The Middle Class in Neoliberal China by Hai Ren

Author:Hai Ren [Ren, Hai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138851733
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2015-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

Consumer citizenship as an individualized configuration of values and norms

In sum, three important aspects of spatial practice characterize the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park as a landscape of capital accumulation and social order. First, the park is a built theme environment. The building of a “natural” environment in the urban context of Beijing involves both constructing a landscape of the ethnic minorities and associating it with Beijing’s most well known national sites such as the Palace Museum and the Great Wall. In this way, the socially reconstructed “ethnic minority region or space” is closely tied to wider social forces. This leads to the second aspect of spatial practice. The park appropriates the built environment as an important resource for capital accumulation. This mode of accumulation is mainly characterized both by separating consumption from production and by incorporating existing knowledge about and of the ethnic minorities into consumption. Finally, the process of accumulation is also a process of regulating visitors to follow a social order structured by spatiotemporal arrangements of exhibits and performances. In the process, tourists are guided not only to visit the exhibitions of the ethnic objects but also to behave properly according to the spatial order of these objects.

Chinese theme parks function as an institution of social engineering in the broader context of China’s social transformation in the past two decades. They represent an efficient and flexible economic system in which the production of cultural commodities, moving between economic and cultural circuits, increases the economic value of investment capital.43 As illustrated by my ethnographic example, representing the Chinese nation through displaying ethnic minority objects and ethnic minorities themselves is an economic process in which cultural symbols and commodities are made to float in relation to one another. An ethnic costume, for example, is not only an ethnic marker for the nation but also a commodity. The Chinese Ethnic Culture Park concretizes the abstract idea of the nation in the form of the commodity, encouraging cooperation between the symbolic and the material.

The design of this cultural economy targets the park’s visitors as a coherent group who would be transformed by their movement through its space into responsible consuming subjects. In the broader context of the tourist industry, its general manager claims, the park is operated as “a means for distributing culture, linking together knowledge, entertainment, participation, and taste. Not only does it guide tourists to ‘look,’ but it also directs them to ‘play’.”44 The park instantiates the process of middle-class self-formation in three ways: first, it encourages the internalization of the norms that define middle-classness, such as decision-making and the performance of civility (wenming). Second, the cultivation of an appreciation for ethnic minority culture marks both a form of cosmopolitanism (a tolerance for cultural difference) for the urban consumer, while also inciting subjects to engage in an ethical relation to an ethnicized Other through charitable endeavors. Third, these practices position middle-classness according to a neoliberal logic of calculation rather than observance of the law, a logic that defines citizenship in terms of entrepreneurial subjecthood.

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