Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (28 page)

In Yin’s lecture, trainees were taught to view their labor as a commodity and their training as added value that comes from “professionalization.” First, Yin compared selling the trainee’s labor power to selling potatoes. “If you do well, then it will be easier for us to recommend you to other clients.
It
is like selling potatoes. Usually people say, ‘Come and look at my potatoes, big and good.’ I can’t say, ‘Come and look at my potatoes, black and small.’
” She later stressed that trainees must be prepared to do a superior job, because in 2005 their beginning wage at 450 yuan per month (about US$55) was significantly higher than the average of 350 to 400 yuan for domestic work in Beijing. To illustrate the concept of added value, she made use of a pork analogy: “The higher your wage, the higher expectation your clients will have for you, right?” Some trainees replied, “Right.” “Why?” asked Yin. No reply. Yin continued, “You raise your pig. Others also raise their pigs. Others sell their pork at 2 yuan per
jin
[500 grams], but you sell yours at four yuan. Why can you do that? Do your pigs have more legs? What do you have that is different? Well, you have had training. Anyone can sweep the floor and dust the desk. What do you have that is different? You’ve got a qualification [for being better paid].” Another wall slogan echoes her words, “A trained domestic worker is different from others [
yu zhong bu tong
]! Your training should show!” This exhortation teaches them the value added from the professional training in which they have invested through their tuition payments. The school becomes a brand that acts as a guarantee for nervous prospective employers about the reliability and quality of their maids. While the luster of Mao Yushi generates much of this brand value, it can be sustained and reproduced only by these workers delivering labor to the satisfaction of their clients.

In Yin’s teaching, the analogy between pork and the trainees’ labor power is a clue to the commodity logic of the training school. Disparate things—potatoes, pork, domestic labor—are linked together in this teaching as they all speak the language of commodities. The subsumption of labor to the market is articulated through this prosaic commodity objectification. Labor power is made to appear “like” pork and potatoes despite its potential to produce more value than it costs. What the trainees were taught was not the Marxist critique of the commodity form but a neoclassical economic logic of commodities in its most naked and objectified form without any sentimental veiling. Marx’s analysis of the commodity reveals that commodification and objectification of labor power, rather than being natural and universal in human history, is a particular problem of capitalist relations of production. Marx’s analysis of labor under conditions of capitalism is thus a historical and specific critique of capitalism and points to the historical instances and future possibilities of decommodification. In contrast, neoclassical economics
not
only takes commodifiction to be natural and ideal but is also used as the basis for policy advocacy and employment training.

Neoliberalism challenges the state’s function in managing and distributing public goods and in providing regulations to protect domestic industry and the domestic market against transnational competition. It codes privatization, or the conversion of public goods into commodities, as “liberty” and “freedom” and calls for governmental encouragement of labor migration. Educating laborers to embrace their own positioning as commodities in the market is both a crucial condition and effect of neoliberal marketization. In the case of Fuping, provincial governments have subsidized the tuition for these rural young women to learn to think less about their expectation of the state and more about themselves as autonomous and self-willed agents in the market as service providers.

Yin has just done that: She unsentimentally teaches about the object-ness and value added of their labor power so that the young women would come to act consciously as a commodity of some distinction. The fact that Yin is not an ideologue but an ordinary teacher reflects how widely neoliberal ideology has become disseminated as a social common sense, which needs only to be reinforced through formal instruction for rural young women who lack an awareness of their own commodity status.

In Yin’s instruction, however, there are multiple codings for the domestic worker. A subtle shift is implicit in moving from the question “Do your pigs have more legs?” to “What do you have that is distinctive? Well, you have had the training.” The first “you” is the owner of the pigs to be sold and the third “you” is the worker as seller of her labor power. In Yin’s language here, however, the second “you” is at once both the first “you” (owner and seller) and the third “you” (worker and seller). The three iterations of the second-person pronoun are placed in a chain of equivalence, and thus each “you” is mobile and can therefore become transmuted into the other. The trainees were thus told that not only does the same logic of value operate in these different instances for the owner/seller and worker/seller alike but that as workers/sellers they can also become owners/sellers. It is implied to the trainees that this transformation from workers/sellers to owners/sellers follows the same logic of value. Hence we could recall the shift in calling one’s employer a client, as already noted.

The trainee’s television viewing in the evenings reinforces this lesson. For example, the melodrama
Oshin
, produced by NHK (Japan Broadcasting
Corporation)
in 1983, tells the story of how a young girl from a poor tenant farmer family in Japan who had worked as a domestic servant became founder and owner of a supermarket chain.
3
Although the metamorphosis of Oshin allegorizes the transformation of Japan from a rural society to a high-growth economy, in noting the circulation of this series throughout developing countries and regions in Asia, Leo Ching argues, “Through the drama’s regional distribution, this national allegory is then narrated into a regional story that dramatizes the parallel but belated economic development of Asian countries such as Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, and more lately, China and Vietnam” (2000: 250).
Oshin
was shown on Chinese television in 1984 and became a huge hit among urban Chinese who had just begun to have access to television sets. The story inspired the imagination of its primarily urban audience for the opportunities that the economic reform would open up to them in the 1980s. This replay of
Oshin
twenty years later is for a new generation of young women coming from rural areas not yet exposed to this TV series and presumably not yet transformed by this new consciousness. Oshin’s specific humble beginnings as a domestic worker from the countryside and her eventual business success must speak with particular force to these rural trainees about both personal and national teleologies of economic development in a way that is undisrupted by the uncertainties of the global market economy. The Chinese broadcasting of
Oshin
has the theme song titled “Always Believe” (
yongyuan xiangxin
).

