John_Shanghai

Yesterday evening, as I rode home on the #4 above ground subway, watching Shanghai descend into night, my thoughts turned to Walter Benjamin. I thought of what he wrote to Theodor Adorno in a letter about the Arcades Project, that it was “the theater of all my struggles.” I thought about his death, about what must have been running through his mind -the hope, anguish, anxiety and fear not only for himself but the world- as he rode the train south from Paris in search of safe passage from the Nazis. I wondered what image or vision had sustained him all those thirteen years that he labored on the Arcades Project: surely something more than his desire to expose the rotten core of bourgeois phantasmagorias. That intention alone would make the Arcades Project an interesting, but not an important and powerful, exercise in thought. Some indescribable feeling seems to weigh heavily on the Arcades Project in a way rarely echoed in other similar works of the period: a sense of the density of human history so radically counter to the illusion of historical contingency; an oppressive anxiety about the present moment and the ability of living men and women to cope with the superhuman tasks before them; a sublated but intact hope for the one-day realization of a better world and a redeemed (or at least more fulfilled, more equitable) humanity. Benjamin’s work, like his life, seems an attempt to wrest something coherently heroic from the cruel banality of the world, and to imbue his readership with a sense that even -or most profoundly- in their mundane daily actions they are participating in a sublime work, equal parts unjust and full of hope. Benjamin is the only “theorist” I’ve read in whom I sense genuine philosophical selflessness. He wasn’t a saint, but he did give himself to his work and his historical moment to a degree that his contemporaries could or would not. In Benjamin, the personal and the historical blend together in such a way that both emerge all the more saturated with meaning: history is literally a life-and-death matter. Revolutionary practice, for Benjamin, begins from a heightened awareness of this fact.

The other day I began reading Jonathan Spence’s magisterially written “The Gate of Heavenly Peace: China’s Century of Revolution, 1895-1980.” Spence’s technique -to recreate the precarious and convulsive but exhilarating and revolutionary atmosphere of turn-of-the-century China by following the internecine lives of individual thinkers, writers and activists- is perfectly tailored to his subject matter. You get the impression that any other method, however analytically rigorous, would do injustice to the lives (and deaths) of those who labored to remake China. Spence’s work is by no means perfect, but (in the words of Benjamin) it provides “intensive, intimating access” to the full meaning of that moment in history; it presents a “crystal of the total event.” Moreover, it reminds me why I was attracted to 20th century Chinese history in the first place.

Before I go further, let me make a slight detour through some things I’ve been pondering since coming to Shanghai. Everything in my life right now feels like an emanation of one big struggle to understand the present moment and my place in it. This struggle takes the form of a few questions: what exactly is “globalization,” what are the historical and philosophical consequences of contemporary shifts in material conditions, and what does this process mean for our daily practice, our understanding of and relation to the world around us, each other and ourselves? Underlying these questions, as their continually repressed kernel, is another: what kind of world do we want and what are we willing to do to bring it about? This question is seldom seriously posed because it belies the possibility that “we” have a responsibility to the communities of which we are part, be they familial, national or global. It contains an injunction to engage with and remake concepts that most American academics are content simply to criticize. It uncovers for American academics the uncomfortable reality that they have their own intellectual heritage, a legacy whose denial (in the form of a half-baked obsession with 20th century French thought) is as easy as it is crippling, and whose resuscitation today is as difficult as it is necessary. Let us consider, by contrast, what I’ve observed of the contemporary Chinese intellectual situation.
My work for the conference consists of proof-reading, editing and occasionally re-writing parts of the English translations of papers to be presented by Chinese professors. In the process, I’ve had the chance to engage at length and from several perspectives with the arguments made in these essays. I have been amazed by the internal consistencies between the Chinese papers, and despite some initial suspicion of their ultimate aims (which I naively considered “nationalist,” but more on this later), I’m beginning to get a sense of the larger intellectual project that subtends and binds them. Insofar as it makes any sense to speak of a body of “Chinese thought” today, and insofar as the few papers I’ve read (along with the work of thinkers like Wang Hui) can be understood as representative of this thought or of a contemporary Chinese intellectual “situation,” let me offer a few reflections:

The relationship between contemporary Chinese thinkers and the intellectual, cultural and political history of China is unlike anything found in the contemporary American academy. They seem to possess (or are the possessions of) a sense of duty: to their country and to the world, yes, but more pointedly, to the Chinese revolutionary writers and activists whose legacy they literally embody and must strive to uphold and extend into the future. For them, the past is not a collection of words in a history textbook, but a living memory of destruction and creation whose injunction to push forward into a better form of human society provides the lens through which they imagine their relationship to the world around them and the communities they live in. History weighs heavily on them, but not as an objective and objectifying structure: history is that which makes them and which they in turn can collectively make and remake. The key to such a conception of their relation to history is, I think, the notion of China as a project. Like those turn-of-the-century revolutionaries, writers and thinkers who underwent the transition from China as a God-given fact to China as an open question and product of human labor, contemporary Chinese scholars seem to think of the future of their country (and by extension of the world in which it will play an increasingly decisive role) as one which their own subjective intervention can alter and shape. To put it bluntly, they think they can make a difference. Nothing is so big or so impersonal as to categorically defy adjustment, reformation and revolution by human hands and ideas. If anything, the very concept of modern China necessitates their continual intervention: “China” serves in their essays as the name for the raw liberatory force of human enlightenment whose potential they are bound -almost as if by fate- to cultivate.

