Ka-ming Wu | The Chinese University of Hong Kong (original) (raw)
Videos by Ka-ming Wu
How does the culture of a “throwaway society” work in Asian cities? How much and what kind of was... more How does the culture of a “throwaway society” work in Asian cities? How much and what kind of waste do we throw away on a daily basis? How is urban waste shaping class and gender relations? How is waste changing human relationship with non-human animal and plant species?
In the age of the Anthropocene, challenges arising from global environmental change are numerous: extreme weather, land and water pollution, species extinction, toxic contamination, just to name a few. These challenges are now raising concerns both from scholars in the natural science and from the humanities and the social sciences. A transdisciplinary field of inquiry that combines socio-cultural theories with recent methodological and theoretical approaches of understanding the Anthropocene, including cultural ecology, environmental history, science studies, is emerging. New knowledge shall allow us to think across disciplinary borders and tackle the environmental and social challenges of current times.
10 views
CV by Ka-ming Wu
Books by Ka-ming Wu
The final destination of the Long March and center of the Chinese Communist Party's red bases, Ya... more The final destination of the Long March and center of the Chinese Communist Party's red bases, Yan'an acquired mythical status during the Maoist era. Though the city's significance as an emblem of revolutionary heroism has faded, today's Chinese still glorify Yan'an as a sanctuary for ancient cultural traditions.
Ka-ming Wu's ethnographic account of contemporary Yan'an documents how people have reworked the revival of three rural practices--paper-cutting, folk storytelling, and spirit cults--within (and beyond) the socialist legacy. Moving beyond dominant views of Yan'an folk culture as a tool of revolution or object of market reform, Wu reveals how cultural traditions become battlegrounds where conflicts among the state, market forces, and intellectuals in search of an authentic China play out. At the same time, she shows these emerging new dynamics in the light of the ways rural residents make sense of rapid social change.
Alive with details, Reinventing Chinese Tradition is an in-depth, eye-opening study of an evolving culture and society within contemporary China.
Part 3 is on Cultural Revolution soundscapes beyond the Mao era. It begins with a chapter that co... more Part 3 is on Cultural Revolution soundscapes beyond the Mao era. It begins with a chapter that contextualizes the innovations of the yangbanxi as having occurred within a century of musical experimentation. The following chapter, by Nancy Yunhwa Rao, is a refreshing study of the effect of the yangbanxi on social and cultural practices of ordinary people during the Cultural Revolution and the enduring effect of that musical environment in post-Cultural Revolution China. Rao demonstrates that the musical taste established in people's youth during the Cultural Revolution has directly led to the innovative and energetic aesthetics of the now internationally acclaimed "Class of '78" composers and musicians, including Tian Hao-Jiang, Tan Dun, and Chen Yi, whose "modes of cultural synthesis were paradoxically shaped by the music canon of the decade they sought to leave behind." The book ends on a high note with a chapter by Barbara Mittler that offers a brilliant and entertaining analysis of the incorporation of Cultural Revolution music into contemporary youth pop culture. Mittler uses this as a platform to draw together the findings of the whole book. Its fundamental insight is that Cultural Revolution musical culture was primarily a form of popular culture, which drew on deeply embedded popular culture traditions that will continue to resonate into the future.
the workforce, they are still objectified quite often in society, as can be seen in the designati... more the workforce, they are still objectified quite often in society, as can be seen in the designations of unmarried women in their late twenties as "leftovers, " and prostitutes as a "cancer of society. " It is fascinating to compare twenty-first-century China with the late Qing period Widmer depicts. In the first generation, Wang Qingdi was a free spirit with an enthusiastic ambition for the fulfillment of her talent, even though society did not value woman's talent in writing. And in the second generation, we have much to learn in contemplating Zhan Xi's acknowledgment of women's abilities and Zhan Kai's admiration of women's power, portaying courtesans as the leading heroines. Interestingly enough, all those courtesan
What is the contemporary meaning of "folk culture" in one of the most iconic rural places in mode... more What is the contemporary meaning of "folk culture" in one of the most iconic rural places in modern China? This is the overarching question Ka-ming Wu asks in her excellent short ethnography of villages in Yan'an district, Shaanxi province, based on fieldwork conducted primarily in 2004 and 2008. She examines three arenas of "folk culture": paper cuts, storytelling and spirit cults. Yan'an, of course, was the revolutionary base area of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), where Edgar Snow interviewed Mao Zedong for Red Star Over China, and where Mao gave his famous 1942 lecture "Talks at the Yenan [Yan'an] Forum on Literature and Art" which set the agenda for cultural production to "serve the people" under the Party vanguard. In her introduction, Ka-ming Wu outlines this history, telling more about how during the Mao years Yan'an was represented as a utopian place and as a "revolutionary mecca." She argues that now, "folk culture in Yan'an has shifted from a site of state control in Mao's period to a site of contest in the late socialist period" (pp. 4-5). This "folk culture," of what she calls the "hyper-folk" (inspired by Baudrillard's "hyperreality")a representation detached from realityis manipulated by the Party-state, tourism companies, urban intellectuals, foreign foundations and of course, villagers themselves. Curiously, in her introduction, Wu does not discuss the film Yellow Earth, released four decades after Mao's Yan'an talks. Director Chen Kaige and cinematographer Zhang Yimou shocked the film world with their beautiful and poignant film set in Yan'an, which depicts villagers as living a poor, brutal life stuck in patriarchal tradition. The film raised much controversy not only for its style, but also for its intimation that the CCP has failed the peasants, leading to the film being banned. Discussing