East-West Identities (International Comparative Social Studies)

East-West Identities

International Comparative Social Studies Series Editor

Wil Arts Editorial Board

Duane Alwin, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA Wil Arts, University College Utrecht, The Netherlands Mattei Dogan, Centre National de la Recherche Scientique Paris, France S.N. Eisenstadt, Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel Linda Hantrais, Loughborough University, UK Chan Kwok-bun, Hongkong Baptist University, Hong Kong Frank Lechner, Emory University Atlanta, USA Ola Listhaug, Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim, Norway Rubin Patterson, University of Toledo, USA Eugene Roosens, University of Tokyo, Japan Masamichi Sasaki, University of Tokyo, Japan Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, New York, USA John Rundell, University of Melbourne, Australia Livy Visano, York University Toronto, Canada Bernd Wegener, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany Jock Young, London, UK

VOLUME 15

East-West Identities Globalization, Localization, and Hybridization

Edited by

Chan Kwok-bun, Jan W. Walls and David Hayward

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007

The photograph on the front cover was taken by Choi Kwok-to This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress East-west identities : globalization, localization, and hybridization / edited by Chan Kwok-bun, Jan. W. Walls and David Hayward. p. cm. — (International comparative social studies ; v. 15) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-90-04-15169-7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Hybridity (Social sciences) 2. Culture and globalization. 3. Identity (Psychology) I. Chan, Kwok B. II. Walls, Jan. III. Hayward, David. IV. Title. V. Series. HM1272.E37 2007 306.0951—dc22 2007031596

ISSN 1568-4474 ISBN 978 90 04 15169 7 © Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Acknowledgements .....................................................................

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Introduction: Globalization, Localization and Hybridization: Their Impact on Our Lives ................................................... Chan Kwok-bun

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Chapter 1 Identity in the Politics of Transition: The Case of Hong Kong, ‘Asia’s World City’ ........................................ Michael E. DeGolyer

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Chapter 2 Depoliticization, Citizenship and the Politics of Community in Hong Kong .................................................... Lam Wai-man

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Chapter 3 Globalization and Hybridization in Cultural Production: A Tale of Two Films .......................................... Georgette Wang and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh

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Chapter 4 Globalization and Identity Formation: A Cross-cultural Reading of Amy Tan’s “Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat” ............................................................ Lu Fang

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Chapter 5 Identity Shifts as a Consequence of Crossing Cultures: Hong Kong Chinese Migrants Return Home ....... Nan M. Sussman

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Chapter 6 Japan’s ‘Beckham Fever’: Marketing and Consuming a Global Sport Celebrity .................................... Rie Ito

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Chapter 7 On the Globalization of the Self: Internet Weblogs as an Identity-forming Activity ................................ Oscar Bulaong Jr.

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Chapter 8 Hybrid Language and Hybrid Identity? The Case of Cantonese-English Code-switching in Hong Kong ............................................................................. Brian Chan Hok-shing

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Chapter 9 Changing Heart (Beats): From Japanese Identity and Nostalgia to Taiko for Citizens of the Earth ................. Millie Creighton

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Chapter 10 Learning Hong Kong’s Body: Beauties, Beauty Workers and Their Identities ................................................. Anthony Y.H. Fung

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Chapter 11 The Impact of Localization and Globalization on Popular Music in the Context of Social Change in Taiwan .................................................................................... Ho Wai-chung Chapter 12 Building Traditions for Bridging Differences: Islamic Imaginary Homelands of Chinese-Indonesian Muslims in East Java .............................................................. Chiou Syuan-yuan

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Chapter 13 Pi’s Passport: Identity and the Peculiar Economics of Popular Culture ............................................... Chris Wood

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Chapter 14 The Pacic Rim Consciousness of American Writers on the West Coast ..................................................... Chung Ling

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Chapter 15 Making Do and Making Meaning: Cultural and Technological Hybridity in Recent Asian Animation .... Steve Fore

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Chapter 16 ‘Globalizentity’: Assessing the Effects of ‘Global Career’ on National Identity in Japan ................................... T.J.M. Holden

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Chapter 17 Cyberpatriarchy: Chat Rooms and the Construction of ‘Man to Man’ Relations in Urban India .... Ashley Tellis

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Chapter 18 Diverging Media Convergence: Perceptual Differences Across Cultures, Genders and Habits ................. Jeffrey Wilkinson and Steven McClung

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Notes on Contributors ................................................................

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Index ...........................................................................................

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book comprises papers which were presented at the LEWI & IIBD International Conference, “East-West Identities: Globalization, Localization and Hybridization”, on 26–27 February 2004. The editors of this book would like to thank Emilie Yeh, Associate Director of David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies (LEWI), and Vivienne Luk, Director, and Jane Moy, Associate Director, of Wing Lung Bank International Institute for Business Development (IIBD) at Hong Kong Baptist University for putting the conference together, refereeing the papers and selecting them for inclusion in this book. Elizabeth Cheung of LEWI has worked hard in contributing to the editing of the book, while other LEWI colleagues, Hidy Ng, Erica Poon and Deanna Leung, have rendered, as always, their hearty assistance and support throughout the book project. In an amiable and effective manner, this book represents the spirit of intercultural understanding and global collaboration in scholarship between the David Lam Centre for International Communication of Simon Fraser University, Canada, the Institute of Social Research of Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, and LEWI and IIBD at Hong Kong Baptist University. Chan Kwok-bun Jan W. Walls David Hayward

Introduction

Globalization, Localization, and Hybridization: Their Impact on Our Lives Chan Kwok-bun As an idea, globalization is by no means new to social theory and social research. Sociologists initially discussed globalization in the 1960s and 1970s. Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan and Powers, 1989) introduced the concept of the “global village” in 1960 to portray the world as being compressed in time and space by new technologies of communications. While McLuhan was concerned with communications, others were more interested in economic development. The neomarxist scholars, Barran and Sweezy (1961), for example, drew attention to the rise of MNCs (or monopoly capital, as they called them) and their impact on capitalism, while Wallerstein (1974, 1979) similarly pointed to their role in facilitating the expansion of world trade, and the international division of labor, which in turn was leading to a new model of global economy. These original ideas still have some currency today, although the instruments of globalisation have changed in various ways, for both better and worse. We live in a world of risk society (Beck, 2001), when globalizing forces such as the modern mass media in its increasingly converged form, not to mention email, mobile phones and the Internet, have become incredibly powerful drivers of change that open endless possibilities for the future, both good and bad. They invade all aspects of our being, including our local milieus—our homes and communities—and they permeate our private lives and our encounters with people from other countries and cultures, for better or for worse, in ways that were unimaginable only thirty years ago. Our everyday experiences and our cherished social institutions, such as the family and marriage, face an unrelenting pressure to respond and adapt to the relentless external forces unleashed by globalization—or face the consequences of being displaced or reduced to oblivion. The charioteers of globalization clamor, “live together or die alone!” Notably, our adaptation involves a redenition of such close and personal facets

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of our lives as, for example, family structure, marriage patterns, sexuality or sexual orientation, spousal relations, gender roles, self-identity, social identity, identication with signicant others, interpersonal relationships, consumer behavior, work patterns, and so on. We live in a “runaway world”, as Anthony Giddens (2000) describes it, and the impact of globalization is intensely felt by each of us in the public domain as much as it is in the privacy of our own homes, irrespective of whether we like it or not, or whether we acknowledge it or try to look the other way. Dimensions of Globalization The recent discourses on the implications of globalization refer to the process whereby the world is said to be transformed into a single global system. Analysts approach the question (and debate) from three angles: economic, political, and cultural. The rst angle is observable in the emergent global economy, wherein capitalism is expanded and transformed into an integrated global economy as illustrated by world nancial markets. The globalization of nance, whereby capital circulates rapidly around the world as a hyper lubricant of world trade and investment, is accelerating, courtesy of a cocktail of highly technical and increasingly complex debt and arbitrage instruments overseen by global investment banks. This process of “nancialisation” (see Frankel, 2001) affects everything from stocks and shares through to large chunks of public infrastructure such as roads. Even home mortgages are part of this global circuit of capital. The rapid development of information technology has tremendously facilitated nancial globalization, thus enabling markets to continue expanding on a global scale by, for example, the electronic transmission of funds and the detailed and nely-tuned tracking of economic transactions, which can increasingly be done from any location in the world. On the one hand, the internationalization of capital and free trade facilitate the continued development of MNCs, which occupy the lion’s share of the increase in world trade, either directly or indirectly, through the spider web of outsourcing relationships in which they are embedded. On the other hand, some of the biggest MNCs carry out their global activities in such a way that they are beyond the control of any national government. Both their internal operations and their transactions with other MNCs serve to integrate economic practices

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on a global scale. Helping to drive all this is government policy settings encouraging privatisation and deregulation, thereby opening up new investment opportunities in areas of activity previously assumed to be the preserve of the state—from the supply of water to the provision of prison services and even the supply chains that bring clothing and food to armies engaged in warfare. Such enormous changes have affected all states, but none more so than Hong Kong. While many fear the effect of globalisation on their national identity, Michael DeGolyer’s essay in this book, based on detailed empirical research, argues that Hong Kong’s history and geography as a major international port and nancial center have made it a source and beneciary, not a victim, of globalization. Other socio-economic forces such as social diversity within a centralizing government, communications, and globalization played a key role in the making of Hong Kong. Geography has essentially determined Hong Kong’s destiny and affected its history. Rather than being resistant to globalization, the erstwhile British Crown colony was molded after 1841 into an open port for free trade with the entire world. It continues in that role today. These unique geographical and historical forces have been the major factors in forming its people’s culture, mindsets, and identity. Globalization can be approached from the second angle of global politics. The globalization process has strengthened the world economy’s regulatory mechanisms such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, which regulate the global economy and thereby act as constraints on the degree of freedom with which nation-states can pursue their own individual economic development and, by extension, their political policies. For example, the European Union is capable of exercising supra-national control over national sovereignty in the economic, social, and political affairs of its member states. The globalization of nancial markets and corporations also encroaches on the power of sovereign states to administer affairs within their own jurisdictions. Like the internationalization of capital and labor, MNCs can re-deploy their operations to other locations with relative ease, should they nd the policies of a government not to their liking. Thus, social critics are keen to point out that under the globalization movement, a number of highly contentious issues have arisen: the erosion of the authority of nation-states; environmental disasters; aboriginal rights and citizenship status; migration and interracial, inter-ethnic, and inter-religious conicts; and tensions between human rights and civil rights, as in the ethical issues of abortion and

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of distributive injustice between rich and poor nations, and between the north and the south. Others have drawn attention to the way white hot money ows can quickly turn a nation’s destiny upside down with incredible speed, as was demonstrated by the Asian nancial crises of the late 1990s. Globalization has also been held responsible for undermining the continuity and authenticity of indigenous cultures, which has often energized social movements in protest of real or putative homogenization or uniformization of cultures in certain societies—to the neglect of the cultural pluralization or heterogenization thereof. Roland Robertson (1992) coined the term “glocalization” to describe these immanent tensions between the local and the global, and he railed against incorporation of the former into the latter. On a more positive note, Daniele Archibugi and David Held (1995) entertained the possibility of new modes of governance and cosmopolitan democracy in the new homogenizing global order. In this regard, Lam Wai-man’s essay in this book offers a critical examination of the development of citizenship and community-building in Hong Kong since 1997 as a unique development of a new form of governance. Lam explains that, “in every post-colonial society, reconstruction of community or citizen identities is one of the foremost tasks of the newly established post-colonial regimes.” The third way to approach globalization is in terms of its impact on culture, or cultures. Some critics liken cultural globalization to cultural imperialism by Western powers, and it is said to be the corollary of a groundswell of mass tourism—tours of the exotic indigenous cultures that have been re-packaged (and are, hence, unauthentic) to suit the appetite of foreign, deep-pocketed tourists on package tours (Luk, 2005). Increased migrations of peoples and refugees and other human trafcking between societies leads to the globalization of culture and the possibility of cosmopolitanism (Chan, 2005a, 2005b). The commodication of cultural products (for example, package tours, Shaolin Ku Fu ghting, McDonaldization, Disneylandization) is part and parcel of the brainchild of Peter Berger’s (2002) recent theory of cultural globalization. The global dissemination of a postmodernist ideology of consumerism is destined to displace or intermingle with the more localized cultures (see a critique of the myths of consumerism by Jean Baudrillard [1998]). The global marketing of cultural objects by MNCs, reinforced by the all-pervasive mass media technologies that are themselves controlled by these MNCs, contributes to cultural globalization.

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Berger gave the examples of McDonaldization or a “McJob” as the archetypal American cultural icons—and as part of global popular culture in the dynamics of cultural globalization. Georgette Wang and Emillie Yeh argue in their essay that, in the lms “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “Mulan,” “the constant motion and incorporation of different elements brings with it new characteristics, new distinctions, and new similarities.” From this perspective, perhaps hybridization and globalization do lead to the loss of distinctiveness in cultural products—and in cultures as well. However, by losing what was there, we are presented with something new, something fresh, something that represents yet another hybrid. In a similar vein, Fang Lu offers that “Mulan” and “Sagwa” (a lm and a television series, respectively) belong to two different genres of hybridities. “Mulan” is an example of the Americanization of Chinese culture aimed at assimilating it into American culture. By contrast, “Sagwa” seeks to localize Chinese culture in America, aiming at letting others recognize and embrace it by achieving a reciprocal understanding between two different cultures. Not only is globalization affecting aspects of the public domain, such as nancial markets and telecommunications, it is also impinging on our personal lives in varied ways—in our homes, in our communities through its exogenous forces such as the mass media, Internet and popular culture, and through voluntary and forced migration that put us in close contact with people from many alien cultures. In her essay, Nan Sussman considered the implications of globalization for the private lives of Hong Kong residents when the former British Crown colony was to return to Chinese sovereignty on July 1, 1997. Many Hong Kong residents decided then that the consequences of remaining after 1997 were too daunting to contemplate, and out-migration skyrocketed from 22,400 in 1980 to 66,000 in 1992, tapering off to about 40,000 in 1994. The bulk of migrants acquired visas for the UK, the USA, Canada, and Australia. These migrants were principally members of the educated middle and upper classes. Three generations of a family, rather than the husband alone, left Hong Kong. Commenting on the impact of globalization on those migrants who returned to Hong Kong, Sussman thrusts upon migration researchers frontal questions that every serious researcher must face. “What is the nature of the cultural identity of the Hong Kong returnee, whether husband or entire family? Another layer of identity has been added to the core Chinese, British/Western, Hong Kong identity vis-à-vis British, Hong Kong identity vis-à-vis China, and

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new passport country. Now the identity of repatriate is added. Who are these individuals and what is the conguration of identity? Do they feel at home again in Hong Kong or has identity transformation led to a new global transnational identity?” Looking at such issues of identity in Japan, Rie Ito provides a critical examination of Japan’s “Beckham Fever” during the 2002 football World Cup and its impact on the notions of “Japaneseness” and “otherness”. Ito argues that the Beckham phenomenon was something larger than one Western athlete in an Eastern country. “Beckham Fever” enabled local Japanese to talk about many issues ranging from sport to media, celebrity, globalization, race, gender, and national identity. At the same time, Japanese nationals could consider the complex ways in which these elements link to one another, as part of the world’s rst major global sport, which in turn has itself been truly commodied. The cultural meltdown of globalization is now omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent, and penetrates into our private lives. Imageries, notions, commodities, and lifestyles today spread like prairie re. World trade, cutting-edge information technologies, and a wired world of global media networks and of people have together quickened the trafc of different cultural forms across international jurisdictions. Some observers contend that we now have a single global culture and that we all live in a single global order. Nevertheless, Oscar Bulaong argues that as global communications spread, we are beginning to be able, to quote Heidegger, to conceive of a new possibility of understanding the human being and the human condition. “Only seeing ‘self ’ in a contingent situation of ‘dynamic absence’ is it possible to envisage ‘the self ’ unhindered in appearing uniquely, rather than uniformly . . . that every individual must project himself into the historical and contingent situation in which he is rooted,” Bulaong writes. I have visited the concept of “cultural imperialism” in the above because some observers fear that globalization is creating a “global culture” of homogenous tendencies. Global culture is a culture of the world’s most afuent military powers, such as the USA, and the mass media—Hollywood lm producers, CNN, the BBC, Reuters, and the opportunist, self-censoring and self-serving Chinese branches of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. The values that these media octopuses convey to the world’s consumers overwhelm the forces of local customs and traditions and even their histories (a postmodernist argument), and such dynamics are often tainted by political expediency and capitalist prot-motive ethics at critical moments in history. Under the inuence

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of the globalizing tendencies of the Western-dominated mass media, modern people are over-socialized, and yet they constantly feel a sense of social- and self-estrangement and alienation from the rest of the West. Hence, there is some truth to the argument that globalization today is a variant of “cultural imperialism,” as it held sway in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cultural imperialism aims to disseminate the values, styles, worldviews, and behavioral patterns of Occidental countries to the rest of the world. This invidious cultural intrusion is so overwhelming that the contents thus propagated can suffocate the cultures of indigenous peoples. I argue for the continuing primacy of traditions (history, language, geography, culture, lived experience, practice, etc.) for a post-postmodern perspective on culture, history, and globalization. The merits of a postpostmodern perspective are that it is able to transcend the dilemma of a lingering structuralism by freeing itself from the shackles of pre-determined conceptual structures without being lost outside those structures in a twilight zone of total indeterminacy and ambivalence—a much-critiqued problem of postmodernism. Thus, a post-postmodern perspective is one that is able to carry forward and go beyond postmodernism without adhering to a postmodernist language of excess and innitely deconstructive reexivity on culture and identity. A postpostmodern perspective is one that emphasizes the carrying forward (thus, the purposeful transformation) of biography, history, tradition and culture in the present, and toward the future, in actual human practice and in foregrounding a relationship between the present and the future in which future events carry out the implications of the present practice without simply repeating that practice. The emphasis of a post-postmodern perspective is therefore laid on biography, history, tradition, and culture as purposeful, transformative human praxis (as distinguished, but not entirely divorced, from abstract theorization), thus going beyond postmodernism and its logic of utter indeterminacy. On balance, however, other observers have argued that the globalization movement has engendered a owering of cultural traditions and forms. All things considered, they have argued, instead of cultural homogeneity or uniformity, the world has now witnessed a tremendous momentum toward an awesome diversication of cultures co-existing with whatever the hegemonic culture be. Chan Hok-shing examines an interesting case of Cantonese-English code-switching in Hong Kong. The major argument he makes is that this code-switching does not project a “hybrid” Hong Kong identity; nevertheless, he believes

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that Hong Kong culture is “hybrid” because it comprises Chinese and Western elements—it is both Chinese and Western and yet is neither completely Chinese nor completely Western. This cultural hybridity is a result of the fact that Hong Kong was a British colony for about 150 years, and is geographically peripheral to the Chinese border but is politically separated from China. In her essay, Millie Creighton presents a participant-observer’s eldwork account of Kodo and taiko in Japan’s cultural landscape. Creighton observes that Kodo rose to fame in Japan by renewing interest in drumming forms seen as strongly associated with the Japanese identity and a Japanese spirit, and its emphasis on taiko as a traditional Japanese percussion form. It also recognized taiko as a statement of Japanese or partial Japanese or even partial Asian descent, and later as a music form available to all peoples in a growing globalization of cross-fertilizing musical inuences. In the process, the highly localized region of Sado Island, where Kodo is based, becomes a site of globalization and hybridization through the fusion of music forms and experiences from around the world. Anthony Fung discusses the interesting cultural product of beauticians and their cultural resistance to the dominant classes in southern Chinese society. In doing so, these beauticians nd an alternative path to making up their identities through working in beauty parlors, which reveals a kind of cultural resistance of particular signicance for those who all too frequently assume that power relationships are one-way and that elites must always win. Fung explains that the dissemination of beauty culture is well received within the mainstream culture and that the beauty industry uses the female body as a vehicle or an object, either to raise the social status of beauty workers or to modernize (to effect a complete make-over). Body cosmetology is perceived as part of the “modernization” process. In both cases, the female body is only an object for modernization and a mere product readily commodied for other purposes. Moreover, for beauty workers, cosmetology represents cultural resistance inside the beauty parlors, where the power relations between workers and their high-heeled customers are temporarily reversed.

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Dimensions of Localization Local traditions and cultures are penetrated by a handful of alien cultural forces from the center and the periphery, confronting indigenous people with making an intelligent choice from a bewildering and intimidating assortment of cultural formations and alternative lifestyles (it is, one may argue, a Hobson’s choice—and who are we to judge whether one has made an intelligent choice or not?) As the famed postmodernist Jean Baudrillard (1998) intuited, far from being a unied global culture, the present global order is characterized by a fragmentation of cultural forms in which culture-based identities and lifestyles rooted in local communities are yielding to novel variants of “hybrid identity” that comprise essentials from diverse cultural sources like a salad bowl; people sample each recipe and mix in yet other ingredients to produce their own favorite “hybrid (sub)culture(s)”. As Peter Berger (2002) frames it, “localization shades over into another response, best described by the term ‘hybridization.’ This is the deliberate effort to synthesize foreign and native cultural traits.” Several other authors in this book speak of localization and hybridization in various contexts. Ho Wai-chung maintains that from the lifting of martial law in 1987 to the reign of Chen Shui-bien, Taiwan has made good use of the dynamics of globalization and localization to harmonize the triangulation of the government, the music industry, and popular artists. This dialectical relationship between localization and globalization has resulted in the continual growth of Taiwan’s pop music, which has kept its local identity while incorporating global styles. Chiou Syuan-yuan discusses the history of Chinese-Indonesians and of the Chinese Islamic movement in Indonesia since the early 20th century. According to Chiou, the Association of Chinese Muslims of Indonesia of East Java (PITIEJ)’s identication of Chen Ho (a powerful eunuch during the reign of Yung-le in the early Ming Dynasty) and Chinese Hui (mainland Chinese Muslims) with their homelands has created a diasporic tradition that nurtures a kind of Islamic Chineseness that is very different from other forms of diasporic Chineseness, which usually identify China as the motherland without considering Hui Muslim culture. But the PITIEJ does not automatically equate conversion to Islam with assimilation to the Indonesian nation; members still keep their Chinese identity.

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Addressing the commonly mistaken belief that globalization means exclusively Americanization, Chris Wood argues that the lm “Mulan” is produced by Walt Disney, but based on a script originally attributed to a traditional Chinese saga. Wood also discusses “Hello Kitty,” from Japan’s Sanrio Corporation. This animated character earns her Japanese creators a fortune and is a phenomenal commercial success worldwide. So, Wood argues, it is inaccurate to equate the globalization of pop culture exclusively with Americanization. The “nationality” of a corporate character and story is very often one of blended parentage, something we are likely to see even more of as lm studies—from Hollywood to Bollywood—come to embrace a wider cultural base from which they can produce the next global box ofce hit. In her essay, Chung Ling afrms the “Pacic consciousness” of American writers on the west coast. She argues that many American writers take the initiative in integrating Eastern and Western cultures in their writings. They absorb Asian cultural elements in their life and their works. These writers, who seek a new utopia, a new horizon, are in the minority in the United States. They see Asian culture as equal to their own, and actively learn from and adopt it. They strive for the communion of different peoples and cultures, and for a localization that is open and outreaching. A process of localization is under way here, Chung argues, because when these writers adopt Eastern and Asian cultural elements in their writings, they create a new, innovative hybridity within the tradition of European civilization, one that is respectful as well as intellectually stimulating. Exploring certain technologically hybrid forms of animation as they exist in Asia today, Steve Fore argues that it has become increasingly common to digitize cel-based sequences within the production process in order to blend them with computer-generated material. That is, an increasingly large proportion of commercial animation is “hybrid” in nature while the traditional forms of 2D animation are becoming obsolete in commercial productions. Todd Holden’s essay illustrates this phenomenon vividly. He coins the term “globalizentity,” which refers to a phenomenon in Japan (and elsewhere) in which globalization bears on the discourse about national identity. This identity discourse transpires through the mediation of advertising, news, television entertainment, music, and webpages, and inuences the “global career” of Japanese diasporic human ows in sports. The hybrid product of a national identity arising through globalization can be signied by the compound word: “globalizentity.”

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High Culture and Popular Culture under Globalization It can be argued that Chinese migrants nowadays may remain strongly inuenced by Chinese culture, Confucian ethics, and polygamous sexual orientation, for example. Yet they also perform religious rituals during the Hungry Ghosts Festival (held on the 14th of July), as they embrace cosmopolitanism as exemplied in their donning designer jeans, golng in exclusive country clubs, collecting antique Chinese porcelain, marrying Caucasians, vacationing in Kenya, and so on. These activities represent a cosmopolitan lifestyle and taste. They are also what the literati call “high culture” or, as Berger (2002) phrases it, the “Davo culture” of the social elite and intelligentsia. But the elite culture must be distinguished from the “popular culture” alluded to earlier if only for conceptual clarity; however, elite culture and popular culture sometimes cross-cut each other and depend on each other, as cosmopolitanism depends on localism—without localism, there can be no cosmopolitanism. A generic denition of popular culture is that it is simply culture that is widely favored or well liked by most people. Instances of this may include: best-selling books like the Harry Potter series, CDs, videos, sporting events, bull-ghting (against the bull) and bull-charging (against the Spaniards) in Spain, music festivals such as Woodstock, television sitcoms, and soap operas. All of these cultural manifestations can justiably claim to be popular culture in the modern sense of having mass engagement. Another characterization of popular culture worthy of note draws upon the political analysis of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, especially his thesis of “hegemony.” By hegemony, Gramsci means the way in which dominant groups in society are able to win the hearts and souls of subordinate groups through a process of claiming the intellectual and moral highground (Gramsci, 1998a). Gramsci’s cultural theory is useful for our understanding of the political dynamics of popular culture in capitalist society. Other commentators pursuing his approach opine that popular culture represents a site of ideological struggle between subordinate groups in society, through resistance, and dominant groups intent on incorporation and cooptation. Football hooliganism may be seen in this light, for example, as might forms of popular music such as punk rock and rap music which challenge acceptable forms of behaviour and elite institutions. For Gramsci, then, popular culture is not simply an imposed mass culture that reects the dominant ideology. It is not simply a spontaneously oppositional culture of the masses. In

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actuality, it is a terrain of negotiation and contestation between the subordinate class and the dominant class. It is a terrain of dialogic relations characterized by resistance, incorporation, and cooptation, which are manifestations of popular culture that cruise within a “compromise equilibrium” or “dynamic equilibrium” (Gramsci, 1998a, 1998b). For Gramsci, this movement is a “historical” process, which determines that popular culture be labeled as “popular” at one historical juncture and as some other type of culture at another. This process is also “synchronic,” meaning its cultural symbolism moves between resistance and cooptation at any given moment in history. To illustrate this point, it can be noted that the seaside holiday began as an aristocratic pastime, but within the space of one hundred years it had been popularized and become a symbol of popular culture (Storey, 1998). The “compromise equilibrium” in the theory of hegemony is a dynamic process that can be utilized to explain various types of conict, such as class conict within and across popular cultures. The theory of hegemony can also be employed to explicate conicts involving ethnicity, race, gender, generation, sexuality, identity, and so on (Storey, 1998). All of these categories were at different moments in history locked in variants of cultural struggle against the homogenizing forces of incorporation and cooptation of the dominant culture under the sway of globalization (Storey, 1998). On hegemony, as on patriarchy, Ashley Tellis presents in his essay a critique of the book Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia, authored by Chris Berry, Fran Martin and Audrey Yue (2003). Tellis chastises the authors for failing to analyze the political economy of sexuality, the differential power relationship between homosexual partners—differentials that constitute “glocalization” and eulogize the “glocal” as a progressive, impermeable, and resistant space of sexual cultures, thus facilitating supportive transnationalism. Tellis also takes the opportunity to lash out at the book’s authors for portraying the new media as a “crucial site for constituting new Asian sexual identities and communities” or “new forms of queerness,” without due regard to the inuences of external forces, such as unequal access to the Internet. Tellis contends that the authors’ rhetoric and optimism are without basis, and that the new media technologies they discuss can work to merely re-articulate and perpetuate conservative ideologies and practices. Instead, Tellis argues for an alternative perspective. He writes that in India, at least, although the queer political space created on the Internet is among the front-runners in Asia, in practice men sexually desiring men in

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India only further strengthens heterosexual marriage and patriarchy and further marginalizes women, as his research in cyber ethnography clearly demonstrates. By far the most intriguing concept in Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is that of articulation. Articulation, for Gramsci and his adherents, is the hallmark of resistance discourses. Articulation embraces a double sense, designating both “to express” and “to join together” (in a succession of events, for example, or in the sense of “connectivity”) (Storey, 1998). Chantal Mouffe (1981) is of the opinion that popular culture is marked by a “process of disarticulation-articulation.” To demonstrate this argument in action, let us take as an example the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom. The message in one of the Party’s political broadcasts signied a process of “disarticulation of socialism” in Britain as a political movement devoted entirely to economic, social, and political emancipation (Storey, 1998). However, this partisan telecast actually favored the process of “articulation” as a political movement aimed at imposing restraints on individual freedom (Storey, 1998). To press the point further, it will be remembered that the feminist and gay movements have always taken cognizance of the centrality of cultural struggle within the bitterly contested terrain of popular culture. Homosexual and feminist publications have invariably included science ction, detective stories, and romantic dramas. These kinds of cultural incursions signal an attempt to articulate popular artistic endeavors for feminist or homosexual identity politics. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony can be used to illuminate the ideological and intellectualized struggle between minority resistance and de facto attempts at incorporation and cooptation, which plays itself out within and across popular literary, artistic, and innovative endeavors. In this way, popular culture is rendered a sophisticated intermingling of different cultural tendencies. In other words, theories of popular culture are actually ideas of the constitution of “the people” (“communities,” such as feminist, gay or ethnic communities). Additionally, popular culture stands for nothing other than a contested site for the political construction of “the people” (“communes” and “communities”) and their relation to “the power blocs” (the “center” as opposed to the “periphery”) (Storey, 1998, p. 12).

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chan kwok-bun Postmodern Culture under Globalization

Under globalization, there appears to be an interpenetration of commerce and culture, or a postmodern blurring of the distinction between “authentic” and “commercial” cultures (Storey, 1998, p. 13). Globalization and postmodernism are closely related. For example, it can be observed today that there is a close relationship between television commercials and pop music. Pop music thrives in television commercials, which illustrates one of the basic points in the debate about the relationship between postmodernism and popular culture. In such a context, the distinction between high culture and popular culture arguably does not matter any more. Postmodernism extols an end to the elitist, hence arbitrary, status of culture. For post-postmodernists, however, the ultimate victory of commerce over culture is an occasion for sadness (as it also is for the great faiths of the world, hence their call for re-sacralization—for imbuing culture with something sacred—in the post-postmodern era). This in and of itself represents the commodication, hence the objectivization or externalization, of cultural objects for their “use value,” if not entirely for their “surplus value.” It is another way of saying that popular culture is controlled and manipulated by economic elites, despite the fact that popular culture penetrates the broad mass of people worldwide. It has been claimed by many social critics that the implication of commercial-driven popular culture is that its resistance potential is lost to the commercial protmotive. Neo-conservatives, on the other hand, aver that such a relationship (popular culture’s warming to globalization) may have a serious inimical effect on “high culture.” The debate in cultural studies goes on and on (Storey, 1998). Both of these critiques of the commercialization of culture, despite their different (hidden) political agendas, demonstrate a crucial facet of the dominant culture in Western societies, which is that the West is not a homogeneous cultural unit, but rather a multicultural entity, whose conict-ridden heterogeneity is hauled along by its globalization dynamics (Berger, 2002, p. 15). As Berger maintains, this conict-ridden heterogeneity in the West itself demonstrates the in-dwelling cultural forces of economic globalization. In their essay, Jeffrey Wilkinson and Steven McLung advance the argument, based on their empirical study of media convergence, that popular culture, including mass media technologies, is developing with lightening speed in the West, for example, in the US, and in some Asian regions such as Hong Kong. More importantly, Wilkinson and

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McLung stress that their ndings show that gender and age, as well as cultural, differences apply to the term “media convergence” and its usefulness. Dening “media convergence” as the coming together of media and consumer technologies, Wilkinson and McLung indicate the need to rethink the various theories and models of communication that concern the exponential increase in the application rates of the numerous varieties of mass media technologies. Cultural Revitalization under Globalization and Hybridization Another way of looking at the possible effect of the economic imperatives of Western capitalism on its “high culture” (or the “Davo culture,” in Berger’s analysis) is that impinging global forces can also foster a revitalization of ethnic cultural forms (Berger, 2002, p. 10), quite apart from what the “resistance theorists” have said about the loss of oppositional possibilities when commerce and popular culture grow too close. According to Berger, the best word to characterize this ethnic cultural implosion is “hybridization,” which refers to the purposeful attempt to mix foreign and native cultural attributes (Berger, 2002, p. 10). This is also when localization shades over into globalization or when what Roland Robertson (1992) termed “glocalization” transpires. Nonetheless, it has been argued elsewhere that the notion of “hybridization” is more useful as a social phenomenon than as a social fact, because it is actually difcult to pinpoint if and when hybridization has indeed taken place, if only because cultures since the dawn of mankind have always been mixed. So, hybridzation then becomes the mind-boggling task of ascertaining the genealogy of human evolution, which is often deeply riven by conquests (Chan, 2002). The propositions of cultural hybridization and related cultural creativity have four dimensions (Friedman, 1999): (1) Ethnic cultures are syncretic; (2) such cultures challenge the mainstream and take the upper hand: for example, American pop music, which has become “blacker”, and American lmography, which has become increasingly willing to embrace proscribed themes as was the case with the 2006 Oscar award-winning and critically acclaimed “Brokeback Mountain,” which depicts a homosexual relationship; (3) with the goal of transforming society, these minority cultures are now understood as a kind of challenge and dynamism—culture as a composite and challenging force; and (4) transcultural identities have both cosmopolitan and local

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afliations, and, hence, globalization and the need for specicity/ethnicity can be fullled within transculturality. In Hannerz’s (1996) view, cosmopolitans and locals have a common interest in the survival of cultural diversity, which is to say that there can be no cosmopolitans without locals. On this topic, contemporary globalization theory argues that globalization comprises the two entirely contradictory processes of homogenization and differentiation, that there is a complex interaction between localism and globalism, and that there are powerful movements of resistance against globalization processes (Marshall, 1998). Also, in a derivative of the fourth dimension above, cosmopolitanism depends on localism, and transcultural people (transmigrants) combine the two to create hybridism. Many of these propositions in cultural studies can be boiled down to the issue of class conict or the politics of ethnicity. For example, the analysis of “race” and “gender” issues is best understood in Marxist/class terms rather than in value-neutral/functionalist terms, and are reducible to a subculture of the current cultural discourse (Friedman, 1999, p. 245). Another perspective on ethnic conict is that ethnic subcultures can give rise to a substantial transcultural social formation; a hybridized cultural transformation and new forms of communities; a return to ethnic traditions among migrants or a search for one’s roots, which can be described as cultural expansion or re-territorialization driven by a sense of homelessness and homesickness (see, e.g., Inglis, 2000). In a postmodernist world of cultural tumult and social fragmentation, the interaction between ethnicity and modernity holds out the hope of new pathways toward some kind of transethnic, transcultural transcendence of boundaries and border existence, and toward a composite social formation (or toward reborn ethnic communities) nested (as distinguished from embedded) within a new global order with a new global culture (Friedman, 1999, p. 247). Such new composites are not just constructed from the cultural mosaic or from Western multiculturalism, but express themselves as creative and constructive cultural hybridities with the specic cultural legacy of their past. Or, to add a personal touch to it, I would say: modern strangers are going home at the same time they are away from home, or, to put it paradoxically, cosmopolitans are returning to their cosmopolis in a post-postmodern world without cosmopolis (centers), echoing William Butler Yeats’ prediction: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold” (cited in Wendy Griswold, 2004, p. 172). On Yeats’ view, Wendy Griswold (2004,

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p. 172) wrote an elegant and eloquent paragraph, which deserves to be quoted at length here: Now at the dawn of a new century, we realize that he (Yeats) was half right. Cultural centers did not hold. We have gone from a bipolar to a polycentric world, from a world of cultural pyramids to a world of multiple and parallel meaning systems. . . . Cultural purity is gone from the face of the earth; it was probably always a myth but now few even pretend to believe in it. We are all hybrids now. . . . At the same time, however, things did not fall apart. Human beings continue to ward off chaos through cultural objects. People continue to perpetuate their cultures through interaction and socialization. People still pick up mass-produced cultural objects and mix them up with their own cultures, thereby individualizing and transforming the nal cultural product. Our original cultural denitions still work. People may exist in multiple communities through multiple networks, but along these networks they still share meanings with one another. Communities, whether relational (humanistic) or spatial (geographical), still collectively represent themselves through patterns of meanings embodied in symbols, meanings that shape attitudes and actions.” (Italics mine).

Conclusion Under the inuences of globalization and localization, there has emerged a prevalent social formation based on a hybridized culture in which the cultural norms are many and various: boundary transcendence, alternative cultures, cultural hybridity, cultural creativity, freedom, autonomy, individuality, collectivity, connectivity, tolerance, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism. While the economic forces shaping globalization are powerful and seemingly getting stronger, they are not immutable, nor are their effects predictable or necessarily overwhelming. We are optimistic that the socio-cultural formations of the future will be a viable option for constructing global communities of migrants around the world. This proposition presents both an empirical and a theoretical question in studies of diaspora. For example, such cultural norms of newly constituted Chinese diaspora communities throughout the world are generated by the dialectic of cultural identication and social conict. Examples include racial exclusion and discrimination, which, in Western societies, have prompted a return (or repatriation) to Chinese cultural traditions, neo-fundamentalism or renewed Buddhism and Confucian ethics. These in turn have become increasingly ethnicized in Chinese diaspora communities—re-territorialization in the wake

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of de-territorialization. It is on these diasporic communities that the self-denition (the self-identity) and cultural expansion of all Chinese migrants depends, and it is with these tools that Chinese migrants are best equipped to navigate the raging torrents of globalization in the new millennium of a post-postmodern era. Globalization brings with it a fear, a sense of loss and demise. It also brings with it opportunity and hope. It is in this spirit that the chapters which follow should be read. REFERENCES Archibugi, Daniele and Held, David (eds.) 1995. Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Barran, P. and Sweezy, P. 1961. Monopoly Capitalism. Harmondsworth: Pelican. Baudrillard, Jean. 1998. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage Publications. Beck, Ulrich. 1998. World Risk Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Berger, Peter. 2002. “The Cultural Dynamics of Globalization”, Introduction, in P. Berger and S. Huntington (eds.) Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World. N.Y.: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–16. Berry, Chris, Fran Martin and Audrey Yue (eds.) 2003. Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Chan, Kwok-bun. 1997. “A Family Affair: Migration, Dispersal, and the Emergent Identity of the Chinese Cosmopolitan”. Diaspora, 6 (2): 195–214. ———. 2002. “Both Sides, Now: Culture Contact, Hybridization, and Cosmopolitanism”, in Robin Cohen and Steven Vertovec (eds.) Conceiving Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 191–208. ———. 2005a. Chinese Identities, Ethnicity and Cosmopolitanism. London: Routledge. ———. 2005b. Migration, Ethnic Relations and Chinese Business. London: Routledge. Frankel, Boris. 2001. When the Boat Comes In: Transforming Australia in the Age of Globalisation. Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press. Friedman, Jonathan. 1999. “The Hybridization of Roots and the Abhorrence of the Bush”, in Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (eds.) Spaces of Culture. London: Sage, pp. 230–256. Giddens, Anthony. 2000. Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives. N.Y.: Routledge. Gramsci, Antonio. 1998a. “Hegemony, Intellectuals, and the State”, in John Storey (ed.) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 2nd ed. London: Prentice Hall, pp. 210–216. ———. 1998b. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Griswold, Wendy. 2004 Cultures and Societies in a Changing World. 2nd ed. London: Pine Forge Press. Hannerz, U. 1996. “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture” in his Transnational Connections. London: Routledge, pp. 102–111. Inglis, Christine. 2000. “The ‘Rediscovery’ of Ethnicity: Theory and Analysis”, in Quah, Stella and A. Sales (eds.) The International Handbook of Sociology. London: Sage, pp. 151–170.

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Levin, David Michael (ed.) 1997. Language Beyond Postmodernism: Saying and Thinking in Gendlin’s Philosophy. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Luk, Tak Chuen. 2005. “The Poverty of Tourism under Mobilizational Developmentalism in China” in Chan Kwok-bun (ed.), Special Issue on Chinese Entertainment, Visual Anthropology, Vol. 18, nos. 2 & 3, pp. 257–289. Marshall, G. 1998. A Dictionary of Sociology. N.Y.: Oxford University Press. McLuhan, Marshall and Powers, Bruce R. 1989. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Mouffe, Chantal. 1981. “Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci” in Tony Bennett, et al. (eds.) Culture, Ideology and Social Process. Milton Kupness: Open University Press, pp. 219–234. Quah, Stella and Sales, Arnaud (eds.) (2000) The International Handbook of Sociology. London: Sage. Robertson, Roland. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Storey, John (ed.) 1998. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 2nd ed. London: Prentice Hall. Varga, Ivan. 2000. “The Challenge of Modernity/Postmodernity to the Classical Heritage in Sociology of Religion”, in Quah, Stella and Arnaud Sales (eds.) The International Handbook of Sociology. London: Sage, pp. 101–121. Wallerstein, Immanuel, M. 1974. The Modern World-System. New York: Academic Press. ———. 1979. The Capitalist World-Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 1

Identity in the Politics of Transition: The Case of Hong Kong, ‘Asia’s World City’ Michael E. DeGolyer Corporate Identity: The Geography and History of Experience Geography has not just determined Hong Kong’s destiny or affected its history. Hong Kong exists solely because of a gift of geography: its deep water harbor. There would be no city without that central geographic feature. Hong Kong’s fundamental physical struggle has been with the surrounding sea, to wrest its food from it, to pump sand from it to make land to house its teeming masses, to batten down and shelter against the storms and typhoons which frequent it, and to travel upon it for the trade which is its lifeblood and fount of its wealth. Instead of spurning globalization like its mother country China did so long, the British who wrested the former colony from China by dint of their dominance of the sea established Hong Kong in 1841 as an open port for free trade with all the world. It continues in that role. It came into existence as a shipping port; it continues as one of the largest on earth. Though a giant port, Hong Kong has always been a tiny place under a different system uncomfortably adjacent to a huge continent-sized state which controls the supply of its water, its food, and its main resource other than its harbor: people. Hong Kong’s high, densely packed population has struggled from the rst with scarcity of at, buildable land. Many were willing to tolerate a degree of crowding accepted nowhere else on earth because they regarded it as a way station to elsewhere. A place to make money, hone skills, do business, network and then emigrate to greener, or more appropriately, more golden, pastures: that was Hong Kong, the “borrowed place on borrowed time.”1 This history as a waystation of emigration has fostered a network of “overseas Chinese” that has made tiny Hong Kong a

1 See Ronald Skeldon, ed. Emigration from Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1995). The phrase is Richard Hughes’ famous description of Hong Kong.

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global nancial and trade powerhouse. (van Kemenade, 1997; Meyer, 2000)2 Unlike the case of France, Hong Kong’s geography and history have made it a driver and victor, not a victim, of globalization. But both have been, as Fernand Braudel argued of France, fundamentally shaped by the forces of landscape, location, size and the past. In The Identity of France, the great historian Braudel asserted geography explained much about the culture and mindsets of the French. France, when compared to states like China, Russia, Canada, Brazil, the US or India is not that geographically sizeable. But it is one of the largest states in Europe, and until 1795 it was the most populous European state, even over Russia. France was also one of the earliest countries, and at the time the biggest, to become a nation-state. Indeed, nationalism as an ideology and the self-identity of oneself as a ‘citizen’ of a nation arose in 18th century France. (Hutchinson and Smith, 1994) The notion of state authority and power ran up against France’s size, population and geographic diversity. The primitive level of the technologies of communication and travel in the 17th to 18th centuries, the time of the rise of the nation-state as a form of political and international order, mitigated against the erection of a powerful centralized government. (Brubaker, 1996) Despite centuries of effort to centralize France from Paris, to the point that a Minister of Education boasted once that at any given time in the school day he knew precisely where every teacher in France was in that hour’s lesson, the diversity of the land and the people, the stubborn insistence, as Braudel put it, “for every community to avoid being confused with the next tiny ‘patrie,’ to remain other” is what makes France and the French what they are. “Throughout its history,” Braudel insisted, this underlying ‘plural’ France has been contradicting the ‘one’ France which has dominated it, controlled it, sought to blur its individualities while unfairly monopolizing the limelight and the attention of traditional history. Whereas France is not one, but many . . . (trans. Braudel and Reynolds, 1988, pp. 40–42)

Braudel wanders over the face of French diversity, tracing in it the contours of French identity. In their geography lie many of the challenges of French history. That history and geography comprise the ever-renewing sources and the very continuities of French identity, Braudel argued. 2

Hong Kong’s stock exchange is 8th in the world by capitalization, just behind Germany, a country 10 times its population.

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Geography and Hong Kong Identity So too with Hong Kong and its people. If anything, the geography and history of Hong Kong has been a stronger factor in forming its people’s culture, mindsets and identity than that of France, or at least that of the 21st century France in which the Channel Tunnel and bullet trains connect every part of France and France with every part of Europe in a network of commerce and travel in which mere minutes or a handful of hours separate one region from another. Connectivity, communication and globalization are, to the fury of many French, transforming, perhaps even erasing, the diverse France that Braudel so lovingly recounted. These same forces—history, geography, diversity within an even larger centralizing state, communication and globalization—played a major role in the formation of Hong Kong. Geographic location has, perhaps most of all, determined the culture and mindset of Hong Kongers. Hong Kong has always been part of China but always separate from it, and for over half a century—1950–2003—Hong Kong’s border with that dominating state was closed either fully or partially.3 Hong Kong, forcibly carved from Imperial China’s ank by the British conquerors, like any adult abandoned by a parent at birth, has had an uncomfortable relationship with its cultural motherland since its return to Chinese sovereignty in mid-1997.4 The chosen, ofcial phrase characterizing its reunication, ‘one country, two systems’ is both a promise and a description which is even now under negotiation and elaboration as the boundaries of the one country and the dynamics of democratization promised to an uncomfortably incompatible system come into dispute.5

3 The border was closed and trade with China highly restricted from 1950 to 1978. The border remained closed to all trafc for about seven hours a night until January 2003, and not until late 2003 were greatly restricted numbers of mainland Chinese permitted to enter Hong Kong individually, and then were required to obtain a special visa to do so. 4 Michael E. DeGolyer, “Legitimacy and Leadership in Post-British Hong Kong,” in Robert Ash, et al., eds. Hong Kong in Transition: One Country, Two Systems (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003),139ff “Pre-handover views of reunion”; see also Suzanne Pepper, “Hong Kong and the reconstruction of China’s political order,” in Ming K. Chan and Alvin Y. So, eds. Crisis and Transformation in China’s Hong Kong (NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), pp. 20–66. 5 See Michael E. DeGolyer, “Listening to the Wisdom of the Masses,” (Hong Kong: Civic Exchange, 2004). Available: http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~hktp and http://www. civic-exchange.org.

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One country is a geographic assertion of unity; two systems is an acknowledgement of historical diversity. The ongoing dispute over these two givens is a political reality shaping Hong Kong’s future role in China and the world. The complex dynamics of these fundamental realities of this uncomfortable, advantageous, dangerous, competitive, evanescent and protean environment means that Hong Kongers have always had to live by their wits, hone their ability to make a deal, and survive if not prot from their endangering yet vital and enriching proximity to ‘mother’ China.6 The land and the sea thus comprise the inseparable yin and yang of Hong Kong’s character. The sea and the struggle for survival upon and from it have rendered Hong Kong and Hong Kongers what they are. There is not much land to Hong Kong, and when it was originally founded in 1841 it was only one island surrounded by sea. Not until the 1960s and 1970s was Hong Kong Island connected rst by undersea road tunnel, then rail tunnel, to the Kowloon Peninsula to which it had expanded rst in the 1860s and then well beyond that to the New Territories in 1898. Sea-based travel was so vital to everyday survival that one of the biggest civil disturbances in Hong Kong’s history was sparked by a 10 cent rise in charges by Star Ferry in 1966, then the only means to cross from Kowloon to the island. This sea-dominated history and geography has even, perhaps, to account for Hong Kongers scoring highest in the world on IQ tests.7 While some of that high IQ has come from a nearly merciless process of natural selection (Hong Kong long had little to no government assistance and to this day has only the most minimal of safety nets for the unemployed), a diet heavy in sh and other seafood may have played some role.8 But without doubt, Hong Kong’s geography and its 6 See Frank Welsh, A History of Hong Kong (London: HarperCollins, 1993) and also the documents detailing the economic aspects and often stormy relations with mainland China in David Faure and Lee Pui-tak, eds. Economy: A Documentary History of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004). 7 “Hong Kong ranks top in IQ world survey,” The Standard (23 Dec 2003) available: http://www.thestandard.com.hk/thestandard/news_detail_frame.cfm?articleid= 44213&intcatid=1 An Oxford University study underway has reported initial results buttressing the role of oils found abundantly in seafoods with improved brain performance. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/3146574.stm reported by the BBC 23 September 2003 and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/1985548.stm reported 13 May 2002. 8 See also Birch E.E., Birch D.G., Hoffman D.R., et al., “Visual maturation of term infants fed omega 3 long chain polyunsaturated fatty acid (LCPUFA) supplemented

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location have molded its attitudes in everything from food preferences to government priorities to personal identity. The only question is to what degree. How may we measure such? Measuring the Effects: Birthplace and History Combining the aspects above—food, attitudes toward government and personal identity—a study conducted by the author in 2001 for Civic Exchange on environmental attitudes found that government priorities by cultural and political or patriotic self-identity manifested distinct patterns. The analytic framework within which are couched these preferences and other survey results relevant to our overarching question of how Hong Kongers’ identity formed and how it affects attitudes toward democracy and government needs elucidation.9

formula.” ARVO Meeting 1996, New York; Farquharson J., Cockburn F., W.A., Jamieson E.C., Logan R.W. “Infant cerebral cortex phospholipid fatty-acid composition and diet.” Lancet 340 (1992): 810–813; Florey C. Du V., Leech A.M., Blackhall A. “Infant feeding and mental and motor development at 18 months of age in rst born singletons.” International Journal of Epidemiology 1995;24:S21–26 and Martinez M.J. “Tissue levels of polyunsaturated fatty acids during early human development.” Journal of Pediatrics 120 (1992): 129–138. 9 Analysis of the Civic Exchange report by Michael E. DeGolyer, Professor of Government and International Studies and Director of the Hong Kong Transition Project. Survey questionnaire developed by Christine Loh, Executive Director Civic Exchange, Y.Y. Yip of Civic Exchange, Michael DeGolyer and P.K. Cheung, Research Assistant, of the Hong Kong Transition Project. Survey conducted and supervised by P.K. Cheung. Civic Exchange, an independent Hong Kong based policy research think tank directed by Christine Loh, and the Hong Kong Transition Project, a long term multi-university research project directed by Michael DeGolyer, collaborated in this survey on constitutional reform issues and process, funded by an anonymous donation to Civic Exchange. At a 95% condence level, the range of error is plus or minus 4 points. The completion rate for the November 2003 survey was 28% of those contacted by telephone. As the project uses the Kish table to randomly identify the correspondents desired and then schedules a callback if that respondent is not at home, the completion rate tends to be lower but the randomization of responses (needed for accurate statistics) tends to be higher than surveys that interview readily available respondents. Respondents were interviewed in Cantonese, Mandarin, English, Hakka and other dialects as they preferred and as interviewers with the language skills needed were available. Other surveys referred to above are Hong Kong Transition Project surveys. The demographic and methodological details of those surveys and reports can be found on the Hong Kong Transition Project website at http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~hktp Further details about Civic Exchange may be found at http://www.civic-exchange.org. The number of respondents in the Hong Kong Transition Project surveys.

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Birthplace is a standard demographic variable but one which has additional signicance in Hong Kong.10 Technically, those born here since the 1 July 1997 reversion to PRC sovereignty are considered born in China, while those Hong Kongers born in mainland China are technically now merely residents in a different part of the same country. However, birthplace has much greater identity shaping signicance in the Hong Kong of today than in states such as the US. As Hong Kong does not determine citizenship by birthplace (again unlike many other countries), we begin the analytical framework by explaining the nature of this normally simple variable. The 2001 census indicated 59.7 percent of those normally residing in Hong Kong were born in the SAR, and that 85.1 percent of the population in 2001 had been resident seven years or more. Seven years residency is the minimum to qualify for permanent residency and the right to vote. The November 2003 survey referenced may be taken as representative of that 85 percent who are or are qualied to be citizens, not of all residing in Hong Kong. There is a large population of domestic helpers and expatriates and a signicant number of recent mainland emigrants (approximately a million people). These have been excluded for the sake of examining N = Nov Feb Feb Feb Feb Feb Jan Apr Apr Apr Apr June

91 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03

902 615 636 647 627 546 700 838 704 830 751 776

Aug Aug Aug July June April July Aug June Aug Nov

93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03

609 640 645 928 1,129 852 815 625; 808 721 835

Dec

96

June 98 Nov 99 Aug 00 July (media) Nov 02 Dec 03

326 625 July 98 647 Oct 98 811 813 1059 Oct 00 721 Nov 00 801 831 July (party) 1029 Nov 01 759 814 815

All gures are in percentages unless otherwise stated. All references should be to Civic Exchange and the Hong Kong Transition Project, which has project members at the Hong Kong Baptist University, the University of Hong Kong, the University of Macau and Lingnan University. The Hong Kong Transition Project is funded via a competitive grant from the Research Grants Council of the University Grants Committee of the Hong Kong Government (HKBU 2033/01H) and is a participating research project with the David C. Lam Institute of East-West Studies. None of the institutions mentioned above is responsible for any of the views expressed herein. 10 The framework discussion is adapted from “Listening to the Wisdom of the Masses,” a report written by the author on constitutional reform commissioned by Civic-Exchange and conducted by the Hong Kong Transition Project in November 2003. The report is available in English and Chinese at http://www.civic-exchange.org and http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~hktp. See end of this paper for details of surveys.

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the identity of Hong Kongers, not just in the sense of residing here, but in the sense of those who have established permanent residency or taken up citizenship. Of this group, the permanent residents surveyed, 73 percent said they were born in Hong Kong, 23 percent in mainland China, and 4 percent born elsewhere. Just because someone is a permanent resident of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, or even born here does not mean that they identify themselves as Hong Kongers. The survey asked 836 randomly selected permanent resident respondents how they classied themselves—as expatriates, mainland migrants or professionals, returnees after an extended time abroad, or as Hong Kongers or ‘other’ classications. We referred to this form of identity as cultural afliation or simply cultural identity. We also asked another identity question (see below) which we refer to as the patriotic identity. These two forms of self-classied identity show distinct differences.11 Just 12 percent of permanent residents identied themselves in some other way than as Hong Kongers, indicating birthplace is not the only means by which permanent residents form an attachment that is sufcient to identify themselves as primarily Hong Kongers. Table 2 shows reclassication of responses due to the need for a minimum number of respondents in each analytic category. Other surveys by the Hong Kong Transition Project with more respondents have shown returnees to have response patterns broadly aligned more with expatriate response patterns than with Hong Kongers or mainlanders. Thus, the 18 returnee respondents are grouped with the expatriate and ‘other’ identities of Table 1.12 Birthplace is the strongest factor inuencing identity, even though a majority of those born elsewhere (53%) also identify themselves primarily as Hong Kongers. Of those born in Hong Kong, 6 percent describe themselves as having an expatriate, other or returnee identication,

11

See http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~hktp. See, for example, Michael E. DeGolyer, “Western Exposure, China Orientation: The effects of foreign ties and experience on Hong Kong,” in Peter Koehn and Joseph Y.S. Cheng, eds., The Outlook for US-China Relations following the 1997–98 Summits (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1999), pp. 297–323. Other Hong Kong Transition Reports discussing, among other things, this aspect are available at http://www.hkbu. edu.hk/~hktp. See also Kenneth L. Dion and Karen K. Dion, “Chinese Adaptation to Foreign Cultures,” in Michael H. Bond, ed., The Handbook of Chinese Psychology (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 457–478. This reclassied table is used for signicance of association testing. 12

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michael e. degolyer Table 1: Identity Self-classication

Group

No.

%

Expatriate Chinese mainland migrant Mainland professional Grew up in HK, returned from abroad Hong Konger Other

14 38 4 18 734 28

2 5 — 2 88 3

Table 2: Reclassied Identity Categories Group

No.

%

Expatriate, other and returnee identity Mainlander identity Hong Konger identity

60 42 734

7 5 88

Group

No.

%

Hong Kong Chinese Chinese Hong Kong person Hong Kong British Overseas Chinese Other

226 182 365 16 13 34

27 22 44 2 2 4

Table 3: Self-description

94 percent as Hong Konger. Of those born in mainland China, 75 percent identify themselves as Hong Kongers in the afliation identity question asked at the beginning of the questionnaire.13 Fifty-three percent of those born elsewhere chose Hong Konger identity. The second form of identity, patriotic identity, was identied from responses to a question providing an alternative list from which respondents were asked to select the most appropriate description of themselves.

13 A returnee is one of the half million or so who emigrated during the 1980s and 1990s in prospect of 1997 and then, after the 1997 reunication returned to Hong Kong with a foreign passport. Since most had to meet minimum residency requirements of ve years on average and all had signicant time living abroad, their identity underwent profound changes, as shown below. Expatriates include many ethnic Chinese, a signicant proportion born in Hong Kong or China, who consider themselves foreign citizens or expatriates, even though Hong Kong or China is their native land.

29

identity in the politics of transition 50 45

H H

40

J

H

J

H

H HHH H H

H HH

H HHH H

H

H 35 J H H HH H J HJ J 30 J BBB B H J J JB J J J J J J J B B JB J B J J 25 B B J J J J B B BJ B B B B B B B 20 J BB BB BB 15 10 5

F F

F

FF

B

Chinese

J

HK Chinese

H

HK people

F

HK British

Ñ

Overseas Chinese

É

Others

F

Feb 93 Aug 93 Feb 94 Aug 94 Feb 95 Aug 95 Feb 96 July 96 Feb 97 June 97 Jan 98 Apr 98 July 98 Oct 98 Apr 99 July 99 Nov 99 Apr 00 Aug 00 Nov 00 April 2001 July 2001 Nov 2001 Apr 2002 Aug 2002 Nov 2002 Nov 2003

F FF FFFFFFFFFFFF ÉÉ FÑ FÑ FÉ FÑ FÑ F ÉÉ É ÉÉ ÉÑ ÉÑ ÉÉ ÑÉ Ñ ÑÑ É É É É É É ÉÉ ÉÉ É ÑÉ ÑÉ ÑÑ ÑÑ ÑÉ ÑÑ 0

Chart 1: Most Appropriate Description: Trends

The replies to the patriotic identity question above have been remarkably stable after a period of considerable uctuation before and just after the 1 July 1997 handover, as Table 4 below and Chart 1 indicate. We refer to this form of identity as patriotic because it has been shown in many previous analyses to be strongly correlated to other questions probing the degree of patriotism felt by respondents.14 As Chart 1 shows, patriotic identity has a strong association with birthplace, but 28 percent of those born outside Hong Kong or China identify themselves as Chinese, whereas a third (not much less than the 44 percent for the whole sample) identify themselves as Hong Kong people. Identity in the case of Hong Kong is not a simple matter of birthplace or even nominal nationality or ethnicity. The chart shows, being born in Hong Kong makes one more likely to identify oneself as a Hong Kong person, but age also makes a difference, as Table 4 shows. Analysis by age group shows that among those 20 to 59, or those who lived almost wholly during Hong Kong’s time of most complete isolation from the mainland, 1950–1978, and those who came of age during the disputes and negotiations over Hong Kong’s return, 1982–1997, were more likely to identify themselves as Hong Kong people. Those 70 and

14 See the Hong Kong Transition Project website http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~hktp for earlier reports examining this aspect.

30

michael e. degolyer Table 4: Patriotic Identity by Birthplace Hong Kong born

China born

Elsewhere

Total

26 19 49 7

34 32 30 5

11 28 33 28

27 22 44 7

100

100

100

100

Hong Kong Chinese Chinese Hong Kong person Overseas Chinese, Hong Kong British, other Total

Table Contents: Percent of Column Total Chi-square = 52.37 with 6 df p  0.0001

Table 5: Patriotic Identity by Age Group 18–19 20–29 30–39 40–49 50–59 60–69 70–85 Total HK Chinese Chinese Hong Kong person Overseas Chinese, HK British, other Total

36 14 38

32 14 50

25 24 44

28 23 44

25 22 48

33 20 33

19 45 31

28 22 43

12

5

8

6

6

13

5

7

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

Table Contents: Percent of Column Total Chi-square = 32.46 with 18 df p = 0.0194

older, almost all born in China, were more likely to identify themselves as Chinese. Until 1997, only those who came of age in the late 1950s and 1960s, a period of intense anti-colonialism but also the start of the Cultural Revolution on the mainland, tended to identity themselves as Hong Kong Chinese. Those forming their views as young adults at this time seem to have be repulsed from identifying themselves as plain Chinese or Hong Kongers, choosing a mixed label instead (these people are now in their 50s and 60s). This perspective may be returning among those in their teens and early 20s, the people forming their views under the uncertainties of ‘one country, two systems.’ Living outside and being born in Hong Kong rather than the mainland has a distinct impact on many aspects of identity and opinion. Nearly one in four citizens (23 percent) have such overseas experience. One in 10 surveyed in November 2003 had the right of abode in

identity in the politics of transition

31

another country (and 44 percent had family members and close relatives living abroad with the right of abode, excluding those in Taiwan and Macau). The experience of Hong Kongers with overseas entities, either living in or having right of abode there, or living there for extended periods, or by visiting close relatives living there, is considerable.15 This direct experience with alternative forms of governance by so many lays a substantial basis for many Hong Kongers to compare their form of government and the conduct of their ofcials with others. Forming a Distinct Identity of Its Own Having established the effects of birthplace and of history on identity in general, the tables and charts below show how these two aspects come together with Hong Kong’s geography and its trade-oriented behavior such as food consumption to form key aspects of its distinctness.16 Differences in cultural identity show up in a wide array both on preferences for what priorities respondents prefer government to assign particular issues, and the priorities those issues receive as personal concerns. In each category below, the rst column represents those who assign the issue top priority. The second column is the combined top plus medium priority. This is where signicant differences emerge. For example, no cultural identity group differs much in terms of the extent to which it would like the government to assign top priority to pesticides in vegetables. The problem of pesticides in mainland-grown food, where controls over such chemicals are rudimentary, has been an ongoing one because so much local fresh produce comes from the mainland. However, in combined priority, only 75 percent of mainlanders gave that issue high priority versus 89% of expatriates/returnees. The difference is more dramatic on contaminated seafood, the top priority for the great majority of expatriates/returnees. While 75 percent 15 The unusual nature of the Hong Kong family is discussed in William T. Liu, “Hong Kong Family in Transition: Will 1997 make a difference?” In Hong Kong in Transition 1992 (Hong Kong: One Country Two Systems Economic Research Institute, 1993), pp. 562–580. 16 The discussion of environmental issues over the next few pages is based on DeGolyer (December 2001) “Taking Charge and Cleaning Up: the search for a greener environment in the Hong Kong SAR,” (Hong Kong: Civic Exchange) available at http://www.civic-exchange.org and http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~hktp The number of respondents to this survey was 830.