Let’s return for a moment to those initial years of the Chinese revolutionary century. A vibrant and varied cast of characters with widely differing “plans” for their country emerges: Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Sun Yat Sen, Qiu Jin, Lu Xun –to name only a few of the most auspicious. What makes this period so troublesome for contemporary historians is the fact that most, if not all, of these thinkers and activists were deeply influenced by their readings in “Western” literature, politics and philosophy. Thus the thesis of “Western Impact” (that China’s revolution was sparked and structured by Western ideas adopted wholesale by Chinese activists) which guided the first phase of American historiography on China gave way in the last few decades to a “China-centered approach” which pushed to its limits the structuring role of wholly endogenous forces in Chinese history and society. Taken to their extreme, both approaches become ideological gibberish, but each obviously reflects part of the humanly felt “reality” of that moment in history. If there is no denying that “Western” ideas about history, the nation, and political and civil rights influenced the people who first imagined China as a progressive project, we must unpack the word “influence,” accounting for the simultaneous novelty of the ideas produced in the name of this “project” and their groundedness in Chinese and Euro-American intellectual traditions. What emerges is a topography of intersecting philosophical and political currents: Euro-American “Revolution” with a longstanding Chinese tradition of social unrest and revolt; “Women’s Rights” as an abstract declaration with the reality of practices like foot-binding and the near-total subjugation of women to men (described so powerfully by Qiu Jin); the concept of “Nation” and the struggle by Chinese writers and thinkers to imagine a form of community beyond the Mandate of Heaven. We should approach the legacy of this period of unprecedentedly intense interactivity between Chinese and Euro-American intellectual currents not from the “critical” perspective, which sees in it little more than the workings of “Western” intellectual imperialism and the production of that faulty –if initially liberatory- device: the nation. Such a “critical” approach will prevent us from fully understanding the ways in which that revolutionary legacy works its way into the psychological and material conditions of contemporary Chinese intellectual life. How could we possibly grasp that contemporary Chinese thinkers feel an imperative to struggle for the improvement of their country if don’t ourselves attempt to “feel” the weight of the historical legacy they see themselves as part of? This legacy is not simply of those who “thought” of a new China, but who suffered and died for the possibility of a country in which the vagaries of their predecessors would not be repeated. It is a project which by nature could not be completed by those early revolutionaries or by Mao, and nor will it be completed by the professors whose papers I edited. But there is a real, undeniable sense in which they see themselves working from something, as part of something and towards something, and grasping that sense even tangentially from my “outside” perspective has been the single greatest gift of this summer.

It has also challenged me to rethink most of what I’ve studied in the last three years. I’m glad I spent so much time reading and engaging with post-War French and European thought, if only because without having done so I would not now be able to recognize how important it is that I emphatically reject most of its (logical, if not explicitly stated) conclusions. Though such a rejection, if it’s to be genuine, will have to come after more protracted and serious engagement with this thought, my readings will from now on be motivated by cautious skepticism –rather than naive embrace– of its intellectual consequences. Why this reaction? Because in the relation of Chinese contemporary thinkers to their own intellectual legacy I’ve found an articulation of the need to understand, as Holderlin says, what is “one’s own-most.” Simply put, post-War French and European thought isn’t mine. I think I’ve known and felt this for a long time, and I think it in part explains why I have never been content with the implications of this thought. I am beginning to see that in order to understand not “what” contemporary Chinese thinkers think but “why” and “how” they think this way, I will have to seriously engage with my own political-intellectual legacy: that of America, of figures like Emerson, Du Bois, Dewey, Sontag, Rawls and Rorty. An understanding of the present moment will not come from a denial of the continued structuring force of what is one’s “own-most.” In order to grasp the global, we have to better understand the many dimensions of the national which still weigh so heavily on us. We might find that the national legacy has a productive and “progressive” role to play in the unfolding of the global, and moreover, that the “Chinese” and “American” modern national legacies share a deeper affinity than first expected.

The fundamental problem is this: very little of the critical theory cannon handed to me on Cornell’s silver platter is remotely concerned with making our world a better place. This is a serious problem, and from within the post-War Euro-French tradition, probably an intractable one. But other intellectual traditions exist which maintain a living connection to this basic progressive injunction, some of them to be found half-way across the world, others hiding within what is one’s own-most. One of these belongs to China, another to America.

