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.     

Interpreting the Cultural Revolution politically

Abstract

This essay reviews the recent work of three sociologists, Andrew Walder, Alessandro Russo, and Joel Andreas, on factionalism in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (CR). To varying degrees, all three authors under review question the dominant sociological interpretation of CR factionalism, which directly links factional allegiance to objective class position, and they each attempt to develop a political interpretation instead. Politics, however, is understood differently by the authors. Walder argues that, through attending to the ‘event sequence’ of the CR in which factionalism emerged, factional politics can be de‐linked from the sociological base to which it is usually tied. Russo, influenced by the work of Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus, argues that the factionalism of the CR should be linked to the emergence of a subjective ‘political sequence’ and not to the pre‐existing structural organization of Chinese socialism. Unlike Walder, for whom mass politics seems to be firmly identified with elite intra‐party power struggle, for Russo a space between elite power struggles and the pluralization of mass political organizations allowed a genuine subjective politics to emerge. Joel Andreas employs Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of political and cultural capital in order to study the development of CR factions in the Qinghua Attached Middle School and Qinghua University, painting a complex political and sociological understanding of factionalization. These works not only offer reinterpretations of the CR itself, but also help to generate interesting questions about the political relationship between the present and the 1960s, both in China and globally.     

Hollywood domination of the Chinese kung fu market

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the cultural significance of three emerging Chinese kung fu films in their recent box office success in global film market. The paper aims to provide an integrative framework that shows how Hollywood’s global dominance in both film consumption and production contributes to the success of the newly Chinese Kung Fu films. Focusing on marketing strategies of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero and House of Flying Daggers, this study argues that the economic success of the three films represent further regulation of Hollywood. In production, the NICL thesis is at work with a particular collaboration pattern among the transnational Chinese film talent communities. In distribution and exhibition, this paper contends that global box office achievement fails to contribute directly to any Chinese film industry. Autonomy is seen between Hollywood film majors and Chinese filmmakers when consumption of these films becomes a global phenomenon.     

The temporal pocket: 1990s Beijing artist colonies

In recent years, a small but growing body of scholarship has emerged on the category of the Chinese art district, particularly its institutionalisation amidst twenty-first century creative industries polices. Such research presents important stories of Chinese artists’ negotiations with urban and political authority, thus nuancing paradigms for the comprehension of political work within contemporary China. This current article contributes to this growing research area by considering the spatial conditions for these socio-spatial categories’ emergence, namely, the urban structures in which they first took shape in 1990s Beijing. First occupying traditional villages (cunzi) and later ex-socialist work units (danwei), these arts colonies appropriated existing communal architecture, and turned their designs and physical buildings to their own communal ends. Importantly, these sites were made available by the dramatic reconstruction of the city, and in this sense these occupations were limited to the temporal realm. To describe the nature of occupations, and their eventual impact upon the shape of the city, this paper proposes the category of “the temporal pocket”: a cellular and temporary inhabitance, defined by the shared investments of its participants, and one that is both discrete (in the sense of its spaces) and discreet (in the sense that this can be understood as a non-oppositional politics). The article is informed by spatial and cultural theory, literature on Chinese urban planning and art history, as well as primary documents (such as documentaries, art works and archival material) and interviews conducted by the researcher in Beijing.     

East Asian pop culture and the trajectory of Asian consumption

This article focuses on Chua Beng Huat’s work on the East Asian pop culture that became more prominent in East and Southeast Asia from the 1990s, when the circulation of multilingual and multi-format pop culture started to exceed linguistic, ethnic and national boundaries. It argues that Chua’s work indicates that the pop-cultural production and innovation that support the globalisation and regionalisation processes in East Asia need not be national in origin but can hail from different national origins – and this despite the existing political realities of the region and its history of political fractures. Chua Beng Huat cautions, though, that the national popular can also be marshalled to defeat the border-crossing potential of an inter-Asian pop culture. What is the “Asia” imagined or being represented in such cultural production? Chua’s work is also distinctive in that it deals with the political and economic conditions that underpin mainstream pop consumption as a socio-cultural phenomenon, instead of examining consumption as identity politics. The article concludes by noting the significance that Chua as an institutional builder has played in enabling the study of East Asian pop culture in the region.     

