Dancing in the Squares
by
Yifan Wang
Department of Humanities Duke University
Date:______Approved:
______Ralph Litzinger, Supervisor
______Michael Hardt
______Diane Nelson
Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Humanities in the Graduate School of Duke University
2015
i
v
ABSTRACT
Dancing in the Squares
by
Yifan Wang
Department of Humanities Duke University
Date:______Approved:
______Ralph Litzinger, Supervisor
______Michael Hardt
______Diane Nelson
An abstract of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Chemistry in the Graduate School of Duke University
2015
Copyright by Yifan Wang 2015
Abstract
“Guangchangwu,” or what is literally translated as “square-dancing,” is a form of public dance that has been exceedingly popular, albeit controversial, in China over recent years. Most of the participants are elderly women in their late-50s or above, who roughly fall in the category called “dama” (“big-mother”). Usually, a dancing group assembles in the evening and dances on a daily basis to the music played through a portable loudspeaker. Yet, because many dancing sites are in or close to residential compounds, the music played, or, the alleged “noise pollution,” have caused numerous conflicts nationwide. During the summer 2014, I conducted a three-months fieldwork on the dance in China. In this thesis, I first demonstrated how a specific guangchangwu dancing group organized in relation to the space it occupied, then I traced the media discourse of guangchangwu and showed how it became linked with elderly women, dama.
I argue that this seemingly new and overwhelmingly women-dominated public dance emerges from a series of long existing activities, the embedded gender politics of which articulates China’s recent and ongoing revision of policies and laws regarding birth control and the retirement age. Moreover, it is precisely against the backdrop of such social discourse that the practice and persistence of individual dancing groups becomes meaningful: through an effective organizational structure, these elderly women made their existence visible, audible, and their stories irreducible.
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Contents
Abstract ...... iv
List of Figures ...... vi
Acknowledgements ...... vii
1. Introduction ...... 1
2. How to dance in the Squares ...... 10
2.1 Morning guerilla ...... 14
2.2 Organizing group A ...... 21
3. The politics of dance ...... 35
4. Becoming Dama ...... 47
4.1 Representing guangchangwu: the “2013 turn” ...... 49
4.2 The production of the linkage ...... 58
5. Conclusion ...... 63
Works Cited ...... 70
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List of Figures
Figure 1: Map of Yongping City ...... 5
Figure 2: Site A Detail ...... 14
Figure 3: Site A1 on Weekend Mornings ...... 15
Figure 4: Organizational structure of group A. Lines are dotted to indicate that the group is only loosely associated and the division is not absolute...... 30
Figure 5: Hu Rong's graduate designing sketch. The title of the red print reads: “Value- added Tax Declaration Form (B).” Note the seam on the top. Hu taped two pieces of paper together to make a larger piece of paper to meet the size requirement...... 66
Figure 6: Liu Yun's sketch of the choreography drawn on a sample contract...... 67
Figure 7: Fan-dancing Thursday on Site A. Note the bicycles and mopeds parking on the periphery...... 68
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Acknowledgements
This project was initiated from the East Asian Cultural Studies class I took during the first semester of my graduate studies, which was co-instructed by Professor
Leo Ching and June Hee Kwon. Their encouragement and guidance made possible my very first entry into academic research. Professor Ralph Litzinger’s mentorship since the beginning of the project fundamentally changed the way I view the dance and the world at large. The second chapter is based on the final paper for Professor Michael Hardt’s class on Leadership. Along with the series of classes I took with him, his intellectual engagement and generosity profoundly influenced me as a student and a person. I am deeply inspired by Professor Diane Nelson’s distinctive ways of thinking and being, and her passion and love of life. Moreover, I am most grateful for encountering them as great individuals even beyond their academic achievements. APSI’s generous funding largely facilitated the fieldwork during summer 2014. I would like to thank Stephen Goranson at Duke Library for patiently reading through the scratches, notes, drafts, and offering comments. This project sees the friendship with Chris Ma Jingchao, with whom talking has always been enjoyable and enlightening. I want to thank all the friends I met in my graduate studies for their intellectual and emotional support, especially my “twin” Yang
Minghui, Huang Shan, Magdalena Kolodziej, Huang Sihui, Nadia-Estelle Fiat, Zhou
Dihao, Chris Daley, and Zach Levine. Thanks to all my friends who have been sending
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me articles, links, and virtually everything related to guangchangwu they read over the past two years, which greatly enriched my otherwise fragmented collection. They are,
Zhao Xinzhe, Huang Peiying, Sun Ning, Shi Qian, Wang Zhiyin, Zhang Zining, Wang
Yuting, Hua Sha, Zhao Yue, Elisa Conterio, Yao Yao, and An Ning. I am indebted to my parents, without whose care and support this would be unimaginable. Their good reputations among the neighborhood and colleagues also smoothed the way for my fieldwork. My deepest gratitude goes to all the dancers I have encountered through this project. They show me how courageous and beautiful it can be being a woman in this world.
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1. Introduction
In 2012 I lived in Guangzhou in south China. Sharing an apartment on the 26th floor overlooking the metropolis’s old downtown, I enjoyed all its conveniences of public transport and 24-hour stores around the corner while being kept from car horns, hawkers, and all the bustle that this third largest city of mainland China teemed with.
Yet, as soon as I settled down, I found myself wearing earphones every night listening to music, turning the volume up and up, with the dimmest hope to drown out the dancing music outside. Featuring strong drum beats and earworm tunes, the music from a neighboring public square penetrated into my room almost every night during my residence unless when the rain poured—a drizzle would not be a problem for the enthusiastic dancers.
Annoyed that my own life was squeezed, I somehow became curious about the dance that people had been colloquially long called “guangchangwu” (广场舞). The term can be literally translated into English as “square-dancing,” named after the space where the dance usually takes place, without evoking the square dance in the American context.
Even in the muggiest southern summer nights, the square was packed with people engaging in all kinds of activities, stirring the thick and unbreathable air. People of all ages seemed to have much fun playing badminton even without a net in between; some elderly wielded plastic tai chi swords and held the pose for a minute, waiting for the instructor to correct the movement. I jogged around the square, dodged the skaters, and
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for the first time rested my eyes on the dancing group, though I already felt too familiar with what I saw. Faced toward a set of loudspeakers, it was a group of more than a hundred dancers, mostly women in colorful dresses. They danced individually to the music at a set pace, only occasionally moving beyond their own square of tile.
Thus was my first personal encounter with the dance, beyond a perfunctory glance when walking down the street. In the past few years I had traveled and lived in different cities across China, yet however differently I experienced them, invariably there mushroomed throughout the cities’ nightscape this similar kind of public dance.
The generic name, guangchangwu, was used to cover a range of dancing activities: the size of the group ranged from two or three friends to a crowd of hundreds of participants, among whom dominantly are middle-aged women; the music embraced ballroom tunes from the 1980s, disco-like pop song remixes, mainstream praise called
“red songs” (hongge, 红歌), and not surprisingly, songs that were written specifically for this dancing market. The choreographies vary, too, though usually they are a combination of typical movements picked up from the recognizable Chinese ethnic minority dances, ballroom dance, and calisthenics.1 Along with its popularity in the city landscapes, news reports on the dance grew exponentially. Centering on “noise
1 What today commonly taken as ethnic minority dance involves complex cultural politics. For related discussions, see for example Louisa Schein, "Gender and Internal Orientalism in China," in Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities : A Reader, ed. Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Ralph Litzinger, "Tradition and the Gender of Civility," ibid., esp. 420-1. 2
pollution,” these widely circulated reports, discussions, and commentaries made guangchangwu and dancers, especially elderly women, a social spectacle.
Since fall 2013 when I left China and came to the US for graduate studies, I initiated my research on guangchangwu. During the summer 2014, I went back to my hometown and conducted a three-month fieldwork at Yongping City,2 a satellite city 60 kilometers west of Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi Province.3 There I had established connections with some guangchangwu dancers during the preliminary research. Xi’an connects the geo-economically demarcated East (dongbu, 东部) and West (xibu, 西部) of
China. Meanwhile, being a satellite city of nearly 255,000 population, in which around
90,000 belonged to “non-agricultural populations” (feinongye hukou, 非农业户口),4
Yongping was also on the urban-rural borderline, witnessing a drastic process of urbanization both internally and externally. Planned to hold three large engineering- related state-owned enterprises (SOEs), or danwei (“work units,” 单位), in the 1950s,
Yongping retained this industrial pattern well into the present, though the three SOEs had also undergone constant reform, internal reorganization, and privatization in some of its industrial sectors in recent years. The three danwei, however, were not equally
2 In this thesis, all names related to the fieldwork are pseudonyms, including specific places and interviewees. 3 Strictly speaking, Yongping is not an independent administrative city in China’s administrative division system. In this paper, I use “city” as a synonym to urban area (chengqu) as opposed to the rural. This is not so much to say that the dance is an exclusive urban thing as to clarify the physical boundary of my studies. In fact, many interviewees told me that rural residents were equally enthusiastic about the dance as well. 4 Ministry of Public Security Breau, 2011 Demographic Statistics of the City and County of People's Republic China (Quanguo Fenxianshi Renkou Tongji Ziliao) (Beijing: Qunzhong Press, 2013). 3
regarded. For the purpose of this paper, we may say that while employees of Danwei A, a research-oriented institution, were usually considered “intellectuals” (zhishifenzi, 知识
分子), those of the other two were thought to be “lower” in comparison. 5 It falls out of the scope of this paper to examine the specificity of the reforming trajectories of these danwei in comparison with the general accounts by scholars such as David Harvey;6 yet, it is important to note that the functioning danwei system largely shaped the experience of people in this city. For instance, I was still constantly asked which danwei my parents worked in by my interviewees during my fieldwork in 2014—“still” in the sense that it contrasted so sharply with David Bray’s account that in mid-1990s the younger generation had already deliberately shunned exactly the same question.7 In other words, danwei remains central to the formation of identity in Yongping City.
5 To tell from the current hiring criteria, while the other two employed manufacturing workers from professional schools and community colleges, danwei A normally requires a master’s degree from top universities in China. 6 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 125. 7 David Bray, Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 158. 4
Figure 1: Map of Yongping City
Yongping was the kind of city where its people may say that it was too comfortable for the young to build a career but cannot be more favorable for the elderly.
Its traffic heavily relied on the sole major road, a four-car tarmacked lane shaded by large trees on both sides. The traffic light was only installed at its busiest crossroads within a decade. Paralleled and crossed (mostly perpendicular) subsidiary streets divided the city into uneven blocks, where there spread dominantly uniform six-story high danwei planned residential buildings. Living in such a city, the farthest expansion of one’s daily life was an area no larger than two square miles. Ten minutes’ bicycle ride would satisfy most kinds of daily needs from school and work, to restaurants and 5
grocery shopping. Yet, if one wanted to hang out in shopping malls for fashionable items or to experience modern city life, it would take an hour’s drive on the expressway to go to downtown Xi’an City. Public buses also conveniently connected the city on the fringe with the core of the capital. They set off every twenty minutes throughout the day, costing 20 yuan (less than four dollars) for a one-way trip.
