Peasant cultures of the twenty‐first century 1

Abstract

In the last quarter of a century there has been a fundamental change in the historical situation of post‐coloniality. The new conditions under which global flows of capital, commodities, information and people are now regulated have created both new opportunities and new obstacles for post‐colonial countries. The old idea of a Third World, sharing a common history of colonial oppression and backwardness, is no longer as persuasive as it was in the 1960s. The phenomenal growth of China and India in recent years has set in motion a process of social change that, in its scale and speed, is unprecedented in human history. I will argue that the forms of capitalist industrial growth in the twenty‐first century may, in large agrarian countries like China, India and the countries of South‐east Asia, make room for the preservation of peasant production and peasant cultures, but under completely altered conditions. The analysis of these emergent forms of postcolonial capitalism requires new conceptual work.     

On the continuing necessity of anti-Americanism

Abstract

In Hong Kong, even though the Bill of Rights Ordinance (the localized version of ICCPR), Sex Discrimination Ordinance and a series of legal reforms (such as the cancellation of marital exemption of rape and the recognition of sexual discrimination in criminal law) were enacted and introduced respectively since the 1990s, gender/sexual discrimination in the legal discourse still persists; for example: Chinese customary law which only recognizes the male’s right to build small houses in the New Territories remains an exception under the Sex Discrimination Ordinance; the government insists on not tabling an anti‐sexual‐orientation discrimination bill; the right to same sex marriage/partnership is still absent from any legal‐political agenda; and so on. Some politicians and academics argue that any attempt to transplant a Euro‐American individual‐centric perspective of gender/sexual equality/justice will violate the Han‐Chinese culture of harmony. In the paper, I will adopt a critical perspective in examining the above argument and examine why harmony politics becomes a meta‐narrative in Han‐Chinese socio‐legal culture and how human nature/subjectivity is re‐constituted in such a context. I will further argue that a culture should always be meticulously and critically represented and investigated in order to reproduce ‘gender/sexual justice’. I will also investigate the possibility of scrutinizing and exploring the spaces of resistance within the Han‐Chinese socio‐legal culture in Hong Kong, where foreign theory of gender/sexual justice/equality and related legal reforms can be engaged to politicize current discrimination and suppression.     

“Make every Indian a creator of intellectual property”: Mumbai's casual labour as a creative class

Abstract

When the Government of India declares its plan to convert Mumbai's Kala Ghoda art district into India's equivalent of Times Square, it does something that many Asian countries are doing in their understanding of the needs of the creative industry. In Mumbai's case, however, such an act has several additional historical echoes. This paper proposes that the origins of the so-called ‘creative class' lie in the failure of the city's historic 1982 textile strike, which saw the return of an artisanal practice to the city, often practiced by a class of casual labourers being forced to turn into low-end entrepreneurs without financial security. Such an artisanal entrepreneurship has had a far more complex relationship with industrialization than most theories recognize, and today's cultural industries are effectively replaying a longer history of this class in Bombay that may go back to pre-colonial and colonial times. The paper explores both the colonial and developmental interventions into this artisanal class as essential histories to understanding their new relationship to the ‘creative’ economy into which they are being presently inserted.     

The power of circulation: digital technologies and the online Chinese fans of Japanese TV drama

Focusing on the online Chinese fans of Japanese TV drama, this paper explores the way in which the fan subculture, in connection with digital technologies, has carved out alternative practices in the circulation, production and consumption of Japanese TV drama. As ‘minority audiences’ who are not targeted as the objects of capitalist interests, online Chinese fans invent spaces for Chinese transnational networking with self‐help and sharing, as a way of resisting the aloofness from marketing strategies of Japanese TV distributors in Asia. This case study reveals that the online Chinese fan clubs, the websites for downloads, pirated VCD markets, digital file conversion, and private VCD burning – all of these have linked endless networks for the digitalized circulation and consumption of Japanese TV drama. The online Chinese fans are guerrilla fighters in the politics of autonomy, network and low‐cost digital technology; they are attempting to break down time–space constraints and the official distribution hierarchy. Such fan practices shed light on the new trends of audio‐visual consumption via digitalization.     

