Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (10 page)

10
. In recent years, for example, more than 400 large malls have been built in China. Currently, five of the ten largest malls in the world are in China, many of which are created by real estate developers. In the context of the global economy, these malls show that the Chinese are more like consumers than producers. Thus, a
New York Times
reporter proclaims: “Retailing and real estate are radically altering the face of China, and opening the door to the possibility that soon China may not simply be the world’s factory, it may own the world’s shopping space” (Barboza 2005).

11
. For an excellent analysis of the phenomenon, see Bryman (2004). See also Ching-wen Hsu (
Chapter Two
in this volume) on the production of a shopping street in Taiwan for a comparable development elsewhere in East Asia.

12
. The strategy of market segmentation is used to divide mass markets into smaller market segments “defined by distinctive orientations and tastes, each to be sold different products or even the same product packaged and marketed in totally different ways” (Cohen 2006: 56). In the United States, the spread of this practice in the late 1950s paralleled the development of themed built environments (especially shopping malls and theme parks). Both played an important part in the historical development of the middle class in the United States (Cohen 2006).

13
. This is based on the currency exchange rate in 1996. Until recent years, the monthly salary of an ordinary Chinese urban citizen has been below 500 yuan.

14
. The term
graduated sovereignty
comes from Aihwa Ong’s discussion of how populations are differentially governed in Southeast and East Asia (1999; 2006).

15
. In June 2006, when I surveyed more than eighty Chinese publications on theme parks in the past decade through Wanfang’s digital database, the high price of admission was often mentioned as a major problem by industry analysts and experts.

16
. I learned during my fieldwork in 1996 that this tract of land was acquired in the early 1990s when Chen Xitong, a standing member of the politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, was the mayor of Beijing. Chen was charged with corruption in 1995 and given a sixteen-year jail sentence.

17
. The rest of the funding came from various organizations, including government organizations in charge of administrating land use, environment regulation, and sanitation. The park’s general manager Wang manages the park’s operations. Her husband Bai (the son of a former mayor of the city) is the chairman of the board, and he is in charge of planning and development. In addition to managing the park, Wang also works with scholars, especially folklorists, ethnologists, and urban planning experts. She was elected as a vice director of the Ethnological Society of China. In 2002, she worked with private business people in the tourist industry to establish a nationwide nongovernmental organization titled “Chamber of Tourism All China Federation of Industry and Commerce” (see their website at
www.tcc.org.cn/
). A few years ago, the park launched a website (
www.emuseum.org.cn/
) to provide updated tourist information in both Chinese and English. In 2008, she became a member of the Eleventh National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).

18
. The sixteen national ethnic groups included in the park are the Zang (“Tibetan”), Qiang, Jingpo, Hani, Wa, Miao, Yi, Buyi, Dong, Hezhe, Dauer, Ewenke, Elunchuan, and the Korean, Taiwanese Aboriginal, and Dai cultures. There are fifty-six national minority cultures in China altogether. The cultures that are included in the park represent the ecologically diverse areas of China’s borderlands.

19
. As I found out in my fieldwork, the company hires these performers through three channels. First, it contracts local (that is, county or prefecture) commissions for ethnic affairs to select ethnic performers. Second, the park managers, with the help of local government, go to a village to hire people on site. Finally, the company may contract a local performance troupe to perform at the park.

20
. The representation of ethnic minorities reflects how the Han (ethnically Chinese) construct a relation of the self to the other. Scholars such as Gladney (1991), Harrell (1995), Oakes (1998), and Schein (2000) have discussed issues on nationalism and internal colonialism in representations of national minority cultures. My concern here is to examine multiculturalism more generally as a mode of middle-class consumption.

