The new issue of Remembrance (<记忆>) continues to review Mao’s Last Revolution (by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals; Chinese translation can be found here). The four articles in issues 55 and 56 discuss the book from different angles, with thoughtful comments and legitimate questions. All are well worth reading.

Coincidentally, nearly two years ago, it was Michael Schoenhals who had this to say about the journal (阅读中文):

Remembrance (记忆, jiyi) is an electronic journal edited by Cultural Revolution historians in China in the May 4th tradition of the joint intellectual venture that does not so much put a premium on uniformity of opinion — and even less on common party political affiliation — as on a shared desire to explore a subject without prejudice in the pursuit of historical truth. … The journal is a Chinese venture, but in the 21st century that no longer prevents it from being a globalized one.

Schoenhals nailed the main characteristic of the e-journal precisely: it is non-partisan and it is without prejudice. One can often find opposite opinions in feature articles and readers’ letters to the editor. Meanwhile, the journal consistently provides high-quality research and well-written memoirs. For anyone who is interested in learning about the true history of China’s Cultural Revolution, or contributing to the research, Remembrance is the one reliable place to go.

Another book discussed in the current issue is Fighting for Mao – Chongqing’s Large Armed-Fights (《为毛主席而战—文革重庆大武斗实录》) by He Shu, newly published (in Chinese) by Joint Publishing (H. K.). I’ve read He Shu’s articles on this topic before, and I believe his new book is a significant contribution to the CR research. It is a valuable book to possess and I certainly am going to buy it.

Remembrance is published every two weeks. To manage in the reality of China’s internet censorship, the journal maintains a low-key, high-quality policy, and it does not have an official website in the mainland. As such I volunteered (with the editors’ permission) to host the journal on my website. I will update every two weeks as soon as the e-journal arrives in my inbox.

My only regret is that I don’t have the time to translate all the articles into English. Hopefully, as the journal content gets compiled into books, professional translations will also become available. For now, those of you who can read Chinese have the clear advantage of “a waterside pavilion getting the moonlight first.”

This post was first published at Inside-Out China. It is reposted here with the author’s permission.

For the past four years, I have periodically worked with a Chinese grassroots HIV/AIDS non-governmental organization (NGO) that serves children in Fuyang Prefecture, Anhui Province. The Fuyang AIDS Orphan Salvation Association (AOS) gives aid directly to local communities, addressing local needs that are often overlooked or underfunded by large-scale government projects.

After the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003, China’s leadership began to develop programs to provide care for people with HIV/AIDS, beginning with the Four Frees and One Care Policy and the China Comprehensive AIDS Response (China CARES). Among other things, this has included free pediatric HIV/AIDS medicines for a small number of children, and the training of local doctors on the treatment of children with HIV/AIDS.

These changes have been slow to take hold, however, and patients and families still pay out-of-pocket for treatment for opportunistic infections and related clinical tests. Many more suffer in silence, and because they live in isolation are unaware of the new treatment policies. The growth of NGOs like AOS serves as a reminder of the needs that remain unmet.

While some farmers in Fuyang Prefecture have the financial capacity to manage their own economic and healthcare costs, most farmers with HIV/AIDS need support. For example, children with HIV/AIDS need to take their medicines at set times of day. If patients do not maintain strict adherence, the medicines lose their effectiveness. A recent report on the Chinese National Pediatric Therapy detailed the problem of treatment adherence and the resulting growing resistance of patients to first-line antiretroviral (ARV) drugs.

However, many children live at home with aging grandparents who are unable to follow this strict schedule, while their migrant laborer parents work far away. Some farmers in Fuyang, especially women and the elderly, are illiterate, and find it difficult to navigate the complexities of a pediatric HIV/AIDS treatment regimen.

With the help of a Boston-based NGO, PATS Kids, AOS started a health worker project to provide assistance with treatment to children with HIV in Fuyang. The health workers project was loosely modeled after Mao Zedong’s “Barefoot Doctors.” In the Mao era, the “barefoot doctors” were farmers trained in basic preventative medicine. The program was founded on the principle that basic health care does not have to be costly and can be provided by drawing on the resources of the local communities. Following this model, some of the AOS office staff were trained as “barefoot doctors” with a limited scope of care: their mission was to ensure the treatment adherence of children living with HIV/AIDS.

The assistance of AOS healthcare workers was especially important in impoverished mountain regions, where local village hospitals are underfunded, and local doctors inexperienced and untrained in the treatment of HIV/AIDS. I remember visiting a small cluster of HIV/AIDS-affected families in a mountainous region in Henan Province with an AOS healthcare worker. While families there received free HIV/AIDS medicines and care, a trip to the local doctor took two days, and was not an affordable expense. Additionally, inexperienced local doctors often failed to prescribe the proper combination of medicines, resulting in unnecessary physical pain and discomfort for their patients. As a result, some of the people living with HIV/AIDS that I visited suffered from bloating, weight loss, and skin infections. All of these symptoms can often be alleviated with targeted personalized medical regimens, and regular medical exams. The AOS healthcare workers documented these problems, tracked and monitored the basic health of the children they visited, and worked to address medical issues that came up.

AOS healthcare workers also served as a reliable source of information from outside the villages. Isolated rural families do not have access to information regarding treatment. They also lack psychological and social support. A father living with HIV once told me, “I don’t care about my own health, I just care about my child’s. I don’t understand all of these medical issues. I just want to know that my child will live a long and healthy life. I will do anything to help him to be healthy.” To an isolated family like this one, a visiting health care worker brings much-needed relief from the daily anxieties and fear of living with HIV/AIDS.

