Media, Identity, and Struggle in Twenty-First-Century China

Rachel Murphy,Vanessa L. Fong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317991076
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

How are different groups of people such as sex workers, migrant workers, rural cadres and homosexuals represented in China's media? How accurately do representations created by the media reflect the lived experiences of Chinese people? Do Chinese people accept the representations and messages disseminated by the media? Can they use the media to portray their own interests? How are media practices in China changing? Have new technologies and increased access to international media opened up new spaces for struggle in China?

The essays in this volume address these questions by using a combination of ethnography and textual analysis and by exploring representation in and usage of a range of media including instant messaging, the internet, television, films, magazines and newspapers. The essays highlight highlights the richness, diversity, and sometimes contradictory tendencies of the meanings and consequences of media representations in China. The volume cautions against approaches that take the representations created by the media in China at face value and against oversimplified assumptions about the motivations and agency of players in the complex struggles that occur between the media, the Chinese state, and Chinese citizens.

1

PERFORMING MEDIA-CONSTRUCTED IMAGES FOR FIRST-CLASS CITIZENSHIP

Political Struggles of Rural Migrant Hostesses in Dalian

Tiantian Zheng

LOUD WESTERN MUSIC FILLED MY EARS as I stepped into the “Romance Dream,” a karaoke bar in Dalian. Two friends accompanied me, a high-level official in the municipal government and a businessman, both regular customers. At the door, a beautiful woman dressed in a cheongsam greeted us with a bow and ushered us inside. As I made my way into the main lobby, my nose tickled from the pungent odor of cosmetics. Images from an American x-rated video flickered on a wide-screen TV. Over a hundred zuotai xiaojie (literally, women who sit on the stage) stood poised in eager anticipation of the male customers. Each woman was heavily made up and fancily dressed, each head topped with an elaborate coiffure. The Mami (Madam or “mother”), clad in sheer black tights, selected a dozen of the women by pointing with the antenna of her walkie-talkie and led them into the VIP rooms located on the second floor. There, a lucky few would be chosen by customers as escorts for the night.

Within the fifty-plus years of Communist rule, China’s sex industry has gone from bust to boom. During the Maoist era, the Communist Party attempted to level previous class distinctions and promote its egalitarian ideology by eliminating all forms of conspicuous consumption and “reactionary” leisure activities including the consumption of commercial sex.¹ The time, form, and content of leisure activities fell under the scrutiny and supervision of the state, and leisure itself was conceptualized as a form of collective action. In political study classes, unsanctioned leisure activities were denounced as capitalist behavior, and state propaganda advocated the ethos of “hard work and simple living.”²

Since 1978, the state’s pro-consumption stance has opened the way for the reemergence of nightclubs and other leisure sites. To avoid any residual negative connotations left over from the previous era when nightclubs, dance halls, and bars were condemned as emblems of a non-proletarian and decadent bourgeois lifestyle, nightclubs in the current post-Mao period are referred to as karaoke bars, karaoke plazas, or liange ting (literally, “singing practice halls”). These new consumption sites are prominent in the more economically prosperous SEZs (Special Economic Zones).³ Visitors are mainly middle-aged businessmen, government officials, police officers, and foreign investors. Clients can partake of the services offered by hostesses and at the same time engage in “social interactions” (yingchou) that help cement “relationships” (guanxi) with their business partners or their patrons in the government.⁴ Hostesses play an indispensable role in the rituals of these male-centered worlds of business and politics.⁵

The Chinese government calls hostesses or escorts who work in karaoke bars “sanpei xiaojie,” literally, “young women who accompany men in three ways.” These “ways” are generally understood to include varying combinations of alcohol consumption, dancing, and singing. Sexual services are an additional, unstated part of the work these women are expected to perform.

These women, mainly seventeen to twenty-three years of age, form a steadily growing contingent of illegal sex workers. Hostesses first emerged in modest numbers at the end of the 1980s. Their numbers expanded rapidly in the mid 1990s as KTV (karaoke) bars became favored sites not just for male recreation but also for transactions between male businessmen and political elites. Paradoxically, the state agents responsible for policing KTV bars comprise one of the main segments of the KTV bar customer base.

The majority of these hostesses come from China’s countryside. Of the two hundred hostesses with whom I worked, only four were from cities. They were extremely averse to exposing their rural origins. At the beginning of my field research, hostesses always told me that they were from large, metropolitan cities, such as Dalian, Shanghai, and Anshan. It was only after becoming close friends that they confided to me that they were actually from rural areas on the outskirts of these cities.