32

michael e. degolyer

of expatriates/returnees identied this issue as a top priority, only 45 percent of mainlanders agreed, and while 91 percent of expatriates/ returnees identied it as a high priority (top and medium combined), just 67 percent of mainlanders did so. In some real sense, those who call themselves returnees and expatriates are the most typically ‘Hong Kong’ in identity in the sense that they have identied themselves as returnees and expatriates even though they are permanent residents or even born in Hong Kong. They have moved abroad, traveled and traded and become so globalized in outlook that they see Hong Kong as a chosen base and optional afliation, not as the only home they have ever known. Expatriates/returnees and Hong Kongers seemed to rank issues more closely together than did mainlanders and Hong Kongers. Table 6: Comparative Government Priorities by Cultural Identity Expat/Returnee Issue

Hong Konger

Mainlander

Top Top/ Top Top/ Top Top/ Average priority Medium Priority Medium Priority Medium of all (Top)

Pesticides in vegetables

68

89

69

87

67

75

69

Contaminated seafood

75

91

63

81

45

67

63

Drinking water pollution

62

92

63

81

50

65

62

Littering & hygiene

57

84

51

80

50

68

52

Seawater pollution

56

84

46

80

37

75

46

Lack of landll space

41

79

47

75

30

55

45

Illegal trade in endangered species

44

79

43

71

47

67

43

Noise pollution

43

78

42

79

35

62

42

Global warming

51

71

41

66

35

52

41

Indoor air pollution

19

63

28

65

38

60

28

33

identity in the politics of transition Table 7: Differences in Comparative Priorities by Cultural Identity Top priority Expat/returnees Issue

Top priority Hong Kongers

Top Issue priority

Top priority Mainlanders

Top Issue priority

Top priority

Contaminated seafood

75

Pesticides in vegetables

69

Pesticides in vegetables

67

Pesticides in vegetables

68

Contaminated seafood

63

Drinking water pollution

50

Drinking water pollution

62

Drinking water pollution

63

Littering & hygiene

50

Littering & hygiene

57

Littering & hygiene

51

Illegal trade in endangered species

47

Seawater pollution

56

Lack of landll space

47

Contaminated seafood

45

Global warming

51

Seawater pollution

46

Indoor air pollution

38

Illegal trade in endangered species

44

Illegal trade in endangered species

43

Seawater pollution

37

Noise pollution

43

Noise pollution

42

Noise pollution

35

Lack of landll space

41

Global warming

41

Global warming

35

Indoor air pollution

19

Indoor air pollution

28

Lack of landll space

30

In terms of concern about effects on personal health and well-being, 9 of 15 issues revealed signicant differences due to cultural identication. On six issues—noise, drinking water, sea water pollution, loss and degradation of green areas, overpopulation and crowding, and the mainland’s environmental problems—there were no signicant differences in degree of concern. Concerns certainly affect behavior, but just as certainly behavior affects concerns. This can clearly be seen with the priorities assigned to the contaminated seafood issue, such as how often respondents eat seafood. Expatriates and returnees tended to eat fresh seafood every day far more often than any other group, whereas a majority of mainlanders said they never ate seafood. Hong Kongers by identity, and especially

34

michael e. degolyer Table 8: Comparative Concerns by Cultural Identity Expat/ Returnee

Issue

Hong Konger

Mainlander

Great Great/ Great Great/ Great Great/ Average deal Some deal Some deal Some all (Great deal)

Pesticides in vegetables

68

91

53

82

48

77

54

Outdoor air pollution

56

89

50

88

43

80

50

Littering & hygiene

51

81

48

84

40

72

48

Contaminated seafood

65

89

45

80

30

63

46

Indoor air pollution

43

82

43

83

35

67

43

Global warming

37

76

29

65

18

48

29

Genetically modied food

40

73

27

62

27

58

28

Lack of landll space

24

59

26

61

13

35

25

Coastline reclamation

18

67

22

59

17

45

21

Table 9: How Often Do You Eat Fresh Seafood? Expatriates/ Returnees

Hong Kongers

Mainlanders

Average

5 22 24 22 27

1 8 22 31 38

0 8 12 25 55

1 9 22 30 39

Nearly every day Once or twice a week Once or twice a month A few times a year Never Chi-square = 32.64 with 8 df

p  0.0001

those born here (not all who call themselves Hong Kongers were born here), eat seafood far more often than mainlanders born well inland. Here, geography as well as habits of the table and habits of trade and travel truly bear out the adage that you are what you eat.

identity in the politics of transition

35

Seafood consumption evinces and demonstrates Hong Kong’s distinction with the mainland. The old slogan that Hong Kong is the Pearl of the Orient seems far more apt to its identity and character than the insipid sloganeering of the Tourism Board (Hong Kong: City of Life; Asia’s World City; Hong Kong: Love it, Live it; and so on). The pearl is a jewel born of the sea, created by an oyster secreting minerals around an irremovable irritant. The pearl and the oyster almost perfectly characterize the essence of the Hong Kong-China relationship, and encapsulate the origins as well as advantages of ‘one country, two systems.’ The jewel is a precious irritant, too valuable and too difcult to expel, so the one shell becomes shared between the living mollusk and the tiny irritant. The differences are fundamental, but the relationship is organic and inseparable. Such is, not are, Hong Kong and mainland China. These fundamental relations and equally fundamental distinctions have formed the attitudes of Hong Kongers toward their local government and what is now their national government. Identity and Politics: Between Worlds or in a World of Their Own? The formation of Hong Kong’s corporate identity and the formation of personal political preferences are also part and parcel of one another. Birthplace, right of abode elsewhere and having family members overseas and identity preferences both cultural and patriotic have effects on political attitudes of permanent residents. Table 13 takes one of the continuing questions posed, and presents the overall trends on the issue of the performance of the Hong Kong Government. As can be readily seen in the chart, trend lines show a fundamental transformation occurred in attitudes with the change of sovereignty in 1997. Before 1 July 1997, Hong Kong was in effect ruled by a condominium of locals and British ofcials. The British were often long-term expatriates or China or colonial specialists who occupied most of the top ofces in government. But, side by side with these foreigners and often in roles in which they exercised the real power, were local Chinese civil servants. These civil servants were characterized by ‘patriotic’ local Chinese as collaborators. Tensions between the colonialists and patriots burst into ames during the 1960s, when scores died and hundreds were injured in riots and bombings that went on for months. In the 1970s and 1980s the system of governance became far more open and participatory, and from 1982 onward elections increasingly determined government

36

michael e. degolyer

80 B

70

B

60 B

1 11

BBB

1 B

50 B

40

B 1

30 1

111

10 H

1 1 H HH

B

B

1

H

H

Satisfied

1

Dissatisfied

H

Don’t know

1

BB B B

H H H

BB B BB

1

1

1 1

111

1

B

B BB

B

H H HH H H H H H H H H HH H HH H

Feb 93 Aug 93 Feb 94 Aug 94 Feb 95 Sep 95 Feb 96 July 96 Feb 97 June 97 Jan 98 Apr 98 June 98 July 98 Oct 98 April 99 July 99 Nov 99 Apr 00 Aug 00 Oct 00 Nov 00 April 2001 June 2001 July 2001 Nov 2001 April 2002 Aug 2002 Nov 2002 June 2003 Nov 2003

HHH

B

1

H

20

11 B B B1

B 1

1

0

1

B

B

1 1 1

Chart 2: Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction with the Local Government Performance

representation. By the 1990s before the handover, as Chart 2 shows, Hong Kongers had on the whole become quite satised with the performance of what was nominally a foreign government but was in reality one more sensitive to their wishes than the one touted by Beijing as fullling their promise of ‘Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong’. The intensity of dissatisfaction had risen too, with only 1 percent (9 people out of 836 surveyed in November 2003) very satised, 19 percent satised, 45 percent dissatised and 30 percent very dissatised with the government’s performance. Excluding those who did not know and reclassifying the very satised with the satised, shows 21 percent satised to any degree, 47 percent dissatised and 31 percent very dissatised. Birthplace has some association with satisfaction with government performance, being strongest in explaining satisfaction than dissatisfaction. While 81 percent of Hong Kong born were dissatised with the government’s performance, this dropped to 72 percent of those born in mainland China and elsewhere. But as Chart 3 indicates, age and education level are more strongly associated with level of satisfaction with government performance. Teenagers and those 50 and above had higher levels of satisfaction than the overall sample average. Those in their 30s and 40s had much higher levels of very dissatised than other groups. Only those 70 and above show a majority satised. In part, these patterns can be explained by workforce participation. Those in the workforce have the most stress put upon them by policies that have

37

identity in the politics of transition 100 Satised

90

Dissatised

80

Very dissatised

70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

18–19 20–29 30–39 40–49 50–59 60–69 70–85 total

Chart 3: Satisfaction with Local Government Performance by Age Group

90 Dissatised 80 Satised

70 60 50 40

Lines indicate general tendency for dissatisfaction to increase and satisfaction to decrease with rising level of education

30 20 10 Univ & Post-grad

Form 6–7

Form 4–5

Form 1–3

Primary 1–6

No formal

0

Chart 4: Satisfaction with Local Government Performance by Education Level

38

michael e. degolyer

pushed down wages by keeping immigration high and by bringing in professionals from the mainland and elsewhere under special programs. But youth may also have been affected by changes in educational practices. The Tung government pushed ag ying and national anthem singing in the schools in an attempt to raise levels of patriotism among Hong Kongers. This program may be having some effect, but nearly seven years after handover, that effect seems minimal. Although age and education level are strongly associated (see the demographics section at end), the correlation of dissatisfaction with education can be seen in Chart 4 quite clearly. Post-graduate and tertiary levels are collapsed because only 17 respondents had postgraduate degrees, too few to analyze separately, and are charted by levels of satisfaction with the performance of the government (also collapsed into satised or dissatised to clarify the relationship). One consequence of higher education is that better educated citizens have more condence in their abilities, including their ability to participate in the making of community and governmental decisions. In turn, better educated citizens expect better performance from government leaders than the less educated. Part I showed trade has played a major role in formation of identity. What one does certainly affects one’s outlook. The data show despite the theory that since 1997 Hong Kong has been run by businessmen for businessmen—with a ‘representative’ system that ensures not only disproportionate numbers of professionals and business people among Legco members, but gives them multiple levels of veto—managers and administrators as well as professionals/associate professionals show the highest proportion of dissatisfaction, whereas retirees show the highest proportion of satisfaction with government. The old bedrock of government authority, business and professionals, has clearly been eroded, with only 13 percent of that category and 14 percent of professionals/ associate professionals satised with government performance. Even a larger proportion of the unemployed are satised than managers and administrators and professionals, indicating the argument that high unemployment is behind the government’s ‘unpopularity’ is not based in fact. Government gained most approval from retirees and those 70 and above, and the second most approval from students. Both groups are the least involved in the economy. As Chart 6 shows, more managers and administrators were very dissatised with the government than any other group. One in ve of those very dissatised were managers and administrators, well above

39

identity in the politics of transition

100 90

Satised

80

Dissatised

70

Very dissatised

60 50 40 30 20 10 Total

Students/Educators

Unemployed

Retired

Housewife

Ag, Fish Craft

Sales

Clerk

Professional

Manager/Admin

0

Chart 5: Satisfaction with Local Government Performance by Occupation

100 Students/Educators

90 80

Unemployed

70

Retired

60 50

Housewife

40

Ag, & Fish, Craft, Machine Operators

30 Service & Sales

20

Clerks/Secretaries

10 0 Very dissatised

Dissatised

Satised

Professionals/Assoc Prof Managers/Administrators

Chart 6: Occupations of Those Dissatised and Satised with Local Government Performance

40

michael e. degolyer

the 13 percent of the sample that the occupational category comprises. Retirees make up nearly the same proportion of those satised with the government’s performance, 19 percent, far outweighing their overall sample proportion of just 9 percent. The measure to remember while examining Chart 6 is that just 22 percent were satised with government performance, meaning although retirees make up small proportions of the very dissatised and dissatised columns, in actuality 53 percent of all retirees were very dissatised or dissatised. This is a key nding. The assumption was that turning Hong Kong over to business people, giving them a disproportionate inuence in the Legco and making sure the initial Chief Executive, Tung Chee-hwa, was a businessman, would virtually guarantee support of business people for government. With 88 percent of administrators and managers and 86 percent of professionals and associate professionals saying that they were dissatised or very dissatised with government, this cannot be assumed. Another assumption was that public sector (civil service and quasi-public services like the Airport Authority and the Hospital Authority) would continue to support the government. For the rst two years this was the case, but support among public sector workers declined under Tung and rose after the British-trained civil servant Donald Tsang took over in mid-2005. After pay cuts and job losses in the public sector, one would suspect workers in the public sector would be more dissatised with government than those in the private sector, and in terms of intensity of dissatisfaction, the assumption is correct. However, in terms of proportions satised, the private and public sectors are nearly the same. Only the non-workforce sector—students, housewives, retirees and the unemployed—showed more satisfaction than the other two sectors. Cultural identity (see Part I above) makes a difference in satisfaction with government as the small group of permanent residents who identify themselves with the mainland show distinctly less dissatisfaction than Hong Kongers and much more satisfaction. This has continued through surveys conducted in 2004 and 2005 under the new leadership.17 While a third of those who identify themselves as being Hong Kongers were very dissatised, only 8 percent of mainlanders and 24 percent of expatriates/others were very dissatised. And while one third of mainlanders and 29 percent of expatriates/others were satised, only 17

See the Hong Kong Transition Project website for updated reports.

41

identity in the politics of transition Table 10: Satisfaction with Government Performance by Sector

Very dissatised Dissatised Satised Total

Public

Private

Nonworking

Total

40 42 19 100

33 50 17 100

27 45 28 100

31 47 22 100

Table Contents: Percent of Column Total Chi-square = 14.22 with 4 df p = 0.0066

Table 11: Experience Living Outside Hong Kong for 1 year or More by Cultural Identity

Expatriate/Other Mainlander Hong Konger Total

Yes

No

Total

16 9 75 100

5 4 92 100

7 5 88 100

Table Contents: Percent of Column Total Chi-square = 40.65 with 2 df p  0.0001

one in ve Hong Kongers felt the same. However, among all groups, dissatisfaction considerably outweighed satisfaction. Cultural identity was strongly associated with experience living abroad and with right of abode in another country. Of the 23 percent of the 836 respondents who had lived outside Hong Kong for one year or more, 16 percent identify themselves as expatriates and 75 percent called themselves Hong Kongers. But even 5 percent of those who have not lived outside Hong Kong for a year or more (remembering that this survey was of permanent residents with at least 7 years of residency or birth in Hong Kong), characterized themselves as expatriates or others. Table 12 reverses the dependent variable to show that of those who identied themselves as expatriates, 49 percent had not lived outside Hong Kong. This cultural identity was not formed solely by experience or birth, but among a fairly signicant number by voluntary afnity. It seems possible that many of those who designate themselves as expatriates who are natives and have never lived outside Hong Kong do so because of family ties, cultural choice or even legal designation as ‘foreign’ citizens despite never having left Hong Kong and having been born here. Until well after 1997 some South Asians, Indians, Nepalese

42

michael e. degolyer Table 12: Cultural Identity by Living Outside Hong Kong for 1 Year or More Expatriate/ Other

Mainlander

Hong Konger

Total

51 49 100

43 57 100

19 81 100

23 77 100

Yes No Total

Table Contents: Percent of Column Total Chi-square = 40.65 with 2 df p  0.0001

Table 13: Patriotic Identity by Experience Living Outside HK for 1 year or More

Yes No Total

Chinese

HK Chinese

Hong Konger

HK British, Overseas Chinese, other

Total

24 76 100

25 75 100

19 81 100

34 66 100

23 77 100

Table Contents: Percent of Column Total Chi-square = 8.724 with 3 df p = 0.0332

and Vietnamese boat people who were granted asylum here (but born in detention camps) were legally permanent residents but not granted citizenship. However, the number is so small that those who fall into this group cannot account for a signicant proportion of those who have not lived outside Hong Kong who call themselves expatriates. Even those with right of abode abroad show that cultural identity choices are not the same as legal nationality. Of those who called themselves expatriates, a majority did not have right of abode elsewhere. Of those calling themselves Hong Kongers, 8 percent had right of abode elsewhere. No mainlanders had right of abode abroad. Patriotic identity shows similar patterns to cultural identity. Of those identifying themselves as Hong Kong British, overseas Chinese and other, two thirds had not lived outside Hong Kong. Nearly one in ve who called themselves Hong Kongers had lived elsewhere for a length of time. And even 76 percent who called themselves Chinese had not lived on the mainland a year or more. Identity, cultural and patriotic, seems to be a choice similar to food preferences or brand loyalties, not

43

identity in the politics of transition Table 14: Patriotic Identity by Satisfaction with Performance of HKG

Very dissatised Dissatised Satised Satised

Chinese

HK Chinese

33 41 26 100

25 53 23 100

Hong HK British, Konger Overseas Chinese, other 35 47 18 100

35 45 21 100

Total

32 47 21 100

Table Contents: Percent of Column Total Chi-square = 11.35 with 6 df p = 0.0781

legal origins or even experience. This, perhaps more than anything else, demonstrates Hong Kong’s globalized perspective in which the whole world, not just China or Hong Kong, is home. This patriotic identity does demonstrate that those who identify themselves as Chinese (predominately the aged and teenagers) are more satised with the performance of the local government than by those who identify themselves as Hong Kongers, but the association is not strong, indicating patriotism toward the mainland has less to do with people’s dissatisfaction. The call for ‘patriots’ to support the Hong Kong government still has some inuence, but increasingly those who identify themselves as Chinese do not necessarily agree that it means expressing satisfaction with the government. The difference between satisfaction with the performance of the mainland government in handling Hong Kong affairs and satisfaction with local government could hardly be greater, as Chart 6 shows. The leap in satisfaction following the withdrawal of the Article 23 legislation was unmistakable, zooming from 57 percent satised two weeks before the 1 July march to 72 percent satised ten days before the November 2003 District Council elections that saw allies of the Tung government soundly trounced. The election was not initially about Beijing, but with Beijing announcing it would become deeply involved in deciding whether constitutional reforms would proceed, the election turned out to be a referendum on the issue, with 62.9 percent voting for pan-democratic candidates. The breakdown of responses to the question of satisfaction with the performance of the mainland government in dealing with Hong Kong affairs in November 2003 showed 4 percent very dissatised, 14 percent

44

michael e. degolyer

80 B

70

BB 1

60 50

1 1

1 1

B

1

B BB B

BB

BBB B

1 B 1

40

1 30

1

B

B

BB

B

Satisfied

1

Dissatisfied

H

Don’t know

B 1

1 1 1 1 1 B 1 1 B H 1 H 20 H H B H B H 1 H H 1 1 1 H B H HH HHH 1 H HHHHH H H H H 1 10 H B

1

Aug 93 Feb 93 Aug 94 Feb 95 Sept 95 Feb 96 July 96 June 97 Jan 98 Apr 98 June 98 July 98 Oct 98 Apr 99 July 99 Nov 99 Apr 00 Aug 00 Nov 00 Apr 2001 July 2001 Nov 2001 Apr 2002 Aug 2002 June 2003 Nov 2003

0

Chart 7: Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction with Mainland Government Performance

dissatised, 61 percent satised and 11 percent very satised, which is a very different picture from the results for satisfaction with the performance of the Hong Kong government. As in the analyses above those who did not know are excluded, but in contrast to the above analyses of satisfaction with the performance of the Hong Kong government, the very dissatised are consolidated with the dissatised (totaling 20 percent) because there are too few very dissatised to analyze separately. The very satised, at 12 percent of respondents, is large enough as are the 68 percent satised. Birthplace has almost no signicant difference between those born in Hong Kong and those born in the mainland. The Hong Kong born were 20 percent dissatised, 69 percent satised and 11 percent very satised with the mainland government’s performance in Hong Kong affairs. The China born were 18 percent dissatised, 69 percent satised and 13 percent very satised, while those born elsewhere were 27 percent dissatised, 46 percent satised and 27 percent very dissatised. This latter group was by far the most polarized. Another contrast with previous results can be found in the breakdown by age group. Younger groups and those over 70 had higher levels of dissatisfaction with the mainland government’s performance in Hong Kong affairs. These same groups had lower levels of dissatisfaction than other ages with the

45

identity in the politics of transition Table 15: Satisfaction with Performance of PRCG in HK Affairs by Age Group

18–19 20–29 30–39 40–49 50–59 60–69 70–85 Total Dissatised Satised Very satised Total

30 65 6 100

24 69 7 100

15 71 14 100

19 70 10 100

17 68 14 100

18 58 24 100

24 58 18 100

20 68 12 100

Table Contents: Percent of Column Total Chi-square = 20.66 with 12 df p = 0.0556

Table 16: Satisfaction with Performance of PRCG in HK Affairs by Education

Dissatised Satised Very satised Total

0

1–6

7–9

30 60 10 100

31 51 18 100

20 68 12 100

10–11 12–13 14–16 17–18 Total 14 74 13 100

20 73 8 100

22 67 11 100

13 44 44 100

20 68 12 100

Table Contents: Percent of Column Total Chi-square = 31.64 with 12 df p = 0.0016

performance of the Hong Kong government. There seems to be very little connection between attitudes toward the central government and its leaders and those toward the local government and its leaders. The ‘China factor’ in Hong Kong elections appears well and truly dead. Again in contrast to earlier results, the less educated had higher levels of dissatisfaction than those with more education. The very satised among those with the highest levels of education are by far the most numerous among the groups shown in Table 16. Again in high contrast with satisfaction patterns with the Hong Kong government’s performance, business people and professionals showed high levels of satisfaction with the performance of the mainland government in handling Hong Kong affairs. Housewives and students were the most dissatised occupational groups. Again in contrast, the public sector was more satised than the private sector with the mainland government’s performance in Hong Kong affairs. While 20 percent of the public sector respondents described themselves as very satised, only 9 percent of the non-working sector respondents felt the same. The private sector fell in-between, with 13 percent very satised. However, the public sector respondents at

46

michael e. degolyer

16 22 72 63 12 15 100 100

16 75 9 100

Total

Students/Educators

Unemployed

Retired

Housewife

Ag, & Fish, Craft, Machine

19 68 14 100

Service & Sales

12 67 21 100

Clerk

Professional Assoc Professional

Dissatised Satised Very satised Total

Manager/ Admin

Table 17: Satisfaction with Performance of PRCG in HK Affairs by Occupation

30 14 24 28 20 62 69 73 64 68 8 17 3 8 2 100 100 100 100 100

Table Contents: Percent of Column Total Chi-square = 30.57 with 16 df p = 0.0153

Table 18: Satisfaction with Performance of PRCG in HK Affairs by Patriotic Identity

Dissatised Satised Very satised Total

Chinese

HK Chinese

Hong Konger

HK British, Overseas Chinese, other

Total

11 74 15 100

19 66 15 100

21 68 10 100

40 53 7 100

20 68 12 100

Table Contents: Percent of Column Total Chi-square = 24.85 with 6 df p = 0.0004

15 percent and the private sector respondents at 17 percent had similar levels of dissatisfaction, while the non-working sector respondents, at 26 percent, showed signicantly more dissatisfaction. There is no signicant relationship with cultural identity. Patriotic identity shows some association. The results in Table 18 demonstrate the ranking of patriotic identity clearly, with the lowest level of dissatisfaction with the mainland government among those calling themselves Chinese and the highest levels among Hong Kong British, overseas Chinese and others. However, even among these, a clear majority (60 percent) are satised with the performance of the mainland government in handling Hong

47

identity in the politics of transition 70

B 111

60 50 1

B

1

11

BB

1

1 1

40 B

B B

BB

B B

1B

11

BBB

B

B

Satisfied

1

Dissatisfied

H

Don’t know

BB

B 1B

B

11 1 H1 H H H 1H H HH H H HH B B HH 1 20 H H 1 1 1 1H H HH H HB HH H H 1 H 10 30

B

B

BB

1

1H

1

Feb 93 Aug 93 Feb 94 Aug 94 Feb 95 Sept 95 Feb 96 July 96 Feb 97 June 97 Jan 98 Apr 98 June 98 July 98 Oct 98 Apr 99 July 99 Nov 99 Apr 00 Aug 00 Nov 00 apr 2001 July 2001 Nov 2001 Apr 2002 Aug 2002 June 2003 Nov 2003

0

Chart 8: Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction with Mainland Government Performance in the Mainland

Kong affairs. Patriotism had much less to do with political attitudes up to November 2003. In terms of political participation and attitudes toward the mainland government, those who were registered to vote were more satised than those who were non-registered. There is no signicant relationship with those who were planning to vote in the District Council elections, or those who had signed petitions, or even the July 1 marchers. But attitudes toward the mainland have not just been based on Beijing largely keeping its hands off Hong Kong affairs, at least until January 2003. As Chart 8 shows, never have levels of satisfaction with the way the mainland government is ruling China been higher, quite in contrast to the record levels of dissatisfaction with the performance of the Hong Kong government. Whereas Hong Kong people once contrasted the performance of their government against China’s and found China’s governance to be seriously wanting, the situation post1997 was reversed, despite Hong Kong’s objectively greater freedoms, security, welfare and much greater wealth.

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michael e. degolyer Dissatisfaction with Government and Identity

The complex, difcult relationship that so characterized Hong Kong until 1997 seems, as of late 2003, to have been resolved in China’s favor. Dissatisfaction became focused on internal governance. Many complain anecdotally of deterioration in Hong Kong’s perceived international and cosmopolitan nature, despite the administration’s proclaiming it “Asia’s World City.” The overall results of the growing dissatisfaction with local government and local trends can be clearly seen in the replies to whether people were satised or dissatised with their lives in Hong Kong. In November 2003 only 4 percent of the respondents described themselves as very satised, 47 percent as satised, 30 percent as dissatised, and a disturbingly large 14 percent as very dissatised. Reclassifying the categories by dropping those who did not know and collapsing the very satised, at 36 cases too small to analyze, into the satised group, shows 15 percent very dissatised, 32 percent dissatised and 53 percent satised. The results of the November 2003 survey indicate by far the lowest level of satisfaction with life in Hong Kong. The 15 percent very dissatised equaled the entirety of those dissatised in 1991, and far exceeded the 9 percent dissatised in February 1997.

90 80

BB

BB BB

B B

BBB B B

70

B BB B B B

BB B

60

B BBB B B B B

B

Satisfied

1

Dissatisfied

H

Don’t know

B 1

50 40 30

1

1 1 1111

20

11

1

1 11 1 1 1 1

1

1

1 1 111 1 111 HHHHHHH HHH HHHH HHH HHH HHHH HHH 0 HHHH 11

Nov 91 Feb 93 Aug 93 Feb 94 Aug 94 Feb 95 Sept 95 Feb 96 July 96 Feb 97 June 97 Jan 98 Apr 98 June 98 July 98 Oct 98 Apr 99 July 99 Nov 99 Apr 00 Aug 00 Nov 00 April 2001 June 2001 July 2001 Nov 2001 April 2002 Aug 2002 Nov 2002 June 2003 Nov 2003

10

Chart 9: Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction with Life in Hong Kong

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identity in the politics of transition Table 19: Satisfaction with Life in Hong Kong by Satisfaction with Hong Kong Government Performance Very Dissatised dissatised with with Hong Kong Hong Kong government government

Satised with Hong Kong government

Total

Very dissatised with life in Hong Kong

39

4

4

15

Dissatised with life in Hong Kong

32

40

13

32

Satised with life in Hong Kong

30

55

82

53

100

100

100

100

Total

Table Contents: Percent of Column Total Chi-square = 206.3 with 4 df p  0.0001

That satisfaction with life in Hong Kong is strongly associated with attitudes toward the government can be seen in Table 19. Only 4 percent of those satised with the performance of the government were also very dissatised with life in Hong Kong, whereas 39 percent of those very dissatised with government were also very dissatised with life in Hong Kong. Thirty percent of those very dissatised with the government were satised with life in Hong Kong, but this rises to 82 percent among those also satised with the government. Identity and Conformity: History and Geography or Politics and the Motherland? Did something fundamentally fail in the promise of ‘Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong’ that might explain this plunge in satisfaction? Perhaps there is signicance in the fact that Hong Kong’s widely disdained rst Chief Executive was not actually a native of Hong Kong. Tung Chee-hwa came to Hong Kong at age 12, and to his nal day in ofce he spoke Cantonese with a very heavy accent.18 Perhaps Hong Kongers

18 Tung resigned in March 2005, well before the scheduled end of his term 30 June 2007.

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prefer the international tones of the British ‘received’ accent over the Shanghai-accented tongue spoken by the beleaguered Chief Executive. But more likely the increasingly well educated, increasingly internationally oriented, increasingly globalized Hong Kongers are impatient with the pace of change and the direction set by the aging shipping tycoon whose greatest vision was stability and who wanted, above all, to calm and slow the pace of political change. Hong Kongers are not rejecting their past as a center of the shipping trade; they merely want their governance to keep up and change with the times. While its port is large, Hong Kong as an air freight and air passenger hub has grown even larger, and at a much faster pace. It has also become a global center of information, particularly in business and nance. The world has shrunk into a global village where comparing the competencies and performance of both employees and governments are routine. There is much to support such an interpretation. Surveys have shown Hong Kongers overwhelmingly approved of China entering the World Trade Organization. They adored the man who led that change in China’s traditional isolationism, Zhu Rongji.19 It may be no uke that China’s rst astronaut, Yang Liwei, the man who proclaimed to the world his internationalism by ascending with the ags of China and the UN ying in his spacecraft, created a sensation during his visit to Hong Kong. The visit had been arranged in an attempt to boost the agging political fortunes of Tung and his political allies in the run-up to District Council elections. Instead, it contrasted even more strongly and in striking images China’s heroic young astronaut with the increasingly tired and aged Hong Kong shipping captain. Yang epitomized change and China’s future; Tung became irretrievably mired in the past and became a symbol of vain resistance to change, not unlike the Empress Dowager a century earlier. Hong Kong began with its eyes xed to the sea in hope of opportunity and to the north in fear of interference if not destruction; it now has the stars in its eyes, and like all of China, wants to reach for the moon, not freeze things in place. “Fifty years without change,” a slogan Deng Xiaopeng once used to set Hong Konger’s hearts at ease by assuring them neither their wealth nor their freedoms would decay after 1997,

19 See Hong Kong Transition Project brieng, DeGolyer, “The First Five Years: Floundering Government, Foundering Democracy?” (April 2002). Available http:// www.hkbu.edu.hk/~hktp.

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now seems like a sentence of death by permitting no change at all. The transformed geography and the utterly changed mental landscape witnessed on the mainland in the past 20 years may now account more for the fundamental disgruntlement of Hong Kongers with the lack of economic and political progress after reunication than anything else. After all, the very essence of Hong Kong identity is risky geography, rapid change, proximate threat and great opportunity.20 To insist that Hong Kongers accept no change, and meanwhile to witness a transformation taking place literally next door must be most frustrating.21 In 1978 Shenzhen, a Special Economic Zone, was established on Hong Kong’s northern border. From roughly 40,000 inhabitants in 1980 today some 11 million people with the highest per capita income among all mainland cities call it home. Shenzhen’s growth rate has ranged between 15 and 30 percent per year since 1997. It looks set to soon be home to double Hong Kong’s population of 6.9 million. Opportunity, growth, risk taking, even population density: all seemed to move to the mainland after 1997. And Hong Kongers followed. From less than 50,000 living and working on the mainland in 1990, the Hong Kong government’s own study showed some 500,000 lived or worked there in 2005. Lack of progress may have been the deepest cause of Hong Kongers’ dissatisfaction. For example, Hong Kongers strongly reacted against pro-democracy groups that rejected even incremental constitutional change toward democracy in December 2005. Whoever blocks progress appears to stand against the essence of Hong Kong.22

20 In a brief outline, Edwin P.W. Leung acknowledged Hong Kong’s development of a separate identity and culture from China, but argued that it should provide the basis for a ‘re-ethnicization’ of Hong Kong along the lines of the 56 distinct but still ‘Chinese’ national cultures. See Leung, “Transition from De-ethnicization to re-ethnicization: The Re-emergence of Chinese Ethnic Identity in Hong Kong prior to 1997,” in Hong Kong in Transition 1992 (Hong Kong: One Country Two Systems Economic Research Institute 1993), pp. 595–600. But a more detailed study by Albert H. Yee, A People Misruled (Singapore: Heineman Asia, 1992), esp. pp. 217–254, argues that there is a degree of duplicity in Hong Kong’s ‘Chineseness’ that is causing its disintegration rather than reintegration or Leung’s re-ethnicization. 21 See Kuo-Shu Yang, “The Psychological Transformation of the Chinese People as a Result of Societal Modernization,” in Michael H. Bond, ed., The Handbook of Chinese Psychology (Hong Kong: Oxford Univerrsity press, 1996), pp. 479–498 and James C. Hsiung, “The Hong Kong SAR: Prisoner of Legacy or History’s Bellwether?” in James C. Hsiung, ed., Hong Kong the Super Paradox,” (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 307–348. 22 See “Parties, Policies and Political Reform in Hong Kong,” (May 2006) a report written by the author, commissioned by the National Democratic Institute for

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The refugees who became Hong Kongers populated a “barren rock,” took on the uncertain seas, lived under China’s guns, and built a breathtaking city largely on pumped up seabed. Those who expect fearful resignation of Hong Kongers to their fate under the thumb of China’s Communist Party fail to understand what geography and history forged here. Those who know nd it unsurprising that Hong Kongers vehemently rejected the “slowly, slowly” philosophy of their rst Chief Executive and the interpretation of “50 years without change” as a means of “protecting” Hong Kong by freezing it in situ like an insect in amber. Hong Kongers demand change, particularly political change, faster than mainland ofcials will or want to give it. And they even reject those who in the name of democracy refuse to improve things by taking the small steps forward Beijing is willing to accept. Hong Kongers, more than anyone, have been the drivers and dealmakers behind China’s own breathtaking growth and modernization. These few on the margins facing the uncertain sea have played a massive role in transforming a continent and reforging a traditionally anti-commercial culture in their own rambunctious, prot-hungry image. To make progress “slowly, slowly” toward democracy, and by democracy they mean imposing accountability on their own government and their own tax money, conicts with the history, geography, and very identity of this globalized city of capitalist risk takers. China’s rulers may want to force on Hong Kongers a new identity as patriotic citizens loyal to an eternally unchanged situation of China as a one party state. But patriotism stirred into this formidable character forged by Hong Kong’s history of challenge and response could change China politically far faster than its politically conservative rulers imagine. Unlike the French who protest and violently resist change, who seek state-guaranteed security and protection from all risk, who ercely protect farming as the essence of being French, Hong Kongers literally cannot conceive of life without rapid, continuous change or without them captaining their own fate in whatever direction it may lead. Venturing in search of opportunity and seeking risk, not quietly bowing in surrender to a challenge or even a disaster, has become the essential character of this city. There are few if any places that have brought more change or experienced more change more rapidly than

International Affairs, on the Hong Kong Transition Project website, http://www.hkbu. edu.h/~hktp.

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Hong Kong. And that, more than anything, is at the core of the Hong Kong identity. Joining China has not changed that; instead, that is what is changing China. There is a new “Chinese” identity being forged in Hong Kong, but it is one the history and geography of change via trade and risk have forged, not that of the idealized obedient mainland masses cowed by the state-centric planned certainties of conservative communist cadres. The symbol of China increasingly, however, is no longer most aptly the Great Wall, built to repel outsiders, or the Forbidden City, meant to separate government from the governened, or even Tiananmen Square, lled with staged parades and dominated by the dead face of dictatorship. The true symbols of China today are the Hong Kong harbor, open to the trade of all nations, the streets of this teeming city which have witnessed the marches of millions of Hong Kongers since the 1997 reunication to the ballot boxes and to government ofces demanding accountability and progress from their elected representatives, and the great bridge leading to the Chek Lap Kok International Airport, Hong Kong’s link to tomorrow. France, for its essence, looks inward to the land. Hong Kong, to the sea. REFERENCES Birch, E.E., D.G. Birch, D.R. Hoffman et al. 1992. “Visual maturation of term infants fed omega 3 long chain polyunsaturated fatty acid (LCPUFA) supplemented formula,” Lancet 340, pp. 810–813. Braudel, Fernand. (Sian Reynolds, trans.) 1988. The Identity of France. London: William Collins Sons & Co. Brubaker, Rogers. 1996. Nationalism Reframed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Civic Exchange. “Taking Charge and Cleaning Up,” at website: http://www.civicexchange.org. DeGolyer, Michael E. 2003. “Legitimacy and Leadership in Post-British Hong Kong,” in Hong Kong in Transition: One Country, Two Systems, edited by Robert Ash et al. London: Routledge Curzon. ———. 2004. “Listening to the Wisdom of the Masses,” at website: http://www. civic-exchange.org and http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~hktp. ———. 1999. “Western Exposure, China Orientation: The effects of foreign ties and experience on Hong Kong,” in The Outlook for US-China Relations following the 1997–98 Summits, edited by Peter Koehn and Joseph Y.S. Cheng. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Dion, Kenneth L. and Karen K. Dion. 1996. “Chinese Adaptation to Foreign Cultures,” in The Handbook of Chinese Psychology, edited by Michael Harris Bond. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Faure, David and Lee Pui-tak, eds. 2004. Economy: A Documentary History of Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

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Florey, C. Du V., A.M. Leech, A. Blackhall. 1995. “Infant feeding and mental and motor development at 18 months of age in rst born singletons,” International Journal of Epidemiology, pp. 821–826. Hong Kong Standard. 23 December 2003. Hong Kong Transition Project. Reports at website: http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~hktp. Hsiung, James C. 2000. “The Hong Kong SAR: Prisoner of Legacy or History’s Bellwether?” In Hong Kong the Super Paradox, edited by James C. Hsiung. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hutchinson, John and Anthony D. Smith. 1994. Nationalism. London: Oxford University Press. Liu, William T. 1993. “Hong Kong Family in Transition: Will 1997 Make a Difference?” In Hong Kong in Transition 1992. Hong Kong: One Country Two Systems Economic Research Institute. Leung, Edwin P.W. 1993. “Transition from De-ethnicization to re-ethnicization: The RE- emergence of Chinese Ethnic Identity in Hong Kong prior to 1997,” in Hong Kong in Transition 1992, Hong Kong: One Country Two Systems Economic Research Institute. Martinez, M.J. 1992. “Tissue levels of polyunsaturted fatty acids during early human development,” Journal of Pediatrics, pp. 129–138. Meyer, David R. 2000. Hong Kong as a Global Metropolis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pepper, Suzanne. 2002. “Hong Kong and the reconstruction of China’s political order,” in Crisis and Transformation in China’s Hong Kong. New York: M.E. Sharpe. Skeldon, Ronald, ed. 1995. Emigration from Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Van Kemenade, Willem. 1997. China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Inc. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Welsh, Frank. 1993. A History of Hong Kong. London: HarperCollins. Yang, Kuo-Shu. 1996. “The Psychological Transformation of the Chinese People as a Result of Societal Modernization,” in The Handbook of Chinese Psychology, edited by Michael Harris Bond. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Yee, Albert H. 1992. A People Misruled. Singapore: Heinemann Asia.

Chapter 2

Depoliticization, Citizenship and the Politics of Community in Hong Kong* Lam Wai-man This chapter critically examines government discourses on citizenship and community in Hong Kong from the 1960s to the present. By making special reference to the government discourses on three public events—the 1966 Star Ferry riots, the 1981 riots, and scufes such as those that took place at the Cultural Center, Tsimshatsui, on Christmas and New Year’s Eve 2002—it reconstructs the meaning of good citizenship as promoted by the colonial and post-colonial governments. These three public events are selected as cases highly indicative of what governments expect an ideal citizen to be because all of them aroused substantial public attention that subsequently invoked considerable discourse and action. Citizenship is built upon a shared sense of community. Considered in this context, I also trace the understanding of community of the governments, as it is intertwined with the notion of citizenship, through the development of government policies on youth and citizen education in the city from the 1960s onward. It is obvious that citizenship has been constituted from both above (by the government of the day) and below (by the civil society). By reconstructing the government discourses in this regard, I will shed light on part of the process of citizenship-making in Hong Kong. Citizenship and Its Constitutive Stories Although denitions of citizenship are numerous, they usually encompass three major themes. Pamela J. Conover offers an example, explaining citizenship as the fundamental relationship of a person to a political

* A similar version of this chapter entitled “Depoliticization, Citizenship, and the Politics of Community in Hong Kong” was published in Citizenship Studies. 9(3): 309–322, July 2005 (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals). The author would like to thank the journal for permission to reprint.

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community that consists of a collection of individuals who are “committed to dividing, exchanging, and sharing social goods.” A political community is “constituted by its members and its formal institutions, and citizenship shapes how individuals relate to both components. It is the basis, therefore, upon which people answer the fundamental questions about public life: Who am I? What can I do? What must I do?” (Conover, 1995, pp. 134–5) Conover’s idea of citizenship reveals that it encompasses three elements. The most basic element is membership in the political community. The second element is the sense of citizenship, which consists of the concept of citizen identity: that is, the affective signicance people give to their membership in a particular community. It also connotes the common beliefs that people engender about their relationship to the state and other citizens. The nal element of the idea of citizenship is practice: that is, the forms of behavior in which people engage as part of their public lives. The practice of citizenship includes both political participation and civic activity. (Conover, 1995, pp. 134–5) While political participation manifests an active citizenship through which citizens assert their rights and inuence their government, civic activity indicates a relatively passive citizenship by which people’s obedience and fulllment of civic duties serve to keep the political system going. In theory, the construction of the concepts of citizenship and political community is a process embedded with a sense of reciprocity and egalitarianism, as both the government and the citizenry have a part to play in bringing good citizenship to fruition. There should be a dual emphasis on the importance of political and civic activity. However, in politics, as Roger M. Smith (Smith, 2001, pp. 79–80) argues, the status of citizen is often utilized for creating common memories and feelings of identication, as well as to create belief in the importance of practices benecial to governance. While citizenship indicates a political identity of a people, this identity, like other identities, is a political construction, subject to political manipulation. Also, shaping a sense of citizenship is a political process embedded with competing narratives of an economic, political and constitutive nature. Each type of story serves particular political functions. Economic stories promote accounts of interests, arguing that a particular version of citizenship advances each member’s economic well-being. Political narratives foster trust in the worth of a citizen identity by promising the people enhancement of their political power through institutions and policies, and protection

depoliticization, citizenship and the politics of community

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from all external enemies. Constitutive stories show members of the community with shared identities, as dened by their common religion, race, ethnicity, language, culture, history and so on. Building upon Smith’s perspectives, I will demonstrate that the ofcial discourse of citizen identity and practices in colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong have been on the whole depoliticized, although the colonial and post-colonial governments have also been responsible for re-politicizing Hong Kong as a result of the proto-democratic reforms of the former and the promotion of nationalism of the latter. (Lam, 2004, pp. 231–42) The colonial depoliticized notion of citizenship placed great value on cultivating a passive citizenship. It was intertwined with economic discourses that emphasized citizenship qualities such as selfreliance, economical usefulness and contribution. It was basically an individualized and instrumental account, promoting a shallow sense of community. As a result, this notion afrmed the historic vision of the Hong Kong people as economic animals, and saw society’s primary goal as enabling economic activities to ourish. A narrowly dened identity for its citizenry was entrenched within a constricted vision of society or community, which assisted in weaving the people together and strengthening governance. Although it has largely adopted the colonial government’s depoliticized understanding of citizenship and narrow sense of community, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government has been confronted with different political and economic circumstances since the return of sovereignty to China in 1997. Because of these circumstances, it has endeavored to cultivate nationalism as a part of citizenship and to experiment with various constitutive stories of a Hong Kong identity that caters to its governance needs. The Three Events in Focus The three public events selected here demonstrate vividly the development of the ofcial discourses on citizenship and community from the 1960s to the present. The 1966 Star Ferry riots took place at a delicate moment in Hong Kong’s history. In 1965, a run on the banks had occurred. At the same time, there was a recession in the real estate market and many of its ancillary activities. The Star Ferry Company’s application for a fare increase further depressed the people in Hong Kong. Although the proposed magnitude of the rise in fare was not

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substantial,1 public opposition soared—at its height attracting 174,398 signatures on a petition against the increase. Regardless of the opposition, the company’s application, although with a reduced level of permitted increase, was eventually granted. A signicant turning point in the event came on April 4, 1966, when So Sau-chung, a young man in his twenties, began a lone hunger strike in protest. His hunger strike attracted numerous young supporters. As events escalated, riots also took place and a curfew was nally imposed on April 7. Order was restored on April 9. One casualty and twenty-six injuries were reported. Relatively smaller in scale and less political in intent, it appears that the 1981 riots were triggered by crowds of people concentrated in the downtown areas celebrating Christmas and the New Year. It was reported that a car bumped into a pedestrian on Christmas Eve, which subsequently led to arguments and open ghting. The driver was beaten up while other people began to riot. The crowds smashed the car and other cars nearby. They set re to cars, assaulted people (notably foreigners), stoned policemen, and later rampaged into nearby districts, causing even more damage to public and private properties. Order was restored the next day with eleven injuries and twelve arrests, all of which were of people aged between fteen and twenty-seven. A few days later, on New Year’s Eve 1981, similar hostilities took place. Two non-Chinese youngsters danced on the street, which provoked hostility from the crowds that were also celebrating. The police subsequently made a number of arrests, most of which were of young people.2 Among the three events in discussion, the following scufes were the smallest in scale. In recent years, the Hong Kong Cultural Centre has become a popular venue where people, notably youngsters, gather and celebrate Christmas and the New Year. However, problems of littering, grafti, illegal hawking and vandalism are increasingly serious, and scufes between youngsters and the police and minor disorders incited

1 The proposed fare increase of ten cents was for both rst and second-class round trips on the Central to Tsim Sha Tsui route. Also, the cost of an adult’s monthly ticket was to rise from HK $8 to $10, and a child’s monthly ticket from HK $4 to $5. 2 See Eddie Kwok-wai Wong. 1996. An analysis of disorder in Hong Kong society. M.A. dissertation in Public Order, Centre for the Study of Public Order, University of Leicester, in association with School of Professional and Continuing Education, University of Hong Kong, 10; and Lawrence Yeung-yin Ng. 1995. Reections on riots in Hong Kong in the 1980s: a study in public disorder. M.A. dissertation in Public Order, Centre for the Study of Public Order, University of Leicester, in association with School of Professional and Continuing Education, University of Hong Kong, pp. 71–2.

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by excited gangs have also become common during the celebrations. At Christmas 2002, conicts occurred between young celebrators and the police at the Cultural Center, leading to several arrests. Both the youngsters and the police complained about being assaulted. Similarly, during the celebrations for New Year of 2003, a crowd of youngsters sang and danced to express their feelings but were stopped by a police ofcer. A scufe occurred, and the policeman was surrounded. The police eventually took steps to disperse the crowd, cleared the venue and arrested at least seven youngsters. The authorities accused the celebrators, notably members of youth gangs, of a lack of self-discipline and care for public property, getting excited too easily and not cooperating with the police to maintain public order. Although the three types of events under study appear to be different in nature, they manifest the government’s changing focus in the construction of citizen identity, and the constitution of the types of citizenship stories suggested by Smith. Political Passivity and Depoliticized Citizenship It is no exaggeration that the ofcial discourse on citizenship in Hong Kong has been narrowly focused and depoliticized. This depoliticized discourse consists of several major characteristics, including, rst of all, a passive notion of citizenship. The events described reect that the concept of citizenship promoted by the Hong Kong colonial and post-colonial governments have been strikingly passive. It has emphasized civic duties rather than political rights and the development of critical ability. For example, in the 1966 riots and the 2002 scufes, the main blame for the conicts was placed on the actions of so-called irresponsible youths who were also accused of just wanting excitement, lacking self-control, behaving in an ill mannered way and so on. On the whole, the young people involved in the conicts were accused of lacking a sense of civic consciousness, with the term “sense of citizenship” dened as being well-mannered, well-adjusted and socially responsible. Citizenship in this sense skips its activist components. In fact, educating local people on how to become responsible citizens has remained a constant theme of government youth and community building policies since the 1960s. For example, the aims of many of the activities organized for young people and for community development

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have been explicitly designed to promote public-spirited citizenship. As early as the beginning of the 1950s, the Social Welfare Department stated that its common ideal was: To enable every member of the community to develop into a reliable neighbour, and a useful and informed fellow-citizen. Every practical step taken towards that ideal meant a gain to the community, inasmuch as successful social work resulted in fewer social mists, more individual selfreliance, and less dependence upon ‘charity’ by families or persons . . . in short, citizens with a much more highly developed social consciousness and sense of social responsibility than had existed previously. (Social Welfare Department, 1955, p. 1)

Similarly, as exemplied in a report published before the 1966 riots, citizenship meant being cooperative and fullling civic obligations: This [community centre] is the network by which residents are helped to become citizens, to develop co-operative attitudes, to increase their capacity to work together, and, by furthering their own particular interests, to serve the wider interests of the community. (Social Welfare Department, 1965, p. 9)

After the 1966 riots, the colonial government carried out a series of measures to strengthen its legitimacy. With regard to citizenship, it implemented the City District Ofce scheme,3 improved social welfare services, nurtured a sense of belonging in the people and developed civic education. It further promoted civic education in the 1980s in response to the 1981 riots and the question of Hong Kong’s political future. In his 1998 Policy Address, Hong Kong’s rst post-colonial Chief Executive, Tung Chee-hwa, also stated that he looked to the younger generation to not only seek their rights as individuals, but also to meet their obligations to society. (Tung, 1998a, p. 111) In a similar vein, after the 2002 scufes, calls for cultivating a sense of civic responsibility and civic consciousness among Hong Kong citizens were frequently heard. Notably, 140 “Ambassador” volunteers were mobilized as exemplary youth in assisting Madam Tung to clear up the situation at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre.

3 The City District Ofce scheme was implemented in 1969. The scheme established ten City District Ofces and a number of area committees in the urban areas of Hong Kong for better government coordination.

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A Citizenship Intertwined with Economic Narratives We can make sense of the government emphasis on promoting civic obedience and responsible citizenship very easily. These qualities are essential conditions for maintaining stability and harmony in society, and are prerequisites for favorable economic investment and prosperity. Indeed, another notable characteristic of the depoliticized discourse of citizenship shared by the two forms of government is its economic emphasis. First of all, there is a tendency to seek economic explanations for poor citizenship. In the three social conicts examined above, government ofcials closely scrutinized the occupations and social classes of those involved. The rioters or the so-called problem youth were described as unemployed, underemployed, undereducated or double-losers in competitions in schools and in the job market. The employment situation of the youngsters involved was said to have had a part to play in causing the problems, and also contributed to their poorly developed citizen consciousness. For example, regarding the 1966 rioters, the report of the Commission of Inquiry stated that The type of employment many of the boys were in held little for them by way of future security or advancement and this, coupled with the long unorthodox hours they worked, as well as the low pay they received, contributed to the feeling of aimlessness and boredom which was part of the motivation behind their involvement in the riots. Because of the demands of their employment, they lacked opportunity for normal teenage fun, so used the riots as one outlet for this need. (Commission, 1967, p. 106)

Hence, it appears that the jobs of the youngsters had a part to play in causing the riots. Like the 1966 riots, the discourse invoked during the 2002 scufes has a similar component. The participants in the scufes were presumed to be unemployed and were labeled as “losers” in schools. They were from the so-called double losers, who had neither career nor educational prospects, and who amounted to around 100,000 in number according to the government. Indeed, this type of economic explanation was particularly prevalent after the 2002 scufes, reecting the predominance of economic narratives in the city since the 1997 return of sovereignty to China. Second, good citizenship means not relying on government and contributing to economic growth. Suggestions to enable young people to become self-reliant and contributive were made after the events under study. In the aftermath of the 1966 riots, voices were raised to secure

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better prospects and more stable employment for young people through improved educational and training programs. (Social, 1968, p. 1) Such suggestions were also prominent after the 2002 scufes, which doubtless indicates that the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government regarded helping youngsters to nd employment and offering employment retraining programs as feasible solutions to the perceived problems of the young. Further, since reunifying with China, the aim of social welfare has been commonly stated as helping young people to “become participating and contributing members of society” and to provide individuals “with opportunities to achieve self-reliance and self-betterment, and promote social cohesion and harmony.” (Hong, 2001) This emphasis on the concept of self-reliance explains why Comprehensive Social Security Assistance4 recipients who are able-bodied and have the ability to work are a problem. Driven by the fear that such recipients will become dependent on the government, the Active Employment Assistance Programme under the Support for Self-Reliance Scheme has been implemented to help them to become self-reliant again, offering them job retraining and job-hunting assistance. (Social, 2003, p. 11) Such calls for preserving a self-reliant culture and being economically contributive reveal an economic emphasis in government notions of ideal citizenship. If the concept of self-reliance is to orient the people of Hong Kong to be economically independent and useful, then the fulllment of that goal requires an active attitude from the people to search continuously for knowledge and skills that are benecial to the city’s economic recovery and reconstruction. Since the handover, there has been an increasing emphasis on this “activist attitude” that was not found before. This discourse encourages people to actively acquire economic skills so they can contribute to and be useful in Hong Kong’s economic recovery. For instance, Tung Chee-hwa sated in his 1997 Policy Address that: It is important that we educate our young people, so that they master the knowledge and skills needed to make a living and to contribute to society. But this is far from being the only aim of importance. Knowledge and skills can propel economic growth. (Tung, 1997b, p. 104)

4 This is a type of government nancial assistance that serves as a “safety net” for the unemployed and poor.

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An Instrumental Overtone The economic orientation of the idea of citizenship promoted by the colonial and post-colonial governments clearly contains an instrumental overtone, seeing youth development and citizenship education as a social investment that in the end will mean a gain to the community or lead to economic and social prosperity. For example, a government report in 1964 stated that the government was obliged to concentrate on those social services that contributed directly to the self-reliance of individuals and so to the greater economic and social prosperity of the community. (Social, 1964, pp. 3–4) It can be understood that good citizenship meant, at least partly, satisfying the economic demands of the government. Good citizens could not constitute an economic burden. Instead, they had to be able to contribute to the economic growth of the city. It is worth noting that such demands from the government have intensied when Hong Kong’s economic situation has deteriorated. Since the economic downturn in 1999, the post-colonial government’s promotion of this ideal citizenship has become particularly prevalent. The instrumental overtone of the ofcial stories on citizenship has also been revealed by government emphasis on social control. Good social control leads to good citizenry, which is potentially benecial to economic growth. If citizens were all politically cooperative and socially responsible, they would pose no threat to stability. And social stability is a prerequisite for economic growth according to the governments. It is thus no surprise that in each of the three instances examined, the colonial and post-colonial governments stressed the need to enable young people to use their energy constructively. After the 1966 riots, the colonial governments focused its efforts on organizing summer youth programs and parties, and promoting youth activities. The 1981 riots led the Home Affairs Department to endorse the same themes. To avoid an over-concentration of restless youngsters in one district the next year, the District Boards were even given a special grant to set up lighting and Christmas and New Year’s celebrations in each district to ensure that adolescents would celebrate the festivals in their own neighborhoods. This “energy release” theme was reiterated after the 2002 scufes. For instance, Legislative Councilor Chan Yuenhan stated that “adolescents are rebellious, we need to provide them with proper channels to release their feelings.” (Oriental, 2003) Under the instrumental view of citizenship promoted by the governments, the

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narrowly constructed political function of a good citizenry merged with its economic functions. The Construction of a Narrow Sense of Community A sense of community is a prerequisite to a sense of citizenship. However, given the depoliticized overtone of the idea of citizenship in Hong Kong that has prevailed since the colonial era, it is no surprise that the cultivation of a sense of community was not perceived as imperative until the 1960s. Before that, the colonial government considered the promotion of Hong Kong citizenship and a local sense of belonging irrelevant or of negligible importance. An interesting example comes from the government’s response to the petition of the Reform Club of Hong Kong regarding the Young Plan5 to expand the Hong Kong electorate to include “Hong Kong citizens.” (Colonial, 1946–52, para. 24) In 1946, Governor Mark Young proposed to establish a Municipal Council based on representation, which would be granted a high degree of nancial autonomy and authority to handle certain important functions of the government. The proposed council would be composed of forty-eight members, of which sixteen would be elected Chinese members, sixteen elected non-Chinese members, and sixteen members nominated by Chinese organizations and non-Chinese organizations. In response to this proposal, the petition of the Reform Club of Hong Kong, submitted on June 22, 1949, suggested that the dened electorate in Hong Kong should be composed of British subjects and Hong Kong citizens. Those who had resided in the city for ve years and applied for registration with an expressed commitment to upholding the interests of the colony would be qualied as Hong Kong citizens and eligible voters. It was hoped that the proposal would help to build up a large and loyal body of citizens. Although attractive, Governor Alexander Grantham considered the proposal to be “based on a false premise.” In his perspective, promoting citizenship was of little value to governance, as there was not such an entity as a Hong Kong citizen. To quote him:

5 See, for example, Steve Y.S. Tsang. 1988. Democracy Shelved: Great Britain, China, and Attempts at Constitutional Reform in Hong Kong, 1945–1952. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 32–3.

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This idea is supercially attractive but it is based on a false premise. There is no half-way house between a British national and a Chinese national, and it would be absurd to rely on any paramount loyalty of non-British Chinese other than self-interest arising from long and close connexion with the Colony and a desire to maintain the status quo. Any Chinese, who felt as a ‘Hong Kong citizen’ ought to feel, would have applied to become a British subject long ago. (Colonial, 1946–52, para. 24)

In addition to the mistrust in the value of cultivating a local identity, the colonial government’s relative lack of interest in this regard was probably also generated by political fear. It appeared to believe that “if local interest was awakened, there were very real dangers of exploitation by triad societies or undercover political agents.” (Social, 1955, p. 32) Indeed, it was believed that the constitutive stories of a citizen identity, once invoked, might engender too much solidarity and potentially threaten colonial rule. Why was that? If it is true to claim that a depoliticized discourse has prevailed in Hong Kong, one of the characteristics of this discourse was the widespread belief that political instability was the result of a left wing or local activist conspiracy. Because of Cold War politics, which in Hong Kong was further complicated by Chinese politics and the competing political allegiances of the Hong Kong people to the governments of the People’s Republic of China or the Republic of China (Taiwan), society seemed to be trapped in an atmosphere of political sensitivity that constantly feared Communist subversion. Also, high levels of political activism in the city, notably left wing activities in the 1950s and 1960s, and those by young people in the 1970s, further accelerated such fears. From the perspective of the colonial government, a Hong Kong identity contextualized by the city’s colonial history was probably harmful to governance because it united the people around the themes of nationalism and democracy.6 In the 1960s, the need to stimulate a sense of community in Hong Kong had become imperative, notably after the 1966 and 1967 riots. The sense of community, if successfully created, would encourage citizens to play a part in the development of a society comprised of responsible members, and hence ensure stability. (Social, 1965, pp. 6–7) The following is a typical example of this thinking:

6 See, for example, Lam Wai-man. 2004. Understanding the Political Culture of Hong Kong: The Paradox of Activism and Depoliticization. New York: M.E. Sharpe, chapters 5–7.

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lam wai-man There has been an urgent need for conscious efforts to quicken this process without allowing this rootlessness characteristic of the past years’ remarkable development to take its own course and to expose the population to irresistible inuences. (Social, 1969, p. 11)

However, intentionally or unintentionally, the colonial government had been careful to construct only a shallow community identity among the people of Hong Kong, as a buffer against Chinese communist inuence, yet still allowing it to protect its rule from the dangers of too much local interest and solidarity. In this construction, the people were depicted as a “great assemblage of people,” rootless refugees, sharing little common in their histories and memories. An interesting example follows: Hong Kong is in most practical ways not a settlement with a history of 124 years (much less an outpost of the world’s most ancient continuous and uniform culture) but rather a great assemblage of people, few of whose corporate memories can go back as long as twenty or twenty-ve years without some traumatic break. (Social, 1966, p. 6)

It was also believed that most of these rootless refugees “had come here solely to make a living for themselves, to seek asylum, or to take advantage of Hong Kong’s social services.” (Social, 1955, p. 32) As a result, they were somewhat socially and politically apathetic, self-interested, and would likely return to China if circumstances allowed.7 In these examples, economic and political stories worked jointly to constitute a narrow understanding of the people and a constricted imagination of what constituted Hong Kong society. Indeed, in the previous few decades in Hong Kong, such narratives had become very pervasive not only in the ofcial discourse on society but also in academia and within many sectors of the population. Nevertheless, contradictory attempts at repoliticizing Hong Kong on the colonial government’s part were witnessed after the 1980s. Negotiations between China and Britain over the political future of Hong Kong began in 1979. In 1984, the two countries signed a Joint Declaration stating that the British administration of Hong Kong would end in 1997, and that Hong Kong would become a special economic zone under Chinese sovereignty. However, Britain and China were of two different minds about the arrangement after 1997. While China determined to maintain Hong Kong’s capitalistic way of life, Britain

7 See, for example, Hong Kong Government. 1966. Report of the Working Party on Local Administration. Hong Kong: Government Printer, p. 11.

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introduced democratic reforms in the territory on the eve of the handover. For example, the 1981 White Paper “District Administration in Hong Kong” represented a turning point in government policy, introducing universal suffrage in Hong Kong’s district elections. The Legislative Council started to have an element of indirect election in 1985. In 1991, the colonial government allocated seats for direct election by geographical constituencies in the Legislative Council election, opening eighteen out of sixty seats. Intentionally or unintentionally, the British democratic reform in Hong Kong helped promote political activism in the community and unite the community under the umbrella of democracy. Limited Repoliticization: Good Citizens as Nationalists In every postcolonial society, the reconstruction of community or citizen identities is one of the foremost tasks of regimes. Examples include India, Algeria and many other colonies in Asia or Africa.8 In the reconstruction of a collective identity, nationalistic discourses often play an important constitutive role. Hence, not surprisingly, contrary to the colonial government’s ambivalence, we see in Hong Kong the new Special Administrative Region regime’s attempt to consolidate a “thicker” set of common memories necessary for increasing the sense of community by introducing nationalism into the concept of ideal citizenship. It is hoped that these memories can serve to consolidate the philosophical foundation of a cooperative and socially responsible citizenry. However, probably different from examples in other parts of the world, nationalistic discourses in Hong Kong exclude, instead of include, democratic discourses in the process of creating a collective postcolonial identity. Rather, the government has been keen on producing nationalism in citizenship building as a measure to eliminate the sense of community built under the umbrella of democracy in the nal years of British colonial rule in Hong Kong.

8 See, for example, Frantz Fanon. 1965. A Dying Colonialism, trans. H. Chevalier. New York: Grove Press; Partha Chatterjee. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? London: Zed Books; Partha Chatterjee. 1993. The Nations and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press; and Benedict Anderson. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso.

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For example, in education, although depoliticization was the norm in the colonial era,9 former Chief Executive Tung started limited and directive repoliticization. Contrary to the colonial government’s ambivalence, the new regime is dedicated to repoliticizing civic education and the school curriculum. The Guidelines on Civic Education implemented since September 1996 aim to enhance students’ understanding of the Basic Law and the principle of “One Country, Two Systems,” cultivate a sense of belonging to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, nurture identication with the home country and encourage contribution to the global community. In 1998, the Committee on the Promotion of Civic Education stepped up efforts to promote various themes of civic education, ranging from respect for human rights, equal opportunities and good citizenship to instilling a sense of belonging to Hong Kong, concern for the motherland and understanding of the Basic Law. (Hong, 1998, pp. 146, 163) However, the aim of repoliticization has been limited to renationalization, which promotes ethnic nationalism and a sense of belonging to China rather than an all-round political consciousness and activism. Subsequent to its establishment, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government carried out series of measures to strengthen the Chinese elements in the existing school curriculum. For instance, school textbook publishers were provided with “guidelines” advising them to observe the “one China” policy. From 1998, Putonghua, the national language of China, has been taught in all primary schools, and civics has been made available as an elective subject in Secondary One to Three. (Morris et al., 2000, p. 249)

9 Not surprisingly, depoliticization is again a major theme in the colonial government’s education policy. The postwar period saw the colonial government exercising extensive power to ensure that schools did not promote political ideologies. The education system in Hong Kong was designed to produce depoliticized and denationalized individuals. The situation did not change until the 1980s. See Paul Morris et al. 2000. Education, civic participation and identity: continuity and change in Hong Kong. Cambridge Journal of Education. 30(2): 247; Paul Morris and Chan Ka-ki. 1997. The Hong Kong school curriculum and the political transition: politicisation, contexualisation and symbolic interaction. In Education and Political Transition: Implications of Hong Kong’s Change of Sovereignty, ed. Mark Bray and Lee Wing-on, pp. 101–118. Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre, the University of Hong Kong; Paul Morris and Anthony Sweeting. 1991. Education and politics: the case of Hong Kong from an historical perspective. Oxford Review of Education. 17: 249–67; and Tse Kwan-choi. 1999. Citizenship education in Hong Kong: problems and Issues. Journal of Youth Studies. 2(1): 178.

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In this light, the image of a good citizen is a nationalist, in the hope that this narrative will facilitate the building of a new collective identity in postcolonial Hong Kong. As Tung said in 1998: We must step up civic education so that our youngsters will have a better understanding of China, the Chinese culture and history, the concept of ‘one country, two systems’ and the Basic Law. Through better understanding, we hope to inculcate in them the passion and the concern for China, the pride of being Chinese, and a constant readiness to contribute towards the well-being of not just Hong Kong but the entire country. (Tung, 1998)

In this regard Tung obviously attempted to construct a “thicker” set of common memories necessary for the sense of community to build upon, and hoped that these memories would serve to consolidate the philosophical foundation of a cooperative and socially responsible citizenry. Unlike the colonial government that constructed the people of Hong Kong as a mere assemblage of rootless refugees, he explicitly endorsed neo-Confucianism and Asian values as the sources of the qualities of good citizenship. Singapore has been cited at times as an exemplar of good governance and a good government-people relationship. As Tung expressed: Every society has to have its own values to provide a common purpose and a sense of unity . . . For a long time, Hong Kong has embraced the eastern and western cultures. We will continue to encourage diversity in our society, but we must also reafrm and respect the ne traditional Chinese values, including lial piety, love for the family, modesty and integrity, and the desire for continuous improvement. We value plurality, but discourage open confrontation; we strive for liberty but not at the expense of the rule of law; we respect minority views but also shoulder collective responsibilities. (Tung, 1997)

Experimental Constitutive Stories of Citizen Identity and Collective Memories While Tung’s intentions are obvious, the question remains whether the people of Hong Kong will accept such constitutive stories of their citizen identity. Apart from the fact that neo-Confucianism and Asian values are a bit anachronistic to the people of Hong Kong, the complexity of the question of Hong Kong identity also makes Tung’s goals difcult to achieve. The development of Hong Kong society has increased the multiplicity of a postcolonial Hong Kong identity. Hong Kong’s people are both traditional and modern, cosmopolitan and familial,

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eccentric and conventional, apathetic and populist, materialistic and post-materialistic, and so on. It is the hybridity of this identity that keeps the city’s culture constantly in reformation, and it is still open to various possibilities. Also, for many, the discourses of neo-Confucianism and Asian values are rather hard to swallow. At the most, the ideas of homogeneity, consensus and harmony stressed by these values can only be a partial description of the identity of some sectors of the population. Also, there are obviously difculties in invoking an imagination of community that unites people only around the theme of nationalism and not democracy, as democratic ideals have been part and parcel of the people’s identity since the 1990s. Indeed, post-unication Hong Kong has been like an experimental ground for constitutive stories of citizenship. In this respect, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government is certainly more imaginative than the colonial government, and its efforts are certainly comparable to those of any postcolonial government in the world. After the neo-Confucian and Asian values discourses, government ofcials also invoked other stories to cultivate community cohesiveness, notably the ‘Lion Rock myth’ raised by former Financial Secretary Antony Leung Kam-chung. Lion Rock is a geographical landmark in Hong Kong. In the 1970s, a television drama series entitled “Below the Lion Rock,” produced by the government’s Radio Television Hong Kong and featuring stories of lower class people, was very popular and furthered the government’s attempts to consolidate a Hong Kong identity. Typically, the myth was embedded with nostalgic feelings, praise of traditional values such as hard work, mutual help and tolerance, and a community spirit believed to underpin Hong Kong’s economic takeoff in the 1970s. It urged a return to these virtues and a community of good people working to overcome their hardships. It is true that these memories were part of the collective memory and therefore might have been appealing, but they were not well received. There were many reasons for this rejection. Critics considered these narratives an undisguised means of discursive control and excuses on the part of the government to try to shirk its responsibility to the people.10 Also, Hong Kong has never been as harmonious as suggested, and the

10 See, for example, the criticisms of Cheung Man-yee published in the South China Morning Post, April 24, 2002, 16. Cheung was the producer of “Below the Lion Rock” and formerly the Director of Broadcasting in the colonial government.

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core values acknowledged by the people of Hong Kong at large appear quite different than those the government and the ruling elite imagine. This was reected in a recent call by well-known local academics and professionals to uphold Hong Kong’s core values, including freedom and democracy, and only more remotely the virtues of endurance, diligence and unquestioned obedience as promoted by the government and ruling elite.11 Hong Kong identity has changed to an extent and in ways that the political leaders have failed to recognize. Tung’s dilemma was that although he perceived the need for common memories to support the language of citizenship, he had to be very careful in his choice of frameworks. Too much solidarity on unwanted issues, such as democracy, would be harmful to governance. Within the depictions of good citizenship as patriotic, cooperative and socially responsible, together with the promotion of neo-Confucianism, Asian values and the Lion Rock myth, we see the government’s deep fear of losing control over its people. Parallel to the Lion Rock myth, the government also went back to an economic concept of citizenship, invoking the economic theme of self-reliance. In contrast to the previously mentioned exhortations, this narrative seems to have worked quite well up until now. It matches the capitalistic tradition of the city and the government’s intentions to reafrm economic development as the society’s primary goal. It also serves political functions. Amidst the economic downturn in Hong Kong, the theme of self-reliance served to provide the “losers” with individualized explanations for why they failed and solutions to their plight. In the recent controversies about whether Hong Kong’s people can directly elect their Chief Executive in 2007 and all Legislative Council members in 2008, economic narratives were developed further. Although it is no surprise that Chinese government ofcials and members of the pro-Beijing camp in Hong Kong labeled the city as an economic city and restated economic reconstruction as its primary goal, it is amazing that the individual pursuit of economic well-being was packaged as the

11 Recently, there has been a pervasive fear that Hong Kong is losing its freedom, as witnessed by the resignation of three renowned radio talk-show hosts. All of them alleged that because they were critical of the Hong Kong and the mainland governments, they received threats authorized by the latter. The radio talk-show programs were well-known and important platforms for articulating public opinion in the city. In response to these incidents, some sections of the population, such as professionals and academics, called for a defense of freedom of speech in Hong Kong. See, http://www. hkcorevalues.net/b5_declar.htm.

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society’s collective goal. In this discourse, the city was urged by mainland leaders to reconsider its priorities, which should be economic development and preservation of such prerequisites for economic development as stability, to be China’s world-class city, and to achieve a decent living standard for everyone, rather than political reforms.12 Hong Kong has been compared intermittently with other international cities such as New York and London. Such talk thus serves to redirect the efforts of Hong Kong society to an economic rather than a political agenda by boosting the economic identity of its people. It is hoped that in the end the people’s economic identity will absorb their political identity, or they would simply forgo their political identity. If, as Smith argues, political narratives have any signicance in the making of citizenship, it is the depoliticizing functions of certain political narratives that have worked hand in hand with the aforementioned economic talk in Hong Kong. The ofcial notions of citizenship and community are unsurprisingly constricted and thin. Conclusion In this chapter I have critically examined government discourses on citizenship in Hong Kong from the 1960s to the present. By making special reference to three public events—the 1966 Star Ferry riots, the 1981 riots, and the scufes in 2002—I have reconstructed the meanings of good citizenship as promoted by both the colonial and post-colonial governments. I have also traced the governmental understanding of community through the development of the policies on youth and citizenship education in the city from the 1960s onward. The idea of citizenship as promoted by the colonial and post-colonial governments is depoliticized. It places exclusive importance on the values of economic independence and contribution, and lauds an enterprising characteristic of citizenship. Also, stressing civic obedience and responsibility instead of rights and critical judgment, it is narrowly dened politically. For both the colonial and post-colonial governments, economic stories intertwined with political stories to provide

12 For example, Chinese President Hu Jintao expressed serious concerns over the debate on political reform in Hong Kong, and claimed that the most pressing priority for the city was to stand united to improve the economy. See South China Morning Post, April 24, 2004.

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notions of good citizenship that provided individualized explanations and hope for those who had thus far failed. While the discourses on citizenship of both governments are on the whole depoliticized, the colonial government gave weight to the need for repoliticization by initiating proto-democratic reforms from the 1980s onward, and the post-colonial government gave weight to the need for renationalization. Although both governments recognized that community identication was a prerequisite for the development of good citizenship, they feared that the solidarity thereby engendered would be too hot to handle. As a result, they chose to construct predominantly limited and shallow community memories based on the themes of political passivity, economic self-reliance, and self-interest. In the government discourses on citizenship and community in Hong Kong, we see the merging of depoliticized, economic and constitutive narratives. However, the political narratives for making sense of citizenship suggested by Smith are packaged in highly depoliticized language, although they are similarly embedded with political intentions to strengthen governance. While the making of citizenship clearly indicates the prevalence of a depoliticized narrative in Hong Kong, it should be noted that the narrative has been paradoxically balanced by political activism at signicant levels. Hong Kong society has had a rich history of collective mobilization, numerous social organizations and an active media. Looking back, civil society in Hong Kong, such as the numerous civic and resident associations that were active during the colonial era, has contributed signicantly to challenging the depoliticized narrative, and building up an active and democratic citizenship. These circumstances combine to make the process of citizenship building in Hong Kong highly interesting and complex. REFERENCES Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso. Chatterjee, Partha. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? London: Zed Books. ———. 1993. The Nations and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. City and New Territories Administration. 1992. Report. Hong Kong: Government Printer. Civic Education Committee, Education Department. 1985. Guidelines on Civic Education in Schools. Hong Kong: Government Printer.