These healthcare workers served also as coordinators, relaying messages between local doctors and the Center for Disease Control. They helped to locate HIV/AIDS training for local doctors, and provided families with travel stipends to visit the hospital.

In addition, AOS healthcare workers often connected isolated families and individuals living with HIV/AIDS with one another. I remember visiting young newlyweds who had been introduced to one another by an AOS worker. They fell in love and later moved in together. The young woman said to me, “When I met my husband, I felt the need to put on makeup again for the first time. I look forward to getting up every day and seeing him.”

Grassroots organizations like AOS can alleviate and address specific needs of local communities. Farmers with HIV/AIDS in China live with heavy medical debt and the constant strain of illness. Their children, who are often stigmatized at school, live in constant stress and fear that their parents will soon pass away. These are not problems with simple solutions, and while grassroots NGOs are not the only solution, they work to bridge gaps where services simply do not exist.

Annie Ye Ren will be attending the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Sciences Po, for a Masters in Public Policy. In the past she has worked in Beijing on the Global Fund, China, and UK HIV/AIDS program on developing an all China National HIV/AIDS surveillance program. She will continue to work with the NGO PATS kids as well as other projects relating to global health.

This article previously appeared at Asia Catalyst; it has been reposted here with permission.

Feng Xiaogang’s blockbuster Aftershock is making headlines these days, setting new records at the box office in China. We cannot say yet if the excitement is justified—Aftershock has only just hit the theaters here in Singapore. It is clear, however, that the current cinema craze in China is not at all a new phenomenon. In fact, new releases on the silver screen created similar sensations in Shanghai as early as eighty years ago. And many of these old films continue even today to fascinate. Films by pioneering Chinese directors of the 1920s and 1930s still dazzle, with their opulent sets, the metropolitan glamour of Shanghai, not to speak of their melodramatic stories of love and distress, passion and agony.

At a workshop held at the National University of Singapore in June and July 2010, directed by Paul Pickowicz and chaired by Yang Lijun and Nicolai Volland, we took a closer look at some of these films, gems of China’s silent film era. Although interest in “Golden Age” Chinese cinema has gradually picked up in recent years, many of these films remain little known, as opposed, for instance, to the works of directors from China’s “fifth” and “sixth” generations. Yet after several days of collective movie-watching and intensive discussion, there is little doubt about the richness of this treasure trove of early Chinese films.

Imagine, for example, the following opening shots: The camera zooms in on the supple thighs of a young woman. A few seconds later, you—the viewer—see her charming smile. She is wearing a simple short sleeved shirt, both arms exposed, and clad in shorts with one of the seams torn. In full view now, you are able to admire her slender body. She is in a playful mood. Such are the opening shots of Sun Yu’s 1931 film Wild Rose (Ye meigui), set in an idyllic countryside. But this dream world will not last; misfortune will soon befall the female protagonist and the man she loves. Painful separation seems inevitable. Will the couple eventually reunite? What will lead them back together? Just a hint (spoiler alert!): they both sign up for a vaguely defined “revolution.”

The intertwined themes of romance and revolution have recurred throughout the history of Chinese filmmaking and continue to have remarkable appeal today. Call it cliché, but early Chinese silent-era filmmaking produced a good number of such stories and audiences never tired of them. Neither did we. In the films of the 1930s we viewed, women took center stage—from the innocent Xiao Feng (played effectively by Wang Renmei) in Wild Rose (1931) to the seductress Li Huilan (played nicely by Xue Lingxian), a woman who seeks men for pleasure and money in A Dream in Pink (Fenhongse de meng, 1932, d. Cai Chusheng). The viewer first marvels at how the materialistic “new woman” Zhang Tao (played by the vivacious Li Lili) ultimately repents in the film National Pride (Guo feng, 1935, d. Zhu Shilin), and then feels emotional distress as Xiao Mao (played again by Wang Renmei) loses her only brother to malnutrition in Cai Chusheng’s famous Song of the Fisherman (Yu guang qu, 1935).

It is the women, played by Shanghai’s top film stars, who command the audience’s attention. Not only are their lives inevitably entangled with issues like imperialism, violence, and poverty, but they are able to endure mountains of heartache along the way. The directors—some of the most creative artists in Shanghai’s highly entrepreneurial cultural marketplace—identify a wide array of “modern” women, and dwell on the complexities of the social and personal problems these resilient women faced in their daily lives. The fact that quite a few of these problems—self-sacrifice, marriage, temptation, vanity, and love—remain unresolved in present-day society points to the contemporary relevance of these films. While directors generally proposed reconciliation as the solution to most problems, the viewer is easily touched by the earnest attempt of the male directors to openly discuss the plight of women, especially in Spring in the South (Nanguo zhi chun, 1932, d. Cai Chusheng) and A Dream in Pink. One of our favorite films is Shen Xiling’s Boatman’s Daughter (Chuanjia nü, 1934), a seamless and powerful narrative about modern-style exploitation and violence woven into a quasi-traditional Chinese love story about a boatman’s daughter (played beautifully by Xu Lai) and a laborer.