During twenty months of fieldwork in Dalian, I lived and worked with the hostesses as a hostess myself.⁶ My research sample includes approximately two hundred bar hostesses in ten karaoke bars. I was intensively involved in three karaoke bars categorized respectively as high, middle, and low class. In the first section of this article, I explicate how rural migrants obtain political identities as second-class citizens. In the second section, I discuss how rural migrant women’s cultural and social identities are naturalized as derogatory second-class citizens in the media. Their bodies are a site where the imperatives of state politics become legible. In the third section, I pinpoint the creators of this image and the underlying reasons for the creation. I will explore in detail how and why the agents of the state, intellectuals, and markets exercise the power to establish and naturalize the differences between the rural and urban women. In the fourth section, I demonstrate how such a derogatory cultural representation, while tying the hostesses to the constructed identities in a constraining way, paradoxically leaves some room for the hostesses to maneuver. Specifically, I argue that rural migrant hostesses perform this image as a means to accumulate the accoutrements for legitimate first-class citizenship.

Migration and Political Second-Class Citizenship in Post-Mao Dalian

In 1958, the Maoist government initiated the household registration system (HRS), classifying the national population into mutually exclusive urban-rural categories possessing unequal political, economical, social, and legal access.⁷ Rural residents found themselves on the losing end of a heavily lopsided distribution of social wealth. Concomitant with the broad-based restructuring of society, the “peasantry” as a derogatory cultural category but revolutionary mainstay was further refined and concretized.⁸ The Maoist government portrayal of the countryside in peasant administrative categories involving the HRS and mobility restrictions reinforced the cultural stereotypes of rural identities⁹ and segregated and branded the peasants as the reservoir of backward feudalism and superstition and a major obstacle to national development and salvation.

Relaxation of state mobility controls in recent years has allowed rural residents to migrate to urban regions, where they are now labeled the “floating population” (liudong renkou).¹⁰ In search of job opportunities and adventure, these migrants have become the “vanguard” in China’s largest population movement since 1949 and harbingers of the market economy in the post-1978 era of economic reforms.¹¹ As China’s engagement with the global economy and experiments with economic reform continue, cities highlight the deepening disparities between permanent urban “citizens” (those with urban residence permits) and migrant populations without residence permits.

Market reform has provided a new and powerful justification for the loosening of restrictions on population movement. Starting in the late 1990s, many advocates of the dismantlement of the HRS argued that labor, as a key input to the production process, must be free to relocate in order to realize the market’s promise of enhanced efficiency and optimum resource distribution.¹² These calls for reform have materialized into a program of limited and cautious policy experimentation. In the late 1980s, some provinces started selling local urban household registration cards, known as blue cards or blue seals, ¹³ to migrant workers.¹⁴ Building on and deepening these reforms, the State Council in August 2001 announced a “township household registration system” that allows peasants who own housing and have stable careers and incomes in a township to apply for permanent residency.¹⁵

Although the state today tolerates a higher degree of population mobility than under the Mao Zedong government, the urban-rural gap is still the main fault line between rich and poor in Chinese society. Inequalities are perpetuated and even aggravated by post-Mao state policies that transfer the brunt of the state and collectives’ tax burden onto poor rural households.¹⁶ This situation has not gone unnoticed by peasants themselves. Since 1985, peasants have launched collective protests against taxes, fines, cadre corruption, and the drastic urban-rural income gap. This unrest points to their discontent with local authorities and constitutes one of the major threats to the Chinese Communist Party’s power and stability.¹⁷

With one hundred million rural migrants on the move, modern China’s urban landscape is now faced with the management of individuals who by definition are “outsiders” (waidiren, wailaigong).¹⁸ Despite their contributions to local and overall economic growth, migrants encounter severe institutional and social discrimination. Blamed for blemishing the appearance of cities and contributing to overcrowding, migrants have become the scapegoats for a multitude of social problems, ranging from crime to urban pollution.¹⁹ As the “losers” in China’s market reforms, migrant workers are denied civil, political, and residential rights.²⁰

Women account for over 30 percent of the total number of rural-urban migrant laborers.²¹ Providers of labor power for the state, they are important social and political actors. Institutional (such as the household registration system) and social discrimination (such as the derogatory category of migrants) forces most female migrants onto the lowest rungs of the labor market, where they commonly work as garbage collectors, restaurant waitresses, domestic maids, factory workers, and bar hostesses.

