SUPER GIRLS IN CHINA: THE PERFORMANCE OF NEOLIBERAL VALUES, DESIRE, AND ALTERNATIVE TEMPORALITIES
KIERA D. CHION
THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTERS IN ARTS
JOINT GRADUATE PROGRAMME IN COMMUNICATIONS AND CULTURE YORK UNIVERSITY, TORONTO, ONTARIO
MAY 2009 Library and Bibliotheque et 1*1 Archives Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition
395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Canada Canada
Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-51621-8 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-51621-8
NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives and Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par Plntemet, prefer, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans loan, distribute and sell theses le monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, worldwide, for commercial or non sur support microforme, papier, electronique commercial purposes, in microform, et/ou autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats.
The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. this thesis. Neither the thesis Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels de nor substantial extracts from it celle-ci ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement may be printed or otherwise reproduits sans son autorisation. reproduced without the author's permission.
In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne Privacy Act some supporting sur la protection de la vie privee, forms may have been removed quelques formulaires secondaires from this thesis. ont ete enleves de cette these.
While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires in the document page count, aient inclus dans la pagination, their removal does not represent il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant. any loss of content from the thesis. Canada ABSTRACT
In May 2005, Li Yuchun/Chris Lee, the winner of the Chinese singing competition, The Mongolian Sour Cow Yoghurt Super Girl Contest, became the catalyst for a national debate on issues ranging from democracy to standards of feminine beauty to the visibility of a queer national identity. Using critical discourse analysis of news reports and surveys with heads of local and diasporic fan clubs, I investigate the culturally performative aspects of Yuchun's image by interrogating the particular socio political-virtual space that she occupies as both a new moral and cultural reflexion for the performance of an alternative Chinese temporality. I explore how her image connects with the dislocated and globalizing forces of gendered national identity by locating the role of Yuchun in the boundaries of the Chinese digital imaginary - an imaginary that is driven by new modes of consumption, desire, and fantasies of locales within Asia and beyond.
IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Without the guidance of my supervisor and second reader, Dr. Kenneth Little and Dr. Anne-Marie Lee-Loy, this thesis would not have been possible. Dr. Lee-Loy has been an unwavering source of support and humor at every stage of the process and her enthusiasm in the project gave me the final push to put it all together. Thanks so much for going through the extra legwork to be on my committee.
From our first meeting, Dr. Kenneth Little has shown me nothing but patience, kindness, and warmth. I am grateful for your level-headedness, support, and strong critical eye for commas! Our tangential conversations always got me right back on track with the project and gave me extra food for thought!
Drs. Little and Lee-Loy: Huzzah! You are both stars!
v TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract iv
Acknowledgements v
Table of Contents vi
Chapter 1: What does it take to be a Super Girll 1 Thesis Outline 7
Chapter 2: CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK Theoretical Articulations of An 'Imagined Community' 11 The Performance of China's Semicoloniality through the Image of the Modern Girl 14 Multidirectional Flows in China's Semicolonial Popular Cultural Industries 18 Contextualizing Super Girl: From the Hello Kitty Effect to the Rise of Tomboy Cool.. .27 The Japanization of Asia: The Culturally Odourless TV Format 33 Uneven Cultural Flows: The Rearticulation of Yuchun's Chineseness 39 'Alternative Modernities' 40 Conceptual Shifts: Transnationality vs. Globalization 44 Chinese Transnationalism: On the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm 49 New Cultural Imaginaries: Citizenship and Subject-Making 53 Conclusion 56
Chapter 3: METHODOLOGY Overview and Rationale 58 Researcher's Role 59 Recruitment and Criteria for Participation 61 Description of Data Sources - Electronic Survey Interviews 63 Description of Data Sources - News Articles and Blog Entries 64 Analysis Strategies of Surveys 66
Chapter 4: YUCHUN AS THE SITE OF THE INSTANTIATION OF NEW NATIONALISM Introduction 68 The'China Dream' 70 How the Language of Personal Transformation is Operationalized 71 Super Girl as an Imaginary Pathway to Success 79 The Commodification of National Newness: The Uniform of Individuality 81 Yuchun's Everygirl Relatability Factor 89 Articulations or Absences of Queerness 92 Media Discourse around the 'Opening up of China' through Deregulation vs. Democracy 95
vi Conclusion 99
Chapter 5: CONCLUSION The Price of Participation in 'National Newness' 101
Appendix A 107 Appendix B 109 Appendix C Ill Appendix D 114 Bibliography 115
vii Chapter One: What Does it Take to Be a Super Girl?
How do articulations of gendered national identities become grounded culturally, consumed, and eventually absorbed by state apparatuses? As China continues to transition to a more leading, pivotal role in the global capitalist economy what does the emergence and widespread popularity of locally produced pop idols, say about the potentials and limitations of a highly commodified cultural citizenship? This thesis attempts to answer these questions by investigating the singular and incredible national outpouring of support surrounding the phenomenon known as The Mongolian Sour Cow
Yoghurt Super Girl Contest (to be referred to as Super Girl) that occurred in China in
2005. The 'Supergirl rebellion', a term coined by reporter Benjamin Joffre-Walt (2005), refers to the country-wide mania over and emulation of the unconventionally celebrated female characteristics such as confidence, assertiveness, and originality that were best embodied in the mannerisms and sartorial system of the 2005 winner, Li Yuchun, also known by her English name, Chris Lee. For the purposes of simplicity, I refer to Li
Yuchun or Chris Lee throughout the paper as Yuchun.
In May 2004, local producer Liao Ke, via Hunan Satellite Television, introduced the annual Chinese singing competition, Super Girl, to a national audience. The show
(named after its primary sponsor, a dairy manufacturing company based in Mongolia) attracted 150 000 aspiring contestants ranging from 4 to 89 years old in its five regional competitions (Epstein 2005). English media coverage of the contest frequently drew comparisons between the populist fervor over the contestants and the text messaging voting format of the competition, to American Idol and Britain's Pop Idol. On the night
1 of the 2005 three-hour national finale, eight million SMS 'text messages of support' were
sent.
The intense public interest with the independently produced show stimulated a
nationwide online discussion in endless message boards and forums on issues ranging
from democracy, to a breakdown in standards of feminine beauty, to the emerging
visibility of a queer identity in China's national imaginary. In China, where it is illegal to
organize many types of public meetings, fans formed online 'booster clubs' (forums to
stir up support for one's favourite candidate) and canvassed malls to sway "prospective voters", and "campaigned publicly" on Yuchun's behalf (Jakes 2005). The creators of the
original Super Girl would not have predicted or anticipated that the 2005 season's winner, Yuchun, would ultimately achieve the distinction of being the most watched and most voted for national figure in Chinese political and televisual history. Nor did they realize that the process of voting for the next Super Girl was an exercise in selecting and producing an image of 'national newness' that would be the signifying extension of an
emerging 'alternative' Chinese female identity and temporality that was already brewing
in the cultural imagination of millions of Chinese youth.
As Yuchun rose through the regional qualifying rounds in the 2005 season, media
coverage continually focused on her unconventional masculine style and performance of
songs traditionally sung by men. Against an industry backdrop of "... .an interchangeable
lineup of warbling coquettes, husky crooners, and jolly fellows in brass stars and epaulets belting out odes to red flags", Yuchun stuck out because of her "proud androgyny" and
"creative eccentricity" (Joffe-Walt 2005). In her audition tape, Yuchun wore jeans, a
2 loose-fitting men's dress shirt, and not a bit of make-up, and sang, "In My Heart There's
Only You, Never Her", a song made famous by Taiwan's Liu Wenzhen, a male heartthrob (Lo 2006). Possibly, the most vivid characterization of Yuchun's appearance came from Joffre-Walt, who described her as "frizzy-haired" and "androgynous", with a stylistic penchant for "loose jeans, a black button-down shirt, with no make-up and the haircut (and body) of David Bowie during his Space Oddity phase" (2005). Yet, despite having the weakest set of technical singing skills and not being "particularly pretty",
Yuchun won the hearts of legions of female fans (young and old) and served as an empowered marker of success for young women who are struggling to form their own identity and social role in a rapidly changing sociocultural environment where China's surging economy opens up new avenues for accessing and participating in the everyday practices of cultural citizen-making.
The confident and self-described 'tomboy', Yuchun, won with 3.5 million text messages of support from an audience of over 400 million viewers during the season's final episode (MacCartney 2005). First runner-up, Zhou Bi Chang, was a close second with 3.2 million votes. Local and international media coverage zeroed in heavily on
Yuchun's unconventional gender-neutral sartorial style and behaviour even though
Chang and subsequently 2006 Super Girl winner Shang Wenjie shared an almost identical style.1 The collective tomboy style and confidence of Wenjie, Chang, and most of all Yuchun, points to the prior existence and emergence of a 'new girl' national
1 For the purposes of limiting the scope of this study, I have elected to focus on the media and fan discourse around the figure of Yuchun but it is important to consider her rise to fame as a national icon against the larger context of two other national figures, Zhou Bi Chang and Shang Wenjie, who not only have an uncannily similar aesthetic look, but arguably share a comparable level of popularity among fans even if they did not inspire the same media scrutiny.
3 identity. This highly flexible, audience-produced identity is unfolding in a technologically mediated public arena before the eyes of Chinese youth at home and abroad (in diasporic networks) via an interactive television format that encourages transnational dialogue in online forums and chat rooms over the idealized traits that should belong to China's newest national icon, even though mainland viewers were the only ones who could technically vote.
Full details of the complicated selection and elimination process for Super Girl are not available on the official show website or made known to the general public in any other format.2 What is known is that for the 2004 and 2005 season, the competition was opened up to any female contestant regardless of age, appearance, or singing ability. A minimum age restriction policy of 18 years was implemented for the 2006 season (Lynch
2005). The preliminary rounds of the 2004 season were held in four cities: Changsha,
Chengdu, Nanjing, and Wuhan. For the 2005 season, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, and
Zhengzhou were added to the bill while Nanjing and Wuhan were dropped. For the 2006 season, Shengyang replaced Zhengzhou. The reasons behind the switches in preliminary locations are not disclosed in any official statements to the public. For the initial 'try-out' round, each contestant was given 30 seconds to perform in front of a pre-selected panel of judges. If successful, she was able to move on to the preliminary regional rounds (Qing
2005).
2 As of my most recent attempt on January 3,2008 to locate the link to the Super Girl web page on Hunan Satellite Television's official website, http://www.hunantv.com/ it appeared that the page had been permanently removed and the search engine failed to turn up any results. The cause of the web page's removal may be linked to the general demise of Super Girl, as the Chinese government officially banned the show after the 2006 season. Prior to this date, I was able to access the web page but was unable to locate any official rules and regulations beyond the general procedures for elimination as outlined on the television show itself. 4 The competition 'officially' begins once the roster of contestants is established for the preliminary rounds in each of the previously selected cities. Subsequently, viewers support their favourites by either calling in or by texting in weekly "knockout competitions" that are broadcast from Changsha, Hunan province. At this point in the competition, the panel of judges is selected from the entertainment industry. For instance, at the auditions in Changsha in Hunan province, the panel consisted of a composer, a TV producer, a folk singer, and an agent. Another group of 31 judges from the laobaixing, which directly translates to "common people", play a key role in the elimination process.
After the votes are calculated from the vote-in, the weakest two - as determined by the judges and the total amount of weekly text messages, face off in what is referred to as the
Player Kill or PK round. The term originates from the "kill-or-be-killed" language common in multiplayer online games. The singer with the least amount of votes in the face-off is eliminated (Lynch 2005).
This thesis argues that the 2005 Super Girl contest was a key moment in Chinese cultural politics that can provide insight into the significance of fan and media discourses of an alternative and gendered imagined transnational community and temporality via
Yuchun's image even as these discourses simultaneously perpetuate and displace dominant Western narratives of Chinese modernization and progress. The figure of
Yuchun emerged in a period of exploding global neoliberalism and her image became the site upon which this shifting field of power, meaning, and rising new nationalism are playing out. What does this flexibility in terms of an emerging cultural citizenship mean and translate to for Chinese youth of the diaspora and within the nation's borders who
5 participated in the consumption and production of Yuchun's image as transnational cultural citizens? What are the new conditions of cultural citizenship as articulated by the events of Super Girl? And do these conditions necessarily match up with Western constructions of democracy, access, and mobilization?
The relationship of this study to the existing literature lies in describing new locators (symbolized by Yuchun) of cultural production as an example of how new (and past) historical moments such as the Super Girl phenomenon allows for the expression of subjective meanings of self-fashioned 'modernity' produced by Yuchun's fans and the simultaneous manifestation of a new female identity/ power that is a metaphor for the desires and personality of what 'gendered modernity' should look like as collectively determined by the transnational and local Chinese cultural imaginary. As the living representation of a new cultural reflexion, Yuchun became an effect of the globalized, capitalist modes of production and consumption underpinning Super Girl itself and the platforms that made it possible, while also acting as a point of its instantiation and not so much a historical form. This thesis seeks to explore the implications behind the commodification of citizen making within this delocalized and neoliberal structure, and to locate the power of Yuchun's image in the articulation of the 'China Dream' that fan discourses ascribe to her. Thus, the following question plays a defining role in this thesis: what are the underlying tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities that exist in the cultural space and aftermath of Super Girl in the context of China's burgeoning rise to super power status on the global stage?
6 Thesis Outline:
Chapter Two offers a framework in which to examine Super Girl. This chapter presents an integrated approach to examining the contest as a significant moment in the performance of a gendered alternative modernity in the Chinese cultural imaginary. In outlining China's semicolonial conditions, I begin with a brief overview of how the performance of nationhood has been historically encoded on the bodies of Chinese women. Additionally, the notion of "call and answer" diasporic relationships, "creative self-fashioning" as the anti-colonial strategy and answer to Enlightenment 'modernity', and everyday practices of cultural citizenship provide the analytical tools with which to interrogate the construction of Yuchun's image as part of a wider transnational dialogue that negotiates "Chineseness" in new digital arenas that exist outside of formal Chinese political life.
Chapter Three provides an overview and rationale of the methodology undertaken in the study. Chapter Four is structured into two parts. The first, locates Yuchun as the site of the instantiation of a new nationalism through her representation of a particular historical moment. This chapter begins by describing the emergence of the 'China
Dream' and how Yuchun is the constitutive event that enacts a gendered notion of success embedded within global capitalist frameworks. The first half also highlights the commodification of the highly valorized national desire to 'stand out' and the implications of this for the authenticity of a 'tomboy' social role for young women.
This is followed by an exploration of the language of personal transformation articulated by fans and media reports surrounding Super Girl, which coincides with and foregrounds
7 a shift in the acceleration of the nation's orientation toward a deregulated and delocalized model of industrialization that is linked to Yuchun's performance of particular neoliberal values and idealized traits essential for survival in contemporary China.
The second half of Chapter Four addresses Yuchun's 'relatability' factor and how this facilitates and enables the operationalization of the language of personal transformation. This portion also addresses fan discourses around articulations or absences of Yuchun's queerness or 'tomboyness'. It ends with an examination of how the media discourse inaccurately positions Super Girl as a beacon of 'democracy' (because of its Westernized voting format) with the figure of Yuchun as the benign, liberatory face of modernization. This thesis argues that as a "flash in the pan" event, Super Girl represents a formative moment in a long-standing Chinese history of gendered performances of nationhood that provides insight into how iconoclastic symbols of the nation emerge and under what conditions. The final chapter concludes by exploring
Mazzarella's notion of aspirational consumption in relation to the branding of Yuchun's image and the entry and exist points into this commodified cultural citizenship. The chapter ends with a look at the significance of the 2008 Beijing opening ceremonies and the ways in which this spectacle may signal a power shift by the government to reassert control over how Chineseness is constructed and for what purposes. As an open arena for a transnational dialogue on what the next Super Girl should represent, the contest brought the issues of political and cultural citizenship into focus, and indirectly spurred a digital mobilization over how to conduct cultural politics outside of the realm of official political life. The unruly effects of the contest was that it turned into a politically and culturally
8 engaged event and this thesis attempts to provide an analysis of Super Girl that reflects the complexity of this once-in-a-lifetime cultural moment. Chapter Two: Conceptual Framework
In the aftermath of Super Girl's 2005 season, media coverage in both English and
Mandarin language formats frequently invoked a vague relationship between a 'modern' national identity and an emerging cultural citizenship. Many scholars have previously made the connection between how notions of modernity, cultural citizenship, nationhood, and femininity became encoded on the bodies of urban Chinese women in the early half of the 20th century to the Cultural Revolution (Barlow 2005, Chen 2003, Edwards 2000,
Rofel 1994). The period where there are gaps in academic research are from the late
1970s onward, when a series of economic reforms were implemented (in a program commonly referred to as "socialism with Chinese characteristics") that resulted in the opening up of the country's economy to trade, export-led growth, and the encouragement of capitalist business practices via the creation of Special Economic Zones, geographical regions of the nation where economic laws are relaxed in order to attract foreign investment (Gittings 2005, 33).
All these factors contributed to stimulating both directly and indirectly the redevelopment of China's cultural production industries, which began to undergo dramatic shifts throughout the subsequent decades in response to increasing contact with global flows and commodity exchange, not only with North America and Europe, but increasingly within Asia as well (Tarn et al. 2002, 12-15). The emergence of locally groomed pop idols whose identities become inflected with the desires and dreams of
Chinese youth who consume them, is the most contemporary manifestation and extension of a particular type of cultural production traceable back to the 1920s and 1930s where
10 mass produced images of watercolour calendar girls were some of the earliest symbols of a gendered Chinese modernity. The symbolic role that pop idols can, and do, perform in periods of unstable and changing sociocultural times have larger implications for the formation of a new national image and identity and in creating a sense of belonging for youth who are struggling to make sense of their lives.
This section locates the historical emergence of gendered images of modernity beginning with Tani Barlow's "Modern Girl from Around the World Project".
Additionally, I seek to establish existing theoretical debates around the concepts of national identity and emerging cultural citizenship, as well as to apply the terms to situate
Yuchun as a symbol of 'national newness'— a term that I use to refer to the discourse of
'eccentric originality' and 'uniqueness' that is deployed by both fans and the media to describe the power and popularity of her image. By addressing the theoretical literature on performance and national identity and establishing the context in which Chinese performance of the nation has been historically coded on pop cultural productions of the female body, I seek to tease out the significance behind the following fan quote: "Li is a no frills, natural girl who has control of the stage, and is not easily disturbed. She has no long skirts or long hair, and will challenge the traditional female idea. She is the Super
Girl in my heart" (Marquand 2005).
Theoretical Articulations of an 'Imagined Community'
National identity is commonly described in anti-essentialist terms with the idea of the nation situated as an imagined political community that is discursively created and maintained (Anderson 1991, 22). In his seminal text, Imagined Communities,
11 Benedict Anderson anchors his discussion of the 'national imagination' to an analysis of the power of the printed word, in the form of novels and newspapers, to bring together
individuals in a shared sense of belonging to an 'imagined community' (Ibid, 25). For
Anderson, the widespread dissemination of printed texts does more than just establish the boundaries of a shared culture or language. It has the power and capacity to mold and
give life to the idea of the nation within the imagination of the citizen. Anderson confirms the source of these imagined linkages by concluding, "...the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation" (Ibid, 46).
However, the act of reading an article in a magazine, despite the wider relationship between the magazine, which is one form of the novel, as Anderson would note, and the market, still remains a solitary act. While it is likely that hundreds of thousands, or perhaps even millions, of people are also engaged in the exact act of reading the same text, leading to a shared sense of temporality and to "the imagined
community [being] confirmed by the doubleness of our reading about our young man reading" (32), in general, the act of reading still takes place alone. In contrast, the very nature of theatrical performances removes the solitary element from the imagination of the nation and instead, introduces a public arena for the physical enactment and performance of the nation.
Loren Kruger (1994) maintains that the national theatre is a site of contestation, debate, and recognition of the national image. She asserts that this space then becomes
12 transformed into a site of meaning-making creating "a representative audience that will in
turn recognize itself (Kruger 1994, 176) and contribute to the creation of a larger sense
of collective ownership in the production of the image of the nation that will even surpass the sense of shared temporality offered by written materials. In the context of Super Girl,
one may extend Kruger's and Anderson's notions of the power of the written word and
collective performance to forge imagined linkages even further by observing that the widespread availability of instantaneous digital technology at the time of the 2005
season, such as the mobile phone and the Internet creates an added multimedia layer of
immediacy, interaction, and feedback.
The simple fact that television became almost universally adopted, meant that a nation of spectators was able to come together for several hours every week, turn on the medium, and respond to the exact, identical program that was captivating the imaginations of everyone who lived on some street, apartment building, and town.
