Authors: Unknown
From the tourist’s perspective, the participatory experience becomes intertwined with negotiating the carefully structured time provided by the park. If consumption indeed “creates” time and does not simply respond to
it
(Appadurai 1997: 27), then how do visitors develop a
new
sense of time—a new temporal relationship between external time and their own personal time—through consuming practices? Visiting a theme park as an activity consumes time; it takes the form of time management. First, planning a trip to the park entails an allocation of time set outside of the rhythms of everyday life. A visit to the park is associated with spending time with family members or friends. Many people visit the park as a group (whether as a family or as a group of friends or colleagues).
23
Moreover, visiting also involves creating a memorable archive by documenting the experience at the park in the form of a photo album shared with others or posted on the Internet (via such sites as Live Spaces, MySpace, and YouTube).
Of course, time is not all that is spent here. For many, particularly those who were drawn to the park on the basis of a simple direction given by a tourist map, a calculation of the monetary value of their time may be necessary. This was the case for a family, I had observed, who had come to Beijing from Jiangxi Province in the summer of 2000. The group included a woman (a schoolteacher in her early thirties), her mother-in-law, her daughter, her sister’s daughter, and two boys of other relatives. The total cost of admission for the group was 240 yuan for two adult tickets and three student tickets. The youngest boy did not require a paid ticket because he was still a preschooler. Although the younger woman, who led the group, felt the cost of the tickets to be higher than she had anticipated, she decided to spend the money anyway because they had taken all the trouble to get themselves there. Once inside, they took part in as many activities as possible, visiting all the villages, participating in the festival, and taking photos. The schoolteacher mentioned how pleased they were to see ethnic minority artifacts because they live far away from any ethnic minority region. At the Miao village, she spent twenty yuan to rent Miao costumes for all four children. The children laughed in excitement to see each other wearing the colorful and decorative clothing as the younger woman took photographs of them. In the end, the whole group wanted to be photographed.
A visit to the park is not, therefore, something that everyone can afford. In the case of my informants in this example, the admission was high enough to warrant a careful calculation of costs and benefits. The ability to pay for admission is a privileged one, thus pointing to the ways in which these practices of self-making are exclusionary, but also, as in this case, it can operate as a form of “self-fashioning” for those for whom it also acts as a form of aspiring consumption, one that is not easily affordable. If “self-fashioning”
means
“the unscripted, self-reflexive thinking and action that are continuously shaped and transformed by the diverse kinds of knowledge that circulate in the dynamic and globalized Chinese environment” (Ong 2008: 185), it is often an affirmative and positive mode of living (that is, life-building), one that tends to be available only to the privileged. For example, in a visit to Shenzhen’s Window of the World, a group of rural migrant women had carefully saved the price of admission and wore their best jeans and T-shirts so that they could enjoy their trip in the same way as other visitors. Once they were inside, however, they were called out by middle-class patrons as
dagongmei
(rural women migrant laborers) who properly belonged in the factory rather than in middle-class spaces of leisured consumption (Pun 2003: 484–485). This example suggests that rural migrant laborers—who are among the least paid and those who work the longest hours in China—are not normally acknowledged as those capable of self-fashioning. For the visitors in this case, I wonder whether the schoolteacher was willing to invest in the experience, not so much for herself as for the investment in her children’s middle-class mobility.
24
Learning about the ethnic minority cultures on display justified the value of their visit. The cultural value of ethnic minority culture on display is a form of leisured pastime that enriches middle-class identity as a form of educational play.
25
The sign of the ethnic becomes mobilized in capital accumulation and circulated through the reproduction of the tourist body as a consuming body. The photographs that capture these cross-dressed bodies (ethnic Chinese in Miao dress) commemorate a very uneasy decision of having to spend money to spend time in this way. Long after their visit, these photographs will enable them to wrest a value from their purchase again and again. In this particular case, sharing their experience with the absent husband and father of this family group will further extend the experience of their visit as a process of self-making, making their selves both known and knowable (Foucault 1988), in this context, as middle-class consumers.