Beyond the anti-American sentiment

Abstract

This paper juxtaposes the predicaments of two popular stars in Asia whose mobility in their respective cultural fields became challenged by political sentiments in 2004. Chang Hui‐Mei (A‐Mei), the aboriginal pop diva from Taiwan, became the target of a protest organized by Chinese ‘patriots’ before a performance in Hangzhou. The event set off a series of public debates involving high‐level Taiwanese politicians, fans, and members of the public that recalled a similar controversy in 2000 when A‐Mei was banned in China after singing at the inauguration of President Chen Shui‐Bian. Some months later, Korean Wave star Song Seung‐Heon became the subject of a draft‐dodging investigation while he was shooting a highly anticipated TV drama, Sad Love Story. Support from different configurations of overseas fans poured in and remained strong even after he gave up the project and began his mandatory military service. Using these two parallel cases to reveal how politics and entertainment interact in Asia independent of stars’ volition, this paper investigates the affective investment and communication strategies of A‐Mei’s cross‐strait fans and Song’s Chinese‐Asian fans during these emotion‐laden circumstances. The inter‐referential approach of this paper not only reveals the importance of considering patriotism as a latent (rather than exceptional) political and popular force in trans‐Asian popular culture, but also reconfigures the relationships between the public, popular, and political in inter‐Asia cultural traffic.     

Chained to the grassroots: the music industries and DCMS

The paper analyses the implicit assumptions made by three key DCMS reports about how successful music products are made. I show how the reports divide the music sector into small and large producers, handing responsibility for innovation to small producers and expecting that large producers will exploit these innovations efficiently. I argue that this approach risks ignoring the realities of music production and contradicts the findings contained in the reports themselves. I conclude that a romantic idea of successful products developing from small producers may not only misrepresent and misunderstand small producers in the music industries but constrain them.     

‘Chinese’ Indonesians in national cinema 1

Abstract

Through much of post‐colonial history and particularly during the so‐called ‘New Order’ (under General Suharto), Indonesian citizens of ethnic Chinese descent have been caught in a strangely ambiguous position: they have enjoyed enormous economic power while at the same time being threatened with politico‐cultural effacement. This paper is an attempt to understand that ambiguity in relation to the Indonesian cinema – both around questions of industry history and around issues of representation of national and ethnic identity on screen. The paper traces the presence, the erasure and the absent‐presence of Indonesia's ethnic Chinese minority from the establishment of a film industry in Indonesia in the 1930s to the post‐New Order political shifts, opening up possibilities for a new public discourse of Chineseness. I argue however that the openness of current Indonesian culture and politics, while providing the necessary condition for re‐imagining the Chinese Indonesians, does not ensure a radical shift in a politics of representation, deeply embedded in the textual practices of the film industry and more widely in the cultural and political history of modern Indonesia.     

The development of comparable European cultural statistics

UK cultural statistics are far from complete, so the development of comparable European cultural statistics sounds like an ambitious task and one for which clear objectives are needed. One spin‐off from comparing the statistical systems of different countries should be some improvement in national statistics, as best practice is examined and taken up by other countries. However, the essence of the on‐going programme of work described in this chapter is the search for a common statistical language, to be used whenever cross‐country comparisons are wanted or European totals are to be compiled.

Compiling cultural statistics for different countries on a comparable basis sounds like a contradiction: how can the cultures of one country be harmonised with those of another? The key is to identify why the comparison needs to be made. In this chapter, therefore, current developments in European cultural statistics are reviewed by first exploring the needs for pan‐European cultural statistics that flow from policy.

The chapter describes and reviews a European Union project to develop cultural statistics that reported at the end of 1999. The results of this project have been taken into the European statistical system. Hardly any statistical results have yet been published. The chapter questions how far this work will progress beyond the UNESCO framework for cultural statistics. One significant issue is that the UNESCO framework, compiled some 15 years ago, gave relatively little attention to the creative industries. These industries now feature more strongly in policy responses to the wider economic and social challenges facing European countries and the European Union. The new work on cultural statistics gives some recognition to the creative industries but it does not embrace the full extent of the creative industries as defined in the UK.     

