Chinese Urban Shi-nema: Cinematicity, Society and Millennial China

247 Pages·2020·7.127 MB·English

by  David H. Fleming, Simon Harrison

Chinese Urban
Shi-nema
Cinematicity, Society and
Millennial China
David H. Fleming · Simon Harrison
Chinese Urban Shi-nema
“Fleming and Harrison have produced a deftly-written psychogeography of the
contemporary Chinese city. The authors peel back the skin of the city to reveal
urbanscapes unfamiliar even to long-term residents of Ningbo, but nonetheless
exhilarating. These observations are underpinned by a theory of the screen that is
compelling to the reader in its articulation of a concept that here is inter-woven
with motifs and ideas that draw on Chinese culture. For all those who seek
insights from the collision of screens, global capitalism and contemporary Chinese
urban culture, there is no more sure-footed guide than Fleming and Harrison’s
impressive book.”
—Andrew White, Independent Scholar and author of Digital
Media & Society (Palgrave Macmillan 2014)
David H. Fleming • Simon Harrison
Chinese Urban
Shi-nema
Cinematicity, Society and Millennial China
David H. Fleming Simon Harrison
University of Stirling City University of Hong Kong
Stirling, UK Hong Kong, China
ISBN 978-3-030-49674-6 ISBN 978-3-030-49675-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49675-3
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For Mira, the captain of our ship, in memory of our adventures in Ningbo
DHF
For 陈星超, for making the city in this book a place to call home
SH
P
reface
GettinG Started: and LearninG from our StudentS
With rapid changes in technology Chinese society has transformed radically…
(Anonymised UNNC Student Essay 2012, p. 1)
After spending the best part of a decade marking Chinese undergradu-
ate and master’s work at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China
(UNNC), we have each encountered many thousands of essays that began
with a riff on the line reproduced as our epigraph. Various modulating
iterations of which were invariably jerry-rigged to introduce a throng of
Arts and Humanities and Social Science arguments on a wide range of
subjects spanning: the rapid modernisation of Chinese urban infrastruc-
ture, the appearance of luxury shopping malls populated by foreign stores
and brands, the spread and acceleration of the internet, smartphone use,
social media apps and new-fangled ways of acting, living, viewing and
spending. These were what most Chinese students were naturally inclined
to write about. And while the vagueness and derivativeness of such open-
ing lines have—on the odd occasion—admittedly frustrated the marker,
when we retroactively reflect upon the sheer volume of these mantra-like
statements we have parsed, it now speaks to us as a general truism, or gen-
erational zeitgeist, indexing a shared impression that no doubt remains
very real to a vast number of young people growing up in China today.
With hindsight one particular dissertation exploring the “becoming-
image” of Chinese culture under capitalism stands out as an illustrative
case in point, and can help us here to gesture towards the core themes of
vii
viii PREFACE
the current project. This was a visual anthropology master’s project that
was authored by a student that had undertaken an internship in a reassur-
ingly expensive Ningbo “pre-wedding” photo agency—just one manifes-
tation of the multimillion RMB modern wedding industry that produces
“fantasy” image-memories for Chinese couples engaged to be married.
Turning her free labour into university work had allowed this supervisee
to repurpose a vast archive of images that, to our Western eyes, looked
more like fashion magazine spreads than traditional wedding snaps. For, in
our experience, wedding pictures are often taken on the big day, then
hung up or archived in the family home, rather than being taken in advance
and then projected onto various screens during one’s wedding. What is
more, these image spreads typically captured the same bride adorning
three or more different wedding dresses across a shoot, while the groom
modelled a corresponding range of complementary styles and colours of
suit: a white wedding dress paired with a black tux and dickie bow, for
example, or a red Qipao with a traditional Chinese suit. All peppered with
an array of hats, shoes, canes, veils and props—sometimes requiring the
assistance of various camera men, drone operators, make-up artists and set
hands. Depending on the season and budget, we were informed, couples
could be bussed with their wardrobe and make-up artists to be imaged
next to: a grey horse in the beach surf; a row boat next to a picturesque
lake; a field of cherry blossoms; a traditional village or some other dynamic
touristic hot spot such as the Shanghai bund or DongQian Lake that pro-
vided their picture with a suitably aestheticised backdrop (Fig. 1).
More affluent couples, the author informed us, would often go abroad
with a crew, with Paris, Sydney and Santorini then being the most popular
options for a romantic shoot—a trend that was itself inculcated around
2008 after the widely covered destination wedding of the Chinese movie
star Tony Leung Chiu-wai, who helped popularise and engrain a “No
travel, no wedding” ethos with regard to at least one of the three new-
fangled wedding industry phases (pre-wedding, wedding, honeymoon)
(see e.g. Zhuang and Everett 2018, p. 84). The final images derived from
such events would invariably be edited and colour-corrected, with the
company removing haze and blueing the sky, while also performing com-
plementary 2D digital skin grafts and teeth-whitening procedures as needs
be. The dissertation argued that within the new geometry of Chinese sta-
tus, when eventually displayed on the Big Day or hung in the married
couple’s (invariably) new home, these commercial images signified that
ironclad distinctions between memory and fantasy, reality and fiction,