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Colonial Ofce (Constitution of Hong Kong: Correspondence 1946–52). CO 882, no. 2: part 2, para. 24. Commission of Inquiry on Kowloon Disturbances. 1967. Kowloon Disturbances 1966. Hong Kong: Government Printer. Commission on Youth. 1991. Charter for Youth. Hong Kong: Government Printer. Conover, Pamela J. 1995. Citizen identities and conceptions of the self. Journal of Political Philosophy. 3(2): 133–65. Curriculum Development Council. 1998. Syllabuses for Secondary School: Civic Education. Hong Kong: Education Department. ———. 1999. A Holistic Review of the Hong Kong School Curriculum: Proposed Reforms. Hong Kong: Education Department. Fanon, Frantz. 1965. A Dying Colonialism, trans. H. Chevalier. New York: Grove Press. Home Affairs Department. Various years of 1968–1980. Departmental Report. Hong Kong: Government Printer. Hong Kong Government. Various years of 1970 to 2000. Hong Kong Annual Report. Hong Kong: Government Printer. ———. 1966. Report of the Working Party on Local Administration. Hong Kong: Government Printer. Hong Kong SAR Government. 2001. Policy Objectives: The 2000 Policy Address. Hong Kong: Government Printer. ———. 2002. Policy Objectives: The 2001 Policy Address. Hong Kong: Government Printer. Lam, Wai-man. 2004. Understanding the Political Culture of Hong Kong: The Paradox of Activism and Depoliticization. New York: M.E. Sharpe. Lee, Wing-on. 1996. From depolitization to politization: the reform of civic education in Hong Kong in political transition. In Educational Reform: From Tradition to Postmodernity, ed. Chinese Comparative Education Society-Taipei. Taipei: Shih Ta Publishing. Ming Pao. April 1966; December 1981; December 2002. Morris, Paul and Anthony Sweeting. 1991. Education and politics: the case of Hong Kong from an historical perspective. Oxford Review of Education. 17: 249–67. Morris, Paul and Chan Ka-ki. 1997. The Hong Kong school curriculum and the political transition: politicisation, contexualisation and symbolic interaction. In Education and Political Transition: Implications of Hong Kong’s Change of Sovereignty, ed. Mark Bray and Lee Wing-on, pp. 101–118. Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre, the University of Hong Kong. Morris, Paul et al. 2000. Education, civic participation and identity: continuity and change in Hong Kong. Cambridge Journal of Education. 30(2): 243–62. Ng, Lawrence Yeung-yin. 1995. Reections on riots in Hong Kong in the 1980s: a study in public disorder. M.A. dissertation in Public Order, Centre for the Study of Public Order, University of Leicester, in association with School of Professional and Continuing Education, University of Hong Kong. Oriental Daily. January 5, 2003. Secretary for Chinese Affairs. Various years of 1950–1968. Departmental Report. Hong Kong: Government Printer. Smith, Roger M. 2001. Citizenship and the politics of people-building. Citizenship Studies. 5(1): 73–96. Social Welfare Department. Various years of 1948–2003. Departmental Report. Hong Kong: Government Printer. South China Morning Post. April 24, 2002, p. 16. Tsang, Steve Y.S. 1988. Democracy Shelved: Great Britain, China, and Attempts at Constitutional Reform in Hong Kong, 1945–1952. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Tsang, Wing-kwong. 1995. National and citizenship education. Education Journal. 23(2): 1–26. Tse, Kwan-choi. 1999. Citizenship education in Hong Kong: problems and Issues. Journal of Youth Studies. 2(1): 177–86. Tung, Chee-hwa. 1997a. Speech at the celebration of the establishment of the Hong Kong SAR, July 1. ———. 1998a. Speech at the Gala Banquet of the International Forum of Leaders in Higher Education, July 4. ———. Various years of 1997b–2003. Policy Address. Hong Kong: Government Printer. Wah Kiu Yat Pao. April 1966; December 1981. Wong, Eddie Kwok-wai. 1996. An analysis of disorder in Hong Kong society. M.A. dissertation in Public Order, Centre for the Study of Public Order, University of Leicester, in association with School of Professional and Continuing Education, University of Hong Kong. Yau, Shing-mo et al. (eds.). 1983. A Study of Youth Problems in Hong Kong. In Chinese. Hong Kong: Chun Sin Publishing.

Chapter 3

Globalization and Hybridization in Cultural Production: A Tale of Two Films Georgette Wang and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh Hybridity, Hybridization and Global Culture Globalization has been seen as a process, but also a project; a reality, but also a belief (Mattelart, 2002). There is continuing debate over its onset, denition and end result. Many believe that a global culture will emerge with the rise of globalization. Yet opinions are divided over what the nature of this culture will be whether it will be a single, homogeneous system that is characterized by convergence and the presence of the universal in the particular (Wallerstein, 1990), or whether it will be an ensemble of particulars that features long-distance interconnectedness (Hannerz, 1996). With the rise of post-colonialism, the concept of hybridity (Bhabha, 1994) has become a new facet of the debate about global culture in the social sciences. Hybridity, according to Bhabha, opens up what he calls a third space within which elements encounter and transform each other (Young, 1995; Papastergiadis, 2000, p. 170). It is, at the same time, the site of struggle and resistance against imperialist powers (Kraidy, 2002, p. 316). With the goal of abolishing the distinctions between center and periphery, and other forms of binarism, this post-colonial interpretation of cultural change is a signicant departure from the linear diffusion model of the West to the rest. It directly challenges the idea of essentialism, according to Pieterse (1995, p. 64), because it unsettles the introverted concept of culture, a concept that underlies ideologies such as romantic nationalism, racism and cultural essentialism. It helps to release us from the boundaries of nation, community, ethnicity or class, while presenting a kaleidoscope of collective experience in motion. In the globalization debate, hybridization presents yet another scenario for the outcome of cultural globalization besides hegemonic Westernization and postmodern diversity. The concept of hybridization, however, falls short of acknowledging structural inequalities, and

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has allegedly become a neocolonial discourse that is complicit with transnational capitalism (Dirlik, 1997; Kraidy, 2002, Friedman, 2000, p. 3). Another, perhaps more fundamental, weakness of the concept of hybridity lies with its intellectual power. The histories of the hybridization of metropolitan cultures, as Pieterse (1995, p. 64) indicated, show that hybridization, with its downturns and upswings, its go-slows and its turns of speed, has been taking place all along. Moreover, hybridization is not unique only to certain societies; the creolizing spectrum, as Hannerz pointed out, extends from the First World metropolis to the Third World village (Hannerz, 1987, p. 555). Hybridity, therefore, is the ongoing condition of all human cultures, which contain no zones of purity because they undergo continuous processes of transculturation, as Rosaldo (1995, p. xv) concluded. In this sense, hybridization is a tautology, and globalization has brought about nothing more than the hybridization of hybrid cultures. The paucity of communications research on this topic indicates the ontological and political quandaries that are inherent in using the concept as an analytical device (Kraidy, 2002, p. 317). Nowhere can we nd more convincing and abundant evidence for the hybridization of the hybrid than in cultural products, as imitation, borrowing, appropriation, mutual learning, and representation erode all possibilities for authentic cultural production. In an interview with the New York Times, Baz Luhrmann, the Australian director of the Hollywood lm Moulin Rouge, admitted that the idea to combine high comedy, high tragedy and song and dance in that lm was deeply inuenced by popular Hindi, or Bollywood, lms (Shome and Hegde, 2002, p. 184). Bollywood lms, in turn, draw on mythological epics, classical, folk, and modern theatre, and MTV and Hollywood for inspiration, and thus are hybrids in themselves (Ciecko, 2001, p. 125). To those in the business of cultural production, boundaries and restrictions serve to stie, rather than enhance, creativity. The issue here is not one of nding evidence for hybridization in cultural products, but, given the globalized production practices in the cultural industries, of discovering the terms and conditions under which it takes place, the way in which hybridization has been achieved, and the cultural features that the end products exhibit. As Chan pointed out (2001, p. 4), we are experiencing a give and take among cultures that encounter each other, a multifaceted and complex working of forces. However, nagging questions remain about who has given and taken what, what has been the result of such give and take within the exist-

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ing industrial framework, and what the implications of the answers to these questions are for the cultural globalization debate. Deculturalization, Aculturalization and Reculturalization As cable and satellite television mushroomed in the 1990s, the demand for lms and television programs grew twenty-fold and more, leading to the localization of global products and the globalization of local products on an unprecedented scale. This phenomenon allows producers to borrow ideas to enlighten an established story model or to make content adjustments to cater to the needs of a different audience, but it also creates a need to adapt, repackage or transform an existing product to make it more appealing to different viewer groups. In meeting the needs and tastes of different viewer groups or simply as a reection of the way production is organized today a set of content design strategies has emerged that removes, incorporates, transforms, or redenes elements that relate either to a specic geographical location, time, social, political and economic setting, or to cultural values and practices. Lee (2003) used the term de-localization to describe the minimization of local elements to create content that is least objectionable to a larger, more diversied audience both in form (e.g., dubbing) and content, and the term re-localization to describe the incorporation of local elements into transnational products. The same concepts can be used to describe the globalization of local products, and the localization of global products. For lms such as Mulan, the meaning of local is expanded from covering the spatial to encompassing a combination of the spatial and the temporal, or more precisely, it takes on a cultural denotation. Through a process of deculturalization, all of the elements that are culture-specic, including those that are ethnic, historical or religious, that create barriers to intercultural reception or are deemed unt for a new presentation style, may be contained in a familiar narrative pattern that not only plays down cultural differences but also guarantees comprehension across viewer groups. The result is the emergence of a new breed of lms and television programs the aculturalized cultural product. In analyzing the presence of Japanese cultural products in Asia, Iwabuchi (2002, p. 257; 2000) noted that one of the major reasons for their

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popularity is a lack of Japaneseness, the fact that they do not invoke images of Japan, and thus of Japanese cultural presence. Mu-kokuseki, a Japanese term that is the equivalent of acultural, refers to something or someone that lacks any nationality, and the erasure of racial or ethnic characteristics and any context which would embed the characters in a particular culture or country. This feature not only characterizes Japanese animation, but also other Japanese products such as karaoke, computer games, comics or televised singing contests. In place of traditional icons such as the kimono dress, bon dance and sumo wrestling, Japanese cultural products now feature cute cartoon characters with big round eyes and girls with knee-high socks. This cultural odorlessness, which now gives Japanese cultural exports an effective competitive edge, is itself a product of American domination in the 1950s and the early part of 1960s, according to Iwabuchi (2002, p. 260). American television programs and most Hollywood blockbusters have long been accused of following a universal formula that enables them to cross cultural barriers and capture a transnational market the same cultural facelessness as is found in Japanese products. They typically present a fantasy world of romance and adventure (Wang, 2001a). Constructed with dazzling visual and audio effects and easily comprehensible story lines, these fantasy worlds are full of dangers that rarely fail to hold the undivided attention of viewers regardless of age, gender, ethnic, religious, social, and cultural differences. Although deculturalization may be the key to entering the global market, its acultural outlook may in fact be deceptive, as storytelling cannot be accomplished without touching on beliefs, attitudes, values, and behavioral patterns. When characters are pushed into action and decisions are made, the underlying beliefs and values emerge. It does not take a careful viewer to notice that in the cultural blender of Hollywood blockbusters, superheroes, space ghters, young adventurers and even the charming princes of the animal kingdom are depicted as high achievers who, rising from below, play the role of guardians of freedom, equality and peace. Reculturalization, therefore, is often as symbiotic with deculturalization as it is with aculturalization.

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A Tale of Two Films In 2001, a Chinese-language martial arts lm became the highest grossing foreign-language lm in the history of Hollywood (Lahr, 2003, p. 72).1 The lm, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, has almost every ingredient needed to make it authentically Chinese. Adapted from a novel published in China in the early 1930s, it features a romantic martial arts story that is set in ancient China. The Chineseness of the lm is also characterized by dazzling sword-ghting scenes, period costumes, an iconic Chinese setting and an all-Chinese cast who speak Mandarin throughout. However, one aspect of the lm production sets it apart from other Chinese martial arts lms: it was made with an eye on the market beyond Greater China, was nanced through international presale,2 bonds and bank loans, and was distributed by a transnational distributor. Despite the attacks that the lm has received from critics, its market success in repackaging an ethnic story for a global audience manifests two closely linked characteristics of cultural production today: the indispensable role of the capitalist mechanism in nancing, marketing and distribution, and the emergence of cultural fusion and hybridization as a prevailing strategy for transnational content design. Strictly speaking, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is not the rst lm of its kind to feature a specic Chinese location, characters, actions and narrative motifs. Chinese stories or historical backgrounds are nothing new in Hollywood. Hollywood’s interest in Chinese themes or motifs began in the second decade of the twentieth century. Many of the lms that employ such themes have been criticized either for enhancing the stereotypes of China under Western imperialism, or for recreating what Edward Said calls an Oriental fantasy. However, this has not stopped Hollywood from appropriating Chinese stories or from utilizing a Chinese setting. Mulan is the most prominent example in recent history of Hollywood borrowing Oriental narratives and repackaging them as global blockbusters. In contrast to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which is a Chinese-owned, Chinese-made art lm with similar objectives, Mulan is a distinctly Hollywood lm with a clear corporate product

1 This record has recently been broken by yet another high grossing foreign language lm, The Passion of the Christ (2004). 2 International presale is a method for lmmakers to raise funds through the sale of the showing rights before shooting begins. It was introduced to the US in the 1980s by the Italian producer De Laurentis (Wasser, 1995, p. 430).

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differentiation for global consumption. Despite the Chinese origin of its story, as a Disney animation picture, Mulan is a global product par excellence.3 Its transformation of a Chinese folktale into a global box ofce success testies to the spiral process of hybridization. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Mulan thus represent two different kinds of hybridization in the current mediascape of global cultural ow. One employs a glocal strategy of incorporating transnational nancing models and the aesthetics of art house cinema into the making of a seemingly local story; the other usurps a story of foreign origin and adds it to the gigantic Disney pantheon. Both are hybridized entertainment products, but they display different approaches to the process of mixing and matching distinct cultural and social elements. In the following, we employ the terms deculturalization, aculturalization and reculturalization to describe and analyze the many faces of hybridization. In telling the stories of two hybrids, we tease out a detailed description of the compound conditions of globalization. We argue that globalization and hybridization, as is illustrated by our case studies, have become ever more intertwined and multivalent, and are far from being a one-way ow of capital, talent and ideas. The Chinese Heroine and American Multiculturalism: Deculturalization, Reculturalization and Aculturalization The Mulan story is based on a popular ballad that was written during the Northern Wei Dynasty (386 A.D. to 534 A.D.) about a legendary fourteen-year-old girl, Mulan, who joins the army in place of her aging father to ght invaders from the north. There are several renditions of the story, although they all share the similar premise of the incred-

3 Although its revenues are dwarfed by the dazzling global successes of blockbuster series such as The Lord of Rings, Harry Potter, or Star Wars, Mulan grossed US$303,500,000, and was ranked 66th (http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/3540/topworld. htm) in the top-100 list of all-time worldwide box ofce successes, only a few places behind Schindler’s List and Air Force One. It is also one of Disney’s ten most protable lms. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with a box-ofce total of US$213,200,000 and numerous international awards, including the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film Award, was the most successful “non-American lm” ever made. Judging from the box ofce returns, both Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Mulan achieved a success that went well beyond cultural boundaries, an accomplishment that is especially signicant given that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was originally targeted at art theaters outside of the Greater China region.

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ibility of Mulan’s ability to pass as a man and a ghter. Mulan’s father is suffering from various ills when the draft arrives. The draft requires at least one man from each household to join the army to defend the country. Mulan, as a lial daughter, volunteers to join the army hiding her gender in her father’s place. Mulan miraculously survives the tenyear war against the invaders, and ghts so well that she is decorated by the emperor. However, she declines the emperor’s offer of a high appointment to return home to her parents. The story, which features Mulan as a role model, is one of the ten most popular folk tales in China, and exemplies both lial piety and patriotism. It has been adapted into operas, television series and at least two lms in China prior to the Disney production. The Chinese star Michelle Yeoh has adapted it again into a martial arts picture called Hua Mulan (forthcoming) with special effects and location shooting in China. Compared with the Chinese story in its various forms, signicant changes have been introduced to the Disney rendition, whereas the previous Chinese lm adaptations are relatively unadulterated. What should be noted here are the strategies employed by Disney to transform a Chinese legend into a modern, entertaining product with a cultural distinction or avor. The entertainment commodity, true to the Disney brand, contains a kernel of American-style individualism in the context of ethnic and gender assertion. This is in contradiction to the ideology of the Chinese source material. Mulan is introduced in the Disney lm by a series of comic gags that are built on misunderstandings and bickering, which are typical of early Disney cartoons such as Silly Symphonies (1927). This is contrary to the way in which Mulan is introduced in the original Chinese story. The Chinese ballad begins with Mulan retiring to the traditional women’s place of the loom, and contemplating ways in which to help her family. Whereas the Chinese story characterizes Mulan as a quiet and thoughtful girl in the domestic sphere who attends to duties such as weaving, the Disney Mulan is sprightly, tomboyish and unt to be an ideal wife. This major difference represents the familiar dichotomy between old China and the modern West. Whereas the Chinese story immediately proceeds to Mulan’s course of action as a lial daughter, Disney’s Mulan spectacularly fails her bridal test. Dejected, she begins to have doubts about herself. The opportunity for redemption comes when the war breaks out. She wants to prove to her family and herself that she can bring the family honor, not by marriage, but by taking

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on the male duty of ghting a war. Therefore, we have a major shift from the Chinese cultural trait of lial piety to the pursuit of a sense of selfhood. Another signicant change in the Disney version of the story of Mulan relates to the issues of cross-dressing and sexual ambiguity. In the Chinese ballad they are handled with subtlety and a wry understanding of the (im)plausibility of a woman serving in the army as a man. In the original story, Mulan is not discovered to be a woman until she decides to return home. Accompanied by her fellow soldiers, Mulan arrives home and immediately changes back into her old dress. Seeing a great warrior in a woman’s dress, her companions are shocked: for ten years, they had no idea that she was a woman! The Chinese commentary concludes by drawing an analogy to explain the ambiguity of sexual identity and how it can easily fool the eye of the beholder. Perhaps Mulan does look like a man, which in turn questions the assumptions of sexual stereotyping. This subversive coda was considered too threatening for Disney’s popular image and they neutralized it by having Mulan’s identity disclosed in the middle of the story, a typical narrative development in which obstacles have to be created for the heroine to overcome to achieve nal victory. In the lm, Mulan is expelled from her military duties when her identity is revealed, but soon after she proves that girls can ght and ght even better than men. The necessity of cross-dressing becomes, in the end, a shrewd military tactic. To animate a Chinese story that was unfamiliar to the rest of the world, at least two processes of cultural hybridization were involved. The rst has to do with the blending of cultural iconography and the sounds of ancient China, complete with pagodas, willow trees and owing robes, and classical Chinese music. These Chinese cultural icons may simply be used instrumentally to ensure a façade of otherness. In the second process, Disney’s Mulan signies Hollywood’s packaging of multiculturalism that glories the multiplicity of culture, ethnicity, nation, gender and race. Consider the various voices that dub the main characters of the lm: African American Eddie Murphy for the mini dragon, Mushu; Chinese American Ming-na Wen for Mulan; B.D. Wong for Mulan’s commanding ofcer General Li Shang; and James Hong for Mulan’s fellow soldier, Chi Fu. It is apparent that the Disney version of Mulan wishes to present itself as a multicultural lm for a wider demographic that is inclusive of white, Jewish, African and Asian Americans. To do this, Disney

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plays with several extant stereotypes of Asian Americans and their culture. The name Mushu immediately brings to mind ethnic food, Mushu pork being a popular Chinese takeout food in America. Hence, Mushu is a highly recognizable ethnic-comic type that calls to mind various generic conventions, just as his name conjures up a delicious and cheap stir-fried pork dish with vegetables. What is more interesting in Disney’s typecasting of Mushu is the choice of voice artist for the mini-dragon Eddie Murphy. Murphy is a big star who is known for playing swaggering wisecracking characters in mainstream American comedy action lms. In the successful Beverly Hills Cop movies, Murphy plays not a loser, but a sh out of water who nevertheless beats the uptight Caucasians on their own turf. Similarly, in Mulan, nobody eats Mushu, but he is a runt and an underdog, a good-for-nothing dragon who is trying to earn his stripes. At the beginning he is craven, stupid and driven by status. This makes him a good parallel to Mulan herself, as at the beginning of the lm she also is a good-for-nothing daughter: the you ll bring honor to us all song is highly ironic, given her tomboy inclinations. Mulan is unsuited to her feminine destiny by respectable patriarchal standards. Similarly, Mushu lacks the stature and mystical powers that are appropriate to a Chinese dragon, yet both prove themselves in the end. Mulan successfully passes herself off as a soldier and a leader of men, which takes place under cover of gender when her band of brothers inltrates the palace and defeats the Huns by going in drag. Mushu gets the assignment to help Mulan by pretending to be the great stone dragon. He fools the chief ancestor, and tries to fool Mulan in the next scene (her horse stomps all over him), but he proves himself useful to her despite his diminutive size. Both Mulan and Mushu prevail through imposture and guile, while managing to hold on to their real characters. The message of the lm implies, and the song at the end Be True to Your Heart explicitly states, that proof of authenticity does not come from one’s social role but from who one is inside and the need to stick to that. In the end, Mulan manages to meet her father’s expectations and restores the family honor and, as is typical of Disney heroines (Wasko, 2001, p. 116), nds her prince charming. Such have-it-all endings can only be possible in the popular imagination, but not in practice, as in Chinese feudal societies family honor has never been the business of daughters. The values that the lm endorses are not simply those of family love or even individual freedom, but specically the true value of authenticity, of

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the recognition of one’s identity, and the celebration of the triumph of the will and the victory of the underdog. These values are all too familiar in Hollywood blockbusters (Wang, 2001). Thus the story, although set in ancient China, is resolutely modern and American, in which the dark past of the other is represented by two minor but annoying characters, the matchmaker and the prime minister. One is a fussy gatekeeper of traditional femininity, and the other is an ofcious, mean-spirited bureaucrat who cares only about the rules. Through the obese, meticulous and rigid caricature of the matchmaker, the lm criticizes the view that the role of women is limited only to that of the virtuous wife. The prime minister is characterized as a tiny, physically unt meddler, whose only priority is to make sure that the rules will be followed. Together, they encapsulate the old, outmoded traditions and practices of feudal China, and everything that the modern Disney Mulan is up against. With the Confucian doctrines of loyalty, lial piety and ideal femininity represented as ancient, if not primitive, ideologies, the introduction of gender equality and contemporary concepts of femininity, and the erasure of the gender bending that is specic to Chinese theatre,4 the Mulan story was remade into a timeless legend aimed at Disney’s family audience that celebrates universal, acultural values of love, courage and independence. Even the history of conicts between the Chinese and the so-called barbarians of the north is depicted as a type of medieval warfare that could occur at any time and in any place in human history. Pathways to the Crossover Market: Cultural Negotiations in Global Cultural Production What the Disney producers have done to the Chinese ballad of Mulan is far from unprecedented. Similar to the disappearance of lial piety and loyalty from the Disney lm Mulan, the issue of social hierarchy, which is central to the novel of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, was sidestepped in the lm version. Like Mulan, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a

4 It is important to note that Hua Mulan’s persistent presence in Chinese popular memory is largely to its endless renditions in operas. By gender bending, we refer to standard practices in Chinese opera such as cross-dressing in all-male troupes in Peking opera, and women’s troupes in regional opera. The Hua Mulan story conveniently casts the woman warrior at the center of stage, as us required by both the story and the institution of Chinese opera.

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romantic martial arts story that centers on a young girl’s struggle toward self-discovery. The hidden dragon of the title refers to the sensational martial arts of Jiaolong (or Jen), which remain under wraps due to her background as the daughter of an imperial ofcial. Jen’s secret passion is the jianghu, or outlaw demimonde of banditry and bodyguards. Like Mulan, she has a double life; her martial arts are practiced to serve dark, anarchic purposes. Unlike her mentor Jade Fox, she is not a villain, but a supremely gifted prodigy in need of guidance. Her martial arts need to be honed, turned into the virtues of justice and benevolence that are represented by her good mentors, Yu Xiulian and Li Mubai. Here we nd the central problem of the deculturalization process, because Jen’s domestication in a properly arranged marriage is sidelined in favor of the struggle for control of her martial arts. Compatibility of rank and social hierarchy was probably the main consideration for all marriages in feudal China. Given the supreme importance of social hierarchies, the sexual encounters between Jen, the high-born mistress of a noble family, and her bandit lover Lo (Tiger) would have been unthinkable, and they were therefore very carefully staged in Wang Dulu’s novel. First there is the removal of hostility when Lo, the charismatic bandit leader, rescues Jen from imminent death in the desert while dutifully keeping a physical distance from her, as is required of a gentleman. Second, there is the removal of hierarchical distance when Lo condes his family tragedy to her, implying that he was not low-born, and had possibly had quite a respectable background that was compatible with hers. Finally, there is the removal of personal distance when Jen, in an act of self-defense, unintentionally aggravates Lo’s injuries. His pain and agony triggers her sympathy and she turns to help, an act that eventually triggers love and passion. In the lm’s treatment of their romantic encounter, however, subtlety and decorum are replaced by libido and passion. When James Schamus was asked to rewrite one love scene between Jen and Lo in a romantic way with a modern sensibility, he added starry skies, falling stars, a desert, and solitude to the screenplay (Zhang and Lee, 2002, pp. 298–9). With solitude setting the two free from their social bondage, this backdrop prompts the disappearance of personal distance and justies the explosion of passion. This sequence leaves out crucial information about Lo’s background, which is the key to Jen’s change of attitude toward Lo from animosity to sympathy. Instead, Director Ang Lee emphasizes Jen’s willful and intuitive propensity that leads her to live through impetuous emotion, rather than rationality.

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In the novel, the issue of social compatibility continuously haunts Jen. Wang Dulu repeatedly describes Jen’s inner deliberations on this problem, and emphasizes the contradictions between her choices and her true feelings. In the lm, however, Jen is depicted as a relatively at character who is devoid of any psychological dimension. This major difference may explain the change of emphasis that Lee makes at the end of the lm. The ending of the novel begins with a mysterious plan that Jen has carefully set up. The plan turns out to be the staging of her own suicide so that she can be reunited with her lover, Lo. However, the story does not end with their elopement, as might be expected by readers. Instead, Jen disappears by herself after a romantic night with Lo (Wang, Vol. 2, pp. 756–774). The stark contrast of social strata is the key to the suspension of a love relationship between Jen and Lo in the novel. Because of the irreversible hierarchical boundary between the two ill-fated lovers, Jen decides in the end to leave Lo. However, this essential obstacle that prevents a happy ending is greatly played down in the lm. The lm ends with the death of Jen’s two masters, which does not take place in the novel. The good master Li Mubai dies to save Jen’s life, but the evil master Jade Fox is also killed to set Jen free to go back to the desert with Lo. However, Jen does not choose the path to the ultimate happy ending. Instead, she falls off a cliff into a roaring falls. Therefore, Jen’s difculty in trying to reconcile love and class is displaced by a sense of redemption and regret for her willful personality. Social strata was not the only factor that caused Ang Lee and his writers to make adjustments to the ending of the lm in contrast to the source material. The alteration was also due to the perception that popular Chinese ction is old fashioned, and the lm attempts to revive it with the forms and patterns of international art cinema. According to Ang Lee, several features of Chinese martial art ction and lms are considered incomprehensible and antiquated. One is the authors compulsive discussion and exposition of the motivations of the characters and cause-effect relationships. For instance, Wang Dulu adds an expository coda that is addressed directly to readers, which explains how and why Jen must choose to leave Lo in the end (Yeh and Davis, 2005). To readers who are unfamiliar with this crude convention in Chinese martial arts ction, it is problematic, because it assumes that readers lack the ability to surmise the story and must be told explicitly of the twists and turns in the plot arrangement. This type of literary trope also featured heavily in the popular lms that are derived from the

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martial arts tradition, including many both low-budget and major lms of the 1960s and 1970s. It might have been an acceptable practice in the past with a predominantly Chinese audience, but it probably would not work for a transcultural lm that is intended for a contemporary niche audience across cultural and national boundaries. Hence, Lee and his writers had to strip away this practice that was embedded in the source material. The lm must not come to an end with a closure, either narratively or ideologically, and so Lee stages what looks like a suicide, or a redemption, by allowing Jen to throw herself off a cliff of the Mudan mountain, which is known as a Taoist pure land. This ending gives rise to several possible interpretations. One is that Jen nds a level of self-awareness by choosing the path to death, which in the Taoist tenet signies a way to enlightenment, the ultimate achievements of martial arts. This line of argument, however, could be re-interpreted by feminists who might see Jen’s action as a submission to cultural and social authorities. Conversely, the ending might also indicate a silent deance of any attempt to contain the ying dragon. Jen leaps and ies away so that she is free from any social (class and hierarchy), cultural (gender) and sexual (romantic relationship) bounds. With this ambiguous ending that is open to various interpretations, the lm fullls the expectations of an art lm audience, who would prefer to infer the meaning on their own. In searching for the nal meaning of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the audience is given the opportunity and space for playful hermeneutics. Another major example of reculturalization is the language of the lm. The dialogue is a hybrid, and underwent various rounds of translation, retranslation, writing and rewriting. The multi-layered writing comprises the work of Chinese-language scriptwriters Wang Hui-ling and Tsai Kuo-jong, Ang Lee’s own translation, James Schamus’s rewrite and overwrite, and Lee’s rewrite, and colloquial expressions, literary language, classical, provincial and Western and Chinese language (Zhang and Lee, 2002, p. 297). This mixed, hybrid language is not unproblematic, and has attracted criticism. For Ang Lee, the antiquity of the historical setting and the linguistic particularity of classical Chinese that is embedded in the story needed translation to contemporize an old text. Yet to critics in Taiwan and mainland China, Tiger’s love talk sounds too modern, largely as a result of the period inaccuracy of his language. Perhaps the most telling evidence of Lee’s efforts to make a Chinese lm that is globally accessible comes from the translation. According to

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Lee, when we did the subtitling we translated in a way to allow Western audiences access, nding equivalences to likely speech and syntax patterns in a Western context (Zhang and Lee, 2002, pp. 304–5). This was a daunting problem, because the English titles are not the same as the spoken dialogue at all, and it was like writing a whole new script. Doubling pairs of characters and organizing them into binaries middle-aged versus young, reserve versus passion, traditional versus modern, reective versus impetuous also serve to make the theme of the lm comprehensible to global audiences. These binary themes are connected with the ideologies of individualism, obligation to society and to family, and hierarchical and social norms. They point toward Lee’s use of a formula (cf. Kristin Thompson) to create the clarity of value judgment that is a requirement of a global media commodity. They also point to Lee’s recreation of a modern martial art stage from old materials through the mixing of West and East, art and marketplace. The strategies of mixing, synthesizing, and hybridizing East and West may be similar in the making of both Mulan and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but they were employed for quite different aims and entailed quite different outcomes. Terms and Conditions of Hybridization The background of the two production teams reveals interesting common features that may explain the similarities in the measures that were adopted to achieve cultural hybridization. First, both teams had already accumulated signicant experience in producing for the global market when they launched the lm project. Although Ang Lee’s team neither carries a transnational brand name like the Disney team, nor can it afford a production scale that is comparable to any Disney production, it does enjoy an international reputation that has helped it to acquire funding through international presale, bonds and bank loans. Second, both teams comprise members of different cultures who ensure the multivalence of the product, and both teams went through rounds of debate and negotiation before the nal product was hammered out. In the last stages, both teams managed postproduction tasks through an international division of labor, and both lms were marketed and distributed through transnational corporate networks with a global market reach.

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The similarities, however, stop here. Ang Lee, being ethnic Chinese, has attempted to instill a specic cultural signicance in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that no member of the Disney team would be interested in. According to his autobiography, Lee saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as the embodiment of a dream to prove to the world that martial arts stories can be made with a sense of artistic beauty. He also wanted to accomplish the mission of presenting a quality product to the world audience and to bring glory to Chinese lms (Zhang, 2002, p. 421). The creation, to him, reects who he is, what he knows about, identies with, and the inuences that he has been exposed to, including his Chinese cultural upbringing and Western lm education. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon represents Ang Lee’s conception of ancient China and his vision of Chinese art and ethics. As a homage to earlier Chinese art directors such as King Hu, the martial arts in the lm are presented as a synthesis of Peking opera, kung-fu and the Taoist world view. Moreover, the narrative of the story does not strictly follow that of the classical Hollywood formula. In Ang Lee’s view, Chinese drama is built on the release of tension from suppression, which is contrary to Western drama, which feeds on the escalation of tension (Lahr, 2003). These features explain why Ang Lee stood rm when Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was charged with Westernization and of presenting a silent, Taoist image of China, a long-standing stereotype, to attract Western viewers. Lee did not deny having had foreign viewers in mind when making the lm, but to him this did not mean that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was just another Hollywood lm. It does not take many more examples to show that the mission that Ang Lee loaded onto Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a rare exception in an industry that is ruled by capitalist logic and transnational corporations that link a global network. As critics (Dirlik, 1994, p. 349; Miller, et al., 2001) have pointed out, these transnationals hold the key to the current imbalanced market structure by forming business alliances, achieving vertical and horizontal integration, and buying out reproduction rights from independent and local producers. Yet within this tightly controlled business world, the possibility of raising funds through pre-sale, credit insurance, and bank loans, and of lm distribution through contract arrangements with transnationals, have opened up opportunities for a limited number of independent producers with good credentials and creative ideas. Ang Lee conded in his autobiography that the autonomy he has enjoyed in lmmaking comes

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with the back up of overseas investment and global distribution (Zhang, 2002, p. 257), and it is this autonomy that has allowed him the chance to realize his childhood dreams. This autonomy, however, does not translate into total freedom for lmmakers. Unbeknownst to Lee, both the source of investment for the lm and his dream of proving to the world have made it impossible not to deculturalize the original Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon story and the tradition of martial arts lmmaking. The clash of ideas and different practices became evident in the production process, which was a painstaking dialogue and negotiation between cultures, old and new, East and West. It reached a climax at the scriptwriting stage, when the narration of the story unfolded. In his autobiography, Lee admitted that the Chinese social structure was one of the rst obstacles that he encountered in communicating with James Schamus, his long-time partner and one of two scriptwriters for the lm (Zhang and Lee, 2002, p. 287). What draws viewers to a different culture is curiosity, Lee said. Once their curiosity is aroused comes comprehensiveness. There is not much more to mutual understanding than logic and reason, and the reference framework that is constructed on the basis of common sense. Lee admitted, beyond these, crossing cultural barriers would become difcult. To an outsider there are things about other cultures that are insensible, illogical or unreasonable, and yet are accepted without question as habits or traditions by the members of those cultures. To solve the problem, cultural elements that were deemed to be beyond common sense to Schamus were compromised. Given his cultural background and expertise, Schamus in this case did not stand for one person, but for mainstream values and a predominantly cosmopolitan worldview. In an interview, Schamus admitted that he began to understand how central the idea of the book is to the genre, and to the culture as a whole during the process of rewriting the script, and that he resolved to preserve its function and its importance (Teo, 2001). Yet it does not alter the fact that throughout the production process, the Chinese team relied on Schamus to sensitize its members with regard to what would be considered absurd or interesting from a Western perspective, pointing to the parts in the original work that should be omitted or elaborated, an exercise that was described by Lee as a frustrating, yet useful (Zhang and Lee, 2002, p. 292).

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Globalization and Hybridization: A Third Space? A Third Possibility? In his more recent work, Homi Bhabha has extended his notion of hybridity to include forms of counter-authority, a third space that intervenes to affect the hybrid moment of political change. Here the transformation value of change lies in the re-articulation, or translation, of elements that are neither the One (unitary working class) nor the Other (the politics of gender), but something else besides which contests the terms and territories of both (Young, 1995, p. 23). Hybridity, in this sense, involves the generation of new ways in which to understand and to generate possible new cultures. The birth of a third space, therefore, requires a process of dialectic discourse and reective interaction through which ideas, values, and meaning clash and are negotiated and regenerated. Without this element, hybridity is not much more than a simple mixing and hybridizing to include forms that blend different elements. In practice, however, hybridity in cultural production is not always achieved through dialectical discourse among cultures, whether in an effort to globalize or to localize. Under the capitalist maxim of minimizing cost and maximizing prot, hybridization is all too frequently reduced to hasty, cosmetic and even casual incorporations of different nominal elements. The localization of transnational text, for example, often involves no more than using local actors and actresses in transnational advertisements, local hosts and players in licensed televised game shows, or, as is seen in some obscure soap operas, local names for cities and characters. Hybridity in these products, whether initiated by transnationals or local producers, may be common, yet has remained at the supercial level where the mainstream, as dened by market size, permeates and prevails. As some have warned, localized products are not local products; they are essentially global. To go beyond this supercial level of hybridization, deculturalization and reculturalization become necessary. Deculturalization, as witnessed in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is key to ensuring comprehension and acceptance by a global audience, as much as Lee would like to claim the Chineseness of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, it was necessary to remove, or play down, cultural values such as lial piety or social hierarchy, despite the autonomy of the lmmaker and his cultural background and aspirations, because the lm was targeted at the global market. What causes the difference in the type of hybridity that comes out of the process of transformation is the kind

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of reculturalization strategy that the lmmaker seeks to adopt, and the objectives that the lm is expected to achieve. For Disney’s Mulan, no cultural mission or personal vision was involved in producing the lm. Tony Bancroft, Mulan’s co-director. admitted that there were limitations to how Chinese the lm would be: we knew we had to respect the material, but the bottom line is we also knew we weren’t going to make a Chinese picture. We couldn’t We are not Chinese. In addition, Disney has already established a production model for its lms, which has a different sensibility, a different storytelling style (Chan, 2002, p. 237). Disney’s middle of the road approach to Mulan and the occasional deviation from Disney’s favorite formula5 was therefore a way in which to show respect for the original legend, a courtesy gesture that does not alter the fact that Mulan represents the transculturalization of an ethnic story by a transnational giant. To Disney managers, neither cost nor cultural literacy were a real problem, yet cultural fusion that goes beyond the level of their winning formula was deemed unnecessary in terms of corporate prot. The authentic outlook of the lm gave the repackaging of the formula a fresh and exotic appearance, but it was important not to overkill the original context within which the story takes place, given the importance of the Chinese market. The level of hybridity achieved in these products, therefore, is instrumental in nature, and is no different from the hybridity that is found in most transnational advertisements or localized television serial dramas. Looking at the way in which Disney has built its animation kingdom through the adaptation of popular fairy tales and folk stories such as Aladdin and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, it can be seen that Tony Bancroft was merely following a Disney tradition that was established by Walt Disney himself. After deconstructing the process of cross-cultural reguration in The Three Caballeros, a Disney cartoon released in 1945, Burton-Carvajal (1994, p. 147) noted sincerity in Disney’s quest for ethnic originality. Yet to him, all these good intentions served but one purpose to mask the evidence hidden behind the comic frenzy and the authentic cultural appearance that no cultural reciprocities are created equal. 5 The Disney formula, according to Chan (2002), includes the following: good prevailing over evil, emotional catchy songs, cute animal sidekicks for comic relief, young romance, funny in-jokes, an assorted supporting cast with a grumpy to dopey personality range, and character voices performed by lm stars.

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The difference between Ang Lee and Tony Bancroft is therefore not just that of a brand-name independent producer/director versus a generic transnational executive, but is the difference in aim of the realization of a cultural mission and the production of another box ofce hit. Mulan and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are both hybridized products, yet the aim and outcome of their reculturalization operations are distinctly different. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a rare case in which a reective dialectical process was attempted. The paradox lies in the fact that the process was not intended to achieve cultural fusion. Rather, the purpose was to present a contemporary rendition of a classical Chinese work in a way that was acceptable to the West, and to change the stereotype of martial arts lms. In making Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a modern Chinese lm, Lee attempts to deconstruct the stereotypes of Chinese culture, cinema, and language. What critics noticed in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the removal of traditional values, such as social hierarchy, from the story, the change in presentation style, and hence the lack of Chineseness. To its production team, however, Chineseness and authenticity did not exclude creativity and innovation. In response to the question of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s cultural authenticity, Schamus suggested a different interpretation of Orientalism which suggests that Orientalism lies as much in the perception of what one is from the perspective of the colonizers as in the perception of what one is not from the perspective of the colonizers. Schamus claimed that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was criticized for failing to be authentically Chinese or Asian because the idea that one can attain expertise in different cultural realms and feed it back into one’s own culture is essentially a Western idea and prerogative (Teo, 2001). Others non-Westerners are expected to stay faithful to their genres and to cultivate authenticity, much like a panda in a zoo, as Ang Lee put it. A Chinese product that has excluded certain Chinese cultural attributes and incorporated Western elements, from this perspective, is considered a fake and the result of cultural bastardization. This point touches on an important issue that has largely been overlooked in the literature, namely, the nature and characteristics of hybridized products other than their exhibition of features of the parent cultures. Many, including Schamus himself (Teo, 2001; Pong 2002; Wei, 2003), attributed the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the Western market to that which is identied as being Eastern in the lm, and the success (or failure) in Asia to that which is identied as

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being Western in the lm. The focus of attention was readily put on the question of the lm’s Chineseness or Easternness, yet there was less interest in seeing, if not a reluctance to see, the lm in its own right. What can a cultural product be if it is neither here nor there? To label a cultural product fake, in disguise, or authentic presumes the existence of a standard prototype that simply does not exist. The case of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon implies that modern cinema should not, and perhaps cannot, be restricted to national and aesthetic boundaries, because lmmaking appropriates anything that is fun and anything that the producers are able to create. It is no longer a secret that a great majority of the historical lms and soap operas which ll movie theaters and television channels in Greater China have also been deculturalized. Female characters no longer subject themselves to the tyranny of patriarchal rules, commoners casually play jokes on emperors, and children ght with their parents. The Chineseness of these cultural products lies in their ability to identify with, and attract, viewers in contemporary Chinese societies, rather than in a faithful reection of stereotypical images of feudal China. We are reminded by Ulf Hannerz that cultures are by nature uid and are always in motion as the result of continuing interaction and discourse both from within the culture itself and with the outside world. Both Bakhtin and Levi-Strauss noted, each from their own perspective, that all cultures are hybrids (Werbner, 1997). However, it is important to also note that the constant motion and incorporation of different elements brings with it new characteristics, new distinctions, and new similarities. From this perspective, perhaps hybridization and globalization do lead to the loss of cultural distinctiveness in cultural products and in cultures as well. However, by losing what was there, we are presented with something new, something fresh, something that represents yet another hybrid. It is only when we lose sight of the dynamic nature of culture and lock ourselves into a quest for cultural essentialism that the hybridization of cultural products will necessarily lead to stale homogeneity. Globalization may have stepped up the process and scale of the hybridization of cultural production, and may favor certain elements over others, but it has hardly changed the nature of the process.

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REFERENCES Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Burton-Carvajal, J. 1994. Surprise Package: Looking Southward with Disney, in Disney Discourse, edited by E. Smoodin. New York: Routledge. Chan, J.M. 2002. Disneyfying and Globalizing the Chinese Legend Mulan: A Study of Transculturation, pp. 225–248 in In Search of Boundaries: Communication, Nationstates and Cultural Identities, edited by Joseph Man Chan and Bryce T. McIntyre. Westport, Connecticut, London: Ablex Publishing. Ciecko, A. 2001. Superhit Hunk Heroes for Sale: Globalization and Bollywood’s Gender Politics. Asian Journal of Communication 11:2, 121–143. Dirlik, A. 1994. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, Critical Inquiry 20, 328–56. ———. 1997. Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism. Durham, Duke University Press. Friedman, T. 2000. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Anchor Books. Hannerz, U. 1987. The World in Creolisation, Africa 57:4, 546–560. ———. 1996. Transnational Connections. London and New York: Routledge. Iwabuchi, K. 2002. Recentering Globalization: Popular culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2000. To Globalize, Regionalize, or Localize Us, That is the Question: Japan’s Response to Media Globalization, pp. 142–159 in The New Communication Landscape: Demystifying Media Globalization, edited by G. Wang, J. Servaes and A. Goonasekera. London: Routledge. Kraidy, M.M. 2002. Hybridity in Cultural Globalization, Communication Theory 12:3, 316–339. Lahr, J. June 30, 2003. Becoming the Hulk, The New Yorker, pp. 72–81. Lee, C.C. 2003. Media Business Strategies in the Global Era: From a Connectivity Perspective, Mass Communication Research 75, 1–36. Mattelart, A. 2002. An Archaeology of the Global Era: Constructing a Belief, Media Culture and Society 24: 591–612. Miller, T., Govil, N., McMurria, J. and Maxwell, R. 2001. Global Hollywood. London: British Film Institute. Papastergiadis, N. 2000. The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization, and Hybridity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. Pierterse, J.N. 1995. Globalization as Hybridization, pp. 45–68 in Global Modernities, edited by M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson. London, Thousand Oaks, California: Sage. Pong, Jixiang. 2002. Chinese Visual Arts under the Globalization discourse, pp. 1–12 in Globalization and the Destiny of the Chinese Film and Television, edited by Zhang F., Huang Z and Hu Z. Beijing: Beijing Broadcasting Academy. Rosaldo, R. 1995. Foreword, pp. xiv–xxi in N.G. Calclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnestoa Press. Shome, R. and Hegde, R.S. 2002. Culture, Communication, and the Challenge of Globalization, Critical Studies in Media Communication 19:2, 172–189. Teo, S. April–May, 2001. Love and Swords: The Dialectics of Martial Arts Romance. Senses of Cinema (http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/11/crouching. html). ———. March–April, 2001. We Kicked Jackie Chan’s Ass! An Interview with James Schamus Senses of Cinema (http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/13/ schamus.html). Thompson, K. 1999. Storytelling in the New Hollywood. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

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Wallerstein, I. 1990. Culture is the World-System: A Reply to Boyne pp. 63–66 in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, edited by M. Featherstone. London: Sage. Wang, D.L. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (1985) 2 vols. Taipei: United Literature. Wang, G. July 12–13, 2001a. Hollywood the Global vs. Taiwan the Local: Universal Formula and Beyond, paper presented at the International Conference on Transculturalism, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. Wang, G., L.L. Ku, and C.C. Liu 2000. Local and National Cultural Industries: Is there Life after Globalization? pp. 52–73 in The New Communications Landscape: Demystifying Media Globalization, edited by G. Wang, J. Servaes, and A. Goonasekera. London: Routledge. Wasko, J. 2001. Is It a Small World, After All? Pp. 3–30 in Dazzled by Disney? Edited by J. Wasko, M. Phillips and E.R. Meechan. London: Leicester University Press. Wei, T. 2003. From Local to Global: Critique on the Globalization of Taiwan Cinema, paper presented at 2003 Focus on Taiwan Cinema, Nov 28–30, 2003, Taipei, Taiwan. Werbner, P. 1997. Introduction: The Dialectics of Cultural Hybridity, in Debating Cultural Hybridity, edited by P. Webner and T. Modood. London: ZED Books. Young, R. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity, Culture, and Race. New York: Routledge. Yeh, E. and D. Davis 2005. Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island. New York: Columbia University Press. Zhang, J.P. and Ang Lee. 2002. A Ten-Year Movie Dream. Taipei: Times Culture.

Chapter 4

Globalization and Identity Formation: A Cross-cultural Reading of Amy Tan’s “Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat” Lu Fang Introduction Childhood and adolescence play crucial roles in the process of identity formation. Experiences and education during this period shape a person’s worldview and determine a possible future self. There is a Chinese popular saying: “The youth can be known by three, and by seven know how the elder will be.”1 It is always a great challenge for parents and educators to provide children with positive values and beliefs and a healthy social environment. However, this challenge becomes more rigorous for people who have left their homeland and make a living in other countries. The sense of uprooting and the dilemma in straddling between different cultures create enormous confusion and identity crises for both adults and children. This phenomenon is quite common among Asian North Americans, and has been addressed in the writings of many of second or third generation Asian North American writers.2 Many of us may have been impressed by Amy Tan’s3 portrayal in The Joy Luck Club of the frustration of raising children in a society different from that of the parents. Lindo, one of the mothers in this novel says, that “I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these two things do not mix?” (Tan, 1989,

1 Chinese saying, 中國民間諺語, “三歲知小, 七歲知老,” trans. Dr. Jan Walls, talk with author, January 20, 2004. 2 Such as Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961), Maxine Hong Kinston’s The Woman Warrior (1975), Wayson Choy’s Jade Peony (1976), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989), Mary Paik Lee’s Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America (1990), and Denise Chong’s The Concubine’s Children (1994), etc. 3 Amy Tan (1952–) was born to Chinese parents in Oakland, California. Her major works include The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife.

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p. 289) This reveales both the dream and the fear, the perplexities and the difculties that numerous Asian North Americans encounter when living between cultural spaces. The lives of Asians in North America have greatly improved in recent decades along with the progression of globalization. Discrimination and racism have gradually diminished or gone into recession. However, the personal and psychological struggle in identifying places between two very different cultures has not eased, and to a certain degree it has even complicated and intensied as—unlike rst generation immigrants who were mostly isolated in ghettoized spaces such as Chinatowns and maintained sojourner mentalities—the later generations have more opportunities to politically, socially, and culturally integrate themselves into North American mainstream life. Asians are becoming the fastest growing minority population in both the US and Canada, but not enough is known about their particular cultural and psychological needs. How can they achieve an ideal balance of assimilation and their own cultural heritage? What are the common causes of their intergenerational conicts? Which factors are crucial to forming their personal and cultural identities? What does it mean to be both Asian and North American in an age of globalization? Although these questions should be the focus of academic study, creative and productive means of nurturing the spiritual needs of these people in daily life are even more important, especially in early childhood and at elementary school. On September 3, 2001, a new animated daily television series, designed for the 5–8 age group and entitled “Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat” was launched on the PBS KIDS4 television station. Viewers were delighted to learn that the series was originated by Amy Tan, who has been long concerned about the identity crises of the younger generation of Asians in America. Forty half-hour episodes were produced by CineGroupe5 in association with the Children’s Television Workshop

4 Headquartered in Alexanda, Virginia, PBS is a private, nonprot media enterprise owned and operated by the nation’s 346 public television stations. PBS Kids is one of the most trusted places for pre-school television in North America. For more information, visit http://www.PBSKids.org. 5 Headquartered in Montreal, Canada, CineGroupe is one of the leading animation companies in North America. It is an internationally acclaimed leader in kids and family programming. For more information, visit http://www.cinegroupe.com.

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(Sesame Workshop),6 and distributed in the United States, Canada, and afliates with satellite service worldwide. The Chinese Siamese Cat, Amy Tan’s original tale, begins with a Siamese mother cat who tells a story to her kittens about their ancestor, Sagwa of China, and explains how Siamese cats got their distinctive dark markings on their faces, paws and tails. Sagwa (literally meaning ‘silly melon head’) is a pearl white, spirited and curious young cat, about 8 years old. She lives with her parents along with her siblings Dongwa (winter melon) and Sheegwa (water melon) in a foolish magistrate’s house in China at the end of 19th century. Her parents are often forced by the magistrate to write his strict and selsh rules by dipping their brush-like tails in ink. One day, they are called again to write a new rule, which is that no one can sing until the sun goes down. Sagwa, the most mischievous of the kittens, changes this unhappy rule by falling from a bookshelf accidentally into an inkwell and walking over the selected parts of the scroll with her blackened paws and tails. When the people learn of the new happy rule that they must sing until the sun goes down, they sing songs in praise of the magistrate. The magistrate is so touched by the songs that he takes back old rules and becomes a wise man. He does not punish the frightened Sagwa, but instead declares that “all Chinese cats shall have dark faces, ears, paws, and tails—in honor of the greatest of felines, Sagwa of China.” (Tan, 1989) This curious and spiritual cat became the source of inspiration for the television series, with Amy Tan and the illustrator Gretchen Schields working together with a team of talented creators from CineGroupe and Sesame Workshop. Set in the far-off beautiful land of ancient China and the magistrate’s marvelous house, Sagwa, the spunky kitten, along with Dongwa, Sheegwa, and her best friend Fu Fu, the nearsighted bespectacled bat, start a series of adventures to nd their places in the world. Following the humorous adventures and explorations of the kittens, young audience members are introduced to the splendid landscape of China and a miniature, yet comprehensive Chinese cultural system of written characters and calligraphy, festivals and customs, history and legends, values and beliefs, music and folklore, gardens and architecture, Tai Chi and dance, pandas, crickets and zodiac zoo,

6 A nonprot organization in the US, created in 1967 to produce the educational program Sesame Street, designed to promote the intellectual and cultural growth of preschoolers. For more information, visit http://www.sesameworkshop.org.

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and so on. Meanwhile, they are also presented with a series of strategies for dealing with personal and social issues. Although Sagwa and her friends frequently get into trouble and make numerous mistakes unintentionally, they learn many important lessons as they grow into a variety of new roles: how to appreciate differences and appreciate what one has, how to accept the consequences of one’s actions, why one should stand up for what one believes in and believing in oneself, how to build up friendships and be honest, and Chinese family values and history. Sagwa has been greatly welcomed by young children and their parents regardless of their ethnic background. When the theme song “Sagwa, My Best Friend” starts each day, numerous young children (like my son and his friends) sit enthusiastically in front of the television to learn what Sagwa’s next adventure will be. Soon after Sagwa was released, it won several awards, such as the Daytime Emmy Award for individual Achievement in Animation for outstanding Children’s Series, the Silver Award at the Chicago International Film Festival for Outstanding Children’s Series and the Silver Award at the Houston Film Festival for Children’s Animated Series. (Cinegroupe, 2004) Several book and TV reviews have had Sagwa as a cover story (Cinegroupe, 2000; Moor, 2002);7 Amazon.com has many reader’s reviews, written by children as well as adults, claiming that the Sagwa picture book and video series are the best they have ever had.8 In September 2003, the Sagwa began a run in France and Africa. “We are thrilled that children in France and Africa will have the chance to discover Sagwa’s incredible universe,” declared Marie-Christine Dufour, Executive Vice President, Distribution and Marketing, at CineGroupe. “Audiences worldwide appreciate the Sagwa series, thanks to its quality stories and animation.” (PBS, 2000) Why all this fascination? How can a children’s program, aiming at celebrating Chinese culture, at the same time “embrace universal themes accessible to children of all cultures”? (Wong, 2001) Where does Sagwa’s ‘incredible universe’ come from? What motivated Amy Tan to create this tale and led her to achieve this enormous success? 7 Also in “DVD Review: Sagwa: Sagwa’s Storybook World,” Entertaining Kids, January 2003. http://www.edutainingkids.com/reviews/vdsagwasstorybookdvd.html (accessed on 12 February 2004). 8 “Editorial Reviews,” and “Customer Reviews,” Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese Cat, Amazon.Com. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0689846177/inktomibkasin-20/ref%3Dnosim/103–9463335–2548661#product-details (accessed on 12 February 2004).

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Are there any important strategies we could learn from this achievement? To what degree has Sagwa affected the young generation of Asian North Americans, and of North Americans in general? And what is the series’ signicance in the context of globalization? In the following sections, I will address these questions. I begin by analyzing the successful narrative and cultural strategies of Sagwa’s localization of Chinese culture in North America. Narrative and Cultural Strategies of Sagwa’s Localization of Chinese Culture in North America Sagwa’s extraordinarily good reception in North America suggests a successful communication between Chinese and Western cultures. “Every culture has created its own world, its own truth or meaning,” writes Antonio Gallo in his article Hermeneutics as a Path to Inculturation, “to go inside a culture is to enter some very special and inward truth produced by communication within the group.” (Gallo, 2004) Hence, the methods for making paths into another cultural world and reaching the goal of reciprocal understanding are critical and worth careful study. In this section, I will examine the narrative and cultural strategies that Amy Tan and the other creators applied in the Sagwa series to make the communication so successful. Storytelling has long been used around the world as a means of helping children understand the world and develop their sense of self, suggesting resolutions to universal problems and transmitting cultural heritage to them. Sagwa uses this timeless vehicle. It works on children’s minds, which are full of fantasy, soaring imagination and curiosity, but still immature and unordered. The Sagwa series could be viewed as a series of lessons, but in the rst place they are all brilliant children’s tales. The Swedish children’s writer Lennart Hellsing once said that “all great art is educational, all educational art is bad.”9 Sagwa is just art at its best: teaching without preaching, or in the Chinese saying, teaching while enjoying.10 From the perspective of narrative skills, it has almost all the advantages of children’s literature. Serious messages are wrapped in humor or irony, sometimes in nonsense. Personication

9 “Sweden Children’s Literature.” http://www.sweden.se/templates/FactSheet_ 3279.asp (accessed on 15 February 2004). 10 A Chinese idiom: “寓教於樂”.

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is successfully applied and leads young audience members to identify themselves easily with the kittens and view them as their good friends. The personality traits of the cats and people are humorously exaggerated: Sagwa’s curiosity leads her into numerous traps and magnicent discoveries, and so does the magistrate’s foolishness, which has often caused his stupid actions and silly rules. Misunderstanding and coincidence are frequently used to link the plots and create a climax: had Sagwa not fallen into the inkwell, the generations of Siamese cats would not have got such remarkable markings on their faces, paws, and tails! Logical inconsistency is also applied to make things seem foreign and enhance attractiveness, and the effects are sometimes comedic, sometimes absurd. While watching these series, the audience’s normal sense of time and space are intermittently stretched, so the gap between the contexts in which the stories are set and contemporary challenges that children face today are bridged. The stories follow exactly a child’s way of logical thinking, which converts impossibilities into possibilities. Magical and mysterious colors are also added to the tales: what kind of fantastic tails the kittens have, how talented they are in writing Chinese calligraphy! All these excellent literary qualities are indispensable for Sagwa’s success in the children’s market and make it comparable to many world classic children’s tales. However, the more fundamental factor in its success, especially in its accessibility by other cultures, lies in its structure. There are numerous resemblances between oral culture and writings for young children, because the structure of the children’s tale is very similar to the structure of myth. According to the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss,11 the structures of myth provide basic structures for understanding cultural relations. He explains why myths from cultures all over the world seem so similar. Though the content, the specic characters and events of myths may differ widely, they share structural sameness. Levi-Strauss also insists that myth is a language, because it has to be told in order to exist. (Adams and Searle, 1986, pp. 809–822) By applying Levi-Strauss’ theory to the analysis of Sagwa, we can see clearly that its structure has provided a language that makes the stories accessible to many different cultures.

11 Claude Levi-Strauss (1908–) is best known for his development of structural anthropology. His major works include The Raw and the Cooked, The Savage Mind, Structural Anthropology and Totemism.

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Based on structural similarities, several interesting narrative and cultural strategies were successfully developed. One of these strategies I can name with a Chinese expression “ll the old bottle with new wine.”12 This refers to the insertion of new content, and thus signicance, into narrative forms that are already quite familiar to the young audience. Typical titles of the episodes in this category are “The Tortoise and the Cat,” “Sister Act,” “The Foolish Magistrate’s New Robes,” “Lord of the Fleas” and “My Fair Kitty.” I will use three examples to illustrate this strategy. 1. The title of “The Tortoise and the Cat” is a wordplay on Aesop’s fable “The Tortoise and the Hare.” In this tale, Sagwa likes to move fast and pretend to be animals that she’s not, whereas the tortoise likes to sit back, move slowly and appreciate the beauty of the palace garden. The tortoise shows Sagwa what she’s missing: the sweet smell of a rose bush, the amazing strength of the garden ants, the joy of throwing rocks into the pond and so much more. Sagwa then plays follow-the-leader with a couple of mice, showing them the beauty of the garden as well. (TV Tome, 2004) In this beautiful fable-like episode, Sagwa learns how to appreciate the difference. This reminds us of some of Zhuang Zi’s most memorable parables illustrating the same idea, such as an encounter between a giant sea turtle and a frog in a well (Zhuang, 1964, pp. 107–108) and the great bird and the small cicada (Zhuang, 1964, pp. 23–24) Zhuang Zi says in “Autumn Flood” that “if we know that heaven and earth are tiny grains and the tip of a hair is a range of mountains, then we have perceived the law of difference.” (Zhuang, 1964, pp. 100 –101) That is how Amy Tan uses this strategy on the one hand to make the story more easily accessible to children, and on the other hand to introduce Zhuang Zi’s philosophy and guide them to look at the world from other perspectives. 2. The episode “Cat of a Different Class” also illustrates Zhuang Zi’s ideas. Sagwa learns here the idea of following nature and how to appreciate the freedom she has. One day, Sagwa meets some royal cats from Beijing who wear beautiful slippers and use silver food dishes. She is amazed by their luxurious life and wants to talk to them, but they arrogantly refuse to do so. However, the curious and

12

A Chinese idiom: “舊瓶裝新酒”.

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persistent Sagwa soon discovers the true reason for their arrogance is their unhappy life and their sacrice of freedom. Sagwa discovers that the silver dishes are lled with rice (if they ate shrimp, their breath would stink). So she gets them shrimp from the kitchen in exchange for trying on their beautiful slippers. However, the slippers are much too tight. Therefore Sagwa frees them and lets them play in the palace lake. The royal cats say that Sagwa lets them be real cats for the rst time. These cats are quite similar to the sea bird in Zhuangzi’s “Supreme Happiness:” “once a sea bird alighted in the suburbs of the Lu capital. The marquis of Lu escorted it to the ancestral temple, where he entertained it, performing the Nine Shao music for it to listen to and presenting it with the meat of the T’ai Miao sacrice to feast on. But the bird only looked dazed and forlorn, refusing to eat a single slice of meat or drink a cup of wine, and in three days it was dead.” (Zhuang, 1964, p. 116) The same idea is also expressed in Zhuang Zi’s “The Secret of Nourishing Life:” “the swamp pheasant has to walk ten paces for one peck and a hundred paces for one drink, but it doesn’t want to be kept in a cage. Though you treat it like a king, its spirit won’t be content.” (Zhuang, 1964, p. 48) 3. The title of “The Foolish Magistrate’s New Robes” is a wordplay on Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Through the hint of the title, young audience members immediately nd similarities between the emperor and the foolish magistrate, and see joyfully how the stupidity of the authorities is ridiculed; meanwhile, they also realize that this kind of stupidity could happen anywhere in the world. The child who tells the truth about the invisible clothes in Anderson’s tale is transformed into Sagwa in Amy Tan’s tale, who has learned how to tell the truth. The art of dialogue is applied systematically in the structural organization of Sagwa, which leaves it open and dynamic. Most of the stories in the series are structured intertextually. Thematically, Chinese cultural topics are constantly compared to those of other nations, and open to the dialogue in a universal context. For example, Chinese ancestor worship is connected to root-seeking and knowing family history in general; the Chinese Spring Festival is shown in parallel to all the new year’s celebrations around the world; the Mid-Autumn Festival is related to the myth of moon and sun in East Africa, or the worship of natural forces in general everywhere; Tai Chi and Gong Fu are discussed

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together with acrobatics and dance in other countries; and the bat as a lucky symbol in China is compared with frog and cricket elsewhere. Through dialogical comparison and demonstration, universal themes underlying the seemingly quite different surface themes are gradually revealed. In addition to the well structured tales, this TV program also features with two interesting segments: Curious Cat and What About You? After each 11 minute animated adventure ends, there is a minidocumentary in which real children from different cultures share their hobbies, music, special festivals, foods, and show off their neighborhoods. “Through this combination of adventure and documentary, children explore both the culture of China long ago as well as the cultures of children around the world today.” (PBS Kids, 2004) “It resonates with a universal theme of discovery, hope, and childlike joy which will touch a wide and diverse audience.” (PBS 2000) With the advantages of technology, the program also launched many interactive activities on the pbskids.org website, inviting children to continue the experience in cyberspace. These narrative and cultural strategies and the dialogical structure provide the young audiences with a very good environment for active reception. According to Hans Robert Jauss’13 aesthetic theory on literary horizons of expectations, the textual strategies, overt and covert signals, applied by authors actually dene reception and construct horizons of expectations. “A literary work with an unusual aesthetic form can shatter the expectations of its reader” and positively change “people’s perceptions of the world in which they live.” (Holden, 2003) This explains how the dynamic and open space of Sagwa has been constructed for an active communication and how this inuences the positive reception of the young audiences. In the meantime, Norman Holland’s14 psychological reception theory adds another dimension to the explanation of this successful two-way dialogue. He believes that audiences actually “identify with characters and plots when identity themes similar to their own are expressed.” (Holland, 1998) This speaks

13 Hans Robert Jauss (1921–1997), German literary critic, famous for his literary theory of reception, important works including Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, Theory and History of Literature (Brighton: Harvester, 1982). 14 Professor at the University of Florida, famous for his psychological approach in literary studies, important works include The Dynamics of Literary Response (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1968).

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to the role of exchangeable relationships between the kittens and the young audience of Sagwa. The Desire to be Recognized and the Interrelated Cultural Strategies Chinese culture is enormously rich, complicated and profound. People approach it from different perspectives to meet their specic interests and needs. Amy Tan’s policies of thematic selection in this miniature version of Chinese culture have disclosed some very important cultural strategies that she uses in her multidimensional dialogues with global readers. And the motives for her to create Sagwa indicate her strong desire in expressing her never-diminished cultural nostalgia. One of the most striking and attractive features of this series is that the cats can write Chinese characters by using their magic, brush-like tails. By watching this program and using the web-based interactive exercises, kids are expected to acquire a basic knowledge of Chinese language and written characters. Language, as the essential means of communication, plays a signicant role in forming an individual’s identity. Our personal identity, which is afrmed by our culture, cannot be dissociated from the cultural language that we have acquired since childhood. Our sense of who we are is rst expressed through language. It is therefore extremely important and challenging for immigrants to preserve their native language and culture, and to nd balance between their original/parents’ identities and their adopted identities. Many writers have addressed the issue of the severe language barrier that has existed between different generations of Asians in North America, which have caused serious identity crises and intergenerational conicts. Wayson Choy’s Jade Peony (1976) reveals these crises and conicts in a family among three generations as different acculturation outcomes. In this story, second generation Chinese Canadians, who are ready to t into Canadian society and give up their Chinese ways and language, are trapped like prisoners between two cultures. In Denise Chong’s Concubine’s Children, Winnie, the daughter of the concubine, having been assimilated into mainstream life and kept her children away from a Chinese language environment, is only able to communicate successfully with her daughter after their visit to China and having been nourished again in that cultural environment. Jade, the young actress in Mina Shum’s Double Happiness, has a sense of split identity, mainly due to her experiences of being torn between two worlds. She

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considers herself as a Canadian, but she does not t into the mainstream image. When she auditions for a Chinese part in a local lm she is turned down because she cannot read Chinese script. Often, many older generations of Chinese North Americans use term such as banana (yellow on the outside and white on the inside) or bamboo (empty inside) to refer to these Westernized Chinese youth who are no longer able to communicate in Chinese, and express their worries about the new generation who might become useless after losing the signicant part of their own culture. It is extremely difcult to keep one’s language facility in another overwhelming language environment even if it is one’s mother tongue, not to mention that many immigrants are under other social pressures, such as having to improve their English to assimilate into mainstream society. For these reasons, many parents and kids have to give up the effort of maintaining and learning Chinese after several years of struggle. It is therefore very important for Chinese in North America to have Sagwa available to help kids to learn the language through the Public Broadcast System. Amy Tan once talked in an interview about her Chinese language capability and her fascination with Chinese words: “I also grew up, thankfully, with a love of language. That may have happened because I was bilingual at an early age. I stopped speaking Chinese when I was ve, but I love words. Words to me were magic . . . It was amazing to me that words had this power.” (Academy, 1996) In the Sagwa project, Amy Tan and the team of creators have designed many interesting ways, including web-based interactive exercises, to demonstrate the art of Chinese calligraphy and the interesting combinations of the ideographic words, aiming at demystifying written Chinese characters and encouraging young children to learn their own language. For non-Chinese children, learning the basic ideas of the Chinese ideographic writing system and the beauty of calligraphy is an eye-opening experience. It suggests another way of thinking, encourages them to appreciate cultural differences, and gives them a good sense of global consciousness. “Before you go out into the world,” Ming Miao told her ve kittens, “you must know the true story of your ancestors . . .” so begins the story of Sagwa, and a series of themes closely related to family, history and ancestor worship, which are the essential avenues to understanding Confucian-orientated traditional Chinese society and human relationships. Amy Tan’s interest in traditional Chinese culture is actually deeply related to her early experience as a Chinese living in a Caucasian society.

