Authors: Unknown
In order to encourage Chengcheng, Teacher Wei sits beside the little youngster, carefully explaining each question. Chengcheng’s 80-year-old grandfather continues to stand behind her holding a fan in his hand to swat mosquitoes away. The father and little brother have also joined in with the grandfather, helping Chengcheng by pouring water, looking through the school books. The small room of this ordinary rural family is filled with people, but it is very quiet, there is only the sound of the teacher’s soft voice. At this moment, Chengcheng’s mother comes out from the kitchen and watches the scene from a distance, the corners of her eyes are moist and she says softly, “Happiness is having the family together!” (CCTV 2007)
This scene of intense care for a dying girl indicates the value of each child for rural families who are allowed to have a second child only if the first born is a girl, as was the case here. The exam asked for an essay about her favorite animal, but Chengcheng decided to turn the assignment into a letter to the leukemia sufferers she had befriended in the hospital. The article continued with excerpts from her diary detailing the course of her chemotherapy. In one entry she promised not to cry anymore and to correct her “bad behavior” during the transfusions. In another journal entry about the
surprise
party to celebrate her return to school, she wrote about the “strenuous effort” (
chi li
) entailed to walk to school during the rains and the walk home from school in the afternoon and how her schoolmates would fall into the muddy puddles along the dirt road. The journalists writing her story also made an appearance as she wrote of how they trekked through the dirt path to attend her surprise party at the schoolhouse and then returned to her home to share a family dinner. The story ended with the grandfather carrying Chengcheng on his back to a waiting ambulance on the outskirts of the village because the road was inaccessible to vehicles after days of heavy rain. Finally, we learn that the publicity surrounding Chengcheng’s story has led to the local authorities allocating funds to pave the five-kilometer stretch of dirt road.
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What is arresting about this story is how the story of Chengcheng’s struggle with leukemia was transformed into a public campaign for a paved road. Her story may have been nominated as one of the most moving stories in 2007, but it is certainly not about saving her life. According to a posting on her blog site, she passed away on July 23, 2007. Her death was a given, but the surprise ending that the road will finally be paved meant that their campaign was a success—of a sort. It is difficult not to read this story with some degree of cynicism as an example of how local authorities were using Chengcheng’s case to receive economic aid for road construction. This suspicion is analogous to the cynicism of passersby who encounter the family on the street. However, in this case, it is the reader who suspects that this narrative has been deftly framed by local authorities by appropriating her voice, her actions, her intentionality, and her story.
Throughout the story, the mention of the dirt path can be seen to serve many roles in the narrative as well as to highlight the family’s poverty and the daily difficulties she faced. The desire for a paved road was again mentioned and even included in her letter to her friends at the hospital. At the end of the letter wishing her friends to be brave in the face of their illness, she closed with, “I feel very happy today, I am at home taking my final exam. Teacher Wei is tutoring me. Finally, many journalists have come to my home; they are all here on behalf of the dirt path in our village; they have worked hard. I really wish that this dirt path would be transformed into an asphalt road. How great would that be!” (CCTV 2007). Nothing can be done for a dying girl because this is, after all, an example of everyday tragedy, but the village can be saved through the building of a road. Public attention is directed not
at
the inadequacies of the health care system but on how the government construction of roads is the solution to the rural and urban divide. So who is the beneficiary of the media and government attention? Is there any other way to interpret this story as other than a justification for the priorities of the government? Melodrama with its potential for critiquing the social order is appropriated to fall in line with the imperatives of the state. Chengcheng was celebrated as embodying the quality held in high esteem by the Chinese Communist Party: self-sacrifice and service to the nation.
The Spectacle of the Commodity
Nothing happens; this is the everyday.
—MAURICE BLANCHOT, EVERYDAY SPEECH
I went back to where I had encountered the family of three in hopes of finding them again, but with no success. To borrow a term from Avery Gordon (1997), everyday life is full of “ghostly matters” haunting social life. There are many possibilities for why they may not have appeared again. It might be that they are no longer allowed to set up at that location by the local authorities. The mother told me that sometimes the security guards would take pity on them and allow them to set up in front of the mall entrance where they can collect more money. Or the son may have died and the parents returned home. Or, perhaps, new security guards chased them away.
My attempt to track them was to find a trace of their existence, their “realness” in an urban landscape that did not recognize their legitimacy to be there. China’s economic rise has been marked with the building of showcase cities such as Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Beijing, especially in anticipation for the 2008 Olympics and the 2010 World Expo. What the city has become today is a political stage set with much more sophisticated mobilization campaigns to advance a “socialism with Chinese characteristics” through the promotion of privatization, marketization, and “responsibilization” of the citizen-subject.
15
The family’s appearance in this showcase space serves as an unsettling remainder of what has been excluded. With their bodies marked as rural through their clothing, speech, and mode of address, the family is caught within the effacing
signification
of the everyday that indexes
the
future of urban life rather than its links to an agrarian past. The parents’ desperate desire to gain attention from the mass media affirms the promise of this medium to escape the nullifying experience of the everyday, “a visible negation of life” in the modern world (Debord 1994).
The problem is that there are too many of these stories out there. Their appearance on the street is a form of protest against the conditions that have been forced on them. They are refusing to allow their son to die unheralded in the remote countryside. Yet the parents recounted a narrative of family tragedy well rehearsed and likely familiar to passersby who have seen similar stories on Chinese television. The labor of publicizing their need must be entirely taken on by themselves, and, by its very nature, this is a labor of repetitive iteration, a story that must be told again and again. However, there is an entire genre of television shows dedicated to telling tales of hardship and moral conflict such as “Ethical Review” (
daode guancha
) or repentant testimonies by criminals such as “Repentant Record” (
chanhui lu
). In these stories, if there is a failing, it is on the part of the individual, the family, or the community, rather than being an institutional or structural failure. These stories are compelling because they are both exceptional and familiar, and their tragedy provides a moral lesson to the public that stops short of any political critique of the system.
