Queering the National Body of Contemporary China

On October 1, 2009, when the memory of the 2008 Beijing Olympic glitz remained still fresh, the People’s Republic of China (prc) stunned the world again. In celebrating its sixtieth anniversary, the prc not only impressed the worldwide tv audience with dazzling weaponry and military forces but also recapitulated decades of developmental transformation into a one-day spectacle relayed globally by its flagship media monopoly China Central Television (cctv). Like many national ceremonies, the celebration started in the morning with a parade that lasted for nearly three hours, including military and civilian parts, and culminated with a gala turning the ceremonial event into a midnight carnival. For the military parade alone, the state allocated a budget of roughly 44 million dollars to bring onto the scene troops armed with the most advanced military technologies to solicit patriotic sentiment from the Chinese audience. For primal scenes as such, as Cynthia Enloe famously quipped, “Nationalism has typically sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope.”¹ In this militant-power-emblazoned spectacle, it is not difficult to identify a masculinizing fabric that weaves the otherwise scattered imaginary and material articulations of state, nation, revolution, conflict, and violence into a collective memory of unity, cohesion, and harmony.² Alongside the gender line, the ceremony also maneuvered a range of material and discursive resources to represent the prc‘s history. Drawing upon feminist scholarship on gender and nation-state, the present article centers on the event as an optic to explore how gender, in relation to other axes of power such as class and sexuality, is employed and deployed to articulate and rearticulate the image of the prc in its transitioning from an autarkic socialist economy to a daunting player in the global geostrategic power game.

Indeed, since its foundation in 1949, the prc has emerged from the wreckage of wars and turmoil into a giant of continental proportions that holds the power to reshape the world. For more than thirty years, its double-digit growth in gross domestic product has been the world’s envy. In 2009 when many countries were struggling with the Great Recession, an aftershock from the worst financial meltdown since the end of the Great Depression, China’s sustained vitality and vibrancy became even more intriguing. In an article published by Forbes magazine, Panos Mourdoukoutas, a columnist and expert on the global economy, embraced China as the new powerhouse (after the predecessor Japan) that could save the world economy.³ Likewise, as the government pronounced, after a brief slowdown, China had reentered the fast lane of development by the end of 2009 and taken a role in leading the world’s recovery.⁴ The high-profile commemoration of its sixtieth anniversary, in this light, is a fine footnote in this triumphalist rhetoric. And its significance doubled by convergence with the thirtieth anniversary of “reform and opening-up,” the milestone that kindled China’s marketization at the end of 1978.

It should also be noted that without shedding its Communist straitjacket, China’s state-sponsored capital accumulation and marketization really hinge on the reproduction of “proper” subjects for the new social relationships driven by market rather than plan.⁵ In regard to these changes, some feminist scholars draw upon Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality.⁶ They suggest that the state adopted a set of flexible and contingent governing techniques to reproduce fitting subjects for China’s marketization, and gender in particular is a crucial biopolitical conduit for these practices.⁷ For instance, gender, as an axis of power, is invoked not only for the reproduction of flexible and cheap labor in the service of the accruing appetite of domestic and transnational capital.⁸ It also serves for recruiting citizens-cum-consumers for the market economy.⁹ And gender has a role in the reconstruction of ideological legitimacy to justify the reconstituted class relationships and skyrocketing social inequalities unleashed by China’s marketizing endeavors.¹⁰ Moreover, though sharing the same office and staff members with the Olympics organizing committee, the prc‘s sixtieth anniversary direction team strove to create a televised ritual of nationalist...