Like many dancers, I rode a bicycle to travel around this small city. In some sense, a bicycle was more than a vehicle that connects places; it created and shaped the rhythm in which I experienced the field—the same rhythm that the dancers as well as the residents living in Yongping City now as in the past decades experienced. Every night, a few dancers and I would chat while carefully riding on the jolty sidewalk, as the surface had been bent by the roots of the trees along the road.
Among the tens of dancing sites across Yongping City, I decided on three as my sites of observation (respectively marked as A, B, C in Figure 1), which spread across the east to the west of the inner city—a round trip of my daily fieldwork routine ran about three miles. For one thing, I had initially established some connections with dancers on these sites in my preliminary studies, which made my entry fairly easier and more effective. For another, the time and location settings of these three sites allowed me to optimize the limited time. The time for most of the dancing groups to gather were often the same in the evening, while these three groups happened to operate in a staggered manner as listed below:
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Group A: 7: 30 – 8:30 PM
Group B: 8:00 – 9:00 PM
Group C: 7: 50 – 9:50 PM.
For the purpose of clarity, in this thesis, I will use unified names to call the dance groups and the site they engage with. For instance, I use “group A” to refer to the loosely connected group of dancers that regularly dance at “site A.”8 In terms of my daily itinerary, I stayed for the full session at site A from the beginning to as late as a bit past 9
PM, depending on whether they held an after-session. Stopping by B for the remainder of its course if time allowed, then I would head to C and stayed till it concluded at 9:50
PM. Therefore, given that I engaged with group A the most in the fieldwork, in this thesis, I will primarily focus on group A and its regulars, and compare with those of groups B and C when necessary.
Through the fieldwork, I constantly felt that I was moving back and forth between two disconnected worlds. During most of the daytime, I read overwhelmingly negative reports and online discussions on guangchangwu and “dama” (“big-mother,”大
妈), a derogatory term that has been associated with guangchangwu to call elderly women; yet, at night, when I traveled around the city, landscape was dominated by the
8 Such a division of groups can be arbitrary. Rather than committing to a single group, a number of dancers travel to other groups for different reasons. For example, one feature of site A was that on Thursdays, instead of dancing barehanded, this group would do fan dancing and sometimes with handkerchiefs. Hence, on this day, some A-regulars would go for B due to a lack of interest in fan dancing; meanwhile, some other dancers only showed up on this day for the sake of fan dancing. 7
dance. Hoping to understand the inconsistency, I seek to address two questions in this thesis, namely, what indeed does the discourse about the dance mean, and second, how individual dancing groups function. In chapter 2, I look at the individual case of the dancing group in my fieldwork, focusing on the interaction of the group and the space it utilized. Bridged by chapter 3 in which I discuss the way that dance has always functioned as a discursive tool in the context of China, I examine the media discourse of guangchangwu in chapter 4, and provide an angle of understanding the discourse of guangchangwu in the larger social context. By working through these two aspects, I argue that guangchangwu-dama is a discursive product that was created in line with the redefinition of women’s reproductivity and the reconfiguration of the urban order, which is precisely challenged by the very practice of guangchangwu.
Working on such a contemporary topic as guangchangwu is both exciting and challenging. In the beginning of the research in 2013, most of the searching results on the
Internet about the dance were instructional videos, and I had to delve into online discussion boards and forums to find traces of how the dance was discussed. Yet, by the end of the year, the number of related news reports, commentaries, and encyclopedia entries grew exponentially. Revolving around the alleged noise pollution that guangchangwu caused, the dance together with the dominant dancing population, elderly women, became one of the most heatedly discussed keywords in China. It was then that I began to realize that if I wanted to look at the dance, I should be careful to
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examine the discursive formation of the dance in social media. While the always- ongoing discussions and constant change of policies provide me with abundant sources, being in the middle of an event means that my view is largely limited by where I was situated and can hardly be comprehensive.9 Hence, being aware of the limitations, instead of offering any generalized understanding of the nationwide dancing fever, or taking guangchangwu as anything static, I seek to look at how the dance is constructed and what it reproduces in the social relations at the very moment of its rise.
9 In addition to the changing of policies, in the process of my working on this project, I am also getting to learn a growing number of scholars and graduate students working on this topic, especially Qianni Wang at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Claudia Huang at University of California, Los Angeles. 9
2. How to dance in the Squares
On a casual Saturday night, I arrived on site C as the last stop of my daily routine.
C was the largest dancing site among the three I observed. It was located next to a sports ground featuring eight-lane running tracks around a soccer pitch. The membership was for 20 yuan per year, roughly the cost of a casual meal. The ground was packed with people of all ages jogging and playing, or just seeking a bit of outdoor time after dinner, after a day’s work. Outside the enclosed ground, dancing was completely free. Every night, streams of people would park their bikes at the empty area behind the dancing crowd, and go along the edge of the dance site, as it was the only passage connecting the road and the sports ground.
I parked my bike and walked around, exchanging greetings with dancers that I had already known. Not far from where I stood, five high-school youngsters were hanging around site C, bantered with each other, and mimicked the choreography at the back of the dancing crowd. Soon they started to play a finger-guessing game, agreeing to
“punish” the loser to dance inside the crowd. Romping around the edge of the dancing group, they played for several rounds and finally a boy lost all of the games. He was pushed into the dancing group, and was asked to dance for a song.
The boy was annoyed, being too embarrassed to actually dance with the elderly women. It seemed that the choreographies were so outdated that simply imitating a
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movement made his peers laugh. Yet, at the same time, he was also well aware that he would spoil the fun of his friends if he took the "punishment” too seriously. After a couple of minutes of struggling, they all stepped back to the edge of the group next to me, and fell into boredom again. One suggested to go elsewhere, yet a girl quickly answered: “In Yongping what else can you entertain seeing (Zai Yongping, hai you sha biede ke kan)?”
The question of the schoolgirl struck me: what does it mean to say a place offers something to see, and what makes the dance, more than anything else, something to see?
Similarly, once on site A, I happened to overhear a passerby’s brief talk on the phone, in which she referred to her then location as “where they dance.” I was fascinated by how the temporary dance became the handy term for the concrete, long-existing place, changing the way the place was perceived by replacing the landmarks of the area.
All of this invited me to look at the dancing groups in relation to the spaces they occupied. What if we do not so hastily take the dancers’ inhabitation of their sites as a given? Through the fieldwork, my focal point had been constantly directed toward the formal aspect of the dance group in relation to its space. It is precisely the buildings, passages, and their distribution and physical relations with each other that actively create the ground where the negotiation between the dancing group and the surroundings is made possible. On the one hand, the space facilitates the dancing group to assemble, practice, and organize; meanwhile, on the other, the dance groups’
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appropriation of the space is contingent upon the many local circumstances that can be completely different from the planned purpose. People, activities, and space are not separable, and the boundaries in between are always within negotiation.
Stopping by dancing sites, I quickly found myself occupied by random conversations with the curious dancers. They asked me why a young woman as I was would ever pay any attention to the granny’s fashion, followed by a series of questions about me and more to tell me about their histories of dance. Given my primary interest in the dance lies in dance as a social discourse and the dancing population, I chose to withhold myself from the dancing group, and to participate from the edge as a spectator—after all, spectators, as I noted, made up an indispensable part of the dancing scene.
On the first Friday night of my fieldwork, a leading dancer reminded me that
Saturday’s morning session would move to the front of the swimming center (site A3 in
Figure 2). The next morning, however, I headed there only to find an empty ground and a few confused dancers. It turned out that the dancers temporarily moved to a nearby parking lot, because they were dismissed by the security guard earlier that morning on orders “from above” (“shangmiande,” 上面的).
In fact, through the summer, I observed that group A mobilized in a total of four places as the dancing site due to different concerns. This can be especially the case in its arrangement of the morning session. While Danwei A had approved on group A’s use of
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the space in front of the gymnasium for their evening session, the morning gathering had been operating on an ad hoc basis. Site A2, which they moved to on the first
Saturday, for instance, was actually a parking lot between two apartment buildings for single employees (danshen gongyu). Thus, the morning exercise did not have a fixed place and was faced with constant moving. In addition to the major dancing site A located between the main entrance of the gymnasium and the large residential complex, three other smaller sites were mobilized in the morning sessions. Importantly, I found that these sites were not so much a capricious choice as a result of careful calculation, practice, and negotiation. In this chapter, by looking at the dance groups that I engaged with in the fieldwork, I show that the composition of the dancers, the places where the dance occupies, and the way in which the group organizes, are invariably enabled by the danwei framework, and, at the same time, what it destabilizes is precisely this presumably monolithic planning and the disciplined life it expects.
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Figure 2: Site A Detail
2.1 Morning guerilla
Summer hit the town in late June. The temperature could reach 32 degrees
(nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit) at 8 in the morning. Some of the dancers would stay at home, while others kept coming out, considering persistence (jianchi, 坚持) crucial to physical exercise. Nevertheless, in the sweaty morning, a shaded area would be preferable than those exposed to the sun. Therefore, group A initially opted for site A3
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by the swimming center, for the square is on the west side of the center, where the rising sun would cast a vast shadow of the building and in this way keeps the area mild enough for morning exercise.
Yet, A2 was faced with a problem similar to the main site A: they both were too close to residential buildings, and hence the music could be especially annoying. While the nearby residents had usually gone for work before their active time during the weekdays, broadcasting dancing music at 8 AM appeared to be too early for the quiet weekend morning. To reduce the impact of the music, the dance group moved to site A1, the narrower space between the kindergarten and the rear of the gymnasium on the weekend morning. Because the kindergarten was empty during the weekend and, blocked by the gymnasium, the music would not reach out to the nearby residents who wanted to wake up late on weekends, a changing of place enabled the continuation of the morning sessions through the week.
Figure 3: Site A1 on Weekend Mornings
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This mobilization of the sites to dance impressed me. A brief background concerning the site may help to contextualize the dance group A closer look at the dancing site may help to make sense of the danwei identity in relation to the dance group.
The dancing site I engaged with was located next to the north of Danwei A’s residential compound, dis/connected by a newly-installed iron gate. 1 This area was the property of
Danwei A in the service of its own employees and their immediate relatives. A few facilitates were constructed in the vicinity, including a gymnasium, an indoor swimming pool, a kindergarten, and two apartment buildings (particularly for employees that are single), all of which were not supposed to be open to the public. For instance, only employees of A and their children and partners were allowed to access the swimming center.
In his book Social Space and Governance in Urban China, David Bray has usefully argued that the perception of danwei is closely related to the space it creates.2 In this sense, the actual spatial distribution provides the materiality for people to conceptualize the self and others based on to which danwei he or she belongs. Most significantly, in the case of Danwei A, its affiliates are accustomed to categorize people into “insiders” (zijiren,
1 For an account on the burgeoning gated communities in China in relation to the privatization of the housing market, see Li Zhang, In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), esp. 107-36. 2 Bray, Social Space and Governance, 121-2. 16
自己人) and “outsiders” (waimiande ren, 外面的人).3 In fact, I found it common for
Yongping City’s people to claim that they could tell others’ Danwei Affiliation simply by appearance. I frequently heard dancers of Danwei A complaining about the outsiders’ trespassing the grass regardless of the sign as an evidence of their lack of “public virtue
(gongde),” though, through the summer, I noticed that many employees of Danwei A took shortcuts via the lawn, too.
