Reflections on a Thunder Emperor

I’ve made no secret of my hatred for Graydon Carter’s society rag Vanity Fair, so guess what happened when I opened its September 2010 issue? I sliced my finger open on a subscription card; not off to a good start. I was only interested in this issue because of the feature story devoted to Lady Gaga, who you may know as an artist of particular interest to me.

Vanity Fair’s profile on Gaga has little to recommend it save some exquisite photography from Nick Knight (which nevertheless fits perfectly into my Vanity Fair Cover Nudity Theorem). The piece comes off as an insubstantial primer on Gaga for the fearful and clueless; I’m sure the cover blurb “Should you worry?” was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek but the article seems to take it at face value. To reassure its readers of Gaga’s corporatist credentials, the article starts off with a barrage of pull quotes from top music executives, as if they could be trusted to be the arbiters of anything of importance.

However, the Vanity Fair article manages to bumble into inadvertent insight with the title “Lady Gaga’s Cultural Revolution,” a configuration of words with the right balance of senselessness and pretension. Yet there’s a bit of truth there—it’s a title that wouldn’t fly in the PRC, but by recalling one of the most traumatic and important events that shaped modern China, it makes one think about Gaga’s influence in that country.

The Gaga phenomenon has a worldwide reach, but the response to it is always local. Amid the recent explosion of academic interest in Gaga and her work, there’s been an intriguing exploration into how Gaga’s status as a native New Yorker has shaped her artistic development, and how she’s been influenced by, and in turn influences, the Byzantine cultural sphere of that city. (It’s a point Vanity Fair touches on with thinly veiled condescension when it breathes a sigh of relief that Gaga wasn’t one of those unwashed tourist-bumpkins continually invading their city.)

But let’s talk Gaga area studies: her reception in Beijing is necessarily going to be different from her reception in Manhattan. Mobs of adoring fans may look the same from a distance, but their perceptions as they engage with Gaga will be entirely different. In the West she exists in well-developed, sophisticated and jaded media spaces. Chinese pop culture, on the other hand, is in a period of rapid transformation, and injecting Gaga into the mix has had some interesting results.

While it’s not the whole truth, it’s a useful generalization to say that Chinese media consumers and producers take a great deal of their cues from Western media, gleaning the broad strokes and amplifying them. Modern Chinese pop music builds on the foundations laid in Hong Kong and Taipei, which were heavily influenced by American and British styles. International response to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon led to a decade of domestic and for-export wuxia fantasy epics, and probably made the formerly-realist director Zhang Yimou the man he is today. For now and into the near future, there is a premium in China on what American trendsetters think.

The Gaga phenomenon, which originated in a combative and conflicted American media environment, is entering practically uncontested into China. The result is what I only half-jokingly call Total Gaga Dominance. In my stay in Beijing, her work was ubiquitous; constant play on the radio and at bars and clubs goes without saying, but I’d get a haircut and hear “Bad Romance” over the speakers while someone’s phone rang to the tune of “Paparazzi.” My local supermarket put The Fame and The Fame Monster on loop over their PA system and left it like that for five months. Unscrupulous concert promoters can claim Lady Gaga’s going to be performing and sell out in hours. There’s even a talk show host on Chinese television named “Lady Guagua” whose star is unsurprisingly on the rise.

Elizabeth Lynch of China Law and Policy noted this too, musing that this may come from the accessibility of both Gaga’s music and fashion. She also delightfully points out that

Lady Gaga is so popular right now that her name is barely ever translated into Chinese characters, much to the chagrin of Chinese officials (if it is translated, it is usually translated as 雷帝嘎嘎 ["Lei Di Ga Ga"], meaning “Thunder Emperor Gaga”).

Language has a great deal of power, and the fact that Gaga goes untranslated in Chinese culture puts her above a host of other foreign celebrities. Lynch also notes—and I’ve seen firsthand—that the current Chinese net expression of surprise is not “OMG” but “OMLG”: Oh My Lady Gaga. In the officially atheist People’s Republic of China, Lady Gaga has replaced God.

Pop culture and commercialism serve as social glue; in early 20th century America, Hollywood pictures created an idealized version of the American that the working classes, especially a generation of recent immigrants, could aspire to. This weakened the cultural hold of ethnic enclaves and reduced the isolation of certain social groups by giving them a common language and set of desires. Although there were large swaths of the population excluded from these developments, they still had a noticeable effect.