Despite their immense popularity with audiences in the 1930s, many of these films were criticized by reviewers, including leftists, for “failing to provide further insight or understanding” of such hot-button political issues as spiritual pollution. At our workshop there were lively discussions after each screening about the difficulties of achieving such clear cut ideological indoctrination in commercial entertainment films. Many films (then and now) have unintended consequences. Further, a good film certainly invites more than one mode of interpretation. Does one end up emulating the protagonist Zhang Lan in the film National Pride not because of her lofty moral qualities, but because the part was played by screen legend Ruan Lingyu and this was Ruan’s last film before her tragic suicide at age 24? Films can be both popular and politically compelling for reasons that are largely external to the intentions of a particular director. A challenging problem for contemporary viewers and researchers is figuring out how these films were received by audiences in the 1930s. One suspects, however, that present-day audiences (including scholars!) share some of the sentiments and instincts of actors, directors, and viewers eighty years ago. In short, there is a humanistic dimension to these ignored cultural artifacts. We love these films because there is a bit of “us” in the human dramas that unfold on the screen.

A second theme that caught our attention is the depiction of the big metropolis, that is, “Shanghai modern” and its irresistible allure. Take A Dream in Pink, complete with a street lined with tall trees, an art deco interior, women in bright qipaos dancing in the marbled mansions of the French Concession. Similar images appear on screen in almost all the films we viewed. It seems that many movies from the 1930s were bathing in the glitz and glamour of the modern metropolis.

The city-on-screen, however, is highly paradoxical. Almost invariably the modern metropolis is revealed to be as evil as it is alluring. Underneath its bright and modern veneer is a moral abyss which causes people—the young in particular—to lose their moral bearings and fall into a degraded state. In National Pride, Zhang Lan (whose name, Orchid, implies nobility and virtue) learns that big city culture will destroy young people, while rustic life and self-discipline will purify their minds. Propaganda is a conspicuous component of National Pride, which was produced for the Guomindang’s New Life Movement, but it is interesting to note that the demonization of the modern city is a common theme in Chinese films of the 1930s, including so-called leftist works. In this respect, they resonate (intentional or unintentionally) with cultural traditions that tend to favour the countryside over the city, the rural over the urban. Literature since the late Qing has depicted the prosperity of Shanghai as a symbol of hypocrisy. Ugly and immoral phenomena, including prostitution, deception, and greed, are said to corrode the simple and modest lifestyles of the past.

The danger of the metropolis is often attributed in these films to spiritual pollution—corrupt culture (especially “Western” culture) imported from abroad. Once again, we have a theme that feels very “current.” How to resist this pollution? How does its harm manifest itself? The answers to these questions vividly unfold in such films as A Dream in Pink, where the screen vamp Li Huilan literally “embodies” the attractions and dangers of “Western” culture and ultimately stands in for the metropolis itself. She is independent, fashionable and charming. She never waits for men. She talks about love but never relies on love. At the end of the film, she deserts her lover (who has divorced his lovely wife in favour of the vamp) and leaves with another man. She is a female figure who differs radically from what is often imagined to be the stock “traditional” Chinese woman. Director Cai Chusheng thus poses poignant questions. Is “Western” culture suitable for China? Is a city (like Shanghai) a safe place to be? What is substantial and good in the city? The relationship of city and countryside, and the larger configuration of modern/Western and traditional culture featured prominently in our discussions, as they do in the films. Are the representations of “traditional” and “Western” culture reliable or are they crude, distorting, and manipulative caricatures?

Despite its potentially corrupting influence, the modern city retains its magnetic powers of attraction, a pull that was obviously well understood by the directors and permeates the films. Young women from the rural areas, for example, cannot help being fascinated by the modern, educated ladies on display in such films as Boatman’s Daughter. And in a film like National Pride, which explicitly devalues the city and “Western” culture, extravagant and luxurious city life is omnipresent on screen and seems to undermine the original anti-urban messages. Is this another example of unintended consequences? Similarly, while the countryside might appear idyllic (in Song of the Fisherman and other works), it is almost always shown to contain violent and life-negating elements (in Wild Rose for instance) and other negative forces. This paradox of the city, its allure and glamour alongside its pernicious influences, was clearly one of the powerful riddles that attracted Chinese films audiences of the 1930s. Eighty years later, this attraction has lost little of its allure.

Yap Soo Ei and Ji Xing are graduate students in the Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore (NUS). Nicolai Volland and Yang Lijun teach Chinese Studies at NUS, and Paul Pickowicz is professor of Chinese History at the University of California, San Diego.

Mengfei Chen: What were some of your inspirations in writing the book? How did it begin? What experiences informed your writing?

Deanna Fei: A Thread of Sky is the story of a family of Chinese American women who reunite for a tour of their ancestral home. It was inspired by a trip through China’s “must-sees” that I embarked on ten years ago with my mother, my sisters, my aunt and my grandmother — six strong-willed, complicated women herded together for two weeks on a package tour. I was struck by the dramatic possibilities of this set-up, as well as the questions it raised about home and identity, culture and authenticity, travel and migration, history and memory. The tour took place at the end of a year I’d spent studying Chinese at Beijing Normal University. I’d thought I was ready to move on to the next stage of my life: teaching in New York, studying creative writing. But a few years later, I hadn’t stopped thinking about that tour. I started scribbling notes, and the characters began taking on lives of their own, completely apart from their real-life counterparts, and soon I was writing a novel.

I knew that in order to write about my characters’ travels through China with the necessary depth and immediacy, I needed to return. This time, I went back on a Fulbright Grant, intending to stay for another year, researching contemporary Chinese history and soaking up modern life in Shanghai while making periodic trips to the cities on my characters’ itinerary. I became so immersed in my research and writing that my stay eventually stretched to three years, during which my understanding of China continually evolved — and I expect it always will.

MC: One of the major themes in the novel is feminism in Chinese history. Why did you want to write about this topic? How did you do your research (sources, etc)? Did you learn anything surprising?

