Underglobalization Beijing’s Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy Joshua Neves Underglobalization Beijing’s Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy Joshua Neves duke university press | durham and london | 2020 © 2020 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper ∞ Designed by Drew Sisk Typeset in Portrait Text, SimSun, and Univers by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Neves, Joshua, [date] author. Title: Underglobalization : Beijing’s media urbanism and the chimera of legitimacy / Joshua Neves. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2019032496 (print) | lccn 2019032497 (ebook) isbn 9781478007630 (hardcover) isbn 9781478008057 (paperback) isbn 9781478009023 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Product counterfeiting— Law and legislation— China. | Piracy (Copyright)— China. | Legitimacy of governments—China. | Globalization—China. Classification: lcc knq1160.3.n48 2020 (print) | lcc knq1160.3 (ebook) | ddc 302.230951— dc23 lc record available at https:// lccn . loc. gov / 2019032496 lc ebook record available at https:// lccn . loc. gov / 2019032497 Cover art: Xing Danwen, detail from Urban Fictions, 2004. Courtesy of the artist and Danwen Studio. Chapter 5 was originally published in “Videation: Technological Intimacy and the Politics of Global Connection,” in Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global, edited by Joshua Neves and Bhaskar Sarkar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). CONTENTS vii acknowl edgments 1 introduction After Legitimacy 33 1 Rendering the City Between Ruins and Blueprints 61 2 Digital Urbanism Piratical Citizenship and the Infrastructure of Dissensus 94 3 Bricks and Media Cinema’s Technologized Spatiality 120 4 Beijing en Abyme Tele vi sion and the Unhomely Social 150 5 Videation Technological Intimacy and the Politics of Global Connection 169 6 ­People as Media Infrastructure Illicit Culture and the Pornographies of Globalization 199 notes 227 bibliography 245 index ACKNOWL EDGMENTS This has been a slow book about fast changes. And like most first books it is indebted to many peop le for their guidance, care, and, perhaps not least of all, patience. This book grew out of my gradu ate work in film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I must first thank my dissertation committee. Bhaskar Sarkar gave me a home from the first day and mentored my research with generosity, rigor, and fun! This book could not have been written without his stimulation and friendship. Lisa Parks brought me into the world of media studies; she inspired an interest in experimenta- tion and a penchant for engaging prob lems that mat ter rather than preformed disciplinary questions. Her interventions hover over this manuscript. Michael Berry provided a steady hand, pushing me to dig deeper into Chinese cinema and cultural studies, indulging the strange turns in my project , and provid- ing valuable feedback. Swati Chattopadhyay s haped my thinking about spatial practice and the city. She pushed me to develop postcolonial critiques and, perhaps most of all, precision with conceptual language. The failings here are all mine! Fi nally, Charles Wolfe was a model of academic bigheartedness; his door was always open and he patiently engaged my ideas and anxi eties, re- sponding with wisdom. I must also thank Bishnupriya Ghosh, my spectral committee member, whose zest and dynamic thinking have had a tremendous impact on this research and beyond. Fi nally, I want to thank the entire film and media faculty at ucsb for their support, big and small, especially Peter Bloom, Edward Branigan, Michael Curtin, Anna Everett, Constance Penley, Greg Seigel, Cristina Venegas, and Janet Walker. I was fortunate to be a part of the first cohort of PhD students in film and media at ucsb, and I must also thank my peers. I remember fondly the hours passed with Hye Jean Chung, Chris Dzialo, Regina Longo, Dan Reyn- olds, Jeff Scheible, and Nicole Starosielski, among many others. Our work on the Media Fields conference series and journal remains a bright spot. This book also could not have been written without the support of many students, schol- ars, and filmmakers from my years in Beijing. Thanks especially to Wang Wo and Zhu Rikun for the amazing and difficult work with the Li Xianting Film Fund, to Yang Shu and Wang Wenhuan for their research support, and to JP Sniadecki for our travels and bringing me into the sel community. I am grateful to Yomi Braester, Chris Berry, and others for the stimulating Summer Program in Chinese Film History at the Beijing Film Acad emy, among many other interactions. Finall y, thanks to the many panelists and interlocutors, too many to name here, who have engaged this work over the last ten years, es- pecially Ruoyun Bai, James Cahill, Jenny Chio, Jinying Li, Eng- Beng Lim, Ralph Litzinger, Ramon Lobato, Anna McCarthy, Pang Laikwan, Luke Robinson, and Nishant Shah. This research was also supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto. I