the film would have allowed Wu to set up a tension between representations of Yan'an as a utopian or dystopian "folk" place. Teachers of undergraduates might have students skip the introduction and jump right into the engaging ethnographic chapters. In chapter one, "Paper cuts in modern China," Wu provides some of the history from the introduction in more specific detail. She tells how paper cuts, once used for ritual purposeshealing or bringing fertility or good fortunewere appropriated by the CCP for propaganda purposes. She then tells how, in the current "late socialist period," few people are making paper cuts any more. Thus, urban intellectuals from Beijing, concerned that the folk tradition will die out, start training women to work in a small paper cutting factories to sell paper cuts to tourists. My favorite chapter is the second one, where Wu discusses how intellectuals from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing decided to try to list a Yan'an village as a UNESCO world heritage site. However, since they were having difficulties finding a
What ever happened to Yan'an? Ka-ming Wu's thought-provoking Reinventing Chinese Tradition brings... more What ever happened to Yan'an? Ka-ming Wu's thought-provoking Reinventing Chinese Tradition brings us up to date, based in fieldwork on the revitalization of "folk culture" in the Yan'an region in the 2000s. Wu's analysis remains firmly anchored in the history of the Yan'an period from 1935 to 1947, while at the same time bringing the study of this largely forgotten region into the present. Wu's ethnography innovatively pushes forward the "invention of tradition" thesis by analyzing precisely how tradition is invented. Coining the term "hyper-folk" to highlight tradition's fundamental detachment from any type of stabilizing authentic origin, Wu poignantly traces how the production-cum-invention of "Chinese tradition" is always a site of struggles between multiple highly contentious narratives: traditional visions, Party-state interventions, market forces, and contemporary communal anxieties all come together to form today's "folk culture." Wu develops this insight through a series of case studies of modes of folk culture in Yan'an today, focusing in turn on paper cutting, storytelling, and spirit mediums. Wu begins by tracing the complex history of Yan'an paper cutting from the Maoist era to the present. She shows how, in the early Maoist era, local paper-cutting traditions became a target of socialist reformation, appropriating this medium to communicate the state's messages. In the 1980s, paper cutting was rediscovered as "folk culture" and thus came to represent a direct pathway to forgotten traditions, ironically imagined as unaffected by recent history. Then, in the 2000s, as capitalism expanded and rural areas became increasingly urbanized, paper cutting was dually envisioned as a medium for preserving the region's disappearing landscapes and a commodity for developing a tourist economy. The contested nature of tradition is demonstrated powerfully in the second chapter's recounting of the attempt to establish Xiaocheng village in rural Shaanxi as a folk art village: tradition is neither naturally passed down from earlier generations nor purely invented in the present, but rather exists as a locus point of multiple contesting narratives among divergent players-locals, intellectuals, state officials, and developers-who ascribe different and even often diametrically opposed meanings to tradition itself. Wu proceeds in chapters 3 and 4 to trace the path of storytelling as a folk tradition from the 1930s to the present. Originally used, like paper cutting, as a reformed medium to promote Party policies, storytelling experienced an unexpected revitalization in the reform era. Wu interprets this revitalization as being less about the stories themselves than about the gatherings they facilitate, providing a rare platform to gather and discuss emergent problems in rural Shaanxi: households split between the cities and the countryside, the lack of career prospects for youth in the area, and the lack of care for the elderly left behind by the young. Chapter 4 profiles a group of storytellers who make their living visiting work units, using this traditional medium to promote statefriendly messages for their own private profit: one ditty asserts "selfish and greedy thoughts hurt people, the heaven and the earth, people should be alert about the fakes, everyone learns the Law of Quality Control to facilitate the Great Development of West China" (p. 106). Wu provides unforgettable accounts of the tense negotiations held with any work unit unmotivated to purchase the storytellers' services. Finally, in chapter 5, Wu turns her analyses to spirit cults, consisting of largely female mediums who claim to be possessed by and speak for various deities. This chapter
本書一系列田野考察呈現和講述在經濟迅速發展之下、北京城鄉廢品從業者的生活世界，並將垃圾視作參與社會政治關係的物質，審視它如何有機地參與在中國的轉型社會過程：階層斷裂、政策壁壘、城鄉經濟文化差異、... more 本書一系列田野考察呈現和講述在經濟迅速發展之下、北京城鄉廢品從業者的生活世界，並將垃圾視作參與社會政治關係的物質，審視它如何有機地參與在中國的轉型社會過程：階層斷裂、政策壁壘、城鄉經濟文化差異、農民工流動性和城鄉隔閡，糾纏在一起。
Papers by Ka-ming Wu
University of Illinois Press eBooks, Apr 20, 2017
This chapter examines the role of northern Shaanxi folk storytelling (Shaanbei shuoshu), a musica... more This chapter examines the role of northern Shaanxi folk storytelling (Shaanbei shuoshu), a musical drama prevalent in the Yan'an area, in isolated rural communities where villagers actively seek folk storytelling to reflect on new desires and problems. In particular, it considers how both state propaganda and folk cultural tradition continue to intertwine in their contemporary forms and contents, and yet both have been subjected to radical reinterpretations. The chapter explains how northern Shaanxi storytelling remains connected to the Maoist legacy of mass culture, while responding to agrarian change and translocal conditions in rural communities of Yan'an today. It suggests that popular religious revival is not only a rural phenomenon but also rampant in today's urban prosperous Yan'an city. Northern Shaanxi storytelling can be considered a quasi-religious resource with late socialist characteristics, which responds to new social and communal desires in the context of a great rural–urban divide.
How does the culture of a “throwaway society” work in Asian cities? How much and what kind of was... more How does the culture of a “throwaway society” work in Asian cities? How much and what kind of waste do we throw away on a daily basis? How is urban waste shaping class and gender relations? How is waste changing human relationship with non-human animal and plant species?
