Contemporary China Center, Australian National University
Review: [untitled]
Author(s): Beverley Hooper
Source: The China Journal, No. 58 (Jul., 2007), pp. 171-173
Published by: Contemporary China Center, Australian National University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20066329 .
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REVIEWS 171
Consuming China: Approaches to Cultural Change in Contemporary China,
edited by Kevin Latham, Stuart Thompson and Jakob Klein. London:
Routledge, 2006. [x] + 246 pp. ?75.00/US$135.00 (hardcover).
This book originated in a seminar series held in 1998-89 at London
University's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and, having been
listed for some time by Routledge as a "forthcoming publication", finally
came out in September 2006. Despite some minor updating of references, the
book overall is located in the 1980s and 1990s, which puts it, albeit belatedly,
in the same genre as Deborah Davis's edited volume The Consumer
Revolution in Urban China (2000) and Perry Link, Richard Madsen and Paul
Pickowitz's edited volume Popular China (2002).
Consuming China, according to Kevin Latham's Introduction, focuses on
"practices of consumption, understood more broadly than consumerism, and
their relation to different manifestations of social and cultural change" (p. 2).
In pursuing this focus, the volume does not restrict itself to mainland China
but includes chapters on consumption in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and a
"transnational virtual context" (p. 3). This broad conceptualization has,
however, created something of a tension between the five papers that are
conceptualized within the scholarly discourse on consumer culture in post
Mao China and a miscellany of four chapters that are located, to a greater or
lesser extent, within a broader "consumption" rubric across Greater China.
While Latham's introduction justifies the inclusion of these chapters, it
focuses largely on familiar questions about consumption in the PRC in the
post-Mao era, including the characterization of "Chinese" consumption, the
"revolutionary" nature of China's "consumer revolution", China's
consumption in global contexts, and consumption and representation. In what
is virtually a second introduction, Elisabeth Croll reinforces this focus when
she explores "the powerful connection between consumption and culturalism"
(p. 22) that developed in the PRC in the 1980s and 1990s, expanding on her
1997 inaugural professorial lecture at SOAS to examine goods, identities,
cultural seduction, selective borrowing, Chinese characteristics, and new
characteristics.
The chapters that fall within the "consumer culture" rubric are the most
successful. John Bayne provides an imaginative analysis of photography and
consumerism in 1990s Hangzhou within the context of expanded leisure
activities and the allure of the foreign. Similarly, Jakob Klein has produced an
innovative paper on the upsurge of gastronomic writing in the Guangzhou
daily press in the late 1990s, which he sees as being bound up not just with the
proliferation of eating places in the city and the growing variety of tastes and
styles, but also with the increasing commercialization of the Chinese print
media. Also focusing on Guangzhou and using one newspaper {New Express)
as a case study, Kevin Latham argues that the "imagined consumer, as
newspaper reader, is playing a fundamental part in the understated
transformations that together amount to China's silent media revolution"
(p. 83).
172 THE CHINA JOURNAL, No. 58
Readers interested in gender issues will already be familiar with Harriet
Evans' writings on gender and consumerism. Her article on fashions and
feminine consumption questions the dominant narratives on female
representation in the Maoist and market eras, challenging the idea of a "simple
rupture" between the two periods and arguing that "the link between
femininity and appearance was obscured but not eradicated from Maoist
imagery" (p. 180). In the fifth paper on consumerism, Michael Palmer
examines the emergence of consumer rights in the 1980s and 1990s. While not
one of the first publications on the subject, the paper presents a lawyer's clear
examination of the more formal aspects of this issue. Overall, these chapters
make a worthwhile contribution to original scholarship on the development of
a consumer culture in the PRC in the 1980s and 1990s, supplementing other
research on the period.
What the remaining papers (which are interspersed with the above
chapters) have in common is that they are linked, sometimes rather
tendentiously, with the broad theme of "consumption". Charles Stafford
presents an insightful anthropological analysis of deception {pian), corruption
(fubai) and the Chinese "ritual economy", all linked to "popular ideas about
the morality of exchange" (p. 43) and based on ethnographic research done in
the 1980s and 1990s in two communities in south-eastern Taiwan and north
eastern mainland China. Nicholas Tapp's article (previously published in The
Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 2 [2000], pp. 73-101)
examines the Hmong people, many of whom migrated from southern China to
North Vietnam, Laos and Thailand (and some subsequently overseas), and
illustrates the production of new images of Hmong identity through modern
communications technology.
