Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. vii, 260 pp. (Tables, B&W photos.) US$23.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-6193-0.
According to the text on the jacket, contributors to this volume see China as “haunted by the promises of capitalism, the institutional legacy of the Maoist regime, and the spirit of Marxist resistance.” Although it is hard to disagree, the chapters that explore the tensions underlying contemporary Chinese society do not add up to a new conceptualisation of how it might embody, as Carlos Rojas suggests in the introduction, both global capitalism and its communist antithesis. The concept of contradictory “protocols” dictated by these conflicting impulses, featured in the title, suggests an ambitious conceptual agenda, but remains unexplored by most contributors and offers little to connect the chapters. It is through the empirical richness of the heterogeneous but generally high-quality case studies that the book ends up presenting something of a diagnosis of contemporary China’s contradictions, though some have been covered in earlier work by these and other authors.
Yomi Braester analyzes the imagery of billboards surrounding the rebuilding of Beijing’s Qianmen district, suggesting that they combine the celebration of the past with conjuring up the future, making the realities of the present disappear in the eyes of passers-by. Robin Visser shows how the wave of “eco-city” construction does little more than rationalize land transfers and facilitate suburban sprawl. Alexander Des Forges’ chapter is essentially a critique of a collection of texts by Chinese intellectuals on how migration was shaping a putative new Shanghainese society in the 1990s, a discussion rather characteristic of that period and therefore somewhat out of place in this volume. Bryan Tilt examines conflicts over dam construction on the Nu River, arguing they represent competing moral visions. In one of the most interesting chapters and the only one that engages with the concept of “protocols,” Kabzung and Emily T. Yeh argue that the teachings of senior Tibetan Buddhist monks who oppose the sale of yaks for slaughter as sinful ultimately converge with the objectives of state officials who encourage it, since both emphasize the need for Tibetans to become more “modern” through education and integration into the nation’s capitalist economy.
In a highly original contribution, Xiang Biao argues that the resilience of China’s political system is due not only to coercion, nationalism, and developmentalism, but also to what he calls a structural chasm between citizens’ understanding of “the state” as a moral actor and the logic of economic self-interest that frames their interaction with local officials. Xiang insists that this duality is not the traditional belief in the good emperor, but rather a legacy of “socialism” that enables people to preserve a political subjectivity not folded into neoliberal economic subjecthood. Rachel Leng’s chapter analyzes online gay fiction to point out tensions between the conflicting “protocols” that view homosexuality as both urban “cool” and subordinate to the demands of heteronormative domesticity. Lisa Rofel describes the hopes and fantasies of migrant workers in garment factories that produce garments for export to Italy. In some ways, her emphasis on encounters and hope echoes Xiang Biao’s “ethnography of incidents” in China’s labour export industry; these chapters also come closest to addressing the theme of “global China” indicated in the book’s subtitle. Finally, the chapters by Ralph Litzinger and Carlos Rojas analyze films that deal with the generational tensions between the desires of migrant workers and their children.
The book makes no attempt to make sense of the considerable variance in emphasis across contributions. For example, the hopeful note Xiang ends on, that the preservation of political subjectivities outside the realm of the neoliberal economy should allow the envisioning of possible futures, goes against Kabzung and Yeh’s conclusions in the preceding chapter. It would be interesting to ask to what extent that difference is due to diverging methodological and conceptual apparatuses and to what extent it is affected by differences in the groups studied (Han urban middle class versus rural Tibetan poor). The absence of such questioning on the editors’ part is a missed opportunity, since the chapters provide glimpses (albeit of uneven depth) of some of the best scholarship on the issues they cover. An actual conversation between the authors could reflect on, rather than merely showcase, the state of the art in studying contemporary Chinese society.
Nyíri Pál
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
pp. 792-793