Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (30 page)

Some trainees replied hesitatingly, “Yes.” Chen nodded his head and continued:

Think more about what you want out of migration. You come to the city to make money for your family. Think about this. Gradually you will surely take the place of the dog. Everyone is her own boss. You, a boss, in order to make money, need to serve your clients well, but you do not need to think too highly of them. For each of us, if we want to change ourselves, we can.

Finally, like Yin, Chen also wrote the following inscription on the blackboard as a parting gift, which he asked the trainees to copy into their notebooks. It appears to be a translation and adaptation of a nineteenth-century poem in English:

   
A Smile

   
How easy it is to smile,

   
Yet the value it creates is limitless.

   
Those who receive it become instantly rich;

   
Those who give lose nothing.

   
None is too rich to accept it;

   
None is too poor to give it.

   
It brings joy to the home

   
And is a wonderful expression of friendship.

   
It is a miraculous antidote for stress,

   
And gives courage to those in despair.

   
If someday you meet a person

   
Who does not smile to you,

   
Then generously give yours to him,

   
For nobody needs it more

   
Than those who have no more to give.

Chen recommended, “When you feel gloomy, you can read this poem and remember Hara Ippei’s million-dollar smiles.” Chen then suggested that the trainees conclude the class by singing together the song “Zhenxin yingxiong” (The True-Hearted Hero), a song sung by Taiwan and Hong Kong
singers
such as Zhou Huajian and Jacky Chan, which is also popular on the mainland: “In my heart there used to be a dream. My singing will let you forget all the hurt. . . .” Although the class sang heartily, Chen kept shouting, “Louder! Louder!” The volume of the chorus rose still higher with each wave of his hand, celebrating a sentimentalized and romanticized militarism via an image of a hero who struggles in the battlefield of life:

   
Let our song bring out your hearty smile.

   
Let (us) wish that your life from now on will be different.

   
Grasp every minute of life.

   
Go all out for the dream in our heart.

   
Without enduring wind and rain, how could we see rainbow.

   
Nobody can succeed without effort.

The Power of a Smile

The lectures by Yin and Chen may seem contradictory, with one comparing trainees to pork and potatoes and emphasizing the thinglike aspect of human labor, and the other celebrating the ability and agency of the individual. One emphasized the role of the domestic worker as a seller of her labor power, while the other stressed her being a self-possessing sovereign subject (the boss of herself). Yet the two aspects are in fact two sides of the same coin of market humanism. In fact, I propose here that market humanism involves at least three separate instances of a contradiction packaged neatly within an apparently continuous logic. First, one is equally the thinglike “you” (a commodity) and the bosslike “you.” We might note that the discursive origin that Chen drew on was humanism, and then he talked about domestic workers taking the place of dogs. If we were to find this surprising, Yin would remind us about the logic of continuity and equivalence between the thing-like you and the bosslike you. The thinglike you is objectified as something less than human, but, instead of rebelling against this treatment, the bosslike you must take charge of the situation and discipline the self to endure hardship to attain ultimate transcendence as a successful person. As dictated by market humanism, your self-worth will be sorted out in the market!

Second, in Chen’s lecture, he stressed the importance of accepting yourself and that only if you accept yourself can you accept others. On the other
hand,
he performed an image of a peasant in front of the class that all were told to reject and denigrate. His own rural origin, which he had shared with the trainees, combined with his cosmopolitan status, which he was able to exhibit in front of them, added authority to the advice he gave as a living testimony of his teaching, “You must like yourself. You must learn to look at yourself in the mirror everyday and look for shortcomings.”

This contradiction is also found in the biography of Hara Ippei. He invented his own self-critique sessions, inspired by a motto from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Never by reflection, but only by doing is self-knowledge possible.” His narrative emphasized the pains and shame in the process of struggling against the self and how difficult it was to reform oneself. One conclusion Hara drew from his six years of struggle is that “you are your own worst enemy” (1993: 23). Yet Hara’s book also teaches that “a person who can love himself is then capable of loving others.” Hara emphasized this love of the self again through a quote from Oscar Wilde, “To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance” (1993: 30–31).

Third, related to this project of reforming the self is an emphasis on attitude: “Attitude is everything.” Chen advised the class, “If you want to change yourself, you can. . . . [But] the extent of your career is determined by your imagination.” This philosophy assumes that the originary productive force is the mind that produces not only an individual’s self-identity but also his or her relationships with the surrounding world. It also assumes that the production of the self motivates and propels all other social productions. If a now widely ridiculed Great Leap Forward slogan, “The size of harvest matches the degree of audacity” [
ren you duo da dan, di you duo da chan
], articulated a collective ambition in the Mao-era, the market version asserts an individual voluntarism in the sphere of self-production that will spur production in all social spheres.
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Yet this form of voluntarism, much more extreme in its assumption, goes unremarked. In the poem Chen offered, a smile is such a matter of voluntarism. Not only is it a free material for social lubrication and mobility, but it itself creates value endlessly and enriches all—if we just have the will. It is all a question of attitude.

What is described as a voluntary act in the poem all too quickly will be encountered as a market coercion in reality. Here we see how market voluntarism also has its contradiction: Chen told the class that there are classes in Japan and Korea that provide training on smiling and warned, “If you don’t
know
how to smile, Hilton will not hire you.”
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Voluntarism, however sentimental and romantic it may appear, reveals itself as a hard discipline integral with the ruthless bedrock of market dictatorship.

