Mahjong Politics in Contemporary China: Civility, Chineseness, and Mass Culture

The surge of popular nationalism in China following the U.S.-led NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May 1999 came as a surprise to many observers, especially when juxtaposed to the "goddess of democracy" and the June Fourth massacre in Tiananmen Square a decade earlier (see fig. 1). The anti-Western patriotic efflorescence has been too passionate and pervasive to attribute to the (mis?)guided missiles in Eastern Europe alone.¹ And yet, neither is it easily reconcilable with the progressive trajectory within which social and economic trends of the 1990s in China have been generally situated and often optimistically interpreted.² The much heralded "retreat of the state" in the reform era, along with the "consumer revolution" of the 1990s, has led many to view emerging pockets of personal and community autonomy as signaling a (civil) society poised to bring down the communist citadel, or at least to sustain open criticism of the regime, were the necessary "organizational and legal buffers" in place.³ While the expansion of the local bureaucracy since the late 1970s has not been overlooked,⁴ central state powers were deemed to be eroding, a perspective that now must be problematized in the light of the rise of an assertive popular nationalism.⁵

Figure 1.

Anti-U.S.-led NATO demonstration at Beijing University, May 1999. The banner reads: "In the spirit of May Fourth patriotism, redress the national shame inflicted by NATO." All photographs courtesy of the author

Toward this end, I believe it is necessary to examine carefully the politics of regulating and controlling "mass culture" (dazhong wenhua) in contemporary China. In this article, mass culture refers to the domain where state power, the market economy, and the people (especially the people-qua-consumers) converge and often clash in the context of both the practical and pleasurable activities of everyday life.⁶ It is, I will argue, through a modern mode of regulating—of cleansing and policing—mass culture that the state maintains its grip on society and works to realize the articulation of the public and private, state and society.⁷ How does the state discipline and control a consumption-driven mass culture without suppressing the diversity and heterogeneity of personal interests and desires that the market thrives upon? What are the key discursive figures through which the state seeks to cultivate a unified moral consciousness and to crystallize the articulation of the personal and the national? What role do individual consumption and the market economy play in the modern politics of mass culture in contemporary China?

In this essay, I will explore these questions by examining the official campaign to regulate and control a quintessential icon of mass culture in contemporary China—mahjong. Specifically, I will examine the disciplinary discourse and tactics employed by the state to sanitize "popular mahjong" (minjian majiang) and promote "healthy mahjong" (jiankang majiang or weisheng majiang) as a competitive national sport and a symbol of China's distinctive cultural legacy. In the 1990s, people of all classes, occupations, and ages in China appeared to have been smitten by "mahjong fever." Suppressed during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), mahjong reappeared in the early 1980s and is now being played privately within homes during all hours of the day and night throughout the country. In Sichuan, Guangdong, and Zhejiang, especially, people can be found playing in a variety of public places (e.g., restaurants, teahouses, and work units). During a winter 1999 visit to Chengdu and Leshan, Sichuan, I even observed people playing mahjong on the sidewalks and in the streets, a scene entirely absent from these cityscapes on my previous visit only five years earlier in 1994 (see fig. 2).

Mahjong is closely associated with gambling, and rarely is the game played without some level of wagering. Stories abound of thousands of renminbi (RMB) being won and lost, sometimes in one evening, and semiofficial reportage casts a shadow over mahjong's popular image with sensational stories of personal and familial tragedies. Notwithstanding, mahjong has become widely...