“To Reach the Lands of Freedom”: Petitions of Polish Displaced Persons to American Poles,Moral Screening and the Role of Diaspora in Refugee Resettlement

ABSTRACT

In 1949, in the wake of the USA’s Displaced Persons Act of 1948, the American Committee for the Resettlement of Polish Displaced Persons received thousands of letters from refugees of peasant and worker background residing in camps in Germany and Austria. These potential immigrants appealed to the Polish diaspora for help with securing assurances of accommodation and work which would enable them to resettle in the USA. This paper investigates the discursive strategies of the authors and the wider meanings of their emigration endeavour. Firstly, it demonstrates that non-elite Displaced Persons (DPs) adopted the language of martyrology, patriotism, anti-Communism and freedom to maximise their chances of emigration. These DPs did not evoke the language of rights as they appealed to the traditional network of support, based on benevolence and familiarity. Secondly, it argues that the American Poles and Polish social elites played a crucial role in resettlement of the DPs, providing an additional layer of screening, here called ‘the moral screening’. It is an example of how ethnic and cultural communities mediated the resettlement procedures supervised by international humanitarian organisations. Using a ‘history from below’ approach, this article argues that during this episode of migration, political and economic ideological underpinnings intertwined.     

China’s popular nationalism on the internet. Report on the 2005 anti‐Japan network struggles 1

Abstract

In April 2005, waves of anti‐Japan protest swept China and South Korea. In China, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in more than 40 cities to protest against Japan over its irresponsible attitude toward the history of colonial rule and war crimes of 60 years ago. Despite the protest having a strong ground and its action being generally non‐violent and peaceful, it was then severely condemned by many Western critics and media as chauvinistic and irrational, and as being manipulated by the Chinese government to legitimize its rule. Against such a notion, this essay attempts to work with China’s ‘popular nationalism’ (renmin minzu zhuyi), and considers its space as an autonomous political domain that is independent of the state nationalism. The ‘cyber‐nationalism’ (wanglu minzu zhuyi), this paper argues, not only challenges the state monopoly over domestic nationalist discursive production, but also opens up new possibilities for performing common people’s ‘public discursive right’ (gonggong huayu quanli). Far from being a homogeneous unity, the online campaign is characterized by free exchange of information and lively debate over the boycott strategy.     

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.     

Rebuilding the homeland in poetry and song: Simin Behbahani,Dariush Eghbali,and the making of a transnational national anthem

ABSTRACT

This article traces the transformation of an Iranian nationalist poem by Simin Behbahani entitled “I Will Rebuild You, Homeland” (1981) into an expatriate national anthem, and the poem-song’s subsequent incorporation into protests and political speeches by individuals and groups in and outside of Iran. Employing musical and textual analysis, interviews, and a transnational perspective on cultural circulation and reception, I show how exile pop singer Dariush Eghbali’s adaptation of the original poem mobilized the text and opened it to audience participation. The article argues that the poem and its musical–textual permutations exemplify contemporary Iranian practices of national identification in which conflicting parties attempt to motivate “the Iranian people” to political ends. As actors from around the world and across the political spectrum repeatedly turn to nationalist poetry, song, anthem, and political speech, we observe how mass-mediated popular culture reveals ongoing recourse to nationalist forms even in transnational space.     

People's security: Okinawa's anti-bases movement

Abstract

The evolution of moral panics is dependent on the particular social context and the ability of certain issues to trigger concern within society. In this paper, the authors have employed a cross‐comparative study of the heavy metal music subcultures in Singapore and Malaysia to understand the differences in the issues that generate such panics based on the socio‐political context of each country and its current concerns. Although the youth involved in both cases are marginalised male Malays, the framing of their alleged deviance and criminality permits, in the case of Singapore, only a limited possibility for moral panic creation given the conservative socio‐political governance that limits allegations such as ‘Satanism’. In the case of Malaysia, where a ‘large‐scale’ moral panic involving black metal emerged in 2001, the recent trend towards Islamisation gave fodder for the condemnation of black metal based on the allegations of the anti‐Islamic behaviour of Muslim youth involved in the black metal scene. In both cases, such groups were exploited by parties claiming to defend the social fabric of the moral majority, but in the latter case it took on grave implications due to the extent of the state and public response. This paper thus argues that the framing of these moral panics is an important component determining the relative ‘success’ of the panic or its ability to capture public and state imaginings.     

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.     

My Wild Lily: a self‐criticism from a participant in the March 1990 student movement 1

Abstract

The ‘Wild Lily’ student sit‐in in March 1990 was often praised in the later political transformation process as a crucial moment when the ‘pure and innocent’ students facilitated democratization in Taiwan. From the perspective of a participant in the protest, the author argues that the sit‐in was actually a failure of the ‘popular democratic’ wing of Taiwan's student movement in the 1980s, which championed a more radical vision of democracy. The idea of ‘popular democracy’ was an anti‐elitist ideology arising from critiques on the elite‐led political reform movement. However, due to its historical constraint, practices along this line were unable to alter the bourgeois democratic character of 1980s' democratization process in Taiwan.     