DF: Though they might not call themselves feminists, all six women in the novel are fiercely independent and have strived to make a difference in the world around them. Until this tour take shape, the American-born daughters of this family have always thought of these traits as being tied to their Westernization, but now they begin to trace it back to their grandmother and the story of feminism in China.
Their grandmother was once a leader of the Chinese feminist movement who garnered comparisons to such historical heroines as Hua Mulan and Qiu Jin. In my research, I read accounts of their lives as well as contemporary portraits of female leaders such as those in Wang Zheng’s Women in the Chinese Enlightenment and Xie Bingying’s A Woman Soldier’s Own Story.

What fascinated me was how an entire movement, a brand of feminism that many argue started earlier and spread wider than its American counterpart, had become obscured in history. In China, the conventional narrative is that feminism began with Communist liberation, when in fact a generation of activists had made huge inroads back in the 20s. Meanwhile, Westerners tend to see themselves as the standard-bearers of progress, particularly in terms of women’s rights. I wanted to explore the life story of a woman whose contributions to modern China had been erased, even as she still carries the cause in her bones.

MC: How does history, personal and cultural, playing a role in the lives of your characters?

DF: In various ways, my characters have seen themselves as somewhat untethered to history, whether by dint of being exiles, immigrants, or American-born. Yet they are all haunted by it, in the form of war wounds, family secrets, genetics or simply sensing its shadow. In China, history just is; an ordinary person doesn’t have to study it or return to it in order to feel it. But for the family in my novel, it’s only when they embark on this tour that they begin to comprehend how their lives play out against the intersections of political and family history, Chinese and American history, that have shaped their present.

MC: Much of A Thread of Sky is set in China, yet it’s also about Chinese Americans. What are some of the issues that you consider to be important for Chinese Americans of your generation?

DF: Whereas previous generations tended either to seek acceptance as assimilated Americans or to hold onto their Chinese identity as primary, I think my generation is eager to build a culture of our own. We’re truly Chinese American — not just Chinese or just American — and we don’t feel limited by the category. We might identify more broadly as Asian Americans, Americans of color, transnational Chinese or all of the above. Whatever the case, we seek to gain a lot more representation in “American” arts, politics, media and more.

MC: There is a growing appetite for writing on China. Is there anything that you think fiction about China offers readers that non-fiction or academic writing does not?

DF: That’s an excellent question. I’ve relied on plenty of wonderful nonfiction and academic writing to deepen my own understanding of China, but fiction definitely has its place. China often tempts Westerners to make sweeping, oversimplified statements — for instance, Chinese culture is repressive, or materialistic or all about saving face. Sometimes this happens precisely because China is a place of such vastness and complexity that it’s easier to make such statements than to convey true understanding; sometimes it’s plain ignorance. Either way, when you combine this impulse with the fact that nonfiction and academic writing are often aimed at arriving at a definitive answer, at some inarguable conclusion, there’s considerable potential for misunderstanding.

Fiction, by contrast, is aimed at exploration, not explanation. It’s the province of nuance and contradiction. A good novel gives a sense of expansion, of a broadening and deepening view, but it also acknowledges that some things remain beyond our grasp. In this way, fiction can sometimes offer readers a truer perspective of China than other forms of writing.

That, at least, is my hope.

This spring, a series of well-coordinated and successful strikes in foreign-invested enterprises in China made headlines all around the world. Young migrant workers openly and forcefully articulated demands for higher wages, better representation, and more consideration of their “spiritual” and mental well-being. These demands have led to increased speculation that China’s current economic boom is winding down, as its growth strategy founded in part on cheap migrant labor from rural areas faces domestic and international difficulties.

This is not the first time that Chinese workers have openly protested for higher wages, better treatment, and more job security. What makes this period more important and potentially much more consequential is the confluence of demographic, social and political trends that have increased the bargaining power of employees for the first time in two decades. Workers are now protesting in a position of relative strength after a long period of perceiving that the economic and political trends were against them.

Travelling to China three different times this summer has offered me some time to observe this phenomenon from different locations, different perspectives, and in different points of time – when large strikes were still occurring in June to now in late August where strike activity has quieted down. Foxconn’s management just unleashed their 50,000 strong “worker party” with domestic and international media showing bizarre photos of underpaid workers holding up posters of Terry Guo that say “Love Me, Love You, Love Terry.” New Life Movement ideology combines with the CCP’s “your factory is home” propaganda to create a mishmash of capitalist company-driven paternalism and “work-unit socialism:” low pay, Taylorist work organization, company control and oversight of a worker’s life, but without the security and benefits of the now quaint “iron-rice bowl.”

Demographic change
“The virtually limitless supply” of Chinese workers dries up

A key underlying factor in the rising wages and increased demands of China’s migrant workers are the labor shortages now evident in many coastal manufacturing regions, especially the Pearl River Delta. According to the Institute of Population and Labor Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, labor shortages were first apparent in Guangdong in 2003. [1] They have now appeared in other major industrial regions, including the Yangtze River Delta around Shanghai and even in central China. There are a number of reasons for the labor shortage. First, the share of the working population is falling due to the effects of the one-child policy that began in the 1970s. This long-term demographic shift has important implications for the Chinese economy and for the sustainability of China’s ambitious social welfare programs. Second, policy changes and increased investment in agriculture have made migration to industrial jobs less attractive for some rural residents. Large-scale, government-sponsored infrastructure projects inland and the domestic stimulus package of 2009 are also providing jobs and opportunities closer to home. These changes inland have adjusted the calculus of migration.

