Routledge Contemporary China Series, 91. London; New York: Routledge, 2013. xv, 192 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$135.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-50135-4.
With China becoming one of the largest economies in the world, the rising Chinese middle-class citizens and their astonishing consumption power have become popular topics in Western media. Yet, in academic circles, the urban middle class as an emerging social group has fallen under the radar, unlike migrant workers, whose work and lives in big cities and industrial towns have received consistent careful examination. Dr. Ren’s timely empirical study allows readers to glimpse the framing processes of the middle-class subjectivities in contemporary China, with an unconventional perspective that elaborates on the performances and effects of an ethnic museum and theme park-based ethnic tourism.
Inspired by Foucault’s “dispositif” in his study of biopolitics, Dr. Ren defines the Chinese middle class as “a dispositive class”: an ensemble of forces, practices and discourses that is “both strategic and technical” (12). To unravel this dispositive class, Dr. Ren follows a three-prong framework: the normative formation of the middle class as a governing strategy; the institutional framing of middle-class subjectivities by cultural industries including museums, theme parks and media; and the self-making process of middle-class individuals as rational, responsible consumer citizens.
Specifically, Dr. Ren starts his discussion by tracing the rhetorical transformation of class composition in official documents in China (chapter 1). When a socialist state was transformed into a neoliberal state from the late 1970s, the “from-cradle-to-grave” planned economic system was replaced by a market-oriented system that redistributed risks and responsibilities to individuals. The proletariat was no longer the leading class as stated in the old constitution. Thanks to surveys and statistics as tools that articulated the newly established truth of the existence of the middle class and other classes, a new class structure recognizing the effects of the new self-making processes was inscribed in official speech and documents. Thus the formation of the middle class is more than a result of economic growth, but is itself a political strategy of the neoliberal state in legitimizing its rule ideologically and institutionally.
In the next three chapters (chapters 2, 3, 4), Dr. Ren extrapolates the framing of middle-class subjectivities from his ethnographic examples of a Yi ethnic minority museum in Sichuan Province and the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park in Beijing. Museums and ethnic parks illustrate the transformation of cultural institutions that served propaganda purposes to cultural enterprises in China’s neoliberal transformation. As themed spaces, museums and ethnic parks provide controlled built environments to present different temporal and spatial narratives about lives that deviate from those in the socialist period. The adaptation of TV media further promotes the new narratives by bringing the spectacular, including ethnic festivals performed in the ethnic parks, to a broader audience than those who can afford to go to the pricey ethnic park. The new narratives communicate the idea of life as a strategic response to external changes and of nonlinearity and heterogeneity as constitutive of human quality and community life. These narratives resonate with the new configuration of social stratification that is drastically different from the poor but relatively even past. In this sense, with the help of media, ethnic museum and theme parks form part of the governing apparatus that manages risks in the neoliberal order, on the one hand, and teaches the middle class “what living a Chinese everyday life means, should mean, and will mean” on the other (72).
Dr. Ren then continues to explain self-making processes by examining the tourists’ as well as the ethnic workers’ experiences in the ethnic theme parks (chapters 5, 6). He depicts how the tourists took costumed photographs and how they sought to maximize the value of the tour by participating in as many ethnic performances as possible. Seeing these occasions as illustration of the do-it-yourself way of individualizing living, Dr. Ren argues that they are also stages that demonstrate middle-class civility and cosmopolitism, and training grounds that orient individuals to be rational consumers. Yet, the middle-class tourists’ self-refashioning would not be possible without the ethnic workers’ affective labour. Despite their precarious lives in and outside the ethnic park, Dr. Ren argues that these workers’ performance of being “authentically” ethnic enables the framing narratives of the middle-class subjectivities.
The Middle Class in Neoliberal China is theoretically engaging and ethnographically interesting. It is thought provoking for Dr. Ren to argue that the middle class in China can be understood as a statistical fact and a political strategy in articulating a new political order. Inspired by the Frankfurt School and later cultural studies scholars, Dr. Ren’s investigation of ethnic tourism goes beyond the conventional framework of ethnic studies, and probes into the realm of subjectivity in tandem with new forms of governmentality. The propositions of China as “a neoliberal state,” and of identifying the hand-over of Hong Kong in 1997 as the transitional moment from socialism to neoliberalism, which Dr. Ren developed in his previous book Neoliberalism and Culture in China and Hong Kong: The Countdown of Time (Routledge, 2010), will continue to be a touchstone for scholars grappling with neoliberalism and China’s transformation. Nevertheless, while the book poignantly analyzes the changes in the framing processes of the new class structure, the readers might still wonder whether the potential framing effects of the new political representations through work and leisure are unique to the middle class or in fact equally applicable to all social strata. As other scholars have demonstrated, the values of individualization as required by neoliberal strategies are well articulated among migrant workers as well as the new rich. Yet, after all, a class structure is inherently built on distinction, if not confrontation. That said, Dr. Ren’s book contributes greatly to the ongoing discussion of China’s structural transformation.
Jun Zhang
The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
pp. 577-579