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In an interview, Amy Tan talked about her childhood and adolescent identity crises growing up in America in the 1950s and 1960s. As a child at a time when “children all want to be the same, the same as whatever is popular,” (Detroit, 1995) she was different. She remembers putting a clothespin on her nose hoping to make it pert, to change its Asian shape. (Detroit, 1995) When she was 17, Tan says, she vowed “I’m not going to have anything to do with anything Chinese when I leave home; I am going to be completely American.” (Academy, 1996) Yet when she started to write, “it started off with family. It started off with knowing myself, with knowing the things I wanted as a constant in my life: trust, love, kindness, a sense of appreciation, gratitude . . . Those were the things that helped me decide what I was going to write.” Ironically, “that the very thing she felt so ambivalent about in growing up—her Chineseness, her relationship with her mother—have been at the center of her books and her success.” (Detroit, 1995) Amy Tan’s personal experience with Chinese tradition is partially reected in the stories of the daughters in her novel The Joy Luck Club, who are unable to understand their mothers due to cultural barriers. The daughters, however, nd new ways to be independent and assert themselves positively only after they have recognized the cultural spirit their mothers have tried to pass onto them. In one episode of Sagwa called “Royal Cats,” Dongwa at rst announces that he hates history. But after he has learned the roots of his family from his uncle and discovered some interesting relationships between himself and the ancestor statues in a cave, Dongwa takes back what he said. This episode reects exactly what Tan talked about regarding her own attitude towards history: “one of the subjects I hated the most was history. I thought it was completely a waste of time . . . Today, I love history. I nd it is absolutely relevant to everything that is going on . . . You see the undercurrents of change and culture and that is history . . . History really is a record of behaviors and intentions and actions and consequences.” (Academy, 1996) She also talked about her interest in philosophy. “I wish I had known it when I was younger, because I think I missed a lot of observations in life. That is to develop your own philosophy . . . It’s extremely important in how you perceive the world and your place in the world and what happens in the world . . . all of those things are so important in how you deal with the changes that happen in life—how you deal with your successes, your failures, with love, with loss.” (Academy, 1996) This explains why Tan has written so many fable-like tales in Sagwa to illustrate Zhuangzi and other philosophers’ ideas and to discuss the commonalities between

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the different approaches of Eastern and Western philosophy. It is all these understandings that have contributed to her motives to write for readers, especially for young children, who are at a critical age for forming their identities. Cultural nostalgia, which is commonly considered to be one of the noblest feelings of a human being, has permeated thoroughly Amy Tan’s writing and encouraged her to seek roots, to write about her culture, to give voices to the voiceless, to the desire to be recognized. “I often believe that what made me become a storyteller is my memory of childhood. This is why I am so thrilled that we are creating a television series for children . . . The series will echo the wonders of childhood, and spur imagination and self-discovery in a young audience.” (Cinegroupe, 2000) Wounded childhood memories have been transformed into beautiful wishes for the younger generation; she shares her understanding of the Chinese cultural spirit with them, tells stories to them just like a mother does for their children, and encourages them to have a sense of pride toward their own culture instead of the sense of inferiority that she once suffered. These kinds of wounded childhood memories and distorted identities do not just belong to a single or a few writers. They actually belong to a group, a generation or two, and are expressed remarkably in many of their writings: to mention a few, Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961), Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1975), Wayson Choy’s Jade Peony (1976), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), Mary Paik Lee’s Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America (1990), Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café (1992) and Denise Chong’s The Concubine’s Children (1994). They release a painful yet thoughtful voice from deep within the hearts of these Asian North Americans. This is where the desires come from—the desire to connect the tradition, to get rid of the dark shadows of inferiority, the desire to be recognized. “It is the desire for recognition, ‘for somewhere else and for something else’ that takes the experience of history beyond the instrumental hypothesis . . . it is the space of intervention emerging in the cultural interstices that introduces creative invention into existence,” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 9) writes Homi Bhabha in the introduction to his book The Location of Culture. Our sense of who we are, on the other hand, is largely based on internalization of reections and feedback from other people. If, in the early years of one’s life, the reections and feedback provide a healthy and well-integrated sense of self, then one will be in a better position to maintain a strong sense of self-condence and weather adversities

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later in life. Therefore, the external social structure and environment also play signicant roles in shaping one’s identity. However, for those Asians who make their home in North America, especially during the early years, the institutionalized racism, harsh government legislation and social pressures not only prevent them from achieving economic success, but also cause internalized inferiority feelings at being Asian, socially, historically and culturally. This has haunted and hurt many, especially young children. Some Asian North American writers have recorded such encounters in their books: for example, Mary Paik Lee talked in her Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America about how she was teased and hurt by other girls in kindergarten. (Lee, 1990, p. 17) Jade Snow Wong recorded in her Fifth Chinese Daughter how she was made fun of by other kids just because she was a Chinese: “Chinky, Chinky, no tickee, no washee, no shirtee.” (Wong, 1989, p. 68) The dreadful atmosphere at school made the young girl decide to “endure by not talking. The image of silence is equated with a sense of inferiority of being Chinese.” (Wong, 1989, p. 66) Even today, many Asian Canadian students in my classes at university have also talked about their experience of racism at an early age, when they were called names, teased by funny songs, but knowing that even their parents were powerless to prevent these from happening. The distorted images and stereotypes of Asians as ‘yellow perils’ have deep roots in Western societies and have caused self-identity confusion for several generations of Asian North Americans. Although these phenomena have been diminished to a great degree, the roots are hard to expel thoroughly. Therefore, to readdress the stereotypical image of Asians and to reduce the discrimination of Westerners towards Asians shares the same importance as enriching young Asian Americans through the Asian cultural spirit. Sagwa’s success has set an excellent example. Its popularity has actually helped to reduce misunderstanding of Western kids towards Chinese people and culture, and in general provided them with a very good basis for preparing to be cosmopolitan, good new members of the global village. One customer review of Sagwa on Amazon.com points out that the illustrations in the book contain images that are stereotypes in the worst way. The reviewer believes that “the portrayal of the Foolish Magistrate in his Manchurian costumes and menacing looks, coupled with the Reader and his long queue, harken back to the days of the ‘Yellow Peril’ hysteria which gripped the country in the early part of the

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20th century. These characters are right out of the 1930s ‘Fu Manchu’ era”.15 The reviewer’s worries actually reect the dark shadows of the harsh history of Asians in North America, and the deep internal psychological injury that many Chinese have suffered and are still suffering. However, one should be aware that readdressing the wronged images of Asians in Western societies does not mean being overly sensitive or becoming too frightened to touch wounded history. The human gures in Sagwa, although with distinctive costume and queue, are as normal as the villagers and ofcers in other children’s tales from all over the world. They may be foolish, laughable, kindhearted or evil, but they are typical people. To normalize the image of Chinese people, regardless of which historical period, is a strategy that Amy Tan has used to correct wronged images, to counteract Orientalism. The content of the signiers are re-signied, which is not necessarily related to the distorted images from a certain historical period. By the way, the protagonists in this series are Sagwa, Sheegwa and Dongwa, the spiritual and adventurous Chinese cat, not the foolish magistrate. Amy Tan’s policies in redressing stereotypical images of Chinese in the Western mind are therefore quite strategic. “Rough propagandistic pressure in the end works real violence and is a principle of alienation for the members of the group.” (Gallo, 2004) This emphasizes the importance of achieving true communication between peoples from different cultures, which Amy Tan recognizes and has applied in her writing practices. Another noteworthy cultural strategy that Tan uses successfully in the Sagwa series is the power of naming. A name is a sign, representing subjectivity, but it is not just a single sign. Successful naming has power, not only to establish an important representation compactly and saliently, stimulating our imagination and impressing our memory, but also in occupying a space and creating a voice. Sagwa, in Chinese pronunciation, literally means ‘silly melon head,’ but she is not silly at all. As the Chinese idiom states, “the greatest wisdom often appears dim-witted or silly,”16 and so is Sagwa. Although

15

Ron Lee, Reviewer from Palo Alto, California, “Shades of Yellow”. http://www. amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0689846177/ref=cm_rev_all_1/103–9463335–2 548661?v=glance&s=books&n=507846&vi=customer-reviews (accessed on 12 February, 2004). 16 In Chinese, “大智若愚”.

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she gets into all sorts of trouble by accident, she never stops searching for her own position in this world. Through all these adventures and mistakes she discovers that there is more than one way to view the world. She is also never afraid of letting her own voice be heard, no matter how small she is and how difcult it could be. Sagwa represents a distinguished new way of thinking, and so do Dongwa and Sheegwa. Dongwa, winter melon, homophonically in Chinese can be also understood as eastern melon, and Sheegwa, water melon, as western melon. Dongwa’s way of doing and thinking is quite antagonistic, different from Sheegwa’s, which is very Daoistic, enjoying what she has and practicing non-ado. East and West, with the Silly Melon Head in the middle—the names of three kittens in one family could imply different ways of thinking about the world. Successful naming is connected to seeds and roots, and can also generate seeds and roots. Sagwa is now one of the most famous gures in the world of Children’s literature and is admired by children in many countries. She is listed together with the Ugly Duckling, the Little Mermaid, Alice in Wonderland and Snow White, among the most loved gures of children. She also stars alongside Clifford, the big red dog, Angela, the dancing mouse, the Berenstain Bears, the curious adventurers, Peter, the smart rabbit, the Teletubbies and gures from Japanese anime such as Robotech or Ultraman. Sagwa, with her brilliant appearance, interesting characteristics, untiring adventures, and her fantastic, magical brush-like tail, occupies a remarkable place in the world of Children’s literature. Creative Dialogue in the ‘In-between’ Cultural Space—the Values and Signicance of Sagwa in the Context of Globalization The success of Sagwa is especially signicant in the context of globalization. “Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, the Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.” (Yang et al., 1997) What Rudyard Kipling said in “The Ballad of East and West” (1889) is proven to be even more wrong as Sagwa adds a new dimension to the meeting of East and West. In Eastern Standard Time (1997), a book that is almost a mini encyclopedia on almost every aspect (from philosophy to daily life) of Asian inuence on contemporary American culture, the editor Jeff Yang writes that East and West “have not only met—they’ve mingled, mated, and produced myriad offspring,

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inhabitants of one world, without borders or boundaries, but with plenty of style, hype, and attitude.” (Yang et al., 1997, p. 1) This shows that Asian cultures have not only been incorporated into the ‘mainstream’ of North American life, but are also essential constituents of it. Before Sagwa, there was another interesting animated movie that gave American youth a feel for Chinese culture: Mulan, produced by Disney Studios in June 1998, directed by Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook. The lm is a cross-cultural retelling of a Chinese legend about a girl who disguises herself as a man and takes her old father’s place in the emperor’s army. She comes back both as an accomplished soldier and a dutiful daughter. “Tsiek tsiek and again tsiek tsiek, Mu-lan weaves, facing the door. You don’t hear the shuttle’s sound, you only hear Daughter’s sighs.”17 The original poem is from the Northern Wei period of ancient China, about 1,500 years ago. However, it inspired the Disney team to create a breathtaking animation movie that is one of the most remarkable Disney classics, full of action, laughs, sensational music and emotion, and also, of course, with an exotic setting. Over the centuries, Mulan has been retold and altered in China to suit different times, and it was also once retold in America, by Maxine Hong Kingston in her book Woman Warrior (1975). The legend is rearticulated by Kingston in a quite Western feminist way, in that it lays emphasis on a woman not needing to t into tradition-bound society, and a prince needing be saved by a princess. To put the consideration of the American audiences rst, Disney’s animated version also changes a lot of content; spiritually it is close to Kingston’s retelling. The movie is also “a mix of many different ingredients palatable to the tastes of America,” (Seno, 2001) such as adding a dragon and a cricket to meet the commonly exotic images in America about Chinese culture. By comparing the different ways of representing Chinese culture in North America in Mulan and Sagwa, we can recognize that they belong to two different types of hybridities. Mulan is a good example of the Americanization of Chinese culture, which aims at assimilating Chinese culture into American culture and not necessarily correctly portraying Chinese cultural images and customs; misreading happens in the process of assimilation. In contrast, Sagwa seeks to localize Chinese culture in America, which aims at letting

17 In Chinese, “唧唧復唧唧, 木蘭當戶織。不聞機杼聲, 唯聞女嘆息,” rst two lines from “Ode of Mulan,” Yue-Fu, by an anonymous author (c. 5 A.D.). http://www. chinapage.com/mulan.html (accessed on 10 February 2004).

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others recognize and embrace their culture by achieving a reciprocal understanding between different cultures. Localization, or domestication, in contrast to assimilation or Americanization, has particular signicance for minority cultures. “The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation.” (Bhabha, 2004, p. 2) Sagwa’s localization of Chinese culture in North America represents exactly this effort. To establish roots in a new place is a way of pioneering, to nd the ‘location of culture’ in the marginal, ‘haunting,’ ‘unhomely’ space between dominant social formations. (Gewertz, 2002) Sagwa therefore retains her enlightening values for cross-cultural adaptation. Globalization and internationalization have created a greater degree of intercultural contact than ever before. Writing in a space of hybridities, seeking a location of culture in a world “where time and place are increasingly compressed,”18 writers today are facing unprecedented challenges of cosmopolitanism. Homi Bhabha once talked about his interest in the writers and artists who have this kind of global consciousness: “one of the greatest things that modern literature does is to show how the human imagination ranges across countries and cultures to extend its inspiration and imagination, so that, while we tend to study history or literature in national frames, writers and artists tend to consider themselves imaginatively to be citizens of the world. So I am very interested in that aspect of literary culture and the cosmopolitan imagination—what would a global culture be?” (Gewertz, 2002) This echoes Amy Tan’s effort in searching for universal themes in her writings. Tan usually refers to herself as an American writer in general and not necessarily as ‘Chinese’ in nature, as she believes in the universal themes of her writings, which make people from different cultures and age groups accessible to each other. When she was asked how to dene ‘American’ and ‘American culture,’ she answered: Well, I think it’s an interesting question, especially now that the demographics are changing and people are wanting to close borders. What

18 “Rationale,” International Conference on “East West Identities: Globalisation, Localisation and Hybridisation,” Hong Kong Baptist University, 2004. http://www.hkbu.edu. hk/~lewi/conf1.html (accessed on 20 February, 2004).

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do we mean by American culture? And I think we’re lacking a good consensus on what we mean by that, what keeps us together, what makes us proud. I would say it’s that right or that ability that—I would like to claim—allows us to create the life that we wish, that we can become who we want to be. We have the right to shape our identity, which is not true of a lot of other countries. And within that right there’s freedom of expression, freedom of the pursuit of happiness. Not that the opportunities are always available to do that—as when we look at people who are stuck in lives full of despair—but that potential exists and that’s what I think is America. (Mosaic, 1994)

This poignant, suggestive and positive answer afrms Amy Tan’s strong belief in cosmopolitanism and her strategic effort in the “on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation.” (Bhaba, 1994, p. 2) Scholars around the world have been discussing the possible futures of cosmopolitanism, or ways of thinking, representation, etc., beyond one’s particular society. Questions such as what are the possible universal themes and where more paths to access reciprocal understanding between cultures can be found, are frequently posed. Sagwa’s success has suggested some excellent models, thematically, structurally and methodologically. Amy Tan is famous for her adult novels; few know that she is also an excellent writer for children. Her attention to the eld of children’s literature has suggested that we turn our gaze to more common themes in our daily life. The openly structured Sagwa also encourages us to apply dynamic equivalence when we are thinking across different cultures. Taking Children’s literature as example, you could question in Sagwa’s way and link many interesting ideas between East and West: is there any similarity between a ying Arabic carpet in One Thousand One Nights and the magical cape that American Superman wears? Are they not both representative of the same human dream to y? Sagwa’s best friend Fu Fu, the bespectacled bat, is he a modern version of Alice in Wonderland? How different is the ancient Chinese Monkey King from the modern Spiderman? Why are the Brothers Ultraman in Japan spiritually so close to the Brothers of Gourds in China? The evils they are ghting are also almost the same, just with different appearances—as foxes or snakes in China, and as machine-like demons in Japan. There are so many possible universal themes because human nature has so much in common around the world.

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If it is true that Jehovah confused the human language and scattered its parts from the Tower of Babel over all the surface of the earth,19 then he must be wondering at the many ways that people have discovered to achieve better communication. Myth is a language for all; music is too, and there are many others. Sagwa has constructed a creative dialogue in the ‘in-between’ space of East and West, and suggested that there are endless possibilities in this new space. Just to add one example more, in January 2004 an interesting program called Creative Exchanges: Sights and Sounds of the Silk Road, was held at the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts. The program was directed by the world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma and aimed “to create greater awareness of both the diverse peoples and the interactions of rich cultural traditions in the lands along the historic Silk Road.” (Silk, 2004) Artists from disparate cultures from both the musical and visual sphere joined together. When the strangers met, when the artistic collaboration started, a magical transformation took place; new meanings were generated and shared by different cultural groups. “The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with ‘newness’ that is part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation.” (Bhaba, 1994, p. 6) This signicant practice of cross-cultural exchange, like the creation of Sagwa, evidences again the incredible creative vigor that exists in this ‘in-between’ cultural space. The ‘Silk Road’ image symbolizes numerous bridges and passages that cross different cultures, illustrating what Martin Heidegger said in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” “a boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.” (Heidegger, 1971) REFERENCES Academy of Achievement 1996. “A Uniquely Personal Storyteller.” Interview: Amy Tan. http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/tan0int (accessed 10 January 2004). Adams, Hazard and Searle, Leroy (eds) 1986. Critical Theory Since 1965. Tallahassee: University Press of Florida. Cinegroupe 2000. “Amy Tan’s Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese Cat, Produced by Cinegroupe in Association With Children’s Television Workshop and IF/X Productions, is

19 Genesis 11:1–11:9, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, trans. New World Bible Translation Committee, revised 1984, p. 18.

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Coming Daily to PBS KIDS,” News Room, 9 January. http://www.cinegroupe.com/ english/news/pdf_communique/sagwaeng.pdf (accessed 12 February 2004). Cinegroupe 2004. “Awards.” Filmography & Awards. http://www.cinegroupe.com/english/lmo/awards (accessed 20 February 2004). Bhabha, Homi 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Chow, Wayson 1995. Jade Peony. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre. Chong, Denise 1994. The Concubine’s Children. Toronto: Viking. Chu, Louis 1961. Eat a Bowl of Tea. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Detroit News 1995. “The Joy Luck Lady,” Detroit News. http://detnews.com/menu/ stories/22098.htm (accessed 20 August 2001). Gallo, Antonio 2004. “Hermeneutics as a Path to Inculturation,” Hermeneutics and Inculturation, edited by F. George et al. http://www.crvp.org/book/Series07/VII-7/ chapter%20ii.htm (accessed 20 February 2004). Gewertz, Ken 2002. “Telling Tales out of, and in, Class: Bhabha Studies Culture and Genre with a Moral Squint.” Harvard Gazette Archives. http://www.news.harvard. edu/gazette/2002/01.31/03–bhabha.html (accessed 05 February 2003). Holland, Norman 1968. The Dynamics of Literary Response. Cambridge: Oxford University Press. ———. 1998. “Reading and Identity.” http://www.clas.u.edu/users/nnh/rdgident. htm (accessed 20 February 2004). Holden, Philip 2003. “Hans Robert Jauss and Literary Horizons of Expectations.” University Scholars Programme. National University of Singapore. April. http:// www.thecore.nus.edu/literature/Jauss.html (accessed 15 February 2004). Mosaic 1994. “An Interview with Amy Tan,” MOSAIC. http://dolphin.upenn.edu/ ~mosaic/fall94/page15.html (accessed 21 August 2001). Jauss, Hans Robert 1982. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kingston, Maxine Hong 1977. The Woman Warrior. New York: Knopf. Kogawa, Joy 1994. Obasan. New York: Anchor Books. Lee, Mary Paik 1990. Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Levi-Strauss, Claude 1983. The Raw and the Cooked. Chicago: University of Chicago. ———. “The Structural Study of Myth,” pp. 809–822, in Critical Theory Since 1965, edited by Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 1986. Moor, Sean 2002. “Sagwa: Sagwa’s Storybook World,” DVDtoons, 23 November. http:// www.dvdtoons.com/reviews/118/print (accessed 20 February 2004). New World Bible Translation Committee 1961. New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures. translated by New World Bible Translation Committee. New York: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York. PBS 2000. PBS News, January 19. http://www.pbs.org/aboutpbs/news/20000119_ sagwa.html (accessed 12 February 2004) PBS Kids 2004. “About the Show,” Caregivers Area. Sagwa. PBS Kids. http://pbskids. org/sagwa/caregivers (accessed 10 February 2004). Seno, Alexandra 2001. “Woman Warrior: An unconventional Chinese heroine who stays true to Disney tradition,” Asiaweek Magazine. http://www.pathnder.com/ asiaweek/98/0605/feat7.html. (accessed on 5 February 2004). Shum, Mina 1994. Double Happiness. Canada: Steve Hegyes and Rose Lam Waddell. Silk Road Project 2004. “Creative Exchanges: Sights and Sounds of the Silk Road,” 20–31 January. http://www.silkroadproject.org (accessed 25January 2004). Swedish Institute 2004. “Sweden Children’s Literature.” http://www.sweden.se/templates/FactSheet_3279.asp (accessed 15 February 2004). Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Ivy Books, 1989.

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———. Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat, produced by CineGroupe in association with the Children’s Television Workshop and distributed in US, Canada, and afliates with satellite service worldwide. September 2001. ———. 1994. The Chinese Siamese Cat, illustrated by Gretchen Schields. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1994. TV Tome 2004. “Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat-Episode Guide.” Season 1. http://www.tvtome.com/SagwatheChineseSiameseCat/season1.html (accessed 20 February 2004). Wong, David. 2001. Creators Making the Show, Sagwa, PBSkids. http://pbskids.org/sagwa/ bts/creator/textres/index6.html (accessed 20 January 2004). Wong, Jade Snow 1989. Fifth Chinese Daughter. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Yang, Jeff et al. (eds) 1997. Eastern Standard Time: a Guide to Asian Inuence on American Culture, from Astroboy to Zen Buddhism. Boston: Houghton Mifin. Zhuang Zi 1964. Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings, translated by Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press.

Chapter 5

Identity Shifts as a Consequence of Crossing Cultures: Hong Kong Chinese Migrants Return Home* Nan M. Sussman In this chapter, I explore a psychological conceptualization of the dynamic nature of cultural identity and the behavioral consequences of East-West transitions. Amidst the existing complexity and emergence of a Hong Kong identity is added the newest geographic movement from Hong Kong to North America, Australia and England in the 1980s and early 1990s, and the remigration to Hong Kong in the rst decade of the 21st century. The case of Hong Kongers’ changing cultural identities and the behavioral manifestation of those identities is viewed through the lens of a model of cultural transitions and identity response proles proposed by Sussman (2000), and will be contrasted to both US/European and Japanese repatriation experiences. Three central premises of this chapter upon which theoretical and empirical data are presented are the exible and dynamic nature of cultural identities which enables transformation and hybridization, the evaluative variability of affective, cognitive and behavioral outcomes, and the ability of individuals to maintain and negotiate multiple cultural frames activated by situational cues. In turn, these cues access differential sets of behavior and cognition that reect the cultural frame. Denitions of terms will clarify this discussion. In the cultural transition literature, distinctions are frequently made between sojourners and migrants, the former being expatriated citizens of one country

* I am grateful to the William J. Fulbright Program of the US Department of State for granting me a Fulbright Research Award to travel to Hong Kong for data collection and to Kwok Leung and the Department of Management at the City University of Hong Kong for their warm welcome. Also, many thanks go to Loraine Pun and Yat Yee Lee, who served as research assistants and kept the project on track. The College of Staten Island, City University of New York provided sabbatical leave and subsequently granted me a Presidential Research Award which provided the opportunity to analyze the data and write this manuscript. For this, I am appreciative.

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temporarily taking residence in another for a specic task or assignment (education, business, diplomacy or conversion) with the intention of returning home. Immigrants have been described as taking permanent residence in a new country with amorphous political, economic and social motivations and goals. Hong Kong cultural transitors blur these distinctions, as we will see later in this chapter. Those intending to return do not, those choosing permanent change return, and the intentions of many are unclear to themselves and others. Through the discussion of linked themes, I propose to explore the identity change process that Hong Kong Chinese are undergoing and the consequential negotiation of multiple identities. First, a discussion of the place of identity research within the psychological perspective will be summarized. While it is not within the scope of this chapter to present an exhaustive review of the literature, I will present several critical elements of identity conceptualizations. The case will then be made that collective identity and more particularly, cultural identity, are subsets of the multiplicity of possible identities. Second, I provide an abbreviated review of research documenting the identity of the Chinese population of Hong Kong and the emergence of the ‘Hong Konger’ identity. Third, I use the cultural identity model of cultural transitions (Sussman, 2000) to describe the cultural transitions of outgoing Hong Kong migration and re-migration during the last two decades. Fourth, I review empirical ndings that examine the cultural identity proles and outcomes of US and Japanese repatriates. Finally, drawing on the results of a recent study, I discuss variations in the Hong Konger cultural identity response to remigration. Psychological Perspective on Identity At its core, psychology has always explored issues of the self and identity. While other social sciences have shared this interest, resulting in conceptualizations of political, linguistic, class and geographic identity theories, the essential element of psychological thought has been the individual, and so it is with identity. Personal identity, or those characteristics which are unique to an individual and set them apart from others, and relational identity, or those features in which the self and familiar others interact, were the major focus of attention. Social psychological writings, however, broadened the concept by examining group membership in which members do not necessarily interact or

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even know each other. These concepts were developed by social identity theory (Tajfel, 1978, pp. 61–76) and self-categorization theory (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher and Wetherell, 1987), in which the emphasis was on self-categorization and the outcomes of ingroup-outgroup bias and group cohesiveness respectively. Several writers have recently suggested replacing the term ‘social identity’ with ‘collective identity’ as less ambiguous and more meaningful. Ashmore, Deaux and McLaughlin-Volpe (2004), in a much-needed integrative article, dene collective identity as a multidimensional concept that serves as a statement about categorical membership which must be personally recognized by the individual (a “subjective claim”, Deaux, 1996). Individuals possess a multiplicity of collective identities including gender and familial position (ascribed characteristics) and occupation or avocation (achieved characteristics). Cultural identity can be construed as one element or subset of collective identity, although this not well explored in the psychological literature. This identity element can be dened as that identity which, through geography, ancestry or perceived similarity, links an individual to a membership group that encompasses affective ties, cognitive frameworks and behavioral actions. Cultural identity may be overlapping with national (or passport) identity, but it is not a requirement and often in heterogeneous national settings it is distinct. Extrapolating from the collective identity framework developed by Ashmore, Deaux and McLaughlin-Volpe (2004), cultural identity has several fundamentals. These include an evaluation of the cultural identity, sense of belonging, behavioral involvement and ideology (or a narrative about the cultural group and the individual’s link to it). However, I suggest that distinct from other collective identities, cultural identity may occasionally be reected more in cognitive frames and behavior than in self-categorization; that is, individuals may not be required to make the self-categorization statement that is considered necessary for collective identities in general. Baumeister (1986) points out that not all beliefs about oneself are simultaneously part of our self-awareness. The lack of cultural identity awareness may be explained conceptually through the phenomenal self or the working self-concept (Markus and Kunda, 1986), which refers to a part of self-knowledge that is present or not present in our awareness at a particular time. Finally, note that the individual experience of cultural identity, as with other individual level elements of collective identity, develops over time and may have considerable variability. This is particularly true of the

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individual experience of Hong Kong identity, in which developmental changes (individuals progressing, for example, from adolescence to adulthood) intersect with historical changes (e.g. the 1949 Communist revolution, the 1997 handover and the 2003 SARS epidemic). Due to both geographic mobility and increasing cultural heterogeneity within national borders, individuals can possess several cultural identities, often referred to in the psychological literature as ‘frames’ (e.g., an Italian-American, a Japanese living in Peru, a Dutch citizen as a permanent resident in Thailand). These multiple cultural identities or frames interact in a variety of ways, and several competing theories have been developed to account for individual responses to multiple cultural identities—identity maintenance, identity conict, integration, biculturalism, hybridization and situationalism. Berry’s (1986, pp. 37–51) acculturation theory proposes four identity responses to multiple cultural identities—assimilation, integration, marginalization and separation—with variable acculturative stress levels associated with each response. Berry’s model was devised to explain identity issues facing indigenous individuals who are confronted with an imposed dominant or ruling culture, although later it was applied to sojourner adaptation as well. Other writers have focused their attention on the movement of individuals (sojourners or immigrants) from one culture to another and the competence associated with biculturalism. LaFromboise, Coleman and Gerton (1993) review this literature, which tends to stress the positive outcomes of an integrated or bicultural identity, although Rudmin (2003) disputes this claim. Hermans and Kempen (1998) suggest that the increasing cultural connections experienced by the world population will result in the phenomenon of cultural hybridization, and they speculate that this will lead to new forms of cultural identities. Oyserman (1993) similarly examine the layering of two cultures into a hybrid or bicultural identity while further exploring the situational prime in which one set of cultural identities become activated. Others have explored in greater detail the situationalism and cultural frame switching of biculturals (Benet-Martinez, Leu, Lee and Morris, 2002; Hong, Ip, Chiu, Morris and Menon, 2001). Baumeister and his colleagues (Baumeister, Shapiro and Tice, 1985; Baumeister, 1986) propose a theory of identity conict in which individuals have irreconcilable components of their identities. Further, individuals may have positive affective responses to both identities yet incompatible behavioral repertoires. In a test of this model, Leong

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and Ward (2000) nd that among Chinese sojourners in Singapore, increased contact with the host nationals positively predicts cultural identity conict. With Hong Kong in the early 21st century as a case study, what is the genesis of multiple cultural identities among a population of nearly 7 million inhabitants, and how are they negotiated in the public and private arenas? Hong Kong Identity The complexity of Hong Kong Chinese identity began in 1841 when the British claimed the island of Hong Kong at the terminus of the rst Opium War with China. While the battles ceased, the identity turmoil continues today. The ontogeny of the identity of Hong Kong Chinese has several discrete time periods. Before 1841, four distinct indigenous communities of farmers and shermen existed in Hong Kong, governed loosely by a fth landowning group, the Cantonese (Morris, 1989). When Hong Kong Island and later Kowloon (1860) and the New Territories (1898) came under British rule, the foreign population grew. However, then as now, the population of Hong Kong remains 98% Chinese in origin and language. The island grew slowly in population during the next 100 years and only experienced a dramatic growth beginning in 1949 on the heels of the Chinese Communist Revolution. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese, many from southern China, poured into Hong Kong and became the workforce that transformed Hong Kong from an entrepôt of Chinese and foreign goods to an independent manufacturing, production and nancial center. The Chinese population doubled in the following 30 years. The indigenous and immigrating residents brought with them to Hong Kong core Chinese values: the self dened by one’s duties and obligations toward family (Chiu and Hong, 1997; Nisbett, 2003), avoidance of non-familial group associations (Lau, 1981, pp. 195–216), social structures that are immutable and individuals who are malleable (Chiu and Hong, 1999), a preference for harmonious social relations and avoidance of conict (King and Bond, 1985, pp. 29–45), self-effacement (Yik, Bond and Paulhus, 1998), and attention to the situational context (‘high-context’, Hall, 1976) as well as traditional Chinese cognitive structures: an attributional style in which the behavior of a group member

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is attributed to the group rather than to the individual (Chiu, Morris, Hong and Menon, 2000), continuity and wholeness, and a philosophical belief in dialectical arguments (Peng and Nisbett, 1999). Layered over the core Chinese identity were introduced values, social and behavioral structures, communication styles and cognitive preferences common to British and northern European culture. These Western values included conceptions of the person as independent and the belief in inalienable individual rights (Shweder and Miller, 1985), distinctive attributes of each person, orientation toward individual success and achievement, motivation to increase self-esteem (Triandis, 1995), equality in social relationships or if unequal, preference for the superior position (Nisbett, 2003) and cognitive preferences toward categorization and logic. Not all values were in conict; both the Chinese and British had long histories of successful and creative entrepreneurship with elaborate trade relationships beyond their borders. While the British were in a numerical minority, as colonial rulers the institutions and public laws, rites and rituals that they established reected their Western cultural preferences. The Chinese population, during the nearly 150 years between 1841 to 1984, at which point the Sino-British treaty was signed stipulating that Hong Kong would revert to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, was exposed to a dual system of Chinese and Western cultural elements (Bond and King, 1985, pp. 29–45). Chinese values and behavior were primarily operational in the home among family and friends, and Western values and behavior were operational in the public realm. Many residents saw themselves as “sampling the best from both cultural traditions, the Chinese providing the spiritual grounding, the Western, the technical prowess” (Bond and Hewstone, 1988, p. 134). Identity was often described in oppositional terms as ‘we’ (Chinese) versus ‘they’ (British) but behaviorally, a hybridization was emerging. Siu (1999, pp. 100–118) suggests that the Chinese of Hong Kong have avoided rigidly dened identities, are comfortable with their multicultural qualities and have learned how to “be exible in themselves” (p. 111). Western values and behavior became more salient and infused within Hong Kong identity for the middle and upper classes who choose to have their children educated in the West. In the latter half of the 20th century, thousands of Hong Kong Chinese children attended high schools and universities in the UK, Australia and to a lesser extent

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Canada and the US. This sojourner experience deepened and broadened the Western cultural layer surrounding the individual. Exposure to Western culture was also pervasive for Hong Kong residents who did not leave Hong Kong but found themselves as part of the local workforce for the British-style civil service and international companies in Hong Kong. They spent their working days communicating within the Western corporate style with Western managers and to a lesser extent co-workers. By 1984, the specter of a 1997 handover of political control from Britain to China was becoming a reality. While Hong Kong and the world discussed the political and economic consequences, a more personal cultural identity crisis was brewing. Not prepared to abandon their sophisticated, urbane behavior and cultural identity for the drab and autocratic Chinese-ness of mainland China, a new Hong Konger identity began to emerge, now in opposition to the Chinese rather than the British. Utilizing her optimal distinctiveness theory, Brewer (1999) posits that Hong Kong Chinese needed to fulll the twin motivations of being connected to the Chinese (through ethnicity and origin) and being distinctive. The Hong Konger identity appeared to be three nested identities: a core Chinese identity surrounded by Western economic and civic values encased in a regional identity. Empirically, Bond and Hewstone (1988) show that Hong Kong Chinese identied more with and had similar characteristics to both British and mainland Chinese than did the British with either mainland or Hong Kong Chinese. Others identify this same duality. Siu (1999, pp. 100–118) reports that designers of the Hong Kong room in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing debated whether English and Ming furniture should be juxtaposed. Wong (1999) suggests that Hong Kong identities were rooted in family experience within China and Hong Kong, and that individual preferences for cultural identity reected that family history. In 1991, 45.9% of the population dened themselves as Chinese while 48.4% choose the Hong Konger label. Wong dened the emerging Hong Konger identity as characterized by being mobile, pluralistic, exible, situational and pragmatic. However, as the 1997 handover approached, the motivation for distinctiveness between the Hong Kong and mainland Chinese identity became more salient and polarized. The Hong Kong Transition Project, which collected self-categorization data between 1995 and 1997,

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found that in the rst six months of 1996, the percentage of Hong Kong residents who identied as Hong Kongers increased from 35% to 45%, while those who identied as Hong Kong Chinese decreased from 32% to 20%. Simultaneously, there was an increase in those claiming Chinese identity from 22% to 30%. Cultural Transitions Hong Kongers on the Move The handover of sovereignty from the UK to China, from a frenetic capitalistic environment that was ruled by a democratic Western country to a communist country characterized by limitations on individual rights of speech and private property, created fear, anxiety and uncertainty about what the future might bring. Hamilton (1999) encapsulates these feelings when he states that the entrepreneurs and professional classes needed to “assess whether the risks of being grounded in China . . . outweigh[ed] the opportunities that might ensue from becoming China’s broker to the world” (p. 8). The decision-making process appeared to be family-focused, and behavioral intentions were inuenced by identity descriptors: among those identifying themselves as Chinese, 60% were committed to staying in Hong Kong, while among those claiming a Hong Kong identity, 45% said they would denitely stay after the handover. Thousands of Hong Kong residents decided that the risks of staying were too great, and migration soared from 22,400 in 1980 to a high of 66,000 in 1992, leveling off to about 40,000 in 1994 (Wong, 1999). The majority of immigrants obtained visas for the UK, Australia, Canada and the US. Distinct from the 19th century migration of skilled and working class people who built the railroads and established the Chinatowns of the US and Canada, this migration was primarily of educated, middle and upper class people; three generations of a family rather than a husband leaving alone. When the handover occurred on July 1, 1997 the people of Hong Kong held their collective breath. But as no calamitous changes occurred in the next few months, the population cautiously exhaled. So did the Hong Kong immigrants who were now adapting to life in Vancouver, Los Angeles, Sydney and London. For many, their fears about the sovereignty of China were not realized and neither were their optimistic expectations of life as immigrants. Professionals found

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themselves under- or unemployed, subtle discriminatory practices were uncovered, and English language skills were insufcient. What began as a trickle of husbands returning to Hong Kong to work, turned into a steady ow of returnees. One study suggests that 30% of those who left in the 1980s returned to Hong Kong (Kee and Skeldon, 1994). While return immigration has occurred in small numbers in other geographic settings, sociologically, this was not, at rst, a typical remigration. Instead of the entire family returning to Hong Kong, wives and families frequently remained behind in the country of immigration while husbands pursued their livelihoods and entrepreneurial dreams in Hong Kong. For example, more than 160,000 Canadian passport holders presently reside and work in Hong Kong, many of whom are ‘single’ husbands. Dubbed ‘astronauts’, such men originally ew back and forth between Hong Kong and their new countries of citizenship, leading bi-national lives while their ‘satellite’ families struggled to adjust to new cultures and new identities. By the late 1990s and the rst decade of the 2000s, however, the lone husband returnee was expanding to include intact families, returning to live, work and be schooled in Hong Kong. Psychologically, what is the nature of the cultural identity of the returnee, whether husband or entire family? Another layer of identity has been added to the core Chinese, British/Western, Hong Konger identity in relation to the British, Hong Konger identity in relation to China. The identity of repatriate has been added. Who are these individuals and what is the conguration of their identity? Do they feel at home again in Hong Kong, or has their identity transformation led to a new global transnational identity? While initially devised to conceptualize the repatriation of the sojourner, the cultural identity model (CIM) of cultural transitions may provide a framework with which to understand the repatriated immigrant identity (Sussman, 2000). Model of Repatriation and Cultural Identity This model suggests that self-concept disturbances and subsequent shifts in cultural identity characterize cultural transitions, and argues for three fundamental elements: identity salience, sociocultural adaptation and self-concept/cultural identity changes. These features interact within a larger cyclical framework of cultural transition to predict consequences for the transition process made evident during repatriation.

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Identity Salience. While self-construal, emotion and motivation may be shaped by the cultural context, few individuals are cognizant of culture’s inuence. Culture may be part of the self but cultural identity is not explicitly recognized. Like a sh in water, culture surrounds an individual but its impact is seldom a salient feature of an individual’s selfconcept; individuals rarely recognize the imprint of their own culture and its ubiquitous nature. In my social psychology classroom in New York, few students, in describing themselves, ever list ‘American’ among their top twenty attributes. There are exceptions to the general lack of cultural identity awareness, such as when an individual holds more than one identity, either distinctly separate or embedded. The multiplicity of identities for the Chinese residents of Hong Kong makes for a heightened salience of cultural identity generally and embedded or overlapping identities specically. The CIM predicts that one situation in which one’s cultural identity will emerge or become heightened is during the commencement of a cultural transition. Enveloped in a new social environment where behavior and thinking diverge from one’s familiar cultural context, awareness of the profound inuence of culture on behavior begins to grow. In close juxtaposition to the emerging cultural identity salience, a new social identity status emerges, that of outgroup member, an expatriate or immigrant in a new cultural environment. These twin cognitions—of cultural identity salience and outgroup membership—appear to strengthen, at least initially, identication with the home culture. For the Hong Kong transitor, Chinese identity may be activated as a result of both heightened identity salience and the motivation to be distinct. Sociocultural Adaptation. Following the cultural re-afrmation phase, the model posits that immigrants recognize the discrepancy between their cultural selves (and the goals that direct behavior and thought) and the new cultural context. Higgins (1996) suggests that self-knowledge is pursued for practical reasons, in part for the adaptive benets of improving the person-environment t. This is precisely the context in which cultural newcomers nd themselves. Cultural readjustments, prompted by the lack of t between one set of cultural cognitions and behavior no longer appropriate within the new cultural context, may lead individuals to modify behavior, cognitions, or both, and conse-

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quently cultural identity. For the Hong Kong resident, this phase may activate the latent Western identity. Immigrants are faced with a continuum of accommodation choices that range from maintenance of the cultural self and its behavioral repertoire at one anchor to transposition to a new cultural self and a new behavioral and cognitive repertoire at the other, the latter colloquially described as ‘going native’. They might also nd the new culture too difcult to understand, suffering from what Shweder (1991) refers to as ‘confusion-ism’, an immigrant’s honest assessment that cultures can be so diverse that it is impossible to comprehend the framework of another culture. Distinct from adjustment, however, adaptation is conceptualized as the successful endpoint of the accommodation process. Newcomers have adapted to their new culture if they utilize to some extent the behavioral repertoire, beliefs and attributional conventions of the host culture to smoothly engage in social relationships, and understand and utilize the cultural rules of social and professional life to appropriately lead, motivate, negotiate, decide and plan. Repatriation. The classic migrant story ends with gradual accommodations and adaptations to the new culture. The nature of the sojourner experience is to return home, but this is not true of the migrant. Similar to the emergence or salience of home culture identity at the commencement of the sojourn, the model suggests that as a result of cultural accommodation and adaptation, the self-concept is disturbed and consequent changes in cultural identity become salient upon the commencement of repatriation. In a process that is parallel to culture identity awareness when sojourning, though now against the backdrop of the home culture, repatriates evaluate their personally held values, cognitive maps and behavioral repertoires against the prevailing cultural norms at home. For many repatriates, there is no longer a t between their newly-formed host culture identity and that of the culture of origin. For most repatriates, the affective response is overwhelmingly negative, with repatriates reporting feelings of ‘not tting in’ with former colleagues, friends and family. Behaviorally, actions that were functional in the host country are blocked or opposed. Home culture identity no longer matches and the sojourner is now a member of a new outgroup within the home country, that of the repatriate.

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The Relationship between Self-Concept Disturbances and Cultural Identity Change As sojourners and immigrants successfully adapt to the new culture by modifying behavior and social thought, cultural identity changes. Newly learned cultural scripts that enabled the newcomer to t into the host environment are not appropriate in the home culture. Those trivial and profound aspects that in combination create home culture identity are no longer actively engaged at the point at which one has adapted to a new culture. Behaving Australian while in Melbourne is adaptive, but what about in Kowloon? It is upon repatriation that the cultural identity shift emerges and becomes salient. Upon repatriation, sojourners experience the most severe level of stress at any time during the cultural transition. Repatriation may be more jarring for the immigrant who did not anticipate returning home. The CIM suggests that four distinct types of identity shift might occur, the shift latent until repatriation makes it salient to the repatriate. These cultural identity shifts are labeled as subtractive, additive, afrmative, or global/intercultural.

Figure 1: Substractive and Additive Identity Shifts

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Subtractive and additive identity shifts (see Figure 1) commence the transition cycle identically with an obscured cultural identity (shaded in the rst box of the gure), which becomes salient as the transition to the new culture begins (indicated as an unshaded box). Home-culture and new culture discrepancies are recognized, and the adjustment process is triggered. The two identity types diverge at this point, distinguished from each other by the individual difference variables of identity centrality and cultural exibility. For sojourners whom home-culture identity centrality is low and cultural exibility is low to moderate (indicated by striped shading in the gure), a track begins that leads to a subtractive identity shift. For sojourners whom home-cultural identity centrality is moderate and cultural exibility is high, additive cultural identity becomes the repatriate response. Subtractive and additive identity shifts are both associated with high sociocultural adaptation, and it is predicted that sojourners will experience a more difcult repatriation than those with low adaptation. Suda (1999) shows that the more integrated the sojourner is into the host culture, the more distressing the re-entry and the more long-lasting the distress. The subtractive identity shift (in the striped shaded box) results in repatriates feeling less comfortable with their home culture’s values and norms and less similar to their compatriots. An additive cultural identity shift would result in repatriates feeling more similar to their host culture, such that the repatriates’ cultural identity more closely resembles the host culture’s values, norms and forms of behavior. One outcome of an extreme form of this shift category nds repatriates seeking opportunities to return to the host culture as soon and as often as possible. Although both subtractive and additive identity shifters experience similar negative effects, their behavioral consequences vary. For the subtractive repatriate, responses to home might include seeking out other repatriates while perceiving other compatriots as less similar in culturally-shaped values and behavior. At the extreme, the subtractive repatriates feel devoid of cultural identity. In contrast, additive repatriates might seek out opportunities to interact with members of the former host culture, participate or attend entertainment, sports or culinary representations of the host culture, or continue study of the host culture language. The model does allow for repatriates to adopt both types of identity shifts, subtractive and additive. Alatas (1972) describes this psychological

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state as the “captive mind syndrome,” whereby a sojourner rejects the home culture identity and uncritically adopts the host identity. In both identity shift categories, interaction with the home culture collective is minimized, exacerbating the experiencing of isolation from the home culture and the perception of not tting in with co-nationals. The third category of identity (see Figure 2), afrmative, can be described as one in which the home culture identity is maintained and strengthened throughout the transition cycle. These newcomers also begin with an obscured cultural identity (indicated by the shaded box in the gure), which becomes salient during the early stages of the cultural transition. In contrast to the subtractive and additive experience, afrmative shifters largely ignore the cultural discrepancies between home and host cultures, resulting in low adaptation to the host culture environment. Cultural self-concept consequentially will be highly stable and unambiguous, which in turn will result in a repatriation experience that is low in distress. For afrmative sojourners who neither adapted successfully overseas nor experienced an identity change, it is predicted that repatriation comes as a welcomed relief. The intercultural or global identity shift (see Figure 3), a less common identity modication, enables repatriates to hold multiple cultural scripts simultaneously and draw on each as the working self-concept requires. The transition cycle commences for these transitors with an awareness of their own cultural identity (unshaded box in the gure). Recognition of the cultural discrepancies between the sojourner’s current cultural values and behavior and that of the new sojourn site triggers the adjustment process. Adjustment is facilitated by low cultural centrality and high cultural exibility, resulting in high adaptation. Structurally, the self-concept of the sojourner with an intercultural identity can be described as more complex. This identity shift paradigm is neither the integration of home and host culture values (hybridization) nor the bicultural strategy that results from the acculturation experience, but rather an identity in which the repatriates dene themselves as world citizens and are able to interact appropriately and effectively in many countries or regions by switching cultural frames as needed. Intercultural identity shifts result in positive affective responses and little repatriation distress. Behaviorally, intercultural repatriates might seek to develop friendships with individuals representing many different cultures, selecting a wide-range of international entertainment (movies, sports and television programming), and reading material (books and newspapers), and participating in international electronic discussion groups.

identity shifts as a consequence of crossing cultures

Figure 2: Afrmative Identity Shift

Figure 3: Intercultural Identity Shift

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It is important to note that multiple cultural transition experiences are not sufcient to result in an intercultural identity. Self-concept complexity and subsequent positive response to the return home is dependent on two features. First, before the commencement of the transition, the sojourner is actively aware of his or her cultural identity and its consequences—that is, they understand themselves as cultural beings. Second, during the adaptation and repatriation phases, the sojourner is also actively cognitively processing cultural aspects of the self-concept and is aware of changes in cultural identity. Physical movement home, then, is not coupled with an unexplained negative effect, as is the situation with additive and subtractive shifters. Rather, the intercultural identity shift evokes a positive affective response. US, European and Japanese Identity Responses to Repatriation The United States, Europe and Japan have not experienced signicant remigration patterns, and thus repatriation research in these locations has been limited to the repatriated sojourn experience. While all four types of identity responses to repatriation have been found among Western and Japanese returnees, they differ in the variability and typicality of response. Negative effects of returning home to the US are most frequently associated with subtractive identity responses as repatriated Americans report feeling less American, less similar to other Americans and less able to “t in” (Sussman, 2002) compared to pre-departure identity. The negative effect is exacerbated by the unexpectedness of the identity response, and it is often misattributed to the re-entry job, the city where the returnee is settling or to spousal or familial relations (Sussman, 2001). Afrmative identity responses are the second most frequent for American returnees coupled with the positive effects of and relief at returning home. These grateful repatriates rarely make cultural adaptations in their host countries and therefore do not experience self-concept and identity changes. A smaller percentage of American repatriates experience additive or global identity shifts. Recent research among Italian sojourner repatriates reports consistently negative effects and subtractive, additive and global identity responses. Few returnees react positively to their return and to their Italian identity (Grisi, 2004). One woman who repatriated to Italy fol-

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lowing a sojourn to Sweden remarked, “I’ve experienced the feeling of no longer tting into my home country, and talking with other students, they had the same feeling, the same distress.” In a study of repatriates to Finland, subjective identity appeared to be a common consequence of cultural transitions. A woman returning from Australia noted, “Coming back home was more difcult than going abroad because I had expected changes when going overseas. During repatriation it was real culture shock! I felt like an alien in my own country. Surprisingly, I was totally unprepared for the long, harsh, cold, dark Arctic winter. My attitudes had changed so much that it was difcult to understand Finnish customs. Old friends had moved, had children or just vanished. Others were interested in our experiences, but only sort of. Most simply could not understand our overseas experience or just envied our way of life.” Additionally, negative effects upon repatriation are correlated with a lack of communication with home family and friends while the sojourner is overseas (Gregersen and Stroh, 1997). Adolescents returning to Turkey after many years of living in various European countries experience more depression, anxiety and academic achievement problems than those who have never left Turkey (Sahin, 1990). While the repatriation effect is negative, identity data has not been collected. Japanese sojourners, due in part to the cultural homogeneity of Japan, report high cultural salience before departure from Japan. Despite that awareness, Japanese repatriation is also often negative in effect but characterized as an additive response as a result of successful adaptation to the host culture. However, the negative effect is tempered by the awareness of self-concept and identity changes (Sussman, 1985). Japanese repatriates report knowing that despite additive identity changes, the norms of Japanese culture demand adherence to Japanese forms of behavior and lifestyle once they return home—that is, low cultural exibility. In an attempt to negotiate his two cultural identities, one respondent indicated that he often hid “Newsweek” magazine inside a Japanese magazine when reading on the subway. The prevalent identity response among adolescent Japanese returnees is subtractive, with participants reporting a sense of “feeling different” from mainstream society (Kidder, 1992) in that they are usually more assertive and individualistic than peers who have not left Japan (Minoura, 1988) resulting in a prolonged negative effect. Japanese women repatriates who accompany their husbands on overseas assignments

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also report “difculty in tting in to Japanese society” due to feeling “less Japanese” (Suda, 1999). An intercultural or global response is found among Japanese corporate executives who have had several overseas assignments. This is particularly evident when the overseas site is a small-sized city, the Japanese expatriate community is small and local adaptation is more compelling. Hong Kong Identity Response to Repatriation Factors that affect repatriation The case has been made in this chapter that residents of Hong Kong have developed complex identities. Triggered by situational cues, they have learned how to negotiate these identities in Hong Kong, the region and the world. Wong (1988) provides a rich example of the ability to switch cultural identities among Hong Kong textile executives (cotton spinners) who were born in Shanghai: According to the situation, a Shanghainese can activate regional ties of various scope . . . In international forums such as textile negotiations, the cotton spinners usually present themselves as industrialists from Hong Kong . . . Vis-à-vis their foreign buyers or the senior British ofcials of the colony, they are Chinese. Meeting in regional associations, they are people from Ningpo or Shanghai city who enjoy their local cuisine and theatrical entertainment. When they participate in the activities of their trade associations, they are modern, Westernized businessmen. (pp. 111–112)

How will migration and remigration affect these cultural identity frames? Among the professional/educated repatriates, the CIM predicts that although identity proles for Hong Kong repatriates will be found among all four types, the modal one will be the global identity. In part, this is due to pre-departure cultural identity salience and the multidimensional nature of Hong Kong identity. The CIM model also describes identity response as being affected by individual difference variables. Some individual level variables that may affect adaptation and repatriation include English prociency and the appropriateness of host country and repatriation employment. In Hong Kong, due to the collectivist nature of the core culture, differences in familial variables are expected to moderate individual identity responses to repatriation. Such familial factors include the number of

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family members accompanying the head of household, host country adaptation level of family members, number of years spent in the host country, ages of children and the nature of immigrant/home country experience (intact family versus astronaut family). Based on the global identity prole alone, one might expect the affective response to repatriation to be positive. However, there is reason to believe that Hong Kong remigration will result in a more nuanced and complex identity response. Psychological, sociological and economic factors indicate that re-migrants may experience a negative repatriation affect. First, psychological expectations were not met for the transition experience. The basis for immigration, imagined economic and political catastrophe as a consequence of the 1997 handover, did not materialize; the “push” of immigration was unfounded. Further, the “pull” of immigration, nancial success and smooth adjustment, may not have been realized. The attempt to minimize handover anxiety and provide for future family stability may not have worked, and repatriation may have become the public statement of a failed strategy. There does appear to be a category of immigrants for whom a multination residential life was purposely planned. These migrants may have already possessed a global identity, and obtaining a foreign passport was viewed as a hedge against political turmoil in Hong Kong and not a reection of a desire for a either a new identity or a new permanent abode. However, there were unexpected consequences for some of these immigrants. While husbands commuted between Hong Kong and their immigrant country maintaining and strengthening bi-cultural identities, adolescent children were developing new cultural identities which in many cases may have supplanted the Hong Kong or Chinese identity. Repatriation compounded the differing familial identities. Anecdotal evidence suggests that adolescents discovered that they now possessed a combination of “subtractive” and “additive” identities and experienced discomfort in returning to Hong Kong. Frequently, these returnee children have continued their education at international schools in Hong Kong due to their lack of Cantonese prociency, which further isolates them from the general population. Sociologically, both migration and re-migration may have resulted in unexpected familial stresses. Absentee husbands who left families behind in the country of emigration resulted in changes in spousal roles. Wives, for example, found themselves as heads of households for long periods, and were thrust into being sole decision makers. Repatriation found

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families united again physically but fractured culturally and structurally. One additional aspect of the acculturation process for many migrant families involved joining Chinese Christian churches. In maintaining these afliations upon their return to Hong Kong, yet another life choice might have separated them from non-emigrant friends and family. A nal factor that may inuence the negative effects of the repatriation experience is economic. The cycle of the world nancial markets were particularly unkind to Hong Kong migrants. In the decade leading up to handover, property prices in Hong Kong fell as anxiety ourished and departing immigrants sold real estate and businesses at loss. However, economic booms in Australia, Canada and the US led to these same migrants investing in their new countries at high prices. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, when re-migration began, economies in the West had slumped and Hong Kong re-migrants lost on their investments. Current investigation and results I interviewed 50 male and female returnees in Hong Kong during 2004. These re-migrants departed Hong Kong between 1984 and 1995 and returned after living at least one year in either Canada or Australia. The age range at the time of emigration was 13 to 47 years. Interviewees were obtained through targeted advertising and snowball sampling. The methodology of the project combined qualitative interviews with quantitative psychological scales that measured overseas adaptation, identity, repatriation stress, satisfaction with life, and independent versus interdependent self-concept. The interviews each lasted 1½ hours and consisted of participant responses to a semi-structured interview schedule. Analyses of the data collected from these interviews reveal some surprising results. First, in contrast to American and European returnees, very few of the Hong Kongers exhibited subtractive identity changes. Irrespective of immigration location, gender or length of time overseas, only two Hong Kongers in the study indicated feeling less a part of Hong Kong culture or substantially different from friends, family or coworkers. One woman who lived in Australia for six years before returning to Hong Kong remarked “. . . I don’t like Hong Kong tricky things anymore. I like to be frank and simple, be honest . . . People give me feedback . . . and they ask “have you come back from another country? Were you born somewhere else?” even though my Cantonese is quite

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good. They say I act Caucasian.” For this re-migrant, a subtractive identity was both her perception and those of others. Why were subtractive identity changes so rare in Hong Kong when they were the most prevalent response of American returnees? It appears to be a result of two factors. First, among the middle class, a large percentage of the population has lived overseas, if not as migrants, then as sojourners. Until recently, for example, the Hong Kong government provided most civil servants with an overseas education allowance (to the UK) for their children, a remnant of the colonial days in which British workers in Hong Kong were provided with this education perquisite. The children of thousands of government workers, including teachers and professors, have attended either secondary school or university overseas. Additionally, many Hong Kongers spend summer holidays and other vacations in Western countries visiting family. Therefore, rather than perceiving themselves as different from their compatriots and not tting back into Hong Kong culture, the re-migrants’ experience might echo that of the returned sojourner. A second reason for the subjective identity response being rare focuses on the complexity and exibility of the core Hong Kong identity. In contrast to Japan for example, Hong Kong culture allows for a broad range of acceptable behavior and thought from its residents. While successful adaptation in the new citizenship country may have resulted in the adoption of new Western forms of behavior and values, and in the expression of some of these forms of behavior upon return to Hong Kong, this did not appear to supplant the Chinese or Hong Kong identity among the re-migrants. This interpretation underscores the second major nding from the study described next. The most common cultural identity prole for the Hong Kong re-migrants is additive, with nearly fty percent of the interviewees adopting this identity prole. High cultural exibility allowed for high adaptation when living in Canada or Australia and an appreciation of the values of these cultures. Although the study participants had returned to Hong Kong to live, many anticipated moving back to their new country of citizenship, perhaps during retirement. Quantitative analysis revealed that Western and Chinese identities were associated with each other and that most re-migrants held both Western (on a 4-point scale, average 2.6) and Chinese (average 3.0) identities. Conrmation of the additive identity was also found in the results of a self-description task. Forty-nine percent of the descriptions in the study sample were dispositional or personality traits that are most common

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in Western cultures, compared with 18% being relational (these interpersonal descriptors, such as wife, mother and daughter, are more prevalent in Chinese cultures). The remainder of the descriptions fell outside of these two categories (e.g. “I am very busy” or “I like to ski”). Qualitative analyses that coded for identity themes indicated that the additive identity response was more complex than anticipated, and represented two sub-categories: hybridization, in which the Western and Hong Kong identity combined to form a unique set of behavior and thoughts; and biculturality, in which the re-migrant’s behavior was situationally determined, either Chinese/Hong Kong or Western, by the setting in which the behavior took place. The additive/hybrid prole is exemplied by one re-migrant who returned from Australia. In comparing the Australian and Hong Kong work style, she commented “(the Australians) are very direct and blunt. They say what is on their minds. In work (back in Hong Kong), I express myself although I am not blunt. I am also seen as quite independent. I will go out to lunch myself or shop. I don’t always need to be with others.” Additive/bicultural identity and behavior is characterized by a male re-migrant from Australia. “I am a mix of Australia and Hong Kong . . . a mixture in the sense that at home I am Chinese but at work I feel like I’m not a Chinese guy. Most of my bosses are foreigners, or Australian or English or American.” Additive identity, however, did not result in generalized repatriation distress as it does among Western returnee groups. The Satisfaction with Life Scale revealed much satisfaction (average of 5.1 on a 7point scale), and the Repatriation Distress Scale revealed low distress (average of 2.9 on a 7-point scale). There were ample opportunities in Hong Kong for additive repatriates to engage in Western activities, cuisine, entertainment and work-styles when they wished. Technology and communications also facilitated ties to the passport country. One interviewee, the only one experiencing some distress, remarked that he regularly watched his favorite Canadian hockey team on the Internet and couldn’t wait to get back to Canada. He was, however, an “astronaut” and his family still resided in Toronto, which accounted in large measure for his distress. In general, the Hong Kongers exhibited additive identity of a bi-cultural variety, switching cultural frames and behavior as the situation necessitated. A third more limited result pertained to men who migrated after the age of 40. Their cultural shift resulted in afrmative identities—low

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overseas adaptation, high motivation to return to Hong Kong, and strong desire to remain. A behavioral manifestation of the afrmative identities was the choice of the traditional naming pattern when using English (family name followed by Chinese given name) among 50% of the afrmatives. This compared to traditional usage among only 20% of the additives and 20% of the globals. One male returnee expressed a strengthening of his Chinese as opposed to Hong Kong identity: “I felt very Chinese when I returned to Hong Kong. Then I went back to China more frequently . . . When I am older maybe I will move back to China . . . maybe move to Canton.” Approximately 8% of the interviewees held a global identity, all of whom had experienced multiple cultural transitions before migrating. A women who had migrated to Canada and then returned to Hong Kong explained: “We lived in Singapore, I lived and worked in Australia, we lived in Michigan . . . so it’s like departure and re-entry, many times before we did this. I was pretty international . . . there may be some ingrained Chinese values, but I was more cosmopolitan because of all the contacts that I’ve made.” Although it was predicted that most Hong Kong re-migrants would experience a global identity, the additive identities better captured the cultural exibility combined with bi-culturalism of the returnees. However, as predicted, the affect was generally positive, with re-migrants expressing satisfaction with their returnee lives. Two groups that were more likely to experience some repatriation distress were women and those who migrated at a younger age (teen years). These results conrm earlier studies of Japanese repatriates. It has been suggested that if adolescent development intersects with cultural transitions that the identity consequence encompasses more cognitive and behavioral variables and results in more negative effects. Additional investigations need to pursue the characteristics that might lead to increased risk for repatriation distress among these populations. An unanticipated nding suggests a link between immigrant adaptation and political behavior in Hong Kong. Consistent with the additive identity prole, many returnees noted that they have incorporated into their cognitive and behavioral repertoire the Canadian/Australian value of individual freedom and the need to speak their minds despite the opposing views of co-workers, friends or family. With tens of thousands of Hong Kongers returning, these beliefs and forms of behavior could have consequences for local politics and the burgeoning democracy movement.

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Geography, history, economics and psychology intersect with any investigation of Hong Kong identity. When cultural transitions are added to the mix, the outcome is understandably complex. Cultural exibility and pragmatism, hallmarks of Hong Kong society, set the tone for both overseas adaptations and for repatriation accommodation. Most of the interviewees in this study experienced successful overseas adaptation, adopting the values, forms of behavior and thought patters of the to which they emigrated. The resultant additive identity (both hydrid and bi-culturalism types) affords Hong Kongers the ability to feel comfortable both in the diaspora and in Hong Kong. In both large and small decisions, the behavioral consequences of additive identities were enacted. It seems clear that in the future, Hong Kongers will continue to be both geographically and psychologically mobile. What is more difcult to predict is the effect of cognitive hydribity and bi-culturality on political and social attitudes and behavior. This investigation suggests that the cultural identity model should be expanded to include more external or cultural variables. In its current form, the CIM highlights individual difference (personality) variables as the antecedents of repatriation experiences. Although earlier explications of the model (Sussman, 2000) indicated cultural limitations, the Hong Kong case is particularly instructive. Here, the positive affective consequences of the additive identity reect similar results found among global identiers from Western countries. Additionally, the distribution of the repatriation identities differed signicantly from those experienced by Western repatriates: few subtractive and afrmative identities, with the majority additive. I posit that these are due in large part to the internal factor of the cultural exibility of Hong Kongers and to the external factor of the cosmopolitan characteristics of non-migrating compatriots who themselves possess rich and complex identities. The stories that the re-migrants shared were simultaneously heartbreaking and inspirational, courageous and mundane. They encompassed dramatic changes in patterns of thinking and friendship networks, and small preferences for food types and leisure pursuits. They are all reminders of the consequences of monumental political decisions on the intimate, personal decisions and lives of individuals and families. The ever-changing narrative of Hong Kong identity continues. As cultural and political ties with China increase, Hong Kong identity will again be transmuted. Increases in sojourns in China for employment

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will add yet another layer to the already rich and complex identity of the people of Hong Kong. REFERENCES Alatas, Syed Hussein. 1972. The captive mind in development studies: Some neglected problems and the need for an autonomous social science tradition in Asia. International Social Science Journal, 24: 9–25. Ashmore, Richard D., Kay Deaux and Tracy McLaughlin-Volpe. 2004. An organizing framework for collective identity: Articulation and signicance of multidimensionality. Psychological Bulletin, 130: 80–114. Baumeister, Roy F. 1986. Identity: Cultural change and the struggle for self. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Baumeister, Roy F., Jeremy P. Shapiro, and Diana M. Tice. 1985. Two kinds of identity crisis. Journal of Personality, 53: 407–424. Benet-Martinez, Veronica, Janxin Leu, Fiona Lee and Michael W. Morris. 2002. Negotiating biculturalism: Cultural frame switching in biculturals with oppositional versus compatible identities. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 33: 492–516. Berry, John W. 1986. Multiculturalism and psychology in plural societies. In Ethnic minorities and immigrants in a cross-cultural perspective. Edited by L.H. Ekstand. Lisse, The Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger. Bond, Michael Harris and Miles Hewstone. 1988. Social identity theory and the perception of intergroup relations in Hong Kong. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 12: 153–170. Bond, Michael Harris and Ambrose Y.C. King. 1985. Coping with the threat of westernization in Hong Kong. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 9: 351–364. Brewer, Marilynn. B. 1999. Multiple identities and identity transition: Implications for Hong Kong. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 23: 187–197. Chiu, Chi-Yue and Ying Yi Hong. 1997. Justice in Chinese societies: A Chinese perspective. In Asian perspective on psychology, pp. 164–184. Edited by Henry S.R. Kao and Durganand Sinha. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ———. 1999. Social identication in a political transition: The role of implicit beliefs. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 23: 297–318. Chiu, Chi-yue, Michael W. Morris, Ying-Yi Hong, and Tanya Menon. 2000. Motivated cultural cognition: The impact of implicit cultural theories on dispositional attribution varies as a function of need for closure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78: 297–318. Deaux, Kay. 1996. Social identication. In Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles, 777–798. Edited by Edward Tory Higgins and Arie W. Kruglanski. New York: Guilford Press. Gregersen, Hal and Linda Stroh. 1997. Coming home to the artic cold: Antecedents to Finnish expatriate and spouse repatriation adjustment. Personnel Psychology, 50: 635. Grisi, Daniela. 2004. Cultural transition and change in social identity: MLAL’s returned volunteers. Master’s thesis, Faculty of Education, University of Verona, Italy. Hall, Edward T. 1976. Beyond culture. New York: Anchor Books. Hamilton, G. 1999. Cosmopolitan capitalists. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Hermans, Hubert J.M., and Harry J.G. Kempen. 1998. Moving cultures: The perilous problems of cultural dichotomies in a globalizing society. American Psychologist, 53: 1111–1120.

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Chapter 6

Japan’s ‘Beckham Fever’: Marketing and Consuming a Global Sport Celebrity Rie Ito Introduction Sport has been an integral part of globalization (Maguire, 1999). This is especially true in the case of sport celebrities.1 Despite overwhelming neglect by academic researchers (but see Andrews and Jackson, 2001), these sports stars have increasingly traveled the world as commodities and popular images, as much as athletic laborers. The issue in this paper—‘Beckham Fever’ in Japan—can be viewed as an exemplar. During the Korea-Japan World Cup in 2002, David Beckham served as captain of England’s national football team and, consequently, received enormous attention in Japanese society. This was not exclusively due to his play on the eld. His hairstyle (the socalled ‘Beckham hair’), adopted by many Japanese boys, and his socalled ‘sweet mask’ (raved about by numerous women) also fueled the enthusiastic gaze of both media and public. The increasing attention soon led to the widespread of the use of the Japanese honoric, ‘Beckham-sama.’ This was signicant, because such an honoric was rarely used for athletes. In this respect, we can nd only a few contemporary rivals including ‘Leo-sama’ (the Hollywood star, Leonald DiCaprio) and ‘Yon-sama’ (the Korean TV drama star, Bae Yong Joon). The variety of these markers serves as evidence of Beckham’s tremendous popularity. What is more, this popularity continued and even developed following 1 The denition of sporting individuals has been one of confusion and controversy. The point at the heart of the confusion seems to stem from a famous description by Boorstein (1961, p. 61): “the hero was distinguished by his achievement: the celebrity by his image or trademark. The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media. The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name.” As a result, there has been a certain amount of difculty in fully differentiating the sporting individual into the roles of ‘hero’ and ‘celebrity.’