Migration and Cultural Second-Class Citizenship in Popular Media

Numerous theorists have examined the relationship between discourse and power. One characteristic of discourse identified in these theoretical studies is the naturalized representation of a social group to produce and legitimate a hierarchical social order. Foucault writes, “Discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things….It is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe.”²² Defined and viewed as “the political economy of communication,”²³ discourse is the place where relations of power are exercised and enacted. In this section, I discuss the ways in which media discourse defines, constrains, and ties rural migrant women to their labeled identities in the coercive discursive regime that affects “their participation in employment, in development programs and in education in profound and immense ways.”²⁴

Fertility and Uninhibited Sexuality

Concerned that an oversized population is a major impediment to economic growth and an indirect cause of a myriad of social ills that carry the potential for disrupting social stability (e.g., a tight labor market), the Chinese government has made population control a key item on its agenda of economic expansion and continued political dominance.²⁵

The state declares rural women’s mobility to be a serious threat to government population policy. Women migrants’ “floating” lifestyle puts them out of reach of regular monitoring techniques administered through “grassroots” (jiceng) government organs — namely, the countryside’s village committee and the city’s street office (jiedao banshichu). Indeed, ruralists are sometimes even accused of purposefully using migration as a way to escape detection.²⁶

The government’s anxieties are amplified by the perception that rural women are naturally prone to high fertility. Indeed, the media depict the entire countryside as a hotbed of sexual activity driven by raw, animalistic passions.²⁷ Some scholars lend scientific credence to this view. Based on a nationwide survey of sexual behavior, prominent sex sociologist Liu Dalin claims that there is not only a higher rate of premarital and extramarital sex but also a greater overall frequency of sexual intercourse in the countryside than the city.²⁸ Rural women’s sexuality is implicated as the critical variable for explaining urban-rural differences in sexual behavior:

Many [rural women] have precocious sexual biology but late-maturing sexual psychology. For many, the period of sexual hunger is too long, but they cannot get married in time [to satisfy this hunger]. Lovers have frequent contact with each other, but their sexual control is weak. If by chance a male shows interest, the female lover, also in the grasp of “an unbearable hunger,” will give herself to the man.²⁹

In this passage, rural women’s sexual promiscuity is portrayed as a product of their carnal urges. Other scholars emphasize rural women’s lack of culture to explain their behavior.³⁰ These two angles — biological and cultural — are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary: Rural women’s bodies intensify their sexual urges at the same time that their lack of culture reduces their ability to resist these impulses. This dual-level explanation reflects larger patterns in the discriminatory representations of peasants and national minorities.

Regardless of the approach, however, rural women’s sexuality is always implicated as the critical variable that explains the differences in sexual behavior between rural and urban areas. Studies rarely draw attention to men’s sexuality, implicitly taking the level of men’s sexual desires as a constant across the urban-rural divide. By assuming that all men are equally likely to engage in sexual conduct, responsibility for the countryside’s alleged sexual promiscuity is pinned on the rural woman for failing to fulfill the traditional female duty of policing the body and thereby maintaining the community’s moral order. The culpability of those women is extenuated only because they are acting under the influence of passions against which they are culturally defenseless.

Even before migration skyrocketed in the earlier 1990s, the People’s Daily began featuring articles on the dangers of the unchecked fertility of migrant women. The earliest example — a 1988 article entitled, “Concerns about Over-Reproduction” (chaosheng de danyou) — helped introduce the issue to the general public: “They [migrant women] bear children above the one-child quota, disturbing the implementation of the family planning policy.”³¹ Urbanites suddenly awoke to find that their homes and neighborhoods had become a haven for rural fugitives from state reproductive policies.

These twin characteristics of mobility and fertility are condensed in the epithet “over-quota guerrilla force” (chaosheng youjidui) — also the title of a comedy skit featured in the 1990 Spring Festival broadcast.³² In this performance, a rural husband and wife — performed by Huang Hong and Song Dandan, respectively — engage in a humorous dialogue about their reproductive travails. The husband is frustrated by the fact that among the six children to whom his wife has given birth not a single one is a boy. He vows to continue to enlarge his family until his wife su...