The two remaining chapters, on Taiwan and Hong Kong respectively,
further stretch the volume's thematic coverage. Luke Robinson's thoughtful
article on Wong Kar-wai's "sensuous histories" argues that the director's films
are about "more than a rendition of the postcolonial or postmodern
experience" which is stressed by other scholars, and are rather "an attempt to
explore the way in which we engage with both objects and images" (p. 201).
A somewhat idiosyncratic inclusion is Stuart Thompson's chapter, which
involves, in his own words, "a re(con)sumption of a seminar paper" (p. 125)
which he originally gave in London more than two decades earlier, on the
practice followed in a Taiwanese coastal village of descendants not consuming
pork when someone dies. Thompson re-presents the seminar paper verbatim,
though in an apparently abbreviated version taking up eleven pages, and
follows this with a theoretically-informed auto-critique. While each of these
four articles is of some interest, together they do little more than show that
"consumption" is indeed a broad concept (as Daniel McKinnon's 1995 book
Acknowledging Consumption demonstrated), even when applied to Chinese
societies and limited to the disciplines of anthropology and cultural studies.
Given the wide-ranging usage of the term "consumption" in contemporary
social sciences discourse, Latham's Afterword rather states the obvious when
he writes:
" ... we can see that understanding consumption in China requires
REVIEWS 173
attention to more than just consumerism, and consumption is not simply a
manifestation or epiphenomenon of economic reform in the PRC ..." (p. 231).
Although not the volume's stated objective, Consuming China's major
contribution is to scholarly discourse on the socio-cultural dynamics and
transformative qualities of post-Mao China's burgeoning consumerism, while
at the same time it reminds us?if we need reminding?that the "practice of
Chinese consumption" goes beyond those parameters. Despite the book's
extortionate price, it deserves a place in university libraries?if they can afford
it.
Beverley Hooper
University of Sheffield
Media and the Chinese Diaspora: Community, Communications and
Commerce, edited by Wanning Sun. London: Routledge, 2006. xiv + 220 pp.
?65.00/US$120.00 (hardcover).
"The 'Chinese diaspora' is as much a discursive project as a material and
socio-economic reality" (p. xii), argues Wanning Sun in her new edited
volume. She is right, but the argument is not new: Aihwa Ong, Ien Ang,
myself and others have discussed how the "Chinese diaspora" emerged from a
confluence of business-school fads, academic interests and governmental
agendas in East Asia and the West. Nonetheless, apart from Sun's Leaving
China (2002), there have been few empirical studies of transnational Chinese
media, which is central to constructing this new imaginary.
This book sets out to fill this gap, but only about half of its chapters follow
the editor's agenda. Xiaojian Zhao's chapter on the struggles between
Kuomintang and Communist sympathizers for the control of Chinese
newspapers in America provides a parallel to today's battles from an earlier
period of transnationalism. Chua Beng Huat highlights the emergence of a
shared Chinese pop culture imaginary based on ethnic Chinese pop stars on
the international circuit, but cautions that it is an ephemeral one: some of the
singers have, after all, opted to perform in Chinese rather than English out of
economic considerations. Chang-yau Hoon shows how Chinese media in post
Soeharto Indonesia are engaged in a mission of "resinicizing" a largely non
Chinese-speaking but large and distinct population group. Unfortunately, this
chapter is among the least successful in the book?Hoon is more concerned
with unmasking the essentialism behind this project than doing justice either
to the diversity of the media he studies or paying serious attention to the
impact of the diaspora discourse imported from China. Jia Gao's exploration
of how the emergence of a Chinese community radio station in Melbourne
affected ethnic leadership dynamics is an original effort, but the basis of his
conclusions is unclear. Thus, Gao puzzlingly posits that ethnic Chinese in
Australia "were in need of re-Sinicization in the late 1990s" (pp. 174-75). He
neither supports this statement nor asks why the radio station studied
Article Contents
p. 171
p. 172
p. 173
Issue Table of Contents
The China Journal, No. 58 (Jul., 2007), pp. 1-268
Front Matter
Wal-Mao: The Discipline of Corporate Culture and Studying Success at Wal-Mart China [pp. 1-27]
Subways as a Space of Cultural Intimacy: The Mass Rapid Transit System in Taipei, Taiwan [pp. 31-55]
From Resistance to Adaptation: Uyghur Popular Music and Changing Attitudes among Uyghur Youth [pp. 59-82]
Depoliticizing Tobacco's Exceptionality: Male Sociality, Death and Memory-Making among Chinese Cigarette Smokers [pp. 85-109]
Population Governance in the PRC: Political, Historical and Anthropological Perspectives [pp. 111-126]
Reviews
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Back Matter