The time spent at the park is a form of leisured pastime; it is, nonetheless, an instrumentalized time ordered by a logic of consumption. This carefully calculated time synchronizes the time of the cosmopolitan consumer with the time of ethnic minority cultures (in the forms of festivals and exhibitions). This synchrony operates according to a relatively coherent, homogenous, and teleological trajectory of consumption, aiming at shaping the visitor’s consuming habits in a prearranged manner (for example, the regular scheduling of festival display). However, it is often affected by a visitor’s personal
time, which comes from the rhythms of everyday life outside the park’s instrumental time. The visitor’s personal time is incoherent, heterogeneous, and contingent. It is organized not only by objective rhythms of work and leisure but also by spontaneous moments of daydreaming and pleasure. In participatory consumption in forms such as doing something together with family, friends, or colleagues; learning something about ethnic minorities; and walking around in the park, the visitor often negotiates with the park’s instrumental time through an enactment of personal time as a way to create a temporal consciousness of an exceptional visit.
In such a situation, contingency becomes unleashed as a power enabling a visitor to transgress the park’s instrumental time. As an act of suspending the regular rule of instrumental time, this transgression is an exceptional act, transforming the visitor into a sovereign consumer.
26
In this way, experience at the park becomes memorable. Photo taking, for example, may be practiced as an interruptive activity. When the Zang performers were ready to dance and sing at 9:30 one morning in the summer of 2000, a park employee announced the performance to the visitors through loudspeakers distributed around the park. As a result, visitors rushed to the Zang village. However, according to my observation, quite a few of them did not give their full attention to the singing and dancing. The hot summer weather might have been a factor, but I noticed that most of the visitors were more interested in taking their own photos in front of the performers than in being attentive to the performance. They had spontaneously chosen to confuse two forms of consuming practice: the cultural performance versus the occasional photo-ops already set up for them along their itinerary through the park to commemorate their visit. They refused their role as passive members of the audience by inserting themselves into the performance via the photograph.
A memorable experience at the park also may take on the form of a more active interruption. I mention two examples here, one positive and one negative. A group of twenty visitors from northeastern China arrived one morning at the Dazhao Temple in the Zang village exhibit. One man went up to the second floor and stopped in front of the statue of a Buddha. While holding a water bottle, he bowed to the statue. Afterward, he deposited a few coins into the donation box and said, “This small amount of money conveys my respect to you!” The man’s act of worship suggests that worship in the park is different from what might occur outside. In a normal temple, a worshiper would be either empty handed or holding a joss stick while bowing to a god.
Holding
a water bottle and donating such a small amount of money marked his act of worship as an interruption of normal or conventional behavior.
The eventfulness of this interruption is threefold. First, the bowing is a demonstration (or performance) of belief rather than of faith.
27
Here, belief is maintained as a moral value, despite not being treated as an object of desire, as in institutionalized religious practices. Second, the tiny donation is insignificant, but it is a gesture toward giving, an affective expression of charity, an impulsive act rather than a rational philanthropic effort. Nevertheless, it is considered as a norm of becoming a responsible middle-class citizen in China (CASS 2002: 253).
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The third dimension of the eventfulness of the interruption refers to the economic value of uselessness and idleness. Because the man has already paid for the admission, his worship and donation become a mode of participatory consumption. In this sense, the two activities reassure the built environment’s function as a consuming environment; his acts are productive activities because they actively consume the exhibits. However, their consumption is based on an interaction with a nothingness, whether the “idleness” of the statue of Buddha, which is, in fact, not connected to the actual religious institution of the Dazhao Temple in Lhasa, or the “uselessness” of the donation, which will not be used, in fact, to help the poor but in fact has become a part of the exhibit. Therefore, the eventfulness of the incident is fabricated by a moral demonstration of belief, an affective enactment of middle-class charity, and the production of exchange value out of a disembedded enactment of worship.