Furthermore, the mass participation voting format of Super Girl, facilitated by the widespread usage of the personal computer and text messaging technology meant that the event was continuously being streamed in a seemingly endless flow of media output that permitted fans to search their favourite candidate at all hours of the day or night, upload mobile footage shot by other fans and bloggers, and to be up-to-date on all the latest gossip and rumours on a minute-to-minute basis. Super Girl's intense level of digital mass engagement translated to creating an hyper awareness and unity amongst fans about the show. This in turn unified fans in an interactive national spectacle that permitted the exchange of dialogue that would eventually forge new civic and cultural bonds and
13 modes of citizen-making across national boundaries in online forums that would have never occurred otherwise in official Chinese political life and channels of communication.
The Performance of China's Semicoloniality through the Image of the Modern Girl
Unlike the challenges to a 'modern' national identity that nations in the West have historically faced, China's status as a semicolonial state in relation to particular European powers, such as Britain, and its more fraught relationship with Japan, a nation that has historically been viewed as the imperial power of Asia, means that its identity as a nation was formed in many ways, in spite of, and in other ways, because of, the imperialist motivations and involvement of other nations. Shu-Mei Shih (1996) explains that the term "semicolonialism" in the context of China refers to a "discursive context [that] designates both the multiple intellectual positions available due to both a fragmented colonial structure and the urgency of the appointed task of anti-traditional cultural criticism via pro-Westernism, in tension with the material existence of multilayered colonial domination" (Shihl996, 939). The difficulty in defining China as a nation already posed a serious challenge in the 1920s and 1930s, but the difficulty in articulating the post-semicolonial nation proves even more daunting. It is important to situate one's understanding of China's identity as an ancient nation with a history shaped by the violence of a complicated network of semicolonial 'stewardships', influences that remain evident and traceable even in its present and modern construction. As Westlake notes in his study on nationalist theatre in Latin America, "The nation shows its permeable boundaries through its unstable string of performances" (Westlake 2005, 34).
14 The interest in tracing how notions of modernity, cultural citizenship, nationhood, and femininity become encoded on the bodies of Chinese women in the contemporary context builds on the existing scholarship on how particular notions of 'gendered modernity' were initially produced in the 1920s and 1930s by Shanghai's semicolonial structures.3 While Super Girl was a key moment in recent Chinese cultural politics that can provide insight into discourses of 'gendered modernity' at a time when China's parallel status on the world stage is also rising, the contest itself was not an isolated historical instance. Rather it is the latest multimedia instantiation of a long historical trajectory that began in mass produced paperback novels, calendars, commercial advertisements, and posters.
Tani Barlow's "Modern Girl from Around the World Project" documents the first emergence of the 'modern girl' image in a number of 'cosmopolitan' cities around the world, including Shanghai, in the above-mentioned period (Barlow 2005,246). In this era, images of the 'modern girl' with her bobbed hair, revamped qipao (the traditional one-piece dress for Chinese women), and Westernized facial features began to appear in the writings of popular fiction writers, commercial advertisements, and calendars
(Shihl996, 947). Barlow deploys her conception of the 'modern girl' as a 'heuristic category' and cultural formation in order to investigate "how global processes intersected with and were reconfigured by gendered and racialised social hierarchies and political
In Shih's (1996) study of the representation of the "modern girl" in the short stories of Liu Na'ou, she asserts that the "denationalized cosmopolitianism" of Shanghai (which is directly related to its semicolonial structure) paved the way for women's emancipation from the patriarchal confines of a nationalist discourse. In mediating the intermediate space between the "material conditions of semicoloniality" and urban colonial modernity, Shih maintains that the "modern girl" can be viewed as a discursive effort to "confront, negotiate, and incorporate the material" (953). 15 and economic inequalities in specific locales" (Barlow 2005, 247).
One of the main conclusions of the study was that the aesthetic of the 'modern girl' depicted in cosmetic and fashion ads from Europe to Africa to Asia was hardly developed in a mono-linear fashion. In fact, local constructions of the 'modern girl' were most often the product of a multi-directional flow of exchange and influence borrowed from a variety of regional and colonial aesthetics (Ibid, 287). In a similar vein, the idealized traits ascribed to Yuchun arise from localized desires as much as she is also constructed out of the transnational Chinese imaginary, given that these 'local' desires are formulated in increasingly borderless technological environments such as the Internet, and by self-identified members of the Chinese diaspora whose fluid political and cultural citizenship makes them geographic nomads with no fixed address.
Much of the existing historical literature on modernity and femininity in the
Chinese context is limited to focusing on economic centers of the nation such as
Shanghai and Beijing. The strong focus on the former city may be due to the fact that under the semicolonialism of the economic treaties imposed by the governing European settlers in the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai underwent a period of rapid commercialization and saw its cultural production industries flourish (Lee 1999,110). Building on the work of Barlow, Louise Edwards points out that in the context of China, the symbolic category of the "new woman" or the "modern woman" (2000, 116) was deliberately created by the intellectual reformers (who were predominantly from Shanghai) and consequently, the language surrounding her subjectivity was located in a "nationalist universality in a masculinist discourse" (Ibid, 117).
16 Edwards' findings echo Partha Chatterjee's research on the role of women in 19
century Indian nationalist discourse, where she highlights the dichotomous categories that were created to police women's behaviour (Chatterjee 1993, 50). Within the nationalist, heteropatriarchial project, local Indian women who became Westernized "new women" were assigned a lowly status in society and were seen as the tainted and immoral
signifiers of Western materialism and corruption (Ibid, 53). Prior to the rise of a commercial culture in Shanghai, the new Chinese woman, as defined and controlled by the intellectual male elite, symbolized a national modernity that was compatible with their vision of how China should evolve under their intellectual and moral guidance.
However, with the mass production of images of the 'modern girl' appearing in
Shanghai's commercial landscape in the 1920s and 1930s, the intellectual reformers
struggled to retain the power that they had to utilize the image of the 'modern girl' for their own symbolic purposes (Edwards 2000, 112).
Edwards observes a struggle for ideological control over the definition of what qualities and characteristics constituted the 'modern girl' between Shanghainese—and to a lesser extent—international corporate companies, and the intellectual male elite
(Edwards 2000,115). The sense of entitlement that the reformists felt with regards to controlling the idealized female figure was based on their desire to utilize her image as part of a "nationalist modernization campaign" for symbolic purposes (Ibid, 116). When the "new woman" first rose to prominence in the May Fourth Movement, she was a carefully crafted literary image of independence, political activism, patriotism, and higher
17 learning.4 She primarily appeared in Chinese fiction and her virtues were detailed by a number of philosophers and writers in the movement, such as Chen Duxiu, Mu Shiying,
Li Dazhao, Lu Xun, Li Da, and Ye Shaojun. These novels and articles were intended for the political re-education of the literate masses. The 'new woman' epitomized the intellectual elite's "radical challenge to Confucian China" and was an important ideological tool in their fight for a re-assertion of their political status in the new society against the incursions of the military and commercial sectors. However, the intellectual reformers' exclusive rights over the definition of the "modern girl" were quickly usurped by the powerful and glossy visual images produced by cosmetic, cigarette, and clothing companies (Edwards 2000,118). Thus, while postcolonial nations have a history of direct and violent contact with conquest and colonization, semicolonial states such as China have a more complicated relationship with a host of imperial powers in the form of economic and political treaties, 'relationships' that have left a permanent and indelible mark on China's notion of itself as a 'modern' nation.
Multidirectional Flows in China's Semicolonial Popular Cultural Industries
In the introduction to Inventing Nanjing Road, Sherman Cochran describes the very same "material existence of multilayered colonial domination" noted by Shih when he points to how the development of a commercial culture in Shanghai (a city that has
The May Fourth Movement was an anti-imperialist, cultural, intellectual, and political movement that began on May 4, 1919. It marked an intellectual turning point in Chinese history, moving away from an idealization of the Western liberal democratic model and ushering in the study of Marxism, which would later lead to the birth of the Chinese Communist Party. The movement was also a direct reaction to the exploitation of China in the Treaty of Versailles and led to the re-evaluation of Chinese cultural institutions, such as Confucianism. Some of the cornerstones of the movement were the promotion of individual freedom, science, democracy and the emancipation of women. 18 historically been the economic engine of China), originated in the "private sector of the city's economy" in the foreign-occupied areas of the city (Cochran 1999,6). These international "concession" areas were occupied by American, British, French, and
Japanese expatriates (Dong 2000, 17). Cochran describes commercial culture by distinguishing it from what it is not: high culture. Cochran also describes it as
"thoroughly secular... .distinctly urban... .and unlike mass culture, commercial culture has locally oriented means of expression, not fully standardized mass media" (Cochran 1999,
3).
Historically, the high level of economic activity in Shanghai's "concession" areas can be traced to the signing of the economic treaties of the Opium War of 1839 - 42 which handed the British exclusive access to trade and residence in Shanghai and four other Chinese ports (Bergere 1981,11). The International Settlement was heavily invested in Shanghai's burgeoning commercial culture and economy. The head offices of twenty foreign banks were stationed in the city, in addition to a number of large trading firms, such as the German Carlovitz & Co., the Japanese Mitsui Bussan Kaisha, and the
British Jardine Matheson (Dong 2000, 23).
The international status possessed by the Westerners (which entitled them to extraterritorial rights and excluded their merchandise from taxation) was set up by a number of 19th century treaties and cemented by the diplomatic precedence established since then (Clifford 1993, 31). Consequently, the semicolonial grip that these foreign interests had on China, in terms of molding the political and economic orientation and development of Shanghai's cultural production industries, had a formative effect on
19 shaping the unique 'cosmopolitan' character of the city, and in turn, of producing a national image of gendered modernity via advertisements and calendar girls that was heavily influenced by Western popular cultural flows. Influence in the form of
Hollywood exports such as Greta Garbo and Marilyn Monroe transformed and created hybrid local articulations of what it meant to be a 'modern girl' or a 'new woman'.
For Bhabha, the task of ironing out any heterogenous bumps in the process of creating a tidy and homogeous national culture necessitates: "the death, literal and figurative, of the complex interweaving of history, and the culturally contingent borderlines of modern nationhood" (Bhabha 1994, 4). Consequently, the identity of a
'modern' post-semicolonial state like China is similar to that of a postcolonial nation, where the identity of the nation exists as "a more transnational and translational sense of the hybridity of imagined communities" (Ibid, 5). Viewed in this manner, the emergence of a 'new girl' identity via Yuchun's image is an example of the mobilizing forces from the margins of society, discovering and operationalizing new ways of asserting themselves into the subject-making process of performing and inventing the nation.
For E. J. Westlake, the 'theatre of the postcolonial nation' is the site at which
'memorialization' and 'preservation' of the national history and identity takes place.
These performances are not singular occurrences but rather, multiple and "continues in a steady stream of discourse about the character of the nation as citizens contest and adjust the character in the collective imagination" (Westlake 2005,21). Moreover, these performances are not static but must continually reiterate and reinvent themselves as the construct of the nation is too slippery "to exist outside of this repetition" (Ibid, 22). Sarah
20 Radcliffe echoes Westlake's emphasis on the continuous need for repetition and change in the construction of a national imaginary when she writes: "National representations are performed through public spectacle, each nation having its own genealogy of performance, often with specific gender connotations and representations" (Radcliffe
1997, 96).
Much of Westlake and Radcliffe's theoretical grounding can be traced to Judith
Butler's concept of performativity and repetition. Butler's oft cited assertion that our gendered acts—from the way we carry ourselves, the manner in which we speak, to the spaces that we inhabit, and how we inhabit those spaces—serves to produce the self that those acts are so often interpreted as being merely a representation of our "gender core"
(Butler 1990, 278). For instance, Butler observes:
Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self (Butler 1999, 179).
Subsequently, it is through the repetition of these patterned styles that we turn into the gendered self that we have been taught, disciplined, or learnt to perform. Moving beyond a simple application of Butler's notion of the repetition of actions to the arena of
Super Girl, one witnesses how the emergence of a new media model based on instantaneous mobile uploads, blogging, digital consumption, and the bouncing back of personalized feeds through social networking forums, facilitates articulations of national
21 identities as they become taught, contested, reinvented, and re-circulated in an endless media flow.
Historically, articulations and performances of nationhood in the 1920s and 1930s in China took place in urban centers with thriving cultural production industries such as
Shanghai and were articulated through the realm of print advertising. 'The stylization of the [national] body', to amend Butler's phrase, which was always a female body, were commissioned by European traders and local Chinese companies for advertisements in calendars to sell imported Western commodities that were also symbols of 'modernity' and 'progress,' such as telephones, pianos, phonographs, and electrical stoves (Qing
2005, 328). In these commercial calendars, the "modern girl" would be depicted engaging in a number of "modern" pastimes such as playing tennis, swimming, and dancing and attired in the most fashionable clothing of the period. Barlow's study concluded that commercial constructions of the "modern girl" produced in the tradition of
Chinese watercolour calendars are located firmly in the semicolonial legacy of Shanghai, where transnational flows of economic and cultural capital in the region strongly influenced the creation of racialized and gendered notions of national identity and women's roles in society.
It is important to note, however, that the encoding of sexual desirability and attractiveness on the bodies of the young women depicted in the ads reveal a more traditional performance of feminine beauty that is specific to the Chinese context—a definition of beauty that is more demure, coy, and characterized by a wide-eyed innocence that is actually closer to the contemporary Japanese "cute style" aesthetic.
22 When American pin-up images were imported to Shanghai via the packaging on dry
goods such as cigarettes, the local population expressed extreme disgust and amusement
with the overtly sexual poses, overexposure of skin, and direct come hither gazes of the
models (Cochrane 1999, 41). Thus, local Chinese artists were employed by European
companies to create updated or 'modern' pin-up images that would appeal to the
traditional norms and values governing Chinese femininity and sexuality (Ibid, 42).
Cochrane's usage of the words "local" and "traditional," in this context refers to a
traditionalism carried over from the Qing dynasty but which rapidly disintegrated during
the 1920s and 1930s. In her research on the development of a commercial culture in
Chinese women's magazines, Carrie Waara notes that "Republican-era Shanghai style"
was not a direct Western import but that the Chinese population consciously rejected or
appropriated elements of Western style (in everything from architecture, advertising, to
fashion) to suit their own needs and desires. Thus, Waara calls the "modernism-as-
nationalism" ideology in the development of Shanghai's commercial culture as the
struggle for a modern national identity based on a constant negotiation and "rereading" of
imported Western ideas and influences (Waara 1999, 62).
Thus, while Western sartorial influence had an impact on the depiction of the
sleeker, more form-fitting cut to the qipao, and the widespread popularity of the permed bob, and accessories such as the fox stole, high heels, and silk stockings, the actual performance of a "modern" sexuality remained more local in nature. My usage of the terms "local," and "traditional," in this context carries connotations of a feminine
docility, demureness, and innocence carried over and indigenous to the Qing dynasty
23 mixed in with the Chinese interpretation of 'positive' attributes of Western femininity: that of a fresh-eyed, robust, ruddy cheeked schoolgirl engaged in sports such as tennis.
Frequently, the models depicted in the commercial ads would pose with their hands resting against their cheeks, with a fresh-eyed expression. Or if they were engaged in a
"modern" activity such as playing tennis, their glowing complexion, and sparkling eyes denoted a healthy, youthful femininity rooted in a schoolgirl charm rather than in the seductive arts of a vamp.
In a similar vein to Barlow's scholarship on the "modern girl" phenomenon, Tina
Mai Chen's research on clothing choice during the revolutionary Mao era, adds to the existing literature on processes of citizenship and feminine identity in the Chinese context. By focusing on the centrality of fashion in the "constructive process of citizenship as a gendered, raced, and classed concept" (Chen 2001,145), Chen explores the tensions between formal "sartorial discourse" and what people actually wore on a day-to-day basis in the early years of revolutionary struggle. Her study analyzes how fashion was deployed as a mode of governance by the Chinese Communist Party to regulate the body politic in accordance with alternative visions of socialist modernity.
Chen seeks to prove that contrary to popular beliefs about the anti-feminine peasant uniform of the period, and even against a backdrop where fashion was officially stripped of positive value, notions and displays of femininity continued to flourish, albeit in a much more "under the radar" manner (Ibid, 157). She describes four intersecting elements that shaped the shifting meaning of femininity and the larger relationship between clothing, citizenship, and gender formation in China: 1) constant recognition of dress and appearance as imbued with social meaning; 2) insistence that a true Communist does not concern herself with clothing but rather revolutionary struggle 3) privileging of the militarism-masculinity strand of the national narrative 4) depiction of women as full citizens (Ibid, 163).
Chen's research illustrates how the coding of nationalist projects onto the female body is another way to interpret 'gendered modernity' throughout China's history that is applicable to this study. While Yuchun's tomboy look sends a much more visible and explicit message about the empowered social role and identity of Chinese women, her sartorial system and body is used in a similar service to represent the identity of the nation. Her androgynous style becomes the subtext for a new gendered Chinese personality that actively strives toward material success, recognition and validation in the global markets.
It is apparent that in the context of Shanghai's semicolonial past, Barlow, Chen, and Edwards have already established connective links around themes of transnational capitalism, alternative modernities, and the construction and performance of an idealized feminine identity in the service of nation-building. The period where there are gaps in the literature are from 1970 to the present, where China's cultural production industries are undergoing a second renaissance in a socio-political context of increasing global flows and commodity exchange, not only with North America and Europe, but increasingly within Asia as well. Additionally, Japan's dominant position in intra-Asian flows of cultural capital can now be said to wield just as much sway as Hollywood's former influence on local notions of "modern" femininity - as was the case during the 1920s and
1930s in Shanghai.
25 It is clear that these printed visual articulations of nationhood from the 1920s and
1930s in Shanghai represent an exercise in negotiating what Bhabha calls "the image of cultural authority.. .ambivalent because it is caught, uncertainly, in the act of 'composing' its powerful image" (Bhabha 1990, 3). Captured on paper in the moment of visual performance, the nation seems untouchable and unchanging. However, the identity of the nation is actually constantly in flux, and former or current images of the nation shift in response to changing cultural, technological, and economic practices. Even the moment of production for semicolonial states such as China are not always stable, despite the drive to create a unified and seamless representation of one nation. At the time that the calendar advertisements were created, Chinese commercial artists regularly and liberally, applied their own creative license to what an idealized "modern girl" could and should look like. Most of the artists were given images of Western pin-up icons, such as Jean
Harlow, to imitate, yet were mindful that a direct importation of Western ideals of beauty would fail to appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities of the local population. While these depictions can be analyzed through an exoticist discourse that links the economic and structural occupation of Shanghai to the kinds of racialized notions of beauty that arose, one must also keep in mind that these images of nationhood contain selectively modified and hybridized Western and Chinese features in order to retain a distinctively local and national look.
The tensions inherent to the creation of a hybridized local and 'international' face for the historical calendar girl also comes to the surface when one applies Butler's principles to an interrogation of the Super Girl contest and the figure of Yuchun as a
26 stylized icon of'national newness'. As an individual embodying a coherent assemblage of both masculine and feminine sexualities, Yuchun's tomboy style successfully straddles the line between a heterosexist masculine and feminine identity. In many ways, her playful and fluid performance as an intersexual hybrid, may be compared to the similar effect that Butler's original example, that of a man in drag has on illustrating the performative aspects of all genders. A man in drag is understood to be imitating a femininity that he does not actually personify. However, this very attempt to turn into and to live up to an ideal of femininity exposes the impossibility of any performance being able to achieve the absolute essence of femininity or masculinity and exposes the illusory and imitative structures of all genders.
If Yuchun represents the 'coolest' tomboy of them all, in what ways does the positive traits associated with being a boy become normalized and legitimized through her performance on a national stage? What does one make of the inherent doubleness of
Butler's notion of performativity when Yuchun eventually receives a national stamp in her honour, yet Super Girl is officially banned from production after its 2006 season?
Within this 'complex field of relationships' (to use Butler's phrase), the Japanification of
Asia's popular cultural flows provides an interesting point of entry for thinking through the various transnational/local and producer-receiver connections that underpin the Super
Girl contest and made it possible in the first place.
Contextualizing Super Girl: From the Hello Kitty Effect to the Rise of Tomboy Cool
Prior to the emergence of Yuchun, the landscape of Chinese pop was dominated heavily by sweet-faced schoolgirls in pigtails and knee socks taken from Taiwan, Japan,
27 and Hong Kong; regions (with the exception of Japan, a nation that has historically occupied the role of the imperial power in the region) commonly referred to by Western economists as "little dragons" because of their thriving, open economies and well- developed cultural production industries in comparison to the anachronism that is mainland China (Gittings 2005,49). Subsequently, it is against the backdrop of a number of imported pop idol franchises, one of which was Shanghai Performance Doll in 1996 (a direct spin-off of Tokyo Performance Doll) that the Super Girl phenomenon emerged.
The incredible domestic mania over the contest marks the beginning of China's increasing presence in intra-Asian popular cultural flows not only as a receiver of culture, but also as a producer. In a region of the world dominated by Japanese "cute culture", a dominance that is masked by an innocent, moon-shaped Hello Kitty face and logo, Super
Girl is flexing its own tomboy muscles as a locally produced national hit that defies the existing "cute-style" sartorial regime as to what constitutes a youthful, "hip", and
"modern" commodified transnational and pan-Asian feminine identity.