I’ll continue this later. I’m completely exhausted right now from preparatory work for the conference and basically can’t form another coherent thought. Suffice to say, the direction I’m headed with this is: we need to revisit the progressive potential of certain national legacies, in our case those of China and America. It is imperative, I think, for young American scholars to wean themselves of paralyzing contemporary critical theory (a front, I’m coming to believe, for bourgeois academic solipsism) and to reclaim the American intellectual legacy –the greatest source of Benjaminian “historical weight” available to us- as our own. My own first step in this direction will be a serious study of John Dewey, as well as Richard Rorty’s book, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. To put it bluntly, the example of the still-felt Chinese legacy is too powerful for me to simply return to what I was doing and thinking before. Chinese and American legacies are both distinct and deeply intertwined, both analytically and historically. If we want to grasp what “the present moment” means, I think we would do better to understand these legacies from within.

Currently reading: The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Zizek; The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss; articles by Giovanni Arrighi, Bin Wong, Kenneth Pomeranz.

Shanghai is an anxious city. You wouldn’t necessarily know it by looking around: towers of unimaginable height continue to rise everywhere you turn; all manner of luxury cars glide past you on the street; high-end malls dot the landscape, filled to the brim with shoppers and lookers-on. But when you talk to people, you (unsurprisingly, maybe) get a very different picture. The anxiety expressed to me by residents of the city isn’t quite the anxiety I expected to find; it’s more complicated, with deeper roots. It’s connected to and finds expression in worries about the current global recession, but it isn’t encapsulated therein. Most interesting, this anxiety isn’t only about Shanghai; it’s about China, too. Or I should say, it’s about China through Shanghai, Shanghai as the laboratory of and metaphor for China.

Maybe the concept of anxiety and the different forms and directions it takes is a good lens through which to think about the present moments in Shanghai and New York City. Insofar as it makes any sense or does anything productive to speak of whole cities as anxious, let alone internally coherent entities with specific character traits, this descriptor applies particularly well to Shanghai and New York. Like the former with regard to China, New York historically had the peculiar ability to be both anomalous to the rest of America and oddly synecdochic for it. This is not only because of its economic and cultural preeminence among American cities, but also its historical status as “melting pot” of America (a faulty metaphor that implies the dissolution of the pluralities that characterize the city), where you can find traces of every other part of the country (and the world). Similarly, Shanghai, the saying goes, is nobody’s “lao jia” (“old home,” or hometown, place of origin, referring not so much to where you were born, but to where your grand- or great grandparents were from). This isn’t quite true, of course, but for the most part I’ve met very few people who can claim to have family connections to Shanghai stretching back more than a couple generations. Most people I meet either came to Shanghai on their own or on the backs of their parents and grandparents. This is reflected most dynamically in the incredible diversity of food in Shanghai: if you know where to look, you can find just about every variety of Chinese food here, cooked and served by people who grew up in the home region of that food and who came to Shanghai for the same basic reason (the same reason people went to and in some cases still go to New York). Historically speaking, that reason is often violence of one form or another: poverty, exploitation, sometimes war. Shanghai and New York similarly owe their existence to the long history of violence and the desire to escape it.

Today, Shanghai and New York City strike me as equally anxious cities, and their anxiety is no doubt directly related to that of the other, but the historical situation and complex of feelings collected in the word “anxious” are very different, even diametrically opposed, for each. A helpful visual: New York and Shanghai are two cones connected at the tip by the feeling of anxiety. They may share this tip, but from there their situations shoot in radically different directions. To put it bluntly, New York’s (and America’s) anxiety is that of waning hegemony or global preeminence. Shanghai’s (and China’s) is that of the possible but by no means guaranteed (re)emergence of China as a globally hegemonic or central force. New York is not only a city that in one century has accrued more power than most nation-states (its operating budget is 3rd largest in the United States, behind California -the 9th largest in the world- and New York State, of which it constitutes over 90%), but one which for at least a half-century has (rightly) considered itself and been considered the center of the world, the symbol for and driving force behind America’s 20th century emergence. Today, New York is ossifying. Though it clings to its political-economic preeminence, the city is not and cannot be what it was, as can be read in any number of articles in the New York Times and New Yorker lamenting the city’s loss of character and growing homogeneity (code for the expulsion of the poor to the outer-reaches of the city). It will never die in the way of cities like Detroit, but it will and in large part has grown to resemble (so I hear) cities like Paris, London and other capitals of the “old world”. In other words, New York is on the threshold of the end of its moment and “it” knows it.

Shanghai, I think, is a significantly more complex case, and has a lot to do with aspects of Chinese history I don’t yet fully understand (and certainly don’t have an immanent connection to). Maybe a good metaphor for the situation in Shanghai can be found in Harold Bloom’s concept of “the anxiety of influence,” in which poets are both inspired and hindered by reading their precursors, caught between the twin desires to emulate what came before and to strike out on an original path (that would in turn guarantee their name to posterity, perpetuating the cycle). A visit to the Shanghai Urban Planning Center exemplifies this: several large displays on the top floor show iconic images of other great world cities receding into the darkness in order of relative importance, with Shanghai, embodied in the Pearl Orient Tower, standing front and center in the spotlight. It’s no coincidence that the two cities closest behind Shanghai are New York and Paris, respective cultural capitals of the 20th and 19th centuries. But despite the energetic displays of Shanghai’s new and growing status as the city of the future, I sense a palpable if sublated uncertainty of the city’s future. It’s almost as if the glamorous projections of the World Expo site that have become ubiquitous in the city serve not only to advertise the coming event, but to convince the city that “it’s really going to happen!”, that is, that Shanghai and China’s time really has finally come, that the era of “American Imperialism” that more than a few Chinese friends have complained to me about is finally over, that the modern legacy of embarrassment at the hands of foreign powers has closed. This is particularly striking considering that the Chinese revolutionary legacy, which seems to have been disavowed in all but name, also built its support on the idea of ending a century of Chinese embarrassment at foreign hands.