PREFACE ix
Fig. 1 Wedding shoots at DongQian Lake, Ningbo
were eroding in contemporary China. Channelling Baudrillard she con-
cluded: “The Chinese no longer have traditional weddings or identities,
but they do produce wonderful hyperreal images.”1 For us, the student’s
project also made clear what Susan Sontag means when she argues that
social change has been “replaced by a change in images,” and that “the
production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology” (2018, p. 178).
Looking back on this period, and both detouring2 and distilling thou-
sands of comparable essays and dissertation work, what successive cohorts
of young people appeared to be experiencing—and often vicariously too
through the eyes of three generations of close-knit family—and docu-
menting was that they were bearing witness to an unprecedented event or
historical phase transition that marked nothing short of a complete recod-
ing and reorganisation of China’s socio-political fabric and cultural being.
Or again, that everything everywhere—from dating to working, exercis-
ing, eating, shitting and personally communicating—was being re-
imagined, re-invented and overcoded. Which is to say, they were bearing
x PREFACE
witness to an unfolding mutation in the relationship between subjectivity
and its conditions of exteriority.
Many of these projects were not wrong in pointing to China’s joining
of the WTO in 2001 as a key catalyst for these changes, albeit better ones
acknowledged the pre-history of this trend through the market-economy
reform experiments of Deng Xiaoping or, better still, pointed to a longer
history of the Chinese state associating itself with civilising drives and
modernising teleologies. However, most young Chinese people saw the
nation’s new geopolitical orientation towards the outside developing
alongside a concomitant reorganisation of its internal cities and their
material infrastructure—as well as the modes of social life unfolding
therein (through the use of technologies—including “of the self”—and
techne more generally). It is these manifold processes that Chinese Urban
Shi-nema takes as its focus.
Looking back, perhaps a short blog piece we wrote together entitled
“Are the Chinese Losing Their Gestures?” retrospectively appears as a sig-
nificant prelude or prolegomenon to this book (Fleming and Harrison
2016). This was a project that we originally wrote together as a form of
report—in the style of a staged philosophical dialogue—derived from a
few conversations we were then having, and which reflexively speaking
demonstrates that we were also taking our lived environment not so much
as a standing reserve but as a stimulus and provocation for thought. That
dialogue developed and helped us to road test and work through a com-
plex of ideas and concepts that stemmed from, and helped to digest, our
different but overlapping lived experiences in China.
As a monograph project Chinese Urban Shi-nema began when we were
both living and working in the place where this book lays its scene, Ningbo,
China. However, as we put our finishing touches to the book today, we
both find ourselves living elsewhere: in Edinburgh and Hong Kong
respectively. It is therefore a book that is shaped by different moments and
speeds, and by a heat proximity and immediacy that has since been tem-
pered by distance and reflection. It remains therefore a work about transi-
tions and transformations—“a finding which is also a leaving” (Thrift
2008, p. 16)—that was contingently compounded by our own transfor-
mations in circumstances.
Stirling, UK David H. Fleming
Hong Kong, China Simon Harrison
PREFACE xi
note
1. In their Brief history of Chinese Wedding and Bridal Photography Tourism,
Zhuang and Everett (2018) situate Chinese “pre-wedding photography”
within a booming 500-billion RMB wedding market as “the most essential
spending among all of the wedding event purchases” (p. 80). Our descrip-
tion of real estate showrooms in Chap. 3 explore how these trends become
mobilised in the sale of real estate, where they become further articulated
with what Zhuang and Everett refer to as “the behaviour of ‘travel with a
bridal gown (带着婚纱去旅行)’” (idem).
2. Our use of the term “detour” throughout this book derives from the notion
of détournement, a critical and dialectical manoeuvre popularised by Guy
Debord and the Letterist International, and later the Situationist
International. Détournnement is a term often translated as “deflection,”
“diversion,” “detour,” “hijack,” “misuse,” or “reroute” in English. In thesis
208 of Society of the Spectacle (1984), Debord argues that détournement
must appear “‘in communication that knows it cannot claim to embody any
inherent or definitive certainty.”’ Elsewhere, in the 1956 essay “‘A Users
Guide to Detournement”’ co-authored with Gil J. Wolman, the procedure
is described it in terms of a “‘mutual interference of two worlds of feeling,
or the juxtaposition of two independent expressions, [which supersede] the
original elements”’ to produce a “‘synthetic organisation of greater effi-
cacy”’ (1956, p. 15). Our use of the term “detour” throughout aims to
evoke this sense of hijacking and deflecting original meaning.
referenceS
Fleming, D. H., & Harrison, S. (2016). Are the Chinese Losing Their Gestures?
Published on Contemporary Chinese Studies at UNNC Blog, December 9,
2016. Retrieved from http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/chine-
sestudies/2016/12/09/chinese-losing-gestures/.
Sontag, S. (2008). On Photography. London: Penguin Classics.
Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Routledge.
Zhuang, Y.J., & Everett, A. M. (2018). A Brief History of Chinese Wedding and
Bridal Photography Tourism-: Through the Lens of Top Chinese Wedding
Photographers. In E. Yang & C. Khoo-Lattimore (Eds.), Asian Cultures and
Contemporary Tourism. Perspectives on Asian Tourism (pp.  79–100).
Singapore: Springer.