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the World Cup, due to the media’s consistent reportage and his wide daily visibility via advertisements. This was most clearly evidenced by the enthusiastic response to him when he revisited Japan as a member of his club team, Real Madrid, in June 2003. Hundreds of passionate fans ocked to Narita airport to witness Beckham’s arrival with his wife, Victoria, the former Posh Spice. Reective, perhaps, of his honoric, their ve day schedule was accorded blanket media coverage, rivaled in frenzy only by the imperial wedding a decade before. In observing the Beckham phenomenon, I seek to explore Japan’s mediated national identity under the conditions of globalization. To do so, I will detail how the global footballer was marketed and consumed. By employing content analysis of differing media—including newspapers, magazines, TV and Internet web pages—I will show how he was presented in and represented and interpreted by Japanese media. The point of this analysis will be to measure whether and how Beckham was used to (re-)create distinctions of ‘we/they,’ ‘Japan/the West’ and ‘Japan/others’, which are historically key distinctions in Japanese society. As this chapter will show, the Beckham phenomenon was something larger than a Western athlete in an Eastern country. It enables me to talk about many issues, ranging from sport to media, celebrity, globalization, race, gender and national identity. At the same time, I can consider the complex ways in which these elements link to one another. The discussions that Beckham stimulates vary, and include at least the sport-media complex (e.g. Boyle and Haynes, 2000; Hashimoto, 2002; Rowe, 2004; Wenner, 1989, 1998), the globalization of sport (e.g. Holden, 2003; Maguire, 1999; Miller et al., 2001), the transformation of athletes into celebrities (e.g. Andrews and Jackson, 2001; Boyle and Haynes, 2000; Vande Berg, 1998; Whannel, 1992, 2002), the globalization of popular culture (e.g. Tobin, 1992; Iwabuchi, 2002) and celebrity and ‘collective congurations’/power (Marshall, 1997). In other words, Beckham is a perfect case of the contemporary sport celebrity who is embedded in global capitalist culture and also serves as a site for (re-)production, negotiation and challenges to the socially privileged meanings of race, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality and more (Andrews and Jackson, 2001). It is important to know that the media serves as the locus where celebrity and national identity (or, national identication) may embrace

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one another.2 In much the same way as it has been in other societies, national identity has been a mediated matter in Japan. A major current element has been the discourse of Nihonjinron—a perception of the Japanese as a unique collectivity. In the words of Yoshino (1997; 1999), Nihonjinron has served as the marketplace for the reproduction and consumption of cultural nationalism. It has also worked to enable the creation of cultural distinction into “Japan and its Others” (Clammer, 2001)—a division, it is often asserted, that Japanese society strongly makes. Moreover, it should be noted that Japan’s continuous national

2 This may need a little more explanation. In a society where a celebrity is more than ever created by and communicated through media, there is a temptation for consumers to believe that they truly know the celebrities whom they worship. After all, contemporary media reports to consumers detailed information about a celebrity’s personality, preferences, activities and life history, as well as constantly providing glimpses of their daily appearance. Japan is undoubtedly one of the leading societies in this regard, according increasing public attention to celebrities-cum-celebrities. In truth, they make regular appearances on ‘wide-show’ TV programs (as targets of conversation and gossip), as well as various other media. They are so pervasive because they are easy to produce and much in demand for consumption. In this way they serve as a source for media presentation 365 days a year, with almost no holiday. (Indeed, even their holidays are mediated!) Despite this mediation, however, there is very little of the actual person there. The mediated gure delivered to audiences is nothing more than a “simulacra” (Baudrillard, 1993). The celebrity’s representation is a creation that comes to have its own tangible existence. The representation by media ends up attaching new meaning for the consuming audiences, shaping the public gure of the celebrity. In turn, there cannot be a celebrity where there once stood an actual person, without an identication being made by the media and a reception of it by the mass consumers. Even though the images received among consumers are not always the same—they differ from person to person—the media represents the celebrity and, at the same time, largely shows collective ways of identication (i.e. interpretation, signication and evaluation) of the celebrity in society. If one allows this claim—thereby reading celebrities (as a block) as mediated identications—it would be correct to seat them at the same table in the discussion of identity. In truth, it is not a stretch of the imagination to suggest that identity is a mediated matter. In a way, media invites audiences to construct a sense of who ‘we’ are in relation to who ‘we’ are not (Cottle, 2000, p. 2). This is certainly true in Japan, where ‘we’ is often constructed with ‘they’ in mind—a pattern that has been historically ingrained for centuries. Such strategies work to identify self and others often by referring to global-local levels (although not exclusively) and even aids in the construction of what Anderson (1983) has called ‘imagined communities.’ This is precisely the methodological perspective that I employ in this chapter. By focusing on the images and discourses as the result of the mass mediation of ‘Beckham Fever,’ I seek to catch Japan’s national identity in the presence of this global sport celebrity.

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cultural identication as Nihonjinron discourse has been accomplished by holding a signicant other fully in mind: the ‘West’ (Aoki, 1990; Befu, 1987; 2001). As Befu has suggested, in particular, whether it was Europe before the Second World War or the United States thereafter, Western societies have consistently been involved in Japan’s national identity formation since the Meiji restoration, above all as a gure for contrast (2001, p. 123). Taken together, I use this chapter to question whether globalization has changed this. Has increasing global cultural ow worked to diminish or dismiss Japan’s view of distinction? If so, how? Although these questions are not easily answered, in the case of mediated national identity, the prospects do not seem all that positive (i.e. Holden, 2003). That is, in contemporary Japan, while identity increasingly appears to be tied to discourse about globalization in the media, it is refracted through or directed toward the ‘local’ (and the ‘national’), rather than the ‘global.’ In the remainder of this chapter, I will look back at ‘Beckham Fever,’ focusing on marketing as well as consumption. In particular, two types of consumption will be addressed: the image of Beckham and the sign of Beckham. In analyzing both marketing and consumption, I will refer to various related elements—including sport, media, globalization, celebrity and identity; primarily, though, I will seek to discern the ways in which the phenomenon—especially representation and interpretation by the media—was a matter of Japan’s self-identication vis-à-vis the ‘West’ or ‘others.’ This will lead, naturally, to discussion of mediated national identity in Japan under conditions of globalization. In so doing, I especially wish to show whether and how it can be said that the marketing and consumption of this global celebrity has shaped Japan’s identity. Marketing Beckham Selling a Global Sport Sport is increasingly becoming a major global business. This is most reected by the increasing cost of broadcast rights, which enables sport to employ media as sponsors more and more easily. This was true in Japan during the Korea-Japan World Cup of 2002. It was estimated

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that a consortium of Japan’s public and private broadcast channels and a satellite channel, SkyPerpecTV paid about JPY 18.6 billion (roughly US $186 million) to broadcast the games (Sugiyama, 2001).3 It would not be incorrect to say that this related to the issue at the heart of this chapter. In truth, to a large extent, the Beckham phenomenon was created by the Japanese media. Before the 2002 World Cup—or, more correctly, until the moment that media began paying attention to this global event, the name David Beckham was practically unknown in Japan. Beckham was the exclusive property of football, and his appeal was limited to a small number of enthusiastic football fans interested in professional leagues abroad. But then, as media increasingly concentrated on the World Cup, Beckham rapidly came to be known throughout Japanese society. This was certainly a reection of a fact that the larger part of Japanese media—including (regular) non-sports media—started to spotlight footballers competing in the event. In so doing, their eyes began to turn to players who represented foreign national teams. It should be noted that this tendency was not unintentional. Beckham was employed as a tool by the media to secure the largest possible audience. In particular, they sought to capture the attention of non-regular football fans—namely women—as a means of heightening public enthusiasm for the World Cup. In fact, according to some (e.g. Psiko HenshÖbu, 2002), Beckham was quite often introduced in articles featuring footballers or concerning the Cup, mainly on the basis of his attractive face and physical characteristics, rather than his football talent and skills. To provide but one example, immediately before the opening of the 2002 World Cup he was introduced in a special photogravure entitled “Cool Guys’ World Cup,” which ran in the weekly magazine, ShÖkan Asahi. As for ‘Beckham Fever,’ it can be said that the efforts by the media to emphasize the footballers’ individual (mainly, visual) images bore fruit. In the case of Beckham, the success was exceptionally large. The original purpose of heightening public recognition of the event was almost completely accomplished, as the headline in the ShÖkan SakkÊ

3 This was based on the prior contract between FIFA and the agency, Sporis and Kirch. The corporation was reported to have bought the TV broadcast rights from FIFA for about 1.3 billion Swiss Francs. The Sports Illustrated’s report (2002) translated this sum into American $779 million, but a Japanese sport journalist did $1 billion (Sugiyama, 2001).

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Magajin proclaimed: “I Love Beckham. First of All, From That (I’m stepping into the World Cup).” What the title clearly underscored was the idea that many women were opening the door to the World Cup for the sole purpose of pursuing the English footballer. Because of him they were hastily transformed into football fans. More precisely, of course, they were rst and foremost Beckham fans. Becoming a Marketable Commodity The explosive increase of Beckham fans produced economic effects in a wide range of markets. For example, in a sporting goods store in Tokyo, about three hundred people per day bought the replica English team uniforms, paying the additional charge of about US$30 “BECKHAM 7” on the back (Ueda, 2002). This was not limited to the world of sporting goods. During the World Cup, the English footballer’s hairstyle (the so-called ‘Beckham hair’) was quickly adopted by Japanese boys. As the staff in a hair salon in Tokyo commented, “half of the male customers ordered Beckham hair” (Ueda, 2002).4 Other products associated with Beckham were also traded at a high rate. These included the jeans he wore in a photo carried in his biography, Italian brand sunglasses he modeled in a PR campaign, a special (but pricey) tour package to sleep in the hotel at which the English team stayed during their camp in Japan, and even a short-term tour plan to England just to watch Manchester United, his club team at the time, play (Ueda, 2002). The publishing business was also greatly impacted, in much the same way in his home country. As an assistant editor-in-chief of a weekly magazine for women explained, the sales of female-oriented magazines increased by using Beckham’s photos—especially on their covers—or carrying stories about him. This was true even if the stories were rather insubstantial or short (Katagiri, 2002). All told, it is clear that Beckham became more than a footballer. From the marketing viewpoint, one can say that the World Cup served as the occasion for Beckham to gain a reliable, steady, lucrative, alternative ‘career’ in the Japanese advertising world. After the Cup he signed endorsement contracts with some of Japan’s elite companies

4 This craze even led to a special issue on ‘how to make Beckham hair’ in a weekly magazine for women (Takahashi 2002). In the history of women’s magazines, Takahashi estimated, this was the rst case that an angle was employed to introduce a man’s hairstyle.

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for an aggregate sum (for one year) of about US$4 million (Katagiri, 2002).5 What is more, the most successful case (from Beckham’s perspective) was probably a series of ads that Beckham made for a body-care company, TBC, in which he made appearances with his wife, Victoria under the theme ‘Just Beauty.’ Until that time Victoria had not been well known in Japan (unlike other countries where her celebrity often exceeded that of her husband). In fact, many Japanese were not familiar with her past singing career and persona of Posh Spice; rather, Japanese media quite often labeled her as ‘Mrs Beckham’ or ‘the wife of David Beckham.’ One magazine (ShÖkan Josei Jishin) even depicted her life as an almost-Cinderella story by focusing and tracing her life-story until she nally had the good fortune of becoming married to the prince had the good fortune to become married to the prince, David Beckham (of course, the details do not much rival Cinderella’s: Victoria was [and remains] even richer than Beckham). Despite all of this, Victoria became so well known through these early advertisements that she nally was awarded an advertising contract of her own with the auto maker, Daihatsu. In a word, it seems true that she started to do business in the Japanese market as a result of her husband’s popularity. Putting aside the matter of Beckham’s image (which I will spotlight in a section to come), it should be noted that these advertisements also functioned as an intentional tool for Beckham’s self-promotion. In fact, according to a report (i.e. Katagiri, 2002), despite the pricy sum for the endorsements, the footballer’s agency required some restrictive preconditions regarding Beckham’s appearance: the advertisements had to be shot using a hair and make-up artist, stylist and photographer chosen by Beckham’s handlers. This last condition should be emphasized here, because the photographer demanded was the one who had been in charge of David and Victoria’s photograph collection. Here we see that athletes as well as sport organizations/associations and media, take charge of their transformation into celebrities; moreover, their advertisements are tied to (and driven by) their ‘image business.’6 5 Katagiri also reported many abandoned planned contracts with this celebrity due to severe nancial pre-conditions insisted on by his management agency, SFX. For instance, the agency once asked for a contract in the sum of US$5 million which would last for two years or more. 6 In this respect, Beckham’s case was not necessarily exceptional. According to Nanba (2000), a recent trend in Japanese advertisement making has accorded more direct communication between the talent presented and the audience. In a country like

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This is not to say that the companies failed to use Beckham’s image strategically in pursuit of a positive reaction to their products. In fact, in seeking increased public attention and positive reaction to their products, the companies emphasized that Beckham’s appearance in their advertisements was (close to his) natural (state). A perfect example of this was Meiji (a famous Japanese confectionary company), which employed Beckham as an image character in a series of advertisements for chocolate-coated nuts. A PR person explained that the concept of the television advertisement in which Beckham simply threw a chocolate-covered nut in the air and caught it in his mouth was “natural Beckham” (see Katagiri, 2002). Other companies sought to play up this natural or authentic angle. The website of the abovementioned body-care company, TBC, recommended that audiences pay attention to the (natural) behavior and facial expressions of Beckham and his wife; the website also explained how they both behaved during lming. A similar strategy of depicting Beckham as ‘just himself ’ was adopted by a satellite pay per view TV channel for which sport was the second largest content. After Beckham moved to his new club, Real Madrid, the TV channel, WOWOW, billed itself as the only tool available for meeting him (i.e. the only broadcaster of the Spanish football league in Japan). Doing so, it featured Beckham calling out to the audience (in English): “Watch me on WOWOW.” The Image of Beckham Beckham as a Kind, Family-oriented Man As I have shown, the earliest media focus on Beckham was almost exclusively on his visual image(s). This changed, though, as his popularity increased. Media started to cover his ‘private faces’—including past Japan, where the advertisements devote a larger proportion of advertising time and money to the talent (the so-called ‘talent-CM’), the border between reality and ction has become more and more blurred. After all, the celebrity appears in the ads to sell not only the product, but also him- or herself. Although image control is not unusual, it is worth noting those many cases in which celebrities, especially American lm stars, have stipulated before appearing in Japanese advertisements that the distribution of their image be limited to the Japanese market. According to a report by Newsweek in 1989, the images of these celebrities in Japanese advertisements (including the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger raking in Nisshin cup noodles) are often quite at odds with the images that the celebrities have carefully created and nurtured in their home countries.

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and present experiences, family relationships, friendships and more—in addition to his play on the eld. This helped to produce a reputation of a personality that was ‘shy,’ ‘cute,’ ‘honest’ and ‘kind.’ Over time, what came to be most emphasized was his kindness and familial face (above all, a man who was a devoted husband and indulgent father). In fact, a weekly magazine for women ShÖkan Josei Jishin featured a special issue that revealed just how shy, kind and family-oriented he was; in particular, it detailed his rst meeting and kiss with his wife and his presence at the delivery of their rst son. In addition, of his several tattoos, only two received extended, nearly exclusive focus. These include the words “Victoria”—in Arabic—on his left arm, and “Brooklyn” (his rst son’s name)—in hip-hop style script—on his waist. These symbols were introduced as evidence of his love for his family. This image of devoted family man was reinforced during Beckham’s visit to a primary school during his trip to Japan in 2003. The visit was extensively (and enthusiastically) covered in the media, punctuated by Beckham’s confession that he had a strong desire to interact with the children of Japan. The image of kind family man was also communicated in advertisements. In truth, Beckham (and his management team) succeeded in reproducing and maintaining a particular image among Japanese fans throughout his tenure. It was an image that in no way offended, and made him appear sweet and loveable. This was achieved, above all, through his kind gaze and perpetual smile. Viewing this, audiences reconrmed their prior perception of his personality—a perception that not only resonated with, but was reproduced by, multiple past media reports of his kindness. An exemplar was the abovementioned series of 2003 advertisements featuring Beckham and his wife Victoria for the Japanese body-care company TBC. The series tended to highlight Victoria, with husband David in the role of assistant. As such, he often did something for her: he tenderly escorted her, praised her beauty; and even took a bath alongside her separate bathtub lled with beautiful owers. In the bathroom situation, Beckham lled his tub with small footballs, making Victoria laugh in amusement. Combined, such scenes heightened the impression that Beckham was a good partner—a fun-loving, faithful, gentle companion—and husband. More, for the women watching television, the advertisements encouraged them to run out to the company’s salon with the aim of becoming like Victoria (and therefore catching a tender man like Beckham). The message underlying these spots was,

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‘see this most blessed lady beside David, who is the most attractive catch: handsome, fashionable, kind, as well as talented and rich. Come to TBC salon, soon you will be like her!” A Global Celebrity, a Global Image? Cashmore (2002) has observed the presence of and attention to Beckham among the British. He writes: Manchester United fans often chant (to the tune of José Fernandez Diaz’s Guantanamera): ‘One David Beckham. There’s only one David Beckham.’ Actually, there are two: the esh-and-blood father with a fondness for cars, decorously pale looks and ne soccer skills; and the icon, the celebrity, the commodity, the Beckham that exists independently of time and space and resides in the imaginations of countless acolytes. (Cashmore, 2002, p. 4).

Methodologically, this is a basic statement, but it is stimulating in terms of the globalization of popular culture. In light of Beckham’s movement ‘Eastward,’ it would not be strange to ask how many David Beckhams there are. On the one hand, as The Observer’s 2002 special report observed, the increase of women addicted to Beckham was certainly a phenomenon on a global scale. The reason for this addiction seemed to have been uniformly due to his being family-oriented, extremely cool, fashionable and gorgeous. Certainly, in the case of Japanese fans, these were the traits singled out for affection. Despite such universality, it is important to bear in mind Giardina’s (2001) observation about the global postmodern celebrity. In his view, in societies where transnational celebrities make appearances, they are blessed with “exible citizenship” because they do not begin with any original image for mass consumption. Following this, their images can change in ways that reect any local context. In a word, celebrities “do not just drop from Heaven. They are to large extent home-grown.” (Buruma, 1995, x) Applied to the case at hand, ‘Beckham Fever’ in Japan assumed its own unique contours; it should be distinguished from fan reception in the player’s homeland. Consider, for instance, Cashmore’s research that is cited above. It indicates that Beckham’s ‘soft-ness’ is perceived by the British as a departure from the commonly-held image of footballers, which, in turn, bears on discussions of racism, violence, alcohol use, ‘hard’ masculinity and ‘blue collar’ origins. Yet, almost none of these elements, I would argue, held

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true in Japan. Little of Beckham’s Japanese audience experienced any hint of ‘class’ in his sport.7 Instead, as one can see from the marketing of the J-League ( Japan’s professional football league), the advertising strategy from the start was aimed at a different kind of fan (i.e. Watts, 1998). One intention was to provide an alternative to baseball—a sport that is associated with salarymen (or white collar workers).8 To do this the sport was marketed as a new lifestyle for younger people, including young ladies; its image was made more accessible and fashionable than other major sports. In contrast, although Beckham’s ‘soft’ gure apparently rendered him a gay icon in England (Cashmore, 2002), this dimension was almost wholly absent in Japan, at least insofar as everyday media production was concerned. This became particularly clear when one considers the contemporary tendency among young Japanese men to favor a softer aesthetic, part and parcel of a heterogeneous appearance. As Miller (2003) has shown, this has encouraged the development of a male beauty business. Aesthetic salons for men have proliferated, as has the practice among men of daily facial care: cleansing, eyebrow trimming and using sheets to remove oil from the skin. Indeed, this ‘male esuté’ (beauty care) is one of the services for which Beckham became a commercial spokesman. In truth, Beckham was not the rst footballer to be presented in an advertisement for a Japanese esuté company. Compared to those of sportsmen from other elds (such as baseball and sumo), images of soccer players seem less resonant in terms of traditional masculinity. What is more, footballers tend to be identied with and portrayed in more intimate terms. They are depicted as having an interest in (and some sense about) fashion and trends concerning body care. They are often represented in media as being cognizant of their appearance, whether it be hairstyle, accessories or clothing. Noting these points, it can be said that ‘Beckham Fever’ to some extent involved indigenous aspects. Although his popularity was global, in Japan his gure was also shaped and conceptualized locally. The

7 Watts (1998) has referred to the notion—rst introduced by Ohnuki-Tierney (1987)—that in Shinto belief the foot was perceived as a polluted part of the body. Still, at least in contemporary Japanese society, football does not appear to carry any such negative connotations. 8 Apart from Watts’s understanding, I take into account that baseball in Japan is not popularly limited to ‘white collar’ workers. It seems to appeal to and engage a number of ‘blue collar’ fans, as well.

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gure presented to the Japanese audience, processed through the Japanese media, embodied a complicated co-existence of the ‘global’ and the ‘local.’ Nationalizing a Global Phenomenon As mentioned above, Beckham’s popularity can be said to have been a global phenomenon in terms of its (re-)creation of gender distinctions. While certain distinctions might have been the result of local factors, they seemed to have been seen to a large extent outside Japan. However, female Japanese Beckham fans were not always free from the national categorizations of indigenous media. An example of this could be seen when these women were disparaged in the media during the World Cup. Importantly, these critical comments were not only because such fans had become addicted to the World Cup despite knowing little or nothing about football itself. Rather, the criticism seemed to stem from a discourse—long held in Japan—concerning the worship of Caucasians (in Japanese, actually referred to as ‘white (people)’ or the ‘West’).9 In other words, Beckham and these women were placed in a narrative frame that was strongly associated with the racial distinction ‘Japan and white others.’ In truth, representations of both were formed on the basis of long-standing local distinction. In attempting to account for Beckham’s popularity among women one broadcast scriptwriter dened his face as a ‘tenkeiteki na gaijin gao (or typical foreigner’s face)’ preferred by Japanese” (Kueda, 2002).10 In this vein, a magazine writer even referred to Beckham as “a young (British) nobleman who made Yamato Nadeshiko (i.e. graceful Japanese women) his slaves”. (i.e. Abe, 2002) was published. In short, Beckham’s female fans were almost never free from categorization and/or scrutiny as ‘Japanese’ by Japanese analysts. The negative comments they received channeled into a centuries-long, still on-going discourse about ‘Japan and the West’—particularly concerning male-female relationships. In this way, ‘Beckham Fever’ was framed as a national concern, involving the embodiment of national pride in relation to international love affairs. 9 For many Japanese, ‘white’ immediately connotes the ‘West,’ so the distinction ‘Japan/the West’ is not a geographic as much as a racial distinction. 10 Despite its general perception as the shorten form of ‘gaikokujin’ (or foreigners), the word ‘gaijin’ is often said used by Japanese exclusively to mean ‘white’ people. In that sense it is also considered a racially charged or discriminatory word.

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The Sign of Beckham Beckham as a Distant Sport Celebrity While Beckham’s personality came to be well known due to the widespread distribution of his image as a ‘kind, family-oriented person,’ this did not immediately lead to his transformation into one who was proximate and familiar.11 Rather, in Japanese media, he appeared as a sign in sometimes distant terms. One example was an advertisement for the mobile phone company Vodafone in which Beckham appeared with an ordinary Japanese girl (who, nonetheless was what Japanese call a ‘talent’) in an everydayseeming situation. In brief, the advertisement involved the girl watching boys playing football, but looking bored and a bit depressed. She muttered “I want to join in (the football game) . . .” which appeared to account for her depression. At the next moment, Beckham suddenly appeared before her, gently urging “You can do it!” and then kicking a ball to her. Soon, (and thanks to his instruction) she is able to lift the ball very well. Seeing this, the boys playing on the eld regard her with surprise and admiration. At this point a slide with the picture of Big Ben and the title ‘London’ is inserted; at the same time the audience can hear a mobile phone ringing. The person receiving the call (which is actually an email) turns out to be Beckham, now presumably back in Britain, in a football team’s locker room.12 The suggestion is that he is receiving a message from the girl he instructed in Japan. Attached to the message is also a short private video, in which the girl, dressed 11

Sport celebrities seem to possess a distinct sign system that does not fully create familiarity with the audience. In many cases, knowledge about Beckham’s personality and the fact that he was a talented footballer did not result in a contradiction (even though these could clearly be discrepant traits). When audiences viewed the name ‘Victoria’ tattooed on the player’s arm during the broadcast of the World Cup game, some of them might have been reminded of the Beckhams’ love story, which was once covered by a magazine. Certainly, this did not devalue the player’s authenticity as a professional athlete. This example serves to underscore the reality that sport celebrities exist as a chain of (mediated) images over a broader symbolic eld—one that is comprised of signs (and maybe identities) both on and off the sporting eld. As their lives outside of sports are frequently covered by non-sport media, these signs are no less relevant or substantial. At the same time, these celebrities certainly continue to be perceived primarily as residents of their professional sphere. 12 The audience seems to be able to nd another, faceless ‘player’ in a red uniform. This seems to suggest that Beckham was located in the Manchester United locker room. Actually, this team and the British company, Vodafone, had just concluded a contract for a sponsorship agreement.

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in uniform, calls out in unison with the other members of the boys’ team: “We are teammates!” This communication aims at demonstrating how this particular technology can be used in exchanging short private videos internationally; it also serves as a way of differentiating itself from rival companies. This is highlighted by making reference to the great geographical distance between Europe and Japan. There is, as well, implicit reference to the lessening of social distance between Beckham and ordinary Japanese (embodied in the girl in the advertisement, but referring to all consumers in Japan). In other words, the underlying message of this advertisement, which ends with Beckham’s ubiquitous smile toward the girl and her friends, is that the company’s mobile phone enables unexpected things to come true. Just as the girl suddenly becomes to be skilled at football, a celebrity as remote to the normal, everyday Japanese consumer as the English football great David Beckham, could be made proximate thanks to communication technology. The advertisement asks the audience to believe that not only geographical distance, but social, cultural and linguistic distance can be spanned. Although this advertisement points to the engineering of proximity between Beckham and his Japanese fans, other evidence points to distance. One very good example of this can be found in Fuji television’s late night sport-entertainment program, Suporuto (Sport) in which a young Japanese female talent offered a series of reports on Beckham. Appropriately enough, the series was entitled ‘Weekend Beckham.’ In so doing, her perspective was much more that of a fan (representing the female audience in front of the television) rather than a reporter. This was especially true when the player visited Japan with his club team, Real Madrid in 2004 (at the invitation of and sponsored by Fuji TV). A number of examples occurred by which we saw this talent standing in for women throughout the country. For instance, in Japan it is customary for celebrities to engage in pre-arranged interviews; however, as Beckham received so many offers for interview, this particular talent had to resort to trying to interview Beckham spontaneously, after his practice game, without an appointment. Doing so made her appear to be no different than the legion of ‘ordinary’ female fans who thronged to Beckham’s public appearances, hoping to have a chance encounter with him. On this particular occasion, the sports program recorded its female correspondent enthusiastically watching a tape of Beckham’s play during her “private” time. This, again, conveyed the idea that she was consuming Beckham in a role apart from her job as reporter. Part of

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the record of her Beckham experience was also a ‘behind the scenes’ view of the strain she was experiencing before her interview. She was depicted as unable to sleep or eat in the day before the encounter. One way to interpret this episode is as a competition of celebrity signs between Beckham and the female talent. According to Marshall (1997), who has theorized entertainment celebrities semiotically, television celebrities can be dened as a sign system of familiarity. Considered this, one might estimate that this female talent and her performances represented the entire Japanese female audience. In turn, despite his appearance with her (and in large part because he is not primarily a television celebrity), Beckham came across as less familiar to the audience (than the reporter, one of their own). In short, semiotically he was more distant. In this way, Beckham’s image was constructed in a less proximate way via contrast with that of the Japanese female television performer. This distance was reinforced by the female reporter’s inability to secure an interview with Beckham, despite her extraordinary efforts and preparation. Her disappointment, like that of most ordinary fans who are generally rebuffed by celebrities, underscored the great distance between the player and others. Even when it comes to television celebrities (and certainly their audiences), Beckham stood at a remove. It should be noted that this image of Beckham as distant is not entirely due to an inequality in celebrity sign systems. Obviously some of this can be attributed to the enduring distinction between ‘Japan’ and the ‘West.’ Indeed, rather than the talent being a television personality or female, the fact that she was Japanese also seemed to be an important dimension in social distance. One indicator of this is how pre-recorded segments captured her preparing for the potential interview by practicing English. Her phrase “Hi David”—which by the Japanese standard seemed inappropriate for an interviewer who didn’t know the interviewee—underscores the non-trivial factor of a language barrier and differences in interpersonal communication between the two cultures. Becoming Close to a Western Celebrity, Becoming Closer to the ‘West’? The ‘Japan/the West’ distinction was not always invisible (behind the celebrity distance); sometimes it was treated in more overt, essentialist ways; ones that emphasized Beckham’s racial or national attributes. For instance, in a special issue of the weekly fashion magazine for young women, anan, while the ostensible focus was on learning the English language, Beckham was employed as a foil. The issue explained that

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Beckham’s charm was comprised of “his sincere attitude toward football and kind-hearted personality” and went on to (incongruously) suggest that, as evidence of this, the issue would focus on the footballer in his own words. Employing text from its exclusive interview with him remarks from past press conferences and his autobiography,13 anan stated that “the best way to attain what Beckham truly feels and thinks is to directly access his words in English without any translator.” The magazine’s editors challenged their readers to understand accurately Beckham’s ‘true mind’ through his actual speech in English. One might naturally ask just what is this ‘true mind,’ which one can nd only by accessing his original message in his native language? Does such an essence actually exist? My answer is that a reading of the text offered in the magazine suggests that this was all an illusion; there was no such ‘true mind,’ which could be understood only in Beckham’s native tongue. Nonetheless, in the hands of this Japanese magazine, its existence was asserted as actually there. What should be noted here is that the prepared text was far from adequate if it was truly hoping to achieve its goal of locating ‘Beckham’s essence.’ After all, it did not provide any social or cultural background that might give his messages any real signicance or something more than practical (or surface) linguistic meaning. Instead, the text was interpretable using the enumerating vocabularies and idioms. Despite this, the magazine held out a select set of (edited) texts, rendered only in a foreign language, English: the only tool capable of reaching the “true” Beckham. In short, based on an essential(ist) cultural distinction, Beckham and English were tied together and—both symbolically and practically—created a vacuum in the communication context. In this way, the distance between Beckham (as a celebrity) and Japanese audiences was replaced (or, made overlapped) with their language difference. In addition, because of this linguistic barrier, Beckham seemed to have been rendered culturally separate from message consumers, and this worked, of course, in the same way for his consumers.

13 The Japanese translation, Beckham’s autobiography sold over 330 thousand copies in ve months following its publication in April, 2002 (Ueda, 2002).

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Discussion Whatever one wishes to call it—domestication (Tobin, 1992), glocalization (Robertson, 1995) or hybridization (Pieterse, 1995)—the forms and processes by which Japan consumes foreign culture, have been the point to argue. One stimulating discussion can be found in an anthology edited by Tobin (1992). While the collection details the ways in which “Western goods, practices, and ideas are changed ( Japanized) in their encounter with Japan,” (Tobin, 1992, p. 4)14 it has been criticized for the static view that it adopts toward Japanese people and society. For instance, Iwabuchi (2002, p. 60) pointed out its lack of attention to “the dynamic socio-cultural transformations engendered by cultural hybridization and/or the internal cultural politics of difference pertaining to race, ethnicity, gender and class.” The apprehension here is that the anthology—especially its static analytical frame of “Japan’s import and indigenization of Western culture”—unexpectedly but unavoidably risks serving as a discourse that reproduces the essential view of cultural difference between ‘Japan’ and ‘the West.’ Another criticism—offered in the form of an alternative analysis of this ‘Japan consumes the West’ phenomena—has been advanced by Yoshimi (2003). First asserting that Tobin’s anthology tended to ignore the fact that the Japanese context for consumption of foreign things was historically and socially constructed, Yoshimi emphasizes the ambiguity and conversion between the ‘local’ (i.e. ‘Japan’) and the ‘global’ (i.e. the ‘West’). Yoshimi seems to feel that the anthology contained an aspect that was less emphasized than it should have been. There is a conversion process, he argues, that includes everyday perceptions. Under these conditions, contemporary Japanese consumers feel most familiar with traditionally Western things and vice versa (Yoshimi, 2003, pp. 181–188). This raises an important point in relation to the discussion at the heart of this chapter: the actual consumption of foreign culture and communication about it are not always one and the same. Representations 14 It should be noted that Tobin used the word, ‘domestication’ in the introduction of this anthology. This was, he explained, “to indicate a process that is active (unlike westernization, modernization, or postmodernization), morally neutral (unlike imitation or parasitism), and demystifying (there is nothing inherently strange, exotic, or uniquely Japanese going on here)” (1992, p. 4). He argued that Japan does not passively consume foreign things, but sets out to “tame, civilize, naturalize, make familiar, bring into the home them vis-à-vis the West” (ibid., p. 4).

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by the media and their interpretations of Beckham, of course, pertain to the latter. In truth, the complex interrelationships between these two levels—global and local (as well as the internal politics regarding, in this case, gender)—are often ignored or made less visible. In so doing, they also serve as the occasion for (re-)creating the distinction between ‘Japan’ and the ‘West’; so, too, do they impinge on Japan’s self-identication. In this way, representations and interpretations of Beckham by Japanese media served to dene Japanese identity in the way that Holden (2003) has suggested: in the form of sameness and difference. Thus, for Japanese, the player publicly served as a refracted image capable of shaping national identity; in this sense he served, in Buruma’s (1995) conception, as another “Japanese Mirror.” One simple example of this can be found in the adoption of ‘Beckham hair’ by Japanese boys and the media’s description of this phenomenon. For instance, an article published in a weekly magazine, ShÖkan Bunshun, in June 2002 commented that the hairstyle was not suitable for Japanese due to the shape of skull or their bristly black hair. In this account, even if Japanese adopted ‘Beckham hair,’ the color of their hair (i.e. black) would make its shape appear different than the original. With Japanese hair it was simply too hard to create the nuance of Beckham’s ‘soft Mohican.’ What is important here is that the denition of ‘Japanese’ in such comments reinforced traditional views and served essentialist ends. The fact is that in contemporary Japan dyed hair is accepted among a wide range of people (across age groups); and soft hair is one of the major types of hair available (as made obvious by numerous issues of magazines featuring hairstyles). Even if ‘Beckham hair’ had an inuence as a new trend, the category of hairstyle called ‘soft Mohican’ was not very new, especially among the younger generation. In addition, the shape of the skull was not, of course, always the same among all Japanese people. Nonetheless, the denition of ‘Japanese’ conveyed in the media depicted the population as a collective and homogeneous entity (and nally Japan as an entire nation). In so doing, the adoption of ‘Beckham hair’ was represented and interpreted as consumption of ‘foreign (or Western) culture.’ What is more, this distinction (which is also a means of creating Japanese identication) cropped up in the exchange of the intimacy between the Beckhams, which was curiously focused on and widely discussed in the Japanese media. An example of this appeared in the weekly magazine, AERA, which focused on the Beckhams’ public display of intimacy during their visit to Japan. The reportage was presented

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in ironic, jocular and even derisive tones. Inserting photographs taken of the pair during various moments that they appeared together in public—times at which their bodies were very close or intertwined, their hands held rmly, Victoria’s arm wound around Beckham’s neck—the magazine article emphasized the constant touching between the two. Interestingly, following the lead of this physical description, this article observed the couple’s relationship from a variety of perspectives. In the course of this treatment, the analysis provided by the article was rather vague. While it sometimes connoted that their public intimacy might be acceptable in their homeland (i.e. in England/back in the West), it also viewed the couple as special. In both cases, though (and importantly), the article tended to serve as a tool for shaping Japanese identity. For instance, stories began to notice the large degree to which Beckham assisted his spouse and they pointed out Victoria’s leadership in their relationship. Furthermore, their intimacy in public was identied as noteworthy. One theme that appeared was the comparison between the Beckhams (in their relationship) and typical Japanese relationships. In this vein, it was observed that David Beckham’s assistance was not unlike one of the more traditional types of Japanese relationships— whereby the male was likened to a true workman who gives priority to his job in a specialized eld. So, too, was Victoria’s skill in handling her husband compared with the case of the wife of a certain (famous) Japanese musician. Despite these cultural conjunctions, in the matter of their public display of love the couple was treated as decidedly unlike their Japanese counterparts. As with the case of ‘Beckham hair’, their behavioral pattern (or ‘fashion’) was dened by the media as unsuitable (or even strange) when applied to Japanese. It was explained that except for those who are in the beginning stages of dating, Japanese males and females do not (and also should not) behave in such ways. Indeed, in this report, the early stages were referred to as ‘the Beckham period.’ What should be emphasized here is the report’s view that this kind of sexual fashion was inappropriate for Japanese. It did not deny the legitimacy of, or suggest any negativity in, the couple’s actions. Rather, it was declaring how Japanese couples do/do not “ordinarily” express their love. Although the Beckham’s intimacy was avidly pursued, exposed and scrutinized, the Japanese media ultimately turned the lens back toward their audience, the Japanese; what they described referred to and sought comparison with the collectivity. By doing this, their reports served as a powerful reminder to the audience of the

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general and preferable ‘Japanese way’ of behaving, as between lovers in public. In this way, such communications can be identied as strong mediations on national identity. It is important, therefore, to recognize the multiple ways that ‘Beckham Fever’ led to meditations about Japanese self-description. As mentioned above, even when it came to something as seemingly trivial as hairstyle, discussions of Japanese-ness managed to be born. With regard to Beckham’s public intimacy with his wife, despite being labeled as pursuing ‘their own style’ rather than a ‘Western fashion,’ such episodes served as an excuse for or entrée into identifying the “ordinary” and preferable form of behaviour for Japanese. Beyond the actual diversity of lifestyles, values and behaviour that actually exist in Japan, the media chose to tie the Japanese people into one collective type, in terms of physical appearance, fashion, love and interpersonal relations. Throughout, media descriptions were generally traditional, conservative and nostalgic and, as a consequence, cultural distinctions were drawn (and ‘naturalized’ and made valid) between ‘Japan’ and the ‘West.’ Conclusion Sport celebrities embody globalization as commodities and popular images, as well as athletic laborers. Moreover, they are not only used to advance the purposes of the global sport-related business, they also are a part of what could be called the transnational ‘image business.’ This latter function is one that they perform in conjunction with their own marketing team by (and for) themselves. At the same time, their image is often appropriated and used by others, for derivative, if not parasitic purposes. Japan’s ‘Beckham Fever’ was certainly one case of this kind of transnational image marketing and use. Beckham was rst presented—actually, made his debut in Japan—by the Japanese media; this was done with the intention of increasing public (mainly female) attention to the World Cup. This strategy succeeded which, in turn, allowed Beckham to appear in Japanese advertisements under his own auspices, directed by his own marketing team. The Japanese image of Beckham can thus be understood in various ways: in terms of gender distinction, celebrity distance and the complex dynamics of global business and popular culture.

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However, it is important to note that the marketing and consumption of Beckham in Japan was not unrelated to distinction of ‘Japan/the West.’ Such a distinction, as explained above, is deep-seated in Japanese culture. It is an identication of long-standing. Regarding gender, in the hands of the Japanese media, it sometimes intersected, if not generated, discourse on Japan’s national identity. As I observed above, media did not simply circulate and reproduce images of gender roles (as in the case of Beckham as father or Beckham as perfect husband), but also emphasized the ‘stereotypical’ sexual preference of Japanese females—that is, their ‘worship’ of Caucasian (or ‘Western’) males. This, of course, is as ironic, as it is likely to be a caricature. In so doing, it depicted those females not merely as Beckham fans, but also as Japanese females who were addicted to ‘white’ males. In short, the angle employed by Japanese media in treating Beckham and Japanese females who were addicted to him was not only one of ‘men and women,’ but also ‘the West (or others) and the Self (i.e. Japan).’ What is more, in the irony-tinged descriptions of female worship of ‘white’ (or the ‘West’), an ironic undercurrent of national pride rippled through. Thus, a series of media reports on female Beckham fans could be identied as containing within it something we might refer to as ‘gendered national identity.’ Here we can see the intersection of gender and cultural nationalism (or, a form of national identication). In summary, it could be said that media representations engendered by ‘Beckham Fever’ contained distinctive identication of (and separation between) self and others, sometimes involving an essentialist view of what it was to be Japanese, as opposed to ‘others’ beyond national and cultural boundaries. What is more, and what is crucial here, is that while Beckham’s image in Japanese media (and ultimately society) was not simply imported from England, Japan’s mediated identity did remain very much xed; if anything it became even more solidied. Japan’s mediation of David Beckham greatly expanded the national sense of self and nationhood. Beyond Beckham is the phenomenon of the increasing ‘global’ character of Japan’s celebrity world. Observing the trend of the internationalization of Japanese consumption patterns, Clammer (1998, p. 95) claimed that “Japan is consuming the world.” This is also true when we consider the Japanese consumption of celebrities. Part and parcel of this trend is the interesting dimension of relatively anonymous people who leave their homeland then become immensely popular in Japan. This has happened often, especially with sports celebrities; the

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most notable current case being the African-American K-1 boxer, Bob Sapp.15 Despite Japan’s racist reputation, Sapp has managed to develop a large fan base. While he remains relatively unknown as a boxer in his homeland,16 his popularity in Japan has skyrocketed to the point where he has received the (media) label ‘the people’s beast.’ The increasing visibility of celebrities in everyday life is important to Japan, as this world offers a window into the actual multi-ethnicity of Japanese society. Although often ignored or denied, such multiplicity does exist and can be found in the increasing presence of those who are ethnically or racially mixed, the descents of Korean or Chinese, Japanese Americans, Okinawans17 and foreigners who are culturally Japanese. It is often said that Japanese possess the belief that “Land = People = Culture = Language” (Befu, p. 71).18 This, in turn, strongly shapes conceptions of self (and others). This rm tie between geography, population (or race),19 culture and language has helped keep Japan ‘monoethnic’ (Lie, 2001). Although it ies in the face of Japan’s multi-ethnic reality, it remains an iron-clad myth by shutting racial, ethnic, national and cultural others out of recognition or the right to claim status as “Japanese.” In this respect, ethnically other celebrities—including Namie Amuro and some mixed fashion models such as Anna Tsuchiya—may be recognized as challengers (whether winners or losers) to Japan’s mythical unitary identity. In concluding this chapter, I want to suggest that celebrities, including sports celebrities, are a fruitful means for conducting empirical research about globalization and national identity (or nationalism). This is true, I would argue, not only in the case of David Beckham being consumed in Japan, but that of any number of public performers in other societies. So, too, will such analysis be applicable at non-national levels. For now and into the future, such inquiries should lead to meaningful

15 This serves as more evidence to support Holden’s (2003) contention, introduced above, that the signicance and position of sports culture in contemporary Japanese society is steadily increasing. 16 He was a star in (American) college football and then played four years in the National Football League before coming to Japan. 17 In general, Okinawans were perceived as Japanese (i.e. “Okinawa kenmin”). Despite this, they have been problematized in ethnic studies as evidence of Japan’s multiethnicity. 18 Befu’s model was an extension of Sugimoto’s (1999). 19 In Befu’s model, ‘people’ was perceived as a racialized concept, as many others viewed it in criticizing Nihonjinron.

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Sugiyama, Shigeru. 2001. “SakkÊ WÊrudokappu HÔsÔken Bijinesu no KÔbÔ” in SupÔtsu HÔsÔken Bijinesu Saizensen, edited by Medyia SÔgÔ KenkyÖjyo. Tokyo: Kadensha, pp. 11–31. Takahashi, YÔji. 2002. “WÊrudo Kappu, JyÖtten Sashiageru,” Sports Graphic Number, July 3, p. 11. TBC. 2003 “TBC ‘Just Beauty’ KyanpÏn” Available online at http://www.tbc.co.jp/ topics/20021115_justcm.html (accessed April 28, 2005). ———. 2005. “Bekkamu Web GararÒ.” Available online at http://www.tbc.co.jp/gallery/gallery.html (accessed April 28, 2005). The Observer Special Reports. 2003. “Women like Beckham because he’s a good husband and father and because he’s cool enough to pose for gay photos . . . and they like his God-given gorgeousness,” 7 July 2002. Available online at http:// observer. guardian.co.uk/worldcup2002/story/0,11031,749235,00.html (accessed December 9, 2003) Tobin, Joseph J. (ed.) 1992. “Introduction: Domesticating the West,” in Re-made in Japan: Everyday Life and Consumer Taste in a Changing Society, edited by Joseph J. Tobin. London: Yale University Press. Ueda, Jyunko. 2002. “Bekkamu: ‘Hugen JikkÔ’ no KyaputenshÒ ga Hitobito no Mune o Atsuku Suru,” The 21 19, pp. 8–9. Vande Berg, Laurel R. 1998. “The Sports Hero Meets Mediated Celebrityhood,” in Media Sports and Society, edited by Lawrence A. Wenner. London: Routledge. Watts, Jonathan. 1998. “Soccer Shinhatsubai: What are Japanese Consumers Making of the J. League?” in The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures, edited by Dolores P. Martinez. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wenner, Lawrence A. (ed.) 1989. Media, Sports, and Society. Newbury Park: Sage Publications. ———. (ed.) 1998. Mediasport. London: Routledge. Whannel, Garry. 1992. Fields in Vision: Television Sport and Cultural Transformation. London: Routledge. ———. 2002. Media Sport Stars: Masculinities and Moralities. London: Routledge. WOWOW. 2005. Nisensan Nendo Jyanru-betsu HosÔ Jisseki. Available online at http://www.wowow.co.jp/co_info/data.html (accessed April 28). Yabe, Mariko. 2003. “Koi ni okeru “Bekkamu-ki”: Karera ga Omoidasaseru Kanbi na ano Tokimeki,” AERA, July 7, pp. 47–9. Yoshimi, Shunya. 2003. Karuchuraru TÊn, Bunka no Seijigaku e. Kyoto: Jinbun Shoin. Yoshino, Kosaku. 1997. Bunkanashonarizumu no Shakaigaku. Aichi: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai. ———. 1999. “Rethinking Theories of Nationalism: Japan’s Nationalism in a Marketplace Perspective,” in Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism: Asian Experiences, edited by Kosaku Yoshino. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Chapter 7

On the Globalization of the Self: Internet Weblogs as an Identity-forming Activity Oscar Bulaong Jr. On the World Wide Web and Weblogs During the infancy of the Word Wide Web, academic, government and commercial institutions produced most of the content on the Internet. Until the late 1990s, the Web was simply a new medium for delivering information and online services by already established institutions. Personal webpages were few and far between because only those who had learned to code html, the language of webpage creation, could publish in the electronic medium of the Internet. This meant that if one wanted to create a webpage, one had to learn a new language. Thus, most personal webpages were maintained by individuals who worked as website developers for institutions and who spent their off-work hours surng the Internet and maintaining their own websites. Then in 1999, build your own website tools became popular. These tools were free services and applications that enabled amateurs to create and edit webpages. Hence, more and more people started publishing personal websites and they multiplied rapidly with the advent of what were eventually called weblogs.1 A weblog is basically a webpage that consists of dated entries where the weblog editor, called the blogger, is free to post links to other websites and publish essays or commentaries of any nature and topic. Normally, a weblog serves as an online journal where the weblog editor has the ability to publish anything on the global network: daily reections, reactions to current events, graphic les, and music.2

1 Some examples of weblog providers are www.blogger.com, www.manilasites.com, www.livejournal.com, and www.pitas.com. These sites claim to offer free and easy to update pages with easy to use web interfaces. 2 For a closer look at the cultural inuences of weblogs, an anthology of essays was recently published by Rebecca Blood, ed., We’ve Got Blogs: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture (Cambridge: Perseus Publishing, 2002).

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Since then, the World Wide Web has not been the same, because content has gone far beyond what established institutions had made available. Previously, Internet users comprised the audience or spectators who passively received information and services from content providers, such as news services and government information agencies. Now the public can participate in the delivery of Internet content in and through weblogs. In this case, the World Wide Web has truly become a public space. In January 2004, an Internet census reported that almost 1.7 million sites on the World Wide Web were weblogs.3 This phenomenon is unique. A journal or diary remains private and personal as it reects a person’s thoughts and opinions, but a weblog brings these into an electronic and global medium. The journal becomes public, because a weblog provides a space in which to publish trivial stories, reactions to mundane affairs, personal lists and experiences. The weblog editor as a journal writer now has an audience; the medium is electronic and the audience is global. Thus, the central interest of this chapter is the weblog as an electronic and global journal. What is signicant about this phenomenon? What does a weblog do to and for the person who maintains it? How can we understand this new phenomenon in the context of what it means to be a human being? Or more specically, how does the weblog determine the identity of a human being in this global and electronic age? These questions are given signicance in a remarkable essay by one of the rst weblog editors on the Internet: Shortly after I began producing Rebecca’s Pocket I noticed two side effects I had not expected. First, I discovered my own interests. I thought I knew what I was interested in, but after linking stories for a few months I could see that I was much more interested in science, archaeology, and issues of injustice than I had realized. More importantly, I began to value more highly my own point of view. In composing my link text every day I carefully considered my own opinions and ideas, and I began to feel that my perspective was unique and important.4

3 NITLE Blog Census from http://www.blogcensus.net/, retrieved on 26 January 2004. According to the homepage, the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Arts (NITLE) “weblog census is an attempt to nd as many active weblogs as possible, across all languages.” This online census has been active since 2003. 4 Rebecca Blood, from “Rebecca’s Pocket,” http://www.rebeccablood.net/, retrieved on 26 January 2004.

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Thus, I study the weblog phenomenon in the light of self-formation. I will attempt to uncover the process of identity-formation in a philosophical manner, which means reecting on how a weblog not only exhibits one’s identity but more so determines it. To do this I will use a framework that is neither in the context of cultural studies nor the social sciences, but one that surveys the history of ideas to grasp a fundamental insight into being human. The path towards this reection begins with the question of what identity means. I will briey examine how, in ancient and medieval thought, the metaphysical categories of being and substance provided the belief that the self is abstract and essential. Then, I uncover how contemporary thinkers, particularly Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, have rejected the notion of self-as-substance and how it is possible to conceive of the human self from an historico-temporal and contingent perspective. I will explain why the notion of self-assubstance must be replaced with the self as an historical artifact. Next, I will look more closely at Foucault’s articulation of the new axis that contemporary ethics rests on: the subtle relations that people have with themselves, or the care of the self. In this new axis, I will elaborate on how we can begin to understand the human self in aesthetic—and no longer in normative—terms. This insight reveals the manifold possible disclosures of the human self. In this reection I will draw upon a clearer understanding of the weblog phenomenon, that each weblog is, ultimately, an exercise of free self-creation as a work of art. On the History of the Self as Substance and its Rejection The concept of self can be traced back to the ancient Greek word ousia, which dominated much of Aristotle’s metaphysical insights. It is the fundamental and foundational principle of being, which many thinkers consider to be the concept with which Western metaphysics began. This was eventually translated into the Latin word substancia (or substance). Medieval thinkers understood substance as the unchanging inner core of an existent that unies its various attributes. Substance also functions as the hidden and underlying ground, or that which ‘stands under’ (sub + stare) any real being. In the modern period the term substance evolved into what is called subject or subjectivity, which means, in a manner similar to its Latin origin, ‘thrown under’ (sub + jaceo). Substance and subjectivity, in this

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context, differed little in meaning, but a signicant change happened in the modern period. While substance, in the Middle Ages, could refer to the ground and unifying core of any real being, Descartes designated subjectivity to be solely the human consciousness. The initially self-certifying Cartesian subjectivity, or that which utters ‘cogito ergo sum cogitans,’ became the fundamental conception of selfhood. Notice that the word that originally had applied to everything came to be used specically for the human being. It is with these originary insights into being, which led the history of ideas to consider the self as substantial, that the self became the substantial core that gives unity and identity to the human being’s manifold attributes and experiences. Or simply, the self became subject/ subjectivity. It was believed that the reality of a person is substantial; it is stable and xed. The self as substance refers to self-identity to the point of meaning ‘always being the same’ and completion. Furthermore, the human self received a new and exalted status, the self-grounding starting point of reality. This means that the self as subjectivity—when it confronts the “object” in the subject-object duality—is the point of departure and validating ground for our knowledge of the world. It is interesting how Heidegger rejects the understanding of ousia— which later became substance and subjectivity—as the underlying ground of any being. He justies this rejection by interpreting ousia not as substance or subjectivity but as dynamic absence. What does he mean by this interpretation? In the context of his phenomenology of the human being as being-in-the-world, what is most primordial is not the subject-object duality of modern philosphy but a “clearing” in which humans, along with all other entities in the world, emergeinto-presence. This insight reects on the question of what is most primordial or fundamental in the existence of things, and the insight is plain; namely, before any thing comes to exist in a specic place and time, there is an initial clearing or opening, which is nothing other than absence. The clearing or opening that is absence allows a being to manifest its appearance. This means that appearance occurs against a background of absence. It is the clearing of absence, after all, that makes the appearance of a thing possible. Thus, absence is the fundamental condition of the entity, not presence that is ‘always being the same’. In this context, Heidegger claims that “self and world belong together . . . [they] are not two beings, like subject and object; . . . they

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are the basic determination . . . in the unity of the structure of beingin-the-world” (Heidegger, 1982, p. 297).5 Thus Heidegger rejects the notion of the ‘self as subject that confronts the object’. When he rejects the self in this light, he also rejects its characteristic as being xed and unchanging. Instead, with the conception of the self as a dynamic absence, he opens up the manifold possible disclosures of the human being. This means that the possibilities of what may emerge from the self as absence are diverse and not pre-determined, that there are many ways—and not just one—that the human becomes real. The shortcomings of the lineage of the self become manifest in this light, because we have inherited the idea of the self as xed, abstract and ‘always being the same’. Viewing the contemporary period one can still see how thinkers are dealing with this lineage of the self. In particular, the French thinker Michel Foucault takes into account JeanPaul Sartre’s notion of the self. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre asserts that self-creation is based on the human capacity to bestow meaning in one’s situatedness. (Sarte, 1984) He avoids the notion of a ‘true self ’ as a substance and proposes the situated and open nature of free self-creation. However, in the same text, Sartre employs the term ‘authenticity’ as part of this exercise of freedom, of which Foucault takes particular note. Foucault believes that in Sartre’s notion of ‘authenticity’ there are traces of a xed self—a center or core—that suggests a substratum of substantiality. In Sartre’s attempt to dene the self through authenticity, he “turns back to the idea that we have to be ourselves—to be truly our true self.” (Foucault, 1983, pp. 61–9) Foucault believes that the Sartrean notion of self-creation remains rooted in the Western metaphysical tradition. Thus, Foucault opposes the notion of authenticity, that one needs to be liberated to come to terms with one’s ‘true self,’ because there is no conceptually bounded ‘self ’ to reveal in the rst place. Instead he returns to Friedrich Nietzsche’s account of the self as an historical construct, that the human self emerges from within a specic historical contingency.

5 For a more detailed account of Heidegger’s critique of the traditional conceptions of selfhood, see Michael Zimmerman, Eclipse of the Self: The Development of Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity (Athens: Ohio University Press), pp. 23–31.

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Foucault believes that, on the one hand, the self can be considered as passively controlled and constituted by power, an effect of various modes of subjection by social and institutional forces. On the other hand, he believes that the self, in the practice of its relation to itself, fashions its own identity. This means that the human being is the active agent that constitutes itself in its specic historical situatedness. While the self emerges within the constraints of discursive and institutional forces in the world, it is still in the practice of constituting itself in the face of such forces. By returning to Nietzsche, Foucault replaces the Sartrean project of authenticity with the Nietzschean project of the creative construction of oneself. Foucault argues that: What I rejected was the idea of starting out with a theory of the subject—as is done, for example, in phenomenology or existentialism—and, on the basis of this theory, asking how a given form of knowledge was possible. What I wanted to try to show was how the subject constituted itself, in one specic form or another . . . through certain practices. (Foucault, 1984, p. 290)

Here it is clear that Foucault does not consider the self as substantial; it is not a metaphysical given in the way that the Cartesian res cogitans or Sartrean ‘authenticity’ is identied with the self. But what does it entail for the self not to be a substance? Foucault believes that the self is a form that is not always identical to itself, that it is unxed and thus changeable. Ian Hacking claries Foucault’s rejection of any conception of the self: Where previous nominalists thought of the self as making up its own categories, Foucault did not imagine that there is any self, any ego, any I waiting to do that. Each human subject—you, me—is an artifact.6 (Hoy, 1986, p. 235)

To consider the self as an artifact is to think of it as a product of civilization, and likewise the product of individuals constituting themselves. It is clear that Foucault’s business is not to proffer his own idea of what the individual is or should be.7 His intention is not only to refrain from answering the question of who we are, but to disallow others from 6

Emphasis added. The problem, Foucault believes, lies in the business of coming up with normative principles of what the individual ought to be. Foucault calls this the “government of individuation.” Michel Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, eds. Richard Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chacago Press, 1983), p. 212. 7

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answering the question as well, for the result is the oppression and entrapment of the individual.8 Any articulation of a universal human nature or substance, after all, forces individual conformity. Foucault believes that institutions throughout history have imposed what is to be idealized as the uniform human nature. This employment of power results in a philosophical, scientic, or therapeutic ‘truth’ about the human being. Thus, Foucault struggles against any positive theory of the individual that claims to know the truth about human nature. What, then, can be said about the individual? What idea can we have apart from the fact that human beings are artifacts that they themselves produce? James Bernauer identies a kind of “negative theology” with the question concerning the self.9 He proposes what is called “apophatic discourse” (from the Greek apophanai, to deny) for the self, which is a reminder of negative theology. On the one hand, whatever is said about God is not entirely true because He transcends that which is said; no human articulation or conception can fully comprehend the truth about God. On the other hand, what is denied about God, or what is said about that which God is not, is true because it heeds God’s transcendence of human categories. John Caputo claries what Bernauer meant to associate with negative theology: Foucault wants to keep open the negative space of what the individual is not, of what we cannot say the individual is, to preserve the space of a certain negativity that refuses all positivity, all identication, that is always in the end a historical trap.10

If human knowledge of God is always insufcient, then the denial of what we know of God is called for so that one can be open to the revelation of God in history. Likewise, whatever knowledge we have of the human being and human nature is always inadequate. We reject any concept of human essence. In this case, Foucault clears the space of what the individual is not, of what cannot be said about the human being. Apophatic discourse clears the space that allows creation apart

8

Ibid., p. 211. “The Prisons of Man: An Introduction to Foucault’s Negative Theology” in International Philosophical Quarterly 27:4 (December 1987), pp. 365–81. 10 “On Not Knowing Who We Are: Madness, Hermeneutics, and the Night of Truth in Foucault,” in Foucault and the Critique of Institutions, eds. John Caputo and Mark Yount (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1993), p. 251. 9

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from the normative ideal, because any kind of positive identication would always end in an ‘historical trap’. What philosophers must do is ask not, like Descartes, “What am I?”—as if there were a general answer—but like Kant, (“what is Enlightenment?”), who are we now, at this particular moment of our historical constitution.11

Thus far, I have explained why Foucault rejects any theory of the self, but have not yet explored the importance that he attributes to the work of the self on the self. In this light, Foucault’s interest lies in the practices of the self that it employs to constitute itself; in other words, the care of the self. Care of the Self and the Practice of Freedom In his essay “Hermeneutic of the Subject,” Foucault enumerates and describes the different aspects or functions of the care of the self: that is, what typically consists in self-work. First, care of the self fullls a critical function. “The practice of the self must enable one to get rid of all the bad habits, all the false opinions that one can get from the crowd or from bad teachers, but also from parents and associates.” (Foucault, 1984, p. 97) Such practice aims to disburden or disencumber the individual from ineffective behavior. One must be able to discern and distinguish the good in oneself apart from the bad, to sever the undesirable and ineffective in oneself. People make themselves into objects that are subjected to critique. In a weblog, this happens when in the course of daily life the weblog editor narrates a mistake that they made, such as telling a lie. The act of narrating this lie allows the person to observe their behavior and reactions, as well as their reasons for lying. This enables them to assess what might be a better course of action in the future. Furthermore, the care of the self has the function of struggle or resistance. Foucault understands human struggle to be the permanent condition of the care of the self because struggle is an indispensable characteristic of human existence. “It is not simply a matter of shaping a man of valor for the future. The individual must be given the weapons and the courage that will enable him to ght all his life.” (Foucault,

11

Ibid., p. 252.

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1984, p. 97) To describe the human condition as a constant struggle points to the many and varied ways one has to strive to transcend not only the forces of domination acting upon oneself, but more importantly, those forces acting within one’s own desires. This means that people can become the slaves of their own appetites. Here we can speak of struggling against a certain ‘fascism’ within ourselves that could, if left unchecked, lead to tyranny and domination. In their daily entries, weblog editors often write about their workload, when their days are especially stressful or when a project has just been accomplished and it is time to indulge. In this situation, weblog editors learn to be moderate, discerning the line between excess and decient amounts of effort. They castigate themselves for being complacent, and praise themselves for being hardworking. Finally, care of the self has a curative and therapeutic function. This function more closely resembles the medical model rather than the pedagogical model because the intent, above all, of self-cultivation is to heal the diseases of the soul. Foucault recalls that one “must bear in mind certain facts that are very ancient in Greek culture: the existence of a notion such as pathos, which denotes both mental passion and physical illness. (Foucault, 1984, p. 97) Similarly, Caputo speaks of a ‘we’ who are “beset by an apprehensiveness that our sane, healed, whole lives mask a deeper rupture.” (Caputo and Yount, 1993, p. 259) Thus, care of the self aims at healing, nursing, amputating and purging both the mind and body. Concretely, Foucault cites the practices of journal writing (hupomnemata in the Greek, which literally means copybook or notebook) as a development of an ethic that was very explicitly directed towards care of oneself. An Internet weblog is an ‘account of oneself ’ that is directed towards denite objectives, such as “retiring into oneself, living with oneself, being sufcient to oneself, proting by and enjoying oneself,” which have healing value. (Foucault, 1984, p. 274) These aspects reveal the care of the self as not merely an ethical principle, but more so a concrete form of activity. It is not a form of comprehension or attention that focuses on the self. More than an act of the intellect, the care of the self is an act of the will. The ancient Greeks tell us that the care of the self designates not merely a preoccupation but a whole set of occupations. It is not a single, all-encompassing act but a prevailing care throughout one’s life. This prevailing care refers to a whole domain of complex and regulated activities, so it is lled with exercises, practical tasks and various activities. Thus, the care of the self is an organized occupation that is technical and

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procedural in nature. It implies labor on the self and thus is in the domain of action. Concretely, this domain recalls the Greek idea of ethos as a way of being and behaving. An ethos is a person’s manner of being, which is evident in that person’s gait, in the way that they speak, in their clothing and general disposition. A person’s ethos is the concrete form of their freedom that is visible to others. This is the result of the practices of the self that it employs to constitute itself. Here, the issue of human freedom comes to light, because the practices of the self are precisely what dene forms of life. Instead of searching for formal structures with universal value, we are interested in the “events that have led us to constitute ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, [and] saying.” (Foucault, 1984, p. 314) This means that we identify self-constitution as the practice of freedom. Kant is responsible for establishing freedom as a practice, because it is not an object of cognition that one comes upon by thinking or contemplating. One postulates freedom as a matter of practical reason. I do not merely know or understand myself to be free; instead, I posit myself to be free as I act and insofar as I act. Kant asserts that freedom becomes real through action. The only way to be truly free is to actualize oneself; in other words, the demand to actualize oneself is precisely freedom. In this case freedom is neither nature nor essence, but precisely the lack of nature or essence. To speak of freedom is to understand it as capacity for novelty and origination. Radically, this means that there is nothing positive that can be said about freedom— except that we create our ethos within the open space that freedom is. Freedom, after all, is possibility. The question thus arises: does freedom imply pure possibility that, in its operation, is transformed to nished, actualized freedom? No. There is never an idyllic commencement of freedom where it is pure and unhindered. For Foucault, freedom necessarily involves the question of power, for one’s freedom operates from within a host of interpersonal, social, institutional and personal forces of domination that act upon or within a human being. This means that freedom begins with limits. (Bernauer and Rashmussen, 1994, p. 64) One always starts in a specic and contingent situation where forces of domination are present. There is always unfreedom as well as freedom. This notion of limitedness provides the possibility for freedom as an exercise, because the confrontation with limits sets up the opportunity to transgress those very limits.

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In the context of self-constitution, transgression means being at the frontier of one’s existence so that new forms of life become possible, because what is beyond the limit, beyond the already normalized way of life, is new and unique. The encounter with limits allows new modes of creation. A profusion of possibilities emerge in the face of limits. Self-constitution is meant to be a certain choosing or inventing of oneself, so that freedom is deliberately practiced and trained toward what Foucault calls the ‘technologies of the self,’ or the manifold ways that one relates to one’s self. Thus, the self is constituted in the governance of the one’s thoughts and actions. The nal objective . . . is to establish a certain number of relations with oneself. These relations are sometimes conceived on the juridico-political model: to be sovereign over oneself, to exert a perfect self-mastery over oneself, to be completely ‘self-possessed’ (eri suum, Seneca often says). (Foucault, 1984, p. 96)

Self-mastery is about how we fashion our freedom: that is, after all, how we fashion our selves. Instead of a metaphysical, essential conceptualization of the self as model, Foucault proposes the practice of creativity. What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something related only to objects and not to individuals or life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life? . . . From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art. (Foucault, 1984, p. 262)

To create the self as a work of art points to self-constitution as an aesthetic of existence; in other words, we situate the entire task of selfconstitution in aesthetic terms. This means that the self, taking itself as a work to be accomplished, undertakes to create a life—indeed, a way of living—that is beautiful. The task ceases to be the moral problem of being obedient or authentic to one’s essential nature, as if human nature were a law or norm. The task is to evolve a style of existence that is not fastened to some code of moral behavior. Foucault claims that “the principal work of art one must take care of, the main area one must apply aesthetic values, is oneself, one’s life, one’s existence.” (Foucault, 1984, p. 271) Once self-constitution is associated with an aesthetics of existence, human life becomes a task of stylization.

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I have articulated how Heidegger conceives of a new possibility for understanding the human being, that instead of considering the self as some thing that already is, he claims that the self is not yet; it is absent. Only in a dynamic absence is the self unhindered in appearing uniquely, rather than uniformly according to some notion of human essence. In this absence, the manifold and innite possible disclosures of being human, of being a self, come to fore. Therefore, conformity to an abstract and substantial self ceases under the light of the self as dynamic absence. I have also showed how, in the contemporary period, this transformation is parallel to Foucault’s critique of Sartrean ‘authenticity’ in favor of Nietzsche’s account of the human as an historical construct, as an artifact produced by one’s freedom. The common insight is that all individuals must project themselves into the historical and contingent situation in which they are rooted. There they learn something of themselves in the movement of free self-creation. This is precisely what weblog editors do. In their own personal web ‘spaces’ they make their own personal stake in the vast world of the Internet. In and through the disclosures of themselves in the electronic ‘space,’ regardless of how trivial or insignicant the entries might be to us, they interpret their experiences and thereby create the meaning of their identity, free from any normative standards. Selfcreation is nothing other than self-interpretation, the act of bestowing meaning on one’s situatedness. Furthermore, we can relate Foucault’s description of the different aspects of the care of the self, or what consists of the work of identityformation, to the practice of maintaining a weblog. To varying degrees, publishing a weblog as one’s journal serves critical and therapeutic functions as well as the function of struggle and resistance. Ultimately, the weblog discloses a particular editor’s unique manner of being and behaving; it reveals their ethos. This disclosure demonstrates the capacity for novelty and origination, that this person exercises their freedom from their specic situatedness. The remarkable contribution of Foucault to understanding weblogs as an identity-forming activity emerges at this juncture. To identify selfcreation with the practice of creativity, to “create ourselves as a work of art,” is to conrm the transformation of our understanding of the self. If we cease to employ a normative ideal—a substantial and essential self—with which to conform, in the spirit of the manifold possibilities

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for being human, then identity-formation can be associated with an aesthetic of existence. By placing creativity within the task of self-constitution, Foucault frees this task from any moral imperative, because stylization takes the place of the quest for the universal standards of behavior. Stylization refers to the exercise of freedom that respects the integrity of a human being’s place or role in the global society. Notice that we are now speaking in an historical context where self-constitution is confronted by unique, singular and contingent experiences rather than uniform and universal categories. This means that self-constitution differs for the Filipino teacher, the Chinese businessman or the weblog editor who writes in Dutch. We have brought down self-constitution to the factical life of activities and practices of the individual. The multiplicity of beautiful designs that one witnesses as one browses various weblogs is evidence of this new kind of identity-formation. The weblog editor has something to teach us: that ultimately, the practice of stylization of one’s weblog, as a reection of one’s ethos, invites us to exercise identity-formation according to one’s rootedness in the world and in the global society. REFERENCES Bernauer, James and David Rashmussen, eds. 1994. The Final Foucault. London: The MIT Press. Caputo, John and Mark Yount, eds. 1993. Foucault and the Critique of Institutions. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1984. The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1985. The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1986. The History of Sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1984. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1982. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, translated by Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hoy, David, ed. 1986. Foucault: A Critical Reader. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1984. Being and Nothingness. Washington: Washington Square Press.

