6 Individualization and precariousness of life

In contemporary Chinese society, individualization is a general process in which social values and norms are distributed. As a do- it-yourself (DIY) way of living, its development involves at least three mechanisms. First, it marks a new histor-ical process of socialization. The DIY way of living becomes a dominant process in which individuals become members of society. It represents a qualitative shift from the socialization process in the socialist period – the standard way of living that was supported by socialist institutions such as class designation, household registration, work organizations (work units and communes), and the political dossier system.1 Due to this change, the individual is expected to become respons ible for the self and others in her or his life- making and life- building process. Second, the DIY way of living registers a new kind of temporality. Instead of only using one temporal framework like Maoist socialist time, the DIY way of living becomes tied to multiple temporal frames, especially hetero-geneous temporalities that are supported by certain communicative technologies such as countdown clocks, built theme environments, the Internet, and digital cameras. The individual is expected to define and manage her or his individual time – its duration, continuity, contingency, and their appearances – in synchro-nization with other times. Third, the DIY way of living also grows out of the global process of neoliberalization in which individuals are encouraged to apply economic rationalism to calculate rather than abide by the rules and laws. Rules and laws still exist as normative tools, but they become transgressed by individu-als who regard them as undermining the DIY principle. The outcomes of trans-gression are varied, but they are positioned within the failure–success spectrum. When these three mechanisms of individualization frame middle- class subjects, they distribute middle- class values and norms unevenly. In this chapter, I examine risks in the uneven distribution of middle- class values and norms by focusing on the following questions: how do middle- class norms and values become knowable and recognized in the DIY way of living? Who are recognizable middle- class subjects and who are difficult to recognize? What is the relationship between recognizable middle- class subjects and those who can only anticipate middle- class lives and are not recognized as middle- class subjects? To address these questions on precarious conditions of living in Chinese middle- class society, I discuss three cases from my ethnographic

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research on the cultural industries, especially those related to communication and mass media. The first case deals with risks associated with photography. Digital photogra-phy is ideal for producing memories and related experiences in the DIY way of living (see Chapter 5). However, this does not mean that digital photography is always constructive and guarantees positive outcomes in the life- building process. Individuals in digital photographic practices are often framed and con-sequently lose control over images of their bodies and body parts (especially their faces) in a globally wired network like the Internet. The second case offers an ethnographic analysis of the links between media consumption, middle- class subjectification, and norm recognition. Informational technologies are commonly believed to offer wonderful opportunities: for example, promoting connections, openness, and friendship; empowering their users through online activism; and producing a global democracy in which everyone can speak online. For those who are not recognized as middle- class subjects, however, uses of informational technologies do not generate life chances. The third case shifts to the problem of affective labor in the communicative industry. Digital photography requires its users themselves to invest their affective labor in practices (see Chapter 5). This is also the case for users of the Internet, especially of Web 2.0.2 While affective labor blurs the boundaries between consumers and producers in digital media practices, it also blurs the boundaries between employment and subjectification in the work organization of the cultural industries. At the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park, for example, ethnic minority migrant workers invest affective labor not only in producing tourists as middle- class bodies but also in being framed as subjects of charity in their employer’s philanthropic enterprise. These cases address diverse problems of individualization and precarious lives in communication and mass media practices. They are about media that support multiple temporalities, that is, digital media and built environments that are particularly relevant to the understanding of individualization. They highlight the dominant place of affective labor in the communication and mass media practices. They also show that uneven distributions of middle- class values and norms in various contexts produce not just precariousness as a general condition of living but also a precarity as a new politics that is different from socialist poli-tics in Maoist China.

Facial recognitionPhotographic practices often create a crisis of the visual. They may alert a par-ticipant to the possibility of losing control over his or her images, especially when digital photos become circulated through the Internet. At the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park, for those who dress- up as ethnic minorities, they use cameras to produce memorable photos of fun and exciting experiences. Some-times, however, they encounter unforeseeable incidents that heighten a sense of risk in the middle- class subjectification. I would like to discuss one incident that deals with issues of “portrait rights” (xiaoxiang quan).

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Mei, a 21-year- old college student majoring in media and visual arts at a college in Nanjing, was touring the park on Sunday, August 19, 2007, with her mother “Yu” and her family’s guests visiting from Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province – her mother’s friend “Kai” and Kai’s high- school daughter “Hua.” Like many other tourists who visited the park as a group of friends or relatives, the young woman and her companions enjoyed renting ethnic dresses and taking photos with them. In the morning, they put on Korean dresses in the north section of the park. In the late afternoon, they arrived at the Mongolian village in the south section of the park, where I met them. While most of the tourists came here to watch the scheduled Mongolian performances (16:00–16:20), they decided to rent three sets of Mongolian dresses – ten yuan each – and to take photos at the site. Yu did not try any clothing; she helped to carry their personal belongings. The three cross- dressed women appeared to be excited. They took many photos – either individually or collectively – and moved from one location to another: first in an area marked as “The Mongolian Grassland,” then on a wooden bridge over an artificial creek, and finally in front of one of the Mongolian yurts the park imported from Inner Mongolia. As they moved around at the village site, they began to attract the attention of other tourists who were watching the performances. Some tried to follow them to take photos. An elderly Chinese man, in his sixties, appeared to be a serious photographer. Carrying a large camera bag, he took a number of shots of the group. By the time the women finished their photos, the old man had already left the site. They certainly saw him. Mei later told me that she became uncomfort-able because she felt that the old man was stalking them. And yet, none of them attempted to stop him. The elderly photographer was not the only admirer. Chae, another tourist and a middle- aged man with long but carefully combed hair, was also closely fol-lowing them and asking Mei and Hua to model for him. He even tried to direct Mei and Hua how to show their cross- dressed bodies for the camera. Some shots highlighted their young, natural, beautiful bodies, while others invoked their per-sonalities through smiling and quiet looks. He asked Mei to hold up her long skirt to display the bright colorful Mongolian dress while blocking the strong sunlight (see Figure 6.1). He also carefully measured the lighting of Mei’s face to ensure his camera had the correct setting. As an observer, I could not tell that he was not part of the group. The women did not talk to him, but nor did they refuse to follow his direction and his camera. They seemed content with the photo session as if their expectations were met through the incidental admirer. As the Mongolian performances ended, this group of tourists wrapped up their photo session, returned the ethnic costumes, and redressed themselves. They decided to talk to Chae. Mei politely asked if Chae could email a few photos. Speaking in Putonghua, standard Chinese on Mainland China, Mei did not know that Chae could not understand and speak Chinese. Chae’s companion, a younger Korean woman who spoke some Chinese, told them that his name was Chae Ki- seon, a professional painter from Cheju, South Korea. Chae would use the photos to create paintings. Repeating that she would like to receive photos