To stick to the original theme: I detect in what many residents of Shanghai tell me a certain disbelief that things will happen quite as they’re told, that Shanghai (again, as a proxy for China) has what it takes to fully take over where New York and America leave off. The reason this causes anxiety, I think, has something to do with the historical inferiority complex developed (mainly by intellectuals and political leaders) in 19th and 20th century China and apparently not entirely or perfectly resolved by the Chinese communist revolution and its legacy. Why this complex will only dissipate if and when China can indisputably consider itself the economic and cultural center of the world again is both entirely clear and fabulously mystifying. Clear when you consider the self-conception of China for most of the world’s history. Mystifying when you begin to think about the ways in which care (or anxiety) for the nation becomes a personally, individually felt situation. Even more mystifying (clearly mystifying or mystifyingly clear, not sure which) when you think about the sheer magnitude of intellectual and ideological work that goes into the production of world and national history as one of progress and increasing global integration. No doubt China’s history (as the double whammy of the Beijing Olympics and the Shanghai World Expo clearly illustrate) is inextricable from an emerging global history into which China hopes to write its ultimate redemption and return to a “rightful” place at the center of the world, and indeed as far as trans-historical narratives go, this is a pretty solid one. But that doesn’t make it real. It’s still a production, a spectacle just like the fictions of “manifest destiny” or the now-debunk “New American Century,” and one whose intellectual framework, no matter how tempting, needs to be criticized.

If modernization can be thought of as a process of translation, broadly conceived, then what we must do in our considerations of Shanghai today is look for that kernel of pure language, to take from Benjamin, which subtends this process. Translation is to Pure Language as the Symbolic is to the Real or as Capitalism is to the Proletariat. What we need to do is return to that constitutive contradiction that both drives the incredible productive output (on material and intellectual fronts) of contemporary China and continually threatens to destabilize its ideological foundations, and to use that root contradiction to criticize not the Chinese government or any specific entity, not even China itself, but the contemporary global situation that produces the kinds of narratives described above. To me the urgency of this task derives not from the political heights these narratives reach, but from the fact that they reify themselves in the minds and desires of all of us.

The last week or so has marked a subtle but for me substantial shift in my feelings towards Shanghai. Which is to say, for the first time I began to feel like I really could live here long-term. My first two weeks here were no doubt an incredible learning experience, but I felt like I was completely outside city life, looking in as if through a musty window. And, to be fair, I *was* and still mostly am on the outside. But if in my first two weeks I was the kid who stands at the edge of the deep end of the pool unable to convince himself that jumping in won’t be so bad, now I’ve at least put a foot in and tested the water. It isn’t nearly as cold and intimidating as I expected.

Enough of lame analogies. This last week has been great. What made the difference? First, I’m just naturally more comfortable with the city now; I know how to get just about anywhere within the inner rings of the city on my bike, and I know how to ask directions and make small talk if I happen to lose my way. Second, following from the first, my Chinese is generally improving. I’m doing language exchanges with a number of Shanghai students and young professionals and becoming much more comfortable and proficient with speaking. Beyond these, I’ve befriended a strange but very intelligent and interesting retired Taiwanese professor who sits at the Shanghai Library cafe everyday complaining about America and globalization. Though he was born and raised in Taipei, where he taught economics at the university, he decided upon retirement that he really didn’t care for Taiwanese politics or social/cultural life and moved to Shanghai. As far as I can tell, all he does is drink coffee at the library, read, and chat with folks like me. He shows his love for the Chinese communist party by daily donning the uniform of a PLA general, onto which he buttoms a Mao-head pin and three stars. As I said, a strange guy. The benefit for me is that he’s become very intent on teaching me Chinese, and because his interests are generally similar to my own (critique of capitalism and globalization, literature, Chinese revolutionary history etc.), I’m learning a lot of really good Chinese academic and political lingo.

The third and most important reason things have improved exponentially is that my work for Yan Laoshi (Haiping) has begun and through this work I’ve had the chance to meet and get to know some of her students at the East China Normal University (co-host of the Cornell center for cross-cultural studies). Though my language skills are nowhere near sufficient to be able to fully participate in their conversations without the help of Yanzi, one of Haiping’s students who’s been kind enough to serve as translator for me at the dinner table, I can already tell that this is a group of friends I would like to maintain if and when I do return to Shanghai. It’s amazing what a difference being around a group of engaging, jovial and altogether warm young intellectuals can do for one’s morale! So far they’ve been kind enough to Zach and I to include us in several of their dinner-outings, to the extent that I’m starting to think it’s less a formality on their part than a sign that they actually enjoy our company. Tomorrow night, Zach and I will return the goodwill by treating them to dinner, my first foray into the strange world of guanxi.