Chapter 8

Hybrid Language and Hybrid Identity? The Case of Cantonese-English Code-switching in Hong Kong Brian Chan Hok-shing Hybrid Language, Hybrid Identity? The Case of Hong Kong ‘Hybridity’ is always the buzzword in descriptions of Hong Kong and its culture. Not only is it the image actively promoted by the government and the Tourist Association (namely, Hong Kong is ‘the meeting point of East and West’—see Lee (2000) for a sociolinguistic account of this ideology), it has been the topic of much discussion among many writers, critics and social scientists. There is no doubt that Hong Kong culture is ‘hybrid’ in the sense that it comprises Chinese and Western elements, and accordingly it is both Chinese and Western and yet neither (completely) Chinese nor (completely) Western. It is commonly assumed that this cultural hybridity is attributable to Hong Kong being a former British colony for about one and a half centuries (i.e. 1842 to 1997), geographically peripheral to the Chinese borders and politically separated from the motherland. What has been (perhaps a little) less apparent and far more recent is that the language spoken by most people in Hong Kong is also ‘hybrid’. For many people, young and old, the Cantonese they speak is often interspersed with English elements from single words to phrases or even sentences. These elements are not instances of ‘borrowing’ or ‘loanwords’ that are phonologically assimilated to Cantonese (such as “baa1 si2(bus)”, “dik1 si2(taxi)”, etc.),1 but elements that are spoken with English pronunciation and ‘felt’ to be English by the listeners, who sometimes speak out against the use of too much ‘English’. Very often these code-switched English terms acquire more specic meaning than their sources (Gibbons, 1987, Li, 2001, Li and Tse, 2002). One

1 The transcription of Cantonese in this paper follows the system devised by The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong ( Jyut6 Ping3—Cantonese romanization).

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may not be surprised by the emergence of code-switching given Hong Kong’s exposure to and adoption of Western culture for more than a century. Indeed, many of these code-switched English words or phrases are related to culture or technology that has been ‘imported’ from the West (Li, 1996, Li and Tse, 2002). The question that I will investigate in this chapter is, given that language is a primary means of expressing one’s identity ( Joseph, 2004, Le Page and Taboret-Keller, 1985, Taboret-Keller, 1997), does a ‘hybrid’ language (for instance, Cantonese-English code-switching as spoken in Hong Kong) project a ‘hybrid’ identity (of Cantonese/Chinese and Westerner)? The logical assumption is that there is a ‘hybrid identity’ on a par with a ‘hybrid language’ and a ‘hybrid culture’. Nonetheless, the position I defend here is the contrary: there is little evidence that such a ‘hybrid’ identity has been fostered. This position contradicts a static and straightforward relationship between language and identity; rather, it lends support to the view that this relationship is more dynamic and intricate than popularly assumed (Le Page and Taboret-Keller, 1985, Taboret-Keller, 1997, also see Pavlenko and Blackledge (eds.), 2001). In fact, there are cultural differences as to whether the language one speaks is considered to be a symbol of one’s social/ethnic/national/cultural identity (Kramsch, 1998). Before I turn to the arguments from which I derive my thesis, let me rst present background information about Cantonese-English codeswitching in Hong Kong and the research done on this topic. Who ‘Code-switches’ to Whom, and When and Where? By ‘code-switching’ I mean the use of more than one language in a single conversation (Gumperz, 1982) or text. For various theoretical and practical reasons, the phenomenon has alternatively been called ‘code-mixing’ (Chan, 1993, Gibbons, 1987, etc.) or ‘code-alternation’ (Li and Tse, 2002), but here I use ‘code-switching’ according to the common practice in the bilingualism/code-switching literature (Heller, 1988, Milroy and Muysken, 1995). To my knowledge, the earliest empirical studies of code-switching between Cantonese (the lingua-franca of ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong; see Luke and Richards, 1982, Li, 1999) and English date from the late 1970s (Gibbons, 1979). Accordingly, I assume that the phenomenon of Cantonese-English code-switching may very well have emerged at that

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time. It seemed that code-switching was rst a kind of youth talk spoken by university students (Gibbons, 1979, 1987) but was soon found in the speech of working adults (Leung, 1987, Reynolds, 1985), including many Chinese teachers who were supposed to speak English as the medium of instruction in the classroom (see Lin, 1996 for a socio-historical review). By the time I conducted my research in early 1990s, it had been observed that people who regularly engaged in code-switching spanned from secondary school students to adults (many of whom had lived in English-speaking countries), and data were collected not only from participant observation but also from radio phone-in programs and television interviews (Chan, 1993, 1998). While code-switching originated from the spontaneous speech of Hong Kong bilinguals, around 1997 it emerged in various media channels. Chinese scripts and English alphabets are juxtaposed in the same written texts in print advertisements (Cheung, 1997), newspapers (Li, 1996) and magazines (Lee, 2000), even though there has been a strong norm of the use of ‘pure’ ‘standard’ Chinese (Li, 1996, 1999, Snow, 2004). Spoken code-switching has inltrated into media genres such as radio (S.-L. Li, 1996, Pennington, Chan and Lau, 1996) and pop songs (Brian Chan, 2004b, Candy Chan, 2003). My personal impression is that the use of code-switching has been somewhat less widespread in certain media (such as newspaper) after 1997, but it denitely exists and can be found occasionally. Pending further investigation, this may well reect a ‘purication’ process—conscious or unconscious—that has been concomitant with Hong Kong being more and more integrated with mainland China. In the 21st Century, Cantonese-English code-switching remains vibrant and a common feature in informal speech within families and peer groups, and everyday encounters (Li and Tse, 2002). There are signs that this form of speech has even permeated into more ‘formal’ settings such as the workplace and business meetings (Wong, 2002, Yip, 2001). Occasionally, one also nds (on television or radio) public gures or interviewees code-switching on public occasions that are not supposed to be informal. The extent to which code-switching has ‘invaded’ more formal speaking situations, however, has not been sufciently studied yet. The following is a summary of what I think to be the major characteristics of Cantonese-English code-switching as spoken in Hong Kong in typical conversations.

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(1) Characteristics of Cantonese-English code-switching in Hong Kong a. Speakers: Ethnic Chinese who grew up in Hong Kong but who may have lived abroad in English-speaking countries. b. Formality: Informal conversation between friends and peers (Li and Tse, 2002, Luke, 1998). c. Form: English words or phrases embedded in predominantly Cantonese sentence structures. Occasionally, English sentences may appear in the midst of Cantonese sentences (Chan, 1993, 1998). d. Meaning: The code-switched English words or phrases are often, but not limited to, technical terms or items related to Western culture and technology (Li, 1996, 1998, 2001). Motivations for Cantonese-English Code-switching in Hong Kong In the code-switching literature, a major research question has been why code-switching is used instead of a single language. Summarizing important proposals on this issue, I have suggested elsewhere that there are three main reasons. (2) Motivations of code-switching (Chan, 2004a) a. Social—Code-switching is used for social purposes, such as excluding participants, or to signal the identity of the speaker; in other words, in code-switching, a speaker signals the message “I am speaking as an X” (X can be any social identity the speaker is projecting, such as profession, nationality, or so on). b. Pragmatic/Communicative—Code-switching serves communicative purposes in the ongoing discourse (e.g. emphasis, clarication, quotation, etc.) or conveys certain inferences (e.g. implying a certain tone, such as that a statement is a ‘condential,’ etc.) c. Psycholinguistic/Processing—Code-switching results from a speaker not knowing or being unfamiliar with certain terms in the language that is being spoken, or that the main language used has no appropriate term to express the intended meaning. One should note that these three reasons are not mutually exclusive and any one instance of code-switching may be motivated by more than one—see examples in Chan (2004a).

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The major argument for my position that Cantonese-English codeswitching does not project a ‘hybrid identity’ is this: most data have been found to be motivated by the latter two factors, that is, (2b) and (2c); however, instances that support (2a) have been rarely documented. In his data Gibbons (1987) found many examples of (2b), which he calls ‘rhetorical code-switching’ (Gibbons, 1987, p. 79), and he thinks that the other examples are mainly due to a ‘gap’ in the speaker (Gibbons, 1987, pp. 83–84)—the speaker may not know or be less familiar with the exact counterpart in Cantonese, or the ‘so-called’ Cantonese counterpart expresses less meaning in terms of ‘connotation’ or ‘inference’. These cases correspond to (2c) of my taxonomy. Li (1996, 1998, 2000, 2001) has been interested in the motivations of Cantonese-English code-switching in Hong Kong. One major point he has kept on arguing for is that the code-switched English elements have no exact equivalents in Cantonese in terms of meaning or style, and therefore code-switching is linguistically motivated and unavoidable in one way or another. Based on Chinese/Cantonese-English data from newspapers and his personal observations, Li suggested that Cantonese may be switched to English because of euphemism, lack of stylistic/ semantic congruence (the lack of an appropriate Cantonese equivalent) and the principle of economy (the corresponding Cantonese expression with no code-switching is ‘less economical’). As a follow-up to these proposals, Li and Tse (2002) conducted an interesting experiment in which subjects were asked not to code-switch for one day and then to reect on their experience. The qualitative/reective data conrmed the motivations Li that suggested earlier. What is more, the subjects unanimously agreed that they had immense difculty in communication. It appears that the data Li has observed are primary instances of (2c) in my taxonomy. This presumption was in fact spelt out by Li and Tse (2002, p. 181), who conclude that “little or no negotiation of identity was involved. All this suggests that a sociolinguistic model of code-alternation in Hong Kong does not work so well.” This is not to say that code-switching plays absolutely no role in the construction or negotiation of identity in Hong Kong. Given that it is so common in other bilingual communities, it would be surprising that Hong Kong people cannot do that with Cantonese-English code-switching, although it is possible that negotiation or construction of identity is not a typical function of code-switching in Hong Kong. There is

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rm evidence that Cantonese-English is a solidarity marker within fellow classmates, friends, colleagues or professions, especially in view of the fact that the code-switched English items are always ‘specic’ to certain topics or semantic elds, such as academic subjects, school life, pop culture, computers and professions (see Bolton and Luke, 1999, Gibbons, 1987, Li and Tse, 2002, Lee, 2000). Occasionally, one may also come across negotiation or projection of different ‘identities’ by language choice, but code-switching may or may not be involved in that situation. (See (3) and (4) below.) (3) Anecdote of language choice: Code-switching is involved At the inauguration ceremony of his second term of ofce, Chief Executive of Hong Kong Tung Chee Wah made his vow of allegiance in Putonghua, but then he switched to Cantonese when he made his speech to Hong Kong people. Apparently, he spoke Putonghua as ‘a Chinese ofcial’ addressing mainland leaders, but later he switched to Cantonese as a ‘Hong Kong Chinese’ addressing the Hong Kong public. (4) Anecdote of language choice: Code-switching is not involved Former Financial Secretary Anthony Leung was meeting a group of students at the University of Hong Kong. A student representative asked a question and requested Leung to switch to Cantonese since it is the language of ‘Hong Kong Chinese’, but Leung rejected the request and answered in English, stressing that English was the international language and the medium of instruction in Hong Kong universities. Interestingly, Leung did switch to Cantonese later when he sang the Cantonese pop-song “Under the Lion Rock”—where the English version is simply not available and, even if there were one, would be out of place. Examples such as (3) and (4) have seldom been documented and studied in Hong Kong research on code-switching or bilingualism, as far as I know. In any case, these examples show no sign of a dual ‘Chinese/ Cantonese-English’ identity in Hong Kong. Luke (1998) suggested a dichotomy of ‘expedient (code-)switching’ and ‘orientational (code-)switching’. ‘Expedient code-switching’ refers to cases in which the English words or phrases are used because of the lack of Cantonese equivalents of the same (informal) style or tone. ‘Ori-

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entational code-switching,’ on the other hand, refers to cases in which there are Cantonese counterparts available, and hence code-switching seems motivated by the desire to project a more ‘Western’ outlook, which comes close to a ‘hybrid’ Chinese/Cantonese-Westerner identity. Nevertheless, this concept does not seem to be supported by data from other studies. Based on his data from newspaper and personal observation, Li (2000) explicitly doubted whether ‘orientational switching’ ever exists in Cantonese-English code-switching in Hong Kong. Summarizing the foregoing discussion, I conclude that CantoneseEnglish is motivated by chiey pragmatic/communicative purposes (i.e. 2b) or processing reasons (i.e. 2c), and yet the majority of the speakers remain essentially ‘East Asian/Chinese/Hong Kong’ in outlook. This seems to me to be the key to explaining a paradox perennial in codeswitching research in Hong Kong (Gibbons, 1987, Li, 1996, 1998, Li and Tse, 2002). Why do people keep on engaging in code-switching despite private dislike or even public hostility toward it? The answer is that people engage in code-switching, probably unconsciously or subconsciously, because of communicative needs, but as listeners they perceive that it projects a dual ‘East-West’ hybrid identity that comes into conict with their essentially ‘East Asian/Chinese/Hong Kong’ identity. That code-switching is perceived to signal a dual identity is evident in Gibbons’ (1987) ‘Match-Guise’ experiment in which he asked subjects to identify traits of people who engage in code-switching. The results indicated that most subjects attached negative traits to its speakers (such as ‘arrogant’). What is more, the subjects thought that these speakers were moderately between Cantonese speakers and English speakers in terms of ‘Westernization’. That people in Hong Kong have an essentially monadic ‘Eastern’ cultural identity (i.e. as Hong Kong Chinese) is supported by Bolton and Luke (1999). In their survey, only a tiny proportion of interviewees (i.e. 8.7%) identied themselves as “British Hong Kong” (versus “Hong Kong Chinese”, “Hong Kong citizen” and “Chinese”). An even smaller percentage (i.e. 0.9%) considered their way of life to be ‘Western’. Although previous studies on code-switching in Hong Kong have seldom looked outside of Hong Kong for similarities and differences, it is not actually difcult to nd a similar ambivalence towards codeswitching elsewhere. For instance, in Blom and Gumperz’ classic study (1972/2000) of Hemnesberget, Norway, the students surveyed believed

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that they always spoke the local dialect of Ranamal and yet in actual behavior they often code-switched between Ranamal (the local dialect) and Bokmal (the standard dialect). Language Attitudes and Ethnographic Surveys The suggestion that the (code-switched) English elements in Hong Kong people’s speech do not symbolize a ‘Western’ identity is indirectly corroborated by research into language attitudes. One robust nding from earlier research (Pierson et al., 1980) is that subjects were very resistant to English being used in intra-ethnic communication. They also worried that speaking English might jeopardize their ‘Chinese/ Hong Kong’ identity. However, over the years, people seem to have increasingly disagreed with the statements which suggest that speaking English is unpatriotic or makes one less Chinese (Axler et al., 1998, Hyland, 1997, Pennington and Yue, 1994). This apparent dissociation between language (i.e. English) and identity (i.e. ‘Chinese’ or ‘non-Chinese/Westerner’) seems to me an indirect assertion that the subjects are still Chinese or ‘Hong Kong Chinese’ (Hyland, 1997). Put simply, Hong Kong people still mind if others look at them as ‘Westerners’ or ‘non-Chinese’ now that they have to use English in their everyday life for whatever reason. Is ‘Hong Kong Chinese’ an identity distinct from ‘Chinese’? Most ethnographic studies suggested that a majority of interviewees (especially the younger ones) consider themselves to be ‘Hongkongers’ (Lam et al., 1998, Lau and Kuan, 1988 and others); nevertheless, elsewhere in the surveys, these respondents have shown very strong afliation with Chinese traditional values. It may well be the case that Hong Kong people do not identify themselves with their so-called ‘compatriots’ in mainland China and the socio-political system there (Lau and Kuan, 1988, see Ku, 2002 for a detailed survey). However, it would be too hasty to conceptualize ‘Hongkonger’ as a hybrid ‘East-West’ identity despite language (code-switching) and culture (one nds elements of East and West here in Hong Kong). The ‘We-code’ and the ‘They-code’ Gumperz (1982) observed that in code-switching the two participating languages play different functions, and this role specication depends

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on the status of these two languages in that specic community. He proposed the dichotomy of ‘we-code’ and ‘they-code’. The ‘we-code’ is the language used within family and peers for solidarity, carrying a ‘personal,’ ‘subjective’ or ‘informal’ avor. The ‘they-code’ is the language used in formal situations such as the government or the workplace, bearing an ‘objective’ or ‘distanced’ avor. It is not difcult to see that in Cantonese-English code-switching English has conventionally played the role of a ‘they-code’ whereas Cantonese has been the ‘we-code’. This is obvious because Cantonese has been the lingua franca (or common language) of ethnic Chinese, but English has been imposed on Hong Kong by colonization and globalization. Looking at code-switching data, one nds that many code-switched English items are technical terms or those specic to certain aspects of Western culture or technology (Gibbons, 1987, Li 1996, 1998, 2000, 2001). Lee (2000) further points out that this phenomenon is consistent with current ideologies which aligns ‘English’ with ‘Western culture’ and everything that is ‘fashionable’ and ‘trendy’. English is somehow used to ‘quote’ terms or expressions that have been circulated in Western culture or media, fullling the function of ‘intertextuality’. (Faircough, 1992) ‘Hybrid Identity’ or ‘Local Identity’? One remaining issue is whether the role differentiation of Cantonese and English will remain unchanged over time. If one were to focus on conversational code-switching, one would nd that code-switching is so ubiquitous that not every instance of a code-switched English item can be directly explained in terms of the ‘they-code’. This may imply that the speakers feel less ‘distant’ to English and the ‘Western-ness’ that it may symbolize. In particular, to many Hong Kong people CantoneseEnglish code-switching has become more or less a habit (Li and Tse, 2002) rather than playing around with the social meanings attached to Cantonese and English. Recently I heard this small sentence from Christine Loh (an ex-member of the Legislative Council who acted as the spokeswoman for the Protect the Harbor Association) at a press conference.

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(5) Example of Cantonese-English code-switching in conversation jat1-zan6 dang2 keoi5 explain go3 answer… Soon wait he explain CLASSIFIER answer “Let’s wait for him to explain the answer (for you) then.” Here, it is not obvious that the code-switched English words ‘explain’ and ‘answer’ are instances of the ‘they-code’ here. Some media texts contain code-switching in which English also does not seem to be the ‘they-code’. Consider the refrain from a Golden Hit in 2003. (6) Cantonese-English code-switching in pop song See me y, I’m proud to y up high 不因氣壓搖擺 (not wavering amidst uctuations in air pressure) 只因有你擁戴 (because of your support) Believe me I can y, I’m singing in the sky 假使我算神話 (if I were a myth) 因你創更愉快 (it’s more pleasant to know that you made it) Song title: Singer: Composer: Lyricist:

My pride (我的驕傲) Joey Yung (容祖兒) Chan Kwong-wing (陳光榮) Wyman Wong (黃偉文)

The English parts seem to be earnest requests that crystallize the singer/lyricist’s ‘innermost’ feelings. Given this interpretation and the occurrences of rst person pronouns (i.e. ‘I’ and ‘me’), English functions more like a ‘we-code’ than a ‘they-code’ here. Does this suggest the onset of an ‘East-West’ identity? My preliminary assessment is that English is more of an expression of the lyricist’s ‘style,’ which contrasts with everyday communication in which Cantonese-English code-switching is used. One last point I would like to add here is that Cantonese-English remains an exclusive mode of expression between ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong which most Westerners do not understand or participate in. In this sense, code-switching is likely to reect a local identity which represents Hong Kong Chinese, as suggested by Lee (2000)

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and supported by survey results (Bolton and Kwok, 1999, Lai, 2001).2 This is consistent with the observation that given similar exposure to Western culture in recent decades, people in mainland China and Taiwan—other “Chinese” communities—engage in code-switching relatively infrequently: they do prefer translating Western concepts and brand names into Chinese, contrary to what Li (2001) suggested of people in Hong Kong. Conclusions and Further Research In this chapter I suggest that a hybrid language does not necessarily imply a hybrid identity, which is logically induced from a static and straightforward relationship between language and identity. The hybrid language that I have examined is Cantonese-English code-switching as spoken in Hong Kong, which is largely accounted for by familiarity, habit and other communicative purposes that have little to do with identity construction and negotiation. This, I claim, explains why codeswitching is used frequently in conversation even though the current ideology is that code-switching is not desirable. The negative attitude towards code-switching may well arise from the fact that it is perceived to project a ‘dual’ identity that goes against people’s essentially ‘monadic’ identity—‘East/Chinese/Hong Kong Chinese’. Support for this claim comes from two sources. First, studies of language attitudes indicate that people still have a strong sense of ‘East/Chinese/Hong Kong Chinese’ identity despite the increasing use of English over the last twenty years (Hyland, 1997, Li, 1999). Second, although ethnographic surveys have consistently found that the majority of people in Hong Kong identify themselves as ‘Hongkongers’ instead of ‘Chinese,’ interestingly they show strong afliations with ‘Chinese’ cultural values and orientations rather than Western ones. It appears that the ‘Hongkonger’ identity is closely related to being ‘Chinese’ in many subtle ways rather than a being a genuinely ‘hybrid’ identity—a mere combination of Western and Chinese.

2 Snow (2004) proposes that this identity has also led to the emergence of written Cantonese in media texts.

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Further research is needed to examine the future direction in which the role and status of English and code-switching may change. Is it possible that a ‘hybrid’ identity will eventually be formed given the increasing use of English and code-switching across all domains of everyday communication? Alternatively, given more integration (social, cultural, economic and political) with mainland China, will ‘Hongkonger’ become less ‘local’ and eventually closer to being an ethnic ‘Chinese’ identity? How far can we track these developments in language use and attitudes? As I see it, these questions will be of interest to sociologists, linguists and researchers on communication and culture alike. REFERENCES Axler, M., Yang, A and Stevens, T. 1998. “Current language attitudes of Hong Kong Chinese adolescents and young adults,” pp. 329–338, in Language Use in Hong Kong at Century’s End, edited by M. Pennington. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Blom, J. and Gumperz, J. 1972/2000. “Social meaning in linguistic structures: codeswitching in Norway,” pp. 111–136 in The Bilingualism Reader, edited by Li Wei. London: Routledge. Bolton, K. and Luke, K.-K. 1999. The Social Survey of Languages in the 1980’s. The Social Science Research Centre. Hong Kong: The University of Hong Kong. Chan, Brian H.-S. 1993. In Search of the Constraints and Processes of Code-Mixing in Hong Kong Cantonese-English Bilingualism. Research Report No. 33. Hong Kong: Department of English, City Polytechnic of Hong Kong. ———. 1998. “How does Cantonese-English code-mixing work?” Pp. 191–216, in Language in Hong Kong at Century’s End, edited by M. Pennington. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. ———. 2004a. “Beyond contextualization: Code-switching as a textualization cue,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 23:7, 7–27. ———. 2004b. “Tracking Changes in Language and Identity in Hong Kong: Evidence from Canto-pop,” paper presented in the 2nd International Humanities Conference on July 23, 2004 at Prato, Italy. Chan, Candy Y.-Y. 2003. Conditions and Motivations of Code-Switching in Hong Kong Cantonese Pop Songs, Unpublished MA Research Paper. Department of Modern Languages and Intercultural Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. (In Chinese) Cheung, M. M.-S. 1997. Code-Mixing in Hong Kong Print Advertising, Unpublished MA Dissertation. Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong. Faircough, N. 1992. Language and Power, Second edition. Longman. Gibbons, J. 1979. “U-gay-wa: A linguistic study of the campus language of students at the University of Hong Kong,” pp. 3–43, in Hong Kong Language Papers, edited by R. Lord. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. ———. 1987. Code-mixing and Code Choice: A Hong Kong Case Study. Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters. Gumperz, J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heller, M. (ed.) 1988. Code-Switching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Hyland, K. 1997. “Language attitudes at the handover: Communication and identity in 1997 Hong Kong.” English World-Wide 18, 191–210. Joseph, J.E. 2004. Language and Identity. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan. Kramsch, C. 1998. Language and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ku, A.S.-M. 2002. “Culture, identity and politics,” pp. 344–373, in Our Place, Our Time: A New Introduction to Hong Kong Society, edited by K.-C. Tse. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. (In Chinese) Lau S.-K. and Kuan H.-C. 1988. The Ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese. The Chinese University Press of Hong Kong. Lai, M.-L. 2001. “Hong Kong students’ attitudes towards Cantonese, Putonghua and English after the change of sovereignty,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 22:2, 112–133. Lam S.-F. et al. 1998. “Hong Kong adolescents’ social identities and conceptualization of modernization,” Hong Kong Journal of Social Sciences 11: 83–99. (In Chinese) Le Page, R.B. and Taboret-Keller, A. 1985. Acts of Identity: Creole-based Approaches to Ethnicity and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, M. 2000. “Code-switching in Media Texts: Its implications on society and culture in post-colonial Hong Kong,” pp. 95–130, in Language and Education in Post-Colonial Hong Kong, edited by D. Li et al. Hong Kong: The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong. Leung, Y.-B. 1987. Constraints on Intrasentential Code-mixing in Cantonese and English. M.A. Dissertation. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong. Li, D.C.-S. 1996. Issues in Bilingualism and Biculturalism: A Hong Kong Case Study. New York: Peter Lang. ———. 1998. “The plight of the purist,” pp. 161–190, in Language in Hong Kong at Century’s End, edited by M. Pennington. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. ———. 1999. “The functions and status of English in Hong Kong: A post-1997 update,” English World-Wide 20:1, 67–110. ———. 2000. “Cantonese-English code-switching research in Hong Kong: a Y2K review,” World Englishes 19:3, 305–322. ———. 2001. “L2 lexis in L1: Reluctance to translate out of concern for referential meaning,” Multilingua 20:1, 1–26. Li, D.C-S., and Tse, Elly C.-Y. 2002. “One day in the life of a ‘purist’,” International Journal of Bilingualism 6:2, 147–202. Li, S.-L. 1996. A Sociolinguistic Study of Code-Mixing in Hong Kong. Unpublished M.Phil. Dissertation. Department of English, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Lin, A.M.-Y. 1996. “Bilingualism or linguistic segregation? Symbolic domination, resistance and code switching in Hong Kong schools,” Linguistics and Education 8: 49–84. ———. 2000. “Deconstructing ‘Mixed Code’,” pp. 179–194 in Language and Education in Post-colonial Hong Kong, edited by D. Li et al. Hong Kong: The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong. Luke, K.-K. 1998. “Why two languages might be better than one,” pp. 145–160, in Language in Hong Kong at Century’s End, edited by M. Pennington. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Luke, K.-K. and Richards, J. 1982. “English in Hong Kong: Functions and status,” English World-Wide 3, 47–64. Milroy, L. and Muysken, P. (eds) 1995. One Speaker, Two Languages—Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Code-switching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pavlenko, A. and Blackledge, A. (eds) 2001. “Negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts: Special issue,” International Journal of Bilingualism 5(3). Pennington, M. and Yue, F. 1994. “English and Chinese in Hong Kong: Pre-1997 language attitudes,” World Englishes 13, 1–20.

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Pennington, M., Chan, B. and Lau, L. 1996. Hong Kong Radio: A Changing Prole. Strategic Grants Research funded by the University Grants Commission, Hong Kong, with M. Pennington as principal investigator, B. Chan as assistant investigator and L. Lau as research assistant, City University of Hong Kong. Pierson, H.D., Fu, G. S. and Lee, S.-Y. 1980. “An analysis of the relationship between language attitudes and English attainment of secondary students in Hong Kong.” Language Learning 30: 289–316. Reynolds, S. 1985. Code-switching in Hong Kong. Unpublished M.A. Dissertation. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong. Snow, D. 2004. Cantonese as Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Taboret-Keller, A. 1997. “Language and identity,” pp. 315–326, in The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, edited by F. Coulmas. Blackwell. Wong, Y.P.-Y. 2002. An Update on Attitude Changes towards Code-Mixing in Hong Kong. Unpublished manuscript. Department of Modern Languages and Intercultural Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Yip, W. 2001. Sociolinguistic Motivations and Linguistic Variations of Cantonese-English CodeMixing in Hong Kong Workplace. Unpublished M.A. Dissertation. Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Chapter 9

Changing Heart (Beats): From Japanese Identity and Nostalgia to Taiko for Citizens of the Earth Millie Creighton Introduction: Journey into the Drumbeats of Identities In the much proclaimed millennial year of 2000, a new form of exhibit in the contemporary globalizing world, the airport exhibit staged for the edication of travelers passing time between ight destinations, featured a series of photos and text about drumming traditions world-wide. This exhibit was entitled, “Journey into the Spirit of Percussion”. The opening photographic image showed two nearly naked taiko drummers from the group KodÔ hitting a huge drum in a natural setting, with land meeting water meeting sky, as the world met a new day at the crack of dawn. The group KodÔ rose to fame in Japan by renewing interest in drumming forms seen as strongly associated with Japanese identity, and with a Japanese spirit (seishin). Their rise to fame was also associated with the remote, highly localized place setting of Sado Island on which they trained. In the following decades, KodÔ imaging and musical involvements would undergo a shift that would retain an emphasis on taiko as a traditional Japanese percussion form but would also recognize it as a statement of Japanese or partial Japanese (or even partial Asian) descent elsewhere in the world, and later as a music form available for all people in a growing globalization of cross-fertilizing musical inuences, which KodÔ itself began to promote. The highly localized venue of Sado Island became a site of globalization, and hybridization through the merging of music forms and experiences from throughout the world. I begin this chapter with three vignettes, spread over a twenty year period, that reect my own journey into a knowledge about taiko and the taiko group KodÔ. The vignettes also begin to reect the shifting identity statements taiko has been used to express; Japanese identity within Japan, an Asian, mixed, or hybrid heritage identity outside Japan, and nally a more universal identity as human beings, or citizens of the earth.

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Vignette #1: TokyÔ, the Urban Core of Japan, 1983 I sit among several students at the Inter-University Center, a center for learning Japanese afliated with North America’s Ivy League and Big Ten universities, and several important Japanese associations, at that time located in the fast-paced central district of Yotsuya, in Tokyo, Japan’s central commercial and intellectual core. In a country long conditioned to the concept of rank (e.g. Nakane, 1970; Martinez, 1990, 1992, 2004) TokyÔ is frequently referred to as the ‘highest ranking’ place in Japan. This is shown in language by the use of ‘up’ to refer to movement toward TokyÔ. Just as during the Roman empire all roads led to Rome, in Japan all directions lead ‘up’ to TokyÔ, whether one is headed north, south, east, or west. We sit listening to what I would then have called ‘middle-age’ Japanese women (but who on reection seem much younger to me now) explain to us about the taiko group KodÔ. These are women from the College Woman’s Association of Japan, a group that regularly provides a scholarship for a female student at the center, and that sees to the ‘cultural enhancement’ of all (male and female) students. They have decided all the students should attend KodÔ’s upcoming taiko concert being held in TokyÔ. ‘Taiko’ basically means ‘large drums’. KodÔ had already gained fame in Japan both for their drumming, and for their strict training and lifestyle. Their fame was also already associated with the remote island they had chosen to be their home base and training center, Sado Island (Sadogashima). In the nostalgia-laden context of Japan in the early 1980s, Sado symbolized to many Japanese a setting “back in time” to a more pristine age, where and when people lived in a less technologically developed way. Magazine articles about KodÔ showed scenes from their strict training regimen on Sado. Trainees rose with or before the sun, and ran for miles each day, spending further hours in intense physical endeavors, in addition to those spent in drumming practice, while otherwise living a very disciplined life, on a regimented diet. There were associations in the Japanese mind with ideals of disciplined training, education, self-development and denial. Such associations tended to coincide with ideas of a traditional Japanese spirit or seishin. The location, in a remote and highly localized place, added to this, as Japan was enmeshed in a ‘furusato’ or ‘home village’ boom that sought out remote rural areas and imaged these as representatives of the ‘real Japan’ (see Befu, 1992, 1983; Creighton, 2001, 1998, 1997a; Ivy, 1995, 1988; Kurita, 1983; Robertson, 1991, 1988, 1987). Such places and a sense of Japanese

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identity associated with them seemed to be, in Ivy’s (1995) wording “vanishing” amidst Japan’s pronounced urbanization, industrialization and Westernization. Vignette # 2: Sadogashima, the Rural Periphery of Japan, 1996 The passage to the island is by ferry. From the central core of one of HonshÖ’s northern cities Niigata (a major urban center, but already ‘remote’ from ‘central’ TokyÔ), one must travel outward toward the Sea of Japan.1 In contrast to the coastline that separates Japan from the Pacic Ocean, even the way this side of Japan is referred to ‘marks it’, in socio-linguistic terms, as cognitively considered more distant from the central core. This is the northern coast of the Japan sea side, also called ‘Ura Nihon,’ meaning the ‘back’ side of Japan, in contrast to the Pacic Ocean coast which is ‘omote’ or the ‘front’ side (see, for example, Bachnik and Quinn, 1994, Tobin, 1992). The station is still at this time old, salty and sea worn, and has not yet been redone in a popular modern, clean and sparkling style, because it is after all just a ferry terminal, the pragmatic, cheaper way for people to get across the water to Sado Island (Sadogashima). Most of the year, the pace at the terminal is slow, and trafc is mostly people going to Niigata or cities farther away, including TokyÔ, for work. Usually, when trafc at the ferry terminal is towards Sado, it consists of people who have found work elsewhere and are returning to visit family. In late August, the ferry terminal is busy, with large numbers of passengers to Sado Island. For the most part these are not relatives returning for summer festivals, as the Obon (summer festivals to honor the dead) season has passed. Most of the travelers are not workers, or local dwellers. Instead there is an incredible inux of people with few ties to Sado as a place, including a very large number of gaijin or ‘foreigners,’ who are living and working in other parts of Japan. For a few days, Sado Island is transformed from a remote local area, now symbolic of the supposed ‘real Japan’ into an international arena, 1 This sea is between Japan and Korea. At this time I use the long-existing designation, Sea of Japan to refer to this sea but note that currently this is contended by Korea which seeks to replace this designation with a term not referencing Japan. Currently the chosen Korean designation is Eastern Sea. However, this designation is also potentially problematic in that the sea is to the east of Korea and China but west of Japan, hence many nd this a designation that instead prioritizes Korea or China rather than being neutral.

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for what is known as ‘the Earth Celebration’. During these days, one encounters scenes that are reminiscent of activities during a Japanese summer matsuri, or festival. There are crowds of people in the small streets dancing local folk dances while wearing the light cotton summer kimono known as yukata. In Sado Island’s largest park, Shiroyama KÔen, paper lanterns such as those typically seen at Japanese festivals, line the long rising pathway to the entrance of the park. Near the dock areas, people ride in at boats called tarai bune. Tarai bune are a famous icon of Sado, symbolizing its history and the local adaptations of the island’s shing and sea catch cultures. Representing its local history, tarai bune ferry people around the Japan Sea Side. As at any summer fair, festival, or tourist location, stalls lining the coast sell local area meibutsu. For Sado these local specialties include sazae, a snail like seafood, and octopus served on a stick. In the carnival-like atmosphere of the festival there are also more recent Western additions such as hot dogs, and cotton candy or candied apples on sticks. Wherever one goes, one can see people playing or practicing a local instrument associated with Sado that is made of wood and has been shaped in a snake-like line, with slits throughout. It is played by snapping the long wooden cord back and forth. However, at some point, something seems decidedly different from other Japanese summer festivals. A man in a small papered booth that looks like a puppeteer’s box is playing the trumpet. In addition to the local wooden folk instrument associated with Sado, a group of Irish musicians passes by carrying harps and other instruments. Although, given rising ‘internationalization,’ (kokusaika), (see for example, Creighton, 1991, 1997a, 1998a; Robertson, 1998, 1995) that has been pursued actively as a national goal in Japan since the mid-1980s, it is not uncommon to see a foreigner or two, or even three or four, at a local festival even in ‘remote’ areas of Japan, a very large number of foreigners have descended and are present on this little island. What I am describing is the Earth Celebration, as I rst experienced it in 1996. The Earth Celebration is a summer music festival held on Sado, usually every second year. It is a music festival, but as the name implies a festival that also emphasizes human ties to nature, and the importance of preserving both nature itself, in the sense of the earth, and our ability to live a life in harmony with nature, and thus one in balance with our inherent humanity and spirituality. The Earth Celebration on Sado reects contemporary associations in Japan of remote areas having closer ties to nature, to community, to our essential humanity,

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to the nostalgia for a lost Japan and desires to recapture traditions that evoke a sense of Japanese identity. Sado Island became the venue of the Earth Celebration because it is the area in which the Japanese taiko group KodÔ trains. The Earth Celebration was organized by KodÔ, and remains a large taiko celebration. However, it also emphasizes the role of music in a natural interplay of human beings amidst nature, and in human life generally. KodÔ has sought to bring together musicians who represent music traditions that are associated with specic cultures throughout the globe. The Earth Celebration serves as a venue for preserving forms of ‘ethno-music’ while allowing the creative and innovative mixing and fusing of various music forms. Vignette #3: Vancouver, Canada (with analogues elsewhere in the world), 2003 I have signed up for another taiko workshop, believing that to research something it is good to at least try to participate in it for a fuller understanding of the process. I have taken taiko workshops before. The rst taiko workshop I participated in was offered by Vancouver’s Katari Taiko (Katari-Daiko), a group that celebrated its 20th anniversary early in the new millennium with a two-day celebration concert of Canadian taiko cast as a ‘feast’ of taiko (taiko no gochisÔ), in which other Canadian taiko groups also performed. In addition to the taiko groups, a renowned Vancouver shakuhachi ( Japanese bamboo ute) player was also on the concert bill, partly because both taiko and shakuhachi have symbolic associations with Japanese heritage and Japanese descent identity. The second taiko workshop that I was involved in was offered by members of Toki Doki Taiko, a Vancouver group which at that time was made up solely of gaijin, or people who are neither Japanese nor of Japanese descent. However, most of these had extended experience living in Japan, knew Japanese culture and spoke Japanese well. This was in contrast to some of the other groups whose members were mostly of Japanese or Asian descent, but often had no experience living in Japan, and did not speak Japanese. The third workshop I am taking now is being taught by a young Canadian Nikkei (person of Japanese descent) woman, with occasional instruction from a Chinese Canadian taiko player. Now, a variety of people from all backgrounds and walks of life are participating in taiko, and are welcomed. The instructor jokes that there was perhaps a bit of tension at rst over the idea of those of Japanese descent with a strong Japanese heritage not necessarily

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knowing the Japanese language or culture as well as some of the nonJapanese players who had lived in Japan. Now, however, the various groups often play in concert, and membership in the various groups is mixed. In this third workshop I am in we again learn to play Matsuri (“Festival”), one of the most commonly performed taiko numbers, perhaps because of the association of drumming with summer festivals in Japan, and we again learn to play RenshÖ or “Practice”. The workshop has two people of Japanese descent (Nikkei), and the rest are gaijin like me. On reection, however, I realize that perhaps they are not gaijin, ‘outsiders’ or ‘foreigners’ to Japan, in the same way as me, as they have never lived in Japan and thus have never had to deal with the ‘inner’ understandings of being an ‘outsider’ in Japan, or had to deal with being placed in the identity of being gaijin in the same way. As in the other taiko workshops, we are all involved in the transmission of knowledge through the means of a style that is based on forms of oral tradition, observation and apprenticeship. Lining the walls are notices and advertisements for other taiko groups or gatherings. For example, one announces a big taiko convention in California. Newsletters from KodÔ’s Earth Celebration in Japan are posted on the walls, including testimonials from non-Japanese who have gone there and experienced it. While in this workshop hall, hidden away in a local area of East Vancouver, I am aware of the international or global ramications of taiko. Taiko has become a music form with a gathering of enthusiasts, followers and players from all over the world. In many cases, Taiko is an afrmation of an identity of Japanese descent outside of Japan, and of Asian heritage more generally. I have witnessed this with taiko played during the Powell Street Festival held in Vancouver, in Winnipeg and Edmonton during Canada’s Asian Heritage month, in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle in the United States during summer Bon Odori celebrations, in events carried out in Nikkei ( Japanese descent) areas of Sao Paulo, Brazil, Lima, Peru and Santiago, Chile, and in events highlighting Japaneseness held in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. I have also seen drummers from African traditions engaged with taiko or shakuhachi players, in attempts to create new fusions of music forms. There is an afrmation of Japanese identity or descent identity, and of Asian heritage involved with taiko as it is performed outside Japan. However, something more than just an afrmation of ethnic heritage and identity is happening, particularly in more recent manifestations of taiko. Previous discourses of identity merge with discourses of inclu-

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sion and heritage fusion. In many places outside Japan, taiko groups rst consisted of people of Japanese descent. Gradually it was deemed appropriate to allow others of Asian descent to perform even if they were not of Japanese descent. As taiko was initially seen as representing a heritage identity, there was once some resistance to the idea that people who were not of Asian descent could play. However, over time players and participants from all ethnic backgrounds and age groups have come to be accepted and this is now seen as natural. Concepts of fusion play into new creations. Members from other ethnic heritages bring in different forms or experiences; there is recombination, and identity statements broaden. For example, a prominent new taiko number, “Fast Life on a Lazy Susan,” that became part of the repertoire of the group Uzume Taiko (Uzume-Daiko), was composed by a Chinese Canadian female member of the group, based on her recollections of Chinese Canadian family life. Sometimes, there is a broader call for the perpetuation of music styles that may be endangered throughout the world. There is the suggestion that taiko can still represent Japanese heritage and identity, while also reecting a sense of the universal tradition of music among humanity, new possibilities for participation, and new fusions of hybridized forms. The Place of Place in Identities Place and the concept of place have important ramications for human meaning and the construction of human identities. Even the focus of this volume, ‘East-West identities,’ suggests a reference to place, or to places once thought of as being in the east, and those being in the west. The concept of place once inscribed can be ‘dis-placed,’ while meanings are continually reconstructed, as ‘East’ and ‘West’ become repositories of espoused or asserted meanings that are sometimes associated with groups or individuals despite global ows that result, for example, in people referred to as ‘Eastern’ who are part of so-called ‘Western’ countries, and those called ‘Westerners’ who are members of so-called ‘Eastern’ societies. I suggest that the venue chosen as the taiko group KodÔ’s ‘home place’ and later as the site of the Earth Celebration, Sado Island, is a pivotal symbol of place. The multivocal symbolic associations of Sado place it both as a trope of Japanese identity and as a metonym of remote locations that is symbolic of all humanity’s ties to the globe.

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Sado as Space and Place of Japanese Identity The presence of KodÔ and the Earth Celebration in a place that represents localized Japan is signicant, because Sado becomes emblematic of the metaphors of place that have embraced Japan since the 1970s. In the last thirty-odd years Japan has been embraced by a ‘retro boom,’ which the Japanese scholar Akatsuka (1988) has referred to as “our retrospective age”. It involves a renewed interest in things that are considered part of a Japanese identity or heritage, and in traditions from the past. It romanticizes Japan’s rural heritage, with the domestic travel and tourism industries shifting their focus from the attractions of the big cities and sites like Tokyo Disneyland to featuring remote local areas that in the 1950s and 1960s, as Japan was trying to gain economically and ‘catch up with the West,’ were seen as boring and unsophisticated (Kelly, 1986; Martinez, 1990). This nostalgia for what has been called the “vanishing” (Ivy, 1995) Japan and its localized places also involves a quest for returning human life to meaningful relations with nature and community. These gure signicantly in the location of Sado Island, which is projected as a remote local area that symbolizes human ties to nature and the natural landscape, in contrast to the convenience of big cities. Early articles about KodÔ training on Sado Island highlighted this. There is a suggestion that taiko involves a spiritual element, and that to achieve it one has to be in accord with nature. Thus, the rigorous training regimen showed that KodÔ drummers were not soft; they had to live amongst, and interact with, the elements of nature. Even their physical exercise, such as running early in the morning, was an engagement with the natural environment of a place that was conceptualized as more natural. The spirit, seishin, being developed in the process was seen, like taiko, to be resonant with an aura of Japanese identity. To get in touch with a Japanese spirit required involvement in a place that was conceptualized as somehow inherently ‘more Japanese,’ and more ‘pristine,’ peripheral from the highly Westernized urban cores of Japan. The quest to reconnect with nature and remote rural areas, characteristic of the retro boom in Japan, is also linked to a contemporary quest for community and collective identity. Cultural values in Japan have long given preference to embeddedness in networks of relationships rather than to individualism and self-reliance. Increasing industrialization, urbanization and Westernization, have raised concerns that the basis of essential human ‘belongingness’ once embedded in

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community life has been sacriced to achieve technological sophistication and economic advancement. This has also prompted a nostalgic lament for the possible total loss of the ‘Japanese life and identity that is still within us’. Davis (1979, p. 107) characterizes nostalgia as a “collective search for identity” that “looks backward rather than forward, for the familiar rather than the novel, for certainty rather than discovery”. Nostalgia focuses on the past, because as Smith (1982, p. 128) points out, the “past will always seem more stable than the present”. Thus, images of the past, and past ways of life, are invoked to refute the perceived threat of cultural loss to which the processes of modernization and Westernization have subjected Japan. It may not matter to the human soul that contradictions potentially abound in promoting Sado as a pristine place (that then ends up sometimes being used in less pristine ways by visiting nostalgic Japanese tourists, or festival goers during the Earth Celebration). Social analysts such as Tuan (1977, p. 194) point out that the “cult of the past calls for illusion rather than authenticity”. The nostalgia that is associated with remote areas linked to a Japanese past, such as Sado, helps to suggest a recreation of the past in the present and thus serves present needs. Such associations also help to link the present via the past to the future, or to the suggestion that a particular vision of the future can be shaped through actions in the present that build on the valued aspects of a heritage. In this case, invoking the sense of past, and of Japaneseness associated with Sado, addresses fears of a vanishing Japanese cultural identity. Sado as an island is also seen as a very specic space, and thus also serves as a very specic metonym for the islands of Japan, creating a very real symbolic association of Japanese identity with the physical space and place of Japan, in terms of the actual land comprising the islands of the Japanese archipelago. Just as taiko is conceptualized as Japanese, the islands themselves are seen as ‘Japanese’ and as tied to the lifestyle of the Japanese people.2 2 This strong connection of identity with the place of a group of people is not, of course, unproblematic, particularly when identity surges are associated with competition for land and its resources among different groups of people. The intensity of such a strong association with the physical place of the islands has been highlighted recently by the conict between South Korea and Japan over a very small and uninhabited island, known as Dokto (in Korean) or Takeshima (in Japanese), a conict which put a pause in planned activities to honor 2005 as ‘Korea-Japan Friendship Year,’ and which at times has threatened to completely rupture relations between South Korea and Japan.

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It is signicant that the prevailing imagery of community in Japan is rural, remote and local, as embodied in the place of Sado. Davis argues that collective nostalgia often occurs with large-scale changes and cultural transitions that leave masses of people feeling lonely or estranged from others. Although Japan has a long history of urban centers, the historical associations of community in Japan, and the continuing predominant symbolism of this often derive from the context of rice-growing or shing villages. I have suggested elsewhere (Creighton, 1997a, p. 242) that “images of a symbolically mediated past agrarian existence have come to represent not just the ideal of community but also the good life, wholesomeness, and the moral values of Japan”. Sado reects discourses surrounding the search for furusato in contemporary Japan. Furusato literally means ‘old village,’ but commonly refers to one’s birthplace, hometown or home village (Creighton, 1997a). Furusato is strongly associated with the desire for a sense of community (Creighton, 1998a). Just as the ideal of ‘home town,’ as exemplied by Tracy Kidder’s (1999) Pulitzer Prize winning novel Home Town, bears heavy sentimental weight among Americans as encapsulating such ideas as community, support and belonging, furusato, or ‘home village,’ represents analogous sentiments among Japanese, and often among people of Japanese descent (see Creighton, 2005). The affective power of furusato imagery in Japan is enhanced by its associations with motherly love. The social critic Matsumoto (1980) claims the rural community place of furusato is synonymous with motherhood (see also Buruma, 1984, p. 213; Robertson, 1988, p. 500). Furusato and ‘mother’ both reect a desire for belonging. According to Tuan, for small children a person can be a place (1974, 1977). Furusato and mothers are places where one can lean on someone, be indulged and taken care of. Both are prototypes of what Doi has called amae relationships (Doi, 1986), representing a Japanese tendency to reafrm a sense of dependency among people rather than emphasizing independence and selfreliance. In Tuan’s (1977, pp. 177–178) terms they are both “intimate places” of nurture. Both ‘mother’ and ‘furusato’ are places where “fundamental needs are heeded and cared for without fuss” (Tuan, 1977, pp. 177–178). They are ‘places’ that represent security and stability. Several authors have discussed how the concept of furusato has been reied while also decontextualized (i.e. Creighton, 1995a, 1997a, 1998a, 1998b, 2001b; Ivy, 1988, 1995; Robertson, 1987, 1988, 1991, 1995, 1998). Furusato imagery frequently depicts scenes such as rustic landscapes, remote waters and dilapidated shrines. There is frequently

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the suggestion that any local area can now become representative of a generalized furusato or a furusato of Japan, as evidenced in the savings bond campaign showing traditional area festivals, with children playing, which read, “watakushi no furusato, watakushi no Nippon,” “My furusato, my Japan”. This statement both attempts to usurp the strong placeconnected affective attachments that individuals have for a particular community, and associate it with an asserted national community in a manner that is suggested by Anderson’s (1983) critique of the nation as an imagined community, and it also allows people to feel they can consume any localized place in Japan as reminiscent of their own place-based furusato. Taiko is also associated with the concept of community. In Japan, a community was typically bordered by the area that the sounds of the taiko drums could reach. Thus, taiko itself is a signicant symbol of community in the Japanese context. This is highly signicant to the corresponding sense of Japanese identity. Bestor (1989, p. 265) contends that in contemporary Japan, images of community are granted cultural and emotional value, and are good to identify with precisely because they are recognizable to “members of society as a whole and unassailably legitimate because they invent and then represent a history of cultural continuity with the pre-industrial past, the cultural legitimacy of which no one could or would dispute”. Sado island becomes associated not just with the remote and local, but also with the generative aspect of Japan. It represents ‘maternal Japan,’ or ‘Japan as mother’. The suggestion of return to nature is likewise the suggestion of return to mother, and the espoused ‘naturalness’ of the pre-birth bond with mother. Just as humans have a bond with the earth, they have had in their initial existence such a bond with mother. Thus the concepts of mother and mother earth come together in place. This is further exemplied in the suggestion of taiko as a traditional aspect of Japan or of a Japanese identity. Japan’s foremost taiko group, which uses Sado as its home base, chose the name ‘KodÔ,’ using characters that mean ‘child’ and ‘drum’ while also carrying the meaning ‘heartbeat’. This expresses the idea that there is an essential human connection to drumming, based in the essential human connection to mother earth, to which one is linked via one’s own mother. It involves the recognition that a primordial experience for all of us was listening to the sound of our mother’s heartbeat, and feeling the rhythms of mother’s heart, while we were in the uterus. Thus, returning to Sado is returning to mother, and also recreating the heartbeat of mother for others, thereby allowing

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others to reconnect in this way. In Tuan’s (1974, 1977) discussions of topophilia (love of place) he points out that human sentiments of place are ‘grounded’ in childhood experience, where sensations play a major role. Although vision is the primary sense upon which humans rely, it is not the sense with the strongest emotional associations, which tend to be touch, smell, and sound, thought partly to be due to their role in our pre-birth experience. It is often suggested that the sense which humans use most before birth is that of sound, making the pulsing rhythm of the heartbeat so primordially important, and creating this potentially intense emotional association—even if we are not aware of where it comes from—with drumbeats throughout life. In contemporary Japan the idea of ‘craft’ is also often associated with the concepts of tradition and community life. Just as there is a suggestion that modern people have lost their essential connectedness to nature, there is a corresponding suggestion that their life has been distanced from the satisfying engagement in a craft lifestyle and products created by hand, with materials derived from nature (see Creighton, 1998b, 2001b). Thus, nostalgic forays frequently also call for a renewal of craft processes and engagements. Like many local communities, Sado Island has its own small history museum, exhibiting items that represent long existing craft processes, such as large looms used to weave silk. KodÔ as a group increasingly embrace not only taiko and the sense of a natural lifestyle amidst nature, but also the sense of craft. Whereas in the early years, little attention was given to the wives of drummers if they were married, in more recent years wives are also part of the imaging of KodÔ, and often in terms of craft products that they make and exhibit at Earth Celebrations. Burakumin: A Submerged Minority Japanese Identity in Emergence Taiko is a music form, but it also involves craft in terms of the making of the drums. Associations of nature and craft come together in the drums, which have long been made from natural elements—wood and tanned hides. However, there is a sense in which taiko represents a reverse case to many Japanese craft involvements. Typically in Japan there is a suggestion that those participating in something should know all aspects of it, and all processes involved in it. Thus, to write or paint calligraphy, calligraphers are also expected to learn to grind ink, and silk weavers must learn to cultivate silk worms, spin and dye thread (see Creighton, 1995a, 1998b, 2001b). However, in the case of taiko,

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drummers did not traditionally make the drums, and the drum makers were often not allowed to play them. Burakumin are a group who have faced discrimination for centuries in Japan, whose membership stems from descent from an occupational caste of those who dealt with the dead, and from others who were itinerant. Burakumin who butchered animals and tanned the hides of dead animals were considered polluted, while taiko was seen as a sacred and spiritual tradition. Recently, some Burakumin have chosen to challenge these concepts by forming their own taiko groups and drumming to educate others about their identity issues. One such group chose the name Ikari, or ‘Anger,’ to express their feelings about the discrimination that Burakumin face. The group Ikari has also traveled and performed outside of Japan to educate others about their identity issues, and in many cases this also has an inuence back within Japan where there is concern about Japan’s international image. Ikari performed in Vancouver, and later one of the Vancouverbased taiko groups created a special taiko performance drama involving the story of a Burakumin taiko drum maker who wished to play rather than just make drums. His dream was eventually supported by other members of the community as inroads into decreasing prejudice and discrimination were made. Developed outside of Japan, the skit was intended as a means of educating members of Japanese descent communities and other people about minority issues in Japan. Sado as Symbol of Earthling Identities By the 1990s, a shift begins to occur in the identity uses of Sado Island. As host of the Earth Celebration Sado continues to resonate with idioms of Japanese identities, but has also come to stand for a broader identity of all humans. As the venue for the Earth Celebration, Sado Island’s remote localized place again resonates with a sense of closer associations with nature, which thus ‘places’ it in greater balance with the earth. The call to ‘celebrate’ and also to ‘save’ the earth is seen to require a place that can be projected as more in keeping with the primordial nature of the earth. There are potential contradictions in this process, in that hundreds of people will end up utilizing energy ows in traveling to the island for the festival, and will probably affect it and the actual localized community while they are there. Does having a major international festival on the less affected ‘pristine’ Sado end up making it more like the other ‘affected’ places in the rest of Japan? This question does not seem to be asked. Instead, what are highlighted are the symbolic

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associations of Sado as representing both the heart and spirit of Japan, and a more generalized human spirit seen as once more in tune with nature and with others in close associations of community life. As indicated, the Earth Celebration embraces the return to craft movement. Various craft exhibits are set up to accompany the celebration. Sometimes these exhibits highlight Japanese style crafts. In one case, there was an exhibit of a typical Japanese style of embroidery using white thread on dark blue (indigo) cloth, done by the wife of one of the drummers. In another area there was an origami display, showing the craft of paper folding, Japanese style. Other exhibits were less specically Japanese, such as a display of pottery in a range of styles. The Earth Celebration embraces the idea of craft in other ways. Large promotional panels of cloth for the Earth Celebration show a snail like gure, done in natural dye, representative of a crafted process. The advertisements and posters attempt to incorporate a sense of printed craft processes. Thus, the Earth Celebration reiterates themes of Japanese identities while playing with the themes of nature, community, and craft as essential elements to the identities of all people of the earth. Education Through Oral Tradition, Observation and Apprenticeship The process of learning how to play or perform taiko can be thought of as involving a form of oral tradition. It emphasizes the importance of observation through the Japanese concept of minarai, meaning to see and learn. It involves the idea of learning in and through the body, and of habitus, incorporating the body through habit to the movements. These ideas are common to other aspects of seishin training in Japan, found for example in the tea ceremony, and in various of the martial arts. Educational transmission on Sado, both in terms of training drummers and in educating festival goers about music, also reects concepts of education that are found in other contexts in Japan. In the collection Learning in Likely Places: Varieties of Apprenticeship Education in Japan (edited by Singleton, 1998) the contributors explore ways in which knowledge is transmitted through direct learning by doing, focusing on social, cognitive and computational perspectives. The ‘likely places’ that they discuss are intentionally not formal school settings, highlighting the important recognition that schools are only one type of site of education or transmission of knowledge. The Earth Celebration on Sado Island represents another such ‘likely place of learning’. During the festival the park is set up for workshops on dif-

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ferent music styles. Among these is what I have nicknamed the ‘what you can do with bamboo, musical review’, in which participants learn to play different styles of music created with bamboo. These include types of bamboo utes, bamboo xylophones and a means of making music from rhythmically dropping long bamboo sticks on stones covered with cloth. I later saw and heard individuals in Mexico City playing music in a way that was similar to the last example, not with bamboo, but with other types of sticks. The music in both cases was profound, involving sounds I would not have anticipated could be achieved with such simple materials. It seems likely that it was discovered in a number of places that dropping such stick-like pieces on cloth covered rocks or other objects could be used to make melodious sounds, and this again suggests the idea of humans deriving music in part through their experiences and interactions with nature. Other workshops at the Earth Celebration festival teach about styles of music developed elsewhere in the world. Some workshops are intended to help people get in touch with their musical nature, emphasizing once common (now often lost) understandings of music, and the suggestion that music is a ‘natural thing’, developing out of the sense humans have of the natural world and experiences with it, along with the experiences of everyday life, through such things as hearing the sounds of wind blowing, bamboo creaking, water vapor escaping a kettle. There is the suggestion that musical instruments at one point grew from human awareness of such sounds emanating naturally, then using natural materials to create similar sounds, but with control. A lot of education goes on during the Earth Celebration in terms of these attempts to teach or transmit different elements of music, and connections with music, through oral communication, observation, and apprenticeship-like learning. Along with this there is an attempted transmission of ‘learning’ in the sense of discussions related to the earth, the environment and how to live in harmony with nature. A different type of education occurs at Sado in terms of the education and socialization of KodÔ drummers as apprentices. The educational ideas and routines that are basic to Japanese school settings come into play in other arenas of Japanese life involving learning situations, including leisure and personal interest pursuits as well as those explicitly dened as work forms. In relationship to principles emphasized in school settings, I note elsewhere that, Japanese day-cares, preschools, and elementary schools all emphasize socialization into structured routines and cooperative group identities,

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Rohlen also notes this as a cultural emphasis on xed patterns of daily order, into which students are socialized in school that is consistent with learning and engagement in other, later, contexts. According to Rohlen, It is important to note that the teacher is the rst agent of a society that agrees very broadly on the importance of xed patterns of daily order. The routines and group processes learned at three and four will certainly be conrmed and reinforced in other structured situations throughout life (Rohlen, 1989, p. 25).

These concepts have been well discussed by Japan specialists dealing with socialization into workplace communities (including Rohlen, 1974; Cole, 1979; Clark, 1979; Dore, 1973; Abeggeln and Stark, 1985; McMillan, 1985; Kondo, 1990; Creighton, 1995, 1997). Other work has shown that there are similar patterns of socialization into leisure educational workshops, even when these are of a fairly short duration (such as a week) (Creighton, 1998, 2001). It is thus consistent that such practices and expectations are involved in the educational transmission to the festival goers during the Earth Celebration. While in Sado I had the chance to discuss at length the socialization of new drummers with one of the new recruits. He was a Nikkei (person of Japanese descent) from California, who passed the admission requirements and became one of the rare ‘foreigners’ to be allowed to train with KodÔ in its regular sessions on Sado Island. He explained what was involved in daily practices and routines. It was clear that the idea of regulating one’s body and temporal rhythm to a set schedule every day was part of the xed pattern of daily order established in the training regime. Rising early is the mark of a moral person in Japan, and is incorporated into many planned activities. In a retreat studied by Kondo, the day begins at 5:00 AM and in weaving workshops I studied, although it was not ‘required’, participants frequently adopted the expectation that they were to wake up by 5:00 to 5:30 AM. (Kondo, 1990, p. 84; Creighton 1998b, p. 198). The training schedule of KodÔ drummers likewise emphasizes rising early. The literature on new company recruits and the socialization into a company ‘community’ shows that ‘bonding’ is typically encouraged by having recruits share intense, difcult experiences, including physical ordeals. This was also structured into the lives of drumming trainees.

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The similarity of patterning for drumming trainees with other forms of education in Japan, whether in formal school settings, workshops, leisure pursuits or craft involvements, include the following: socialization into a collective or group identity, awareness of senpai-kohai (senior-junior) relationships and their incorporation into the learning experience, a profound emphasis on structured routines, shared cooperative learning, shared group responsibility, shared decision making, and group forms of evaluation. As in early school settings it is the establishment of routines that govern activities (Sano, 1989, p. 128). Rohlen (1989, p. 21) points out that in schools, the management of education is enacted “rst of all, through teaching of selected basic routines that punctuate the day. Likewise, in what seems to many when rst hearing it a gruesome training routine, the KodÔ trainees habituate their bodies to a daily schedule such that after a while, the schedule itself organizes and carries them through it. The processes and expectations that are found in school settings in Japan come into play in the education about music and music forms during workshops that go on during the Earth Celebration, and also in the education and socialization of new drumming recruits. This reveals that schools or institutions that are expressly dened as educational are not separate from other social processes and forms of cultural organization. The transmission of knowledge to both festival goers and new drumming recruits reect important emphases that have long existed in Japan on learning by listening, learning by seeing, and learning by doing that involve forms of oral tradition, learning by observation (minarai ), and apprenticeship or apprenticeship-like involvement. Localization, Globalization and Hybridization The Earth Celebration at Sado is interesting in that it embraces the extreme local while espousing the global. As explored in the discussion of space and place, Sado Island is, as a remote Japanese location, a summarizing motif of the traditional spirit of Japan, and suggestive to many of the ‘real’ Japan that is considered somewhere still ‘within us’. It is thus representative of the ultimate uchi, inside, or inner world of Japan, and the nostalgic desire to reclaim that. This is again reiterated in taiko, as a form of music associated with a traditional Japanese heritage, and symbolizing a proclaimed Japanese spirit or seishin. The Earth Celebration, in a sense hosted by taiko resonants with the idea

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that tradition can be preserved and passed on, while also being a living and thus changing form that allows new types of innovation, and can involve the fusion and hybridization of various forms. Localization and Globalization Sado is one of the remote places that represent the ‘womb of Japan’. However, the Earth Celebration celebrates not just Japan as a specic place, but the earth as mother place for all peoples. So while there is the rhetoric of Japaneseness associated with the rhetoric of nostalgia, this at some point broadens to all of humanity. Musicians are invited from all parts of the globe, and concerts featuring their musical forms are highlighted in addition to the taiko performances. Likewise, into this remote heartland of Japan many foreign visitors come for the festival. Reecting Japanese attempts at kokusaika, or ‘Internationalization,’ in recent years large numbers of JETs, as they call themselves, can be found at the Earth Celebrations. JET is an abbreviation for Japan Exchange and Teaching. JETs are native English speakers present in Japan to teach English or assist Japanese who are English teachers throughout Japan. The program is designed to address criticisms that despite years of studying English in school, Japanese often know ‘book English’ and can read English, but have difculties understanding spoken English or lack the ability to hear true English pronunciation. KodÔ is famous in Japan, along with its ‘local’ place of Sado. However, the group is also famous globally with large numbers of non-Japanese fans. Kurita (1983) contends that the new nostalgia results from Japanese beginning to view their traditions the way foreigners do, and thus beginning to love them. The suggestion in part is that foreigners are just as likely, or even more likely, to recognize the value in supposedly traditional elements of Japan. Although it might be prohibitively expensive for many foreigners to come from abroad just for the Earth Celebration, JETs are located throughout Japan, and do come in large numbers. This sudden global presence during the festival is often a very strange experience for the ‘real’ local rural dwellers of remote Sado. Given its location, many local Sado dwellers, particularly older ones, once never thought they would actually encounter or interact with foreigners, often exoticized or thought of as ‘glamourous gaijin’. To the local dwellers, the KodÔ drummers are often themselves seen somewhat as ‘outsiders’ even though they are Japanese, in that their families did not live in Sado through generations. Local dwellers accept the presence of the KodÔ drummers on Sado, but often do not fully relate to the

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extent of their global fame. Suddenly, every other year, the small community is descended upon by foreigners who can outnumber the locals to appreciate what is conceptualized as a traditional Japanese icon, which many of the locals were not paying that much attention to, and sometimes nd it hard to understand why it draws so much attention. This became clear to me, because as a foreigner with a good command of the Japanese language I was approached by local dwellers in small shops, on roads, etc. who wanted to ask about these issues. In addition to highlighting a local place, the Earth Celebration also invokes a global appeal to harmony among all people and with the earth, rather than invoking a sense of extreme nationalism. In the process, the extreme local is used to connect with the extreme global. The ultimate uchi (inside) of Japan interfaces with the absolute soto (outside) of the international and global world. Although at rst this might seem strange, there have been other cases of this in contemporary Japan. I have also written about the international festival called the Nibutani Forum that was held in the village of Nibutani, in BiratorichÔ, HokkaidÔ, in 1993, as an interface of uchi and soto. The Nibutani Forum was an international festival hosted by Indigenous Ainu, whose largest remaining concentration is in Nibutani, to commemorate the United Nations declaration of 1993 as the International Year of Indigenous Peoples. Thus again, a specic remote, rural, local area, a place representing close ties to nature, and space seen as within the landscape of Japan, was both highlighted for its extreme localness and promoted as a site of international activity. In both cases, Nibutani and Sado, the particular traditional heritage that was associated with the place, and associations of sacredness of the land in relationship to human endeavors, created a metonymic connection with these concepts in relationship to people with the earth in general, and outside of particular national associations, while at the same time invoking particular national associations. In the case of the Nibutani Forum this involved the Ainu quest for the Japanese state to recognize their Indigenous status and status as a distinct minority within Japan, while they were networking internationally with members of other Aboriginal3 groups. The Nibutani Forum provided a

3 In keeping with growing practice and the policy of the Native Law Center (see Levin et al., 1993; Creighton, 1995, p. 72) the words, “Aboriginal”, “Native”, and “Indigenous” are capitalized whenever they appear unless it is within a quotation from another source.