Finally, the entrenched social and legal discrimination toward rural migrants remains a key barrier to their permanent resettlement as legal urban citizens. China’s household registration system (户口 hukou) continues to classify citizens into two separate groups designated by place of birth as either “rural residents” or “urban residents.” Citizens of rural China, while now permitted to work temporarily in urban areas, are usually not able to gain legal urban citizenship. Lack of urban citizenship deprives them of many social welfare and social insurance programs, restricts educational opportunities for their children, and subjects them to greater risk of exploitation at the workplace. The hukou system also restricts labor mobility and increases segmentation in China’s labor markets. These institutional barriers to migration have also exacerbated the labor shortage.

A brouhaha between economists on the nature and future of the labor shortage has been in the works for some time. The Economists’ cover story of Chinese workers two weeks ago cited an article by Knight, Deng, and Li that is dubious about the staying power of the labor shortage because there are still tens of millions of rural Chinese who are underemployed in agriculture. [2] Once these “potential migrants” start to move, they argue, the shortages will be alleviated. Others such as Cai Fang, the head of the Institute of Population and Labor Economics at CASS, have written forcefully that China has reached the important “Lewisian turning point,” when labor scarcity begins to shift the economy away from input-driven growth to enhanced productivity, declining inequality, and greater domestic consumption.

I side with those like Cai Fang as seeing this period as a fundamental turning point. While it is true that there are still many “potential migrants” in the Chinese countryside, it seems clear from research that the institutional barriers of the hukou system are critical in dissuading these people (who are often older, have children and/or aging parents, and land) to take the risky plunge of moving to a life with hardly any security, little government support, and filled with the daily humiliations of discrimination and incrimination as a country bumpkin serving urban elites.

So would meaningful reform of the hukou system alleviate the shortages? Reform of the hukou system would increase migration and we might see a new flow of workers into the Pearl and Yangtze River Deltas. But as newly sanctioned urban citizens with hukou in hand, expectations would not decrease, but only rise: better jobs, more security, free education for their children, etc. This adjustment would not lower the cost of Chinese labor even if it improves the current shortages. Whatever happens to the migration and urbanization pattern of rural citizens going forward, the iconic figure of a young, shabby farmer making his way to the city for a limited amount of time with limited ambitions and expectations for his time there is giving way to young people who see the city as their future and, if not their birthright, as something that they have earned.

Social change
China’s new generation of migrant workers grows up

Not only are China’s migrant workers become scarcer, they are also more demanding, more rights conscious, and more attuned to the inequality of treatment and opportunity they face as second-class citizens in China’s modernizing cities. In interviews that I did in 2005 at a legal aid center in Shanghai, young migrant workers were always quick to point out the discrimination and bad treatment they suffered simply because government officials and employers believed that they can easily be intimidated due to their insecure legal status in urban areas. [3] Unlike their parents or elder siblings who compared their fortunes to what “would have been” if they had stayed in the countryside, these younger migrants compare themselves to their urban counterparts. Differences in treatment are no longer as readily acceptable.

Members of this younger generation are now working on assembly lines all over coastal China. These are children of the reform era. As single children or from very small families, they have been treated well by their parents and have not suffered the deprivations or political calamities that affected those born during the Cultural Revolution. They tend to be better educated and because of greater exposure to mass media and technology, they are more acclimated to city life than were their parents. Their expectations for the future are wider and different than earlier generations. Future plans rarely include returning to the countryside as farmers. Longer time horizons in cities and higher expectations for their futures are feeding their new demands.

My admittedly unscientific measure of this is the “hairstyle test.” Walk through a Chinese factory these days and look at the workers on the production line. What are they wearing? What technology do you see them using on their (albeit limited) downtime? What kind of hairstyle do they have? Do the girls have dyed red-hair? Japanese-straightening? Do the guys have the long, shaggy look currently fashionable among the younger set everywhere? How many are copying Rain, the popular Korean heartthrob? What kind of product do they use? Mousse? A bit of holding gel? These people are not going back to the farms.

Political change
The government and the party listen up

The Chinese central government has not been totally unresponsive to these changing dynamics. Widely publicized stories about the problems of migrants in Chinese society have led to policy changes and improvements in the legal protections offered at the workplace. For example, in 2003, the central government rescinded laws and policies that allowed local governments to detain migrants for improper documentation after it was widely reported that a young, rural college graduate was killed while in a detention center in Guangdong. In 2008 and 2009, the media published sympathetic accounts of migrant workers who had killed managers while embroiled in long and frustrating labor disputes. In the spring of 2010, the domestic media in China covered both the strikes and the suicides at Foxconn until the government decided to clamp down. Informal debates and discussions took place on-line about the nature of work in Chinese factories and why laws and regulations to protect workers are so frequently violated. The relative media openness on these issues is a good indication that the government is concerned and examining ways to improve conditions, though always with an eye toward maintaining social and political stability.

Government support for change can be seen beyond its toleration of sympathetic media coverage. It is also apparent in new laws and regulations and in the reforms and changes within the official Chinese trade union, the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU).

In 2008, the Chinese government passed three ambitious labor laws to improve working conditions at Chinese companies and the employment security of Chinese workers. Employers criticized these laws as a return to the age of the “iron rice bowl” under socialism, which guaranteed lifetime employment and extensive welfare benefits for all urban workers. Labor activists hoped that the new laws would help close the gap between the high standards of Chinese “law-on-the-books” with its implementation and enforcement in reality.