I don’t mean by any of this to imply that my first two weeks here were anything less than scintillating. But I’m not a solitary person, or at least, having grown up in a very talkative family and spent my college years in Telluride, I’m not accustomed to not having a community of talkers around me all the time. Since meeting Haiping’s students and beginning my regular language exchanges, I’ve felt a load lift from my head, as if the mere fact of sharing a word with another human being (even if the word is mispronounced) stimulates the synapses and gets the mental juices flowing.

You may be wondering: where are the juices flowing? Now that I’m thinking with more ease and clarity, what exactly am I thinking?

Unfortunately, I don’t have enough time to answer that now. Suffice to say, I’ve been reading and pondering writings by the late Giovanni Arrighi (d. June 18th) on the historical succession of capitalist hegemony and particularly his most recent writings on China (though unfortunately I can’t find a copy of his book *Adam Smith in Bejing* in Shanghai). In addition to this, I’m re-reading some theory, sifting my way through Hobsbawm’s *The Age of Empire* and reading a chapter here and there of various Chinese history books lying around the apartment. I’m beginning to return to my thesis research on Shanghai after a much needed brief hiatus, and to Benjamin. Sometime in the next few days (once I’ve finished a particular article by Arrighi), I’ll provide a more extended philosophical excursus. For now, try to be happy with a simple recollection of recent happenings in my life in Shanghai.

Currently reading: The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985 by John King Fairbank; Oracle Bones, by Peter Hessler; Cries in the Drizzle, by Yu Hua. Plus articles by Mark Selden, Elizabeth Perry.

This morning I visited Jing’an Temple. Lining the longest side of the temple were a series of shops devoted to everything from mobile phones to what looked and smelled like very expensive gelato. Next door to Jing’an is a massive high-scale shopping complex which, despite its obvious seniority to most buildings in the area, seems to have maintained its cache. It smacks of older money than the newest complexes, perhaps part of the first generation of international indoor malls. Once inside, I tried several times and from several spots to take a picture. Each time a guard appeared and simply said “No. No pictures.” I wondered if Jing’an were just a decoy and I had found the real temple.

I spent the afternoon in Zhongshan park, reading. It was as lovely a day as I’ve seen in Shanghai, with a relaxing breeze and light skies. I haven’t yet witnessed a blue sky, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed. At Zhongshan park I struck up a halting conversation in Chinese with a young man from Sichuan province. Mostly we talked about how good Sichuanese food is, but then he started asking me about America. After a few minutes we parted ways, but before leaving he told me (from what I understood) that he thought China and America were the same (“yiyang”). The comment was a little out of the blue, and I didn’t get a chance to follow up. He said he loved Shanghai; he thought it was a very beautiful city. I agreed.

Several comments made to me on this blog (or in private about this blog) have meant a lot to me and been very helpful for thinking about my time here in Shanghai. I’m now two weeks into my stay, and it feels like it’s gone by in a heartbeat. I’ve learned a lot about the city, but I’m constantly reminded of a comment Professor Sherman Cochran made once in class, that after 50-odd years of studying China he still felt he hadn’t quite grasped it, that something eluded him. At two weeks, something would be seriously wrong if this comment didn’t resonate with me, but even after so short a time here I think I’m beginning to get an idea of what exactly he meant. China and Shanghai may forever be just beyond my understanding; I may always lack the kind of immanent, visceral understanding of this place that, to a limited extent, I can claim with America. There are whole worlds of American experience that I couldn’t possibly understand, but I did grow up and come into consciousness as my own person ensconced in American literature, history, politics and myth. That’s what it takes to get under the skin of a place, and the consequences of that frighten and excite me. Do I think professor Cochran feels any less fulfilled because he devoted his life to the study of a place he will die not understanding? No, probably just the opposite. But I wonder if when he set out he fully believed he would one day arrive. I wonder if anyone has the luxury of that illusion today.

I will hazard one comment: one thing that young people in Shanghai seem to have in common with many young people in America is a sense of being released from History’s demands. For the generation of Americans born on the eve of the “end of history” (a claim whose absurdity doesn’t change the fact that it has exerted massive ideological force on many of our understanding of the last 20 years), History is something we imbibe intellectually but have little tangible contact with. The closest I have come to History in America is my parent’s stories about the late 1960’s, through which I once vicariously lived the excitement of that time. For the most part, we experience the great events of the recent past through books and television programs; they remain neatly contained in the past, safely prevented by time from spilling over into the present. Sadly, I don’t experience September 11th or the War in Iraq as History, but as an image repeated so many times as to have no meaning. No doubt this is due to the peculiarities of my own situation and these sentiments won’t be shared by others, but I know from countless conversations that at least a few other young Americans feel similarly.