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from Chae, Mei handed over a notebook to Chae. Chae suggested Mei sit down on a bench and then took out a pen to draw Mei’s portrait. Within a few minutes, Chae vividly captured Mei’s key features such as her facial shape, hairstyle, and necklace. Chae signed his Korean name below the drawing and then handed the notebook back to Mei. Mei’s mother and her friends were smiling and quietly watching. Mei was pleased to look at the portrait and thanked Chae. However, she still insisted that Chae email her the photos. Calm and yet puzzled, Chae looked his companion. She then told him about Mei’s request. While his partner repeated to Mei that he would use the photos only to create paintings, Chae took out a few of business cards to show his paintings printed on these cards. Mei took a card, which listed Chae’s address, phone number, and website. When the Korean couple left, I walked toward the exit with this group of Chinese tourists and engaged in an informal conversation. I asked them whether they liked the photos they took for themselves. Mei’s mother said: “The youth in costumes looked beautiful.” Her friend quickly followed: “However, when we old women put on the costumes, we looked like deflated eggplants (bie qiezi).” I asked Mei whether she was satisfied with the outcome. While she was pleased with Chae’s drawing, she was concerned about the photos Chae took. Whether she could get the photos would depend on many factors. She was not sure if Chae understood her request. She also did not know if Chae actually used email due to the fact that Chae’s card did not list any email address. Most importantly, Mei said, she was concerned about whether Chae violated her “portrait rights” and whether he would make a profits from her images. Her mother suggested

Figure 6.1 Photographing in Mongolian dress, the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park, Beijing, 2007.

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Mei write to Chae. Our conversation stopped there, as they were exiting the park. Although I do not know whether Mei eventually contacted Chae, I was left with the clear impression that Mei found the whole incident to be troubling. Not only does such an incident alter a tourist’s overall experience of visiting the park, but it also affect the DIY biographic process. As Mei apprehended the incident, she became aware of an uncertainty associated with the photos taken by the Korean artist. Given the fact that numerous photos, old and new, which are circulated in a (global) network society (via the Internet), become used for the purpose of surveillance and crowdsourcing, Mei’s concern with her “portrait rights” was real. Searching the term “portrait rights” on the popular baidu.com, for example, resulted in about six million relevant web pages in July 2010. Moreover, Chinese netizens in recent years have developed a popular practice called “human flesh search” (renrou sousuo).3 Although it is mainly used as a popular way to expose corrupt officials, it may also be used to reveal an ordinary person’s life history, especially his or her personal or private matters such as marriage, sex life, and leisure activities. In addition, uploaded photos and videos of human subjects in public places are also widely circulated online. Their circu-lations have generated massive digital inscriptions of individual bodies and faces, as well as their precise locations. Thus, it is within the context of photo-graphic surveillance and crowdsourcing that her concern with portrait rights was about struggling to avoid being framed by other photographers. The cameras used by herself and others captured photos about which she was excited. However, whether she could consume the digital images depended upon whether she would receive emails from Chae. This means that she might not be able to create a complete narrative of her experience at the park without at least some of the photos from Chae. Consequently, her story as a tourist to the theme park was not an autobiography but a biography to be completed both by her and by others (including Chae). Her dependence upon others in this instance shows that the normative DIY way of living is a social process, and because of this, it generates opportunities of encountering others in unexpected ways that include uncertainties and risks.

Still lifeIndividualization, as Mei’s case shows, encounters things unexpected and unforeseeable, and its trajectory in the life- building process – despite being planned regularly – cannot possibly be predetermined. This means that the life- building process is not simply an assembly- line process that follows a set of existing logics and norms that allow the individual to make sense of and move according to the direction of her or his life. The trajectory of the DIY process can be either linear or nonlinear. That is, it may be progressive or regressive, up or down, or cyclical, but it also may become lateral, sidetracked, or stand still. Moreover, statistical norms of the middle class are available to every individual-izing process in a society, and, thus, they appear to offer a standard life- building framework. In practice, however, they do not simply affect individuals, their

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conducts, life orientations, and subjectivities, they frame individuals. A middle- class life has to become intelligible as a middle- class life, has to conform the conceptions of what middle- class life is, in order to become recognizable.4 I met Yunfeng during my fieldwork in 2007. He lives in a working- class com-munity in Chengdu, part of a large state- owned factory established in 1958 in response to Mao Zedong’s strategy of developing the third- front (sanxian) areas. Born in the early 1970s, Yunfeng dropped out of high school to pursue business opportunities when he turned 18. He achieved some success in the early 1990s when he became a manager of a well- known restaurant chain in Chengdu. A few years later, however, he lost his job to a child of a government official who was in charge of the service sector, including restaurants. He tried to find a similar job, but had little success. He agreed to work for minimum pay during a three- month probationary period and only realized at the end that he was never going to be hired as a regular employee regardless of his job performance. Besides res-taurant related jobs, he also pursued other types of work like renting a counter in a department store to sell clothing. As an increasingly large number of college graduates entered the job market from the late 1990s on, less educated urban res-idents like Yunfeng began to have a hard time finding regular jobs. Since 2001, Yunfeng has not been able to find any regular job. Because of underemployment and unemployment, he does not have the income to rent his own apartment, and has to live with his parents, retired workers whose only sources of income are pensions. Given that Yunfeng could not follow a standard biographic process of living in a way similar to his parents even though he was a son of the socialist work unit system, does he simply take on the DIY way of living? The answer is no. Yunfeng’s life- building process is nonlinear, and includes both standard and DIY aspects. Yunfeng lives in a standard life trajectory because he belongs to the group of residents at the community who are unemployed. According to my field research, there exist two types of the unemployed in the working- class community. Those who are officially laid- off from the state- owned factory are identified through a “certificate of stepping down from the post” (xiagang zheng). Their employer paid them a total sum of money for their working years. Yunfeng is part of the second group of the unemployed who holds a “certificate of waiting for being employed” (daiye zheng). This distinction shows that the official government policy does not acknowledge “unemployment” (shiye). The first type of the unemployed (laid- off workers) are considered as displaced and, thus, given a “social security card” (shehui baoxian ka), while the second type of the unemployed are considered “yet to be employed” and do not qualify for a “social security card.” For both groups, they are supposed to find ways of making a living on their own. For those who are laid- off, some use the sum of money from their former employer to pursue business activities such as selling things and providing services, while others invest in the stock market through online trading. For “those waiting to be employed,” they have to become more entrepreneurial and more adventurous even while waiting for a job. This is indeed what Yunfeng does in his life.