These protective measures coincided with the onset of the global financial crisis and a rapid decline in China’s export markets. The combination of more protective laws and greater economic volatility led to a rapid and unprecedented increase in labor conflict, including legal filings and large-scale strikes and demonstrations. In the wake of China’s recovery from the crisis, this conflict has continued with newly confident workers now demanding wage increases and better representation. Labor disputes are highly concentrated in coastal provinces and cities with high levels of foreign-investment and export manufacturing.

The demands by some striking workers to elect their own representatives highlighted workers’ deep lack of confidence in the “official” representatives of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. Chinese trade unions at the workplace level are closely tied to management and rarely have the will or the capacity to represent workers during disputes or bargaining. At the higher levels of the trade union, trade union officials are closely tied to their local governments and CCP, which strictly limits how far they can go in advancing the interests of workers at the macro level. I meet sincere and hard-working trade union officials at every conference and workshop in China on labor issues. I feel sorry for them; but I don’t have much hope for them.

The current Chinese government has attempted to expand the presence of ACFTU-affiliated unions in foreign-invested enterprises for some time in the hope that union presence in foreign firms will improve the government’s knowledge and surveillance of labor conflict. However, these initiatives have done little to improve workers’ confidence or trust in the union. The strikes of spring 2010 sharpened concern over this problem of representation, leading the central and local governments to call for new measures to empower unions and “worker representative committees” at the firm level. Local regulations are currently being drafted in Guangdong and Shanghai that stipulate collective wage bargaining between employers and workers through these institutions. These reforms are fascinating in their return to the institutions of the socialist workplace – the Workers’ Representative Councils. And surely attempts at implementation will frustrate managers and foreign investors who are used to calling the shots. But without significant institutional reforms to the trade union itself, including the system of leadership selection, compensation and job security of trade union leaders within the enterprise, and better support and training from higher-level unions, these reforms are unlikely to succeed.

The future of the “China Price”

The demographic, social, and political changes of China’s labor markets point toward a future of rising wages and rising social insurance costs. Government plans to expand and deepen coverage of rural citizens in pension and medical insurance programs will add to the costs of migrant labor. Reforms to the hukou system and further legalization of permanent, urban citizenship for rural Chinese, while improving labor mobility and reducing labor market segmentation, will increase the expectations of migrants as they transition from farm to the city. The development model that began in the early 1990s, founded in labor-intensive export manufacturing using very low-cost migrant labor, has begun to shift.

In comparative perspective, however, China’s attraction as a production locale will continue. Chinese wages, while increasing rapidly recently, are still low relative to wages in the developed world. [4] Inland China is increasingly attractive for investors as it offers preferential policies and improving infrastructure with lower wages and social insurance costs than the coastal regions. The attempts to lure Foxconn away from Shenzhen and its apparently depressed workforce by inland local governments is only the beginning of a new drive by investors to find places further afield that will bend over backwards to get money and jobs for their locality. By late June Foxconn had announced plans to build a plant in Zhengzhou; by August the company was recruiting 200,000 workers for its operations there.

In this way, central government support for better legal protections and trade union empowerment will be mitigated by local government competition for investment and the fact that implementation and enforcement of law are still the responsibilities of local governments. Trade unions are still under the control of the local party-state and beholden to local economic interests. While the trade union mission seems to be changing, its political position vis-à-vis the local government and party is not.

Muddling through this period of increased expectations and rising conflict is possible. The central government’s desire for change and its concerns about political legitimacy are balanced by local governments’ close ties to and reliance on investment and industry for growth and jobs. A key danger going forward is that popular expectations for change and improvements will exceed what local governments actually do.

Notes
[1] Fang Cai, “Approaching a Triumphal Span: How Far is China Towards its Lewisian Turning Point,” UNU-WIDER Research Paper, No. 2008/09, p. 9.

[2] John Knight, Deng Quheng, and Li Shi, “The Puzzle of Migrant Labour Shortage and Rural Labour Surplus,” Oxford Working Paper, Department of Economics.

[3] Mary E. Gallagher, “Mobilizing the Law in China: “Informed Disenchantment” and the Development of Legal Consciousness,” Law & Society Review, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec., 2006), pp. 783-816.

[4] Lett and Banister estimate that the average hourly compensation costs of China’s manufacturing workers in 2006 was $0.81. Even with significant wage increases since then, China’s manufacturing workers still make significantly less than workers in the developed world. Erin Lett and Judith Banister, “China’s Manufacturing Employment and Compensation Costs: 2002-06,” Monthly Labor Review, April 2009, pp. 30-38.

Mary E. Gallagher is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and author of Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China (Princeton University Press, 2005).

Photo via China Digital Times.

• At his New Yorker blog, Evan Osnos asks “Why the Long Face?”, explaining that “While the story has rated front-page treatment in the U.S., it has sent China into a frenzy of self-flagellation, in the hope of reminding people that it is still home to a lot of very poor people.”

• Yoree Koh at the Wall Street Journal reports that Japan is taking the news of its third-place status with a shrug:

“It can’t be helped,” said Koichi Matsubara, 36, who works in real estate. “Business has been drifting overseas, our population is shrinking. We’re a small island, and given the size of our country, we were perhaps at the top longer than expected. I think we will continue to lose ground.”

• A few observers, however, are asking if China can maintain its sustained economic growth for much longer. Citing China’s heavy reliance on export-oriented development, as well as the country’s relatively low level of domestic consumption, some economists are instead looking to India to become Asia’s next hot economy, as James Fontanella-Khan of the Financial Times explains. Why?

First of all, unlike China, India isn’t rapidly getting older. In fact, its ratio of working-age people to dependents (children and the elderly) is actually improving.