Nevertheless, the “outsiders” were free to wander around the open-air area, and indeed, because of its greenery coverage, this area became favored among the neighborhoods and functioned as a park especially in the evening. In this way, this area became a site of both inclusion and exclusion: while users of the space constantly made distinctions claiming entitlement, it was also on the ground of its open accessibility that the formation of the group was made possible.
I argue that such a spatially conditioned flux of people largely shapes the way in which the dance group organizes. Particularly, it is the existing danwei identity, which at the first glance is about othering and distinction making, that paradoxically enables the coalescence and functioning of the dancers as a group. Furthermore, it is the spatial arrangement of this area that gave potential to alternative utilizations that cannot be reduced to the blueprint of this area.
3 For works on public activity participation and the sense of membership, see Judith Farquhar, "The Park Pass: Peopling and Civilizing a New Old Beijing," Public Culture 21, no. 3 (2009). 17
Scholars have long been paying attention to the undergirding danwei system beyond the sphere of central economic planning, looking at the various social effects that came along with the decades of the functioning of the urban-rural dichotomy. Review essays show the profound influence of the danwei system as the mechanism that maintains such division;4 at the same time, monographs see the nuance that this broad imposition functions in specific social contexts. Julie Chu in her studies on the transnational mobility of Fujianese peasants, for example, shows that danwei supervises the implementation of the one-child policy in the urban area in a far stricter way than in the rural. By assessing the peasantry reproduction (that marked by bearing more than one child in a family) as unproductive, danwei in fact enables the urbanites to rearticulate the order in terms of modern eugenics.5 In the light of the Foucauldian notion of governmentality, both Mayfair Yang and David Bray take Danwei As the organizational structure that shapes and creates urban China by emphasizing the mechanism that danwei exercises is providing, necessitating, and creating rather than repressing and limiting.6 While Yang looks at the economic interaction given rise by the state’s central
4 Alan Smart and Li Zhang, "From the Mountains and the Fields: The Urban Transition in the Anthropology of China," China Information 20, no. 3 (2006): 486-7; Stevan Harrell, "The Anthropology of Reform and the Reform of Anthropology: Anthropological Narratives of Recovery and Progress in China," Annual Review of Anthropology (2001): 144-5. 5 Julie Chu, Cosmologies of Credit : Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 74-80. 6 Smart and Zhang, "From the Mountains," 486. 18
role of redistribution through the danwei system, Bray addresses the space that danwei constructs, relying on which it functions. 7
Yet, people living in the danwei-constructed world are not static. Even if social mobility had been restricted within, people are certainly getting old as everywhere else, and at a certain point of time of life, they reach the bar of retirement and hence fall out of the production sphere yet continue to live their lives within the danwei-based social network that presumably provides and mediates every aspect of daily life. Would this life be any different after retirement? And what kind of gender dynamic may it create if urban residents, both women and men, are in the first place categorized in terms of danwei? If danwei is a centralized way of governing that organizing the production and reproduction by “providing for the needs of the population,”8 it also provides something else, something unintended.
To be sure, I do not want to overgeneralize the single case that I recount here. By presenting the dancing group from this perspective, what I want to address is a different way of formulating and understanding of the dance in its social milieu, and to take the very specific spatial form as a constitutive part of the event that takes “place.” For space is by no means a static ground on which activities happen; on the contrary, as Henri
Lefebvre points out, space “is at once a precondition and a result of social
7 Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, "The Modernity of Power in the Chinese Socialist Order," Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 4 (1988): 412; Bray, Social Space and Governance, 125. 8 Smart and Zhang, "From the Mountains," 486. 19
superstructures.”9 Cultural geographers have been drawing on a spatial dimension in critical theories as against the privileged temporal/historical one.10 Lefebvre attributes the relegation of space to the background to two “illusions,” namely, the illusion of viewing space as a “transparency” characterized by a sense of “free rein,” and a
“realistic illusion” where space is opaque, substantial, and objective.11 Reflexing upon the politics of anthropology, in late 1980s, Arjun Appaudri called for a reexamination of the long fetishized notion of “the native,” which assumes a fixation among people, social relations, and space that falls within Lefebvre’s critique.12 Setha Low uses phrase
“spatializing culture” to emphasize the spatial form that social relations of all kinds gained.13 Exemplified by the reference of the place as “where they dance,” a phenomenological approach suggests that space is conceptualized through one’s oriented ways of perception and bodily inhabitance.14
The tiniest geographic element in fact constitutes, shapes and also manifests the activity. Here, the spatially constructed danwei identity was once again mapped onto the dancing geography that I touched on, and it in fact functioned not just by shaping the schedule of the group but enabling a structured organization of it. In the following, I
9 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), 85. 10 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 2011), 15-6. 11 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 28-30. 12 Arjun Appadurai, "Putting Hierarchy in Its Place," Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 1 (1988). 13 Setha Low, "Spatializing Culture: An Engaged Anthropological Approach to Space and Place," in The People, Place, and Space Reader, ed. J.J. Gieseking, et al. (New York and London: Routledge, 2014). 14 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology : Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 6-14. 20
would like to lay out group A’s horizontal and vertical utilization of the dancing site, and how such a way of using it facilitated and manifested the central leadership structure of the group.
2.2 Organizing group A
In her studies on qigong and yangge, anthropologist Nancy Chen argues that these practices have always been both “social aspects of healing” and “individual physical regimens.”15 Though guangchangwu needs to be understood within this framework, the noise significantly differentiates it from qigong and yangge. The noise breaks the silent scene and at the same time makes prominent, though in a stigmatized way, the otherwise considered harmonious, cooperative, and largely unspeaking body. If, as Iris
Young points out, the importance of the city life lies precisely in its public-ness, providing “spaces and forums to which everyone has access,”16 the very existence and persistence of dancing groups practicing on the physical city landscape requires further investigation. How have dancing groups managed to persist under such social pressure, given that dancers are fully aware of how the dance and they themselves as the dancers are stigmatized?
On the first day I arrived at the site, I stood at the back corner of the group and watched, trying to get a clue of what to look at out of the dancing scene that I thought I
15 Nancy Chen, "Health, Wealth, and the Good Life," in China Urban : Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture, ed. Nancy Chen, et al. (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001), 167. 16 Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 240. 21
had seen everywhere: remixed pop hits, black tight tops featuring wide, V-shaped necklines in neon pink or purple, and dancers ranging from those who robustly followed every beat of the music to those who took pains to raise their arms above their heads. It appeared to be especially unorganized when other people went back and forth through the dancing crowd to access the entrance of the gymnasium, or when toddlers ran around, causing their grandma dancers to stop to look after them. My informant introduced me to a woman who had just stopped by. She was holding a poodle in her arms, slightly swaying her body to the music. She had been a dance teacher and quit dancing not long ago because of a knee injury, and turned to walking as the alternative physical exercise. She immediately pointed to a woman who then was at the side of the team, and told me I should talk to her if I wanted to know about this group. That was perhaps the first time I noticed Liu Yun, a slim, tall woman with short silver hair, wearing a red T-shirt and a pair of wide-leg trousers, which I later learned were all designed and made by herself, reusing her daughter’s discarded clothes. At that moment, she looked serious and distant, and I quickly decided not to approach her before familiarizing myself with the group a bit more.
At the end of my last day of fieldwork when I was having final words with Liu, a senior woman shambled toward her, held her hands and said: “I enjoy watching you dancing so much, especially your yangge dance!” Liu, apparently being flattered and embarrassed at the same time (perhaps especially so in my presence) told the woman
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that she could learn to dance on the Internet as well. Murmuring that she could not manage a computer, the woman once again expressed her admiration for Liu, and went away. Liu seemed to be quite used to such compliments, after all. She told me that many a time she was stopped by strangers in the market, who warmly greeted her and called her “Teacher Liu.” Liu said she had no idea about who those people were but guessing they must be fellow dancers, for, unlike now, she had been recognizably the one in charge of the group for years.
Liu Yun said she had retreated from the leading position, since she now spent the winter half of a year in Zhuhai City where it is warmer, and now the group was run collaboratively by six leading dancers. Yet, through the fieldwork, I found her words still weighed the most when she was on site, and, as in the vignette above, she was clearly respected as the leader. Sometimes after the usual session concluded at 8:30 PM, a few dancers, usually the leading dancers and sometimes one or two outsiders, stayed for a half-an-hour long after-session, practicing “more advanced” dances featuring more complicated choreographies and formation changes. Although participants claimed joining this after-session was only a matter of interest, it in fact was only staged when
Liu was on site and organized accordingly.17 I then became interested in the way in
17 During my fieldwork, Liu traveled out of town twice, and during these intervals the after-session was suspended. 23
which this dancing group is operated; specifically, I tried to understand what makes possible the practice of this group if its leader is absent.
In fact, anthropologists working on China have noted the importance of an organizational structure for the existence of yangsheng practice groups. Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang’s Ten Thousand Things, for example, is of particular relevance here.
Although the authors only mention this in passing, they in fact offer two cases in which dancing groups disbanded after a short period of time, both of which can be attributed to the failure of organization. In the first case, the authors witnessed the decline of a popular calisthenics group around the Houhai area, because the leading dancer’s vigorous dancing style could no longer accommodate the growing population of the group and finally resulted in its collapse.18 In the second case, as an interviewee—who used to lead a dancing group—recounted, the group fell apart precisely because of his withdrawal.19 These two examples call into question the alleged spontaneity of such dancing groups, and the very existence of them should not to be taken for granted in the first place. Moreover, as my fieldwork and similar dance groups observed elsewhere suggests, a centralized organizational structure is crucial to the functioning of such groups, however voluntary the association might seem to be.
18 Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang, Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing (New York: Zone Books, 2012), 73. 19 Ibid., 208-9. 24
In contrast to the two fragile groups above, group A was unified and flexible enough to be mobilized to perform as a whole, so we now might be able to come to the point that I raised earlier: what makes the group a group? My fieldwork suggests that the maintenance of dancing groups requires laborious work behind the scenes. While pedagogy, logistics, and sociality are all constitutive parts underlying the everyday practice of dancing groups, studies of such supposedly “spontaneous” or “grassroots” groups often omit their organizational aspects and take their grouped-ness for granted.
However, even the most basic division between the leading dancers and the followers requires cultivation.
