Authors: Unknown
The neoliberal transformation of the Chinese state has led some Chinese scholars to consider its consequences. The Chinese economist Yu Wenlie, for example, mentioned four major problems in 2004:
1. The increasing gap between the rich and the poor presents a challenge to the socialist distribution system (
fenpei zhidu
).
2. The privatization of state-owned enterprises and “state-owned assets” (
guoyou zichan
) damages the socialist “collective ownership system” (
gongyouzhi
).
3. The government’s “malfunctioning” or “misbehavior” (
shiwei
) in the market damage the socialist market economic system.
4. “The urban-rural twofold economic structure” (
cheng xiang eryuan jingji jiegou
) and the increasing economic disparities among regions damage the balanced development of the national economy. (2004: 20)
These shifts have turned Chinese society from one of the world’s most equal societies to one of the most unequal. China has become a risk society in which responsibility for employment, welfare, education, health, poverty alleviation, and environment have become redistributed from government to nongovernmental organizations and from the collective to the individual.
5
During China’s neoliberal transformation, governmental and social policies have shifted from regarding peasants and workers as model citizens to “disadvantaged groups” (
ruoshi qunti
). Their lack of various kinds of capital (political, economic, and cultural), unequally redistributed during the economic reforms (Yi Wang 2003; Li 2003; Xiao 2003), has made them less able
to
take responsibility for livelihood, health care, and education. Forming the largest segment of China’s population, they are viewed as a threat to the stability of Chinese society in case of a state emergency, such as an economic or political crisis or even a crisis of biosecurity, as in the case of an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) or avian flu. To address these problems of security, government officials, policy experts, and scholars advocate for the growth of a middle class (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences [CASS] 2002; Hu 2003; He 2003; Qin 2003) as necessary for balancing the contradictions between economic growth and social stability produced by neoliberal reforms.
6
They attribute a stabilizing power to the middle class in addressing such issues as social inequality, aspirational life ways, and civic discipline. Although the middle class is still statistically small in size, it is anticipated to grow to become the predominant social class so that the pyramidal shape of the present social structure will be transformed into the ideal olive shape (CASS 2002).
The conceptualization of the category of the middle class to address the structural problem of Chinese society has built on an extensive sociological and journalistic literature on China’s new class strata since the early 1990s.
7
Many of these studies were proleptic in nature: representing something that has not yet come into view as if it already existed in fact (Anagnost 1997). This figure of prolepsis suggests the performativity and productivity of all the discourse on the middle class. It also marks the practical development of the middle class as a project involving many actors, including governmental and nongovernmental organizations, corporations, educational institutions, and individuals (government officials, businesspeople, and ordinary citizens). The development of the category of the middle class reflects a fundamental policy change in understanding cultural transformations in China’s economic reforms (Ren 2007a).
The middle class as a normative category becomes intelligible through systematic uses of statistical surveys by population scientists, state planners, and government bureaucrats. Among many statistical surveys, the most influential one is carried out by some of China’s leading sociologists in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Between 1999 and 2001, they conducted the first systematic nationwide sociological study of China’s social stratification since the end of the 1970s. The CASS project, under the full support of the central government, surveyed over twelve provinces and seventy-two cities, counties, and districts. Major “findings” were included in
a
411-page report, entitled
The Report on Social Stratification Research in Contemporary China (Dangdai zhongguo shehui jieceng yanjiu baogao)
(CASS 2002) (for an in-depth analysis of this report, see Ren 2010b). A major study like this provides a national standard for developing the category of the middle class through statistical thinking, based on “numerical inscriptions” such as tables, figures, charts, and equations (Greenhalgh 2005: 357).