21
. This structure makes up an annual cycle of festivals: New Year celebrations (January), religious activities representing Zang (Tibetan) Buddhism (February), Chinese Woman’s Day (March), the Dai Water Splashing Festival (April), the Qiang Hill Worshipping Festival (May), the Miao Dragon Boat Festival (June), the Hani Kuzhazha Festival (July), the Yi Torch Festival (August), the Jinpo Song Festival (September), the Wa New Rice Festival (October), the New Year celebrations of the Buyi and the Dong (November), and a sports exhibition representing the peoples of the north (December).

22
. To make a monthly festival flexible, the company considers two major factors. First, the availability of ethnic minority performers is a factor determining a festival theme. During my 1996 fieldwork, for example, there were festivals representing the Miao, Dai, Qiang, Dong, and Yi. In July 2000, Zang, Jingpo, and Dai festivals were featured. Another important factor is sponsorship for special events, such as national celebrations, visits of Chinese or foreign officials, and national and international meetings and sports events. When a special event takes place, the regularly scheduled programs are modified mainly because the event usually brings in more revenue. On July 11, 2000, for example, the Preparatory Committee of the Twenty-First International University Sports Games to be held in Beijing from August 21 to September 1, 2000, came to the park to inspect whether the park might be a suitable site for the closing ceremony. During the event, managerial staff and performers curtailed their regularly scheduled programs to receive the officials of the committee.

23
. This ethnographic observation of mine was confirmed by park staff members.

24
. For a discussion of how aspiring middle-class professionals invest in their children’s middle-class mobility, see Anagnost 2004.

25
. For a detailed discussion of how leisure becomes an important domain of citizenship, see Jing Wang 2001a.

26
. According to Carl Schmitt, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exceptional case” (2005: 5). Sovereignty emerges as a decisive issue only in a state of exception. A sovereign must decide what is a state of exception
and
must make the decisions appropriate to that exception. Decision in a state of exception must be based on the quality of the deciding person not on any existing rules and laws.

27
. “Faith,” according to Alain Badiou, belongs to the territory of truth; it refers to the fidelity to truth (the indiscernible) that always leads to the creation of a hole within a claim about truth. Thus, it is faith rather than belief that constitutes a truthful subject (2003 [1997]: 74).

28
. This practice of charity cannot be considered as a gift of grace, which refers to the granting of a gift, charisma (
kharisma
), to the ethical subject who is faithful to truth. That is, becoming a subject faithful to truth does not follow any laws and thus cannot take the form of a reward or wage (Badiou 2003 [1997]: 77).

29
. Here, I use the word
nothing
to mean the emptied and the disembedded. What is emptied and disembedded is the symbolic meaning or aura of the exhibit. However, the operation of the park as a commercial environment creates exchange value out of the emptied and the disembedded. The acquisition of information or knowledge about “ethnic culture” at the park becomes the accumulation of emptied and disembedded artifacts.

30
. See Berlant (2007) for a clear elaboration of the negative agency of sovereignty in neoliberalism.

31
. One example is that overemphasizing consumption’s association with freedom would lead to a reading of China’s consumer culture merely as an example of the transition from socialism to market society (in which consumption substitutes for production), a process that mirrors what has taken place in the West. A consequence of this understanding is that it disconnects what happens in China from the present process of neoliberal globalization, of which China has been an important player (Harvey 2005; Ren 2010a). For a good example of this reading, see Zukin and Maguire (2004: 189–191).

32
. Consumption merely extends the process of exploitation that begins in the productive process. This situation applies both to cosmopolitan and disenfranchised subjects (Ren 2012).

33
. For example, the Shanghai-based
Hurun Report
Group ranks the philanthropic activities of individuals and corporations every year. See the organization’s website at
www.hurun.net/
.

34
. For an excellent case study of charity that involves the participation of the masses, see King (2006).

35
. For a summary of these problems, see an article originally published by the
Beijing Morning News
(
Beijing Chenbao
2006).

36
. These arguments were posted in a public forum on the
hainan.net
. Many original news articles and photos were reposted at the site. See
http://1home.hainan.net/New/PublicForum/Content.asp?idWriter=0&Key=0&strItem=funinfo&idArticle=89696&flag=1
, retrieved in March 2007.