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Yunfeng’s family offers him both affective support and practical help. The way in which the household operates resembles a mini socialist welfare state. His parents receive a standard pension (about 2,000 yuan per month in 2007), a small but nevertheless stable source of income. While his parents live in one room, Yunfeng lives in another. Most of time, he just stays in his room to avoid conversations with his father who is said to be obsessed with complaining about everything. Besides welfare support, the family cannot offer other kinds of opportunities, especially employment. Yunfeng’s explanation is that his parents were neither Communist Party members nor government officials. Because of this, according to Yunfeng, his family lacks “connections” (guanxi), a Chinese concept of social capital. In effect, he has to develop his own way of managing and building his life. He calls this process “path- breaking” (chuang), an expression of the DIY life trajectory. He knows that this “path- breaking” way of living is risky and insecure. One day, I invited him to watch Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (sanxia haoren) (2006), a popular film about migrant laborers who demolished buildings in the areas affected by the newly developed Three Gorges Dam. In a final scene of the film, the main character, Tianming, and his migrant friends made a decision to move to Shanxi Province to work as unauthorized miners – a kind of work that might pay well (200 yuan a day instead of 45 yuan a day in demolition work) but does not benefit from any safety insurance.5 Just before departure, Tianming was watching a man who was walking across the Yangzi River on an iron cable. Tianming’s contemplation of the spectacle clearly meant something to Yunfeng. He asked me: “What does the scene of walking on the cable mean to you?” I responded: “The migrants know how dangerous the mining work will be. The scene also implies a future not only uncertain but also risky.” Not disagreeing, he said: “Living is like a matter of walking on an iron cable” (shenghuo jiu xiang zou gangshi yiyiang). The film’s final scene apparently resonated with Yunfeng’s understanding of risk and insecurity. He is not alone. In fact, whether young or old, employed and unemployed, Communist Party members or not, residents in this community have a shared sense of life insecurities, including (but not limited to) problems of food safety in everyday life, job insecurity, health risks, and future uncertainty.6 Yunfeng is well aware of his marginalized status. During a chat, he reminded me of contrasting realities of everyday life between the wearing out and deterior-ating working- class neighborhood where he was living and the vibrant, fast- growing and ever- transforming city center, where what he called the “mainstreamers” (zhuliu renshi) or the people of the “mainstream society” (zhuliu shehui) live. “If you want to understand changes and transformation in China,” he said,

you cannot just look here [the poor neighborhood], you should go to the central areas of the city to experience the lives of the mainstream society. In the process of social transformation, some people’s lives become better and some become worse. People here are in the latter situation. But overall, China gets better and society becomes more peaceful.

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I said: “Many have given lots of attentions to the mainstream society. Should not scholars look at the poor’s struggles for making a living and their insecurities in their daily lives?” He responded:

It is no use to consider problems of the marginalized people. China’s future is represented by the mainstream society. If you look at the United States, there have been so many problems such as racism, crimes, and rising income gaps between the rich and the poor. However, the United States is so stable.

His perception of China’s future that depends on the mainstream society is as optimistic as those of sociologists, scholars, and marketers discussed in Chapter 1. It shows that he has embraced certain norms and values of the mainstream society despite his self- recognized marginal status. Every day, Yunfeng must wait for his chance and stand the cruelty of the ticking clock. Normally, everyday life in the DIY way of living includes many aspects such as work and consumption. For a person like Yunfeng who “waits to be employed,” his everyday life does not include salaried work. Instead, con-sumption – with the support of his parents – gives meanings to his everyday life. In effect, he lives in what Zygman Bauman calls a consumer society, where indi-viduals engage in their living capacities primarily as consumers.7 One major capacity Yunfeng engages in his daily life is as a media consumer. When staying at home, he usually closes the door of his room to avoid his father. During lunch and dinner times, according his mother, he often eats in his room. This suggests a problem of communication between him and his father. His alienated relation-ship with his father, however, does not mean that he lacks communicative skills. In reality, he spends most of his time engaging in media consumption: for example, looking at newspapers, watching television programs (especially sports- related), reading books (especially martial arts novels), and surfing the Internet. His daily online activities focus on several areas. He reads martial arts novels because martial artists inspire him to fight for a better life. He enjoys playing the Chinese online game “Go” (weiqi) because it helps him to think about strategies in life. He also plays popular action games from which he could earn a little bit of income. In addition to entertainment, he devotes lots of time to job- hunting. Every week, he reads the job ads of Sunday newspapers. He told me that he would like to engage in live chats to look for jobs via a popular website like qq.com. Employers that urgently need to hire usually use the online chat as a tool to find workers. If he could use the live chat, he would have had more opportunities of finding a job, whether regular or temporary. The slowness of the Internet pre-vented him from pursuing online chats. His mother later tried to help him by giving a “little smart” (xiaolingtong) – a low cost mobile phone that only worked within the city8 – in case a potential employer wanted to get hold of him. The issue of the Internet speed is actually inseparable from the broader problem of speed in the DIY life- building process. To control the costs of media consumption, his father bought a low- end laptop. The computer itself might be

