China Off Center

Part III. Social and Cultural Margins

part iii Social and Cultural Margins To name something marginal is to claim that a center exists, which is contradictory to the aims of this book. Yet the belief that a center exists is something else again. There is a psychological center in views of China’s society and culture ; for Westerners, it may involve the exotic East, and, for Chinese, it may involve state-sponsored extravaganzas. It is such centers that dominate Western and Chinese representation of contemporary life and permit a facile understanding of China. The realities, however, are much more complex. It is not the case that we can generalize about Chinese, nor can we say anything definitive about Chinese culture. What we have done in this part of the book is to portray what we believe are little-known aspects of Chinese society and culture . Students have tended to be surprised when they learn that such things exist in contemporary China. This part has chapters on sexuality, gender and work, migrants, rock and roll, and spiritual life. Sexuality in China, like sexuality in other societies, takes many forms. Yet each variation may be evaluated too; acceptance of a range of practices is familiar in the United States but not often found in China. Sexuality is front and center today, explicitly displayed in billboards, in magazines, on film and television, and in forms of dress, but, because it is not spoken of, sex stands on the edge of Chinese social life. Gender and work open up the difficult topic of what are believed to be the proper roles for men and women as well as the realities of who does what work. The centers of economic vitality may appear familiar to residents of U.S. cities, but the margins—which are now growing—may not. Because of China’s recent economic and political history , people who had formerly been employed by state-sponsored factories or provided for in rural enterprises are now left to their own devices, creating one of China’s largest social problems as they wander by the millions from countryside to city and from city to city. Popular music in China has many forms. One form favored by younger people is rock and roll, although it may not be entirely the same thing as what we find on our charts. Contemporary musical styles—including rap, hip-hop, grunge, and heavy metal—popular in the United States are manifest in China, and their local appropriation by 217 young musicians has produced a new discourse that competes with, but does not overcome, politics. Finally, although religious and spiritual life is not well represented in the Western press, it is extremely varied in contemporary China, as the reader will learn from the small slice of religious life that we present below. The sections in this third part may not fit together into a coherent picture of what a “typical” person in China is like, but they will ambiguate common assumptions sufficiently to provoke further reflection on the manifold splendor of this vast nation’s real life and perhaps open space for comparison of the readers’ culture with that of those they seek to understand.—Eds. 218 ...