Dear Colleagues,
I am happy to announce the publication of the latest issue of the Made in China Journal. You can download it for free at this link: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2022/07/28/out-of-time.
Below you can find the editorial:
Out of Time: Realms of Chinese Nostalgia
乡愁如亡国之君
寻找的是永远的迷失
Nostalgia is like a king with his kingdom lost
What it searches for is an eternal bewilderment.
—Bei Dao, 2008 (translation by Tao Naikan and Simon Patton)
Cultural theorist Svetlana Boym famously distinguished two types of nostalgia: a restorative one that ‘manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past’; and a reflective one that ‘lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.’ But nostalgia is not necessarily only backward-looking. Rather, it can represent a feeling of longing for a future yet to be lost or even realised. For the historian Roxanne Panchasi, nostalgia may originate in the ways in which people anticipate and plan their lives around an expected future. This anticipated future, Panchasi intimates, ‘can tell us a great deal about the cultural preoccupations and political perspectives of the present doing the anticipating’. In these and other ways, nostalgia can actualise in cultural expression and performance within communities of nostalgia and as immersive environments that shine a light on past trauma to move closer to reconciliation. Contributors to this issue explore the workings of nostalgia in people’s memories and spaces in China and beyond from a variety of perspectives to uncover how and why admirers of the Maoist and post-socialist eras express their longings for pasts real, imagined, and somewhere in between.
The special section of this issue includes nine articles. Jennifer Hubbert opens by tackling the question of what it means to be nostalgic amid a global pandemic and worsening repression in contemporary China. Emily Williams investigates the practice of collecting ‘Red relics’—objects relating to the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—and argues that in recent years these objects have been increasingly coopted into the party’s narrative about the rejuvenation of China under its leadership. Frank N. Pieke explains how the CCP has developed strategies to boost its legitimacy that draw on a dedication to the party that is specifically religious yet does not require belief in a doctrine. These strategies revolve around the Leninist concept of ‘party spirit’ and are here discussed in the context of party-cadre education and ‘Red tourism’. Laurence Coderre engages with Matthew Galway and Christian Sorace in a conversation about her latest book, Newborn Socialist Things: Materiality in Maoist China (Duke University Press, 2021), and reflects on how the material culture of the Mao era set the stage for the post-reform commodification of society. Zhang Lisheng examines how official and unofficial museum commemorations of the zhiqing generation—the youths who were sent to live and work in China’s rural areas between 1968 and 1980—have articulated a pervasive nostalgia marked by narratives of a ‘zhiqing spirit’ that celebrate qualities of perseverance, patriotism, and self-sacrifice. He does so through the lens of the Museum of Zhiqing Lives in the Jianchuan Museum Complex, China’s most high-profile private museum project and home to the largest collection of Maoist artefacts. Zhu Ruiyi recollects the stories she heard from Chinese workers she met during her fieldwork at a Chinese-owned fluorspar mine in Mongolia and reflects on why they claimed a past that was never fully their own. Stephen Roddy revisits the nostalgic pragmatism of the reformer and Confucian philosopher Liang Shuming (1893–1988), highlighting how his responses to the social and economic dislocations of the early Republican era are surprisingly relevant today. Phyllis Yu-ting Huang offers a reading of the nostalgic writing of civil war exiles in Taiwan, tracing the evolution of these texts from the 1950s to the 2010s and exploring the authors’ narratives of China in relation to the concept of ‘homeland’. Finally, Matthew Galway delves deep into the nostalgic reflections of Sino-Khmer journalist turned CCP intelligence agent Vita Chieu on his time working for the CCP and the Chinese Embassy in Phnom Penh.
The issue also includes a forum with four pieces about the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic in China. Mary Ann O’Donnell provides an ethnographic account of Shenzhen’s response to the Omicron outbreak in February and March 2022, introducing how the country’s ‘grid management’ system was implemented in the city. In so doing, she tracks viral mobilities online to understand how physical mobility emerged as a site for the evaluation of the commitment to ‘Zero Covid’, the quality of implementing protocols, and what were perceived as acceptable forms of policy enforcement. L.G. reads the Shanghai lockdown as a chronotope, exploring the biopolitical process of immunisation through an analysis of the Zero Covid policy in the context of the security discourse that has taken root in the People’s Republic of China over the past decade. Jing Wang pays attention to the everyday soundscape of the Shanghai lockdown—what she calls ‘lockdown sound diaries’. Analysing a sample of podcast episodes released in that period, she highlights women’s voices and food as mediums to reconnect people, arguing that the lockdown sound diaries serve as defiant gestures recording ordinary voices and making fun out of bitterness in a time of uncertainty. Finally, Lynette Ong talks to Hong Zhang about her latest book, Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China (Oxford University Press, 2022), explaining how her research can inform our understanding of the Zero Covid policy enforced in China.
In the China Columns section, Björn Alpermann reflects on professional, personal, and political ethics in social science research in China, arguing that we must recognise the complex trade-offs involved in this type of research rather than proposing simplistic solutions. In the Op-Eds section, Nicola Macbean considers the implications of China’s recent ratification of the International Labour Organization’s two forced labour conventions. The China Labour Bulletin looks back at how the dramatic economic, social, and technological changes that have taken place over the past decade have affected the landscape of workers’ rights in China. We conclude the issue with a conversation in which Ivan Franceschini interviews Eli Friedman about his book The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City (Columbia University Press, 2022) and, more broadly, about the prospects for Chinese migrant workers and their children.
The Editors
Ivan Franceschini (ivan.franceschini@anu.edu.au), Nicholas Loubere, and Matthew Galway