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sufficient for email, getting information, reading news, and even playing simple online games, but it is too slow to handle complicated online operations like video chats and multimedia functions. According to Yunfeng’s nephew, a student in a vocational high school, he wanted to design a sophisticated e- commerce site but could not do it due to the slowness of the computer. I asked whether he had ever created a website. “I did it at school,” he responded. The website he showed me was a one- page blog site hosted by baidou.com. I asked Yunfeng what kind of website he wanted to create. “A site to sell information and advice to people who buy lottery tickets.” He claimed that he had invented a winning formula for lottery ticket buyers. I asked: “Have you bought tickets and won by using the formula?” While Yunfeng remained silent, his nephew men-tioned that quite a few times, he was only one number away from winning. It became clear that a chat about the family computer and the Internet speed had turned into a discussion about the potential for communication technologies to improve their lives. Like other unemployed and those waiting to be employed, Yunfeng embraces the common belief that informational technologies offer wonderful opportunities in life, allowing him to continue to imagine that they can help to improve his life. The discussion also shows that he has a strong desire for finding a technological solution to problems in life, including address-ing unemployment and poverty. Given that neoliberal conditions in China encourage individuals to conduct transgressions, a disenfranchised person like Yunfeng has learned many life lessons from mass media reports and popular soap operas about corruption cases involving elites, especially officials and Communist Party members. I asked a hypothetical question to Yunfeng: “If a disenfranchised had an opportunity to be corrupt to gain great benefits, would the person take the opportunity?” He responded:

For someone who openly complains and criticizes corrupt officials, the person might become even more corrupt if he were given an opportunity. Even though this means that the person might be caught, punished, and even sentenced to death, this also means that his family and children could benefit from his corruption.

To illustrate his point, he mentioned a media report of a corrupt official in Fujian who escaped to Canada before he got caught:

He WAS corrupt, but he gave money to his family and his village – 800 yuan to each retired person in his village. It was worthwhile for him to take risk. The moral nature of a corrupt case is not absolute, it changes according to points of view.

His cost–benefit calculative reasoning in life conduct makes him an ideal neolib-eral subject according to such a prominent economist as Gary Becker.9 His mother doubted whether any disenfranchised person could have an opportunity

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to become a corrupt official or businessperson. His father added that laid- off workers and the unemployed did not even have the necessary skills to become corrupt. Compared with Mei who is well- educated and indisputably well- positioned to become a middle- class subject, Yunfeng has much less formal education and has not been employed regularly. It is hard to imagine Yunfeng’s life trajectory in terms of a middle- class subject. And yet, he maintains his awareness of insecuri-ties of life and existing social, economic, and political gaps among Chinese citi-zens. Moreover, he openly embraces both middle- class values of social and state stabilities, and neoliberal values of entrepreneurialism. He appears to resemble an ideal self- responsible citizen in contemporary Chinese society. Finally, his treatment of informational technologies in his practice of everyday life also reso-nates with common belief in how informational technologies may lead to inno-vations and unofficial democracy. Yunfeng’s life trajectory, I argue, is nonlinear and is framed to be unrecog-nizable. Yunfeng engages in a lateral life- building process.10 Playing video-games, reading martial art novels, and looking for jobs online are about managing paces of life. They might generate certain pedestrian pleasures from time to time, but they primarily characterized his life as a still life, both a life standing still and a life that is barely living.11 Yungfeng and his family can upgrade the computer and the Internet speed. However, technological improve-ment bears no direct relation to the speeding up of life opportunities like waged work. As long as he is framed by the government only as a person who is “to be employed,” a category that does not apply to a college student like Mei, he is excluded from being recognizable by the opportunities generated in the distribu-tion of middle- class norms and values (entrepreneurialism, self- responsibility, and self- enterprising). And his way of living is refused as a normative middle- class way of life.

Affective labor and the subjectification of lifeAffective labor is a major characteristic of work in the cultural industries. In photographic practices at the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park, both ethnic minor-ity workers and tourists invest their affective labor in producing memorable experiences (see Chapter 5). So do the users of the Internet. Not only does affective labor blur the boundaries between consumers and producers, but it also blurs the boundaries between employment and subjectification. The more self- directed and entrepreneurial a person like Yunfeng becomes, the more she or he needs to become accustomed to precarious, nonstandard employment and daily life. The relationship between the work of affective labor and the production of middle- class subjectivity is paradoxical. Affective labor may increase capacities to act, expanding affectability, both to affect and to be affected. And yet, it also may generate threats to the laboring person in her or his affective relationship with others. That is, no matter how strategic or desir-able affective labor is as a means to produce a future orientation, it does not

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guarantee a desired return and may bring about desperation and disappoint-ment.12 At the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park, as ethnic minority migrant workers invest affective labor in producing tourists as middle- class subjects, they are framed by the employer as charitable objects. Like Yunfeng, they are also not recognized in the distribution of middle- class norms and values because they are part of the “vulnerable group.” The affective work of the young ethnic minority migrants at the ethnic theme park mainly involves representing ethnic minority cultures as a way of educating the tourists to become more cosmopolitan, stimulating their senses and appetites for ethnic differences (see Figure 6.2). Their daily work involves various tasks. It stages a performance of certain aspects of an “ethnic culture” such as festivals, dances, songs, and clothing, along with displays of artifacts and “life- size” archi-tecture. It also encourages tourists to spend their money in various ways, whether eating foods, renting ethnic clothing, or buying souvenirs. Moreover, it functions as public relations campaigns, advocating ethnic tourism on behalf of their local governments, creating media events for the theme park as free advertisements, and promoting the goods for sales at the park. In their affective work, these ethnic workers are required to manage their feelings to make them appear genu-inely friendly, cheerful, enthusiastic, helpful, polite, and patient. In doing so, they effectively incite tourists to attach themselves to cosmopolitan values and norms. This kind of affective work is shown in their reflections about their work performance, especially their discussions of how they address various “pres-sures” (yali) from the tourists, co- workers, and bosses.

Figure 6.2 Miao Sister Festival, the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park, Beijing, 1996.

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In 2006, 18-year- old Yeble, a Wa from Yunnan’s Changyuan County, was recruited to work at the park after graduation from high school. Upon arrival, she attended a required two- month training session led by a college student intern from Beijing. She learned the basics about the work of a tour guide at the park. During my fieldwork in 2007, I asked Yeble to describe what issues she dealt with at work. She talked about her multiple work responsibilities and the kinds of work- related pressures she and her peers felt. She mentioned three major kinds of pressures. The first comes from the tourists. She said:

When tourists hire a tour guide, some of them feel happy (xinqing hao) and some do not (xinqing buhao). As tour guides, we do our best to manage their feelings to encourage them to ask questions during a tour. We try to avoid situations in which tourists don’t ask any questions.