In the age of the Anthropocene, challenges arising from global environmental change are numerous: extreme weather, land and water pollution, species extinction, toxic contamination, just to name a few. These challenges are now raising concerns both from scholars in the natural science and from the humanities and the social sciences. A transdisciplinary field of inquiry that combines socio-cultural theories with recent methodological and theoretical approaches of understanding the Anthropocene, including cultural ecology, environmental history, science studies, is emerging. New knowledge shall allow us to think across disciplinary borders and tackle the environmental and social challenges of current times.
10 views
The final destination of the Long March and center of the Chinese Communist Party's red bases, Ya... more The final destination of the Long March and center of the Chinese Communist Party's red bases, Yan'an acquired mythical status during the Maoist era. Though the city's significance as an emblem of revolutionary heroism has faded, today's Chinese still glorify Yan'an as a sanctuary for ancient cultural traditions.
Ka-ming Wu's ethnographic account of contemporary Yan'an documents how people have reworked the revival of three rural practices--paper-cutting, folk storytelling, and spirit cults--within (and beyond) the socialist legacy. Moving beyond dominant views of Yan'an folk culture as a tool of revolution or object of market reform, Wu reveals how cultural traditions become battlegrounds where conflicts among the state, market forces, and intellectuals in search of an authentic China play out. At the same time, she shows these emerging new dynamics in the light of the ways rural residents make sense of rapid social change.
Alive with details, Reinventing Chinese Tradition is an in-depth, eye-opening study of an evolving culture and society within contemporary China.
Part 3 is on Cultural Revolution soundscapes beyond the Mao era. It begins with a chapter that co... more Part 3 is on Cultural Revolution soundscapes beyond the Mao era. It begins with a chapter that contextualizes the innovations of the yangbanxi as having occurred within a century of musical experimentation. The following chapter, by Nancy Yunhwa Rao, is a refreshing study of the effect of the yangbanxi on social and cultural practices of ordinary people during the Cultural Revolution and the enduring effect of that musical environment in post-Cultural Revolution China. Rao demonstrates that the musical taste established in people's youth during the Cultural Revolution has directly led to the innovative and energetic aesthetics of the now internationally acclaimed "Class of '78" composers and musicians, including Tian Hao-Jiang, Tan Dun, and Chen Yi, whose "modes of cultural synthesis were paradoxically shaped by the music canon of the decade they sought to leave behind." The book ends on a high note with a chapter by Barbara Mittler that offers a brilliant and entertaining analysis of the incorporation of Cultural Revolution music into contemporary youth pop culture. Mittler uses this as a platform to draw together the findings of the whole book. Its fundamental insight is that Cultural Revolution musical culture was primarily a form of popular culture, which drew on deeply embedded popular culture traditions that will continue to resonate into the future.
the workforce, they are still objectified quite often in society, as can be seen in the designati... more the workforce, they are still objectified quite often in society, as can be seen in the designations of unmarried women in their late twenties as "leftovers, " and prostitutes as a "cancer of society. " It is fascinating to compare twenty-first-century China with the late Qing period Widmer depicts. In the first generation, Wang Qingdi was a free spirit with an enthusiastic ambition for the fulfillment of her talent, even though society did not value woman's talent in writing. And in the second generation, we have much to learn in contemplating Zhan Xi's acknowledgment of women's abilities and Zhan Kai's admiration of women's power, portaying courtesans as the leading heroines. Interestingly enough, all those courtesan
What is the contemporary meaning of "folk culture" in one of the most iconic rural places in mode... more What is the contemporary meaning of "folk culture" in one of the most iconic rural places in modern China? This is the overarching question Ka-ming Wu asks in her excellent short ethnography of villages in Yan'an district, Shaanxi province, based on fieldwork conducted primarily in 2004 and 2008. She examines three arenas of "folk culture": paper cuts, storytelling and spirit cults. Yan'an, of course, was the revolutionary base area of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), where Edgar Snow interviewed Mao Zedong for Red Star Over China, and where Mao gave his famous 1942 lecture "Talks at the Yenan [Yan'an] Forum on Literature and Art" which set the agenda for cultural production to "serve the people" under the Party vanguard. In her introduction, Ka-ming Wu outlines this history, telling more about how during the Mao years Yan'an was represented as a utopian place and as a "revolutionary mecca." She argues that now, "folk culture in Yan'an has shifted from a site of state control in Mao's period to a site of contest in the late socialist period" (pp. 4-5). This "folk culture," of what she calls the "hyper-folk" (inspired by Baudrillard's "hyperreality")a representation detached from realityis manipulated by the Party-state, tourism companies, urban intellectuals, foreign foundations and of course, villagers themselves. Curiously, in her introduction, Wu does not discuss the film Yellow Earth, released four decades after Mao's Yan'an talks. Director Chen Kaige and cinematographer Zhang Yimou shocked the film world with their beautiful and poignant film set in Yan'an, which depicts villagers as living a poor, brutal life stuck in patriarchal tradition. The film raised much controversy not only for its style, but also for its intimation that the CCP has failed the peasants, leading to the film being banned. Discussing the film would have allowed Wu to set up a tension between representations of Yan'an as a utopian or dystopian "folk" place. Teachers of undergraduates might have students skip the introduction and jump right into the engaging ethnographic chapters. In chapter one, "Paper cuts in modern China," Wu provides some of the history from the introduction in more specific detail. She tells how paper cuts, once used for ritual purposeshealing or bringing fertility or good fortunewere appropriated by the CCP for propaganda purposes. She then tells how, in the current "late socialist period," few people are making paper cuts any more. Thus, urban intellectuals from Beijing, concerned that the folk tradition will die out, start training women to work in a small paper cutting factories to sell paper cuts to tourists. My favorite chapter is the second one, where Wu discusses how intellectuals from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing decided to try to list a Yan'an village as a UNESCO world heritage site. However, since they were having difficulties finding a