thank the community of fellows and my colleagues in Cinema Studies and Visual Studies for our rich conversations. At Brown University, I received gen- erous funding from the Pembroke Center and the Seed and Salomon Awards. I am also grateful for the mentorship of my mcm colleagues, especially Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Lynne Joyrich, and Phil Rosen. I completed this manuscript at Concordia University and want to thank to my colleagues in film studies and across the Montreal community—man y of whom have commented on parts of this manuscript, including Luca Caminati, Michelle Cho, Yuri Furu- hata, Thomas Lamarre, Masha Salazkina, and Marc Steinberg, among others. I also want to thank the Canada Research Chairs Program, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (sshrc), and the Canada Foundation for Innovation– funded Global Emergent Media Lab for supporting the final stages of writing and editing. Cheers to our gradu ate students, especially Weixian Pan, for their help with the final manuscript. Fi nally, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their generous engagement, and, at Duke Uni- versity Press, Drew Sisk for the book design, and Courtney Berger at Duke University Press for her wisdom and support over the past few years. Chapters 3 and 4 originated as the articles “Cinematic Encounters in Bei- jing,” Film Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2014): 27–40, and “Beijing en Abyme: Outside Tele vi sion in the Olympic Era,” Social Text 107 29, no. 2 (summer 2011): 21–46. Chapter 5, “Videation: Technological Intimacy and the Politics of Global Connection,” also appears in Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global, edited by Joshua Neves and Bhaskar Sarkar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). Thanks to the readers and supporters of these early pieces, as well as the many friends and colleagues who have provided critical insights over the last few years. Many friendships and loved ones have also shepherded this proj ect over the past de cade. I remember my dear friend and collaborator Graham Bury. Graham passed away during the writing, and this book is in his memory. I also thank my f amily for all their support, especially as this research has often viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS sent me far from home. Fi nally, to my dearest Meg Fernandes, who has been a fellow traveler on this proj ect and many other adventures besides. She has not only improved this book with her ideas and passion, but brought joy and beauty into our world these last years. I would not have wanted to do any of it without her wonder and love. I dedicate this book to the memory of Graham Bury; to my mother, Eden; my grand mother, Mary; and to Meg. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix INTRODUCTION After Legitimacy You have failed, you have done wrong, says the modern orientalist. — EDWARD SAID In July 2007, Beijing tv aired a story about local food stalls that served steamed buns (baozi 包子) filled with fat- soaked cardboard instead of pork. The money- saving tactic caused an uproar in the city’s media and was broadcast nation- wide on China Central Tele vi sion (cctv), leading peop le to speculate about food safety and the everyday flavors of getting ahead in the capital. Shortly after the report aired it was retracted by the station as itself a fake. The journal- ist, Zi Beijia, allegedly staged the story based on hearsay using migr ant workers. He had hoped to the boost the ratings of Degrees of Transparency (Toumingdu 透明度), a program he produced for Beijing tv’s Life Channel. Soon after, Mr. Zi issued a formal apology and was arrested. The fake story about the fake baozi, however, did not go away. The media and passing conversations revealed a rampant belief that the fake buns were in fact real— that is, actually filled with fatty pulp—and that the retraction, apology, and arrest w ere put on by government intervention.1 Unsavory practices that contributed to the negative “made in China” image, it was thought, would not to be tolerated in the Olympic era—a period intrinsically linked to China’s twenty-fir st- century media urbanism. Regardless of the story’s truth,2 the string of fakes, or more precisely un- certainties, underline a host of issues related to media, development, and legitimacy in con temporary China— and globally. In the very same week in July 2007, the former head of China’s State Food and Drug Administration, Zheng Xiaoyu, was executed for accepting bribes to approve substandard and tainted medicine. The proximate months were equally marred by repeated controversies, at home and abroad, over poisonous infant formula, contami- nated toothpaste, intellectual property (ip) violations, performance- enhancing drugs, human rights abuses, artificial rain, images of stubborn “nail houses” (dingzihu 钉子户), campaigns against corruption and pornography, and confu- sion over the high ste roid levels of Beijing’s poultry.