However, sometimes, they “asked all kinds of strange questions.” For example, they often asked her to explain why her skin is so “black” (hei), whether or not she uses make- up, or whether her darkness was caused by Beijing’s strong sun-shine. She also mentioned that some tourists, usually married middle- aged men, asked her whether a dark- skinned young woman like her could find a husband. On a few occasions, middle- aged men asked her to engage in sexual activities with them. Since the work of a tour guide requires her to ensure visitors’ posi-tive and satisfactory experiences, she just told herself to be patient and not to become “angry” with “rude” tourists. Thus, her description of these concrete instances shows that her affective work entails the management of both her own feelings toward the tourists and the tourists’ feelings toward her. This managed orientation of feelings is based not merely on the worker’s individual perform-ance of acting13 but also on the workplace’s institutionalized separation between the backstage and the front stage.14 She has to conceal some of her own feelings and leave them at the backstage so that she can make positive feelings visible on the front stage. How does a visitor respond when ethnic workers fail in their acts of affective work? In the previous chapter, I discussed the affective work of Kim, a Korean woman and a native of Yanbian, at the theme park. Kim thought that she could perform better than the younger workers because she knows better about how to affect tourists, particularly to make them feel happy and satisfied. She argued that her guidance may enhance visitors’ experiences as consumers and reorients visitors’ attention from the expense of the entrance fees to the happiness of pho-tographic memorization. Due to her affective labor that enables the circulation of cross- dressed photos as objects of happy feelings, visiting the park as an ordi-nary tourist or consumer is not separated from visiting the park as a social activ-ity that involves seeing an acquaintance. Kim affects visitors to feel happy and satisfied, she is also affected by these visitors’ pleasant responses, not simply their happiness but also their appreciation of something ethnic (that is, Korean in this case).15 Thus, affect in this case is powerful in a twofold meaning of both the productive power of affective labor and the biopower of affective subject.

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Kim’s case also shows that because older ethnic workers are not preferred at the tourist site, they may have to prove their usefulness once they are hired. Thus, Kim works there as an irregular worker, a volunteer who is paid not by the park but by renting ethnic costumes to tourists. Moreover, she compares her own performance with other younger ethnic workers to show her work productivity. In addition, Kim’s substitution of the work done by other ethnic workers at the Korean village was a result of Kim’s dissatisfaction of the work performed by the ethnic workers. This kind of comparison and substitution contribute to peer pressures younger workers feel. Yeble regarded peer pressures as a major issue. With respect to the work of a tour guide, she may be selected to host major ethnic “festivals,” performances usually involving multiple ethnic groups and being scheduled twice a day. Once being selected to host a show, she needs to use a microphone to introduce all ethnic minority groups displayed at the park. Thus, she must make sure she knows and understands as much as possible about every ethnic minority group. Otherwise, she might make mistakes, which sometimes lead to criticisms from ethnic performers, especially from groups different from her own. Yeble talked about this type of work in terms of both “work attitude” (gongzuo taidu) and “learning attitude” (xuexi taidu). For her, this work involved constant learning. In August 2007, she was assigned to host ethnic festivals. After learning of the new work responsibility, she appeared to be very excited and told me that she considered this new responsibility an opportunity to learn and to gain a new experience – rather than an opportunity to show- off. Thus, she read books about other ethnic groups to prepare for the work. Opening her copy of the park’s script book used by tour guides, I saw many notes in the margins throughout the book. Some were from the books she read. She attempted to memorize the entire script. One day when I entered the tour guides’ office, I saw her practicing oral presentation skills by focusing on her sound level, pronunciation, and the script’s content. She spoke loudly and with enthusiasm. After hosting the first show, she told me that she was nervous in front of a large crowd of several hundred people. She was concerned about making mistakes. When I watched the show, however, I did not notice anything that would embarrass her. In fact, she did an excellent job in using the microphone to guide the tourists throughout the performance, especially during the interactive dance session at the end of show. Her practice of public speaking skills in her office clearly paid off16 and demonstrated how she had appropriate learning and work attitudes by transforming peer pressures into effective work performance. One major responsibility in hosting a festival involves guiding the tourists. Normally, the hostess uses the loudspeakers distributed throughout the park to remind the tourists about a scheduled festival. This way, tourists may come to the festival site in time. During interactive dance sessions, the hostess literally becomes a trainer, teaching the tourists how to move their bodies and perform dance steps. When some visitors begin to interrupt the show or misbehave during a festival, it is the responsibility of the hostess to deal with this. One common mischief is that tourists tend to splash water before the official beginning of the

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splashing activity, the last program in a festival. When this happens, the hostess usually says something via the loudspeakers like: “Please respect the custom of our ethnic minorities. Don’t touch the water before our ethnic minority perform-ers splash the first bowl of water.” Another common misbehavior is that in the middle of an ethnic dance, some young adults (and children) get on the stage to imitate the dancing performers so that their companions or parents can take photos. The hostess uses the loudspeakers to ask them to leave the stage or the parents to tend to their children. In dealing with those types of situations, a hostess actually communicates norms of cosmopolitan civility to visitors through marking specific boundaries between the permissible and the prohibited in their conduct. Yeble and her co- workers also mentioned another kind of pressure, which comes from the company’s management. Besides such types of work as leading tours and hosting festival events, ethnic workers are also required to be present at the company’s public relations events. In the company’s public relations mat-erials and media coverage about the park’s employment of ethnic minorities, the park often mentions that the employment of ethnic minority workers from remote regions is a way for the company to contribute to the Chinese govern-ment’s efforts in poverty alleviation. During my fieldwork since the mid- 1990s, the park’s senior managers have told me several times that these workers from the poor ethnic regions are “very lucky to have the opportunity to work in Beijing.” Compared with those still at home who might never have any opportu-nity to travel to major cosmopolitan regions, they have invaluable opportunities to learn about modern urban life, modern ways of working, learning, and living in the same way as urban residents in Beijing. After working at the park for several years, when they go back home, they may apply what they have learned and experienced to help to change poverty at home, usually in the development of local ethnic tourism. Thus, the park’s employment of ethnic minorities is advertised as an opportunity for ethnic youth’s self- development in alliance with national development.17