What ever happened to Yan'an? Ka-ming Wu's thought-provoking Reinventing Chinese Tradition brings... more What ever happened to Yan'an? Ka-ming Wu's thought-provoking Reinventing Chinese Tradition brings us up to date, based in fieldwork on the revitalization of "folk culture" in the Yan'an region in the 2000s. Wu's analysis remains firmly anchored in the history of the Yan'an period from 1935 to 1947, while at the same time bringing the study of this largely forgotten region into the present. Wu's ethnography innovatively pushes forward the "invention of tradition" thesis by analyzing precisely how tradition is invented. Coining the term "hyper-folk" to highlight tradition's fundamental detachment from any type of stabilizing authentic origin, Wu poignantly traces how the production-cum-invention of "Chinese tradition" is always a site of struggles between multiple highly contentious narratives: traditional visions, Party-state interventions, market forces, and contemporary communal anxieties all come together to form today's "folk culture." Wu develops this insight through a series of case studies of modes of folk culture in Yan'an today, focusing in turn on paper cutting, storytelling, and spirit mediums. Wu begins by tracing the complex history of Yan'an paper cutting from the Maoist era to the present. She shows how, in the early Maoist era, local paper-cutting traditions became a target of socialist reformation, appropriating this medium to communicate the state's messages. In the 1980s, paper cutting was rediscovered as "folk culture" and thus came to represent a direct pathway to forgotten traditions, ironically imagined as unaffected by recent history. Then, in the 2000s, as capitalism expanded and rural areas became increasingly urbanized, paper cutting was dually envisioned as a medium for preserving the region's disappearing landscapes and a commodity for developing a tourist economy. The contested nature of tradition is demonstrated powerfully in the second chapter's recounting of the attempt to establish Xiaocheng village in rural Shaanxi as a folk art village: tradition is neither naturally passed down from earlier generations nor purely invented in the present, but rather exists as a locus point of multiple contesting narratives among divergent players-locals, intellectuals, state officials, and developers-who ascribe different and even often diametrically opposed meanings to tradition itself. Wu proceeds in chapters 3 and 4 to trace the path of storytelling as a folk tradition from the 1930s to the present. Originally used, like paper cutting, as a reformed medium to promote Party policies, storytelling experienced an unexpected revitalization in the reform era. Wu interprets this revitalization as being less about the stories themselves than about the gatherings they facilitate, providing a rare platform to gather and discuss emergent problems in rural Shaanxi: households split between the cities and the countryside, the lack of career prospects for youth in the area, and the lack of care for the elderly left behind by the young. Chapter 4 profiles a group of storytellers who make their living visiting work units, using this traditional medium to promote statefriendly messages for their own private profit: one ditty asserts "selfish and greedy thoughts hurt people, the heaven and the earth, people should be alert about the fakes, everyone learns the Law of Quality Control to facilitate the Great Development of West China" (p. 106). Wu provides unforgettable accounts of the tense negotiations held with any work unit unmotivated to purchase the storytellers' services. Finally, in chapter 5, Wu turns her analyses to spirit cults, consisting of largely female mediums who claim to be possessed by and speak for various deities. This chapter
本書一系列田野考察呈現和講述在經濟迅速發展之下、北京城鄉廢品從業者的生活世界，並將垃圾視作參與社會政治關係的物質，審視它如何有機地參與在中國的轉型社會過程：階層斷裂、政策壁壘、城鄉經濟文化差異、... more 本書一系列田野考察呈現和講述在經濟迅速發展之下、北京城鄉廢品從業者的生活世界，並將垃圾視作參與社會政治關係的物質，審視它如何有機地參與在中國的轉型社會過程：階層斷裂、政策壁壘、城鄉經濟文化差異、農民工流動性和城鄉隔閡，糾纏在一起。
University of Illinois Press eBooks, Apr 20, 2017
This chapter examines the role of northern Shaanxi folk storytelling (Shaanbei shuoshu), a musica... more This chapter examines the role of northern Shaanxi folk storytelling (Shaanbei shuoshu), a musical drama prevalent in the Yan'an area, in isolated rural communities where villagers actively seek folk storytelling to reflect on new desires and problems. In particular, it considers how both state propaganda and folk cultural tradition continue to intertwine in their contemporary forms and contents, and yet both have been subjected to radical reinterpretations. The chapter explains how northern Shaanxi storytelling remains connected to the Maoist legacy of mass culture, while responding to agrarian change and translocal conditions in rural communities of Yan'an today. It suggests that popular religious revival is not only a rural phenomenon but also rampant in today's urban prosperous Yan'an city. Northern Shaanxi storytelling can be considered a quasi-religious resource with late socialist characteristics, which responds to new social and communal desires in the context of a great rural–urban divide.
University of Illinois Press eBooks, Apr 20, 2017
This chapter examines how folk paper-cuts have served as a site of intellectual expressions and d... more This chapter examines how folk paper-cuts have served as a site of intellectual expressions and debates about the meanings of—and the entangled relationships between—culture, gender, history, and the state in modern China. It first takes up the question of folk traditions, gender, and modernity before discussing the practice of paper-cutting in the Yan'an period (1937–1947) and in the late 1970s. It then considers how gender figures in the narrative of the folk cultural form of paper-cuts in Yan'an and its later deployment by urban intellectuals in various nationalist campaigns. In particular, it looks at women paper-cutting artists in contemporary Ansai County and describes how folk paper-cuts have become that “site of awkward engagement” where the agenda of the state, global capital regimes of values, and local tradition forces interacted with each other. The chapter suggests that, through the representation of paper-cuts, the binary oppositions of gender and rural–urban divide have become part of the meanings of Chinese modernity itself.