Made in China: the cultural logic of OEMs and the manufacture of low‐cost technology

Abstract

This paper investigates the conditions of the manufacture of low‐cost technology in China with the examples of ‘pirated’ VCD players, ‘no‐name’ DVD players, and Shenzhen’s development as a techno‐urban city. It emphasizes the significance of the cultural logic of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and argues that the various transformations and deflections that are derived from ubiquitous OEM experiences have gone beyond the original model of an authorized OEM, experiences that are to some extent embodied in the transgression of brand name and patent hegemonies, which are mainly controlled by high technology companies. OEMs have been associated with China’s current imperative and uninhibited development of low‐cost technology capitalism. ‘Made in China’ signifies the production of any product, legal or illegal, for transnational high technology giants or domestic technology manufacturers. Learning to ‘become an OEM’ in China has partly resulted in excessive technological mimesis that may be part of an unauthorized, underground economy that is based on low‐cost technology. Based on the Shenzhen experience, part of this study will show industrial production‐oriented OEM cultures in which illegal operations and counterfeit trade are incorporated, even in city projects that are shared by municipal governments and Chinese technological companies, and undergo spatial restructuring in the development of the economy, consumerism, and urbanism.     

Translation of ‘America’ during the early Cold War period: a comparative study on the history of popular music in South Korea and Taiwan

Abstract

The evaluation of the cold war influences played by the US on the rest of the world should not only be accounted economically and politically, but also culturally. In this paper we see the US influences on South Korea and Taiwan from the value‐laden concept of Americanization and through which we examine comparatively specific practices of domestic popular music development in these two countries. Setting this paper as a historical comparative study, we see the working of Americanization in relation to popular music as a value regime in which American is constructed as an ideal model imaginatively and discursively, which was made possible by economic, social and cultural forces in South Korea and Taiwan. Focusing on the Cold War period, circa 1950s to 1960s, levels and aspects of Americanization were therefore ways of translation, to use Said’s concept of traveling theory analogically; Anglo‐American music genres traveled to these countries to be incorporated contextually as new or trendy conventions of music‐making, which in turn helped form local music genres. The socio‐historical contexts of South Korea and Taiwan, with respect to the presence of American army forces, and similar postwar anti‐communist political forces, in nation‐building (north–south Korea, red China–free China antagonism respectively) are central to our understanding of the visibility of Americanization in different music cultures in these two countries. This paper will go into each country’s historical trajectory of music practices that took Japanese colonial influences up to the postwar time and then blending with Anglo‐American genres in indigenizing that eventually marked their different paths, as we comparatively reveal their institutional, political and national cultural conditions, which were necessary in shaping each country’s music‐making conventions, entertainment business, and consumption cultures of popular music – and that might implicitly inform tentatively the present rivalry between ‘offensive’ Korean Wave and ‘defensive’ Taiwanese ‘rockers’ in the globalization era.     

From boot camp to bu‐bu? IT surveillance,patriarchal familism,and labor control: a South Korean case study

Abstract

Information technology capable of real‐time evaluation has changed the nature of labor control by completely monitoring a system. This homeostasis of real‐time control eliminating the space barrier has increased workers' stress and anxiety and weakened the workers' solidarity. An IT surveillance system, frequently called an electronic panopticon, has been viewed as the sophisticated form of the Talyor principle of scientific management. However, IT surveillance has operated in the way of combined form with the cultural values of a certain society. In this paper, I show how cultural values influence labor control through IT surveillance using a case study from the tire industry. H tire company has introduced the DAS (Data Acquisition System) for increasing productivity through a new control system. Real‐time evaluation, an instant report of each workers' merit on the monitor, and compensation have made workers feel constantly under surveillance and under stress due to competition with other workers. This IT surveillance has more deeply influenced labor control when combined with patriarchal familism – composed of features such as group‐oriented attitudes, hierarchical relations between the old and young, subordination to one's seniors, etc, which have come to be viewed as some of the typical cultural values prevalent in South Korea. Although the basic principle of technology may be the same in all societies, the effects of applied information technology depend on specific socio‐historical contexts: not only culture, habits, and politics, but also the power relations between managers and workers. I will tentatively designate this as a ‘hybrid form’ of labor control, in the sense that cultural value is added or intermingled with the principle of IT surveillance.     

