Hair Washer Number 5

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Her last name is Xu, but she insisted that I call her by her number, 5, Hair Washer Number 5. She called me Pretty Lady, or 美女 (meinv), a common form of address for women between the ages of 17 to mid 30s, but nothing I’ve ever been called. After I laughed and asked if I was truly a meinv, Xu explained that women like to be called pretty, and even when they were as old I was, to call them Auntie (阿姨 ayi) or Older Sister (大姐 dajie) might make them unhappy. I acknowledged how difficult it was to know how to address strangers, especially without an introduction.

Xu came to Shenzhen 3 years ago, when she was 15. She has been working in the beauty industry for two years now and took a job at this salon, which markets Korean style service and products because “For people without education, or money, or status,” she explained, “the only thing we can do is learn a skill and make our future ourselves.” She hopes to learn enough to someday open her own shop. She works 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, but says that once her trial period is up she will have one rest day a week.

As she kneaded my arm, Xu shyly asked, “What do you do when you’re upset?”

“I meditate and go for walks.”

She nodded slowly and then, eyes intently fixed on the skin of my inner arm, she told me that this afternoon at lunch she cried from weary exhaustion. Then her manager and several co-workers urged her to stop crying and toughen up, after all, if she didn’t learn to eat bitterness when she was so young, it would only get harder as she aged.

I asked if the crying helped.

“No, nothing’s changed.”

I fumbled to clarify, “I didn’t mean the question rhetorically. I just wanted to know if you felt better after you cried.”

She nodded her head once.

“Then cry,” I said, “and when you feel better, analyze your situation and figure out what to do next. You’ll make worse decisions when you’re tight and unhappy than you will after a good cry.”

She looked at me and then resumed kneading my other arm, adding softly when she finished, “Next time you come, ask for Number 5 and we can talk again.”

Humbled, I left the salon, hoping for the courage to return, ask for Number 5, and listen to her story.

海湾村: land locked futures

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The Transformation of Shenzhen Villages (沧海桑田深圳村庄30年), Episode 9: Haiwan Village tells the story the Nantou Peninsula and the reclamation of land in Houhai (the southern coast facing Hong Kong) and Qianhai (the northern coast facing Guangzhou). This was the platform from which Hong Kong entered China and Baoan villagers once launched themselves to Hong Kong.

During the Mao era, Wanxia Village was divided into two production brigades, one land based for agricultural cultivation and the other water based for oyster farming. Eventually, the Wanxia Oyster Brigade was renamed Haiwan Brigade, creating two administrative villages through the division of one natural village. This division points to the importance of production — rather than history — in defining Maoist administrative units, especially in rural areas, where villages were integrated or split depending upon production needs. Importantly, however, these administrative categories were not naturalized in the same way during the early years of Reform and Opening, when some administrative villages re-instituted traditional boundaries while others did not. Haiwan retained Maoist status and began building village level factories.

Access to the sea shaped village demographics, with a population gap of people, ages 45-65 who escaped to Hong Kong in the last large flights in 1968 and 78, respectively. Nevertheless, traditional land rights enabled Haiwan to prosper. In addition, we learn from an older, Cantonese-speaking villager that Haiwan Village is an Overseas Chinese village, with many descendants scattered throughout the world with village association buildings in the United States and Hong Kong, representing support, ranging from monetary to knowledge to investment connections. The village has also maintained its identity through traditions and ritual that centered on a small Tianhou Temple.

Watching this episode, I suddenly realized something that was clearly obvious to the filmmaker: Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour coincided with the establishment of guannei villages as stock-holding corporations and urban neighborhoods. In other words, the second tour did result in new policies or breakthroughs as they are known. My a-ha moment was in seeing the connection between politics and the radical restructuring of the south china coast.  The episode ending rhetorically juxtaposes images of Wall Street with Houhai, asking if Shekou can become the next Manhattan. The question is illuminating not for its booster-hype pretensions, but rather because it clearly reiterates the primacy of investment and real estate over traditional livelihoods such as oyster farming. In such a world, insofar as the sea becomes a factor in determining property values and not an independent source of value, reclaiming the sea makes good business sense.

winners of the “dare to upset” china prize

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Today, I received a list of 10 winners for the “dares to upset China (敢动中国)” Awards. The Awards are a snarky spoof on the Annual “Touches China’s Heart Awards (感动中国奖)”, punning the words “dares to upset” and “touches the heart”. Heart awards are presented at the Spring Festival and given to persons whose heroic actions inspire us to be more than we think we are. A pervasive and not unimportant bit of contemporary propaganda, heart award presentations are highly stylized performances and broadcast nationally. To get a sense of the ideological packaging, view the tribute and award presentation to Liu Jinguo for his courage during a fire.