Ethnology: An international journal of cultural and social anthropology, 2007
A small bridge project in rural China became a corruption scandal and burdened villagers with a h... more A small bridge project in rural China became a corruption scandal and burdened villagers with a huge debt. Seeking reason and justice from government officials, villagers encountered only obfuscation and frustration. At the same time, a void left during the Chinese Cultural Revolution by the destruction of an arch to chastity, a village monument, became a gathering place for mythical legends, stories of loyalty and betrayal, and speculations on the fate of the community. Forced to retain a pre-reform identity of rural residency, yet confronted with a market economy constrained by arbitrary state regulations, the bridge and the lost arch are spaces where villagers reconstruct their memory of Maoist governance, evaluate meanings of political relations, and project their image for fairness and a responsible state. (Chinese village-state relations, political corruption, social memory) Mojiagou village,2 in the mountains of Northern Shaanxi province, is a 40 minute bus ride north of Yan'an city, the "red capital" in the history of modem China. Mojiagou's neighbor, Zouyuan village, a higher rural unit (xiang) under the administration of Yan'an city, has become an important tourist spot ever since Mao Zedong's brief sojourn there before the liberation of 1949. Visitors to Zouyuan rarely set their eyes on Mojiagou village, which is hidden across a road and a river. A bridge constructed in 2003 to link Mojiagou villagers to a main road, and an arch destroyed more than thirty years earlier, in 1969, which had been the village monument to chastity, are two spaces villagers relate to and by which they reflect on questions of their relationship to the state. The bridge cost a fortune, allegedly due to political corruption involving the local government. By contrast, the demolished arch indicated the violent intrusion of the state into rural life, a declaration of the state's presence in an unforgettable manner. Though born of different periods in modern China, the bridge and the fallen arch are sites where villagers imagine how relations between the state and its subjects change and are reconfigured. Through these two structures the villagers feel loss. With the bridge there is the loss of money and trust in the ruling system, and with the arch there is a painful void in the villagers' lives and their heritage.
XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 13-19, 2014), Jul 14, 2014
This paper explores the new realities and challenges facing skilled self-employed migrants who ha... more This paper explores the new realities and challenges facing skilled self-employed migrants who have worked in Beijing for almost two decades and who tend to settle in the far-off, intersecting area between the rural and urban spaces of the city (chengxiang jiaohequ). Based on extensive field research and in-depth interviews with some of these veteran migrants, this paper asks these questions: how do veteran migrants define their living space and resist structural discrimination? The research shows that veteran migrants are able to unite with their left-behind children and wives in the outlying area of the city, where cheap accommodation, public education and an informal economy are available. Examining the ways these migrants speak about parenting strategies, reuniting households and take advantage of various resources and opportunities in the intersecting area, this paper argues that they make claims on what I call a “sub-urban citizenship.” The paper joins a broader discussion on citizenship mutation in the global era and argues that the concept of sub-urban citizenship allows one to understand the nuanced and everyday strategies peasant migrants actively assert to enfranchise themselves.
Hau: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Sep 1, 2020
This essay reveals that infrastructure, both transit and legal, not only facilitates exchanges ac... more This essay reveals that infrastructure, both transit and legal, not only facilitates exchanges across distance and borders, but also creates public structures of feeling. By structures of feeling, I refer to Raymond Williams’s discussion of those emergent trajectories of emotions that prevail without being fully articulated in a particular time and space. I found the term structures of feeling useful to articulate those emergent forms of mistrust, repulsion, anger, and even apprehension among the population with regard to the subway and other border-crossing projects.
China Journal of Social Work, Jul 1, 2012
We studied 12 migrant families who lived on the outskirts of Beijing, conducting participant obse... more We studied 12 migrant families who lived on the outskirts of Beijing, conducting participant observations and in-depth interviews between July 2008 and December 2009. Adopting the family strengths perspective, we identified the strategies employed by the migrant population to manage family life, the reliance on family networks for help and support, and their means of coping with the lack of
The final destination of the Long March and center of the Chinese Communist Party's red bases... more The final destination of the Long March and center of the Chinese Communist Party's red bases, Yan'an acquired mythical status during the Maoist era. Though the city's significance as an emblem of revolutionary heroism has faded, today's Chinese still glorify Yan'an as a sanctuary for ancient cultural traditions. The book examines the relation between the government and local communities for heritage preservation and cultural tourism in the age of runaway urbanization by focusing on the moments of mobilizing and representing folk traditions in both socialist and late socialist Yan'an. This ethnographic account of contemporary Yan'an documents how people have reworked the revival of three rural practices—paper-cutting, folk storytelling, and spirit cults—within (and beyond) the socialist legacy. Moving beyond dominant views of Yan'an folk culture as a tool of revolution or object of market reform, the book reveals how cultural traditions become battlegrounds where conflicts among the state, market forces, and intellectuals in search of an authentic China play out. At the same time, it shows these emerging new dynamics in the light of the ways rural residents make sense of rapid social change. The book uses “Yan'an and folk culture” to connote a historical model of the Chinese Communist Party appropriating folk traditions to promote rural reform and national state campaigns.
University of Illinois Press eBooks, Apr 20, 2017
This chapter examines the public secrecy and popularity of spirit cults in Yan&am... more This chapter examines the public secrecy and popularity of spirit cults in Yan'an in the context of the urbanization of the rural area. It first provides an overview of folk popular religion and spirit possession in and out of China before discussing how deity worship figures as a form of unspoken yet widely circulated knowledge, communal bonds, and spiritual services in rural Yan'an. It then considers how spirit cults in Yan'an produce what it calls a “surrogate rural subjectivity” and proceeds by turning to the emergence of women spirit mediums in the 1990s. The chapter argues that, in the context of rapid urbanization, spirit cults provide occasions for the expression of disappearing rural communal relations, folk values, and ritual memories. It also suggests that folk religion now constitutes a new form of rural discourse through which the urbanizing rural subject of China is recognized. Finally, it describes spirit cults as a major site through which rural norms, values, dispositions, and desires are de facto produced and reconstructed in the urbanization of the rural area.