Group A gathered regularly twice each day at 8 am and 7:30 pm, and each session lasted for an hour. While the morning sessions were faced with constant changing of places as we just discussed, the evening session had become a regular activity, though not without complaints, and was one of the largest dancing sites in the city. Taking a glimpse at this group, one cannot fail to notice that it is divided into leading dancers (lingwu, 领舞) and followers. The six leading dancers would stand in a row in the front, and the followers, ranging from 60-100 people, formed four to six rows behind. Such a pattern was well maintained on a daily basis, though an individual dancer’s occasional absence was not uncommon. Claiming she had retreated from the leadership, Liu Yun usually stood in the back rows. Yet, for certain songs, she would mount the stairs and dance in the front. Inconspicuous differences had not drawn my
25
attention until two months into the fieldwork, and I discovered that among the six leaders, the two standing to the left-hand side always adhered to their positions, while the other four did not have a particular order to stand in. More curiously, this division coincided with their differentiated danwei identity: the two on the left were “outsiders” while the four on the right were all affiliated to Danwei A. Sensing that it might cause an awkward moment if I threw out the question in front of the mixed dancers on site, I did not learn how this arrangement came into being until I later visited the home of Li
Xiangning, the leading dancer who was always at the farthest to the left in the front row.
She told me that when she first joined the group, there were only four leading dancers—
“all the other four” as she put it.
“Have you always been standing on the left-hand side?” I asked.
“Yes. The left is for ‘us.’ Didn’t you see that? The other side is for Danwei A’s people. We don’t go beyond to ‘their land’ (renjia de dipan, 人家的地盘) .” She laughed and proceeded, “We’ve got to be conscious. Mostly people are chill, it’s just some people from their side dislike us. We don’t usually dare to go their side.”
In the conversations that followed, I learned from Liu that the shape of group A I observed was in fact a result of an intentional reorganization in favor of Danwei A affiliates in early 2013. The majority of the dancing group was made up of retirees and peasants who lived nearby, while about only 20 were Danwei A affiliates, or the
“insiders.” The number of the leading dancers, however, was in a flipped proportion in
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that four among the six were “insiders.” One of the two outsider leading dancers was Li
Xiangning. She was selected in early 2013, only half a year after her joining the group.
New leading dancers were needed at that point of time because the conflict between dancers of Danwei A and the “outsiders” had been intensifying: while the size of group kept growing larger, “good spots”—those where on could see clearly the choreographies of leading dancers—were limited. Previously on the first-come-first-serve basis, now late comers, especially those of Danwei A affiliates, were no longer satisfied with standing on the margin of the group, from where they could barely see leading dancers in the dark.
Given that this area was technically Danwei A’s place, “insiders,” then, claimed they were more entitled to the space and should be guaranteed with “good spots”; some even constantly argued with “outsiders” who stood in the center of the front rows, and blamed the latter for “encroaching on the resource.” Therefore, the organizers decided to solve the dispute by regulating who-to-stand-where.
The shape of the group I saw during my fieldwork was then the result of this reorganization. First of all, the number of leading dancers increased from four to six.
Thus it was the time when Li Xiangning, an outsider, was appointed as a leading dancer, by which the outsiders were expected to take charge of “their own.” Second, behind these six, there stood roughly four rows of dancers, each consisting of ten to twenty people. Specifically, to save the better vision spots for Danwei A participants, the majority of the area that the two rows just behind the leading row occupied were saved
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for the “insiders,” only leaving the margin on the left side to fit into several “outsiders.”
Dancers agreed to follow the rearrangement, and my observation two years afterward it was precisely the proof of its effectiveness. Although marked with no separating signs, the division was pronounced by the two outside leading dancers’ sticking to the left side periphery.
Selecting six leading dancers was not a matter of personal preference, either. Liu consciously picked people based on their function in the group. According to Liu’s accounts on various occasions, more than just being proficient dancers, leaders were appointed based on organizational roles. Specifically, two dancers that Liu considered rather “average” in dancing skill were selected, too, for they could memorize the movements better, complementing those that danced beautifully but sometimes forget the next step. Logistic responsibilities such as bringing and storing the equipment and organizing costume purchasing were also distributed to specialized individual leading dancers—when the group planned to order new costume or dancing fans, the outsider leading dancers were also responsible for “counting their own people.”
However, such a division of labor was more ambiguous than it sounds. Not just that sticking to the boundary was entirely voluntary, and transgression was not uncommon, but that all the de facto leading dancers distanced themselves from what the term “leader” implied. They claimed that there were no personal interests involved, and they did not have any intention in being a leader.
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As an outsider, Li repeatedly told me not to regard her as a “people person,” and that she was not involved in any kind of decision-making process of the group. Similar to this disclaimer, Li Yun also refused to place herself in the leadership board, even though she initiated the group, developed the entire dance routine, and it was she who designed the reorganization. She expressed that to manage people is her “least favorite business (zui taoyan guan ren).” Seeing me confused, she continued, telling me how she had rejected a good promotion at work because she did not wish to “deal with people.”
More convincingly, unlike most of her colleagues of her age, especially capable as she was, she did not join the Chinese Communist Party. She did so not because of persecution, but simply because she wanted to be independent from any organization.
Liu Yun took arranging the group much as “doing good” (“zuocishan,” 做慈善), hoping to provide people with a chance to do exercise and to have fun (haowan, 好玩).
Other dancers’ comments about Liu corroborated her role. A former dancer said she respected Liu for her persistence and devotion, even though her dance was not as good as her tai chi. Li Xiangning, similarly, said that Li was a “truly great person
(zhenzhengde haoren)” and her style of leading was very idiosyncratic, as she put it: “[Liu
Yun] doesn’t talk much. She won’t bother you. Her standing there is the command.”
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Figure 4: Organizational structure of group A. Lines are dotted to indicate that the group is only loosely associated and the division is not absolute.
Importantly, Li Xiangning acknowledged the inner-group division, because the boundary usefully eased the previous tension by ensuring each individual a place to stand. She also rationalized that such division was a fair one, because it prevented many outsider dancers who did not dance well from occupying the front, which made the group “look not good” (buhaokan, 不好看) as a whole. I challenged her that simply working for Danwei A did not necessarily render one a good dancer, but she insisted:
“No, Danwei A’s dancers usually dance better than us the rest of us. We are from other
Danwei And nearby villages.”
How should we understand the relation between one’s dancing skill and Danwei
Affiliation? Instead of questioning whether this statement is true or not, I think it is at least worth noticing that Danwei A dancers were provided with more opportunities to learn and practice a dance, which is likely to contribute to their familiarity with the choreography.
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In addition to the regular morning and evening sessions, virtually all “inside” dancers gathered every Tuesday and Thursday at 2:30-4:00 pm in the dancing room located up on the second floor of the gymnasium in front of site A. The eligible participants of this afternoon class were naturally Danwei A affiliates, because the gymnasium was open for their use only. However, the two “outside” leading dancers were recruited nonetheless, since, in fact, the guard at the door was rather lenient. This session was designed for this inner group to practice extracurricular dances and learn new dances in advance. It was especially to my interest to note that during these sessions, dancers that were excluded were commonly referred as “those downstairs.”
Tainted with a subtle tone of superiority, this spatial metaphor sufficed for the Danwei A dancers with a certain sense of privilege in accordance with their identity and the space.
Yet, such a privilege should not be equated with any hierarchy, for, after all, the relations among the group were reciprocal rather than obligatory and one was free to quit and opt for other groups at any time.20 This upstairs session served to complement the structural-ness of the group and made possible the alliance among group members based on existing social categories.
20 Although on a much larger scope, I find Kojin Karatani's analysis of the transition of historical paradigms helpful here in terms of understanding the dynamic sociality of the group. Karatani argues that a community organized according to the principle of reciprocity by definition prevents itself from forming a centralized hierarchical relation. He particularly distinguishes subordination from hierarchy, that while the latter is characterized by absolute control, the former is more of an agreed order and alliance. See Kōjin Karatani, The Structure of World History : From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 47-8.
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Moreover, the upstairs session opens the vertical dimension of the space for my investigation. The functioning of the group as a whole, especially its pedagogy, also relied on vertical appropriation of the space. Likewise, I noticed that the use of the four- steps stair in front of site A played a central role in the practice of the group in addition to the upstairs session. The steps I refer to here are to the entrance of the gymnasium, and they were utilized as a platform raised above the ground level when a new dance is taught in the evening session. By mounting the stairs and dancing on this relatively higher position, the leading dancers can be seen more clearly, especially for those who are in the back rows. Therefore, on the one hand, the steps practically facilitate the efficiency of demonstrating and teaching; on the other hand, such a vertical differentiation precisely reflects the organizational order of the group by means of showing who can dance on the stairs. This can be particularly the case for Liu Yun, who initiated the group in early 2000s yet claimed to have retreated from the organizational affairs since her spending the winter in Zhuhai in recent years. However, through my fieldwork, Liu Yun had been the only one who danced upon the stairs at her will regardless of whether the dance was new or not.
Pioneer urbanist William Whyte noticed the social function of steps in public spaces in his early studies of New York City in 1980s, pointing out that more than their architectural function, steps, by creating a difference of height inviting sitting, facilitate
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sociality among space users.21 More broadly, associations between the physical space and authority of man have been recorded, though peripherally, in a variety of texts.
Take Malinowski’s account on the Trobrianders for example. Malinowski notices, “when a chief is present, no commoner dares to remain in a physically higher position; he has to bend his body or squat.”22 To be sure, by quoting this I do not mean to imply the spatially expressed hierarchy is anything universal; rather, what I want to address here is that space is meaningful and is open to both utilization and interpretation from this perspective. Indeed, many a time we see spatial metaphors—the “horizontal,” the
“vertical,” and the “frontier,” for example—are used to indicate the organizational structure of a group; yet, it might also be important to see what it means when these metaphors take on materiality.
Then, how do we understand the organizational structure if no one even claimed the leader’s role? I argue that it is the existing social category of Danwei And its embedded means of distinction-making that gave the dancers vocabulary to organize, transforming them into a coherent group, and paradoxically enabled them to negotiate, and to use the danwei space in unplanned ways. By clearing out personal interests, danwei identity is justified. In other words, what makes possible the group to sustain is exactly this seeming reinforcement of the social imposition. The spatialized danwei
21 William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (Washington, D.C.: Conservation Foundation, 1980), 29-33. 22 Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1984), 52. 33
identity both conditions the shape of the group and paradoxically enables the challenge of it.
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3. The politics of dance
When I asked a participant why the dance was so popular that it seemed to be able to occupy every big empty space (kongdi, 空地), he laughed and corrected me, joking that the only thing required for dancing was having a square of “flat surface”
(pingdi,平地). In fact, the name of guangchangwu is misleading. Though called a “dance”
(“wu,” 舞), it is primarily taken as a way of physical exercise (duanlian shenti, 锻炼身体); not just in city “squares” (“guangchang,” 广场) as the name suggests, guangchangwu can also be found in residential compounds and next to the busy streets. Along with the growing popularity of guangchangwu, complaints about it—both in terms of aesthetic criticism and “noise pollution”—arise in social networks, media reports, commentaries, and virtually everywhere, to such a degree that middle-aged women and the dance are taken in daily use as metonymies for each other, and indeed, “guangchang-wu” (“square- dancing”) is frequently referred as “dama-wu” (“big-mother-dancing,” 大妈舞). Such an interchangeable use reveals that the dance concerns more where to dance and who is dancing than with choreographies and techniques of dancing.