The dares to upset awards point to the emergence of China as a global player and public reception of that process in vaguely hawkish terms. Notably, the dare to upset awards have been presented Asian countries that involved in maritime disputes with China, especially in the mineral rich South China Sea. Of note, the word “dares” points to the point that the winners are “small’ countries that should not be giving China problems. The fact that so many little nations dare to upset China is consequently interpreted as a sign of national weakness and the snarky commentary on the list states, “China has used habitual responses: the enemy invades, I endure; the enemy retreats, I endure; the enemy is exhausted, I endure; the enemy occupies, I endure… this is called pretending to use Sun Tze’s Art of War (敌进我忍，敌退我忍，敌疲我忍，敌驻我忍。。。装孙子兵法).”

According to the latest text message, the 10 winners for the 2012 Dares to Upset China Awards are:

1. Japan (for the Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands Dispute);

2. The Philippines (for the Huangyan Island or Panatag Shoal dispute);

3. North Korea (for holding Chinese fishermen in a dispute over fishing rights, although there is no dispute over North Korean refugees in China because the PRC regularly repatriates them);

4. South Korea (for demanding that Beijing release a South Korean activist who has been detained in the PRC without legal representation. The activist works for democracy in North Korea);

5. Thailand (is the new coordinating country for ASEAN – China relations, inheriting the three-year term from the Philippines)

6. Palau (the location of another disputed island, Okinotorishima);

7. Indonesia (has persecuted Overseas Chinese, but in April signed a cooperation agreement with China);

8. Myanmar (is opening its economy and China and the US are rushing in, however, last year the Myanmar government halted Chinese construction of a dam because locals felt that Chinese petroleum interests were too hardnosed);

9. Nigeria (is host to one of the largest Chinese presence in Africa. More than 200 Chinese companies operate in Nigeria, more than 40,000 Chinese nationals live in Nigeria, and total Chinese investment in Nigeria is close to $US 8 billion);

10. Somalia pirates (have been targeting Chinese vessels since 2008 and there have been calls for Chinese military intervention);

what i realized this june 4

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On June 4, 1989, I was in Japan. That year, I had been diligently learning Japanese pronunciations for Chinese characters and memorizing [subject]-time-place-object-verb sentence patterns. The Chinese democracy movement, the call for transparent and clean governance, and the military crackdown came to me filtered through Japanese television because CNN was not yet global. Only after the fact would I learn about the two month build-up to the sight of tanks grinding through the Beijing streets. It took me years to understand the significance of Shenzhen reforms to inspiring the movement as well as how the crackdown unmade many of the political reforms, culminating in the 1992 Southern Tour, when Deng Xiaoping announced that economic liberalization would continue. Political liberalization would emerge piecemeal and in unexpected places, but no longer with the hopeful momentum of the early 80s.

Nevertheless, over the past years, I have noticed that my knowledge of events has been less important than the nitty gritty of everyday life in transforming June 4 into a meaningful symbol.

On Saturday, for example, I went to a coffee shop, where a man was lying on the ground, hands clawed, some kind of froth at his mouth, trembling. Two guards stood and another man sat, watching. I asked if an ambulance had been called. They answered, yes and I went into the coffee shop. Over twenty minutes later when I came out to look for someone, the man was still on the ground and no help to be seen. This time, I dialed 120 and connected with a dispatcher, asking a former student to explain what was happening. This decision disturbed the watchers who explained that the man was a thief and that he had faked a seizure when the guards had caught him. Moreover, according to the guards he frequently came by and stole things. The guards seemed less concerned about the man then they did about being seen not taking care of him. They stopped me from taking a picture and, when help did finally arrive, they kept repeating, “There’s nothing to see,” and pushed people away.