University of Illinois Press eBooks, Apr 20, 2017
This chapter examines folk storytelling performances staged in and by various government work uni... more This chapter examines folk storytelling performances staged in and by various government work units or state-owned enterprises for public relations purposes, with particular emphasis on how the production of folk cultural tradition became intertwined with danwei business promotion in Yan'an. Using the case of northern Shaanxi storytelling, the chapter considers how the practice of folk tradition is linked to work-unit messages and, sometimes, national ideology promotion. It discusses the ways in which folk cultural production today concerns complicated political, commercial, and social relations with work units. It shows how the production of folk tradition is increasingly adapted to danwei public relations events and campaigns, while, at the same time, danwei events also become the spaces wherein traditional folk art forms find new developments, audiences, and visibility in the age of urbanization and marketization.
International Journal of Asian Studies, Jan 9, 2023
In a single serving of boba tea, the non-human actors of the tall plastic cups, plastic dome lids... more In a single serving of boba tea, the non-human actors of the tall plastic cups, plastic dome lids, and the giant plastic straws dominate, but receive little attention. This article uses recent theories and discussions of new materialism to bring together cultural analysis of the boba tea consumption phenomenon that could be relevant for reflecting on a sustainable future. The article contributes to social research of waste by focusing on the mediating functions of plastic before it becomes waste. My central argument is that plastic is not merely a physical and impartial container in the contemporary food and beverage industry. It plays an indispensable role in the visualization, mass mediation, and consumption of the boba tea beverage. While current waste research often focuses on the "afterlife" of plastic waste as it relates to underclass waste workers, recycling economy and global waste trade, this article highlights the performative function of plastic as it changes the way we imagine time, gender, and waste. I show it is the plastic cup that enables boba tea to be so visually and gastronomically satisfying in an age when the photogenicity and "Instagrammability" of food and beverage have become more relevant to taste and distinctions.
University of Illinois Press eBooks, Apr 20, 2017
This chapter examines how Xiaocheng Folk Art Village in Yan&a... more This chapter examines how Xiaocheng Folk Art Village in Yan'an was transformed into a container of tradition and the practice of paper-cutting into an intangible cultural heritage. It first considers the origin narrative of Xiaocheng Folk Art Village before discussing how China's urban intellectuals in the fields of folklore, religious studies, and anthropology have sought to re-understand the meanings of their work in the broader national and international framework. It then explains how Xiaocheng Folk Art Village emerged as a site of local, national, and international interests, with particular emphasis on the birth of creative rural subjects, reconfigured domestic relations, and a new public life in the village. It also describes the village's democratic struggles over folk art and concludes with an analysis of the politics of cultural authenticity and the invention of tradition in the broader context of intense urbanization and agrarian crisis in China. The chapter argues that heritage making in China is a process of “narrative battle” in which various actors construct differentiated meanings of history and tradition against the official party-state narrative.
China Journal, Jul 1, 2011
The ways in which ex-socialist cultural practitioners have opened up a quasi-religious space for ... more The ways in which ex-socialist cultural practitioners have opened up a quasi-religious space for rural villagers to express their new needs and communal concerns are discussed. The revival of such traditions remains connected to the socialist past, while at the same time responding to agrarian change and translocal conditions in the rural communities of Yan'an currently.
China Review International, 2011
Modern China, Mar 27, 2014
In the twentieth century, paper-cuts have been variously regarded as a domestic craft, a site of ... more In the twentieth century, paper-cuts have been variously regarded as a domestic craft, a site of rural purity, a marker of Chinese civilization, and more recently, a national intangible cultural heritage. This article analyzes paper-cuts not merely as a cultural practice but as a medium of articulation through which Chinese urban intellectuals have understood the countryside and traditions at specific historical moments. It also explores paper-cuts as a cultural medium through which urban elites have expressed their visions of the nation’s path to modernity and women’s liberation. During the Yan’an period (1937–1947), paper-cuts served as a Communist marker to distinguish an “art form of healthiness and honesty” from urban decadence under Nationalist rule. Since the 1980s, however, the art and practices of paper-cutting have come to share new discursive spaces: as the site of recovery of a lost Chinese civilization, an urban nostalgia for vanishing rural ritual practices, and most recently, a discourse of capital, profit, and personal success. By analyzing the shifting meanings assigned to paper-cuts, this article explores the relationship among the state, culture, and capital as it has been actively manufactured and negotiated through this folk practice.
