ABSTRACT
Introduction Emerging from the rubble of demolition and reconstruction are pictures of urban inhabitants that contrast sharply with those depictions from the past. It is commonly agreed that the post-Mao reforms have unleashed materialistic aspirations, especially in terms of stimulating consumerist cravings that contrast sharply with the socialist and Confucian values of former times (Whyte 2003: 14), and this has had a profound impact on Western ways of seeing China and its youthful population. As Dai Jinhua has commented, pictures of angry citizens have been replaced by ‘happy [my italics] consumers in the plaza’ (Dai 2006: 221) and Chinese youth have come to be seen as synonymous with heady, often hedonistic, consumerism (Cadwalladr 2007) fixated upon ‘a new and individual pursuit centering on the personalised acquisition of clothes, adornment and entertainment’ (Croll 2006: 210). It is in the context of such changes, both physical and discursive, that this chapter investigates the ways in which young Chinese respond to metropolitan life. Although I do not wish to dismiss the aforementioned image of Chinese youth as savvy consumers, I contend that there is a big discrepancy between the representations of hip, happy-go-lucky consumerist urban Chinese youth and those young Chinese who participated in my ethnographic research, and who were much more ambivalent not only about consumption itself but also the changes occurring within cities. Applying a notion of ambivalence to informants’ feelings towards cities is, I feel, more useful than utilizing a polarized dystopian or utopian language which either conjures up negative images of megacities as sites of poverty, misery, violence and crime (Davis 2006) or, in a more positively, highlights the promise of urban life by depicting cities as exhilarating locations of ‘wonder, speed, diversity, density, verticality, innovation’, ‘exotic adventure and excitement’ (Murray 2008: 150).1 In short, I wish to highlight how ‘images of urban dystopia and utopia act together to suppress the appearance of porosity, contradictions’ (Prakash 2008: 16) and, in so doing, tend to mask the ways in which such emotions often coexist within subjects. More specifically, this chapter aims not only to provide insight into the ambivalent, often fearful, ways in which young Chinese respond to Chinese
metropolitan life but also to illustrate how they seek to reconcile different images of the city. I first seek to explore the ambivalence of informants with regard to urban spaces by focusing on how cities simultaneously inspire feelings of attraction and repulsion. Then, having established that cities should be read as domains requiring pragmatic strategies to maneuver through, I suggest that consumption and other ways of behaving in, and thinking about, the city, should be read as tendencies deployed to find refuge, security and protection. As a means of constructing such an argument, I make use of de Certeau’s notion of ‘tactics’ (1984), in which de Certeau distinguishes between the strategies of the strong and tactics which are ‘the art of the weak’. Fiske deploys the metaphor of a landlord and tenant to illustrate the interrelatedness between these two elements:
The landlord provides the building within which we dwell, the department store our means of furnishing it, and the culture industry the texts we “consume” as we relax within it. But in dwelling in the landlord’s place, we make it into our space; the practices of dwelling are ours, not his.
