We want to thank Anastasiya Miazhevich for sharing her observation of the anti-war protests in Russia as a comparative perspective. We also want to thank the two editors Jieun Cho and Aaron Su for their generous feedback and editorial work.
Jieun Cho and Aaron Su are contributing editors for the SEAA section in Anthropology News. This piece is part of the SEAA series “The Future of the ‘Public’ in East Asia.” Contact them at jieun.cho@duke.edu and aaronsu@princeton.edu.
Youth, Disaster, and Collective Mourning in South Korea
Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Shinjung Nam
October 12, 2023
Following the 2022 Halloween crush disaster in Seoul, South Koreans gather to remember the young victims and the nation’s history of human-made disasters and formations of publics in furious mourning.
On the eve of December 16, 2022, thousands of people filled the main street of Itaewon, a former US camp town in Seoul, South Korea. My husband and I were standing among the assembled, feeling the temperature drop far below the freezing point as gusts of wind rushed through town. The town has a long history of foreign military occupation, transnational exchange of goods and fashion, and festivities that, like Halloween, inspire creative self-expression in public and a sense of belonging among young people. We were gathered in memory of those who were crushed to death on the night of October 29, 2022, in a narrow alley that shoots off of the one on which we were standing; 152 were injured, 159 died, including a teenage survivor who committed suicide. Most of the crowd crush victims were in their teens and 20s, out with friends on Halloween weekend. December 16 marked the 49th day of mourning for the lives lost—a day believed to be the last day spent by the spirits of the dead among the living before their final departure to the yonder. Throughout the history of contemporary South Korea, collective mourning in the streets for the wrongful deaths of youths has been central to the social and spatial materialization of publics, that is, assemblies of stranger-others woken to the reality of their common fate as citizens subject to state violence. Earlier on the morning of December 16, select family members of the crush victims had held a memorial service at a Buddhist temple, just north of Itaewon. The ritual had come to an end by burning the name tags of the lost in a metal pit amid the sounds of cries, bells, and monks chanting. About 300 of the family members then relocated to Itaewon, wrapped in red scarves to symbolize the blood of their kin to continue the memorial service among thousands of other citizens in the main street of the town. When the clock hit 6:34 p.m.—the officially recorded time of the first emergency call made to the local police on the eve of the disaster warning of possible crush deaths—the crowd closed their eyes, lowering their heads in silence. On the screen set up at the head of the assembly appeared the words of the caller, her urgent voice ringing through town, followed by the victims’ names, their portraits, and messages of longing from their families and friends.
Up until the 49th day of mourning, people had to gather for weeks before a faceless and nameless altar set up by the South Korean government in front of the city hall in Seoul. The current administration, under Yoon Suk-Yeol, withheld the backgrounds of the victims from being publicized in the news media, making it difficult for the bereaved families to contact one another. The initial footage of the victims—lying side by side on the streets of Itaewon covered in white sheets—had evoked in me much older photos from the 1980s of youths murdered by the state under military dictatorship. While interrogation, torture, and murder of youth protesters by police had become a thing of the past in South Korea, the mass loss of young people continues as they fall victim to human-made disasters in the most ordinary spaces in their everyday lives.
But the Itaewon crush also brought back memories of another recent disaster that took hundreds of lives of young people. In mid-April 2014, a ferry capsized near the southwest coast of South Korea, drowning 304 people, including 250 high school students on a field trip. As the search and rescue was prolonged amid a lack of government response, the entire country watched innocent youths disappear into the abyss, broadcast real-time on television and on YouTube. Realizing how easily the lives of youths could be forsaken in a neoliberal democracy, without guns or tear gas, people gathered across the country to mourn for the victims who had been left to die at sea. In the aftermath of the 2022 crush disaster, publics formed again to collectively remember the victims’ names, faces, and histories.
A large crowd of citizens and the family members of young crush disaster victims gather in front of the Seoul City Hall building to set up an altar for the dead on the 100th day of mourning.
The family members and their supporters stand on guard as the police readies to remove the altar from the site any moment. (CREDIT: SHINJUNG NAM)
South Koreans’ collective mourning for the young victims of state violence and human-made disasters has been long shaped by their experience of becoming witnesses. Mourners would stand in the streets, hear the names of the victims called out loud, one after the other, see their faces enlarged on screens, and shout, “The state was absent!” The assembled would bear witness to not only the fact that the lives taken away had once fully existed but also the very experience of collective mourning. Such an experience of becoming witnesses is crucial to revitalizing a public that embraces the pain of others and its roots in their shared fate of being citizens responsible for the democratically elected government and its actions.