Guangchangwu, the umbrella term, encompasses an array of existing forms of dance from costumed yangge dancing to athletic-style calisthenics. These public dances are now not only retrospectively referred to as prototypical guangchangwu in public discourse, but accounts of them can also be identified in earlier ethnographies on
35
contemporary China under various names, such as “old-people disco,”1 “group calisthenics,”2 “senior citizen dances (laonianwuhui, 老年人舞会),”3 and “mass disco dance.”4 Almost all the dancers I encountered during my fieldwork had at least partaken in some of these dance-related activities. To put it in their words, the difference of those activities is just they were not yet named guangchangwu.
Moreover, unlike what the name guangchangwu suggests, most participants did not take it as a form of dance but juxtaposed it with forms of exercise (duanlian, 锻炼) such as tai chi, qigong, badminton, and walking (sanbu, 散步). On the level of official administration, “guangchangwu” is also listed under the name of “square calisthenics
(fitness dancing)” (“guangchang jianshen cao(wu),” 广场健身操（舞） ), a sport regulated by the General Administration of Sport.5 State sponsored competition of guangchangwu was also held annually as “an innovative model of mass sport competition.”6
Among related studies on the broadly defined public dance, Susan Brownell begins with the word “sport” (tiyu, 体育) and argues that the notion of sports has always been a particular set of ideas that link individual conceptualization of the body and the
1 Susan Brownell, Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. 277-80. 2 Farquhar and Zhang, Ten Thousand Things, 66. 3 James Farrer, "Play and Power in Chinese Nightlife Spaces," China: An International Journal 6 (2008): 5. 4 Nancy Chen, Breathing Spaces : Qigong, Psychiatry, and Healing in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 4. 5 National Committee for the Calisthenics Contest (Quanguo quanmin jianshen caowu jingsai weiyuanhui), "Official Website of the National Calisthenics Contest " http://qmjscw.sports.cn/. 6 Ibid. 36
evolution of society.7 Especially considering that guangchangwu is also deeply intertwined with the National Fitness Program (quanmin jianshen, 全民健身), and the dance is primarily considered a physical exercise, such a view is particularly helpful in linking the body that is exercised within cultural and ideological regime. Similarly, drawing on Foucault’s notion of biopower, Judith Farquhar and Zhang Qicheng show how the seemingly spontaneous “life-nurturing” (yangsheng, 养生) fever that includes public dance sinuously coincides with the modern state’s art of sovereignty.8 Moreover,
Judith Farquhar’s long engagement with yangsheng activities has provided a crucial body of work that broadens the scope of looking at the dance. In one of the series of essays, she focuses on the “park pass,” which allows the city’s elderly yangsheng practitioners to exercise at a low price in many famous parks that used to be imperial gardens. She discusses how this ID-like card holds, resolves, and translates the
“revolutionary past” that is embodied by the elderly and the “capitalist present” that they experience.9 Importantly, by relating the gathered group of people with the particularity of the spaces, i.e., public parks, she argues for the political significance of such seemingly apolitical activities and populations, for the very act of “peopling the
7 Susan Brownell, "The Global Body Cannot Ignore Asia," in The Body in Asia, ed. Bryan S. Turner and Yangwen Zheng (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 54; Beijing's Games : What the Olympics Mean to China (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). 8 Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang, "Biopolitical Beijing: Pleasure, Sovereignty, and Self-Cultivation in China's Capital," Cultural Anthropology 20, no. 3 (2005). 9 Farquhar, "The Park Pass," 552. 37
city” with the physical body is an active creation of political space in which the politics of the personal and the everyday is articulated.10
More than a particular genre of art, the term dance, “tiaowu,” always dances across borders of meanings. In a variety of contexts, dance has been functioning and understood as a social metaphor that signifies an array of things. Specifically, dance has been on the verge of conflicted cultures and politics. Deng Xiaoping, for instance, famously assured Hong Kong residents’ right to continue to “horse-race and dance”
(“ma zhao pao, wu zhao tiao,” “马照跑，舞照跳”) after the handover, which distinguished the socio-political operation of Hong Kong from that of the mainland under “one country two systems.”11 In her study of individuals’ changing conceptualization and mobilization of the self in the process of China’s privatization,
Aihwa Ong mobilizes “dance” as a double entendre, referring both to the physical dance and the metaphorical movement between regimes.12 Looking back to more than half a century ago, Emily Honig, in her study of female cotton mill workers in pre-1949
Shanghai, addresses the 1948 Shanghai dance hostesses’ strike as the movement characterizing women’s rising political awareness and participation at the time.13
10 Ibid., 559. 11 Matthew M Chew, "Research on Chinese Nightlife Cultures and Night-Time Economies: Guest Editor's Introduction," Chinese Sociology & Anthropology 42, no. 2 (2009): 5. 12 Aihwa Ong, "Self-Fashioning Shanghainese: Dancing across Spheres of Value," in Privatizing China : Socialism from Afar, ed. Aihwa and Li Zhang Ong (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). 13 Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 239. 38
Meanwhile, this dance on the borderline has always been gendered. One of the central debates about this 1948 Shanghai crackdown on dancing halls was how to settle the would-be unemployed dance hostesses. While interest groups held opposite opinions on whether the western-imported ballroom dance should be accepted as a decent entertainment in Chinese society, they invariably agreed that for these dancers, as an object of political reform, “getting married and going back to the kitchen” was the most ideal settlement. 14 It seems to reassure us that dance quintessentially marked an outside realm as opposed to the domestic, and while women in the former might be justified in service of the modernization/westernization of the society, the latter held on to be the place where women should be.
This discussion regrettably remains relevant today. A large body of studies has been devoted to revealing the gendered nature of the public/private division. On the one hand, as cultural geographers such as Doreen Massey and Susan Ruddick argue, the female has always been confined to the domestic, systematically being deprived from having a voice in the public.15 Susan Ruddick contends: “city space has been gendered in a way that tends to exclude women form the public realm, or to include them only in
14 Jun Ma, 1948: Shanghai Dancers' Uprising - Study of a Women's Collective Violent Protest in the Republican Period (1948 Nian: Shanghai Wuchaoan- Dui Yiqi Minguo Nvxing Jiti Baoli Kangyi Shijian De Yanjiu) (Shanghai: Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, 2005). 15 Doreen B. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), esp. 179- 80. 39
highly scripted and delimited roles.”16 On the other hand, to which space women belong is perhaps never a question as simple as whether women go “out” to work. In the
American context, visioning “what a non-sexist city would be like,” architect Dolores
Hayden notices the paradox that the status of women in the domestic realm and that in the society (exemplified in the workplace) are interdependent and presuppose each other.17
Indeed, as Kathi Weeks argues, the very idea of “work” itself is fundamentally problematic: under the capitalist vocabulary of property ownership, the ever-so privatized work appears to be a naturalized and neutralized public realm outside the household.18 Rather than an activity that innocently produces value, work is precisely where gender and class differentiation are constantly reproduced.19 Moreover, not just that the politics that equating work with an equally participated public life requires rethinking, it can be especially problematic if we treat home, the domestic, and the private as the same in the context of China. In his classic text From the Soil, Chinese anthropologist Fei Xiaotong argues that in the Chinese society, the self, family, and
16 Susan Ruddick, "Constructing Difference in Public Spaces: Race, Class, and Gender as Interlocking Systems," Urban Geography 17, no. 2 (1996): 135. 17 Dolores Hayden, "What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, and Human Work," Signs (1980): S176. 18 Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work : Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 3. 19 Ibid., 8-9. 40
social relations are conceptualized in a relational and contextual way.20 In other words, what is thought to be the domestic is not necessarily at the same time the private in the first place. The twentieth-century history of China adds more specificity and ambiguity to the public and private division. From “female liberation” to the Maoist calling to work and “hold up half of the sky” since the late 1950s, the now-retired generations of
Chinese women experienced a distinctive trajectory of life that could not fit into any established notion of the public or the private. In the same vein, when Mayfair Yang points out that along with the privatization of the household, Chinese women are in fact being pushed back to the domestic from the public, she suggests that such a process, manifested in the increasing advertisement of the ideal middle-class nuclear family, is simultaneously the process of defining the public and domestic. 21
It is precisely against the backdrop of such a transitional moment that Lisa Rofel argues the post-Maoist “efforts to create a public realm separate from the state necessarily entail a public discourse on gender.”22 In this light, it especially strikes me to see how discourses on guangchangwu and elderly women are uniformly anchored to a claim of “public awareness” (gonggong yishi, 公共意识). Lvqiu Luwei, an influential
20 Xiaotong Fei, From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society, trans. Gary G. Hamilton and Zheng Wang (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 69. 21 Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, "Introduction," in Spaces of Their Own: Women's Public Sphere in Transnational China, ed. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 26. 22 Lisa Rofel, "Museum as Women's Space: Displays of Gender in Post-Mao China," ibid., 118; also quoted in Gail Hershatter, Women in China's Long Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 102. 41
journalist in the Chinese press, for example, calls guangchangwu a “public nuisance”
(gonghai, 公害) in her article, and cites cases of how the New York and Hong Kong authorities strictly regulate the public dance’s accompanying music/noise, contrasting with Shenzhen’s lack of control over it.23 Noticing that guangchangwu has been popularized among Chinese communities around the world, Lvqiu offers a comparative reading of the regulation of such regulation,
“Lawsuits caused by guangchangwu related noise have not appeared in Hong Kong yet. In Hong Kong, there are legal provisions for all kinds of noise; even more, every day from 11 pm to 7 am, anyone who has been affected by noise can call the police, whether it is at home or in the public. During this period of time, controlling the loud noise, either from in the park or on the street, all falls in the duty of the police.”24
She proceeds,
“In fact, the problem of guangchangwu is after all an issue of noise in public occasions and the management of the space. It has been said that noise problem is ‘persistent’ (laodanan,老大难), but looking around the world, there are many measures ready to take. Looking back at China, Shanghai has already issued Procedures of Shanghai Municipality on Prevention and Control of Pollution by Noise of Social Activities. The problem is not that controlling is difficult; it is just no one takes action.”25
Lvqiu concluded the article with a rhetorical question: “It is not about guangchangwu but the problems raised from guangchangwu, isn’t it?”26
23 Luwei Lvqiu, "Why Guangchangwu Becomes a Public Nuisance (Weishenme Guangchangwu Hui Biancheng Gonghai)," Nandu weekly, http://www.nbweekly.com/column/lvqiuluwei/201311/35171.aspx. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 42
A short answer would be an unfortunate “Yes, it is about the dance.” Instead of arguing against this specific article, in this thesis, I treat Lvqiu’s commentary as exemplary of the pervasive views, in which the alleged noise has justified too many things that must not be overlooked. Essentially, this narrative assumes a universal lineage where specificities of societies are curtailed and the map of the world can be translated into stages of this progress. While New York and Hong Kong set an example of advanced and refined social regulation, Shenzhen, a city a gate away from Hong
Kong, is backward for lacking this. Second, such progress is marked by neutralized and numerable standards and the policing of such standards—sounds beyond a certain decibel at a definite distance and duration of time are universally “noise,” for example.
