Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (29 page)

Truly, winning
is
the name of the game. . . . To win you must change the way you approach day-to-day situations. . . . (2004: 1–2; italics in the original)

Militarism is a new model of self-discipline and self-management and a new way to engage the world as society comes to be seen as an unending and intensified process of competition.

Chinese publishers and business circles are quick to borrow this inspiration when management in postsocialist China faces the problem of disgruntled labor and social unrest. The Chinese Social Sciences Press has created a book series called “Learn management from the military” (
xiang jundui xuexie guanli shu xi
) that so far has published nine books, eight of which are translated from English and include those discussed in this section. On
Amazon.com
, a blurb from
Fortune
magazine promotes
The Marine Corps Way
(Santamaria 2005) as follows: “The book makes a convincing case that battlefield techniques really do work in the business world.”
Publishers Weekly
says of
Team Secrets of the Navy Seals
(Anon. 2003): “The armed forces are a wellspring of managerial concepts.” Indeed, an explicit adoption of the military as a way of thinking about the business field is the premises shared by all these books and their promoters.

Mainstream media in China have embraced uncritically leadership ideals associated with a variety of U.S. military units as part of a larger literature on
“studies
for success” (
chenggongxue
).
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The Military Academy of West Point is said to be even better than Harvard’s MBA program for training entrepreneurs. It not only incubates militarists and entrepreneurs but also reveals the shortcomings of higher education in China (Fan 2003: 82).

With the neoliberal notion that the social sphere be brought into the economic domain (Lemke 2001: 197), the military and market have become interpenetrating spheres. In thinking about their relationship, we have to go beyond viewing the military as merely a metaphor and into thinking of it as a discourse that has the power to perform a certain reality into being in the production of new kinds of subjects.
9
Martha Banta writes of the narrative productions in the age of Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford, both pioneers in scientific management in the early twentieth century, “Everyone caught up in the times had tales to tell that ‘spoke’ the times into being” (1993: 5). The question for us is what times are now being spoken into being by narratives that make a corporate military-market world not just imaginable but as an imperative for survival. In our neoliberal time, we have highly rated reality shows such as “The Apprentice” and “Survivor” that beam out a message espoused by Barber: “Winning is the name of the game.” Society is a battleground, whether it is in the boardroom, on the street, or on an island. These shows are being broadcast in Asia. To broaden its transnational appeal, “Survivor” has its “Survivor: China” series. The neoliberal reform is telling a new story of the time. With tens of millions of urban workers losing their jobs and their livelihoods devastated with the reform of state-owned enterprises, with tens of millions of migrant workers toiling in substandard conditions for a substandard living while a few magically accrue astronomical wealth, “hard work” is no longer an economic and social guarantee of a livelihood (c.f. Ehrenreich 2001). “Winners” and “losers” are propagated as the basic binary characters in the tale of our new time that renders society as a battlefield.

From Literary Humanism to Market Humanism

If Yin’s class taught trainees to objectify their labor as a commodity, then the psychology class was to teach them how to reanimate themselves through an affective attachment to their work. In his midthirties, Chen had himself grown up in the countryside. He opened the class as follows: “A year has
four
seasons, and our life has high points and low points. . . . Today we talk about how to deal with human relations [
yu ren da jiao dao
]. If you are good at dealing with human relations, then you will be happy; if you are not good at dealing with human relations, then you will feel relatively painful.” Then he asked the class what kinds of skills one should have in dealing with others. Some trainees were eager to reply, “smile,” “be polite,” “be careful with one’s words and behaviors” (
zhuyi yanying juzhi
). Chen nodded approvingly but wrote his first point on the blackboard: “Respect” (
zunzhong
). “Do you like yourself? Can you accept yourself?” he asked. Trainees, “Yes!” “Good! Only if you accept yourself can you accept others.” He wrote this adage on the blackboard. His second point, “Self-presentation” (
da ban ziji
), was divided into natural appearance, appropriate dress, and proper deportment. He especially emphasized “words and behaviors” (
yanxing
) because “the moment you move your hand or foot (
jushou touzu
), you pass information about yourself to others.” In elaborating this point, Chen provided a comparison between rural and urban people:

The image that impressed me most was a peasant in Northern Shaanxi: old, wearing a white towel on the head, perhaps with a sheep prod in hand, his eyes without any expression. The eye is the place where urbanites are different from rural folks. And you also need to pay attention to walking. Rural folks walk differently from urbanites. [To mimic the rural style of walking, he hunched his back a little bit and walked slowly. The trainees all laughed.] In short, you should be energetic. You should like yourself and learn to look at yourself in the mirror everyday. You should look for shortcomings and for places where you can improve yourself.

The image of an elderly man as a symbol of rurality is perhaps not accidental. It strongly evokes the famous oil painting named “Father” by artist Luo Zhongli. This painting was awarded the first-class prize in the 1980 China Youth Art Exhibition and is now in the collection of the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. The Chinese Central Television’s special program on this painting offers a familiar interpretation: “[This painting] gives a tragic shock [
beiju xing de zhenhan
] in its representation of an old peasant in poverty. The realistic details of his parched lips, wrinkle-furrowed face, and his crude bowl diminish the distance between the viewer and the image. Through this painting, the artist offers a reflection on the traditional culture
and the nation.”
10
The artist had intended to create an image of national allegory and a portrayal of humanity.
11
However, for many urban Chinese, this painting has become a stereotypical image of the peasantry, an aged figure stupefied by the impoverished conditions of his existence and static tradition. Chen was not unique in his view of rural culture. In a recent documentary that follows the artist Luo Zhongli to the mountainous area where the prototype of “Father” had lived, a film critic again described the look in the eyes of rural people:

Their eyes all have a kind, meek, and indifferent look, like that of a camel in a desert. Sailing on the sea, one can reach the shore; hiking on the mountain, one can reach the summit. Only in a desert can one feel the indifference of the endless yellow sand to human effort. It hurts us to see the desertlike indifference in the eyes of the children. It shows us the history.
12

Contrary to the intention of the artist, viewers are not brought closer to the figure of the peasant by the realistic details. Rather, this close-up view of a peasant face was produced precisely at a moment of historical reversal to the relationship between intellectuals and peasants in the Maoist revolutionary legacy. The revolutionary process had compelled a recognition of self-inadequacy of the radical intellectuals as the sole subject of revolution and had nurtured a “combined” (
xiang jiehe
) agency between the intellectuals and the peasantry in the making of a social revolution. The negation of the radical content of Maoism, followed by the cultural turn in post-Mao China historiography, helped to reconstitute the intellectuals as the self-adequate subject of modernity.
13
The close-up ironically forebodes an unbridgeable chasm that opens up in the reform period between the cosmopolitan urban subject and the “backward” peasants now seen as a drag on China’s modernity project.

Paradoxically, this took place in the emerging liberal discourse of universal humanism in the early 1980s. The liberal discourse of humanism is a negation of the leftist view that there was no universal humanity in a class-divided society and that “universal humanity” as such is a bourgeois ideological imagination.
14
The official negation of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 signaled an end to China’s short twentieth century of revolution (1919–1976) (Wang 2006). Following the official ending of revolution and class politics came a tidal wave of humanism that first emerged in the field of philosophy of
aesthetics
around the issue of whether there is universal aesthetics and hence universal humanity (
pubian renxing
). In the same time period, the question of literary subjectivity (
wenxue zhuti xing
) was also raised and widely discussed in the field of literary criticism. “Literary subjectivity” emphasized the self-realization and agency of authors, literary characters, and literary critics as self-affirming sovereign subjects. Although this view of subjectivity encountered critiques from the perspectives of Marxist historical materialism, it won out in the debates and became the dominant and popular concept of self-hood after 1985. With the hindsight of the present it should be clear that this theory of subjectivity reflected the rapid rise of the intellectuals in the early to mid-1980s to resume their status as elites and that they thereby “expressed their expectations of their own agency and position as the subject (
zhuti
) above the object (
keti
), which included social environment (
shehui huanjing
), state, and the masses” (Zhu 1998: 120).