My particular usage of the phrase, "the Hello Kitty effect", refers simply to a general pan-Asian (including diasporic networks beyond what is geographically known as East Asia) fascination with and consumption of cuteness that differs from the broader global fascination with cuteness, because of the different functions that cute culture serves for diasporic members and citizens of countries such as China, Japan, and South
Korea. In these countries, the Hello Kitty effect serves a different purpose in the national cultural imagination because, for instance, for members of the Chinese diaspora, the act of participating in the consumption patterns inherent to the Hello Kitty effect may also be
28 read as a way of accessing a sense of either shared pan-Asianness or alternative Chinese temporality depending on one's identity politics and self-awareness, and beyond the escapist freedoms that cute culture is more generally known to inspire.
Prior to the national frenzy around Yuchun, young Chinese women regularly and actively participated in the consumption of pop idols that adhered to a look that can be generally defined and explained by the Japanese word kawaii, which directly translates to
"cute". The "cute style" phenomenon that originated in Japanese idols has become excessive and developed into a mode of dress, behaviour, and lifestyle immensely popular throughout East Asia.5 Wide-eyed innocent expressions, extremely feminine and frilly clothing and mannerisms, and the consumption of a vast array of cutesy goods
(from Hello Kitty stationary to toaster ovens) characterize kawaii culture. More specifically, it involves the embodiment of a repertoire of behaviours that include demure facial expressions, childlike handwriting, singing, dancing, and speaking in a sweet, baby voice. Idols perform cuteness by posing with toothy smiles and demure or coy poses. The sartorial evolution of the "cute style" from the 1970s to today has meant that the original
"fake-child uniforms" (consisting of lacy, pastel coloured pinafores and baby doll dresses) that were previously popular with the idols is no longer the only look that is in fashion (Kinsella 1995, 229). The ever-changing cutsey sartorial system has broadened to include more quirky, tomboyish, and eclectic styles but the dominant and underlying practice of having a sweet and innocently childlike expression and way of carrying oneself remains a crucial hallmark of the performance of kawaii (Aoyagi 2000,231).
While both men and women take up "cute style", for the purposes of this thesis, the terms "pop idol" or simply "idol" refers to female pop singers. 29 When Yoshimoto Kogyo and Sony Music Entertainment teamed up with Japanese
retailer Yaohan to scout and sign four Chinese women from the city of Shanghai to form
Shanghai Performance Doll, the infantile mannerisms and uniform aesthetic look of the
adolescent singers turned them into the ultimate local ambassadors to mainland China for the embodiment of cute culture outside of their country of origin (McGray 2002, 56). The
immense popularity of Japanese idols in East Asia is an indication of the nation's
economic prowess in the region, and their parallel supremacy in intra-Asian popular
cultural flows. It is against this particular legacy and history of cuteness that Super Girl
stands out in its integrally "Chineseness", in its challenge to the dominance of Japan's cultural power, the Hello Kitty effect, and in contrast against images and performances of traditional femininity.
Judith Herd, Hiroshi Aoyagi, and Sophia Kinsella have produced case study investigations on the relationship between idol symbolism and identity formation for
adolescent youth in Japan, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan that also has a particular
significance for understanding how and why Japanese pop culture has had such an impact
on China. Musicologist Herd's (1984) study focuses on the performative element of idol culture and how it is associated with reinforcing the Japanese cultural value of group conformity. She asserts that through the performance of pop idol songs and ways of behaving and speaking, the idols create a sense of togetherness between the members of the same social group that they represent. Kinsella's (1995) study establishes the relationship between pop idols, the commercial frameworks that they are embedded in, and the female oriented youth culture that has blossomed in recent years due to Japan's
30 economic progress. Her study concludes that pop idols in the kawaii tradition represents that existence of an identity for young women who refuse to conform to patriarchial social roles and expectations in Japanese society. While the hyper-feminine aesthetic and behaviours associated with "cute style" appears on the surface to be highly infantilizing and hardly empowering, "being cute" also permits one the choice and the freedom to be young and playful in a consumer sociocultural environment where traditional values have little to no role to play in the decisions that one makes and in the social roles that one adopts.
Aoyagi's (2000) research on idol symbolism ties together the scholarship of Herd and Kinsella in showing how the need to conform and to rebel against predefined social roles connect in the desire to form a pan-Asian identity via the ways in which Japanese idols are produced and marketed. In speaking with Chinese, Taiwanese, and Cantonese youth who regularly consume Japanese idols, she discerns that particular qualities are deliberately attributed to the idols by marketing directors in order to meet the specific social and cultural needs of East Asian youth struggling to develop or access a pan-Asian identity against a tumultuous backdrop of modernizing economic reforms and sociocultural changes.
Aoyagi observes that Japanese idols are purposely marketed to have two key qualities: to be "life-size" or toshindai and kawaii or cute. In most East Asian cultures, the desire to conform to group expectations and norms supersedes any desire to be unique and outstanding. Unlike the distinguishing qualities that make Hollywood stars into the
"larger-than-life" personalities that help garner legions of fans, Japanese idols are
31 deliberately groomed to be "life-size" and to be slightly "above average" in musical talent and appearance (Aoyagi 2000, 309). Herd observes that the desire to avoid being seen as outstanding is rooted in the cultural desire to not alienate one's fans and to cultivate the feeling that anyone is capable of achieving success if she or he works hard enough (Herd 1984,112). In Aoyagi's interview with Sun Music Productions President
Hideyoshi, he maintains that "to be 'life-size' is to publicly confirm that idols are not living in this world on their own, but together with people who are there to support them and whom they are expected to support" (Aoyagi 2000, 311). Thus, it is precisely the ability to be both "life-size" and cute that permits these pop idols to be the pseudo- companions of their teenage fans and to participate in an intimacy that evokes the bonds of an actual friendship.
Aoyagi and Kinsella theorize that the reason why the idol phenomenon has penetrated so deeply into China beyond the marketing efforts of Japanese music moguls is that this development may be linked to the emergence of a pan-Asian identity that allows youth to make sense of the modernization reforms at work in contemporary Asia, in a way that American pop culture is unable to speak to their experiences. Perhaps a hybridized version of the highly individualistic, 'every man for himself mentality of
American reality television formats would be more successful if the symbolism and rewards were negotiated and localized to suit the particular needs of Asian youth.
Further, the success of the idol phenomenon in China can also be partly attributed to the fact that it builds on another tradition of representing/negotiating 'gendered modernity' already familiar to the nation such as in the deliberate local tailoring of images of retro Hollywood pin up models via advertisements and commercial posters to suit Chinese standards of empowered feminine beauty.
Thus, although China does not have an explicit kawaii tradition as in the case of
Japan, upon closer examination of the mass produced and heavily Holly woodized calendar girls, advertisements, and commercial posters that emerged in the 1920s and
1930s in Shanghai, it appears that a similar underlying aesthetic governing the poses and expression of the young women does exist. Sartorial differences aside, the fresh-eyed, coy, demure poses of the Chinese calendar girls from this period in Chinese cultural production history bears a striking resemblance to the cute style poses historically and currently in vogue in Japan. Consequently, "the Hello Kitty effect" has a deep hold in
China, not only because of Japan's economic dominance in intra-Asian pop cultural flows, but because it hooks into loosely shared cultural values, anxieties, and hopes for the future of each respective nation and the possibility of a pan-Asian identity.
The Japanization of Asia: The Culturally Odourless TV Format
It has been theorized by Leo Ching and Koichi Iwabuchi that the export of what I refer to as "the Hello Kitty effect" in everything from pop idols, to fashion, to toaster ovens, is traceable to the immense influence that Japanese pop cultural flows exert worldwide and to link the effects of Japan's influence on the popular consumption patterns of Chinese youth with what scholar Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang identifies as a
"spatial mobility of subjectivity" that is at work in the development of a mass media in
China and the construction of a transnational Chinese imaginary (Yang 1997, 82). This
33 emerging "spatial mobility of subjectivity" is operationalized through and enabled by the processes involved in the rapid expansion of China's television industry, its need for commercially viable content, and the emergence of the Internet with its accompanying
Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mantra. Most importantly, it is this DIY ethos and the hunger to interact with other audience viewers as both content producers and consumers that has accelerated the need for individualized content and context generation best exemplified by the grassroots 'booster clubs' and bloggers behind Super Girl that launched the contest into the realm of a new technologically mediated public space.
Koichi Iwabuchi and Leo Ching's notion of the "culturally odourless" Japanese cultural export leads one back to David Morley's discussion of the deterritorialization of culture. The deterritorialization of culture refers to the break between culture and the local contexts, spaces, and traditions of its production. Morley observes that rather than understanding cultures as entities fixed in space, "we see a complex system of long distance cultural flows of images, goods, and people interweaving to form a kaleidoscope of unstable identities and transpositions" (Morley 2000,10). Iwabuchi's reference to
'glocalization' works off of Morley's idea of a portable, mobile cultural product or form capable of adapting to local preferences for the purposes of being disseminated across the globe (Iwabuchi 1999,179).
Thus, the "culturally odourless" character of Japanese cultural products (be it clothing or electronics) permits the nation to export a consumer culture to a
"modernizing" East Asia, legitimized by the claim of "cultural proximity". Iwabuchi goes further to assert that the consumption of Japanese pop cultural goods allows people living
34 in East Asia to feel 'a sense of co-evalness'—a feeling that they live in the same
"modern" period as the Japanese and share in a lifestyle that is alike enough to imagine that they live in an "Asian modernity" (Iwabuchi 2002,154). Aoyagi's work on idol symbolism indicates that Chinese consumers of Japanese idols allows them to access and to share in a sense of pan-Asianness, a feeling and connection that may be similar to
Iwabuchi's use of 'co-evalness'.
Iwabuchi's idea of the "culturally odourless" scent of Japan's pop cultural forms and products is synchronous with Anthony D. Smith's idea of the non-national character of today's cultural imperialism—capitalism (Smith 1990, 177). In today's global cultural economy, cultures are becoming decontextualized and dehistoricized as they cross national boundaries with greater ease - the capitalist framework into which these cultural products are being injected and translated erases all traces of national identity (Ching
1994, 214). Additionally, Smith notes that "these translation processes are accompanied by a technological structure that is really 'cosmospolitan' in the sense that the same telecommunications base will eventually erode cultural differences and create a genuinely
'global culture' based on the properties of the media themselves, to which the "message" will become increasingly incidental" (Smith 1990,181).
The development of a transnational Chinese cultural identity outside of the dictates of the state is strongly linked to a curiosity about the world outside of the nation's borders (Mitchell 1997, 65). However, the fact that China is undergoing a transition from a state economy to a "mobile capitalist transnational consumer economy" without giving up many aspects of state control complicates many of the uneven tensions
35 at work in the desire to consume and to be familiar with cultural products that were for many decades sealed off from contact (Yang 1997, 302). This transition is further complicated by not only the widespread availability of the Internet, but the way its social networking orientation is changing the way information is produced, circulated, re shaped, and accessed; making media-consumption leaps and bounds ahead of the official government and its major station, China Central Television (CCTV), in terms of providing access to unscripted and self-generated content. In Shanghai, the establishment of the Dongfang Dianshitai TV station and its subsequent popularity is reflective of the eagerness of citizens to consume 'new' cultural products exported from Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong but it is also partly due to the fact that this type of programming or television format (in the form of pop idol singing shows) is the only kind that its advertisers support, given the market-oriented model for developing profitable programming (Mitchell 1997, s67).
Michael Keane (2004) links the traffic in television formats in Asia to the notion that culture can be successfully formatted and extended across national boundaries without losing "local specificity or diversity" (Keane 2004, 57). Keane suggests that television formats are almost always created after the likeness of successful programs in other nations of origin, and as a result, produces "a chain of value that can be modified and extended across" borders as well as within national media and telecommunications systems (Ibid, 59). Television format franchising has seen its strongest growth in
Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Indonesia, and South Korea (Lee 2003, 98). The global- local dynamic that Keane observes where "formats are able to transfer diversity as well as
36 maintain local specificity" is found worldwide but most strongly pronounced in Japan— the nation that currently occupies the role of lead exporter to other countries in the Asia
Pacific region, in terms of cultural formatting.
The television format is a relatively new addition to China's burgeoning and increasingly globalized media landscape. While it could be argued that cultural content on television has long since been mediated and 'politically formatted' by the Communist
Party, the unprecedented spike in cultural traffic in television formats in recent years can be primarily attributed to China's accession to the World Trade Organization in
December 2001, the move to convergent service industries, and the globalization of programming (Keane 2004, 37). An example of the hybrid nature of the local-global dynamic can be found in the evolution of the reality game show format in China and in the success of shows like Great Survival Challenge and Into Shangrila (translated from
"Zouru Xiangelila"), both of which in many ways are the early predecessors to Super
Girl.
Historically, the concept of a 'winner-take-alP show was seen to be against the socialist values of Maoist philosophy and as a result, it was not until 2001 that prizes in large sums were permitted. When Survivor first became a massive hit in the United States and Canada it was expected that the format would also experience similar levels of commercial success in the Chinese market, but it did not gain the audience acceptance producers hoped it would. In the hybrid version of the original format, Chinese producers repackaged Into Shangrila as 'an exercise in anthropology and sociology' (Keane 2004,
41) where a documentary style of filming focused on the contestants' lives prior to and after the show ended. Additionally, instead of the million dollar grand prize that was offered on the original Survivor, Into Shangrila offered the contestants the ultimate prize of achieving national fame and glory simply by being seen on television (Keane 2004,
45). While the show was hardly a runaway national hit like Super Girl, it paved the way for a wider variety of reality game shows in China and more importantly, it pointed to a slowly growing desire on the part of Chinese consumers and audiences for shows that articulated increasingly individualistic fantasies of attaining immense fame and wealth.
The evolution of the television show format in China illustrates the adaptive and hybrid nature of programming to meet the social needs of a rapidly evolving Chinese cultural imaginary that is in the midst of formulating an alternative temporality for a nation of aspiring Super Girls.
It is possible to link the success of Japan in the internationalization of programming to the "culturally odourless" character of Japanese cultural products.
Iwabuchi defines the cultural odour of a product as a country's "racial, bodily, and ethnic" imprints that bring to mind stereotyped images of a way of life that is positively associated with a particular product in the consumption process (Iwabuchi 2002, 26).
Many of these associations are rooted in an exoticist imaginary such as in the case of
China, the image of the traditional one piece cheongsam 'Suzy Wong' dress for women or the delicate, bound foot. Thus, in the arena of television formatting, the culturally odourless character of Japanese programming in the form of shows such as Iron Chef and
Tokyo Performance Doll make it easier for Japan to export cultural forms as well as the technical expertise and knowledge on how to modify and 'indigenise' Western cultural
38 products (Iwabuchi 2002, 101). As a result of the rapid growth of a consumer culture in
China (spurred first by the widespread adoption of the cassette recorder, the telephone, the television, the VCR, and now the Internet), the space of the state is becoming displaced by "transnational spaces of orientation" (Yang 1997, 300). Thus, it may be said that the consumption and identification with the lifestyles and "roles" played by Japanese pop idols is an indication of the operationalization of this new portable spatial subjectivity in the construction of a "modern" Chinese feminine identity that increasingly identifies with the region's existing super power, and wants to share in its 'modern' and successful temporality as China itself is moving toward a more open economy and greater role on the stage of the world economy.
Uneven Cultural Flows: The Rearticulation of Yuchun's Chineseness
In the case of Super Girl, it was not so much the technology of television, cellular phones, and the Internet that 'eroded' Yuchun's Chineseness, as she became reinjected into the global, capitalist framework, but rather, that her Chineseness was given new avenues of transformation and re-articulation via the technology. Additionally, the historical timing of her emergence against the backdrop of China's booming socioeconomic development turned her Super Girl performance into a tomboy performance of neoliberal values that created a sense of co-evalness amongst diasporic
Chinese networks and for those who continue to reside in the mainland. If Chineseness is to be located in the cultural politics of the Communist Party, then it is without a doubt that technology and the twin forces of derealization and deregulation that have displaced
39 those former constructions. For the youthful consumers of Super Girl, however, the kind
of 'Do It Yourself cultural politics that the contest inspired had nothing to do with
official channels of political and cultural life. Instead, they were always imagining their
vision of what China's 'national newness' as embodied by Yuchun would look like from
an external, parallel society, existing solely on the outskirts of the state.
It is important to note that it is not my intention to argue that the Yuchun phenomenon is a sign of the imminent displacement of Japan's current dominance in
intra-Asian flows of popular culture traffic, (even in China at least). Rather, it is my aim to explore the implications of Yuchun's rise to prominence and the assertion of her image
as a signifier of "national newness" in spite of, or against a socio-politico-cultural context that is heavily shaped by the consumption of Japanese cute culture. The pluralism of perspectives in performing nationhood as previously illustrated by Butler, Mei-Shih,
Anderson, Westlake, and Bhabha begs larger questions of how to move toward a
definition of modernity, or more relevant to this particular study, the performance of
'alternative modernities' as set out below.
'Alternative' Modernities
By grounding the study of Super Girl in the recognition of the existence of a plurality of alternative modernities, I aim to contribute to the ongoing dialogue around
Chinese transnationalism as marked by unstable (and concomitant) displacements that move beyond the former Orientalist East-West binary in terms of both cultural forms and productions. Through assuming the plurality of alternative modernities, I seek to
40 emphasis the contradictory and hybrid features of the onset of late capitalist 'modernity' in post-semicolonial states such as China. The pop cultural phenomenon that is Yuchun may be linked to the emergence of a pan-Asian identity that has produced multiple and hybrid ways of being in the globalized context that incorporates the 'modernizing' processes of social, cultural, political, and economic change without duplicating the
Western cultural production or capitalist totality that accompanies those processes.
Dilip Goankar's writings on alternative modernities provide an excellent point of entry for this analysis of Super Girl as a strategy of "creative self-fashioning" that
Chinese youth have taken up by way of cultural reappropriation and negotiation (Goanker
2001,15). The current and diverse body of literature on modernity from postcolonial cultural theorists and anthropologists breaks with Eurocentric visions of modernity as a singular 'project' traceable to the Enlightenment and instead, pushes for an understanding of multiple modernities located in various historical and cultural contexts. By creatively self-fashioning their own meanings and vision of modernity, Yuchun's fans are mobilizing technology not only as a tool of the oppressed for reformulating Western modernity, but the contest also turns into the pivotal site at which modernity is recreated, as postcolonial citizens " 'make' themselves modern, as opposed to being 'made' modern by alien and impersonal force..." (Ibid, 11). The strategy as described by Gaonkar highlights the ways in which an accelerated rate of social, cultural, political and economic change resulted in the intensification of cultural difference rather than in the creation of a uniform capitalist totality. Thus, instead of arriving at some homogenous copy of Western modernity, postcolonial societies or in this case, semicolonial societies
41 forge new paths of existence that neither reject modernity nor blindly absorb the Western context that accompanied it (Gaonkar 2001, 19).
One of the most nuanced and powerful articulations of the notion of a plurality of modernities can be found in the work of Lisa Rofel who also focuses on the self- fashioned element of modernity. Based on an ethnographic study of three generations of
Chinese female workers in a silk factory in Hanzhou city, Rofel argues that the way in which modernity is imagined and lived out among the women depends on the intersection of one's social location (gender, class, work position, and age) with technologies of power such as nation-state, socialism, and capitalism (Rofel 1999, 32). In complicating the discourse of modernity by addressing the heterogeneous and personalized meanings that each woman brings to her imagining and experience of modernity, she also complicates Foucaldian notions of power and complicity.
This complication is highlighted in Rofel's recognition of Foucault's commitment to "excavate—and hold in tension—the discursive production of subjectivities and equally the ways in which ordinary people embrace, appropriate, and transform these as they recast their embodient of past practices" (Rofel 1997, 174). Indeed, what breakdowns occur when one takes apart the "forms of domination and exclusions enacted in the name of modernity", such as when the general public no longer needs to rely on the state media in the form of CCTV for cues on how to perform nationhood or Chineseness?
It is from this vantage point that Rofel explores the discursive practices of each generation of Chinese female factory workers as their local environment becomes
42 intertwined and eventually reinvented through the inclusion into a transnational context of global capitalism (Rofel 1997,29).
The alternative framing of modernity in its plural form anchors the discourse in specific historical flashpoints. Tani Barlow's (1997) conception of "colonial modernity" offers a "speculative frame" with which to explore:
.. .the infinitely persuasive discursive powers that increasingly connect at key points to the globalizing impulses of capitalism. Because it is a way of posing a historical question about how our mutual present came to take its apparent shape, colonial modernity can also suggest that historical context is not a matter of positively defined, elemental, or discrete units.. .but rather a complex field of relationships or threads of material that connect multiply in space-time and can be surveyed from specific sites (Barlow 2007, 6).