In Shanghai I am confronted with History all over, and in many different forms. But I’m most interested in disavowed history, which there’s a lot of. Most young people I’ve talked to in Shanghai don’t seem to care at all about China’s revolutionary legacy. They say they basically respect Mao, but beyond that they don’t seem to have put a whole lot of thought into it. Two people, when I asked about the Tienanmen Protests, simply shrugged. I asked if the topic was taboo, and they said: Sort of, yeah, but it’s just not something we think about. When I asked one girl what she thought about Shanghai’s revolutionary history and its various powerful labor movements, she chuckled, told me I ask silly questions and changed the subject. I pose these anecdotes not to criticize young people in Shanghai for being so depoliticized, but to ask: what does it mean for a city (or country) to change so much and so many times that such seemingly powerful legacies and narratives can be met with such passing indifference? After all, China’s revolutionary legacy seems to me not just one narrative among others in China’s recent history, but *the* narrative. As Wang Hui says, the very idea of modernity in China is so intimately linked with political revolution that the process of severing that tie will take a tremendous amount of intellectual/ideological work.

I want to understand how people in general relate to China’s 20th century, but I’m most interested in learning from and about young people. So far, this has proved very difficult: the clearest and most thoughtful voices either come from beyond China or beyond the youth.

The above is the title of one of the most famous patriotic songs in China. It’s also the name of the most famous (and by far most expensive, almost $10 in Shanghai for one pack) brand of cigarettes. It reads “Ai wo Zhonghua,” or “I love Zhonghua” where Zhonghua is both an alternative name for China and the name of the cigarettes. Apparently these are the cigarettes smoked by party members and government bureaucrats. It’s a brilliant bit of advertising, and it seems to work; despite their absurd price (most other cigarettes run between $1-3 a pack) they are almost always completely sold out in Shanghai’s ubiquitous cigarette shops.

Yesterday morning I put an add on a Chinese website looking for language exchange partners –that is, someone who will help me with my Chinese in exchange for aiding their English practice. I mentioned that I was an American student and gave my name, “john,” enough to indicate that I’m male. When I came home that evening, I had received twenty responses in a mixture of excited if highly broken English and Chinese characters. Since then, new responses have trickled in at the rate of three or four per hour. Almost all of them are from Chinese girls, aged 21-25, university students. Did I unwittingly happen upon a major informal dating ring in Shanghai? This should be interesting.

Yesterday I revisited Hongkou district, ate some more amazing xiaolongbao, and explored. So far this is my favorite neighborhood in Shanghai, a far cry from the ethereal quiet of the French Concession or the eye-popping glamor of parts of Nanjing and Huaihai roads. There are family run food stands and various other informal enterprises lining the streets that throughout the day (and probably even more so at night) serve as gathering spots and social outlets for people of all ages. While in Hongkou I began to think a little more about an idea raised in a comment to a previous post on this blog, about the ways in which the wealthy in Shanghai understand their situation vis-a-vis the city’s (and country’s) poor. As I mentioned in a previous post, the rich in Shanghai don’t seem to benefit from the same kind of organization of space as the rich in America (via suburbs, highways, etc.) It’s common to see Roles Royce, Bently, even Lambourgini cars (belonging no doubt to the now infamous nouveau riche of China) driving through the streets of a poor neighborhood like Hongkou. The question: what sorts of narratives have the nouveau riche developed to rationalize their absurd wealth? If it can’t be claimed (as one might in parts of America) that the rich in cities like Shanghai are “blissfully unaware” of the poverty around them (how could they be when they drive through this poverty on their way to work?), then we should ask what kinds of ideological/intellectual armature they’ve developed to make sense of their situation. Is there a nascent Horatio Alger narrative at work, i.e. people are where they are because they and their parents pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, etc.? From the few people I’ve talked to, I think not, or at least not in a form that directly resembles the evolution of those narratives in America. Perhaps this is due to the universal suddenness of this wealth, where in America people could make pretensions to a gradual, multi-generational rise in prosperity. But then what? What allows the young in China to pass through neighborhoods like Hongkou on their way to Nanjing to shop and not be dumbstruck by the contradiction they are fueling? Perhaps there is a sense of conscience among them, but it certainly isn’t strong enough to stop or stall the expanding consumer market here. Two people I spoke with mentioned “fate” as their explanation for their wealth or poverty. I wasn’t able to question further, but I think there’s an interesting line for critique in this word –as the name for an understanding of the world and one’s place in it, as a state of mind for negotiating daily life, etc. It will take a lot more research before I can begin to think about “fate” in contemporary Chinese life –I’ll first have to get a basic understanding of the historical function of this concept/experience in China, then I’ll have to talk to many more people and try to unpack its current dimensions. But I wonder if there is something qualitatively different about the experience of wealth in China and America today (or China today and the America of the early 20th century, when the radical benefits of capitalism were first showing themselves), and whether this difference might be mined through thinking the relationship between the two myths of “fate” and the “hard work”.