In practice, ethnic migrants work under the company’s official title, “ethnic receptionists” (minzu jiedaiyuan) when they entertain the company’s special guests such as government officials, journalists, and special groups. Under the watchful eyes of their bosses, they have to make sure to put on their best ethnic clothing, to greet the guests with warm smiles, and to make sure that they prior-itize the company’s interests over their individual needs. The managers pressure them to make multiple contributions to the positive appearance of the company: presenting organizational effectiveness through their work performance; illus-trating the company’s work toward taking social responsibility for poverty alle-viation; and staging the company’s non- profit status. For a tour guide, if the work takes place during the lunch hours (11:30–13:00), she may not have time to go to the employees’ cafeteria and thus miss her lunch. When this happens, she either eats instant noodles or does not eat at all. The tour guides are all aware of this problem. Sometime, they try to help one another. Work takes the priority over breaks too. At the park, an ethnic worker (whether

Individualization and precariousness of life 139

an ethnic performer or a tour guide) usually takes one day off after working six days. This normally is scheduled on Monday or Tuesday. On a Saturday, I asked Yeble whether her break day would be the coming Monday or Tuesday. She said she did not know yet. On the next day (Sunday), she told me that her break might be three days later (Wednesday). Two days later (Tuesday), I ran into her and her friend on the street outside the park. She then said that her break was changed back to a day earlier (Tuesday). It becomes clear that although they generally know Monday or Tuesday is a break day, they do not really decide for themselves. They are required to be flexible about their break times for the sake of their work. Due to this requirement, it is inconvenient for an ethnic worker to plan anything outside her work schedule. Under this work regime, unlike mana-gerial staff who have regular work and break schedules, no ethnic worker could have her personal life beyond the park’s walls.18

During that day when Yeble took her break, she went to watch an interna-tional archery competition, part of a series of international sports events designed to prepare for the 2008 Olympics. The company gave six tickets to ethnic workers. Originally, the tickets were given to the young men. She was happy to get one after asking her boss. In telling me her experience, she said that she did not eat any breakfast because she worried about being sick when taking a bus to the stadium. Because she did not want to miss any games, she did not eat lunch until 3:00 in the afternoon. They sat in an outdoor stadium and got lots of sun-shine. Overall, she said, she was very impressed by athletes from other countries. In summary, ethnic workers are required to develop various skills to be able to deal with the routine pressures their work entails. They have to learn to accept peer criticism and flexible work schedules. They need to find ways of improving their cognitive and intellectual capacities through acquiring more information, learning new things, and applying them in work- related activities. They are required to be capable of managing their bodies through handling physical appearances, facial expressions, and interpersonal interaction and communica-tion. Thus, as they communicate cosmopolitan values and norms through show-casing ethnic cultures and interacting with the tourists on the front stage, they must make invisible traces of worn- out bodies and signs of eating disorders, mental distresses, and anxieties. All these capacities make these ethnic minority migrants work more effectively and efficiently without any additional compensation.19

Under neoliberal conditions, which are broader and more global than condi-tions of post- Fordism, affective labor becomes closely linked to entrepreneurial-ism.20 Affective labor does not simply entail the problem of employment; it is in fact linked to the subjectification of life through work and the state’s politics of developing a “harmonious society.” It connects together various norms and values, which are dispersed in separate domains, whether economic, political, or cultural.21 Affective work relies on self- enterprising to figure out the individual path in the life- building process. Thus, the way in which feelings are invested in social norms is intimately intertwined with the way in which self- enterprising

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invests in economic norms. That is, the investment of affects and entrepreneuri-alism work together to affect both the valuation of labor and the recognition of subject. It is critical that we understand the proliferation of affective work in various forms. In the cultural industries, such as ethnic tourism, advertising, television, film, and new media, the reproduction of social order and subjectivity become an inextricable part of value extraction, and affective labor becomes a major source for extending the historical process of proletarianization,22 and for producing precarious living conditions that are characterized by anxiety, insecurity, fatigue, exhaustion, frustration, and individualized shame. Scholars of affective labor tend to pay more attention to the work of those who have better education and more skills,23 such as the creative class (see Richard Florida’s work) whose members are “self- directed, entrepreneurial, accustomed to precarious, nonstand-ard employment, and attuned to producing career hits.”24 For example, Hoch-schild argues:

lower- class and working- class people tend to work more with things, and middle- class and upper- class people tend to work more with people. More working women than men deal with people as a job. Thus, there are both gender patterns and class patterns to the civic and commercial use of human feeling.25

Hesmondhalgh and Baker point out that “[c]ultural workers might be thought of as the pampered children of the bourgeoisie, and they may be relatively privi-leged compared with other kinds of worker, but the human costs of their working conditions are real enough.”26 As I have shown, less- educated and marginalized laborers, like their privileged counterparts, also face precarious conditions of living in their affective work. The ethnic minority employees at the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park are treated as objects in the company’s poverty alleviation project, which is always con-ceived in relation to China’s national development. That is, their affective work elevates the company’s status as an organization that contributes to the govern-ment’s efforts in reducing poverty. Thus, while affective work points to intensi-fying exploitation and proletarianization, it is further obscured by the company’s strategic deployment of philanthropy. Under the guise of corporate responsibil-ity, the company’s assertion of its compassion, good- heart, and caring for its employees is an exercise over the terms of what counts as working subjects in the affective turn in Chinese neoliberalism.

The middle- class frame and precariousness of lifeThe middle class as a dispositive or frame involves multiple dimensions. It is an epistemological frame through which individuals apprehend, or fail to appre-hend, their lives as normal – thus, safe, secure, and good (that is, average). Among the cases in this chapter, Yunfeng is particularly conscious about