Beyond abstract statistics, the category of the middle class is primarily used in two ways in popular culture and everyday life. The emerging nouveaux riches (
xin furen
) have a special interest in advocating for the term
middle class
, along with associated concepts such as “public sphere” (
gong-gong kongjian
) and “individualism” (
ziyou zhuyi
) (X. Wang 1999; Xue 1999; Luo 1999). They use the term
middle class
to characterize their experience and lifestyle as a “successful person” (
chenggong renshi
), prototypically portrayed by the mass media as a married middle-aged businessman. He wears designer labels; owns a house with a garden; drives a car; socializes in bars, nightclubs, and hotels; plays golf; and attends concerts (X. Wang 1999: 29). He enjoys a “practical existence” (
shizai
) of a comfortable life, the “freedom” (
ziyou
) of consumer choice, a “stylish appearance” (
qipai
), the “prestige power” (
zunyan
) of his wealth, and a “cultivated appreciation for the finer things” (
mei
).
8
Such a celebration of a person’s success in achieving middle-class status embraces a cosmopolitan experience at the expense of the Maoist historical experience.
9
Whether the nouveaux riches and successful people described in the preceding paragraph are proper middle-class subjects is subject to debate. Besides its representation as the experience of the nouveaux riches, the middle class is primarily used as a norm to regulate and discipline behaviors of Chinese citizens to make them become more responsible, not only for the ongoing stability of Chinese society but also for their own success or failure. In the following section, I analyze how individuals who aspire to become middle class develop their responsibility-bearing capacity by looking at a specific context of middle-class consuming practice: the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park in Beijing. Drawing on ethnographic research first begun in 1996, I show how a private corporation shapes the conduct of consumers and how consumers carefully calculate their responses to this regulation. Their deviations from the plan are tolerated as long as they also contribute to the development of certain capacities for bearing middle-class responsibilities and values.
Responsive
and Responsible Consumer Practices
Themed built environments, such as department stores, shopping malls, theme parks, and specialty restaurants, are spaces designed to produce certain kinds of consumer subjects.
10
This shift represents an international trend toward integrating the combined practices of shopping, entertainment (through cinema, arcade games, and amusement rides), education (through stories and themes), merchandising (through copyrighted images and logos), performative labor (of the front-stage employees), and control and surveillance (of both employees and consumers) (Ren 2007b).
11
Each themed built environment targets a group of consumers presumed to be middle class.
12
The design of the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park targets its visitors as a coherent group who will be transformed by their movement through its space into responsible consuming subjects.
This park is an outdoor exhibition of the life ways of a number of China’s fifty-six officially recognized national minority cultures through displays of housing, costume, and performance. In the broader context of the tourist industry, according to its general manager, the park is operated as “a means for distributing culture, linking together knowledge, entertainment, participation, and taste. Not only does it guide tourists to ‘look,’ but it also directs them to ‘play’
” (quoted in Zhang Tongze 2001). I argue that the park instantiates the process of middle-class self-formation in three ways: First, it encourages the internalization of the norms that define middle-classness, such as decision-making (consumer sovereignty) and the performance of civility (
wenming
). Second, the cultivation of an appreciation for ethnic minority culture marks a form of cosmopolitanism (a tolerance for difference) for the urban consumer, while also inciting subjects to engage in an ethical relation to an ethnicized Other through charitable endeavors. Third, these practices position middle-classness according to a neoliberal logic of calculation rather than observance of the law, a logic that defines citizenship in terms of entrepreneurial subjecthood.
These aspects of middle-class self-formation constitute a form of bio-power: the power to “regularize” life, the authority to force living not just to happen but to appear
in a particular way
(Foucault 1995). At the park, a particular way of living takes the form of active participation in consuming practices. The carefully designed scheme of operations that constitute the park produces the park’s visitors as middle-class consumer citizens who
are
supposed to possess the values of civility, cosmopolitanism, and morality. Visitors must negotiate the park’s policing of space in the form of uniformed guards, walls, gates, warning signs, and other visible and invisible surveillance techniques. Through this process of active negotiation, the visitor as an individual consumer experiences the park as an act of self-making according to the norms defining middle-classness. Entry to the park, in itself, is contingent on the ability of the visitor to pay what might seem to many to be an exorbitant price for a ticket (60 yuan for an adult ticket, about US$7.50).