Barlow's conceptual framework behind "colonial modernity" picks up on modernity's innately globalizing characteristics, as noted by Anthony Giddens (1990) in his seminal text, The Consequences of Modernity; characteristics which can be traced back to colonial conquest and the emergence of European imperial expansion (Giddens
1990, 11). Additionally, research by Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini (1996) maintain that the cultural politics of modernity in China are neither a completely localized process or the realization of a universal discourse of Western progress (Ong and Nonini 1996, 31).
Rather, it gestures toward:
the kinds of modernity that are (1) constituted by different sets of relations between the developmental or postdevelopmental state, its population, and global capital; and (2) constructed by political and social elites who appropriate 'Western' knowledges and re-present them as truth claims about their own countries (Ong 1998, 35).
43 Yuchun's performance of self-fashioned neoliberal values as determined by the idealized traits that the viewing public of Super Girl attributed to her was very much a direct exercise in "creative self-fashioning". As a symbol of "national newness", Yuchun is emblematic of how local and transnational processes intersect to create a cultural politics grounded in new modes of production and communication, as individuals harnessed the necessary media at their disposal to knit together a collective narrative about their vision of an alternative modernity based in their personal values, dreams, and desires, complete with specific pathways to accessing it.
Conceptual Shifts: Transnationality vs. Globalization
It has been argued by scholars seeking to shift the conceptual frameworks through which intra-Asian pop cultural flows are examined that the vast majority of the existing literature on the globalization of media technologies and popular culture adheres to a binary dynamic based on the global-local orientations rooted in the "West vs. the Rest" paradigm. Research by scholars such as Koichi Iwabuchi, Arif Dirlik, and Leo Ching have pushed for a move beyond the limitations of this model by conceptualizing Asia as being composed of multi-ethnic and multi-national spaces of cultural production in its own right that have led to "a new mode of cross-cultural fertilisation and Asian modernities which cannot be a mere copy of Western counterparts" (Iwabuchi et al. 2004,
2). In order to move forward with this conceptual shift, scholars have developed and carefully delineated their usage of both terms: "transnationality" and "globalization".
This section outlines some of the emerging debates on the usefulness of either term. In
44 carving out the theoretical limitations and potentials of each concept, I illustrate how the global vs. local dimensions of popular cultural flows within China (that shaped the context out of which Super Girl was born), was not merely a matter of one-way American
Idol influences, but part of a larger process of multidirectional transnational flows.
My reservations around using the term globalization as a conceptual tool stems from the particular frame of reference from which existing theorizing on the topic has been traditionally conducted. It is commonly argued that the term globalization can be used to refer to both a historical chain of events or processes and a constantly evolving conceptual tool that is reflective of those changes. Roland Robertson broadly defines globalization as "the crystallization of the entire world as a single place" (Robertson
1996,21) and Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong similarly valorize the universalistic effects of today's multi-mediated communication technologies brought about by the forces of globalization.
In his seminal article "Print, Space, and Closure", Ong's description of the interactions of the second wave of oral communication and globalization as being marked by "its fosterings of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas" (Ong 1982, 56) contains some implicit notions of Utopian universalism that are eerily colonial in nature. This shared and idealized 'communal sense' enabled by advances in oral communication and globalization is hardly global in scope and can only be read as relevant to the experiences of Western imperial nations.
Indeed, the inherent universalism underlining the exalted possibilities of globalization obscures the historical record of violent conquest and colonial subjugation that preceded
45 and enabled these globalized networks of communication (and submission) to be created
in the first place.
Likewise, McLuhan's (1964) valorization of the "electric age" and the abilities of
these new technologies to bring back aspects of oral culture that were wiped out with the
advent of print culture contain similar assumptions. For instance, in the introduction to
Understanding Media, McLuhan echos Robertson's definitional notion of globalization
as the emergence of a "global-human condition" when he writes, "In the electric age,
when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole
of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in
depth, in the consequences of our every action" (McLuhanl964,20). Such universalist
rhetoric based on the idea that being "connected" equates to "freedom", "global participation", and "unity" obscures the inequalities that define what popular cultural
forms and products people can and cannot consume or appropriate and in what manner they are able to do so. In recognition of the power relations that mediate globalized popular culture flows, Anna Tsing points out that it is important not to dismiss those borders and limits created by power imbalances as inconsequential because even though
goods and people now have an accelerated flexibility in mobility never before seen in history, they continue to move within ".. .the geopolitical frameworks marked by national, regional, ethnic, racial, and gender distinctions that structure how culture
acquires meaning" (Tsing 2000, 335).
Within the realm of the cultural politics of diaspora, the notion of transnationalism is conceptually deployed to investigate the ways in which the current
46 unprecedented scale and speed of transnational flows of communications media, people, and goods has bypassed the legitimacy of national borders and identities from both global and local levels. The usage of the term in this sense draws attention to "new modes of unevenness, connection, and imagination crisscrossing the world that we need to come to terms with" (Iwabuchi 2002, 52). More generally, in recent years, the term transnationalism has been used to describe a context characterized by processes of globalization, "a condition by which people, commodities, and ideas literally cross— transgress—national boundaries and are not identified with a single place of origin"
(Watson 1997,11).
Aihwa Ong's model of transnationality (1998) offers a more fluid and holistic view of the transcultural global flows and practices that have been debated so heavily in studies of late on globalization. She discusses the existing bipolar model of transnationalism, where, on the one hand, the structuralist perspectives of sociologists and geographers means they are preoccupied with a political economy breakdown of "the global", and, on the other, social theorists, are concerned with "the local" as cultural. For instance, Ong notes that in The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey's emphasis on the Fordist regime of flexible accumulation and the rapid movement of capital elides any recognition of human agency and its navigation of cultural meanings "within the normative milieus of late capitalism" (Ong 1998, 3).
Harvey's notion of accumulation is based on the idea that flexibility characterizes labour markets and consumption patterns operating in tandem with "the emergence of entirely new sectors of production, new ways of providing financial services, new
47 markets, and, above all, greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation" (Harvey 1989, 147). Ong's research (1998) on Chinese transnationalism and 'flexible' citizenship fills in the gap in the literature on the missing element of human agency left by the economic rationalists and social theorists such as
Arjun Appadurai who tend to focus on how transnational flows of material goods, people, and knowledge become imaginative nodes for the production of "virtual neighbourhoods" and "multiple modernities" (Appadurai 1990,178). While Appadurai's contribution to the field is foundational to an understanding of how the processes of globalization ultimately produce "the paradox in constructed primordialism" (192), in the end, the social theorists are unable to shift the analytical parameters of the debate to include everyday practices of citizen-making and therefore remain, within "a top-down model whereby the global is macro-political economic and the local is situated, culturally creative, and resistant" (Ong 1998, 4).
Arif Dirlik attempts to move beyond the global vs. local binary by examining how both dimensions of globalization are "internal to each other" (Dirlik 1994, 32) in the same way that spatial markers such as nation and region are also internal to each other. It is because of the fact that globalization is characterized by the dual processes of fragmentation and homogenization (which occur on multiple levels) that also renders the global and local internal to each other (Ibid, 91). This relationship is characterized by a mutually reinforcing "embeddedness" that positions 'the global' as one part of a wider chain of processes, rather then creating a hierarchical chain of geographical configurations (Chen 2004, 8).
48 Ong's definition of transnationality (1998) builds on the usage of the term developed by Ulf Hannerz and Arjun Appadurai. Both scholars prefer the term transnational because it recognizes to a greater degree the more nuanced and localized manner in which the multi-flow of communication and cultural exchange takes place in particular locations without the more general 'one size fits all' connotations that the term global carries (Ulf 1996, 6: Appadurai 1996, 21). Ong's usage of the term transnationality seeks to invoke ideas about movement between spaces and borders as well as referring "to the transversal, the transactional, the translational, and the transgressive aspects of contemporary behaviour and imagination that are incited, enabled, and regulated by the changing logics of states and capitalism" (Ong 1998, 4).
Her conceptualization of the term prioritizes the "cultural logistics" and human practices of global processes that make Harvey's notion of flexible capital accumulation possible.
Chinese Transnationalism: On the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm
In the current body of literature on nationalism and globalization, it is widely argued that national identity is not a fixed essence but is discursively deployed and created (Anderson 1991, 12) It is further argued that against the backdrop of the processes of globalization which have made the world more intimately connected, nationalism is also becoming much more evident and pronounced (Hall 1992, 72). If
"Chineseness" can be liberated from its essentialist categorization as argued by Ien Ang
(1998), and be permitted to operate "as an open and indeterminate signifier whose meanings are constantly renegotiated and rearticulated in different sections of the Chinese diaspora", then being Chinese can mean different things depending on one's movement from place to place and the manner in which one has produced new ways of living (Ang 1998, 225). Ang's perspective is traceable to Paul Gilroy's pioneering work
(1994) on the African diaspora, wherein he emphasizes the need to interrogate the very category of "black", moving beyond blackness as a sign and disrupting the all encompassing, familial notion of blackness that can essentialize and imprison just as much as it can seemingly guarantee a safe political and cultural unity (Gilroy 1994, 203).
Furthermore, Gilroy's usage of the "call and answer" relationship (best illustrated in his discussion of Jamaican sound system dances in Britain) suggests how movement back and forth across the Atlantic can be seen in the significance of transnational flows of music as the site at which a Black British identity comes into formation. Music formulates a coherent cultural politics of the African diaspora through its intersection with race and nation and functions as the site or process where multiple fluid identities are created and maintained, as well to point out disruptions in the identity. For Gilroy, the
"call and answer" relationship is also a part of an ongoing diasporic 'conversation' about how music gets created in a new environment while continuing to carry the vestiges, or preserving aspects of its essentiality, shaped by the lived experiences of Africans in the
Diaspora.
Historically, during the process of slavery, hybrid strategies of communication were created in order to ensure linguistic survival. Oftentimes, coercive labour groups were categorically merged with others of various ethnic groupings and differing language, rendering previous communication practices largely useless and necessitating
50 the birth of new languages of resistance that became mongrelized versions of former languages. In this way, music rose to the forefront as the cohesive that permitted the articulation of stories about forced movement, shock, suffering, and survival. Moreover, music contextualised the emergence of these transplanted and fragmented cultures, because it memorizes and references a simulacrum of the past. In writing about the authenticity of Jamaican sound system dance in Britain, Gilroy notes the deliberate playfulness of language,
.. .records become raw material for spontaneous performances of cultural creation in which the DJ and the MC or toaster ... emerge as the principal agents in dialogic rituals of active and celebratory consumption. It is above all in these performances that Black Britain has expressed the improvisation, spontaneity and intimacy which are characteristics of all new world black music's providing a living bridge between them and African traditions of music making... (Gilroy 1987,164).
In the ongoing transnational dialogue between Yuchun's mainland and diasporic fans, how does the 'call and answer' relationship outlined by Gilroy operationalize in guiding youth towards accessing a sense of Chineseness? Out of this dialogue, in what ways did Super Girl emerge as a musical articulation of gendered modernity and subjectivity?
The inherent condition of diasporic formations lends a theoretical grounding for
Ong's formulation of the idea of Chinese transnationalism. According to James Clifford, one of the principle characteristics of diasporic formations revolves around the notion that multiplicities of locations comprise of the "decentered, partially overlapping networks of communication, travel, trade, and kinship that connect the several communities of a transnational people' " (Clifford 1994, 311). Thus, the instinctual
51 connotations of Chinese transnationalism almost immediately draws one's attention to the emergence of a "third culture" or a "third space" that "provide alternative visions in late capitalism to Western modernity and generates new and distinctive social arrangements, cultural discourses, practices, and subjectivities" (Ong and Nonini 1996, 11). Ong and
Nonini's version of Chinese transnationalism is historically located in European conquest, the mercantile colonial economy, and in more recent decades, the American military occupation of certain regions in the Asia Pacific (Ibid, 12).
Through situating Chinese transnationalism as a third culture, Ong and Nonini echo Mike Featherstone's intention behind his creation of the term. Third cultures are located in "a new type of habitus" characterized by "flexible personal controls, dispositions and means of orientation" that "frequently work in and inhabit a specific type of urban space: the redeveloped inner city areas" (Featherstone 1990, 8). My usage of the term Chinese transnationalism borrows from Ong, Nonini, and Featherstone and revolves heavily around this notion of a flexible new habitus that meets in space and time to connect with transnational communities of the Chinese diaspora, but I also want to anchor my usage of the term in the recognition of the kind of schizophrenic, double society that contemporary China has increasingly become, a 'third' social field that permitted Super Girl to emerge and take off.
Within this emergent cultural formation, what are the new subjectivities and identities that become constituted and legitimated? Indeed, if the Super Girl contest functions as a third space, or its own social field, where one can live out the day-to-day practices of citizen-making that is not permitted in the official political realm of Chinese
52 society, then what are the implications of this for locating genuine social power? Does this mean that there is a power shift in terms of who gets to determine new cultural formations and values, with the will of 'the people' (single-handedly responsible for 'the
Supergirl rebellion') beginning to generate greater influence than the official state?
New Cultural Imaginaries: Citizenship and Subject-Making
'Flexible citizenship' refers to the cultural logics of capitalist accumulation, travel, and displacement that induce subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions. In their quest to accumulate capital and social prestige in the global arena, subjects emphasize, and are regulated by, practices favouring flexibility, mobility, and repositioning in relation to markets, governments, and cultural regimes. These logics and practices are produced within particular structures of meaning about family, gender, nationality, class mobility, and social power (Ong 1998, 6).
Against the backdrop of unprecedented global capital flows within Asia, Ong's quote highlights a new adaptive approach by both individuals and governments toward a more flexible notion of citizenship. The existing debates on conceptions of citizenship exist primarily within an almost exclusively legal-political framework based on
Enlightenment processes of modernization, civic obligations and rights. For instance,
Angus Stewart observes that the current body of literature particular to Western academia on citizenship can easily be divided into two categories: state and democratic. State citizenship refers to the formal legal status of citizenship associated with the formation of nation states. The latter category involves the identification of citizenship around shared belonging in a political community in which citizens are political actors constituting political spaces (Stewart 1995, 63).
53 Other scholars in the field have focused on the unrealistic disparity between
capitalist structures and democratic citizenship. The contradiction lies in the
universalistic rhetoric of rights and the experienced and lived inequalities brought about
by market competition, immigration policies, and one's social location (Hall and Held
1989,175). For the most part, the vast majority of the current literature leaves very little
room for the consideration of any kind of subjective negotiation of power relations and meaning-making between the state, the individual, the cultural industries, and diasporic
networks beyond national boundaries as they are mediated by transnational flows of pop
cultural traffic.
Cultural Citizenship by Toby Miller (2006) is probably one of the few exceptions
in the field that directly connects consumerism (primarily, television news consumption),
individual identity, and citizenship in a more substantive elaboration of what cultural
citizenship can and does look like in the American context. However, the fact that Miller
does not map out an actual definition or conceptual framework for his contribution to the
current body of theory on cultural citizenship makes it difficult to pin point exactly what
he means by the term beyond "the right to know and to speak" (Miller 2006,14).
Additionally, Miller's lack of attention to the significance of multidirectional exchanges
and flows of transnational pop cultural flows restricts the usefulness of this text for the purposes of the Super Girl contest.
Where Miller's study on identity construction and American news consumption
leaves off in the current gap in the literature, Ong steps in with her article, "Cultural
Citizenship as Subject-Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in
54 the United States". In the article, Ong offers a dramatic conceptual shift in the manner through which one views the relationship between cultural citizenship, subjectivity, and transnational processes. She describes cultural citizenship as a process of self-making and subj edification embedded within relations of power traceable to the nation state and civil society (Ong 1996,741). For Ong, citizenship is constituted through the dual processes of subjugation or self-assertion in the enactment of these power plays. By utilizing
Foucault's notion of "governmentality" which refers to the relations that control the behaviour of subjects as both a population and as individuals, as an organizing principle through which she frames cultural citizenship, Ong emphasizes the "everyday aspects of citizenship making" (Ibid, 739).
In clarifying the two primary uses of the notion of popular culture in relation to citizenship, scholar William Uricchio moves the existing discussion forward with a slightly expanded notion of cultural citizenship by making a comparison between the cultural industries in Europe and the United States:
Creative activity—and, by implication, the meaning of creative industries—thus inhabits two very different cultural contexts. The project of using culture as a way of constructing and maintaining identity and as a space the enactment of an expanded notion of citizenship [Europe] contrasts sharply with the use of culture as commodity and the recasting of citizen into consumer [US] (Uricchio 2004, 80).
In a similar vein, and building on Uricchio's train of thought about the "uses of popular culture", Joke Hermes questions the democratic connotations attributed to the idea of popular culture as indicated by the work of John Fiske and John Hartley. Hermes' problematization of whether or not popular culture is truly democratic in its effects begs
55 the larger question of who is included and who is excluded from the notion of cultural citizenship (Hermes 2005, 9). She defines the term in the following manner, "Cultural citizenship can be defined as the process of bonding and community building, and reflection on that bonding, that is implied in partaking of the text-related practices of reading, consuming, celebrating, and criticizing offered in the realm of (popular) culture"
(Hermes 2005, 31). Like Ong, and Hermes, my usage of the term citizenship is more concerned with the everyday cultural practices of citizen-making in relation to identity construction, ideology, and the particular 'styles' (to borrow Hall's wording) in which new cultural imaginaries are envisioned and articulated.
Conclusion:
The particular historical timing of Super Girl meant that the contest could not have occurred 15 years earlier (or perhaps even at all) with the same explosive effect.
Rather, it demonstrates the extent to which the cultural politics of the contest were heavily embroiled in the emergence of a new paradigm of digital communication, made possible by the disposable incomes of China's rising middle class. This chapter has endeavored to provide the analytical room in which to examine the contest in the contexts of alternative modernities, the performance of nationhood, transnational Chineseness, and concepts of citizenship that focus on the day-to-day practices of citizen-making.
As a defining moment in Chinese cultural politics, Super Girl represents the articulation and manifestation of a new transnational Chinese female power, and more broadly, a statement about the particular personality of this newly defined Chinese
56 'national newness' and modernity. It is important to keep in mind that the performance of new cultural imaginaries and realities were preceded by decades of changes in society, in the cultural production and media industries, and in the increasing openness of China's television format industry. As such, the power to define China's image and her place on the world stage is no longer the exclusive territory of the state and CCTV, but rather, it can be located in a social matrix of the Internet, in channels of communication such as mobile phones and interactive reality shows, where citizens feel like they have a say and a claim in defining for themselves the nation's emerging social dynamic and direction.
By having chosen to segregate itself from informal information flows in this double society, the official government has also removed itself from the debates, experiments, and conversations where real social power is to be found, and undermined its role in shaping the most important symbols of the nation, even as a whole transnational community of aspiring Super Girls continues to gain momentum in achieving influence and cultural status.
57 Chapter Three: Methodology
Overview and Rationale
The chosen methodology for this research relies on a triangulated approach based on critical discourse analysis, textual analysis, and survey interviews. In order to investigate and to uncover the particular meanings that Chinese youth have attached to
Yuchun as the site for the articulation of a new nationalism and alternative modernity, I conducted 8 short-answer survey interviews over email with individuals who were members of two online fan forums: the "I Heart Chris Lee" group on the social networking website facebook.com and the Li Yuchun thread on tieba.baidu.com. In addition to the 8 survey interviews, I also conducted open-ended email survey interviews with Chinese filmmaker, Jian Yi, creator of the 2006 documentary, Super Girls! and with four self-identified tomboys from Chengdu, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong. The four individuals contacted me directly through tieba.baidu.com. Finally, the critical discourse and textual analysis portion of the methodology focused on 18 relevant English language newspaper articles and blog entries on the Super Girl phenomenon with a specific focus on the 2005 season and winner, Yuchun.
At this point, I would like to explain the rationale behind selecting only English language news items to include in the media discourse portion of my sample and for conducting the surveys in English. The focus of this research is on Yuchun as a signifier of "national newness" based in transnational popular cultural flows embedded within a global capitalist framework of deregulation and neoliberal values. Consequently, while media discourses in Mandarin and survey interviews with individuals who are not able to
58 respond in a written format in English, would have been immensely valuable in rounding out the perspectives provided, it is beyond the scope of this study to include a large enough sample of both language formats.
Additionally, my inability to read Mandarin as a researcher, and the logistical, cost, and ethical elements involved in procuring a translator also played a role in my decision to proceed with media and survey responses in the English language format.
Also, it is important to keep in mind that immediately after winning the 2005 Super Girl title, Yuchun immediately adopted an English name, Chris Lee. The deliberate and strategic positioning of Yuchun by herself and her management team, as an international icon and ambassador of Chinese transnationalism played a role in my decision to include only English language data sources.
Researcher's Role:
As a first-generation Chinese Canadian woman, I am aware of the personal influences and trajectories that I bring into my analysis of the phenomenon in question— assumptions that may be more reflective of my own social location and upbringing than of the individual, group or institutional practices surrounding Super Girl. Having said that, and acting in tandem with scholars like Shulamit Reinharz whose contributions to qualitative feminist methods in social research has successfully debunked the objectivity myth, I also share Reinharz's emphasis on the importance of self-disclosure from the researcher's point of view, the creation of a more equitable relationship with the research subject and researcher, and the benefits of self-reflection, collaboration, and inclusion as research goals (Reinharz 1992,180). Thus, I began this study with the understanding that
"there is no such thing as removing the observer from the knowledge acquisition process, since to do so would be like trying to see without eyes" (Stiver 1993, 410).