Individualization and precariousness of life 141

deploying the frame to guide his apprehension of life. Compared with Mei, he does not have as much formal education. And yet, he speaks the language of a middle- class based harmonious society. He connects the DIY life- building process with entrepreneurialism and transgression. His identification of who are middle- class subjects and where they are located becomes a frame for appre-hending his own life as a non- middle-class life. In the case of ethnic minority employees like Yeble at the ethnic park, they invest affective labor both in com-municating middle- class norms and values to the tourists and in caring for their own selves. Their employer exploits them to generate monetary profits. Mean-while, in the name of contributing to the state’s national development project of poverty alleviation in ethnic minority regions, their employer relies on their affective labor to accumulate moral capital. In this reversed order of things, their affective labor contributes to the redistribution of wealth while becoming un recognizable as a valuable middle- class activity (that is, charity). Moreover, the middle- class dispositive is a mechanism of power by which the state polices the order of things for the purpose of developing a harmonious society. It distinguishes between those who conform to established norms and those who do not, and thus, between the recognizable and the unrecognizable middle- class subjects. Mei as a “college student” is a more recognizable middle- class subject. By comparison, Yunfeng as someone “to be employed” and Yeble as an “ethnic minority” are not recognized as middle- class subjects even though both contribute to the development of a middle- class society. Both Yunfeng and Yeble are struggling, not because they have problems with the middle- class norms and values but because they are framed by the state as subjects who pose potential risks or threats to the state’s harmonious order of things. In addition, the middle- class dispositive makes individualization both a nor-mative and a precarious life- building process. In the cases of Mei, Yunfeng, and Yeble, all of them are framed by the middle- class dispositive in such a way that their lives become precarious. While the middle- class dispositive may contain some risks, it also creates other risks. This reveals that the middle- class disposi-tive itself is vulnerable to self- breaking, to reversal, and to subversion. To recog-nize the problem of framing in the middle- class dispositive is to recognize precarity or the precariousness of life. Judith Butler defines precarity as a “politi-cally induced condition” under which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to all kinds of risks such as poverty, starvation, displacement, violence, and even death.27 The lives of ethnic minority workers like Yeble at the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park and Yunfeng are more clearly affected by such a condition of pre-carity. If we could envision precarity as a new political alliance that cuts across various state categories of identification, then the question is: does precarity also apply to a cosmopolitan subject like Mei? Mei as a “college student” is more recognizable as a middle- class subject. However, this does not mean that she is not subject to the state’s policing, which is responsible for creating a condition of precarity. She is in fact subject to the power of self- policing. The issue of portrait rights is inseparable from

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the distribution of her body’s traces in public. Among a state’s policing technol-ogies, a person’s face and fingers, in the forms of “mug shot” (photo de pose) and fingerprints, are commonly used as signatures of the body’s identity.28 They function as indices to the policing of the population as a whole and an individ-ual. Both mug shots and fingerprints are captured after- images of a body. Framed in particular ways, the photograph of a mug shot and the print of a fingerprint are technologies that represent certain strategic arrangements of the face and fingers to make them legible and legitimate. They are about the policing of the sensible. In the development of digital photography, facial recognition underlines the entire photographic process, from focusing and shooting the subject to indexing in photo management. The face becomes a key register for indexing a large quantity of photographs. Together with other meta information recorded by a digital camera such as GPS, aperture, speed, size, camera type and model, a facial image – whether a still image or a distilled image from motion pictures – now has an enduring life after a body’s pose or activity. The proliferation of digital photographs goes beyond the disciplinary power of policing the body of a population. It extends the logic of visible marks in cultivating the body’s poten-tial (the body’s afterlife) by shifting the policing of the body to the policing of the sensible. Whether online or offline, fewer people today can escape from being captured by cameras that are installed in public and private places – such as airports, train stations, ports, shopping malls, office buildings, just to name a few – across the country. Facial images are circulated in public at an accelerated speed. For an individual, he or she is always in danger of being misidentified and misrecognized. Thus, even if someone like Mei is careful about the public circu-lation of her bodily images, she is unable to control the process. This is what Mei learned in her visit to the theme park. Precarity in Mei’s case does not come from failing social and economic networks of support but from the normalized shift from the socialist standard biographic process to the neoliberal DIY way of living.

164 Notes 3 Kim, an ethnic minority worker at a theme park, August 2000. 4 Haldrup and Larsen, Tourism, Performance, and the Everyday, p. 122. 5 Ibid., p. 130. 6 Sontag, On Photography, p. 178. John Berger also noted the state’s early interest in

photograph as an instrument of surveillance: “Within a merely 30 years of its inven-tion as a gadget for an elite, photography was being used for police filing, war report-ing, military reconnaissance” (About Looking, p. 52).

7 Haldrup and Larsen, Tourism, Performance, and the Everyday, p. 129. 8 Ronnie J. Steinberg and Deborah M. Figart offer a good review of the scholarship in

“Emotional Labor Since The Managed Heart.” 9 Hochschild, The Managed Heart, p. 7.10 Ibid.11 Weeks, “Life Within and Against Work,” p. 241.12  In  the  field  of  fashion  modeling,  there  is  a  difference  between  a  modeling  for  a 

product catalogue and that for a fashion magazine. While the former focuses on showing the product, the latter makes an “editorial” statement through the model’s bodily posture. In a way, Kim’s emphasis of expressing one’s personality does resem-ble editorial types of photographs. However, for most of the tourists, their photo-graphs really focus on the ethnic dimension of their photographed bodies. In this sense, dress- up photos are usually the first type of photographs.

13 Haldrup and Larsen, Tourism, Performance, and the Everyday, p. 144.14 Anagnost, National Past- Times, chapter 7.15 I should point out that an interesting incident took place at the bridge during the

Olympics in 2008. Some foreign visitors staged a pro- Tibet protest on the bridge. According to international media reports, protestors hung a “Free Tibet” banner on the side of the bridge facing the public outside of the park.

16 Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, p. 264.

17 Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” p. 18.18 Ibid.19 Gibson, “The Theory of Affordances.”20 Larsen, “Practices and Flows of Digital Photography,” p. 146.21 Norman, The Design of Everyday Things.22 Larsen, “Practices and Flows of Digital Photography,” p. 146.23 Ibid., p. 157.

6 Individualization and precariousness of life

1 Yan, “The Chinese Path to Individualization,” p. 491. 2 Web 2.0 blurs the line between producer and consumer and has shifted attention

from access to information toward access to people. New kinds of online resources – such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and virtual communities – allow people with common interests to meet, share ideas, and collaborate in innovative ways.

(Grinnell, “From Consumer to Prosumer to Produser,” p. 597)

3 International media has also begun to report on the phenomenon, for example, see Downey, “China’s Cyberposse.”

4 My discussion of middle class recognition is indebt to Judith Butler’s discussion of frames of recognition in Frames of War (p. 7).

5 Incidents involving injuries and deaths of large numbers of miners, whether author-ized or not, often appear both in domestic and international news headlines. For example, at least 74 miners died in an incident in February 2009 (see Wong, “At Least 74 Miners Are Killed in China Blast”).