Perspectives chinoises, Jul 1, 2019
Au nom de l'État-parti, au service du peuple : organisations de masse et de base dans la Chine du... more Au nom de l'État-parti, au service du peuple : organisations de masse et de base dans la Chine du XXI e siècle Vivre avec les déchets : « l'émancipation » des récupérateurs dans les villes chinoises
China perspectives, Jun 8, 2019
his yard stinks," Ling whined as she watched her one-year-old baby boy stumbling inside the waste... more his yard stinks," Ling whined as she watched her one-year-old baby boy stumbling inside the waste-sorting courtyard in Cold Water Village, located in the outer ring of Beijing, China. As Ling and I talked inside the brick shack in which they lived, the baby boy had fun picking colourful objects from the dirt ground of the yard. He showed them off to his mother and expected approval, but Ling slapped them away and responded with a contemptuous face, "Dirty!" I remember the temporary confusion in the eyes of the baby boy and his quick resumption of the mode of finding treasures at "home"-an open space courtyard of about 10,000 square feet, in which heaps of plastic and glass bottles, books, old clothes and shoes, newspapers and cardboard, plastic bags, foam board and gunnysacks, DVD disks, and electronic cable wire were neatly piled up. Ling and her boy lived with another 11 households in 12 individual brick shacks on one side of the yard. All residents in the yard made a living by collecting and selling recyclable waste. They were some of the waste pickers (shoufeipinren 收廢品人) of Beijing city. When asked why she chose to raise her baby in Beijing, Ling smiled, "My neighbours can help babysit him while I find a job." In Cold Water Village, there were at least five courtyards of this nature. Surrounding Beijing city centre, at least several hundred similar courtyards for waste sorting and storing purpose can be spotted from a bird-eye view. (1) In Beijing city alone, the estimated number of waste pickers living in such yards was at least 100,000. Some news reports estimated the number to range from 100,000 to 300,000 (Xinhua 2014). The reason that a huge number of waste pickers and waste collecting courtyards cluster around the capital city is obvious. The enormous amount of urban waste generates huge profits for the recycling business. This is especially the case in megacities such as Beijing, which has a population of about 20 million and keeps expanding into new residential and commercial districts. Xinhua News reported that the weight of discarded television sets in Beijing added up to 24,000 tons in the year 2013 alone (Shan 2014). By 2015, the amount of municipal waste produced daily in Beijing city had reached an alarming level of 20,000 tons. This amount of municipal solid waste stretches the city's landfill capacity, and it takes four incineration facilities operating 24 hours a day to "annihilate" the huge amount of waste. (2) At the national level, the production of waste is not discouraged, as it is linked to spectacular economic growth, high industrial output, and increased urban construction and domestic consumption. While megacities are growing, the intense urbanisation of China's rural areas and small towns implies that millions of rural residents are now joining the journey of consuming and throwing away more. And just as governments at both the rural and urban levels enjoy increased GDP growth, they are also fighting a growing enemy-the fast-accumulating waste of all kinds. Luckily, or unluckily, the huge amount of waste generated daily in many Chinese cities is "filtered" and thus substantially reduced by an army of waste pickers. "Each trash bin is checked by one hundred eyes daily" (Shan 2014). This popular saying succinctly describes how fierce the battle is over valuable recyclable waste. In Beijing, hundreds of thousands of rural migrants, mostly from Sichuan and Henan provinces, engage in the business of recycling urban waste. Their daily informal and meticulous labour of loading, sorting, and storing waste keeps the capital running its business as usual.
International Journal of Asian Studies
In a single serving of boba tea, the non-human actors of the tall plastic cups, plastic dome lids... more In a single serving of boba tea, the non-human actors of the tall plastic cups, plastic dome lids, and the giant plastic straws dominate, but receive little attention. This article uses recent theories and discussions of new materialism to bring together cultural analysis of the boba tea consumption phenomenon that could be relevant for reflecting on a sustainable future. The article contributes to social research of waste by focusing on the mediating functions of plastic before it becomes waste. My central argument is that plastic is not merely a physical and impartial container in the contemporary food and beverage industry. It plays an indispensable role in the visualization, mass mediation, and consumption of the boba tea beverage. While current waste research often focuses on the “afterlife” of plastic waste as it relates to underclass waste workers, recycling economy and global waste trade, this article highlights the performative function of plastic as it changes the way we i...
Reinventing Chinese Tradition: The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism, 2015
This chapter examines the role of northern Shaanxi folk storytelling (Shaanbei shuoshu), a musica... more This chapter examines the role of northern Shaanxi folk storytelling (Shaanbei shuoshu), a musical drama prevalent in the Yan'an area, in isolated rural communities where villagers actively seek folk storytelling to reflect on new desires and problems. In particular, it considers how both state propaganda and folk cultural tradition continue to intertwine in their contemporary forms and contents, and yet both have been subjected to radical reinterpretations. The chapter explains how northern Shaanxi storytelling remains connected to the Maoist legacy of mass culture, while responding to agrarian change and translocal conditions in rural communities of Yan'an today. It suggests that popular religious revival is not only a rural phenomenon but also rampant in today's urban prosperous Yan'an city. Northern Shaanxi storytelling can be considered a quasi-religious resource with late socialist characteristics, which responds to new social and communal desires in the context of a great rural–urban divide.
Reinventing Chinese Tradition: The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism, 2015
This chapter examines the public secrecy and popularity of spirit cults in Yan'an in the context ... more This chapter examines the public secrecy and popularity of spirit cults in Yan'an in the context of the urbanization of the rural area. It first provides an overview of folk popular religion and spirit possession in and out of China before discussing how deity worship figures as a form of unspoken yet widely circulated knowledge, communal bonds, and spiritual services in rural Yan'an. It then considers how spirit cults in Yan'an produce what it calls a “surrogate rural subjectivity” and proceeds by turning to the emergence of women spirit mediums in the 1990s. The chapter argues that, in the context of rapid urbanization, spirit cults provide occasions for the expression of disappearing rural communal relations, folk values, and ritual memories. It also suggests that folk religion now constitutes a new form of rural discourse through which the urbanizing rural subject of China is recognized. Finally, it describes spirit cults as a major site through which rural norms, values, dispositions, and desires are de facto produced and reconstructed in the urbanization of the rural area.