Second — India’s government reforms, and its growing infrastructure spending, have helped create jobs, and dynamic labour market, and a vibrant private sector.

Finally, globalisation has helped India tap into both the goods export market, but more importantly, the global services exports market — which India now has a 2.6 per cent share of.

• Tom Lasseter, the Beijing bureau chief for McClatchey Newspapers, contemplates that problem of low domestic consumption at his “China Rises” blog. Writing about the story at a microeconomic level — as it relates to his choices when buying a new bicycle — Lasseter concludes that “For a country that wants to drive up domestic consumption, widespread worries about product quality and scant legal recourse to assuage those concerns is a serious issue.”

• At Forbes, Gady Epstein advises readers to take a step back and consider whether or not this story deserves the breathless headlines it’s been generating:

But do we really need a quarterly statistic to tell us anything we don’t already know about these two economies? There is not much value in debating the matter other than for the fun of the headlines and the hype.

We already know that China is the world’s second economic center of gravity now after the U.S., and in important ways is the dominant center of gravity: It has long been the economy that draws every big company in the world seeking growth, and which sets global markets in most commodities . . . When China, growing as quickly as it does, becomes a net importer of something, that is the vital turning point for prices going forward, and it didn’t take until the second quarter of 2010 for this to become true. This has been true for most of the last decade.

• And Joshua E. Keating at Foreign Policy asks “How Do We Know That China’s Economy Is Really Bigger Than Japan’s?” For those of us who need a quick review of college macroeconomics, Keating is a helpful guide as he talks through the various ways a country can estimate its GDP.

I had never bid on eBay. It takes too much energy, too much attention to follow the vagaries of an online auction. And there never seems to be anything I want that badly. But I wanted that propaganda poster—a reproduction of an oil painting, mid-1970s—depicting, with the imagination and rhetorical power possible only in socialist realism, the May Fourth movement of 1919.

"The May Fourth Movement," propaganda poster, 1976

In the painting, the sky is clearing and clouds are dissipating behind the imposing presence of Tiananmen, which dominates the scene. The students, young men and women, are marching at the center, their facial expressions ranging from outrage to stern determination. They wear either the scholar’s long gown or Western-style suits; both kinds of attire identify them as belonging to the social group of “modern” students. And the fact that they indeed embody the forces of modernity, of progress against an essentialized tradition, is made very evident by the painter. One of their signs reads, “Down with the store of Confucius and Co.” while the notable presence of female students marching prominently in the forefront epitomizes the stance on gender equality.

11 minutes 15 seconds. I wanted it. I repressed the creeping sense of unease, took out my credit card, and placed a bid.

9 minutes 20 seconds. “You have been outbid.” Somebody else wants it? But who? And why? Who could want that? I tried to resist the urge, tried not to get sucked into this perverse poker-like game of raising the stakes. I am an intellectual, a historian; I am above the petty antiquarian lust for ownership, for artifacts. I trace trends, ideas, and lives. Right.

8 minutes 35 seconds. All true. But I am specifically a cultural historian. I work with materiality, I study representation, I analyze images. Why shouldn’t I own my subject matter?

I looked at the image again. Around the marching students, people converge toward the demonstration: they are workers, common citizens awakened by the words of students, words they literally clasp in their hands, in the forms of the leaflets students have distributed. The signs the protestors carry—“Give us back Qingdao,” “Abolish the unequal treaties”—alert the people of the imminent danger to the territorial integrity of China: the Treaty of Versailles had just assigned to Japan the German colonies in Shandong Province. It was then the pull of nationalism that drew the students out of their schools and connected them to the people.

7 minutes 22 seconds. “You are now the highest bidder.” My opponent seemed to have given up. Reassured, I started fantasizing, imagining the poster in my office, or better, in my living room. I had seen that image before, many times. I reached for a copy of Vera Schwarcz’s The Chinese Enlightenment, and there it was, on the cover. Schwarcz never talks about that painting, and, for some reason, until this time I had never paid much attention to it either. But now, I was becoming obsessed with owning it.

4 minutes 10 seconds. Still the highest bidder.

It is a powerful image, and it synthesizes perfectly the multiple legacies of the May Fourth movement, a moment that, in different but converging histories, has been made to coincide with the birth of Chinese modernity, the emergence of a national consciousness, the birth cry of an infant class struggle. But the painting clearly suggests a precise historical interpretation; in the official Chinese Communist Party (CCP) mythology, the events of May Fourth mark the first encounter between the students and the people. Yet in the picture the students still march alone (and one wonders whether the promises of that encounter will ever be truly and completely fulfilled). They march under their own banners; they bring awareness to the people, thus making evident that their new political consciousness has matured apart from the people, inside a closed community, and implicitly because of that very isolation. The political awareness of the students is then almost a natural byproduct of their status. But how can it be that this particular category is always assumed to be “naturally” political?

3 minutes 19 seconds. Still the highest bidder.

The monumental outline of Tiananmen (the Gate of Heavenly Peace) looms in the center of the scene. It marks more than a simple location; it is the central point in the map of student activism throughout the following century. Tiananmen stands as the symbol of continuity of the nation-state, the embodiment of power, authority, and national unity. Through the gate an uneasy suture is achieved between the public space of protest, the modern state, and an ahistorical national past (the cyclical recurring of China’s five thousand years). By implicitly linking May Fourth’s student nationalism to the imperial officers’ concern for the dynasty, the gate suggests a continuous reference to the long history of the relation between the state and intellectuals, for which “students” are the modern embodiment. Students are therefore always already political because they inherit a particular place in relationship with the state (imperial or national); they are always already standing in front of Tiananmen, waiting to be heard by (or curry the favor of) who is inside. Differences in time and space are erased in this perspective, and every instance of student activism becomes just the recrafting of an old tradition.