Notes 165 6 For readers who are interested in understanding some of these issues, I suggest watch-

ing Jia Zhangke’s 2008 film 24 City, a film that combines both fiction and documen-tary styles to tell the stories of those living in this community.

7 Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. 8 See Jack Qiu’s discussion of uses of “Little Smart” in Working- Class Network Society

(chapter 3). 9 Becker, “The Economic Way of Looking at Life.”10 In her study of obesity in American popular culture, Lauren Berlant critiques the use of

the idea of liberal sovereign agency as a social norm in constructing the dominant dis-course of obesity as a complex of negative phenomena (such as improper consumption, health crisis, and poverty). Under neoliberal conditions, she argues, the practical agency in everyday life, especially for the marginalized, is less about a positive or upward living but more about a negative or downward orientation toward what she calls “slow death.” In the case of obesity among the marginalized, seeking and accumulating minor pleas-ures in daily life, despite their sideways orientation, are in fact practices to sustain lives worn out or exhausted by capitalist productions (“Slow Death”).

11 The idea of “still life” is from Kathleen Stewart (Ordinary Affects).12 Affect’s paradoxical relationship to the future is discussed by Gregory J. Seigworkth

and Melissa Gregg (“An Inventory of Shimmers,” pp. 12–13).13 Hochschild, in The Managed Heart, examines different degrees of acting in the man-

agement of feelings at work.14  Scholars  of  reflexive  modernity  such  as  Anthony  Giddens  (The Consequences of

Modernity) argue that the modern trust system is based on the careful management of the front–back stage distinction. One aspect of that management involves a laboring performance that aims at evoking others’ (especially consumers’) feelings of trust – feelings of confidence  in  the administration of  the unknown by strangers  (including organizations).

15 Stewart, Ordinary Affects, pp. 1–2.16  Her practice in fact fits in with what popular media describes as an important step for 

a young woman to pursue a successful “white- collar” (bailing) career, as shown in such popular television series as “A Story of Du Lala’s Promotion” (Du Lala shengzh-iji) (32 episodes, 2010).

17 The “effect” (xiaoying) of rural- to-urban migration on local development is often dis-cussed in Chinese media. For a critical analysis of the case of young female “domestic helpers,” see Yan, New Masters, New Servants, pp. 188–194.

18 It is obvious that exploitation often operates on the level of time. See Gill and Pratt, “Precarity and Cultural Work,” p. 17.

19 This situation is very similar to affective work performed by domestic helpers (baomu). Hairong Yan, for example, shows that domestic helpers in middle- class households, whose routine work includes cooking, cleaning, and childcare, must be able to handle physical appearance, facial expression, personal interaction, and oral communication (New Masters, New Servants).

20 Scholars who theorize affective labor tend to based on their conceptualization against the rise of post- Fordism that transforms Fordism, especially in Italy and other Western European countries (see Muehlebach, “On Affective Labor in Post- Fordist Italy,” pp. 59–82). In this historical context, Hardt and Negri argue that affective labor involves “the production and manipulation of affect” and “requires (virtual or actual) human contact, labor in the bodily mode” (Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 293). I do not disagree with their assessment of affective labor. However, the rise of post- Fordism itself is not a sufficient context for understanding the hegemony of affective labor. For example, we also need to look at the crisis of the state in relation to neoliberal policies (see Neilson and Rossiter, “Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Excep-tion,” p. 54).

166 Notes21 There . . . is no room to make a distinction among political, economic, and affec-

tive forms of existence, because the institutions of intimacy that constitute the everyday environments of the social are only viscerally distinct but actually . . . intricately and dynamically related to all sorts of institutional, economic, histor-ical, and symbolic dynamics.

(Berlant, “Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal,” p. 279)

22 Today, we face a tendency towards the hegemony of immaterial work (intellec-

tual, scientific, cognitive, relational, communicative, affective work, etc.) increas-ingly characterizing both the mode of production and processes of valorization . . . [T]his form of work is entirely subordinate to new modes of accumulation and exploitation.

(Negri, The Porcelain Workshop, p. 20)

23 Ross, Fast Boat to China.24 Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It, p. 10.25 Hochschild, The Managed Heart, p. 21.26 Hesmondhalgh and Baker, “Creative Work and Emotional Labour in the Television

Industry,” p. 103.27 Butler, Frames of War, pp. 25–26.28 O’Connor, “Lines of (F )light,” p. 58.

Conclusion: the middle- class dispositive in Chinese risk society

1 Dutton, Policing Chinese Politics. 2 Ren, Neoliberalism and Culture in China and Hong Kong. 3 Goodman, “Why China Has No New Middle Class.” 4 Guo, “Class, Stratum and Group.” 5 Goodman and Zang, “Introduction,” p. 16. 6 Ren, Neoliberalism and Culture in China and Hong Kong. 7 Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception. 8 Ong and Zhang, “Introduction: Privatizing China,” p. 3. 9 Yan, “The Chinese Path to Individualization,” p. 491.10 Beck and Grande, “Varieties of Second Modernity,” p. 418.11 Anderson, Imagined Communities.12 See Atkinson’s critique of Beck’s thesis of individualization in “Beck, Individualiza-

tion and the Death of Class.”13 The way in which the middle class operates is similar to the way in which sexuality

operates (see Foucault, History of Sexuality, pp. 103–104).14  In official documents, the Chinese government first used the term “the vulnerable 

group” in 2002. The Chinese economist Shen Liren provides a good summary of discussions of “the vulnerable group” in China. Shen argues that this group includes a wide range of Chinese populations: the majority of peasants, the rural migrant laborers, the urban poor, the aged and the disabled, the poor students, and the beggars (Zhongguo ruoshi qunti, chapters 3–8). Collectively, they share four major characteristics. First, they are unemployed or underemployed. Second, they are the poorest in Chinese society. Not only do they receive the lowest amount of income, but they also maintain the lowest quality of life. Third, they are vulnerable and powerless. They lack political, social, and economic power and resources to deal with risks. Fourth, they are marginalized in Chinese society (ibid., pp. 23–24).

15 Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor.16 Zhu Fu’en and Wang Jinrong, “ ‘Nu xianxiang’ shuoming le shenmo.”