I left the coffee shop, came home, jumped online, and saw blog posts and articles on June 4, which caused me to make sense of the incident in larger, cultural terms. “China is a place where dissatisfaction with the regime or petty thievery can cost a human life,” I thought, “therefore people tend to be cynical and to ignore the suffering of strangers.” The coffee shop incident also allowed me to hear Chinese leaders repeating to other world leaders and journalists, “There’s nothing to be seen.” Consequently, my anger at the coffee shop guards grew into a nightlong bout of “what the fuck am I doing in China?” These were not happy or useful thoughts. Instead, as the anger cooled, I realized that I had argued with the guards about what should be done and our different values (them bad, me good). In retrospect, however, what is clear is that in actual practice our values were the same — we became increasingly angry with each other rather than wiping the froth at the man’s mouth or placing a pillow under his head.

This was not the first time that my sense of outrage has led me to fight with others rather than to comfort a suffering being. Consequently, June 4 this year, I listened to Pema Chodron‘s teaching on Shantideva’s The Way of the Bodhisattva in hope that by working with and through my anger, I will achieve something of the revolutionary patience necessary to change the world:

The hostile multitudes are vast as space –
What chance is there that all should be subdued?
Let but this angry mind be overthrown
And every foe is then and there destroyed.

honey lake: the charm of organic kitsch

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Honey Park PK OCT Bay.

In the early 1980s, the Honey Lake Resort was designed as a suburban getaway for the folks working “downtown” in the city limits that conventionally ended at the Shanghai Hotel. Almost three decades later, the Resort Area has been picked apart to make room for the Urban Planning buildings and lawns, the Lake fenced, and the concrete boxy hotels, yurts, and three story castle gradually transformed into a kitschy smorgasbord of themed dining experiences. The labyrinthine alleyways in Honey Lake transform dinner into a proper urban adventure, where the creativity of our neighbors offers unexpected worlds.

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the social media production of mutual assured cross-cultural contempt in the US and China

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By now, most have heard that Global Times, the Party’s international mouthpiece printed an editorial which called for the Chinese public to permit a moderate amount of corruption; if you haven’t jump over to Fauna’s piece at ChinaSmack for translation of the article and web responses. The self-justifying rhetoric and virulent counter-attacks illuminate the cynicism and anger that increasingly characterize public debate in the PRC micro/ blogosphere. Moreover, the virulence and smugness of English language responses to the post need to be analyzed in terms that explain the ongoing social media production of mutual assured cross-cultural contempt in both the US and China.

In many ways, the cynicism of the exchanges remind me of populist diatribes in the US; I actually can hear Mitt Romney and other anti-gay or anti-black or anti-women or anti-child advocates calling for “moderate levels of discrimination” and exhorting the country to “understand” the necessity of continued legal inequality because there are so many incompatible definitions of discrimination and we need to respect everyone’s traditions. The pseudo-rational justifications for continued discrimination understandably anger those who directly suffer the consequences of said laws and customs.

Just how closely does the tone and rhetorical form of US and Chinese popular debate mirror each other? Below, I have copied the Chinese editorial and substituted the following keywords, underlining the substitutions in text:

  • discrimination for corruption
  • prejudiced for corrupt
  • strong economy for development
  • prejudice for income
  • America for China
  • Western for Asian
  • Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney for Railway Minister and Party Secretary Liu Zhijun (and yes, in both countries we keep pandering to our lowest acceptable prejudices and greed, respectively)

I have made these substitutions to make a simple point; although the effects of economic globalization and political inequality are different in the PRC and the USA, nevertheless the turn to cultural justification and excuse-mongering is similar. Moreover, tone of the debate transcends relative levels of legal freedom of expression. The anger and absurdity of debate in the Chinese micro/ blogosphere is matched by the anger and absurdity of debate in American television and radio programs (Hello, weibo and Fox News).