Stories of poverty and hardship exist alongside tales of entrepreneurial success in the expanding market economy. One program on the CCTV agricultural station, called “On the Road to Good Fortune” (
zhi fu lu
), was a favorite program for a number of my urbanite friends. Each episode documented an industrious peasant who had discovered a new market for produce or had created useful goods from agricultural products. The freedom to construct a lifestyle of one’s choosing is the new promise of the marketplace filled with the spectacle of commodities. Jing Wang’s discussion of the government promotion of leisure culture in the mid-1990s provides an example of how the state reinvents itself as the protector of the right to “free” access to the market as the primary constitutive right of modern citizenship in a postsocialist state (Wang 2001a; 2001b). However, the sensibility honed by living in a “consumer revolution” (Davis 2000) is also increasingly permeated by suspicion of self-serving neighbors, the dehumanizing marketplace, and corrupt officials. A recognizable socialist system is receding from view, and what is left is literally smoke from polluting factories and the mirrored surfaces of shopping high-rises reflecting a shimmering vision of the modern
world.
The social security represented in the “iron rice bowl” of the state-owned enterprise is usurped by the commodity form. As the experience of daily life becomes increasingly dominated by commodities, the banal embodied in the everyday takes on monumental importance and needs to be examined in the context of a greater spectacle of state-sponsored development.
As Guy Debord argues, the spectacle serves to justify the dominant mode of capitalist production by obscuring the social relations of production: “The spectacle is the acme of ideology, for in its full flower it exposes and manifests the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment, enslavement and negation of real life. Materially, the spectacle is ‘the expression of estrangement, of alienation between man and man’
” (Debord 1994: 151). Spectacle and distraction depoliticize the social sphere and direct public attention to the realm of the private car, the private home, and a private life. However, it is exactly private life that has become the terrain of politics. The increasing sequestration of politics in the domain of the personal is at the core of neoliberal governmentality. The Beijing Life Channel is a prime example of how the governance of personal life has expanded into a daily lineup of shows such as: “Facing Life,” “Healthy Life,” “Life Is Beautiful,” “Happy Life,” “Seven Days,” “Can I Help You?”, “I Love My Car,” “Fashion Circles,” “Charm Front,” “Clever Secrets,” “Big City/Little Stories,” and “Fill the World with Love.”
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Programs of this nature represent consumer liberation as a democratic revolution. Consumer choice and rights are the new rallying agenda for the public and the government.
Televisual reenactments of daily concerns expose moral stakes in everyday actions. Therefore, the shows that dole out tips on cooking, home décor, and fashion on the Beijing Life Channel are broadcasting the virtues of providing for family, working hard to afford a comfortable home, and consuming appropriately to express one’s standing in life. Social standing is increasingly expressed through consumption practices that validate one’s place in the world (Bourdieu 1984; Ren,
Chapter One
in this volume). However, the family on the street lacks the means to become the valorized consumers of the new economy, and they are trying to resuscitate a subject position from which they can legitimately speak about their suffering. The new registers of public recognition dismiss the specters of failed subjects as part of the everyday marginalia undeserving of attention. The family is seeking transcendence from banality to consequentiality bestowed through the media.
The
identification cards displayed by the parents not only substantiate their claims to authenticity but also express a desire to be anonymous no longer.
In a media environment already saturated with the spectacle of commodities and state propaganda, the misfortune of a dying son is not spectacular enough to attract any particular notice from an audience already numbed by “compassion fatigue.” According to Susan Moeller, “compassion fatigue” comes from the way the media covers crises so that the viewer feels “overstimulated and bored all at once” (1999: 9). For example, in the coverage of famines in Africa over the past two decades, Moeller states, “The problem with famines . . . is that they just are not considered newsworthy until the dying begins” (1999: 13). The stories begin to sound alike with their redundant images and well-trodden scripts so that “once the parameters of a news story have been established, the coverage lapses into formula. . . . Formulaic coverage of similar types of crises makes us feel that we really
have
seen this story before. We’ve seen the same pictures, heard about the same victims, heroes and villains, read the same morality play” (1999: 13). This leads to even more sensational reporting to elicit sympathy from viewers. If the story is not gruesome enough, then it is not worth reporting, even though the stories that do get reported follow a familiar formula so that it is “déjà vu all over again.” And that is truly the tragic dimension of the family on the street: They are the background noise of the radio or television program that saturates daily life but does not penetrate the consciousness of the listener or viewer. As Maurice Blanchot suggests, “The everyday loses any power to reach us; it is no longer what is lived, but what can be seen or what shows itself, spectacle and description, without any active relation whatsoever” (1987: 14). The distracted consumption of news media and the casual glance of the observer on the street are both manifestations of everyday indifference.
Morality Tales
The appearance of families and individuals seeking charity on urban sidewalks is illustrative of structural inequalities, but these people are ultimately
not disruptive
of the social order. In fact, both stories of dying children traffic in a “society of spectacle” (Debord 1994). Both narrate the resilience of the family in the face of tragic odds. The difference between them is that Chengcheng’s story becomes tied to a vision of economic growth through
media
exposure, whereas the story of the family in Beijing is part of the everyday ephemera that quickly pass out of sight, a “ghostly matter.” Both of them register in different ways the changing relationship between the city and the country. The economic policies of the state have led to what Yan Hairong calls the “spectralization of the countryside” in which the countryside has been negated as a place to build a viable life.
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