Hou Hsiao‐Hsien reviewed

Abstract

Press reviews of Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s films appeared in a range of European magazines at a time when Hou’s films were hardly, if at all, available for watching in European cinemas. This essay asks what, in this context, may have been the reviews’ function. By way of an examination of a representative sample of these texts, I argue that, far from negotiating a relationship between, on the one hand, the producers, distributors and exhibitors of Hou’s films and, on the other hand, Hou’s European public, reviews of Hou’s films served to mediate the gradual and capillary instillation of new modes of viewing films. Reaching Europe very sparingly at a time when European cinemas had finally capitulated to the increasingly aggressive marketing strategies of distributors of Hollywood produce, the construction of Hou Hsiao‐Hsien as an auteur became available for the ‘educational’ realignment needed in order to sell Hollywood cinema better, not in spite of, but because of, the negligible European circulation of Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s films.     

A Chinese in the new world: television dramas,global cities,and travels to modernity

Abstract

After having lain dormant for some 20 years during 1973 and 1991, the Singaporean film industry is experiencing a revival. Films produced since the early 1990s have been resolutely ‘local’ in their portrayals in an effort to ground this emergent cinematic modernity. Only a handful of these films have, however, received any international attention; most remain ‘too local’, ‘too colloquial’ to be exported further afield. This paper explores those visions or versions of the local presented in contemporary films from Singapore that simultaneously manufacture a brand of foreignness assimilable by international audiences. Through an overview of films from the revival period, this paper will show that the images that do travel successfully overseas are those that portray the dark side to Singapore’s road to economic modernization, the failed processes of an Asianized modernity. It is these images, representing one vision of an ‘authentic’ social reality, that is recognizable by international audiences in the context of previous successes by Asian films utilizing a shared form of (local) expression. My question is whether we can read these images as a particular kind of ‘slang’ – a vagabond expression that represents a filmic vernacular that also strategically invokes a cinematic modernity for the Singaporean film industry. This argument may extend to other (emergent) Asian cinemas that also participate in the production of this particular brand of foreignness. The paper will therefore provide some initial speculations towards the regionalization of cinema and ask whether such a move might be desirable and what its purpose might be.     

Discourse of cultural identity in Indonesia during the 1997-1998 monetary crisis

Abstract

‘Asian Pop’ cultural products, which include a wide range of media artifacts such as film, music, television drama, comic books, magazines, websites and fashion, have emerged as a popular choice for youth in Asia in recent times. These cultural artifacts feature prominently in the lives of urban youth in major metropolitan centers throughout Asia. This paper examines how Thai youths have become consumers of Korean pop (K‐pop), following the trend of neighboring countries. The popularization of Japanese pop (J‐pop), Taiwanese‐pop and more recently, K‐pop, is welcomed by the Cultural Industry as a sign of expanding borders and as a major step towards expanding its Asian market. On the one hand, growing consumption and mainstreaming of Asian pop might become problematic due to the notion of cultural ‘McDonaldization’/standardization, in the future. On the other hand, perhaps nationalism and national ties will manage to overrule this projected standardization. This paper explores the Thai youth’s consumption of K‐pop in the process of cultural appropriation vis‐à‐vis their ‘national’ cultural formation in changing socio‐cultural contexts.     

The emerging (national) popular music culture in China

ABSTRACT

Before the emergence of the modern sense of popular music in China, the uses of music in that country have been instrumental in serving political purposes for the state. The modern form of popular music began to enter China through Hong Kong and Taiwan – the two very political locales in which we could observe China’s political economy through the reception of their music in mainland China. How the Chinese authorities coped with the production, distribution and consumption of this ‘foreign’ popular music, is reflective of the swing of the pendulum between relaxation and control, and hence the changing ideologies of the state. Based on the cultural and institutional analysis on a few classical Chinese popular singers since the mid‐1980s, this paper illustrates such a transformation. The paper argues that the Chinese authorities have evolved from a dictatorial authority, which chose to control popular music by means of direct bans and censorship, to an active agent, through various strategies, managing and producing a kind of popular music that can be conducive to, and be resonant with, the national ideologies.     