As a result, during the process of contacting individuals for participation and communication over emails, I self-consciously positioned myself not as an expert but as a woman with similar experiences as those of my respondents. In many ways, I established rapport by appealing to each participant's leadership role in the fan subculture, and in turn, I became the individual who had a great deal to learn. Additionally, my status as a first generation Chinese Canadian woman played a role in the way that my participants viewed me and influenced their responses to my questions. At least half of the respondents recognized me as someone a lot like themselves, in terms of our age and inclusion in the diasporic network of Chinese living abroad.
One survey participant sympathized with my frustration over being unable to read the fan postings on the Chinese Li Yuchun fansite, tieba.baidu.com, and observed: "Yes, it's OK, I understand why you cannot read or write Mandarin. If I grow up in Canada for so many years, I will forget too! Next time I make a comment, I will mention your research and post your email there if you like and whoever want to contact you can do it if they interested?" This participant identified with me as a Chinese Canadian woman who was struggling to reconcile the dual aspects of her upbringing and wanted to provide assistance that was within her means to do so. In many ways, this incident equalized the relationship between myself as the researcher, and herself, as the survey participant,
60 because she had access to resources and tools that I could not obtain access to without her
assistance.
Recruitment and Criteria for Participation:
This study uses a random sample composed of eight self-identified Chinese
women. The criteria for participation were fairly open-ended; I was seeking self-
identified Chinese youth, male or female, who were "active" members of an online fan
club dedicated to Yuchun. My definition of the term "active" encompasses the range
from someone who at one end of the spectrum initiated the online forum to someone who
is a registered fan on the forum. As the above sample indicates, I opened the survey to
male and female participants, but unfortunately, did not hear back from any males. At the
same time, this was not surprising given that the overwhelming majority of the fans on both the facebook.com group and tieba.baidu.com were female. Upon realizing that the
vast majority of Yuchun's fans were female (of all age groups), it occurred to me that the
data overwhelmingly suggested that Yuchun was a female articulation of Chinese
identity. The rationale for conducting survey interviews over email and not in person or
over the telephone had more to do with logistical execution and cost. Yuchun's fans are
geographically dispersed around the world and the administration of the survey over
email was the most practical and cost effective method of data elicitation given the
limitations and scope of the study.
Through the facebook fan group, "I Heart Chris Lee" and the Li Yuchun forum on tieba.baidu.com, I was able to identify individuals who fit the criteria for participation. In
61 my first phase of initiating contact, I joined the facebook fan group and posted a message on the "wall" of the group introducing my research, my contact information, and myself.
While this elicited two or three queries, the sample was too small to be significant. In the second phase of initiating contact, I cut and pasted my original description and individually messaged each member of the facebook fan group. Out of sixty-four fan members who were signed up to the group at the time of contact, fifteen individuals responded to my message and 6 actually completed and returned the survey. My reasons for selecting the social networking website, facebook.com as a platform for accessing fans were twofold: since 2005, the vast majority of Yuchun's online clubs had decreased to little or no active status and the facebook group was one of the few active groups in existence. Secondly, I rationalized that there was a higher chance that the respondents would be fluent in English enough to complete the survey since facebook.com is a social networking tool that originated in North America and the formatting is written in English.
I came across the Li Yuchun forum on tieba.baidu.com as previously mentioned through one of the survey participants that I originally contacted through the "I Heart
Chris Lee" group, who also happened to be a registered fan on that site. However, it was not until she offered to post the description of my study on the forum messageboards that
I began to receive email queries and to send out my survey directly to interested individuals who contacted me about my project in that manner. I received five individual queries as a result of the posting on tieba.baidu.com and out of the five surveys that I sent out, I received two returned and completed surveys.
62 Description of Data Sources - Electronic Survey Interviews:
During April 2008,1 administered and received eight completed short answer survey interviews over email. The participants are all self-identified Chinese women. The geographical origins and current locations of the survey participants are widely and evenly dispersed between urban and rural cities. Three out of the eight survey participants were born in China but currently live abroad in Canada and Australia in large urban centers, Sydney and Toronto. Two of the survey participants were not born in China but in Singapore and the United States (in Fort Worth) and continue to live in the same city of birth. The remaining three survey participants were born in China and continue to live there today. One of the three lives in Beijing and the other two continue to live in the provinces of Zhejiang and Chengdu where they were born, but in different cities. The women are between the ages of 19 and 35. At the time of the interview, and with the exception of two women, six were unmarried and with no children.
Out of the eight participants, two voted for Yuchun more than ten times during the contest, one voted three to four times, another participant voted once, and the remainder did not vote either because they became fans after the contest was over or because they were living overseas at the time. All of the participants who were living overseas at the time and were unable to vote indicated that they would have voted if the option had been available to do so. Seven out of eight participants cited the Internet as the primary arena for mobilizing fan support, communicating with other fans, and receiving information about Yuchun. The online Li Yuchun thread on baidu.tieba.com was the most frequently mentioned online forum to talk to other fans about Yuchun. Two
63 participants did not participate in the online threads or chat rooms at all and one of the two participants cited her satellite access to CCTV as the primary means of her engagement with the contest due to her lack of Internet access.
Out of the eight participants, one identified as bisexual and another identified as a
"tomboy", three left the question unanswered and three identified as heterosexual. All of the women identified as middle-class and one participant spoke of their family's poverty during the 1950s and attributed it to the Cultural Revolution. At the time that the surveys were administered, all of the participants who were living abroad apart from their immediate family were students living on university campuses. Two of the women with children still lived at home with their parents, as did the participants who had not moved from their city of birth.
Description of Data Sources - News Articles and Blog Entries:
The eighteen media articles included in the sample are collected from the period when international and domestic media coverage began to focus on Yuchun from August
2005 - July 2007. It is important to note that the media interest in Super Girl as a whole coincided directly with the spike in coverage around Yuchun in the abovementioned period. The articles in the sample are from the following news agencies or sources: The
China Daily, International Herald Tribune, The Times Online (British version), Time in partnership with CNN, People's Daily Online, Xinhua News Agency, China Digital
Times, The Baltimore Sun, afterellen.com, USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, www.womenofchina.cn, SFGate.com, danwei.org. At this point, it is important to make a note of and to distinguish the relationship of the state to the various Chinese media sources included in the sample. Danwei.org is a multimedia website with no ties to the state media in China. It contains podcasts, blogs, and video journals about Chinese urban culture, media, and advertising. Many of its published articles are based on translations from mainland media sources. The vast majority of its contributors are based internationally. In contrast, the China Daily is the nation's largest state-owned English-language daily newspaper. It has the widest print circulation of any English-language daily in the country at 200 000 per issue. The newspaper has branch office in most major cities of China as well as foreign editorial offices and contributors in several international capitals. China Digital Times is a news portal that publishes online in both English and Chinese and provides cultural, social and political commentary through technologies such as Wiki, social bookmarking, tagging, and photo and video sharing. The site is formatted to encourage dialogue and debates between readers, editors, and self-bloggers. It was founded in 2003 by Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project, which is based out of the Graduate School of
Journalism, University of California, Berkeley. The China Digital Times website is currently blocked and not accessible from mainland China. The womenofchina.cn website is directly affiliated with the All-China Women's Federation, a social arm of the
Communist Party of China, which was originally founded in 1949. The website contains a number of publications, news items, links to government funded research bodies and white papers, as well as updates on recent campaigns dealing with women's health and fitness. Xinhua is one of the two primary press agencies of the official Chinese
65 government and the largest centre for data collection and press conferences in the PRC.
Xinhua's, origins as an institution are traceable to the State Council of China. The news agency is also directly responsible to the Communist Party of China's Public Information
Department. Finally, the People's Daily is the official newspaper of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of China (CCP), published worldwide with a circulation of 3 - 4 million. In addition to Chinese, it has editions in English, Japanese,
French, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic. As the official mouthpiece of the CCP it regularly publishes directly on the viewpoints and policies of the state.
Analysis Strategies of Surveys
I administered and transcribed all of the interviews myself. Throughout the review and collating process of the data I kept a file of flash cards with key words and themes that continually emerged over and over again. In the initial stage of open coding I reviewed the written responses thoroughly to ascertain emerging themes. This was the most time-consuming stage because I had to comb through each survey line-by-line, oftentimes puzzled by the grammatical structure and vocabulary of the respondent. For many of the respondents, English was a second or even third language, and their hybrid and quite literal approach to certain questions posed a challenge in deciphering the meaning. As I read through the surveys and highlighted particular sections with a code word, I would also make a note of the same code word on my flash card and refer back and forth to the survey with each additional discovery. In the second part of the coding, also known as axial coding, I reread the transcripts and evaluated my growing list of 66 coded themes in order to pinpoint the "causes and consequences, conditions, and interactions, strategies and processes" of my preliminary codes and I sought out concepts that could potentially merge together (Neuman 2005, 321). At this point in the analysis I was focused on forging connections between ideas, key words, and themes. In the final stage, or selective coding, I examined the similarities and differences of all the themes in the data. This involved collapsing some categories together, organizing and elaborating on the ones that stood out and remained.
67 Chapter 4: Yuchun as a Site of the Instantiation of New Nationalism
Introduction
Benjamin Joffe-Walt from The Guardian coined the term "Super girl rebellion" to describe the unprecedented surge of support and emulation for the characteristics that distinguish Yuchun from "the old, introverted ideal of pretty-girl Chinese pop" (Joffre-
Walt 2005) — qualities that can be extended and applied to the articulation of a gendered new nationalism that Yuchun's image instantiates. In recognizing the multiplicitious, unstable, and fractious nature of her image as a constantly shifting field of power, meaning, and derealization, I describe the impact of the disparate trans-cultural, social, political, and economic flows that coalesce through her image and example. She is a representation of an historical moment, an actual site where economic and social forces have coalesced to make something of her. Yuchun is a constitutive event who animates existing intra-Asian popular cultural flows that are embedded within a larger global capitalist framework, at the point of their material and emotive emergence. As a symbol of aspirational consumption (to borrow Mazzarella's phrase), the meanings attached to her image were self-consciously produced by million of fans out of their desire to express a 'modern' Chinese personality. She is a new moral and cultural reflexion, a highly commodified national identity and process and a powerful representation of the "New
China".
Against the economic reality of China's increasingly dominant presence on the stage of the world economy, the language of personal transformation articulated by fans and media reports surrounding Super Girl coincides with and foregrounds a shift in the
68 acceleration of the nation's orientation toward a neoliberal model of industrialization and
economic 'progress'. In the realm of this language of personal transformation and what I
call 'perception of opportunity', Yuchun (and to a larger extent, Super Girl) becomes a
site of deregulation and derealization. My usage of the term deregulation is not to be
confused with the overall effects of the liberalization of the Chinese economy. I employ
deregulation to refer to the general period after the late 1970s in China when the
government initiated a process whereby a number of previously imposed restrictions on businesses and individuals were lifted and Special Economic Zones were sanctioned in
order to create regions that would benefit from more 'efficient' economic development. I prefer to use the term deregulation over liberalization in the context of China, because while the two terms have been used interchangeably to characterize the economic
changes that the nation is undergoing, China's increasingly 'open' market orientations with fewer and more simplified regulations does not necessarily mean that alternate
regulations have emerged to protect consumer's rights or to encourage efficiency, such as
anti-trust legislation, which is typically one of the primary hallmarks of liberalization.
Additionally, my usage of the term derealization is anchored in discussions of
globalization's delocalizing effects which include shifts in consumption to non-locally produced commodities and technologies (including popular culture) and increased
vulnerability to the actions of global corporate entities who are far removed from local
family, community, state, and nation (Featherstone 1990, 73). As a symbol and product
of these delocalized and deregulated effects, Yuchun becomes the site where local and
69 the transnational flows of capital have collided to create this neoliberal figure of
'progress' and 'modernity'.
The 'China Dream':
Yuchun embodies 'opportunity', 'success' and the realization of what Chinese filmmaker Jian Yi calls, the 'China Dream'. Similar to the 'rags to riches' narrative of the
American Dream, the 'China Dream' carries with it the implicit and integral belief that if you persevere and work hard work enough, you stand a strong chance of 'making it' - and 'making it' is defined in terms of accruing wealth and fame. In Yi's words, the
'China Dream' is:
.. .the realization of the marketability of one's talents as a natural response after the release from rigid Soviet/Maoist social structure. One can say in this sense, that the market poses a liberating force to an extent - at least people have a choice now and you can be who you are and pursue your personal ambition. Also the success of the show depended heavily on it [the market] and opened up a channel for people to really get involved and feel that they too can actually make a difference, either on their own lives or to support someone they really like. In this, I think it shows us the tremendous energy of people in participation... (Yi 2008).
The "liberating force" of the market introduced the ideology behind a very potent and particular kind of capitalist democracy to the Chinese population - a meritocracy, albeit in a very broad and imperfect sense to a nation of aspiring Super Girls. In the increasingly deregulated and commodified local environment, the lure of the 'China
Dream' tapped into what Yi describes as "the basic human instinct to want to be seen and heard and to make a difference" and was in reality, less of an exercise in civic participation or democratic organizing (Yi 2008). Consequently, in an era when Chinese
70 youth have the option to completely bypass official state media sources in favour of participatory forms of journalism via youtube and blogs, that are delocalized in their very form and origin, an entire generation gains access to an external world at an accelerated speed and media flow. This access permits a nation of Super Girls to employ their own self-creativity in order to contribute to a collective knowledge production about Yuchun, such as in building the context around the social field that she arises from, and to knit together a story about their dreams and how she serves as the embodiment of those same dreams, further strengthening her symbolic role as an icon of Chinese transnationalism.
How the Language of Personal Transformation is Operationalized:
The language of personal transformation and the 'perception of opportunity' surrounding Super Girl took hold of and captured the Chinese national imagination at this particular moment in history primarily because it was indirectly fueled by China's increasingly market driven economic and social environment. The language of personal transformation is operationalized vis a vis Yuchun's image in a two-step process. First, the language of personal transformation conflates the more general desire of Chinese youth for achievement with the particular cultural emphasis and pressure that is placed on the need to be successful in Chinese society (this success is typically defined in terms of providing financial security for the rest of your dependent family). Second, the language of personal transformation introduces an alternative transnational Chinese temporality with its own vocabulary of opportunity and empowerment on a scale that is widened to encompass access to all young women regardless of one's talent, wealth, appearance, or
71 social networks. While this language can obviously have a strong and meaningful impact on young boys, due to the particular focus of this study and the gender of my participants,
I intend to focus on Chinese women.
The point is that Yuchun embodies the qualities essential to survival and success in an increasingly neoliberal and deregulated environment. Consistently, five overlapping attributes reappear in the lists created by all eight survey participants when asked to describe Yuchun and when subsequently asked to create another list of qualities that one would need to possess in order to be successful "in the environment of China's ongoing socioeconomic development". The top five overlapping talents or qualities that appeared in the lists for both questions were: independence, strength, confidence, hard work, and
'sense of one's self or individuality.
When the survey participants were asked to explain in a short answer format the relationship, if any, that they saw between the success of Yuchun and "China's ongoing socioeconomic development reforms", the responses of the young women indicate two patterns. First, as the site of the articulation of a gendered new nationalism, Yuchun acts as a triumphant 'marker' or 'point of reference' for Chinese youth who are struggling to make sense of their position in a rapidly deregulated and capitalist society, amid changing social expectations of success that go hand-in-hand with modernizing economic reforms.
Second, Yuchun represents a kind of national "brand" identity and constructed mythology of opportunity and serves as both a role model and a barometer of success for transnational Chinese youth. At the same time, while she acts as an ambassador of
China's new economic power and confidence, she also literally performs and translates
72 this 'confidence' onto the (world) stage. For instance, a 29-year old self-identified
Chinese woman who was born and has lived her whole life in Fort Worth, Texas in the
United States writes, "I think Chris represents the up and coming youth in China through the way she sings and acts on stage. I think in the next 20 years, China will be a free country with free elections. I think the confident youth now will be leaders in the government and create a new wonderful country."
A 30-year-old schoolteacher from Beijing makes a more direct connection between Yuchun's perceived confident personality and China's newfound conviction in its presence on the world stage as an economic superpower:
With the socio-economic development of China people have got to be more self-confidence than before, which is one of Chris's most charming characteristic, and is also a common characteristic for 80's generation (those young people born in the 1980s). They know what they want, believe in what they think and value, and insist without doubt. It's unbelievable 30 years ago (even 10 years ago) when China was still in hard economic time.
Additionally, filmmaker Jian Yi sees a strong connection between Yuchun and
China's socioeconomic development as being located in a common national desire "to impress". He writes:
There is a strong desire to impress, to show off, and to display one's sense of self. All of the girls who tried out for the preliminary rounds had those qualities in them, and I would say that it is these so-called successful qualities that makes Yuchun and Shang winners, in the same way that China wants to be seen as a winner by the world. Nobody wants to be a loser or to support or vote for a loser. And if having those qualities is what it takes to be a winning Super Girl or a country, then everyone wants to be just like them.
73 A 22-year old self-identified Singaporean Chinese woman traces the relationship between the popularity of Yuchun and China's increasingly capitalist and deregulated environment to the commercial frameworks outside of the contest that enabled the contest to take place to begin with. She observes:
Her [Yuchun's] image and singing has a larger part to play for her rise to popularity. However, we cannot dismiss the fact that with China developing so rapidly and standards of living are increasing, fans are definitely more affluent than the past. Therefore, they will be able to provide more support for Yuchun by purchasing her albums (in bulk!), producing banners, voting via sms etc.
For a number of Yuchun's fans, her image is also the site of the enactment of a constructed mythology of opportunity and 'alternative modernity'. One 35-year old fan and mother from Beijing describes how China's economic stimulation by the forces of global capitalism in the 1980s has led to the emergence of individuals such as Yuchun as symbols of national pride and development. She begins first by describing the differences in the socioeconomic environment of her own childhood with that of her daughter's:
I was born in 1970s. In my childhood, although I was very familiar with Chinese culture, I didn't have more ways to know different culture around this world. There were seldom chances to me at that time to approach different music styles. My parents only paid on food, house, and medicine. Even now they don't get use to paying for a film or a live concert. They have such a consuming habit because they experienced a very hard period with China during 1950s and 1960s. They think it is a kind of waste of money on entertainment. And they can only enjoy Chinese traditional music and theatrics by TV and can't accept rock-and-roll, Latin music and opera.
Her four-year old daughter's upbringing is much more privileged and
'cosmopolitan' and involves a number of Westernized leisure activities such as piano,
74 ballet, and English lessons with annual trips outside of China "in order that she can know what is going on in the world". She compares the differences in the socioeconomic development of the two eras by referencing Yuchun as a marker of national development:
Chris Lee was born in 1980s. China's economy began to fly in 1980s. More and more families have enough money to send children to study overseas. Merchants and government officials search out chances to cooperate with big enterprises of other countries that benefits China a lot. Then, we have chances to know different culture in many ways. Chris Lee was educated in an open world and she was free to learn different music style. She likes Latin music most and forms her own style freely that attracts Chinese youth but sometimes not accepted by some traditional Chinese like my parents. Chris Lee maybe the first person to challenge tastes of traditional Chinese. I believe there will be more and more confident and talented youth come to stage. I hope my daughter is one of them.
For the participants who were self-identified as overseas Chinese belonging to a diasporic community, including two young women who had never been to China and were born in Singapore and the United States, Yuchun represents a comforting symbol of connection to the mainland who reinvents and performs a 'modem' Chineseness based in the idealized values of self-assertion, originality, and confidence. Unlike the sweet-faced idols of Canto-pop whose saccharine sweetness is probably even more unrelatable than
Marilyn Manson's goth anthems, Yuchun's proud androgyny is a marker of not only
China's new strength on the stage of the world economy, but speaks of a nation becoming more 'open' in allowing its citizens greater freedom in terms of economic and social self- determination (outside of the political realm) in how one is able to carry oneself, in selecting whom one falls in love with, and what unconventional career paths to take.
75 Reactions to Yuchun throughout the Chinese diaspora contain a number of fundamental differences to how music facilitates a conversation within the African diaspora. While Super Girl did not have its own explicit dialogical reappropriation of language (such as in the case of North American and British hip hop with the usage of terms such as 'thug', 'gangsta', and 'mutha fucka' in order to claim subjectivity),
Yuchun's nonchalant attitude does perform a validating rejection of China's previously subservient, semicolonial subject posturing to its imperial masters. So while Gilroy's "if you don't give a shit, I don't give a shit dialogue" does not necessarily occur in the linguistic sense of how the Chinese diaspora read Yuchun's nonchalant performance, the concept maybe altered to mean, "I don't give a shit, because now I can afford to not give a shit".