The same developments are happening in China right now. American writers in China, such as Peter Hessler and Leslie T. Chang, have examined the conflicts generated by the massive social upheaval caused by the past decade of Chinese industrial development. Although the average Chinese citizen has intense loyalty to China as a national idea, there is still a great deal of parochialism and provincialism in play; China’s unity disguises the fact that it is heavily regionalized. Although Mandarin is proclaimed as the official language, it may not necessarily get you far with the locals in southern Guangzhou, or even heavily commercialized and modern Shanghai. (A friend of mine mentioned that on a trip to Shanghai, she received a much better reception speaking her decent-to-good English as opposed to her flawless Mandarin.) And these are urban cores we’re talking about—rural China is fractured into thousands of isolated villages with their own dialects and flavor of culture.

But millions and millions of Chinese are traveling to the cities to work, and they’re experiencing the full force of mass media, pop culture, and commercialism. One of the consequences of pop culture’s attempt to reach the largest audience possible is that it transcends provincialism, and a generation of working-class Chinese is rejecting their parents’ old ways for the perceived values of modernity, glamour, and sophistication offered by urban culture. And if pop culture is social glue, Gaga’s the stickiest of them all. There are more people in China studying English than the entire population of Great Britain, and for them Gaga’s lyrics are surprisingly easy to sing along to. She carries foreign glamour and no cultural baggage; her beautiful alien aesthetic seems divorced from anything else her fans have ever known, and thus a place to build a new culture and identity.

In the new Karate Kid film, Chinese actress Han Wenwen performs an energetic dance to Gaga’s “Poker Face.” The funny thing about it is that it doesn’t feel like a forced needle-drop—it’s emblematic of something real in China. Han’s standing in for millions of Chinese girls doing the same dance.  In a sense, Gaga’s values are the values of a new Chinese pop culture. At the moment, Gaga is irrepressibly cool in the PRC, and this moment is very, very important in a lot of ways. When she finally deigns to perform there, the reaction will be intriguing, to say the least.

Inception to Premiere in Mainland China September 21

It’s official!  Inception is hitting IMAX screens across the mainland on September 21, nearly 2 months after its release in Hong Kong.  There was some back-and-forth about whether the movie would be given one of the 20 slots reserved for foreign films each year but the release date has now been confirmed by the Associated Press and China Radio International.

Many believe the film’s release was pushed back to allow Feng Xiaogang’s Aftershock to play uncontested.  As a result Aftershock has broken domestic box office records but I can’t help wondering how well it would have done against competition.  Last December the World Trade Organization rejected China’s appeal to maintain strict control over foreign film distribution and China has until this December to implement the law.  But with less than six months left, China still seems intent on protecting domestic releases.

Some domestic releases, I should say.  Aftershock was the Chinese film industry’s summer tentpole and with its sensitive subject matter and tacit approval of the Communist Party, its no wonder the government tried so hard to protect it.  But China Film Group, the association that controls all movie distribution in China, has no qualms about throwing Inception in with several, less important Chinese films that also premiere in September.

EDIT: For reasons unknown, the release date for Inception has been moved up to September 2nd.

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Sources:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE55O0OG20090625
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/film/news/e3i9b1395cce9be0a2e41fb96653bbdeeaf
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90782/90872/7027413.html

Souther Exposure – Part 2: Dress Code

I talked a little bit in my last post about how the Shanghai Expo is definitely not about cultural sensitivity.  But if I left any doubt, on day two of my expo adventure, my cousin told me the following story:

I was walking through the entrance line like we did yesterday and approached the security check.  After passing through the metal detector, an Expo volunteer gave me the usual pat-down.  But after I turned around the volunteer noticed several lines of script on my shirt.  I was wearing a black t-shirt with something like, “The world is one; life is one,” written in multiple languages on the back.  The volunteer wasn’t sure what to do and called over a policeman who was standing nearby.  The policeman studied my shirt and asked me what the script in other languages meant.  I told him I didn’t know but that it was probably the same as the Chinese.  The policeman didn’t recognize any of the languages and the volunteers who had gathered around could only identify certain languages like French, German, and Arabic, but couldn’t confirm what was written.  At this point the first policeman called another policeman and some more volunteers over.