Today I’m going to the Shanghai Museum and the Urban Planning Center. More updates to come.

Fouad Makki, a professor in the department of development sociology, writes in his article, “The Empire of Capital and the Remaking of Centre-Periphery Relations”:

“By taking at face value the claim that globalisation is a universal process propelled by its own interior logic, we give it a coherence it does not possess. Passive acceptance of the claim that the current form of globalisation is a fate we have to resign ourselves to has become a convenient alibi for governments who willingly or unwillingly subscribe to the dogmas of market purism. To counteract this tendency, we need to highlight globalisation’s contingent and contradictory history and identify the forces that regulate its dynamics.”

Published in Third World Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 1, After the Third World? (2004), p. 163.

As some of you know, I spent virtually all of last semester reading and thinking about Walter Benjamin. All of my final papers dealt with some aspect of Benjamin’s thought, and I’ve identified Benjamin as one of the primary theoretical sources for my developing thesis work.

My particular interest in Benjamin has to do with his concept of history. For Benjamin, the primary targets are notions of historical continuity and progress. I don’t have the time or space now to describe his theory of history in depth, but its general thrust is perfectly echoed in the above quote. For both authors, capitalism has a unique ability to create the appearance of continuity where no such continuity exists. This apparent continuity is a powerful force for naturalizing what are in fact human social processes. If we can imagine a continuity between various epochs of economic or historical development, it becomes easier to imagine their extension into the future: progress. In this way specific social configurations, however exploitative for the working poor, can be thought of as organically unfolding, natural processes not to be tampered with by human institutional intervention. Makki and Benjamin contend that we must not see the economy or history as natural, continuous processes, but as highly contingent human endeavors. Doing so breaks down the appearance of historical progress (the “rise and fall” phenomenon of succeeding empires), allowing us to more critically engage their social effects. If the various forces of what Benjamin calls “the victor” aim to represent themselves as natural forces akin to the movement of the earth and moon, our duty is to continually insist on their imminently human character.

I wonder if there are clues in this appraoch -which, as articulated, seems primarily temporal- for my own thoughts on Shanghai, which are both temporal and spatial.

A lot has happened in the last couple of days. Mostly notably: Sunday afternoon, while reading in Fuxing Park, I was approached by an old man who accosted me for supposedly supporting Mao (my book was titled Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution). In ten minutes he roughly summarized his life: he had once been a successful engineer with a wife and two children, all of whom were killed along with his mother and father during the Cultural Revolution. After 17 years of imprisonment he was released but given no aid by the Chinese government and no chance of employment. He was clearly an educated man (his English was good and he seemed to know a lot about 20th century American and European history), but whatever he had undergone in the last however many years had done something to his mind. After ten minutes he begged me to help him immigrate to America, and as he grew more insistent, I became uncomfortable and had to leave.

Later that night two friends of Zach’s took us to dinner and then to the observation deck of the Shanghai World Financial Center, where through the passing fog I managed to catch a few glimpses of the largest conurbation will ever see.

Yesterday Zach and I met up with a young Shanghainese woman named Virginia, who showed us around a neighborhood just north of the bund where former factories and slaughterhouses have been converted into high-end shopping, dining and art spaces (my first encounter with American Apparel in Shanghai, plus $7 lattes). Later, a short walk away found us in one of the poorer neighborhoods in downtown Shanghai, eating what Virginia considered the city’s best xiaolongbao.

Currently reading: Wang Hui, “Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity,” Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1992, and more articles from the essay collection, Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution.

Currently thinking: If my first few days in Shanghai were sensory overload, I could only describe the latter few as maniacal. It’s good for me to write all this down, even if nobody reads it; how could I possibly process these distinct but (by virtue of coexisting in one city) interrelated moments right now? Worse still, how do I preserve them in my memory well enough to genuinely reflect on them when I am ready? Hopefully this blog will be a useful tool in that respect.

The starkness of contrasts in Shanghai is extraordinary. Less than thirty feet from the Slaughterhouse now trading in American Apparel and $7 cups of coffee are people living in what could only be described as hovels. However terrifying, there is a strange honesty in the constant play of juxtapositions this city is given to. Unlike American cities, triumphs of the spatial separation of rich and poor, I have seen little attempt (as of yet) to disguise the profound iniquities in Shanghai through the reorganization of space. Save the area surrounding the World Financial Center -the most perfectly manicured urban space I’ve ever been in- and a few areas along Nanjing and Huaihai roads, the city seems to trade in a constant interplay of rich and poor. It’s one thing for rich girls in Los Angeles to be oblivious to the poverty all around them: thanks to post-War America’s brilliant reconfiguration of space, most of those girls have probably never had to drive through South Central. But for the children of the rich in Shanghai to happily run around Nanjing Lu bearing starbucks and LV bags must take a whole new level of discipline. I can see no way, short of closing their eyes, that they would miss the poverty around them.