China can afford to "dress up" now and flex its own muscles in intra-Asian popular cultural flows and does not have to look to Japan for how to be 'modern' or
'cool'. All of the survey participants who identified as members of the Chinese diaspora maintain that Super Girl taught them how to be proud of their Chineseness again, how to
"stand up for China", and most of all, to be given the chance to be part of a transnational dialogue in handpicking the exact traits or qualities that they themselves want to see
"modern" China have. Where previously members of the diaspora looked to Japanese popular culture for accessing a sense of shared temporality and pan-Asianness, Super
Girl has emerged as another pathway of imagining and expressing a musical articulation of'modernity', nationhood, and subjectivity.
76 Yuchun is a powerful symbolization of images and processes of change - a site of triumphant self-determination and flexibility. For millions in the Chinese diaspora, who have only a vague idea of what it is like to grow up under Communist rule, an idea most likely shaped by accounts of their immigrant parents' struggle, Yuchun is a figure who makes sense to them, and whose nonchalant attitude is a living embodiment that they too can partake in a transnational Chineseness even if they prefer not to eat with chopsticks, and without having to give up other aspects of their identity as a Singaporean or
American. A 21-year-old participant describes why she became a fan of Yuchun after the contest,
I like Yuchun and her music because she is different from all the other Chinese singers with their smiles and peace signs. I usually never paid attention to that music because it's too lame and girly. But Yuchun is cool. She is like, what this generation of Chinese kids who grew up abroad needs, someone who just does her own thing, doesn't care what people think, and she's really successful, and doesn't have to be like everyone else, to be successful. Because in Chinese families, that's what they always want. It means a lot to kids like me, who have issues sometimes figuring out where I fit in here.
Another college student who identifies as belonging to the diaspora, but who grew up in mainland China echos a similar sense of comfort in Yuchun's image. She writes,
Yuchun teach me how to be myself. Just because I dress like a boy doesn't mean that I don't like to go with boys, it means that I can choose and be flexible and free, you know? Also, Yuchun is loved for her sense of self. And that is why I like her, she is like a symbol of opportunity for young people who maybe feel like they have to do this and do that in order to please their parents. But even my mom likes her! So I feel like, in this way, she represents how China is changing.
77 Yuchun as a national "brand" of opportunity, access, and 'cosmopolitan' tastes and education becomes a barometer and emblem of success for Chinese youth who may grow up within China's borders as in the case of this survey participant's daughter, and for the youth who are part of the diasporic network that remain connected to each other through the consumption of Yuchun'a projected sense of 'alternative modernity'.
Yuchun's performance of self-fashioned neoliberal values as determined by the idealized traits that the viewing public of Super Girl attributed to her was very much a direct exercise in "creative self-fashioning". As a symbol of "national newness", Yuchun is emblematic of how meaning and context becomes created out of new modes of production and communication, as individuals harnessed the necessary media at their disposal to knit together a collective narrative about their vision of an alternative modernity based on their personal values, dreams, and desires, complete with specific pathways to accessing it.
Thus, when one takes apart the "forms of domination and exclusions enacted in the name of modernity", and as the general public's reliance on the state media in the form of CCTV for cues on how to perform nationhood or Chineseness weakens, the mode of production of information becomes broken down and rendered increasingly more individualized via the exchange of global flows over the Internet to the extent that
Super Girl turns into a metaphor for a shift in the society-wide power structure, that translates in many ways to an enactment of an alternative Chinese 'modernity'. The fan discourse around the contest was not only a marker of society's neoliberal turn and the individualization of Chinese youth culture but it is also part of a new sense of citizen
78 mobilization as reflected in the voting behaviour inspired by the contest's SMS format and the larger fan culture that sustains the show. In a society where political expression is illegal, Super Girl became the embodied bearer of a new type of social power for which the government had no answerable antidote.
Super Girl as an Imaginary Pathway to Success
While the vast majority of media articles included in the sample focused on the
'democratic' aspects of Super Girl and located the national frenzy in the excitement around civic participation as facilitated by the contest's text messaging format, one author picked up on the 'perception of opportunity' aspect of Yuchun's appeal. In The
Guardian article by Joffe-Walt, the journalist cites Professor Chen Shangjun from Fudan
University who locates the primary reason for the popularity of the singing contest in the
'access to success' that it offers to young women. Shangjun asserts:
In every sphere of Chinese life - social, economic, and academic - it's simply too difficult for young people to beat everyone and win. There are so many restrictions and you have to be perfect and extremely lucky to attract any attention at all... [But with Super Girl] anybody, really anybody wanting to show off could take part. This is very unique in China (Joffe- Walt 2005).
The mundane harshness of life before Super Girl is repeatedly referenced by all of the articles included in the sample, including Jian Yi's documentary, Super Girls! In one scene of the documentary, when a young woman is asked by Yi to describe the day-to day routines of her life prior to entering the contest, her response is to the point, "I feel like dying when I wake up in the morning" (Yi 2006). Additionally, the universalistic
79 'everywoman' undertones that characterize the language of personal transformation is
invoked most strongly in the following passage by Gady A. Epstein from the Baltimore
Sun, "Super Girl has given every young girl in China - the daughters of farmers, migrant workers, coal minders or low-level government workers in far-flung provinces - a chance, however slim, of becoming a star" (Epstein 2005). In David Lynch's USA Today
article, the author presents two examples of the extreme lengths that young women went to in their attempts to enter the contest. The emotionally charged wording of the two examples evokes a sense of longing and desperation that is typical of the 'rags to riches' or 'once in a lifetime' story-telling genre. Lynch writes:
To reach the Chengdu auditions, one teenager endured a 15-hour train trip from her home in western China, according to a weekly magazine Liaowang Dongfan Zhoukan. It reported that a woman from Fujian province traveled to each city in sequence, losing in the first round every time. She spent more than three months' wages before finally abandoning her quest for fame (Lynch 2005).
Dr. Cai Lin, an associate professor at Tongji University associates what I refer to as this 'perception of opportunity' with the empowered feelings of 'uniqueness',
'creativity', and 'celebration' that ordinary women do not get to experience in their day- to-day lives (qualities that are also invoked when describing Yuchun's talents and popularity). As a result, Super Girl became the site for the imagination (or realization, in the cases of a very select few) of the 'extraordinary dreams of ordinary young women'. It appears then, that it is not so much the political and legal aspect of human rights freedoms that one typically associates with democracy that young fans and contestants of
Super Girl want access to - but rather, they desire access to opportunities for material
80 success and stardom. In the newspaper discourse around the 'democratization' of China through the voting format of the contest, this 'perception of opportunity' is likened to a
'democratic opening up' of the nation. In actuality, this notion of democracy is distilled down to its barest and most capitalist components. Dr. Cai Lin put it most aptly in her summation of the social change that is characterizing China via the contest, "If everyone begins to feel that they too can be on stage and show off whatever they like then this is a development in our culture from social bondage to democracy" (Joffe-Walt 2005).
The Commodification of 'National Newness': The Uniform of Individuality
Against the backdrop of the lure of Jian Yi's notion of the "China Dream" and hand-in-hand with China's rapidly 'modernizing' economy, there is the simultaneous emergence and valorization of a cult of 'national newness' reflective of China's newfound confidence on the stage of the world economy and best epitomized by Yuchun.
What this 'national newness' translates to for a nation of aspiring Super Girls as Jian Yi observes in his film is the desire to "be just the unique self and "to impress". Integral to achieving the 'China Dream' is the need to distinguish oneself, to be noticed, and in this manner, to achieve fame and wealth on the basis of being recognized for one's uniqueness. Thus, the commodification of the desire to distinguish oneself from others has resulted in the emergence of a tomboy aesthetic and uniform that has ideologically come to represent the outward 'look' or uniform of the performance of a 'national newness' and the emergence of an alternative modernity.
81 The urgency to assert one's individuality has articulated itself in the widespread national mania around the 'tomboy' aesthetic and the accompanying nonchalant attitude that includes the characteristics of being "outgoing", "confident", and "in control". The consistency of the unconventional sartorial systems and tomboyish demeanour of 2005
Super Girl winner Yuchun and first runner-up, Zhou Bi Chang, and 2006 winner, Shang
Wenjie, points to the prior existence of a normalized androgynous subcultural identity among Chinese youth in urban centers like Shanghai and Beijing that now appears to have become commodified within a global capitalist framework and taken on a life of its own as the national uniform of individuality. Whether or not this cultural identity can be directly traced back to what Tze-Ian D. Sang observes as the "butch-femme T-po" ("T" stands for "tomboy" and "po" is the Taiwanese word for "w//e") role-playing of tomboy/girl lesbian communities in the T-bars and university campuses of Taiwan and
Hong Kong from as early as the late 1980s (Sang 2003,226), is a highly plausible and interesting tangent but remains beyond the purview of this study.
For Yuchun's fans, it is her nonchalant occupation of this liminal space and performance of this interstital identity between preconceived gender constructs that makes her an "original" and "confident" national heroine. When asked by one reporter to comment on the Internet speculation that the primary reason behind her popularity was because young girls identified her as their boyfriend, Yuchun merely shrugged off the interviewer and refused to engage with the loaded gender role assumptions in the question, "I have no such feelings. That is their choice, I am an independent person"
(Yardley 2005). Moreover, the intense visibility of Yuchun's public performance of a
82 hybrid identity on a national stage opens up and legitimates radical new possibilities for
Chinese youth to define new imaginative ways of being a 'natural woman' (one fan's description of Yuchun) without having to resort to the binary and conventional masculine and feminine gender roles and types that are currently most visible on pop idol shows.
Clearly, the incredible popularity of Li Yuchun, and first runner-up, Zhou Bi
Chang and 2006 Super Girl, Sheng Wenjie point to the previous thriving existence of a tomboy cultural identity among Chinese female youth; however, it is the public enactment and the subsequent endorsement in the form of a national outpouring of fan support for these performances that gives these identities their long-lasting normalization, legitimization, and power. Previous ethnographic studies conducted by Chou Wah-Shan,
Tze-Ian D. Sang, and a more recent study by Carmen Tong Ka-Man (2001) entitled,
"Being a Tomboy: An Ethnographic Research of Young Schoolgirls in Hong Kong" confirms the common existence of same-sex female social bonds that include tomboy roles and identities. In an interview I conducted with a young woman who has lived most of her life between Hong Kong and Guangzhou province in China, she tries to explain the widespread popularity of the tomboy identity as she has encountered it:
I know some girls who simply don't like being/acting/looking girly. For others, it's simply a phase and I guess it's the influence of other tomboys who look 'cool'. As I explained before, a lot of girls don't get to meet guys in their middle school years, and they can only direct their affection towards these tomboys - 'replacements' for the male gender but in some ways, even better because as girls they understand how girls think. The good-looking tomboys become very popular and cool. I guess some people BECOME tomboys to attract this kind of attention.
83 As a result, Yuchun represents the 'coolest' tomboy of them all. The positive attributes and status that comes with being a regular tomboy (who oftentimes have relationships with both men and women) become enlarged and transposed to a national stage, the Super Girl contest. Even in the very processes of normalization and absorption into an official state identity, such as with Yuchun receiving a national stamp created in her image, the inherent doubleness of Butler's notion of performativity, with the continual and attendant power to both establish the norm and the power to challenge it, surfaces:
Performativity describes this relation of being implicated in that which one opposes, this turning of power against itself to produce alternative modalities of power, to establish a kind of political contestation that is not a 'pure' opposition, a 'transcendence' of contemporary relations of power, but a difficult labor of forging a future from resources inevitably impure" (Butler 1993, 241).
The dynamic and unpredictable nature of public participation in the construction of a 'new girl' Chinese national identity, reveals an emerging national culture that is part of a "complex field of relationships or threads of material that connect multiply in space- time and can be surveyed from specific sites" (Barlow 1997, 6).
The conclusions of my survey results did not explicitly connect Yuchun's androgynous image with a queer identity. However, it is important to note that the primary reason for this could have been the lack of access to Western terminology and language surrounding queer identity politics. Nonetheless, six out of eight survey participants were very familiar with the word "tomboy" and could describe what they thought this word meant or referred to. Their responses indicate that the English word
84 "tomboy" has become a term used to describe a new social role and identity for 'modern'
Chinese women who desire the same opportunities and rights as men, and who are no
longer obliged to live up to and to conform to the more 'traditional' ideals of femininity
in terms of how one should behave and dress. Additionally, flexibility in fashioning for
oneself what the term means and the 'freedom to choose' how one presents and conducts
oneself is strongly associated with the tomboy social identity. One survey participant's
response summed up the qualities that define a 'tomboy' best: "Being a tomboy doesn't
necessarily mean donning guy clothes and behaving like a guy. I think it all boils down to
an attitude - being a confident, independent girl with leadership qualities, without having to rely on guys."
Another survey participant's response indicates that the positive social value
placed on the personality traits attributed to tomboys may provide an incentive for
adopting this social identity. She writes:
It's her [Yuchun's] choice, maybe many girls' choice. You may like it or not, but can't say it's good or not. Boys with some girl's personalities are seen as patient, thoughtful and delicate, but girls with some boy's personalities are seen as brave and independent, and are said to have higher IQ and EQ. So I think it's good, maybe better to be tomboy than just girl.
The four self-identified tomboys who contacted me through the tieba.badu online
forum indicated that they were directly involved in some aspect of their day-to-day life in
a community of T-pos, however, none of the survey participants from the facebook.com
group or tieba.baidu.com indicated their belonging to this community. Nonetheless, a
self-identified femme tomgirl remarked on the insignificance behind this seeming
85 disconnect:
Maybe those fans of Corn [Yuchun's nickname] are still sorting out who they are, and then along comes Corn who has this totally boyish style who says, this is who I am, accept me. And maybe for the first time, they don't have to say why for who they are or try to fit themselves into a box. Who knows if Corn is gay or not? The media is stupid to care about who she sleeps with! The point is that there is for the first time in Chinese history, a pop star bigger than ever before, is here for her fans, and she is, through her image, and through the way she speaks, and just is, a figure that makes who she is seem like the norm without even saying one word about it, or actually doing anything.. .just by being who she is she is making it OK to be free and weird and cool and yourself. That is the point.
In China, where families have traditionally favoured the births of males, the empowering qualities associated with being a tomboy are seen as a way for young women to set themselves apart from everyone else, and to be able to adopt an identity that permits them to participate with greater freedom in an increasingly competitive and deregulated market environment. Jian Yi observes that in the filming of his 2006 documentary, Super Girlsl many of the contestants looked up to Yuchun and adopted a similar persona and manner of dress in the hopes of replicating her success. He observes,
"Given the success of Li Yuchun, there were many 'tomboy' type girls. On the other hand, girls who were too distant from being tomboys try to think of other ways to impress
- some were dressed in Red Army uniform, and some were very feministic looking, etc.
But overall, the tomboy type of girls were considered to have bigger chance". Thus, at the sartorial level, it seems that 'national newness' is defined in terms of looking as outlandish, eccentric, and original as possible. Even if one did not fit into the tomboy look, there were other ways to distinguish and to assert oneself. This desire to stand out,
86 to assert oneself as special and deserving of attention is the heart of what this 'national newness' is all about.
It would seem that the commodification of Yuchun into a national "brand" of cool and success would have the dual effect of cementing her position as the ultimate
'tomboy' while also de-authenticating her original appeal. Jonathan Friedman maintains that within a capitalist system, the social act of identification is also an act of consumption of a set of pre-defined symbols that can only be purchased in the market place. Consequently, within the act of identification, authenticity suffers because it is
"undermined by obj edification and potential decontextualization" (Friedman 1994, 114).
The only authentic act possible within such a system is if it is also an act that simultaneously incorporates both the authentic and its commodification.
Yuchun's authenticity escapes complete obj edification because of her engaged nonchalance, a central facet of her personality that is frequently cited by six out of the eight surveys for her enduring popularity, even three years after her initial victory.
Overwhelmingly, the eight survey responses located Yuchun's authentic appeal in her
"attitude" which can be described as a simultaneous perceived occupation of an engaged nonchalance. One survey participant who currently lives in both Cambridge in the United
Kingdom and Chengdu province in China describes this engaged nonchalant attitude in the following manner:
She [Yuchun] just doesn't care about what people think, the management, or the money. She considers the music itself more important than the
87 competition, everybody said they didn't care about the results, but only Yuchun really didn't. Music is her dream, not a tool for making money. She insisted on it, ignoring anything else. In interviews, she never say more than few words. She is - how you say - aloof? I like this. She is real and keeps to herself because she doesn't care about the publicity and the magazine gossip.
Yuchun's enduring popularity three years after the contest, and the emergence of a nation of 'tomboy' singers and wannabes points to the absorption and objectification in many ways of her 'national newness' by the state and by transnational commodity flows.
Despite being upheld as the face of 'natural' womanhood, and adored for her 'proud androgyny', Yuchun is currently the face of MAC Cosmetics' Viva Glam campaign in
China. When the survey participants were asked about how they reconcile this commercial endorsement with what Yuchun represents to them, the survey participants made an interesting concession and distanticiation between Yuchun as a national icon and the commodification of her image. Their responses revealed a complex understanding and acceptance of the transnational commodity flows that Yuchun's image is embedded in, and the necessity of conforming to market forces in order to be economically marketable. One survey participant rationalizes the dichotomous relationship in the following manner:
Chris is forever in my heart as a natural, trueheart, no frill girl. I know this 100%. But at the same time, she is a singer and she must make money for her company, and being the face of MAC is a big honour and big contract. Chris is not too stupid to pass up this opportunity, and I understand her choice for doing this. Also, think about why MAC choose Chris - she can change how female beauty is look upon for so many young girls.
This strange dichotomous relationship can be further extended to Yuchun's absorption by the state and into the status of a semi-officially accepted public national
88 figure. While consistently derided by state officials during the 2005 contest for not being able to carry a tune and for being part of a "boorish" and "manipulative" television show that was denounced for the creation of American-style "stars" and "celebrities", Yuchun also had a stamp made in her image by the province of Changsha issued in the early part of2006.
Yuchun's Everygirl Relatability Factor:
The language of personal transformation and access to success is also facilitated by fan perception of the 'relatability' of Yuchun. While her tomboy look was celebrated for being 'different', 'bold' and 'proudly androgynous', it was also her simultaneous embodiment of the qualities 'crystal character,' 'truehearted', and 'hardworking' that endeared her to fans on the level of one's best friend, neighbour, or family member. This sense of 'relatability' that Yuchun offers, feeds specific social and cultural needs of
Chinese youth struggling to articulate and to assert a transnational Chinese identity against the backdrop of a number of modernizing economic reforms and creates a calming sense of shared temporality amongst members of the Chinese community who live within the nation's formalized borders and beyond.
As previously mentioned in the section on the export of the Japanese pop idol franchise to China, the importance of being relatable as a celebrity in the music industry in Asia is practically synonymous with being toshindai or "life-size", the Japanese term used to describe an intentional avoidance of being seen as outstanding. The desire to be toshindai can be found in a number of regions where the Japanese pop idol format has taken off, in particular, in places such as China, Taiwan, and Korea. The cultural desire to not alienate one's fans and to cultivate the feeling that anyone is capable of achieving success if they work hard enough is almost an essential element for success in the music industry of those aforementioned countries (Herd 1984, 78). Thus, it is possible to link the language of personal transformation in the media discourse around Super Girl with each fans' deeply personal sense of identification with her unconventional, imperfect, and unpolished appearance. For example, when asked to describe the point in the contest when she started to support Yuchun with her text messages of support, one survey respondent, a 30-year old schoolteacher who currently lives in Beijing, expresses her emotional reaction to Yuchun's 'trueheartedness':
I start vote for her from eight to six during the contest. At first, I'm not interested in the contest at all, two friends asked me to vote; then I began to watch the show and attracted by Chris unawares; I got to be active from five to three because Chris cried in six to five that shocked me a lot, I thought I have to protect her and support her like a baby sister.
This desire to shield Yuchun from harm and to want to care for her like "my baby sister" reveals a strong sense of identification with her on a fraternal level. This vulnerable side to Yuchun's seemingly impenetratable nonchalance might be a larger metaphor for China's vulnerability as a nation. Indeed, even as her status as a pop icon continues to rise and to gain legitimacy outside of China's formal borders, Yuchun remains largely a created symbol of the nation's new social and economic powers. As a symbol produced almost completely by her fans, it could very well be that those same fans deliberately ascribe weakness to her as a reflection of their own uncertainty in the face of new socioeconomic developments, despite their desire to appear confident and
90 capable in a new era of accelerating change. This sense of vulnerability continues to haunt China even as she transitions to her role as a 'modern' nation because it was only slightly more than half a century ago that she was referred to as 'the sick dog of Asia', first, by the Japanese invaders and subsequently, by the West.