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stage for Aboriginal ideals of a life lived within a sense of community, in harmony with the spirit world and with nature as encapsulated in the Ainu concept of Ainu Moshir (see Creighton, 1995c, 2003). In the case of the Earth Celebration, similar ideals of nature are associated with the local place setting, while a music form representing Japanese traditions, taiko, is used to highlight both a sense of Japanese cultural heritage and identity and the broader musical impulse of humans generally. Tradition, Innovation and Hybridization Issues of intellectual and cultural property rights are currently very important. Sometimes, it is suggested that people should not create with anything that might appear to be a cultural motif that is associated with a specic people. These issues are often particularly important in reference to the cultural and creative products of Aboriginal peoples and remaining small-scale groups. Often, traditional products and forms have been re-created for mass consumption by others with little or no form of compensation going to members of the group. In some cases, such mass production of similar items or motifs has rendered it difcult to retain and train people in the making of the more complicated forms in time-consuming traditional processes, creating another difculty for the retention of such creative forms. Often forms of social organization and network relationships in terms of who may and may not reproduce certain motifs held within groups are ignored or not understood by outsiders. However, there is another side to this debate in that such concerns have been used to impede the legitimate transmission of ideas, and of the cross-germination of ideas and creative forms from a variety of places. An example of this is shown in the movie The Red Violin. In the name of ‘cultural purication’ violins, seen as aspects of Western tradition, are destroyed in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. As viewers, we understand this to be somehow ‘wrong,’ that creative forms emanating from a particular cultural tradition are also part of the shared heritage of humanity. Another aspect of the universal nature of human creativity has been the borrowing and transmission of ideas through time and across cultures. During the Earth Celebration there is a recognition that taiko belongs to a Japanese heritage but also belongs to all of humanity as a part of a creation of a specic culture, ‘Japanese,’ that makes it part of a universal human heritage as well. Additionally, musicians from different parts of the world are brought in, or come in, to participate. There is a sense of the validity of tradition, particularly as a means of

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transmission or of passing something for others to learn and to learn from, while ‘learning’—very importantly—also implies the possibility of doing something different from now into the future, and innovating with the creative ideas supplied by ‘traditional motifs’. This view of tradition does not hold that things conceptualized as traditional need to be frozen in past forms. Rather it embraces the creative and generative possibilities of tradition, and proclaims tradition to be alive and have the capacity to incorporate change and innovation. During the Earth Celebration, there are examples of creative fusion of music forms from different traditions, constructed and entwined intentionally, sometimes creating new hybridized forms. There are other examples of this in which taiko is involved. I have already mentioned some examples of how taiko has been used in other contexts such as in Vancouver. In this case, taiko becomes an emblem of a ‘Japanese heritage’ or what it means to be a person of Japanese descent, yet also becomes part of a broader Asian Canadian identity. There are also examples of a set tradition being used with others to create new forms. Bonnie Soon’s drumming number “Fast Life on a Lazy Susan” was developed to express something from an identity perspective of being a Chinese Canadian. Takeo Yamashiro is a well known Vancouver-based shakuhachi (bamboo ute) player (see Greenaway 2004). Because shakuhachi is also seen as a traditional form of Japanese music, he frequently plays at Vancouver taiko events (such as the two-day Taiko no Gochiso, “Feast of Taiko”) bringing the different forms together. Taiko players and other musicians in Vancouver jam and create new numbers with drummers who specialize in African drumming traditions. There are attempts to bring together different traditional cultural forms and use them in the creation of new ones, which results in new forms of creativity by combining different motifs, creating new forms of fusion and hybridization. Although concerns about cultural, creative, and intellectual property rights are important, it is also important to remember that there are a variety of ways that ideas have traveled or been transmitted from one place to another, from one people to another, throughout human existence. Thus, there must be some way of allowing for the valid transmission and ow of ideas amongst human beings as part of the creative human process. Without negating concepts of cultural property, there also needs to be a recognition of the living nature of tradition that has the capacity to incorporate change and innovation, and the possibility of hybridization of new forms.

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Elsewhere, I have written about the symbolism associated with furusato, as a means of helping Japanese deal with a sense of lost identity, or reafrming the values of Japaneseness in the present, to move toward an uncertain future (Creighton, 1997, 2001). In analyzing the potential positive aspects of the contemporary tendency towards nostalgia in Japan I suggested that “nostalgia for a lost past, rather than stagnating people in the past, can be a collective means to move forward into the future by quelling fears about an uncertain present” (Creighton, 2001). In Japan, the rhetoric of nostalgia that is associated with localized places like Sado Island and with icons of Japanese heritage and identity such as taiko reafrms the values of community and belongingness, and thus addresses a profound sense of loss that many experience in modern life. Bestor asserts that in contemporary Japan such images of community are recognizable to “members of society as a whole and unassailably legitimate because they invent and then represent a history of cultural continuity with the pre-industrial past, the cultural legitimacy of which no one could or would dispute” (Bestor, 1989, p. 265). I would additionally suggest that once invented and asserted this cultural continuity with the pre-industrialized past can be projected into the future. This is exemplied in the travel industry by the Japan National Tourist Organization’s slogan of “Japan . . . where the past meets the future” (Creighton, 1997, p. 252). Images of localized village-like communities and images of heritage engagements such as taiko are used to grant reassurance that something representing a sense of Japanese identity, and Japanese concepts of community, still exists and will persist into the future, despite increasing globalization. The above might have been sufcient to account for the full analysis of the imaging of taiko and Sado Island in the 1970s and 1980s, reecting why KodÔ chose Sado Island and a return to harsh samurai style training involvements to suggest seishin, or a Japanese spirit. However something more is being suggested in the Earth Celebrations from the 1990s and into the twenty-rst century. In an attempt to understand this difference, I would like to relate the shift to contemporary campaigns in large cities of Japan, for ‘furusato zukuri’ and the creation of ‘shin-furusato’. Furusato zukuri means ‘making furusato,’ and ‘shin-furusato’ is a seemingly oxymoronic term that would literally mean ‘new old villages’. However, as furusato evokes the associations of community, the projected meaning

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of shin-furusato is the creation of ‘new communities’ or new concepts of communities. Such campaigns have sprung up in various urban centers in Japan. The point of these campaigns has been to address the sense of lost community in modern human life, and to seek to re-create it. The campaigns have been aimed at addressing the human needs that are seemingly being expressed in the contemporary quest for furusato, and nostalgic forays into the past, rather than just provide pleasant reafrming imagery. Such campaigns suggest that people should put effort into nding new ways of re-creating humanistic ties among themselves in contemporary forms of communities as they now exist in Japan. What seems to be happening in the Earth Celebration is the suggestion of taking this idea to a larger scale through the projection of the possibility of creating ‘global furusato’. This involves the idea of re-embracing ties to nature and the earth as part of the human experience, thereby broadening the suggestion of community from being tied to a sense of Japanese identity that is associated with the islands of the Japanese archipelago, to a larger human experience because all humans are tied to the earth (and presumably we were all once more aware of it). In recent years the Earth Celebration on Sado Island has espoused a sense of identity as chikyÖjin, (people of the planet earth), a broader category than Nihonjin ( Japanese, or people of Japan). The bringing together of different forms of music that are associated with different specic places or traditions in the creation of new innovative forms that in many cases can be thought of as hybridizations is also relevant. The earth might exhibit variations, yet we all have an essential tie to it. One meaning associated with the name KodÔ is ‘heartbeat’. However, it is also understood that the ‘heartbeat’ is heard by all humanity, not by just one people. Music is a part of the human experience, and there is a suggestion that the various cultural forms of this are also part of our collective heritage as human beings, and in addition to specic identities can be used to further a more universalistic understanding of ourselves as human beings. Hence, at some point there is the suggested potential merging of specic cultural heritages, based in localized places and ways of life, with a universal heritage of humanity. There is thus the suggestion that ‘community’ remains a multivocal symbol which is important in human life, that our ties to ‘nature’ need to be recognized, and that particular cultural traditions are to be appreciated. But there is also something else. This additional element involves the suggestion that as humans we can reect on these issues and create new forms of communities between and amongst the

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peoples of Earth. In this search we can nd understandings that join us while celebrating the contributions to the different ways of expressing humanness that humans over the centuries and in different places have conceived, nurtured and perpetuated. The Earth Celebration celebrates the possibility of new forms of creativity by fusing various motifs and creative forms. It is a harmony of musical traditions composed as an accompaniment to the suggested quest for ‘new’ and not ‘old’ forms of furusato or communities that can be reectively thought out and developed. These are conceptualized as new forms of communities that will foster stronger ties to nature, encourage the balance of ourselves as persons individually, as persons in community, in relations to others, and in relations to nature, and as communities that address the basic human, not just Japanese, need for belonging among peoples as part of a global community and heritage. In keeping with the chosen metaphor of drumming with the heartbeat, I would like to end with a quote from James McBride as it appeared on one of the MILK (Moments, Intimacy, Laughter, Kinship) photography projects (see for example M.I.L.K. Project, 2001, 2002a, 2002b) exhibits that was held in Grand Central Station in New York in July 2001. Close your eyes and put your hand to your heart . . . you will hear the sounds of hearts beating all across the world . . . They are the same heart. REFERENCES Abegglen, James and Stalk, George, Jr. 1985. Kaisha, The Japanese Corporation. New York: Basic Books. Akatsuka Yukio. 1988. “Our Retrospective Age,” Japan Quarterly 35:2, 279–286. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Shocken. Bachnik, Jane M. and Quinn, Charles J., Jr. (eds) 1994. Situated Meaning: Inside and Outside in Japanese Self, Society, and Language. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Befu, Harumi. 1992. “Symbols of Nationalism and Nihonjinron,” pp. 26–46, in Ideology and Practice in Modern Japan, edited by Roger Goodman and Kirsten Refsing. London: Routledge. ———. 1983. “Internationalization of Japan and Nihon Bunkaron,” pp. 232–266, in The Challenge of Japan’s Internationalization: Organization and Culture, edited by Hiroshi Manneri and Harumi Befu. Tokyo: Kodansha. Bestor, Theodore. 1989. Neighborhood Tokyo. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

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Buruma, Ian. 1984. A Japanese Mirror: Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture. London: Vintage. Clark, Rodney. 1979. The Japanese Company. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cole, Robert. 1973. Japanese Blue Collar: The Changing Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Creighton, Millie. 2005. “Nikkei Ethnicity and Identity through Japanese Diaspora Transnational Networking,” pp. 1–19. ———. 2003. “May the Saru River Flow: The Nibutani Dam and the Resurging Tide of the Ainu Identity Movement,” pp. 120–143, in Joining Past and Present: Japan at the Millennium, edited by David Edgington. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. ———. 2001a. “The Anthropology of Nostalgia,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by Ulf Hannerz. Great Britain: Elsevier Science, Ltd. ———. 2001b. “Spinning Silk, Weaving Selves: Gender, Nostalgia and Identity in Japanese Craft Vacations,” Japanese Studies 21:1, 5–29. ———. 1998a. “Pre-Industrial Dreaming in Post-Industrial Japan: Department Stores and the Commoditization of Community Traditions,” Japan Forum 10:2, 1–23. ———. 1998b. “Weaving the Future from the Heart of Tradition: Learning in Leisure Activities,” pp. 190–207, in Learning in Likely Places: Varieties of Apprenticeship in Japan, edited by John Singleton. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997a. “Consuming Rural Japan: The Marketing of Tradition and Nostalgia in the Japanese Travel Industry,” Ethnology 36:3, 239–254. ———. 1997b. “Marriage, Motherhood, and Career Management in a Japanese ‘Counter Culture’,” pp. 192–220, in Re-Imaging Japanese Women, edited by Anne Imamura. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1995a. “Japanese Craft Tourism: Liberating the Crane Wife,” Annals of Tourism Research, 22:2, 463–478. ———. 1995b. “Creating Connected Identities Among Japanese Company Employees: Learning to be Members of Department Store Work Communities,” Culture 15, pp. 47–64. ———. 1995c. “The Non-Vanishing Ainu: A Damming Development Project, Internationalization and Japan’s Indigenous Other,” The American Asian Review 13:2, 69–96. ———. 1991. “Maintaining Cultural Boundaries in Retailing: How Japanese Department Stores Domesticate ‘Things Foreign’,” Modern Asian Studies 25:4, 675–709. Davis, Fred. 1979. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: The Free Press. Doi Takeo. 1986. The Anatomy of Dependence. New York: Kodansha International. Greenaway, John Endo. 2004. “Takeo Yamashiro: Blowing in the Wind,” The Geppo Bulletin: A Journal of Japanese Canadian Community, History & Culture 46:5, 3–7. Ivy, Marilyn. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1988. “Tradition and Difference in the Japanese Mass Media,” Public Culture Bulletin 1:1, 21–29. Kelly, William. 1986. “Rationalization and Nostalgia: Cultural Dynamics of New Middle-Class Japan,” American Ethnologist 13:4, 603–618. Kidder, Tracy. 1999. Home Town. New York: Random House. Kondo, Dorinne. 1990. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kurita Isamu. 1983. “Revival of the Japanese Tradition,” Journal of Popular Culture 17:1, 130–134. Levin, Michael D. (ed.) 1993. Ethnicity and Aboriginality: Case Studies in Ethnonationalism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Martinez, D.P. 2004. Identity and Ritual in a Japanese Diving Village. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ———. 1992. “NHK Comes to Kuzaki: Ideology, Mythology and Documentary FilmMaking,” pp. 153–170, in Ideology and Practice in Modern Japan, edited by Roger Goodman and Kirsten Refsing. London: Routledge. ———. 1990. “Tourism and the Ama: The Search for a Real Japan,” pp. 97–116, in Unwrapping Japan: Society and Culture in Anthropological Perspective, edited by Eyal Ben-Ari, Brian Moeran, and James Valentine. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Matsumoto Kenichi. 1980. “Sengo sono Seishin Fukei: Kotoba” (The Postwar Spiritual Environment: Language), Asahi Shinbun 19 August. McMillan, Charles. 1985. The Japanese Industrial System. New York: de Gruyter. M.I.L.K. Project. 2001. Family: A Celebration of Humanity. Auckland, New Zealand: Hodder. ———. 2002a. Friendship: A Celebration of Humanity. Auckland, New Zealand: Hodder. ———. 2002b. Love: A Celebration of Humanity. Auckland, New Zealand: Hodder. Nakane Chie. 1970. Japanese Society. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Robertson, Jennifer. 1998. “It Takes a Village: Internationalization and Nostalgia in Postwar Japan,” pp. 110–129, in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, edited by Stephen Vlastos. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1995. “Hegemonic Nostalgia, Tourism, and Nation-Making in Japan,” Senri Ethnological Studies 38, 89–103. ———. 1991. Native and Newcomer: Making and Remaking a Japanese City: Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press. ———. 1988. “The Culture and Politics of Nostalgia: Furusato Japan,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 1:4, 494–518. ———. 1987. “A Dialectic of Native and Newcomer: The Kodaira Citizens’ Festival in Suburban Tokyo,” Anthropological Quarterly 60:3, 124–136. Rohlen, Thomas. 1989. “Order in Japanese Society: Attachment, Authority, and Routine.” Journal of Japanese Studies 15.1, 5–40. ———. 1974. For Harmony and Strength: Japanese White-Collar Organization in Anthropological Perspective. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sano Toshiyuki. 1989. “Methods of Social Control and Socialization in Japanese DayCare Centers,” Journal of Japanese Studies 15:1, 125–138. Singleton, John (ed.) 1998. Learning in Likely Places: Varieties of Apprenticeship Education in Japan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Smith, M.E. 1982. “The Process of Sociocultural Continuity,” Current Anthropology 23:2, 127–142. Tobin, Joseph. 1992. “Japanese Preschools and the Pedagogy of Selfhood,” pp. 21–39, in Japanese Sense of Self, edited by Nancy R. Rosenberger. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tuan Yi-fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1974. Topophilia, a Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Chapter 10

Learning Hong Kong’s Body: Beauties, Beauty Workers and Their Identities Anthony Y.H. Fung The allure of beauty is perhaps part of human nature and is found in every culture. The idea of the perfect body of being health-consciousness and of those concrete customs practices and programs for skin care and body slimming are collectively called cosmetology. This chapter does not address the history and cross-cultural nuances of cosmetology. Instead, its focus is on the cultural as well as politico-economic aspects of this eld of knowledge. The politico-economic and cultural implications of cosmetology have expanded to such an extent that its intrinsic value and signicance have gone far beyond the mere physical. Not only is it intermingled with capitalistic protability, and political and economic contours on a societal level, but the conceptualization of beauty has also changed the perception of the body on an individual level. While the former concerns values of gender, class and consumption that are associated with cosmetology on a macro level, the latter focuses on micro body politics. Based on eld data collected in southern China, I focus on the liberating potential and social and individual controls that are inherent in the practice of cosmetology. That practice can be regarded as a cultural product, and in this context its use of systematized and ‘scientic’ techniques to restore and enhance beauty embodies the values of Western capitalism and of modernization. Combined with the historical development of China they produce a specic cultural meaning and politico-economic implications. In this chapter I seek to interpret the cultural meaning of cosmetology in South China through ethnographic methods. Based on a cultural studies perspective, I argue that cosmetology is, on the one hand, a profession much akin to other culture industries, and that it is highly dictated by the political economy of the society. Hence, its workers and consumers serve largely the prot and stability of the system. On the other hand, allowing a group of female beauty workers to have the opportunity to pursue an alternative path

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of working out their identities that is shielded from suppression and exploitation represents a kind of cultural resistance in small private sites of beauty (Foucault, 1980, pp. 255–257). However, this appropriation and new interpretation of beauty has serious implications for femininity and for the body politic as a whole. The Interaction between Hong Kong and Cities in Southern China Until around a decade ago, professional cosmetology was still a remote concept to Chinese people. This is not to say that grooming, beauty products and body care were not popular in China, but that cosmetology seemed only to pertain to individual care and not any collective social needs—a private realm that was not worth public discussion. As an individual form of behavior, its macro relationship with society was simply not visible. Since the 1990s, with the booming of the Chinese economy, the inow of foreign capital and the interactions with ‘modern’ Hong Kong, the cities of southern China have experienced a drastic change of conception and practice in reaching out to people’s needs and desires. Even without market surveys of conceptions of beauty, the visibility of business that is related to body care and the emergence of so-called beauty practitioners in the ‘beauty profession’ suggests that locals have become are very open and vocal in talking about body-related desires and satisfaction in public. One major factor that has made cosmetology publicly visible and professionalized has been interference from the government. When China became more open in the 1990s, cosmetology was associated with illegal prostitution in that both involved services to body parts and satisfaction of various bodily and psychological desires. Places offering sexual services disguised themselves as cosmetology services by carrying labels such as ‘massage,’ ‘bath,’ ‘sauna’ and even ‘hairdressing salon’. As a result of this precursor ‘contamination,’ concepts that are associated with individual body care are laden with derogatory meanings. However, it was precisely this legal boundary-trespassing, non-standardized and chaotic eld of cosmetology that prompted the government to recognize the traditional individual matter of beauty as a publicly recognized business. It was also under these conditions that cosmetology became a professional, social or economic discourse that the authorities could legitimately regulate.

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To suppress illegal sexual business, the government had to standardize industry practices, and require the industry to install a licensing and registration system. The process involves inspections from ofcials from the Bureau of Industry and Business to make sure relevant regulations are abided by. Moreover, one aspect of ‘modernizing’ such places is to institutionalize and stipulate the uses of the space (Giddens, 1991, pp. 17–29). Now, all of these places practicing cosmetology follow the authorities’ requirement to foster an open design without hidden rooms or corners to reduce the trade in sexual services and facilitate inspection. The Bureau also makes regular checks to ensure that the space for male customers is separate from that for female customers. Further, to restrain the development of the sexual service business, since 2001 the government has temporarily stopped licensing cosmetology businesses. All of these administrative pressures have restrained the growth of undesirable and immoral elements in society and indirectly facilitated the professionalization and regulation of cosmetology. Compared to mainland China, the Hong Kong government has a long established system that regulates this professional business. Beauty salons can easily obtain licenses by observing the regulations for business registration and re safety requirements. In recent years, Hong Kong practitioners and the schools that teach beauty techniques have tried to push the cosmetology market along the path of professionalization. In 1998, the rst professional cosmetology magazine, Hong Kong Beauty, was founded. The magazine features grooming stories, information on new products, cosmetology product suppliers and contact information for beauty parlors. The website of the magazine specically points out that “different from other women magazines in the market, Hong Kong Beauty is a more professional and specialized cosmetology magazine”. In 2000, the magazine published the rst cosmetology yearbook in Hong Kong— the 2001 Hong Kong Cosmetology Yearbook. According to the database in the yearbook, there were about 800 beauty product suppliers and 9 schools of cosmetology and associations offering professional cosmetology education and relevant certicate programs. It is estimated that there are some 2,000 various types of beauty parlors in Hong Kong. When the professionalized beauty industry in Hong Kong met with the social and economic development of South China, Hong Kong’s concept of beauty immediately set off various cultural and economic interactions, including knowledge transfers, the trading of beauty products and changes in values and in the larger culture of mainland China.

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During this process of transferring know-how, Hong Kong plays the role of cultural center as knowledge diffuses to its satellite and periphery cities, which in turn spread to more cities inland in southern China. The transfer process is kept running by means of a qualication system. To improve the so-called ‘professional’ qualication, all cosmetology businesses in the mainland require their staff to be trained before actually working in a salon. First, the staff member is required to pass training courses that are run in large beauty parlors in Shenzhen for about two months, and after that tackle a test in a locally accredited cosmetology school or shop to obtain a primary cosmetology certicate. After several years of work experience, the staff member can take a higher level of recognized professional test to gain the mid-level or advanced certicates. The ultimate goal of beauty workers is then to acquire a certicate in Hong Kong as the schools in Hong Kong are afliated with various international organizations of cosmetology. Such an afliation only implies that the certicate issued carries the names of the international organizations, but this does not mean that the courses are all offered by these international bodies. A cosmetology tutor whom I interviewed who worked in Lo Wu said that it had taken her almost 8 years to receive an advanced certicate. She was very excited to tell me that she nally went to Hong Kong to take the test for an internationally recognized professional qualication in 2001. Practitioners of the cosmetology business in Shenzhen, the border special region adjacent to Hong Kong, also said the process of reaching the highest level of the profession was long and difcult. They often have to go back to their hometowns to obtain visas (to Hong Kong) rst and then return to Shenzhen to cross the border to Hong Kong via the Lo Wu immigration portal. Another beauty worker, originally from Wuhan, said that this process was too long and complex and she described studying cosmetology in Hong Kong as a ‘pilgrimage’—“a journey to a treasure house of cosmetology knowledge.” Not only must students pay the money, but they also have to possess the ‘faith’ in their hearts, to be absolutely faithful to Hong Kong—a necessary step toward international recognition in cosmetology. The discourse, practices, professional courses, examinations and certicates have gradually become institutionalized as part of the professionalization process. While this process was started by practitioners in the eld, the practitioners nowadays have to participate in and abide by

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the dominant rules that they have established. If a practitioner wants to advance to higher-level recognition beyond local acknowledgement, or simply a higher cultural status, she or he has to go to locales that are supposed to be more modern for further education. This is similar to other mainland people who have lifelong ideals of studying abroad to learn new and modern knowledge. As modernity is tied up with the consumption of foreign products, knowledge and culture, beauty workers and teachers of cosmetology have to go through Hong Kong, which is culturally closer to Western society. They do this to improve the cultural status of the cosmetology business and distance themselves from the previous negative image connected to sexual services (for the case in South Asia, see Breckenridge, 1995, pp. 1–22). Hong Kong thus sets the standard of beauty and the skills, techniques and even bodies that are related to beauty, and the cosmetology of Hong Kong has become a major target of learning. In general, cosmetology schools in Hong Kong are the suppliers and distributors of such ‘knowledge’. Some of the large beauty parlors in Hong Kong have extended their business from offering beauty services and selling beauty products to running short-term training courses that are taught by tutors and beauty workers who have been trained and recognized by overseas cosmetology associations. These parlors are also internationally registered and exist as Hong Kong branches of such international associations. Beauty workers in mainland China can study in these cosmetology institutes or schools and take qualication tests held by the four authoritative international cosmetology associations: CIDESLO of Switzerland, CIBTAL of the UK, INFA of the European Union and the IFA International Aroma Therapy Association of the UK. The practitioners, beauty workers, tutors and beauty product manufacturers in Hong Kong are fully aware of their strength and status. Their attraction to the mainland market is not simply because that they are from Hong Kong but that they have foreign connections and are selling skin-care products and ideas culturally developed for modern Western countries. A manager and owner of a beauty product supply store who had his product research laboratories located all over the world, insisted on having all of his products labeled “La Rose Blanc” and registered in Paris with a French brand name simply because this is more marketable. In both China and Hong Kong, the French written name itself has the attraction and signies a higher cultural status and a higher sense of modernity.

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While this understanding of modernity may not make total sense outside the eld, to those beauty workers, practitioners, cosmetologists and owners of cosmetology shops who pursue the interests of professionalism in cosmetology there is a clear pecking order. Starting in the mainland, moving to Hong Kong and then to the West, this learning process demonstrates the cultural hierarchy between nations in relation to the beauty esthetic. In the postmodern era, the stability of the hierarchy is maintained by the cultural capital or knowledge that a place possesses. Beauty workers acquire established qualications, which give them a higher cultural capital that they can market to others. While service manners, skin care procedures and the use of products are the technical side of the cosmetology, the cultural aspects of this industry are more essential. Everyone working in this industry tries to build up their own professional image, and their status relies upon people’s recognition of their practices and procedures. The Western cosmetology business and institutes in Hong Kong have to constantly offer exchangeable knowledge to maintain their commercial value and social status. Based on a cultural interpretation, this means that the invention of new specialized cosmetology products and instruments and the replacement of the old ones are mechanisms through which this cultural hierarchy is sustained. These ‘specialized’ and unique procedures, machines and instruments range from facecleansing machines and face-lifting and face-tone-improving machines to large whole-body fat-eliminating machines and the so-called ‘capsules’ for comprehensive care of the whole body and so on. The manufacture of these machines has now entered into a very mature stage and is every bit as complex as the manufacture of personal computers. Manufacturers also have their own training teams to offer classes to beauty workers to guarantee that professional knowledge is controlled. The Appropriation of Cultural Capital The main question of this chapter then naturally points to the cultural and social functions of a Hong Kong-derived concept of beauty for mainland beauty workers. The eldwork results show that these functions are linked with the hierarchy of the beauty parlors where the beauty workers work. In-depth interviews were conducted with 12 beauty workers in four different levels of beauty parlors in Shekou, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, including hairdressing salons, foot-washing or foot-massage shops,

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and medium-range to expensive professional beauty salons that were engaged in various sorts of cosmetology and body-slimming activity. Most of the interviewees came from small villages in northern China or other provinces, and most of them switched from other careers to the beauty business. According to a beauty worker who had been working in Lo Wu for almost 8 years, of those workers whom she met in the industry, she only recognized two Shenzhen locals. Quite often, beauty workers are non-local people from different and remote villages in different provinces. Beauty workers of different sorts have different aspirations and attitudes towards their work, very much depending on the level of beauty salons in which they are working. Staff members who are engaged at the lowest level wash and cut customers’ hair and all they wish is to make a little bit more money than their jobs in factories and then switch their profession to work in beauty parlors. Women workers who are engaged in the foot-washing business are more conscious of their status. Two foot-washing workers who come from Sichuan and Jiangxi respectively were from small villages and had worked in factories in the suburbs previously. When asked why she switched to the foot-washing business, the woman in her twenties said: There was nothing to do after work when I worked in the factories in the suburbs. Although my current salary is similar to that of before, it is different here (the foot-washing shop). We can buy clothes and go shopping here in town.

The experience of the non-local village girl shows that village women come to work in the big cities not just for money. This girl has more than ten acres of land in her hometown but what she is pursuing now is the fancy and rich life of the city. When she was working in the factory in the suburbs, she found that the real environment was much different from what she expected. She would rather go to Shekou to work as a foot-washing girl. A foot-washing girl works more than ten hours each day and only has two days off each month. Yet whenever she has holidays, she can go shopping in the town center to enjoy the material life. The cultural imagination of the foot-washing girls seems limited. When asked what they would choose to do were they not foot-washing girls they only knew that they wanted to maintain a kind of life that was characterized by buying new clothes and cosmetics worth several hundred yuan. They often did not have savings nor did they have many friends. Some of those interviewed even hid from their parents the fact that they were working as foot-washing girls.

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Compared to the foot-washing girls whose social status and image is relatively low, beauty workers or professional cosmetologists in the beauty parlors who have professional qualications enjoy a higher selfimage and behave more condently. If we measure the importance of the occupations by the different parts of the body the practitioners come into contact with, hairdressers touch the most surface area of the customer’s body while the foot-washing girls only touch the ‘dirtiest’ part—the customer’s feet. The beauty practitioners serve the ‘most important’ part of the body. A cosmetologist in Hong Kong said: When a woman gives you her most important part of the body, her face, it shows her trust in you—how important you are!

Besides being responsible for the facial care of the customers, professional beauty workers also help customers with weight loss and other kinds of health problems. They can touch the ‘important parts’ of the customers’ bodies such as their breasts and abdomens. However, professional beauty workers do not feel that they have an inferior social status. Particularly after they have completed the training courses or tests in the professional cosmetology schools, they feel that they have passed through a social threshold and achieved a different level of social status. For these beauty workers, the knowledge of cosmetology is a kind of cultural capital that empowers them in society (Bourdieu, 1984, pp. 53–54). The Inversion of the Power Relationship Compared with women workers from the countryside who work in factories or foot-washing girls who stop advancing at the foot-washing service stage, professional beauty workers have a superior social status. Factory workers often blindly follow the instructions and orders of their line managers and any innovative ideas and anything ‘extra’ of their own is forbidden. Foot-washing girls might have more freedom than factory workers, but they are still perceived by city-dwellers to be inferior workers with no education. Their role is just to serve the upper class or the people who can afford to pay. What is different for professional cosmetologists is their knowledge and know-how. For these beauty workers, the acquisition of cosmetology knowledge is a two tier appropriation. First, they acquire professional knowledge by paying money, and on this level they appropriate the

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practical knowledge for their own living. Second, their knowledge bestows them with a lifestyle of high cultural capital, the use of which demonstrates for them higher, modern cultural values coherent with those of the West (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 116). From the moment that they enter a salon customers leave their superior economic positions behind them. What becomes currency is vocabulary, knowledge and dexterity in the language of beauty. The entire beauty salon is designed in such a way that makes people feel that modern beauty knowledge comes from elsewhere. For example, to demonstrate that their cosmetology knowledge is ‘Hong Kong style’ most of the larger beauty parlors display the Hong Kong editions of trendy magazines such as Jessica and Cosmopolitan. This cultural capital is valued more than economic capital. Thus, despite the fact that the customers of the beauty workers are wealthier and perhaps better educated, their discourses on beauty, skin-care and knowledge of cosmetology pales in comparison to that of the beauty practitioners. As is the case for all professionals, while in the salon (dental ofce, garage etc.) the beauty workers have a higher status or power than the customer. The power relationship between the customers and the beauty workers described here can be considered a kind of reversal of social power. The beauty workers, who are often from the countryside and were previously in a lower social class, suddenly become the origin and powerful sources of knowledge. Customers have to rely on the beauty workers to understand the modern Western view of beauty. Although the previous class relation and economic capital relation remain unchanged, in terms of cultural capital, the beauty workers have become transcendent. Social Power Relationship

High

Economic Capital City Dwellers

Villagers

Power Realtionship in a Beauty Salon

Professional Beauty Workers

Cultural Capital

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City Dwellers

Low

Low

Figure 1: Inversion of Power Relationship in a Beauty Salon

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The reversal of the power relationship is more apparent where the information ow is more one-sided, as it often is in mainland China. Mainland customers simply lack the channel of getting to know the Western techniques, skills, brands of cosmetology, and many of the brands are not obtainable in the domestic market because of tariff and regulations. Thus, customers rely on the knowledge of beauty workers who have international qualications and have previously trained in Hong Kong. Customer reliance on beauty workers boosts their cultural capital even more. Sites of Cultural Resistance The beauty profession has become a site in which the relationship between city-dwellers and rural people or the relationship between customers and beauty workers can be temporarily reversed. If the relationship of these two classes is perceived to be contradictory or one dominating the other, then beauty parlors can be regarded as a site of cultural resistance that is in favor of rural people or people from the lower social class. Although we know that the triumph of the rural person or beauty worker is temporary, the reversal of the relationship can at least assure them that a class boundary can be successfully crossed (Williams, 1980, pp. 220–272). Moreover, the beauty business has shaped the imaginations of young rural female villagers, whereby they are able to fantasize about gaining a higher social status. Perhaps, for some, such imaginings, despite being only marginally true outside the salon, are very real and for a time sufcient. Because the numbers of beauty workers are limited and their opportunities to work in these parlors is restricted by all sorts of qualications and examinations, existing beauty workers feel that they are superior to their peers who may be illiterate, uncivilized and even pre-modern in their rural lives. What they long for is perhaps a perpetual maintenance of this provisional reversal of the power relationship in the salons. In the interviews, I could sense that the beauty workers were aware of the exorbitant prot of some of the beauty salons and, by way of contrast, their relatively low monthly salaries. Yet, they avoided talking about it, and convinced me that they were not being exploited. What is paradoxical is that almost all of the owners of the beauty parlors are capitalists or businessmen from Hong Kong or the mainland, who have little knowledge about cosmetology. To these owners, this site of cultural resistance for the beauty worker is no more than their base

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of making money. In the nal analysis, by subscribing to the current working conditions beauty workers bring stability to the beauty eld and hence economic status and opportunity to the industry. Cosmetology as a Social Culture There is a tendency to think that cosmetology is unique, unlike the regular manufacturing industry. In a modern factory, there is a simple exchangeable relationship between money and labor as workers are willing to exchange their labor for salary and then exchange goods with their salaries. Whether fair or unfair, these exchangeable relations are one-off, accurately calculated, and terminated when the job is completed; the labor paid out by the workers contributes nothing to raising their cultural capital. The cosmetology industry is different because it offers workers both cultural capital and economic capital, and the cultural capital of workers is more robust and enduring as long as they remain in the eld. First, beauty workers offer services to customers to earn their living: that is, they gain economic capital. Second, as mentioned earlier, because of the temporal reversal of the power relationship, the cosmetology industry permits beauty workers to earn a higher cultural status inside the salons. Unlike economic capital, which can be expended in a day, cultural capital is always accumulated. Beauty workers can also continue to expand their cultural capital by investing part of their economic resources to learn more about cosmetology. The whole process involves using knowledge to earn money that is then exchanged for more knowledge. When the customer enters a salon, the beauty workers pass some of this beauty know-how on to the lay person. Consequently the circulation of discourses of beauty in everyday life becomes part of the culture of society. In this way, not only are practitioners not willing to give up the attraction of this profession, but the public is not able to extricate itself from the culture of cosmetology. From facial care to the improvement of the body, cosmetology is perceived as part of the ‘modernization’ process and social development. The Myth of the Body and Commodication It seems that the cultural resistance that beauty workers have created inside the beauty parlors is temporal, and that the public cannot resist (and have no reason to obstruct) the dissemination of beauty culture.

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However, the beauty industry essentially uses the female body as a vehicle or an object either to raise the status of workers or to modernize consumers. In both cases, the female body is only an object of modernization, and from a macro perspective, merely a product readily commodied for other purposes. In the interviews, this commodication seems not to have been problematic. The beauty workers from the countryside generally thought that a perfect body was an unpolluted state—the body nourished in nature instead of articially constructed. However, they are also aware that bodies in big cities are no more perfect than those in the countryside, so city dwellers have to maintain their ‘beauty’ by articial methods such as cosmetology, skin-care and make-up. This myth of the body is commensurate with the values of capitalism, and not conducive to development of any modern values of femininity (Barthes, 1972, pp. 17–18). The culture of commercialization is so all prevailing that it extends its tentacles to the female body, turning it into a product to be sold, processed and re-xed. What I want to advocate here is that it is necessary to view such commodication as a kind of body politic. It involves power from without, a powerful control from business. The body exists independently of cultural capital and knowledge of cosmetology. To help beauty workers deconstruct the myth of the body and its commodication is to expose the fact that the beauty profession raises the cultural status of beauty workers but does so at the expense of the female bodies of others. Western countries have experienced decades of feminist activities to educate their societies, to advocate the importance of the autonomy of the body, and to regain the freedom of subjects. I believe that this long process will now take place in Chinese society (Fung, 1998, pp. 413–414). REFERENCES Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Breckenridge, Carol A. 1995. Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. New York: Pantheon Books. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Williams, Raymond. 1980. Problems in Materialism and Culture. New York: Verso. 馮應謙, 1998. ª市場、文化工業與女性主義¼, 陳浩文編，值與社會第二集，北京： 中國社會科學院出版社, pp. 397–414.

Chapter 11

The Impact of Localization and Globalization on Popular Music in the Context of Social Change in Taiwan Ho Wai-chung Introduction Taiwan is located between the Philippines and Japan, 100 miles off the south-east coast of mainland China. Its earliest inhabitants left no records but anthropological evidence suggests that people from Pacic islands may have lived there for about 10,000 years, with migration from China as early as the 12th century. The modern history of Taiwan goes back to around 1590, when Jan Huygen van Linschoten, a Dutch navigator, passed by the island on a Portugese ship and exclaimed ‘Ilha Formosa’ (‘Beautiful island’). In the late Ming Dynasty, Taiwan was occupied by the Dutch and Spanish until Cheng Cheng-kung drove them out and reclaimed the island for China. Cheng used Taiwan as the base for his anti-Ching, Ming loyalist movement, which aimed to overthrow the Ching Dynasty (1644–1911) and restore that of the Ming (1368–1644). Taiwan was a part of the territory of the Ching Dynasty, and belonged to Fu-Jian Province from 1683, from which time it remained a part of the Ching Empire for more than 200 years, until 1895 when it was ceded to Japan under the Treaty of Shimonoseki1 following the rst Sino-Japanese war in 1894. The Taiwanese Republic, which was formed to resist Japanese imperialism, was crushed by over 12,000 Japanese soldiers, who landed in the northern part of the island on 29 May 1895 (for details, see China Times, 25 May 2001; Su, 1986). The Japanese colonial occupation, which

1 The Treaty (also known in China as the unequal treaty) marked the end of the rst Sino-Japanese war on April 17, 1895, and the defeat of the Ching Dynasty army. It was negotiated and signed by Ito Hirobumi for Japan and Li Hung-chang for China. Besides the termination of Chinese sovereignty over Korea, Taiwan and other places, China was obliged to open its ve new treaty ports to Japan.

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lasted fty years, outlawed the use of Mandarin and local dialects,2 and attempted to make Taiwan’s people forget their Chinese heritage and adopt Japanese language, culture, traditions and values; in short, to become loyal Japanese subjects. To confront this, a viable Taiwanese language movement was formed in the 1920s that advocated a new written language based on a version of the southern Fujianese dialect used by the majority of the people. The resulting Taiwanese New Literature3 movement was initially a form of sociopolitical resistance against Japanese colonial domination (Government Information Ofce, the Republic of China, 2004). In 1949, Chiang Kai-shek lost the civil war on the mainland, and ed to Taiwan, where he established his regime and chose Taipei as the capital. During the Chiang regime, he attempted to promote and construct a Chinese national outlook in a people who had once considered themselves Japanese subjects. Besides dealing with unstable internal politics, the government also had to manage difcult international relations. During the Korean War, which began in 1950, the United States considered Taiwan as a buffer against communist expansion in Asia and provided nancial support and military supplies. US President Harry Truman agreed to protect Taiwan against a possible attack from communist China and sent the Seventh Fleet to police the waters between Taiwan and China. But on 1 January 1979 the United States terminated its diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and on November 15th of the same year the Taiwanese Republic of China was expelled from the United Nations in favour of the mainland People’s Republic of China. After the death of Chiang Ching-Kuo in 1988, Lee Teng-hui,4 the rst native-born president, succeeded to the

2 I refer to the local dialect as Taiwanese. In Taiwan the main dialect was the Hokkienese Minnanhua, locally named as taiyu or Taiwanese. Today most people in Taiwan speak both Hokkienese and Mandarin. 3 There were signicant parallels between Taiwanese New Literature (also known as the Taiwanese New Culture movement) and the Chinese mainland’s 1919 May Fourth movement. Intellectuals in both societies advocated the integration of the democratic ideas of modern Western society. The Taiwanese New Literature movement also instigated the anti-imperialist (or anti-Japanese or anti-colonialist) movement that marked the beginning of the upsurge of nationalist feeling. 4 Lee Teng-hui (1923–) was born in Sanchih, near Taipei. Lee admitted that his deep feelings towards Japan were because he was in fact Japanese, and consequently changed his name to Iwasato Masao. He was educated at Kyoto Imperial, Iowa State, and Cornell universities. He was the President of the Republic of China from 1988 to 2000, during which time he supported the Taiwanese localization movement that was established in the Japanese colonial period and sought to establish the independence of Taiwan from mainland China and even Japan.

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presidency and implemented a process of localization in which local culture and history was promoted over a pan-China viewpoint. On 20 May 2000 Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was selected as president, thereby ending more than 50 years of nationalist rule. Chen exerted even greater efforts to promote the ‘de-China’ movement, and the theory of ‘one country on each side’. This chapter addresses the dialectical relationship between the contemporary social processes of globalization and localization within Taiwanese popular music in the light of this difcult historical background. In spite of fast developing interest in cultural studies and the sociology of music, the analysis of popular music in relation to social developments in Asia remains largely undeveloped. Although much attention has been paid to these disciplines, particularly in Chinese literature, there has been no single study that systematically addresses the complicated interplay between the two interrelated processes of globalization and localization in the development of Taiwanese popular music. Publications that have focused on the social context of Taiwanese popular songs (for example, see Yang, 1994; Zeng, 1998) have not shown how music has been embedded within Taiwan’s political struggles around the issues of globalization and localization. In this chapter, the ‘gobalisation’ of Taiwanese popular music stands for the inuence of Western, particularly US, styles, alongside Japanese styles, whereas ‘localization’ refers to the rise of diverse endogenous musical identities. I examine the history of Taiwanese popular music in relation to its social development and state ideology, in an attempt to contribute to recent theoretical efforts in history and sociology to establish an understanding of the identity of Taiwanese popular music in its historical context. I argue that globalization does not necessarily lead to homogenization or Americanization or even Japanization, and that local music producers and popular artists nd ways of establishing their own identity and music markets within the patterns of globalization. My point of departure is the assumption that there is a complex and necessary relationship between the globalization and localization of Taiwanese popular music. This relationship can be formulated provisionally as follows. 1. Globalization lends identity to local popular songs. 2. The search for local popular music makes use of global corporations to reach larger markets. The Taiwanese state has played a crucial and complicated role in these processes as a victim and as an oppressor of both the globalization

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and localization of popular music. I rst examine the rise of Taiwanese popular music in the socio-political climate of the Japanese occupation from 1895 to 1945. Second, I trace the domination of the Kuomintang over Taiwanese pop, and the development of Mandarin ‘campus folk songs’ in the 1970s and 1980s. Third, I explore the ideological identication of various forms of 1990s popular music with ethnicity consciousness on the one hand, and economic globalization on the other. One core question in this regard is how popular music negotiates with state ideology in Taiwan. I argue that the development of Taiwanese popular music can only be fully understood within the matrix of wider social processes, and conclude with a discussion of the power relations between popular music, state ideology and the social forces of globalization and localization in Taiwan. Popular Music during the Japanese Occupation Though Taiwan’s pop music business was established by a Japanese music company, it has always produced local pop music containing a mixture of Japanese, Western and Chinese inuences. Besides love songs, pop lyrics have bolstered courage against the prevailing political authority, challenged the status quo and accompanied rites of passage through life under Japanese rule. The lyrics of popular songs during the Japanese colonial period show both an acceptance of colonial domination and a residual Chinese cultural awareness, as well as a nationalistic consciousness. Taiwan’s music industry and recording business was established in the Japanese colonial period in close conjunction with Japan. This was most evident in the setting up of the Japanese owned Columbia Records in Taiwan in the 1920s (China Times, 13 March 2000). The period of Japanese rule from 1932 to 1939 is often thought of as the golden age of Taiwanese music (http://www.tccs.ca/tcfEg/html/etwmusic.htm), and many popular songs of today, such as “Craving for the Spring Winds” and “The Torment of a Flower,” were the products of this era (ibid.). From 1929, Columbia Records began to employ local songwriters and to advertise local singers (Yu, 2003). The Lins, a wealthy clan in Panchiao who were appointed as the Taiwanese agents for the Japanese Victory Records company, pushed Taiwanese music to a new height, and the company invited Chang Fu-hsing, a Taiwanese graduate of the Ueno School of Music in Tokyo, to head the cultural

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arts division (Tsai, 2002a). Chang was the rst Taiwanese musician to be trained in Western music, and became honored as the ‘Father of New Music’. Under the leadership of Chang, Victory Records signed up the talented 19-year old Chen Ta-yu, who was acclaimed for songs such as “Shadow of Two Swallows,” “Young Mountain,” “Heartache” and “Drinking to Sadness”. Because of the various contributions of the Lins, Chang and Chen, Victory Records became as successful as Columbia (ibid.). 1930s Chinese cinema, which was mainly produced in Shanghai, had a great impact on Taiwanese pop. In 1932 a silent lm from Shanghai, The Peach Blossom Weeps Blood, was imported into Taiwan,5 and the theme song that was then composed for it became the rst Taiwanese song to win mass popularity, with tens of thousands of recordings being sold at a time when Taipei’s population was only 200,000 (Tsai, 2002a, p. 7). Later, it was even performed in the seven-character verse of traditional Taiwanese opera. Because of this overwhelming success, the Columbia Record Company recognized that traditional Taiwanese music could be good business (see Tsai, 2002a; Yang, 2002). Chun Chun, who sang the theme song, is regarded as Taiwan’s rst pop singer, and later had other hits such as “Embracing the Spring Breeze,” “Flowers on a Rainy Night,” “My Regret,” “One Red Egg” and “Please Listen to My Singing”. The song “Embracing the Spring Breeze”, written in 1933 by lyricist Li Lin-chiu and composer Teng Yu-hsien, is regarded as a Taiwanese classic. It was inspired by a line from the Chinese literary classic Romance of West Chamber that read: “the shadows of owers cast against the wall moved, and I thought my lover had come”. Lin rewrote this idea in his song to read, “I heard someone coming outside. I opened the door to see whether you had come. The angel of the moon laughed at me. I was just deceived by the wind” (Tsai, 2002a, p. 8). These Taiwanese songs were mostly modeled on enka,6 a ‘traditional’ largely pentatonic style, that used a swelling, ‘delayed vibrato’

5 In the 1920s, Taiwan desired to resume connections with China, and between 1923 and 1945 more than 300 Chinese lms were distributed in Taiwan (see Chen, 1998, p. 49). 6 Enka ballads have enjoyed widespread reception since the 1930s (for further details, see Okada, 1991, pp. 283–303). Hibari Misora, who died in 1989, is regarded as the queen of enka, and her death sent the whole nation into mourning. In recent years, enka has lost some of its popularity, because the tunes of Japanese pop lend themselves better to karaoke singing and disco rhythms.

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to emphasize the emotional content. The lyrics are usually associated with sorrow, irrecoverable destiny, homesickness or desertion by a lover. The melodies are often simple, but with detailed colorations and ornamentation, and most were in 4/4 time. Despite the Japanese occupation, Taiwanese songs at this time were greatly inuenced by Western styles in terms of theory and instrumentation. According to Zhang Chun-lin, a Taiwanese musicologist, the range of Taiwanese songs during the Japanese occupation was between the eighth to thirteenth degrees, and a pentatonic scale was used (cited in Yang, 2002). Though these songs employed indigenous Taiwanese musical instruments, the piano, violin, trumpet, saxophone and Western percussion instruments were also commonly found. Hsu Chang-hui, a Taiwanese musicologist, notes that Taiwanese songs of that time came from various sources—folk song writers, church-trained musicians and Western classically trained musicians (Tsai, 2002a, p. 8). During the last phase of the Japanese period (1937–1945), as Japan declared war on China, the colonial government mobilized huge amounts of social resources to intensify the enforcement of the Japanization program (literally, ‘the movement of converting Taiwanese into loyal subjects of the Japanese Emperor’). Taiwan served as a base from which Japan launched its invasion of the Philippines and Indonesia in pursuit of its Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. In 1940, the Japanese government even instituted a policy that promoted Japanese as the national language and banned Taiwanese. Consequently, the development of popular Taiwanese-language music was terminated. To accomplish its plans, Japan drafted Taiwanese men into its army, and gave popular Taiwanese songs new Japanese propagandistic lyrics. Thus “Embracing the Spring Breeze” became “Call of the Earth,” “Moonlit Sadness” reappeared as “Soldier’s Wife” and “Flowers on a Rainy Night” became “Soldier’s Honor” (Tsai, 2002a, p. 8). During the Second World War, when many Taiwanese were sent to the South Pacic and mainland China, songs such as “Awaiting Your Early Return” described family separation. In 1949, Chiang Kai-shek lost the civil war on the mainland, and ed to Taiwan, where he established his regime and chose Taipei as the new capital. During the 1950s, Taiwan became saturated with the Chinese culture that had been brought by the people that had migrated with the Kuomintang government, and its endogenous popular songs and music industry consequently failed to develop (Zeng, 1998, p. 5). The popular music industry of Taiwan was now mainly an extension of

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those in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Bai Guang (1920–1999) and Zhou Xuan (1918–1957) were the representative songwriters of this era.7 From the Prohibition of Taiwanese Songs to the Inception of Mandarin Campus Songs (1950s–1980s) After Taiwan returned to the Chinese rule of Chiang Kai-shek, the central government either ignored or belittled the value of developing local cultural activities, such as music, theatre, crafts, and cuisine, and strongly restricted the use of local languages in favor of Mandarin. The Taiwanese people suffered from harsh rule under the Kuomintang and tens of thousands were killed at their hands on 28 February 1947. This incident (often simply called 228) was a brutal military crackdown on civilians protesting against the corrupt administration of Chen Yi, a Chiang Kai-shek appointed governor who exercised a policy of repression (see C.Y. Lin, 2002; Ma, 2002; Taiwan Headlines, 1 March 2001). Martial law was reinforced in 1947, prohibiting the formation of new political parties and giving power to the secret police—the Garrison Command and associated agencies—to arrest anyone criticizing government policy. Due to the ofcial language policy, Taiwanese songs faded away and Mandarin songs with Japanese melodies rapidly took over the local music market. US inuences can be traced back to this time, when cooperation began between the United States and the Kuomintang. US popular music of the 1950s and 1960s was highly inuential, as can be seen in the massive four-hour nationalistic epic “A Brighter Summer Day,” produced by Taiwanese lm director Edward Yang8

7 Bai Guang was born in northern China and made her debut in movies in 1943 wartime Shanghai. After the Communist Party took over the mainland in 1949, she left Shanghai (where her songs were branded as decadent) for Hong Kong. Bai died in Malaysia on August 27, 1999. Zhou Xuan was born in Shanghai and was famous for her beautiful voice. She was rst acclaimed for her moving performance in Angels of the Street (1937), but disappeared from the screen between 1941 and 1945, resuming her career in 1946 when she moved to Hong Kong. Although Zhou Xuan and Bai Guang rose to fame in the 1930s and 1950s, their songs are now celebrated as Chinese golden oldies. 8 Edward Yang was born in Shanghai in 1947, and moved with his family to Taipei in 1949. He graduated with a B.Sc. in electrical engineering in the United States, and then studied computer science at Florida State University and lm at the University of Southern California. Upon his return to Taiwan in 1981 he directed a number of television shows. As in his earlier lms, Yang continued to explore social realities,

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in 1991 and now regarded as one of the masterpieces of modern Taiwanese cinema. Its title was lifted from the Elvis Presley song “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” Local pop artists and bands loved to adopt US pop styles into their songs. For example, the Kupa band, originally formed in the 1950s, integrated jazz, Latin music, mambo and all kinds of dance music, even classical music, with traditional Taiwanese folk music. During its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, the band regularly performed on national television and radio (for detailed information about the band, see Leavey, 2002; Phipps, 2002). Before the rise of Taiwanese Mandarin pop in the 1980s, US songs were regarded “as a better kind of music” (Yang, 1994, p. 56) and their appreciation was thought to involve “better taste” (Yang, 1993, p. 97). This phenomenon was spelt out by the government’s cultural policy, which considered popular Taiwanese music “a vulgar form” (Yang, 1993, p. 97; Yang, 1994, p. 56). For example, in 1976 Western programs could be viewed for up to 3.6 out of a total of 12 hours daily programs, in which no more than one hour was given over to Taiwanese programs (in Chouwei Chang cited by Yang, 1994, p. 56). Under the ofcial policy, US pop music continued to dominate the airwaves and the local music market in the 1970s. Many discos opened in the 1970s and local singers released many English language albums. Taiwan’s pop music accelerated and diversied with the dynamic growth of radio, cable and satellite television transmission, bringing revolutionary changes to local entertainment habits. The rst radio broadcasting station was established in Taipei in 1928;9 52,457 radios had been sold by 1952, 609,131 by 1961 and more than 10,000,000 by the end of 1980 (Yang, 2002). 117 record companies and 26 record manufacturers were registered in 1967 (ibid.). The three Taiwan television stations—Taiwan Television Enterprise (TTV), China Television

painting a portrait of Taiwanese society in ux, with scenes of clashes between Chinese immigrants and native Taiwanese, the political imperialism of pre-war Japan, and the cultural imperialism of post-war US pop culture. However, the inuence of US popular music of the 1950s and 1960s on his lms illuminates the ambivalent relationship between youth rebellion, colonial evocations and critiques of neocolonialism in post-war Taiwanese history (for details, see Yeh, 2003). 9 Radio development and administration in Taiwan was under Japanese control and the rst radio broadcasting station on the island was set up in Taipei in 1928. This station was rst aired on shortwave though soon afterwards a medium wave transmitter was adopted.

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Company (CTV) and China Television Service (CTS)—were established in 1962, 1969 and 1971 respectively, and promoted variety shows featuring popular songs and singing contests to the community. In 1976, 23.48 per cent of Taiwan’s households owned colour television sets, which rose to 77.90 per cent in 1981 and 97.34 per cent in 1988 (ibid.), and ownership of VCRs rose from 37 to 81 per cent from 1986 to 1990 (Hong, 1996). Media globalization was oriented towards global pop in this era, and consequently problematized the relationship between the new technology and local popular music. The ourishing of popular songs in Taiwan in the 1960s had a close relationship with radio and television broadcasting, such as television variety shows, dramas and movies. TTV’s rst Mandarin variety show, Qun Xing Xue (A Galaxy of Stars), lasted 15 years, and helped the growth of the music industry in Taiwan. Other popular music programs such as Cui-di Yin-zheng (Beautiful Flute and Silver Zheng) in the 1960s and Ge-xin Zi-ye (Night of Singers) and Yin-he Xuan-gong (Silver River and Palace) in the 1970s scored very high ratings and helped the growth of Mandarin pop music (Yang, 2002). Though TTV produced two programs of songs in the 1960s, Bao-dao Ge-san (Songs from Formosa) and Bao-dao Zi Ge (Formosa’s Songs), such Taiwanese language music programs disappeared as the government pushed its Mandarin language policy (Yang, 2002). But these television stations, as well as radio stations that were established in the 1960s, did not help to promote the circulation of Taiwanese pop, because it was largely banned or censored during this period. In the early 1960s television and radio stations were allowed to broadcast only two songs in Taiwanese per day (Tsai, 2002a). In 1966, the government launched a movement to revive Chinese culture, stipulating Peking Opera as the national drama and traditional Chinese ink painting as the national visual style. In 1970 CTV produced an 18-month music programme titled Jin-qu jiang (Award for Golden Songs). Although it promoted many popular Taiwanese songs such as “A Girl Feeding Ducks,” “Seeing You off with Tears,” “Rain from Northwest” and “No One Knows My Heartfelt Things,” the program was not supported by the government. In 1973 the Ministry of Education ordered all of Taiwan’s elementary and high schools to actively promote Mandarin as the national language. In the same year the government banned the broadcast of Japanese-language music and television programs, shortly after the termination of diplomatic ties with Japan when it ofcially recognized the People’s Republic of China (Smith, 1993: 38). In 1975, non-Mandarin language television

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was restricted (Gao, 2001), and in the following year the government insisted on a minimum 50 percent Mandarin programming for AM radio and 70 per cent for FM radio. The Regulatory Guidelines for Broadcast Radio and Television Programming postulated that ‘dialects’ such as Taiwanese and Hakka could not account for more than 55 per cent of total programming (Chang, 1998, p. 95). Besides television shows and music programmes, Mandarin pop had a close relationship with television dramas and lms. Many novels by Qiong Yao (a prolic Taiwanese writer of modern sentimental romances) have been aired on television and lm since the 1960s. In 1969 the theme song of a lm version of one of her novels, “Today I am not Going Home,” sung by Yao Su-rong in Mandarin, was regarded as initiating the golden era of Taiwanese pop. Not only was this song highly popular in Taiwan, but also in Hong Kong and other East Asian Chinese communities. Besides Yao Su Song, other Taiwanese singers such as Xie lei, Qing Shan and Chen Fen-lan were also popular in Hong Kong, where they frequently performed. Chen Fen-lan even signed a contract with a Hong Kong record company, which produced her rst record, Dear Mother (Weng, 2000, p. 230). The 1973 ban of Japanese music on Taiwanese radio and television forced the Taiwanese music business to look for local popular artists and music. Because of the political climate in the 1970s, contemporary Taiwanese folk songs composed by college students entered the mainstream of Mandarin pop. In 1971 Taiwan was replaced by the China as one of the ve permanent members of the UN Security Council. In 1979 China established diplomatic relations with both the United Kingdom and the United States, thereby breaking diplomatic relations between Taiwan and the United States. As a result of its new international isolation, as well as the death of President Chiang Kai-shek in April 1975, Taiwanese society begun to sense a need for self-reliance, and in September of the same year, folk singer Yang Hsuan released an album of Modern Chinese Folk Songs (Gao, 2000, p. 9). The rise of folk songs was closely tied to intellectuals’ growing consciousness of their Taiwanese cultural identity, which was known by the mid1970s as the ‘return to native roots’. In the 1970s, Taiwan’s folk songs were categorized into three main types: Chinese modern folks songs that emerged from 1975 to 1979, Tamkiang-Hsiachow folk songs that emerged from 1976 to 1979, and campus songs that emerged from 1977 to 1981 (for details, see Yang, 1994, pp. 56–9). Chinese modern folk

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songs and Tankiang-Hsiachow folk songs were created and promoted by intellectuals and consumed by high school, college and university students, (Yang, 1994, p. 56), but the concern of their lyrics with social reality also attracted farmers, laborers, students and other common people. Whilst Yang (1994, p. 56) claims that the emergence of modern Chinese folk songs between 1975 and 1979 represented a movement against total Westernization, these songs were heavily inuenced by US folk singers such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, both in their performance by singers playing guitars, and in their use of Western melodies and rhythms (ibid., pp. 56–7). The enrichment of Tamkiang-Hsiachow folk songs was advocated by left-wing intellectuals to subvert government oppression between 1976 to 1979, but also represented an attack on both Westernization and the modern Chinese folk songs (ibid., p. 57). ‘Campus folk songs’ developed from this modern Chinese folk song movement in the late 1970s, helped by the broadcasting and music industry. Many liberal scholars, particularly in universities and through intellectual magazines, publicly renounced foreign-inuenced modernist work and advocated native literature. For the same reason, universities and colleges in Taiwan renounced Western popular songs and began writing their own campus folk songs. Sony and Synco (the Sony branch in Taiwan) established the Golden Melody Award in 1977 to recruit student singers and song-writers from the universities and to expand the music market in higher education, and other companies such as Four-Seas, Li-Co, Collin and Universal repackaged some popular singers to target college students (Yang, 1994, pp. 58–9). The characteristics of the campus songs were ‘naturalness’ and ‘purity’, with a focus on the ‘singer-songwriter’ (Yang, 1994, p. 57). Lo Hsiao-yun, a music critic who worked in the Broadcasting Corporation of China (BCC) for nearly thirty years, said that the emergent folk songs of the 1970s, which should not be thought of as distinct from pop music, were simply presented and provided a vehicle for the outlet of emotion, and a point of identity for young people (Gao, 2000, p. 11). Despite the movement’s rejection of Western inuences, the style of “Grandma’s Penghu Bay,” which is one of the famous campus folk songs of this time, is very similar to US folk/protest songs, with a simple vocal style accompanied by ute, acoustic guitar and violin. The campus ballads concerned mainly love for nature and the homeland. Although these songs used Western instruments and US folk styles, they were understood to represent Taiwanese cultural identity. It was for this reason

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that university students at this time also promoted the music of earlier Taiwanese composers in the mass media. The success of Taiwan’s recording industry began to open inroads in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia with singers like Teresa Teng10 (Deng Lijun) (1953–1995), Hou De-jian and Luo Ta-you. Teng is best known for her performance of Mandarin folk songs and romantic ditties, marked by sweet and cute vocal inections. Her appearances on the television show Galaxy of Stars lead to her hosting her own show called Each Day One Star in which she perfected her folk song style. Her most famous Mandarin songs include “I Wish You and I Could Live a Long Time,” “When Will You Come Back Again?” “More Than Words Can Say” and “Small Town Story”. In 1973, having achieved fame in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, Teng went to Japan to establish her international stardom, where she won the title of the Best New Singing Star in Japan’s popular Red and White Song Competition. When political disturbances hit Taiwan, Japan and China, Deng helped lift the spirits of the Taiwanese by presenting herself at all National Festivities and giving performances for the armed forces. During the Cultural Revolution in China, Teresa’s songs were forbidden because of their ‘anti-revolutionary’ content.11 The ban was lifted in 1986, when her song “When Will You Come Back Again?” was ofcially legitimated as a ‘revolutionary patriotic song’ (Davidson and Reed, 1998, p. 80). But, due to her involvement in the democracy movement that culminated in the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, Teng’s songs were once again banned on the mainland. Towards the late 1970s, the development of Taiwanese popular music appealed to a wider national consciousness. Taiwanese cultural nationalists proclaimed themselves the ‘descendents of the dragon’ and the ‘young China’, and in 1979 Hou De-jian composed the song “The Descendants of the Dragon,” which became extremely popular, not 10 Teng died of asthma in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and was buried with a Buddhist ceremony. Her cofn was wrapped with the Taiwanese ag and was carried by military ofcers and family members. 11 When mainland China started to reform and open to the outside world in 1978, some mainlanders with overseas connections imported Teresa Teng’s fresh sounds, which consequently took the mianland by storm. One expression even said that by day, Deng Xiao-ping ruled the mainland, but by night Teresa Teng ruled, and she was known as Xiao Deng, in contrast to Da Deng (Deng Xiaoping) (Davison and Reed, 1998). In 1983, alleging spiritual pollution, the mainland banned Teng’s records, which it feared might turn her followers against communist rule.

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only in Taiwan but also in Hong Kong and China. The song uses the traditional symbol of the dragon to represent Chinese nationalism. The lyrics, which have been a hugely popular call for pan-Chinese unity, are as follows (my translation): In the ancient East there ies a dragon whose name is China. In the ancient East there lives a host of people, they are all descendants of the Dragon. Under the Dragon’s feet we are growing, growing as offspring of the Dragon. With black eyes, black hair, and yellow skin, We are forever the Dragon’s descendant.

Following Teresa Teng’s success, Taiwan’s ‘campus folk music’ began to penetrate mainland China in the rst half of the 1980s and spread widely, led by the songs of Luo Dayou, the vernacular social commentary of which found a tremendous resonance with young people. Luo’s most clearly directed songs are “Childhood.” “Tomorrow Will Be Better,” and “Little Town of Lugang”. “Tomorrow Will Be Better,” which was modeled on the Western pop song “We Are the World,” produced in 1984, was recorded by 60 Taiwanese artists in 1985, and suggested hopes for a better world in the face of continuous wars and starvation in Somalia. Part of the lyrics said (my translation): Giving a slight knock to your sleeping soul, light up your eyes slowly. Seeing the busy world, are you still turning round lonely? The sun set has called upon a morning to bring colors and to renew the earth. Let the light wind blow its sound to create a life symphony

Music television (MTV) and karaoke television (KTV) pushed the development of Taiwan’s popular music to the peak. Nonetheless, the Taiwanese record industry sought more commercial benets in promoting artists rather than their work, and consequently singers and musicians became role models for Taiwanese’s youth (Yang, 2001). It is claimed that the folk song movement lost much of its original spirit when recording companies marketed folk songs as pop songs and campus folk singers as pop stars (see Yang, 2002; http://www.gio.gov. tw/info/taiwan-story/culture/edown/3–3.htm).

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Taiwan has been moving toward democracy since the lifting of martial law in 1987, when the Kuomintang ended its ban on new political parties, giving legal status to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and other smaller opposition groups. It also lifted a long-standing ban on travel to mainland China. In 1990 Lee Teng-hui succeeded Chiang Ching-kuo as Taiwan’s rst native-born president,12 and the government began to renegotiate indigenous cultural identities13 and build its own sense of history independent from that of the mainland,14 around the terms localization, Taiwanization and indigenization. In the early 1990s, Taiwan began to refer to itself as ‘the Republic of China on Taiwan’ or simply ‘Taiwan’, rather than as ‘the Republic of China’, on many public occasions and in government documents, and more importantly, in its bid for membership of the United Nations. Great efforts were made to promote ‘nativist’ education in elementary and secondary schools by teaching the natural history, geography, environment, dialects, arts and culture of Taiwan.15 Since this time interests have shifted away from thinking of Taiwan’s history and culture solely as an appendage to that of China towards Taiwan’s international relations. To facilitate economic globalization Taiwan equipped its people to become competent in foreign languages other than English, and educated its school students in information and communication technology, diverse languages and multicultural musical styles (see Ho

12 For more details about elections and other political developments in Taiwan in the 1990s, see Fell, 2002, pp. 31–60; Chu and Diamond, 1999; Copper, 1996, pp. 43–49; Lin and Tedards, 2002, pp. 75–122. 13 For example, Taiwan’s language and other similarly phonetic systems of southern Fukienese and Hakka, as well as phonetic symbols for aboriginal languages in Taiwan, were established, and the tight controls over television and radio broadcasting in languages other than Mandarin were loosened. 14 Recently the Taiwanese authorities published a new history syllabus for senior high schools in an attempt to place Chinese history after the mid-term Ming Dynasty into the broad context of world history and out of the narrower focus on Chinese history. Wu Chan-liang, a professor with the History Department of Taiwan University, maintained that this act was a typical historical outlook featuring one country of the Taiwan Straits and the two-states theory to signify the high degree of Taiwanese independence (see People’s Daily, 25 September 2003). 15 See Ho and Law (2002, pp. 345–7) and Law and Ho (2003, pp. 83–96) for more information about the localization of music and education in Taiwan.

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and Law, 2002, pp. 342–3). With such measures, Taiwan’s economy has been upgraded rapidly over the last few decades. The per capita income rose dramatically from US$150 in the 1950s to US$13,000 today, and Taiwan has become the 16th largest economy in the world (Ying, 2003, p. 22). From the lifting of martial law in 1987 to the reign of Chen Shiubian, Taiwan has made good use of the dynamics of globalization and localization to harmonize the government, the music industry and popular artists. This careful approach to the dialectical relationship between localization and globalization has resulted in the ongoing growth of Taiwan’s pop music, which has maintained its local identity while incorporating global styles. The support for native language songs and the recognition of aboriginal performers in music awards have both stimulated the protable transnational music markets that I will describe in this section. Until the lifting of martial law in 1987, Taiwanese pop fell into two distinct categories: Taiwanese pop sung in a native dialect, which was popular among older and working-class listeners, and Mandarin pop that attracted younger listeners and was supported by the Taiwanese government along with its Mandarin language policy. Mandarin’s dominance of the local pop scene has been challenged by folk songs in Taiwanese, Hakka, Puyuma and all of the other indigenous tribal languages that give Taiwan its mix of cultures. As 73 percent of the population speak native languages, the development of Taiwanese music became a promising business. Now singer-songwriters such as Luo Ta-you and Chyi Chin, who used to sing in Mandarin, also started to perform and produce Taiwanese songs, and Wu Bai, Taiwan’s ‘King of Live Music,’ who once sang only in Mandarin with a heavy Taiwanese accent, has begun to sing in native languages as well (Lin, 2002). The adoption of Taiwanese pop songs is also well received in Taiwanese television puppet series,16 which also helps its promotion (Taipei Journal, 28 April 2000).

16 Traditional puppetry in Taiwan comes in three forms: marionette theater, glove puppet theater, and shadow theater. In the early nineteenth century, immigrants from south-eastern China introduced these three art forms, and local puppet masters gradually developed a unique Taiwanese style. In the early years of the Republic of Taiwan (which was established in 1911), puppet shows were so widespread that their popularity could be compared with that of Taiwanese Opera. Glove puppetry is the most popular form, and Taiwan has a cable TV channel devoted exclusively to puppet shows.