The South Korean public’s rage has only intensified since their recognition of the government’s undeniable role in the unfolding of the crush disaster. The Yoon administration had set the large gathering of the youths at Itaewon on the weekend of Halloween celebration as a stage for what. Yoon had called “a war on drugs,” replacing the crowd control police, once regularly dispatched to the town on such festive occasions, with police officers dressed in plainclothes for their undercover operation against drug trafficking and drug use. This “war on drugs” was engineered as a key strategy for empowering the authority of the former prosecutor-turned-politicians now heading the government and for legitimating their monopoly on executive powers. And the strategy has pivoted around the criminalization of innocent youths and their occupation of the street space.
Mourning to Remember
Now occupying the main street of Itaewon that had once invited young visitors was a public in furious mourning. “Memory has such strength,” said Ms. Choi Sun-Hwa, mother of one of the high school students lost at sea in 2014, as she stood on stage on December 16, 2022, wearing a yellow scarf around her neck, facing the family members of the crush victims who sat in the audience wrapped in red scarves. For months, makeshift spaces for commemorating the ferry disaster victims had filled public spaces across South Korean cities with yellow memorabilia symbolizing the youths left to drown just when their lives were about to bloom like the forsythia of spring (Kim 2018). The main street of Itaewon now cried red and yellow.
Joined by the choir group formed in memory of the ferry disaster victims, Ms. Choi began to sing “We Won’t Forget,” promising so to the victims of the crush disaster.
We will remember, surely and everything, so not one of you feels alone.
Such were the words of promise that had brought hundreds of thousands out into the streets, awakening a public powerful enough to charge the country’s legislative bodies with an exigent sense of duty to push through the country’s first ever impeachment process in 2017. The successful impeachment of President Park Kun-Hae (2013–2017) did not stop people from remembering the loss and their duty to remember. I still regularly spot yellow stickers on the backs of people’s cellphones or yellow ribbons hanging on people’s backpacks when traveling on public transportation. Ms. Kim Sunny, whom I have known for years, is no exception.
An assortment of yellow memorabilia is laid out on a white desktop—from simple ribbon-shaped pendants to round badges of varying sizes, on all of which are written, “We are sorry, We won’t forget you.”
These memorabilia belong to Ms. Sunny Kim, a long-time interviewee of the author, who has matched each of them with one of her daily objects, including her handbags and her cellphone case. (CREDIT: MS. SUNNY KIM)
“The song was specifically written for the ferry disaster victims in 2014 by Yoon Min-Suk,” my husband whispered into my ear. He remembered Yoon Min-Suk from his college days in the mid-1980s, when the artist first started writing songs for an underground cultural movement organized as part of the student activism against the military dictatorship. The song’s promise to remember has now been stretched to address the victims of the crush disaster. Those who were young adults in the tumultuous years of the 1980s, including Ms. Kim and my husband, came of age by bearing witness to the murders of youths under the military dictatorship (Lee 2009). Adopted new roles as parents, this generation now sees their children living in an era of the state’s dereliction and abuse of power. Publics in South Korea are constituted through this chain of collective mourning, where memories of the wrongfully dead youths get interwoven across generations through colorful mantras, objects, shapes, and lyrics. This mode of coexistence has persisted against and through times of collective upheavals. Their memories of the victims and of mourning together while embodying a public resistant to forgetting and forsaking the country’s youth dwell in the most ordinary spaces, shapes, and sounds—from all things yellow and red, to the very word “memory”—beyond the spectacular moments of such a public’s materialization in space.
Bouquets of fading white and yellow chrysanthemums and a poster biding its readers to remember the young victims line up the wall along one side of the alley.
In the photograph taken on the 49th day of mourning, the poster reads, “Please, remember us.” (CREDIT: SHINJUNG NAM)
Shinjung Nam is a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Center for Liberal Arts & Basic Education at Sungkyunkwan University. She received her PhD in anthropology from Princeton University.
Nam, Shinjung. 2023. “Youth, Disaster, and Collective Mourning in South Korea.” Anthropology News website, December 12, 2023.
Copyright [2023] American Anthropological Association
We’re Queer, We’re (Not) Here
Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Alex Wolff
October 24, 2023
Queer activism often includes public visibility. But everyday surveillance and economic risk complicate LGBTQ+ politics in South Korea.
Author’s note: All the names in this piece are pseudonyms and locations have been withheld.
In 2021, I attended a protest held in a bustling shopping district near a local university in South Korea. It was organized by LGBTQ+ student groups and a regional LGBTQ+ advocacy group supported by Korea’s progressive party, Jeong-uidang, to raise public consciousness of LGBTQ+ Koreans’ presence in everyday life and the need for an anti-discrimination law. Some organizers held placards bearing phrases like “The youth want a comprehensive anti-discrimination law!” Others marched the streets, wrapping LGBTQ+ flags around their bodies like capes. We took photos and videos and later uploaded them on social media with #WeAreHere and #StopDiscrimination. The protesters, largely in their twenties, chanted, “We are here!” (우리는 여기 있다!), a phrase often repeated in queer activism in South Korea. To me, it sounded like saying, “We exist!”