The awkwardly proud yet vulnerable appeal of Yuchun may be partly accountable for her incredible popularity with women from all age groups. While the media reports in my sample focus on her popularity with young teenage girls, six out of eight survey respondents indicate that in their view, the single largest group of Yuchun's fans are
"middle-aged, white collar women." For example, when one respondent was asked to describe who she thought Yuchun's biggest fans were, she wrote: "Lesbians maybe? Not sure. But tons and tons mid age women also fall in love with her such as my mom, even though she is definitely heterosexual, she is also a crazy fan of Chris Lee."
In addition to the previously mentioned top five characteristics that the survey participants selected to describe Yuchun, the remaining four characteristics that repeatedly came up over and over again in at least six out of the eight surveys were:
'crystal character', 'truehearted', 'good' morals, and compassionate. When asked to explain the terms 'crystal character' and 'true hearted', the participants responded with
"clean morals", "traditional", and "be good girl, do right thing". However, it is important to note that the same survey participants who described Yuchun with the adjectives mentioned above also listed the qualities "strong" and "independent". Thus, it appears that for many of Yuchun's fans, in order for them to share a sense of identification and relatability with her, it is important that she not only possess the more unconventional
91 characteristics that distinguish her from her competitors and from traditional Chinese conceptions of femininity, but that she also simultaneously embodies a few qualities that are familiar and recognizable as of those that belong to a "good Chinese girl". In this way, the vision of alternative modernity that each survey participant constructs vis a vis
Yuchun is a highly personal exercise and expression of their hopes, desire, and dreams for their nation, themselves, and their daughters.
Articulations or Absences of Queerness
Survey responses with regards to the media speculation around Yuchun's rumored lesbian sexual identity indicated two patterns with regards not only to attitudes toward same-sex female desire in China but also in terms of the openness with which to have that discussion. While all of the survey participants viewed the rumors as a deliberate smear campaign, only one participant vocalized support for the possibility of Yuchun's identification with a queer identity. When asked to respond to how they felt about these rumors and why they began in the first place, half of the respondents indicated that they
"did not care about labels", that it did not affect how they viewed Yuchun and that they would remain her fans regardless of her "choice".
The remaining half couched their response in terms of how the homophobia of the wider population negatively impacted Yuchun's popularity and the significant harm that they believed was done to Yuchun's image because of the rumors, to the extent that
".. .lots of people dislike and even hate her just because they are told that Chris is lesbian.
It's hard to change their mind to know about the truth." While I did not have a question in
92 my survey asking the participants to define Yuchun's sexuality due to my reservations around offering and projecting my own Eurocentric labels of sexual identification, the overwhelming pattern in responses to the rumor question appeared to be that half of the participants believed Yuchun was heterosexual and asserted that it did not matter how she identified her sexual orientation.
The most striking aspect of this portion of the survey is that half of the participants simply left the question around the lesbian rumors concerning Yuchun's sexuality blank and avoided it altogether. Further, it is also important to note that as part of the preliminary set of questions in the survey, I offered participants a wide range of sexual orientations to choose from with room to elaborate on a self-identified label of their own choosing but this question was largely left unanswered by the majority of participants. It is possible to theorize that this deliberate avoidance and absence of a response is not rooted in general apathy but to a lack of access to the terminology of queer identity politics that has become so part of the everyday vernacular in the West.
When I asked the self-identified tomboys and tomgirls who contacted me about my project to explain their take on this silence, one graduate student offered this response,
Are you kidding me?? Do you think people are familiar with the words 'transgender' and 'queer' just because they watch youtube!? I also think that because the issue of Yuchun's sexuality has been used against her so much and to bash her out really, that most of her fans simply don't know how to approach your question. Plus, they probably want to give you an answer that makes Yuchun look good and they don't have the words to express sexuality in labels that you would want them to so they just avoided it.
While Yuchun is clearly a startling and unconventional symbol of gendered
93 Chinese alternative 'modernity', it is more difficult to decisively conclude that she is
equally a transgressive symbol of queerness and social mobilization towards a subcultural
transgendered identity. This difficulty in ascribing a purely transgressive element to her
image arises from the particular social value and meaning given to the characteristics that
form the core of her identity. More specifically, in a Chinese cultural context where the
masculine traits of strength, confidence, and self-determination are praised, young
women who fulfill these criteria are looked upon in a much more favourable light than
males who may choose to cross over into what may be considered the truly transgressive
realm of adopting feminine social roles and sexualities. The implications of the
transgressive limitations of Yuchun's image for the performance of nationhood have a
direct correlation with China's built-in sense of vulnerability even as she is ascending to
world power status.
It goes back to the question of just how much of Yuchun's popularity is based on
her bravado of nonchalance and her queer positive 'uniform' alone? And if the transgressive element of her image is rooted in being a marker of distinction and
separation, how sustainable is her influence? And while there is certainly significant
social power in her once-in-a-lifetime Super Girl moment alone, the fact that Yuchun's
idealized traits are derived from existing cultural valorizations of traditional Chinese masculinity speaks to the transgressive limitations of her image. These boundaries also
speaks volumes about the doubts and suspicions that continue to haunt China's notion of
itself as a 'modern' nation, even as she continues to move toward a more central and
enlarged role on the stage of the world economy.
94 Media Discourse around the 'Opening up of China' through Deregulation vs. Democracy
The language around the democratic 'opening up of China' in the overwhelming majority of the eighteen articles included in the sample hinges around a construction of
China's national identity as that of a "backward" Other that stands to benefit from the
"participatory" and "grassroots" organizing that has overflowed from the Super Girl contest. It is undeniable that the text-messaging format of the contest opened up discussions around democracy and political transformation but the contest as a whole, and as a constitutive event, was really the site for the expression of the unruly and unintended (or 'liberatory' in the words of the journalists covering the contest) effects of an increasingly market-oriented environment embedded in a capitalist framework and transnational flows of exchange. While only two articles position Super Girl as a local phenomenon that was the brain child of a producer named Liao Ke from Hunan province, the vast majority trace Super Girl's format to Britain's Pop Idol and the United State's
American Idol, thus attributing the national mania to 'vote' to the benevolent export and influence of Western popular cultural flows. In reality, the discourse around democracy obscures the real forces behind the opening up of China—that of economic deregulation and derealization.
While the media discourse around China's national identity is blatantly racist and embedded within Orientalist stereotypes and tropes, Super Girl is frequently positioned as a beacon of 'democracy' (because of its Westernized voting format) with the figure of
Yuchun as the benign, liberatory face of modernization. The inherent political illiteracy
95 and 'backwardness' of rural or Communist China is repeatedly used to set up a contrast between the Communist China that refuses to literally 'get with the program' and the more youthful and democratically inclined portions of China's population that is tapped into the Super Girl phenomenon via new digital technologies. For instance, Robert
Marquand opens up his article for the Christian Science Moniter with, "In China, Super
Girl created a stir from bamboo forest villages to the crab shacks of Shanghai..." (2005).
Similarly, Lynch refers to the city of Changsha, one of the locations where the regional finals were held as "a polluted industrial backwater known for its spicy food and its link to Mao Zedong..." (2005). Additionally, Lynch opens his article on the contest with a description of contemporary China that conforms to a covertly racist and common
Western stereotype of urban Chinese youth as 'spoiled, little emperors' reared in a nation increasingly characterized as mercenary and robotic in its economic development and
"relentlessly commercial, individualistic, and apolitical" (Lynch 2005). However, despite
Lynch's characterization, he offers an interesting explanation for the factors responsible for turning the contest into a national success at this particular moment in Chinese history. He locates the intense nation-wide motivation for becoming the next Super Girl not just in the desire for self-expression but in a combination of factors: China's rising standard of living for an ever-expanding middle-class, the emergence of a greater variety of entertainment formats on television, but mostly, the desire for material success, or put more simply: money.
In 15 out of the 18 articles included in the sample, quotes from students or
Chinese academics who extol the 'democratic' or 'liberating' effects of Super Girl are
96 placed directly next to or underneath quotes from state officials who are critical of the
contest. From the Christian Science Monitor article, Marquand includes the excited
reaction of a young student from the Beijing Foreign Language Institute regarding the
freedom to choose one's song repertoire, "The whole thing is about singing whatever you
want, and millions of young girls in those provinces have never had that chance before."
Immediately after this quote, Marquand quotes specific adjectives from an official
statement released by China Central TV (CCTV), the national state-run broadcaster. The
highlighted adjectives used to describe Super Girl include "vulgar", "manipulative", and
"boorish" (2005).
The overly effusive and idealistic characterization of the 'democratic' nature of
Super Girl by Western media reports not only carries paternalistic undertones, but it
obscures the complex translation of these so-called electoral practices to the day-to-day
fan campaigns. Jian Yi describes some of the "experiments in electoral practice" that he
witnessed in the 2006 season,
I believe the campaigning must be better organized in 2006, thanks to the practice in 2005. In 2006, the campaigning was amazing - never before I've seen rally like this and never have I seen such spontaneous thing in my life - given the fact that we never had any real political election. In my film, there was even one guy who worked as "professional" rally campaigner, in the hope that he was to somehow also get famous if one of
6 The 15 articles were: 'Super Voice Girls' Challenges China's TV Culture from chinadaily.com; "TV talent contest 'too democratic' for China's censors" from entertainment.timesonline.co.uk; "Li Yuchun" from times.com; "China's 'Super Girl' singing contest creates 'economic miracle' " from english.people.com.cn; "The final week of TV sensation Super Voice Girls" from danwei.com; "China rockin' to 'Super Girl' " from chinadaily.com; "Sexual Politics No Longer the Same" from chinadaily.com; "Li Yuchun" from times.com; "Idol-style 'Super Girl Voice' a hit in China" from sfgate.com; "Pop idol TV Show stifled as Chinese get taste for having a vote" from timesonline.co.uk; "Super Girl" from afterellen.com; "China Under Spell of Mighty Super Girl" from usatoday.com; "In China, it's Mongolian Cow Yoghurt Super Girl" from csmonitor.com; "Supergirl Falls out of National Beauty List" from womenofchina.cn; "CPPCC: Exterminate the Super Girls" from danwei.org; "Super Girls Keep on Going" from xinhuanet.com.
97 the candidates he supported suddenly became famous. Very interesting experiments of election practice - looks similar to the American elections.
Chinese interpretations of American-style electoral politics ended up looking absurdly real-to-life in terms of the more mercenary aspects of political organizing— in the emergence of 'lobbyists' and professional 'campaigners' to work on one's winning
'ticket' but much less so in terms of 'political voting' and the emergence of a grassroots democratic awakening! The insertion of Western liberal democratic terminology by journalists to describe the Super Girl phenomenon is more often than not an exercise in the author's injection of his own experience of liberal democracy to the context of China.
For example, Marquand describes the style of "voting" made available by the Super Girl contest as "making a private choice in a public matter" and condescendingly observes that only a few "daring fans" make the connection between the text messages of support to "political voting". This comparison is a little baffling in the context of China where the notion of separate spheres of private/publicness does not have the same meanings as they do in countries like Canada and the United States.
The media discourse around Super Girl and the Yuchun phenomenon associates the particular formatting of the show with the nation's mania over 'political voting' and consequently, with the democratic opening up of China. However, this is not the case.
Super Girl became a success not only because people got a chance to 'vote' but because they were given a real-life, tangible arena to articulate and to act on their desire to realize the 'China Dream', which in the words of Jian Yi, was for most people, the equivalent of winning the lottery. Thus, the interactive element of the show turned into a national
98 selection process (and showcase) of the qualities that it would take to be China's next
Super Girl, who is most importantly, an articulation of alternative modernity and
economic prowess.
As a third culture, Super Girl created its own social field of meaning and citizen-
making where the official Communist Party with its accompanying rituals and teachings
did not matter. It became a place, where self-fashioned values from a new cultural
imaginary located in the digital world ruled. In many ways, Super Girl was emblematic
of the fact that China is increasingly turning into a double society, which is most
prominently visible in the way that the political system has become practically divorced
from the rest of society. What happens in the formal political realm, where citizens have
no real civic rights and obligations and what happens in one's own social and private
lives become two fully functioning yet alien systems with little to no chance of the two
ever coming into contact with each other.
Conclusion:
As a living symbol of the realization of the 'China Dream', Yuchun articulates a
desire for personal transformation through her successful embodiment and performance
of a specific set of neoliberal values needed for survival in the 'new China'. The tensions
and ambiguities of the alternative cultural politics that Yuchun inspired is exemplified by the mobilization from the margins across diasporic channels that turned the Super Girl
contest into a national phenomenon. Among other things, the language of personal transformation marks a shift in how a gendered modernity is performed and formulated from within state channels to an explosion of citizen engagement with a seemingly superficial, pop cultural construct of self-generated meaning located within a parallel new social field. This chapter attempted to show the deep-seated desires and tensions that led up to the assertion and creation of Yuchun's image and how she became an effect of the globalized, capitalist modes of production and commodification governing the structure of Super Girl itself. While it is accurate to assert that cultural politics is undergoing seismic shifts in China, as evidenced by Super Girl, it would be false to claim that the momentum and dialogue generated by the event would be sustainable and long-term without continued mobilization and support for this kind of engagement. Nonetheless, the
Chinese state's discourse of moral decay and dismissal of'boorish' low-brow pop culture indicates that there is a strong and growing anxiety about the emergence of third spaces of citizen-making that completely bypass the authority of official political life.
100 Chapter 5: Conclusion
The Price of Participation in 'National Newness'
Drawing on Mazarella's notion of 'aspirational consumption', it is possible to theorize that Yuchun and the 'tomboy' aesthetic represent the assertion of an alternative modernity and the reinvention of a contemporary transnational Chinese feminine identity within a capitalist framework. Mazarella's aesthetic politics of aspiration, when discussing the local Indian brand of Kuma Sutra condoms, has strong parallels to the qualities that are ascribed to Yuchun, with the desire for personal transformation through the consumption of her image and new modes of Chineseness. If this is the case, then what are the entry and exit points to this commodified gendered cultural citizenship? As one survey participant's response indicates, the price of participation in a commodified cultural citizenship for a young and "modern" woman in China is easily bought if one has enough money to buy a ticket to one of Yuchun's concerts, to wear the latest fashions in the 'tomboy' look, to have a cell phone and to be able to pay the cost for the 'text messages of support', to purchase her CDs and to donate to the many charitable organizations Yuchun is affiliated with.
On the one hand, as the survey responses of all of the participants who self- identified as a member of the diasporic Chinese community indicates, their experience of a commodified transnational Chinese citizenship may be different on many levels from that of a young local woman living in a more rural province in China, due to at least two factors: one's primarily expatriate or "Canadian" and "American" circle of friends and relative financial privilege. These two factors alone may influence one's ability to
101 consume and to participate in activities that exclude local women (such as the ability to buy a ticket to one of Yuchun's concerts). Their consumption and participation in the cult of 'national newness/coolness' via the 'tomboy' look has more in common with the consumption patterns of young women of a middle to upper middle class socioeconomic location in urban centers such as Shanghai and Beijing.
James Fairer labels urban female office workers in Shanghai under the term,
"white-collar miss" and describes them in the following manner: ".. .she works in the
Shanghai branch office of a foreign firm, earns a high salary, speaks English, enjoys the nightlife, marries late, is sexually active, and even dates foreigners and married men while engaging in a difficult search for a husband with even higher status and earnings than herself (Farrer 2000:100). Farrer concludes that in contemporary Shanghainese society, young women exert a great amount of financial, sexual, and social freedom.
Similarly, Jian Yi describes the appeal of 2006 Super Girl winner, Shang Wenjie in terms of her "white-collar" appeal:
Shang probably appealed to the ones who would really get to their cell phones and vote for her. She was a French-speaking 'white-collar', in a way representing the dreams of some other people. These people also like to see a modern Chinese version of Cinderella, like Li Yuchun—which was somehow everybody's dream at one point or another. One similarity between Shang and Li is that they were both quite "cool" in this sense and their fans I would wager had to be able to afford to vote first of all, and to identify with them.
Thus, the consumption and performance of the 'tomboy' identity may represent different imaginary pathways to the 'China Dream' depending on one's social location.
For the 'white-collar' survey participants who live in urban centers abroad or in China,
102 participation in the tomboy identity via consumption represents an escape from or a rejection of the confines of marriage, traditional gender roles, and the responsibilities of everyday life. For the older survey participant who has never left her province of birth in
China, but dreams of a life abroad for her daughter, her consumption of the tomboy identity via Yuchun represents a hope in a future where her daughter will be a "global citizen" with multiple passports and the political and financial liberty to move easily between countries on a high-earning salary.
The survey results illustrate how entry and acceptance into China's gendered notion of cultural citizenship is easily facilitated by the ability to consume and one's existing social location. The commodification of gendered notions of cultural citizenship via the tomboy aesthetic works to enable young women to access a sense of belonging, of being "in the moment," and of attaining certain pleasures (emotional, sexual, spiritual) that they may not be able to access in other spheres of their lives at work, at home, or at school.
This thesis offers an approach to analyses of Super Girl as a critical moment in
Chinese cultural politics. By integrating the notion of Yuchun as a social and cultural site of change through which to examine the aspirational consumer fan discourses around the performance of an alternative Chinese temporality, this thesis offers insight into the power of new cultural imaginaries. The desires articulated by these imaginaries, and that also arise from diasporic conversations and digital spaces, can play a significant role in shaping contemporary cultural politics. Moreover, images of gendered Chinese modernity have historically been pushed and pulled in a number of influential directions
103 based in local and external fantasies of idealized Chinese femininity. The contemporary, expressive arena offered by Super Girl to re-write and build meaning and context around a transnational icon of 'national newness' is part of a larger historical tendency to re write the 'modern girl' into existence in the 1920s and 1930s in Shanghai. In this way, this thesis has argued that the vision of alternative modernity that each survey participant constructs vis a vis Yuchun is a highly personal and aspirational exercise and expression of their hopes, desire, and dreams for their nation, themselves, and their daughters.
While the 2005 season of Super Girl may have come and gone, and is likely to never return due to the official government ban on the reality show, its lasting impact as one of the most crucial identity defining moments for the nation in recent history, remains. This thesis has maintained that Super Girl will serve as a reminder and marker for how, for the first time, a generation of Chinese youth came together in mass digital mobilization and through the sheer (consumer) will and desire of the people was able to articulate a transnational gendered image of Chinese 'national newness'.
The significance of idol symbolism in China is rooted in how the seemingly superficial elements of a consumer popular culture contains clues as to how power is culturally codified. Thus, in a society where political and civic life largely does not exist for the masses, the articulated symbolism of a figure such as Yuchun has much deeper levels of signification with regards to how one examines the manifestation of social, cultural, political, and economic configurations of power. In terms of configurations of economic power, this thesis also has shown how the consumer might of a rising generation of Super Girls marks the entry of China's booming economy onto the world stage. Furthermore, the reality show format of Super Girl was directly born out of an increasingly deregulated television formatting industry in Asia, in particular, out of increased competition within the Chinese television industry which was greatly heightened after the year 2000 and became the effect of the general trend toward that industry's commercialization. Thus, from the very origins of the contest, the Super Girl phenomenon was implicated in the development of free market forces in China.
Even when one takes apart the structural platforms that make Super Girl possible, it is undeniable that the economic power that sustains Yuchun's image and that propelled and facilitated her rise to stardom represents the up and coming economic consumer power of the next generation of Super Girls. The sheer numerical strength of the buying power of the contest's fan base is staggering. In a 1996 Kinsey report, China's urban teens were a 290 billion renminbi or a 36 billion dollar business. Surveys have revealed that not only do Chinese parents spend almost one-third of their income on their children but that Chinese youth also have the purchasing power to influence the parents' consumer habits as well. Sixty-five percent of Chinese teens said that it was very important to keep up with the latest fashion, 80 percent indicated that they prefer name-branded mobile phones, and 80 percent also preferred name-branded clothes (Kinsey 2006). In this way,
Li Yuchun, Zhou Bichang and Jane Zhang represent not only cultural and social power; their influence is also very much economic, since they are trend-setters for millions of consumers.
As the national audience of Super Girl voted for the winner of the 2005 season, they were doing more than searching for a winner. The fans were actively participating in
105 the construction of a Super Role Model who could represent their reality, their hopes for the future, and Yuchun became the super cultural code and symbol for what the new
China will represent and do on the world stage, as determined by the desires of the people and not sanctioned through the official channels of Chinese government. If Super Girl was a genuine and momentary articulation of an emerging new social field of power originating in the desires and dreams of the people, then the opening ceremonies of the
2008 Beijing Olympic Games represents an equally strong and decisive performance intended to reverse the power shift back into the control of the state apparatus. The highly coordinated spectacle of nationhood that was the opening and closing ceremonies of the
Games represents not only the literal arrival of China onto the world stage and the debut of its super power status but also explicitly declares that only the state has the authority to determine how Chineseness is constructed and performed. Furthermore, the platform of the Olympics provides the state with the official international validation needed to strengthen its legitimacy as the official channel of political life.
106 APPENDIX A
INFORMED CONSENT FORM
Date: March 2007
Study Name: The Mongolian Sour Cow Yoghurt Super Girl Contest: Desire, Femininity, and Cultural Citizenship in Contemporary China.