The controversy over ' Fire ': a select dossier (Part II)

Abstract

Structured as a series of personal reflections on the relations between two Asian countries, this article moves between personal anecdotes during a visit to Beijing and musings on historical exchanges between India and China in the 20th century. Beginning with Tagore’s visit in 1924, the author includes Dr Kotnis’s heroic efforts at working with the wounded during the Sino‐Japanese War in 1938, Dr Bhabha’s invitation to S.S. Chern in the 1940s and moves on to a visit by a leftist folksinger, Hemanga Biswas in the 1950s. The present‐day expansion of tourism in a globalised Beijing provokes thoughts that contrast to the present with the past and also reflects on Indian perceptions of communism and the Cultural Revolution. A visit to a Biomembrane laboratory becomes the occasion for surveying the development of modern science in China. Finally, the article raises questions about the nature of cross‐cultural interactions that operate beyond linguistic and ideological barriers.     

Scenes from Timika,West Papua

Abstract

Hou Hsiao‐Hsien has been one of the central members of Taiwan New Cinema (TNC) since the early 1980s and subsequently took on the rising trajectory of becoming an internationally famous film master. In contrast, during the same period, the Taiwan film industry diminished dramatically and nearly collapsed. Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production and the thesis of political economy of communication, this article regards Hou as a social agent and accordingly analyzes the dynamic interactions between him and the structural factors related to the broader transformations of Taiwan film industry. Hou seemed to choose his filming and production mode subjectively from the beginning, but actually the possibilities he got at the time were limited by the social structures. In addition, his rising trajectory also has been embedded in the dynamic processes of global cultural economy. Paradoxically, by the same local and global processes, Taiwan film industry has been seriously declining.     

Conceptualizing an East Asian popular culture

Since the 1980s, popular cultural products have criss‐crossed the national borders of East Asian countries, enabling a discursive construction of an ‘East Asian Popular Culture’ as an object of analysis. The present essay is a preliminary attempt to provide some conceptual and analytic shape to this object, delineated by its three constitutive elements of production, distribution and consumption. Each East Asian location participates in different and unequal levels in each of these component processes. Production can either be located entirely in a single geographic location or, alternatively, each of the necessary constituent sub‐processes can be executed from different locations; preference for either arrangement tends to reflect the relative dominance of the production location in exporting its finished products. Consumption and thus consumers are geographically located within cultural spaces in which they are embedded. Meanings and viewing pleasures are generated within the local cultures of specific audience. Conceptually, among the several possible consumption positions, the one in which an audience watches an imported programme is most intriguing. In this viewing position, differences between the cultures of the location of consumption and that of the production location become most apparent. The audience member has to bring his or her own cultural context to bear on the content of the imported product and read it accordingly. In this sense, the cultural product may be said to have crossed a ‘cultural’ boundary, beyond the simple fact of its having been exported/imported into a different location as an economic activity. Such an audience position requires the consumer to transcend his or her grounded nationality to forge abstract identification with the foreign characters on screen, a foreignness that is, in turn, potentially reabsorbed into an idea of (East) ‘Asia’; a potential ‘East Asian identity’, emerging from consumption of popular cultural products, is thus imaginable.     

Coping with the threat of westernization in Hong Kong

Most developing countries show great concern that they will compromise their cultural integrity if they import foreign models of economic development. The Chinese in Hong Kong have been dealing with this problem since they were colonized in 1841. This paper explores their various responses to this potential threat. Tajfel's (Tajfel, H. (1974). Social Science Information13, 65–93) social identity theory is advanced as a theoretical tool in considering (a) how Chinese understand Westernization throughout history and in contemporary Hong Kong, and (b) how they stereotype themselves and various relevant groups. It is hoped that this analysis will be of some value to persons in countries considering the problem of importing models of development.     

From passivity to a new border-crossing subjectivity

Abstract

1997 as a global media spectacle about Hong Kong’s handover of its sovereignty from Britain to China is now almost forgotten; yet Hong Kong is still caught between the politics of time and memory too complex to be captured under simple post‐colonialist notion such as ‘hybridity’. This paper tries to put in perspective a (post‐)colonial cultural politics of counter‐memory in Hong Kong cinema by investigating its decades‐long investment in a sub‐genre built around the motif of undercover‐cop. Specifically, the example of the blockbuster Infernal Affairs series is analyzed in details, with particular attention to its innovative plot, to show how the ‘structure of feeling’ about Hong Kong’s political fate is embedded in the films underpinning their local box‐office success. The allegorical reading of the film series attempted in this paper also connects the discussion about the ‘political unconscious’ of Hong Kong, now and in the past, with the wider problem of how the future political subjectivity of Hong Kong will take shape.