The second policeman studied my shirt for a while and then said that I would have to change my clothes.  I asked if I could turn my shirt inside-out.  He said no.  My father, who had passed through security unmolested, came over and said that our clothes were in the hotel and we didn’t have time to go back.  The policeman said that I would have to change my shirt before he let me in.  I asked him why.  He said that the writing on my shirt was “too sensitive.”  ”Sensitive in what way?” I asked.  He chose not to answer my question and told me not to wear that shirt outside again.  I said that I wore this shirt every summer, even to the Olympics in Beijing.  ”Beijing and Shanghai are different,” came the reply.  The policeman then asked for my identification number and other personal information.  He jotted it down in his notebook.  The volunteers snapped a picture of my identification card and told me to continue on.  As he policeman walked away I heard him say to the volunteers, “Next time something like that happens, don’t tell me.”

What do you think about this story?

Beside the fact that the policeman made a deal out of something he didn’t even want to be informed of, for me the greatest irony is that a gathering of hundreds of cultures ostensibly aimed at understanding and tolerance fails before one can even enter the grounds.  My cousin did not wear his shirt on purpose, nor is he an ideologue of universalism—he’s just a college student who is actually excited about the Expo.  I can’t fault the policeman for being vigilant; to him and others in the Chinese security apparatus, anything foreign could potentially pose a threat and they can’t take any chances.  (Never mind that a dissident trying to display incendiary rhetoric probably wouldn’t wear it on his person to the security check.)  Usually this is understandable, but at the Shanghai Expo, it is self-defeating.

It’s regrettable that none of the policemen or volunteers could recognize any words of the other languages but is it right to punish someone for your own ignorance?  I imagine that other people from other countries will wear clothes emblazoned with their own languages.  Would they be turned away as my cousin almost was?  My guess is that will be let through because they look foreign.

And that’s the way it goes sometimes.  Even though “foreign” things are looked on with suspicion, Chinese people live under stricter rules and regulations than people from other countries.  It gets me angry just thinking about it.  The next time something like this happens, I hope my cousin just doesn’t tell me.

Southern Exposure

I knew going into the Shanghai Expo that I would probably hate it.  No one—neither the critics who stayed at home nor the people who had actually went—said anything remotely positive to me about it.  They complained about the lines, the heat, and, most of all, the sheer number of people.  Now having been there, I can safely say that they were telling the truth.

But I don’t want to spend these lines complaining—far from it.  For me, the Shanghai Expo raises many questions about the face of modern China and its citizens.  My posts in the following days will investigate the conundrums that arise when half a million people a day from 200 countries, but mostly China, decide to congregate in an area just over five square kilometers.

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The first day was bad.  Not unbearable, but not nearly enticing enough to make me want to go back.  Throughout the day, one question kept running through my mind: what is the purpose of this Expo?

I came home and looked for a mission statement but was unable to find any coherent statement of purpose from the official site.  I was left to wonder.

CULTURAL EXCHANGE?

The Expo is a grand gathering of over 200 countries and organizations, each with their own culture or interests.  Looking at the interminable lines of people queuing to visit the pavilion of a country they had probably never heard of, I joked to my mother that to enter a country’s pavilion one should have to be able to locate that country on a map to which she replied that the purpose of the Expo was to give people the chance to understand the countries that they didn’t know and had never been to.

Fair enough.  The Expo is a great opportunity for the majority of Chinese who might never have the chance to travel abroad to explore and learn about the myriad other countries with whom they share the world.  But at times, the Expo seems more like a mad scramble for passport stamps and pictures of impractical architecture than any sort of cross-cultural understanding.  Indeed, in the Russian pavilion hundreds of flashbulbs captured the Pandoran landscape that scaled the walls but I didn’t see a single person listen to or watch the videos explaining Russia’s technological developments.

At the end of my first day, I watched a performance at the World Expo Cultural Center, which is arguably the most impressive building on the grounds, resembling the alien spaceship from Independence Day.  The purpose of the show was ostensibly to showcase the world’s musical culture and included everything from Riverdance to flamenco to folk songs about the Communist Party but all the performers were Chinese.  A few songs were performed in foreign languages—a Japanese ballad and an aria from Turandot—but the rest seemed like Chinese interpretations of foreign culture, which was interesting and informative in its own way.  We are all familiar with Western interpretations of Chinese culture, from Enter the Dragon to Rush Hour to Kung-Fu Panda, but seeing the Chinese interpret other cultures was a rare delight.

