ABSTRACT
The media spectacles that this book has examined – the new millennium celebrations, media stories about AIDS and SARS, SARS reportage and the media campaign war over Falun Gong – are examples of how the interplay between state and non-state forces shapes Chinese cultural transformation at the turn of the twenty-first century. Such interplay produces contesting and yet conjunctive narratives about subjectivity, identity, citizenship and ethics. A counter-hegemonic process is implicated in the interplay: these sites illuminate how various cultural activities enacted through different mediums (e.g. television, newspaper, the Internet, mobile phones and staged display and performance) can be read as signs of resistance and subversion as well as evidence of complicity and compromise. The theatrical media war between Falun Gong and the Chinese state, for example, demonstrates, on the one hand, a split in writing the nation and, on the other hand, a tendency for mutual appropriation between state and non-state socio-cultural agents. While the split and contestation characterise the relationship between the state and Falun Gong or any other oppositional groups, appropriation and reconciliation are the distinctive features in contemporary media and cultural production in China. These four case studies illustrate the internal dynamics of the symbiotic yet conflictual relationships among the different cultural agents of Chinese post-socialist modernity. To put it in another way, they are sites of transculturation among local and global, elite and grassroots, state and nonstate forces and influences – the heterogeneous dialogues associated with globalisation. Chinese cultural transformation is implicated in the many forms of heterogeneous dialogues. In the production of the nation as narration, according to Homi Bhabha,
‘there is a split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation’ (Bhabha 1994: 297). Understanding the conceptual ambivalence between the ‘pedagogical’ and the ‘performative’ is key to China’s cultural transformation in the new century. As earlier analysis has shown, the heterogonous dialogues between the state and non-state ensure a hegemonic and counter-hegemonic process, in which
dominance is not total and resistance not absolute. Such a situation calls for a rejection of the normative baggage in discussing media and cultural transformation in China. Each and every cultural agent in China’s cultural transformation constitutes a factor that is in itself an entity of tension between the pedagogical and the performative. The pedagogies of the state, journalists, urbanites and the Falun Gong group are exemplified in their accumulative efforts to assert their own ideologies and agendas. These efforts are also themselves part of the performative, embedded in the everyday media and cultural practices. Take the concept of citizenship as an example: the pedagogical narrative argues for natural and universal rights for members of an ‘imagined community’; the performative narrative, however, in effect favours a minoritised community. Such a split has seen not only a tension between the state and non-state but also a battle within the non-state in order to reconcile the performative and the pedagogical. Like China’s war on the Falun Gong, which has been described as ‘a giant fighting a ghost’,1
the conceptual ambivalence in the production of the nation as narration means a continual ghost battle, perpetuated by different actors, both in and outside China. The conceptual ambivalence in writing the nation produces counter-nar-
ratives of Chinese modernity (in relation to the state) and Chinese counternarratives of modernity (in relation to the West). These counter-narratives can be explained by the conjunction as well as the disjunction between the various socio-cultural agents. The chapters in this book have demonstrated through four types of media spectacles that various narratives about nation, identity, subjectivity and citizenship are all part of a culture of circulation that permeates various discursive publics in modern social imaginary. These discursive publics pronounce counter-discourses that are ‘more than the expression of subaltern culture and far more than what some Foucauldians like to call “reverse discourse”’ (Warner 2002: 87). Rather, as Michael Warner has argued:
Fundamentally mediated by public forms, counterpublics incorporate the personal/impersonal address and expansive estrangement of public speech as the condition of their own common world. Perhaps nothing demonstrates the fundamental importance of discursive publics in the modern social imaginary more than this – that even the counterpublics that challenge modernity’s social hierarchy of faculties do so by projecting the space of discursive circulation among strangers as a social entity, and in doing so fashion their own subjectivities around the requirements of public circulation and stranger-sociability.