But beyond the celebratory colors and phrases, this event was carefully planned and executed to manage the risks activism posed for each protester. The organizers made sure that we recorded ourselves during the protest in case we were refused entry into stores or harassed because of our outfits. Protesters also hid their faces with rainbow-patterned surgical masks during the march. When uploading the recorded footage and photos later online, they censored participants’ faces and altered their voices for anonymity. These measures were taken in response to a well-founded fear of being “outed,” both online and off, which could ultimately cost their social connections and chances for employment.
LGBTQ+ Koreans build politics between a desire for collective visibility and individual invisibility even as the possibility of being “outed” haunts their public and private lives. By selectively concealing and revealing their identities and intentions to others, queer and trans young adults manage to be with and keep a distance from the largely heteronormative public.
Image Credit: JEONG-EUIDANG COMMISSION FOR SEXUAL AND GENDER MINORITIES & SOLIDARITY FOR THE ENACTMENT OF THE ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAW
Image Caption: Undisclosed city, South Korea. Protest for a national anti-discrimination law and awareness of LGBTQ+ Koreans in 2021.
Image Description: A group of 14 people standing in a public park on a rainy day, waving “hello” at the camera. They are wearing rainbow flags like capes, rainbow surgical masks, and holding umbrellas. Their faces are censored with a digital mosaic pattern.
Queer life under a heteronormative gaze
Following student activism that helped bring about Korea’s shift from a military dictatorship to a parliamentary democracy in 1987, LGBTQ+ student groups flourished at top universities. Yet compared to the youths who risked their lives to participate in democratization, contemporary Korean young adults are often portrayed as risk-averse, self-interested, and generally indifferent to politics because of economic pressures.
Since economic liberalization following the Asian financial crisis (1997–1998), irregular employment with lower job security, benefits, and income became normalized in South Korea. The brunt of these transformations has disproportionately affected those in their twenties and thirties. A recent report suggests that nearly 40 percent of those in their twenties depend on parents for primary financial support, and over half of unmarried people in their thirties live with their parents.
Yet this narrative of depoliticization is contradicted by young adults’ key role in activism related to the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster and mass uprisings against government corruption in 2016–2017. Though often unrecognized in public discourse, LGBTQ+ student groups have also been instrumental in the recent groundswell of youth activism in Korea. Over the past decades, queer and trans students have worked to promote anti-discrimination, legislative reform, and destigmatization. Their activities significantly expanded in the mid-2000s, creating groups at more than seventy universities and even cross-university organizations.
Image Credit: JEONG-EUIDANG COMMISSION FOR SEXUAL AND GENDER MINORITIES & SOLIDARITY FOR THE ENACTMENT OF THE ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAW
Image Caption: Flier for the 2021 anti-discrimination protest. The translated text reads, “Gender and Sexual Minorities are nowhere to be found. But we’re everywhere without a doubt. So now we’re going to show you. We are here now.”
Image Description: Protest poster for a LGBTQ+ activism event. Depicts a stylized street with rainbow flags and the message is depicted in a handwritten font in Korean.
Still, as was evident in the protest I attended, students participating in LGBTQ+ activism frequently expressed anxiety over potential harassment and the long-term effects of discrimination. The ubiquity of surveillance in both public spaces and interpersonal relationships have largely contributed to this concern. Like many other countries, in Korea surveillance infrastructure is pervasive and social practices of self-and-other monitoring are a part of daily life. With almost a million security cameras installed by public institutions alone, being recorded in everyday settings is nearly inevitable. People’s daily routes are also logged by banking institutions whenever they use bank cards to pay public transportation fares. The ubiquity of smartphones and social media such as Twitter are also creating a condition for what Brooke Erin Duffy and Ngai Keung Chan call “imagined surveillance”: users’ conscious control over what information they publicize online based on the anticipated scrutiny of peers and employers.
Combined with public homophobia and transphobia, surveillance culture enacts an imagined heteronormative gaze for LGBTQ+ folk—something underscored by regular anti-LGBTQ+ organizing at pride events. At a queer festival hosted in Incheonin 2018, for example, anti-LGBTQ+ protestors from conservative civic groups harassed and physically injured festivalgoers.
They also stoked LGBTQ+ attendee’s fears of being outed by recording them without consent. According to a festival organizer, they taunted, “If you’re proud, then don’t cover your face!” Fears of being surveilled while participating in facets of queer life were further emphasized by the pandemic, as individual privacy was often curtailed to create public safety. In May 2020, state-led contact tracing methods even led to the outing of a twenty-nine-year-old man to his family and employer after his visiting businesses in Itaewon, one of Seoul’s few explicitly queer-friendly neighborhoods.
Although many LGBTQ+ Koreans I met were already out to certain friends, family members, and peers, they frequently worried that mismanaged publicity could jeopardize their employability. Young adults are broadly impacted by economic insecurity, but the situation is more fraught for LGBTQ+ Koreans because there are no enforceable anti-discrimination laws for protection in the workplace—or anywhere else—in society. A 2015 report by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea detailed that 44 percent of LGBTQ+ workers who came out or were outed in the workplace faced discrimination, including pay reductions, exclusion from promotions, or even forced resignations. One college group leader, Yeoungho, clearly summarized this situation when he told me, “Doing activism is burdensome, especially because many of us aren’t economically stable yet. I feel like I won’t be hired if they find out I’ve been doing queer activism. There are so few queer-friendly careers that I can count them on one hand.” For these reasons, many LGBTQ+ interlocutors in their twenties and thirties were particularly concerned that being associated with queer politics could cost their social connections and professional careers.
Between risk and possibility
Under these circumstances of pervasive heteronormative surveillance and a volatile labor market, interlocutors practiced what I conceptualize as a queer politics of “discretion,” in reference to Lilith Mahmud’s definition of the term as “a contextualized set of revealing and concealing practices, of knowing how much to say, to whom, and when.”
For many LGBTQ+ young adults, discretion is a way to stay engaged in collective politics while preserving themselves. One college group leader, Sungwoo, explained various strategies taken to mitigate the risks of being outed in activist and more mundane situations. Group members often don masks and costumes during protestsand commonly use pseudonyms (hwaldong-myeong) when referring to one another. When organizing LGBTQ+ students’ events on campus, the members of Sungwoo’s group would describe their events as “human rights festivals for minorities” to stave off harassment. When confronted by other students, they often claim to be allies—because being a queer ally is more socially acceptable than actually being queer. They also removed the label from their official meeting room door to prevent defacement, rumors, and bullying, making it a kind of open secret. As another group leader, Narei, explained in an interview, “We take a lot of care to secure participants’ anonymity. The primary goal is that everyone ends up safe and that no one is outed. If we let one person get outed, it becomes pointless and contradicts the existence of our group and the purpose of our activism.”
But the outcomes of queer discretion are not always liberatory. Sungwoo confessed, “Finding the balance between activism and the rest of my life is becoming harder as I get closer to graduation, because I actually have to think about my future now.” To practice queer discretion entails the constant anticipation of discrimination, which creates a heavy affective burden of self-regulation—in line with the neoliberal demands of the market and discourses of hetero- and cisnormativity.
When we discussed the future of queer politics in Korea, Yeongho said he was more worried about the people doing activism than the activism itself. He likened this tension to activists “passing a bomb around” (pogtan dolligi) among themselves, not knowing when it would explode. As Sungwoo described, it invites both risk and possibility: “Finding people to do activism is so hard because there’s always a possibility of being outed and experiencing even more economic instability. It’s exhausting. All my friends worry about this. But we have to do it to make ourselves real to the rest of the world.”
Many interlocutors, including Sungwoo, emphasized the significance of cultivating discretionary politics that entailed not just visibility but also invisibility as a means toward both everyday survival and activism. As Naisargi Dave and Cymene Howe have observed, the dominant logic of visibility politics—a belief that more visibility leads to increased tolerance—does not always define queer activism transnationally. On the one hand, queer Koreans’ careful work to ensure each other’s mutual invisibility emphasizes the vulnerability of their subject positions. On the other, it highlights the importance of ethical discretion within queer politics and the very practice of ethnographic research. As my larger work explores, queer discretion exists alongside other semi-public forms of politics, allowing queer and trans interlocutors different political and social possibilities, even as it complicates their existing vulnerabilities. More than just being “out” or “passing” as heterosexual or cisgender, their politics attempt self-preservation while aspiring to build a future of collective recognition and rights for queer and trans Koreans.
Alex Wolff (they/she) received their PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, and is a Korea Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. Their piece draws on field research conducted between 2018 and 2022 with LGBTQ+ folk in South Korea. Their research examines intersections among economics, temporality, and politics, through a focus on issues of gender and sexuality in Korea.
Wolff, Alex. 2023. “We’re Queer, We’re (Not) Here.” Anthropology News website, October 24, 2023.
Copyright [2023] American Anthropological Association
Feeling Futures of Diversity in Japan
Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Daniel White
September 27, 2023
The global growth of interest in building machines with artificial emotional intelligence sheds surprising light on how engineers in Japan are reimagining diversity through companion robots.
Stories of humans and robots cohabiting harmoniously have long been popular in Japan. In recent years, Japan’s robot manufacturers have increasingly attempted to bring this idea to life by equipping robots with capacities to care for others. For example, Softbank’s four-foot-tall humanoid robot Pepper, introduced in 2014, is marketed as the “the world’s first personal robot that can read emotions.” The animated hologram Azumi Hikari, produced by Gatebox Inc. in 2016, is designed to realize the “ultimate return home” for those who do not otherwise have or prefer a human companion. Fujisoft’s Palro is created as a communication partner for the elderly. And Sony’s pet robot AIBO (1999–2006) and re-released as “aibo” in 2018—a name that combines “AI” with “robot” but that also plays on the Japanese word for “partner” or “pal” (aibō)—is imagined as a constant companion.
Image Credit: Daniel White
Image Description: A small silver canine-like robot is standing on a small stage and facing the camera. To the right of the robot, in the background, is a sign that reads “aibo” in red letters.
Caption: aibo by Sony, featured at a conference on AI in Tokyo in 2019.
In a fieldwork project on the rise of emotional technologies like these, my colleague Hirofumi Katsuno and I ask how practices of modeling emotion in machines are transforming expressions of human emotionality more generally in society. As we have described elsewhere, at the heart of these experiments is heart itself. Across different models of companion and care robots, Japanese engineers attempt to build robots that can express a sense of heart (kokoro) by leveraging artificial emotional intelligence to contribute to a future of human-robot care. Technologies like cameras connected to software that reads facial expressions, for example, or sensors that respond to affectionate forms of touch with haptic feedback can give these robots elementary capacities to display affection.
Intriguingly for many, these machines also raise discussions about whether robots should be granted the right to be considered as legitimate members of Japanese society. While such discussions have stimulated new ideas about how diversity in a future society might be extended beyond human members, they have also raised concerns that a robot-inclusive diversity might come at the expense of other humans.
Robot-inclusive diversity
In 2018, the robotics startup GROOVE X introduced a small furry robot on wheels called LOVOT that was designed for just one thing: “to be loved by you.” In the updated release of LOVOT 2.0 in 2022, GROOVE X shifted its marketing campaigns to add to this message on love an emphasis on diversity. A tagline for the new LOVOT on the company’s official website reads, “All to express the diversity and complexity of life. 10+ CPU cores (central processing units), 20+ MCUs (micro controller units), 50+ sensors reproduce behavior like a living thing. A new relationship between robots and people begins here.”
Image Credit: Daniel White
Image Description: Two small brown furry robots on wheels stare at the camera with LED eyes. One is wearing a beige onesie; the other is wearing beige overalls.
Caption: LOVOT by GROOVE X
When GROOVE X introduced its new PR materials on “diversity,” it also institutionalized what the company’s founder and CEO, Hayashi Kaname, had been promoting for years: the idea of a society of genuine human-robot coexistence (kyōzon). Importantly, the use of the word “diversity” (tayōsei) is applied here to refer to all “living things” (seibutsu), a category which GROOVE X proposes could be inclusive of robots like LOVOT. Thus,GROOVE X’s framing of LOVOT as a “living thing” promotes the possibility of welcoming LOVOT into a future society where “diversity” might be extended to nonhuman robot persons.
Prior to GROOVE X’s latest campaign, at an event called Industry Co-Creation held in 2020, Hayashi outlined in detail his vision of an emerging future of robot-inclusive diversity. Building on themes of diversity and social justice—which had gained attention in global advertising cultures—he proposed to an audience of fellow technologists and mass media that his company’s latest companion robot exemplifies a model of diversity.
What kind of era will the world face in the future? I think we are facing an era of the robot native [robotto neitibu no jidai]. Until now diversity has been used to refer to skin color and gender, but in the future, I wonder if the borders between living and nonliving things will be erased. Ultimate diversity leads to peace. I want to create that kind of technology and disseminate it from Japan.
Hayashi is familiar with critiques of the lack of diversity in AI, where AI media images have been criticized for their explicit “whiteness” and AI algorithms for their ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic biases based on machine learning data. By framing the inclusion of robots like LOVOT into society in terms of global social justice, Hayashi presents robots as equally deserving of it as people.
Other robot advocates agree with Hayashi’s perspective that robots deserve a place in societies as a distinct species. The legal scholar Inatani Tatsuhiko has been working for several years on creating legal codes that can promote a society in which humans and robots coexist in harmony. This is imperative, in Inatani’s view, because there exist no uniform codes of law for regulating human-machine relations in the emerging age of artificial intelligence. He suggests that “rather than trying to determine what the essence of machines and human beings is, everyone should think about what kind of society we want first, and then discuss the distribution of legal responsibilities appropriate for that purpose.”
Inatani further recommends that we gradually develop a “synthesized society” between human beings and artificial intelligence by considering “what we want to be with them.” Inatani’s point is that public discussions on the philosophical nature of humans, machines, and AI cannot provide a useful guide for living well with machines. Instead, he proposes to consider human-machine relationships as an open-ended experiment which will yield new models for harmonious cohabitation.
Together, Hayashi and Inatani—among many others—seek to make a place in society for nonhuman robot persons by reconceptualizing the constituency of Japan’s future publics in relation to emotional and interactive capacities. The future of a robot-inclusive society may thus depend less on the makeup of its members than on those members’ abilities to generate what is seen as socially appropriate emotionality toward others, human or otherwise.
More-than-human or all-too-human diversity?
With such an emphasis on the inclusion of robots into society expressed by figures like Hayashi and Inatani, however, there is reason to wonder if the extension of care to robots may contribute to “socially appropriate” emotions that come at the expense of other humans.
While Japanese society has long been admired for its fantastically imaginative fictional characters and robot friends, it has also been criticized for its cultural homogeneity and far less friendly immigration policies. In fact, some ethnographers of Japanese robotics have pointed to an overt lack of diversity among Japan’s mostly male robotics engineers and its implications for the disproportionate number of robots gendered as female. Other ethnographers have raised concerns that certain government endorsements for employing robotic technologies in the elderly care sector attribute more rights to robots than to potential foreign care laborers, particularly from Southeast Asia. Still others have suggested that while robots may not prove to be a replacement for migrant care workers in Japan, they may ultimately deskill the forms of labor in which they are trained. As James Wright has argued in an intimate study of the use of the robot Pepper in a care home in Japan, these robots are still elementary and need the help of human staff to operate. Accordingly, a better word than replacement to describe the impact of care robots is displacement, as “the introduction of care robots displaces skills and practices,” “direct human-human contact,” and “caring for people.”
Such critiques point to practices in Japan of privileging technological diversity by protecting perceptions of human homogeneity. Importantly, these emerging debates over who will be incorporated into future imaginations of diversity in Japan are playing out in a marketplace increasingly focused on feeling. Corporations defend the value of developing robots that care given a Japanese society in which care is in deficit.
Seeking to capitalize off perceptions of increasing alienation and loneliness in contemporary Japan, given an aging society and decreasing birthrates, companion robot companies release prototypes in part to test how people respond to them affectively. Different designs—a furry robot on wheels (LOVOT), a puppy-like pet (aibo), a headless cushion with a wagging feline tail (QOOBO)—evoke different reactions among consumers that are not easy to anticipate or define. Robot makers intentionally focus on positive affect, amorphous feelings of comfort that can be produced by just being with robots. Producers imagine that this palpable but not always explainable form of comfort might expand the abilities for positive emotionality between humans and robots in so much that it is not dependent on the limits and expectations that come with human language, and can thus attend more directly to heart.
Image Credit: Yukai Engineering
Image Description: A woman photographed from the nose down, wearing a white blouse and blue jeans, is sitting on a gray sofa. In her lap she holds a black cat-like cushion robot with a tail and no head. To the right of her on the couch is another gray cat-like cushion robot with its tail sticking out to the left.
Caption: QOOBO
GROOVE X’s robot LOVOT is at the leading edge of building these companions with heart. Despite critiques that investment in robots may discount the value of certain human relationships, GROOVE X argues that the cultivation of affection for fictional and “haptic creatures” like LOVOT 2.0 is not a problem but is rather part of the promise of robot diversity. Hayashi and staff often claim that LOVOT is a “technology that cultivates humans’ power to love”; as Hayashi has qualified in conversation, such love need not be limited to humans or even to nonhuman animals. “When I look at LOVOT, I feel like we are entering an era in which we need not discriminate between humans and robots or even between robots and other living things.”
If the future of diversity in Japan is robot-inclusive, it is also one incorporating a history of people grappling over certain human exclusions. As the current biases of emerging AI and machine learning technologies are increasingly brought to light, both in Japanese and global technocultures, we might also question how optimistic visions of diverse machine-inclusive publics of the future in part trade on discounted visions of human diversity. For robot makers like Hayashi, however, the enlarged capacities of “heart” in LOVOT 2.0 have far-reaching implications for how we pursue human values such as diversity in the future, even redefining emotionality itself in and beyond Japan.
Daniel White is a research affiliate in anthropology at the University of Cambridge and author of Administering Affect. He researches emotion modeling in AI, social robots, and other affective and emotional technologies. His publications and ongoing projects can be found at modelemotion.org.
White, Daniel. 2023. “Feeling Futures of Diversity in Japan.” Anthropology News website, September 27, 2023.
Copyright [2023] American Anthropological Association
Making Waste Visible in Qinghai
Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Yanping Ni
November 18, 2022
A heavy metal band seeks to counter state imagery and bring issues of waste management and pollution to the general public.
Even those least familiar with Qinghai would be shocked by the scene of waste burning all over the province. Most evenings by the Winter Gecuo Na Lake, “the sacred lake” for Tibetans, fires are lit inside rusty dustbins, burning plastics, papers, foods, metals, and animal remains into ash. Smoke spreads in the air before being swallowed by the blue sky. Toxins sediment into the ground and are slowly absorbed by the soil. Home to Indigenous Tibetans and source of the Yellow, Yangtze, and Mekong Rivers and called the “water tower of Asia,” Qinghai was once portrayed by the poet Hai Zi as a pure, pristine heaven. Yet residents describe a life of smoke and foul smells. As environmental activists captured in their survey of the locals, “We are living in a gas room. Such strong stenches make me dizzy. We never dare to open the windows.”
And yet the issue of piling waste in Qinghai has remained largely unseen by the public. For one, only a small proportion of waste is produced by locals; the majority is left by domestic tourists, who neglect their behaviors’ long-term impact and how these undesirables flow back into their own cities via water, air, and soil. Without a proper waste management system, Qinghai residents often resort to Tibetan customs and burn the unaddressed waste. But, unlike the clean spaces created by burning fallen tree leaves, incinerating modern materials like plastics and metals pollutes the environment further, rather than purifying it.
Image Description: Bright flames and smoke rise from a large trash can with two open doors on top. The orange and yellow flames stand in stark contrast to the cold grey of the ground and walls surrounding it. Just beyond are housing estates. The slogan painted on the can reads “Let the harmonious and beautiful environment be more beautiful because of us” (rang hexie youmei de huanjing, yin women er geng meihao!).
Caption: Trash cans burn in densely populated residential areas, sometimes as close as 10 meters from peoples’ homes. Image credit: Tian Xi.
The two conflicting portrayals of waste in Qinghai by state media and grassroots activists show how the issue’s visibility is actively contested. On the one hand, the state’s recent politico-ecological agendas have reinforced Qinghai’s image as “heaven.” In 2015, the Three-River-Source Park was chosen a pilot site for China’s ambitious National Park project, and in 2021, it was made an official one. State channels such as CCTV have created four celebratory documentaries on Qinghai in just the past two years (e.g., Qinghai: Our National Park). Such promotion of Qinghai as a place of “pure[ness], innocence, and eternity” makes it hard to openly discuss issues like waste, rendered invisible in circulating images of Qinghai despite its devastating impact on the ground. On the other hand, environmental activists, artists, and NGOs (e.g., Snowland Great Rivers Environmental Protection Association and Green Rivers) have been countering the state’s agenda by making Qinghai’s waste issues visible to the general public.
“Waste Qigong” as a new daily norm
“People live on breath, in each breath hides garbage / In Qinghai, from south to north, toxic gas follows you /… / People produce waste, waste produce toxic air / stink, stink, stink / poison, poison, poison / … / one year, five years, ten years, years after years.”―Lyrics from “Waste Qigong” by Bing Huang (translated by the author)
In the summer of 2021, a group of musicians arrived in Qinghai for a special performance, as one stop on their “2021 Heavy Metal Countryside Tour.” Heavy metal bands were invited to tour the country’s most polluted areas, their audience local villagers and viewers watching the live stream online. The band’s slogan was, “Breathe heavy metal air, listen to heavy metal music!” By linking heavy metal toxins with a musical genre, the musicians combined their performance with environmental activism, critiquing the exploitative nature of China’s industrial development and proposing a new way of taking immediate, public-facing actions.
Tian Xi, a key figure in the project, was a tourist business owner in Qinghai for many years. As a semi-local, he identified waste discarding and burning as Qinghai’s most severe and urgent crisis, which inspired the flash composition of a song titled “Waste Qigong.” Intended as a pun on Qigong, a traditional healing practice combining breathing, meditation, and bodily movements for balance and peace, “Waste Qigong” indicates how breathing waste has become a new daily norm, poisoning Qinghai residents. “People live on breath, in each breath hides garbage,” the song repeats. Bing Huang, the lyricist, explained her creative intentions in our interview, “Qigong is systemic. And waste management should be as well…. But in Qinghai, this system involves no public discourse or voices from below. I use Qigong to critique this irony.” Surrounded by rank grass and in front of piles of rusty trash bins, the musicians performed with their hazmat protection suits on and gas masks covering their faces.
Image Description: A screenshot of the band Laotoule performing their song “Waste Qigong” in a deserted patch of land in Qinghai. Five musicians wear hazmat suits and gas masks. Behind them are two banners: one (above) reads “2021 Heavy Metal Countryside Tour” and the other (below) reads “Breathe heavy metal air, listen to heavy metal music.” The song’s title, in white, has been added to the music video post-production.
Caption: A screenshot from the “Waste Qigong” music video. Image credit: Laotoule
What influence can this experimental performance have? While Nut Brother, the well-known performance artist who initiated this campaign, achieved remarkable success in the Xiaohaotu water pollution case, he understands the unpredictability of practicing activism in China and embraces the strategy of taking “one step at a time.” Online forums are one avenue where further conversations can take place between those committed to keeping this movement forward, slowly yet daringly. On one forum, an anonymous user writes, “I don’t know what kind of spirits sustain their actions. How many, among 1.4 billion Chinese citizens, can do this?” In the chat group maintained by Nut Brother, people from diverse backgrounds, including Chinese diaspora communities, ask, What does Qinghai need (funding or human resources)? Who should be responsible for waste management (the state or citizens)? What can we learn from other countries’ waste governance models? Answers diverge, unsurprisingly. But the bottom line is, one member writes, “to increase exposure and draw the public’s attention;” another echoes, “we need to offer support, engagement, and advice, as a collective.”
Tian Xi’s fieldwork and stumbling blocks en route
Bridging music and activism to raise public awareness isn’t new, and one may be reminded of The Beatles and Bob Dylan in the 60s, or Radiohead and Bruce Springsteen since the 80s. Yet Nut Brother has added his own flair to the tradition by initiating what the group calls “fieldwork heavy metal (tianye zhong jinshu),” meaning that field research lays the foundation for his themed performances. Specifically, Bing Huang’s lyrics are based on two months of ethnographic investigation conducted by Tian Xi. Tian did his fieldwork while regularly interviewing locals, observing their daily interactions, sampling 20 kilograms of toxic chemicals, and documenting scenes of waste running amok.
Image Description: A photograph of an overfull trash can. In the foreground a large rusty trash can is full to the brim with beige- and black-colored plastic garbage bags. The sweeping yellow and grey roofs of two traditional buildings stand in the background, and behind those, dark mountain peaks.
Caption: An overfull trash can near the Rwa Rgya Dgon Monastery (Lajia si), the most well-known Gêlug Ba Monastery by the Yellow River. Image credit: Tian Xi.
Despite his familiarity with Qinghai and years of experience in activism, Tian’s fieldwork was full of stumbling blocks. Running out of funds, Tian experienced days with no food or gas. Spotted by local security staff, he had to deal with threats and physical violence. But what concerns him the most are the conditions of doing environmental activism in today’s China. Activist projects involve constant negotiations of what can be done and how to reach that end when such actions are inevitably conditioned by political dynamics that penetrate daily life. In their proposal stage, Nut Brother and Tian tried to seek funding from established environmental NGOs who showed interest in their project. But the plan was rejected for being “too radical” in its aims to expose ecological and human costs by economic development of local industries (see Chen Gang’s Politics of China’s Environmental Protection for discussion of the challenges facing Chinese ENGOs). On other occasions, Nut Brother had to turn down enthusiastic sponsors because having “western” connections could make their projects and those involved vulnerable to accusations of colluding with anti-Chinese powers. When international rivalries are broadly defined and perceived, nationalist sentiments may quickly translate into vehement attacks on social media.
In today’s mainland China, grassroots activists face increasingly limited choices for what can be done. Under these circumstances, as shown by the essay collection edited by Peter Ho and Richard Edmonds, figuring out how to change tactics is simply the norm or necessity. According to Tian, in the “environmentalist community (huanbao quan),” one unspoken rule is that “one shouldn’t intervene in environmental affairs close to one’s home.” By “home,” Tian means the province in which one’s residence is officially registered in the hukou system and thus the judicial authority one is subjected to. In Tian’s case, he isn’t registered in Qinghai; even if he was identified as “suspicious,” Qinghai’s government might be deterred from taking significant actions against him because of the complicated inter-province extradition process. Centralized power ironically provides a shield for non-locals like Tian. Reporting a chemical plant miles away in one’s own residential area would be more dangerous than flying hours to investigate issues in other provinces, he explained.
Our long interviews were filled with Tian’s resolutions and witty remarks as well as feelings of disorientation: “Born in the age of ‘reform’ (gaige) and growing up in the wind of ‘opening up’ (kaifang), our generation was told the country was prospering and moving up… Now the world is pushed frantically by something invisible and powerful. It’s sliding to the abyss, and you’re on the train rushing to that end. Other than screaming in horror, what can you do?” From Deng Xiaoping’s “development as the top priority” to Xi Jinping’s “ecological civilization” agenda, just how much so-called progress has been made and in what sense remains an open question. Over four decades of changes in China, one thing that hasn’t changed is the oppositional framing of economic interests against environmental ones in most development practices. This is manifested in today’s Qinghai: the state sells Qinghai’s image as “heaven” to boost tourist revenues