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A second example focuses on delinquency as an act of self-making. After visiting the temple in the Zang Village, two men in the group decided to go back to the main gate to hire a tour guide. While waiting, the rest walked into a gift shop selling jewelry, T-shirts, toys, books, films, and so forth. The solitary sales clerk was overwhelmed and thus failed to notice that a woman from the group took a brightly colored paper umbrella without paying. Later that day, as the group followed the tour guide past the shop, the sales clerk suddenly recognized the umbrella held by the woman and asked the woman to pay for it or return it. The woman denied taking the umbrella at first, but, due to the sales clerk’s insistence, she eventually returned the umbrella to the shop.
In this incident, delinquency is enacted as a form of negative agency. With the redistribution of social responsibility in China’s neoliberalization, a middle-class citizen is an entrepreneur, someone who becomes successful in
both
calculating the rules (rather than abiding them)
and
becoming responsible for his or her own behavior. Because the middle-class citizen is
responsible
for minimizing social risk, the person is held liable for increasing or elevating risk. The woman clearly miscalculated her ability to flout the rules without damaging her claims to middle-class respectability. The sales clerk did not call the park security guards but, instead, chased the woman and forced her to return the umbrella. This sequence of actions created a spectacle of discipline addressed not just to the shoplifting woman herself but also to the whole group by circulating a norm of calculated self-responsibility as a civic value.
All three practices discussed in the preceding paragraphs—photo taking, Buddha worship, and souvenir buying—are common enough activities. Indeed, the park is set up to invite and authorize visitors to do all of these things. However, this arrangement does not specify how and when these activities take place, nor does it determine which visitor will engage in them. Each visitor normally has a certain degree of autonomy in decision making. When a visitor interrupts a normal activity, however, the visitor begins to reveal whether she or he can be a sovereign consumer. This process of disclosure is critical to the formation of a middle-class citizen, a subject who is capable of becoming responsible for the self
and
for maintaining social order for the Chinese state. The positive outcome of an interruptive activity means that the process of rule calculating (rather than rule abiding) becomes successfully managed. The experience of the visit is made memorable and economically worthwhile. By contrast, the negative outcome of an interruptive activity signals a failure in middle-class self-making, while also operating as a form of disciplinary spectacle. The distinction between the two outcomes marks an important differentiation between being recognized as a self-responsible entrepreneurial subject and individual failure in realizing such a goal.
This differentiation goes beyond the environment of the theme park to being a practice central to urban (re)development across the country. The socialist-era work unit (
danwei
) as the primary structure organizing urban space is being displaced by a new entity defined as “community” (
shequ
). Through community building (
shequ jianshe
) in the form of gated communities, urban planning and real estate development tend to separate self-responsible middle-class subjects (such as educated professionals) from those considered to be incapable of bearing responsibilities (such as workers laid off from state-owned factories) (Tomba 2004; n.d.; Zhang 2010). Therefore, theme parks, shopping malls, and residential gated communities are not simply products in urban development, but they also engage in class production (including the middle class) through the production of architectural space.
Conclusion:
Chinese Middle-Class Risk Subjects
Although my ethnographic analysis focuses on situated practices in a themed built environment, it intends to highlight an important link between the spatial production of the middle class and of consumer practices. As economic, social, and political inequalities become increasingly visible in China’s neoliberal development, the middle class becomes explicitly a governmental mechanism for balancing between economic development (or capital circulation and accumulation) and social stability (risk management). The production of the middle class as the dominant social strata—a demographic solution to the risks of Chinese state and society—is a social engineering project of making Chinese citizens into responsible subjects. At stake are two ideal types of such subjects: those who assist the Chinese state to manage the risks resulting from neoliberal policies and those who are capable of addressing any risks emerging in their everyday lives, which include the risks of failing to take responsibility for themselves. Under the regime of the middle-class norm, responsible subjects become celebrated and differentiated from both those who underperform and those who mismanage their responsibilities.