1 minute and 20 seconds. “You have been outbid!”
Damn! Too late to place another bid, too late to recover the lost image. I am left with doubt (who stole it from me?), remorse (why didn’t I bid more?), and this digital reproduction.

Now that I had lost the chance of owning it, I looked at it again. Maybe, if we just shift our perspective a bit, the image lends itself to other readings, to completely different interpretations. Maybe Tiananmen is not as central and dominating as it looked at first glance. Rather, it might be seen as emerging among the dissipating clouds, suddenly revealed, its contours becoming more precise. It looks almost like a nascent symbol, summoned into life by what was happening in the streets. But if we can challenge the stability of the gate, then maybe none of the other elements in this picture will be fixed and determined either, including the “students” themselves. What will we find if we look behind the gate?

Excerpted from Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing by Fabio Lanza. Copyright © 2010 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Poster image from Stefan Landsberger’s collection at Chineseposters.net.

Fabio Lanza is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona.

On my (continuing) walk across China, I have occasionally come across the kind of construction featured in the attached image — a farmhouse with a door half way up the wall, no stairs attached. I have previously assumed the house was still under construction, or perhaps they ran out of money before doing the stairs. But as I passed his one, in Guang’an county in the middle of Sichuan, last Saturday, it struck me that this is in fact a “panic room”, a way to seal off and protect the family and its assets in the top room, safe from marauders. A man I met on the road asked me how the law and order situation is in England compared to China. I replied: “I really have no idea.”
— Graham Earnshaw, author of The Great Walk of China: Travels on Foot from Shanghai to Tibet

To read an excerpt from The Great Walk of China, click the link above; to listen to Graham Earnshaw in dialogue with Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Zhang Lijia in Shanghai last month, check out this podcast at Popup Chinese.

The video has been making the rounds on Twitter this week (follow us at @chinabeat!); thanks to Kaiser Kuo for bringing it to our attention.

August 8, 2010 marked the first anniversary of the Siaolin Village 小林村 tragedy, when torrential rains caused by Typhoon Morakot triggered a massive mudslide that swept this idyllic community off the face of the earth, taking 474 lives. Conditions one year later were eerily similar, with rain drenching the disaster site and another threat (Tropical Storm Dianmu 電母) lurking off the east coast (happily it did not make landfall). Southern Taiwan has suffered heavy rains during the past month, but there has been little destruction and loss of life (so far), unlike the terrible flooding that has ravaged so much of China recently, such as the Gansu 甘肅 landslides.

The past year has been a time of profound pain and loss. Such feelings found expression in the Buddhist memorial ceremony held to commemorate the disaster, with tearful villagers making offerings such as betel nuts and rice wine to their loved ones to the accompaniment of scripture recitation rites. This being an election year, the rituals also attracted all three candidates running to serve as mayor of the new Kaohsiung Municipality (encompassing today’s Kaohsiung City and Kaohsiung County). Nonetheless, the focus rightly remained on the needs of those victims who survived.

For amidst the grief has also arisen hope for new life. The first permanent housing project for some of Siaolin’s survivors, known as “Great Love Village” (大愛園區), was built by the Buddhist Compassion Relief Merit Society (佛教慈濟功德會) in Shanlin 杉林 Township (Kaohsiung County), yet only a few villagers have chosen to live there. More villagers have expressed interest in the second permanent housing project being constructed by the government, which is slated to be finished soon. These homes will be situated in the village of Wulipu 五里埔, located less than one kilometer from where Siaolin Village used to stand and also the site for the successful restaging of the annual Siraya Plains Aborigine 西拉雅平埔原住民族 ritual known as the “Siaolin Night Festival” (小林夜祭).

Most of the villagers, representing between 106 and 130 of Siaolin’s remaining 247 households, have continued to advocate for their dream of undertaking the rebuilding process themselves using land purchased by the ROC Red Cross in Shanlin. Their wishes went unheeded for many long months, with the government insisting that they settle in one of the two above-mentioned housing projects. Things finally came to a head in the days leading up to the anniversary, when villagers and their supporters started circulating a petition that appealed to the government to follow through on its earlier pledges to rebuild the village of Siaolin in a way that helped preserve its Plains Aborigine culture. They also staged a candlelight ceremony on the evening of August 8, with President Ma Ying-jeou 馬英九 and other dignitaries joining villagers in lighting candles placed in the shape of the Chinese character “home” (家).

This time their dreams have come true, be it due to the legitimacy of their claims, the power of their rhetoric, and/or the fact that another round of elections is coming up. Following the ceremony, village leaders joyfully announced the good news: President Ma has promised to support a special rebuilding project that adheres to the villagers’ wishes. If land acquisition and construction processes go according to schedule, the new Siaolin Village should be completed in just eight months, and its Plains Aborigine culture will be preserved.

The road to recovery has been a long one, and there is still some distance to be travelled, but at least things now seem to be moving in the right direction. The fact that so much has been accomplished is a tribute to the spirit of Taiwan’s people, as well as the quality of this nation’s democracy, which, while far from perfect, does allow citizens to pressure their leaders to do what it takes to meet their needs.

Note: Many thanks to Hung Shu-fen 洪淑芬 for providing the photos.

This is the final in a series of articles Paul Katz has written on the rebuilding of Siaolin. Read previous entries here.