37
.
Xinmin wanbao
, October 2, 2010, pp. A1, A7.

38
. Gary Becker, a major figure in formulating economic neoliberalism, agues that delinquency can be calculated as a neoliberal value in self-formation (1992). In fact, as Ren has shown, delinquency in popular culture is historically tied to neoliberalism (2005).

39
. See, for example, Gary Sigley’s (2006: 492) discussion of the divide in neo-liberal governmentality between those who embody the new model of citizenship and those who must be taught.

Chapter
Two

Miraculous Rebirth

Making Global Places in Taiwan

CHING-WEN HSU

It was a hot summer afternoon in 2002. The shops in downtown Kaohsiung had just opened, and people were beginning to filter into the New Kujiang shopping district, but it would take another few hours for activity to pick up on the street.
1
Standing on the side of the road, Mr. Liao, a member of the Committee for Development in New Kujiang, took refuge from the heat in the cold air escaping from an air-conditioned shop.
2
Looking through a veil of smog, he voiced his concern about the trees: “They’re ugly. They look like those trees outside of the municipal cultural centers.” The man had wanted to see a different style of landscaping lining the streets to create a promenade that, he had hoped, would be “like the streets in Austria.” Instead, all he could see were short trees with upright branches, small leaves, and no flowers. To him, they were entirely too predictable and uninspiring—everything the shopping district in the largest urban center in southern Taiwan was not supposed to be. He had envisioned a New Kujiang that would be trendy and alive. In less than fifteen years after its emergence, New Kujiang had indeed become a popular shopping destination for young people in southern Taiwan. Nonetheless it had not quite developed the elegance that Mr. Liao had envisioned. Now he hoped that, if only New Kujiang could get the right kind of trees (and a little more help from the authorities), everything would work out as planned. As Mr. Liao imagined a shopping district simulating
the
streets of faraway countries, retailers from shops all around him burned spirit money to lure in real money and hoped that their prayers and offerings would reach the deities and ghosts they were intended for.
3
The old ritual may have looked out of place in the fashionable shopping district. However, on the streets where the smoke and smog were inseparable and the heat from the fires fused with the heat from the sun, ghosts and deities are in the service of the living, and the retailers’ wishes were as worldly and profit oriented as Mr. Liao’s plan for New Kujiang. Here, new visions and long-standing practices intersect, and imaginations and prayers frequently reach the world beyond to make earthly enterprises more profitable.

First begun as a shopping center aimed at affluent consumers during the island’s burgeoning economy in the 1980s, New Kujiang was revitalized as a shopping district by a state-initiated “place-making” project in the late 1990s. Its emergence and metamorphosis reflect the economic transformation of the city of Kaohsiung as well as that of Taiwan over the years. As part of the national project to refashion the appearance of the island’s towns and cities, New Kujiang exemplifies the desire for Taiwan’s modern development and prosperity through urban planning and spatial reform. As an internationalized shopping district built in the image of Euro-American and Japanese shopping streets, it offers the possibility for its shoppers and merchants to imagine themselves as being a part of the larger world of upscale “quality” (
pinzhi
) places. However, subsumed under a narrative of national modernization and market success on a global scale, New Kujiang also provides the ground on which these visions are contested and where questions about Taiwan’s “internationalized” future are raised. Just as the ideas of Mr. Liao and the shopowners diverge about what it would take to make the shopping district a better place for business, different visions and practices converge, compete, and clash in New Kujiang. While the developers and planners constantly allude to the city’s history of colonial dependency and international trade to build for a future in the global consumer market, those who work and shop in the streets of New Kujiang may also make use of these same idioms to justify existing practices at odds with the official vision of modernization and prosperity. This chapter examines how the space and narrative of New Kujiang as an “internationalized” place has been produced and how this space provides the background against which official narratives and imaginaries of the global become reworked to tell different stories.