Gender and Change in Hong Kong: Globalization, Post-colonialism, and Chinese Patriarchy, 2004
Since the late 1970s, thanks to China's open door policy and transition to a "socialist market ec... more Since the late 1970s, thanks to China's open door policy and transition to a "socialist market economy," the Hong Kong business sector has grasped the opportunity to exploit the natural resources and cheap labour of mainland China and to invade the newly opened market. Its activities were concentrated in the southeastern part of the Guangdong province, where many entrepreneurs set up factories and offices, moving their capital out of Hong Kong. This phenomenon of shifting industrial capital and production lines north of Hong Kong was part of a larger economic and cultural project of "opening up" China. Some cultural studies critics coined the term "the northbound project" to better depict the process not only as economic exploitation of mainland labour by Hong Kong capitalists but also as a heavy investment of Hong Kong cultural industries in the mainland, where images of Hong Kong singers and idols, videos, films, magazines, and novels abound. 1 This process also involved a blooming sex industry in the Guangdong province serving Hong Kong men from all walks of life. In short, new regimes of Hong Kong cultural hegemony and sexual exploitation proliferated alongside the transborder business networks. A recent phenomenon arising from such northbound activities was that more and more Hong Kong men began to, in Cantonese terms, baau yih naai (P: bao er nai), or keep concubines, in mainland China. Literally translated as "keep," baau also carries the contextual meaning of owning a full set of services through monetary payment. Yih naai means "the second wife," or "concubine." In feudal China (and in Hong Kong up to 1970), when polygamy was practised, a concubine and her offspring had certain legitimate positions in the family, albeit of a much more inferior status than the wife (Watson 1991, 231). Nowadays, under monogamous marriage, a concubine is actually a mistress who is illegitimate and often kept in secrecy. The relationship is more like an extramarital affair. For some Chinese men, "owning" one or more concubines is still considered a symbol of their social and economic status, if not sexual prowess. What is so remarkable about
China Review International, 2011
Registration is now open to non-presenting participants Recent years have seen significant change... more Registration is now open to non-presenting participants Recent years have seen significant changes to and growing tensions regarding Chinese feminism. Some have argued for a new generation of feminist activism entirely, one which self-consciously distinguishes itself from the earlier reform period and thereby claims a historically significant turning point with regards to the meaning, tactics, and practitioners of such activism. Others emphasize connections between earlier eras of feminist engagements and aspects of modern state-formation in analyzing contemporary forms of feminist protest. In any case, the current historical moment is defined by several monumental challenges in China and globally: Growing authoritarianism, reactionary attacks on gender and minorities, global pandemic and climate crises, political pressures on higher education and academic research, and dependence on digital technologies and social media platforms, to name but a few. For an emerging new generation of activists and scholar-activists, in the context of global circuits of knowledge production and sharing, these challenges inspire feminist engagements in Chinese societies. This workshop brings together scholars and scholar-activists to explore this critical field, through a set of suggested key questions, informed by relevant scholarship.
Registration is now open to non-presenting participants Recent years have seen significant change... more Registration is now open to non-presenting participants Recent years have seen significant changes to and growing tensions regarding Chinese feminism. Some have argued for a new generation of feminist activism entirely, one which self-consciously distinguishes itself from the earlier reform period and thereby claims a historically significant turning point with regards to the meaning, tactics, and practitioners of such activism. Others emphasize connections between earlier eras of feminist engagements and aspects of modern state-formation in analyzing contemporary forms of feminist protest. In any case, the current historical moment is defined by several monumental challenges in China and globally: Growing authoritarianism, reactionary attacks on gender and minorities, global pandemic and climate crises, political pressures on higher education and academic research, and dependence on digital technologies and social media platforms, to name but a few. For an emerging new generation of activists and scholar-activists, in the context of global circuits of knowledge production and sharing, these challenges inspire feminist engagements in Chinese societies. This workshop brings together scholars and scholar-activists to explore this critical field, through a set of suggested key questions, informed by relevant scholarship.
Queer identity politics has assumed an increasing visibility in China’s urban centers. LGBT frien... more Queer identity politics has assumed an increasing visibility in China’s urban centers. LGBT friendly restaurants, lesbian marriage activism, the popular genre of boy’s love, and transgendered celebrities are changing the public culture of gender and sexuality. At the same time, the pink economy in China is one of the fastest growing sectors. Various new social media platforms such as Blued and LesPark bloom in response to high demands of the LGBT communities. All these new practices are not only responses over new meanings of desires, interests, consumption, and new identities within a changing social, political, and economic landscape. They are also tied to new forms of citizen rights advocacy and new forms of social activism.
The symposium of Movements of Desires gathers esteemed scholars, activists, and artists from China and abroad to explore the ways that queer studies, politics, new media practices and consumption innovation transform and reimagine new social possibilities and scholarship.
Climate change and climate catastrophes, exacerbated by capitalist growth, are creating new forms... more Climate change and climate catastrophes, exacerbated by capitalist growth, are creating new forms of politics, different socio-cultural engagements and new philosophical thinking. Multispecies feminist theorist Donna Haraway has recently asked us to engage the concept of the Anthropocene critically, link it to the Capitalocene, and make kin with non-human species in order to have a future that more can co-exist. What is the role of the humanities in the theorization of global environmental crisis and damage? How do social cultural theories respond to the age of Anthropocene in which human activities have radically changed the meanings of the earth, human and non-human existences? How do we advance postcolonial critiques in Asia where limited natural resource and massive cheap labor is mobilized to manufacture for consumers all over the world? How do humanities scholars respond to the post-Fukushima era when climate refugees are protagonists, animals and plants interact with new technologies, while waste and pollution are fact of everyday lives? This workshop invites young and excellent researchers from the emerging field of environmental humanities to respond to entanglements among capital, ecology, human and non-human, waste, and cultural productions. Keynote Speaker
The Guardian Daily, Premium access to the Guardian app and ad-free reading on theguardian.com. 50... more The Guardian Daily, Premium access to the Guardian app and ad-free reading on theguardian.com. 50% off for 3 months.
Fashion Food Recipes Love & sex Health & fitness Home & garden Women Men Family Travel Money Life... more Fashion Food Recipes Love & sex Health & fitness Home & garden Women Men Family Travel Money Life and style Country life: the young female farmer who is now a top influencer in China Li Ziqi, 29, has garnered millions of followers with her videos of her idyllic life in rural Sichuan. Is she too good to be true? Liziqi's YouTube channel: a rural dream.