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Aboriginal musical performers have been recognized by music awards and have been good for Taiwan’s music business. They were presented during the 11th Golden Melody Awards (GMA), Taiwan’s equivalent of the US Grammies, at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Taipei in April 2000. Mavis Fan’s third album I Want Us Together was awarded the Best Pop Album of the Year, Chen Chian-nien was named the Best Male Performer for “The Ocean,” Faith Yang the Best Female Performer for “Silence,” Luan Tan the Best Group for their self-titled album (Yu and Bartholomew, 2000), and the Best Folk Album went to Difang’s17 (Kuo Ying-nan) Across the Yellow Earth. Labor Exchange,18 a Hakka rock band from Meinung, picked up awards for Best Production of a Non-Mainstream Album and for Best Songwriter for Non-mainstream Groups. Chiang Hui combines the traditional Japanese ballad style with melodies that appeal to a wide range age of listeners. Her hit song “My True Feelings Come Out After Drinking” is one of the most sought after songs at KTV parlors (Davidson and Reed, 1998: 81). She conrmed her position as the queen of Taiwanese pop when she won her third consecutive non-Mandarin female singer award (Woodworth, 2002, p. 17). While the Rock Record Company produces mainstream music for the Chinese-speaking market, the Magic Stone Record company produces ‘alternative’ albums that describe the everyday experience of the Taiwanese people. Among these, the greatest success was chalked up by Wu Bai and China Blue, whose 1998 Lonely Tree, Lonely Bird Taiwanese album sold over 700,000 copies (Her, 2000, p. 19) despite minimal media promotion, and came second in the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s (IFPI’s) 1998 rankings (ibid.). There was a shift evident in the evolution of the

17 Difang (Kuo Ying-Nan) is the chief singer of the Taiwanese aboriginal Ami people. In 1988 Difang and his wife Igay (Kuo-Hsin-Chu) travelled as part of a cultural mission to France where they recorded one of their songs, entitled Palang, for the Taiwanese Magic Stone Record Company. The German pop group Enigma learnt of the song and adapted it to t into one of their own, entitled Return to Paradise. This song was used during the opening ceremony of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. When Difang learned of this he requested that the source of the music be made known, but the Magic Stone Record Company pressed further. The couple retained a lawyer and sued Enigma in the United States in 1997. The case was settled out of court in 1999 with undisclosed conditions (for more information, see Huang, 2002). 18 Hakka folk-rock band Labor Exchange maintained that their music was inuenced by Chinese rocker Cui Jian and Taiwanese singer-songwriter Luo Ta-you, both of whom had been important in bringing traditional Chinese instruments and sounds into the mainstream of popular music (Woodworth, 2002).

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Golden Melody Awards, which were once perceived as ‘good songs for everyone’, carrying messages of social purication and propaganda, but have now become huge money-spinners for the Taiwanese, Hong Kong and Chinese music industries. The localization of Taiwan’s popular music industry became inextricably bound up with economic globalization in the 1990s when many musicians identied with the international scene by borrowing from foreign styles. For example, Chen Ming-chang, a member of Blacklist Workshop, borrowed melodies from puppet dramas and Taiwanese operas19 for his Matinee and I’m Not Without Feelings albums, and produced another album of songs by Taiwanese singers in the, initially Japanese, enka style (E. Lin, 2002). On 1 November 2003, the Hakka rock and roll concert for the Taiwan Hakka Cultural and Arts Festival breathed new life into traditional music through blending hip hop, blues, rock and roll, and techno music with traditional tunes. This contemporary version of Hakka music has become increasingly popular among young people. Bobby Chen’s New Formosa Fun Park Band combined Hakka and Taiwanese aboriginal music, whilst the rock band Luan Tan (a name suggesting disorder) mixed elements of Nan Bei Kuan20 with blues-rock. Deng Yu-sen’s album Love Lit the Face incorporated twelve Taiwanese folk songs sung by Lee Jing-mei, whose hoarse, emotional voice was accompanied by the Moscow Conservatory Orchestra. These songs, which exhibit customary Taiwanese characteristics of simplicity, sorrow and helplessness, have remained popular. Chang Hui-mei (known as A-mei), a native singer of the Puyuma tribe, who has been compared with Mariah Carey, has become a Taiwanese icon. Whilst A-mei incorporates tribal rhythms into some of her pop songs celebrating the matriarchal organization of her aboriginal society, she also sang a chorus of “Give Me True Feeling” in Mandarin to promote Coca Cola’s soft drink Sprite. This advertisement and her music videos were screened

19 Taiwanese opera or Gua-A-He, (‘Gua-A’ in Taiwanese means ‘songs’ and ‘He’ means ‘drama’), and puppet dramas are the two most popular theatrical forms in Taiwan, and both developed at the turn of the twentieth century. Although one employs actors and the other employs hand puppets, they often share the same stories, music, movement styles, make-up (painted faces) and costumes. 20 Bei Kuan is fast-tempo music that commonly accompanied operas and traditional puppet shows in Taiwan. Nan Kuan has a more delicate and soothing sound, originating from southern China in the Tang Dynasty and rst appearing in Taiwan in the 16th century. The Changhua County Cultural Center has maintained a Nan-kuan and Pei-kuan Center since 1990.

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on Hong Kong’s TVB, on MTV and on Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV Group (Munsterhjelm, 1999). In 2000, at the peak of her popularity, A-mei’s songs ranked No. 1 on Beijing Radio, which was regarded as an unprecedented honor.21 Other Taiwanese musicians, rather than integrating international musical elements, have successfully promoted indigenous Taiwanese sounds abroad. Huang Hui-hung, known as ‘Latin Lover’, turned his love for his country into one Taiwanese song after another. His works have been performed widely in the United States, Central America and mainland China (see Tsai, 2002b, pp. 35–7). Meanwhile Chthonic, which is famous for its unique mixture of heavy metal and Chinese instruments, released its rst album in Japan, Singapore and other Asian countries. Taiwan’s popular music has involved a combination of Taiwanese, Mandarin and non-mainstream singers, and both local and international music business. The major international record companies, Sony, EMI, BMG, Warner and Polygram, set up subsidiaries in Taiwan in the early 1990s to ease the integration of foreign music styles and to develop Chinese language music by teaming up with local companies, from which time Taiwan has become the centre of the Chinese language pop market (see Yang, 2002; Yu, 2000, p. 11). These companies not only import Western pop music into Taiwan, but also produce Chinese language music in collaboration with local artists and companies. Furthermore, by creating an international popular music market in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China in the 1990s, the major international record companies achieved a breakthrough in the symbolic relations between the three Chinese communities. For example, the Taiwan music market has worked with that of Hong Kong since Polygram succeeded in introducing popular Hong Kong artists such as Jacky Chan22 into Taiwan (see Chen, 2000; Huang, 1999). In 1997 Andy Lau, another Hong Kong popular artist, scored a No. 1 hit in Taiwan with his Mandarin song “Caring For You” on Music Impact/BMG

21

Taiwan’s inuence is not restricted to popular music. In a prole of the 100 bestselling literary works of 1999, p. 20 were written by Taiwan-based author Liu Yung. Liu was announced as a super best-selling author in mainland China. In the performing arts, the China National Opera Company was willing to pay RMB400,000 for the copyright for Kingdom of Desire, a popularized stage play composed by Taiwan’s Contemporary Legend Theatre (for further details, see Tsai, 2000c). 22 Jacky Chan’s international titles include the Monte Carlo World Music Award in 1996 as the worlds best selling Chinese artist, and the US Billboard Music Award in 1994 as the most popular singer in Asia.

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(Burpee, 1997). Zhang You-dai, a disc jockey at Beijing Music Radio said that the airwaves of mainland China have been entirely taken up by Taiwanese and Western pop (Platt, 1999). Na Ying, the very popular mainland singer, signed a contract with Taiwan’s EMI Records, and the album Conquest was a hit rst in Taiwan and then in the mainland (Lee, 2000, p. 47). Jay Chou and the very popular group F4 (Flower Four)23 received a tremendous welcome in both Hong Kong and mainland China, and Jay Chou even performed to boost the morale of the Chinese national soccer team in Beijing on May 1, 2002. All 37,500 tickets for his concert in Hong Kong in December 2002 were sold out within 45 minutes (Drake, 2003). Furthermore Japan has re-exerted a major inuence on Taiwan’s popular and youth culture after the lifting of the ban on Japanese music in November 1993. Radio and television stations were told by the Government Information Ofce that Japanese songs could now be aired at a maximum rate of one song per hour, and that former restrictions set on the use of non-movie entertainment in television programs were lifted (Smith, 1993). The television industry in Taiwan had undergone major reforms since the 1990s. Local television stations began importing a tremendous number of Japanese soap operas such as Love Generation and Long Vacation, both appealing to young people. Taiwanese magazines and newspapers feature articles about Amuro Namie and other Japanese artists. Many of Taiwan’s popular songs borrow Japanese melodies, and Taiwanese artists go to Japan to study singing, dancing, video production and music promotion (Ng, 2002/2003, p. 10). Japanese musicians are often asked to be directors, composers or instrumentalists by the Taiwanese popular music industry (ibid.). On the other hand, the Taiwanese female singer Vivian Tsui joined the Japanese band Black Biscuits, gaining a good market in both Japan and Taiwan in the late 1990s. In particular, their single “Timing” sold 1,450,000 copies and was rated fourth among Japan’s top ten singles in 1998 (ibid.). However, the international music market of Taiwan became involved in cross-Strait tensions in May 2000. On 20 May 2000, Chen Shuibian—leader of the Democratic Progressive Party—was inaugurated

23 F4 starred in a Taiwanese soap opera entitled Meteor Garden that is a hit throughout East Asia but has been banned by the mainland as a threat to young minds. Chinese parents complained that the main characters spent all their time chasing girls and spent no time on their studies, thus having a negative effect on society (see Bezlova, 2002; Hewitt, 2002).

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as the tenth president of Taiwan, and Chang Hui-mei belted out the national anthem with the National Symphony Orchestra at the inauguration. Taiwan’s political movement from a dictatorship to a democracy and the end of the 55-year-long Kuomintang rule was a remarkable transformation. Ethnic elements were featured in the inauguration ceremony with performances of a Hakka ‘mountain song’ and Holo folk music, and a variety of local cuisine. The presidential inauguration was designed to promote the cultural and political identity of Taiwan, and President Chen Shui-bian proceeded with a referendum that asked Taiwan’s 23 million people to give their views on the future of the island. China regards Taiwan as a rebel province that must be reunited with the mainland, and responded immediately to Chen Shui-bian’s designs by banning A-mei, who had performed at Chen’s inauguration and now disappeared from the Chinese media overnight. Beijing ofcials interpreted her performance as a pro-independence political statement, because of which Coca-Cola dropped A-mei from its multi-million dollar advertising campaign for Sprite (see Ho, 2003, p. 145; Guy, 2002, pp. 96–119), thereby revealing the political determinants of economic globalization. Before the ban, A-mei was the most popular Taiwanese artist in mainland China, where she held six successful concerts in the summer of 1999. China acted similarly with respect to Wu Bai, stripping him of his title of ‘best Taiwanese male singer’ in retaliation for his having sung one song at President Chen Shui-bian’s inauguration party on 20 May 2000. Conclusion The Japanese empire attempted to replace the Chinese cultural inheritance of Taiwan by enforcing the exclusive teaching of Japanese language, culture and traditions in schools. After the fty-year Japanese rule, Taiwan was ofcially handed back to the nationalist Kuomintang government in China in 1945, which reintroduced Mandarin as the ofcial language. The Chinese mainlanders who came over with Chiang Kai-shek in 1949 enforced tight political and social control until the end of martial law in 1987. During his twelve-year tenure as Kuomintang chairman (1988–2000) and Taiwan’s president, Lee Teng-hui pushed a strategy of ‘localization’ that emphasized a Taiwan-centred view of history and culture. Since then, Taiwan has made signicant steps towards the cultivation of an indigenous consciousness.

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This article has explained the growth of Taiwanese popular music over the last century in the context of the state’s political history. It has demonstrated how music history is a struggle between artists, the record industry and state agents for control of the ideological and cultural means of shaping the cognitive and affective interpretations of the social world and musical culture. The dual process of globalization and localization has a double face in the growth of Taiwanese pop music: the rise of transnational regimes and the rise of local identities go hand in hand. Globalization and localization are dual processes articulating global and local relations that have particular effects on the development of Taiwanese popular music in its socio-political contexts. Competing ideologies co-existed within Taiwanese musical culture, even during Japanese colonization and the authoritarian rule of the Kuomintang when the voices of the state and those of the opposition could be heard in extra-musical meanings. I have argued here that the development of Taiwanese popular music has had no static or fully constituted identity, but demonstrates a will to ‘re-appropriate’ its national culture, and to reinterpret it through both production and consumption. Taiwanese folk songs and ballads have become increasingly popular since the 1990s alongside transnational movements of capital and popular artists. The resulting formations of Taiwanese pop songs in the 1990s are not therefore necessarily ‘local’ in the geographical sense of the term. Followed by the open democracy initiated by the government and the quick rise of e-business and cable media, the shift in the role of the state, as with educational and political restructuring generally, is as much about music and culture as it is about economic reconstruction. Taiwanese government policies towards culture and language have resulted in the transcendence of ethnicity in popular music. The new cultural identity in Taiwanese music, resulting from interplays of multiethnicity and a mixture of Chinese, Japanese, traditional Taiwanese and Western inuences, embraces native languages. Technology has now created the possibility and even the likelihood of a global culture. Internet, satellites and cable television have swept away cultural boundaries. The relationship of locals and localization to the global background is complex, ambiguous and changing, particularly when popular music leads the way to more shared values and political unity, with or without the intention to do so. Hence, ‘globalization’ and ‘localization’ are not primarily modern social phenomenon, and that the development of Taiwanese popular music has changed over time and across shifting political ideologies. It remains to be seen whether the local goes

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global or the global goes local in Taiwanese popular music, whether globalization has broken state control over popular music, and whether popular artists and the music markets either side of the Taiwan Strait take advantage of economic globalization. REFERENCES Bezlova, Antoaneta. 2002. “Chinese popular taste bucks propaganda.” Asia Times, 16 May. Available online: http://www.atimes.com/china/DE16Ad01.html. Burpee, Geoff. 1997. “Taiwan’s charts challenged.” Billboard 109:6, 37–8. Chang, Chiung-fang. 1998. “Formosa Hakka radio—Taiwan’s Hakka nd their voice.” (Trans. Scott Williams) Sinorama Magazine 23:12, 94–105. Chen, Chun-bin. 2000. “Remapping Taiwan Musically: The Use of Translocal/Transnational Elements and the Narratives of Local Experiences in Jutopis Music,” paper presented at the Fifth Annual Conference on the History and Cultures of Taiwan at the University of California, Los Angeles, pp. 13–15.October. Available online: http://www.isop.ucla.edu/cira/paper/TW_Chen_Chun-bin.pdf. Chen, Ru-shou Robert. 1998. “Taiwan Cinema,” pp. 47–62, in Encyclopedia of Chinese lm, edited by Ying-jin Zhang and Zhi-wei Xiao. London/New-York: Routledge. China Times. 2001. “New exhibit focuses on Taiwan Republic of 1895,” 25 May. Available online: http://www.taiwanheadlines.gov.tw/20010525/20010525s7. html. ———. 2002. “The recording industry’s early roots revealed,” 13 March. Available online: http://www.taiwanheadlines.gov.tw/20000313/20000313s2.html. Chu, Yun-han and Diamond, Larry. 1999. “Taiwan’s 1998 elections: implications for democratic consolidation,” Asian Survey 39:5, 808–822. Copper, John F. 1996. Taiwan: Nation-State or Province? (Second Edition) Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Davison, Gary Marvin and Reed, Barbara E. 1998. Culture and Customs of Taiwan. London: Greenwood Press. Drake, Kate. 2003. “Cool Jay,” Asia Times Magazine, 161:8, 50–55. Fell, Dafydd. 2002. “Party platform change in Taiwan’s 1990s elections,” Issues and Studies, 38:2, 31–60. Gao, Pat. 2000. “Shifting sounds,” Taipei Review, 50:4, 5–13 ———. 2001. “Raising cultural consciousness,” Taipei Review 51:12, 4–13. Government Information Ofce, the Republic of China. 2004. Taiwan Yearbook 2003. Available online: http://www.roc-taiwan.org.uk/taiwan/5-gp/yearbook/chpt19. htm#12. Guy, Nancy. 2002. “ ‘Republic of China National Anthem’ on Taiwan: one anthem, one performance, multiple realities,” Ethnomusicology 46:1, 96–119. Her, Kelly. 2000. “Song from the heart,” Tapei Review, 50:4, 14–22. Hewitt, Duncan. 2000. “Taiwan ‘boy band’ rocks China,” 20 May. Available online: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacic/1998138.stm. Ho, Wai-chung. 2003. “Between globalisation and localisation: A study of Hong Kong popular music,” Popular Music 22:2, 145–159. Ho, Wai-chung and Law, Wing-wah. 2002. “Music education in Taiwan: the dynamics and dilemmas of globalization, localization and sinophilia,” Curriculum Journal, 13:3, 339–360. Hong, Jun-hao. 1996. “Penetration and interaction of mass media between Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Mainland China: trends and implication,” pp. 185–208, in Dynamics and Dilemmas: Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong in a Changing World, edited by Bin Yu and Tsungting Chung. New York: Nova Science.

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Huang, Sandy. 2002. “Amis singer Difang passes away,” Taipei Times, 30 March. Available online: http://www.bowdoin.edu/~triday/the_jungle/news_difangpassing.htm. Huang, Wei-ming. 1999. “Taiwan changpian xijuan yazhou” (Taiwan recordings found everywhere in Asia), Tianxia (Commonwealth) 216. Available online: http://www. cw.com.tw/magazine/210–9/216/216c24.htm. Law, Wing-wah and Ho, Wai-chung. 2003. “Music education in Taiwan: the pursuit for ‘local’ and ‘national’ identity,” Journal of the Indian Musicological Society 34, pp. 83–96. Leavey, Helen. 2002. “Taiwan’s pop idols swing once more.” BBC News (World Edition), 31 December. Available online: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacic/2615057.stm. Lee, Coral. 2000. “From little Teng to A-mei: marketing time in music,” (Trans. Phil New) Sinorama Magazine 25:3, pp. 34–44. Lin, Chia-lung and Tedards, Bo. 2002. “Lee Teng-Hui: transformational leadership in Taiwan’s transition,” American Asian Review, 20:2, 75–122. Lin, Eric. 2002. “From the fringes to the mainstream—new Taiwanese music booming’. Trans. Scott Williams. Sinorama Magazine 27:6, 26–31. Lin, Chieh-yu. 2002. “228 Victims’ Families Urge Action,” Taipei Times, 1 March, p. 1. Lin, Sen-lun. 2000. “Protest songs,” Taipei Times, 25 June, p. 17. Ma, Ying-jeou. 2002. “A reection upon 228 Incident.” Taipei Times, 28 February, p. 8. Munsterhjelm, Mark. 1999. “Aboriginal Today, Taiwanese Tomorrow: The Packaging of A-Mei.” Available online: http://www.media-culture.org.au/reviews/sounds/ amei.html. Ng, Benjamin Wai-ming. 2003. “Japanese popular music in Singapore and the hybridization of Asian music,” Asian Music, XXXIV:1, 1–17. Okada, Maki. 1991. “Musical characteristics of enka,” Popular Music, 10:3, 283–303. People’s Daily, “Taiwan authorities condemned for tampering with history,” 25 September 2003. Available online: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200309/24/ eng20030924_124841.shtml. Phipps, Gavin. 2002. “Swing to original big band sounds,” Taipei Times, 20 September, p. 19. Platt, Kevin. 1999. “Pop Culture Bridges Political Gap,” Available online: http://www. csmonitor.com/durable/1999/01/07/p6s1.htm. Smith, Glenn. 1993. “Taiwan lifts Japanese music ban,” Billboard, 18 December, 105:5, 38. Su, Bing. 1986. Taiwan’s 400 Year History, The Origins and Continuing Development of the Taiwanese Society and People Washington: the Taiwanese Cultural Grassroots Association. Taiwan Headlines. 2001. “228 victims demand truth.” 1 March. Available online: http:// www.taiwanheadlines.gov.tw/20010301/20010301p2.html. Taipei Journal. 2000. “Glove puppetry alive and well,” 28 April. Available online: http://www.taiwanheadlines.gov.tw/20000502/20000502f1.html. Taipei Times. 2001. “Beijing sings a new tune to Taiwan pop star,” 13 March. Available online: http://www.taiwanheadlines.gov.tw/20010313/20010313p4.html. Tsai, Wen-ting. 2002a. “Taiwanese pop will never die,” (Trans. Glenn Smith and David Mayer) Sinorama Magazine 27:6, 3–19. ———. 2002b. “A third way for Taiwanese pop? Singing star Huang Hui-hung,” (Trans. Jonathan Barnard) Sinorama Magazine 27:6, 35–37. ———. 2002c. “Transplanted from Taiwan—Yam culture catches on in the PRC,” (Trans. David Mayer) Sinorama Magazine. Available online: http://www.sinorama. com.tw/en/show_issue.php3?id=200219101006e.txt&page=1. Weng, Qi-zhi. 2000. Shidai Qu Di Liiuguang Suiyue (The Age of Shanghainese Pop). Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Company Ltd. Woodworth, Max. 2002. “Jay cleans up at golden melodies,” Taipei Times, 5 May, p. 17. Yang, Fang-chih Irene. 1993. “A genre analysis of popular music in Taiwan,” Popular Music and Society, 17:2, 83–112.

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———. 1994. “The history of popular music in Taiwan,” Popular Music and Society, 18:3, 53–66. Yang, Li-chu. 2001. Song and Life in Taiwan.” (Trans. James Decker) Available online: http://www.etaiwannews.com/ History/2001/12/03/1007346565. htm. Yang, Ke-long. 2002. Taiwan Liuxing Quge Yanji (A study of Taiwan’s popular music). M.A. Dissertation. Available online: http://ws.twl.ncku.edu.tw/hak-chia/i/iunnkhek-liong/sek-su/02–khai-soat.htm. Yeh, Emilie Yueh-yu. 2003. “Elvis, allow me to introduce myself: American music and neocolonialism in Taiwan cinema,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15:1, 1–28. Ying, Michael Mao-kau. 2003. “Opportunities and challenges: Taiwan’s diplomacy in the globalization era,” Journal of Third World Studies 20:1, 19–25. Yu, Sen-lun. 2000. “Golden melodies,” Taipei Times, 27 April, p. 11. Yu, Sen-lun and Bartholomew, I. 2000. “Awards in tune with Taiwan identity,” Taipei Times, 29 April, p. 11. Yu, Sen-lun. 2003. “Taking a look back over musical history,” Taipei Times, 24 April, p. 16. Zeng, Wei-jia. 1998. Cong Liuxing Gequ Kan Taiwan Shehui (To View Taiwan’s Society from Popular Songs). Taipei: Guiguan Bookshop Company. Other sources http://www.tccs.ca/tcfEg/html/etwmusic.htm. http://www.gio.gov.tw/info/taiwan-story/culture/edown/3–3.htm.

Chapter 12

Building Traditions for Bridging Differences: Islamic Imaginary Homelands of Chinese-Indonesian Muslims in East Java Chiou Syuan-yuan Introduction In Indonesia, the ethnic Chinese minority have been regarded for a long time as an alien segment of the indigenous Indonesian culture. The labels of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Muslim’ have been seen as mutually exclusive. Despite this perception, the rst Chinese Muslim organization in Indonesia was established in the 1930s. After independence, an Islamic da’wah (mission) movement aimed at Chinese Indonesians was initiated in the 1960s by the Association of Chinese Muslims of Indonesia (Persatuan Islam Tionghoa Indonesia, PITI).1 In 2003, the regional PITI of East Java (PITIEJ) based in Surabaya built a mosque in the Chinese style. The mosque was named Cheng Ho (or Zheng He)2 to commemorate Cheng Ho’s great voyage and his contribution to the spread of Islam in Indonesia. If there is no direct relation between the Chinese Hui Muslims and the Chinese-Indonesian Muslims, then why did the PITIEJ link its own Islamic tradition to the Chinese Hui Muslims by promoting the history of Cheng Ho and building a mosque in the Chinese style? By building the Cheng Ho Mosque, the Chinese-Indonesian Muslims of the PITIEJ have created an alternative socio-religious space, empowering themselves to improve ethnic relations between the Chinese-Indonesian minority and the indigenous Muslim majority after the downfall of President Suharto. Through the ingenious Cheng Ho mosque, an invented Islamic tradition of PITIEJ simultaneously articulates a discourse of religio-cultural intimacy between Chinese and Indonesian Islam, and appropriates

1 The PITI, combined with two Chinese-Indonesian Muslim organizations, was established in Jakarta in 1961. 2 Cheng Ho is usually used in Indonesian.

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Islamic Chinese-ness from the traditions of the Chinese Muslim Hui. It is represented as a symbolic convergence of Chinese-Indonesian non-Muslims and indigenous Indonesian Muslims. Development from Chinese Muslims to Chinese Indonesian Muslims There are actually several historical links between Indonesian culture and Chinese Muslims. There were many Chinese Muslim (Hui) communities along the coast of southeast China, and it is likely some of the Chinese who migrated from China to the Indonesian archipelago in the 15th century were Muslims. Another signicant historical event was Cheng Ho’s voyage to the archipelago.3 Several scholars have also traced the possible contributions of Chinese Muslims to the spread of Islam in Indonesia.4 However, there was no Chinese-Indonesian Muslim organization before the 20th century. Conversion to Islam among ethnic Chinese in Indonesia was not a form of collective behavior before that time. However, interestingly, Cheng Ho’s voyage has been regarded as a signicant symbol by Chinese-Indonesian Muslims, and some scholars hold that Cheng Ho, his followers and Chinese Muslims immigrant contributed to the spread of Islam in Indonesia. Often, for reasons of marriage and naturalization, some Chinese gradually converted to Islam and assimilated to Muslim culture. In sum, it is clear from the historical record that the conversion to Islam of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia is not a completely new phenomenon.

3 Cheng Ho (Zheng He, 1371–1433), a Chinese ofcer and a Hui Muslim, was assigned by Emperor Cheng-tsu (Yung Lo) of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) to visit the Indonesian archipelago seven times in the rst decade of 15th century (from 1405 to 1433). He started a maritime expedition to the Malay World, South Asia, Persia, the Arabic Peninsula and East Africa. See Mills (1970) and Levathes (1996). 4 Although the role of Chinese Muslims in the process of Islamization in Indonesia does not seem to be a core question in the study of Islamization of Indonesian, controversies about the historical relation of Indonesia and Chinese Islam was caused by Muljana’s book in 1971. Kumar (1987) has highlighted the dispute in which a minister of religion criticized that this idea attempts to ‘sinicized’ the traditions of Indonesian Islam. Finally it led to Muljana’s controversial book being banned by the Indonesian government. Yet the book was welcomed by Chinese-Indonesian Muslims and agreed on by some Indonesian scholars such as Budiman and Al-Qurtuby. Regarding the trade and evidences of Chinese Muslims in the Indonesian archipelago and their possible inuences on the spread of Islam, see Al-Qurtuby (2003), Budiman (1979), de Graaf and Pigeaud (1984), Fatimi (1963), Lombard and Salmon (1994), Muljana (1968/2005), and Reid (2000). During the post-Suharto era to talk about the historical roles of Chinese Muslims is no longer a political taboo, al-Qurtuby’s book comprehensively revisits the sensitive topic, and Muljana’s book is published again in 2005.

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The rst Chinese-Indonesian Muslim organization, the Association of Chinese Muslims (Persatuan Islam Tionghoa, PIT),5 was established in 1936, before Indonesian independence. While many Chinese converted to Islam, they remained afraid that non-Muslim Chinese would ostracize them as ‘indigenes.’ The motivation of new Chinese converts was criticized by one of the PIT leaders, who argued that new converts erroneously thought that once they adopted Islam, changed their names to new Muslim names or wore Muslim attire, they were real Muslims. During the 1930s, those Chinese who embraced Islam wanted to retain their Chinese identity and separate themselves from the native Muslim majority.6 In the Republic period during the 1960s, there were two waves of da’wah movements of Chinese-Indonesian Muslims. Abdul Karim Oei (1905–1982) became the rst signicant visible Chinese-Indonesian leader.7 He merged and chaired two Chinese Muslim organizations as the Persatuan Islam Tionghoa Indonesia (PITI, Organization of Chinese Muslims of Indonesia) in 1961, and during the New Order period the PITI underwent two profound changes. First, to gain broader ofcial support, the PITI invited military men to be advisors, and allowed the composition of its board to be ethnically mixed. By 1970 it was developing rapidly and had 11 branches, which gained support from local governments and sponsorship from local elites. Second, despite the support of local authorities, the PITI eventually succumbed to state intervention. In 1972, due to the government’s assimilation policy, the PITI’s request to print the Qu’ran and publish religious magazine in Chinese was denied by the Department of Religious Affairs. Subsequently the PITI was disbanded by the Attorney 5 PIT was rst founded in Medan in 1936 and had several branches in other large cities. It is estimated to have had up to 43,000 members. According to The (1993), “Toward the end of 1938, when the organization held a propaganda meeting at Palembang in South Sumatra its membership was said to number 4800; when it next held such a meeting in Jakarta 9,500 were reported” (p. 67). 6 In my eldwork, I have discovered that currently it may be easier for a ChineseIndonesian to convert to Islam than it was in the 1930s and that Chinese-Indonesian Muslims can win more respect from the Indigenous Muslims; however, many new Chinese-Indonesian converts still face harsh experiences, exclusion from their Chinese families and face suspicions by some indigenous Muslims. 7 Abdul Karim Oey, a successful Chinese-Indonesian businessman, was a Christian before his conversion to Islam. In 1931, at the age of 26, he converted to Islam. He was a branch leader of Muhammadiyah and had a closed friendship with the rst Indonesian president Sukarno; see his autobiography (1982). For a brief English summary of his life and time, see Suryadinata (1992, pp. 105–113).

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General ( Jaksa Agung) on the grounds that the word ‘Tionghoa’ (Chinese) in its name was ‘exclusivist.’ Ten days later, the PITI was reborn with its name changed to Pembina Iman Tauhid Islam (Organization for the Sustaining of Religious Beliefs).8 This change emphasized the organization’s aim of promoting da’wah and education. After the downfall of President Suharto, however, Chinese-Indonesian ethnic politics have gradually become more moderate, and this has led to a revival of the PITI. At present, the PITI is the largest Chinese Indonesian Muslim organization in Indonesia, having developed in several provinces. The second Chinese Indonesian Muslim organization was established by Junus Jahja (1927–). He was the rst Chinese-Indonesian Muslim to promote conversion to Islam as a solution for the so-called ‘Chinese problem.’ With a universal Muslim identity, the social or cultural distinction between indigenous and ethnic Chinese Indonesians would be erased. Since the 1980s, he has published many books that communicate his ideas concerning assimilation. He set up the Yayasan Ukhuwah Islamiah (Islamic Brotherhood Foundation) in 1981, that promotes Islam to Chinese-Indonesians, and is responsible for helping launch the second wave of the da’wah movement for middle class Chinese Indonesians. In 1991, Jahja created the Haji Karim Oei Foundation in memory of Abul Karim Oei. The foundation established its own mosque for Chinese-Indonesian Muslims on Lautze Street in Central Jakarta. The mosque provides a special religious service each Sunday for new converts, who are initiated into Muslim rites and given fundamental religious knowledge. Since the 1970s, many new converts have come from middle class backgrounds—business men, professors and even movie stars—implying that some Chinese Indonesians have altered their image of Islam as a subordinated people’s religion. The Regional PITI of East Java and Its Invention of Chinese Indonesian Muslim Traditions The regional PITI of East Java (PITIEJ) was established in 1987 at Surabaya. In 1995, the association thought that it was important to establish a foundation to deal with nancial matters. The rst chairman of the PITIEJ decided to name this foundation the Cheng Ho Founda8 Although the name of the organization was changed, its abbreviated title ‘PITI’ was kept.

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tion. Why did the PITIEJ regard Cheng Ho as an important gure? Cheng Ho was a Chinese Muslim, a descendent of Hui Muslims. His voyage and diplomacy are admired as a great initiation to Islam, which is especially important for Chinese immigrants in Southeast Asia. The legend of his voyage, a metonym for the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia and the dissemination of Islam from China to the Malay world, has led to the apotheosis of Cheng Ho in the Chinese diaspora community of Southeast Asia. Why has Cheng Ho’s been exalted to this position and why has it been accepted by Chinese migrants in Southeast Asia? There are various explanations. According to An (2003), Chinese migration to Southeast Asia was never supported by the Court, which considered it a sign of disloyalty to the dynasty. Chinese sojourners had to face much hardship; they had to compete with indigenous people and the challenge of Western colonizers. Therefore, Cheng Ho represented an ofcial envoy delivered by the court who was coming to help Chinese sojourners and protect them. Cheng Ho is worshiped in several Chinese temples in Indonesia and Malaysia. The most famous Chinese temple of Cheng Ho, Sam Po Kong, is located in Semarang, a city in central Java.9 In this temple, Cheng Ho is worshiped by the Javanese and ethnic Chinese; the former commemorate him as a Muslim holy man, and the later venerate his great achievement in helping Chinese sojourners in the early days. As both Javanese and Chinese worship Cheng Ho, the PITIEJ uses Cheng Ho as a symbol to bridge cultures. Cheng Ho’s voyage has become a part of the collective memories of the ethnic Chinese of Southeast Asia. The PITIEJ has established a sacred origin from Cheng Ho’s history as a point of interaction between Islam, China and Indonesia, and proof of the Chinese contribution to the spread of Islam in Indonesia. As a Vice-Chairperson of the PITIEJ said: Cheng Ho may have been the rst person to spread Islam in Indonesia. Why don’t we Chinese elevate the position of Chinese instead of Arabic? . . . We just want to tell them [ Indonesian Muslims] that Cheng Ho was a Muslim and expect that they will look at us in a different light!10

9 In ofcial Chinese documents, there is no evidence showing that Cheng Ho ever visited Semarang, but the local ethnic Chinese of Semarang believe that it is true. 10 Interview with a Vice-Chairperman of PITI of East Java in September 2003.

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The Cheng Ho Mosque: the Invention of an Islamic Imaginary Homeland In 2002, the PITIEJ discussed the construction of a building for worship. In the beginning, the plan was to build a small worship room, only later the construction of a mosque was planned. The main person to address the proposal of building the mosque in the Chinese style was the General Secretary of the PITIEJ, who said: At the time, I thought of how to build a mosque that could show our ethnic Chinese character. I started collecting some books about the mosques of Chinese Muslims. Finally, I took the Mosque of Ox Street in Beijing as a main reference for my blueprint and discussed this idea with other architects.11

Interestingly, when I asked the General Secretary whether he had been to China and visited this mosque, he told me that his rst visit to China was before he converted to Islam. So he had never visited Ox Street in Beijing, and only knew of the mosque through a book (see Figure 1). As we see in the photograph, the architecture of the Cheng Ho Mosque is in the traditional Chinese style with distinctive features—a three tower-like green masonry structure on the roof of the prayer-hall, with several red pillars and beams mixed with blue and green colours. (see Figure 2). There is also a horizontal inscribed board with Chinese calligraphy written by the ambassador of China in Indonesia. Yet this mosque’s design does not only use Chinese design styles. In the prayer hall there is a rostrum behind the mihrab (a niche in a mosque indicating the direction of Mecca), which is also used by a modernist (the second largest) Muslim organization, Muhammadiyah. Cheng Ho Mosque does not follow the traditional mosque style of placing a minbar (a pulpit with a ladder used for delivering sermons) on the right side of the mihrab, a typical facility used by the Nahdlatual Ulama, the largest traditionalist Muslim organization in Indonesia. A drum is hung in the right wing, and is used for calling people to prayer, which is typical of traditional Indonesian mosques, but not those of Muhammadiyah. Standing at the center of the prayer hall and looking toward the roof, we nd a regular octagonal geometric decoration on the ceiling that is inspired by the idea of the Chinese Eight Diagram (Ba Kwa). In traditional Chinese

11

Interview with the General Secretary of PITIEJ in October 2003.

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geometry, the Eight Diagram has the power to drive out evil powers.12 Due to its particular style, the mosque has become a famous religious landmark. Many Muslims living in East Java and some who live in the outer islands go there to worship. Although the General Secretary of the PITIEJ claims that the idea for his design was inspired by the Ox Street Mosque, if we carefully compare the two mosques we can see that the Cheng Ho Mosque only adopts one building of the Ox Street complex. In fact, many traditional forms of mosque architecture in China are a complex, with detached pavilions within a walled garden enclosure (Luo, 2002). The traditional Chinese mosque is more splendid, but this construction would not have been practical or economical for the PITIEJ. Although the style of the Cheng Ho Mosque is very different from that of indigenous Indonesian mosques, it adopts facilities that are used in Muhammadiyah and NU mosques, demonstrating that it is in harmony with the ideas of the two largest Muslim organizations and reecting that Chinese Indonesian Muslims seek a balanced position following the main current of Indonesian Islam. Since the Qu’ran offers no direction on a standardized mosque architecture, mosque styles are usually inuenced by local architectural elements, especially regional styles of the Middle East. Indonesian mosques also reect regionalism and eclecticism, and show a diversity of inuences from their pre-Islamic heritage such as an ancient vernacular tradition, Indonesia’s Hindu-Buddhist past and inuences from the Near East. However, even though there were Chinese Muslims in Java during the 15th and 16th centuries and some aspects of several mosques built in the past were Chinese, the remains were too fragmentary for the PITIEJ to use as a model to copy (Heuken, 2003). Hence, it was reasonable to nd inspiration from the architecture of Chinese Islam based on a photo of the Ox Street mosque. In addition to the main construction, a relief of Cheng Ho’s voyage has been placed on a wall on the right side of the mosque, and a sculpture of Cheng Ho’s main vessel sailing on the sea (a pool) is located before the wall (see Figure 3). The relief shows Cheng Ho’s rm face and an emperor’s edict in his hand. There are two different scenes

12 The designer said that the assonance of ba is similar to fa; in Chinese it indicates prosperity and development.

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on each side of Cheng Ho—China is on the left side and Indonesia is on the right, showing that Cheng Ho’s voyage signies communication between China and Indonesia, or Chinese culture and Islamic culture. Interestingly, it is very rare to see such a relief behind a mosque (Frishman et al., 1997).13 The designer of the Cheng Ho Mosque is a second-generation Chinese Indonesian who converted to Islam around 1994. He had only been to China once before converting to Islam and may not have been very aware of Hui Muslim traditions. Hence, the style and architecture of the Cheng Ho Mosque refers to and expresses the characters of Chinese Islam, reecting a hybrid style. In any case, the Hui are not a homogeneous group. Their ethnic origins are in Central Asia and the Middle East, and they gradually assimilated into Chinese culture, speaking Chinese or local dialects, dressed in Chinese-style clothing, even adopting Chinese customs and nally being sinicized by the surrounding Han majority. I will now look closely at the diversity and dynamics of Hui Muslims that the PITIEJ draws on by examining two works. First, Dru C. Gladney’s comparative discussion of Hui communities in four regions has shown that their identities are expressed diversely according to the different local contexts. For the Hui community living in northwest China, Islamic belief is the most fundamental identity. In other words, to be Hui is to be Muslim (Gladney, 1991, pp. 117–170). The second example is the Hui community living in Beijing’s urban areas, which adopts cultural traditions such as the pork taboo, the ownership of business, and craft profession, as part of their cultural identity (Gladney, 1991, pp. 171–228). The cultural identity of the Beijing urban Hui community includes the signicance of ethnic economic status because their traditional occupations such as managing small restaurants, preserves and expresses their cultural identity (Gladney, 1991, pp. 171–228). Thirdly, in Chang-Yang Hui village (located near a rural area of Beijing), Hui villagers maintain their ethnic identities through endogamy, which expresses their belief and maintains an uninterrupted descent from Muslim ancestors and continued Hui heritage for their future generations (Gladney, 1991, pp. 229–260). Fourth is the Hui community on the southeast coast, which although 13 Actually, some Muslims criticize the relief of ‘Cheng Ho’s Voyage’ as violating the Qur’anic prohibition on making imagines and idols, but local leaders of the two important Muslim organizations, Muhammadiyah and NU still support the design. They think it is only a decoration and has nothing to do with idol worship.

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with an Arabic ethnic background is almost assimilated into Han Chinese culture (Gladney, 1991, pp. 261–292). Gladney’s study indicates that expressions of Hui ethnic identity are relevant to ecological contexts. If Hui communities are located in isolated regions far away from Han communities, they may hold pious religious beliefs and have a distinct ethnicity. While Hui communities in regions surrounded by Han majorities (in urban areas) might nd it difcult to maintain their beliefs and ethnicity, and they may gradually assimilate into Han culture. I focus on Gladney’s ndings because it allow us to consider which part of Hui culture the PITIEJ refer to, and ask whether we can be sure that the association can derive its Islamic Chineseness from Hui Muslim culture. A native thinking of the Hui usually identies a Han Chinese person as non-Hui because most Han are not Muslims and Hui are regarded as a backward ethnic community by the Han; the Chineseness of the Hui and Han are not entirely the same. Moreover, unlike the Hui migrant communities in Central Asia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and so on, there are no recent Hui migrants in Indonesia. Most Chinese Indonesian Muslims are new converts with no direct historical relation to Chinese Islam (Liu, 2004).14 Therefore the re-establishment of the historic relation between the Chinese Hui Muslim community and the PITIEJ is part of a new phenomena that involves promoting Cheng Ho’s voyage and his contribution to the spread of Islam in Indonesia, paying visits to Hui Muslim communities in China, and building a transnational Chinese Muslim network.15 Why, then, are Chinese Indonesian Muslims trying to construct a new tradition by visiting Chinese-speaking Muslim communities and highly praising Cheng Ho? The answer is that it provides them with ‘imaginary homelands’16 within a tradition of Islam that extends back before its arrival in the Malay world. The second work I want to consider is Maris Boyd Gillette’s observations of an ‘Arabization’ of Islam in the Hui community in Xi’an since the 1980s. She regards this Arabization as:

14 In addition, I heard from two interviewees that there are Hui immigrants in Indonesia, but this has not been established by any Muslim organization. 15 An interviewee from a regional PITI told me that they wish to construct a transnational pan-Chinese Muslim community. 16 This is Salman Rushdie’s concept.

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chiou syuan-yuan . . . the recreation of an “authentic” Islam through reference to the Middle East, [and] thus a response to modernization even as it provided a model for modernization. In the Xi’an Muslim district (and in other Muslim societies), Arabization was particularly compelling because it was exclusive Muslim (Gillette, 2000, p. 77).17

The opening of China and its economic reform since the early 1980s has allowed Hui Muslims to do business and study aboard in Arabic countries. This has re-opened a channel of interaction between Hui Muslims and the Muslims of the Islamic heartland. The traditional Chinese style used in mosques has thus been questioned as not belonging to Islam (Gillette, 2000, p. 96).18 The irony of this situation, of course, is that to construct its Islamic Chineseness the PITI refers to Hui Islam in order to form its ‘imaginary homelands,’ but at least one of those homelands is transforming itself as its understanding of the Islamic Middle East increases. However, this does show that the PITI is using the Hui Muslim tradition as its paradigm without slavishly following recent trends and developments. Interestingly, since Hui Muslim are regarded as belonging to the social margins in China there has been a long attempt, since the Ming dynasty, to incorporate Han-style design into Hui architecture. This means that when Chinese Indonesians design a mosque following the Chinese style, they are tapping a past tradition of the Hui. To what extent, then, can Chinese Indonesian Muslims understand the Islamic tradition of Hui Muslims? Although the PITIEJ has published in its magazine an introduction to the history of Chinese Muslims, it seems not to have understood the inter-ethnic relationship between the Hui and Han, or how the Hui recognize their ethnicity as being different from the Han. This lack of differentiation is born out in the promotion of Cheng Ho’s heritage. The Chinese government has also encouraged the study of Cheng Ho, organizing conferences and published books on the issue since the 1980s. This reached its peak in 2005 with an ofcial celebration of the 600th anniversary of Cheng Ho’s voyage. One of the motivations of the Chinese government for promoting this history is in order to declare an historical basis for its quest for maritime supremacy outside of its

17 Armijo (2004) also nds a similar development in the Hui Muslim Community of Southwestern China. 18 For instance, some animal-like roof tiles that are used for mosque ornamentation are questioned as disobeying the monotheism of Islam.

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national borders in the South China Sea. Hence, PITI’s promotion of Cheng Ho and his contribution to the spread of Islam in Indonesia contribute to a sort of pan-Chinese inuence in Southeast Asia. A Third Space: Social Meanings of Islamic Conversion in Relation to the Chinese Indonesian Identity Politics of the Reformation Era Conversion to Islam is not common among Chinese Indonesians, but conversion can help to produce a new socio-religious space. Under the banner of Islam, the PITIEJ shares the same religion with the Indonesian Muslim majority, thus creating for itself a niche for more interaction with local government and other Muslim organizations. However, the PITIEJ’s reverence for Cheng Ho and references to the Hui as their ‘imaginary homelands’ has created a diasporic tradition that incubates a kind of Islamic Chineseness, which—not incidentally—is very different from other forms of disaporic Chineseness. This is a new social and religious space, like Homi Bhabha’s “third space which enables other positions to emerge. This third space displaces the histories that constitute it . . .” (Rutherfold, 1990, p. 211). This third space is different from the two main approaches of Chinese Indonesian socio-political movements during the Reformation Era. According to Suryadinata, the rst approach focuses on interests of Chinese Indonesians as a distinct ethnic group, and the second approach appeals to a broader concern for human rights such as anti-discrimination without conning itself to those of Chinese ethnicity (Suryadinata, 2001). The PITIEJ’s third space seems to be closer to the rst approach, but there are some differences. As a Muslim organization, it provides a worship service and initiation courses for new converts that are focused solely on Islam. The PITIEJ organizes social relief activities for all Muslim communities, which shows that its social concern is not merely conned to Chinese Indonesian communities. But this does not mean that the PITIEJ does not care about Chinese Indonesian issues. It has done much work to argue against the position that conversion to Islam should involve total cultural assimilation by providing Mandarin courses, supporting a revival of Chinese cultures, and promoting Chinese festivals and the history of Chinese Islam in its magazine. This has won the association much trust from indigenous Muslims and non-Muslim Chinese Indonesian associations. In its third space, the PITIEJ as a Muslim organization is empowering Chinese Indonesians by working

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with indigenous Indonesian Muslims. As many interviewees mentioned, the PITIEJ has constructed a bridge between the two communities, attempting to move beyond ethnic and religious exclusivity. Concluding Remarks Since the downfall of Suharto there has been much activity in Chinese Indonesian identity politics. The case of the PITIEJ shows that an alternative socio-religious space is a good approach to the reconstruction of social justice and the improvement of inter-ethnic relations. The Cheng Ho Mosque offers worship services to any Muslim, regardless of ethnic background. I visited a weekly prayer session on a Friday and saw many indigenous Muslims attending. A Chinese Indonesian mosque contributing to the Muslim community in Indonesia is a great achievement, and reects the tolerance inherent in Islam. Conversion to Islam among Chinese-Indonesians has only recently attracted signicant research attention. The Muslim diaspora has generated more concern because of increasing Muslim migration to Western Europe and North America. For instance, Peter Mandaville has applied diaspora theory to examine transnational Muslim politics, particularly the diaspora in Europe (Mandaville, 2001). However, his main concern is how Muslim minorities adapt to European societies and how they interpret their Islamic belief by linking their homelands and host societies. But the case of Chinese Indonesian Muslims is exceptional because it involves a non-Muslim minority conversion to Islam in a Muslimmajority society, with the mediating element of ‘imaginary homelands.’ The Chineseness that is constructed by Chinese Indonesian Muslims is very different from that of other ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia. And for that reason it demands more advanced discussion on the issue of Chineseness in the Chinese diaspora. REFERENCES An, H. 安煥然 2003. “Xian-min De Zu-ien: Zheng He Zai Ma-lai-xi-ia De Sh-sh Yu Sheng-Hua” (先民的足跡: 鄭和在馬來西亞的史實與神話), in Zheng He Xia Xiiang Guo-ji Ian-tao-huei (鄭和下西洋國際學術研討會論文集). Taipei: Daoqiang. Armijo, Z. 2004. The Recent revival of Islamic education among in China and it’s linkages with international centers of Islamic learning. Paper presented at the workshop on The Asian madrasa: Transnational linkages and real or alleged political roles, ISIM, Leiden.

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Budiman, A. 1979. Masyarakat Islam Tionghoa di Indonesia (The Community of Chinese Muslim in Indonesia). Semarang: Penerbit Tanjung Sari. de Graaf, H.J. & Pigeaud, Th. G. Th. (Trans.) 1984. The Chinese Muslim kingdoms in Java in the 15th and 16th centuries: the Malay annals of Semarang and Cerbon (M.C. Ricklefs, Eds.). Melbourne: Monash University. Fatimi, S.Q. 1963. Islam Comes to Malaysia. Singapore: Malaysian Sociological Research Institute. Frishman, M. and Khan, H. (Eds.). 2002. The mosque: history, architectural development & regional diversity. London: Thames & Hudson. Gillette, M.B. 2000. Between Mecca and Beijing: modernization and consumption among urban Chinese Muslim. California: Stanford University Press. Gladney, D.C. 1991. Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Heuken S.J.A., 2003. Mesjid-mesjid tua di Jakarta (The old mosques in Jakarta.). Jakarta: Yayasan Cipta Loka Caraka. Holod, R. and Khan, H. (Eds.). 1997. The mosque and the modern world: Architects, partons and designs since the 1950s. London: Thames & Hudson. Karim, A. 1982. Mengabdi agama, nusa dan bangsa: sahabat karib bung Karno (Devoting to religion and Indonesia: a closed friend President Soekarno). Jakarta: Gunung Agung. Levathes, L. 1996. When China ruled the seas: the treasure eet of the dragon throne, 1405–1433. New York: Oxford University Press. Liu, Y.B. 2004. Overseas Chinese Muslims: the general information on distribution of overseas Chinese Muslims. Selangor: Anzagain. Lombard, D. & Salmon, C. 1994. Islam and Chinese. Indonesia 57, pp. 115–131. Luo, X. 2002. China. In M. Frishman and Hasan-Uddin Khan (eds.), The mosque: history, architectural development & regional diversity. London: Thames & Hudson. Mandaville, P. 2001. Transnational Muslim politics: Reimaging the umma. London: Routledge. Michell, G. (Ed.) 2000. Architecture of the Islamic world: its history and social meaning. London: Thames & Hudson. Mills, J.V.G. 1970. Introduction. In Ma Huan, Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan: the overall survey of the ocean’s shores ( J.V.G. Mills, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Hakluyt. Muljana, S. 1968/2005. Runtuknya keradjaan Hindu-Jawa dan timbulnya negra-negra Islam di nusantara (The fall of the Hindu-Javanese kingdom and the rise of Islamic state in the archipelago), Yogyakarta: LKIS. Oey, A.K. 1982. Mengabdi Agama, Nusa dan Bangsa: Sahabat Karib Bung Karno (Devoting to religion, country and nation: My closed friend President Soekarno). Jakarta: Gunung Agung. al-Qurtuby, S. 2003. ARUS CINA-ISLAM-JAWA: Bongkar sejarah atas peranan Tionghoa dalam penyebaran agama Islam di nusantara Abad XV & XVI (A Current of China-Islam-Java: Exploring histories of roles of Chinese for the spread of Islam in the archipelago in the 15th and 16th centuries), Yogyakarta: Inspeal Ahimsakarya. Reid, A. 2000. Charting the shape of early modern southeast Asia, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Rushide, S. 1992. Imaginary homelands: Essay and criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta Books. Rutherfold, J. 1990. The third space: interview with Homi Bahabha. In J. Rutherfold ed. Identity: Community, culture, difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Suryadinata, L. 1992. Pribumi Indonesians, the Chinese minority and China: a study of perceptions and policies. Singapore: Heinemann Asia. Suryadinata, L. 2001. “Chinese politics in post-Suharto’s Indonesia: Beyond the ethnic approach?” Asian Survey 41, pp. 502–524.

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The, S.G. 1993. Islam and Chinese assimilation in Indonesia and Malaysia. In H.T. Cheu (Ed.) Chinese beliefs and practices in Southeast Asia: Studies on the Chinese religion (pp. 59–100). Jaya: Pelanduk Publications.

Chapter 13

Pi’s Passport: Identity and the Peculiar Economics of Popular Culture Chris Wood Our subject is ‘East-West Identities: Globalization, Localization and Hybridization.’ Among our themes are how local identities become internationalized and international inuences localized, the ‘internationalization‘ of identity, and ‘how foreign goods, ideas and self-concepts are localized‘. There is also a sub-text: how much ‘globalization’ is really just ‘Americanization’? As local and traditional identities morph toward something new—is that inevitably some version of Barbie or the Marlboro Man? My approach to these questions will not be academic. I am not an academic.1 What I am is a writer for hire, a commercial storyteller. So my thoughts are about commercial stories, what I call ‘industrial’2 stories of the kind we see on television and at the movies, or on the best-seller shelves of music and book stores. These aren’t the ‘tropes’ of the academy. Even in print, they’re ‘show business’. There are two ways to look at these, and they lead to what have become two disconnected conversations. One targets content: what is inside stories and how that matters. That conversation is about the ‘show’. The other conversation is about ‘business’. It targets culture as commerce and it is almost entirely agnostic on the stories—as long as they produce revenue from ticket or copy or advertising sales. It is indifferent to identity, meaning or how stories might change people. We need to connect these two conversations more often. Let us start on the ‘show’ side with a few remarks about ‘story’ and the idea of identity then shift to the ‘business’ side to examine some reference points drawn from international trade in these goods. Next, we will 1 As will be evident in these footnotes and references, with apologies to academic stylistic purists. 2 It should be noted that this designation has somewhat specic connotations within the world of trade law. Here, I simply mean stories produced for the purpose of mass reproduction and distribution through ‘industrial’ media.

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look at the distribution of facts on the ground: the geographic reach of some of these commercial stories. Finally, I will describe some ways that both the ‘show’ and the ‘business’ sides of the pop-culture equation inuence this distribution. Stories are essentially integrative. They place fact in emotional and social context. They connect act to consequence, desire to outcome. I have a publisher in Canada who calls them “the R & D of the soul”3— the device we use to research and develop our sense of self, laboratories for the fabrication of meaning. Another writer I greatly admire says stories are where we go to discover what is worth living for (McKee, 1997). He might add: “. . . or dying for”. I think that stories are much like food—we consume them daily, chew them up and digest them and turn them into the sinew and fat of our personalities. Stories provide the proteins, the carbohydrates and ber, out of which we structure who we are and determine how we are to be. ‘We’, here, is used in both the individual and group sense—as members of a family, a clan, nation, party or ideology. How the mind achieves this metasynthesis from outer symbolic narrative to inner worldview is a mystery beyond my understanding. That it occurs is the common experience of mankind. Not every story is a narrative, or even conscious. Where I live, some aboriginal nations preserve their histories in the form of long, sacred dances that are never written down. The ‘stories’ that our parents improvise across the dinner table tend to be far more formative then anything they read to us at bed-time. The stories that I am concerned with are only part of this daily diet— but they are, I suggest, a disproportionately important part. They are those products of popular culture that touch the widest audiences through the most immersive technologies and the widest global channels of mass distribution—movies, television shows, video games, music recordings, magazines and books. All of these media contribute to the modern diet of story. Indeed, it is likely that most members of most contemporary urban societies—whether they live in Mumbai, Manila or Montreal—consume far more ‘meaning’ from popular commercial culture than they do from any stories traditional to their family or cultural group of origin.4 But if this kind of industrial story increasingly nourishes our identity, its identity is much harder to pin down. Consider the lm classic,

3 4

Scott McIntyre, Publisher, Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver. I refer here to explicit narratives, not the daily drama of family dysfunction.

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Bridge on the River Kwai. If Bridge on the River Kwai can be said to have a national identity, what is it? Is it British? Alec Guinness played the tragic hero Captain Nicholson. But then an American actor, William Holden, played Major Shears. Director David Lean and the production company, Horizon Pictures, were also British. But then the money was American: it came from Columbia. Or maybe Kwai is really French? The story is based on a novel by Pierre Boule. Or even Sir Lankan: that was where the lm was actually shot and its citizens supplied most of the ‘Japanese’ soldiers in the cast. (Brownlow, 1996) The same game of deconstruction can be played with many global hit movies. The Lord of the Rings movies were made in New Zealand, for a US movie distributor, using German money,5 from a story written by a South African who wrote in English and several other imaginary languages about a place that never existed. (Tolkien, Appiah and Gates, 1999) What nationality are these lms? A countryman of mine wrote a widely acclaimed book called The Life of Pi. That is, its author Yann Martel is a Canadian citizen. He was in fact born in Spain and developed his story from several earlier ones by other writers—including a Brazilian. (Blackstock, 2002) Martel’s telling features a boy from India lost in the Pacic with a tiger from Bengal and a zebra from Africa. In 2002, it won a very prestigious prize given in the UK for English novels from countries of the British Commonwealth.6 Now, it would certainly be fair to say that all of these examples are located mainly in the broadly ‘Western’ cultural tradition. But examples of East-West ‘hybridization’ in popular culture are occurring in growing numbers. The director of the ‘American’ blockbuster movie Hulk was Ang Lee, from Taiwan. Hong Kong actor Jackie Chan is a hugely popular action hero around the world. Mulan is Walt Disney’s take on a traditional Chinese story.7 Or what about Sanrio Corporation’s counter to Disney’s mouse, Hello Kitty? ‘Kitty chan’ is a character in

5

‘Lord of the Rings: the Money Magic Behind New Zealand’s $675 Million Epic’. (New Zealand; Listener, Oct. 21–27, 2000) 6 http://www.themanbookerprize.com/about/rules.php 7 In Disney, Mulan and the Export of Animation, a paper presented at ‘Trading Culture,’ Shefeld, UK, in July, 2002, Shu-Ling Berggreen of the University of Colorado, compares international audiences’s reactions to Disney movies based on folk tales. She nds most are deeply offended by what Disney did to folktales from their own culture—but took Disney’s version of other people’s folktales to be accurate reporting. One Chinese gentleman saw Pocohantas and said he was “happy the English did not trash the Indians as they did with other colonies.”

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animation and comic books. She earns her Japanese creators over a billion dollars a year endorsing products from children’s lunch bags to taxi-cabs and even personal vibrators. (Belson and Bremner, 2003) So it is inaccurate to equate the globalization of popular culture exclusively with Americanization. The ‘nationality’ of industrial character and story is very often of blended. The result is certainly not cultural equity or equivalent representation of all cultural contributions. Some ‘national’, or if you prefer ‘civilizational’ perspectives, are plainly more equal than others, as we nd when we turn to business. Good data on the economics of cultural production and trade are very, very hard to come by. Denitions differ, collection is haphazard and widely differing numbers exist for the same value even within a single country. I have seen Canada’s cultural trade (exports plus imports) for 1997 estimated variously as US$7 billion and US$32.5 billion8—a nearly vefold difference. The best I have been able to assemble is some signicant snapshots. UNESCO9 estimates the value of international trade in mass-media culture to have been worth about US$214 billion in 1997. That is $45 worth of purchases for every man, woman and child on Earth, and the gure has surely risen since 1997. A reasonable current estimate would have to be on the high side of a quarter of a trillion dollars. Books are the oldest technology of mass culture. The International Standard Book Number agency in Berlin (where we get ISBN numbers), has 161 member states and estimates there are some 500,000 publishers active around the world.10 Some 6,500 of those from 110 countries were large enough to attend the world’s biggest book fair last fall in Frankfurt. They promoted more than a third of a million individual titles. Books seem to come from everywhere. According to UNESCO, Thailand, Denmark and Iran each publish more than 12,000 new book titles every year. That is more than 30 new books a day for anyone trying to stay truly abreast of the intellectual scene in any of those places. Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Colombia manage between four and eight thousand new titles a year each. Cyprus—Cyprus!—gets out 1,000 new books a year. Kyrgyzstan, three to four hundred—still one a day.

8 9 10

UNESCO, Government of Canada http://www.uis.unesco.org/ http://www.isbn-international.org/

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Russia releases about 50,000. The United States releases about 70,000 new titles—somewhat more than India but fewer than Germany. China publishes more than 100,000. There are gaps in this abundance. Africa produces relatively few books. Angola (population 10 million) published just 22 volumes in the same year that Estonia, with one-seventh of Angola’s population (1.5 million) managed 2,600. Several Arabic countries produce fewer titles than their size and geo-political importance might suggest. Titles that travel tell a different story again. These are the top works of ction, social or economic critiques that rule the ‘international bestsellers’ lists and line the book kiosks of the world’s air terminals. Daya Kishan Thussu has documented the domination of this part of the market by what he calls “the US-UK duopoly”. (Thussu, 1998) Of the world’s top ten book exporting countries in 1995, two—Britain and the United States—together sold more than the next six combined. Thussu adds that “of the ten most-translated authors of ction in the world (whose books have been translated into twenty ve or more languages), as many as nine originally wrote in English”.11 Similarly, I am always delighted and a little astonished to nd in every large city that I visit a vibrant and new-to-me local magazine culture. Yet the same duopoly dominates the racks of international magazine titles—Time, National Geographic, Vogue, the various editions of the Wall Street Journal and the Economist. It is worth noting here that any big international magazine titles that are not American or British are likely to be European—mostly either French or German. But not Asian. Digital MP3 les are the newest twist on the second oldest medium of mass dissemination of stories: sound recordings. Here again, a wide variety of popular regional, national and even neighborhood styles and artists are available to most domestic audiences on cassette or CD—and very often globally to remote diasporas or niche enthusiasts as well. Many North American and European music stores now have whole sections dedicated to these musical accents under the general heading of ‘World’ music. But here again, the styles and artists that achieve wide trans-national fame are much more limited in number and skewed in origin. I know of no globally comprehensive, more or less real-time tally of music sales compiled by artist. There are various national and regional tallies.

11

The exception was Jules Verne.

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But as a very, very rough proxy for a world view consider the World Music Awards sponsored annually by the Royal Family of Monaco and broadcast to billions of viewers. These awards are tied to sales of recordings in different categories of music. Here, from the awards’ website, are the winners for 2002. Table 1: World Music Awards 200212 World’s Best World’s Best World’s Best World’s Best World’s Best World’s Best World’s Best World’s Best World’s Best World’s Best World’s Best World’s Best World’s Best Artist World’s Best World’s Best World’s Best World’s Best

Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling

Female Artist Male Artist World Artist/Group Pop Female Artist Pop Male Artist Pop Group R&B Female Artist R&B Male Artist R&B Group Artist Rap Artist Reggae Artist Classical Artist Adult Contemporary

Enya Shaggy Destiny’s Child Dido Enrique Iglesias Destiny’s Child Alicia Keys Shaggy Shaggy Ja Rule Shaggy Andrea Bocelli Dido

Ireland US US UK Spain US US US US US US Italy UK

Selling Selling Selling Selling

New Age Artist Latin Male Artist Latin Female Artist New Artist

Enya Enrique Iglesias Shakira Alicia Keys

Ireland Spain Colombia US

World’s World’s World’s World’s World’s World’s World’s World’s World’s World’s World’s World’s World’s World’s

Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling

American Artist Australian Artist British Artist Canadian Male Artist Canadian Female Artist French Artist German Artist Irish Artist Italian Artist/Group Middle Eastern Artist Japanese Artist Swiss Artist Russian Artist Greek Artist

Best Best Best Best Best Best Best Best Best Best Best Best Best Best

Legend Award Winner

12

Please provide.

Shaggy Kylie Minogue Dido Garou Nelly Furtado Alizee No Angels Enya Andrea Bocelli Amr Diab Utada Ikaru DJ Bobo Kristina Orbakaite Despina Vandi Gloria Gaynor

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There is only one culturally Asian name on this list: the ‘designated hitter’ from Japan, who, as it happens, was born in New York. China and India are absent from this ‘World’. With the exceptions of Japan and Australia, the furthest east the list looks is Egypt, in the person of Amr Diab.13 Now, let us remove the designated regional winners and the duplicate names. Here is the list of ‘World’s best-selling’ musical artists that results. Table 2: Winners of the World Music Awards in 2002 World’s World’s World’s World’s World’s World’s World’s World’s World’s World’s

Best Best Best Best Best Best Best Best Best Best

Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling Selling

Female Artist Male Artist World Artist/Group Pop Female Artist Pop Male Artist Pop Group R&B Female Artist Rap Artist Classical Artist Latin Female Artist

Enya Shaggy Destiny’s Child Dido Enrique Iglesias Destiny’s Child Alicia Keys Ja Rule Andrea Bocelli Shakira

Ireland US US UK Spain US US US Italy Colombia

Ten Western names, half of them American. One from Latin America. Neither Diab nor Utada make the cut. Here, an East-West divide seems to apply more than a North-South one. Diab and Utada are only two examples of recording artists who become signicant stars in one hemisphere, carrying their stories to hundreds of millions of people, but who remain virtually unknown in the other. Sally Yah, popular in Hong Kong and elsewhere in China as the ‘Queen of Canto-Pop,’ is another—nowhere on the western hemisphere’s cultural radar. A disproportionate number of the biggest pop acts touring globally originate in the anglosphere—the United States, the British Isles (including Ireland), Canada or Australia. The Rolling Stones can get an audience in China, but no Chinese band is about to ll Wembley Stadium. There are some globally successful artists with other origins—but again, they are mostly European or Latin. It is interesting that a few Africans break into these ranks, but virtually no East Asians. Examined from yet another angle—the corporate origin of popular recorded music—the puzzle reveals a further concentration of this

13

Whose name the awards’ website misspells.

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same anomaly. Of recordings sold in the legitimate marketplace,14 70 percent by dollar volume are released by one of half a dozen international media conglomerates. The names, contents and cross-holdings of these change from time to time, but these are their names and ranges of activity at the moment. Table 3: The Media Club15

Time Warner Viacom Walt Disney Co. News Corp. Sony Corp. NBC-Universal Bertelsmann

US –owned –managed

Media holdings: lm/ TV b’cast

print

music

X X X [X]

X X X X X X X

X X X X X X X

X

X

X X X X X X [X]

X X X X X X X

X X X X

With one exception, regardless of where they are owned, the entertainment divisions of these major conglomerates are managed from the United States. Bertelsmann is the exception: most of its media assets and management are in Europe. Its most important global line, however, is Random House books, which is based in New York. Sony is owned in Japan but its worldwide entertainment operations are managed from Hollywood. News Corp’s ownership is bracketed, reecting the efforts of its controlling shareholder, Rupert Murdoch, to maximize ambiguity about his empire’s precise citizenship. Murdoch himself is ardently pro-American and his FoxNews channel is the most overtly jingoistic in the United States.16 Filmed entertainment is the most expensive and frankly the hardest way to tell stories. One person on a $2,000 computer can turn out perfectly professional music recordings for the price of a blank CD. 14 Where copyright is generally respected and mostly paid for, with the result that records are kept. 15 Grant, Wood; Blockbusters and Trade Wars: Popular Culture in a Gobalized World (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004) 16 It is interesting that a 2003 study found that regular viewers of Fox News were four times as likely to believe demonstrable untruths (such as that Saddam Hussein played a role in the 9/11 terror attacks) than viewers of US public broadcasting.

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Books are often the creative work of a single writer; printing technology is widely and cheaply available. Acceptable books can be produced for a cash investment of only a few hundred dollars. Try that with video. Digital ‘lm’ notwithstanding, making motion pictures is a big-team sport. To make a convincing piece of screen ction typically requires scores of skilled and practiced specialists, from lead actors to junior ‘grips’. Two productions in Vancouver last fall each had cast and crew of over 1,300 people. I will return to costs in a moment, but for now just consider that the average amount that Hollywood spent to make and launch a movie in 2000 was US$82 million.17 Hollywood is not the only place making lmed entertainment. India makes more movies than any other country on earth. China and the Philippines each make more movies annually than the United States does. Nigeria produces 1,000 direct-to-video movies every year. These lms are seen beyond their nations’ borders. Indian titles account for over 60 percent of movies that are screened in some eastern African and Central Asian countries. (Thussu, 1998) The Indian TV series Ramayan was dubbed into English, Mandarin and Cantonese. Nigerian videos travel through Africa and to Europe. Iran exports its movies through the Arabic world. Forty percent of the lms seen in francophone Africa come from France. Brazil and Mexico export television to the rest of Latin America and beyond. One Brazilian series, Escrava Isaura (slave girl Isaura), attracted 450 million viewers in China. Others know far more than I do about the reach of Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese lms around the Pacic Rim. Just as a data-point, Thussu tells us that nearly 40 percent of the movies on Pakistani screens also come from Hong Kong. But—and this question is critical—is this same diversity of accents reected in the value patterns of international trade in lmed entertainment? In a word: no. Instead, the pattern we saw in music and books is repeated in motion-picture entertainment, only now it is on steroids. There is some diversity on a national, local or regional scale, but in global trade there is a very much narrower range of cultural DNA. Some indicators follow.

17

Source: the Motion Picture Association of America.

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¾ Number of 2002’s top 50 highest-grossing lms worldwide that were American: 50. ¾ Of 1998’s top 100: 88 (plus seven more American co-productions). ¾ Portion of all lms shown around the world that originate in Hollywood:19 85%. ¾ Number of 30 countries studied in which US box ofce market share was below one-half: three. ¾ Number in which it was over 90%: eight. ¾ Market share in the United States of lms made elsewhere: