materialities and movements in a changing East Asia

Making Waste Visible in Qinghai

December 2, 2022 by Jieun Cho

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 at the expense of actual environments by obfuscating issues such as waste. Grassroots activists experiment with strategies of exposing and mobilizing in their restricted positions.

In archiving these frontline efforts, it’s important not to heroize any activist practices on the one hand and on the other not to assume the repressive nature of certain environments, thus closing off a critical eye to alternative voices. Navigating shifting political landscapes and tracking these dynamics at various scales might be a major challenge for those who study activism in today’s mainland China or in other highly and complexly politicized places.

Yanping Ni is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her research interests include material, space, ecology, and activism. She has published in the journals China Information and Asian Bioethics Review.

Ni, Yanping. 2022. “Making Waste Visible in Qinghai.” Anthropology News website, November 18, 2022.

Baby Milk and Boundary Transgressions at the Hong Kong-Mainland China Interface

November 7, 2022 by Jieun Cho

Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Sara M. Bergstresser
November 7, 2022

The movement of and controversy around items as common as baby formula powder tell a story about the changing political relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China.

In Hong Kong’s New Territories, directly attached to the Sha Tin MTR subway station, there is an enormous indoor complex of continuous shopping malls. Products available to buy range from groceries and personal care products to luxury jewelry, watches, and clothing. In 2019, it was a commonplace experience for me to find clusters of people in front of the Mannings drugstore packing products into large suitcases, to the point that the entrance to the store was completely blocked. While these suitcases sometimes contained luxury products or tins of butter cookies, by far the most common sight were cans of baby formula powder, known colloquially as “baby milk.” The baby milk was not being bought by new parents; rather, it was being purchased by shoppers from mainland China to transport over the border and resell for profit. For many years, the movements of baby milk have signified changing relationships of trust between Hong Kong and China.

From 2017 to 2019, I studied changing configurations of medical ethics, public health, and regulatory governance in Hong Kong. Though my initial focus was on the workings of large institutions such as the Hong Kong Hospital Authority, I soon discovered that baby milk, a simple everyday product, was a substance that inhabited the interface of complex regulatory intersections—including food, medicine, commerce, and border control—at a time of immense change. Following mass protests, government crackdowns, and two years of a pandemic, a city that once prided itself on freedoms of speech and the press is now the subject of international criticism for its turn to authoritarianism. The commercial landscape has also shifted, with widespread concerns about erosions in economic freedom. In parallel, my reflections on this time shifted from ordinary research to an act of “witnessing” the radical politico-economic and social transformation of a city that I had known (see Wang 2021).

Image Description: A crowded hallway filled with people and their suitcases outside of Mannings drugstore.
Caption: Commodity shoppers outside Mannings at Sha Tin Centre, January 2019. Sara Bergstresser.

The “Chinese milk scandal”

In March 2008, consumers in mainland China began to complain that their children were sickened by Chinese brand Sanlu’s baby milk powder. Action was not taken by the government until months later, when international complaints prompted widespread scrutiny, leading to global recalls. These events became known as the “Chinese milk scandal.” Melamine is an industrial chemical that in large doses is toxic to kidneys, and at least six babies died from ingesting the contaminated infant milk powder, while at least 290,000 others became ill. It soon became clear that the melamine had been purposefully added to watered-down milk to make it falsely appear to have a high protein content. Chinese consumers became extremely distrustful of both the milk industry and China’s food regulatory systems. These scandals highlighted contradictions between China’s rapid economic development and its continuing political messages of Communist solidarity.

Hong Kong played a unique role in the crisis. During the 2003 SARS epidemic, the city had established extensive public health infrastructure, resuming the role of “public health defender” (see Keck 2009). Mistrust drove people from the mainland to Hong Kong to buy baby milk powder of imported European brands, which were not available in the mainland. Baby milk emerged as a cross-border commodity for the rising Chinese consumers to mitigate against their mistrust surrounding the government’s regulatory failure in the market in mainland China.

As more people travelled to purchase more baby milk up until the 2010s, baby milk came to mark the tension surrounding the increasing permeability of the border between Hong Kong and mainland China. There were formula shortages in Hong Kong, which contributed to a growing sense that Hong Kong was being turned into a “city-sized outlet mall” for shoppers from mainland China. Some regarded this as a threat to Hong Kong’s autonomy as an independent political, judicial, and regulatory entity under the “One Country Two Systems” principle.

Image Description: Two banners in orange and pink at the Kowloon side of the Bay, reading “Hong Kong Asia’s World City.”
Caption: In 2018, Hong Kong advertised itself with the slogan “Hong Kong, Asia’s World City.” Sara Bergstresser.

In Hong Kong, under these circumstances, baby milk powder tins became iconic components of artworks, often highlighting the fearful dissolution of the border between Hong Kong and the mainland. In 2013, artist Ai Weiwei released a gallery-wide map of China made out of tins of baby milk powder in an exhibit in Hong Kong. He described the piece as relevant to many problems, including the Chinese milk scandal, the failure of the Chinese food safety regulatory system, the subsequent bans of the mass internal importation of foreign formula, and the increasing tensions between Hong Kong and the mainland—which have only escalated since then. He stated, “Hong Kong people make profits from these problems, and are also victims,” pointing out both the embeddedness of the problem in systems of commerce as well as cross-border mistrust and tensions. The mistrust stemming from the 2008 milk scandal did not abate in the subsequent years; to the contrary, it only compounded focus on newer resentments.

New manifestations of mistrust

Since mid-2019, there have been dramatic changes in Hong Kong, including multiple periods of unrest, the arrival of COVID-19, selective border closures, vaccines, the enhancement of National Security Law, and major changes in Hong Kong-mainland relations. The Hong Kong administration’s attempt to allow legal extradition to mainland China sparked a series of public protests, involving millions of protesters and aggressive police intervention in the coming months. In this landscape, the situation surrounding the border has been substantially reconfigured once again; the current Hong Kong administration declared to politically prioritize reopening the border to the mainland while scaling down trade with the rest of the world.

The iconic images of baby milk appeared again. At a protest outside of the West Kowloon Rail Station, planned specifically for gaining support from mainland shoppers, artist Badiucao released a poster of a giant baby milk tin that read, “Formula Baby Safe.” According to Badiucao’s comment on his Instagram page, this meant: “The best message for mainlanders is ‘If Hong Kong’s gone, so is your baby formula.’” In another image, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, who once stated herself as Hong Kong’s “Mother,” appears with guns emerging from her breasts where nipples should be. In a final illustration, titled, “Instruction: Nursing a baby in Hong Kong,” the mother is instructed to be wearing gas masks while nursing to protect the baby against tear gas, which was widely used to suppress protests. Badiucao’s focus on the dual imagery of baby milk—first, as a salient symbol of cross-border commerce, and second, as a substance associated with food, health, babies, and motherhood—shows the ways in which the protests over Hong Kong’s independence were also interwoven with everyday family life and its emotional complexities.

Image Description: Shop at the Macau Ferry Terminal prominently displays tall stacks of baby formula cans in the front window.
Caption: Baby milk formula displayed in Macau to entice mainland shoppers. Ferries from this location travel to destinations including multiple locations in mainland China. Sara Bergstresser.

Regulatory failures in areas of food and medicine continue to occur in the mainland; new scandals continue to disrupt systems, putting the health of populations at risk. For example, cross-border births are another focus of tensions over perceived encroachment. Like baby milk, places of birth are bound with symbols motherhood and hope for the next generation. In 2012, a national controversy erupted in China when professionals in Hong Kong “took out a newspaper ad depicting incoming mainland Chinese as locusts and asking, ‘Are you willing to pay 1 million HK dollars every 18 minutes to take care of mainland children born in Hong Kong?’” After the 2014 “Umbrella Movement” protests, concerns about increasing border permeability were not assuaged; instead, the mainland engaged in clear messaging that it was taking more interest in Hong Kong’s political affairs. Other regulatory shortfalls, vaccine scandals, and shortages linked to medical tourism have further stoked existing resentments. In addition, Hong Kong has become a node of global distribution for counterfeit drugs and illegally imported medicines. Across different manifestations, baby milk imagery continued to be invoked to indicate growing discomfort with the Hong Kong-mainland China relationship.

As it struggles with new outbreaks and pressure from mainland China to adhere to the “Zero-Covid” strategy, the international character of Hong Kong continues to shift. The once permeable border between Hong Kong and the foreign world has intensified through the implementation of strict travel restrictions and long quarantines, and the internal border with the mainland has become the primary focus for reestablishing traffic. The Hong Kong Free Press, one of the few remaining independent news outlets in Hong Kong, recently published a picture of a workman squatting on the ground to roll up the “Hong Kong Asia’s World City” banner while looking back at three masked policemen walking by. Instagram user otaku_5354 commented: “in 20 years’ time whenever anyone wants a photo to summarize the fall of Hong Kong, they will refer to this!” Border flows and political relationships between Hong Kong and the mainland have been reconfigured in the past few years, are these shifts are both negotiated and presaged by controversies over materials as ordinary as baby milk.

Sara M. Bergstresser is currently lecturer in the Masters of Bioethics program at Columbia University. She works at the intersection of medical anthropology, health policy, and bioethics. From 2017 to 2019, Sara was lecturer and program coordinator for Bioethics Education in the Faculty of Medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Bergstresser, Sara M. 2022. “Baby Milk and Boundary Transgressions at the Hong Kong-Mainland China Interface.” Anthropology News website, November 7, 2022.

Crafting Solidarity after the Sewol Disaster

July 10, 2022 by Jieun Cho

Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Sera Yeong Seo Park
July 5, 2022

For the bereaved of Sewol and activists in solidarity, the yellow ribbon is a powerful index of remembrance, political dissent, and community making.

A day before the seventh anniversary of the sinking of the Sewol ferry, I was sitting alongside a handful of activists in a snug children’s library in Yongsan District, with piles of yellow foam boards and silver chains stacked in front of us. The members of the Yongsan 4.16 Collective were determined to fashion as many yellow ribbons as possible to be circulated in the school district the following morning. This late-night ribbon crafting had become a ritual of sorts to memorialize the sinking of the Sewol ferry on April 16, 2014. April, for those who gathered there, was imbued with harrowing memories of the disaster and the weight of the guilt that they carried as helpless witnesses to the tragedy.

The Yongsan 4.16 Collective was just one among many local clusters of Sewol activism that I came to know during my fieldwork in Korea. Independently organized, these grassroots networks performed paramount work in sustaining the movement nationwide, in solidarity with bereaved family members calling for remembrance, truth, and accountability. What animated these spaces was the yellow ribbon—what was initially a token of condolence, and, later, of multiple affects such as grief, anger, and remembrance. Notably, many who took up the work of Sewol activism often deliberately avoided calling themselves “activists” (hwaldongga) because what they were doing, they told me, fell short of the single-minded, unfaltering commitment they associated with activist work. After all, they diverged from Namhee Lee’s account of the ideological, protest-oriented struggles of the anti-authoritarian, pro-democratization movement in the 1970s and 80s led by the Minjung—common people. Yet, as the Sewol movement illustrates, what it means to “act” was also changing with the historical and cultural currents of Korea. The yellow ribbons that I encountered on the field fashioned new, expansive modes of solidarity, opening up spaces for memorialization of the Sewol disaster and permeable connections within and beyond circles of activists.

The Sewol ferry disaster and the yellow ribbon

The Sewol disaster claimed the lives of 304 passengers, 250 of whom were high school students on a fieldtrip to Jeju Island on the southern coast of the peninsula. It quickly became clear that this was an utterly preventable tragedy. The MV Sewol ferry had been illegally modified to carry more cargo and passengers than originally designed; when the ferry took an abruptly sharp turn on the morning of the 16th, the captain and the crew members were among the first to escape, and passengers were told to “stay put.” Those who followed the instructions through the loudspeakers never made it out of the ill-fated ferry, while the dispatched coast guard forces merely circled around during the critical minutes of the rescue operation.

Image Description: A color photograph shows a group of people wearing yellow vests and holding signs. They stand in single file behind a large white and yellow banner that shows a yellow ribbon. A yellow bus and corroded ferry stand behind them.
Caption: October 2020, Jeonnam province, Korea. Activists demand the truth of the Sewol Disaster, as part of the Truth Bus (jinsilbeoseu) campaign. Sera Yeong Seo Park.

The sinking of the ferry quickly incited a widespread social movement in South Korea, founded on condolence for the victims, guilt in having condoned power structures that failed citizens, and collective determination that “things must change.” The Sewol movement broadly drew on the repertoires and networks afforded by the simin (citizens’) movements, which emerged after the installation of democratic governance. These relatively recent movements foregrounded what Amy Levine describes as “liberal, identity-based, non-violent approaches” to political change, relying on the language of hu m an rights and legal action. Yet the Sewol movement also maintained distinct effects and affects of its own. The yellow ribbon first emerged as a symbol of hope for safe return of the missing passengers: social media users embellished their profile photos with yellow ribbons and the slogan, “May one small movement bring a great miracle.” As the chance of victims returning grew fainter with each passing day, the yellow ribbon morphed into a symbol for remembering the victims and expressing solidarity with their families’ demand for truth and justice.

Refusing to remain idle in the aftermath of this shattering loss, citizens turned to the yellow ribbon to cope with, and make something out of, their grief. A collective that came to be known as the Gwanghwamun noran ribon gongjakso (Gwanghwamun yellow ribbon studio) took up a small corner across the memorial altar set up for the victims in Gwanghwamun plaza in Seoul’s city center. While some showed up daily, any passer-by could join in as they wished. After the physical studio was disbanded and the altar was taken down, other yellow ribbon studios emerged nationwide, most of which are run by volunteers who create and distribute ribbons to the wider public.

At the height of the mass protest denouncing the corruption of the Park Geun-hye administration and demanding the president’s impeachment, the yellow ribbons came to adopt another layer of meaning. The bereaved of Sewol took to the streets to demand truth and accountability, mobilizing a post-disaster campaign of unprecedented scale in Korea. Grievances against the administration were already simmering to the brim when Park’s flagrant abuse of power came to light at the end of 2016. In the weeks leading up to March 2017, Seoul witnessed 20 consecutive weekends of mass mobilizations demanding that Park step down from office―protests unparalleled in scale and reach, writes Nan Kim, since the democratic uprising in 1987. Yellow ribbons were among the most pervasive motifs in these anti-Park rallies, donned not only by the bereaved but by innumerable other citizens who took to the streets, testifying to the inextricable tie the disaster shared with the wider denunciation of the Park administration.

Image Description: Two sets of silver keys and keychains, each including a twist of yellow ribbon dangling on a keychain. The ribbon on the right is visibly worn.
Caption: The owner of the thin and frayed yellow ribbon on the right had been carrying it with him since 2014, soon after the sinking of the Sewol Ferry. Sera Yeong Seo Park

As the Sewol movement expanded, Liora Sarfati and Bora Chung argue that yellow ribbons served as an “affective symbol” that “tie[d] together the personal grief and shock from the disaster with broader public concerns such as personal safety and corruption,” while also being incorporated “into other social injustice debates and demonstrations.” Nan Kim now dubs the yellow ribbon “the most prevalent and durable material metaphor of progressive dissent” in Korea. According to Kim, it was precisely the diverse significations of the yellow ribbon––not just militancy and dissidence, but also hope and the ribbon’s moral register––that gave the symbol such a wide reach.

Materiality, sociality, and the yellow ribbon

My ethnographic work suggests that yellow ribbons were powerful because they fostered a sociality in which people forged ethical and affective attachments to the Sewol cause. In the case of the Yongsan 4.16 Collective, for instance, the crafting sessions kindled conversations about what the disaster meant for each person in the room. On the eve of the seventh anniversary, Eunhee, a seasoned activist who led the Sewol movement in the district, invited everyone to share what had brought them there. Eunhee’s invitation sparked a string of reflections as we went around the room, from a 20-year-old first-timer who had put together events in memoriam for the victims throughout middle and high school to a woman in her forties with children of her own around the age of the deceased students and for whom the tragedy hit too close to home. As the night drifted along and yellow ribbons piled up before us, a chorus of stories emerged. The simple, manual labor of crafting ribbons had woven us together into a collective bound by a common commitment to remembrance.

Image Description: Two children and a woman stand in a busy street in front of a white table, on which stand two trays and two piles of small yellow ribbons. A man on the other end of the table hands them yellow ribbons.
Caption: A family collects ribbons during a street campaign held in the Yongsan district, on the 7th anniversary of the Sewol Disaster. Sera Yeong Seo Park.

Distributing the ribbons on busy streets was also an important part of the project of remembrance. Most pedestrians would carry on without giving a second look at the yellow ribbon campaigns, a bitter testament to the waning presence of the Sewol disaster in the public memory. But there were always a few memorable encounters that reminded me and my fellow campaigners of the power of this symbol as it travels. The owner of a small restaurant across the street from where we held our campaign for the 6th anniversary, for instance, approached us to ask whether he could chip in with a donation; an elderly man inquired if he could take five more for his friends. Several people retracted their steps once they heard the word “Sewol” to skim through the bundle of ribbons laid out on the table. Each of these encounters, albeit ephemeral, facilitated a continual circulation of the yellow ribbons, kindling diffuse, far-reaching networks of solidarity through everyday material encounters.

Towards a wide movement

The yellow ribbon became a versatile symbol standing for, yet also exceeding, the critique of systemic failures and corruption that the Sewol Disaster had brought to the surface. For the bereaved of Sewol, a chance encounter with a yellow ribbon dangling on a stranger’s backpack could be a poignant reminder that theirs is not a solitary fight. For activists across the peninsula, the crafting and distributing of the yellow ribbon is a small yet crucial means to keep the memory of the Sewol disaster alive.

The Sewol movement, according to an activist I met in the field, would be viable insofar as it is a “wide” movement, one with blurred boundaries between its locus and the margins, and between sporadic and sustained engagements. In this formulation, the loosely organized ribbon-crafting sessions and the fleeting encounters with the recipients of the yellow ribbon were as crucial as events of more pronounced political energy and impact, such as protests. The yellow ribbons were crucial for achieving this width, their crafting and circulation inviting diverse repertoires of solidarity without circumscribing what solidarity is or ought to look like.

Sera Yeong Seo Park is a PhD student in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral dissertation examines the social movement that emerged in the aftermath of the Sewol ferry disaster in South Korea. Her research interests include activism, emotions, affect, and the anthropology of ethics and morality.

Cite as: Park, Sera Yeong Seo. 2022. “Crafting Solidarity after the Sewol Disaster.” Anthropology News website, July 5, 2022.

A Flavor of Human Feeling in Beijing

April 11, 2022 by Jieun Cho

Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Hanna Pickwell
April 11, 2022

Aging residents of a Beijing neighborhood give new value to old and used household objects, creating a community space rich with a feeling of belonging in an ever-changing city.

When entering the Guest Living Room (GLR) in a narrow hutong alleyway in Beijing’s old city, you would immediately find yourself encircled by glass cabinets crowded with colorful, outmoded stuff: old phones and video games, painted pigs’ knuckle bones that had once been used to play a game like jacks, collections of ration tickets from the 1950s through the 1980s, and candy wrappers from the 1970s. In the large main room extending behind this display, you might encounter a group of senior citizens chatting over tea or making crafts together. From time to time, tourists or visitors to the neighborhood are drawn inside by the items on display and exclaim that they haven’t seen something like that since they were a kid. How do outmoded objects come to have a renewed appeal to neighborhood residents and tourists, old and young alike, rather than being seen as junk? By giving value to otherwise valueless objects, regulars and visitors at the GLR produced a sense of warmth and hominess in the midst of disorientation and disconnection in an ever-changing urban environment.

Image Description: Shelves and cabinets, bedecked in old telephones, storage tins, televisions, clocks, thermoses, books, and other items are surrounded by brightly colored hanging paper décor. To the right of the frame is a plant, close to a large window that is partially obscured by the many objects in the photo.
Caption: One part of the collection, comprised of objects from neighbors’ homes, at the Guest Living Room. Hanna Pickwell.

Although the GLR somewhat resembled a shop or a museum with its displayed collection of interesting objects, it was more akin to a community center where aging neighborhood residents would come to socialize. I had never visited anywhere like it. Everything in the space had been brought to the GLR by regulars there. They told me that when the space opened in 2017, the founder had appointed it with old furniture, including the glass cabinet they recognized from 1980s and 1990s shops, which displayed a few items and had plenty of space for more. Over the next two years, community members filled every surface and empty stretch of wall with old things they no longer had a use for. As things accumulated there, the GLR became a metonymic extension of the neighbors’ homes. The everyday objects they had once lived with now intermingled on the shelves, sometimes receding into the background as ambient décor, and sometimes drawing attention to prompt commentary or stimulate personal or shared memories.

Some of the items remained in use. More than a dozen drinking vessels, each belonging to a different GLR regular, were kept clustered together in a tray, ready to be used when their owners stopped by, indexing the many cups of tea they had shared and would share together in the future. Even marks of inhabitation like scraps of food, the resident cat, or excess items stacked tightly into corners made the space feel inviting to the neighbors, who referred to it as a second home or a niang jia—a woman’s natal family home that she would move away from after marriage, but that she could return to intermittently and always feel like she belonged. In his study of a London neighborhood, Daniel Miller found that lives rich in relationships with material things were often also the richest in their relationships with people, since the routines and patterns that built up around things provide comfort and stability. This was also the case at the GLR, where objects were not passive decorations or mere clutter; they were integral to the sociality that unfolded in the space.

Image Description: A neat pile of clementine fruit peels and leaves are gathered at the center of the frame, on a brown table. There is a second pile of peels and a few peanut shells in the left foreground. In the background, a blurry television set can be seen on a table crowded with indistinct objects next to a glass display cabinet and a wooden bureau. There are banners, and décor hanging on the wall behind, leaving very little white wall showing through.
Caption: Fruit and nut peels on a table at the GLR. Hanna Pickwell.

A staff member told me that neighbors were eager to donate excess things to the GLR; they had limited space in their small homes, and besides, rapid development and increasing financial resources had produced an appetite for new, modern styles of home décor that didn’t match the aesthetic of old things. According to him, the things that people tended to donate had “no value” (meiyou jiazhi), and were not even worth 10 kuai (approximately $1.50 USD). Even junk collectors wouldn’t want the stuff in the GLR. But these things must have some worth, I replied, since the neighbors had brought them to the GLR rather than simply throwing them away. He conceded, smiling, that the stuff in the GLR did give off renqingweir—a “flavor of human feeling.” I often heard regulars and visitors use this word, which combines the warm emotions of a personal relationship (renqing) with the sensation of smell or taste (weir), to describe GLR’s atmosphere.

The staffer’s simultaneous denial and acknowledgement of the value of the old, used things in the GLR—that they had no exchange or monetary value and yet gave off this homey flavor of human feeling—resonates with contradictions I had been investigating through the changing value of secondhand commodities in post-socialist China. Everyday objects like old clocks, lamps, and basins which I had seen as junk on the street and or sold for next to nothing in secondhand markets a few years before are now framed in museums, public art, and on postage stamps as nostalgic heritage. Meanwhile, historic hutong neighborhoods like the one surrounding the GLR remain popular destinations for tourists seeking a unique Beijing atmosphere. How could it be that the same things were at once seen as valueless and also key to a place’s specificity and warmth?