13
In this sense, entry to the park engineers a segmentation of the marketplace in which the price of a ticket exercises a form of exclusion. Along with other forms of spatial segregation in urban places, it effects a form of graduated citizenship.
14
Access to these places produces middle-classness first and foremost by being limited to those who can most afford it.
15
My observation of visitors at the park illustrates these processes of middle-class self-formation. Established in the early 1990s, the park is located to the west of what has since become the National Olympic Center in Beijing. It occupies a total of forty-five hectares divided into two sites.
16
The north site, about twenty hectares, was first opened to the public in June 1994. Development of the south site was completed more recently, in 2001. The cost of construction for the first phase of development was about US$36.1 million, 85 percent of which came from Taiwan and Hong Kong investors.
17
As described in a brochure, the park “blends the architecture and cultures of Chinese minorities to provide visitors with a unique place to experience the life of the minorities in the metropolitan capital.”
At the north site, the park is organized into sixteen life-sized replicas of ethnic “villages,” each representing the vernacular housing and dwelling environment of one of China’s national ethnic groups (
minzu
).
18
Each village displays artifacts used in daily life, furnishings, domestic architecture, cultural performances, and items for sale, such as food, tea, and souvenirs. Park employees who participate in the cultural performances were hired from their home villages or towns.
19
The principle for constructing each village, as a senior manager told me in 1996, is that of “respecting nature and representing reality.” Based on this principle, material for each exhibit was imported from the ethnic area it represents, and construction was carried out by experienced ethnic craftspeople brought to Beijing for that purpose. For example, a dark purple plant that was used for architectural decoration in the Zang (Tibetan) village was brought from Tibet, and a company based in Lhasa did the construction work under the direction of a Tibetan architect.
The
use of Tibetan design and materials by a Tibetan construction company “authenticates” the “original flavor” of the exhibit (Xie 1995: 424).
The exhibit of ethnic cultures (
minzu wenhua
) in the park participates in a form of temporality pervasive in Chinese representations of non-Han others that relegates them to a space of tradition outside of urbane modernity.
20
However, the temporality of the park is also marked by a series of monthly “festivals” (
jie
), such as New Year celebrations in January and the Dragon Boat Festival in June. These are composed of both official national holidays and the festivals of different ethnic groups.
21
In the park’s operations, however, the celebration of a festival does not strictly line up to the annual succession of months but follows a more practical logic of providing for tourist consumption.
22
The Dai Water Splashing Festival, for example, has been featured as a form of cultural display since the park’s opening in 1994. It begins in April when the festival in Yunnan takes place and runs as late as October. The park’s management contracts with local governments in Yunnan Province (from either Xishuangbanna Prefecture or Dehong Prefecture where there are concentrations of Dai people) to employ ethnic Dai to perform.
These performances (in the name of a “festival”) are scheduled in close coordination with the movement of visitors through the different exhibits, shops, and restaurants. For example, a forty-minute performance is scheduled at the Dai village at 9:30 in the morning, drawing visitors to linger there; another performance is scheduled at 10:30 in the Miao village, a twenty-minute walk away. After watching the second performance, visitors move on to new scenic spots. As they begin to feel hungry around lunchtime, they find themselves arriving at a restaurant in the Buyi village, as engineered by the park management. Many visitors choose to eat at the restaurant, although some either carry their own food or choose to continue their tour of the park. The structure that channels the flow of visitors through the park not only encourages them to consume but also produces a competitive advantage for the park management. Because of its strategic placement, more visitors eat in the restaurant located in the Buyi Village than in another restaurant that leased a retail space within the park. This arrangement reveals the park as a highly structured environment, which overdetermines how it will be consumed. Visitors are positioned as consumers who are directed toward the appropriate modes of economic behavior already set up for them.