But sound is only noise when it troubles. If we do not accept it so quickly and be aware that noise is a highly contextual concept, we may actually be able to recognize the power that defines what counts as noise.27 Then, if the public is to be imagined above all as a neat, silent, and policed—one can hardly resist using the catch-all term hygienic—space as it suggests, or to slightly modify architect Mirko Zardini’s words, “sanitiz[ed] on the one hand and standardiz[ed] on the other,”28 it becomes crucial for us to examine the politics behind such a claim about the public through what it seeks to exclude.
27 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 6. 28 Mirko Zardini, Sense of the City : An Alternate Approach to Urbanism (Montréal: Lars Muller Publishers, 2005), 21. 43
We may well be reminded of David Harvey’s reading of The Eyes of the Poor by
Charles Baudelaire, where he urges us to look at how the seemingly impartial public space “generates a sense of space where ambiguities of proprietorship, of aesthetics, of social relations (class and gender in particular) and the political economy of everyday life collide.”29 For example, not all practitioners are as lucky as those in Judith Farquhar’s work mentioned above. The problematization of guangchangwu shows a distinct case among all yangsheng activities, in which the cultivated body no longer stays in harmony with the environment where it is disposed: what happens if no or not enough such parks are available, and yet it has been so firmly believed that a body needs to be taken care of by the self by means of such exercises? Many of my interviewees mentioned to me that the park where they used to do their morning exercise—which was within a 15-minutes walk from most of the residential compounds of the city—had been moved to “the north of the railroad,” as a way of expressing how remote it was from the boundary of daily life. On the area of the demolished old park were erected one of the first high-rise commercial residences in the city, where dominantly there had been six-story apartment buildings distributed (fenpei, 分配) through danwei. In other words, the manifested noise issue can well be a result of urbanization. Urban planning critics have already noticed the importance of situating noise within the transformation of urban landscape.
29 David Harvey, "The Politics of Public Space," in The Political Economy of Public Space, ed. Setha M. Low and Neil Smith (New York: Routledge, 2006), 19. 44
Working on the public dance in Beijing, Caroline Chen puts it nicely: “Grassroots dancing in the streets reveals the tensions between how the modern city is imagined and constructed, and how the real city is remade, fitted, and lived.”30
From this perspective, this thesis aims to look at guangchangwu on two levels. On the one hand, I argue that guangchangwu is a discursive formation in line with the creation and simultaneously relegation of an age-gender specified population, the elderly women (dama). I call the relation between the dance and the population a discursive linkage in order to address the connectivity and the flexible discursive space in between. This space—the circulation of news reports, commentaries, online discussions where social discourses of the dance are produced—is characterized by the absence of the dama as the speaker, through whom the modern division between the public and private is articulated. On the other hand, as I discussed in chapter 2, in light of Linda McDowell’s insight that “the public spaces of the city have been significant locations in women’s escape from male dominance and from the bourgeois norms of modern society,”31 I look at how the physical public space is effectively occupied by dama, the significance of which is given precisely by women’s invisibility in general. For instance, Mayfair Yang noted that during the Cultural Revolution, under the politics of
“gender erasure,” a woman was said to only “exist as a woman” when she was pregnant
30 Caroline Chen, "Dancing in the Streets of Beijing: Improvised Uses within the Urban System," Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (2010): 33. 31 Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place : Understanding Feminist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 149. 45
and was made visible by the swelled body.32 Thus, I take the very act of dance simultaneously as the performance of the physical body and the cultural codification of it.33 Following a phenomenological understanding of the body, if we agree that the body is “the domain of the taken for granted, the mundane records and routines that fill everyday life, the disciplinary protocols that quietly maintain the (historically contingent) normal,”34 then the dancing presence of the female body in public space can be particularly meaningful in the way that it makes visible—because audible—the site, the body, where defining powers contest.35
32 Yang, "From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference: State Feminism, Consumer Sexuality, and Women's Public Sphere in China," 41. 33 Bryan S. and Yangwen Zheng Turner, "Introduction: Piety, Politics and Philosophy - Asia and the Global Body," in The Body in Asia, ed. Bryan S. Turner and Yangwen Zheng (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 10. 34 Judith Farquhar and Margaret M. Lock, "Introduction," in Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life, ed. Margaret M. Lock and Judith Farquhar (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 8. 35 Jinlin Huang, History, Body, and Nation: The Formation of the Body in Modern China, 1895-1937 (Li Shi, Shen Ti, Guo Jia : Jin Dai Zhongguo De Shen Ti Xing Cheng, 1895-1937) (Beijing: New Star Press, 2006), 5. 46
4. Becoming Dama
Dama: noun. 1) An aunt; 2) an honorific title for senior women (usually elder than the mother). – Modern Chinese Dictionary, 6th Edition
On January 22, 2015, a news report featuring “dama” in the title drew my attention. It was reported first in Chinese and then in English that some middle-aged women “were paid 200 yuan each to demolish homes for a new development,” which once again triggered the “frequent anger” towards forced demolition of houses in
China.1 The report continued with descriptions of an online video of the wrecking scene and introducing preliminary investigations by the officials. What interests me, however, is a line the China News Service journalist added toward the end of the coverage. He asked: “How is it possible that these dama are used by the demolition project in
Zhecheng County, when dama elsewhere are exercising themselves by guangchangwu?”2
The Reuters editors removed this sentence in their edition, but added an explanatory note in the end, to quote, “In China, older women or aunties are known as ‘dama’ - a term that evokes images of a large group of middle-aged women dancing in public areas to loud music.”3
1 Sui-Lee Wee, "'Dama' Queens: China Investigates 'Auntie Demolition Team'," Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/22/us-china-demolition-idUSKBN0KV0SU20150122. 2 Jiedan Men, "'Dama Demolition Team' Revealed in Zhecheng, Henan (Wang Bao Henan Zhecheng Xian 'Dama Chaiqiandui')," China News Service, http://www.chinanews.com/fz/2015/01-21/6992290.shtml. 3 Wee, "'Auntie Demolition Team'". 47
It is worth more than cursory curiosity why guangchangwu is mentioned at all in this apparently irrelevant context. The way the reporter of the Chinese version associated dama with guangchangwu, casually assuming it will resonate with the reader, and the explanatory note the Reuter editors added perfectly exemplify what I have called the discursive “linkage” between guangchangwu and dama and the way such linkage has been deployed.
During the course of my fieldwork, my dama informants constantly asked me if I had read recent news coverage of a guangchangwu-related topic, and when speaking to me, given the age gap between us, they indeed referred to themselves as dama in a manner of self-mockery. This revealed to me that these older women were highly aware of how they were represented in the dominant social discourse and media. In addition to the ethnographic research I conducted during the summer of 2014, I have read through reports on guangchangwu from 2013 to 2015. Comparing earlier reports to the more recent ones, I noticed that guangchangwu had been reported in a tellingly different way, and it was not until the end of 2013 that the media discourse on guangchangwu had transitioned into the one that solely condemned elderly women. Specifically, while reports in the first half of the year usually portrayed public dance in a tone of praise, seeing it as evidence of the prosperous urban life that various kinds of people enjoy,4
4 Fang Zhang, "Qingdao Promotes Local Guangchangwu (Qingdao Tuichu Tese Guangchangwu)," Qingdao News, http://news.qingdaonews.com/qingdao/2013-05/26/content_9768769.htm. 48
those published by the end of the year fixed the scope on the noise pollution and narrowed the dancing population to elderly women.
Why did “dama” and “guangchangwu” become attention-grabbing words in the media, and how did this transition happen? What does it mean to have such connectivity between the dance and elderly women that their names contain, explain, and reflect each other? In this chapter, I first examine how the notion of dama was reappropriated in the context of dance, then, as the last portion of the thesis, I would like to open the discussion, situating the discourse of guangchangwu in the larger social context. I limit my studies here in the interval of 2013, as this time period saw a drastic transition in how the dance and its participants were represented in the media. To be sure, in pointing out that reports came out on specific dates, I do not mean to crown any single moment of them as the changing point. My aim is to show how previously unrelated discourses merged, evolved, and gave rise to the linkage between guangchangwu and dama.
4.1 Representing guangchangwu: the “2013 turn”
In the preceding chapter, I mentioned that what is called guangchangwu encompasses a variety of public dances that have been popular for decades. People I encountered in the field also shared memories of the craze for “16-steps dance” and “32- steps dance” (respectively shiliubu,十六步 and sanshierbu,三十二步), shorthand terms for then-popular dance patterns, after the Cultural Revolution. Leading dancer Zhao
49
Xiaohui recollected that she and her colleagues won first-prize in a calisthenics competition in the 1980s, and she had been a regular practitioner ever since. Hu Rong claimed she had been a regular guangchangwu dancer for six years in the early 1990s when she lived in Weihai City, Shandong province, though the choreographies were
“more complicated and less akin to physical exercise” at that time.
All of these generalities of guangchangwu were well addressed in reports from the first half of 2013. In these reports, guangchangwu is often portrayed as an example of the good life that the development of China brings forth. In hopes that the dancing scene could add vitality to the city nightscape and reconstruct sociality in their urban life, the
Qingdao government was reported to sponsor public dances for free to the city residents, arranging new songs and choreographies based on local culture.5 Around the same time, in May 2013 a major local newspaper of Xi’an City organized a guangchangwu competition and attracted more than 200 teams and 5000 participants from the city.
Moreover, the committee clearly stated that the purpose of the competition was to
“promote The National Fitness Program to flourish (pengbo fazhan, 繁荣发展) in urban communities, and to arouse enthusiasm of public participation in guangchangwu.” 6
During this time, guangchangwu was depicted in two complementary ways. On the one hand, the dance was described as a feature of the national fitness program that
5 Zhang, "Qingdao Promotes Local Guangchangwu (Qingdao Tuichu Tese Guangchangwu)". 6 Xiaolin Huang and Dunhuang Wu, "31 Guangchangwu Groups Ready for Tomorrow's Final," Huashang News, http://news.hsw.cn/system/2013/05/18/051670786.shtml. 50
helped improve the quality of life; while on the other hand, the dancing scene was regarded as the reflection of an exemplary achievement of the nation’s economic development, evoking a common interpretation of Marx’s materialism, which goes that
“economic development and improvement of living condition leads to a higher need of cultural life.” In this way, guangchangwu perfectly articulated the state’s economic growth and the people’s daily life: public dancing itself was simultaneously a result of and a contributor to the betterment of life in contemporary China.