Human Engineering and Its Limits

How do domestic workers respond to the training that they are given at Fuping? I did not ask for permission to poll the opinions of the trainees in my field research, doubting that the trainees would feel free to speak their minds. However, indirect evidence is quite revealing. A teacher who taught at Fuping revealed that a trainee wrote in one of the textbooks, “Fuping is a prison.” It is unknown who wrote it or how many trainees may have seen this note, as textbooks are recycled to new trainees, and they pass through many hands. Mao Yushi himself also offered evidence on the difficulty in transforming the minds of rural women. At a seminar in 2003, he expressed his worries about two ideas still held by trainees in his school:

It doesn’t matter whether they are peasants or ordinary urbanites. They have been under the influence of thousands of years of imperial power and have a deep-rooted mindset of subjection on the one hand; on the other hand, they have also experienced “thought reform” [
sixiang gaizao
] in more recent times, especially since 1949, and thus they tend to seek solutions via violence. At present, two dangerous concepts exist among wider circles of people. The first is the idea of “exploitation,” that is, they think that to
dagong
[work for a boss] is to “be exploited.” For example, trainees in the school I established in Beijing all have quite a low level of education, but nonetheless they have a strong anti-exploitation sentiment. They think to work is to be exploited, . . . The second is the idea that “to rebel is right” [
zaofan youli
]. That is, if there is exploitation and oppression, then there should be revolution and rebellion, and “equality and justice” should be pursued by expropriating the “exploiters.” For these ideas to be changed requires a thorough repudiation of the ideology on which the Communist Party claims legitimacy, which is very difficult. (quoted in Lao Tian 2004)

Mao Yushi fears that, despite their youth, the trainees at his school might still be influenced by the Maoist idea “to rebel is right” and that the training,
however
forceful, has not succeeded in totally transforming their minds. For Mao Yushi, the problem is not the structural relations of inequality and exploitation embedded in these market relations but that trainees should harbor such an understanding. In faulting ideas of “exploitation” and “oppression” for distracting the minds of his trainees, he complains that the legacy of the Communist Party is not completely repudiated. Here we see a good example of how neoliberalism is a utopian vision that touches down in places with deeply sedimented histories that condition how these ideas will work out in practice.

However, it is not only these migrant workers who refuse their objectification as commodity but also the cohort of China’s knowledge workers. White-collar professionals are ordered by their employers to read
No Excuse Leadership
(
Meiyou renhe jiekou
) on their own.
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Heated discussions may emerge from this practice.

When a blogger posted his reflection on the book, it attracted 175 comments. Among them, thirty-three were positive about the book, fifty-seven negative, thirty ambiguous, and eight with mixed views. Thirty-one reported that their employers distributed the book and demanded that they turn in a written reflection. Those who were positive found it useful to push themselves harder. The first blogger, for example, “discovered that making excuses is a poison” and that it incapacitates oneself. Some agreed. One even offered a scathing self-reflection. Still another summarized the lesson, “[It] explains . . . why losers are losers!” Yet more are critical about the book, demonstrating an awareness of the unequal power relations between labor and management operating in real life contexts. Response number 19 snaps:

It is easier to demand of oneself to work hard without excuses, but it is very difficult to put such a demand on one’s superiors in China. To give up one’s personality and self, to talk only about submission and teamwork, and then finally reach one’s self-development—this is another intoxicating trap that works like a multilevel sales system [
chuan xiao
].

Response number 22 is still more direct about power politics, “Your boss hopes that you have no excuse!
No Excuse Leadership
gives bureaucrats an excuse to bully and oppress you!” Response number 25 exclaims, “This dog fart tries to brainwash [us]. When you read it, it seems reasonable and good, but it completely goes nowhere when you put it in specific reality.” Response
number
39 elaborates his analysis by comparing the book with the magic headband in the Chinese classic
Journey to the West
that gives the Buddhist monk Xuanzang control over the fearless and powerful Monkey King to make him his servant:

The modern-day boss is fucking (
zhen tama de
) “clever” and has learned the trick by turning
No Excuse Leadership
into a modern-day headband. . . . If any idiot wishes to have a taste of the experience of the Monkey King, then go read
No Excuse Leadership
. But I will mourn for him [the reader], a walking corpse.

Response number 42 agrees, “
No Excuse
is a mental shackle put on slaves by the slave masters.” Response number 151 asks, “Don’t you find that it is bosses or leaders who ask you to read this book? Doesn’t this vindicate Grandpa Marx that it’s about extracting more surplus value from you?”

Although we cannot draw the simplistic conclusion that all who are critical of the book are critical of market economy, Mao Yushi would find enough evidence here to confirm his worries. He and his fellow neoliberal warriors will continue to battle against common people’s perception of “exploitation” while supporting the continued hegemony of the market economy. The military as the concept-metaphor of society disciplines Chinese workers with a new life philosophy, but, at the same time, it arouses significant disgust and resistance among them and wakens them to the reality of the employment relationship, as demonstrated in these web discussions.

Fuping’s mission statement represents migrant workers as “weaker-powered groups,” a new social label that has become popular since the late 1990s and refers to popular masses (peasants, urban laid-off workers, rural-to-urban migrant workers). Invocations of this term, by NGOs and other civil and political elites, are often in the sympathetic context that these people are in need of empowerment. But we have seen how the benevolent Mao Yushi is so upset and worried when poor and relatively uneducated trainees are opposed to exploitation and dare to think of expropriating the rich. This kind of self-empowerment is something that Mr. Mao and Fuping’s board members are quick to condemn. Thus it is revealed that the discourse of helping weaker-powered groups is a governing strategy: Rather than empowering the workers, it enhances the power and agency of the elites to govern, discipline, and shape the workers’ agency by remolding their subjectivity. Perhaps this discourse, too, is a modern-day magical headband?