The implications of this point, however, are far from simple when our respective national debates end up in our interlocutor’s public sphere. For US citizens, for example, it is difficult to understand the prevalence of and popular resignation to Chinese corruption. Likewise, most Chinese see US concerns about gay marriage and reproductive freedom to be a cases of privileged angst. In the worst case scenario, we focus on the other’s words to explain/ justify our inability to reach mutual understanding because, it seems so obvious, that our interlocutor has such fuck-up values. As a result, in both both countries, we end up focused on the cultural content of public debate, rather than on a shared political-economic structure that has created what are in both the PRC and USA, untenable situations.

So, another call for creative rethinking of what forms cross-cultural understanding and dialogue might assume when translation might do more cross-cultural harm than good.

The modified text begins below:

The American Public Should Permit a Moderate Amount of Discrimination

It was announced yesterday that Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney won the Texan nomination. This piece of news once again touched the public’s most sensitive nerve, that dealing with discrimination. From a national perspective, there is indeed continuous news of discriminatory officials being elected, which does give people the feeling that discrimination is “unending/overwhelming”. They aren’t catching/arresting less, it’s that you can never catch them all [never finish catching them all]. Just what is going on?

America obviously has a high incidence of discrimination, and the conditions for completely eliminating discrimination do not exist at present. Some people say, as long as we have “democracy”, the problem of discrimination can be easily solved. However, this kind of view is naive. The West has many “democratic countries”, such as Indonesia, the Philippines, India, etc. where discrimination are all much more severe than America. But America may very likely be the Western country with the most pronounced sense of “resentment towards discrimination”.

This is related to America’s “serve the people!” official political morals having deeply been engrained in the people’s heart throughout society. However, the reality is that the market economy has attacked its practicality/feasibility, resulting in government officials who half-heartedly observe it or have even betrayed it constantly slipping through various cracks in the system. America is a country that has been deeply penetrated by globalization and the high standards of integrity of developed countries is already known by the American public, and with information coming from different periods and different circumstances being forcible stuffed into America’s sphere of public opinion, bitterness and consternation can find no relief.

Discrimination in any country is unable to be permanently controlled/cured, so the key is to control what the degree that the people will permit/allow. However, to do this is particularly difficult for America.

Singapore and China’s Hong Kong institute a policy of high pay to discourage discrimination. Many Chinese political candidates are wealthy, and normally when someone becomes a government official there, they accumulate renown and connections. After office, they can use then various “revolving doors” to change all they have accumulated into financial return. However, these options and possibilities are not available in America.

Giving government officials power to discriminate is something American public opinion cannot accept. Allowing government officials to step down and use their influence and connections to discriminate against groups is something the system does not allow. Allowing the prejudiced to become government officials is something that people find even more unpalatable. The legal prejudice of America’s government officials is very low, and the compensation for officials of some places is often realized through “unwritten rules”.

All of American society now has some “unwritten rules”. In industries that involve the public welfare such as doctors and teachers, “unwritten rules” have also become popular. Many people’s statutory prejudice isn’t high, but they have “gray prejudice”.

What are the boundaries for “unwritten rules”? This isn’t clear. This is also one of the reason for why there are relatively many discrimination cases now, with some even being “cases of a community of discrimination”. Amongst the people, there is the popular saying that “what is commonplace amongst the people cannot be punished by the law”, and the moment government officials believe this saying while believing “others are the same as me”, then he is already in danger [of becoming prejudiced].

Those who engage in discrimination must be strictly investigated, and not to be tolerated, as this would greatly increase the risk and cost of discrimination, creating the requisite deterrent effect. The government must make the reduction of discrimination the biggest objective of their governance.

The people must resolutely increase supervision through public opinion, pushing the government to fight discrimination. However, the people must also reasonably understand the reality and objective fact that America is unable at its present stage to thoroughly suppress the discrimination, and not sink the entire country into despair.

Writing this definitely does not mean we believe fighting discrimination is not important or should be put off. Quite the opposite, we believe fighting discrimination indeed is the number one problem that must be solved for the reform of America’s political system, and it is also the common demand of the entire country.

However, we believe that fighting discrimination is not something that can be completely “fought” nor completely “reformed” because at the same time, it needs “strong economy” to help solve it. It is a problem of the individual prejudiced officials as well as the system, but that’s not all. It is also a problem of the American society’s “overall level of strong economy”.