Researchers: Kiera Chion - [email protected]. (cell) 647-201-8799
University Affiliation: Kiera Chion is a second year M.A. candidate in the Joint Graduate Program in Communications and Culture at York University.
Program contact info: Joint Graduate Program in Communications and Culture 3013 TEL Centre, 88 The Pond Road York University, D 4700 Keele Street D oronto, Ontario DM3J 1P3DD Email: [email protected] Tel: 416 736-5978 DFax: 416 736-5945
Purpose of the Research: To investigate the culturally performative aspects of Yuchun's image and what she represents in terms of a cultural metaphor for a "modern" feminine identity for Chinese youth and new ideas of virtual and cultural citizenship.
What You Will Be Asked to Do in the Research: To answer a set of questions to be conducted via email on the Super Girl contest, the 2005 winner, and your participation as a fan in the process.
Risks and Discomforts: I do not foresee any risks or discomfort from your participation in the research.
Benefits of the Research and Benefits to You: To obtain valued information from "opinion-leaders" who have already engaged in mobilizing and participating in the Super Girl contest. This data will enable me to flesh out the implications of Yuchun's image for the creation of a national feminine identity in contemporary China.
Time Commitment: The emailed survey (2 pages in total) contains both multiple choice and short answer questions and should take no more than half an hour to an hour to fill out, depending on each individual participant's personal pace and needs. As the survey results are not particularly time-sensitive in terms of the nature of the research involved, the survey can be returned to the researcher at the latest, two weeks after the participant receives the survey and submits a faxed copy of the written consent.
Voluntary Participation: Your participation in the study is completely voluntary and you may choose to stop participating at any time. Your decision not to volunteer will not influence the nature of your relationship with York University either now, or in the future.
Withdrawal from the Study: You can stop participating in the study at any time, for any reason, if you so decide. Your decision to stop participating, or to refuse to answer particular questions, will not affect your relationship with the researchers, York University, or any other group associated with this project. In the event of a withdrawal, any data collected up until that point will be removed and deleted from the file sharing system (electronic and hard copies included).
107 Confidentiality: All information you supply during the research will be held in confidence and unless you specifically indicate your consent, your name will not appear in any report or publication of the research. Your data will be safely stored in a locked facility and only research staff will have access to this information. Confidentiality will be provided to the fullest extent possible by law.
Will the Research be Repeated: Due to the qualitative and time sensitive nature of the research, repeat studies will not be necessary. Issues of generalizability are not of central concern due to the emphasis that the study will place on the particular and specific meanings that each individual participant brings to his/her construction of Yuchun's image. Additionally, it is extremely important to obtain opinions on Yuchun while her popularity is still fairly high and "current". It has already been three years since the contest has taken place, not an insignificant time lag due to the fact that the Super Girl contest represents an "historical flashpoint" anchored in a certain time frame and socio-political moment. Thus, the usefulness of repeat studies in the future is not particularly high for addressing the purpose of my research question.
Storage of data: The data will be stored in a securely locked facility in a file sharing system at York University for a period of 2 years. Two years from the completion of the study, all hardcopy and electronic copies of the data will be removed and destroyed.
Questions About the Research? If you have questions about the research in general or about your role in the study, please feel free to contact Kiera Chion by phone: 647-201-8799 or by e-mail: [email protected]. This research has been approved by the Human Participants Review Sub-Committee, York University's Ethics Review Board and conforms to the standards of the Canadian Tri-Council Research Ethics guidelines. If you have any questions about this process, or about your rights as a participant in the study, please contact Ms. Alison Collins-Mrakas, Manager, Research Ethics, 309 York Lanes, York University (telephone 416-736-5914 or e-mail acollins(a).vorku.ca).
PLEASE PRINT OUT THE CONSENT FORM AND SIGN THE ORIGINAL. PLEASE FAX THE ORIGINAL FORM TO THE FOLLOWING FAX NUMBER: 416-498-3241. WITH REGARDS TO PRIVACY CONCERNS, THIS IS A PERSONAL FAX MACHINE AND NO ONE WILL BE ABLE TO VIEW THE CONSENT FORMS OTHER THAN THE PRIMARY AND SOLE RESEARCHER, KIERA CHION.
Legal Rights and Signatures:
I, consent to participate in (insert study name here) conducted by (insert investigator name here). I have understood the nature of the this project and wish to participate. I am not waiving any of my legal rights by signing this form. My signature below indicates my consent.
Signature Date Participant
Signature Date Principal Investigator
108 APPENDIX B
SHORT ANSWER EMAIL INTRVIEW QUESTION (with Jian Yi, filmmaker of Super Girls!)
1. During the filming of the documentary, you encountered a wide range of young women who tried out for the SG contest. In these encounters, what were some of the primary motivations that these women mentioned or indicated for wanting to try out for the contest?
2. I want to get a sense of the diversity (or perhaps uniformity) of the women who applied for the contest. Can you describe some of physical appearances and personality traits of the aspiring Super Girls?
3. What do you think it takes to be a "Super Girl" (in both a material sense - i.e. sufficient money to travel to the contest and in a symbolic sense)?
4. As you watched the contest unfold week after week, would you describe the process of narrowing down the contestants as an "exercise in democracy" or something else? Please describe the process that you saw unfolding.
5. Western media reports of the 2005 contest focus heavily on the "democratic" aspects of the "text messages of support" voting format and the emergence of online forums and campaigns on behalf of various candidates that took place outside of the official contest. Was there a similar national frenzy around "organizing" or "campaigning" on behalf of one's favourite candidate for the 2006 season?
6. In your opinion, what do you think the Super Girl contest represents (ideologically and symbolically) to the young women who tried out for it?
7. And to the youth who watched the contest?
8. During the 2006 season, as the selection process narrowed for the ultimate Super Girl winner, what were some of the emerging qualitiesof the final top ten contestants?
9. Did any of them stand out from the rest for you? And if so, what was it about them that distinguished them from the rest? 10. Many news reports liken the appearance of the 2006 winner to that of the 2005 winner and even go so far as to claim that the 2006 winner, Shang Wenjie, was a direct copycat of Li Yuchun in terms of her "tomboyish" appearance. In your opinion, what was it about Shang that made her so popular?
11. As a filmmaker who had insider access to aspiring Super Girls and their ardent fans (perhaps these two groups of youth overlap), do you think this contest was also a larger exercise in selecting a "winner" that had desirable qualities of a national heroine that resonated with the youth who were her fans/voted for her? If yes, can you describe some of those "ideal" or "successful" attributes?
12. What do you make of what Shang Wenjie represents? (This can be based on your own opinion of her or based on what you heard about her through your encounters with fans or both).
110 APPENDIX C
SHORT ANSWER INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
Chris Lee Survey
The objective of the following survey is to examine what Yuchun's image represents to a small sample of youth from within China and from the Chinese Canadian diaspora who participated as fans in the 2005 Super Girl contest. The questions are designed to investigate what Yuchun represents in terms of a cultural metaphor for a "modern" feminine identity for Chinese youth and new ideas of cultural and virtual citizenship and engagement. Please note that your name will not be disclosed in the presentation of my research results and will be held in strict confidentiality according to the Ethics Guidelines set out by York University's Office of Research Ethics (and as outlined in the informed consent form).
Most of the following questions are in short answer format - please take as much space as vou need!
How old are you?
Where were you born? (City, Country).
What city do you currently live in, if not in your country of birth?
Do you identify as Chinese in some way? If yes, please elaborate in what way.
Which of the following best describes you? Please circle as many as you feel apply.
Tomboy - Someone with similar style and way of behaving as Chris Lee
Transgendered - refers to individuals whose internal feelings of being male or female differ from the sexual anatomy they were born with.
Asexual - refers to individuals who do not experience sexual attraction.
Bisexual - refers to someone who is attracted to someone of the same or different gender.
Questioning - refers to a person who is unsure of his/her sexual orientation.
Heterosexual - refers to a person who is attracted to someone of another gender.
Homosexual - refers to someone who is attracted to someone of the same gender.
Ill Male - assigned or assumed male gender, is not anatomy dependent in this survey.
Female - assigned or assumed female gender, is not anatomy dependent in this survey.
1. When did you start to become a fan of Yuchun?
2. In what ways did you support Yuchun during the contest? For example, did you initiate or participate in any organizing via in person, in the booster clubs online, or through text messaging?
3. Did you vote for Yuchun throughout the contest?
4. If you did not always support her, when did you start voting for her and what made you change your mind?
5. How many times during the contest did you vote for her?
6. If you identify as an overseas Chinese, what media did you use to keep up with the contest? For example, how did you watch the episodes on youtube and chat with other fans online?
7. If you were allowed to vote as an overseas Chinese, would you have taken the time to vote?
8. List as many adjectives as you can that come to mind when you think of what Yuchun represents to you.
9. List as many qualities as you can that come to mind when you think of what it takes to be 'successful' in today's China.
10. What do you think makes Yuchun different from the other contestants?
11. Do you prefer to call Yuchun by her English name, Chris Lee, or by her Chinese name? Please explain your choice.
12. Why do you think Yuchun won and not the other final three contestants?
13. In your opinion and based on your participation in fan forums, who do you think are Yuchun's biggest fans? (i.e. teenagers.)
14. If yes, why do you think Yuchun continues to be so popular even though the contest happened three years ago?
112 15. In your opinion, is Yuchun still as popular today as she was when she first won? Why or why not?
16. During the contest, there were recurring and widespread rumors in the media about Yuchun's sexuality. Many newspapers called her a "tomboy" and connected these rumors to Yuchun's style and choice of clothing. In your opinion, why do you think those rumors began?
17. In your opinion, is it a good thing to be tomboy? Why or why not?
18. What do you think makes a tomboy?
19. Do you think those rumors about her lesbian identity harmed or helped Yuchun's popularity in any way?
20. Do you see a possible connection between Chris Lee's rise to popularity (in terms of what she represents to Chinese youth) and the socio-economic development of China? As you know, today China is transitioning into the role of an economic leader in the Asia Pacific region, just like Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan in former years. Do you think there is a relationship between Chris Lee's popularity and China's economic success? Can you please describe this connection if you think it exists?
21. As the face of MAC Cosmetic's Viva Glam campaign for Asia, do you think this contradicts Yuchun's tomboy image? Please explain in further details why or why not.
Thank you so much for taking the time to fill this out!
113 APPENDIX D
SHORT-ANSWER SURVEY QUESTIONS (with Four Self-Identified Tomboys/girls through tieba.baidu.com)
1. Can you describe what your experience of same sex female bonds has been like growing up in China?
2. What makes these social bonds different from same sex female friendships as you experienced it from female bonding in North America?
3. How common are these same sex female bonds in China? Are these friendships common across generations and age groups?
4. Would you describe these female bonds as encompassing a range of elements from sexual to platonic? Can one friendship have all three elements?
5. Can you describe or talk about the popularity or the existence of a tomboy/butch look for female youth in China? How common is this look and who adopts it?
6. What makes a female a "tomboy"?
7. What are the qualities of a female who is "tomboy"? Feel free to list as many as you can that come to mind.
8. Do traditional gender roles exist in these female bonds? If so, can you describe them?
9. As a self-identified tomboy/girl, how do you feel about Western labels of queerness?
10. Do you prefer to self-identify as a tomboy for instance over identifying as a lesbian? Please explain your preference.
11. Are Western labels of self-identification used widely in the tomboy/girl community in China? In your opinion, why or why not?
12. How are tomboys treated and viewed by wider Chinese society (i.e., family, friends, coworkers, etc.)?
114 Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Ang, Ien. 1998. Can One Say No to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm. Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field A (Autumn): 223 - 242.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. In Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity: A Theory, Culture and Society Special Issue, ed. Mike Featherstone, 56 - 62. London: Sage.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. The Social Value of Things. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Aoyagi, Hiroshi. 2000. Pop Idols and the Asian Identity. In Japan Pop! Inside the World of Japanese Popular Culture, ed. Timothy J. Craig, 110 - 127. New York and London: M. E. Sharpe.
Barlow, Tani. 1997. Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Barlow, Tani, Madeleine Yue Dong, Uta G. Poiger, Priti Ramamurthy, Lynn M. Thomas, and Alys Eve Weinbaum. 2005. The Modern Girl Around the World: A Research Agenda and Preliminary Findings. Gender & History 17(2): 245 - 294.
Bergere, Marie-Claire. 1981. The Other China: Shanghai from 1919 - 1949. In Shanghai: Revolution and Development in an Asian Metropolis, ed. Christopher Howe, 34-45. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Bhabha, Homi. 1990. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge.
Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Social Selection. Sociological Quarterly 10: 275 - 291.
Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.
115 Chen, Tina Mai. 2004. Introduction: Thinking through Embeddedness: Globalization, Culture, and the Popular. Cultural Critique 58(1): 1 - 29.
Chen, Tina Mai. 2001. Dressing for the Party: Clothing, Citizenship, and Gender- formation in Mao's China. Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture 5(2): 143-171.
China Daily. 2005. China Rockin' to Super Girl, August 30.
Ching, Leo. 2000. Globalizing the Regional, Regionalizing the Global: Mass Culture and Asianism in the Age of Late Capital. Public Culture 12(1): 233 - 57.
Ching, Leo. 1994. Imaginings in the Empires of the Sun: Japanese Mass Culture in Asia. boundary 21(1): 198-219.
Clifford, James. 1994. Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology 9(3): 302 - 338.
Clifford, Nicholas R. 1991. Spoilt Children of Empire: Westerners in Shanghai and the Chinese Revolution of the 1920s. New England: University Press of New England.
Cochran, Sherman. 1999. Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900 -1945. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series Press.
Dirlik, Arif. 1994. After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.
Dong, Stella. 2000. Shanghai: 1882 -1949. The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City. New York: Harper Collins.
Edwards, Louise. 2000. Policing the Modern Woman in Republican China. Modern China 26(2): 115 -147.
Epstein, Gady A. 2005. Idol-Style 'Super Girl Voice' a Hit in China. San Fransico Gate, May 29.
Fairer, James. 2002. Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Featherstone, Mike. 1990. Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity. New York: Sage Publications.
Friedman, Jonathan. 1994. Cultural Identity and Global Process. New York: Sage Publications.
116 Gaonkar, Dillip P. 2001. Alternative Modernities. North Carolina: Duke University Press.
Genosko, Gary. 2005. Natures and Cultures of Cuteness. Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_9/issue9_genosko.pdf (accessed July 2, 2007).
Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Gilroy, Paul. 2004. After Empire or Postcolonial Melancholia. London: Routledge.
Gittings, John. 2005. The Changing Face of China: From Mao to Market. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldkorn, Jeremy. 2005. The Final Week of TV Sensation Super Voice Girls. Danwei Magazine, August 24.
Gordon, Kim H. 2007. Player-Killer TV. EuroBiz Magazine, March 2.
Hall, Stuart. 1996. Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge.
Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. New York: Routledge.
Harvey, David. 2000. Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils. Public Culture 12(2): 529 - 564.
Held, David, and Stuart Hall. 1989. Citizens and Citizenship. In New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, eds. Stuart Hall and Matin Jacques, 78 - 95. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Herd, Judith. 1984. Trends and Tastes in Japanese Popular Music: A Case Study of the 1982 Yamaha World Popular Music Festival. Popular Music 4(2): 77 - 78.
Hermes, Joke. 2005. Re-reading Popular Culture. London: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers.
Innis, Harold A. 1972. Paper and the Printing Press. Empire and Communications. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Iwabuchi, Koichi. 2002. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
117 Iwabuchi, Koichi. 1999. Return to Asia? Japan in Asian Audiovisual Markets. In Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism, ed. K. Yoshino, 19-31. London: Curzon.
Jakes, Susan. 2005. Li Yuchun Loved For Being Herself. Time Asia, October 3.
Joffe-Walt, Benjamin. 2005. Mad About the Girl: A Pop Idol for China. The Guardian, October 7.
Ka-Man, Carmen Tong. 2001. Being a Tomboy: An Ethnographic Research of Young Schoolgirls in Hong Kong. M.Phil thesis, Hong Kong University.
Keane, Michael. 2007. The Great New Leap Forward. London: Routledge.
Kinsella, Sophia. 1995. Cuties in Japan. Women, Media, and Consumption in Japan, eds. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
Kruger, Loren. 1992. The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lee, Ou-Fan Leo. 1999. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China 1930 -1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lo, Malinda. 2006. China's Super Girl Li Yuchun. AfterEllen Zine, February 21.
Lynch, David. 2005. China Under Spell of Mighty Super Girl. USA Today, July 17.
Marquand, Robert. 2005. In China, it's Mongolian Cow Yoghurt Super Girl. The Christian Science Monitor, August 25.
Martinsen, Joel. 2006. CPPCC: Exterminate the Super Girls. Danwei Magazine, April 26.
MacCartney, Jane. 2005. TV Talent Contest 'Too Democratic' for China's Censors. The Times, August 29.
MacCartney, Jane. 2006. Pop Idol TV Show Stifled as Chinese Get Taste for Having a Vote. Times Online, April 1.
Mazarella, William. 2003. Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. London: Duke University Press.
McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge.
118 McGray, Douglas. 2002. Japan's Gross National Cool. Foreign Policy 130: 44 - 54.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. The Medium is the Message. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Mentor Press.
Miller, Toby. 2007. Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Mitchell, Katharyne. 1997. Transnational Subjects: Constituting the Cultural Citizen in the Era of Pacific Rim Capital. In Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, eds. Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini, 54 - 77. London and New York: Routledge.
Morley, David. 2000. Home Territories: Media, Mobility, and Identity. London and New York: Routledge.
Neuman, William L. 2005. Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Allyn and Bacon: London.
Ong, Aihwa. 1996. Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States. Current Anthropology 37(5): 737 - 762.
Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logistics ofTransnationality. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Ong, Aihwa. 1997. Chinese Modernities: Narratives of Nation and of Capitalism. In Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, eds. Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini, 67-83. London and New York: Routledge.
Ong, Walter. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York: Routledge.
Qiang, Guo. 2007. Super Girl Falls Out of National Beauty List. Women of China, July 19.
Qiang, Xiao. 2006. The State Administration of Radio Film and Television Restricts Super Girl. China Digital Times, March 19.
Qing, Miao. 2005. Super Voice Girls Challenges China's TV Culture. Shanghai Star, August 12.
Qing, Zhang. 2005. Cultural Exchanges: The Development of a Fashion Industry in Shanghai, 1919 - 1949. In Shanghai Modern: 1919 -1945 eds. Jo-Anne Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, 319 - 332. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers.
119 Radcliffe, Sarah. 1997. Remaking the Nation: Place, Identity and Politics in Latin America. Journal of Latin American Studies 29(3): 791 - 793.
Reinharz, Shulamit. 1992. Feminist Methods in Social Research. London and New York: Oxford University Press.
Roberton, Roland. 1990. Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as the Central Concept. Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity, ed. Mike Featherstone, 21-33. New York: Sage Publications.
Robertson, Roland. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage.
Rofel, Lisa. 2001. Discrepant Modernities and Their Discontents, positions 9(3): 637 - 649.
Rofel, Lisa. 1999. Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sang, Tze-Ian. 2003. The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Shiraishi, Saya. 1997. Japan's Soft Power: Doraemon Goes Overseas. In Network Power: Japan and Asia, eds. P. Katzenstein and T. Shiraishi, 102 - 114. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Shih, Shu-Mei. 1996. Gender, Race, and Semicolonialism: Liu Na'ou's Urban Shanghai Landscape. The Journal of Asian Studies 55(8): 934 - 956.
Smith, Anthony D. 1990. Towards a Global Culture? Theory, Culture and Society 7: 171 -191.
Stewart, Angus. 1995. Two Conceptions of Citizenship. The British Journal of Sociology 46(1): 63-78.
Stivers, Camilla. 1993. Gender Images in Public Administration. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Tsing, Anna. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Uricchio, William, and R. Pearson. 1993. Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
120 Uricchio, William. 1996. Displacing Culture: Trans-national Culture, Regional Elites, and the Challenge to National Cinema. In Trading Culture: GATT, European Cultural Policies and the Transatlantic Market, eds. A. van Hemel, H. Mommas, C. Smithuijsen, 67 - 82. Amsterdam: Boekmanstichting.
Waara, Carrie. 1999. Invention, Industry, Art: The Commercialization of Culture in Republican Art Magazines. In Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900 -1945, ed. Sherman Cochran, 52 - 69. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series Press.
Watson, James L. 1997. Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Westlake, E. J. 2005. Our Land is Made of Courage and Glory: Nationalist Performance of Nicaragua and Guatemala. Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.
Yang, Mayfair. 1997. Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re)cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis. In Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, eds. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini, 69 - 87. New York: Routledge.
Yi, Jian. Super Girls! Documentary release: 2007.
Yi, Jian, email interview to author, April 28, 2008.
Xinhua. 2005. China's Super Girl Singing Contest Creates Economic Miracle, September 16.
Xinhua. 2005. Li Yuchun Voted Super Girl, August 27.
Zhou, Raymond. 2005. Sexual Politics No Longer the Same Post-Super Girl. China Daily, August 7.
121