There was a quartet that played “famous” songs from every country.  The choice from the Americas?  Kenny G’s “Going Home.”  Granted, it is a fairly common song in China, especially when a store is trying to get people to leave.  Another was a Bollywood number that to me, who has only seen two Bollywood movies and Slumdog Millionaire, seemed pretty on the mark.  There were two African numbers, one vaguely Egyptian and the other sub-Saharan.  In the latter, a group of men wearing skintight black shirts and leggings stomped out with spears.  For some reason the music in both African numbers began with chanting and drumming but ended with a techno beat.  In the end it was hard to know if I was watching a burlesque show or a harmless attempt to encapsulate culture.  Even more I wondered what most Chinese would take away from this and if they would realize that this show, and the Expo in general, was just an approximation of a country’s culture.

COMMON HUMANITY?

Maybe the Expo isn’t about understanding countries, but rather appreciating the diversity of human beings.  In the opening video of the USA pavilion, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton celebrates what she calls “core American values,” which apparently include, “diversity, innovation, and optimism.”  (I will not go into detail about the USA pavilion; it will be singled out for especial ridicule in a later post.)  I can stand by that.  The world is composed of many different cultures and traditions but in the end we are, for better or worse, human.

Because each pavilion employs workers from its own country, there are literally people from all over the world at the Shanghai Expo.  On the one hand it is heartening to see Chinese people taking pictures of people of different races, tacitly taking an interest in the world’s diversity; perhaps some of the visitors have never met anyone from many of the countries represented at the Expo.  But taking pictures of someone because of their race or nationality or skin color can be horribly demeaning for the subject.  It’s one thing to take a picture with someone as a gesture of bonding, and quite another to take someone’s picture because they are an oddity.  Fellow blogger Abby Fitzgibbon, who has been to the Expo twice against her will, confided that she saw one African volunteer plead with visitors to stop taking her picture.

At moments, far from unifying mankind, the Expo is distinctly dehumanizing.  In the morning as I was walking along one of the elevated walkways that criss-cross the Expo, I looked down to see a line for a pavilion.  People were packed into three rows, cordoned off by metal railings.  As the gates were opened, the people flooded into another holding pen, pushing and trampling each other.  While the Expo serves to bring many different kinds of people together, the sheer number of them leads the mind to abstraction.

DICKWAVING?

If there was ever an original purpose to the World’s Fair, the original name for these expos, then it was to showcase technological and cultural superiority.  The first World’s Fair, held in London in 1851, was a testament to the British Empire’s wealth and glory.  Perhaps in this sense the 2010 Shanghai Expo is a worthy successor.  Following shortly on the heels of the Olympics, this Expo is a symbol of Shanghai’s, and by extension, China’s greatness.  Superlatives are everywhere: the largest Expo site with the most countries represented; the most expensive and expected to be the most visited.

Case in point: the China pavilion.  Costing 1.5 billion Yuan ($220 million) and built on a base which is already taller than most of the other pavilions, the China pavilion towers far above all other comers.  It is a pity only a fraction of the people who make the pilgrimage to the Expo will be able to see the inside.  Tickets are either alotted to tour groups or distributed at 9AM, when people rush in to snag the limited tickets given out each morning.

The other original aim of the expo, displaying technology from around the world, has been largely jettisoned.  Apart from the Japan pavilion and a few others, newfangled gadgets are nowhere to be seen.  Perhaps anticipating the number of visitors, most countries decided not to allow visitors to handle objects, as anything that 70 million people touch is likely to break.  In this age, and especially in China, new technology doesn’t remain new for long; fake iPads came on the market about a week after the official release.  Perhaps if Apple or Sony had their own pavilion there would be some interesting toys but with copyrights and patents, anything that can be displayed by a country is either outdated or a state secret.

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So dickwaving it is.  The expo is part popularity contest, part beauty pageant, and, with all the interests and money involved, part political primary.  It’s hard not to wonder what the nearly $50 billion that went into making the expo could have meant for China, not to mention what other countries could have done with the money for their individual pavilions.  But that’s not fair for me to say.  If there is an intended audience for this Expo, I’m not it.  Comically large IMAX screens and Bolivian folk bands do not move me.  I have heard of all of these countries and, with the exception of North Korea, could go there if I wanted to.  I wonder what it would be like if I were a child or a villager.  Maybe my mom was right.  Maybe this expo is just an opportunity to see new things, not necessarily to understand them.  It’s a chance to realize that there’s a big world out there.  It’s a chance to learn or be reminded of common human principles: diversity, hope, wonder, and perhaps most of all, patience.

Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone

Picture this.  A top official of a powerful state newspaper stands before a room of journalism students and flatly admits that their government has been lying to them, changing facts in the news or omitting them altogether.  The hero of a dystopian novel?  A whistle-blower who’s had enough?

Just the opposite.  Xia Lin, the deputy editor-in-chief of Xinhua, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China, was giving a lecture entitled “Understanding Journalistic Protocols for Covering Breaking News” at the Tianjin Foreign Studies University in which he defended the practice of massaging the truth when it comes to news, citing the critical role of media to maintain societal stability.  The examples he gave were shocking, but only confirmed what most skeptical human beings believe: that their government lies to them on a daily basis.

Lin recounted the “live broadcast” of the Shenzhou 5 landing, in which Chinese viewers saw astronaut Yang Liwei emerge from the space capsule smiling and flashing a victory symbol.  But actually when the capsule was opened Yang had blood all over his face due to a cut on his lip.  Workers wiped the blood off his face and shot the second reveal for the country to see.  Lin also mentioned the “July 5th incident” in Xinjiang when state media underreported Han deaths for fear of mob reprisal and, when the reprisal happened anyway, omitted mention of Uighur casualties.

The revelations are startling not because of the obvious fact that news in China is manufactured, but that its top officials are unrepentant about it.  In fact, they see careful management, or manipulation, of the truth as not only justified but integral to their job.  Reporting is not in the service of facts but rather facts serve reporting, and can be airbrushed and edited to benefit those in power.

Though this seems immoral and propagandistic, there are two cultural factors that contextualize the government’s mentality.   First is the Chinese preoccupation with face, and no one is more vain than the government.  Chinese leaders, from emperors to demagogues to its current politicians, have always taken pains to appear irreproachable and by now it has become a part of the fiction.  Every misstep is seen as potential ammunition for those who might want to challenge the incumbent power.  Thus, mistakes are admitted only posthumously, for fear of damaging the reputations or political fortunes of those still alive.

Second, the Chinese government is willing to sacrifice much for stability: ideals, lives, even fundamental tenets of their own party ideology.  If they are willing to abandon their own beliefs for stability, then why shouldn’t every branch of the government, including the media, the military, and the legal system, be used toward that end?

Recently, one can see their point.  In March, the state media reported the first of what has now become a rash of kindergarten stabbings.  Likewise, the reports of factory suicides in Shenzhen have led to nothing but more suicides and a belated pay increase.  If suppressing the news of that first stabbing could have saved the lives of children who died in subsequent attacks, wouldn’t we all think twice?  But denial of death is on some level a negation of life.  Not reporting the deaths of those children would mean they died for nothing and would be an affront to their memory and the grief of their families.  And yet, what is the point in honoring death when it only leads to more of the same?  Truth is lofty and eternal; lives are earthly and transient.  How does one weigh the two?

We can’t.  And maybe we don’t have to, because the news itself is not as important as how we act in response to it.  If we look for easy answers to tragedies, then those who died did so in vain.  If we settle for easy explanations—the killers were mentally ill; the young people who jumped from buildings were heartbroken—then we should not be surprised if these things continue to happen and have one to blame for their proliferation but ourselves.

The furor over the factory suicides have made amounted to some small victories—a pay increase at Foxconn and in Beijing—and has raised awareness of issues like poor factory conditions, the growing income gap, and the dark side of economic development.  However, the response to the epidemic of kindergarten stabbings has been and will continue to be characteristically simple.  The murderers responsible for the stabbings will be executed.  Their point of view will not be reported.  Their reasoning will be lost along with their lives and we will get no closer to knowing, let alone understanding, what would drive them to take the lives of defenseless children.  Even if we are reluctant to understand their reasons, aren’t they the most important piece of this puzzle?

The worst thing about edited news is not the deception or the misinformation—it is the lack of information.  Information that can help us prevent further incidents.  Information we can use to ensure long-term stability, instead of settling for short respites.  Instead of knowing less about these tragedies, we need to know more.  We need to know, truly, why these things happened, because only then can we ask the right questions, the hard questions.  And though we might not like the answers, at least they’d be honest.  People want the truth; the government just needs to believe that they can handle it.

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Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/world/asia/04china.html
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/06/xia-lin-夏林-xinhua-deputy-chief-editor-reveals-secret-details-of-old-news-stories/