Fighting discrimination is a difficult/entrenched battle in the strong economy of American society, but its victory at the same time hinges upon the clearing of various obstacles on other battlefields. America can never be a country where other aspects are very backward and only its government officials are egalitarian. Even if it is for a time, it won’t last long. Eliminating discrimination would be a breakthrough/turning point for America, but this country ultimately can only “advance overall” [any specific progress requires overall progress/strong economy].

WHERE ARE YOU FROM?

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This afternoon, as I struggled out of a damp shirt in the yoga studio changing room, a woman turned to me and enthusiastically asked, “Where are you from?”

“Where are you from?” I countered, recognizing her as new to a studio, where I’ve been practicing for four years.

“Here,” she gestured generally behind her, “What about you?”

“Here, too,” I replied mirroring her gesture.

“I don’t believe you,” she challenged.

“That happens,” I admitted, “a lot.”

17 years into my Shenzhen sojourn, I am still trying to come to terms with my decision to live outside the United States because (a) I reside in a community that treats me as a just arrived guest and (b) my snail mail address notwithstanding, at times I’m not actually sure I left my homeland, and not always because the US and China function as each other’s neoliberal doppelganger. Instead, I abruptly realize the US is all in my head.

As a misplaced second grader in rural Wisconsin, I explored the library through weekly visits, where I maxed out my card (five books at a time) and convinced the librarian that yes, I could finish Bambi in a week and still get through another Nancy Drew or three. No, I would not be playing after school with “little friends”, I would be reading, but only if I had enough books. She laughed at my determination, but permitted me to borrow my limit and even sneak another mystery into my father’s check outs.

I fidgeted through high school classes, and when not lurking in the library, I stayed in the art room, painting and building “The Tommys,” a series of convoluted trees and meandering vines molded in clay and glazed in over-saturated complementary colors that repelled sustained appraisal. I remember arranging vivid magenta petals on a neon green trunk, and writing unreadable letters in yellow ink on purple paper — catch me if you can. When I launched from the Jersey suburbs into a Vermont college, I believed that a new place and a new people, a new life would satisfy my yearning; I studied Chinese language and literature convinced that once settled elsewhere, it would be HEA 24-7.

My early life wasn’t all teenage angst because my craving for distraction had an upside; I read deeply, broadly, and well. I cried each time Charlotte died, and then Old Yeller, was seriously confused by Fiver’s visions, and imagined myself taking on IT with Meg and, yes, I still read YA literature, most recently Hunger Games. I crushed on Oscar Wilde and his baroque fables, fell in love with Adrienne Rich and TS Eliot, H.D. and WH Auden. Emily Dickinson, Jane Austin, Willa Cather, Edith Warton, Louis de Bernieres, Salman Rushdie, Graham Greene, Dashiell Hammett, E. Annie Proulx. And although I started college bored by  Robert Frost’s plain simple, I have since realized that the moral conundrums which grip my heart also root me in his New England soil — Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…

And that’s point du jour. The literary sojourns that once enabled me to ignore shag carpeting and sod, encouraged me to have adventures, now remind me coming full circle doesn’t mean anything so pedestrian as showing up on a childhood front porch, not that I wouldn’t enjoy walking the lake to see how the neighborhood has changed. Instead, that brutal question shocked me into what I might have seen earlier if I interpreted my life with the same close attention I give to reading; perhaps my childhood dramas of displacement have compelled me into literal — rather than literary — exile, where I can confidently say, yes, yes, the stories are true.

union elections in shenzhen

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In keeping with Shenzhen’s place at the core of Guangdong reforms, Shenzhen has announced that 163 companies with more than 1,000 employees will introduce elections for union leaders. These elected representatives will then work with the City, District and Precinct level union organizations in order to represent worker rights in negotiations with company management. According to Southern Daily, the impetus for this move has been ongoing independent worker demands for better wages and benefits. Indeed, the first company to implement the election system was OMO, a German company with a plant at Bantian. The article notes that holding union representative elections seemed to have dispelled worker dissatisfaction.

I’m not sure how to interpret this development other than to note that provincial Party Secretary, Wang Yang is actively promoting this reform. Indeed, as we approach the Two Conferences season, Wang Yang has been very active promoting “Happy Guangdong (幸福广东)” and its recognizably middle class values. It is also worth mentioning that the targeted 163 companies are large and many are foreign. Hopefully progressive change at larger plants will help less protected members of the workforce. The problem, of course, is that like the US American workforce, the Chinese workforce is fragmented into segments that receive more and less protection depending not only on worker skills, but also public visibility. Large, international companies are monitored not only by Chinese unions and news media, but also to some degree by foreign groups and media. In contrast, a large segment of the population works under unseen conditions in smaller factories, restaurants, and services or does piecework at home.

But still. One hopes.

just what is china studies anyway?

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These past few days I have been reading essays on the social organization of power in the PRC. Most of these essays were written by political scientists and economists, but the odd anthropologist makes an appearance as does the occasional historian.

Here’s the rub: I can’t really tell the difference between this kind of scholarship and everyday gossip in Shenzhen.

Our gossip tends to be about people we know, but importantly also about people with power to make decisions that directly affect our well-being. We see someone do something and then speculate about how and why it happened. We try to anticipate what they will do and how we might get them on our side. But this data gathering and analysis is all tenuous and shaky, and often leaves me feeling both convinced I know what’s happening (vaguely), but also unwilling to make definitive statements because I don’t actually know. Instead, I have a residual belief that someone somewhere can explain what is happening; there is, we maintain, a position of knowing, just not with me, here.

Now it’s not as if this tendency to conflate gossipy analysis with research has gone unnoticed within scholarly circles. Consider, for example, the following 1995 quote from Frederick C Teiwes (Paradoxical Post-Mao Transition: From Obeying the Leader to Normal Politics):

Despite the unprecedented openness of the 1980s and a surfeit of purported inside information, in crucial respects we know less about politics at the top today than we do for the Maoist era. Given the secretive nature of the top leadership, it is hardly surprising that participants in the system often express the view that ‘nobody knows’ what goes on ‘up there’. … Even highly placed figures, including those with personal knowledge of the very top leaders, feel limited in what they know, and their assessments sometimes are at variance in significant ways with those of younger, more middle-level officials either in China or living in exile. Given these limitations, scholarship has unfortunately relied extensively and often indiscriminately on suspect Hong Kong sources to fill the gap. As Lyman Miller has observed, the Hong Kong press has recorded ‘a flood of reports, stories, rumors, and sometimes speculations and fantasies about political events in China’.

My speculative sense du jour is that 15 years after Teiwes cautioned us about how much could actually be known and methodologies for securing some kind of confidence in what we think we have learned about China’s highest ranking leaders, weibo may have allowed this unstable situation to perfect itself. The yearning to know, the speculation and furtive analysis. The 140 character limit, the anonymity, the instant forwarding of unconfirmed posts has blossomed in China not only because its fun, but also because it is parasitic upon and supplements the extant situation — what we know, we glean and extrapolate from conversations, incomplete news articles, and our experience of acting within and against everyday life, whether in China or abroad. Thus, I read caveats about how information and conclusions about China’s ruling elite might be and think, yup that tallies. Not just with my experience of unbridgeable distance between moi and the Center, but also with my experience trying to navigate office politics in Shenzhen unreliable and listening to my friends talk about their experiences trying to navigate even more complicated office politics.

So what?

I’m thinking that there’s a kind of cross-cultural overdetermination in the popularity of weibo and its increasing importance as a subject and source of academic knowledge about Chinese political culture. Chinese people use weibo to create public spaces and then scholars speculate on what it means about Chinese society because in large states, like China but also like the United States for that matter, none of us, even those of us in power actually know what’s happening. We live by creating networks of trust and when public trust falters, we turn elsewhere. Recently, Professor Zhao Dingxin (joint appointments at Chicago and Fudan) gave a talk on”Weibo, Political Public Space and Chinese Development” and Owen Lam has translated portions of the transcript and netizen responses to the talk. Zhao Dingxin asserted provocatively:

Weibo is an absolutely democratic but highly manipulative mode of communication. It is democratic in the sense that the user only need to write a few sentences. Once a person knows how to login, s/he can start writing regardless of the quality. It is manipulative in the sense that each voice does not register the character of an equal vote… If a person controls a lot of money or certain technology, s/he can hire an online army to magnify their voice and create fake public opinion. The space for manipulation is huge.