The objects that accumulated in the GLR, then, told a complex story of value. It was true that most of the items populating the GLR lacked exchange value and use value in contemporary Beijing. The knuckle bones have been displaced by flashier plastic toys; ration tickets can no longer be exchanged for rice or cooking oil; even a beautiful quilt, handmade from fabric scraps fifty years ago, can no longer fit with the desirable aesthetic of a modern home. This quilt was made by the GLR founder’s aunt, who had considered throwing it out since it wasn’t being used. When her nephew installed it in the GLR as a door partition, the aunt was so pleased to know that it could be “useful” again.

Thrift and resourcefulness were especially important to the aging GLR regulars, who had lived through times when material plenty could not always be expected (see also artist Song Dong’s Waste Not). The oldest among them had been children during the scarcity of the Great Leap Forward; younger neighbors were born around the time of the Cultural Revolution, and grew up accustomed to rationing of food, cloth, and other essential resources, coming of age just as economic reforms began to marketize and globalize the Chinese economy. Regulars who had donated seemed delighted by the new uses their old things had found as décor and as instigators of interest or conversation. Spared from the rubbish heap, they could remain part of the social world (see Wang 2012).

Image Description: A calico cat crouches inside a glass display case. On the glass shelf above her we can see an old video game, a tambourine, a *jianzi*—a toy that is meant to be kicked and passed between players—and other miscellaneous objects. On the same level of the cat are several balls, an abacus, a toy drum, and several wooden objects.
Caption: A cat crouches amongst the GLR’s collection in a display case. Hanna Pickwell.

The GLR collection also kept the past present. Younger tourists and students often had no idea what the objects filling the GLR had once been used for, and older regulars were eager to tell them about how these things once fit into their everyday lives, bridging generational difference. Moreover, China’s cities, and especially Beijing, have undergone accelerated material transformations that accompanied the dramatic political and social changes of the past century. Although they are now seen as rich with historical charm, hutong neighborhoods like this one have aging and inadequate infrastructure, and many were targeted for demolition in the 1990s and 2000s. They are now often redeveloped into more upscale versions of themselves, and purged of lower income residents, migrants and their small businesses, and unauthorized buildings. In this context, history and community feel continually at risk of being blasted away.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that I often heard renqingweir, that “flavor of human feeling” that evokes the sensory and emotional warmth of relationships, invoked to name what is often lost in the processes of rapid development and modernization. Brought together by a community of aging residents in a neighborhood that has seen its share of change in a rapidly changing city and society, the gathering of objects at the GLR was a stabilization of an atmosphere of renqingweir. Like the domestic objects in Miller’s research, collections do seem to have a special power of shoring up identity by externally objectifying the collector’s senses of self and of control in the world (Baudrillard 1996[1968], Stewart 1992). In this case, the collection was collectively authored. Like the collection itself, any “identity” or quality that the GLR helped to stabilize was not fixed but continually being altered and added to by community members. But the most dramatic change came when the GLR closed its doors due to the pandemic in early 2020. After months of uncertainty, the space was eventually permanently closed, and the collections were moved to into storage, where they will remain until a suitable place can be found. Renqingweir is indeed a fragile quality.

The mostly outmoded things, brought to the GLR from nearby homes, set the scene for a particular flavor of social life to unfurl there. Casual social drop-ins, collective meals, handicraft workshops, and holiday celebrations took shape organically in a space that felt like it belonged to the neighborhood regulars and where they felt they also belonged. The regulars shared the GLR, which they called a second home, with a diverse array of objects of little economic value that seemed to materialize the hominess and “inclusivity” (baorong) that they said set this place apart. The atmosphere of renqingweir, then, was produced both materially and socially, ineluctably linked to broader political, economic, and social contexts beyond the particular place where it was, however briefly, given space.

Hanna Pickwell is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation research on the social efficacies of used and outmoded commodities in China has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright, and the China-US Scholars Program.

Cite as: Pickwell, Hanna. 2022. “A Flavor of Human Feeling in Beijing.” Anthropology News website, April 11, 2022.