Attracting the World's Attention: The Cultural Supplement in Shenzhen Municipality

The Cultural Supplement

Consider the following comments made by two Shenzhen cultural workers:

"That's when they feel like a leader," a friend in the Ministry of Information complained, referring to several district leaders. "Sitting up on the stage, with everybody at their feet." Here he punctuated his statement with an ironic imitation of a self-satisfied sigh. "Everyone knows they're wasting resources. Why give out pens [for note-taking] if everybody already has copies of the speeches? There's a Chinese expression, 'Only beneath one person, above ten thousand' [yiren zhixia, wanren zhishang]. Maybe you can't understand it, but that's what they're looking for, up on stage, that's when the feeling comes."¹

"I'm not interested in power," his former colleague said, explaining why he had chosen to leave journalism to freelance as a playwright. "It's boring. Chinese leaders want what they had during the Cultural Revolution. That was real audience participation, before pompoms, when everyone waved a little red book. Now they've had to move indoors because the ordinary people [laobaixing] like soccer players and stars."

A fine line distinguishes the playwright's analysis from that of the cadre, beleaguered organizer of meetings. Where the cadre assumed that making a political speech from a centralized stage still excited Chinese leaders, the playwright differentiated historically between those feelings produced through political power during the Mao era and those engendered through entertainment in the contemporary People's Republic of China (PRC). More sensitive to the possibilities offered by the stage as a site of apolitical performance, the playwright pointed out that during the Cultural Revolution, cadres, martyrs, and role models received the kind of adoration that now goes to film and sports stars. Furthermore, he implied, if political power no longer brings with it star treatment, why bother? Yet the playwright agreed with the party cadre that it not only felt good to be the center of structured attention, but also that creating and occupying a center of attention was precisely the point of cultural production. Moreover, both men concurred that occupying center stage conferred social legitimacy, enabling the stage taker to influence society, even if that person demonstrated questionable morals.

For those of us used to imagining state officials and artists as antagonists in the play of culture, the cadre and the freelance playwright may seem to hold remarkably similar understandings about why anyone might want to ascend the stage. Yet this convergence points to a more interesting and possibly socially transformative difference; they disagreed over what might compel a person to watch a performance, begging the question of how a government, a television station, or a theater troupe might legitimately create and occupy center stage. For the cadre, audiences were constituted through the expression of social power. The thrill of performing came from being able to make people take note(s). For the playwright, audiences were constituted through the expression of personal taste. The thrill of performing came from attracting the attention of others. Indeed, this contradiction—between political power and personal taste—has vexed Shenzhen stages and the concomitant production of audiences. On the one hand, Shenzhen cultural producers, whether in the Ministry of Information, Culture Bureau, or outside the state apparatus agree that the stage is an important site for representing social values to other members of society precisely because a performance is assumed to affect an audience. On the other hand, they disagree over what standards should be institutionalized to determine who ascends which stages and when, recognizing that precisely because every performance stages a morally legitimate order, a new performance genre may provide a vehicle for re-imaging and re-presenting the municipality.

In this context, the playwright's turn to "personal taste" as justification for staging a performance was precisely what the cadre feared. As in English, in Mandarin the grammatical distinction between "what I like" and "what I'm like" is often smudged in practice. The cadre implied that people who like melodramas showed poor aesthetic taste, which he assumed meant (if...