And my immediate response is, well, yes because within any human relationship the space for manipulation grows with levels of distrust and competing desires. But that space is within each of us and not simply the product of technology. Clearly, the kind of speculative practice that thrives on weibo pre-dated the invention of social technologies. Perhaps instead of an exclusive focus on technology, it might be helpful to ask what about human nature makes weibo so attractive? What fears and desires leave us open to manipulation by digital phrases? The Chinese government is trying to contain the effects of rampant rumors and gossip-mongering by instituting the real name registration system (实名制). I wonder if it wouldn’t be more useful to think creatively about how to rebuild public trust, knowing that this is itself the work of a lifetime.

accidental exhibition, thoughts on the 7th sz sculpture biennale

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Co-curated by Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu, and Su Wei, the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, Accidental Message: Art is Not a System, Not a World (偶然的信息：艺术不是一个体系，也不是一个世界) has two sections, “Unexpected Encounters,” which presents the curators’ take on pivotal Chinese work from the 90s, and “What You See is What I See,” which showcases international artists with whom the curators have engaged over the past few yeas.

Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu have written that their decision to juxtapose 1990s Chinese artwork with recent global artwork (including several Chinese artists who now travel on those circuits) in terms of a “secret glue” and the “mental bonds” that exist between creators, rather than needing “to be delineated according to artificial art politics and planned boundaries of the art system (exhibition catalogue page 25).” In other words, this is not an exhibition about the developments in sculpture over the past two years, or even about placing sculpture into conversation with other medium to get a sense of how digital art and video (the two strongest elements in the show) have reshaped our appreciation of what Benjamin once identified as sculpture’s yearning for immortality. Instead, Accidental Message is a celebratory catalogue of the desires, taste and experience of three people.

I actually get the curators’ urge to categorical disruption and their yearning for “unexpected encounters, chance glances, open hearts and respect for individuals (p 25)”. We all of us want to be recognized as unique personalities, creating connection through idiosyncratic gestures and resonating heartbeats. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure I get the impulse for random hook-ups because alienated, individual and individualizing subjectivity and celebration thereof are symptoms of neoliberal political economics and I was raised in the neoliberal suburbs of New Jersey and currently reside in a neoliberal with Chinese Characteristics Shenzhen neighborhood, [1] where pleasure is derived by crafting oneself into a subjectivity that can be picked up and broadcast over diverse, global networks, unhampered by borders or culture or paychecks or jobs or even history, in short to become a “creation of serendipity and individual spirit.”

Thus, point du jour is actually quite simple. Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu, and Su Wei did not randomly encounter artists and ideas, but did so within the institutional context of art schools and certification, art grants and residencies, and arts funding choices, all which increasingly reflect the ongoing privatization of art for the benefit of corporations and their shareholders.

This year’s show, for example, coincided with the decision to rebrand the Shenzhen International Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition as the Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale and hold it at the Overseas Chinese Town Contemporary Arts Terminal and B-10 gallery. OCT is a major Shenzhen real estate developer that has marketed itself through appeals to high cultural consumption, personal taste, and of course individualized pleasure. Indeed, the event also signaled the general upmarketing of OCT culture industry as an integrated component of its real estate projects. OCAT has been formally established as an independent, not-for profit art museum and as Overseas Chinese Towns (now a recognizable lifestyle brand) develop across the country, the Museum will take the lead in creating a series of art centers under the “Art Museum Cluster Program,” which the curators will take an active lead in developing.

Accidental Message runs until August 31. I enjoyed some of the pieces. I worry that taken as a whole, however, the show is not as subversive as the curators hoped, but instead exemplifies “business as usual” in Shenzhen’s push to become a player in global cultural industry. I close with impressions, below:

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[1] In her paper Enjoying Neoliberalism, Jodi Dean provides a relevant definition of neoliberalism as “…an economic doctrine that channels state intervention toward the elimination of projects of social solidarity in favor of privatization, economic deregulation, tariff reduction, and the use of public and monetary policy to benefit corporations and their shareholders.”