The rapid expansion of the market in the 1990s enriched some intellectuals who were associated with business. Those in fields of management, economics, and technology have seen an ascendance in their prestige and wealth. Humanistic intellectuals, on the contrary, experienced a social marginalization and bemoaned a loss of humanism that once flourished as an intellectual ideal a decade before. As a response, both Zhu Dongli and Wang Hui critically reflect that an imaginary of universal humanism has lost its social relevance to address the new reality of commodification, social disparity, and fragmentation created by the expanding market economy (Zhu 1998: 169–172; Wang H. 2003: 167).

Following this critique, I argue that although, by the late 1980s, aestheticliterary humanism as intellectual discourses had declined, it had prepared the way for the rise of a market humanism that imagined global capitalism as the space of utopia. This is not to say that aesthetic-literary humanism directly gave birth to market humanism by any sort of logical continuity but that the market appropriated the social fermentation brought out through these intellectual debates and created its own version of humanism. Or one could say that the issue of humanism migrated from the spheres of aesthetics and literary practices to the increasingly dynamic and dominant sphere of the marketplace and in the process was remade into market humanism.
15
Indeed, many intellectuals followed this migration themselves into the sea of commerce (
xia hai
) and transformed themselves from self-styled liberal humanists to self-styled entrepreneurs. Some of those remaining in academic
institutions
practice part-time
xia hai
, capitalizing on their credentials in numerous ways. What was felt to have been lost as aesthetic and literary humanism is indeed thriving as market humanism.

The question of what market humanism is will be clearer as we move further into Chen’s lecture. For now we should note a repetition with a difference in Chen’s invocation of the image of the old peasant. He appropriates the legacy of 1980s humanism that speaks on behalf of the nation via an objectification of the peasantry. Of course he does so because this objectification is enmeshed in a historicist view that has become common sense since the 1980s. When the commentator on Luo’s painting found a history in the eyes of “desertlike indifference,” this history has been reconstructed by the post-Mao intellectual discourse, culminating in the 1988 six-part TV series “Heshang” (River Elegy). In that series, the liberal national intellectual surveys a series of objects: the nation, history, (agrarian) civilization, and peasant mentality—from the position of the self-appointed reflective, autonomous, and enlightened subject. Hence Chen’s performative invocation of the peasantry is a citation of this familiar discourse. However, the difference is that this citation here is no longer made in the context of culture but in the labor market for an audience of prospective workers who are in fact from the countryside. In other words, humanism has been brought into quite a different context in its becoming transformed into market humanism. Let us follow Chen’s lecture to explore this relationship.

The highlight of the lecture was to stress that everyone freely owns and expresses his or her own feelings (
qingxu
), attitude, and ultimately the power of a smile. Chen told two stories. The first was about Conrad Hilton, the founder of the Hilton hotel chain, and the second was about the Japanese salesman Hara Ippei (1904–1984), both of whom are noted for their emphasis on the importance of the smile for success. According to Chen, Hara Ippei’s smile was worth millions of dollars, but he acquired it only after intensive practice. One has the ownership of one’s smiles, but the ownership now entails an acquired discipline whose logic is lodged in the commodification of the self. With that note, Chen introduces a testing situation:

Nobody is perfect, and you should not expect others to be perfect, including your future boyfriends and your clients. If you look for a boyfriend who must be 1.8 meters tall and with this and that, you may never find such a boyfriend. Similarly, you cannot expect your clients to be perfect either. There was a
trainee
who quit her job and came back to the school. She said that her clients treat their dog better than they treat her. If your clients treat their dog better than they treat you, can you accept that?