‘Read for Victory’: Public Libraries and Book Reading in a British Naval Port City during the Second World War

In 1942, a library official in Portsmouth, UK appealed to the city’s inhabitants to ‘read for victory’, believing that they had a duty to use their reading time productively as part of their wartime activities. This article argues that long-standing desires among the country’s political and civic elites to encourage the nation’s readers to spend their leisure time prudently intensified during the Second World War. The public library service was utilised by civic leaders, library officials and publishing trade personnel to aid the country’s war effort. The article argues that negative attitudes regarding mass reading tastes remained largely static, despite recognition that the conflict drew people to the written word for relaxation and escapism. Using the naval city of Portsmouth as a case study, this article charts the activities of the city’s public library authorities and the borrowing habits of its readers to reveal that while many people borrowed books in order to distract themselves from the conflict, the city’s strategic importance ensured that many citizens also read in order to facilitate their preparedness for war service, whether that be on the home front or overseas. The article argues that while, in common with national trends, many of Portsmouth’s citizens used libraries to obtain books to help distract them from the war, many remained eager to make use of the service for educational purposes, unlike the majority of the nation’s library users, whose interest in this aspect of library provision rapidly waned as the war progressed. The article concludes that the public library service was viewed as a central plank in the war effort and that library officials worked continuously to ensure that it remained so.     

The Passions of the Prince: Moral Philosophy and Staatskirchenrecht in Thomasius's Conception of Sovereignty

This paper argues that in his discussions of the ethics of sovereignty, Christian Thomasius makes use of two very different conceptions of the prince's moral persona. In his natural law works, Thomasius draws on a Christian-Epicurean moral anthropology, in order to model a sage–prince whose capacity to rule is conditioned by his capacity for restraint of the passions. In his works in the area of Staatskirchenrecht or constitutional church law, however, Thomasius adopts a different stance. Here, drawing on Pufendorf's construction of multiple moral personae, Thomasius restricts the ethic of passional restraint to the personae of the ‘man’ and the Christian, drawing the duties of the prince from a quite different source: the goal of preserving social peace through the exercise of a coercive sovereign power. It is argued that these different kinds of political ethic are associated with the different purposes of Thomasius's natural-law and staatskirchenrechtlich writings, the former being dedicated to the moral formation of his law students, the latter to the provision of political advice to the prince.     

Working Within the Crisis

ABSTRACT

This article examines microhistories and the histories of the everyday both in the context of developments in social and cultural history since the 1960s, and in the light of political and social change in post-war European society. Moving beyond debates about historical narrative, it emphasizes issues of perspective, space, size and historical distance in shaping historical interpretation. This historiographical trend, it argues, emanates from two major debates within the social sciences and politics. One concerns the nature of everyday life under modern capitalism and ‘consumer society’, the other the vexed issue of human agency. Focusing particularly on Italian microstoria, it argues that such writing is best understood as the commitment to a humanist agenda which places agency and historical meaning in the realm of day-to-day transactions, and which sees their recuperation as the proper task of the historian.     

Asian internationalism: Bandung’s echo in a colonial metropolis

Abstract

This paper argues that two conflicting discourses of internationalism stood in uneasy counterpoint and contention in the Asian arena of the 1950s, reflected in the legacies of the Bandung conference. The first drew on a language of global citizenship and rights. The second saw the international system as a source of strength and support for state sovereignty, and state‐directed programmes of national development. The remainder of the paper uses the case of late‐colonial Singapore to examine the intersection of these two discourses of internationalism. An Asian internationalism, which spanned to include Africa over the course of the 1950s, became one of a stock of narratives that made Singapore’s ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ possible, in the worlds of the hawkers, the dockworkers and the agriculturalists. The political aspirations of these groups were sacrificed, ultimately, to the goal of disciplined national development, supported by an international order that had closed in to defend the interests of state power.     

Culture = politics: the emergence of new cultural forms of protest in the age of freeter

This paper examines new cultural and political movements that have developed outside of traditional leftist politics since the early 1990s in Japan. The new movements, including Dame‐ren, the Cardboard House Art movements in Shinjuku and recent anti‐war protests on the Iraqi war, were mainly led by young people, in particular, the freeter generation, who did not experience the leftist politics of the 1960s. These movements are different from traditional Marxist political ones and even from the new social movements in the 1960s and 1970s in the sense that they incorporate more cultural practices such as art, music, dance and performance into their political activities. The paper also explores the historical background against which the new movements were born and have developed since the end of the Bubble economy. It sees freeters, young part‐time workers, as emerging, new political actors that have appeared through the transition of a mode of production from Fordism to post‐Fordism. The transformation of society, economy and politics, known as ‘post‐modernization’ or recently as ‘globalization’, has asked us to re‐consider and re‐define the basic concepts such as class, proletariat, power, labour and work which we once shared. The paper tries to locate, through a critical examination, the new movements within a broader context of anti‐neo‐liberalism and anti‐globalization and find political potentiality within it.