Despite my tone, I’m not here to judge. I can’t help but be angry on some level, but I’m trying my best to channel that anger into a more nuanced engagement with consumerism in Shanghai today. Yu Hua commented in an interview with the New York Times (I’m paraphrasing) that China’s new consumerism is a vain attempt to cover up the same void that plagued the Cultural Revolution. That may be so, but I wonder: what void? Is this a void unique to China? If it subtends not only the cultural logic of China’s integration into the global market, but also the Cultural Revolution, then Yu Hua’s void can’t be intrinsically related to capitalism. I cite this concept of “void” because, on a visceral level, I think it points to something true. And I don’t think it would be fair to collapse this void with something like a Western-derived “post-modern condition”. This is something I’ll have to think about more.

It’s now Tuesday morning and raining. Today Zach and I will make a trip on bike to the outskirts of Shanghai, where we’ll have dinner with his wife’s younger brother. I look forward to watching the city change the further we push out.

Though I’ve been in Shanghai for five days now, I have yet to post here for a number of reasons, chief among which is a general and unsettling awareness that right now I lack the proper vocabulary to describe everything I’ve seen and will see this summer. I wish I were in a position to make new insights in the space of this blog, but something tells me that isn’t the purpose of what I write here. Rather, I’d like to use this as a platform for recording my experiences in as raw a manner as possible. That said, my general orientation to things is more reflective than experiential, so despite efforts otherwise, I’m sure this blog will consist of a lot of theorizing. If and when I do overextend myself, forgive me. I’ll do my best not to make grandiose statements I’d regret in retrospect, but hey, I’m young. Isn’t that what young people are supposed to do?

First impressions:

Riding home from the Pudong International Airport around 8pm, we eventually passed through Pudong proper. Before then, all I’d managed to see were the highway and row upon row of billboards advertising things I’d never heard of in characters I couldn’t read. When the Oriental Pearl Tower came into view it hit me for the first time that I had arrived in the city that has more or less dominated my thoughts for an entire year. Wheeling around the massive Shanghai elevated highway system (by far the largest I’ve ever seen), I caught sight of the two other most salient icons of the area, the Jin Mao Tower and the Shanghai World Financial Center (the tallest building in China). Passing through a series of loops and entering into the ground-level street system, our bus now passed through a world which seemed to have very little to do with the exalted towers above. I was reminded of the many New York Times and New Yorker articles I’ve read describing Shanghai’s aesthetic as that of Blade Runner. Despite the fact that much of my work/thinking on Shanghai is an attempt to critique or debunk such analogies, I understand where they come from. I hate to use the word loosely, but there is something truly post-modern about the appearance of that part of Shanghai. That said, I know modernity (and post-modernity) are complicated terms to use with regard to China, so I’ll do my best in the following weeks to unpack that statement. My hope is that by thinking through both terms with regard to my (admittedly naive) impressions of Shanghai, I’ll get a chance to reevaluate the terms themselves: my goal this summer is to begin to learn how to not apply ready-made theoretical concepts to the city, but rather to let the experience of the city reformulate those concepts. This is easier said than done.

When we arrived at our apartment in the French Concession, Zach, a first year phD in anthropology at Cornell with whom I’m sharing the apartment, gave me a brief tour of the neighborhood on bike. Thankfully, the French Concession is significantly more relaxed than Pudong. Its tree-lined streets and fresh air made for a nice respite from my 18 hours of travel. I got to sleep around midnight, somehow bypassing my much anticipated first experience of jetlag. Since then, I’ve spent my days walking around various neighborhoods and attempting to converse with people. I started an account at the Shanghai public library, which has an impressive collection of English books, so right now my reading list includes: Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes (which I’ve almost finished), The Dialectic of Enlightenment, and a three-volume collection of essays titled Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution.

It would take too long to describe everything I’ve done in the last few days in the same detail. I’ve seen what feels like a lot of the city, but I know I’ve just scratched the surface. Shanghai is the only other place I’ve ever been capable of overwhelming you the way New York City does –a comparison I’ll have to work out further while I’m here. I’m struck by the intensity and vigor of consumer culture, which on first impression seems to be the glue binding the city and its inhabitants together. As I walk through Huaihai and Nanjing roads (the two major shopping districts) or Xintiandi (a new upscale dining/shopping complex), I can’t help but wonder what this city was like twenty or thirty years ago. For someone who has spent most of their college years more or less seriously invested in a Marxist critique of the contemporary global economic situation, coming to Shanghai feels like entering the beast’s lair (or something). I don’t think it’s unfair to say that parts of this city represent the wish-image of contemporary capitalism, and I suspect that if things continue this way, more and more of China will come to look like Shanghai. For now, I want to educate myself on the history of Communist China and use that new armature to critically engage with what I see. Shanghai seems to be a severely depoliticized city, and that may be the most political thing about it.

The most important thing is: I’m learning a lot and enjoying myself. Being in Shanghai feels like being at the center of something historically important. I thank my lucky stars to be alive now and have access to resources to get myself here in time to witness this moment in China’s history. I’m just a beginner, but I have enough sense to know that this place isn’t going to recede from the world scene anytime soon; if anything, its importance will grow dramatically in the coming years.