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BR - Comsuming China

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BR - Comsuming China 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...
BR - Comsuming China
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 . Accessed: 13/07/2011 05:48 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ccc. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Contemporary China Center, Australian National University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The China Journal. http://www.jstor.org 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 Review: untitled [pp. 129-131] Review: untitled [pp. 132-133] Review: untitled [pp. 134-136] Review: untitled [pp. 136-138] Review: untitled [pp. 139-141] Review: untitled [pp. 142-144] Review: untitled [pp. 144-146] Review: untitled [pp. 146-147] Review: untitled [pp. 147-149] Review: untitled [pp. 149-151] Review: untitled [pp. 151-153] Review: untitled [pp. 153-155] Review: untitled [pp. 155-157] Review: untitled [pp. 157-160] Review: untitled [pp. 160-162] Review: untitled [pp. 162-164] Review: untitled [pp. 164-166] Review: untitled [pp. 166-168] Review: untitled [pp. 169-170] Review: untitled [pp. 171-173] Review: untitled [pp. 173-175] Review: untitled [pp. 175-177] Review: untitled [pp. 177-179] Review: untitled [pp. 179-181] Review: untitled [pp. 182-184] Review: untitled [pp. 184-185] Review: untitled [pp. 185-187] Review: untitled [pp. 187-189] Review: untitled [pp. 189-191] Review: untitled [pp. 191-193] Review: untitled [pp. 194-196] Review: untitled [pp. 196-198] Review: untitled [pp. 198-201] Review: untitled [pp. 202-203] Review: untitled [pp. 203-206] Review: untitled [pp. 206-208] Review: untitled [pp. 209-211] Review: untitled [pp. 211-213] Review: untitled [pp. 213-215] Review: untitled [pp. 215-217] Review: untitled [pp. 217-218] Review: untitled [pp. 219-221] Review: untitled [pp. 221-223] Review: untitled [pp. 223-225] Review: untitled [pp. 225-227] Review: untitled [pp. 227-228] Review: untitled [pp. 228-230] Review: untitled [pp. 230-232] Review: untitled [pp. 232-234] Review: untitled [pp. 234-236] Review: untitled [pp. 236-239] Review: untitled [pp. 239-241] Review: untitled [pp. 242-244] Review: untitled [pp. 245-248] Review: untitled [pp. 248-250] Review: untitled [pp. 250-251] Review: untitled [pp. 251-254] Review: untitled [pp. 254-256] Review: untitled [pp. 256-258] Review: untitled [pp. 258-259] Review: untitled [pp. 260-261] Review: untitled [pp. 261-262] Review: untitled [pp. 263-264] Review: untitled [pp. 265-266] Review: untitled [pp. 266-268] Back Matter
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