Along with this, however, negative voices—sometimes even violent conflicts—had also co-existed in early coverage. For instance, it was reported in March 2013 that
Nanjing residents threw feces at a group of dancers due to the loud dancing music, and, according to the article, this incident peaked and made public the long-lasting dispute about the dance in their community. 7 In April, the same city saw “an angry father” destroy a loudspeaker of another dancing group, for the music distracted his son from focusing on homework.8 Two weeks before, some residents in Chengdu disrupted a dance session by throwing “water bullets,” water-filled plastic bags.9
7 Xiaolin Fan and Jing Gu, "Guangchangwu Noise Goes So Far as to Be Splashed with Feces (Guangchangwu Zaoyin Fanren Jing Pofen Zuzhi)," Yangzi News, http://epaper.yzwb.net/html_t/2013- 03/21/content_63617.htm?div=-1. 8 Guoyong Ren, "Grannies Dance in Squares Played Music Too Loud; School Child Interfered, Angry Father Smashed the Speaker (Laotai Guangchang Tiaowu Yinyuesheng Taigao Ganrao Haizi Xuexi, Fuqin Nuza Laba)," Yangzi News, http://epaper.yzwb.net/html_t/2013-04/28/content_72400.htm?div=-1. 9 Wangyi News, "Chengdu Residents Throw "Water-Bombs" to Object to Guangchangwu Disturbance (Chengdu Jumin Reng "Shuidan" Kangyi Guangchangwu Raomin)," Wangyi News, http://news.163.com/photoview/00AP0001/33713.html#p=8SH9HGGL00AP0001. 51
Although reports on the dance intensified during this period of time, no exclusive demographic population was identified as the guangchangwu dancer. Compared with the close link between the dance and middle-aged women that we see today, the names used to identify the dancers varied. In fact, by this period of time, no unified term was used to call the dancers at all. In the above-mentioned articles, for instance, dancers are referred to as differently as “middle-aged female residents” (zhonglaonian nvjumin,中老
年女居民),10 “dancing friends” (wuyou,舞友), “the seniors” (laonianren,老年人),11 “old ladies” (laotaitai,老太太),12 and “the dancing crowd” (tiaowude renqun,跳舞的人群).13
Among the many names, “dama” was also occasionally used to call elderly women in the sense of its dictionary meaning, “an honorific title for senior women,”14 to address the neighborly tone of such reports.
The uneven gender and age distribution of the dancers, i.e. middle-aged women’s domination of the dancing population, was much recognized but no significant value judgment was attached, and young people’s and men’s participation were not uncommon in these reports. In fact, reporters elaborated on a sense of diversity among the practitioners by portraying the wide range of participants. The state-run news
10 Fan and Gu, "Guangchangwu Noise Splashed Feces". 11 Yulei Zhang, "Old People of Yantai Enjoy Guangchangwu (Yantai Laoren Ai Tiao Guangchangwu)," http://www.jiaodong.net/news/system/2013/07/14/011966942.shtml. 12 Ren, "Smashed Speaker". 13 Wangyi News, "Chengdu Water-Bombs". 14 CASS Institute of linguistics dictionary editing room, "Dama," in Modern Chinese dictionary (Beijing: The Commercial Press, 2012), 243. 52
agency Xinhua described the dancing scene in Xining Province as a “youthful sway” that benefitted all sorts of people: the family relation became harmonious, the elderly were kept “happier and healthier,” and the young immigrants “found a sense of belonging.”15 Remarkably, given that female dancers significantly outnumbered the male counterparts, men were encouraged to attend this healthy activity. While the committee board of the dance competition in Xi’an expressed to the media their disappointment of the absent of an “all-man team” (‘chunyemen’ dui, 纯爷们队), the organizer of the Yinchuan equivalent decided to offer teams with male members extra points.16
Importantly, controversies over the dance were reported on the basis of individual cases in early coverage. In these reports, problems of the dance’s accompanying music were treated as an issue raised from a specific milieu but not as a generic problem. The significance of these reports only manifests when read together with those on like incidents published later, where the phrasing sees a dramatic change in that the dance became exclusively an elderly women’s activity. This problematization came hand in hand with the fixation of the gaze on elderly women by deploying of the overarching notion of dama.
15 Chenyang He, "Guangchangwu Sways Youthful Rhythm (Guangchangwu Wuchu Qingchun Jiepai)," Xinhua Net, http://news.xinhuanet.com/sports/2013-06/23/c_124897383.htm. 16 Huang and Wu, "31 Groups into Final". 53
Late 2013 saw a surge of guangchangwu-related topics in newspapers, TV programs, and social media discussions. Dancing groups across China were constantly reported being injured by mastiffs, gunshots, barbed wire, and many other fierce attacks. These reports generated a series of media sensations that echoed each other, making “the unstoppable dancers” a trending topic in social media. Among the many incidents that were highlighted and recirculated in these few months, one of the frequently cited ones was another feces-attack in Wuhan that happened in October 2013. The course of the incident was not much different from the above-mentioned Nanjing one in March of the same year. However, this time, instead of by merely a local newspaper, it was spread throughout mainstream channels such as China Central Television, Phoenix News,
China News, and Tengxun News. However, the way this piece of news circulated featured a title change. When the local newspaper first drew attention, it originally titled the article “Guangchangwu in residential compounds disrupted by sky dropping feces.” 17
But the reposted version of it on other media, this title was edited and replaced by
“Dama doing guangchangwu splashed by feces” or the like, drawing on the new sense of
“dama.”18
17 Jing Yang, "Guangchangwu in Residential Compounds Disrupted by Sky Dropping Feces (Xiaoqu Guangchangwu Zaoyu Gaolou Pofen)," Wuhan News, http://whwb.cjn.cn/html/2013- 10/25/content_5240309.htm. 18 "Dama Doing Guangchangwu Splashed by Feces," China News, http://www.chinanews.com/sh/2013/10- 25/5422441.shtml. 54
Retrospectively, this Wuhan incident in fact revealed an important transitional moment when a new narrative of the dance was shaping. First, by omitting the context
(the residential compound), the new title generalized the noise issue, broadening the case-specific issue into one intrinsic to guangchangwu itself. Second, by highlighting and equating dama with the dancing population, an age-gender specified group of people became the guangchangwu participants par excellence. In this way, through the circulation of the new title, formerly discrete narratives and paradigms of guangchangwu were translated and absorbed into a single one, in which the dance and the participants were detached from the context, and the relation between between guangchangwu and dama became naturalized. If the news report on the demolition team I cited in the beginning of the chapter demonstrates how the relation between the dance and elderly women have been naturalized, this Wuhan incident clearly stood in the middle of the formation of this relation. I call this naturalized relation a linkage.
This linkage between guangchangwu and dama is rather a recent invention, despite the fact that the phenomenon of public dance had existed for decades and women seemed to have long dominated the dancing population. Then, why did this discursive turn happen, and why it was at that moment? The significance of such a discursive reformulation of guangchangwu, hence, needs to be understood in the functioning of it in the larger social context and meaning generated from it.
55
Among the numerous reports on guangchangwu upon which the discursive turn in late 2013 was contingent, here I address two key incidents that later have constantly been referred back to in related discussions and coverage. One is about the arrest of a
Chinese leading dancer in Brooklyn, New York, which became the anchoring point where the the equation of guangchangwu with noise pollution was justified. The other incident is about The Wall Street Journal’s alleged usage of Chinese pinyin “dama” in describing the gold market which gave rise to the normalized use of the term dama.
It was reported that in July 2013 police arrested a leading dancer—a middle-aged
Chinese immigrant—of a waist-drum dance group rehearsing Sunset Park, Brooklyn, due to the noise.19 Chinese media brought attention to this event since early August.
Multiple news websites, including the Chinese Communist Party-run website,
People.com.cn, covered or reposted the incident at length under the title of “Heated debate over guangchangwu dama’s arrestment in New York” (Dama Niuyue tiao guangchangwu bei kao yin reyi).20 From this point of time on, Brooklyn began to serve as the model example in which “noise pollution” should be regulated by law and such regulation was effectively executed, signified by the staging of the police and the act of arrest.
19 Caroline Berg, "Dancing in Brooklyn Leads to Noise Complaints," China Daily, http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2013-08/14/content_16892983.htm. 20 Yuan Chen, "Heated Debate over Square-Dancing Dama's Arrestment in New York (Dama Niuyue Tiao Guangchangwu Bei Kao Yin Reyi)," http://culture.people.com.cn/n/2013/0809/c22219-22499684.html. 56
The framing of this Brooklyn incident, as we see, had already taken on the notion of dama. Opposite to the dictionary meaning I cited in the beginning of the chapter, dama, in these reports, were no longer an honorific name for elderly women. Around early
May of 2013, Chinese media began to circulate that The Wall Street Journal introduced the term “dama,” in the form of Chinese pinyin, into English in the context of the gold market. 21 It was said that The Wall Street Journal associated middle-aged Chinese women’s fever over gold saved the then weakening gold market and influenced the US gold policy in April 2013.22
Analysis of whether dama’s gold purchase had a direct association with the gold mark falls out of the scope of this thesis, yet the way such stories were articulated in
Chinese media invariably carried a sarcastic tone, accusing the elderly women of lacking financial knowledge, rushing into the global market, and being irrational, trivial, and shortsighted. In an audacious commentary appearing in August 2015, the author connected the two cases I cite here, juxtaposing the characters of dama in the two contexts. While dama invested in gold “just hint at a whiff of satire on speculative purchasing and herd mentality,” the author wrote, dama dancing on the square of
21 However, I failed to find the widely cited Wall Street Journal report, for no Chinese version provided specific title or link to the original report, and all versions I could find on the WSJ website with keywords “dama” were published later than August 2013. I noticed a 2014 WSJ column (http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/06/09/chinas-dancing-queens-scolded-for-gettin-down-on-the- highway/) mentioned the same case, yet the report the author cited was published in August 2013, which cannot be the original report to judge from the time, either. 22 China Economy, ""Chinese Dama" Are Coming! (Zhongguo Dama Men Lai Le!)," http://www.ce.cn/ztpd/xwzt/shehui/2013/zgdm/. 57
Brooklyn was unacceptably obnoxious because their “uncouth and uncivilized behavior irks foreigners.”23 The accounts of the Brooklyn incident and The Wall Street Journal thus became the anchoring points by which the complaints about guangchangwu’s accompanying music was justified as “noise pollution” and elderly women became a disqualified population. On this ground, as we have seen, the linkage between guangchangwu and dama was formed, and the discourse of guangchangwu turned by the end of 2013.
4.2 The production of the linkage
With this laid out, we now are able to summarize how the number of discursive shifts contributed the formation of the linkage between guangchangwu and dama. First, discourses revolving around what the public should be like emerged, constantly referring to developed societies to address the legally enforced silence and self- disciplined citizens. Second, as the noise became intrinsic to guangchangwu, the dance itself became the name of the noise issue. Third, the dominant dancing population was discursively reframed in terms of demographic specificity, that is, the elderly Chinese women as an age-gender specified population was created by the very appellation of dama, and therefore the population and the dance became the metonymy for each other.