As if to echo “Always Believe,” Yin concluded this lecture by reciting a hortatory passage, which she asked one of the trainees to write on the blackboard so that the rest will always remember it: “You are not allowed to detest [
yanwu
] your work in any situation. Detesting one’s work is the worst thing. Even if you are forced by circumstances to do some tedious work, you should find some joy [
lequ
] in it. You must understand that you should find joy in all that should be done and must be done.” She paused here and asked the class, “Should you or shouldn’t you make money?” The class answered in unison, “We should.” She continued, “This is the right attitude we should have toward work. If you have this attitude, no matter what work you do, you will achieve a good effect [
hao de chengxiao
].”

Yin instructed trainees that, when they encounter difficulties in their work, they should read this paragraph. If the foregoing analogy of potatoes-pork-trainees has revealed a thorough objectification of labor as a commodity on the market, then the would-be domestic worker is also required to
develop
an affective relationship with labor and to invest her own subjectivity in it. The subsumption of labor to capital, as Marx wrote, does not end in objectification (her labor power and labor time purchased and thus owned by another), but it also requires a reanimation. The trainee must find joy in her work. Objectification and alienation in the process of work is anticipated in Yin’s lecture but is preempted through a militarized command of discipline, “You are not allowed to detest your work in any situation. Detesting one’s work is the worst thing.” This command is aided by an appeal to the moral imperative to make money.

No Excuse: The Military as a Concept-Metaphor

On the classroom wall hung a banner that greets trainees silently every day: “Do not be a deserter once you enter the battlefield. You will never earn sympathy or respect if you are afraid of difficulties, choose desertion, or look for excuses for laziness.” Another banner hails them: “I cheer you on in your courage to walk out of isolated mountainous villages; I applaud your every effort to overcome difficulties.” The classroom environment thus transmits the message that the market is a battlefield and that trainees are soldiers who need to prove themselves through determination and discipline. Mao Yushi, the school founder, had once remarked, “The market finely and fairly sorts out each and everyone.” This is not a minority view of a single economist but is part of the dominant discourse in reform-era China.
4
For example, the
Beijing Review
echoed this view with an article titled, “Let the Market Sort Talent Out” (2004: 5). In these slogans, the market is a battleground that sorts out winners and losers.
5
In Fuping’s education, the war metaphor gathers into itself both a moral imperative against quitting. “Deserters” are considered worse than losers because they constitute a threat to the game of competition. If it is bad enough to be poor and needy, desertion would amount to complete unworthiness: “You will never earn sympathy or respect.” Here we see spelled out the consequences of not measuring up to the standard of Fuping’s brand hinted at earlier by Yin.
6
It is perhaps not a coincidence that Teacher Lu had used the words
battle line
to talk about the training that the school provides. However, this battle line is not one that is formed collectively by the trainees. It is built in each trainee so that each and every one of them is prepared to assume responsibility for all possibilities
and
risks. The market as the battleground compels an internalization of the battle line within individual subjectivity.

Why is the battlefield a privileged metaphor in this context? “A business field is like a battlefield” (
shangchang ru zhanchang
) is a common enough saying, but those involved in battling are presumably entrepreneurs and their chief executives. In Fuping this metaphor is extended to each and every worker. Or is it more than a metaphor? Is this market-cum-battlefield a unique discourse of Fuping, or is it an idea that circulates more widely? How are we to understand this new kind of “militarism”?

Perhaps we can address this last question by way of a detour into popular books that advocate the military as the source of management and leadership skills necessary for business success today. However, Chinese military training is not the model promoted. Chinese military involvement in business in the reform era has been a public secret. Its association with corruption and abuses of power has generated so much public resentment that in 1998 President Jiang Zemin ordered the military to cease its commercial activities. Rather, U.S. military training comes ready to hand in an English-language literature promoting its value for business success.

It is no accident that the U.S. military has become a source of managerial inspiration. As the largest military establishment, with the most overseas operations, it has nurtured a militarism that has become a national ideal.
7
Chalmers Johnson quotes Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate and a Vietnam War veteran, “Americans in our own time have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness. . . . To a degree without precedent in U.S. history, Americans have come to define the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action, and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals” (Johnson 2006: 20).

Yet militarism is not just promoted in its association with nationhood. It is touted as a template for social and individual management. For example, the book
The West Point Way of Leadership
speaks to a civilian readership: “The differences that exist between military and civilian leadership are differences in degree, not in kind.” (Donnithorne 1993: 9). This is substantiated in the book’s list of West Point graduates who have succeeded as CEOs of major corporations, presidents of many colleges and universities, and officials in all levels of government. This book was translated into Chinese and published in Taiwan in 1994 and then in mainland China in 1998. This view
also
resonates in business circles, as an article in the U.S. magazine
Business Week
tells of how military skills honed in the war against Iraq are becoming a human resource asset to corporate America: “It turns out that the U.S. involvement in Iraq . . . has become an unlikely but effective business boot camp” (Plameri 2004: 80). Brace Barber’s
No Excuse Leadership
, translated in 2004 and very popular in China, also makes a similar link:

No Excuse Leadership
illustrates for leaders in all fields how to lead and succeed in difficult circumstances by using the leadership principles that the U.S. Army Ranger School experience helps people develop and that anyone can strive to master. . . . There is no opting out. . . . You either develop yourself and your leaders through purposeful, planned effort or you choose the alternative—suboptimum performance and profit. In today’s elbow-throwing world, you need every advantage. . . . You live your professional life in competition. . . . It is a tiring life and one that can wear you down if you are using trial and error to search for methods that create success. Leave chance to someone else as you adopt a No Excuse philosophy.