Last, demonstrated in Lvqiu Luwei’s commentary comparing Hong Kong and Shenzhen,
23 Wendy Wang, "Will ‘Big Mothers’ Shadow China’s Image?," http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/806207.shtml#.Uq2gK2RDsZN. 58
as soon as the noise was turned into a signifier of a less modernized society, a sense of backwardness was mapped onto both the population and the dance (as they were the same), and hence, dama and guangchangwu both were discursively disqualified from being a modern subject and practice. Meanwhile, it is precisely through disqualifying the aged female both as bodies and a category that a modern city order is imagined and articulated.24
In the social discourse about the dance, aged women are always the objects being looked at rather than the subjects who look and speak. During my fieldwork, I noticed that having a knowledge of the very basic use of computers could considerable distinguish one from the rest dancing fellows. Electronic devices such as portable speakers and USB keys were often carefully protected in original packages or handmade cloth bags. It is not so much about fetishizing a product as expressing the division between the two spaces. For dancers, dancing was first and foremost a physical exercise that one had to commit to in one way or another, since seeing a doctor had become too expensive (“kanbinggui,” 看病贵). The widely discussed healthcare system reform is not just about striking statistics in terms of the drastic drop of government expending in the healthcare sector through the years along with the economic reform,25 but actual changes
24 Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 21. 25 Yanzhong Huang, "The Sick Man of Asia: China's Health Crisis," Foreign Affairs 90, no. 6 (2011). 59
in life that the elderly particularly were attuned to and lived through.26 One of my interviewees who each time talked to me would recount that she was the “top five oldest” people among the entire group, said that getting “less sickness, and less expense” (“shao debing, shao huaqian,” 少得病，少花钱) was her only aim of dancing, consciously associating the reform of the healthcare system with the popularity of public physical activities and her own participation of it. Moreover, dancing was helpful in building a healthier body not simply by means of physical exercise. She believed guangchangwu was especially good because it provided the occasion for people like her to get together, be happy in “mind” (yinian/yishi, 意识), and have a chance to laugh.
Dancing, compared with other forms of practice, was more interesting, diverse, and sociable. Yet, in the evolution of social discourses of the dance I traced above, various kinds of generational experience were eclipsed and the popularity of the dance was dismissed as elderly women’s selfish pursuit.
Then, the question would be, what does it mean to have such a linkage formed at this point of time? To understand the politics behind it, we need to situate its emergence in the larger social background. Around the emerging of the new sense of dama, women in their late twenties had been given a derogatory name shengnv, or “leftover women.”
In her book Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, Leta Hong
Fincher offers a compelling account of this rise of the term “leftover women” in media
26 Chen, "Health, Wealth, and the Good Life," esp. 165-7. 60
discourse.27 Although I do not share her centralized view of the formation of the term, that is, her taking the popularity of the term shengnv as a direct consequence of the state’s planned media “campaign,” the question she points out is nevertheless vital.
It especially strikes me to juxtapose these two categories, dama and shengnv, that came into daily use in recent years and to see the parallel between them. It cannot be a coincidence that shengnv—unmarried young women who are practically almost impossible to give birth to a child in China—and dama—old women who have finished the duty of child-rearing, as the very name “big-mother” pronounced—were solidified as categories precisely at the time when the population aging became ever-so emergent in contemporary China. With the long implemented one-child policy loosening on the one hand and a rising the age of retirement becoming imperative on the other,28 shengnv and dama precisely correspond to two specified groups of females whose reproductivity could not be utilized and whose labor force have the potential to be further extracted.29
Ironically, while the media equate guangchangwu with a matter of dama, elderly women’s domination of the dancing population can in fact be a result of the gender discriminated retirement age—while women retire at 55, the bar of retirement age for
27 See Leta Hong Fincher, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (London: Zed Books, 2014), esp. 1-43. 28 Xinhua Net, "China to Ease One-Child Policy," Xinhua Net, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2013-11/15/c_132891920.htm; for a recent update on the discussion of the age of retirement in China, see Gui Qing Koh, "China to Raise Retirement Age as Pressure on Pension Fund Rises," Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/10/us-china-parliament-labour- idUSKBN0M60CY20150310. 29 Susan Greenhalgh, Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005), 246-9. 61
men is 60. When I asked the female dancers why their husbands did not come along, answers were much alike that their husbands were still working and hence were too tired or too busy to dance. This systematically produced temporal gap largely mobilized the female retirees to find hobbies to spend the time of her own.
I find it helpful to think through Claude Levi-Strauss’s theorization of exogamy.
He points out that rather than an socially imposed restriction, the significance of exogamy relies on its productivity: it is through the exchange of the female member that alliance between men finds vocabulary and is created anew.30 Here I mobilize this analysis in a broader framework. If we expand the exchange of the female member from a physical trading in the form of marriage to a discursive reappropriation of the female role, what it achieves then becomes a more covertly configured and operated system of social relation centering around men. In this case, it is through creating and simultaneous relegating the aged and gendered body, the un-reproductive body, that a previously-repressed now-encouraged reproductive policy is articulated and a modern, silenced, and policed city order is imagined.
30 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 480-2. 62
5. Conclusion
One day in the year 1994, Hu Rong hesitatingly stood aside a dancing group in
Weihai, debating whether she could join in. It had already been two years since her moving to the eastern costal city from Yongping, following her husband, bringing her then three-year old son, however unwilling she was. Like most of her peers, Hu grew up, got married, and had a child in Yongping City, barely giving a thought on social mobility until 1992. Amid the then loosening of the planned economy, her husband decided to leave Danwei A to seek opportunities in the then rising private economy sector (xiahai, 下海).
The first two years living in Weihai for Hu was an experience of being uprooted.
Without friends, parents, weather, or anything she had been familiar with, she found her life completely alien. What was worse, she suffered from a concentration of melanin such that half of her face was significantly darkened. She went to consult a doctor, and the doctor told her the concentration was the symptom of the bad temper built up within that she should seek ways to relieve. She recalled the jolly dancing groups she came across a couple of times in the city square.
There she stood, hesitated, being too shy to participate in. Yet, persuading herself that there was already nothing more to lose (“poguanzi poshuai,” 破罐子破摔, literally “to break a broken pot”), she put aside her embarrassments and joined the dancing crowd.
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Reminiscing about those years, Hu attributed her rejuvenation to dancing. As she recalled, the dark blemish “magically” disappeared just two months later. Cheered up by this healing effect, she gained courage to pursue a new life. In 1995, she decided to take the Self-Taught Higher Education Examination (“zikao,”自考), an alternative pathway to earn a college-equivalent degree outside of campus.1 She chose to major in interior design, the one closest to her never-realized childhood dream of being a painter.
In the following years, she worked as an accountant during the daytime, and every night, after “coaxing” (hong, 哄) her kindergarten son to go to sleep, she went to the other room, and started her own studies. She kept going to the city square to dance after dinner, and together with the drawing time late at night, they were the only hours of her own. As one of four in the class of eighty-four students in the Sunday school she attended, she successfully earned the degree in 1999.
Hu and her family moved back to Yongping in the early 2000s. Stepping into her fifties, Hu constantly teased herself that it had already become too late for her to resume her old artistic hobbies such as painting or learning anything new. She danced with group A every now and then during the summer of my fieldwork, and was virtually the youngest in this elderly community. Yet, she also felt inspired by these dancers, for even though many of them walked with difficulty, they still persisted in dancing.
1 For the history and mechanism of the Examination, see Guijuan Gao, "The Self-Taught Higher Education Examination in China: As Manifested in the Educational Service and National Examination," Educational Research for Policy and Practice 1, no. 1-2 (2002). 64
Having been a regular dancer for six years in Weihai in the 1990s, she sighed that now dancing was her “last connection with,” as well as her “first attempt to go back to the artistic world.”
When I visited her home, Hu showed me her works from pencil sketches she did in the 1970s to calligraphy she did now. Growing up during the Cultural Revolution, Hu practiced painting by herself, imitating illustrated storybooks (lianhuanhua, 连环画) as well as a then-scarce pencil sketches collection that her family managed to obtain for her.
She was impressed so much by the “eye-opening” western painting skills, barely believing one could draw a mop and a sink “truer than photography.”
I was immediately drawn when she showed me her graduate project. She drew the design of an apartment on the backsides of tax forms and charts that she saved from her day-time accounting work (see Figure 5). She joked that it was a way of “practicing frugality to make revolution” (“jieyue naogeming,” 节约闹革命), casually quoting a slogan from the time of the Cultural Revolution.
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Figure 5: Hu Rong's graduate designing sketch. The title of the red print reads: “Value-added Tax Declaration Form (B).” Note the seam on the top. Hu taped two pieces of paper together to make a larger piece of paper to meet the size requirement.
These drafts appealed to me because the leading dancer, Liu Yun, sketched on used paper, too. Since her engagement with guangchangwu in the early 2000s, she purchased VCDs of dancing instruction and taught herself at home. Yet, because the recordings available at that time were filmed from the front view, those who learned from the video had to practice in the opposite direction in mirror image. Liu, who had worked as a professional draftswoman (miaotuyuan, 描图员) for over forty years, then translated the choreographies into sketches from the standpoint of the rear view. All of
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the hundreds of sketches she drew were on the margins and backsides of used paper she saved from work (see Figure 6).
Figure 6: Liu Yun's sketch of the choreography drawn on a sample contract.
It strikes me how these drawings on the literal margin of the paper in fact coincide with the marginal area where these women danced and echo the marginal status of their lives in the grand narratives of the society. Yet, they dwelled, danced, and made noise just as they authored the drawings next to what was printed and unchangeable on the piece of paper.
For its participants, the significance of guangchangwu may not reside in itself, but registers what gives it meaning, or ways in which they negotiate their lives within the world. Whereas the social discourse represents guangchangwu in a totalizing way, my
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fieldwork suggests guangchangwu is probably anything but a homogeneous activity that became widespread overnight. On the contrary, as my study of group A shows, the shape of a dance group is the result of profound interaction with its very specific social milieu. Moreover, even a same dance can be experienced differently by individuals.
There are possibly multiple square-dancings, different ways of organizing, and individuals may well be participating for different purposes.
Figure 7: Fan-dancing Thursday on Site A. Note the bicycles and mopeds parking on the periphery.
Thursdays’ fan-dancing session on site A, for example, meant distinctively different things for different dancers. For group organizers such as Li Yun, as part of the costume, the dancing fans helped to cultivate a sense of uniformity of the group members. For most dancers, knowing which fans to use for which songs marked one’s
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mastery of the routine but also filled one with a sense of belonging. However, it is precisely for the same reason that Hu Rong refused to dance with fans. She did not usually join the Thursday fan-dancing session, and if she had an impulse to dance on
Thursdays, she would go on site and dance barehanded. By rejecting the fans, she distanced herself from the senior group, and hence assured herself a sense of being younger and therefore still have time to fulfill her own dreams.
In this thesis, I examined the controversial public dance called guangchangwu in contemporary China. I first demonstrated how a specific guangchangwu dancing group organized in relation to the space it occupied, then I traced the media discourse of guangchangwu and showed how it became linked with elderly women, dama. I argue that this seemingly new and overwhelmingly women-dominated public dance emerged from a series of long-existing activities, the embedded gender politics of which articulated
China’s recent and ongoing revision of policies and laws regarding birth control and the retirement age. Moreover, it is precisely against the backdrop of such social discourse that the practice and persistence of individual dancing groups becomes meaningful: through an effective organizational structure, these elderly women made their existence visible, audible, and their stories irreducible.
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